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A taste of Cumberland sausage at Ipswich station is the springboard for all sorts of connections
IPSWICH railway station may be
like any other on a bitterly cold
Saturday in March. In a word,
cheerless, and there's a 90 minute
wait before the loose connection.
Now familiar on most big stations,
there's also a cafe called Pumpkin. In a
word, functional, as in up-thejunctional.
I'm morosely chewing on a "Cumberland
sausage baguette", not much liking
their crust, when the theme for today's
column hits like a BLT-trolley. Time to
bridge the Cumberland Gap.
IT'S 20 years since one or other of these
columns broke bread with the Exclusive
Cumberland Sausage Club, whose base
was in Hartlepool but whose hearts were on
the far side of the Pennines.
They even gave me a rather handsome
club tie, though the motif looked more like
a whelk - as in Hail fellow whelk met, perhaps
- than the coil of sausage it was meant
to represent.
They were good lads, bangers and masculine,
conscious that the description
"Cumberland sausage" was being applied
to any thin-skinned impostor with a circumference
greater than the average little
finger.
Thus with Ipswich's enfeebled imitation.
Some would call it Cumberland sauce, the
more robust would simply suppose it pork
sausage, if not quite porky pies.
Said to have originated 500 years ago, true
Cumberland sausage was made from the
Cumberland pig, a breed which became extinct
around 1960. For that and other purposes,
Cumbrians reckoned to use every bit
of the animal except the squeal.
The sausage is chopped and not minced,
coiled and not linked, meaty and not filled
with something akin to wood shavings. Its
spiciness is said to date from the days when
Whitehaven, importing from the Orient,
was England's third largest port.
Cumberland sausage producers are now
seeking registration under 1992 European
legislation to protect their best assets. As
things stand just now, it's all a bit of a pig's
ear.
THE law's called Protected Designation of
Origin, applies to lots of cheeses - including
Swaledale but not, so far, to Wensleydale
- and to produce from Jersey royals to
Arbroath smokies, Taunton
cider, Whitstable oysters and Cornish clotted
cream - but not the dukedom's pasties.
Several beers have PDO status, too - including,
until last year, Newcastle Brown
Ale. These days, however, Newcastle Brown
Ale is no longer made in Newcastle.
ALL this follows some Easter Monday
research. Back on Ipswich railway
station, the thought had occurred
that Cumberland sausage might even owe
something to an 18th century Duke of Cumberland,
the man whom history knows as
"Butcher".
Born in 1721, second son of King George
II, he was a lieutenant general at 24 and led
the government forces against the Jacobites
at the bloody Battle of Culloden in 1746.
That sanguinary soubriquet, sadly, had
nothing to do with his ability as a sausage
maker but with the Highland genocide, rape
and mass murder which followed the English
victory.
Further south, they saluted him. The
Glasgow Journal produced a special edition
commemorating "the greatest rejoicings
ever known in the city"; it was for Butcher
Cumberland that Handel wrote "See the
conqu'ring hero comes".
There was no sausage link. History coils
and recoils, nonetheless.
IT IS also because of the Butcher, apparently,
that so many pubs became known
as the Cumberland Arms.
A couple of years back, we'd spent a memorable
evening watching Morris dancing at
the Cumberland Arms in Ouseburn, east of
Newcastle - one of the region's truly great
pubs. "It was the sort of night," the column
observed a day or two later, "upon which the
only worry in the world appears to be staying
sober and, only narrowly having succeeded,
reading your notes next morning."
There's long been another Cumberland
Arms in Bishop Auckland main street.
We've an archive image from 1906 in which
the pub advertises Ritchie's ales,
Sant's soda water and a football
final between Bearpark and
Shildon Athletic.
A couple of miles
away, there was another
Cumberland at
Coundon Grange,
though locals invariably
knew it as the
Blood Kit.
Explanations varied,
only one of them concerning
the Duke of Death.
Some supposed there to have been a
cock-fighting pit out the back, others that it
had been a handball haven. Handball, they
reckon, could be a blood sport, too.
The Blood Kit, alas, is no longer there to
address the wounds. Already closed, it was
gutted by fire in 1993.
THOUGH the pub's the Coach and Horses,
the hamlet of High Butcher Race, between
Ferryhill and Durham, was also scene of a
bloody battle between English and Scots -
this one was in 1346, before the Battle of
Nevilles Cross, a few miles up the road. It
was a different slaughter entirely.
