Mark Steel's In Town

by Mark Steel

  By now I was expecting a glorious giant marble hippo in mid-yawn, hippo calves playing at its feet, with meticulously crafted sheets of bronze to represent the gurgling, enigmatic mud. Instead, there’s a two-foot-long vaguely hippo-shaped slab of concrete that is – and no other word would do it justice – pathetic. At first I thought it was a bin. ‘There she is!’ said my guide, as if we’d turned a corner to see a Pyramid in a deep orange sunset. I tried, but I knew I was failing to hide my disappointment. ‘Oh, er, right. Well, er, is this it?’ I said, the way you’d react if you discovered your Christmas present from your wife was a jelly baby.

  Maybe it was especially disappointing because of Walsall’s history. This was a town that oozed heavy industry. The region was given the name the Black Country because it was so full of smoke from the ironworks that everything was turned black. Offshoots of the iron trade include Britain’s largest locksmith industry, and companies used the iron to make stirrups, which led to the saddle trade and a leather industry that eventually boasted that it supplied the Queen’s handbag.

  This industrial image is supplemented by the treacly drawl that is the barely plausible Walsall accent, which, once you’re used to it, has an ugliness that’s actually quite beautiful, like the disused Battersea Power Station, or a scrap-metal yard in a thunderstorm.

  The joy of the accent is summed up by the joke about the bloke from Walsall who joins the army, and on the night before a battle the general makes a speech: ‘Now then, men, I’m sure you didn’t come here to die,’ and the Walsall man shouts, ‘I didn’t sir, I came here yesterdie.’

  There’s a snobbery directed at the accent. It’s inconceivable that anyone from Walsall could present Newsnight, as there’d be such horror at them saying, ‘So minister, did yow know about this when yow made the statement or did yow not, and are yow going to resign?’

  In a way the accent suits the town, as there’s a hint of defiance in it. There’s no compromise, no lightening of the fully adenoidal twisted vowels as you get in Birmingham, no attempt to give it a tune or make it palatable to the untrained ear; just a message conveyed with the insistence of a stroppy young film director who won’t allow subtitles on his documentary about an Eskimo village, that ‘This is what we sound like, and if yow don’t like it yow can piss off somewhere posh like Stafford.’

  Maybe it was this attitude that led to Walsall being home to the most famous anarchists in British history. In the 1890s there was a Socialist Club in Goodall Street, but some of the members became anarchists. They met two Frenchmen who said they wanted to join the group, and were then contacted by a man called Auguste Coulon, the leader of a group of anarchists who met in Tottenham Court Road in London. When Coulon found out that one of the anarchists in Walsall, Fred Charles, worked in a foundry, he wrote a letter saying, ‘Then he will do to make bombs for us.’

  Coulon persuaded his followers to form a chemistry class and to ‘worship the great God dynamite’. He wrote in favour of anarchist bombs across Europe, and the editor of the Walsall anarchist newspaper wrote that – and I promise this is true – ‘Coulon sent me an article celebrating the blowing up of a cow in Belgium as a great and revolutionary act.’

  And that, I propose, is surely the most magnificent sentence in the history of anarchism.

  The police started following members of the Walsall Socialist Club, and then raided its premises, where they claimed to find plans for a bomb sent by Coulon. Five of the anarchists were arrested and jailed for five or ten years, despite a national campaign to release them led by William Morris. Later it was discovered that the plan for the bomb was useless, so the police altered the design to make it for one that would blow up. The only anarchist involved who wasn’t arrested was Coulon, who it turned out was a police spy. Inspector Melville of the police recommended him for a post teaching French at a private school for girls. I suppose he stood there going, ‘Il allume la vache Belgique – He explodes the Belgian cow. Nous allumons la vache Belgique – We explode the Belgian cow.’

  But the best-known representative of the town is Sister Dora. She was a sister of the Anglican Church in the 1850s who became a nurse because ‘The hospitals consider men as men, and not just hands to work.’

