The Rest Is History - 18. The North South Divide

Episode Date: January 28, 2021

England has long been divided by an invisible line somewhere north of Watford and south of the Mersey. But do northerners really have more in common with Scots and Welsh people than their fellow Englishmen in London? Dan Jackson, author of The Northumbrians and a former advisor to Cheryl Cole, joins southerner Tom Holland and midlander Dominic Sandbrook to try and decide if we should eat lunch then dinner, or dinner then tea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Hello and welcome to this edition of The Rest Is History, or perhaps that should be The Rest Is Regional History, because today we want to look at the local. And Dominic, because you and I are English, we're going to focus on the regional history of England. So where do the Sandbrooks hail from? That sounds kind of very Hobbit name. I think the Sandbrooks actually come from West Wales,

originally, in the sort of mists of time. But I'm a Shropshire, I'm a Shropshire lad. I'm like a character from A.E. Houseman. So you're a Midlander? Yeah, I'm a Midlander. My mum's family came from Wolverhampton, from Bilston in the Black Country. And I suppose that is my eye, So you're you're much more a man of the people than I am obviously because I bear the whiff of southern

privilege even though the Hollands actually originate from Stoke and we migrated via Birmingham to Salisbury in the heart of Wessex. My mother's family is from the Isle of Wight. I now live in London. So we've basically got the southern half of England covered, haven't we? I was about to say, you're a complete southerner, aren't you? Basically, yes. So we need a bit of northern pride. We do, a bit of grit. Yeah. So who have we got with us, Dominic? We have got Dan Jackson, the author of The Brilliant, The Northumbrian. So he is Mr. Northeastern History. And Dan, I think your claim to fame above all else is that you were the official historical advisor to Cheryl Cole.

Is that right? This is true. Yes. We explored Cheryl's family history in North Shield's register office. A bit of on-screen chemistry. You can still see it on YouTube. Is that how she describes it as well? We didn't keep in touch, sadly. But so, Dan, your book Northumbrians makes a kind of brilliant case,

not just for the significance of Northumbria, but generally, I think, regional history that we can learn a lot from looking at the various parts of a country as well as country as a whole. And I guess that one of the things you get again and again, not just in England, but in Scotland, in Ireland, in France, in Italy, in America, pretty much anywhere you want to look at is the idea of a north-south divide. And perhaps we could kind of focus on that and just cut Dominic out completely. We don't need to bother with the Midlands. He's been itching for this for weeks. So to kick things off, we've got a question from Kane kane carlisle um probably one to cause some

controversial debate and that's good because obviously we want controversial debate but where would you argue the line between north and south should be drawn in england that is not in great britain in england well with my northumbrian perspective, specifically a Tyneside perspective to this, I think there is a case to be made that anywhere south of Scotch Corner is basically a wasteland of warm beer and Morris dancing. But I think there's a good case to be made for the Mersey-Humber line, basically, in England. And there are some border counties along there that it's debatable about which side of the line they should fit in, particularly Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire. But basically, I think in English history,

the topographical barriers within England still aren't well enough understood. And, you know, rivers, hills, forests were difficult to get through, were difficult to traverse for a long time. And if you just, if you think about the geography of England, if you think about the Mersey and the mosses of South Lancashire, you've probably heard of Moss Side in Manchester. Mosses were sort of marshes, difficult to get through. Then that kind of led into the Peak District again, you know, quite a formidable range of hills to get across. Then you've got the

Sherwood Forest, which is the sort of Ardennes of England. It was difficult to get through as well. And then you've got the Trent and the Humber. And the Severn Trent line, some people often pick that out as a key dividing line in England, I think is important but I think the most durable boundary the dividing north and south is that sort of straggly line from the Mersey to the Humber which is difficult to get through and I think it's interesting that one of the few passes through there is a place called Door outside Sheffield literally a door you know an entrance where that you could get through and though the lines either side of that boundary, which roughly correspond still to this day to the provinces of Canterbury and York, and to an extent, the kind of Britannia inferior and Britannia superior division of England by the

Romans. I think that's a decent starting point, to be honest. So Dan, you think it's basically, you genuinely think it's a geographical thing rather than, I mean, obviously, there's cultural and economic elements and all the rest of it, but you think that the geography comes first before the other stuff? Yeah, I'm a bit of a geographical determinist on this front, because I think that then shaped the culture that grew up on either side of that boundary. You could also explore things like the geology that was different on either side, either ends of England, the sort of upland farming country of the north, which was all pastoral. Then you had the richer, more fertile lands of the south, which are largely arable and so on. And then you've got the proximity to the prosperous core of Europe, which was an advantage that the south of England had as well. And I haven't read James Hoare's recent book on the history of England. I was kind of red-pilled a little bit, as I think the young people say, about that, the persistence of the

