Exploring Australia 6: Alice Springs

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Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs, Australia

Alice Springs is seriously hot, heading towards 36°C as I stood in the station yard waiting for the most charming bus driver I have ever met to check in his passengers for the shuttle into town.

The drive between hotels crosses several watercourses:  each of them has all the paraphernalia of bridges, cutwaters and culverts, yet consists entirely of sand, dotted with opportunistic grass and trees, indicating that water is present below the river bed.

Alice Springs people tell of sudden flash floods, the most recent in January 2009, when no rain fell in the town but a storm further north sent so much water that houses in the Casino district had to be sandbagged.  When you ask Alice people about the last time it rained, they tend to mention years, like 2000 and 1988, though in fact a few inches falls each year.  Their idea of a drought appears to be anything up to a decade.

Elsewhere in Australia, farmers and local governments contend with the ironies of the climate:  I repeatedly read newspaper reports of farmers in one place rejoicing because their land was replenished by rainstorms while others desperately wondered how many months they could hold out in the drought;  in different parts of the country, authorities battle with flood disasters whilst elsewhere they squabble over apportioning available supplies.

For a town that didn’t exist until the early 1870s and only gained a rail connection in 1929, Alice Springs is extremely proud of its heritage.  There are tours of the Royal Flying Doctor Service [http://www.flyingdoctor.org.au/about-us/visitor-centres/vc-co], tracing the origins and development of a quintessentially Australian enterprise, without which much of the remote regions could not have developed, and the Telegraph Station Historical Reserve [http://www.nt.gov.au/nreta/parks/find/astelegraphstation.html], now a historic monument that shows where, how and why the location was first colonised by white settlers:  the original “spring” is actually a waterhole on the Todd River – Alice was in fact the wife of the postmaster-general of South Australia, Sir Charles Todd (1826-1910).

While I was in Alice Springs I bought Doris Blackwell’s Alice…on the line (apparently co-written with Douglas Lockwood 1965), an account of growing up there between 1899 and 1908 when her father was officer-in-charge of the telegraph station.  For a reader who has travelled to Alice Springs overland in the comfort of The Ghan and experienced the summer heat there, it starkly focuses the imagination on the conditions endured by the men who laid out and built the telegraph line and the families who came to this desolate and beautiful place to work and live.

On a Tailormade Tours half-day tour with an excellent driver/guide called Graeme, I also visited the Alice Springs Reptile Centre [http://www.reptilecentre.com.au], and met a two-foot lizard called Fred who ambles about the place getting under people’s feet, and drove to the top of ANZAC Hill, the vantage point that reveals the geography of the place, located on a narrow gap in the MacDonnell Range through which the railway and the road penetrate.

In a short stay I left interesting sites unseen, the Museum of Central Australia, the Old Ghan Museum & Heritage Railway, which runs a steam train along a surviving stretch of the narrow-gauge original line, and the National Road Transport Hall of Fame next door, housed in a hall big enough to contain a couple of road-trains and much else.

What I wouldn’t have missed, however, was the Outback Ballooning [http://www.outbackballooning.com.au] dawn flight over the outback, hosted by the inestimable pilot Frans and his driver Ron (apparently they swap roles from time to time).  A balloon flight is worth getting up before dawn for:  it offers time to see the night-sky in desert conditions, all the practical activity of inflating the balloon and, later, squashing it back into its five-foot-high carrier-bag, the eerie silence of drifting above the landscape with absolutely no sensation of vertigo, the entertainment of surprising kangaroos and horses going about their morning business and – since the route and destination are dictated by the wind – such points of local interest as the jail and the oil-refinery.

The champagne breakfast afterwards, a regular ballooning custom, was convivial:  the watermelon, chicken legs and pieces of quiche were washed down with champagne laced with apple and guava juice, a sort of antipodean Bucks Fizz, and the conversation warmed up considerably.  I spent the rest of the morning drinking strong coffee.

There’s enough to do in Alice Springs to while away several days:  in future I’d make a point of visiting in winter, when the temperature goes down to a cool 20°C.

