‘It’s the pictures,’ I said. ‘We love the pictures.’

I didn’t mention the author of Never Let Me Go was going to be there, interviewed by From Page to Screen film festival curator Jonathan Coe. That was a highlight for me. For Mr Grigg it would be anathema.

He was already accompanying this harem of village book lovers under sufferance, filling in for the outing organiser when she suddenly became a grandmother. The thought of a couple of literary luvvies stroking each other’s navels on the Palace stage would have turned his stomach.

And then a little voice piped up from the back seat: ‘It’s a very weird book, about cloning people for organ donations. I didn’t really like it.’

My neighbour, Mrs Warboys.

And then Mr Grigg remembered he was missing Champions League football on the telly. He almost did a handbrake turn and headed back up into the hills. Instead, he wore his grumpiness like a shroud for the rest of the journey, placated only when I promised him snogging in the back row of the movies if he was good.

Fortunately, we had to fill up from the front.

‘What are those two chairs doing on the stage?’ Mr Grigg said.

‘Oh, there’s going to be a quick talk about the film before it starts.’

He sighed as big as Devon.

And then author Kazuo Ishiguro came on with Jonathan Coe to rapturous applause.

‘I’m missing Spurs v. Real Madrid for this?’ Mr Grigg said.

I passed him his gin and slimline tonic and kicked his leg.

‘In the literary world, Mr Grigg, this man is bigger than Pat Jennings’ hands,’ I said, showing my age and also my ignorance of 21st century football.

Mr Grigg settled back and attempted to enjoy the insight of the interview. He warmed to Ishiguro and it was going well until Coe referred to the novelist as ‘Ish’.

‘It’ll be Angel Drawers next,’ Mr Grigg said.

And then Never Let Me Go began. We were spellbound by this beautiful film, which, despite its futuristic tone is a haunting story of love, friendship and regret as the protagonists gently make their way to their inexorable fate. It was beautifully acted, scripted, directed, photographed and lit.

As we filed out of the Palace, the editor of Black Beauty and Hornblower, who lives in Lush Places, breezed past and made a very intelligent comment I did not understand.

‘Yes, the lighting and cinematography did it for me,’ I said, turning to Mrs Warboys, who has very close links to a film director of international repute, and whose approval I seek constantly.

‘And what did you think?’ I asked Mr Grigg.

He wiped a tear from his cheek.

‘I liked it so much, I want you to read the book,’ he said.

Result.

Netmaking in Uploders near Bridport, 1948. The woman with the silvery hair is Mrs Crabb. One of the photos in the "copiously illustrated" Rope, Net and Twine: The Bridport Textile Industry by Richard Sims. Picture reused courtesy of Bridport Museum.

DORSET historian Richard Sims’ book on Bridport’s rope and net industry is praised in the latest volume of the Industrial Archaeology Review.

The scholarly journal acclaims Rope, Net & Twine: The Bridport Textile Industry (Dovecote Press, £25) as “copiously illustrated… authoritative and attractive.”

Reviewer Mike Bone, who used to live in Dorset, and these days belongs to the Bristol Industrial Archaeological Society, says the book is “an invaluable guide to visitors and those researching particular sites or businesses.”     

There are few, if any, other places in Britain that have been shaped for so long by one industry as Bridport has been by rope, net and twine. The trade probably dates back to the ninth century. Read Mr Sims detailed book and you’ll never look at Bridport and its surrounding villages in quite the same way ever again.

Dottery, for example, owes the existence of its corrugated iron chapel – its tin tabernacle – to the presence of Pymore Mill. The Gundry family donated the land on which the chapel still stands, partly to save workers from having to trek over to Bradpole to worship.

Pymore Inn was built in the 1850s to serve thirsty millworkers. Photograph by Richard Sims.

Likewise, when Pymore Inn was built in the 1850s, it had a shop, so there was no need to go into Bridport.

But some workers did walk formidable distances and work extraordinarily hard.

