Key

DC: = Participant
H: = Interviewer, Helen
[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time
[IA 5:22] = inaudible section at this time
[word] = best guess at word
… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

DC: I was born out in Newbiggin, in Newbiggin Hall, which at that time, was the property of my grandfather.

H: You were just telling me, before we turned the machine on, that as a boy, your bedroom was within earshot of Crowdundle Beck.

DC: Yes, I was born in one bedroom within earshot… the beck runs immediately behind the building, and I was born in one bedroom and when I was growing up, I was given another bedroom also looking out over the beck, so that whenever I was there, I heard it.

H: So that must be quite a powerful memory.

DC: Yes, it is. When I walk through the wood at Acorn Bank, which I often do with the dog, I’m fascinated always by the sound of the beck as it goes over the stones, sometimes fairly quiet and sometimes very noisy. It fills up so fast.

H: It’s a fast beck, isn’t it?

DC: It is a fast beck, yes. Of course, it’s a double because perhaps less than a quarter of a mile above Newbiggin Hall, it bifurcates; there are two branches – the Milburn Beck and the Crowdundle Beck – but they join up and become the Crowdundle.

H: OK. And you were just explaining to me as well how close it is to the house, and you think it originally, it will have been some sort of defensive –

DC: Well, it was in itself a defensive feature because it would slow down an invading party, especially if the water was high. But it is thought – of course, I don’t know this because I wasn’t there, obviously – that some of the current may have been channelled off to fill ditches around the house on the other side to make the approach from the other side equally very difficult. ‘cause the whole thing was constructed, and for generations the family lived in it, during the Scotch wars, which were more or less ceaseless.

H: Do you go back and visit the beck of your childhood?

DC: Yes, and I go to Newbiggin quite often but I see more of the beck by walking in the woods at Acorn Bank, where it’s the demarcation between the Newbiggin side and the Temple Sowerby side.

H: What sort of changes have you seen over the long life of knowing that beck?

DC: Well, I can see a change that’s happened rather earlier before because at the bottom of the wood at Acorn Bank, there’s a weir and there, there’s a current of water that goes to the mill, as you know better than I do. Well, part of that wood was, until about 1938, part of the Newbiggin estate. But I think when the weir was built in the 19th century, the course of the Crowdundle was slightly altered in that direction. My grandfather eventually sold to Mrs McGregor Phillips the bit of the wood that had belonged to Newbiggin ‘cause she said it was illogical and she probably offered him a very good price , which he accepted and so that went. There’s a kind of pond in the middle with a little island in the middle. Well, when I was a boy, that was a kind of skating rink and my grandfather, even though he had sold that part of the wood, he continued, I think, to consider it to be really his. So when there was ice, we would come over and skate on there. It was much better kept than it is now, you know; there’s fallen trees and stuff. There’s a little island in the middle, he liked doing figure skating round it . One of his sort of physical prowesses.

H: I wonder how long it is since that part of the river has iced over.

DC: Well, I remember it. When I was at school, my grandfather wrote to me and he said, ‘I can now walk over the beck on the ice.’ That would’ve been… he died in 1950, it would’ve been in 1946, I think, it was possible to walk across the beck on the ice. But of course, the pond in the wood froze up much more readily by then ‘cause it was no longer running water.

H: So there’s memories of skating; presumably, are there memories of fishing and general…

DC: Yes, I mean the river was absolutely bursting with trout. We used to have trout for breakfast because if the water was at all covered, then it was very easy to catch trout with a worm. The flyfishing was done but less so because it’s very overhung by trees, so it’s difficult to cast a fly under trees – in fact, it’s impossible. But with a worm, it’s as easy as anything. So somebody would go out and catch these fish and we would have them for breakfast, in the right weather, when the water was right. And that still happens but they’re far, far fewer of them. I don’t know what has caused them to be so reduced in number. There are some still. You attached a worm to a hook which makes me feel a bit squeamish. It made me feel fairly squeamish even then. But you go to a suitable pool and you drop it in not far from the bank and, lo and behold, before very long, there’s a fish on the other end of it. I was never very good at this because it involves killing the fish as well and I have an aversion to killing living things. But Oliver Pearson, who first came to work for my grandfather as assistant keeper, before my birth I think, he, by this time, lived in the house and he did a great many other things as well, including the boilers and the logs and the catching the fish before breakfast .

H: So he wasn’t so squeamish about the worms.

DC: He wasn’t at all squeamish about it, no, and I think he rather, in his heart of hearts, despised me for being a bit squeamish about killing things.

H: Presumably there’s a rod involved as well.

DC: Oh yes, it’s the same sort of rod but it hasn’t got a fly on it, it’s got a worm on it . And apparently, this is irresistibly attractive in certain water to the trout. But I can remember, not long before I eventually left, walking upstream from the road bridge, which is just there beside the beck, and trout always swim away in one direction. So if you walk up it in the right direction, you can count the numbers of trout, and I counted about 80 trout between there and there. But now, I think they’re few and far between and I’ve hardly ever seen one as low down as Acorn Bank. I think I have seen one, but there used to be so many. So what it is that’s knocked them out, I don’t know.

H: What about other wildlife and species that you can remember there.

DC: Well, there were always a few ducks and some herons and things like that in the woods, and there still are. There are quite a few duck you see there.

H: The river seems to have changed its course quite a bit.

DC: Quite a bit, yes. It continues to erode slightly under this bank. A little bit further… can you see where I’m pointing?

H: We are now looking at a photograph which is north of Newbiggin Hall, yes?

