Martin Wainright Says One Last Thing...
Above: Martin Wainwright
It is still a matter of wonder to me that four simple words like those can carry such a stack of emotion and images of this lovely time of year. Without sounding too much like an old buffer, I hope that this point is still made in English lessons at school, as it was in mine. At least David Jason and Catherine Zeta Jones have done their bit to help, and done it, what’s more, in Kirkstall Road, Leeds.
The phrase still triggers images of abundance and rural beauty created by Yorkshire Television for one of the best series of films they have ever made. I have to declare an interest in May because I was born on the 18th and, more importantly, married on the 12th, so my generally radiant view of the month is loaded with personal bias. I also have particularly happy memories of the month from last year, because it saw the sun shine at last on an arduous project which I had started two months earlier.
This was an assault on my famous namesake Alfred’s Coast to Coast walk for a guidebook which is published on May 10th this year, in the National Trails and Recreational Paths series produced by Aurum Press and the Ordnance Survey. In March I marched through snow up an ice staircase from Borrowdale to Grasmere; in April I was drenched on the quagmire beyond Nine Standards Rigg. But in May I stood at Crackpot Hall above Keld with my heart in my mouth at the sunlit glory of Swaledale.
Before the month ended, my wife and I were forging along through equally warm weather to such excellent places as the Postgate Inn at Egton Bridge. One of my uncles, whose favoured life has also included a spell as vicar of Esholt, that nook near Bradford protected from exploitation for years by the neighbouring sewage works, spent three happy months as a guest at the Postgate. He was a surveyor and the sale of the large estate of Egton Hall required meticulous plans to be drawn up of a dozen or so farms. The way he tells it reminds me of the idyll, also in the 1950s, enjoyed by the tax inspector Cedric Charlton or Charley in The Darling Buds of May. Like the former vicarage at Esholt, whose riverside garden compensates for the whiff when the wind is from the east, the Postgate flanks the river Esk and in May there are bluebells, wood anemones and (although this is admittedly shared by all other 11 months) friendly people and good beer.
When Alfred Wainwright came this way he was in a cheerful mood. Not just the serenity Martin Wainwright. Photograph: Justin Slee One last thing... By Martin Wainwright In March I marched through snow up an ice staircase from Borrowdale to Grasmere; in April I was drenched on the quagmire beyond Nine Standards Rigg. But in May I stood at Crackpot Hall above Keld with my heart in my mouth at the sunlit glory of Swaledale. which marks all his writing about wild or beautiful places, but extra warmth and optimism which comes from falling in love.
As Hunter Davies discovered for his outstanding biography, the fellwalker suffered for 40 years from a catastrophic marriage, to whose cruelties he contributed greatly. We may well be concerned about the ease with which couples part nowadays, but Wainwright’s story is an exemplar of the evils of unsuitable people obliged by social mores to stay together. By 1971 when he began researching the Coast to Coast, he had been through a messy divorce and remarried to Betty McNally who was and remained the love of his life. It shows on every page. Wainwright’s name is associated for ever with the Lake District, through his seven-book masterpiece The Pictorial Guides.
People also relate him to Blackburn because he was born and grew up there and perfected his meticulous ways and drawing style as a clerk in the town hall. Incidentally, I was intrigued to learn from Davies that a one-o-clock gun was fired on Blackburn Town Hall roof every day until 1931, a practice which they are currently thinking of reviving in Bradford, on the lines of the Edinburgh cannon. It’s a great idea, as is the allied notion of making a lake where the hideous courts and police station now squat.
But back to Wainwright. In spite of the Cumbrian and Lancashire claims, you will not be surprised to know that he was really a Yorkshireman. His father Albert and mother Emily (nee Woodcock) were both from Penistone where they taught together at Netherfield Congregational Church Sunday School. Where else, apart from Yorkshire, could the great man have inherited his combination of pride, bloody-mindedness and laconic humour? He is also further proof of my theory that if you go back far enough, everyone comes from Yorkshire; and in the end, most of them pay the great county back. Wainwright certainly did, by giving us our section of the Coast to Coast, between Keld moors and Robin Hood’s Bay, which I wholeheartedly recommend as something wonderful to do this summer.