The Industrial Archaeology Review remarks on the “massive effort” that Mr Sims and Dovecote Press put into his book; “massive effort” is a hallmark of the Bridport textile industry.

Hard life of Mrs Hughes, 75

By chance, I was recently browsing through old copies of the magazine Picture Post, which published a feature about Bridport net-making on 21 July, 1951.

The journalist Juliana Crow tells the story of a Mrs Hughes, a 75-year-old outworker living in Bridport, who cannot remember the time when she could not braid. (‘Outworker’ means that she worked from home).

“As a young married woman she lived near Crewkerne, 11 miles away. Her husband’s wages were only 11s a week, but she could average £2.

“The money was hard earned.

“She had five children under six, but every Friday she sent her husband off to work, settled the elder children with neighbours, loaded the pram with the baby and the completed nets and walked to Bridport to collect her earnings and do her shopping.

“Then she walked back in time to get the tea for the children and to cook her husband’s supper.

“Often she had had no sleep the night before.”

It’s a shame there is no photograph of Mrs Hughes.

Mr Sims notes in his book that, after World War Two, Pymore Mill found it hard to recruit new workers.

He writes: “In 1955 only 50% of the available posts were filled. It would seem that the school leavers of post-war Bridport had no wish to follow their parents into the town’s staple industry.

“The mill was closed in June 1955…”

Pymore’s predicament is fleshed out by Picture Post.

“Girls, nowadays, don’t want to learn anything more after they have left school and a unskilled job in shop or office is good enough to fill up the time between school leaving and marriage.

“Net making is an art that must be learned and it keeps them in the factory and, they believe, out of the world. Those girls who are drawn to the industry are too few to supply all the nets that are needed.”

This was written, remember, in 1951, so it was prescient, if rather harsh and haughty. I don’t get the feeling that Juliana Crow would have much fancied doing a four-year apprenticeship herself.

But then, would anyone reading this now want to walk 11 miles with a pramful of nets and a baby?

The Spirit of Bridport

The Spirit of Bridport painted by Fra Newbery in Bridport Town Hall (1924-27).

You could argue that Fra Newbery made a mistake when he sought – in his murals in Bridport Town Hall – to represent the Spirit of Bridport as a beautiful flaxen-haired young woman, working with twine.

Why not an older woman like Mrs Crabb (pictured below)?

Mrs Crabb, braiding, at her home in Uploders in 1948. This photograph was taken by the Central Office of Information in 1948 to help publicise the Bridport net industry. It's reused here courtesy of Bridport Museum.

CAMRA hopes its West Dorset pub guide will encourage people to visit more pubs and help keep them in business. The cover shows The Boot in Weymouth, The Anchor at Seatown, The Anchor in Burton Bradstock, The Rose & Crown in Longburton, The Royal Oak in Dorchester, Shave Cross Inn in the Marshwood Vale, and The Three Horseshoes in Burton Bradstock.

YOU KNOW the scenario – you’ve arrived in a place you don’t know well and you need to find a fine pint of real ale – and a good lunch.

Here to help you around West Dorset is the new Campaign for Real Ale guide, listing all 273 pubs in the area roughly bounded by Lyme Regis, Sherborne and Lulworth.

Within the packed 64 pages are descriptions of all the pubs, their location, telephone numbers, facilities, opening hours and – most importantly- the real ales they serve.

The centre pages open out to a map of the west of the county, showing towns and villages where real ales are served, while other pages display maps of the principal towns. You won’t get lost with this guide!

One of my favourite West Dorset pubs is the very popular and traditional George Hotel in Bridport’s South Street, described in the guide as an “unspoiled oak-panelled pub at the centre of the town, attracting a mixed clientele. Can get very busy at weekends. Less than a mile from the brewery.” It serves all of Palmers’ outstanding real ales.