 

Exploring Australia 5: The Ghan

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The Ghan

The Ghan

The Ghan backtracks over the route that brings the Indian Pacific into Adelaide, including the section from Tarcoola that the Indian Pacific traverses in darkness.  For someone who watches train-journeys like other people watch movies, this is like watching the last bit of DVD that you missed when you fell asleep – but backwards.

This is the great outback railway, originally opened between Oodnadatta and Alice Springs in 1929, along an alignment that proved prone to flash floods which regularly washed the track away.  Apparently the surveyors never saw any rain in all the time they were planning the route;  the rain only came when it was too late to divert the line.  The idea was always to link Adelaide with Darwin, but in the 1930s this made no financial sense.

In 1980 a new standard-gauge flood-free western route replaced the old narrow-gauge Ghan as far as Alice Springs, and the long-intended link to Darwin, via Katherine, was opened in 2004.

Heading northwards from the suburbs and satellite towns of Adelaide, the line runs through a huge plain of agricultural land – market gardens, crops, the occasional herd of cows, racehorses with coats on to protect them from the sun.  At some point in the past, someone cleared all this acreage to make agriculture possible, probably with no more than horse- and man-power at their disposal.

As the afternoon wore on, and the train glided effortlessly across mile after empty mile, I was aware that this vast landscape was initially explored by nineteenth-century pioneers on horseback, working out what there was and where it led from the vantage point of a saddle.  Before them, this land was the home of the Aboriginal peoples who, according to a self-serving 1938 writer quoted by Bill Bryson, “can withstand all the reverses of nature, fiendish droughts and sweeping floods, horrors of thirst and enforced starvation – but…cannot withstand civilisation.”  The conflict between the two ways of life lies heavy still on the national consciousness.

I’ve now learned, having travelled on both the Indian Pacific and The Ghan, that the “welcome reception” is a compromise between the attraction of a free glass of champagne and the agony of a badly-handled radio mike with feedback.  Throughout the journey, whoever was in control of the on-board PA system wasn’t:  announcements and music cut in and out without warning and on at least one occasion photographers were told the train would slow down for a landmark in ten minutes’ time and it didn’t – leaving people gazing through windows bemused as whatever it was flashed by.

On this journey, though, the bonus was that I happened to meet a couple, Gabriel and Cornelia, with whom I struck up instant rapport.  They were in the midst of moving house between Melbourne and Darwin, using The Ghan as the easiest way of transporting a car full of luggage while the furniture took a slower route by road.  We share an interest in Victorian history (in the chronological, more than just the Australian geographical sense) and photography, and Gabriel promised me a list of things to see in Melbourne, a privilege I couldn’t otherwise have hoped for.

There was a brief stop at Port Augusta, where the 1980 Ghan route diverges from the original, ill-advised 1929 alignment.  This prompts me to plan to return some day, to ride the Pichi-Richi Railroad [http://www.prr.org.au/cms/index.php], which offers a 1¾-hour ride, often steam-hauled, along the original route in vintage 3ft 6in-gauge rolling-stock.

(Footage of the final journey on the narrow-gauge Ghan can be found at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVIIJSxSCX8 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PztgicynYVw.  A more extensive Channel 7 documentary of 1978 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JU2Jb_f5XCE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBoWBObzkJE, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P94w94BdCUc and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaB0D2Q7How.)

The Pichi-Richi people take the view that the name ‘Ghan’ derives from a passenger on the inaugural sleeping-car run in 1929 who, at an evening stop, rushed on to the platform to place his prayer-mat in the direction of Mecca:  the Australian crew assumed, it is said, that he was an Afghan.  The Great Southern Railway Company prefers to ascribe the name to the Afghan camel-trains which the railway replaced.

Port Augusta is the “gateway to the Outback”:  from there on, the landscape is as arid as the Nullarbor Plain, but more varied.  There are gentle contours, distant mountain ridges, a vast snowy white salt lake, river beds – one, the Finke River, a three-hundred-yard wide channel of bone-dry sand.  The landmarks are minor and far between – a stone marker for the border between South Australia and the Northern Territory, a statue, the Iron Man, commemorating the laying of the millionth sleeper on the 1980 route and, eventually, the MacDonnell Range which marks the location of Alice Springs.

