News from Norfolk

For quite some time, perhaps a year or more, Ada had been in the habit of going for an early morning walk, more or less every day, from her house up towards Harrow Hill. 

The house where she lived with her husband and children was near the church. From there, a track led down to Low Lane, a narrow stretch of road that passed through arable fields before rising up again suddenly, twisting around a curve and crossing the top of Harrow Hill. The path then dropped down again toward a pig farm before rising as it approached another hamlet and then, eventually, the local market town. 

Ada, though, generally walked to the top of the hill before turning around and walking back again. 

The walk took her about forty minutes, all told. 

The route of the walk was, it must be said, very ordinary. The fields were generally drilled with crops like sugar beet, oilseed or winter wheat. The one cottage that lay along the route was a low prefab, clad long ago in brick and inhabited by the elderly widow related to the the local farming family. 

There were only two things that were even potentially interesting about the walk. Although there were two common stories about how Harrow Hill had got its name — either from something to do with agricultural activity, or possibly from the academic backstory of one of the farmer’s ancestors — in fact neither story was accurate. The name was actually based on the Old English ‘hearg’, denoting a spot that had once been a pre-Christian site of worship. These days, though, there was nothing on top of the hill except a Site of Special Scientific Interest, which in practice consisted of some gravel outcrops and a huge amount of bracken. 

The other potentially interesting thing was that the lane was said to be frequented by Old Shuck, the legendary black demon-dog who is a central cliché of East Anglian folklore. In fairness, though, the same is said of pretty much every long stretch of lonely lane anywhere in Norfolk or Suffolk. Certainly Ada didn’t know anyone who had experienced anything notable anywhere on Low Lane. And she had never seen Old Shuck, either. 

Between the years 1621 and 1639  the rector of Blakeney, a village on the north Norfolk coast, was a youngish yet very learned man named Ralph Lowde. As someone who now lives in the house once occupied by Ralph Lowde, I naturally wished to see what, if anything, four centuries on, I could discover about my predecessor. 

The most informative source for the early life of Ralph Lowde is the register of Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge. According to the register, Ralph was the son of Edmund Lowde, husbandman, of Aighton; he studied at Whalley School under Mr Browne; he matriculated at Emmanuel College in 1606 under Mr Walbanks, but migrated to Caius in October 1608 with William Branthwaite, Master. He took his BA in 1609/10, his MA in 1613, and the prestigious degree of BD in 1622. Finally, he served as a fellow of Caius from 1615 to 1622. 

What are we to make of this terse recitation of facts? 

Aighton is a hamlet in the parish of Mitton, five miles southwest of Clitheroe in the Ribble Valley. After the mid eighteenth century the area was to become notable as the location of the Jesuit foundation Stonyhurst College, but in the late sixteenth century it cannot have been more than a handful of modest buildings skirting the banks of a fast-flowing river.

To have started at Caius in 1608 at the age of 18, Ralph (sometimes Raphe or Radulphus) Lowde (sometimes Loud, Loude or Lowd) must have been born in about 1590. His father, Edmund, seems to have been a rather ordinary, middling sort of landowner. Dugdale’s Visitation of Lancashire (1664-5) would later record the family as being from Ridding, then Kirkham, and armigerous — the arms were argent, three bugle horns, sable, stringed, or — all of this presumably a play on the word ‘Loud’. But it was only during Ralph’s lifetime that the family entered the ranks of the gentry. 

Ralph spent four years studying at nearby Whalley Grammar School, a two-hour walk from his home. Before the reformation, the Cistercians at Whalley Abbey had offered educational opportunities for local boys. Afterwards, as early as the reign of Edward VI, a grammar school was founded — apparently in the upper room of a gatehouse formerly belonging to the abbey — to fill the gap. So when Ralph studied there, the school would have been at once rather old, yet also very obviously much changed over the previous generation or two. I have yet to find anything about ‘Mr Browne’, Loude’s schoolmaster. And if the school fit into the Whalley Abbey’s old gatehouse, it is hard to see how it could have educated more than a dozen or so pupils at any given time. But somehow in 1606, at the age of 16, Ralph was sent south to take up a place at Emmanuel College, Cambridge. 