north-south divide in English history. And we might come on to the politics of that. But yeah, I think that would be my dividing line. Well, I mean, talking about the politics and the way that that has expressed itself throughout time, since there are three of us, and since I come from the South, Dominic comes from the Midlands, and you come from the North, and the famous tripartite division

in the Anglo-Saxon period is between Wessex and Mercia and Lothumbria, it might be good to introduce them at this stage. Because of course, the dividing line that you highlight between the Humber and the Mersey is what formed the fusion of Wessex and Mercia in the wake of Alfred the Great's reign, and then his son, Edward. And then Edward's son, Athelstan, he advances from the Mersey-Humber line and conquers Northumbria. And that essentially is then what constitutes England, the United Kingdom of England. The union, perhaps, of those three kingdoms, plus East Anglia. So good to get them in early and good, obviously, to get Athelstan in.

I think he gets his first mention of the series, doesn't he? He does. Well done, Tom. Can I just ask a question now that you've brought that up, the Anglo-Saxons? Dan, what about the Dane law? Do you think the Dane law is a big thing? Do you think that's an enduring boundary? I think it is, yeah. Although it's slightly different from my perspective, again, right up in the northeast of England, because the the the danes um certainly raided but did not

settle north of the teas and i've always been very interested in the lands between the teas and the tweed as in my view forming a separate entity basically in english history and it was always that that land was always seen as a bit of a buffer zone as well between england and scotland we haven't really touched on the northern frontier of all this, but you know, the border between England and Scotland was pretty much settled in 1018 after the Battle of Carrham on the River Tweed. So some people think it fluctuates a little bit, but actually it's been pretty stable for about a thousand years. Well, Dan, following up from that, we've got another question from Sean Barnes, and this leads in very quickly, which is,

does the north of England, in other words, have more in common with Scotland than it does with the south of England that's an interesting question because of course Scotland is also a united kingdom a stitch together of many different identities and one of those identities obviously is the Northumbrian identity yeah I think so I think a useful way of looking at to an extent the useful way of looking at my Northumbria useful way of looking at um my northumbria is if you think of a venn diagram of england and scotland northumbria is a sort of shaded overlapping section because it does it does feature i mean from my point of view if you look at the similarities between cities like newcastle and glasgow and edinburgh there is there is an

affinity there in culture and architecture and trading patterns in the industrial base of those places enthusiasm for football and beer and machismo and all those sorts of features which i do i do think there there is that cultural sort of um vibe that you can notice the similarities with but i mean again it goes back to um very early medieval period because the kingdom of northumbria really goes right the way up to to where edinburgh is now it does yes and there are some of us with kind of revanchist divide her designs on the lines of the fourth um but um but yeah the but that that that anglo-scottish border was border was much fought over and it was slightly complicated too by

the kings of Scotland held Tyndale as one of their liberties as well as Huntingdonshire, didn't they? That was one of their possessions in England. As far south as Huntingdonshire, that's interesting. Yeah, there was Dr Francis Young wrote an interesting thing

on that recently about whether technically Huntingdonshire is still part of Scotland. It's one for Nicholas Durgent. Dan, let me just quiz you a tiny bit more on that last question, because it occurred to me in your very first, when we were talking right at the beginning, that the emphasis on sort of what differentiates North and South slightly sort of explodes the idea of an England. So are you sort of saying,ates north and south slightly sort of um explodes the idea of an

england so are you sort of saying i mean this question does the north have more in common with scotland if in it can that be true because surely the their englishness is very important to people in the northeast isn't it i mean northeasterners follow the england football team they're not they're not they're not sort of lured away by the siren voice of Nicola Sturgeon, are they? I mean, their Englishness surely matters to them intensely. I think it has started to matter more, largely related to football, the kind of the Euro 96 phenomenon

where you started to see a more assertive English identity. And certainly England's greatest ever footballers came from the North East of England. There's no question about that, of course. But Billy Wright, no, no, no, you're greatly mistaken. But I think what we shouldn't lose sight of the fact, and my own family is a product of this, is that the north of England was a huge melting pot

of English, Scottish, Irish and Welsh in the 19th century. So that a British identity wasn't, you know, in certain quarters, I suppose, a British identity has a slightly distasteful feel to it. It's kind of rule Britannia and the butchers. Not on this podcast. Not on this podcast. But in certain quarters. But I think it's a good description of the kind of interconnected

industrial world of the 19th century that connected Glasgow to, you know, Tyneside, Merseyside, Barrow-in-Furness was a very Scottish town in North Lancashire. That was just a fact that there was a huge melding of that population into a genuinely British population, in my view. But I think you're right that the English identity, and all the polling suggests this, is growing all the time. But I still think that England is basically two nations, at least, when it comes to North versus South in its culture, industrial base, etc, etc. Following on from that, and this might be a question that Dominic would definitely want to come in. It's from Keith Mansfield. And he says, why do people from either North or South ignore the Midlands?