In Lyme Regis, the Royal Standard has a good atmosphere, another Palmers house. “Comfortable low-ceilinged 400 year old pub with beachside garden. The interior incorporates stained glass panels, depicting historic events in Lyme. Popular pub meals.”

Country pubs feature throughout, such as the wonderful Shave Cross Inn, described as a “rural thatched pub with small flagstone bar, separate restaurant and second bar in the skittle alley/function room. Caribbean flavoured food. Thatchers cider in summer.” One real ale is from the Dorset Brewing Co. [DBC] at its new Crossways home.

Near the Somerset frontier is the Squirrel Inn at Laymore, on the Beaminster to Chard road, one of those isolated pubs you would never know about, but for guides like this. “Unexpected red brick single bar pub in the middle of nowhere, with good local trade.  Reincarnation of an earlier stone-built pub. Well prepared pub food – popular steak night on Wednesdays.  August beer festival and ‘Ashen Faggot’ festival in January. Garden has play area.” Those like me who like Otter Bitter should find it at The Squirrel and also a Branscombe Vale beer, with occasional guests from Yeovil and Cottage Breweries.

In many cases, pubs will serve a predictable range of real ales- often from local breweries- but sometimes from faraway places. The new updated guide gives an indication of what brands are served at which pubs- although of course that is always likely to change. You will need the West Dorset CAMRA Pub Guide as an essential companion to any future pub outings.

Buy Pub Guide by post

Buy the updated 2011 West Dorset Pub Guide by post from West Dorset CAMRA at 32 Mellstock Avenue, Dorchester DT1 2BQ.

Send a cheque for £5 [including post and packing] made payable to West Dorset CAMRA.

CAMRA members pay only £4; quote your CAMRA membership number to qualify.

Dorset stockists

Alternatively, buy a copy over the bar for only £3.99 from the following outlets:

Bridport – Palmers Wine Store and selected pubs;

Dorchester – The Blue Raddle, 9 Church Street;

Lyme Regis – Tourist Information Centre, Town Mill Brewery and selected pubs;

Portland – Royal Portland Arms, Fortuneswell;

Weymouth – Bradburys, St Edmund Street; Londis, Westham Road and the Railway Station news kiosk.

Michel Hooper-Immins belongs to the British Guild of Beer Writers, whose members share “a love of beer and a desire to see its virtues communicated more effectively.” He is a leading member of CAMRA’s Wessex Region, and his name can often be found in The Good Pub Guide.

The editor of this website also works for Watershed PR, one of whose clients is Palmers Brewery. Please note, however, that Michel Hooper-Immins is an experienced journalist who writes about all pubs and brewers in Dorset as he sees fit.

The CAMRA guide is noticed here because it is a very useful book, worth knowing about and buying. And pubs across West Dorset always do need customers!

Just this month The Bottle Inn  at Marshwood closed, though it may reopen near Easter.          

"The heavy waves sigh and crash": Eype Beach near Bridport, on Dorset's Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site. Photo by Maurice Budden, reused under Creative Commons Licence.

ON the way to the beach it starts to rain.

A soft, pearl-grey winter’s day, the mist forever coalescing into light rain, and dissolving back into mist. The narrow road cuts and twists between yellow sandstone banks; down, down to a tatty turning circle and the dip in the cliffs worn by the little stream’s slow seep into the beach: Eype’s Mouth.

Ignore the battlement of static caravans looming on the headland and plunge, not too literally, down shallow concrete steps, past signs which warn: “Rock falls: Cut off by tides: Mud flows” and: “These cliffs are dangerous and liable to fall at any time”.

Sea surges in, grey and foam-laced white. The heavy waves sigh and crash, turning and tumbling with deliberate, muscular strength. Their edges bubble and cream: wet whipped egg-white sizzling on shingle. Here, near the shore, the water is the colour of putty, but far out the bowed horizon is pure celadon.

Let’s walk. Underfoot the scrunchy pea gravel scrapes and squeaks. Sudden patches of sand give relief to legs already wearied by trudging on banked and sliding stones. Look closer underfoot – individual pebbles lucent with seawater; yellow rock turns to amber, red rock – carnelian, black rock – obsidian.

