Martin Wainright Says One Last Thing...

Above: Martin Wainwright

I WAS talking to the Headingley Afternoon branch of the Townswomen’s Guild the other day and the conversation naturally strayed to fish and chips. I say ‘naturally’ because I have yet to meet a fellow Yorkshireman or woman who doesn’t enjoy the meal (even if we all have strongly-contested differences about whether to fry the cod or haddock in its skin).

We were meeting, too, at round about the time that the Great Scraps Scandal broke – the revelation that those lovely bits of batter which make a great fish-substitute if you’re only having a bag of chips, are now served up as a £2 starter at a swish restaurant in the middle of Leeds. The Headingley townswomen were as astonished as I was, even if the fancy scraps come with a choice of garnish such as chilli sprinklings or lemon and nutmeg. Well, you can swap anecdotes about fish and chips until well after last portions have been served.

My own favourite, until I met the Headingley TG, was a terrifyingly chauvinistic article about dripping in The Frier magazine of 9th September 1919 (nowhere, however obscure, is safe from the erudite journalist’s inquiring mind…) ‘Animal fat is the food of a dominant people,’ it said, in the course of a diatribe against Lancashire oil-friers who were backing a War Ministry plan to cut Yorkshire’s dripping supply because ammunition factories wanted more grease.

‘The cry for vegetable oil is for the feeding of an inferior people. Animal fat for the dominant nation. Animal fat for the dominant county within that nation.’ But that takes second place now to the Cleckheaton Dripping Air Raid Shelter. I was introduced to this unique structure by one of the Headingley women, whose parents built it in 1941. She told me: ‘They ran a chip shop and my Dad was worrying about the bombing one day, when the dripping man arrived with his weekly order in a stack of cardboard boxes. ‘Dad had this brainwave: let’s line the cellar with them. There isn’t a bomb made which could blast through that.’

Even if it had, the family would only be coated in soft and delightfully fragrant animal fat. Luckily the Dripping Shelter, although built, carpeted and equipped, was never tested. But I was still thinking about it a day later, when I had a rare invitation to visit one of the best-protected places in the whole county. There’d been a row the previous week about the Government sneaking out news in an obscure Parliamentary written answer, about a British tie-in with the United States on ballistic missile defence. You’ll have guessed that I’m talking about either Menwith Hill or Fylingdales, and in this case it was the latter.

A Wing Commander Nicky Loveday emailed offering to show regional journalists what goes on in that hulking cheese grater which replaced the golf balls on the moors in 1992. You don’t turn down invitations like that, and the visit was duly fascinating, not just for what we saw, but for sorting out misconceptions. Martin Wainwright. Photograph: Justin Slee One last thing... By Martin Wainwright Well, you can swap anecdotes about fish and chips until well after last portions have been served.

My own favourite was a terrifyingly chauvinistic article about dripping in The Frier magazine of 9th September 1919 Wing Commander Loveday, for starters, had long hair and a skirt, as did her Squadron Leader, Alison Darling. Their home is much larger than it looks from the Pickering-Whitby road. Only the cheese grater shows from there, but over the hill behind there are offices, barracks and a special generator which runs the place on American 9v power, because that’s what the multi-million pound radar scanners use. The nerve centre, however, is invisible from everywhere – buried underground behind three perimeters – barbed wire coils, razor wire and an electric fence, as well roaming dogs and a two-foot-thick steel wall.

No dripping, but the steel is genuinely Northern, if not actually Yorkshire. It has a big panel by the nuclear and chemical-proof doors saying ‘Made in Bolton.’ We also discovered that far from eavesdropping on our mobile ‘phone calls, Fylingdales can warn us when suspect satellites which may do this sort of thing pass over our homes. The service is currently only supplied to the Government, but they gave us a brief demonstration. During the day we were there, 16 iffy information-gathering satellites from other countries snooped at the city of York alone.

Fylingdales’ other occupation, during the 44 years when no ballistic missile attacks have ever threatened, has been plotting the path of the curious items lost in space. There are 16,255 of these whirling round Earth, including two spanners and glove dropped by spacewalking astronauts. If any of them hit the Shuttle or a rocket launch, it would be catastrophic.

So North Yorkshire plays the part of a super-AA Roadwatch in space, showing spacecraft a safe way there and back again. It’s yet another surprising side of our county. And if you want a little orbit of your own, try one round Fylingdales on another Nicky Loveday initiative: a new bridleway which skirts the base via the old foundations of the golf balls. There are three sites of special scientific interest en route, she says proudly, and 81 rare or threatened plant and animal species. Not including any aliens.