Exploring Australia 4: Adelaide

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A Day Out (The Pigs) – Horatio, Truffles, Augusta and Oliver – by Marguerite Derricourt (1999), Rundle Mall, Adelaide, Australia

A Day Out (The Pigs) – Horatio, Truffles, Augusta and Oliver – by Marguerite Derricourt
(1999), Rundle Mall, Adelaide, Australia

The city of Adelaide is really simple to navigate.  Its original surveyor, Colonel William Light, oriented the gridiron street-plan exactly to the compass points.  The periphery of this area consists of four streets, North, East, South and West Terraces, which face the East, South and West Parklands and the Torrens River.  The axial north-south street is King William Street (that is, William IV, after whose consort the city is named).  In the exact centre is Victoria Square.

In fact, most of the major tourist sites sit on the river-side of North Parade, the Old Parliament House, Parliament House, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the South Australian Museum, the Migration Museum, Ayers Historic House (home of an early prime minister of South Australia) and the Botanical Gardens.  There’s enough there to occupy a visitor for a day or two.

Another attraction is to take the tram to Glenelg, Adelaide’s beach resort.  This is a second-generation Light Rapid Transit which glides effortlessly through the Australian suburban dream.  A day rider ticket (A$8.30 – just over £5) gives unlimited travel until midnight on all tram, bus and rail services in the city, though in fact anyone needing only to ride between South Terrace and North Terrace in central Adelaide can travel on the tram for free.  Easy.

At the Glenelg end of the line a vintage first-generation tram provides free rides up and down in between the regular services.  Alongside the beach, the shops and the numerous opportunities for food and drink, there is a superb museum in the Town Hall, the Bay Discovery Centre, covering the story of the establishment of the state of South Australia by the first governor, Captain John Hindmarsh, at what was then called Holdfast Bay in 1836, and the subsequent growth of Glenelg as a resort through to the present day.

I spent much of a day in Port Adelaide, where I was underwhelmed by the Maritime Museum, simply because in a small space it seemed to be trying to do too much.  Jamming in the stories of the founding of the port, the shipping, the immigrants, the growth of Port Adelaide as a community, the industrial conflicts, the natural history and something for the children deserved at least as much space as, say the Maritime Museum in Liverpool’s Albert Dock.

In contrast, the South Australian National Railway Museum fills two great hangars and a lengthy goods shed with gigantic locomotives and other rolling stock, clearly explains the engineering in layman’s terms and narrates the epic sagas of building lines in a medley of gauges from South Australia across the continent and then, mostly, rebuilding them in standard gauge so that people could travel from Sydney to Perth or Adelaide to Darwin without repeatedly changing trains or climbing on board a camel train.

The locomotives are clearly from different stables:  many were Australian built, and others carry builder’s plates from Beyer Peacock & Co Ltd of Gorton, Manchester, Metropolitan Vickers of Manchester and Sheffield and the Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, USA.  One loco is described as based on a British Great Western design, and – sure enough – it has a copper-capped chimney.

This museum encourages people to climb on some of the locomotive footplates and to step into many of the railway carriages:  these range from the luxurious to the penitential, many without any kind of lavatory provision.  The collection includes some of the rolling stock of the Tea & Sugar train which until 1997 supplied settlements along the Nullabor Plain, complete with a bank and a butcher’s van.

In the heat of Port Adelaide in high summer, I was particularly grateful to Eric and Joan Kirkham, friends of an old friend, for taking me to lunch at the Port Dock Brewery Hotel [www.portdockbreweryhotel.com.au], where we were given an informative tour of the brewery by the 28-year-old brewery manager, a man I admired for drinking Guinness the last thing before he left Australia, drinking Guinness again in the half-hour he spent in England before arriving in Ireland to drink Guinness again, proving to himself that it really does taste different in the three countries.  We drank refreshing alcoholic ginger beer, and ate kangaroo steaks with a wild plum reduction and Asian vegetables – in effect, green leaves in runny red jam.

