(At the Ĝamá El Akbar)

The shrillest pipe man ever played
        Was making music overhead,
And in a circle, down below,
Sat men whose faces seemed to show
Another world was all their trade.

Then up they rose, and one by one
        Shook skirts down, following him who led
To where the elder brother sat—
All gaberdine and conic hat,
Then bowed, and off for Heaven they spun.

Their hands were crossed upon the breast,
        Their eyes were closed as if in sleep,
The naked foot that beat the floor,
To keep them spinning more and more,
Was careless of all need for rest.

Soon every flowing skirt began
        Its milkwhite spinning plane to keep,
Each brother of the holy band
Spun in and out with lifted hand
A teetotum no longer man.

But I might see, how, all the while,
        With whisper low, and trembling lip,
The word of Allah’s grace was given
To those that twirled from earth to Heaven,
By a stern mouth that knew no guile.

The grey old man, their leader, went
    Throughout his spinning fellowship,
And reverently to the ear,
Of every dervish circling near,
He spake a soft encouragement.

The piper piped a shriller psalm,
        The dancers thro’ their mystery moved
Untouched, untouching, and the whirl
That set our giddy heads aswirl
Served but to give their faces calm.

Till very surely there was shown
        The glimpse of Paradise they loved,
Then drooped the skirts, then failed the trance,
Then one by one they left the dance,
And in the circle sat them down.

(Idylls and Lyrics of the Nile, p. 5)

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I worked in a warehouse packing room,
    Plenty of dust for the microbes there,
And the pall of the city’s pitiless gloom
    Blessed the bacillus but plagued the air. 

I had a mate with a flush in his cheek,
    With a bit of a cough, and a bit of a spit;
I went off work at the end of the week,
    And the doctor said, “My friend, you are hit.”

I told of my mate, and he said, It is rough
    To be murdered thus by a man and a friend,
But a sunless room and a hacking cough,
    And a spit and a dust—and you know the end:

But the end for you, it is not in sight,
    For death by bacillus has slow degrees.
A cough by day and a swat by night,
    And the lung turned leisurely into cheese.

Till you pray God’s mercy to stop your breath
    Ere your poor eyes out of their sockets shake,
With twenty million angels of death
    Sent out with each coughing your sore lungs make.

Ah! God have mercy on men who die
    By the slow-drawn torture of phthisis ill;
It breaks one’s heart to be standing by
    And watch how slowly the microbes kill.

“But, doctor,” I said, “is it must, is it must?
    Is there not one ray of a hope for me,
Must I pass in my prime to the graveyard dust?
    I’ve a wife whom I love, and children three!”

Then the doctor, sadly he shook his head,
    “There is one way only to ’scape the ban;
Good air, good feeling, good rest,” he said,
    “They are not at the call of a working man!”

Men talk of brotherhood, league, and guild,
    Christ cared for the bodies of men, they say;
The hospital palace they rise and build,
    And the sick are tended from far away.

But the home on the healthy mountain side
    With the three good things the consumptive needs,
Is still to the working man denied,
    Though we pray “Our Father,” and say our creeds!

(Carlisle Journal, 1 May 1903, p. 5)

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Now with this picture of the old Norsemen in mind let us come back to Cumberland of to-day, and see if the sons of the Vikings have much altered, or are in their characteristics Vikings still. (p. 208)

First, they are born farmers.  I suppose there are few men who are so competent to make two ends meet in these days of agricultural depression as the hard-working Cumberland farmer, and there are, for the size of the county, fewer farmers’ sons who take to war as a profession than perhaps in any county in England.  But they have the Viking love of adventure; the men who in our time have made their fortunes in London by sheer pluck and honest industry show this; nevertheless, go where they may, their love of home is very strong.  They have a homing instinct like the heaf-born herdwick, and no matter to what part of the earth they go, or which of the seven seas they cross, the Cumbrian’s heart is back among the blue hills of his native country. (pp. 208-209)

Next about their word being their bond.  I have come across men of the generation passing away, who in all their contracts never once used a piece of written paper.  “Naay, naay,” they would say, “he gev’ me his word, and what, that’s eneuf, or sud be eneuf for any man.” (p. 209)

It is this same feeling about the sanctity of the spoken word that makes a Cumbrian refuse to say he knows to any question, if he does not, also refuses to allow him to speak ill of a neighbour except under great provocation. (p. 209)

