by Mark Steel
Then a woman with no teeth at all sang a song about a Cornish woman with twelve sons, all of whom became soldiers, and in each verse another one got killed until there were none left. Then her friend sang a song about a ship setting off with a hundred men on board, and you knew those poor fuckers would be lucky to make it to the chorus. As expected, every one of them was drowned, though I’d been hoping for a twist in which they all came back with sacks full of fish, but were eaten by a runaway leopard. Then they turned to me. ‘What song do you have for us, dear?’ they asked, and I thought, ‘What sort of fishing disaster song do I know? I’m from London.’ Unless I made one up that went, ‘In nineteen hundred and ninety-six old Dave went out in the rain, to buy some cod in parsley sauce but was never seen again.’
‘So the moment has arrived that I’ve been dreading,’ I said, and considered knocking out a version of Eminem’s ‘The Real Slim Shady’ or ‘The Wheels on the Bus go Round and Round’, but instead we all said we were a bit tired and left, so instead they drew a raffle for a packet of biscuits. Funnily enough, a similar thing happened when I went to see the Wu-Tang Clan.
It isn’t just a prejudice, this sense of being somewhere that doesn’t fit in. Cornwall has a tradition of wanting to keep its distance. The most strident expression of that sentiment comes from Mebyon Kernow, the Cornish nationalist party, which has several councillors. It was founded in 1951, and by 1964 it had five separate branches. Ask someone to guess where those branches were, and see how long it is before they get the correct answer: Penzance, Padstow, Redruth, Truro and Nigeria.
For a while there was a militant wing of the Cornish movement, called An Gof. According to the official history of Mebyon Kernow, ‘They claimed responsibility for a blaze at a Penzance hairdresser’s, attacked in mistake for the Bristol and West Building Society.’
You might think that after a mishap like that they’d keep quiet and hope the police assumed it was revenge for a dodgy perm, but they thought the cause of Cornish nationalism would be advanced if they claimed responsibility, although it’s hard to think of any other combination of shops it would be more difficult to mix up when trying to burn one of them down: not a scrap metal yard for a branch of World of Leather, or a vegan café for a place that changes tyres.
But these movements are marginal to the vague but widespread sense that Cornwall isn’t entirely Britain. It has its own flag, a little white cross and the rest entirely black, as if it was designed by a fourteen-year-old boy who sits in his room all day listening to My Chemical Romance. It has a patron saint, called St Piran, and an annual holiday on which most towns put on a procession.
This semi-dislocation from the rest of Britain is probably a result of Cornwall remaining Celtic while the rest of England was occupied by the Romans. So at unexpected moments as you turn a corner you’ll find an enigmatic stone monument or Celtic cross poking lopsidedly from the edge of a field, whereas anywhere else in England the Romans would have torn it down and replaced it with an aqueduct.
One consequence of this is that there remained a separate Cornish language. Penzance was the last area where it was the first language, up until the sixteenth century.
By the seventeenth century Cornish had mostly died out. But since the 1930s there’s been a movement to revive it, and now about two hundred people speak it. I got a book called Teach Yourself Cornish from the Penzance library, and the librarian said, ‘Would you like book two as well?’ which seemed a bit optimistic Anyway, even a militant Cornishman only needs a few essential phrases, like ‘Ogh! Ni re settyas an gempenoryon-gols gans tan dre wall,’ which translates as, ‘Oh no, we’ve set the hair-dressers on fire by mistake.’
Cornish is a Gaelic language, similar to Welsh and Irish and Breton, and now there’s an English-Cornish dictionary, a novel’s been written in Cornish, and there’s a weekly Cornish radio show, which is impressive for two hundred people. I imagine the radio show must have dialogue such as:
‘And now our mystery voice competition: “Myttin da.”’
‘Is it Stan from the Cornish class again?’
‘Yes, you’ve won £4.’
To make it more complicated, a row broke out because some people wanted to speak the old historic Cornish, which I’m sure was lovely but which died out three hundred years ago. Not only would it have no words for Twitter or Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, it would only have words for things that were around before 1760, so the lessons must go: ‘Repeat after me: “Yth esov vy ow merwel dres an pla” – I’m dying of the plague.’