In the city-centre, round the corner from Victoria Square, I stumbled upon Stanley’s, billed as “the great Aussie Fish Caf [sic]”, http://stanleysfishcaf.com.au/1901.html, where I ate great Aussie fish – a platter of whiting, garfish and barramundi, running from sweet to fishy in that order.  Here is all God’s plenty from the southern seas – bugs (giant prawns, served with garlic, chilli or curry sauce, or in their shells topped with garlic butter and bacon), snapper and calamari.

Another night, across the road from Stanley’s on Gouger Street, I ate at A Taste of Asia [no website, apparently, but e-mails to tasteofspice@adam.com.au], which combines Malaysian food with New Orleans jazz discreetly played in the background.  I tucked into crispy wontons and chilli roast duck, while noting an encouraging proportion of Asian customers, many of whom knew the proprietor and staff and were clearly regulars.  It’s always worth eating where the regulars are of the same ethnicity as the food.

 

St Mary’s at the top of the steps

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St Mary's Church, Whitby, North Yorkshire

St Mary’s Church, Whitby, North Yorkshire

St Mary’s Parish Church on the clifftop above Whitby, North Yorkshire, near to the prominent Abbey ruins, is one of the great architectural surprises of the north of England.  Its exterior is an odd jumble, basically a twelfth-century Norman church with wooden outside staircases, Georgian sash windows and dormers in the roof.

Its interior is a precious survival – one of the very few English churches left virtually untouched by the Victorians – a preposterous clutter of galleries and box pews, with a three-decker pulpit and a no-doubt much-needed iron stove.  Most outrageous of all, the Cholmley family pew is a balcony, spanning the chancel arch where the rood screen would be:  the eighteenth-century Cholmleys sat with their backs to the altar in order to attend to the sermon in a place of worship that eschewed ritual and functioned instead as a preaching-box.

Sir Nikolaus Pevsner’s description is unusually breathless:  “…when one enters it, hard to believe and impossible not to love…one of the churches one is fondest of in the whole England.  Whom do we owe the infinite gratitude of never having gutted it?”

Just as Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the South Bank in London offers an experience of Elizabethan theatre unlike any other in Britain, so St Mary’s Whitby harks back to a form of worship which Parson Woodforde, celebrating communion three or four times a year, would easily recognise.

Pevsner also realised that the proper way to approach St Mary’s is up the 199 steps from the harbour.  There are ways of reaching the church and the Abbey on wheels, but the trek up the steps – reflecting on the way what it must have been like to carry a coffin up the unforgiving gradient – is a part of the unique experience.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Exploring Australia 3: The Nullarbor Plain

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Nullarbor Plain, Australia

Nullarbor Plain, Australia

Sleeping in Gold Class on the Indian Pacific is possible, but not easy:  the compartment is extremely cramped and, as I found last time I slept on a train, lying down magnifies bumps and twists in the track that are innocuous when sitting or standing.

It was very satisfying, however, to wake up to the sight of the Nullarbor Plain at dawn.  (Nullarbor is from the Latin – literally, no trees.)  The train ambled down the dead-straight track, with various pauses, until late in the afternoon when the train-captain solemnly announced that there was a curve ahead.  The railway itself provides incidents – occasional sidings with loading-bays for sheep, a limestone quarry, various passing-loops in which the Indian Pacific waits for the interminable container freight-trains heading in the opposite direction.

The Nullabor Plain is not monotonous, though it could be hypnotic.  Glancing up from a book every few minutes, it’s a surprise to find the landscape constantly varying – more or less vegetation, different colours, different skies.  The only sign of animal life the whole day was a herd of feral camels.  We never once saw a house, except when we stopped for refuelling at Cook (population:  5), once a thriving rail centre housing loco drivers, track-maintenance crews and all the necessary support including a school and a hospital.  When the line was relaid with termite-proof concrete sleepers the need for the community vanished, virtually overnight, and most of the remaining buildings are derelict.