Hashtag Midlands indeed. We exist with a rich history. Yeah, he's quite right, isn't he? Dan, are we not guilty of a kind of Southern Northern carve up here? Yeah, I think we are. And, you know, my Midlands are basically the M62 corridor from my point of view. Lancashire and Yorkshire feel like the Midlands to me. But I suppose, and it'd be good to get Dominic's take on this, that are the Midlands that different to the rest of the south of England? Do they have a distinct... because I would lump the Midlands in with the south, frankly.

That's shameful. that is shameful um i think the midlands are very distinctive i think there's i mean the industrial revolution began in shropshire black country i mean dan's frowning because he thinks everything began in the northeast did it not begin in the weald get a group of yourself tom for god's sake uh no i think the midlands has a very distinctive the weald the midlands has a distinctive identity... The eye works of the wheeled? The Midlands has a distinctive identity. I mean, if you think about the West Midlands and industry, it's often founded on engineering, on chain making, on small family-run enterprises, not necessarily big factories, but smaller workshops.

And there's definitely a sort of cultural identity. I mean, even tiny things like, you know, you mentioned football, obviously, I mean, football is shared across um much of the what the north and the midlands but when the football league was started it tended to be northern and midlands clubs so in that sense the midlands feels more northern um there are sort of distinctive drinks there are distinctive dialects you know a pint of mild for example that you would drink in the west midlands, you wouldn't drink necessarily in the South. So I think there are I think the Midlands has obviously been it has been it is the sort of Bosnia of this story, isn't it? It's the sort of it's the sort of the victim of the greedy eyes of or indeed the rejectionists on both sides who reject the midlands as part of the of the other world and

i guess the other thing that's happened with the midlands is um the decline of industry means maybe the midlands feels a little bit more southern now than it did because you know nowhere suffered a greater collapse in manufacturing in the first years of the 1980s than the west midlands did proportionately um and so in that sense, I guess it maybe feels more southern now than it would have done 50 years ago. But I guess, I mean, that kind of opens up the interesting question about whether regional identities are constant. Because Dan, at the beginning, you suggested that a lot of these are determined by geography and geology, which would imply that certain senses of regional identity are things that you can trace

right the way, you know, maybe all the way back to the Roman period, perhaps even before. But conversely, the better communications become, the less significant geology and geography becomes, and perhaps the more these regional identities fade. And one of the things that is fascinating about the Northumbrians is that you absolutely make the case that this is a very, very strong regional identity. But I thought kind of reading it that it's really the classic example in England. There aren't regional identities in that scale almost anywhere else, perhaps Liverpool, I guess.

Can you think of any other, Dominic? No, I think it's right. I think Northumbria well the North East is unusual partly because it's so far do you not think that's I mean that's the remoteness I mean remoteness would sound offensive

for somebody in the North East because they'd say it's the rest of England that's remote but don't you think that's the key that it's so far away particularly from London that it's not been contaminated as for want of a better word. I suppose the only other place the producer is suggesting,

I'm going to give him the credit since it's his idea and he's quite right, it's Cornwall. So, again, they're both kind of peripheral. I mean, they're on the edge, aren't they? I mean, do you think Northumbria, the northeast, is unusual? Do you think Cornwall is a good comparison, Dan? I think you're right about the distance factor. There was always a fascination

in the industrial heyday between Newcastle and London because they were the two largest centres of English population at the furthest distance from each other. They had this reciprocal symbiotic relationship really because London is the big smoke because it started to burn Newcastle coal from the 1600s. uh it relied on that source of fuel power and there was a traffic

backwards and forwards and it meant that newcastle you know newcastle as a provincial city was was unusually well connected through the collier ships going backwards and forwards um as that as people realized they didn't need coal anymore that relationship has soured slightly but i i it's interesting we've already we started to touch upon the west country because where the west country fits into this is always a bit of a tricky question and i've got a slight hunch that a place like newcastle has a well-drawn people from there the geordies have a well-drawn or there's a well-drawn picture of them in the national consciousness um in a way that bristol i don't think does necessarily and my i've always had this hunch it's because they've

never had a good football team and so they've never really featured as much as their size should suggest in the kind of national conversation but but some i mean somerset people kind of stand in for country people, don't they? It's the archetypal rural accent, which is what people will do as the default mode for when they're farmers or whatever. And so it may be that the lack of a football team is precisely the point, because you need a large conurbation. And Bristol isn't kind of associated with that.

