Canal Ghosts

Following on from my last entry, the two key figures in founding the Inland Waterwazys Association were Tom Rolt and Robert Aikman. However, I've stumbled across another interesting connection between these two men; they also both wrote ghost stories. Indeed, both have stories anthologised in the excellent Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories. Rolt's 'Bosworth Summit Pound' is, as the name suggests set on a canal. Aikman's story The Cicerones also appears in the same volume. It has long been one of my favourite supernatural short stories and even if it doesn't keep you awake it should certainly put you off Belgian cathedrals for a while (although I always mentally visualise it being set in Boulogne Cathedral)

Canal Vision

On Monday night I caught The Golden Age of Canals, one of those wonderful documentaries that BBC4 insists on sneaking out without telling anyone. Although it’s not clear from it title, it was primarily about the movement to prevent British canals falling into dereliction following a final later flowering during World War II, rather than an in depth exploration of their initial creation. One of the key figures in the establishment of the key lobbying conservation movement the Inland Waterways Association was Tom Rolt. He is someone I’ve been becoming increasingly interested in. He was along with figures like Kenneth Hudson at the vanguard of the creation of the practice of Industrial Archaeology, and was not only involved in protecting canals, but was an early pioneer of preserving railways. Pleasingly, he partly owes the success of his first book, Narrow Boat to H.J. Massingham, who is someone I’ve blogged about before. The rise of an interest in the industrial past is something that has been largely neglected in the huge literature generated on the relationship between landscape and environment and the creation of particular narratives about what it means to be ‘English’. Generally speaking, the meta-narratives have been about the anti-modernist and predominantly pastoralist visions of the Neo-Romantic movement (though to be fair David Matless’s excellent Landscape and Englishness is far more subtly argued and contains a number of pages on Rolt). However, in the 1940s and 50s we can begin to see an alternative vision of a distinctively English landscape constructed around the industrial past – interestingly this appears at first to involve particularly steam trains and canals. These are elements of technology that we clearly receding in importance, and significantly I think were physically able to escape the confines of urban landscapes and strike out into rural landscapes. For the first time, it appears people were distinguishing between an interest in technology and modernist agendas. Of course, as Alexandra Harris’s recent Romantic Moderns makes clear the Neo-Romantics were as much Neo- as Romantic and artists such as Eric Ravilious and John Piper were interested in depicting relics of older industry. However, people like Rolt were perhaps the first to flag up the importance of industrial technology, providing it with some sense of time depth, and importantly, flagging it up as something worth saving.

Cecil Sharpe: Photographer!

I've just come across the on-line image gallery of the photographs taken by Cecil Sharpe of the singers and musicians from who he collected his music. These are an absolute revelation. Despite the massive expansion of photography in the later 19th and early 20th century it is incredibly rare to see portraits (and this is what they are) of the working-class, particularly rural workers. The only parallels I can think of are the 19th century 'mugshots' of criminals taken from police records.

Two things impress me particularly about Sharpe's images. First is the gaze of the subjects- straight on at the camera confronting the photographer and the viewer. Many are very relaxed and not at all nervous about having their photographs taken. Also, many of these individuals are elderly, they aren't wearing late Victorian or Edwardian clothes, instead they are dressed in the costume of mid-19th century labourers. With their chin-strap beards and wide-brimmed felt hats they belong to the world of the Tolpuddle Martyrs not Lark Rise...

‘People who don’t like to hear an old song, I don’t know what they do want to hear'

Cecil Sharpe is one of the founding figures in the English folk revival. He was in the forefront of collecting traditional songs and tunes in both England and the Appalachians in the early 20th century. Like most such pivotal individuals he has been the subject of much revisionism, and there is a tension between celebrating him as a valuable collector of a vanishing tradition and condemning him for exploiting those who provided his songs and bowdlerising and editing his material to provide an orthodox canon of ‘authentic’ material. However, I think it’s easy to forget the incredibly important work done by collectors from the 1930s onwards, by which time recording equipment was more transportable allowing a fantastic corpus of songs to be recorded as performances, not simply transcribed straight to paper. It gives us a great chance to hear the performers and singers themselves without an intermediary. I’ve been recently exploring some of this material through the Voice of the People series issued by Topic Records (available on Spotify). One of the revelations for me has been that some of this field recording was Alan Lomax, who is best known for his recordings for the Library of Congress in the US. I must confess I never knew he strayed this side of the pond.