CUMBERLAND Gap may be remembered
- by some of us, at any rate -
as the title of a 1957 number one hit
for Lonnie Donegan, the king of skiffle.
Some of us, goodness knows, even remember
the colour of the record label and the
name of the song on the other side.
Cumberland Gap ain't nowhere
Fifteen miles from Middlesbrough...
Innocence of youth, we'd always assumed
Cumberland Gap to be somewhere west of
Scotch Corner - a sort of northern Watford
Gap - and the reference to Middlesbrough
simply to be disorientation.
The real Cumberland Gap, it transpires,
is a mountain pass in Kentucky, supposed
to have been explored by Daniel Boone. The
town of Middlesboro, which may or may not
answer to The Boro, is a few miles up the
road.
LONG on geography, Lonnie's song was awfully
short on lyrics. Apart from endlessly
skiffling on about the Cumberland Gap,
there were just three two-line verses, one of
which concerned a woman, six feet tall, who
slept in the kitchen with her feet in the hall.
Another ran:
Two old ladies sitting in the sand
Each one wishing that the other was a man
As someone once said, they don't write
them like that any more.
THE other Cumberland Gap, as now it is
known, is a six-mile stretch of road running
from north of Carlisle to the Scottish
border, splitting the M6 and M74. In 2006,
however, the government gave the go-ahead
- rather more quickly than they have over
the A1 in North Yorkshire - for a £174m motorway
link. When complete, the whole
thing is expected to become the M6 - at 350
miles, the longest motorway in the country.
LONNIE Donegan was 69, had had two
heart attacks, a triple bypass and a
recently broken toe when he played
Trimdon Labour Club in September 2000.
He was brilliant.
At first, the John North column observed,
he had proceeded with care, helped on stage
rather as the Queen Mother might have
been, carrying towels with which to wipe
away the perspiration.
Soon, the column added, he was a man
zealously transformed - "born again, pain
forgotten, age barrier traversed".
He'd finished after 75 minutes with a
Rock Island Line so manifestly vibrant it
could have been in line for one of those government
franchises. Belatedly awarded the
MBE for services to music, Lonnie died two
years later. None of us at Trimdon that
night would ever forget him - not putting
the agony, putting on the style.
AT work we have a magic machine, an abracadabra
archive, which when key words are
input will turn up any relevant Echo story
in the past two decades. It was coincidence,
nonetheless, that a search linking "Cumberland
Arms" and "Coundon Grange"
should throw up in the same column another
reference to Trimdon Labour Club.
Sedgefield had a fresh faced and upcoming
MP, already a familiar face on local television.
"Could it be," Gadfly wondered,
"that the next leader of the Labour party,
perhaps even the next Prime Minister, will
be the lad from Fairfield Terrace, Trimdon?"
It was 1992. As always, you read it here
first.
AFTER local government reorganisation
in 1974, Cumberland became
Cumbria and absorbed the former
county of Westmorland - much, it might be
said, to Westmorland's chagrin.
Known best for the Lake District, which
would be fine if no one went there, it has
many other charms - not least Garsdale railway
station, just over the North Yorkshire
border, from which more ere long.
Much the most column's most memorable
experience on the far side of the Cumberland
Gap came three years ago when Millom
still found itself without a parish priest,
18 months after the Rev Phillip Greenhalgh's
move to become vicar of Weardale.
On Cumbria's wild west coast, Millom's
at the dead end of a long cul-de-sac. "The
A595 approaches, takes a look, and like the
Pharisee in the parable of the Good Samaritan,
hurries off in the opposite direction,"
we observed.
It was also the town to which Cumbria police
had wanted to post PC Terence Mc-
Glennon, a move to which the poor constable
so greatly objected - it was a
"punishment station", he said - that he had
to have six weeks off with stress.
He'd had commendations for bravery and
willingly accepted ten other transfers. "Village
bobby Terence McGlennon was prepared
to go to the ends of the earth to do his
duty," said the Daily Express, "but not to
Millom."
Half of the £15,000 awarded him by an industrial
tribunal was for "hurt feelings".
Phillip Greenhalgh had loved the place,
left it with reluctance. It should be reported,
however, that he has now left Weardale,
too. If not quite to Millom, he has returned,
rejoicing, to Cumbria.
THOUGH it would be possible
further to wax about Cumbria's
pleasures, it's long time that the
column was put to bed. Any more of
this, and we shall turn into a
Pumpkin.
11:52am Wednesday 26th March 2008
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