What about the North Devonians? NSFC (Not safe for Cornishmen)

In recent months there has been a hang of al lot of talk about national identity, devolved government and independence bought on by the granting of minority status to the Cornish, the rise of bleddy UKIP in the Euro elections and the Scottish independence referendum. I have found this all very interesting and the ructions caused by such events have certainly livened up the debates at the Reform Thursday Lunch club. Now I like to get me facts straight so I have been doing quite a bit of reading up on these matters in order to give a certain perspicacity to my arguments. Luckily, as a lot of it involves national and local identity based upon historical precedents, I was able to bring my studies on the Celtic Saints and  Celtic culture in the Southwest of Britain during the dark ages or the early medieval era as they would have you call it these days as it turns out there was nothing dark about them specially down here in the South West, to the debate. 

Jamaica Inn - Implausible location

The topic that proved to be most lively and stirred up a fiery although rather one-sided debate was that of the Cornish minority status. It had been only a matter of weeks previous when Cornwall had been a subject of debate as we had been discussing the accents in the BBC TV adaptation of Jamaica Inn and the gaping historical and geographical inaccuracies in the plot of both the programme and Daphne bleddy Dumaurier's, original novel. Anne Cawood had read it but most of us based our argument on the Hitchcock film which had been screened at school by the history master Mr Battersby at the end of every other term, I reckon he must have had a thing for Maureen O'Hara.  However, as the minority status decree had come out of the blue and had provoked such controversy we slated our original topic on the future of the Civic Centre and decided to open an extraordinary debate. If Cornwall can have it why not North Devon? 
The ensuing furore was unsurprising given that many of our members see Cornwall as like "home" and it turned out on a show of hands most people had at least a couple of Cornish folk in their family. Although this is probably best not to be regarded as overly conclusive poll as most of us also couldn't exactly say where it starts or begins. For one thing you don't have to cross the Tamar, or at least no so you'd notice, to get to Cornwall if you are up here in North Devon. at Barnstaple Town F,C, they refer to Bideford as being "the cornish" and also at Exeter City, Plymouth Argyle are rather more vituperatively called the same thing. Mind you, I don’t even know exactly where it is. Somewhere or perhaps that should be, anywhere, West of Bideford, Horns Cross way, down towards Kilkhampton. Is that in Devon or Cornwall? I don't know. Bude's in Cornwall. Although it's local news turns up in The Journal and weddings are covered from couples down that way and babies from Bude are delivered at the NDDH For instance that proud Cornishman, rugby star and celebrity Masterchef winner Phil Vickery being a case in point. Thinking about it I suppose that what makes him vociferously Cornish. He's unsure of his identity, always got to keep stating it, having been born in Devon or worse, England! Bude is the Berwick on Tweed of the Westcountry. This puts me in mind of one of my cousins, whose father funnily enough is actually Cornish, who happened to be born in London by a quirk of fate, he never lived there because as soon as my Auntie was able to leave the Hospital up there she was on the Royal Blue coach, babe in arms, back down to Combe Martin. However, to this day we still call him a Cockney bastard, this makes him bleddy livid and he goes out of his way to stress his Devonian roots and heritage, that is to affirm his identity. The mere whisper of a cockney accent within his earshot accent propels him into paroxysms of muttering and gurning. I digress. 

Hartland Point despite TV's Coast still in Devon.

