Sausage links

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.