Current favourites include the singing of Fred Jordan [Spotify link to We Shepherds are the Best of Men],
Harry Cox (pictured and from who the title quote was taken) [Spotify link to Just as the Tide was flowing] and
Walter Pardon [Spotify link to an unusual version of Raggle Taggle Gypsies]

Disappeared noises

An item on PM on Radio 4 about the power of sounds to evoke emotions got me thinking. The article discussed the impact of the sound of the Merlin engine [] of a Spitfire. Much as I hate to admit it, I am no longer in the first flush of my youth, and I’ve noticed that certain sounds that were part of my childhood no longer exist.

Telephone bells; you get ringtones, trimphones, bleeps and tunes, but analogue phones bells have gone (as have phones with dials – in a brief informal survey of my students none of them had ever used a dial phone)

Foghorns- I remember lying in bed at my great-aunts house in Deal listening to the foghorns. I think they’ve all been taken out of service now (as have the lightships on the Goodwin Sands we could see when we were night swimming).

The Broadmoor siren – this is a slight cheat as its still operational, I’ve simply moved away. I grew up close the high security hospital at Broadmoor (home of Peter Sutcliffe and others of that ilk). Because of the high risks posed if a prisoner escaped, the surrounding area was provided with a network of sirens to warn the population. Every Monday morning at 10 o’clock, it was tested, first with the wail of the alert then the monotone of the ‘all clear’. I must have heard this nearly everyday for the first ten years of my life. Looking back it’s a strange thing to have grown up with, but at the time it seemed utterly normal. I can also remember wanting people to escape as it meant we got kept off school!

Copse and robbers

More ramblings about the Forestry Commission sell-off I'm afraid. What has intrigued me about this new policy (one incidentally not in either the Lib Dem or Tory manifesto) is the absolutely half-arsed way the government have gone about trying to defend it. Any attempt to paint it as a fiscally driven initiative ceased rapidly- the sell-off will make little money. It has become rapidly clear that it’s an ideologically driven policy, a classical liberal/libertarian abhorrence of any involvement of the state in an area where the ‘market’ could apparently make a better job. Caroline Spelman has flagged up the tension between the FCs role as regulator of the British forestry industry, as well as a major commercial contractor, yet never satisfactorily explains why this should require the selling off the forestry estates rather than simply setting up an independent regulator (Off Plank?)

This issue is important, for several reasons. First, of course, our forests are important cultural and natural resources and not simply financial seams to be mined. However, it is also a lens through which we can better understand the problems with the condem ‘big society’ agenda and its promotion of free market alternatives to all forms of state activity. In theory, the ‘big society’ is a wonderful notion, right up there with motherhood and apple pie, but it’s stymied by the friction of reality. Of course, people should get involved with their communities and take responsibility for things. However, just because people get involved in making decisions, does not mean that there are the resources to make these decisions actually happen. If the government really wants to see the ‘big society’ happening, we would be seeing them investing in funding schemes aimed directly at the voluntary sector, we would be seeing initiatives to provide community groups with training in employment law, health and safety, and writing business plans. If they were serious, we would see them ring fencing local government funding for voluntary groups. If they really wanted this to work, we should see increased funding to bodies like English Heritage and the Citizens Advice Bureaux. We would see them working with insurance companies to provide subsidised insurance for community events. Instead, it is precisely these kind of funding streams that are being cut at every turn – it is not surprising that Liverpool has withdrawn from being one of the pilot areas in the ‘big society’ project, citing lack of funding as one of the key obstacles. Support the ‘big society’ by all means, but don’t expect it to also save money. Let Cameron support choice, but let’s see him stump up the cash to pay for the decision-making process and to fund the choices once they have been made.