DC: Yes, and the beck runs just there. Well, it’s eroding a bit there but at one time, the beck ran round that way and you can see traces of where it used to run. These rivers, as I’m sure you’ll know perfectly well, they tend to run at the foot of high banks, especially wooded ones. Well, for some reason or another, the Crowdundle changed its course from running that way to running this way. It may have been done deliberately, for a reason that I’ll come to explain in a minute. It may have been, but I can’t prove that; it may have been encouraged to change its course a bit. My great-grandfather, who built the last addition to Newbiggin Hall, which is that little wing there, he was a great believer in modernising things and he first introduced electric light into the house. But the electricity was powered by a dynamo which is a quarter of a mile upstream. The current that it produced ran underground to the house in a sort of copper cable, buried this far deep, and fed into batteries which were in a battery house on that side. It produced a rather feeble electric light; it didn’t produce any heating but he didn’t require heating . If he was cold, somebody came and lit a fire for him . He was born in 1872 and it came naturally to him, that kind of thing.

H: So what date did he do this work that introduced electricity, do you know?

DC: My great-grandfather? Well, he died in 1913, so it would have been done towards the end of the 19th century, I imagine. He also introduced water closets in the house, which there weren’t any before that. There were poes and the young men went out to a sort of earth closet, which was in the stables there. Anyhow, he changed all that by introducing these very nice, 19th-century thrones with a pull-up handle. There was a story that my father used to like to tell, that when he and his younger brother were boys of about 15, their grandfather, as it was then, took them and showed them this and said, ‘My boys, this is a very delicate instrument,’ . So it was always known as ‘the very delicate instrument’ .

H: Presumably, the water for these water closets came from the beck.

DC: Oh yes, all the water came directly… God knows there wasn’t any shortage of water, no.

H: How did he get it up? Pumps?

DC: I suppose it must have been. By the time my first memories begin, I wonder whether there was a mains water supply by then, there may have been. But in the 19th century, I imagine it was pumped out, but I can’t swear to that. But it was a home power supply, very dim and liable to fluctuate.

H: But that really was very forward-thinking of your great-grandfather, in terms of how we’re thinking about energy now, to put a turbine on the beck.

DC: Yes, exactly, yes. It would have been an expensive operation but it was great fun and it remained in existence. It was still in use when I was a boy and I think it was put out of commission… I mean, I still remember the water-filled batteries in the battery house, which had to be kept filled up, and that was just behind, between the house and the church. I suppose it was towards the end of the Second World War that my grandfather succeeded in getting the current from the grid. But once again, it hardly heated a heater. I think it heated a one-bar electric heater for his bedroom and that was about it .

H: Do you know anything about the name ‘Crowdundle’, where that comes from?

DC: Well , I believe it’s because the two branches that make it up, one comes from Cross Fell and the other from Dun Fell, I believe, producing ‘Crowdundle’. But my father, who liked to have his little fancies from time to time, said that he thought it meant ‘crow down the dale’. Well, of course that was absolute rubbish and he didn’t mean it seriously .

H: It’s quite a romantic interpretation.

DC: Yes. My grandfather composed a piece of piano music called ‘The Beck’, which, among his sort of accomplishments, he used to play from time to time on request . It was rather charming, rather Chopinesque, I suppose.

H: Do you have it still?

DC: No. He did make a recording but I didn’t keep the recording. I regret it but it was an old 78 disc, I suppose, yes.

H: That would be wonderful to –

DC: It would. It’s a pity. I’m afraid that fell by the wayside in the course of moves. One of the most interesting things about the Crowdundle is that above the bifurcation, about another quarter of a mile in the woods, there is an ancient quarry. Well, the great antiquarian William Camden, who… you know of Britannia? Well, he said that he saw a Latin inscription on a stone in this quarry with the names of Veronius, Commander of the Twentieth Legion, Ileus Lucernes, Commander of the Second Legion, Octavius Cotta, Consul carved in the stone. Well, that was Camden. Britannia was published in 1586 but we don’t know in what year he, or whoever he sent round, actually saw these inscriptions. But by the time Nicolson and Burn wrote their history of Westmoreland and Cumberland, the inscriptions were no longer visible and Nicolson and Burn were a little sceptical about it. They said if it wasn’t for the great authority of William Camden, they’d have been tempted to think that it was a fantasy. But what they didn’t say, which is rather obvious to me, is that between 1586 or whenever the year was and the 18th century when they wrote their book, the quarry had probably continued to be used. So the stones on which these inscriptions were carved had been either taken away by somebody or else quarried. This last wing of the house that my great-grandfather built after 1888 was made from stone from that quarry. Course that is a long time later but it shows that the quarry continued to be used until comparatively recent times. But it’s an interesting possibility that the quarry was a Roman quarry; in other words, that it was in use in Roman times.

H: And if it was possibly a Roman quarry, I wonder whether they would have made use of the beck for the workings and how that would have –

DC: Well, I should think it’s highly likely because the beck runs very close to the quarry and, as you know, it’s often a torrent, so I should think it’s certain that they would have used it. It was used later for the production of electricity, so why not for any other purpose in earlier times? Such was their extraordinary ingenuity, the Romans, anyway. There are a few deep pools, one of them just upstream from the house there and a couple more a little further down in the direction of Acorn Bank. And in hot weather which, believe it or not, did happen, we used to swim in these pools. My grandfather said he wouldn’t dream of entering the Crowdundle because it contained the effluent of at least 500 souls upstream but we weren’t bothered by effluent and we had very good fun swimming in the beck. I just wanted to mention that because we did. It was my sister and me and we had three cousins and all of us besported ourselves, from time to time, in the beck.