The choice of Emmanuel College, at least, probably tells us something about Ralph’s education.

When he was six years old Frank was sent, along with his baby sister, to live with his aunt Leonora. Auntie Lili, as he was encouraged to call this formidable person, was not actually his aunt at all, but a sort of cousin so distant that even Mr Landsberg — tutor to Auntie Lili’s sons, and by far the most brilliant person Frank had ever met — had been unable to explain the exact connection. But his summary — ‘Lady Lili is a very kind woman’ — was surely correct.

Lady Lili and her husband the Colonel kept a flat in London, just off Sloane Street, but the house where Frank stayed, and where Auntie Lili lived most of the time too, was a place in Norfolk called Friary Farm. 

Friary Farm had, indeed, once been a farmhouse, but since Aunti Lili had got to work on it — helped by an urbane, harmlessly flirtatious London architect and an army of local craftsmen — the warren of heavily-timbered, low-slung rooms, punctuated by inconvenient beams and surprising doors, had somehow transformed itself into a handsome, well-appointed, intensely charming yet also comfortable minor country house. ‘Well, this is what a sense of style will do,’ observed Mr Landsberg. Then he added, ‘money helps too, of course’. 

Friary Farm was also extensively haunted. No one in Auntie Lili’s family or retinue was remotely troubled by this. Nor, it has to be said, once he’d got used to them, did Frank mind the ghosts either. Frank had known a great deal of change and upheaval in his short life, so much so that the admixture of a ghostly element into his daily routine hardly registered. Indeed, he soon learned from Auntie Lili’s sons to blame any missing sock or jersey on the phantom hound that roamed the long gallery at the top of the stairs, or to salute the old soldier who used to pace up and down in the old kitchen but at its former floor level, so that he seemed to walk knee-deep among the tiles, or to point out to Auntie Lili, who liked to be kept informed about them, the shadowy tonsured friars who could often be seen down at the end of the meadow near the big barn, going about their conventual duties in the indistinct, sweet-scented, late summer dusk.

At present, the modest, interwar building shown above — Two Oaks, in the village of Kelling, Norfolk — is threatened with demolition. The planning application requesting demolition is here, on the website of North Norfolk District Council.

North Norfolk District Council has form for allowing the demolition of interwar buildings, including my own village’s New Rectory, an important early work from 1924 by local architect John Page.

I have, needless to say, sent a letter of objection to the NNDC’s Planning Committee, for their consideration, but in the interest of making the relevant case more widely, I reproduce my letter of objection below. (In the version below, I have also provided web links absent from the original document, as not all the enterprises mentioned, while presumably familiar to council members, will be known to the general public.)

___________

15 January 2020

To the Planning Committee of North Norfolk District Council

I write to object to PF/19/2071 — Demolition of detached dwelling and change of use of site to agricultural land.

Two Oaks, Kelling is an extremely attractive house, compact and pleasing in its simple symmetry. It is also richly evocative of the interwar period in which it was constructed, and of the wartime period which it survived intact. As such it should be preserved, renovated and cherished as an important part of the North Norfolk Coast’s built heritage.

North Norfolk sometimes makes much of its links with the Second World War. The Muckleburg Collection, established in 1988, is now visited by thousands each year. Langham Dome has received awards as a successful educational enterprise and tourist attraction. Private initiatives such as the successful Control Tower B&B in North Creake trade on nostalgia for interwar design as much as the desire to experience a site of wartime interest. North Norfolk Railway’s 1940s weekend goes from strength to strength — drawing thousands to the Holt/Sheringham area, offering everything from 1940s jazz to vintage vehicles, it is now one of the largest such events in the UK. At the other end of the spectrum, people from all over the world make private pilgrimages to visit the places where loved ones served, and sometimes died, amongst our Norfolk airfields and along our coast.

