My recent posts seek to address what I consider to be serious weaknesses in the current British constitutional and political system. As readers will be aware, over the last decade, and particularly in the last year or so, this system has sustained serious and often wilful damage. Attempting in my writing to maintain a long term view of the faults in the system and what is needed to put them right, I was constantly thrown off course by short term events and crises. As I write this, we are all experiencing the most chaotic introduction of a new Prime Minister and Cabinet that I can remember in a fairly long lifetime. We have of course also struggled for almost the past three years with the privations and terrors of the Covid pandemic. This state of almost permanent flux and instability was, at least briefly, arrested by the death of Queen Elizabeth II. All of this somewhat torpedoed my intentions to take a long view, so here I’ll pause briefly before resuming that analysis later.
We know that the ten days of private and public grief and mourning which concluded with the royal funeral resonated with many people who had lost older parents and relatives during the pandemic. Personally, it sent me back to the funeral of my own father (also named Martin), in 1996. There could not be a greater contrast with the royal funeral, for he was a farm labourer and gardener during a life which covered most of the twentieth century. For much of this time he and my mother Josephine (always Josie) lived a life characterised by low paid work, poor and insecure housing, and constant financial struggle. This might seem to make them unremarkable, but it has always seemed to their children that they lived quite remarkable lives. Mum came from her Geordie miner’s home at the age of 16 to work as a maid on the aristocratic Mowbray and Stourton estate at Allerton Park in Yorkshire. My Irish immigrant grandfather was a labourer on this estate and my father was born in their tied cottage along with eleven other children (though another died prematurely). Both Mum and Dad had left school at the age of thirteen. They married in 1937 and thereafter enjoyed, if that is the right word, something of a peripatetic progress around the vales and dales of Yorkshire, often changing jobs and houses for as little as five shillings more on the weekly wage, or because my mother, not one to mince her words, had yet again made plain to some uncaring farmer how inadequate his mean tied cottage was. Dad would sigh, “Nay, Josie,” but clamber on to his bike and cycle off in search of a better place to bring up their three growing children, including me. I might record at this point that I reached the age of 13 before we found ourselves (in 1951) in a house with running water, a bathroom, and an inside lavatory. Since my Dad loved his outside work, and his ability to deploy the real farming skills he had learned, he had never wanted to seek better paid urban employment, so inevitably they struggled for all of their working lives on pay which was never better than two thirds of the average labouring wage. With all three children at Grammar School, both were forced to take on extra work just to pay for our school uniforms and other school costs. For Mum, this meant long hours in a hot hotel kitchen, at a time when she was not herself in good health; for Dad, it meant long extra hours of overtime. Both would often return around ten o’clock at night, exhausted.
This might seem like a rather doleful and gloomy story, but it was anything but that. My parents rose above their unpromising conditions to live full and happy family lives. It became clear at my father’s funeral what a very extraordinary person he was, recognised as such by an overflowing church. He had very little formal education, and knew no real opportunity to get any more, yet it was he who chose the Mozart Requiem for his service, and a poem by Christina Rossetti. We children knew that he had a phenomenal memory, and he delighted in his seventies and eighties in leaping up at family parties to recite long extracts from Shakespeare’s plays, taking all the parts, and leaving his well-educated children far behind. Perhaps it was his Irish background which gave him a strong love of both music and poetry and gave him a tremendous gaiety and sense of fun. He liked nothing so much, especially at Christmas, as a gathering of family and friends, a telling of tall stories, a sing-song, a dance; and if the younger ones wouldn’t get up, he’d get up by himself, dancing around the room. His grandson Nick captured this quality in the photograph of him wearing a straw hat and twirling a cane whilst singing ‘I’m the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo’.
