Roast cygnet, guffawing farmers, a lodge dinner, thwarted evasion and three main courses – my night rubbing shoulders with the great and good of the City of Lincoln (before later retreating downhill to my rented room in a two-up, two-down)

While ‘researching’ – the posh word for ‘googling’ – all and any info I can get on the Lincolnshire Standard Group (in Britain), I came across a newspaper archive. I was working as a reporter on one of its papers, the Lincolnshire Chronicle in Lincoln, from June (the 10th, I think) of 1974 until mid-October 1975 and wanted to remind myself of several things.

Specifying that I was working ‘in Lincoln’ is not a bit of stupidity – the owners, the LSG (which no longer exists), published several papers in Lincolnshire of which one, the Lincolnshire Standard, was published in Boston, a town which the more astute among you will realise is not Lincoln.

Sadly, the archive had nothing on the Lincolnshire Chronicle, but they had these cuttings from the Lincolnshire Echo, which was the local evening paper when I was in Lincoln. The Chron has long since vanished and the Echo is now the local weekly. I doubt either of these stories would have made the nationals, not even at the time.

The Lincolnshire Standard Group (LSG) was taken over several times, thought the name was retained, but according to the UK Government’s Companies House was wound up in 2016.

. . . 

I was ‘researching’ in connection with a new project I am preparing for, and while doing so, I recalled one night getting an evening job which on the face of it would not seem to be the most onerous assignment. In the event I did find it oddly challenging.

Lincoln had a ‘lodge’. It probably also had – and still has – a Freemasons’ Lodge, but this lodge was purely local, and sadly I can’t remember what it was called.

Like all such outfits, its membership consisted of the great and good and the powerful of the city – Lincoln, though not very big – it has a population of just under 104,000 – is a ‘city’ because it has a cathedral – as well as many local farmer and landowners from the county.

Lincolnshire is largely agricultural and in some ways it is something of a mirror image of The Netherlands around 120 miles across the English channel to East-South-East. It is just as flat and featureless, though the county is split in two by the ‘Lincoln ridge’ and the whole county is on two levels.

The Lincoln ridge runs right through the city, dividing it into ‘Uphill’ and ‘Downhill’ with a very steep climb from ‘Downhill’ to the castle and cathedral. Pictured on the right is Steep Hill, named for obvious reasons which 

pedestrians have to climb from the commercial city centre if they want to visit the cathedral.

The medieval – and thus picturesque parts of the city – are ranged around the cathedral ‘uphill’, so this is largely middle-class territory. Downhill, where I lodged, is made up of street upon street of terrace of ‘two-up, two-down’ terrace house, which are a feature of most English towns over the past 100 years.

. . .

One day I was told that I would be ‘reporting’ on the annual dinner of this particular lodge and on the face of it, that sounded like quite a nice number – who doesn’t like a free meal. All it would entail would be to go along, eat a pleasant – though English – dinner, then write about 500 words the following day, pretty much about nothing in particular except who was there and what we were served.

This lodge’s annual dinner was notable in that it was just one of, I’m told three, such events in all of Britain at which roast cygnet – young swan – could legally be eaten. The then ‘Queen’ of England (so now the ‘King’ of England) owned all the country’s swans, and catching, killing and eating one was in times past a capital offence. That is if you were caught, you were executed.

One suggestion I’ve just come across is that centuries ago they were hunted almost to extinction and to preserved them, they were made the property of the ‘crown’, although somehow I don’t buy that explanation.

It casts England’s ‘royalty’ in the role of conservationist and although Brian, our current ‘king’ is something of a green freak, I doubt even 100 years ago a family and their mates which took, and still takes, great delight in massacring grouse and other ‘game birds’ in their thousands very autumn (fall) are much bothered.

The only way they would agree to ‘preserve’ an animal is to ensure it was still available for killing in perpetuity. There is also some scepticism about the claim that all the swans belong to the ‘crown’.

I can’t remember where the annual dinner was being held – possibly the Guildhall, but I am just speculating and really have no idea. But I can still picture the inside of the venue in my mind’s eye.