  Sister Dora came to Walsall, which was considered a ‘difficult’ place to do nursing because, as one book about her says, ‘Furnacemen and miners were the heaviest drinkers, and the butties, who controlled labour below ground, drank on a Homeric scale.’ Dora became a nurse for the poorest people in the town, and set up schemes to improve the health of beggars, drunks and prostitutes. She made a point of nursing the Irish, who were under attack at the time. As a result of her labours she said, ‘There’s hardly a poor man or woman in Walsall I don’t know personally.’

  Dora questioned why so many patients became sick while they were in hospital, from what were called ‘hospital diseases’. She worked out that it was because the places were full of filth and dirt, and organised a cleaning system that almost eliminated ‘surgical fever’. Isn’t it extraordinary how stupid we were back then – not to realise that hospitals are healthier if they’re not filthy. The hospital in Walsall was so proud of its new cleanliness that it was opened to the public for a day to show it off.

  In 1875 there was an explosion at the Walsall Iron Company, and dozens of ironworkers were killed or maimed. Dora organised the treatment for the survivors, and collections throughout the town. She became such a heroine that her picture was put up in thousands of homes across Walsall.

  Sister Dora died at the age of forty-six, and her statue in Walsall was the first in Britain of a woman who wasn’t in the royal family. So it’s easy to see how they must have thought, ‘How do we top that? I know, we’ll do a statue of a woman who was in the royal family, and make it black.’

  Today the statue stands in the middle of the central square. Around it teenage girls chew gum and shout insults at boys on bikes, but everyone knows it’s Dora, knows she was a nurse who looked after everyone, and that she’s Walsall. A few yards away is the hippo, proudly unique, a symbol of the survival of the town’s individuality. When I was recording the show, the mere mention of the hippo provoked a disconcertingly exuberant cheer, of the sort a reference to Usain Bolt would with an audience of Jamaicans. Because they don’t have a hippo in Wolverhampton or Dudley, and in Redditch they probably arrange to meet somewhere tediously unimaginative and clichéd, like a clock tower. But in Walsall there’s affection, even love, for the concrete beast that defies the decades of soulless structures, a reminder that a town will always retain some history, some charm, to remain its own place.

  Lewes

  Towards the Sussex coast, amidst the rolling majesty of the South Downs, is the seemingly pedestrian town of Lewes, a sloping High Street with delis and cafés that serve twenty-seven varieties of tea, a pub with a courtyard and a carvery, and second-hand bookshops so rickety that as you walk between the shelves it feels as if you’re at angle, like in a house of fun at the fairground.

  But Lewes is a cauldron of stroppiness, not because of one campaign or issue, but in general. This is summed up by the town’s slogan, ‘We won’t be druv’, which is medieval for ‘Oy, you wanna try something, DO YA?’ It’s an attitude most prominently displayed each Guy Fawkes Night, when the town becomes a pyromaniacs’ carnival that would leave Al Qaeda organisers yelling, ‘Steady on, that’s too dangerous!’

  The attitude seeps out in other ways. For example, in 2004 the town tried a novel car-parking policy, which involved the council installing a series of parking meters in the High Street, while the residents blew them up. To quote an article in the Independent: ‘The respectable-looking lady in the tea shop was an unlikely advocate of urban terrorism. But she said, “Everyone I know is secretly pleased about the attacks. Good luck to them,” in a hushed tone.’

  At the bottom of the town is Harveys brewery, nestled by the river and looking like the sort of brewery they’d have if everyone drank beer in Toytown. Most
of the pubs in Lewes serve Harveys, including the Lewes Arms, a tiny locals’ pub with no music or quiz machines. When I went there one lunchtime someone pointed out a regular at the bar, saying, ‘You see that old boy? He’s called “The Incredible Dancing Man”. Wherever he is, as soon as the music comes on he starts dancing. So because there’s no music in here he comes in to get a rest.’ In 2008 the Lewes Arms was bought by the Greene King brewery, which removed Harveys from the bar, and this provoked a boycott of the pub. A picket line was set up outside in a protest that lasted over a year.

