Aldershot! Cradle Of English Culture!

Ian McEwan, Mark Dapin and Heather Mills: "Aldershot, Aldershot! It's a wonderful town!" Image: Sweded

If you were asked to name one English town that punches well above its weight, culturally speaking, you might not immediately think of Aldershot. But perhaps you should.

In one week, I read three mentions of this Hampshire town about 60 kilometres south-west of London. While researching a story, I read that Heather Mills, activist and much-loathed ex-wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney, was born in Aldershot. So was Ian McEwan, author of recently published novel Solar.

And so was Sydney-based journalist and novelist Mark Dapin, who wrote an anti-eulogy of his boyhood home in his column for Fairfax’s Good Weekend on 13 March:

“It’s a dull, threatening town, known as the ‘home of the British Army’. When I was a kid, paratroopers coming back from Northern Ireland used to express their nostalgia for the singular ambience of Belfast by determinedly waging war on Aldershot’s civilian population.”

The Irish themselves actually waged war on Aldershot; in 1972, it was the site of the first IRA bombing on English soil. In retaliation for the Bloody Sunday shootings, a car bomb was parked outside the officers’ mess at the Aldershot base, killing seven people and injuring 19. The dead were all civilian support staff, with the ironic exception of Roman Catholic chaplain Captain Gerry Weston, a noted peacemaker.

The military culture of the town did attract one industry famously patronised by the armed forces: tattooing. Bill Skuse, son of legendary British tattoo artist Les Skuse, set up his studio in the amusement arcade of Aldershot’s high street, and it was there that a 17-year-old Women’s Royal Army Corps driver, Janet Fields (known as ‘Rusty’ for her red hair), got her first tattoo in 1961. Three years later, she had 62 tattoos and went on to get more, to train as a tattooist herself, and to marry Bill. In 1970, Rusty Skuse entered the Guinness Book of World Records as Britain’s most tattooed woman. She died of liver disease in December 2007.

Both Heather Mills and Ian McEwan came from military families, as did another local boy made (mildly) good, Jason ‘J’ Brown, of the boy band Five. Five were one of my favourite boy bands, and after they disbanded in 2001 Brown stayed out of the public eye. However, he made a regrettable appearance (is there any other kind?) in the 2006 series of I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here.

And he’s not even the only pop star to come from the ‘Shot. Amelle Berrabah of the girl group Sugababes grew up in Aldershot in a family of Moroccan immigrants who ran a local kebab shop. She joined Sugababes in 2005 after the departure of original member Mutya Buena.

Actor Martin Freeman, best known as Tim from the UK incarnation of The Office, is from Aldershot and is the youngest of five children. His elder brother Tim Freeman was the lead singer of art-pop band Frazier Chorus, who enjoyed moderate indie success around the turn of the ’90s with two albums, Sue and Ray. More recently, Martin starred as Rembrandt in Peter Greenaway’s film Nightwatching, and will be seen this year as Dr John Watson in Steven Moffat’s TV series Sherlock, which sets the Sherlock Holmes stories in contemporary London.

A more obscure, but nonetheless fondly remembered, Aldershot cultural export was a band from the late 1980s called Drink Britain Dry. “Best band to come out of the mid-late ’80s, sold out the West End Centre on a number of occasions,” reminisced one local on the Knowhere Guide to Aldershot. “The bass player pissed all over Mark King and the two vocalists, (Mix Dr Max and Capri Kev) were ahead of their time with a hard rap style. Never sold out just gave it all up.”

There are conflicting accounts of this bass player. While one local remembered him as “the gay one with the tight catsuit”, another countered, “No, the bass player of Drink Britain Dry was the thalidomide. That’s why he had the bass up round his neck so he could reach the strings.”

