Totally Historical

The past has just disappeared. Totally. It was there when I last looked, supported by telly documentaries and beat up history books my sis left around.

It took me a while to get into the swing of history. At school it was a hugely dull subject full of viking invaders and the bubonic plague. I couldn't wait for this dreadful subject to go away and leave me alone.

I dropped the subject as soon as I could, but then my mates - who stuck with it all - started talking about more recent history and I realized I was missing out.

Before I knew it I was spending good money on books they couldn't give away at school. I was learning stuff at last. Names like AJP Taylor, CLR James and Arnold Toynbee began to fill up the bookshelf. Finally I got it, and would be caught reading detailed tones about WW1 rather than a bad Stephen King goulfest and never looked back. Until recently that is...

The news today was that one of our last surviving World War One veterans - who signed up by lying about his age has died aged 105. Bloke from Barnsley. Gilbert Crossland fought in the Somme and Arras campaigns and won the Legion D'Honneur - and won France's highest gong.

Gilbert was probably our last surviving veteran of the great war - from now on it's back to old films and moth eaten books. Not that a guy of 105 is going to be Mr Talkative but you get what I mean.

Looking around many of the traces of history round here have been wiped clean.

Near where I grew up there was a blackened old pit winding gear that hadn't turned in close to a century. It was an uncomfortable monument to a bad pit disaster that claimed many lives back in the day. Why it was still there, large as life, surrounded by nothing more than a rusty fence was a mystery...

Now it's been cleaned of the face of the planet and forms part of a golf course. Any monuments or memorials to the dead? Fat chance ( unless you count the obelisk on the hill about ten miles north.) All that's left to keep the memory alive is a bunch of photos on the wall of the local pub.

But ALL the evidence of the past round here seems to have been wiped.

You go to Cornwall and the evidence of the regions tin-mining past is still there for all to see. The local council's not been going around erasing the evidence like an Enron Accountant. But in Yorkshire you might get half a piece of the winding gear cemented into a shopping mall entrance, but otherwise there's no evidence at all.

A few years ago I got wind of a friends grandfather coming to an ignoble end in a rock fall down a pit not far away.

The guy was from Ireland and had few rellies around at the time, so he ended up being burried without a gravestone and none of the family had much clue where he'd ended his days.

So I went for a snoop down the library and it all came to life. Photos of the terraced street he lived in and vivid newspaper cuttings of the event itself - headline news on the day - brought it all home again..

I went looking for the pit where he died. It was closed in '29 and few of the local yokels even knew about the vast coal mine that used to dominate the area. Now it is a funny shaped landscaped mound where people walk the dogs. A little white pipe sticking out of the ground is the only evidence of the pit top. I remember thinking that blokes died working at that spot and no one remembers

Thanks to the wonders of computers I was able to trace the location of the old dudes grave and managed to bring some comfort to a family who had no idea where their grandfather rested. But no thanks to the local authorities wiping all evidence and n important piece of the local history has disappeared.

Meanwhile on the former Fitzwilliam Estate the old buildings have been turned into a science theme park. Meaningless 'scientific' toys have been installed to amuse the under tens and you can't even find a local map to do any proper Post-Industrial rambling. Never mind the fact that one of the world's earliest rail lines ran right by the entrance and the path it took is still there in the form of a footpath. I asked the curates about it at the flashy museum piece. "Oh sorry love, don't know about it... We've got a nice kiddies steam train out the back..."

Local History? "Not much call for that sort of thing round here, love..."

Old Gilbert Crossland had first hand experience of horrors we can only read about, or see dramatised in the movies. Walking the poppy fields of Belgium will soon become as remote as walking around places like Stamford Bridge ( and no I don't mean an away game at Chelsea...) World War One will be a distant memory fast fading into time. The historical disappearing act is almost complete.

Blogga