Neither Nowt Nor Summat: In Search of the Meaning of Yorkshire by Ian McMillan

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ian mcmillan, neither nowt nor summat, ted hughes, wars of the roses, Yorkshire

Travelling Companions  3  (A Reflection on British Travel Writing)

Before I get to a review of the book, a brief introduction for the benefit of those who may never have walked the hallowed acres of God’s own county. If you’re reading this in England you’ll probably be aware of Ian McMillan and you’ll certainly be aware that Yorkshire is unique. Not necessarily because it is better than other counties (though for a Yorkshireman this is a fact so beyond dispute as to be accepted as an acknowledged truth along with the Ten Commandments and the Rules of Cribbage!) or because it contains, in and of itself, something that is both quintessentially English, and a nationality all its own. All of this may or may not be true.

Yorkshire is the biggest of the English counties, the most culturally diverse and one of the most attractive. It contains extremes. Empty moorland, precipitous cliffs, wide sandy beaches, pulsing cities, mill towns that were once the cradle of the Industrial Revolution but are now suffering neglect and poor municipal decision making, wide fertile farmland and many lovely rivers. You’ll never be short of someone to point out your personal defects in Yorkshire. You’ll never be far from equal measures of free thinkers and bigots. It is a county of great writers: three Brontës for starters, great painters (David Hockney for one) and great musicians (Frederick Delius was from Bradford). It has given the world more than its share of pop musicians, actors and famously (at least in Yorkshire), if it had competed as a country in its own right, it would have come 12th in the medal table at The London Olympics  with 7 gold medals, 2 silver and 3 bronze.

Hutton-le-Hole. (The picture is genuine and unposed. The car did drive through the village as I was taking a few photos.)

People from Yorkshire are known to say things like “There are only two sorts of people in the world. Those who come from Yorkshire, and those who wish they did” and mean it. People from elsewhere have an oft repeated saying (loathed by Yorkshire folk) that “You can always tell a Yorkshireman, but you can’t tell him much!” Legend (purely apocryphal) has it that an old gentleman from Richmond North Yorkshire died and ascended to the pearly gates of heaven.

“Where are you from then?” asked St Peter.

“Richmond.” replied the man.

“Richmond Surrey or Richmond North Yorkshire?” asked the saintly gatekeeper.

“North Yorkshire, though I usually refer to it as the North Riding.”

“Oh dear.” said St Peter.

“Is something wrong?” enquired the man.

“No. nothing wrong. It’s just that after spending your life in Richmond North Yorkshire, you might just find heaven a little disappointing.”

It is known across England as “God’s County” or “God’s Acres”. Again these are terms usually used by those born in Yorkshire. There is also a huge rivalry between Yorkshire and its western neighbour, Lancashire. Yorkshire was the centre of the wool trade. Lancashire was cotton. Yorkshire has Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford. Lancashire has Manchester and Liverpool. Yorkshire has Scarborough, the world’s first seaside resort. Lancashire has Blackpool which became one of the biggest and most popular. More than anything there was the Wars of the Roses. A long lasting series of fifteenth century civil war battles fought under the banners of York and Lancaster. Lancashire being the Red Rose County and Yorkshire favouring the White Rose. Both sides can claim victory or defeat. The conclusive battle of these Wars was the Battle of Tewkesbury (fought hundreds of miles away in Gloucestershire) and won by the Yorkists, which placed Edward IV (possibly Edward V) and certainly Richard III on the throne of England. Richard was eventually defeated and killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485 by the essentially Lancastrian armies of Henry Tudor (henceforth Henry VII). Henry married Elizabeth of York which combined both households and also combined the red and the white into the Tudor Rose which is half one and half the other.

Rievaulx Abbey

All of this gives grounds for rivalry until you look more closely at where the various armies came from. Geographical Yorkshire and Lancashire had very little to do with it. In fact the Yorkists drew many of their soldiers, generals and donors from west of the Pennines while the House of Lancaster had strongholds in God’s County. It’s all very confusing to anyone but a Yorkshireman. He doesn’t need historical facts to prove him right. Being right is something you are born with in the three Ridings.

What about Ian McMillan? Well he’s a very well liked poet, thinker, broadcaster, playwright and educationist. He’s always lived in Yorkshire, speaks with the broadest of vowels, supports Barnsley Football Club and has an authenticity to be envied. He knows his stuff. But he also has a sly sense of humour and you can never be truly sure when he is defending Yorkshire with a straight bat and when he is playing with a great deal of the right hand side of irony.

Ian McMillan: The Bard of Barnsley.

The book takes McMillan on journeys (mostly day trips taken with friends or on public transport as McMillan endearingly and admirably doesn’t drive) to the extremes of Yorkshire. He’s in search of what it is that makes Yorkshireness unique and he keeps asking himself the question “Am I Yorkshire enough?”

