Wrestliana Read online

  Mention of this may help explain the title of The White Stripes’ sixth album, Icky Thump. Jack White is an Anglophile, and loves The Goodies. (I hereby make Jack White an honorary Englishman, by inviting you to imagine him with extremely white legs in red Y-fronts and calf-length black socks. I think he does very well.)

  In his autobiography, One Flew Into the Cuckoo’s Nest, Oddie has nothing to say about the invention of Ecky Thump. It’s not hard to see what it’s about, though.

  ‘Eck’ is a Northern h-dropping shortening of ‘heck’, which is a way of avoiding blaspheming when you say ‘hell’. For example, ‘Bloody heck’ or ‘What the heck?’ So ‘ecky’ means ‘hell-like’ or ‘hellish’. ‘Thump’, of course, means ‘hit hard but with a slightly softish object’. You don’t thump someone with a baseball bat, you smack ’em or whack ’em. A thump, even with a fist, has an element of concern to it. I’m only thumping you now, mate, because I know we’re going to make up later. Putting all this etymology together, ‘Ecky Thump’ ends up meaning something like ‘The Martial Art of the Single Hellish Blow, Not Intended to Wound Permanently’.¶

  The first Ecky Thump sketch was a straightforward, affectionate (or perhaps not so) take on Southern stereotypes of Northerners. Oddie – not a tall man, not a thin man – goes in quest of ancient knowledge, and winds up at The Mystic East… chip shop on Rotherham High Street. He is kitted out, once accepted into the Ecky Thump dojo, with an outsize flat cap, cotton shirt with rolled up sleeves, red necktie, braces, dark trousers, hobnail boots. In other words, he becomes exactly the kind of shorthand Northerner painted by L.S. Lowry. The kind of figures fondly remembered by Brian and Michael in their number 1 hit ‘Matchstalk Men and Matchstalk Cats and Dogs’.

  Ecky Thump first appeared in 1975.|| It was part of a wider trend in TV comedy, abandoned now, to go at cultural stereotypes head on – hence, funny Jamaicans who were funny because they were so Jamaican, funny Indians, funny Northerners.

  Oddie details the special foods eaten, as part of the dojo’s training regime, ‘black pudding, chip butties, tripe and a piece of Parkin for afters’.

  It’s assumed that it’s innately ludicrous that there should be a Northern martial art, or that there should be anything mystical or sophisticated about it.

  But that martial art did exist – in Cumberland, Westmorland and surrounding areas. It was wrestling.

  Some people will always laugh.

  * Walter Armstrong, Wrestling, https://archive.org/stream/

  Wrestling_897/Wrestling_djvu.txt, retrieved 7 September 2015, 11:24.

  † http://www.cumberland-westmorland-wrestling-

  association.com/2015_Articles/NEWS-06-Feb-5th-2015.html, retrieved 7 September 2015, 09:59.

  ‡ ‘The English Lakes: Fell Life and Sport’, The Times, 11 August, 1925, 18 fn.

  § My father is Lancastrian, from Lytham Saint Annes, although his accent only comes out when he’s dispensing wisdom, or discussing what’s fur uz tea with his big sister Shirley. He’s always played his Northern origins for comedy. Lytham Saint Annes is about as South as the North gets. But I’m still the son of a Northerner whose forebears were all from the North. And the older my father gets, the more Northern he seems to become.

  ¶ By this logic, Jack White’s ‘Icky Thump’ would mean ‘The Martial Art of the Single Blow that Leaves Behind an Unpleasant and Quite Possibly Demeaning Residue’.

  || Kung Fu Kapers (aka Ecky Thump), Series 5, Episode 43 (of 76). Aired 24 March 1975.

  10

  ALL-ROUNDER

  William Litt was known as a seriously odd human being.

  I’ve already mentioned the contemporary, probably Robert Gibson, who wrote about him as an ‘anomaly in nature’. This was said admiringly. The praise continued, ‘for, while he shines in the arena, and was, at no distant date, the undisputed champion of Cumberland for a series of years, in all those exercises which require superior strength, courage, skill, and dexterity, his mind is so exquisitely delicate, that many of his effusions in poetry will continue to be read so long as genuine taste and feeling are cultivated…’*

  These words from 1824 put William’s championship years in the past, and his poetic years in the present. But they did overlap.