And the other thing, of course, is that we're talking that it's something that that we should perhaps talk about is the degree to which england is is a peculiarly urban country um and we don't have the sense of kind of rural space perhaps that we you get in in most other countries and that therefore the idea of somerset say as a place that is rural comes to have all the more significance. They're our last peasants, aren't they? We lost our peasant kind of community earlier than most European countries, I suppose, and they stand. And then there's Norfolk, I suppose, as well as the other region, part of England that doesn't fit that easily into this schema, I guess,

of North versus South versus Midlands. Do they stand on a limb a little bit? Well, there's an increasing thing, isn't there, Dan, that the big divide is not, I mean, I think this is increasingly true. It's not North and South, it's London versus, as it were, deep England. Right. Sort of metropolis and periphery. Okay, so this brings us on um to another

question from we'll remember this from previously uh Paradoximoron we oh yes I remember Paradoximoron and he or she asks how far back does the dominance of London as England's premier city go was it always this way um can I answer that that's shocking he's asking and answering questions himself well i mean it goes back to the romans because go on london is a is a roman foundation what is unusual about london um among roman provincial capitals is that there wasn't a foundation there already. To begin with, the Romans planned to make Colchester the centre because that's the centre of the local largest tribal power. But London emerges because it is simultaneously the lowest bridging point on the Thames

and it's navigable up the Thames estuary and so it again it illustrates Dan's point that geography is destiny and it's almost inevitable I think that when you have a unitary power in southern Britain London almost inevitably becomes the most significant centre and the measure of that is that when Roman power collapses in Britannia and the political unity in southern Britain fragments, London goes into decline. Once you have the establishment of a unitary kingdom of England, London, like a massive great spot, the great when, slowly expands and comes back into power. And I think that you're right.

I mean, I think that essentially the political history, cultural history of not just England, but of Britain and perhaps of Ireland as well, is about the gravitational pull of London and the South East more generally and how you deal with that, how you cope with that. Dan, how much politically have people in the North East defined themselves against London and against the idea of a sort of, I mean, to use the sort of the terminology that we're all so familiar with now, the idea of a metropolitan elite? Well, as I said, I think it's soured of late because we've lost that kind of reciprocity between the two places and we've lost that kind of reciprocity between the two places. And we've come to see ourselves more as a sort of benighted province of a distant imperial capital. And if you take the long view of the south of England's dominance,

and I suppose you can read it in that, London's dominance, they've seen off any threat to its power several times in history, or they've been the springboard for, frankly, attacks on the North. You know, if you stand back from it and think about, you know, I've always been interested in the harrying of the North in the 11th century by the Normans, and then you've got the Wars of the Roses after that, the Reformation, you know, when the North was the stronghold of um catholicism the civil war had a north-south dimension the jacobite rebellions also then you've got peter

lew and the chartist rebellion and all those sort of things which were kind of fermented in the north but pretty pretty swiftly dealt with and uh and put down and uh, you know, from the perspective of 2021, London in the South East presides as it ever has, you know, it's seen off any of those threats to its dominance, really. And I can't see much changing on that front, frankly. Because, in a sense, no matter how many government departments or museums or whatever you shuffle around the rest of the country it is the kind of brutal fact of geography that and i suppose of kind of cultural you know the cumulative effect of centuries and centuries of of political and cultural power that makes London so challengingly preponderant.

Yeah, yeah. There was a briefish period from, let's say, about 1700 to 1914 when the North almost became preeminent in England because of the, again, going back to geology, it found this enormous mineral wealth under its feet. And, you know, places like the northeast of England, Newcastle became the sort of dallas or dubai of the 18th century because it controlled this vastly uh important commodity coal fuel power but that didn't last um you know manchester likewise is the center of the industrial revolution cotton spinning and all

the rest of it there were some plans in the mid-19th century to create an alternative parliament in Manchester. But there's not much chance of that these days, although there's some stirrings through this pandemic period in the figure of Andy Burnham being a sort of flag bearer for the North in that same sequence of North versus South clashes, which did emerge a month or two ago and seems to have subsided again a little bit and London's

reasserted itself through Whitehall and Westminster and so on. But other than that brief kind of industrial revolution period when the tables were turned slightly that's been the only time I think when the North has been pre-eminent. And I think that's unusual isn't it it's very unusual in a comparative european context because if you're

if you look at you know portugal you're lisbon and porto spain madrid barcelona bilbao seville france you know lyon marseille germany lots of cities, because, of course, Germany wasn't unified until 1870, 71. But England is very unusual, I think. And that's distorting on our politics personally, that everything is sucked into this, as Tom calls it, the great when. Just broadening the camera a bit and maybe going back before the Industrial Revolution, there's a question from William Ritchie who mentions York. And why did York never emerge as a rival hub to London a Roman and Viking capital ecclesiastical centre capital of the largest county and river port so you know and there was talk wasn't there of moving the house of lords to

York that was a kind of mad Boris plan that seems to have bitten the dust, surprisingly. We can fly there from his S3 airport. But York does have, I think, I can't remember, some famous historian described it as the natural capital of Britain. So what's your take on York, Dan, as a southern softies to you, I guess? Yes, it is. It's a very pleasant place. Although, you know, I did have a large working class community at York, centered around the railways and chocolate making and all that sort of thing.

