The Countryman's Daughter

It’s all in a name

65AF3406-1A20-4771-AEDC-AA2BAE0011BC — The cast of Heartbeat, with Bill Maynard, far right, who played one of Dads most well-known characters, Claude Jeremiah Greengrass

5F4B9361-A159-4AC8-8097-F92D7BE45B8E — Dad’s Heartbeat mugs in his study

EC7BDD80-B43A-45C1-B9FC-AA2048D3E773 — The mug Dad received from the cast after the series ended

A8271685-2FEF-48E0-9A7D-4BF8B522CC87 — The mugs on the shelf in Dad’s study where I had ignored them for years

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 13th April 2018, & the Gazette & Herald 11th April 2018.

Dad had a talent for coming up with splendid names in his books, and he insisted that the best ones were inspired by real people from his life growing up and working as a bobby on the North York Moors.

One of Heartbeat’s best-known characters was the loveable rogue that was Claude Jeremiah Greengrass, portrayed so brilliantly by the inimitable Bill Maynard, who sadly died just a couple of weeks ago. According to Dad, that was a genuine name he had come across as a young bobby many years before it ended up on the pages of the first ‘Heartbeat’ novel, Constable on the Hill, published in 1979.

In Dad’s column from 15th April 1978, we encounter the august-sounding Septimus. Septimus was a schoolfriend, and was so called because he was his family’s seventh son. He was unique because his father was also a seventh son, and so he was in the traditionally auspicious position of being the seventh son of a seventh son.

These fortunate beings were supposed to have been blessed with supernatural powers, but Dad observed that his friend, whom everyone called Sep, displayed no discernible mystical talents. It was possible though, at the tender age of eleven, they were yet to burst forth.

In mediaeval times, it was believed that for the gift to work, the son must be seventh in a line of only boys. If a daughter appeared before the seventh son was born, then the chain, and all the powers associated with it, was broken.

One of their legendary skills was the ability to heal the sick, and back in the day people would travel miles just to be touched by the blessed one. Families would encourage these children to train to be doctors, but those who couldn’t afford to pay for such an education ended up as peasants and labourers, who were nevertheless subject to a constant stream of visits from the great unwell.

It was widely believed that they had a particular talent for curing the illness known as the King’s Evil, or scrofula, a type of lymphatic tuberculosis that resulted in enlarged glands in the neck. Dad recounts a story, reported to have happened as late as the start of the twentieth century, of a Somerset man who had the reputation for curing people with scrofula. On Sundays, he would touch the affected parts of patients, who had to have fasted, and repeated the words of a prayer that only he was allowed to know.

The belief was not confined to England, but was also very strong in Scotland, particularly in the Highlands, and in Ireland where the lucky one was also thought to have the gift of second sight. In France, they called this person a ‘Marcou’, and their body was said to be marked somewhere with a fleur-de-lis. Those with scrofula would touch this marking in the belief that it would rid them of the disease.

Going back to names, I was up at my mum’s the other day and, as I often do, I went into my dad’s study to mooch about a bit. I was intrigued by a couple of mugs on his shelves that had been there for a number of years but which before I’d never really paid much attention to. The two mugs were covered in lists of first names. One mug had ‘Heartbeat VI’ on the front, and when I picked up the other, I found a curled up piece of paper in it which read ‘A gift from the Heartbeat actors’. So I deduced that these must have been ‘end of series’ presents from the actors to the crew. The slightly sad thing about the second mug is that on the inside was inscribed ‘Heartbeat R.I.P.’ next to the picture of a broken heart.

I was, and still am, mystified as to why ITV axed Heartbeat in 2009 when it was still achieving some of the best viewing figures on that channel. Today an active and significant band of fans continues to express their affection for the show through things like Facebook and Twitter. So who knows what the future holds?

It is Dad’s first anniversary soon, and going into his study still stirs up such mixed emotions, as it is the place where I feel his absence most keenly, and yet, his presence is all around me, in his books, in his files, in his collection of trinkets and Heartbeat mementos. Does the time ever come when you stop missing your Dad?

Watch out, the sheriffs are coming

1F5D95DD-6443-42A9-B6E4-E8EC7C1F92DD — Alan Rickman as the dastardly Sheriff of Nottingham

0283AA4C-0DE8-492B-89E0-C2D754F672ED — The new High Sheriff of North Yorkshire, Christopher Legard, front centre, with outgoing High Sheriff Simon Wrightson, front left.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 6th April 2018, & the Gazette & Herald 4th April 2018.

When I sit down to write these columns, I usually have no idea what I’m going to write about until I read the column that Dad wrote in the corresponding week 40 years ago. Often, at the very point I think inspiration has left for its holidays, I see or hear something that ends up being the pivotal subject of the column.