  His most famous bout, with the cobbler Harry Graham, took place on 26 October 1811. His first published poem – as far as we know – appeared in the Cumberland Pacquet on 4 August 1812. I imagined William strolling from victory in the Cleator Moor ring straight down to the Whitehaven Literary Society, where he was an equally dominating presence.

  The Memoirist, who attended these meetings, has already been quoted as saying, ‘His conversational powers were… remarkable. His voice was singularly fine and powerful; and one accomplishment he possessed above all men we have ever known, – he was, without exception, the very best reader we ever listened to’.†

  I found this amazing, and inspiring. For a few years, William became a one-man example of how to be both – both physical and mental, athlete and poet, jock and nerd, body and soul or mind or intellect or whatever isn’t body.

  Such a combination, the ability to be a true all-rounder, is a difficult thing to achieve in western societies – particularly in England and America. We like to know where we stand with a man. They shouldn’t be too good at too many things. What ‘all-rounder’ means, in cricket, is just that a man can bowl and bat and field, not that they can write a decent essay on the causes of the French Revolution and cook beef Wellington and play the flute.‡

  People are fine with Gary Lineker as a cheeky-faced football presenter who can take the banter as well as dish it out, but when he starts voicing his highly articulate political opinions, he gets told to stick to sport.

  William was a strong man who wrote powerful books – this was something I needed to investigate.

  How unique was this? Who were his competitors?

  Name a man who performed at the highest level, both as sportsperson and as writer?

  The pub quiz answers are quickly thrown out. Albert Camus – existentialist novelist and goalkeeper! Samuel Beckett – literary genius and appears in Wisden’s Almanac for his cricketing prowess! Dick Francis – wrote and rode thrillers! Terry Venables – thriller-writer and footballer, too! Jack Kerouac – King of the Beats and college halfback! David Foster Wallace – novelist of vast ambition and sneaky sliced second server!§

  The imbalance in each case is obvious. If the sporting achievement is high, the artistic level is low – and vice versa. Dick Francis probably came closest to being at the very top of both games. Anything resembling balance is clearly hard to maintain.

  Balance was what I’d wanted to talk to Roger Robson about.

  The day after the Academy Shield at Bootle, Bill Hartley had driven me up to Roger’s farm. I was very aware we were travelling much faster than William ever did. This was, as Laurie Lee put it, a landscape ‘bulldozed for speed’, cut to pieces for the motorcar. Above the low hedges of the flat fields around us we could see the hills of Scotland, across the Solway Firth.

  At the farm gate, a plastic ball was rolled toward us by Jess, Roger’s sheepdog. She was after a game of football.

  The Belted Galloways were in the next field along. If a maker of liquorice all-sorts were to design a cow, they would look like this – all gorgeous shaggy black apart from a cummerbund of creamy white.

  Roger and his wife Jill invited us in.

  The top of the front door hit a dangling light shade, making it swing back and forward on its wire. I wondered how long it had been like that.

  We went through, into the sitting room. I’d spotted a few wrestling mementos in the hall. Here, on the window-ledge, there was a metal statue of a particularly good throw.

  Tea came out, and Roger and Bill spoke about how Cumberland wrestling compared to judo. They spoke of their own bouts, sussing one another out. They were presenting their credentials as fighters. I had none to offer. I stayed quiet.

  After a whi
le, I put my idea to Roger: William was a genuine allround man, a real oddity. It was the crux – if Roger had said no, I’d have felt humiliated, wrong. But this is what he said:

  ‘It’s funny – what you’re recounting there is me, because I’m a grammar school product. I went on to university, and so on – but my father was a mole-catcher, and, in the holidays, well, I would be going – Christmas, mole catching; Easter, lambing – hill-lambing. And I can remember, on one occasion, it was about two o’clock in the morning, I was lying in literally a feather bed, and I was reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, and lying there reading, and at two o’clock I thought, “I better stop reading because I’m dipping sheep tomorrow morning, and I’ll have to get up and out.” And the wrestling was part of that. And I’ve never given up on the culture I came from, but I’ve been able to look at it from a different perspective, from having been removed from it a bit.’

