Westmorland men
Michael Wharton
'Retain your Loyalty; Preserve your Rights': these are the words inscribed on the old High Cross in front of the Castle gates at the upper end of the wide main street of Appleby, for centuries the county town of Westmorland until in 1974 the infamous Heatho-Walkerian reforms of local government abolished the county and absorbed it, together with Cumberland and the Furness district of Lancashire, in the new 'county' of Cumbria.
Appleby is one of the oldest boroughs in England (by a malign coincidence the year 1974 was the 800th anniversary of its incorporation); it as the smallest county town in the least populated county. But it had its own assizes (white gloves for the judge, I believe, almost every time he came), and all the other marks of civic dignity. In 1974 all this was swept away; indeed, but for the admirable local historian Martin Holmes, who happened to be mayor at the time, the very name of Westmorland would have vanished from the map of England. By a concession the little town is now officially named Appleby-in-Westmorland. But this is not enough.
I am a native of the West Riding of Yorkshire, which is also supposed to have vanished, together with the North and East Ridings, when the largest county in England was cut up into various absurd and meaningless entities including the bogus and muchhated 'county' of Humberside. But Westmorland is the county of my adoption; I have many ties and associations with it; I lived there before the war, when the towering Lord Hothfield, proprietor of the ancient Castle, now occupied by a company staff-training centre, seemed to be (and probably was) perpetual mayor. Particularly I love the valley of the Eden, the only considerable northward-flowing river in England, which rises in the wild moorland on the border of Yorkshire and passing between the Lake District and the Northern Pennines through a country beautifully diversified with woods, hills, pasture and tillage enters the sea in the Solway Firth.
Cumberland and Westmorland have always gone together, and there is, I admit, a vague historical justification for the name 'Cumbria', the remote north-western corner of England whose early history is so obscure and complicated and whose people combine Welsh, Norse, Danish, Anglian and even Irish elements. For about 200 years the whole If Cumberland, with the northern part of Westmorland at least, was part of the Kine,jom of Scotland. But the English county of Westmorland, 'the land of the people west of the Yorkshire moors', was created in 1131, keeping its boundaries unchanged until five years ago, a quiet region disturbed only by raiding Scots (they burned Appleby to the ground in 1388), the passage and repassage of the Jacobite army in 1745 and, after the romantic movement got under way, the ever-increasing number of visitors who came to admire its lakes and mountains.
This was the inoffensive county, still almost wholly rural, which became part of `Cumbria' in 1974. Quite apart from the loss of their separate identity it is difficult to see any way in which its people have gained from the change. `Cumbria' does not make administrative sense. It has two large urban centres, Carlisle and Barrow-in-Furness, at its northern and southern extremities; between them is the massif of the Lake District. Westmorland itself, together with parts of Cumberland, has been arbitrarily divided into six districts whose only raison d'etre seems to be that they contain roughly the same number of inhabitants. Thus the exruciatingly-named District of South Lakeland, with Kendal as its main centre, has been rounded off by the annexation of certain places — Dent,' Garsdale and Sedbergh, for instance — which everybody who is not absolutely daft knows arc in Yorkshire.
What strange beings, in what strange offices, on what strange drawing-boards, worked out these strange boundaries? Only one principle seems common to them all, in Westmorland as in the rest of England: the principle that English people should no longer know where they are, who they are, to whom they should look for advice or redress: in short whether they are coming or going. They must all be turned into urbanised population-units robbed of the independence and initiative which are such a nuisance to the new administrators (whether they are called 'Conservative or 'Labour' is immaterial) who want to manipulate and direct them for their own supposed good and, not least, sell them things they do not want. About ten years ago some entrepreneur hit on the idea of creating, in a notable beautiful stretch of country in the foothills of the Westmorland Pennines, a 'leisure and amenity complex' complete with casino, marina, discotheque and artificial ski-run, to 'cream off' some of the money-laden motorists from South Lancashire who, thanks to the new motorway, could otherwise be in the Lake District in less than a couple of hours. Officials and planners were all for this progressive scheme ('it will bring much-needed employment to this "grey" area, etc, etc.) But the sheep-farmers who were to be bought off their land to make way for this monstrosity would have none of it (and in the end, I'm glad to say, did not). They were even ready for sabotage, if necessary. It was the time when Welsh Nationalists were mildly blowing up the odd pipe-line, and one young farmer ( I may have egged him on a bit) told me: 'If 'Welsh can dae it, we can dae it — and better'. These were no ecology-mongers or Greenpeace mountebanks but genuine countrymen whose forbears had farmed this land for centuries and who meant to go on farming it.
They were Westmorland men, living in what was then and may still be in the future (who knows what may happen?) a real pocket of resistance in rural England, in spite of the frenzied efforts of the 'Cumbrian Tourist Board' to unman these fine people by getting their wives to advertise 'teas' and 'bed and breakfast' in every farmhouse window, as in the poor touristravaged Lake District nearby.
'Retain your Loyalty; Preserve your Rights'. Now one of the pillars of their loyalty, the very name, 800 years old, of the county where they live, has been filched away, and their rights, like all our rights, are being taken from them piecemeal by those who, having no loyalty themselves, no sense of identity, of history and continuity cannot even begin to understand these instincts in men who, whether they are aware of it or not, are still trying to live by them. To restore Westmorland (and all the other ancient counties of -England) would be a glorious smack in the eye for all those officials and businessmen, at best dull and unimaginative, at worst nasty, greedy and oppressive; and a mighty signal of encouragement for their too long uncomplaining, unresisting victims.
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