Today, I experienced such a moment after reading Dad’s piece from 8th April 1978 in which he talked about the April weather, albino people (following on from his mention of albino blackbirds a couple of weeks before), the annual influx of migrating birds, clouds and the custom of ‘pricking the sheriffs’.

I was undecided as to what to plump for, until I opened my iPad and there on the open BBC iPlayer app was a programme called ‘The sheriffs are coming’. It was a sign.

The word sheriff immediately conjures up two images for me, a Wild West cowboy with a star-shaped badge, and the actor Alan Rickman, whose portrayal of the embodiment of evil that was the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1995 film ‘Robin Hood, Prince Of Thieves’ was so memorable.

Today there are two distinct categories of sheriff in our country. Those featured in the BBC programme are officially High Court Enforcement Officers and are tasked with collecting money or goods in respect of a debt. They are authorised by the Lord Chancellor, but privately employed, unlike bailiffs, who are salaried civil servants. Debts below £600 can only be recovered by bailiffs, and debts over £5,000 can only be recovered by sheriffs.

The second category is now mainly a ceremonial role to represent the Crown at county level and are known as high sheriffs. City sheriffs have largely disappeared, apart from in London where there are two.

The original sheriff is possibly the oldest official role in the country, and the name derives from ‘shire reeve’, meaning the governor of a shire or county. ‘Reeve’ comes from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘reeafan’ which was a levy or seizure. We don’t know for sure when the first shire reeve appeared, but we do know that Alfred the Great (871-901) appointed men to this role. They were the king’s representatives at a local level and executed writs on his behalf. They collected rents and taxes and were responsible for keeping the peace, which also led to them assuming responsibility for prisoners. This made them very powerful and some, like the supposedly merciless Sheriff of Nottingham, abused this power.

To counter the problem, a new official, the ‘coroner’, was installed to oversee all the sheriffs (although clearly they have a very different role today!).

It is the duty of the incumbent high sheriffs to nominate successors. Formal nominations take place at the High Court in London on November 12th and is presided over by the Lord Chief Justice. This is followed by the ‘pricking of the sheriffs’ by the Sovereign in March (I bet you’ve been thinking that was a typo!).

The list of nominees is put on to a vellum (calf skin) scroll which is 15 feet long by a foot wide and, as in centuries before, the Queen chooses her high sheriffs using a silver bodkin, which is a large sewing needle, to prick a hole in the scroll over the selected nominee’s name.

There are a couple of explanations for this rather odd method of choosing. I do like my dad’s, where he explains that it dates back to the time of Elizabeth I. She was sewing in her garden when the time arose to choose her sheriffs. The scroll was brought to her, but she had no pen, so consequently used a bodkin from her sewing basket.

The second (possibly more plausible) reason I found on the high sheriffs’ official website (highsheriffs.com). Apparently not all the nominated sheriffs welcomed the role due to the high expenses they incurred, and the challenges of calculating and collecting taxes. So to stop them trying to remove their names, a hole was made in the vellum which could not be removed, nor sewn up without being noticed.

This year’s ceremony took place at Buckingham Palace on 14th March where Simon Wrightson was succeeded as High Sheriff of North Yorkshire by Chris Legard, of Scampston Hall near Malton, who will officially assume his duties this month.

A Yorkshireman in New York

807A52FF-D81A-440A-8B41-B4C895EC2734 — Dad with his beloved Mark II Jag in the 1990s

E7323B6D-1868-4248-9D9F-67244395ABE7 — The NYPD and Tinton Falls police badges still hang in Dad’s study

40891840-8F61-4462-AB48-ED2C1163CF43 — The NYPD police badge

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 30th March 2018, & the Gazette & Herald 28th March 2018.

Like many a Yorkshireman of a certain generation, Dad was a home bird, loved where he came from, and where he lived close to the North York Moors. He never sought to holiday in foreign parts, and for most of my childhood remained content to spend a week in the Lake District with the family once a year.

So you can imagine the enormous excitement when we learned that he was to go to a conference as a guest of the Mystery Writers Of America for eight days in the heaving metropolis that was New York. I was nearly 11 at the time and simply could not imagine what it was going to be like. When I looked in the atlas, it seemed so, so far away!

In his column from 1st April 1978, he had just returned from that trip. You can tell he was unused to big cities, and found it odd that Greenwich Village, the historic heart of New York, was called such a thing. I could almost hear the astonishment in his voice when I read: “The village was not like a village at all. It was like a large town…and there was no feature which could be linked with a typical English village.”

The food bewildered him too, especially the so-called ‘English muffin’ he’d ordered for breakfast, no doubt expecting a toasted bun with egg on top, but ending up instead with a cake with raisins sprinkled on it. I’ve no idea how he coped.