Of course you can no more define Yorkshireness without stereotype than you can define Texan or Australian or Japanese. The book becomes an enjoyable series of excursions without any great attempt at anthropology or behavioural science. He loves Yorkshire. He loves being Yorkshire. He hates being told he makes a living out of being ‘Yorkshire’, but to a large extent he does. But he is very good at it. He’s a little way short of being a JB Priestly or an Alan Bennett in the pantheon of writers who were peculiarly Yorkshire but, if not a national treasure, he’s a Yorkshire treasure.

Here’s my review.

This book wanders. This book meanders, as the poet goes on a search for Yorkshire and what makes it what it is. He looks for the epic in the seemingly trivial and often is in danger of the delivering a trivial epic. There are certainly long stretches of the book that show no evidence of the editorial blue pencil. At times it is difficult to distinguish McMillan’s search for meaning with that of his fictional Yorkshire neighbour, John Shuttleworth. Except McMillan is a storyteller and Shuttleworth a story; and Shuttleworth often that bit more believable. McMillan is certainly guilty of making up a lot of his anecdotes (so it seems to me) or liberally refining them to suit his purpose. The body language of his prose as much of a giveaway as a Yorkshire batsman taking a close interest in the crowd after the ball snicks his bat on the way to the wicketkeeper’s gloves and the umpire’s finger stays down.

Thirsk Racecourse

When he stops waffling he is suddenly very good indeed. And very funny. If you go and see him perform he’ll delight you, make you laugh, a lot. I’ve seen him several times and will go again. And he makes you laugh here when he hits the nail on the head. When he stops trying too hard to be “The Bard of Barnsley”. When he stops embroidering his prose with rich homely similes or dropping in a fancy poetic term (about every seventeen pages) to prove his bona fides.

To point out the many contradictions in the text is to point out what is meant. Yorkshire is a contradiction. It’s the ugliest county and the most beautiful. It isn’t posh but has some of the most unbearable snobs on God’s earth. It’s got local hairdressers where you can have your arse bored off by the same conversation every time you pop in for light trim. It also has some of the country’s most respected universities. A place where you can confuse ordinary people for characters and characters for ordinary people. And it’s true and honest. But what would I know? I’m a Lancastrian.

The Halifax Piece Hall

I like his search for a perfect pork pie. I like his search, with poet Steve Ely (a very different type of poet; stronger, grittier, more complex and with something that truly captures what it is to be Yorkshire) for the poet Ted Hughes. I’ll be off to Roche Abbey very soon to sit by Laughton Pool and read his poem ‘Pike’ in the likely knowledge that I am at the very spot where it was inspired. I like the parts of the book where he tells the story of his journey simply and without the cap and bells of poetic device or rambling anecdote. And I like these parts of the book enough to overlook the parts of the journey when you want to shout “Are we nearly there yet?” or “Gerron wi’ it!” It’s like being in Yorkshire. Lots of grit and grot but when you look up, a glorious old mill or a castle on top of a hill and the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

I’m not sure that extended prose is McMillan’s strong point but he has an undoubted love of words which is infectious. He’s charmed and entertained audiences for 35 years without ever saying a great deal. And that is a strength. Some might say he’s got away wi’ it. Managed to have a good life without ever having to get a proper job. He doesn’t like being called a professional Yorkshireman but he wears the badge with pride. I kept thinking the book “were going on a bit” but now I’ve finished it I’m beginning to miss it. Pinning down what makes it good (and it is good) isn’t easy. Like Yorkshire itself.

The Road to Little Dribbling: Bill Bryson

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Barrow in Furness, Bill Bryson, HV Morton, The Road to Little Dribbling

Travelling Companions 2

I seem to have decided on the pattern of reviewing these from most recently read and working backwards. Actually I’ve been enjoying the sunshine too much and haven’t had much inclination to sit, for more than a minute or two, in front of a computer screen if nobody’s paying me. This is one of my occasional extended reviews from Goodreads. Don’t be fooled by the unimpressed nature of the piece. Like many of you I am a big fan of Bill Bryson. I just don’t think much of this book. If you haven’t read any Bryson before and you’ve got a train or plane to catch then it will pass the time quite nicely. If you haven’t read any Bryson before, and there is a choice between this book and any other that he has written…choose the other.

Here’s the review.