As I was saying it turns out  even the BBC has trouble pinpointing it's exact location as a while back they gave Harland Quay for being in Cornwall on such a venerable programme as Coast no less! I tell you that had me spluttering into me Horlicks and I called up them up but I suppose as I was watching it late in the Signing Zone I only managed to get onto a security guard who said he'd log my complaint and pass it on to the relative department. I don't reckon he did as just the other evening on Autumnwatch during a piece on the immigration and subsequent dispersal of Ivy Bees( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colletes_hederae ) they said that these hardy little apoids had come over from the continent and had established a colony in an area of Cornwall only to illustrate this fact by putting a shaded area over what looked like North Tawton. You'd think they'd get it right as they all look like Geography teachers and Nick Crane himself is a bleddy Cartographer. Wes Twardo went on to tell us how he'd been listening to Radio Cornwall when he was down in his caravan at Welcombe and there was this woman who had phoned in from Wales, evidently they get both Radio Devon and Cornwall over there, same as we used to get Welsh TV here, who had called to express her solidarity with the Cornish. The caller was a Welsh bard who during the course of her bardic activities had visited Cornwall on many occasions and said she'd always felt a great affinity with the Cornish people she could tell they were fellow Celts and she went on to say that it gave her great comfort to look out over the sea from her South Wales coastal home and see the cliffs of Cornwall looming sublimely on the horizon. Wes paused a moment here for effect....Eh? we questioned in unison. How did sheee manage thaaat? Mazed old fool wasn't looking at bleddy Cornwall! No she got that wrong as their coast faces the wrong way so she was more than likely looking at Morte Point, Hangman in North Devon. She'd need a strange old telescope to see Cornwall or perhaps, I added, she only had one of Nicholas Crane's maps. Also on the same show was Jethro and it turns out he lives in Lewdown.... Devon. Oh we had a laugh.  Annie Cawood then went on to say once again that there is no physical border.It’s an arbitrary line like many borders. She went on to say how her Auntie who lives in Lifton told her that local legend has it that at some point in the Victorian era the border was drawn up by a group of local dignitaries after a lengthy liquid lunch in Launceston convened to verify such matters of delineation where the River Ottery was mistaken for the Tamar and so thats where the border lay for a time. 
Basically, the criteria that give Cornwall it's "separateness" and have been partly used to justify it's minority status can be applied to Devon and parts of Somerset. For instance, the Prayer Book rebellion and the Poll Tax rebellion started in Cornwall but picked up people all the way along so it wasn't exclusively Cornish and subsequently they were joined by other rebels from all other the country. So by way of conclusion we were all happy to agree that the Cornish appropriate everything and claim it for their own. They have even nabbed St Piran who was once considered to be the patron saint of the whole of the Westcountry and they tried to do the same with St Petroc until it was pointed out that there are only two dedications to him in Cornwall and seventeen in Devon. By my reckoning the symbolic bird of Cornwall shouldn't be the chough it should be the bleddy magpie!. They've even claimed this bird, the red billed chough which actually has breeding populations up and down the British Isles and is actually more likely to be found in Spain, as their own and bestowed upon it up some Arthurian mystique. Apparently, King Arthur turned into one when he passed away. From pasties, recently proved to be a Devonian invention, and clotted cream, fudge, cream teas, cheese with nettles in it, Cornish sardines i.e pilchards, lobsters to rugby naive art, smugglers tales and sea shanties you can go on and on.You name it, they take credit for the lot. You'd probably find someone down in Newquay who would be prepared to claim in the West Briton that they'd invented surfing and exported it to the polynesians! Tin mining that's another one. I once read in a copy of the Metal Bulletin which I found lying around in the surgery an article on mining in the South West and it said that over the aeons more tin had been extracted from Dartmoor than anywhere else.Plus, you also get tinner's hares in churches all over the south west. Morwhellham Quay sounds nicely Cornish... in Devon. 
The Tamar has two banks, one of which is in Devon but you wouldn't know it the way the Cornish tell it!

Morwellham Quay a fun day out for all the family - in Devon!

If it's only geography that has earned the Cornish their minority status we had to ask ourselves what about the North Devonians? Bleddy Cornish. Not that we were particularly bothered for ourselves as we know who we are but we just didn't like the idea of the Cornish getting one over on everyone else as they tend to do. We grumbled on into our pints of Doombar lovely drop of Cornish beer, it was on offer were not not going eat Cornish pasties or drink cornish beer.  I don't even deny their right to feel a minority in a rather ill informed romantic sense but what they use to justify this is actually all a part of a shared history and culture for the whole of the Southwest and therefore a part of British culture as a whole. It serves to legitimate in one specific area and not another a cultural and historical heritage. None of it is exclusively Cornish other than the geography and the lines drawn there at times can be rather hazy Of course, it ain't all about location and pasties is it?. There is the question of a separate Cornish Celtic people which raises thorny issues about race and ethnicity, This had to be left alone down the Reform as from bitter experience such questions of race are now banned as a subject for debate, they are taboo. 