He was highly impressed by his visit to the World Trade Centre. Knowing that what he describes would be obliterated in such a horrifying way 23 years later makes it a very moving read. “The splendour of this building defies description, and although it is fashioned from concrete and glass, it enjoys a beauty which is remarkable by any standards…We ascended one of the twin towers of this building, using high-speed elevators, and found ourselves on top of 110 storeys…I could have remained there for a long, long, time, looking down upon some of the most famous and beautiful parts of the world. Central Park was a tiny green patch; the Statue of Liberty was like a Dinky toy, the cars were like insects creeping in procession along the street. And there was nothing living up there besides human beings.”

I talked about this trip when I visited my mum recently and she remembered it well, recounting a rather embarrassing story. Dad had taken some gifts, including a British police helmet and truncheon, which were items of some curiosity and amusement for his American counterparts who were more used to officers in peaked caps armed with guns. The helpful hotel receptionist offered to keep them in the safe until time to present them, and with stories of a vice-laden and crime-filled city at the forefront of his mind, Dad agreed. But when he went to retrieve them a few days later, you guessed it, they had vanished from the safe, never to be seen again. Unfortunately, it was one mystery the gathered writers were unable to solve!

I really missed my dad while he was on that trip, as he’d never been away from us for that long, and I spent ages creating a ‘Welcome Home’ banner to greet him on his return. Mum and I met him off the plane at Heathrow, having taken the train down the day before. We stayed with my aunt and uncle in that otherworldly place known as Cheam in Surrey where Dad had left our car, an old Mark II Jaguar, when he’d driven down the week before. With little awareness of life outside of our small North Yorkshire village, Cheam was as alien to me as New York was to Dad. And it’s funny that often it’s the small things you remember most. I can’t remember the moment I finally saw Dad at the airport, nor my 5’1” mum driving home all the way up the A1 in that great big old tank of a Jag, nor the look on Dad’s face when he got home and saw my banner. But I do remember the surge of joy I felt when my uncle had brought me a cup of tea upstairs in the morning. In my world, only grown-ups were allowed tea in bed, so I felt very mature as I sipped my cuppa, and decided that Cheam must be a very sophisticated place indeed.

A bird in the hand

Me with a barn owl at York Bird of Prey Centre

My brother Andrew with a tawny owl

A southern crested caracara finds my brother fascinating

Me with a majestic golden eagle

Members of the Tourism Association North Yorkshire proudly hold up the 2018 visitor guide

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 23rd March 2018, & the Gazette & Herald 21st March 2018.

I was very fortunate to be invited to the York Bird of Prey Centre in Huby for the launch of the Tourism Association of North Yorkshire (TANY) 2018 visitor guide. TANY is a small, independent organisation that relies on volunteers, and does sterling work in promoting our region, especially Ryedale, Hambleton and the North York Moors, to support local businesses in attracting valuable tourists to our beautiful part of the world.

I’d contributed an article about my dad, which is why I was asked along. What I didn’t expect was to be able to sit among the birds as they flew freely around us, tempted by morsels of meat placed in certain spots. We were invited to handle the birds ourselves, and I got up close and personal with a stunning barn owl, a southern crested caracara (a type of falcon), a sweet tawny owl and a majestic golden eagle. We were taught about the valuable education and conservation work the centre does, and learned that the birds get hours of free flying time outside of their aviaries every day (I must admit, I was wondering about that!).

It’s a rare privilege to be able to get so close, and really made me appreciate just how amazing these birds of prey are. My parents were both (and my mum still is) keen bird watchers, and had installed several nesting boxes and feeders in their garden, keeping binoculars by the window so they could observe the daily antics of their feathered friends. They were both very knowledgeable and could instantly identify most birds that visited.

I can’t remember them ever mentioning a white blackbird though. In fact, until this week when I read my dad’s column from 25th March 1978, I had no idea they even existed. But apparently so, as a reader had written to ask Dad if white blackbirds were rare. Dad remembered having seen one in the grounds of the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle. I assumed this would have been some kind of albino, but not necessarily, as, with help from the RSPB, I’ve discovered that some birds are simply lacking in the pigment that colours the feathers.

Further research revealed that the colouring of birds is in fact quite complicated, and just because a bird appears to be iridescent blue or green in colour does not mean they have blue or green feathers. In fact, the colour is created by the light being reflected off the complex structure of the feathers, making them appear blue or green. These are known as ‘structural’ colours. The true colour of many iridescent feathers is actually brown. So, for example, if you see a kingfisher in low light, it will often appear dark in colour. Blacks, browns, chestnut-reds and yellows are created by melanin, a pigment which does colour the actual feather and also influences the intensity of the hue. Other colours are created by the process of the underlying pigment combining with a structural colour. For example some parrots have an underlying pigment of yellow that interacts with a blue structural colour, which then makes the parrot appear green.

Anyway, back to our unusual white blackbird. Occasionally, the normal process that produces a bird’s colour breaks down, which can result in no pigmentation, or patchy pigmentation. A brief search on the Internet throws up pictures of all sorts of wonderful patterns on the blackbird’s feathers, from pure white, to black with a white head, collar, breast or tail, white with black spots, black with white spots, or even black with white ‘go-faster’ stripes down the side.