We also see with the woodlands sell-off the weakness of the market. Whilst for the Tory’s the freeing of the market is the ultimate panacea to all our woes, by saying that they will embed safeguards regarding conservation and public access in the long-term forestry leases, they are explicitly acknowledging that a completely free market won’t meet these needs without an element of compulsion. If the free market is so perfect why do we need child labour laws and health and safety legislation? Why do we need OFWAT, OFCOM and the Office of Free Trade? Commission, the Office of Fair Trade, OFWAT and OFCOM? Why do banks need bailing out? Because, simply, the results of a truly free market leads inevitably to a lot of sheer bloody misery for a lot of people and huge financial rewards for a minority. One only has to look at the periods in British history when the market was probably at its freest, the mid-19th century, to also see a period where child labour was at its highest, pollution was at its worst and the most industrial deaths and injuries occurred. We could equally turn to areas of the developing world today, where existing legislation over sweatshops are often not enforced, to see the incredibly poor conditions endured by workers. The free market may be the best way of making money, but, banally obvious as it may seem, there is more to life than money. The frustrating thing is that the government clearly realise this themselves. If they really wanted to follow the small state theory to its obvious conclusions, then they should seek to remove all immigration control and abolish the army and replace it with contracts with commercial security firms such as Blackwater. Of course, they won’t, because they too recognise that there are limits to the efficacy of the market,and by following its inexorable logic leads to socially unacceptable conclusions . However, rather then entering into a real debate about where the limits of the state are and how to recognise them, they blithely assert that the state is bad thing and the market a good thing without ever exploring why.

postscript

If ever I feel a need to get really angry and shout at things, there is nothing like a brief listen to Radio 4’s Any Questions to get me suitably splenetic. Only caught a couple of minutes this evening, but that was enough to leave me in a foul mood. Its worth listening to the odious (and looking at his blog, deeply self-pitying) James Delingpole purely for the opportunity to throw heavy objects at your radio.

The Woods and the Trees

The CONDEM proposals for selling of forests owned by the Forest Commissions have attracted, quite rightly, a lot of opprobrium, with particularly concern expressed about the potential threats to both the natural and cultural heritage connected to British woodland. The latest versions of the proposals appear to show some governmental concessions to these widely expressed worries. However, it is still clear that they don’t seem to ‘get it’ and here is why:

First of all, forests are dynamic things. This is an obvious and banal statement; of course they are living ecosystems. The crucial issue, though, is the fact that the vast majority of British forests are actively managed. They haven’t achieved their current state through being left to ‘get on with it’; they are the result of a long period of monitoring, management and control by humans. Like the majority of the British landscape, woodlands and forests are not simple natural landscapes, they are cultural products. It is incredibly important not lose site of this for two reasons. First, it has direct implications on how forests are looked after; they can’t simply be left to grow, they require continual investment in time, money and expertise for them to flourish. Secondly, a clear acknowledgement of this is important to avoid any accusations that those of us who have concern about the current policy are dewy-eyed mystic tree huggers with an obsession with a quasi-mythical wildwood (populated no doubt by Robin Hood, Herne the Hunter and possibly Bambi).

