Protest and Survive

At the end of the nineties, I went to a Nick Cave gig at the Royal Festival Hall that turned out not to be a gig at all but rather a sort of musical academic lecture on the nature of the love song. My mate, bemoaning loudly the pretension of it all, was shushed by the person in front but his reply – “come off it, he’s only a pop singer” – raised a laugh of wry recognition from others around. Bearing in mind this example of the intellectualising of pop music, I approached a talk in my local pub last night with some trepidation.

To their credit, the Bader International Study Centre at Herstmonceux Castle has launched a series of ‘Castle Talks in the Community’; the first was given by Nick Baxter-Moore, a lecturer in politics and popular culture, and posed the question ‘Where Have all the Protest Songs Gone?’ I need not have worried about pretension: in the packed function room of the Woolpack Inn, an audience of all ages was treated to an engaging meditation on the protest song from post-war American folk singers to contemporary popular music. Accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, Baxter-Moore illustrated his chronology with snatches of songs.

Starting with Pete Seeger’s anti-war ‘Where have all the Flowers Gone?’, there was a clear sense that singers such as Seeger, Bob Dylan and their socialist contemporary Phil Ochs were galvanised by the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements, and the general mood of change in the 1960s. ‘Blowing in the Wind’ prompted some audience participation from dewy-eyed children of the revolution, as did Country Joe McDonald’s humorously ironic ‘Vietnam Song’. Baxter-Moore put forward the idea that protest songs that express a generic sentiment have greater longevity. Citing the example of Lennon’s ‘Imagine’ - a song that outlines a communist utopia – being played as Thatcher took the stage at a Tory party conference in the 1980s, he also held that these songs are open to wild misappropriation.

Tracing developments into the seventies and eighties with the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Grandmaster Flash and Public Enemy, Baxter-Moore acknowledged the contribution of punk and hip hop to the music of protest. Beginning with a rendition of Billy Bragg’s ‘There is Power in a Union’ – a joyously surreal moment in an East Sussex village pub - things took a leftward step as he focused on the links between protest music and the labour/trade union movement. Bringing things up to date, last year’s public sector strike in Madison, Wisconsin produced ‘Union Town’ by The Nightwatchman, aka Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, a song of defiance that reminded me of the Strawbs’ 1973 hit ‘Part of the Union’.

Taking questions at the end, a member of the audience rhetorically asked if a protest song had ever changed anything. Making the point that protest songs are best at making people aware and think, more than effecting change itself, Baxter-Moore never actually answered the question. I would say that, arguably, 1984’s ‘Free Nelson Mandela’ by Jerry Dammers’ Special AKA is the most successful of modern times. Protest songs do need to be popular to be powerful and Dammers’ was upbeat, danceable and it was a huge hit. It raised consciousness of Mandela and the struggle against apartheid and, ultimately, its sentiment was realised.

In answer to his original question, Baxter-Moore concluded that protest songs have not gone anywhere, they are alive and well; and he pointed to Ben Drew – better known as Plan B – and his upcoming song of rage against a government of rich boys and their demonization of council estates, ‘Ill Manors’. If post-riots, inner-city London is the natural fertile ground for protest, there is also the music of protest closer to home. Sussex’s finest, British Sea Power, recently asked the question ‘Who’s in Control?’ while rousing the apathetic – “did you not know everything around you is being sold” – and wishing “that protesting was sexy on a Saturday night”. And big-voiced Derek Meins, aka The Agitator (above), and his rabble rousing songs fired up the strikers before the big public sector march through Brighton last summer. But the best proof of the legacy of politics and popular music exists further along the south coast: any serious critic’s album of last year was Dorset-based PJ Harvey’s ‘Let England Shake’, which uses imagery and experiences from the battlefields of the 20th century in its songs to question the priorities and moralities we hold dear in England today. We need protest songs; as Baxter-Moore said, they makes us think.

At the Dripping Pan

Following the example of my dad, I have never tried to impose any of my tastes on my own children. He worked on the basis that you can lead a horse to culture but you can’t make it think (apologies to Dorothy Parker). His maxim was leave them alone and they will eventually come around to your way of thinking. I came around to some things slower than others: I was an adult before I realised how good all those thirties and forties songs he played were, but I was only six when I asked him if I could come too when he disappeared off to football every fortnight. And so it was that, just after my seventh birthday, I experienced the thrill of that first walk through the turnstiles of a football ground and the first sight of the lush, verdant pitch. It has been the same with my own sons: glimpses of televised matches, player sticker albums and my occasional trips to matches have all roused their curiosity and, aged seven and eight, for a while now they have been asking to go to a game. I could have taken them to an all-seated, multi-tiered amphitheatre of dreams named after a global corporation but I could not afford to and I did not want to; so instead, I took them to the Dripping Pan.