Often the captions on these pictures mistakenly describes them as ‘albino’ or ‘part-albino’. As far as I am aware, it is impossible to be ‘part-albino’. All vertebrates can be affected by albinism, which is a genetic mutation leading to reduced or complete absence of the pigment melanin which is responsible for colouring skin, hair, eyes, fur and feathers. The difference between a white blackbird and an albino blackbird is that albinos have pink or red eyes rather than black, because the lack of pigmentation means the blood can be seen. They will also have pale skin, legs, feet and beaks.

I saw recently wildlife artist and fellow columnist Robert Fuller’s wonderful video of the white stoat in his garden. I’d love to find out if readers have spotted any other unexpectedly white creatures in their gardens, or out and about. Sadly, I have yet to clap my eyes on the elusive white blackbird.

A Tawdry Tale of Saints and Lace

E6C09A94-562C-4378-AB51-4EE858B4948E — Ely Cathedral

3A4A26A9-C75C-49F3-812F-991E5D3AFE96 — St Audrey of Ely

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 16th March 2018, & the Gazette & Herald 14th of March 2018.

I love it when I discover an unusual fact that I never knew before thanks to reading my Dad’s 40-year-old columns. I have come across many and this week was no different as I learned the interesting story behind the word ‘tawdry’, thanks to Dad mentioning that someone had asked him if he knew the origins of the word in his column from 18th March 1978.

Tawdry, as we know, describes something that is cheap, nasty and gaudy. But its origins are far from it. The word comes from the very pious St Etheldreda, more commonly known as St Audrey, who was daughter of King Anna of the East Angles. She died on 23rd June AD679 the age of 43 after contracting the plague and developing a huge, unsightly tumour on her neck. Although a doctor removed the tumour, it didn’t save her life. According to the Venerable Bede, writing around 50 years later, Etheldreda declared it divine retribution for having enjoyed wearing ostentatious necklaces when she was a young girl.

Before she became a nun, Etheldreda managed to work her way through two husbands without ever losing her virginity, steadfastly sticking to a vow of chastity she had made in her youth. To be fair the first one died quite quickly, and the second one, Egfrith, son of King Oswy of Northumbria, was only 15 when they wed. She was forced to marry him for political reasons, and after a few years, once he had (shall we say) ‘matured’, he realised what he was missing out on, and so demanded to be granted his conjugal rights.

Horrified, Etheldreda fled, and eventually her frustrated husband gave up and found satisfaction in the arms of another. Etheldreda then became a nun and was free to live the prayerful life she craved at the Isle of Ely in Cambridgeshire, where she founded a monastery on the site of the current Ely Cathedral.

St Audrey has two saints days, both of which are still commemorated by the cathedral. One is the date she died, and the second is on 17th October when her remains were exhumed, 17 years after her death, and moved into the church within the monastery. It is said that when Etheldreda’s casket was opened, her body was found to have not decayed and the tumour scar had miraculously healed. Therefore the wearing of necklaces made of lace or ribbon in her honour became common as they were believed to bring good health to the wearer, especially if they were suffering from illnesses around the throat area. They were known as St Audrey’s lace which, by the end of the sixteenth century, had been shortened to tawdry lace (overheard in Yorkshire, I suspect!).

An annual fair was established in her memory, and although I don’t have a date for when it began, it was still going strong in 1600. In Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, written around 1601, the shepherdess Mopsa says to her sweetheart, “Come, you promised me a tawdry-lace and a pair of sweet gloves.” Over time, St Audrey’s fair had become notorious for selling lace and trinkets of very poor quality, and soon the the word ‘tawdry’ was associated with anything of that nature, and is the reason why its meaning today is so far from its very holy beginnings.

As I was researching this, I did wonder why the Isle of Ely was called ‘Isle’ when the Cambridgeshire city was some way from the coast (about 35 miles in fact) or from any significant body of water. It turns out that it used to be slap bang in the middle of fenland, and only accessible by boat until the seventeenth century when the waterlogged land was drained. The original name meant ‘Isle of Eels’ from the Anglo-Saxon word ‘eilig’.

It led me to wonder how many other isles (that were not islands) were within our shores, as I only knew a couple off the top of my head, the Isle of Dogs and the Isle of Thanet. I found 21, most of which were in the southern half of the country, although there are three that I can associate with Yorkshire, including Kelham Island, which is one of Sheffield city’s 11 quarters, the village of Sunk Island, which was originally a sandbank in the Humber estuary, and the Isle of Axholme, which separates Yorkshire and Lincolnshire, lying between the River Don, near Doncaster, and the River Trent near Scunthorpe.