But I think there's just the brute fact of geography, again, that London is just that much closer to that kind of European core, core prosperous zone of Europe, which I think extends from Southeast England through the Low Countries, through the Rhineland, through, you know, into Northern Italy. That has always been for at least a thousand years, the most prosperous dynamic part of economic part of Europe. And, you know, the Thames faces it more or less. And so just that proximity factor, was as decisive for you know the growth of London the southeast as the width of

the English Channel was to the security of of Britain um you know people sometimes say you know the unique stability of the British political history is because of the glories of our constitution and all that sort of thing which I think is important but I do think the width of the English channel has been pretty decisive it meant that Napoleon and the Kaiser and all those sorts of threats just couldn't march over here very easily the the scepter dial factor so geography uh yet again proving to be destiny I think we need a. I might go and have a scone. Dan, I expect you want a scoon or whatever it is.

Cream over jam. Jam over cream. Who knows? We will see you after this break. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip.

And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com. Welcome back from exercising your whippets to The the rest is history and we're talking about the north-south divide now let's talk about the you know we've dealt with some of the sort of more trivial questions let's get to the real substance tom watts has asked the question he says what is going on with different names for meals eaten at different times of day. Dan, breakfast, lunch, tea. Am I wrong? I think it's breakfast, dinner, tea, isn't it?

Oh yeah, of course it is. What am I saying? I don't even know my own mind. Well, I think dinner or lunch. Do you never use the word lunch? I do, but I always feel slightly effete when I talk about going for a spot of lunch. Yes. Well, luncheon, I suppose. Luncheon, you'd be John Major then, wouldn't you? But tea, I think the key thing is the evening meal, isn't it, is tea.

Yes. I'm a tea man. I was brought up with tea. Though when I went to school, everybody else had dinner, to be fair, because I went to a boarding school. Is it not supper? Well, that is a feat.

No, it's metropolitan and by supper you mean a ball of crunchy nut cornflakes or something no he has multiple courses who who is it said that that it's impossible for an englishman to open his mouth and not be despised by another englishman because it's because i guess that that also what's feeding in here is is the way in which other Englishmen. Because I guess also what's feeding in here is the way in which issues of class mix with regional

variations. And I guess, Dan, you would feel that one of the ways that the South continues to exert its primacy is that it kind of seduces people from the north into coming down to the south and kind of living in clapham yes well that was always as a critique of the ruling classes of the 19th century in britain certainly that they they didn't want to get

their their sons didn't want to get their hands dirty and they wanted to turn themselves into englishmen like mr bingley and all that sort of thing in jnos that they uh they they quickly left the north as fast as they could but i think the rp thing's really interesting because it is said that um robert peel and william gladstone both lancastrian prime ministers had a i think peel more so had a proper lanky sheer sort of uh twang or burr to his accent but all that was ironed out in the course of the 19th century through boarding schools and so on, and then reinforced by the BBC, I guess, from the 1920s onwards.

It smoothed out all the wrinkles. I definitely think that's right. I mean, I remember you might know this book, Classes and Cultures by Ross McKibben, Dan, in which he basically argues that england only got a sort of uniform english culture from the 1920s onwards because of things like the bbc because that erased the differences of dialect and class and and of regional culture by creating a national culture that hitherto had not existed at all. So in other words, you know, if you were growing up in the late 19th century

and you went to the music hall or to hear a comedian or something, you wouldn't get all, if you were in Liverpool and you went to London, you wouldn't get it. You wouldn't get the dialect, you wouldn't get the references. And then actually the idea of an English culture was only created in the 20th century. And as you say, it basically became a southern culture, sort of with northerners dragged

on for comic relief or sort of wilfred pickles style sort of yeah you know amusing character stuff but dominic does it i mean it goes back much further than that doesn't it i mean at least to the 14th century when you are starting when english is starting to become the language of government and you're starting to get the sense that the the triangle of London Oxford and Cambridge is the kind of English that properly should be spoken and I mean it's really telling that Chaucer who's the great first great poet of that kind of style of English Dan I think I'm right in the Reeves tale there are kind of two Geordie students and Chaucer mimics what they sound like to a southern

a southerner in the in in the late 14th century yes I'm trying to remember the quote now but it it's it's it's terms that are designed to draw out those peculiarities of northern speech which any kind of northern student will have experienced they went to university and your pal say go on Dan say snooker but it's there already in the 14th century I'm glad we've got him to do it um I mean it's kind of amazing amazing and and that of course is something that um that you see even more in a even more pronounced way in other European countries I guess Italy would be the classic example of the need essentially to create a unitary single language out of,

