Home Rule for Yorkshire ?

PERSONAL COLUMN JOHN ROWAN WILSON

I have been an expatriate now for eighteen years. I suppose, in that time, I have gone through all the personality changes of the ex- patriate—the sense of early isolation, the deter- mination to adapt, the timidity and bravado, and the gradual absorption into the new en- vironment. I have even found myself entering into a stage beyond that, one of false and hypo- critical nostalgia. I have stood half-fuddled in bars with other emigres like myself and ex- changed sentimental stories of the country of my youth, safe in the knowledge that I was never likely to be called upon to return.

For the fact is that, though a Yorkshireman born and bred, I never felt entirely at home there. Indeed for as long as I could remember my life's ambition had been to get the hell out. For years I had dreamed, like the inhabitants of the European ghettoes at the turn of the century, for the day when I would get my visa for a warmer and more tolerant land. I knew that so long as I stayed at home I would always be a member of a despised and distrusted minority. For on those windswept moors, in those grim forbidding cities, an interest in any- thing which may be remotely regarded as cultural carries a suggestion of mental or moral instability. Literature, as an occupation, can only be justified after the event by proof of extreme prosperity. 'He won't make much brass out of that' was the comment of a mill-owner when my wife proudly told him I had published my first novel.

So I left. But I still think of myself as a Yorkshireman. This is almost unavoidable, for Yorkshire breeds a strong and potent culture of its own, quite different from that of any other country. Does a Londoner give a damn whether he lives in Middlesex or Surrey? Even the Lancastrian, though he has a kind of iden- tity as such, feels his loyalty primarily to the town of his birth; he speaks of himself as a Mancunian or a Liverpudlian. In Yorkshire there is no word for an inhabitant of Leeds or Sheffield. He is a Yorkshireman, and that is enough.

The Yorkshireman is not only different, he is proud of his difference. He is certainly as distinct from a southern Englishman as a Welsh- man or a Scotsman. It is also worth while re- membering that in terms of both geography and population Yorkshire forms a very signi- ficant part of the United Kingdom. The country's area is almost as great as Wales; the population is very much greater than Wales and not very much smaller than Scotland. Home Rule for Yorkshire? It has been suggested and not entirely in joke.

If the Yorkshireman has not yet fully awakened to the possibilities of an independence movement, it is not because of any lack of confidence in his ability to make it on his own. He believes implicitly in the racial superiority of Yorkshiremen. This doctrine is passed down from father to son. As soon as Yorkshire boys can understand connected sentences, they are regaled with stories and legends of a self- glorifying nature. They are told Yorkshire jokes and taken to see Yorkshire comedians at the pantomime. They are taken to cricket matches and bribed with ice-cream and chewing gum while they are indoctrinated with the details of the religious ceremony taking place in front of them.

Of supreme importance in this traditional education is the mythical figure of the York- shireman himself—the 'tyke' as he is sometimes called. Physically he is short and thickset. He is loud-voiced and brusque in manner. He says what he thinks. He 'doesn't wrap it up.' He is big-hearted, hard-working, efficient and humor- ous in a rough sort of way. Though unsophis- ticated, he is shrewd enough, especially in money matters, and is nobody's mug. A York- shireman's picture of himself is a blend of J. B. Priestley, Freddie Trueman and the show- jumper Harvey Smith. The best-known present- day Yorkshireman, curiously enough, hardly seems Yorkshire at all in the conventional sense. Though Harold Wilson was born and brought up in Huddersfield, his whole person- ality is alien to the Yorkshire myth. He appears to them as an awful example of what happens to a local scholarship lad when he gets corrup- ted by those fancy intellectuals in Oxford.

Like most national stereotypes, a good deal of this picture is wishful thinking, some is non- sense, and what remains is considerably over- simplified. The psychological make-up of the Yorkshireman differs materially from the tyke of his own imagining. Like the Australian, he uses an outer shell of bluster to cover deep personal misgivings. He is fundamentally paranoid in his attitude .towards life. He genuinely believes in his own superiority but has inner doubts as to whether anyone else recognises it. This expresses itself in outbursts of aggression which may occur in the most unlikely individuals.