Are there any more I have yet to discover, I wonder? (Source: elycathedral.org)

Fear of the fatal fungi

1AB8AE17-1972-4B17-95DB-F342EB4349A6 — Chef Tommy Banks in the garden of the Black Swan, Oldstead

113CED64-4E74-474B-9EA8-1A024A77E534 — The White Horse at Kilburn

0918377D-709F-491E-A459-B7FDD80CBF6F — The aptly-named Death Cap mushroom

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 9th March 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 7th March 2018.

I’ll never forget the moment when local boy Tommy Banks, enthusiastic forager and head chef at the Michelin-starred Black Swan, Oldstead, produced his incredibly personal tribute to his late grandfather on the TV show Great British Menu in 2016. He had created his dish, a dessert called ‘My Great Briton’, with precision, tenderness and obviously deep love for his grandfather, who for many years was custodian of nearby landmark, the White Horse of Kilburn. Tommy flavoured a parfait with oil extracted from the Douglas fir trees that grow on the hills around the White Horse. When the dish was served to a soundtrack of his grandfather’s voice, it had us all, and Tommy too, in tears. His appearance on that show catapulted him and his family-run restaurant into the stratosphere and Oldstead became a must-go destination for the serious foodie.

The thing about foraging, though, is that you really do have to know your stuff. In his column from March 11th 1978, Dad talks about the dangers of confusing your fungi, and how calamitous it could be to get it wrong. His topic came about as a result of a colleague asking him if Death Cap mushrooms grew in North Yorkshire. Dad had never seen one, but he knew it grew in moist shady areas covered by deciduous trees such as oaks, chestnuts and beeches, and so deduced it was entirely possible.

The Death Cap is incredibly toxic and accounts for more than 90% of deaths from fungus poisonings. One of the reasons people make mistakes is because they look similar to perfectly edible varieties, and are rather tasty when cooked. In 2014, there was a surge in poisonings in California after a spell of heavy rain and mild temperatures caused the mushrooms to flourish. Fourteen cases were reported over a few weeks, with three of those afflicted needing liver transplants. In 2008, a woman from the Isle of Wight died after mistakenly picking and cooking a Death Cap, and in 2013 another from Bridgewater suffered organ failure after putting one from her own garden into her soup. That year, there were 237 reported cases of fungus poisonings in the UK.

In 2016, warnings were issued across the country after the wet and mild autumn had led to significant proliferations of the deadly mushroom, and as last autumn was similar, I’m assuming those warnings are still valid.

But the Death Cap isn’t the only toxic mushroom that grows here, and many have appropriately lethal names, such as Destroying Angel, Funeral Bell, Fool’s Funnel and Panther Cap. But if I came across one on a country ramble, I wouldn’t know my Meadow Wax Cap (edible) from my Deadly Web Cap (poisonous).

In a 2014 statement issued by Public Heath England, Dr John Thompson, director of the National Poisons Information Service (Cardiff Unit), said: “When it comes to wild mushrooms, people really need to be aware of the very real potential dangers involved…While mushrooms growing in the wild are tasty and safe to eat, it is not always easy to differentiate between toxic and non-toxic species, even for people with experience in foraging.”

This was certainly the case for Nicholas Evans, bestselling author of The Horse Whisperer, whose story resembles a plot straight out of one of his own novels. The writer almost killed himself, his wife, his sister and his brother-in-law in 2008 after cooking what he thought were innocent ceps. Evans, a seasoned countryman, was usually extremely careful in checking what he had picked against a trusted book of mushrooms. But this time, he didn’t, and cooked several Deadly Web Caps for dinner with butter and parsley. The next day, they started to feel ill with nausea and stomach cramps, and within hours, all four were in intensive care. Thankfully, they survived, but were sick for months afterwards, and the consequences were life long. For three of them, their kidneys were destroyed, and they ended up having to have dialysis for several hours, several days each week, and eventually, all underwent kidney transplants, with Evans receiving his from his own daughter in 2011.

Despite these fungal nightmares, one of my favourite things to eat will forever be mushrooms on toast, and I have heard that the flavour of foraged mushrooms is in another league to the mass-produced varieties on our supermarket shelves. But I’m going to take some convincing before I dare to venture into the wild to pick my own. (Source: wildfoodsuk.com)

On the March for a myth

D36BB138-6B21-429E-87AE-4BFE68B60985 — Me & Dad on the Greek island of Mykonos, which is in the Cyclades, in 1986

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 2nd March 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 28th February 2018.

In my dad’s column from 4th March 1978 he mentions an old Greek myth relating to ‘angry’ March, so described because of the wind which tends to blow in from all directions throughout the month.

The myth stated that March was angry because an old woman from the island of Kythnos mistook him for a summer month, so he borrowed a day from his brother, February, and froze the old woman to death, along with her flock of sheep. It seems a rather extreme punishment for such a crime (I hope March isn’t reading this or he might come for me!).