To be continued.........

Here's a photo of Jamaica Inn before they diverted the A30 around it
This is how I remember it on trips down "home" to see Cornish relatives.

Two Haiku

                                                              Dozing and dreaming      
                                                              in the benefit office
                                                              a rubber plant wilts

                                                              Swigging sweet cider
                                                              in a cemetery glade
                                                              old cold bones warmed

Instow - The pearl of the North Devon Riviera

The other Sunday morning I took myself off down to Instow a place I haven’t been to in some time living as I do these days over the other side of the delta at Ashford Strand but lately, I have been spending a lot of time up  top in Sticklepath as mother has been off her legs with spondyitus and I've been taken up with attending to her needs, basically going down to the Co-op buying  reams of no 8 scratchcards, Buckfast Tonic Wine, she won’t have Sanatogen, and Lambert and Butlers. Feels like I’ve gone back to being a kid going down to Cox’s stores except these days she doesn’t let me keep the change. I stayed up there the previous evening and spent some time with the Old Boy looking for parts for the Datsun Sunny on the internet as I really must get it going again. Unfortunately not much luck with Datsun parts but we did end up with a quick and easy recipe for making mead. Next morning I decided to take advantage of the fine weather and dazzled by the sun which has made a more than welcome return, after several tempestuous Winter months of Atlantic storms, to our cold and damp and grey and miserable Western skies. Spring seems to have sprung with a vengeance and it must be infectious as half of town seemed to have decamped down to the beach for the day, the 21a Atlantic Wave bus was packed full and everyone seemed very jolly, youngsters and small families and old ones all out on a beano.

I took a stroll along the beach and standing at the waters edge looking out over the confluence of the mighty Taw and Torridge rivers and I cleared out the ventricles in the clean crisp air by doing a few of the breathing exercises I have been recommended by Dr Dos Santos up at the NDI to ease the Farmer’s Lung.  From this side of the water you get a totally different aspect, geographically speaking, of the great course, it seems less like a delta or an estuary and more like a gentle mouth out to the sea. However, in the distance, the white horses galloping over the bar, throwing spume into the sunlight and creating a spectral mist soon minded me that looks can be deceiving when it comes to wild water and the ocean. Looking over at Crow Point I could clearly see the devastation wreaked by the storms as a great gap has appeared between the dunes marooning one of them in the bay, making it look like a cartoon desert island all you'd need to do was stick a potted palm on it and you’d have the full effect. Now there's an idea. In the summer you could stick someone in pirate garb complete with parrot and treasure chest on it, I don't think it'll be necessary for him to have a peg-leg, then you see at high tide visitors could go out on a boat trip out to take a look at the unfortunate castaway. The Robinson Crusoe Experience. Not so daft as it sounds since Daniel Defoe and Stevenson both used this stretch of water, the Bristol Channel as a source n their adventures. Infact, from my reading of Treasure Island I've deduced that Long John Silver must have set himself off from The Hispaniola at some point between Hartland Point and Watchet. Also the location of the Admiral Benbow is on this coast somewhere between here and Bristol. 

After mulling over this unique proposition while walking down to the cricket club I turned round and went back the other way over the dunes which again were showing the effects of the storms, in places tangled, knotty heaps of driftwood was piled high like an ancient form of defence against invasion. I made note of this bounty as I got the sense ttha he Old boy was chomping at the bit, raring to get down here and chop up a few bits for the wood burner. Down on the beach there were dogs of all shapes and sizes and breeds hurling themselves about and tearing around in circles fetching balls and sticks and 

Up on The Front a queue was snaking away from a Hockings Ice Cream van, if snakes had five tails that is! I’d seen a notice that it was the van’s first day out for the season and after a long winter it's always a fine sight to behold, the Hocking’s fleet out on the road. I spied Mr Selkirk Metalbostos  in the queue but fortunately he was with his wife and he barely acknowledges you when they are out and about together. He gave me a sheepish look and a shrug to indicate that he was at pains to go and get his wife a Dairy Cream Ice ’99 which is just as well as it meant I avoided a monotonic Black Counry monologue  on industrial relations in North Devon in the 1970,s  the fact that he was at Kenny Hibbert’s, him of Wolverhampton Wanderers fame, wedding  and his views on the current set up down at Town which as we all know changes by the week.. He’s a lovely bloke, I’ve got a lot of time for him, he doesn't just half  go on a bleddy bit.