Dave Driscoll, lead singer of another indie band called the Aurbisons, had this to say about Drink Britain Dry:

“Our biggest fans were a small group of skinheads (we didn’t know them at the time) who would come to our gigs and shout, “Woahhhhhhh you’re sh*t!!! Ahhhhhhhhhhh!” after every song. It’s funny, if they weren’t there we kind of missed them. I later found most of them were in a band called Drink Britain Dry. They were fantastic and ahead of their time. They were funk-punk with white boy rapping over the top, the basic opus of their songs being the glorification of getting completely munted. At the end of their set the band would throw down their instruments, grab the singer and carry him on their shoulders and lay him on the bar. Genius.”

Lest you think that Aldershot produces only experts in the popular arts, it also nurtures mighty intellects. Born in Aldershot and now based at Durham University, literary studies academic Professor Michael O’Neill specialises in narratives of professional success, anxiety and self-questioning among Romantic and post-Romantic poets. He’s a particular expert on the works of Percy Bysshe ‘Ramrod’ Shelley, though he can also answer curly questions about Coleridge or tell you what’s what with Wordsworth. O’Neill has also won awards for his own poetry.

I also remember the name Aldershot from bibliographic citations in my university essays, because it was the printing site for Ashgate, a publisher of academic books in the humanities and social sciences. The publisher’s headquarters are in nearby Farnham, on the border between Hampshire and Surrey.

Worst. Gig. Ever: the Beatles drown their sorrows at their disastrous Aldershot show. Top-bottom: photographer Dick Matthews; John Lennon; George Harrison; ill-fated promoter Sam Leach.

Aside from its well-known cultural exports, the town of Aldershot itself plays a pivotal role in English culture. Before the Army moved to Aldershot during the Crimean War, it was a crappy farming village on the lonely London to Winchester turnpike. Notorious highwayman Dick Turpin operated in the area, and Nell Gwynne, actress and long-term mistress of King Charles II, is rumoured to have given birth to a stillborn royal baby while passing through on her way to Portsmouth. The child is said to be buried in the town churchyard.

She wasn’t the town’s only entertainment connection; Charlie Chaplin gave his first stage performance in Aldershot in 1894 at the age of five, and James Mason made his debut in 1931 at the now-demolished Theatre Royal.

But perhaps my favourite Aldershot showbiz tale is that in 1961, it hosted the Beatles’ worst. Gig. Ever. The local paper failed to run the “Big Beat Sessions” advertisement placed by the band’s Liverpool promoter, Sam Leach, and as a result only 18 people showed up.

Undeterred, the band – who had travelled nine hours to get to the gig – got boozed on longnecks of brown ale, played football with bingo balls, and at one stage, John and George waltzed around the near-empty dance floor. A month later, they were being managed by Brian Epstein.

In a 1983 interview, Paul McCartney recalled the Aldershot gig as “the night we couldn’t get arrested, but it wasn’t for the lack of trying”. I wonder if alarm bells rang for Paul years later when he found out his girlfriend Heather was from Aldershot.

In September 2009, Aldershot was named one of the UK’s top small cities to live in, news that “received a largely hostile response from the town’s residents,” reported the local paper, the News & Mail.

As former resident Mark Dapin put it, “there are none of Britain’s widely acclaimed gastro-pubs in Aldershot. A few places serve food at lunchtime, but it usually tastes as if it has been catered by Qantas. Eating out is not a big part of life, unlike drinking and getting your head kicked in.”

And using other weapons, too. After 56-year-old Aldershot resident Andy Copland shot and killed himself, his partner Julie Harrison, 40, and their four-year-old daughter Maisie Harrison-Copland, the town is considering a gun amnesty.

Check out this terrifying list of the worst things about Aldershot. Notably, they include chavs and football hooligans who travel in large packs, the fear of being bashed in pubs or in the town centre, and the dilapidated or closed-down shops and civic buildings.

Says one contributor to the wiki: “Unless the army disappears from Aldershot, and something viable replaces the income it brings, then the place is always going to deserve its reputation for fighting.” Here’s hoping it continues to live up to its cultural reputation as well!

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