  As causes go, it might not rank alongside the deepest, and you can only imagine what someone from Burma might have felt if they’d wandered past and said, ‘I must give you solidarity and greetings, my comrades. In my land we too face injustice and must protest with untold courage. What is the nature of the outrage embodied in this “Lewes Arms” which you are resisting? Have they kidnapped your families and held them in the cellar? Is it the headquarters of the brutal and sadistic local secret police? Oh, they’ve replaced your favourite beer, have they?’

  Nonetheless, after months of boycotts and picketing, the campaign began earning publicity, with articles in several national newspapers. When the German magazine Der Spiegel ran a feature, Greene King reinstalled the beer, sold off the pub, and the managing director resigned.

  Lewes has become a popular town to emigrate to from London, and people brought up there refer to the immigrants as ‘DFLs’, meaning ‘Down from Londons’. You can detect a smugness from some who’ve moved down, who might boast that ‘It’s wonderful because there’s a direct route to Victoria that takes only thirty-four seconds and it’s so much better to bring up kids here because the air’s so fresh and everyone’s an expert in explosives.’

  Some parts of the town appear to cater exclusively for this constituency, such as ‘Bill’s’, the organic café and grocers where you seem to hear comments like, ‘The fruit here is amazing, the apples are £9 each but they’ve all been naturally pecked by crows.’

  But the attitude of refusing to be druv must be part of the attraction, so the intake enhances the town’s independent spirit. When you look at the history of Lewes, it seems that process may have been taking place over several centuries. By 1800 it had a reputation as a home for the deliberately awkward, including Tom Paine, possibly the stroppiest Englishman of all time. Paine was a corset-maker, born in Norfolk, who ended up among the leading figures of both the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. But where did he learn his stroppiness – Lewes?

  He went there when he was offered a job as customs officer, and joined the Headstrong Club, a debating society that met every week in the White Hart, still there on the High Street. Each week the debater judged to be the best would take the Headstrong Club trophy to keep at home for the week, and the winner was always Tom Paine. Imagine how historically unlucky that was for those other poor sods. It would be as if at one point in history there was a weekly wine-making race, and every week the judges said, ‘Well, once again the prize goes to Jesus.’

  While Paine lived there he said of the women in Lewes, ‘Every one of them falls victim to my charms and good looks.’ One of these must have been Elizabeth Ollive, as he married her, though it may have been mostly for business reasons, as it meant he could set up a shop with his new wife selling tobacco and spirits. His employers told him this might create a slight conflict of interests, given that he was a customs officer, whose main duty was to stop the smuggling of tobacco and spirits.

  Paine seems to have written his first pamphlet in Lewes, on why customs officers should have their salaries increased, and he finally got the sack for taking days off in London. It was there that he met the American radical Benjamin Franklin, who suggested he go to America, where he wrote the pamphlet that inspired the American troops as they went into battle with the English.

  You can tell the nature of a town from how it commemorates its association with Tom Paine. In Thetford, where he was born, an argument about whether a statue should be erected in his honour led to the mayor stating he would only allow it if there was just a single word inscribed on it: ‘Traitor’. But in Lewes the White Hart has a cardboard Paine inviting you in for Sunday lunch, and Harveys produces a beer called Tom Paine ale.

  Most spectacularly, though, Lewes is famous for burning stuff. Thousands of people are active in the many bonfire societies, who spend months planning their celebrations, each of them choosing someone they can build an effigy of so they can blow them up.

  In some ways it must be like living in a town full of schizophrenics. Perhaps there should be a scheme across Britain whereby if someone says to his doctor, ‘The man in the corner keeps telling me to burn things down,’ instead of prescribing strong medication the doctor will say, ‘Why don’t you move to Lewes?’

  The origins of the custom lie in the events following the death of Henry VIII, when Queen Mary set about trying to make England a Catholic country again. In her enthusiasm she burned Protestants. One third of the victims were from Sussex, and the biggest concentration of fires took place in Lewes.