I walked on down to John’s as I was fast developing a craving for one of their steak pasties and after elbowing my way through the gaggle of weekenders gawping down at his delicatessen offerings and honking and braying over their shoulders at each other the price of Cornish yarg cheese the n stuff with the stinging nettles in it, I was able to make a quick escape. Pasty in hand and crossed over the road and sat on the wall and ate it. It wasn’t really up to much, which was a huge disappointment as in the past they were one of my favourites,  So, I was not only left with a deep sense of regret but also a claggy, greasy palate. There was only one way to remedy that: a nice cold pint of scrumpy with an orange in it that they serve down at The Quay and I was glad to see that, despite recent renovations and a name change it’s now called The Bar a clever pun which I eventually got after a few minutes they still serve. After standing at the bar for an eternity and exchanging sneers with the usual blow in bar fixture bores I took my pint outside and sat down next to a fat, hairless and brazenly semi-nude copper toned man, basking in the sun, a Buddha in speedos as that was all he was wearing who like me was enjoying  pint of apple and orange. He turned and raised his glass and low and behold I recognised him, bleddy hell it was none other than Rowley Barton. I hadn’t seen him for years. Last time was with the Hawkwind lot out at Sheepwash where he’d been spray painting an old bus and they’d got me out there to do a spot of welding.  Blimey he’d put on a few pounds and looks like he’s lost all he’s tousled hair but I recognised that rather insouciant leer anywhere. Blimey, we spent a lot of time together back in the day, I grew up with him but Rowley had a gift for drawing and had gone to the grammar school and then up to the art school in Taunton and then onto London where he’d fallen in with a fast crowd and ended up designing book jackets and LP covers for heavy metal bands. He’d also published a few comics. Or graphic novels as he calls them about a phantom biker gang, piston head Robin Hoods, who righted the wrongs heaped on stoners, surfers, hippies, babes, rastas, grafittos wandering troubadours and such like by the forces of law and order. They were very successful and as it turns out still are as they are now a computer game and a pilot for a TV series was made which Rowley assured me can be viewed on Netflix. Rowley told me he’d been living in the woods in North Bulgaria as he’d married a Bulgarian woman but she’d chucked him out after he’d met an Estonian woman on a trip to Tallin so he decided to come home and he was now living in Yelland.  His current girlfriend it transpires had also left him and gone and set up a house with an old schoolfriend over from the baltic states of in Landkey. That was what Rowley said although I find it difficult to believe. Anyway us two old boys sat out the front of the Quay with our scrumpy and soon we just fell into talking as if time had stood still. We both came to the conclusion that Instow was the North Devon Riviera, the boat hulls shimmering on the water, the pinging of their pennants in the breeze which when it’s sunny and you squint a bit can't be too far off the mark. All you need now is a fishing boat to tie up at the Quay haul up a large tuna and start slicing up big bloody chunks of it and you could be in the vieux port in Marseille, a smashing spot  as I recall. Rowley reckoned Instow was a real community beach where you get a real cross section of the true North Devonian constituency.