Yet those in charge of North Norfolk’s heritage can be casual to the point of negligence when it comes to preserving precious reminders of ‘the greatest generation’ and the world they inhabited. Astonishingly, seriously important 1920s and 1930s buildings — in good condition, often with their internal fixtures and fittings intact, sited prominently in their villages — are still demolished without question or comment.

This is not only grotesque on environmental grounds (the embodied carbon in these buildings means that their demolition is invariably far less ‘green’ than preservation and retrofitting would be) but also on historical ones. A building from the 1920s or 30s is clearly not ‘old’ in the sense that a building from the 1820s or 30s is — but if the younger building isn’t cherished and protected, then it will never have the chance to become old. In a century’s time, our descendants will scratch their heads and wonder why our generation did not fight harder to protect this part of their historical birthright.

Two Oaks may not be ‘remarkable’, in the sense that it is recognisably a normal interwar house, but it is certainly part of Kelling’s history. For some of its time it was apparently the village police house. And for many long decades, it has occupied a prominent position along the busy coast road. Its handsome silhouette is clearly visible, for instance, from Kelling’s War Memorial. And there is something poignant about this. How many troop carriers passed by this house? How many wartime aircraft overflew it? Did Churchill himself drive by on one of his various visits to the area? To anyone who knows or cares about 20th century buildings and happens to drive past Two Oaks today, all these questions are very pertinent. And they may matter even more to those passing by in 100 years, or in 500 years’ time.

There is, after all, a great deal more to North Norfolk’s history than the lazy cliché of flint-built, pantile-roofed fishermen’s cottages. At some level, local government takes account of this. The parish summary for Kelling on the ‘North Norfolk Heritage Explorer’ website expends two long paragraphs on still-extant wartime defensive structures and other built legacies of the Second World War including pillboxes, gun emplacements and anti-aircraft batteries. Increasingly, however, the public understands the history of that war not only through its explicitly military heritage, but also through reminders of the Home Front, civilian experience that underpinned and enabled it.

Two Oaks is very much a part of that Home Front history. In its modest way, it is a monument to Kelling’s wartime experience, and a reminder of that pivotal moment in our region’s history. To demolish Two Oaks is to show contempt, yet again, for the vanishing past, no less significant for being relatively recent.

Please insist on the preservation of Two Oaks, and please reject this planning application.

[Signed etc.]

[This article also appears as a guest post at the excellent Paul Burgin’s Mars Hill blog.]

Brexit, even after all these months, is still capable of surprises. A few weeks ago, I had dinner with a couple of old friends. They’re both Leave supporters. I’m a Remainer, as was my companion. We had met each other — all four of us, actually — through the student politics of the late 1980s. None of us is shy about expressing a point of view. And yet this dinner, which by rights ought to have ended either with a flaming row or, perhaps worse, with a display of ever-more-icy contempt for each others’ abject wrongness, was — from my point of view, at least — an extremely happy occasion.

It says something sad about today’s politics that I found myself, afterwards, picking apart why this conversation — unlike so many conversations about Brexit, both online and in real life — had been so interesting, constructive and friendly. For one thing, as we had all known each other for so long, it was possible to appeal to a corpus of common assumptions. It probably also helped that, as we all genuinely like each other, none of us immediately assumed, the minute someone said something with which we disagreed, that the speaker was either a monster or an idiot — that there was quite a lot of good faith on show. Indeed, the climate of mutual respect was powerful enough that I found myself thinking, at various points, ‘that’s not the way I see things, but if X sees things that way, maybe it’s worth considering’. Finally, there was a pervasive sense, hard to pin down but expressed at all sorts of points, that it wasn’t worth falling out over this.

Did the conversation change my mind? No, but it probably did help to remind me that conversations about Brexit are not only possible, but perhaps also necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

For a long time, I had no particular interest in reading about the Second World War.

History, per se, always mattered a lot, which is how I ended up with a doctoral degree from Cambridge University, the odd insight into how the Tudor reformations did or didn’t play out in the flatter parts of west Norfolk, and a lasting aversion to academic infighting.

