Captain Cook country
Russell Chamberlin
There’s an irritating tendency by some local authorities to follow the deplorable example set by the Local Government Act of 1972 and give madeup names to large slabs of countryside. ‘James Herriot Country’, ‘Catherine Cookson Country’, ‘Poldark Country’ and the like.
There is some excuse for ‘Captain Cook Country’, though. It gives a name to an area robbed of its historical identity by the Act. This was one of the great Ridings of Yorkshire, now suburbanised into ‘Cleveland’, with the sprawling modern town of Middlesbrough at its heart. To be fair, it is an area of contrast so great as to defy classification: industrial complexes arise out of rich farmland; suburban estates sprawl a stone’s throw from 18thcentury parkland; the horrors of seaside Britain link up with the primaeval; the majesty of cliffs meeting ocean.
The area is imbued with the memory of the man who opened up the world: Marton, where he was born; Great Ayton, where he went to school and where his mother and five siblings are buried; the cottage which his father built and which was shipped to Australia in 1934; Whitby, from where he left for his third and last voyage in July 1776; Stockton, where there’s a handsome, full-scale replica of the Endeavour, half the size of a crossChannel ferry.
At the heart of the region is the Birthplace Museum, set in the grounds of Marton Hall, home of the ironmaster H.W.F. Bolckow. He built himself a splendid house in 1856, and also erected a handsome granite vase to mark the site of the original cottage in which Cook was born, and which was demolished in 1786. Bolckow’s own house was demolished in 1966, the park was given over to the public and the first museum was erected in 1978. It won a Museum of the Year award but was then completely refurbished, equipped with modern devices and reopened, appropriately, by David Attenborough in 1998.
On the outside of the museum — a square, squat building set in a garden — is a mystic rune: ‘1o/12'. It means: ‘one degree 12 minutes west of Greenwich’ (the location of Marton), an appropriate device for the world’s greatest navigator. The building seems curiously small for its importance and doesn’t reveal its secret until you are inside: the ground floor houses only the reception and the ubiquitous museum shop. The museum itself is below ground, a fact which allowed the designer to create something of the claustrophobia of a small ship with room leading into room in a complex maze.
All the high-tech devices are here to create the illusion of a ship at sea But, as you hear the scream of seagulls and crash of waves, as you pass the now obligatory model of a lay figure (in this case that of a seaman in his hammock), as you twist the cylinder which records Cook’s ‘secret instructions’, there is an uneasy sense of familiarity. This is a television set.
Television’s obsession with instant history, its earnest belief that ordinary people are incapable of interpreting artefacts, that everything must be dressed up and dramatised — this obsession is passing into the museum world. One wonders how far down the road this trend can go: hands-on is important — but so is ambience.
The Railway Museum in Darlington, a few miles away, housed in what is probably the world’s oldest railway station, has ambience and to spare. There is no indication that this modest residential area is, historically, one of the most important places in the world. It was here, in 1825, that the Industrial Revolution entered everyday life in the shape of the Darlington–Stockton Railway. The infant railway followed the tradition of the stagecoach and processed its passengers via a network of inns, and it was not until 1842 that the station was built.
Reduced to an unmanned halt in the 1960s, the building rapidly deteriorated and would probably have been demolished had it not been for the energetic crusade of a local industrialist, Herbert Wolfe. The building was restored and opened as a museum by the Duke of Edinburgh in 1975, exactly 150 years after the first railway journey.
It is an elegant, curiously modern-looking building. The booking hall with its solid timber fittings, presided over by a solemn grandfather clock, is unchanged. Inside, pride of place is given to Locomotion No. 1, the world’s first locomotive. Looking eerily zoomorphic, something that could have been dreamed up by Terry Pratchett, it is surrounded by its thunderous descendants. Nothing gives so great an impression of raw power as a great steam locomotive. It is possible to experience the dream of every small boy and actually enter the cabin of one. And for the determinedly nostalgic there are the superb posters celebrating the beauties of Britain which British Rail published in its youthful pride.
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