Saturn-ringed and Jupiter-blotched they lie like drifts of miniature planets, or glossy, marbled eggs; easy now to believe that they, like us, are made from the dust of stars.

Raise your eyes and the beach as a whole is patched red-roan with sand, boulders and stones.

As this is a Sunday, there are other walkers out in search of solitude, exercise and a breath of Nature. Two teenage girls with cameras seek to record the atmospherics via techniques of mechanical reproduction. You can gaze along the beach at the spumy, breaking waves and the top of Thorncombe Beacon disappearing into the sea-har and see the moody, picture-postcardish image they may have captured.

Single photographs, however good, will be unable to convey all of this; the sense of the damp wind blowing in your face, the sea noise, that kestrel who was suspended over the cliff edge, the sludgy heaps of carunculated, elephant-grey mud subsiding at the foot of the cliffs, the sharp, paper edges of the cliffs receding to Seatown, and the waves’ endless lift and tumble.

Extracted from Switch Off The Light And Let Me Try On Your Dress by Sara Hudston and John Skinner, published in a limited edition of 500 copies by Agre Books (2002).

Photograph taken near West Milton in Dorset on 28 December, 2010.

Here’s a closer look.

Closer up view of object in the sky photographed near West Milton in Dorset on 28 December, 2010.

I have to say, I don’t think it’s a UFO – it must be the moon – but I’ve never seen it in quite this guise before.

“There’s a great deal here that wd delight you: the statue of George III, glaring heavily along the front, is coloured; and everywhere in the town one has only to lift one’s gaze from the garish fronts of Saxone, Melias & so on to see the pretty round shallow bow windows & the colour-washed plaster. The harbour & old town is delicious.”

Ever since it was announced back in 2001 that a huge cache of Larkin’s letters, postcards, and telegrams to Monica Jones had been found, I’ve been waiting for the chance to read some of them in book form, and now here they are.

Do they disappoint? No. There’s something fascinating or funny on every page.

After Larkin’s return from Weymouth to Belfast, he wrote again to Monica about how he and his mother had walked to Thomas Hardy’s ‘Mellstock’.

“Hardy played a part in my parents’ courtship, & it astonishes me to hear her repeat snatches of his poems she learnt simply to please my father – We kissed at the barrier, for instance (as apparently they always did). Of course my father was grabbing the books as they came from the press, in the nineteen-hundreds.

“O frigid inarticulate man!”

Hardy is discussed again and again. In 1955, now in Hull, Larkin meets a “Botany prof. … called Good” – described as “not very bright”. The notes don’t say, but I’m sure this must be Ronald Good, who published a book on Dorset flora, now revered for its thoroughness by modern environmentalists. Anyway, Larkin is not put off by his dimness because it turns out that Good was born and brought up in Dorchester and “HE OFTEN SAW HARDY WALKING ABOUT”. And Good told Larkin a “striking” story about Dorchester:

 “…after Dunkirk, Dorchester was full of soldiers, lying about exhausted all about the grass verges of the streets, sleeping it off. During these two days, a meeting was held at the Hardy statue to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth (2 June 1840) – with the soldiers lying around snoring. He saw it as ‘This England’ – NS & N [New Statesman & Nation, as it then was] – but I see it as pure Hardy.

“How he’d have felt it!”

Letters to Monica is not officially published until October 20 but you can buy it now for nearly half-price on Amazon and I can’t recommend more strongly that you do.

On a quiet country lane at East Chelborough, a car pulls up to take a look at the striking thatched house on the roadside. You can see right inside the front room. Gemma Arterton is not in.

Down the road at Salway Ash, an opened-topped Mercedes is parked at the end of a drive, next to the wibbly-wobbly fence put up for the film and still there for all to see. A middle-aged couple peer through the trees to get a glimpse of the location for the writer’s retreat.