But because I was born in the mid 1960s, WW2 somehow never registered as ‘history’. Like my parents’ dated taste in music, their books, indeed the blind-spots of their politics, WW2 was simply a generational experience which I could regard with a sort of semi-detached bemusement. It wasn’t my own experience, true, but it never really seemed like ‘history’ either, if only because when I was growing up, every middle-aged person I met spoke of those wartime years with absolute familiarity. ‘The war’, as everyone called it, was both too far and to near to me to come into easy focus. Hence I ignored it.

Of course, like the rest of my generation, both in the USA where I grew up, and in the UK which is now my home, I also grew up in a world where ‘the war’ was omnipresent. Read the rest of this entry »

This article first appeared as a guest post at Mars Hill, Paul Burgin’s excellent blog.

Although I’m British now, I was born in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the American South, and I lived there until I went off to college in 1984.

Raleigh wasn’t a bad place to grow up, at least for someone like me. Still a slightly sleepy, genteel place then, its wide streets shaded by mature trees and, downtown at least, blessed with plenty of handsome antebellum houses, the old-fashioned southern charm was constantly undercut, before it had the chance to grow cloying, by more bracing influences: three first-rate universities all within a short distance of each other, for instance, and the presence of something called the Research Triangle Park, home to forward-looking enterprises such as IBM and various pharmaceutical companies. As a result, the Raleigh of my childhood attracted intelligent, hard-working people not only from around the USA, but also much further afield. My tiny, Episcopal Church-run school placed me side by side with children whose parents had come from Egypt, Iran, Vietnam. Although it was a church school, I grew up with Muslims, Jews, Catholics, protestants of every possible persuasion and even the odd out-and-proud atheist. The universities also ensured that we had more than our fair share of high culture: a very good art museum, as well as concerts and theatre performances from world-famous groups. A thriving farmers’ market co-existed with shops where it was possible to buy Thai shrimp paste.

The reason I am spelling this out is that I don’t want you to get the notion that the Raleigh of the 1970s and early 80s was some sort of redneck backwater wherein good ole boys sat around pickin’ their banjos and swilling moonshine on the front porch all day. In our household, anyway, a recording of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony and a glass of reasonable chablis would have been more like it. And we didn’t even have a proper front porch. Read the rest of this entry »

I have only ever heard one story that makes Theresa May sound like a genuinely good person. The source for it is an old friend from university days. We met through CUCA, the Cambridge University Conservative Association. My friend is still a Tory, whereas I gave up on the party roughly thirty years later during the course of May’s 2016 conference speech — a bumpy journey recalled at some length here.

Anyway, the story involves a visit by my friend to a speaker meeting organised by her local Conservative association. At the time, my friend was trying to balance a career as a corporate lawyer with her demanding role as the mother of an infant and a degree of continued political engagement, and in a slightly desperate moment of multi-tasking, brought her baby along to the meeting with her. In the normal way of these things, as soon as the distinguished guest began speaking, the baby kicked off. My friend tried to calm the baby by breastfeeding him/her, as discreetly as possible. For this, she was rewarded with a range of disapproving looks from the mostly elderly, entirely disapproving audience. In the car-park afterwards, preparing to leave, my friend was feeling as many of us may have felt under similar circumstances — angry, defensive, embarrassed — maybe even a bit tearful. Getting into her car, then, she noticed the speaker hurrying out towards her, apparently anxious for a word. Rather to my friend’s surprise, the speaker could not have been more supportive — praising the qualities of the baby, talking about how hard it must be to balance work and family, unhappy at the audience reaction and passionately defending my friend’s decision to breastfeed in a public place.

The speaker was, of course, Theresa May. I am repeating this story in the interest of scrupulous fairness. Having said that, though, let’s remember that after my thirty years in the party, this is literally the only positive story I have ever heard about Theresa May. The other stories mostly revolve around tone-deafness, rigidity, humourlessness. Often there is a degree of intellectual limitation in the mix as well. Not one of these stories suggests that May got where she is through anything other than a dogged, principle-free, vindictive, deeply joyless strand of personal ambition. Nor do any of them imply that she has much to offer either the Tory party or the United Kingdom.