My university degree covered the myths of Ancient Greece, and I spent a year in the country after leaving school at 18, and Mum & Dad came to visit me while I was out there. But I had never come across this tale and so set about researching it on the Internet. For ages I could find absolutely nothing and went through countless variations of search terms relating to the myth until I finally came across a brief reference on a site called The Internet Archive (archive.org). This amazing resource is a bit like an international version of the National Archives. Started in 1996, just as the Internet was beginning to take off, its grand mission is to provide ‘Universal Access to All Knowledge’ and now claims to have an almost unbelievable 279 billion web pages, 11 million books and texts, four million audio recordings and three million videos in its archive, all of which is free to access.

I found the bit I wanted in a substantial 19th century volume called ‘Weather Lore; A Collection of Proverbs, Sayings and Rules Concerning the Weather’ by a man called Richard Inwards. There were a couple of lines about the myth, which he attributed to a ‘T.Bent’. Nothing else.

In past columns, I’ve talked about my habit of wandering off topic so, of course, once again I set off meandering through the Internet to discover who this mystery ‘T.Bent’ was. I felt like a detective tying to get to the bottom of a rather obscure clue, having to think laterally and persist in search after search. I even went as far as page three on one set of Google results. I know, hard core.

But I’m glad I did, as it turns out ‘T.Bent’ had a very interesting story, and better than that, he was a Yorkshireman! Mr James Theodore Bent was brought up in the West Riding village of Baildon, and came from a well-to-do family. He developed a keen interest in history and grew up to become a distinguished archaeologist and adventurer. What is wonderful about this story, especially in a year when we are marking the achievements of the suffragette movement, is that his wife Mabel was as well known and as adventurous as he was. Together they toured the world to discover everything they could about foreign cultures and civilisations, and their findings contributed greatly to society’s knowledge about those unfamiliar worlds. Their resulting books were very popular and well-respected, presumably because, being fearless and intrepid explorers who often put themselves in considerable danger, their work must have been incredibly exciting to their less adventurous readers back home.

One of Theodore’s most well-known works was ‘The Cyclades, or Life Among The Insular Greeks’, published in 1885, which recounts his and Mabel’s adventures living among the rural inhabitants of these remote islands, and this is where he mentions the myth about March (and it is literally, just a mention, so I have no more to report on that!). He is not very complimentary about the island of Kythnos, declaring, ‘We thought we had never visited a more dreary, inhospitable shore.’

Sadly, it was on one of their adventures that Theodore contracted malaria and died prematurely at the age of 45 in 1897. Mabel was distraught, but found the strength to finish the book about ‘Southern Arabia’ that her husband had been writing at the time. But her deep grief was reflected in her words: “It has been very sad to me, but I have been helped by knowing that, however imperfect this book may be, what is written here will surely be a help to those who, by following in our footsteps, will be able to get beyond them.”

Mabel never remarried and died at the age of 83 in 1929. She was buried, as she requested, with her husband at her ancestral home in Essex. (Source: tambent.com)

Killing for your supper

D02AD0BF-1375-4368-A114-E1D5BB41605D — Run rabbit run – or you might end up part of a roadkill recipe

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 23rd February 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 21st February 2018.

One of the less attractive aspects of living in the countryside is the amount of roadkill we see on our byways and highways. I presume that there are more animals killed by vehicles today than when Dad was writing his column 40 years ago, purely because there are now more cars on the road.

Dad remarked in his column of 25th February 1978 that most of the unfortunate victims seemed to be rabbits. Today, I see mainly pheasants and other critters of the feathered variety falling prey to our motors. I don’t know if there are fewer rabbits around, or if there are more game birds roaming our fields and verges, or whether it just happens to be a characteristic of the routes I take. But I will never get used to the sight of a squashed animal in the road, and it turns my stomach every time I pass one.

In days gone by, it is possible that rural folk were more pragmatic about such things, seeing it as just another way of controlling the population of wild creatures. A friend’s dad had no qualms about picking up fresh roadkill which would end up in the stewing pot. I also I remember staying with my French pen pal, and we were in the car when we heard the sickening thud of a poor hare losing the battle with our bumper. Her dad stopped the car, gathered it up, and sure enough, we had it for dinner. To them, it was a sensible and practical way to dispose of the animal, although my sentimental teenage heart ached for the poor thing that was now on my plate. I don’t think I ate very much that night.

