WHERE THEY SWAP OLD ENOCH STORIES
J. Enoch Powell continues our series of
the English counties, with a personal view of Staffordshire
STAFFORDSHIRE IS not a place of its own. It is an oblong slab of country situat- ed in the West Midlands, in between Lan- cashire, Shropshire, Worcestershire — all of which are places — and Birmingham. At its northern edge it includes the foothills of the Pennines; on the south it trenches upon the Clee Hills, with their distant inti- mations of the Welsh border.
`Before the Romans came to Rye or by the Severn strode', they were well aware of the outcrop of a 30-foot-thick seam of coal in what would become the Black Country of South Staffordshire — a solid layer of the very best coal, ten yards thick. In that seam the industrial history of Staffordshire is locked up. Where the coal was near the surface they mined it in `gin-pits', that is to say, pits where a horse walked round and round raising and lowering buckets. It must have been to such a pit in West Bromwich that my own great-grandfather came out of Wales to find employment early in the last century; and to this day sections of pavement fall in, and the local inhabitants swarm out with hods to pick up choice morsels of coal.
The seam, however, faulted down north- ward underneath a royal forest by the name of Cannock. The mining industry pursued it there in deeper pits, from which was extracted 'Cannock bright' and 'Can- nock best', emblazoned on the side of end- less colliery trains on their way to markets further south.
Providence generously arranged that in the neighbourhood there were found lime- stone and iron ore, to be tunnelled out from beneath the ridge where stands the mediaeval castle of Dudley. The secret of smelting with coal having been wheedled out of the Swedes by a pretended itinerant clarionet-player, from Worcestershire by the name of Foley, forthwith there arose the wrought-iron industry which turned the Black Country black.
Alas, as it plunged beneath the River Severn, the ten-yard coal seam broke up Into fragments, or else the iron industry of Ironbridge would have made Shropshire an industrial county like Staffordshire. Meanwhile the magic of carboniferous fuel had cast its spell over the Potteries further north, where Josiah Wedgwood recreated the arts of ancient Etruria in kilns that coal had heated.
So Staffordshire became a tripartite county — black in the north in the Potter- ies, green and agricultural in the middle, and black again in the south, where guns were cast for the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 but not much longer afterwards. Even in speech the county was divided, the northerners verging towards Lancastrian in their burr, while the southerners spoke the ancient tongue of their eponymous hero `Awd Aynuck' (Old Enoch), that acme of incomprehensibility, who put his pig up upon a wall — the actual wall used still to be exhibited in Upper Gornal — `to watch the band go by'. Nowhere are folk so inseparable as natives of South Staffordshire when they get together and start to swap Old Enoch stories.
The internal contrasts of the county are present in the self-characterisation of its people. It is the Industrialised Black Country, and that alone, which sees itself represented in the mythical character Awd Aynuck, a bit stupid, ignorant and illogical but tough and enduring: 'So ah says, "dom the Pope," an Ayli [Eli] sloshed I."But, Aynuck, yo knowed as ow Ayli am a Catholic."Ah, but ah day know as as ow the Pope wor.' Surely in the Potteries no such incident ever happened and certainly no North Staffordshire man ever so described it.
It might be wondered, with all this, where the county itself has got to; but not for nothing is the knot, the love-knot, the historic emblem of the county. Stafford, Stafford by the River Sow, where St Chad from Northumbria came to preach Chris- tianity, looms over the divided parts and binds them together in a county conscious- ness. William Salt, the historian of Staffordshire, did not found in vain a col- lection of records upon which the Stafford- shire Record Office is today based. Only yesterday the Ministry of Defence, which had dared to propose amalgamating the Staffordshire Regiment with the Cheshires, had to back down when confronted with the surge of local patriotism.
There is a lesson here somewhere. To a geographer the counties are boundaries traced on an administrative map, which override more local divisions and differ- ences. Buried beneath, however, there lie deeper, older, local patriotisms which still breed sentiment and pride, ready to spring at a touch into tough resilience. Where now is the self-conscious Kingdom of Mer- cia, with its own royal family and its own coinage? Where? I will tell you. Not far across the green stretches of Cannock Chase from Stafford are Lichfield and Tamworth, respectively the religious and the civil foci of Mercia. Who knows what tentacles stretch back beyond the ravaged relics of the industrial revolution to join the inhabitants of this slab of England to those who dwelt in Mercia through the cen- turies?
The counties of England are artificial creations, creations of Acts of Parliament in the 19th and 20th centuries; but the politician would be mistaken who took them to be inert tissue that could be carved and recarved with impunity. We have been stirred by the resurrection of historic Lin- colnshire and historic Rutland from beneath the creations of incautious innova- tion; but it is the story of a county such as Staffordshire, with its seemingly uncurable diversity, that carries the cautionary mes- sage.
At Boscobel on the county boundary between Staffordshire and Shropshire, King Charles II sat safe from his pursuers amid the branches of the Royal Oak. Why there particularly? The jurisdiction of one sheriff ended there, and another's began. There is a moral here.
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