So some people added modern words, and the two factions split apart, then someone tried to solve the problem by merging the two Cornish languages and calling the result ‘Unified Cornish’. This was rejected as unspeakable heresy by both the other sides.
Maybe more pertinently, as you leave the railway station there’s a large stone sign on which ‘Welcome to Penzance’ is inscribed in Cornish, and while few people speak the language, they all know there is one, and that it makes them just a bit different. This sense of slight difference seems to have been around for a while. For example, Cornwall’s early trade unions were part socialist and part Cornish nationalist. So according to the book on Mebyon Kernow by Bernard Deacon, in 1847 the quarrymen went on demonstrations carrying the red flag, but with a pasty stuck on the end of each flagpole. (Perhaps their anthem went ‘The workers’ flag is highly priced, with onions, beef and carrots diced.’)
The pasty is a symbol of Cornish pride, to the extent that the Cornish rugby team still begins each game by booting a symbolic inflated pasty through the posts.
But recently the town has become divided over a modern issue. In 2009 the government offered money for a new terminal for the Scilly ferry. Some people said it would destroy the town, especially the harbour, so they set up a group called ‘Friends of Penzance Harbour’. In opposition, those in favour of the new terminal set up ‘True Friends of Penzance Harbour’. Presumably the first lot were tempted to retaliate with ‘Passionate Lovers of the Harbour Who Plan to MARRY the Harbour’, to which the other lot would come back with ‘Mistresses of the Harbour Who the Harbour Turns to for Comfort and Dirty Filthy Sex Between the Boats Because You Can’t Give it What it NEEDS’.
Each group had demonstrations and Facebook pages and protest songs on YouTube, and wrote millions of furious letters, and there were hundreds of websites, and then the local MP proposed a compromise called Option PZ that was hated by both groups. If you think this is all an exaggeration, here’s an extract from a letter written to the local paper by a councillor who supported the new terminal: ‘The claim that the vast majority have opposed option A reminds me of those extraordinary claims by Soviet and Nazi propagandists. It is a colossal untruth, in the tradition of Dr Joseph Goebbels.’
Exactly. Goebbels always began his speeches: ‘Jews and Communists are plotting to prevent the building of terminals so that Aryans are left stranded, unable to dock.’ Equally measured from the other side was this: ‘John the Baptist, you will remember, foretold the coming of Christ. He spoke fearlessly against the politically powerful of the time and lost his head in the process. Some things in life must be spoken against and resisted. The council’s tawdry decision to desecrate the harbour wall is one of them.’
It seems that someone in that council must have been cackling, ‘Bring me the head of the designer of the Friends of Penzance Harbour Facebook page.’ Council meetings here must be fantastic. In most areas they just go, ‘With regard to the proposed bus shelter, a document is to be submitted,’ but in Penzance it’s, ‘I suppose next you’ll be invading Poland,’ and ‘It’s people like me who saw Christ was coming.’
As an outsider you have to wonder whether this is the best use of everyone’s campaigning resources, and if they put that energy into other issues, they might at least get themselves a dentist.
But maybe it’s right that this gloriously overblown internal row should be about an issue that seems minor to anyone outside. This is a town in w
hich the High Street chain stores like Boots and Clinton Cards are punctuated by a shop that sells juggling sticks and playing cards, and in which there’s a building, between a pub and a second-hand bookshop, that for no apparent reason is designed like an Egyptian palace, and by the sea is an oval art-deco outdoor swimming pool that had a cannon built into one side to fire at German ships during the war.
So Penzance is the ideal place to do something off-centre, like setting up a pagan snooker club or a nudist butterfly-collecting society. It’s as if you can do whatever you fancy, because the authorities will say, ‘They can’t do that. Oh, bloody hell, I’m not going all the way down there, let them do what they bloody well want.’
