Sunday at Bill's Mother's: 21st April 2024
Urban rats and rural rangers. The new book by Joe Shute and a celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Peak District's ranger service.
Morning. A piece about our most maligned mammal today, following an interview with local nature writer Joe Shute, whose view of the urban rat is a lot more favourable than most. And after visiting Edale to follow in the footsteps of the Peak District’s first rangers 70 years ago, I have the recollections of one of the early national park rangers, the inspirational Gordon Miller, who I met several times over his long years helping to look after the Peak District.
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Rangering Remembered
Last week I caught the train to Edale to meet rangers celebrating the 70th anniversary of the Peak District national park’s ranger service. Rangers young and veteran said the job had changed over the years, but was in some ways just the same, looking after the national park’s residents, visitors and wildlife.
I’ll have a longer post about what they told me in the next week or two, but for today I’m remembering a legendary ranger from Edale who died last year, who was on the minds of many in Edale: Gordon Miller, or Gordon the Warden, who was also the founder of the International Ranger Federation, representing park rangers from all over the world.
”I must have been a terrible person in my early days," Gordon Miller told me, when I first met him 25 years ago. By then he’d already been working or volunteering as a ranger in the Peak District national park for over 40 years.
I was shadowing him one Sunday, as he wandered around in his bush hat, like Crocodile Dundee, smiling and cheerfully greeting everyone he met. "You have to be approachable," he explained. "It's important to show a friendly face."
The job of the Peak Park Ranger, or Warden as they were then called, was very different when Gordon first worked for the service in the 1950s and 1960s, following a meeting at the age of 15 with England's legendary first National Park Warden, Tom Tomlinson, in the Peak District.
"They were pioneering days, and we felt we had to enforce the byelaws, so I spent a lot of my time telling people you couldn't do this or that. Over the years you learn there are better ways of doing things."
After working in the Peak Park as a teenage volunteer, Gordon joined the Inland Revenue in London, commuting to his volunteering post in the Peak District over the weekend.
"Going up and down the motorway, I realised I was much happier driving north than driving south. A job came up and I got it, and it was the best thing I ever did. It was half the pay of the civil service, but I soon realised there was more to life than money."
On the day we met, we visited a few car parks to chat to tourists, had a quick word about wildflowers with a visiting botanist, then hurtled off to Mam Tor after an emergency call from the radio operator in Edale: one of Gordon's jobs was to act as controller during mountain rescue incidents.
After finding the injured hang glider, Gordon led the team down to the waiting ambulance, then a second emergency call and two vague location reports came in about a woman who'd fallen and sustained a head injury.
I then witnessed two rescue vans, several police officers and Gordon spending ten minutes driving round the summit of Mam Tor and Blue John Cavern car park, talking to each other on various radio frequencies - often as they sped past in opposite directions - as they tried to work out where the woman was and how best to get her off the hillside. (Imagine the fancy dress scene in the first Pink Panther movie, as Peter Sellers tries to direct his motorised officers towards an elusive jewel thief).
An Edale Mountain Rescue Team runner eventually found the woman (who was shaken, but not badly injured), and the rescuers made their way to the pick up point at Woodseats Farm, after Gordon had radioed to warn the farmer. "You have to be a diplomat in this job," he explained.
As the founder (and in 1999, the president) of the International Rangers Federation, which represents rangers from 35 different countries, Gordon was also involved in educational and training work on a global scale.
"Despite the differences in our countries, there is a lot of commonality in our work," he told me.
One of Gordon's final tasks of the day was responding to emails arriving in his Edale cottage. That Sunday, after writing to a ranger on an Icelandic glacier, he was also waiting to hear from a ranger in South Africa, who lived in a small shack surrounded by animals and a fence to keep the lions out.
On his visits to Africa, Gordon met widows of rangers left destitute after their husbands had been shot by poachers (sometimes linked to terrorist groups). The IRF’s charity arm ‘The Thin Green Line Foundation’ was set up to ‘protect nature’s protectors’ by giving financial support to rangers’ widows.
“Sometimes it’s as simple as buying a sewing machine or some cloth so the widow can support herself and her children,” said Gordon.
He added that European rangers often learn from the simple methods used by resourceful rangers in poorer parts of the world: planting bushes of chilli peppers deters migrating elephants from storming through African villages, for example, and swards of tall tea plants around villages keep away marauding baboons, who like to see where they’re going.
