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- The Royal Connection
- Northamptonshire Eats
- Northamptonshire VIPs
- Richard Remembers
- Owlbut's Birdwatch
Althorp is a Grade 1 listed
stately home in Northamptonshire. It covers 13,000 acres. It has been the home of the Spencer family for more than 500 years. Since 1992 it has been owned by Charles
Spencer, the 9th Earl Spencer.
As many of you may know, Charles Spencer is the brother of Diana Spencer, who was Diana, Princess of Wales and the first wife of King Charles III.
Althorp was the childhood home of Diana, although she was actually born in Norfolk. She married the then Prince Charles on 29th July 1981, when I was on holiday in
France, and was killed in a road accident on 31st August 1997, when I was on holiday in France.
Diana is the mother to the future King of England, Prince William. Following her death, she was interred on a small island in the middle
of the ornamental Round Oval lake in the grounds of Althorp. A Doric-style temple with Diana's name inscribed on top is situated across from the lake and is a
major tourist attraction during July and August when the house and estate are open to the public.
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It was quite difficult to find
any food peculiar to Northamptonshire but I did come across this, known locally as hock and dough pudding. Looking at the ingredients it would seem to be a dish for the poorer people, the local peasants
and farm workers. The dish consists of scraps of pork meat put in a suet pastry casing with sliced potatoes, onion, stock and herbs. There seems to be a little
debate as to whether the pie had a lid or not.
I found, on the Foods of England Project website, this little write-up that I thought I would share with you.
Wellingborough Town football club, one of the oldest in the country, are known as 'The Doughboys' after the dish. Read this match report from
the Luton News and Bedfordshire Chronicle - "Thursday 25 February 1897. Look at the size of the crowd...
It was a glorious afternoon, and there must have been nearly 2,000 people present, the "gate" receipt amounting to £39. There was a great shout of 'Play up Hock'
as Wellingborough began to attack. This aroused my curiosity, and I afterwards learned that the nickname had been given to them because everyone at Wellingborough
eats what is known as 'Hock and dough pudding', this being hock pork cooked with potatoes and a suet crust. It has the reputation of being very palatable, but into
its mysteries I dare not enter."
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Seven random people who were born in Northamptonshire in the last 100 years:-
Jo Whiley (Radio Presenter), Matt Smith (Actor, 11th Doctor Who), James Acaster (Comedian), Louise Pentland (Vlogger, Sprinkleofglitter), Sophie Turner
(Actor, married to Joe Jonas), Richard Coles (Musician and Priest), Hugh Dennis (Actor/Comedian who went to the same school as I did).
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For those of you that don't know,
and that may be most of you because I'm not sure that I have written about it anywhere, for a long time in the 1980s and 1990s I was teaching in a classroom
situation. Most of it was in vocational training where I taught young people, 16-18, the skills needed to work in offices, shops and also to learn computer and
word processing skills. I had my own company and we used to carry out the training for larger companies or local councils who didn't have their own training
organisation. I really enjoyed it and it was while doing this that I began to write my first training text books.
In the early 1990s the training extended to adults who had lost their jobs in industries that no longer existed. One company I worked with was not
the most honest and their boss used to offer to do all sorts of training, get the funding and then carry it out as cheaply as possible. I suppose he was directly
responsible for my second journey round England as I had had enough of having to be the one to carry out his promises when I knew most of the time he wasn't
allowing enough money for them to be done properly.
This fits in here because he offered to run one of these courses for the adult unemployed in Corby, which is in Northamptonshire. You can see from the
picture, taken from a leaflet for the courses and of a rather younger me, that I also worked in Suffolk and Essex and Cambridgeshire and Norfolk. Corby had been home
to a large steel works but that was closed down and some 11,000 people lost their jobs. My job, or the job of my team, was to go into Corby and offer advice to
those who had been unemployed for a long time and try to get them back into work. This was a lovely idea except there still weren't really any jobs. I spent much
of my working time driving around East Anglia visiting various sites to see how my tutors were coping. I remember Corby as a very drab, sad place and with people,
some of whom had been out of work for over five years, who looked to have lost all hope. I gather Corby has now recovered, partly thanks to money from the EU.
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Guess what, this page was uploaded on December 11th 2020 and that meant it was nearly Christmas. I thought then that we should look at the little
bird who appears on many Christmas cards and is associated with this time of year. The robin is possibly the UK's favourite bird. It is also a great singer and
will often sing at night next to street lights. They look cute but can be very aggressive if another bird comes into their territory. Males and females look the
same with feather colours of brown, cream, grey, orange, yellow and white and, of course, the red breast. Young robins don't have the red breast though. All robins
have legs that are brown and pink and they have a short, thin black beak. They eat worms, seeds, fruits and insects.
They are 14 cms long, have a wingspan of between 20 and 22cms and weigh between 14 and 21 grams. They can be found in farmland or woodland, hedgerows
and parks and gardens in towns and cities. There are over 7 million in the country.
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Two extra sections, "It Happened Here" and "Now That's Weird", will appear on 20 January 2025
