Gayhurst, Guy Fawkes and Goats (26 November 1976)

A number of small matters have lately engaged my interest.  Matters like the proposal to turn Gayhurst House into separate houses and flats.

Incidentally, the English Place Names Society say that Gayhurst means “goat wood.”  The Old English word for a goat was pronounced “gate” and a wood was a “hurst” – hence Brockenhurst and Lyndhurst in the New Forest and our own simple Hurst end, near Crawley.

What may not be generally known is that the Tudor mansion in the goat wood has a connection with the Gunpowder Plot.

As you know, the plotters plotted to blow up King and Parliament and then to seize power in what today would be called a coup, the last letter being silent and not as in in soup.   But the plot misfired when the plotter deputed to add the final touch, one Guy Fawkes, was caught red-handed among the gunpowder (?) in the cellar.

Guy’s co-plotters then realised the game was up and some of them galloped off northwards.  Among them was Sir Everard Digby.  Eventually they arrived at Gayhurst.  And here, it is recorded, they rested for the night before resuming their headlong flight next day.

The rest of the story is common knowledge.  The plotters reached another similar establishment, Holbeche House, in Staffordshire.  There they were surrounded by the sheriff’s posse.  In a desperate struggle some of the plotters were slain.  Those who did not die on the spot were taken off to London, where in due course and in accordance with the quaint custom of the times, they were publicly hanged, drawn and quartered.

Guy Fawkes himself intrigues me.  Though born and educated in York, he was not christened Guy, but Guido, which rather suggests some foreign connection.  Certainly he served in the Spanish army – which alone would have been enough to damn him in most English eyes – before he came back here and made his name for ever famous or infamous.

Up to the industrial revolution Yorkshire was very sparsely populated and for many years after the Reformation it continued to have a strong Catholic element.  So although Guido was an unusual kind of Yorkshireman, he was not so very unusual in that respect.

Frankly, though Yorkshire-born myself, I cannot understand the shire’s reputation for producing people of grit.  Whenever you pick up a paper and a Yorkshire man or woman is reported to have done anything, he or she has always shown “true Yorkshire grit.”  It is not said about the people of any other shire.  Yet most Yorkshiremen’s connection with the shire – at any rate in part – is only about 200 years old.  We have heard a lot over the past 50 years about the drift to the south-east.  But during the industrial revolution there was not so much a drift as a large-scale rush in the opposite direction to the mills, mines and steelworks of the north.  Those people swamped the indigenous populations.  If any special grittiness exists, then those people either absorbed it pretty fast or just as likely took it with them.

All this leads me to think and indeed to hope that, despite the ease of modern communications and the standardising and debasing influence of the mass media, Milton Keynes will eventually develop a character of its own.

At the moment there is a penchant towards eccentricity.  The latest example concerns the decision of the chief practitioners, the development corporation, to offer a prize of £300 for a musical composition to help unite the developing community of the new city and their appointment of a panel to judge the entries.

The four judges, musicians to a man, have awarded the prize to a Gloucestershire composer for his choral work for children based on the nonsense verse of Edward Lear.  It is called The Dong, but in the opinion of critics it should be called the Clang, for its composer had the whimsicality to point out that it had absolutely nothing to do with new cities, least of all Milton Keynes, and only the remotest connection with “communities.”

But what did the critics expect?  A Galley Hill Gallop, a Coffee Hall Concerto, a Netherfield Nocturne, a Fuller’s Slade Blues, or what?

I would have placed the prize right where it is.  Not so much for the quality, which I am sure the piece must possess, as for the twinkle in the eye of the composer as he made his disarming admission and the answering twinkle from the judges as they let it pass.

So long live the unity of nonsense and long live The Clang – beg pardon, I mean the Dong.