  I said, ‘So, you were reading Ulysses. Did you have a bit of a reputation among the other wrestlers that you were a bit of a boffin?’

  ‘I was always known as being, you know, a bit clever.’

  ‘Doesn’t that mean “too clever”, when they say that?’

  ‘It does when you say “clivver”. “He’s clivver, him.”’ Roger gave me a look. I knew who ‘him’ was, in that room. ‘But, um. Not really. No, I was never aware of that.’

  ‘I think, if they knew that you could prove yourself in their world,’ Bill added, ‘you could do whatever they did, and maybe better than they did, in some cases…’

  Roger agreed, ‘I’m my father’s son, so…’

  ‘It meks a difference,’ said Bill.

  ‘Y’know,’ said Roger, ‘one of the real prejudices I had, which still twitches me sometimes, is to hear public school voices: the voice of privilege. And I still squirm at that.’

  With some fear, I said, ‘I did go to public school. Do I have one of those voices?’

  ‘Edging towards it.’

  ‘Edging? – okay.’

  They laughed and I joined in.

  ‘You’re getting there,’ said Bill.

  I was clivver. I was only a passing visitor there – a tourist.

  With my accent, and my London ways, I stood out.

  Roger was wary of me. William probably wouldn’t have much liked me. In November 1812, he published his second poem.¶ It was a satire of the recent Lake District tourism boom. The title was ‘The Lakes: A Serio-Comic Poem’.

  When I got back to London, before I went to see the WWE wrestling, I read this poem again, very closely. It was the best clue to what William would have thought of me if I, or my nineteenth century equivalent, had been introduced to him.

  I read and re-read ‘The Lakes’, following up the contemporary references I didn’t understand, footnoting them, but feeling all the time that I was being rejected.

  So I looked closer, and read harder, and one evening I got the very strange impression that William was sitting in front of me, and I was looking over his shoulder at lines still inky-wet on the page.

  He was at his desk, back from a convivial meeting with his friends McCombe, Todd, Ledger and Gibson, at the Whitehaven Literary Society, and was feeling moved to respond to the influx of Lake visitors.

  I began to imagine that he even sensed me – as I quite often sense ghostly desk-presences. (He is here; she is watching.) For me, they are usually writers.

  Is it uncanny? Is this unlikely?

  Of course it’s uncanny and unlikely – isn’t all storytelling like that? It’s an attempt to make dead language come alive. It’s calling spirits forth.

  With the first touch of dipped nib to paper, William was throwing his hat into the ring – the place where I, nearly two hundred years later, fought my inky battles. ‘THE’ he wrote ‘LAKES’. His handwriting was slightly childish.

  By 1812, he was no longer content to be a reader. He was trying to become an author. And I was standing there, ringside, silently roaring him on. Even if he was writing against me, I wanted William to write well.

  He was trying to prove something. That he wasn’t just a lunk.|| He was – was he? – was he really? – a poet.

  And he was going to do it by having a good go at all those tourists.

  THE LAKES.

  A Serio-Comic Poem

  He was calling it ‘Serio-Comic’, I think, because it had a Serious message but a Comic manner. Conventionally enough for that time, he begins with a classical epigraph.

  It’s a bit of chopped up Virgil, lines from the Aeneid – the part describing the hero Aeneas’s round trip to Hades.** When I looked them up, I found the poet Dryden had translated them as meaning—

  If you so hard a toil will undertake,

  As twice to pass th’ innavigable lake;

  And followed them with the words, ‘Receive my counsel.’

  A more literal translation would be: ‘If it is your desire and passion to swim the lake, and you want to indulge in such a mad endeavour…’

  In a way that his friends at the Whitehaven Literary Society would have appreciated, William was mischievously presenting the heavenly Lake District as a hellish place.