I mean, they're called dialects, but basically they're a whole range of patchwork of different languages. So England is, is kind of precocious in that sense of developing a common language that actually can be understood relatively early, perhaps relative to French or to what we now call Italian. And I think on that theme, let's just broaden this out because we've

been talking very specifically about England. But I think we can look at the whole question about how do we overemphasise national history at the expense perhaps of regional history? And there's a question here from Mike J., which expresses this very nicely. Many countries have regional divides, most obviously USA, but also many EU countries like Italy again. I'd love to hear your thoughts on what makes the UK split unique. So interestingly, I mean, Mike is talking about the UK. So in England, we've been talking about the North-South divide, and it's generally expressed in that the south is wealthier uh the north is relatively more disadvantaged um in italy now it would be the other way around i guess that's true yeah that is true it's not just true in italy though is it's true in france so i lived for a year in the south of france uh as a student in the 1990s and the

southerners in you know in france absolutely loathed and despised paris in the north and their their image was southerners were seen as criminal as lazy as um um as as sort of deceitful uh and northerners were seen as but but as taciturn and all so those things are not dissimilar but of course northerners were richer than southerners so the souttherners were seen as taciturn and all. So those things are not dissimilar. But of course, Northerners were richer than Southerners. So the Southerners were poor and the Northerners were rich in France. So it's slightly different. And Italy, I guess, it's not just North-South, is it? I mean, effectively, as you say, it's multiple nations bolted together in the 19th century.

But the thing about Italy, I guess, in contrast, say, to Britain, in Britain, the North has always been, relatively speaking, poorer. hadrian's wall is built because the north essentially is seen by the romans as not worth conquering whereas in italy um sicily is the great center of greek civilization and south italy and relatively speaking in antiquity the north is seen as as as more backward and that of course then changes with the rise of the Roman Empire. But it's relatively recent that the idea of southern Italy and Sicily is backward comes in. Because even in the Middle Ages, you've got this incredible,

in Sicily, this incredible reservoir of Greek, Byzantine, Arab, Frankish fusion. And it's, I'm not sure, I mean, when is it that Sicily becomes, is it the 18th century, comes to become a kind of a backwater relative to the north of Italy? I would say 19th century. I would say 19th century, I think. Dan, what about America? So did northerners, when they went to America,

take their northerness with them? Yes, it's interesting that the patterns of migration, depending on where you came from in the British Isles, were very different. And I've always been interested in the so-called Scots-Irish as this group that went in the kind of hillbilly country of Appalachia, but included within their number a large proportion of border English. And there's a great book by David Hackett Fisher called Albion Seed, which describes how the Cavaliers went to Delaware and the Puritans went to New England and what he calls the borderers, both English and Scots, who were originally transplanted to Ulster and then another hop to America, settled in different parts of the world because, frankly, they had different cultures. They had different religions, different stripes of Protestant Christianity,

but they had different kind of culture. And I've always been fascinated by the kind of feuding Hatfields versus McCoy's ranching culture of the Southern and Western USA was pretty much transplanted from the Anglo-Scottish border reavers, you know, who wouldn't take a backward step, who would persist with these feuds down the centuries between different clans? So, Dan, would you say in the 19th century United States, North and South go to war? I mean, that's that's the ultimate expression of a North-South divide. Is that culturally determined rather than determined by geography, would you say? I think to an extent in the way that it was perceived as the kind of gallant martial races of the southern USA

and that martial culture, I think, which was a big part of the southern identity, did emerge, I think, from a particular part of the British Isles and the fact that, and it goes back to our point about if you study regional history, you realise how different it can be because the perspective of English history from the northeast of England is one of centuries of border warfare in comparison to the south of England,

which is all pretty tranquil and swords have been beaten into plough shares pretty early, whereas we're still fighting off the Scots well into the 1700s. So that was a more important fact of life that shaped the culture and in my view shaped the kind of macho martial traditions in the northeast of england that still persist to my in my view uh as a result of that again another factor of geography that it was a borderland and and like i said that was also transplanted to the southern usa um in theth, 18th and 19th centuries. Dan can I ask you a question that picks up on something Tom mentioned earlier which is class.

Northerners particularly in the 20th century has come to sort of stand in for working class hasn't it? So particularly in the 1930s I think in the depression and then in the 1960s obviously when you had kind of new wave cinema and you had the Beatles and you had this sort of Harold Wilson becoming Prime Minister, northerness, and Coronation Street, most famously, I suppose, or the novels of Catherine Cookson, northerness has just become sort of almost slightly lazily equated with this sort of working class authenticity and grit. Is that a 20th century thing or does that have deeper roots i think it's got much deeper roots and you and often this north south thing why it matters is because um they're kind of freighted with meaning aren't they and um kind of value judgments about

northerners being these noble spartan you know honest to goodness really friendly as opposed to um well well when john vanbrugh came up north to to build seaton delaval hall in the 18th century he said i much preferred up here to the tame and sneaking south and he was just southern he says they're all hearty honest to goodness you know hard-working chaps up here and i much prefer their company and you see that whether it's true or not about friendliness and honesty and all those sorts of things but i think the industrial culture of the northeast was that the north in general was certainly decisive because it wasn't as the economy wasn't as diverse as the south and there was a lot of people who were in the same boat or um you could take county durham in 1900 about um 40 or