Thus it is surprising that the Tories somehow ended up with a general election campaign designed to rely primarily on May’s personal appeal coupled with the perceived unattractiveness of her opponents — a campaign contrived without much input from other senior party figures, defensive where not painfully robotic in the face of media interest, producing an appearance of extreme arrogance coupled with reflexive paranoia. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me preface what will necessarily be a personal, subjective yet sustained pre-Brexit lament with a slightly alarming confession.

In 2001, I worked for several months on Iain Duncan Smith’s leadership campaign, and then for a few more months in the Leader’s Office at CCO. As a lifelong Tory who voted ‘Remain’ and who parted company with the party in September 2016, part way through Theresa May’s ‘citizen of the world’ speech, I now heartily regret this brief chapter of my life, realise it constituted monumentally bad judgement on my part, and wish it had never happened. Sorry, everyone.

My reason for reminding the world of this embarrassing interlude, however, has less to do with some random masochistic-exhibitionist personal quirk than it does with insisting on a more general historical point regarding Britain’s rupture with the European Union, which Theresa May has announced that she will trigger tomorrow.

Here it is: in 2001, even a famously Eurosceptic, ‘right wing’ campaign conducted first within the parliamentary Conservative Party, then within its grassroots, did not envision prying the UK out of the EU. It did not envision hard Brexit. In its darkest, weirdest, most extreme moments, it did not even begin to imagine the sort of enormity that Ms May will perpetrate on Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a nice irony — ‘nice’, that is, in the older sense of the word — in the fact that the day of Martin McGuinness’ burial is being marked in London with blue flashing lights, bridges closed off with police tape, helicopters circling low overhead and tributes to a brave police constable, murdered while carrying out his job. At least for people of a certain age, it is these things, more than Tuesday morning’s fulsome farewells to a dead peace-maker, that conjure up the man.

McGuinness’ IRA was responsible for killing far more Londoners, far more police constables, far more UK residents and visitors than Islamist terrorists have ever done. Read the rest of this entry »

Whatever dark hints 2016 may have provided to the contrary, conventional wisdom isn’t always wrong. Having seen James Graham’s This House at the Garrick Theatre last night, I can confirm what more or less every professional or casual critic, UK politics geek, old Labour hack, veteran theatre-goer, friend or sundry acquaintance will already have told you, which is that This House is a hugely compelling, satisfying play, and that James Graham’s is a voice to be welcomed with unalloyed enthusiasm.

This is all the more remarkable when one considers the play’s apparent modesty of aspiration. This House takes place not on the floor of the House of Commons, that great expansive theatre of parliamentary democracy with its larger-than-life characters and set-piece battles, but rather in what it describes as the ‘engine room’ of the House of Commons — the offices of the government and opposition whips, hidden down in the badly-maintained bowels of the building, wherein much of the real business of politics is carried out by figures who, at least as far as the general public is concerned, are all but nameless and faceless. Its timespan stretches from the February 1974 general election to the 1979 vote of no confidence that brought down Jim Callaghan and ushered in the age of Margaret Thatcher. During these not-quite-five years, the Labour Party struggled to govern with an unfeasibly small, fragile, continually embattled majority. How the Labour whips made this happen — and at what cost — is the central focus of This House.

Modesty? Imagine, perhaps, trying to sell to a West End Theatre the idea that procedural wrangles mostly carried out by men in suits in sparsely-furnished basement rooms during the late 1970s are actually really, really interesting. Or to put it another way, think of what might have happened if Shakespeare, having decided for whatever reason to cut from Henry V not only the king himself but also all the higher nobility, made the whole play centre on Pistol, the captains and the Boy, always speaking in prose, with the battles invariably taking place off-stage, hence seen only through their impact on logistics.

This, more or less, is the challenge that Graham has set himself. That he succeeds so brilliantly is surprising enough that, two day later, I can’t entirely resist the temptation to try to pick apart his achievement, and see how he managed to do it. Why does everyone, correctly, love This House so much?

Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this slyly surprising play reposes in its manifest, unabashed and deeply unfashionable lack of cynicism.