But there are serious advocates of the practice of eating fresh roadkill around today, and as long as the animal was not deliberately killed, it is perfectly legal to take it away. Miranda Krestovnikoff, wildlife presenter and president of the RSPB, is well known for feeding roadside kills to her family, and amateur taxidermist and wildlife conservationist John McGowan has lived on a diet of roadkill for more than 30 years, as has Arthur Boyt from Cornwall, who got into trouble for cooking a washed-up dead dolphin (dolphins belong to the Crown). There are resources online which tell you how to butcher your furry finds, but I would imagine you’d need a cast iron stomach and considerable skills if it was to become a regular part of your routine. Mr McGowan recommends heading out just after rush hour for the best, freshest pickings. On the other hand, the Food Standards Agency warns against it, saying that you cannot know how healthy an animal was before it died, and you cannot be entirely certain it does not harbour harmful bacteria such as salmonella, E-coli and clostridium. It seems to me that you have to be sure of your knowledge before venturing out on a roadkill recce.

The Government collects data on animals killed on our roads, and it surprised me to learn that the most commonly reported are deer, with badgers and foxes not too far behind, and then cats and dogs, followed by a whole wildlife menagerie of creatures killed in smaller numbers. There were no rabbits on the list, which covered April – December 2017, but I am presuming this was because they were not reported, as birds were very low in number too, and I’ve definitely seen a lot of them!

I suppose we can take comfort in that, whichever animal comes to that sticky end, in most cases they will not have suffered and will have died mercifully quickly.
A friend suggested that it would be useful to write a book to help you identify roadkill by the characteristics of whatever is left behind, so you know whether that one feather sticking up out of the sorry mess was a pheasant or grouse, or that the furry ear belonged to a hare or rabbit. She decided it should include instructions on how to skin, pluck and prepare the animals, alongside recipes and tips on how to asses whether it was fit for human consumption. My first response was, “Why would anyone want to identify roadkill?” But having researched this piece, I now know there are a fair few people who would genuinely be interested!

Her idea has yet to come to fruition, and I’m still not sure about the wisdom of stopping in our roads to gather up dead creatures, as we could end up being roadkill ourselves!

Never too old – A fond farewell to Hannah

825051DF-7289-457C-9BD0-AE464AAB6E61 — Hannah Hauxwell, who has died aged 91

F5408EB5-ABD7-4219-B9F9-FAD31318A861 — Yorkshireman Henry Jenkins is said to have lived until he was 169 years old

FB3193D2-1D75-44A8-8F8F-610108205CC9 — Henry Jenkins’ grave stone at St Mary’s Church, Bolton-on-Swale

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 16th February 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 14th February 2018.

I was saddened to hear that Daleswoman Hannah Hauxwell passed away on January 31st. Hannah rose to fame in the 1970s following the Yorkshire Television documentary ‘Too Long A Winter’ which filmed her arduous existence on her remote farm in Baldersdale. Her everyday struggles against the elements with no running water or electricity touched the nation, and her lovely, engaging personality led to several books and further TV appearances.

She left the farm and moved to a nearby cottage in the late 1980s, but, because the land surrounding it had been cultivated using traditional methods for so long, it was taken over by the Durham Wildlife Trust and is now a nature reserve and Site of Special Scientific Interest, known as Hannah’s Meadow.

Hannah’s hardy lifestyle may have contributed to her living to the ripe old age of 91, but, as my dad reveals in his column of 16th February 1978, there is a legend of a Yorkshireman who outlived her by an incredible 78 years! Henry Jenkins is said to have been born in Ellerton-on-Swale in 1501, and the Bolton parish records show he died on December 9th 1670. Unfortunately, births did not have to be registered until 1538, so the claim cannot be verified, but there are several reasons why they are believed, and why Jenkins deserves his memorial at St Mary’s Church in Bolton-on-Swale.

We know most of his young life was spent in agriculture, and as an adult he earned a living as a thatcher and fisherman, although was always a poor man. The most reliable account comes from Anne Saville, who was visiting her sister, Elizabeth Wastell, at Bolton Old Hall. She was intrigued by the elderly gentlemen who wandered into the kitchen asking for alms. Anne, who was well educated, wrote a letter to Dr Tancred Robinson, fellow of the Royal Society, explaining what she had heard from the old man. He authenticated her account and published it in the Society’s Philosophical Transactions, suggesting further investigation into how Jenkins had lived so long.

Anne had asked Jenkins how old he was, and he’d replied that he was around 162 or 163. She writes: “I asked him what kings he remembered. He said Henry VIII. I asked him what public thing he could longest remember. He said Flodden Field. I asked him which king was there. He said , None, he was in France, and the Earl of Surrey was general.”

He went on to tell Anne how at the age of 10 or 12, he was sent to Northallerton with a cart full of arrows which was then given to a bigger boy to take to the army. Anne checked her history books and learned that the battle of Flodden Field had been fought 152 years earlier and that if he had been 10 or 12 then it really did make him around 163 years old when she spoke to him. She discovered that indeed, bows and arrows were used at Flodden Field, and that Jenkins was right about the Earl of Surrey, and that Henry VIII was indeed at Tournay in France. For an uneducated man who could neither read nor write, and one who had been questioned on the spur of the moment, his historical recollections were flawless. Anne went on to question other aged village residents, who said that since their own childhoods, Henry Jenkins had always been elderly.

