Scunthorpe
Created | Updated Jan 14, 2007
There's now an Edited Guide Entry about the city of Sheffield. You probably noticed it too.
About forty miles to the east lies another steel town. Its story must be told.
This town is the subject of a Question so Ultimate that Douglas never dreamed of it. Or, if he did, his publisher wouldn't print it. The alternative title of this piece is "Spudendumhorpe", just in case there are any Moderators grubbing around (down, boys!)
Strange to relate, people have grown up in this town without ever hearing the Ultimate Question, at least until they travelled further afield and found themselves ribbed over it. This may mean that Scunthorpe is above such things. It may also mean that Scunthorpe is somehow not quite on the same planet as the rest of us. It may indeed mean both of these things, because both are undoubtedly true.
There wasn't much here before the 1850s. Escunatorp (or something vaguely like it, had one concentrated in history lessons) got a mention in the Doomsday Book. But there were no more than a few dozens families spread through a cluster of five villages before that time, and most of them were probably seriously inbred. Ashby, Brumby, Crosby, Frodingham and Scunthorpe. The last would soon engulf its neighbours.
Just a few miles to the west, Wesley first preached. Across the river, Wilberforce was born and went on to redefine the morality of the Western World. But here, atop the northern extremity of a pathetic ridge called the Lincolnshire Heights, would-be philosophers left no impression. Very little left an impression, unless you count the Devil's Toe-Nails who'd done so 450 million years earlier. At two hundred feet above sea level, this was the highest point for miles around in a Very Low Part of the World.
And then someone rediscovered ironstone. The Romans had injudiciously lost it, along with a few mosaics and the odd hypocaust that they'd dotted around the vicinity. Within a few years, there was an ironworks here. It was imaginatively named the South Ironworks, presumably on account of being south of something. It was the beginning of an industrial economy for a hitherto agricultural community. Three or four generations later, Scunthonians would change the world, though it's fairly typical of Scunny's Lot that Destiny would hazily ascribe the achievements to Japan, or somewhere like that.
They made iron here from stuff that was practically dirt. They invented sintered burden; they perfected industrial-scale open-hearth steelmaking. The World came to learn, and gawped at what was done here using raw materials that most dismissed as dross. Scunthorpe can still show that same World a thing or two when it comes to operating a steelplant.
Nothwithstanding these mighty feats, the most important period in Scunthorpe's distinguished history was the first half of the 1970s. This is partly because the author of this Profoundly Erudite Essay (or PEE, for short) struggled boyfully to attain the estate of puberty during those years.
No, fairly seriously, a lot happened in Scunny around that time...
At the beginning of the 70s, Keegan and Clemence were playing at the Old Show Ground. Fifteen hundred hardy souls knew with passionate certainty that the former was gifted. Somehow the latter never got a game. But the most memorable footie moment had to be the FA Cup 4th Round 1970; Wednesday felled at Hillsborough 2-1. So much for Sheffield.
In the early 70s they built a steelplant here and they called it Anchor. It was a wonder of its day, and the melting shop in particular still takes the breath away. It was also arguably a daft investment, almost as daft as Britain's most beautiful folly, arcing across the Humber a few miles to the north-east. Be that as it may, Anchor underpinned the town's prosperity and saved Scunthorpe from being blown away as the Hard Years befell steel, and beset it still. You can already bet with certainty that Scunthorpe will be the last place in England where iron is tapped. Let's hope that it won't be for a few years yet.
On June 1st 1974 the village of Flixborough suddenly became famous. Every Scunthonian knows what they were doing at five to five that day, just like other people remember Kennedy, or Princess Di, or the WTC. Watching that mushroom cloud rise up, many honestly thought the world was ending. And then, in November 1975, the Queen Victoria blast furnace was rocked in Nypro's wake.
It must have been about this time, too, that someone had the crazed idea that Scunthorpe was in a place called Humberside. They couldn't make it stick though, so that was all right. Lincolnshire was and is the natural home, albeit a sharper, more street-wise kind of Lincolnshire than the soporofic rural sprawl of much of the county. The Poacher lives round here, you can be sure.
There was a pub of that name, of course. A good one. Back in those days, there were lots of pubs with a character. Town pubs of a 1950s housing estate kind (a style now forgotten) like the Priory, the Queensway, the Beacon. Hard places like the Brown Cow and the Oswald. It seemed like anyone old enough to walk would be served a pint in the Green Tree at Messingham. Other entertainments were more emphemeral : there was briefly a bowling alley, and speedway at Quibell Park.
One year about then, John Leggott became joint champions of National Schools soccer. There was a folk club at the Berkeley, and concerts at the Baths Hall on Donny Road. No-one seemed to go to restaurants, but there were some first-rate chippies. The nearest thing to a night-spot was Tiffany's. The teenies wondered at its delights from the outside, most of us fuelled by Pomagne from the offy.
Bottesford Beck was reputedly judged the second most polluted waterway in Britain (even if apocryphal, coming second in such a contest rings perfectly true for Scunny). Famous people from the town were (and remain) thin on the ground. Two examples are Joan Plowright and Donald Pleasance. There may be others, but they don't seem to have admitted it.
The Industrial Garden Town. The Heavens Reflect Our Labours. You bet it is, and you bet they do. It's a fine place, and one that exceeds its reputation by a greater margin than any other town in Britain. They were knocking Scunny long before anyone dared to print the real Ultimate Question. Don't you knock it till you've tried it.