50 percent of all the adult males of working age were coal miners. So it was an extraordinary kind of monoculture where everyone had the same experiences, expectations. They were all doing the same sorts of work, whereas the rest of the country, Birmingham was the city of a thousand trades and all that sort of thing, and the South was very diverse. That sense of all being in it together was a big feature of the North and its economy and therefore its identity, I think. Well, on the issue of class and region, we've already touched on football, but we've got a question about another sport from Tides of History. Excellent Twitter account on the history of the

labour party um which asks our perceptions of rugby league and rugby union symbolic of the historical north-south divide league seen as working class industrial but parochial union as middle class white collar and embedded in the establishment um either of you rugby fans i'm not so i don't know anything about rugby at all but um very happy about cricket there's a lot of truth in this isn't it but of course it it misses you know some of rugby union's biggest hotbeds places like gloucester where it's very much working class game so the sort of stereotype sort of does miss something but i guess there's a seed of truth there isn't it dan that rugby

league is seen as sort of rugby league is gritty and authentic and rugby union is kind of will carling yeah i think it's shaking that that slightly poncy reputation off these days isn't it rugby union and compared to rugby league i mean um but it's interesting that the the uh it's what rugby of any code wasn't uniformly popular across the north of England. It's never really taken off in the northeast of England, for example. Why? Well, Harry Pearson, who's a great writer on the northeast non-league scene, I'm paraphrasing his argument slightly, but he more or less made the point that the Geordies didn't need to prove how tough they were.

So there was no need for outlets like rugby, which is fundamentally about men showing off about how hard they are. What Northeastern working class men was an outlet for their artistry and their skill and their athleticism, which is hence why we produce some of the greatest footballers, Beardsley, Gascoigne, Waddle, et cetera, et cetera. That's where they came from. I think it's an interesting theory. And fundamentally, football, I think we can all agree, is just a better and more exciting game than rugby. So it's always good.

Yeah, yeah, it is. But obviously, it's not as exciting as cricket. And cricket, the national sport of England, is, of course, a sport that is played equally in north and south and uh you know if you think about um surrey playing yorkshire that's one of the great sporting pressures 27 people no millions following millions following from from the comfort of their sitting room i think cricket is is is the closest we've got to a genuinely classless game in england because it is the summer game of got to a genuinely classless game in England

because it is the summer game of the coalfields, cricket, without question. And there was a great footage of when Ben Stokes scored the winning runs and it was a big crowd of Newcastle supporters at White Hart Lane watching this on screens. And when he scores the winning runs, the whole crowd go mental. In a way, I don't think they would do for, you know, England rugby union team. And it is, it's whole, it's popularities across the whole of England,

across classes, and the way that neither football nor rugby really can say that. Brilliant. So cricket's the best. I'm glad you're on that. Dominic, have you got another question for us? I do. I want to ask now, somebody asked and I can't. Oh yeah, somebody somebody where is he? Somebody called Taff Alistair Taff, yes

Alistair Taff says, aptly named, he asks about Wales he says, where does Wales fit in the North-South divide or do you just exclude it because it's not England or he says, controversially would you incorporate it into the South? I don't think many people would incorporate it into the South. But do you think

there's a sort of commonality between Wales and the north of England, Dan? I think so. Politically, I think there's a really interesting point that, again, I mentioned James Hawes's book recently, and he's got this useful way of framing this as Outer Britain, which is basically anything north of the Seven Wash sort of line. He's got this line between about 1880 and about 2015. Oh, we'll put it a bit later than that. Up until 2015, Outer Britain coalesced politically against the southeast and up until 2015 that was known as the labour party basically because the labour party's strength

was based on wales northern england and scotland and that was a useful counterbalance against the tory southeast which was pretty impregnably tory from about 1886 onwards. And that kind of shared industrial base led to a shared political culture in the industrial part, certainly of Wales, Northern England and Scotland. Then I guess there's a big north-south divide within Wales as well, isn't there? Yeah. Yes. I mean, I think also what's interesting about Wales is we also haven't talked about East Anglia very much.

And actually one of the kind of the earliest historical documents that we have from Britain, which is Gildas, who's, Dominic, very like you, kind of Daily Mail. Despairing of the nation, ranting about the state of the nation. To Gildas write articles with the headline, The Great Betrayal. Why, oh why, why, oh why have the Romans left? And he does this after the Romans have withdrawn. And he is talking about a divided Britain, but his division is East and West. So he is saying that that's the division.