Because of his age, he was often called upon to settle disputes over rights of way, and he was called to testify in such a case at York Assizes in 1620. He swore on oath to having 120 years of memory, meaning he was alive when the original dispute arose around 100 years earlier. The judge did not believe him, but after Jenkins said he was employed as a butler by Lord Conyers of Hornby Hall at the time, when they checked the records, sure enough his name was listed.

There is no way of knowing for sure how old Henry Jenkins was, but there are claims of a Bolivian living to 123 years old, an Indonesian to 145, an Ethiopian to 160, and an Azerbaijani to 168. But it is French woman Jeanne Louise Calment who holds the place in the Guinness Book of World Records as the oldest person to have been proven to have lived for 122 years and 164 days before she died in 1997.

ENDS

Don’t bleat about the bush

The Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland

AE2B99EF-35AE-407B-8531-9211282E4712 — The famous Sycamore Gap tree

5851A311-83E0-476D-9CF8-F4D5E45BFD25 — The mulberry tree at Wakefield prison (copyright Yorkshire Post).

74858ECE-5B69-4B8E-BA5F-CCAF0B749F4D — The Mulberry logo

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on 9th February 2018, & the Gazette & Herald on 7th February 2018.

One of the things I battle with when researching these columns is my habit of going slightly ‘off-piste’ when looking for interesting topics to talk about. I get easily distracted by something that I am unlikely to use, but is nevertheless less quite fascinating. In fact, when I was looking for a new notepad, I found one that boldly declared on the front ‘I am 100% NOT procrastinating…HONEST!’. I had to buy it.

This week, having read my dad’s column from 11th February 1978, I was on the hunt for interesting facts about mulberries, as he talked about the origins of the words to the famous nursery song ‘Here we go round the mulberry bush’.

Of course, when I googled it, one of the first things that came up was a link to the website of the famous leather goods brand. Over the past few years, a Mulberry bag has become one of the most sought-after accessories for women of a certain age, so of course, I got distracted by all the images of gorgeous bags, purses and shoes. What also caught my eye (apart from the eye-watering prices) was the ‘Our Story’ tab.

I discovered that Mulberry was founded in 1971 by Roger Saul who set up the business from his kitchen with a £500 loan from his mum. He called his new brand Mulberry after some trees he passed on his way to school, and his sister designed the now famous Mulberry tree logo.

What was odd though, was that apart from a brief mention at the beginning, Mr Saul did not feature further on the ‘Our Story’ tab. After a bit more research, I found a twisted plot so dastardly that it outdid the Machiavellian exploits of the Ewings in the 1980s TV hit ‘Dallas’. And now I’ve said that, you’ll want to know what happened, won’t you? So you see how easy it is to get distracted? I promise to come back to the mulberry bush…

In the early 2000s, Mulberry needed an injection of cash which came from a Singaporean billionaire called Christina Ong, who bought 41.5p.c. of the company’s shares. Mrs Ong, who had huge ambitions for the business, then engineered a boardroom coup to oust its founder and chairman. To remain at the helm, Saul, who owned just 38p.c. of the shares, needed the support of his long-term friend and deputy chairman Godfrey Davis. Davis controlled 4.5p.c of the shares, which would have given Saul the majority he needed. But to Saul’s horror, Davis sided with Ong, and his fate was sealed. He was left to watch from the sidelines as his former friend replaced him as chairman, and the business he founded in his kitchen went on to become a global fashion powerhouse.

So, distraction over, it’s back to the mulberry bush song. According to a book published in 1994 by former Wakefield Prison governor Robert Stephen Duncan, female inmates came up with the song to keep their children entertained as they walked around a mulberry tree in the exercise yard. Some killjoys cast doubt that it is its true origin, but why let the facts get in the way of a lovely story? As far as I am aware, the mulberry tree still stands, and in 2016 was nominated for the tree equivalent of the Oscars, the Woodland Trust’s ‘Tree of the Year’ awards. Sadly, it didn’t win and was beaten by that woody upstart, the Sycamore Gap Tree in Northumberland. To be fair, that is a spectacular tree, far more pleasing to the eye than Wakefield’s wizened mulberry. It nestles in a dramatic dip, with Hadrian’s Wall rising either side, and is said to be one of the most photographed spots within the Northumbrian National Park. It gained its own piece of Hollywood fame when it was featured in the 1991 Kevin Costner film, ‘Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves’, and so is also known as ‘The Robin Hood Tree’ (but I bet there isn’t a song about it!).

I would like to express my thanks to the many people who have sent their condolences, prayers and good wishes following the death of my sister, Tricia Walker, on 8th January. The past few months have been a very difficult time for our family, as Tricia’s cancer progressed so quickly and came so soon after Dad passed away. Your good wishes are helping to keep us strong. Thank you.