Gordon Ramsay and D. H. Lawrence Versus the Cornish

I.

Celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay has apparently received a warning from the Cornish Coastguard for repeated violations of the government's insane lockdown measures put in place primarily to protect the NHS even at the cost of wrecking the British economy and suspending the socio-cultural interactions of everyday life (like Peter Hitchens and other voices of dissent, I'm not convinced that these measures do anything to save lives or stem the spread of Covid-19).     

A Coastguard official told a reporter that Ramsay had been spotted 'multiple times in several places' and had even dared to seem happy and relaxed whilst out strolling on the beach with his wife, cycling on his bike around country lanes, and shopping at the local fishmongers.

Neighbours have also complained to the police of loud noise coming from the £4 million Ramsay home in Trebetherick: 'Why can't he just keep his head down, stay indoors, and be quiet like everyone else?'

Sadly, this sorry tale reveals much about the absurd yet profoundly sinister state of affairs in the UK today; overly zealous officials and fearful, resentment-ridden citizens happy to act as police informants. I'm sure the good people of Cornwall are not the only ones gripped by this viral hysteria (spread by the media), but it does remind me of another incident, in Zennor, that happened a century earlier ...


II.

The novelist and poet D. H. Lawrence lived in Cornwall for almost two years during the First World War and had high hopes of building a new life in the bare, primeval land with his wife Frieda: "When we came over the shoulder of the wild hill, above the sea, to Zennor, I felt we were coming into the Promised Land." [1]

Unfortunately, the neighbours were suspicious and eventually hostile towards this stranger who wrote controversial books and was married to a German woman. The vicar of Zennor, in particular, hated the Lawrences and was largely responsible for them being investigated by the authorities. 

They were suspected of espionage and possibly signalling to U-boats off the coast. Despite pleading their innocence, their cottage was searched (not once, but twice) and some personal papers were removed. The Lawrences were also served with a military exclusion order under the Defence of the Realm Act, forbidden them to reside in Cornwall (or any other coastal region). They were given just 72 hours to leave the county.

Naturally enough, Lawrence found all this hateful and humiliating - just as I'm sure Gordon Ramsay must find the press intrusion, public gossiping, and police snooping in the name of health and safety intolerable - and doubtless Lawrence was reinforced in his initial impression of the Cornish people, which violently veered from love to hate and back again:  

"The Cornish people still attract me. They have become detestable, I think, and yet they aren't detestable. They are, of course, strictly anti-social and unchristian. But then, the aristocratic principle and the principle of magic, to which they belonged, these two have collapsed, and left only the most ugly, scaly, insect-like, unclean selfishness, so that each one of them is like an insect isolated within its own scaly, glassy envelope, and running seeking its own small end. And how foul that is! How they stink in their repulsiveness, in that way.

      Nevertheless, the old race is still revealed, a race which believed in the darkness, in magic, and in the magic transcendency of one man over another, which is fascinating. Also there is left some of the old sensuousness of the darkness, a sort of softness, a sort of flowing together in physical intimacy, something almost negroid, which is fascinating. 

      But curse them, they are entirely mindless, and yet they are living for purely social advancement. They ought to be living in the darkness and warmth and passionateness of the blood, sudden, incalculable. Whereas they are like insects gone cold, living only for money, for dirt. They are foul in this. They ought all to die." [2]       

Kernow a'gas Dynnergh

Notes

[1] D. H. Lawrence, The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II (1913-16), ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), letter number 1187, to Lady Ottoline Morrell (25 Feb 1916), p. 556.

[2] Ibid., letter number 1155, to J. D. Beresford (1 Feb 1916), p. 520. Amusingly, Lawrence confesses at the end of this astonishing description of the Cornish: "Not that I've seen very much of them - I've been laid up in bed."