it stands. It used to be a mining town and – perhaps the two go hand in hand – it also used to be home to the largest independent brewery in the UK, Mansfield Bitter, until the latter was sold off in 1999. The skyline-dominating brewery building has now been demolished and the local bitter’s glory days – encapsulated in the quaintly provincial Eighties ad campaign featuring a picture of Ronald Reagan and the tag line ‘He may be president of the most powerful nation on Earth but he’s never had a pint of Mansfield’ – are now little more than a folk memory.
Mansfield may mark the spot where the North meets the Midlands. In fact, some people question whether there’s any difference between the North Midlands and the ‘real’ North at all. As I mentioned before, some anxious Derbyshire- and Potteries-based posters on that Amazon thread don’t seem to think there is. Others see subtle differences. ‘Midlanders are a bit more sophisticated, like – we can string a few sentences together. Northerners swear more,’ one eccentric friend told me. ‘On the other hand, we’re both from Viking stock. We both like to plunder and pillage,’ he added wolfishly. There’s a takeaway called Viking’s in Mansfield, and it’s certainly the Nordic-invader legacy rather than what is normally considered the more socially cohesive Anglo-Saxon heritage that permeates the atmosphere around here. In the good old days, when pubs used to close in the afternoon, you could see gangs of men (and the occasional woman) marauding across the streets at three in the afternoon, stopping the traffic while they pissed all over the traffic bollards. Part of the recent ‘regeneration’ of the town centre included the installation of a showpiece fountain, prompting fears that local merrymakers would use it as an open-air urinal.
Football is very important in Mansfield, as is violence. The two have often combined to striking effect at Field Mill (or the One Call Stadium, as it’s currently known), the home of Mansfield Town Football Club. A noteworthy outburst of aggro came when the Stags (nicknamed in homage to the regal fauna of that nearby long-vanished Edenic idyll, Sherwood Forest, where Norman and Plantagenet monarchs disported themselves and Robin Hood and his Merry Men evaded the attentions of the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham) were relegated from Division 2 and consigned to non-league status in April 2008: fans showed their displeasure by physically attacking club owner Keith Haslam. The resulting head wounds were severe enough to necessitate a visit to the big local hospital, King’s Mill – it has to be big to accommodate Mansfield’s legions of unhealthy inhabitants: the town’s poor health record is one of the principal reasons for its appearance in that chart of the top ten worst places to live in the UK, and for the ubiquity of those mobility scooters.
Field Mill, King’s Mill … As you may be beginning to surmise, mills and millers play a major role in Mansfield folklore. The naming craze can probably be traced to a tale involving Henry II and the ‘Miller of Mansfield’ found in an eighteenth-century collection of ballads and songs known as Percy’s Reliques. The story goes that King Henry lost his way while hunting in Sherwood Forest and met a miller, who, failing to recognise his regal interlocutor, kindly offered him hospitality for the night. When the monarch’s retinue turned up at the miller’s humble cottage the following morning, the host was astonished to discover the true identity of his guest. The king, of course, thought it all very amusing and bestowed a knighthood on the miller, who henceforth gloried in the name of Sir John Cockle (there’s still a local pub of that designation). Percy’s Reliques wraps the story up:
Then Sir John Cockle the King call’d unto him,
And of merry Sherwood made him o’er-seer;
And gave him out of hand three hundred pound yearlye;
‘Now take heed you steale no more of my deer;
And once a quarter let’s here have your view;
And now, Sir John Cockle, I bid you adieu.’
The tale’s slightly patronising tone sums up the classic relationship between the Southern Establishment and Midlanders. The latter, usually presented in a slightly yokelish light – the men-in-tights vibe is inescapable – are tolerated or occasionally even encouraged in a mildly condescending manner, but are never treated as equals.
Olympic and Commonwealth swimming champ Rebecca Adlington aside, few famous people have come from Mansfield. There’s Richard Bacon, a Blue Peter presenter unceremoniously sacked after the News of the World suggested he took cocaine, who’s clawed his way back to respectability and a huge following on Radio 5 Live. Bernard William Jewry made his stage debut here at age four, but coo-coo-ca-choo’d his way out of town long before metamorphosing into Alvin Stardust, glam rock icon. The incestuous, club-footed Romantic poet Lord Byron inherited an ancestral pile just down the road, Newstead Abbey, which is now a highly atmospheric ruin – not unlike Mansfield town centre, come to think of it. And twenty minutes up the dual carriageway, ‘where the Peak District meets Robin Hood Country’, you can find the historic market town of Chesterfield, home to the Crooked Spire, the 228-foot-high thirteenth-century church steeple that twists some nine and a half feet from true centre and is to the Midlands what Pisa’s Leaning Tower is to Tuscany.
Unimpressed? Good. That’s the way Midlanders like it. Unlike Northerners, we don’t believe in blowing our own trumpets all the time. All the same – let’s call it the Midland Catch-22 – some of us would still like to know what it means to be a Midlander, especially when, for our son’s sake, we need a cultural identity to rival that of Parisians. That kind of thing usually involves locating a foundation myth for your tribe, discovering your rootedness in history.
So what are the deeds that tell Midlanders who they are? The South has King Alfred repelling the Vikings, the North has the Venerable Bede – and, perhaps more influentially these days, Oasis’s first album. But what about the Midlands?
Foundation myths are usually just that: more acts of creative imagination than actual heroic deeds – our idea of ‘The North’ is largely the result of a very successful branding exercise. To define and unite a culture, what you need above all else is the chutzpah to make up something grandiose-sounding. All that stuff about Alfred being the first king to unite England has been overstated and, let’s be honest, Definitely Maybe is mediocre at best. But, as cultural gathering points, they’ve proved extremely successful.
Hungry for possible leads on this unseasonably warm autumn afternoon, I scout feverishly through the magazine racks at Mansfield town library and the local WH Smith. Eventually I alight on an issue of Nottinghamshire Life and Countryside that looks promising: the cover announces a piece about ‘The Pyramids of Nottinghamshire’. I can’t remember any mention of a ‘Sutton Sphinx’ when I was a boy or of Mansfield’s role in the development of ancient Egyptian civilisation, but that doesn’t put me off. Anticipation growing, I turn rapidly to the article and discover that the ‘pyramids’ in question are actually dovecotes, and fairly recent ones at that, but I’m nonetheless full of admiration for the magazine’s feverish overstatement and it persuades me to think big. If the Midlands was the source of my family, why shouldn’t it have been the source of everything else too? Why shouldn’t civilisation itself have begun here?
Well, for one reason – which is that the Midlands is usually said to have no ‘deep’ history. (As a Midlander you sometimes get the impression that the principal aim of history in general is to let you know that you and your kind have played no part in it.) The immemorial mists of time are typically thought to have dispersed to reveal that nothing actually happened here until around 1842. To quote one twentieth-century source on the subject: ‘England’s prehistoric antiquities are mostly to be found south of a line drawn from Worcester to Ipswich; and north of a line drawn from Blackpool to Hull’ – lines that seem almost deliberately conceived to exclude the Midlands.
But history is a remarkable thing. Although by definition it’s all in the past, it keeps turning up again and transforming itself – and everything else with it – in the present. What if evidence suddenly emerged that Nottinghamshire genuinely did have pyramids, and a corresponding Pharaonic era? Unlikely, I know, since everyone seems to agree that the middle band of the country has no prehistory,