Passengers are encouraged to leave the train for half an hour or more while the water-tanks are replenished, and it’s a pity that Cook doesn’t have more to offer.  A visitor-centre could interpret the Nullabor, tell the story of the building and operation of the railway and illustrate the lives of the railway workers and the sudden demise of the working community in 1997, and there are all kinds of commercial opportunities for a place where a couple of hundred fairly affluent people drop by four times a week with nothing to do but spend money.

As it is, there’s a tiny souvenir shop, where postcards are A$1.50 [nearly £1] each, and a set of lavatories.  The “ghost town” consists of very few unspectacular buildings and an expanse of vacant plots.  There’s nowhere to sit and not much to do.  At present, Cook is a missed opportunity.  That’s the most remarkable thing about the place.

In fact, I was eager to get back on the train.  On the Indian Pacific there’s every possible comfort, the incredibly hard-working, multi-talented staff are friendly, and you get what you pay for.  Why should I spend money on a can of Coke in a dump that’s dedicated to ripping people off?

 

Exploring Australia 2: The Indian Pacific

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The Indian Pacific: lounge car (2009)

The Indian Pacific: lounge car (2009)

The Indian Pacific is a serious train [http://www.gsr.com.au/site/indian_pacific.jsp].  For me, it’s the only way to see how big Australia is.  Starting from Perth at midday Wednesday, it takes nearly two days – two lunches, two dinners, two nights’ sleep, and one-and-a-half breakfasts (the latter a doggy-bag before disembarking at Adelaide).  For the even more serious-minded, it continues via Broken Hill to Sydney.

The line from Perth to Adelaide, or more specifically the section from Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta, has major historical significance:  its construction clinched the deal by which Western Australia agreed to join the Commonwealth of Australia in 1900.  Without that deal Western Australia would have remained for the time being a British colony and would, very probably, have achieved independence like New Zealand.  (There was a point in the 1890s when New Zealand considered amalgamating with Australia, but the New Zealanders thought better of it.)

The statistics are awesome – 4,325 kilometres (2,687½ miles) for the full run from Perth to Sydney, crossing two time-zones, including the longest stretch of straight railway track (478 kilometres; 297 miles) in the world.

The train itself is awesome – 29 vehicles, including power cars, crew cars, baggage car and motor-rail vehicles, 771 metres (843 yards) long, 1,375 tonnes, drawn by one extremely powerful diesel locomotive – crawling its way across the endless landscape, much of the time on single track, pausing at passing places to make room for enormous freight trains.

It’s not cheap.  The basic version is Red Service – coach-style seating, by the look of it not dissimilar to basic Amtrak, in which people sit for days on end.  You see Red passengers boarding very sensibly carrying pillows.  There are also Red sleeper compartments.  The next version up is Gold Service – your own compartment, loos and showers at the end of the carriage, a comfortable bar car and a quite opulent dining car with all meals included.  There is something called Platinum Service, newly introduced with spare vehicles from the Ghan route:  apparently, the compartments are more roomy, with en-suite facilities.

On board Gold class, the single compartment is, rather like the interior of an airliner, a masterpiece of compact planning.  Even the wash-basin folds away.  The wardrobe, such as it is, is all of three inches wide;  the bed, of course, folds down;  the window-blinds sit within the double-glazed unit, controlled by an ingenious winding handle.  An odd consequence of the layout of the single compartments is that the central corridor is literally sinuous:  it curves from side to side.  Other coaches with double-bunk compartments have the customary layout with the corridor down one side.

There can be no better way to appreciate the vastness and emptiness of this great continent, without going to the lengths of driving for days on end, as Bill Bryson did in researching his excellent book, Down Under (2000).

I sat for the first hour or so, watching the route out through suburban Greater Perth, leaving behind the electric commuter trains, heading into the hills.  I chose to watch our way through an anonymous valley, with an accommodation road snaking alongside the track:  it was a good twenty minutes before I spotted any sign of life – a track-maintenance crew with their pick-up miles from anywhere.

Through a lunchtime glass of beer, an introductory presentation with a free glass of champagne, an interminable wait for second sitting and lunch itself, the landscape gradually opened out, became virtual desert, then became more verdant, hour after hour, mile upon mile.