Read the rest of this entry »

A month into the Trump era, let’s start with the positives, such as they are.

The past month has produced some memorably good photographs. My three favourites are all dinner-table images. Even the amateur ones are good. This photo …

… was taken by a random member of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Palm Beach, Florida, using a camera phone, and yet there’s a great deal in it.

For a start, the composition is as strong as seventeenth century Dutch conversation piece. Look how virtually all the figures turn inwards, towards the central incident. Read the rest of this entry »

All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way — Lev Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

On the late afternoon of Friday, 20 January 2017, I’ll be in Norfolk, in a village perched on the edge of the North Sea. By 16.30 or so I’ll probably be in my comfortably scruffy kitchen, settled down in the armchair next to the old Aga, watching the BBC news on my laptop computer. Outside in the gathering dusk, the pheasants will shout their usual crepuscular warnings at each other, as the sleek fat farm cats make their regular rounds and night tucks itself in around my 500-year old former parsonage, under a waning quarter moon. All will be well, and all manner of things will be well, as our local St. Julian of Norwich put it. And at the same time, Donald J. Trump will be sworn in as the 45th president of the United States.

This horrifies me. Read the rest of this entry »

I only ever saw Tony Blair twice.

The second time — less interesting, more easily summarised — took place standing next to the push-chair occupied by my long-suffering two-year old son. We were coming home from the sandpit in St James’s Park, and I needed to get back soon for a Cadogan Tate delivery, but it was the day on which Tony Blair, who as prime minister had won four elections and served ten years, was going to the Palace to resign. How often does it happen that one can elect to be present for a (relatively benign) moment of history, just by delaying a journey back from the sandpit? So I stood in a little huddle of press photographers, bemused tourists and politics geeks. In time we were rewarded by the onrush of the sleek black car, the glimpse of a familiar face, our own tiny crumb snatched from beneath the table of world-historical significance. My son doesn’t remember it, of course, but he claims to be glad that he was there.

The first time mattered more.

The date eludes me, but it must have been quite early in Tony Blair’s premiership. But someone could, I suppose, work it out, because it had to have been a year when 11 November fell on a Saturday. I was down in Westminster and, on a whim, went to take part in what was, at the time, a fairly low-key observance at the Cenotaph. Read the rest of this entry »

Far and away the most successful thing in my garden is the deer population.

We have at least two types of deer — sturdy little muntjac, rapacious in their strangely shy, apologetic way, plus a tiny herd of roe deer, whose defence strategy when confronted by a human is to flash a pale bottom  in the hope that this spectacle will somehow be so terrifying as to drive all foes away. I suppose we ought to prefer the roe, as they are natives, but the diminutive exoticism of the muntjac, like labrador retrievers with cloven hooves, is not without appeal.

Whatever anyone may tell you to the contrary, deer are fussy eaters.

Consider the roses. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a question. What’s the flattest county in England?

Norfolk, you might well answer — but you’d be wrong. The answer is, of course, Cambridgeshire.

What’s the second flattest county in England?

Norfolk, you might answer — but again, you’d be wrong. The answer is Lincolnshire, although before 1974, the answer would have been Huntingdonshire — followed by Lincolnshire.

Norfolk, in other words, isn’t as flat as all that. Nor does Norfolk offer much in the way of fens. Fens, in general, are a Cambridgeshire thing. Norfolk does have some fens — but then it also has some coastal cliff formations, at Hunstanton, Sheringham, Cromer and so forth. It has a lot of coastline, but in places it is not particularly close to the sea. It has rivers, obviously, but in recent years, it has had far fewer serious problems with flooding than some counties one might mention. And if there are no mountains in Norfolk, how many English counties can claim anything approaching a mountain? Unless I’m missing something here, post-1974, only Cumbria has mountains — and not many of those, either.

In short, there is nothing particularly astonishing about the altitude of Norfolk relative to the rest of England. Or to put it another way, Norfolk really isn’t very flat, whatever Noel Coward’s not-very-reliable heroine in Private Lives might have claimed to the contrary.

Yet the canard persists. Read the rest of this entry »