In the centre of town, a short stroll from the railway station, the Dripping Pan has been the home of Lewes Football Club – the Rooks - since its foundation in 1885. The name of the ground is believed to refer to the practice of extracting salt from River Ouse water by Cluniac monks on the site. However, behind the west terrace is the Mount, the possible site of a fortress built prior to Lewes castle, and it may be that the shape of the Dripping Pan – steep banks to all sides and the pitch below ground level – is simply because this was the excavation for the Mount. Whatever its origins, it is a natural stadium and has steep terraces at either end - one of them covered – and a stand on the south side. Only the north side has an undeveloped grass bank remaining but you can watch the match from the path at the top for that classic, ‘televised’ vantage point. We stood in the covered home end to take in the view of the Downs in the distance and best soak up the atmosphere of a Ryman Premier League clash against Hendon.

Having paid only £10 for me to get in - kids under 16 go free at Lewes - we had enough cash for the boys to enjoy pre-match sausages in a bap and chips from the food stall. I had a cup of tea – “help yourself to milk and sugar on the table” – before I had the obligatory pint of Harvey’s. The small knot of Hendon supporters were enjoying the local brew as well and were in full voice when they took the lead after 15 minutes; but the atmosphere was never unpleasant and when Lewes scored three goals in five minutes straight after half-time it was the home fans who were making all the noise. As well as standing up on a terrace, there was another aspect of the day that was a reminder of my earliest days of watching professional football: at half-time quite a few supporters swapped ends to be behind the goal their team was kicking into. There was an incredibly friendly atmosphere: supporters all seemed to know each other and I had no concerns that the boys were at pitch-level at the front of the terrace and I was standing at the back. They got particularly excited every time Lewes scored and came racing back up to dance around at the back in celebration. Despite Hendon pulling a goal back to make it 3-2 as four minutes of added time started, Lewes held on for the win and moved level on points with Hendon one place outside the play-off places. Lewes played some good football with Harry Harding and Peter Gregory standing out for the Rooks.

Lewes has been a community football club since 2010. As a not-for-profit, mutual organisation the club is owned and run by its shareholders, none of whom can own more than one share. Shares cost a minimum of £30 per annum or £1,000 for life. Shareholders can all stand and vote in elections to the seven-strong Board of Directors. The attendance of 648 at today’s game would indicate that pretty much everyone who is a member watches the matches. My £30 quid is in the post and I will be back with the boys on Easter Monday for a Sussex derby with Hastings United.

Swing Out Sisters and Brothers

Protests without leaders - the Arab spring, the Spanish Indignants, the Occupy movement – are a product of the digital era. With no single person or group having ownership or rights to the name, it is a franchise of rebellion that can be used by anybody, anywhere and at anytime, allowing protests to grow in size and spread to other areas; a truly modern phenomenon that gives voice to the voiceless against the forces of wealth and power and one that could never have taken place without the proliferation of social networks in the internet age. Except that the Swing Riots that took place in rural Sussex in the autumn of 1830 were just that: a rapidly spreading outbreak of dissent that united poor farm labourers, under the banner of the mythical figure of Captain Swing, against the oppression of the landed class.

Farm labourers at that time would earn very little money but would receive a large part of their wages in kind as food and accommodation. Threshing – literally separating the wheat from the chaff – was work that took place on the farm between November and January and was the bridge between harvest-time and sowing that meant secure, year round employment. There was nothing idyllic about this life: it was a subsistence existence of hard, physical work and little pleasure.

And then along came the threshing machine. The mechanisation of the labourers’ winter work provided an opportunity for further rationalisation, leading farmers to offer lower wages for the human element of the process of threshing and laying off workers in the harshest months of the year. The machines represented a dire threat to already low wages and job security.

The uprising began in Kent. Mobs would break into farms, search for the threshing machines and destroy them. This spread panic amongst landowners who soon began to receive letters, signed ‘Captain Swing’, demanding that the machines be destroyed else barns, houses and haystacks would be fired. Many acquiesced, those that did not found out that the threat was not an empty one.

The rebellion quickly spread into Sussex as more acted under the name of Captain Swing; he did not exist, of course, but became a figure of fear and his name was taken up and widely used to give power to the worker’s campaign against reduced wages and seasonal employment.

As rioting spread westwards, the military were called in and stationed at Uckfield. Hundreds of rioters were prosecuted and a few were hanged; most received long prison sentences or were transported to Australia.

