The English Midlands
Midland England. By W. G. Hoskins. (Batsford. 12s. bd.)
" MIDLAND ENGLAND": what do the words suggest ? Industry first of all, I suppose—iron, pottery, boots, beer ; and, for a landscape, red-brick towns scattered over a great plain that stretches out from the Chilterns to the broad and lazy Trent. Dull country, in fact, through which the traveller dozes without remorse on his journey to Manchester or Sheffield. There is some truth in that picture ; no clement in it is, indeed, wholly false. The industries are there all right, and some of the landscape is dull. Yet the Midlands are not really a flat plain at all, but a country full of variety and interest : from the rugged heights of Charnwood Forest to the valleys of the
Soar and the Ouse and, sweeping away to the east, the pastures of High Leicestershire and Rutland.
Here is Dr. Hoskins' theme. The title of his book is oddly mis- leading, for he is concerned only with the East Midlands ; Warwick- shire, Worcestershire and Staffordshire are here excluded. It may be said at once that this is the best book that has ever been written on that unregarded region, an indispensable work for anybody who wishes to understand its character and history. One thing only is disappointing ; the illustrations, mostly from photographs by Mr. F. L. Attenborough, Isre a splendid set, but they have been marred by thoroughly shoddy reproduction.
Dr. Hoskins begins with an account of the making of the landscape, and then passes on to the life of the people in the small towns, the villages, the farms. His plan is not original ; many books have been based on it during the present vogue of flimsy topographical writing. But this book is in a quite different class from that of most of its fellows because its author is a trained historian—the foremost living authority on the history of Leicestershire and a close and careful student of the development of British agriculture. That means that his book has unusual depth and sureness of judgement. Look for instance at the seventh chapter, in which he surveys some of the special things this country has given to England, and indeed to the world. Stilton cheese, first of all; - instead of rhapsodical nonsense about its flavour, stale jokes about port wine, here is a careful examination of the known history of the cheese that shows us just where it was first made, in the comfortable rolling pastures east of Leicester. Stilton cheese is famous throughout England ; but the Midlands have produced some things with a European reputation— Northampton boots and Birmingham guns and, in the late Middle Ages, the alabaster work of Nottingham, which was exported to countries as far afield as Iceland and Spain. A complete Nottingham altarpiece is now, once again, on show at South Kensington, and fragments of the work survive occasionally in parish churches—six panels, for example, at Drayton in Berkshire, another at St. Mary's in Nottingham itself.
That alabaster panel might serve as a symbol of the city's life— the national importance of its industry (think of Boots and Players and Raleigh bicycles today), the continuity and length of its history. It is five hundred years this summer since Nottingham was first incorporated, and Mr. Gray's book celebrates the anniversary. He has not attempted a compressed history of the town ; wisely he con- fines himself to the growth of its government. His narrative is clear, soundly based on the city records ; and the book, with its thirty-six pages of well-chosen pictures, is the best four shillings' worth I have seen since 1939.
Nottingham is, indeed, one of the grandest of English towns. But though it is the most interesting place in the Midlands, it is only the first of a long line. I choose one other example. If you go out from Leicester six or seven miles northwards along the Fosse Way (the great road whose sixty miles from Leicester to Lincoln are full of the excitements of history) you climb a low hill by Pugin's Rat- cliffe College. Look down from the top, and you see first of all the Wreak valley, with its thick crowd of Danish place-names ; the spire of the church at Brooksby, where the great Duke of Buckingham was born, the founder of the astonishing Villiers connection ; further round, hazier in the distance' the wooded knob of Billesdon Coplow, a landmark famous to all hunting men; and to the south, in the flat valley of the Soar, the chimneys and spires of Leicester. That single view will represent the variety and range of interest that is to be found in these unknown English Midlands. JAC.IC SIMMONS.
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