Here in the Peak District planting simple sphagnum moss on eroded moors rewets the ground, improves the chances for wildlife and helps prevent flooding.
Times have changed since the days when rangers could only signal their colleagues using flares, Gordon told me, taking me through the advent of radio communication, to his evening email contact with rangers throughout the world.
The next step could be the use of mobile laptop computers enabling rangers to key in to information and contact databases from the top of Kinder or anywhere they might happen to be, he said excitedly. (This was seven years before the first iPhone, remember).
But the Peak Park Rangers are still the eyes and ears of the national park, he said, before getting back to his cottage to hear the news from the plains of Africa.
Rat Rethink
If you met a shrew, or a vole, or maybe even a wood mouse, you’d probably take an interest. Maybe you’d try and photograph it as it scurried past. But what about a rat? Would you chance a close up photograph, or run away screaming?
Sheffield author Joe Shute is interested in this strange attitude we seem to have about just two species of British mammal: the Brown, or much rarer, Black Rat. His book: Stowaway: The Disreputable Exploits Of The Rat is out now, published by Bloomsbury.
Despite his misgivings born of a childhood fear of rats, Joe and his wife Liz bought a couple of fancy rats as pets during lockdown, and soon realised, once Ermintrude and Molly began their nocturnal skitterings, why the wild feral versions lead to fearful nights for householders worrying of ghosts and poltergeists.
Joe’s giving a free talk about his book on Wednesday at the central library and I’ll have a longer post from my interview with him for full subscribers later this week. But today I have a brief extract from the book, that might help illustrate one of Joe’s main conclusions, that rats and humans are inextricably linked.
If left alone, and with access to food, urban rat populations will remain entrenched in the same locations for many generations, if not centuries. Recent archaeological surveys of the ruins of Sheffield Castle (demolished during the English Civil War in 1646 as a royalist stronghold) found among the fragments of medieval pottery and floor tiles and the bones of livestock slaughtered on site, the remains of several black rats.
Those rats were in all likelihood residents of the slaughterhouses and market stalls that for 700 years filled the streets surrounding the castle. In 1296, Edward I granted a charter to the Lord of the Manor of Sheffield, Thomas de Furnival, permitting a weekly Tuesday market to be held near the site and a three-day fair once a year. From then until the closure of Sheffield's castle market in 2013, the location was the centre of urban food trade - and a rat bazaar.
One writer in 1861 described the scene at the riverside slaughterhouses erected alongside the Don and Sheaf, where carcasses and any cuts of meat that could not be sold were dumped into the water at the end of each working day. The article, from The Builder (a nineteenth-century architectural journal, which often carried harrowing reports from northern industrial cities intended to shock more genteel audiences), labelled the area around Castlegate ‘a district of slaughter sheds for nearly the whole of Sheffield', where the stench of tripe boiling houses hung over excrement flushed from the tenements above and the 'gory slime' of livestock carcasses.
The author described how 'pail-fulls of blood soak down on the surface of the ground and into it through the wretched paving and percolate from slaughter house to slaughter house until the blood oozingly finds its way - together with faecal matter into the river'.
Outside of trading hours, the streets around the area were some of the city's most prominent nightspots, roaring with drunks, music halls, prize fights and betting rings. Several nearby pubs housed their own rat pits in which a dog was released and people would place bets on how many rodents it could kill.
One large rat pit at the Blue Bell Inn on Silver Street was operated by a local character called Fagey Joe, who boasted that his pitull, Bullet, once killed 200 rats in 13 minutes The landlord of another pub, the Clown and Monkey on Paradise Square, ended up in court accused by a neighbour of deliberately encouraging rats to breed in his basement to ensure a steady supply, leading to the nearby cellars being overrun. Sometimes the bets would take place in the open air in the marketplace itself, with bystanders cheering on the dogs as they mauled whichever rats they could hunt between the stalls.
Once the insalubrious centre of life in Sheffield, ever since l moved here in 2017, Castlegate has stood empty. By then the market had moved to a new indoor location on the other side of the city centre and the old stalls had been demolished. It is a part of the city that has suffered in recent years with shops closing and stalled redevelopment, the formerly bustling marketplace left to the rats who still feed on the takeaway bins nearby.