As to moral life, I fear that parish registers and statistics point to Cumberland being in one matter Viking still.  The Young Women’s Friendly Societies have of late years done much to raise the tone of thought in this matter, and it is hoped that young men may in the next generation think more nobly of what is due to young women, and be more knightly and more self-restrained for Christ’s sake.  But like the Norsemen of old, if the man and woman once wed, they are true to the contract. (pp. 209-210)

They are men of few words, the exact opposite of the voluble Celt still, but they will still listen for hours to those who will entertain them with stories.  They appreciate a “dounreet good crack”….  As to law and order, where will you find men so manageable in a crowd as in Cumberland, so self-restrained.  They have, side by side with their respect for order, great ideas of having their rights, perhaps almost a love of appeal to law and the judge.  I think this is out of their high sense of the greatness and the majesty of law, but it is also partly the result of their willingness to abide by law. (p. 210)

The Cumbrian, too, of to-day, is like his Viking ancestor in being willing to endure long spells of work if only he may have his Martinmas and his Christmas holiday.  The old days of the ‘Merry Neets’ and junketings from farm to farm have faded away, but these were direct survivals of Viking times.  Notwithstanding that we in Cumberland live under the rain-belt, as a county, men seem to me to be learning to be sober.  I can see a great change for the better in the last fifteen years.  But the Hirings on certain Christmas and New Year festivals seem still to waken Viking echoes, and the idea prevails that at such times the wassail horn should be lifted high.  This, too, I believe to be a survival from Norse Festivals. (pp. 210-211)

Men in Cumberland keep their tempers; if they lose them they do not easily recover peace of mind, and the Cumbrian who thinks himself aggrieved or wronged seems to be unable to forgive and forget. (p. 211)….

As regards humour, there is much of it among the Cumbrians, but a large part of it is unconscious, and it takes the form rather of putting dry sayings in a striking way than of light humour.  But the capacity to enjoy humour is considerable, as anyone may see who hears a good roomful laugh their hearts out at ‘Bobby Banks’ Bodderment’ or ‘Wil Rutson’s law suit.’  I think I can detect in their fondness for proverbial sayings a touch of the Viking strain.  Certainly the old Norse delight in the humour of nicknames survives.  One cannot be at any meeting where the names of several people are mentioned without hearing from some part of the room a second name, the name by which the person is better known, being suggested in an undertone.  We have our ‘Lang Nebs,’ and ‘Hairy-faced,’ and ‘Fish Slayers,’ and ‘Hunter Bills,’ and ‘Wet Shods,’ and ‘One-eyes,’ just as the Vikings had of old.  There is no resentment; a boy at school gets a nickname, and he grows up with it quite naturally, and carries it with him to the grave. (pp. 215-216)

There is one matter in which the modern Viking seems to have degenerated, which, as it is akin to humour, may be mentioned here.  The modern Cumbrian is not imaginative; the old Viking was.  The modern Cumbrian is not a man of artistic idea; the old Viking was.  The modern Cumbrian has a soul for the most part turned away from poetry; the old Viking, if he was not a poet himself, was a lover of the bard and the bardic song, delighted to run into rhyme and hear the singer declaim his verses. (p. 216)

I do not forget that we have had in the past century a number of writers of dialect poems.  That Wilkinson of Yanwath and Richardson of St. John’s in the Vale were true poets, and that Cumberland has produced a William Wordsworth, but if I have observed accurately, the average Cumbrian has not developed, or been encouraged to develop, the imaginative side of his nature.  The more the pity.  It is by the imagination that he becomes sympathetic, and gets the greatest good from “man and Nature, and from human life.” (p. 216)

Last, in matters that pertain to death and the fear of death.  One cannot be at many death-bed sides in Cumberland without noting how, as in the old Viking times so to-day, death is looked upon as a quite natural ending.  There is no fear of it for the most part.  It is accepted in fullest trust that all is for the best.  Both the dying person and those around him often let fall words that make one feel that in the presence of the death hour the Cumbrian is calmly resigned and calmly confident that the proper time has come, and that there should be no questioning, no complaint, and after death words of regret or sympathy, though they may be prized, seem unnecessary.  ‘It was all for the best.’ (p. 217)