As the first afternoon wore on, the train occasionally passed vast grain silos, then pastures with surprisingly purposeful-looking sheep, then monotonous low scrub, then patchy woodland.  For anyone used to watching rail journeys in Europe, this is indeed slow-motion travelling, despite the respectable speed of the train.  For hours on end there are no valleys, so no bridges or tunnels, hardly a cutting and never a viaduct.  Where there were cuttings, the rock varied in colour from pale grey to gunmetal to rust;  elsewhere the soil might be mustard or ochre.  That’s all there was to look at:  it was oddly restful.

Sometimes the trackside dirt road was punctuated by a gate, with the name of a ranch (which the Australians call a station) hidden beyond the horizon.  The lifestyle out here is a world away from the experience of most Europeans.  In all but the remotest corners of the British Isles, it’s a matter of choice not to go window-shopping, not to go the theatre or a big-league sporting event;  in populous regions education, health services, social life, variety is effectively on tap.  Living in rural Australia involves a direct reversal of these expectations.  These people must have particular qualities of self-reliance, initiative, stamina and determination.

The evening ended, after a convivial dinner, with a ludicrous but informative tour of the gold-mining twin towns of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in the middle of the night, peering at nineteenth-century hotels and public buildings, viewing the huge floodlit Superpit on the outskirts of town and examining the remaining, innocuous-looking brothels on Hay Street.  The coach-driver was straight from Central Casting – began each stage of the journey with the expression “Okey-doke”, and all of his sentences? Went up at the end? Like they do in Australia?  He knew what he was talking about, and went out of his way to make sure we saw as much as we could in the circumstances.

And so, as they say, to bed…

 

Exploring Australia 1: Perth & Fremantle

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St Mary's Roman Catholic Cathedral, Perth, Australia

St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, Perth, Australia

The first and most striking quality of life in Western Australia is the light.  I did see overcast skies for an hour or two, but for most of the daylight hours Perth glows with sunlight and the blueness of the sky.  It’s a place to be cheerful, full of cheerful people.

Perth is one of the remotest cities on earth:  it’s actually closer to Singapore than it is to Sydney.  Its population is 1.6 million, and it has the confident air of a community that looks after itself.  To arrive first in Australia, as I have, in this place feels a little like landing in the UK in Norwich, but without the crazy road system and all the people rushing about.  Perth people take their time without being lazy:  they’re comfortable and courteous and personable.  I sat in a coffee shop near two uniformed firefighters sitting by the open window taking their break:  in perhaps twenty minutes three passers-by greeted them and shook hands.

Getting acquainted with Perth is easy:  there are three free bus loops, called CATs [Central Area Transit].  After an hour or two of spinning around the streets I was dizzy and disorientated.  At one point I thought I’d seen two cathedrals, and only when I got off the bus did I realise that it was the same building – St Mary’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, initially built in straightforward Gothic in the 1860s, and brought up to date in a post-Modern variant design in 2006-9.  (I missed the Anglican cathedral, St George’s, which is more modest, tucked down a side-street near to the river-front.)

At the river front ferry-terminal there’s a strange sculptural building – a combination of sails and a spire – that turned out to be, of all things, a homage to clocks and bells in general, and English change-ringing in particular.  The Swan Bell Tower houses a peal of eighteen bells, twelve of which are a donation from St Martin-in-the-Fields, London, a 26-bell carillon and the Joyce of Whitchurch clock from Ascot Racecourse.  I learnt more about change-ringing from the explanatory video than I’d ever known in England.

Rather than pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time swanning down the Swan River to Fremantle on a ferry, I caught the train, which cost A$3.40 [slightly over £2] and took twenty minutes each way.  Fremantle, which the locals call ‘Freo’, is entertaining, full of bars and people shouting loudly in a genial manner – rather like Great Yarmouth.  Its main street is awash with fine nineteenth-century facades and feels like the set for a Gold Rush western, and there is a superlative maritime museum that clearly needs half a day at least.  The harbour cafés celebrate fish and chips.