New Towns: Basingstoke, Crawley, Milton Keynes
The proof that every town retains a soul, no matter how concrete, corporate, shopping-malled, retail-parked and Tescoed it becomes, is in Basingstoke. Because Basingstoke is a new town, plonked somewhere in the south, though no one seems exactly sure where to say it is, even if they live there. It’s renowned as the classic modern commuter town, strangled by regional headquarters for insurance companies and hundreds and hundreds of roundabouts, some of which you can only drive round and then straight on, so you wonder whether the roads were laid by a gang of workmen with an obsessive compulsive disorder, who if they go more than an hour without building a roundabout start rocking backward and forward and making deep groaning noises.
Amongst the organisations who’ve established their head offices there are the AA, which might be because it’s the place they’re most often called out to, where their mechanics arrive at the broken-down vehicle and say, ‘Ah, I see what’s happened. You’ve got so frustrated with the roundabouts you’ve abandoned the car and set fire to it.’
The centre of Basingstoke is the Festival Shopping Mall. As you leave the train station, it seems there’s nowhere to go except be poured through the Festival Mall’s automatic doors, into a city of New Look, H&M and Monsoon units in which you try to keep moving forward in the belief that eventually you must come out into open Basingstoke. After a while it occurs to you that perhaps this is open Basingstoke, and that when you finally reach the other side you’ll pass one last W.H. Smith and emerge into countryside and past a sign that says ‘Thank you for visiting Basingstoke’.
Its image isn’t helped by the fact that on Wikipedia, under ‘Cultural Impact’, it says: ‘An episode of Top Gear was filmed there in 2008.’
So I was surprised to find a book called Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture. I thought, ‘Maybe there’s some stuff I’ve missed, like Jimi Hendrix started there, singing, “There’s got to be some way outta here, but every roundabout takes me to another fucking one”.’ Or Jackson Pollock’s most famous painting was called If You can Make Your Way Through Basingstoke’s One-Way System, Joining these Red Dots Should be a Piece of Piss.
The book starts off on a positive note, telling us: ‘Basingstoke is one of the most derided towns in England. Its reputation is as an over-developed eyesore of numbing dullness. Its very name lends itself to mockery. Basingjoke, Boringstoke and the ironic Amazingstoke are used by its own residents, not always with affection.’
But if you look into the town’s past it becomes clear that this isn’t just a new town built by numbers to fill up a bit of Hampshire. Because, far from being solely a modern butt of jokes, the place has been loathed for centuries. The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, went there in 1759 and wrote afterwards, ‘The inhabitants are like wild beasts, slow of heart and dull of understanding.’
‘But surely,’ you must be thinking, ‘it was more exciting in 1669.’ Well, the Grand Duke of Tuscany went there that year, and his valet wrote an account of the visit: ‘His Highness, arriving betimes at Basingstoke, set out to explore it on foot, but it seemed so wretched it hardly repaid the effort of walking a few paces.’
‘All right,’ you’ll say, ‘but what about 1882?’ Which is a fair point, except that in 1882 an article about Basingstoke in The Times said: ‘About midway between London and Salisbury is a benighted little town inhabited chiefly by a race of barbarians.’
This is hugely encouraging for the town, because it means it has a past, a human touch beyond the everlasting Festival Centre and office blocks with eerily silent reception areas. To be insulted with such venom it must have been up to something interesting.
Basingstoke used to be a market town, and its current residents seem aware of this. They refer to a huge and seemingly pointless wall that sits in the centre as ‘the Great Wall of Basingstoke’, and the popular local website ‘It’s Basingstoke not Boringstoke’ describes it as a ‘great mass of concrete poured over the remains of the old market town’.
Also, as Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture points out, the town was the home of Thomas Burberry, a Victorian draper who established the line of clothes that bear his name, and who apparently invented the raincoat. It could be argued that Charles Mackintosh’s coat, which came earlier, was the first raincoat, but Basingstoke and its Contribution to World Culture points out: ‘But these sticky smelly easily punctured garments were a crude concept compared to Burberry’s silky gabardine.’ I’ve no idea who is right here, but it’s joyful to see the town so stroppy over the issue, like when a quiet old aunty unexpectedly gets angry about an incident on a bus in 1957.