As to the power to endure suffering in sickness, I doubt if amongst any other people in England there can be such patient heroism, such stoical endurance to the end.  This, too, is a Viking tradition.  But if men and women in Cumberland are true Norsemen and Norsewomen in their dying, they are not true heirs of the Vikings also in their feeling for the manner of burial and the place of sepulture.  It is true that some of the most remarkable Viking funeral customs are fading out, but the arval cake and the sprig of box may still be seen.  The bidding of friends to the funeral is still carried out.  The touching of the dead man’s face before the coffin is sealed I have myself witnessed.  All these are survivals from the days of our Viking fore-elders.  And the place of burial is as jealously cared for now as in the days of old. (pp. 217-218)

(A Rambler’s Notebook at the English Lakes, pp. 205-219)

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[The letter below is from Henry Whitehead to Hardwicke.  It is published in Hardwicke’s biography of Whitehead.]

Dear Rawnsley—I hope you may be able to preside on New Year’s Eve at the bell-ringers’ supper which you mention in your letter.  I look forward to being similarly engaged here on New Year’s Eve, as the ringers come to the vicarage to supper before the late service, which begins at 11 p.m.  After service, which concludes at 12, they ring the New Year in. (p. 111)

You know that I take a great interest in bells, and belfries, and bell-ringers.  The Crosthwaite bells I had the good fortune to hear one evening last week, and thought them very good.  I believe it is an article of faith in Crosthwaite to consider them the best in Cumberland.  There was never yet a peal of bells that was not regarded by the inhabitants of the parish to which they belonged as the best anywhere known.  Brampton people think our bells the best in the world, though the treble is too sharp.  For my own part I do not think the Brampton bells as good as either Crosthwaite or Penrith, which of the two latter peals is the best I do not undertake to say.  But I may say this, that Crosthwaite folk must give over saying that they have the pick of three peals intended for Crosthwaite, Penrith, and Cockermouth; on which subject see the report of my lecture at Penrith in the Penrith Observer of last Thursday (December 25). (p. 111)

Only the first half of my lecture is reported.  Towards the end I told the Penrith people that, whatever doubt there might be as to which of the two peals of bells was the better, there was no manner of doubt as to which belfry was in the better order.  The Penrith belfry is in a very bad condition.  All the bells need to be re-hung.  And the ringing gallery is ridiculous, so erected that the ropes must all fall in a line instead of in a circle.  The Crosthwaite belfry, on the contrary, seems in first-rate order.  This I know because I not only heard the bells but saw them.  The only thing I feel sorry for concerning the bells is that Nos. 1, 5, 7, and 8 are not from the same foundry as the original peal, not that I have any fault to find with the new bells, which are excellent.  They are from the Cripplegate Foundry, which has a very good name.  But there could have been no possible reason for not calling in the Whitechapel founders to recast bells which came from their foundry, or to add to their number. (pp. 111-112)

I should have been glad to have had an opportunity of seeing the ringers.  But if I did not see the present ringers, I had the pleasure of making the acquaintance of an old ringer, Mr. Geo Holmes, and was much interested in his conversation.  He told me of the peals they used to ring in his time.  Whether the Crosthwaite ringers can ring the same peals now I don’t know.  But if they can it is more than can be said of any other Cumberland ringers as yet known to me. (p. 112)

Now you do say something about an association that is to be formed.  Do you mean a diocesan association?  That is what is wanted.  But as a preliminary step to its formation the Cathedral bells should be set going again.  At present there is not a single wheel among the lot, and the tradition is that they have not been rung since 1745.  The Chapter, I believe, say that to ring the bells would injure the tower, which I don’t believe.  Towers are only injured by bells when the cage is ‘made steady’ by wedges driven in between it and the wall of the belfry.  I did not find that such was the case at Crosthwaite, but it is the case at St. Stephen’s (Carlisle), and the consequence is that though the church is a new one, the tower is already cracked. (pp. 112-113)

But to return to the projected association.  If you wish to be a pioneer in this matter you can get up a local association in your part of the county.  It should engage an experienced teacher.  And when the Crosthwaite ringers undertake their first 5040 peal of Stedman’s triples I hope they will invite me to hear it, that I may have the pleasure of being present at the supper which, as the reporters say, will ‘terminate the proceedings.’ (p. 113)

Wishing you and the Crosthwaite ringers a Happy New Year when it comes,—I remain, yours truly,
                                                                                                       H. Whitehead

(Henry Whitehead 1825-1896: A Memorial Sketch)

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