Yorkshiremen tend to be square and red- faced, just as the Russians do, because they eat too much starchy food and don't bother much about their appearance. They are fond of pies and beer and fish and chips and don't hanker after a sexy reputation. Cricket plays a deep part in the lives of all classes of the community, and few remarks have given me a greater insight into the gulf between North and South than the statement made confidently by a friend of mine that 'cricket is a snobbish game.' To a Yorkshireman, this is like saying that eating or praying or having sexual inter- course is snobbish. In his world it is just some- thing everybody does.

There are other unusual aspects of York- shire life, which one only realises from living for a considerable time in the South. One thing is that the class system is different. There is, practically speaking, no upper class in York- shire. There may be an appearance of it in rural areas like the Dales, but the heart of the county is in the great industrial complexes of the West Riding, and here there is no upper crust at all. There is simply master and man, with great differences in wealth but sharing a common speech and similar manners. A York- shire businessman does not yearn to retire to the country and play the gentleman. If he buys a farm, it is for tax purposes.

He does not identify at all with certain fashionable myths which have seized the minds and hearts of the ruling circles of the country. The Imperial dream meant very little to him. He was in favour of it if it kept the mills going,

but that was the extent of his interest. It was the Southerners who played polo and drank chota pegs and stood in silly hats taking the salute in front of Government House; it was the Scots who built the dams and kept the rail- ways running. The loss of Empire made hardly more impression in Bradford than a transitory break in the price of merino tops. And the same goes too, for the idealistic dreams of the liberal intelligentsia. Nobody gives a damn in Yorkshire about Greece or Biafra or the Indian population problem or aid to the under- developed countries. To them, Sidcup is a far- away country of which they know nothing— never mind Czechoslovakia. .

The Yorkshireman is not ashamed of this narrowness of outlook; quite the contrary. To him it appears as hard-headedness and realism. Preoccupation with ideas is seen as yet another sign of Southern decadence. He believes that Southerners are lazy and effeminate, that they don't know how to prepare good plain food or keep their houses clean, and that they are unbusinesslike. He prides himself on being ex- ceedingly businesslike—quite wrongly, as it happens. Yorkshire industry is, for the most part, still locked in a Victorian pattern which is inappropriate to the modern world. It is a network of family concerns, prosperous enough to be comfortable and complacent, and lacking in the drive necessary for expansion and modernisation. For generations, insufficient capital investment has led to a gradual obsoles- cence of industry. To compare the West Riding factories with their equivalents in Germany or America is a melancholy exercise. When people discuss the reasons for Britain's economic decline, I have to go no further for my answer than the city where I was born.

The managerial revolution has not touched Yorkshire; we are still back in the old days of father and son and 'trouble down at t'mill' The factory areas are dirty and depressing and the new town centre rebuilding is modern re- construction at its most tasteless. As for domestic architecture, it is for practical pur- poses non-existent. All the major towns grew up during the industrial revolution, and were so filthy that nobody who could avoid it would consider living in them. The original mill-owners housed themselves in draughty mock-Gothic palaces sprinkled throughout the surrounding countryside. The contemporary middle class has given rise to a rash of suburban developments that make Chicago seem positively elegant.

And yet . . . There is something about the people you find nowhere else. Proud but self- mocking, stoical, independent; they are, in the fashionable phrase, alienated, but in rather a grand sort of way. And the voices. Who would not trade the strangulated courtesy of the Old Etonian for the harsh, contemptuous bark of Cleckheckmonsedge or the ferocious baying in- sults which pass for affection in Allerton By- water?

I listen to the voices. I feel affection. Yet I have changed in those eighteen years and they look at me differently. I sense that in their eyes I have become a Southerner. Even worse, a Londoner. For to every good Yorkshireman, the capital of this country is the root of all evil and corruption. I remember a colleague of mine telling me how, before the war, he had been presented to a Hungarian general in Budapest My friend explained that he was on a visit from London. `London,' said the general with dis- taste. 'What is London? Nothing but negroes, Jews and homosexuals.' He would have got a warm welcome in Yorkshire.