It is a town beach like one of those ones you see in National Geographic, folk sunbathing and playing games with all sorts of paraphernalia spread out around them posed amid an urban or industrial backdrop say an airport or an oil refinery or fish processing plant. At Instow you’ve got the rusty hulks over at Richmond Dock the cranes beside the Shipyard, the biggest covered yard in Europe at one time, and the span of the Torridge bridge which to my mind all adds to it’s charm.
 Over another pint we agreed that it lacked the pretensions of other beaches in the area a fact made evident from the total absence of VW Transporter vans  along The Front.  No one organised a beach clean at Instow and went on-line or in the Journal to give it the big "I AM"  and going on about how they love the beach and mutually congratulating each other on such a mighty community effort,  uploading their photo’s to the friends up country to show them what a charmed life they are leading and how really involved they are and inclusive they feel before all piling into their vans and causing a monumental tailback in the lanes around Georgeham and Croyde. I was off on one but Rowley seemed more than happy to indulge me!
Oh we had a laugh. Of course it wasn’t long before I was telling him how as kids we would head down here and go cockling and wrack mussels from the rocks but onlyin the months with an r in them. Back then the Taw /Torridge Estuary was reasonably polluted  and you had to squelch through stinking oily black mud which had the sickly sheen of a large bluebottle and would suck your wellies off as often as not leaving you stranded, virtually cemented into the quagmire and you wouldn’t want to be doing that on an incoming tide primed as we were by cautionary tales of poor unfortunates who’d come to a sorry end subsumed by the incoming waters. Thinking about it, back then the mortuary must have been crammed full of  crab nibbled human remains as we all claimed to know somebody who’d  met this fate. Rowley had a laugh when he reminded me of the time that we came down along the railway line from town carrying our forks to dig some bait and to prang some flooks in the shallows as he tells it we got plenty of ragworm but all we pranged on the  prongs of our forks was toilet paper and used condoms. I went on to tell him how I thought the people of North Devon probably cause havoc at airports throughout the world due to the amount of heavy metals we must have ingested over the years eating molluscs and shellfish out of the estuary especially after it came to light that Gales Electroplating down at Pottington had just ben pouring their residuals into the river for donkeys years.

Before long we were both regaling a coupe of visitors, up from Kilkhampton with our youthful escapades and the scrumpy kept coming. At some point Rowley decided to take his leave and cycle back to Yelland and he was the cause of much merriment as he waddled over to his bike precariously mounted it as not to show of his meat and two veg under his budgie smugglers as one passing lad had called his trunks and wobble along the road before falling off as he  attempted to pull in between some parked cars to avoid an oncoming Atantic Wave. He picked himself up turned and waved to one and all before deciding the best course of action was to walk.

After bidding farewell to  he folk at the bar I meandered back along the beach to the foot of the dunes where I laid down for a knap in front of me two rather thin and pale odd looking children, moon kids we used to call this type who were building some sort of arcane diabolic structure out of driftwood. 

I dozed off and awoke with a start it was bloody freezing and the sun was setting I looked down at the totem beneath me and was troubled to see what looked like a pigs head had been place on top of it. My mind was playing tricks and I must have been having some sort of waking dream as on closer inspection after I had slid down the dune it turned out to be a punctured plastic football. However, I was still unsetttled as many ears before I had come across a pigs head almost in this very spot that must have been washed down river from the abattoir at Fremington Quay. Cold and out of sorts I hobbled into the Wayfarer for a restorative rum and a jar of cockles before catching the 21A Atlantic Wave all the way back to The Strand and Antiques Roadshow. 

Ghost Ship Crewed by Cannibal Rats Runs Aground Off Lundy Island

This was the kind of headline I was expecting to see at some point due to the media frenzy that followed the story of the ghost ship adrift somewhere in the Atlantic that, driven by hurricane force winds of recent weeks, is navigating phantasmically towards our shores.

The Lyubov Orlova navigating the Arctic seas

The Lyubov Orlova, a rather dingy looking former Russian cruise ship, was impounded by the maritime authorities in Canada owing to financial irregularities and subsequently abandoned by it's unpaid crew. I have experience of this myself as I must of mentioned that time us lads were marooned in Buenos Aires after the dredging incident in the River Plate and the unfortunate incident with ordnance  left over from the Graaf Spee and I can tell you it's no fun stuck in a foreign land having lost your boat. The aforementioned cruise ship was then towed off to the Dominican Republic where during a storm it broke it's mooring an floated off out into the Atlantic never to be seen again. That is until a beacon was set off and picked up by the Irish Marine Agency. So it turns out that it is still out there bobbing about upon the high seas and is heading this way and could potentially, as some of the media would have it, crash into the North Devon coast.
This story has caught the attention of people up and down the Western Atlantic as reports from as far afield as Casablanca, Galicia, Britanny and Scotland all fear that the ship is about to scuttle itself on their shores along with it's hideous cargo of cannibal rats. Anne Cawood has just got back from a spot of winter sun in the Canaries and she said that they were on full alert down there for the blighted vessel entering their waters and potentially causing a hang of a muddle and caper as it beaches itself on the Playa de Americas to the consternation of hundreds of British and German pensioners.