You might be thinking: all this Irish stuff is all very well, but what about the Yorkshire bit? Dad was in many ways a complete contradiction, both a typical Irishman and a typical Yorkshireman, blunt, plain-speaking and uncompromising. He was a rarity in rural Yorkshire for his interest in politics, and along with my mother he was lifelong Labour supporter. Both grew up at a time when for most men the right to vote was still quite recent, and mostly women didn’t have that right at all. He had a strong sense that this hard-won right should always be used, and indeed he himself became a local Parish Councillor, bizarrely standing on a Labour platform, forcing (and winning) an election for a normally uncontested seat. Even more important in his mind was the duty to call to account the politicians and bureaucrats who run things. He used every channel open to him; Whitehall was bombarded with letters, several of which were addressed to the Prime Minster. So was his local Conservative MP, who became a respectful friend. He aired his views frequently on local radio, and someone once asked my sister Sally, deep in Kent, “Are you related to that Martin Minogue who’s always talking on Radio Leeds?” In his last year, in failing health, he wrote a long letter to the Harrogate Advertiser protesting at the proposed sale of the local cricket ground for property development. When the letter didn’t appear, he telephoned the editor to demand an explanation; it was printed the following week. This was somehow characteristic of his commitment and tenacity. One of Dad’s favourite quotes was from Gray’s Elegy: “full many a flower is born to blush unseen and waste its sweetness on the desert air”. The thought of Dad being content to blush unseen always made us smile, and we thought more apt the line “some village Hampden that with dauntless breast, the little tyrant of his fields withstood” This, incidentally, was another poem he could recite from beginning to end.
Reflecting on my Dad and his life, he was a man of complete personal integrity and honesty, and a most lively personality, with great good humour and charm, and a father who may have possessed little in the way of material resources, but who together with our equally remarkable mother, left his children and his grandchildren a truly rich inheritance.
Queen Elizabeth II was the only monarch the great majority of British people have known during their lifetimes. My Irish grandfather, resident in England for sixty years or more, lived under six monarchs: Victoria, Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI, and Elizabeth II. My parents lived under the last four of these, and I myself under the last two. In a diary he kept, Dad wrote about the funeral of George VI, complaining that for several days all he could listen to on his much prized radio was ‘gloomy and serious music’. Resolutely republican anyway, he was not impressed
These reflections on my father’s funeral and my parents’ lives were sparked by the Queen’s funeral and life. There is a huge difference both in the lives and the funerals, but who could really say that one life was any better than the other? I dare say that the Queen never had to fret over where the next pennies would come from to feed her children, presumably never had to carry pails of water from a yard pump to fill a tin bath to wash her children and their clothes; let’s not even mention the outside privy. We can rightly pay due respect to a long-lived and dutiful monarch, but is that respect earned by or owed to the many other taxpayer-funded hangers-on? And why so many imperial and militaristic trappings? As one of my friends observed: is a gun carriage really an appropriate resting place for a coffin?
One of the problems surely in our society is that we never give, and have never given, proper respect and recognition to the hard working and dutiful lives of millions of ordinary and unsung people like my parents. My family chose a non-militaristic requiem poem by Ernest Rhys to conclude Dad’s funeral service:
He had the ploughman's strength
in the grasp of his hand;
he could see a crow
three miles away,
and the trout beneath the stone.
He could hear the green oats growing,
and the south-west wind making rain.
He could hear the wheel upon the hill
when it left the level road.
He could make a gate, and dig a pit,
and plough as straight as stone can fall.
And he is dead.
But happily, Dad and Mum live on in our family memories, not always chronicled, but never forgotten. We get constant reminders of them in our daily lives. One example is the continued propagation from seeds collected from delphiniums originally grown in their garden, and which bloom for me in our garden in Wales, for my sister Sally in her garden in Canterbury, for my son Ben and his family in Manchester, and another grandson Michael in Harrogate.
And just today, my wife Sarah asked me to forage with her for mushrooms in a nearby farmer’s field, and this brought back the strongest recollection of doing exactly that with my Dad in a Yorkshire farm field when I was fourteen years old, accompanying him at the end of his day’s work. We would take them back to Mum who would produce an instant mushroom fry for me and my sisters Maureen and Sally. And that is exactly what we will do with the mushrooms shown here.
A more detailed account of our family life can be found in my memoir, Shifting Classes (click link for Amazon) or from the publishers, Caxton Press if you prefer to purchase elsewhere.
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