There were rows and rows of long tables at which members sat with a ‘top table’ on a dais – this was not a classy event where guests sat six or eight to a table around a nicely decked spread with fine china.

The top table guests included the Dean of Lincoln Cathedral but as to the other guests I can only speculate that the Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire as well as the Lord Mayor of Lincoln will have washed up for their supper .

The ‘hoi polloi’, as it were, seemed to me to consist, apart from me, of most of Lincolnshire’s farmers. Ruddy-face, large and jovial and increasingly drunk, they were all gratifyingly coarse. I add ‘gratifyingly’ because otherwise you, dear reader, might assume I was rather disparaging of their behaviour. I wasn’t at all.

My first mistake, being then still something of a ‘southern jessie’ despite the four years I had spent at university in Dundee, was once to refer to Lincolnshire as ‘northern’. The first time I did this – long before that lodge dinner, I should add – I caused outrage: ‘Do you mind! We’re the East Midlands!’ And, of course, Linconshire was, but my knowledge of my rather small home country – ‘Old Blighty’ (and I have no idea where that name originated) – was then very limited.

Yet to my then untutored ears the Lincolnshire accent was distinctly ’northern’. It does, in fact resemble the South and East Yorkshire accents, unsurprisingly as South and East Yorkshire border Lincolnshire to the North-West and North, but it is a distinctly ‘Midlands’ way of speaking. Like the Lincolnshire countryside, the accent is very, very, very flat, and, as in most rural areas, from where my fellow guests at the dinner came, it is very, very, very broad.

I don’t mean it as a snooty gibe but as a compliment when I say that rural Lincolnshire folk, like most farmers, are also distinctly unsophisticated. I long ago discovered I prefer the company of men and women who call a spade a bloody shovel.

There were no women guests – this was in the mid-1970s, after all – and once my guests found out that ‘the Chronicle’s reporter’ had never before attended one of their lodge annual dinners, they were very amused and looked forward to what I would make of it all.

England (and Lincolnshire) are not renown for their culinary expertise, despite what many now claim – you certainly can eat very well in Britain if you can spare something like £150 a head with wine, but if you cannot, your options are very limited. My tastes do incline more to French, Italian and Spanish food, but having said that, I do like a good, un-fancy steak and kidney pie with chips.

So on our menu that night was to a standard English dinner – roasted meat with roasted potatoes and ‘two veg’. And, I assumed, that the roast of the first course would be the swan.

After, I suppose, a soup of some kind as our first course, we were served our main course and my new farming friends were very generous, piling my plate high and encouraging me to take ‘seconds’, which I, of course, I did.

Then once the main course plates had been cleared away and I anticipated pudding came the shock: my friends announced that we would now be enjoying or second ‘main course’ – another roast with potatoes and two veg.

But I was full. I could not eat any more. I tried to excuse myself and announced that I would be sitting out this second main course, but they – guffawing with delight, I realised, at some private joke – would have none of it and again piled my plate high. This course, too, I managed to finish, though quite how I did I really don’t know.

Then our plates were again cleared away and my farming friends revealed what had been amusing them so much: there was a third ‘main course’. I said I could not eat another morsel. Nonsense, they said, but I informed them I was going outside for a cigarette.

Well, smoking that cigarette would normally have taken no more than six or seven minutes, but I made sure it took far, far longer, and I lingered outside to allow my friends each to finish their third ‘main course’ and for the dishes to be cleared away before I re-joined them. But when I did . . .

‘Ah, there you are,’ they said, ‘you weren’t here when the food was served, so we filled your plate for you.’

And they had: there in front of me was my third main course. Somehow I managed to finish it, but how?

Then came speeches from the toffs at the top table, with the Dean of Lincoln making a surprisingly filthy speech, and it is a measure of my then unworldliness – I might even already have been 25 – that I was mildly shocked by it. What, a man of the cloth! Good Lord. I suppose it takes all sorts.

I only wish I could find out which ‘lodge’ that was.