And at the village pub in Yetminster, Tamara Drewe ale is on sale.

‘Which scene is it that takes place here?’ asks a wide-eyed punter.

‘The one in which the Gabriel Oak-inspired character bangs the barmaid up against the chill cabinet,’ answers the lady from the WI.

I almost choke on my beer.

Editor’s Note: Read more in The Guardian from Maddie Grigg on Tamara Drewe and the Dorset countryside

Her own blog can be found at http://worldfrommywindow.blogspot.com

This article titled “Tamara Drewe” was written by Peter Bradshaw, for The Guardian on Thursday 9th September 2010 21.44 UTC

The unpicturesque malice and boredom of the middle-class English countryside are cheerfully recounted in this broad Day-Glo comedy with brutal moments of violence; Stephen Frears directs from a screenplay by Moira Buffini, based on the Posy Simmonds comic-book series. It’s set in a world where people stick their noses into other people’s business, or turn them up or otherwise get them put out of joint – and so, fittingly, a nose is here something to be surgically fixed or broken with a single, vicious punch. It’s like a particularly salacious episode of The Archers, or a Midsomer Murders with the violence left to the end and left casually uninvestigated. There is the taste of a McVitie’s Boaster laced with mephedrone.

I admit that Tamara Drewe does not have or aspire to the subtlety and elegance of Simmonds’s original drawings, but it’s a tremendously effective, forthright entertainment, and Frears and Buffini make their craftsmanship look easy, creating a soap-farce pastoral of Brit bourgeois out-of-towners. If middle-classness could be crushed up and mainlined intravenously, these might well be the ingredients that would go into the mix: country pubs, writers’ retreats, Buff Orpington hens, literary festivals, and a cameo from Radio 4’s James Naughtie.

Gemma Arterton plays Tamara, a posh girl from the catatonically sleepy village of Ewedown, whom locals remember as having a bit of a schnoz. After rhinoplasty, she has reinvented herself in London as a glitzy columnist and now returns in babelicious triumph to the old stamping ground, where she employs her ex-boyfriend Andy (Luke Evans) to do up the family home for a quick sale, and begins an affair with eyeliner-wearing pop star Ben Sergeant, poutingly played by Dominic Cooper. The infusion of sexiness sends the locals all of a flutter, particularly celeb-fixated teen Jody, a scene-stealer of a turn from 17-year-old Jessica Barden. But most discomfited are the Hardiments, who preside over an excruciating “writers’ retreat”. This place exists to encourage denial and delusion: it parts wannabe novelists from their cash and provides a sense of purpose for desperately unhappy Beth Hardiment, excellently played by Tamsin Greig, who busies herself with cooking, fussing and not thinking about the state of her marriage.

Most importantly, it exists to gratify the egoism of the appalling and oleaginous Nicholas Hardiment, a terrifically funny performance from Roger Allam – perhaps the only possible casting. Hardiment is a bestselling crime novelist of the sub-PD James variety, with a jaded-yet-sensitive sleuth called Inchcombe, and Frears amusingly shows how life has somehow come to mirror the middlebrow milieu of comfy detective fiction. Allam’s Hardiment has naturally absolutely no interest in helping other writers; his “retreat” is there to provide him with an unending parade of fans to be flirted with and patronised, and it distracts Beth from his frequent trips to London where he enjoys affairs with younger women.

Buffini and Frears show how the appearance of Tamara sets up a new and combustible state of affairs with Hardiment. Tamara cannot quite outclass him in the celebrity stakes – although Nicholas is nettled to notice that people are aware of her writing, and he is also convulsed with lust and resentment at Tamara’s far-from-guileless sexiness which takes the spotlight away from him. Beth says glumly: “She’s poured herself into those shorts; I hope they don’t give her thrush.” It becomes clear that Tamara, in her big-nosed phase, and when she was Jody’s age, indulged in some minxy flirting with Nicholas. The encounter between Tamara and Nicholas takes on the character of a strange duel and the revival of unwholesome, unfinished business.