A new addition to the fleet?

Now if I was a younger man I would have got together a crew and took out one of the tugs and go and have a look for it as it must be worth a bob or two in scrap and it does surprise me that there has been no concerted effort by enterprising folk to go out after the salvage rights as here in North Devon we have the facilities to break up such a ship; cut it in half and stick it in Richmond Dock down at Appledore or beach it down at Yelland and break it up there just like they did with the Severn Star.To my mind, it wouldn't look too out of place down at Chivenor alongside the rather motley looking fleet of houseboats. Or if you really want a laugh you could suggest it get's towed up to Vellator Quay that'll get them going down at Braunton! You could turn it in to a tourist attraction. Come see the cannibal rats. The Big Rat or such like.

Cannibal rats the stuff of nightmares

I don't know about these here "cannibal rats" are they some sort of different species to normal rats? Given that the ships last port of call was the Dominican Republic I assume that they could be voodoo rats. Cannibal voodoo rats gives the whole yarn a more chilling and petrifying aire. I can picture them now with their little dead eyes, drooling and slathering as they gnaw away at each other. Of course in such desperate nautical circumstances humans have been known to do the same thing although I doubt rats draw lots.

I was just thinking the people of Ilfracombe had better watch out in a few months time as they are eagerly and rather avariciously anticipating a cruise ship to pay a visit to the town. They'd better make sure that they get the right one. Otherwise they'd all be stood in their finery on the quayside looking out at this stagnant ship just floating outside the harbour and rather than seeing a party of affluent Americans manning the tenders to come ashore they are unable to discern no signs of life other the barely audible squeaking and mewing of a savage colony of mutated rodents. A ghost ship. I can see it now The harbour master is sent out in a boat by the mayor to investigate and climbs aboard moments later the calm of a summers afternoon is shattered by hideous screaming as he is carried down into the bowels of the vessel. Mind you from what I've seen of cruise ships they seem to carry a cargo of the living dead anyway. That's their raison d'etre. They are God's waiting room on the high seas and often as not plague ridden with the dreaded norovirus!

Ilfracombe expecting visit from cruise ship carrying the living dead

Cor that would make a good horror film, worthy of the late James Herbert. This reminds me of the story of another spectral vessel that turned up in British waters, this time off Whitby and this one was Russian and all. The Demeter out of the Finnish port of Varma went aground off Whitby with no sign of the crew other than the dead Captain lashed to the wheel and a rather strange cargo of boxes containing nothing but earth and mould and I tell you not much good came of that after the local dockers salvaged it and unwittingly disembarked Count Dracula.  As a former seaman we were always on the look out for the Flying Dutchman a ship that was condemned to sail, shrouded in it's own bank of fog, the oceans of the world for eternity.
Should the ship ever turn up in the waters of the Bideford Bay without a pilot on board it would no doubt founder on the rocks off Hartland or run aground on the bar. It wouldn't surprise me if this was seen as divine retribution by some of them Torridgeside UKIP councillors and God fearing souls , a portentous biblical plague sent from above to show displeasure at the furore caused by the suspension of Christian prayers before Bideford Council meetings. On a secular level questions would be asked how all this came to pass and Philip Milton would fire off a letter to the Journal blaming Nick Harvey or Councillor Ricky Knight. Let's not forget Rodney Cann he would be pictured in the Gazette framed by the rotting, god-forsaken hulk asking for more money to spent on something or another.

For those of a nautical bent, read about the Orlov here.