He’s become the Paul McCartney of travel writing; once sublime and now pushing out books that we buy because he’s given us so much pleasure in the past. Maybe it’s very clever writing: the ageing scribe and observer returns to look at England and finds it changed mostly for the worse and so reflects this in his prose; also changed for the worse. There are a few laugh out loud moments; but these are largely fart jokes. I don’t mind a curmudgeon and age suits this persona. I just don’t much like the name dropping multi-millionaire with friends in academe spending half a day in so many towns and then bemoaning that they’re not what they could be. My own home town of Barrow* comes in for a particularly sneering write-off when he walks along the economically depressed Dalton Road and is offended that there are some unemployed people there making the place look untidy with their dogs. Surely, after travelling many miles (there is no other way of getting to Barrow) he might have had a wander around the rather good Dock Museum (after-all he does like a museum in middle class towns), the glorious beaches and nature reserves of Walney or the silent splendour of Furness Abbey, the incomparable loveliness of the Roanhead sand dunes and the Duddon Estuary, even Devonshire Dock Hall; all within walking distance of where he was. No, a cup of coffee in a chain was his idea of the acceptable face of a town I am very fond of. It’s indicative of someone fulfilling contractual obligations but doing so grudgingly and with bad grace.

I’m glad he finds fault with the political mind-set that sees cheese-paring as the route to making Britain great again (otherwise known as austerity, otherwise known as getting the poor to pay for the excesses and mistakes of the rich). We won’t improve anybody’s quality of life, or even save much money, by closing down libraries or removing greenery from urban plazas. But I’m afraid his outsider’s ability to spot the glories and weaknesses of British life has declined with passing years. Seeing the world through the windscreen of a car; and a big car at that; re-tracing steps he specifically says he won’t re-trace, re-hashing old material about the supposed delights of dried cake and hard biscuits, having a pop at a popular travel writer (in this case the pop-worthy HV Morton): it’s all a little tired. It isn’t a bad read but it is by no means a good one. Like Paul McCartney he re-invigorated his genre and delighted a generation. The old stuff is still worth the read (especially Notes From a Small Island and the wonderful Walk in the Woods) but this is the travel book equivalent of Red Rose Speedway.

HV Morton withEdward Cahill in 1950

The main criticisms of HV Morton (and it has become fashionable to find fault with old Harry) are that he made half of it up and the rest he painted with a rosy brush. (Putting aside his serial adultery and desire to see fascism established in England). I’m afraid Bill Bryson is guilty of both (rosy paint brush and inventing encounters, not multiple shagging and longing for the Third Reich to cross the North Sea). His meetings with people seem stage-managed and mostly fiction and his admiration of the English countryside comes across as shallower than it probably is; as well as touching the clichéd. I’m also surprised and disappointed that he’s reverted to the ‘short walk around and then into a pub for pints of lager before a curry and bed’ approach to exploring a town.

The book opens with Bryson’s publisher pointing out the money-making possibilities of Small Island Part II. The book is little more than an exercise in cashing in. (Incidentally it does get a little wearing when this very wealthy man objects to paying a few pounds entry fee, and downright patronising when he tells us we really should be putting more into cathedral collection boxes and be raising money for charity). The title is supposed to be an evocation of the unique and slightly humorous quaintness of English place-names. It equally serves as a description of the contents and prose style.

You’ve made your pile Bill. You’ve made us very happy with your early books. Perhaps it is time to enjoy a well-earned retirement where dribbling can be, and should be, a more private activity.

*Also known as Barrow in Furness, but only by outsiders. (See also Kingston upon Hull).

Writing About England

Travelling Companions: A Short Series on Books About Britain

It was Jon who introduced me to travel books. He’d been further afield than me. I was rooted in England (with an occasional tendency to cross a Celtic border). He read of the Hindu Kush and southern archipelagoes. I didn’t think it likely I’d follow in his footsteps. Why not read about where you’ve been? he said and gave me Paul Theroux’s Kingdom By the Sea. Loved it. And I was off.

Up until then I’d found the planning of a trip as good as the travelling of it. I was invariably on foot, bicycle or a railway line. A railway journey around places I’d been, by someone who saw more than I did, made it a three stage thing. There was now the planning, the doing, and the reading about other people doing. To see the world through your own eyes is a very special thing to do. To see it through the eyes of others, especially the keener eyes of people like Theroux, Betjeman, Priestley, is almost better. Why stick to one life, to one journey, when a library allows you to have as many as you want?

This was in 1987, still four years shy of Bill Bryson setting forth on his genre changing journey with Neither Here Nor There and eight years before his astonishing Notes From a Small Island put travel writing into the best sellers list. I tend to stay away from the crowds in all respects but blimey it was a good read.

From John Byng in the reign of the third George to Bryson the travel story developed three ingredients: the journey itself, the individual places visited and the huge presence of the storyteller. Byng may give you a passing glimpse of Bigleswade in the 1790s but he gives you a lingering insight to his thoughts on the journey. His reaction to a castle, a town, a mountain may take a sentence or two. His reaction to the sauce served with his chops is often a good deal longer. Bryson rarely fails to filter the factual through his own prejudices and ability to tell the real thing from the fake. (An ability that has waned considerably in the last ten years: the prejudice is still there – and often still amusing – but the judgement has diminished.)