As the redevelopment of Castlegate began, Joe described seeing dead rats on cycle paths, and lost rats wandering the streets of central Sheffield, after the homes they and their ancestors inhabited for centuries were dug out ready for our new tourist industry near the site of those old slaughterhouses.
Stowaway is a fascinating exploration of our relationship with rats all around the world. He believes our own western attitudes stem from the Tudor vermin laws, when the open season on rats began after they’d been decreed as a threat to the growing nation’s food production. Not so long ago, Boy Scouts and the Women’s Land Army were sent out to destroy the nation’s rats, and even now the law says if you happen to catch a rat, it must die - taking the cute furry creature looking up at you with plaintive eyes to release it in the countryside a few miles away is illegal.
But some eastern cultures tolerate the rat, Joe says in China rats are seen as cunning and mischievous rather than a threat to the nation’s prosperity, and citizens of India will often ignore and tolerate daytime rats moving across the city streets to new homes after flooding.
Rats are hugely successful and intelligent generalists, able to eat almost anything, to climb, burrow and make their homes anywhere, and over the centuries have learned to live alongside us and exploit human society, in good and bad ways. They will eat through a farm’s grain store, but they’ll also gnaw away at fatbergs to help clear our sewers. Although no-one knows how many there are in the UK, the idea you’re never more than a few metres from one is unlikely to be true. And, Joe notes, they provide food for all manner of animals we rate a lot higher, such as Grey Herons, Sparrowhawks, Foxes and Barn Owls.
As the descendants of our castle rats found new homes, Joe spotted a planter near some city centre flats which appeared to be full of rat burrows. So he went back to watch one night:
While I am waiting in the courtyard, a resident comes out and lights up a cigarette and we start talking. She is called Maria and is visiting Sheffield from her native Greece, staying with her seven-month-pregnant daughter until the baby is born. She says the rats have recently become a lot more active in the courtyard. When she is outside smoking at night she watches them run across the ledges of the ground-floor windows and into the basement of the building. 'I don't mind them because it is just nature, I guess,’ she tells me.
Selected What’s On Out There (from Sun 21st April)
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Sun 21st - Sheffield Conservation Volunteers work at Wadsley Common (Note - tea and tool transporter needed!)
Mon 22nd - Bird and Butterfly Survey at Wardsend Cemetery
Tues 23rd - Graves Park Digging Deeper For All - Reminiscences & Local History (Norton Hotel)
Weds 24th - SRWT User Forum and Walk - Sunnybank Nature Reserve
Weds 24th - Stowaway book launch talk with Joe Shute at Sheffield Central Library
Thurs 25th / Fri 26th - Trouble in the Woods conference at Lees Hall Golf Club (£30-£75 / day)
Sat 27th - Sheffield Bird Study Group: Orgreave Field Trip (meet River Rother footbridge near Treeton Cricket Club, 7.30am - £2 non members)
Sat 27th - Cycle Sheffield Big Ride - Space for Cycling ride for families around city centre (Marshalls needed, contact - info@cyclesheffield.org.uk)
Thanks for reading. And if you haven’t seen it yet, I did a story for the wonderful Sheffield Tribune yesterday about bluebells, if you care to take a look. But how about pressing the “Ok, yes, I give in, I’ll find you the price of a cheap pint every month to support this endeavour” button just here, first?
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I once had a well paid job which I disliked. Loads of us were made redundant when our jobs were outsourced to India, and we were offered help to get a new job in the same industry. I couldn’t stand the idea of continuing in IT, so instead I got a job at our local secondary school. The pay was rubbish, but it didn’t really matter by this stage in my life. But more importantly, I loved it! So I can fully understand Gordon’s happiness in his lower paid work.
Given the other main subject in today’s post, maybe I shouldn’t refer to it as escaping the Rat Race…
I don't like speaking ill of the dead, but here goes. I had the 'pleasure'of meeting 'Gordon the Warden' many years ago on Langsett Moor. Perhaps its just me, but friendly he was not. He 'ordered' me to put my dog on the lead. He seemed to be showing off to a young girl he had with him. I attempted to make conversation, but he insisted on trying to bully me, saying there were sheep around which might be panicked. As it happened there were no sheep in sight! When I pointed this out to him, he appeared disgruntled (but it gave the young lady with him a giggle) and grunted something and moved off. Perhaps he was having a bad day!