This is where the government’s proposals about forests hit their first snag. Whilst saying that many forests will be sold off to commercial companies, they are keen to promote their inchoate ‘Big Society’ agenda, with the proposals that a significant number of forests should be sold off to local community groups (under the Community Right to Buy provisions in the planned Localism Bill). We can take as read the implicit assumption that despite the recession there are lots of community groups out there with the initial capital to invest in the purchase of a wood (the consultation document is clear that any sale would be at the commercial market price and that the local groups simply have the option of first refusal- woodland costs c £3,500 and £7,000/hectare, so an average side wood could cost c £300,000). We can also pass over the assumption that there is an endless stream of volunteers and enthusiasts who are ready to get involved in running the forests (if not a zero-sum game, the size of the volunteer community is far from elastic). The biggest worry is the assumption that a small group of enthusiasts can easily run a wood. It takes more than committee meetings to actively run and maintain even a moderate sized wood. They need to be worked on and looked after. This includes felling dead wood, planting new trees and maintaining the infrastructure (drainage, fences, gates etc). Add to this, the need also to research, understand and curate any elements of the ecosystem (protected plants, animals etc) or the historic environment. This is going to involve money, time and expertise. There is no indication where this money is going to come from, nor the expertise. The planned massive expansion of the ‘big society’ is clearly going to put immense amount of pressure on existing funding sources (e.g. the Historic Lottery Fund and charitable bodies) who are unlikely to see a massive expansion in their own resources to meet this challenge. Equally, at the very time as all these new community groups are going to need professional advice, the bodies that provide them, including local government (e.g. rights of way officers, county archaeologists etc), quangos (e.g. English Heritage) and charities are facing massive cuts themselves. These forests are living organisms. They are going to require management and investment on an on-going basis year after year after year after year, long after the relatively short-term financial gains made by flogging them off are made. Are those community groups who purchased the woods in the first place even going to be around in ten years time? One only has to look at the number of local community initiatives funded by the HLF that have withered and died to realise that such groups often have a relatively life-span, usually relying on the drive and enthusiasm of often a very small group of individuals. The consultation documents states states that if the local group was wound up, the forest would return to the control of the State, presumably then to be sold to the commercial sector and leaving the community. This lack of appreciation of how forests work is disturbing and is symptomatic of a resounding short-termism.

Overall, according to the consultation document, the forests which might be available for management by local groups total about 13,000-26,000 hectares (c. 5-10% of the Forestry Commissions holdings). Another chunk of forests are what they call ‘forests of national historical, biodiversity or cultural significance’ (e.g. the Forest of Dean, New Forest) these might potentially be managed by charities (rather than smaller community groups) on a trust or lease-hold basis – forests potentially to be treated this way comprises a total of 50-80,000 hectares (c.20-30% of the FC holdings). Again, the same problems apply (funding etc), as well as some potentially interesting issues of governance (e.g. what would the relationship be between, for example, the New Forest National Park authority and a charity running the related woods, although, to be fair, the NPA could presumably bid to run the woods). These charity-run woods would have greater obligations to maintain the woods for public access etc. As with the smaller woods, they could apply for Forestry Grants, but there is an explicit assumption they should move away from reliance on state aid (how?). There are finally ‘commercial forests’ which would be leased to the private sector. These would have far less restrictions about public benefit (although there would be some) – key example given of this is Kielder Forest, and over all commercial forests make up a total of c35-50% of the FC holdings.

Whilst it is clear that some forest areas, particularly larger areas of ‘ancient woodland’ have some particular public importance, I am a little worried about the notion that it is possible to separate out some important forests in this way. Some elements within a landscape may not be of particular antiquity, but nonetheless contribute significantly to the character of a particular area. With this in mind, I was more than a little surprised to see that Kielder Forest in Northumberland is classified simply has a ‘commercial forest’/ Whilst in terms simply of antiquity it does not compare to the Forest of Dean, nonetheless, it defines its surrounding landscape, and although very much a working forest, it is of far greater significance to that part of the country than simply an economic one. It dates back to at least the 1920s and there will be increasingly fewer people who remember that area as anything but wooded. Kielder Forest is as essential to local distinctiveness in central Northumberland as the New Forest is to south-west Hampshire.

So, all in all, there are still real problems with the proposals. Let’s be clear, forests need to be managed and a major element of this management is best carried out in a commercial context. Also, there is nothing inherently wrong in the selling off of some elements of the Forestry Commission portfolio on a periodic basis in order to rationalize the estate, if balanced by a more or less equal level of purchasing more threatened forests to protect them. However, the current proposals, seemingly driven by an ideological move towards ‘localism’ and a short-termist demand for immediate capital, fail to address some very real problems. Currently, by operating a mixed portfolio of woodland the Forest Commission can use profits from commercially dominated woodlands to fund and manage forests with greater public / environmental benefits. By splitting up the estates the government are simply offloading the costs of running the woods with a greater public benefit onto a community with a limited capacity and a no secure source of financial support.