It seems (to me at least) time to pull the threads of my reading together. But where do you start and, more surprisingly, where do you stop? Starting is easier. Chronological is always a simple and safe plan. Either chronological in the order they were written or the order in which they were read. Either is fine. But where to stop? What constitutes travel writing? Where does it merge with local history or geography, national history or natural history? Is JB Priestley’s great book a travelogue or a capturing of place in time? And what about fiction? Doesn’t Middlemarch, or even Barry Hines’ Kes, capture the time and the place as well if not better than a man (it seems a strangely male dominated genre) on a horse/train/bicycle with a notebook? Who captures the essence of Nottinghamshire better than DH Lawrence or Dorset better than Thomas Hardy? Several of Dickens’ most popular novels (Pickwick Papers, David Copperfield) are disguised travel books. I’ve literally walked in the footsteps of Howard Spring and Ian McEwan and found it very familiar. And then there is poetry. Owen Sheers devoted an entire book to the way poets have produced their own portrait of Britain. Norman Nicholson captured the history of lakeland off the beaten track in his verses and then went back and captured it again in his prose. I could go on, and probably will.

This short series of posts is an act of filing, recording, cataloguing. It’s 32 years since Jon gave me the Paul Theroux. Since then I’ve been devoted to travel writing. I’d very much like to read an account of my own reading and I’m the only one who can write it. I’ve written a little of what I have seen of Britain. This is my English journey through  through other people’s eyes.

I’ll begin with the book that currently rests on my bedside table.

Engel’s England: Thirty-nine counties, one capital and one man by Matthew Engel

You’ll find this on the convenient tables in Waterstones where they put the books that are already selling well; a process helped by ‘buy one get the next half price’ stickers. It deserves its prominence. He’s a writer whose judgement is still clear, whose wry observational style is worth a chuckle or two per chapter, who isn’t afraid to call a monstrosity a monstrosity, greed greed and still see the beauty shining through. It doesn’t take long to get the Engel angle on a place. This won’t please everyone. Plenty of people will buy it in expectation of a rose coloured pastoral idyl.They will be partly satisfied. I’m two thirds of the way through and the only county he’s visited so far that I could live in (if I were to use this book as my only guide) is Derbyshire. But this balances well with my own findings. He’s attracted by the same things as me; living history, tradition, good independent shops, pubs with good beer and no television screens. He’s put off by the same things: dullness, waste, snootiness, lack of generosity. And I’ve come to the same conclusion. The only county I could live (happily) in is Derbyshire. Apparently he gets excited about London. I do too, but can only cope for three days at the most after which time I’m clamouring for simple peace and quiet.

He’s the same generation as me and, for that matter, Bill Bryson. We all share the same fault. We remember all of these places as being different, and usually much better than they are now. We don’t go to Ulverston (to choose an example I know well and love dearly) and see the perfectly fine Sun Inn on Market Street and describe it as it is. We see what was there. We see the mess an architect made of the corner, the few sad stalls where once a market bustled, we see the inevitable Tesco Metro where we once bought pick and mix. Maybe it is time for travel books to be written by someone in their early twenties who sees a town for what it is now, not for what is was back when ten bob was enough for a night out with enough change to pay the milkman.

Engel’s England is a fine book despite this. His sense of nostalgia is kept in check by his perceptiveness and his descriptions are fair and honest. I’ve lived in Devon and North Yorkshire. I love them  both but I wouldn’t want to live there again and this book pretty much captures why I feel this way. (Mind you, if the right house came up in Scarborough I might be tempted.)

The key to this book is that he travels to the counties as history and geography created them. This is done strictly to pre 1974 lines. (The 1972 Local Government Act redrew county boundaries for the purpose of rationalising provision. Out went historic counties like Rutland and Westmoreland and in came places that nobody can place on a map; Avon, Salop, Cleveland, and regions like Hyndburn and Kirklees (Accrington and Huddersfield in old money)). Happily local pressure has got rid of some of these changes – Rutland was abolished in 1974 but made a comeback in 1995 – but a great deal was lost and very little gained by the changes. Not all were bad. I myself am a proud Lancastrian who saw my home moved into Cumbria. I’ve never liked the idea of Cumbria and certainly never felt Cumbrian. But a great number, especially of those who continued to live there, like their new addresses very much.

This leads on to another point for which Lancashire is a very good example. What happens to an industrial county when the industry is removed and precious little is put back in its place? Engel deals with this eloquently, with affection but sadness. I can see why my old friends and neighbours are happy to turn away from the few surviving mills and shipyards and point their futures at the mountains and lakes.

It’s a first class read. It’s funny and sharply observed. But it’s painful too. Unless it falls away badly in the last hundred pages (which I don’t expect it to) I recommend it heartily. Is it as good as Notes From a Small Island? It gives it a good run for its money and is certainly vastly superior to The Road to Little Dribbling.