Fremantle has its own CAT free bus-service.  The one I caught also had two Aboriginal guys, one entertaining the passengers with a digeridoo.  A digeridoo on a single-deck bus is impossible to ignore.

I must return to both places.  Between them, they deserve a week.  The only problem is, they’re so far away from everywhere.  Which is part of their charm.

Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Gothic Down Under:  English architecture in the Antipodes explores the influence of British architects, and British-trained architects, on the design of churches and other buildings in the emerging communities of Australia and New Zealand.  For details, please click here.

 

Tea at the Raffles Hotel

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Raffles Hotel, Singapore

Raffles Hotel, Singapore

It’s worth taking time to have afternoon tea at the Raffles Hotel [http://www.raffles.com/EN_RA/Property/RHS], Singapore’s most venerable pit-stop.

Afternoon tea here is not just a snack, or even a meal, but an occasion, with all that you might expect from a top-of-the-range internationally famous institution – elegant classical decor, white tablecloth, cake-stand, napkin carefully placed on your lap not once but every time you leave the table, and a harpist.  Lots of attentive waiters and waitresses, all of them clued in to the fact that I’d ordered Assam tea, which came in a dainty silver pot that poured slowly and with dignity.  Because I was on my own, someone brought me a magazine, unsolicited, in case I got bored.

The cake stand was, I was told, simply to start things off.  The buffet included hot dishes, of which the most remarkable was a savoury carrot cake with dried squid.  (I can remember being astonished, around 1985, to discover that carrots will make a sweet cake, to which I was introduced by a Canadian lady called Cathy;  here the concept goes full circle.)

It’s important in these circumstances to pace oneself:  the sandwiches (inevitably with the crusts cut off) are moreish;  the cakes even moreish, and a man comes round with a basket of scones at regular intervals.  I lost track of the number of small pots of Assam that came my way as I gazed at the elaborate cast-iron Victorian fountain outside the window.

It was one of the afternoon teas of a lifetime:  the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town offers more variety;  in my limited experience the Old Swan Hotel in Harrogate comes nearest to the Raffles.

This is the sort of life-enhancing moment for which you simply don’t ask the price.  When the bill came it was S$57.65, which my credit-card company translated as £26.29.

A bargain.

 

Weekend in Singapore

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St Andrew's Cathedral, Singapore

St Andrew’s Cathedral, Singapore

There’s something reassuring for a Brit about landing in a former British colony like Singapore.  Somehow, the footprint remains almost half a century after the Union Flag came down.

Not only are there evocatively British street names (Clive, Kitchener, Mountbatten), but the traffic drives on the left, the car-registration plates are distinctly British in shape and dimensions (mostly with the white characters on a black background that died out in the UK in the 1970s) and – most useful and endearing of all – the power-sockets are British square-pin standard, so there’s no need to fiddle about with adaptors.

It’s fascinating to discover, patched in between the mainly undistinguished post-war buildings, vestiges of the colonial past.

St Andrew’s Cathedral, for example, is an immediately recognisable, rather blocky Commissioner’s-Gothic Anglican church with a squat English-cathedral spire, painted in brilliant white, designed by Colonel Ronald MacPherson, a military engineer who could clearly turn his hand to any constructional task, and built by Indian convict labourers.  Opened in 1862, it became a cathedral in 1870.  Its aisles are dotted with generous memorials to men, women and children who spent their lives in this sticky, remote and dangerous place:  some died here;  others died back in Britain but were memorialised by the colonial community.

Rather more surprising is the Armenian Apostolic Church of St Gregory the Illuminator, a compact cruciform classical design of 1835, its original onion dome replaced by a gothic spire that sits incongruously on top of a pediment.  Its churchyard is littered with modern statuary, and the church itself is a compact circular space, with doorways open to breezes on three sides.

Elsewhere, British eyes lock on to the 1930s central fire-station which would look entirely at home in Birmingham and a Masonic hall, bristling with compass-and-square symbols.  A half-day city tour showed me that there’s much more to see than can fit into a jet-lagged weekend – every possible kind of place of worship, a carefully conserved Chinatown and a thriving Little India, all reflecting the polyglot energy of the place.