Greig shows Beth as the dysfunctional, blind-eye-turning enabler of this situation: she semi-consciously permits Nicholas to behave badly, telling herself that it doesn’t matter because he is so reliant on her – which indeed he is, needing Beth to fill out his tax returns, do factual research, proof his manuscripts and ensure that his female characters are convincing. Greig’s face is a picture of self-reproach, fear and approaching rage; Allan’s face shows conceit and slippery evasion.

A recurring theme is the relationship between younger women and older, self-important chaps: just as Tamara had  a thing for Nicholas; so Jody is infatuated with narcissistic rocker Ben. Glen (Bill Camp), an underachieving American academic at the writers’ retreat with a tender crush on Beth, intuits the ironic, generational aspect of  all this by telling her all about Thomas Hardy’s lesser-known 1897 novel The Well-Beloved, featuring an artist who, at successive stages in his life, falls in love with a woman, and then with her daughter, and then with the granddaughter. The socio-sexual prerogatives of older men are at the heart of Tamara Drewe, and the Hardy parallel is interesting, although these people are not far from the madding crowd. They’re a madder, vainer crowd than anything to be found in London.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010

Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

WITH the film of Tamara Drewe going on general release from today, and ahead of its premiere at the Electric Palace in Bridport next week, here is a list of the exact locations where it was filmed in Dorset and beyond.

Posy Simmonds recently spoke in The Guardian about taking inspiration from Thomas Hardy’s novel Far From The Madding Crowd, so it’s pleasing to see there’s also some literary connections lurking in the locations.

Marvell Farm at Halstock is named after the 17th century poet Andrew Marvell.

Limbury – towards the end of the last century – was the home of the retired literary agent Michael Horniman, who acted for Nevil Shute (and other authors whose names I’m afraid I can’t, at the moment, remember).

Limbury was once vaguely threatened with destruction when somebody proposed routing a Chideock and Morcombelake bypass right through it. I say vaguely because there was no chance of a bypass happening then, and there’s no chance now.

Anyway, here’s the list.

Ext. Stonefields

Grounds / Nicholas’ Shed / Fields / A N Other Farm / Barn / Shack

Limbury, Salwayash, Dorset, DT6 5HT

Int. Stonefields

Glen’s Room / Hall / Kitchen / Cloakroom / Beth’s Office / Dining Room

Blackdown House, Burstock, Beaminster, Dorset DT8 3LE

Ext. Ewedown

Playground / Pub / Bus Shelter / Pig Field

Yetminster Village

Int. Village Pub

The White Hart, High St. Yetminster DT9 6LF

Ext. Winnards & Int. Kitchen

Farm / Fields / Back Garden / Hall / Lane

Chelborough House, East Chelborough, Dorchester DT2 0PZ

Fields

Cow Fields / Woods

Larkham Farm, Holywell, Dorchester DT2 0LL

Rock Festival

Perimeter Fence / Main Stage

End of the Road Festival, Larmer Tree Gardens, Tollard Royal, Salisbury, Wilts SP5 5PT

Int. Bookshop

Hadditon

Muswell Hill Bookshop, 72 Fortis Green Road, London N10 3HN

Ben’s Warehouse Flat

London

63 Gee Street, London EC1V 3RS

A Field

Marvell Farm, Halstock, BA22 9SZ – near Yeovil but in West Dorset

Hadditon Station

Yeovil Junction, Yeovil, Somerset BA22 9UU

Literary Festival

Marquee / Lawn

Pinewood House & Location Gardens

Secluded Lane

Stockers Farm, Stockers Farm Road, Rickmansworth, Herts., WD3 1NZ

Roadside Stop

A41 Lay-By North Bound, North of M25 J20

PS: The film’s production office was at The Wild Garlic in Beaminster, and initial editing was done in West Milton near Bridport.