So there’s clearly a pride in the town’s past. One of Basingstoke’s heroes, who seems to be known by the under-thirties as well as the older residents, is John Arlott the cricket commentator. Arlott was extraordinary, partly because he spoke in a series of six- or seven-word sections followed by a short pause, as if everything he said was a poem, and all in a gentle, lyrical Basingstoke lilt, with an underlying purr, as if while he was speaking he was pushing a slightly broken old lawnmower.
He’d quietly take the piss out of the other commentators. After one of them told listeners that across the ground he could see the sun setting in the west, when Arlott came on he said slowly, ‘You can rest assured that if the sun starts to set in the east I’ll be the first to let you know.’
Arlott was a committed anti-racist, and was instrumental in inviting Basil D’Oliveira, a ‘Cape Coloured’ cricketer who was barred from playing professionally in his native South Africa, to play in England. Arlott called his autobiography Basingstoke Boy, and his portrait is on every brochure or website that publicises the town.
There’s one time in Basingstoke’s history when I wish he’d been there, because the town now scorned as a symbol of suburban sleepiness was once known as irredeemably violent. One report described how ‘In Basingstoke election days are occasions for joyous rioting. And even cricket matches are tediously prone to ending in violent disorder.’
You can almost hear Arlott saying, ‘And there goes Fat Jimmy coming round the wicket – with a Stanley knife – while a crowd on the boundary – chant, “Who are yer, who are yer” – and one wonders if they don’t know who their adversaries are – why it is they’re kicking them with considerable vigour – in an area not distant from the testicles.’
This history, and the way it’s seeped into the culture of the modern town, suggests that the old Basingstoke hasn’t been entirely destroyed by the new, despite the impact of the 1944 Greater London Plan, which aimed to stop London becoming any bigger by building a series of new towns and expanding others, such as Basingstoke.
Houses were built for 40,000 people to move there, which must have seemed disruptive if you were already there, but might have created less tension had hundreds of people not been moved out of their homes to make way for new estates and roundabouts. Dozens of tradesmen were evicted so their workshops could be demolished and replaced by a new shopping centre. One man who felt aggrieved was Alfie Cole, who ran a stables on the Basing Road. In 1966 he drove a pony and trap to Downing Street to hand in a petition to the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, and as Alfie put it, ‘dumping lorryloads of topsoil at strategic parts of the town during the morning
rush hour’ as he went.
Alfie seems almost as revered in the town as John Arlott, and when I mentioned him in a show at the theatre there was almost complete recognition. The majority of people who live in Basingstoke now must have come there as a result of the expansion after the sixties, yet it appears that most of today’s residents identify with the town as a whole, including its figures from before they were there, and approve of the campaigns to prevent the changes that enabled them to come.
Even in a town the citizens themselves refer to as Boringstoke, they want to feel that its traditions and quirks belong to them. It’s their boring town. For example, there’s a blue statue in Wote Street of a mother with a child, that everyone calls ‘Wote Street Willy’. Even a travel website describes it by saying: ‘At 7 tonnes it’s the largest phallic statue in Britain.’
Almost the whole of Basingstoke seems aware that the Forum office block in the town is the tallest building on a line between London and New York, which is indeed impressive, although nearly all of that line goes over the Atlantic Ocean, on which there aren’t many skyscrapers to offer much competition.
The wall, the roundabouts and the jokey image are what make the people of Basingstoke half-proud, rather than the joys of how easy it is to commute to London, or the variety of identical chain stores that have been attracted to the Festival Shopping Mall.
Similarly, Crawley in Sussex, about halfway between London and Brighton, was designated a new town in the 1946 New Towns Act, and built to house 50,000 people. Crawley is mostly a suburb of Gatwick Airport, and it has a feel of earthiness, as if while there are the smug people who moved from London to Brighton, and who boast of how the sea air is marvellous for the kids, Crawley is made up of people who thought of doing that, but got halfway and said, ‘Fuck it, I’m knackered, let’s stay here.’
And it keeps growing, the employment opportunities it offers always attracting newcomers. But the areas within the town retain their quaint names that could easily fool people. There’s Pease Pottage and Three Bridges, whose residents must think, ‘It’s lovely round here, quiet and peaceful. The only noise you ever get is from a major international airport.’