Singapore is a very comfortable place to be, if you can cope with the climate.  The only delinquency I saw was economic – touts trying to lure people into shops.  The policemen smile and greet visitors:  the only time I saw a policeman act aggressively was when a woman tried to cross the road instead of using an underpass.  The police apparently hand out tickets for good driving, with rewards a bit like air miles.

Posters exhort Singapore citizens to promote “graciousness”, and there are notices at the top of escalators reminding people to use the escalator “correctly”.  The Straits Times has the language and attitudes of a 1960s grammar-school magazine.

When I walked into the headquarters of the Singapore Cricket Club at eight o’clock on Sunday morning and asked, as is my habit, for a restroom, I was treated promptly and courteously – and it was an exceptionally fine restroom.  I wonder if I’d get away with that at Lord’s or the Oval.  I hope so.

Singaporeans are notoriously picky about litter:  in the hotel, a magnificent lady reception greeter in a split skirt and full make-up picked up specks from the carpet and fetched a cloth to wipe smears from the marble floor;  I even saw two men in a small boat sweeping the harbour.

And, they disapprove of tipping.

 

Muddle and Get Nowhere

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Melton Constable, Norfolk bus shelter

Melton Constable, Norfolk bus shelter

The holidaymaker’s experience of the Norfolk seaside was, until the late 1950s, bound up with the eccentricities of travelling on the former Midland & Great Northern Joint Railway, one of the less likely networks to emerge from the idiosyncracies of Victorian railway competition.

The East Anglian “main line” network was the Great Eastern Railway, fanning out from London Liverpool Street station to the major towns and cities – King’s Lynn, Hunstanton, Cromer, Norwich, Great Yarmouth, Lowestoft, Ipswich and Southend.

Two of the Great Eastern’s competitors in the national network, the Midland and the Great Northern, recognised that by merging their interests in a string of cross-country lines into and across East Anglia they could reach ports and holiday resorts to capture freight and passenger flows into the Midlands and the North that the Great Eastern simply couldn’t deal with.  They could also provide competing services into London’s King’s Cross, though that route was never as fast as the Great Eastern’s more direct routes.

In 1893 the two companies set up a joint board, with equally shared rights and responsibilities, to manage their East Anglian operations.  Over the following sixty-odd years, the M&GNJR struggled against two particular difficulties – an excess of single-track mileage (over 60%) and heavy gradients across the grain of the landscape.  Normal services were laborious, and holiday specials spent much of their travelling time waiting in loops for approaching trains to clear the route – hence the popular nickname, “Muddle and Get Nowhere”.

The line was distinctive as well as eccentric, and came to be much loved by enthusiasts.  Its locomotives wore a golden ochre livery and its carriages were either built of teak or painted to look as if they were.  Almost the whole of the M&GNJR network, nearly 200 miles, closed down peremptorily in 1959, years before Beeching.

The line from Norwich to Cromer and Sheringham remains operational, and the North Norfolk Railway runs preserved steam and diesel trains between Sheringham and Holt [http://www.nnrailway.co.uk].  Otherwise, much of this extensive railway has completely disappeared – returned to farmland or woodland.

The track between Cromer and Holt is all that remains of the M&GNJR network:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WIYUJd4q80.

Melton Constable, hub of the system with a four-way junction, workshops and workers’ housing, is no longer recognisable as the “Crewe of North Norfolk”.

A couple of summers ago my friend Terry, who knows a thing or two about railways and lives near Holt, spent a baffling morning showing me what little remains of railway archaeology in Melton Constable.

The most impressive relic is the bus shelter – not up to Ukrainian standards [see http://www.brama.com/travel/busstop.html] – but very dignified, with monogrammed ironwork from the station awning, painted in golden ochre.

The monogram in the ironwork clearly has the letters CNR – Central Norfolk Railway – a company that never actually operated:  the spandrels were cast in anticipation and reused by its successor, the Eastern & Midland Railway, itself an amalgamation formed in 1883.