And it's generally assumed that he's talking about what we would call the Britons and the invading Anglo-Saxons who were coming across the North Sea. But it's not absolutely apparent that that is what he's talking about. It may be that he's expressing a kind of sense of a fundamental divide that existed in maybe the province of Britannia, maybe before Britannia, that is certainly to Gildas as significant as the idea of a North-South divide. But I think that is something that's been lost. I don't think anyone would really think of that now. Although, you know, the East-West division in England is an interesting one, because when in UKIP's heyday, their support tended to be concentrated right on the East Coast, didn't it? Places like Lincolnshire and Essex and places like that,

that kind of North Sea. I went through Newark once, Dan, and they had a UKIP shop, which is not the kind of thing. UKIP banners and badges and UKIP reading material. I mean, obviously, Tom, you'd be very unfamiliar with this, with your metropolitan ways. No, obviously. you kept reading material i mean obviously you know tom you'd be very unfamiliar with this with your metropolitan uh ways no i've obviously uh the people who knew it clearly liked it i mean i mean that's an interesting thing isn't it this the whole with you talk you made down what i

thought was a a really interesting point about you know this sort of idea of the european corridor if you like stretching from you know from london to, I don't know, Milan or wherever. And obviously Europe and our relationship with Europe and the idea of the North-South divide, they're very tightly enmeshed now, aren't they? I mean, I remember very vividly, it's really stuck in my mind a few months after the Brexit referendum referendum i'm talking to some academics and one of them saying i wish the bbc would stop going to the north of england interviewing all these people who don't know anything and i thought there you have you know there in one sentence is the sort of key to so much so many of our current discontents so i was going to follow up on that that one of the things that's happened recently with the growth of kind of virtual communications is that actually that sense of geographically based divisions has slightly become confused because I would I would guess that kind of remain essential is London and university towns, essentially.

I mean, it's those are the absolute hotbeds. It's your triangle tom london oxford cambridge isn't it i mean yeah it it is but it's also canterbury for instance um i guess you know wherever there are large quantities of students um and and so that i think has slightly scrambled the the stereotypical regionally based divisions but i think that's a good point and dan there is an interesting thing, isn't there, which is that Sunderland and the Northeast, maybe more generally, has come to stand for Brexit in people's minds.

So people, I think partly because they announced the first results, but also because of Nissan. So often in sort of Remainer iconography, they point to the Northeast and they say, you know, these benighted dupes who have voted for their own economic self-immolation. And it's the North East that they always sort of that is always produced as exhibit A. Do you think Newcastle voted Remain, didn't it? Exactly, yeah.

When everyone points to the north as the Brexit thing, that's where it was born and its strength was. Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, all the big metropolises of the north were solidly remain. This is where basically most of the middle classes live, or particularly the public sector c sector salaria we might call them tend to be concentrated whereas small town northern england hasn't really seen the benefits of this supposed golden age you know since since the 1970s and it's still pretty disgruntled and

there was a lot of how could they be so ungrateful to sunderland when they voted it was it wasn't it it was i think it was about 60 40 wasn? So I shouldn't assume that it was a consensus position by any means. But still, I think it is the smaller towns, and people from Sunderland won't like me describing Sunderland. I was about to say, TV's Jonathan Wilson, who we... Oh, that'd be hell on. Mr Sunderland, who I used to play football with, he would be outraged by this sort

of talk and and and Dan I mean you know to someone like me the the accents and the identities of Newcastle Sunderland Teesside it's all you know it's all kind of northeast isn't it but obviously the fact that you've got these rivers and even in such a short space regional identities are incredibly strong are they not they are and i think you always look to rivers rivers and railway lines and particularly the watersheds of rivers because i i've i've described the main accent dividing line in the northeast as the beetroot line which is basically follows the watershed dividing line between the rivers tyne and weir if you know the northeast comes out of the coast of whitburn kind of heads diagonally southwest anyone from north of that line would pronounce the word beetroot like i'm pronouncing it i

correctly anyone from the northeast from south of that line would it's slightly elongated draw it'd be more like bait road that that's. It's immediately detectable in North East years. You just ask them to say that word and you can place them north or south of that line. And the history of parochialism, I think, has been a massive feature of English history and not getting on with your neighbours. Yeah, not getting on with your neighbours.

That is what this podcast has been all about. And I think that that is the perfect note on which to end it. I mean, I think it's really interesting that this week's subject, basically it's provoked our biggest digital mailbag yet. So apologies if we didn't get to your question, but there'll be lots more opportunities

to ask us questions. So do please keep tweeting us at TheRestHistory, no is in the Twitter handle, and we'll read out the best of your comments next week. Dan, thanks so much for coming on and being brilliant as ever. Thank you, Tom. Thank you, Dominic.

Thank you, Dan. Thank you. That was wonderful. And a reminder, we're releasing pods twice a week at the moment, Mondays and Thursdays. So toodle-pip. Ta-ra! Gan-canny! days so toodle pip ta-ra gankani thanks for listening to the rest is history for bonus episodes early access ad free listening

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