The rioters were not revolutionaries but simply wanted to protect their existing conditions of employment against creeping capitalism. Captain Swing gave a voice to the very weakest - the rural poor – and in many cases he was able to ensure that landowners did negotiate with the workers. Agricultural wages rose in the southern counties of England as a result of the protests and many of the destroyed machines were not replaced. The Captain Swing riots of 1830 represented the last major revolt of agricultural workers in England but his spirit lives on in those leaderless expressions of protest that we see spreading through the digital world today.

On the Level

It is a bright Sunday morning and I am on the Pevensey Levels. The landscape is a sliver in front of me; I can pick out the form of Pevensey Castle, some three miles distant, dwarfed by an endless spring sky with only a whisper of cloud too insignificant to deter the warmth of the early sunshine. The sky dominates in these flat lands. 10,000 years ago they were sea; a thousand years ago they were marshland. Kipling immortalised this landscape in Puck of Pook’s Hill: “Salt Marsh where now is corn… And so was England born.” In reality, it is still too wet here for arable farming but some modern day English yeoman has ensured that I skirt fields of grazed pasture. Sheikh Abed Gulzar, an Eastbourne hotelier, has acquired and tidied-up farmland on the Levels but has upset the parish council and divided local opinion in the process: first, with white, four foot high lion statues at the farm entrances; second, with large Union Jacks flown in place of the lions after their removal because of lack of planning permission. Some see his eccentricities as an eyesore; some as typically English.

As the cattle turn to watch my approach, I feel like Pip with the stolen wittles in David Lean’s 1948 version of Great Expectations; but these cows don’t intrude upon my solitude. I have seen no-one since I walked out of the woods at Herstmonceux Castle and there is only the sound of the south-westerly wind and the calls of the peewits about my ears. Behind me, the church spire and the observatory dome are my navigation points. Negotiating the maze of free flowing and intersecting ditches can take the most experienced walker off course. Before now, heading for Rickney in mist, it has become Brigadoon and I have found myself by-passing it altogether, drifting eastwards and stumbling on to the Wartling Road. Its unknowable nature is what brings me back, time and again, to this landscape. There is no shame in losing yourself once in a while.

Windmills of My Mind

Being brought up on a diet of black and white films - back in my formative years the BBC daytime schedules were not full of programmes about the crap in your attic or vicarious house hunting - has had many personal consequences: a disregard for authority instilled in me by too many Ealing comedies; a reputation for being recondite that is useless, except in pub quizzes; and a disconcertion when it comes to windmills.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 spy thriller Foreign Correspondent left an indelible mark. Starring the American Joel McCrea and supported by the urbane and English George Sanders, the perpetual chase of the film at one point leads to a Dutch landscape overpopulated by slowly turning windmills. The tension of the scene, as McCrea secretly observes the menace of the kidnappers of the drugged diplomat Van Meer behind the ostensibly benign façade of one of the windmills, terrified me; but only as much as the strange, dead ambience of a Hollywood studio set masquerading as countryside. Since then windmills have been a symbol of hidden menace. A fear, I fear, I have passed on to one of my sons who, from the age of two, could not walk past our local windmill. Often we would walk up the hill, only for him to panic and refuse to go on as the mill came in full sight, just like Michael Palin’s teacher character in Alan Bleasedale’s GBH who, everytime he had to cross a bridge, froze.

Our local windmill is magnificent: in a county renowned for windmills the Windmill Hill windmill is the tallest in Sussex and the second tallest in Britain. Built in 1814, it is one of the remaining examples of a post mill in its original condition. After a chequered ownership throughout the second half of the twentieth century, a trust acquired the mill in 1995 and completed a ten-year programme of restoration with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, English Heritage and county and district councils.

A post mill is a timber building supported on a vertical post which acts as a pivot so that the mill can be turned to face the wind. When we first moved here my ignorance led to confusion: every time I glanced up at the windmill, it seemed to be facing a different way; that’s because it was. The mill is now open to visitors on out-of-winter Sunday afternoons and some extra days on bank holiday weekends, with entrance by donation.

My son has overcome his fear: he has not just walked past the mill but been inside it and climbed all the way to the top with me. That was an exhilarating experience but I had the scene from Foreign Correspondent in my mind all the time. I think that the Windmill Hill windmill is best enjoyed after dark when it is beautifully lit and I can see its white, spectral shape against the night sky from behind the safety of my window.

Planting Frenzy

Sunshine, a blue sky and rows of fluffy cumulus clouds sailing along just above the horizon: it feels like spring. And the annual food production has begun: in the week, I managed to get 167 cloves of garlic planted out on the allotment and, since yesterday, four different varieties of tomato - Sweet Million, Gardener's Delight, Beefmaster, Moneymaker - and sweet and chilli peppers have been germinating in seed trays under the Velux windows in the boys' warm loft room.