  For example, Deryk Carver, a brewer from Brighton, was arrested for saying prayers in English. He confessed, was told not to do it again, but carried on. At his second trial he said to the prosecutor, in the spirit of compromise, ‘Your doctrine is poison and sorcery. If Christ were here you would put Him to a worse death than He was put to before. You say that you can make a God. Well, you can make a pudding as well.’ Following that magnificent combination of defiance and surrealism he went up in flames at the Star Inn, which is now the town hall. Over the next two years there were sixteen other executions in Lewes, for crimes such as refusing to attend mass conducted in Latin, or to believe a priest had the power to absolve your sins. Huge crowds gathered at these burnings, but rather than terrifying them, they made them quietly furious.

  When England settled into being Protestant after Elizabeth I came to the throne, there were constant rumours of plots and conspiracies to make the country Catholic again, of which the most famous was the one involving Guido Fawkes. The year after the plotters were captured on 5 November 1605, the government passed an act called ‘For public Thanksgiving to Almighty God every year of the fifth day of November’.

  In some places the locals celebrate this festivity by writing their names with sparklers, but in Lewes each year the towns-people would build a model of a priest sprinkling holy water, and set fire to it. The custom continues; every year they still burn a Pope, while ‘No Popery’ banners hang overhead, so it looks as if Lewes is the only genteel Sussex town whose council has passed directly from the Liberal Democrats to the paramilitary Loyalists.

  I spent Guy Fawkes Night in Lewes in 2010, arriving in the town around five o’clock, which I naïvely thought would allow time for a meal before it all started, because no firework nights start earlier than seven. But twenty yards from the station we had to stop at a crossroads so that around three hundred people dressed as drummer boys, carrying burning torches and pushing wheelbarrows full of blazing wood, could pass by under a street-wide banner. Then the first bangs started. Not distant kabooms and crackles as a circle of purple stars cascade above. Lewes bangs are sudden dull cracks, that sound as if something’s exploded right by your feet. Then you look down and realise that’s because a banger has exploded right by your feet. So you yelp, ‘What the fuck shit bollocks!’ but despite this complaint they carry on exploding, like musket fire, and you can’t hear what anyone’s saying, but presumably it’s ‘Evans has bought it, sir,’ and ‘Perkins, take Amy this letter and tell her I love her.’

  But within a couple of minutes you get used to these miniature bombs blowing up all around, and it becomes part of the background noise, like the bubbling of a fish tank. No one even comments on an explosion unless it goes off extremely close to them, and even if it caused an injury they’d chuckle, ‘Look at that, my middle finger’s sheared clean off, that should get me a discount off a manicur
e, ha ha.’

  As well as bangers there are rook scarers, that crack like the background gunfire on a news report from a war zone, sold in their millions for bonfire night. Anyone looking at the sales figures of rook scarers who wasn’t aware of the parades would assume that Lewes must have the hardest rooks in Britain, sat on roofs on their own while other rooks tell the young ones, ‘Always be polite to Charlie there, he done three years in Lewes.’

  By six o’ clock everywhere smelled of sulphur, burning wood, and a dozen varieties of smoke. Every street was full of crowds that might suddenly shift in one direction, as if an enemy has been spotted and must be pursued. Then another procession, of sailors or pirates, would march by, before a race took place in which burning barrels of tar were rolled across a bridge and into the river. Then came the effigies, the first one a giant David Cameron emerging from the House of Commons as a puppet-master with a frail Nick Clegg dangling from his strings. It was two storeys high and covered in holes packed with explosives.

  The most compelling thing about the spectacle is the raggedness of it all. None of it is choreographed, or announced by a presenter from local radio. There are no ropes to stand behind, no advertising or banners boasting that the council works to make things better. There are no speeches from a mayor or a representative of the sponsor in which they hope you have a wonderful evening but should remember the safety code.

  Sometimes the air seems to be completely smoke, although it’s colourful smoke. At one point I heard what I assume must have been a chemistry student say, ‘That Society’s smoke is purple, which indicates their fireworks contain phosphorus.’

  Most people who live in Lewes are members of one of the five main bonfire societies, which spend the year raising money, preparing costumes and building their arsenal of firepower, and choosing someone to build an effigy of, so they can burn it in a field. The crowds cross each other as they head towards the bonfire they’ve chosen to watch this year, which seems to be a huge decision, the equivalent of where to spend Christmas.