  William began his poem by switching to something right up to date:

  THOUGH Europe’s Lions be seen no more,

  Since Bonaparte has shut the Cage’s Door, –

  After his failed attempt to invade Russian, Napoleon retreated to Paris in the Autumn of 1812 – and Europe gloated for a bit, and awaited his next eruption.

  Yet some we have at Home, of smaller Breed,

  Literary lions, that is. People like me.

  And these to visit Fashion has decreed,

  To thee, fair CUMBRIA! now my Lyre awakes,

  Thy cloud-roll’d Mountains, and thy glassy lakes:

  What William was saying was that his part of the world has suddenly become fashionable, and he was not happy. William personifies his native county (Cumbria, like Columbia), and addresses her with passion.

  Thou marv’leth much, I ween, at such a Train

  Of motley Idlers in thy wild Domain.

  Boast of thy pathless solitudes no more:

  Stage Coaches roll where Carts scarce climb’d before:

  Coxcombs and Clowns on spiral Footpaths mix,

  and Mountebanks on Rocks display their tricks.

  ‘Cloud-roll’d’ was a fine piece of observation. I was happy to see that appear on the page. But there isn’t much time for beauty, because the poking fun at the tourists (‘motley Idlers’ – motley being the costume of fools) starts here. William addresses the God of the booze these tourists are importing.

  Unwieldy BACCHUS! thou coulds’t little think,

  When steel-nerv’d Romans met – to eat and drink

  In Southern Climes, that Northward thou shoulds’t roam,

  And find, near Skiddaw, a congenial Home.

  William was always eloquent on the subject of drink. But he had another God to address:

  Source of the Beams which gild that Mountain’s Brow,

  O Sun! withdraw thy tarnish’d Glories now:

  This Age that, yawning, worships Midnight’s Name,

  Prefers sold Candles to thy unbought Flame.

  There’s so much to say about this. William’s future novel, Henry & Mary, depended almost entirely on midnight scenes. And the Lakers – Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, Southey – were much given to midnight rambles. To be out at this dark time, torchless, risking twisted or broken ankles, and advertising that you didn’t have to be up with the dawn, or out with your herd or your flocks, would have been remarkable, and probably laughable, to the locals. Like their ancestors, the farmers would have spent the hours between sunset and dawn around household fires or asleep. Going out at these times of day, without any real need, was a novelty. For the locals there was one good excuse for going out at night – to go courting. Young men walked across fells to make love to young women, sometimes with parental permission, sometimes no
t.

  When I visited him, Roger Robson had suggested I read James Hogg’s short novel, ‘Love Adventures of George Cochrane’. Hogg, patronizingly known as ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, was a Scottish contemporary of William. More famous as the author of the amazing diabolic tale Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Hogg was also keen on sports – he organized the St Ronan’s Border Games, the first athletics meeting in Scotland. ‘George Cochrane’ has lots of wrestling in it. It’s about a wrestling-obsessed farmer who makes his daughter’s lovers fight bouts for the right to that evening’s night-visit.

  Hogg wrote, ‘Perhaps my Edinburgh readers will be startled at this agreement; but it is a fact that every young woman in the country must be courted by night, or else they will not be courted at all; whatever is said to them on that subject during the day, makes no more impression upon them than stocks or stones, but goes all for nothing, or mere words of course’.††

  Cumberland farmers, seeing Wordsworth out late, might have assumed he was courting a canny lass rather than observing light-effects upon the lake-waters. They would most likely have thought him a bit daft, and been amused by his doings.

  Hark! how prevails the Din of Dice and Cards!

  Flee from the Jargon, ‘ye Five-wandering Bards,’

  No more with Nature your high Converse hold,

  But advertise your Villas to be sold.

  In other words, William was saying ‘Naff off’ to all the outsiders. Seeing him write this made me feel awkward, because I was one of them. I could hear the contempt in his word ‘Villas’ – it was a well chosen sneer. The proper houses, in Cumberland, were farms and cottages. William’s choice of the word ‘Jargon’ is great. He seems to be presenting London as built out of a fearsome mix of jangling, new-fangled language. There’s a daring, as well as some real venom, to his way of putting this.