The past seven years of vegetable growing have taught me a couple of obvious things: it is worth growing as much as you can of crops that are expensive and it is worth growing as much as you can of crops that form a large part of your diet. As a family, we eat a lot of garlic but it is expensive to buy and we have had varied results growing it over the years. We have tried over-winter planting, we have tried spring planting; in both cases, the results have been the same: a moderately good crop but bulbs that are not that big. However, last year I planted spring garlic on the last day of January and had the best garlic harvest we have had. This year, the snow prevented similarly early planting but when the temperature rose earlier this week and the snow disappeared, I got out there with sixteen bulbs, broken into cloves, and had a planting frenzy. Last year’s garlic had run out by Christmas, I am hoping this year’s will last through until spring. I bought the bulbs on offer in a non-gardening shop and the person who served me asked how garlic grew. That each clove planted would turn into a whole bulb of garlic was a delightful revelation to her.

At the same time as I sow tomato and pepper seeds, I usually devote a seed tray to aubergines; but after persevering with these temperamental plants every year, this year I have given up. I have invested a lot of time in trying to grow them but germination has always been hit and miss. I have tried a number of different varieties and some have fared better than others but any plants that have matured have taken up valuable greenhouse space only to produce poor fruit. The dismal truth is that, in seven years, we have been rewarded with only a few decent sized aubergines. So, no more; the greenhouse space will be given over to more cucumbers, which the kids devour in the summer months. And that’s another obvious thing that vegetable growing has taught me: don’t spend time and money on a crop if it outweighs the value of the harvest.

My Funny Valentine

Padding around the orchards of Greenways Fruit Farm yesterday, with Smithy the dog, I fell in love with a thing of rare beauty: it caught me completely by surprise and still seems inexplicable because I had passed the obscure object of my desire many times before without a flicker of emotion.

Perhaps because I had changed the direction of my usual walk from clockwise to counter, and came upon it from the opposite direction, sight of it from a different perspective made me truly see it for the first time.

Perhaps it was the power of the music I was listening to on my headphones - my soul already stirred - that accounted for the feeling that overwhelmed me. As I came up the hill I was listening to Tiger Man from British Sea Power’s atmospheric instrumental album, Man of Aran; at the very moment I turned the corner at the top and caught sight of it through the gap in the beech windbreaks, the track shuffled to the extraordinary Decades by Joy Division.

Joy Division’s music is the perfect snow music: this was cemented in my psyche early on by Kevin Cummins’ beautiful photograph from January 1979 of the band on a snow-covered footbridge. At the highest point of the bridge’s curve, the four are isolated in the bleached landscape, trapped by the symmetry of the railings and streetlights. This connection between Joy Division and snow was probably further compounded by the fact that it seemed to snow a lot in those winters at the end of the seventies and the start of the eighties when I was listening to their music; mind you, I have never really stopped listening to their music and there has been a lot of snow since, too.

So, perhaps the ethereal atmosphere of the snow and freezing fog had made me insubstantial and vulnerable and, when I suddenly found myself in its presence, its towering imposition overwhelmed me.

Whatever prompted it, there is no denying that I fell in love with an electricity pylon; pylon number 4VM 029 to be exact. I had never before considered the beauty of one of these structures but with its graceful, curving sweep from broad base to narrow pinnacle, its delicate latticed framework and its deific trio of pairs of crossarms, it struck me as both magnificent and tender. And its position on the fruit farm, near the top of the hill, shows it in all its glory.

All transmission towers, as pylons are called in the trade, are variations of an original design by Milliken Brothers, commissioned in 1928 by Sir Reginald Blomfield for the Central Electricity Board. The design has since been used all over the world. My pylon looks like an L6 D model but I stand to be corrected.

The American poet (Alfred) Joyce Kilmer wrote in 1913, “I think that I shall never see/ a poem lovely as a tree”. Spike Milligan reimagined these lines from the view of a cocked-legged dog; the people at the Pylon Appreciation Society would probably reimagine the tree as a pylon. For them, the poetry of a pylon is plain to see and they dedicate their efforts to helping the rest of us see their worth. For most however, I am sure the pylon is an eyesore, the forerunner of the dreaded wind turbine. Those who would have the countryside preserved in aspic can only see beauty in a sentimental construct of thatched roofs and tea rooms. The giants of the national grid, roped together as they march cross-country, are a stunning sight on the horizon or at close quarters; and you only have to drive across Romney Marsh and see the towers of Little Cheyne Court in the distance to be filled with awe by wind turbines, too.

Kilmer, incidentally, died in battle in northern France in 1918, by which time every tree had probably been blown to kingdom come. He never got to see the likes of 4VM 029; he would have loved them.