Yeovil?

I know what you’re saying about Lifemanship. The name Yeovil must have had a special poetry for Oxbridge absurdists in the 30s: the loony combination of letters, the earthiness of “yeo”, the echoes of weevil and evil… maybe you had to be there. For Oxbridge dropouts who moved onto Private Eye in the 70s, “Neasden” had a similarly hilarious poetry, and I can sort of understand that.

England is full of names that vaguely evoke the absurd: “Uxbridge”, “Crawley”, “Peckham”, “Frimley”, “Croydon.” And that’s not even looking at places with more than one word in their name: “Chipping Sodbury”, “Hemel Hempstead”, etc.

Yang Yeovil was a character in Alfred Bester’s ‘The Stars My Destination’, which as I recall well postdated Potter…

A few place names from the Rand McNally map of Arkansas: Gin Bottle, 86, Toad Suck Ferry.
A friend of mine from Arkansas claimed that RM always inserted one phony name in every map as a way of protecting its copyright, the same way the OED inserted that phony word (forgotten what it was). The question is: which one of these, if any, is the ringer?

Well, it isn’t Toad Suck; there really is such a place and they make a significant amount of their income selling t-shirts and other paraphenalia imprinted with their name. Among my UK friends Milton Keynes has always been the name of choice for silliness.

MKK

Never having traveled outside of Little Rock when I was in Arkansas (for the junior olympics for fencing when I was 16, to be as pretensious as humanly possible about it), I have had to content myself with New Jersey for my lexicon of bizarre place names: Ho-Ho-Kus, Netcong, Mahwah, Tenafly, Metuchen, etc.

The funny thing about the bizarre place names in New Jersey is that they all appear, one after the other, right when you’re approaching New York City from route 80.

Rockaway, Parsippany, Nutley, Hackensack, Teaneck, Passaic, Secaucus, Weequahic, Weehawken, Hoboken, they’re all right there. It contributes to the feeling that NYC is in a forbidden alien landscape different from the rest of the country.

Out here in Hollywood, in the comedy business, even, I try to get people hooked on the genius of Stephen Potter, but no takers, really, just polite smiles. I don’t care. They are a cure for the blues, and they also enable one to display the proper Lifeman attitude at the valet, when your ’93 Saturn drives up amidst the Beemers.

Confidential to Belle: do you Harvard or Edinburgh? And why the silence of Yale?

But what about Yeovil and Huddersfield?

I think the word here is “dreary”. In quite different ways, because Yeovil was a boring light industrial town and Huddersfield was a soul sucking wool manufacturing mill town, but both of them would traditionally have carried the resonance of “nothing to do here”, and of being good places to avoid.

I don’t know what’s happening in Yeovil these days, but Huddersfield has become a fantastically posh dormitory for Leeds, and in the last fifteen years has generally been regarded as a good address.

Yeovil and Huddersfield aren’t special; I just think you’ve been sensitized by exposure to those names and you see them everywhere. I doubt they’re even in the top five English place names used for comedy.

(and since Mr. Healy’s anglophobia lost its charm about seven World Cup blog posts ago, I’ll point out to him that *all* the vaguely absurd English place names would be pushed out of the top five, in any “British Isles” league, by Irish ones)

Similarly, I obsessed on sightings of “Yonkers” in New York for a while, until I realized that Americans had plenty more places they could use to get a laugh. I think it was Harlan Ellison who, when asked where science fiction writers got their ideas from, replied “a post box in Schenectady”. Why Schenectady?

The most comic part of the address you quote, to me, is the idea that a “Station Road” in Yeovil could have close to seven hundred addresses on it. “Station Roads” in the UK are typically approach roads from the nearest substantial road to the front of the station. Since the Victorian railway builders strove mightily to locate their stations as close to a busy area as they could, such roads tend to be short enough that few get even close to three digits in the addresses.

PS in Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, pretty much all of the main characters, apart from the principal character, are named after English or Welsh place names: Yeovil, Wednesbury, Sheffield, Presteign…

Yeovil is a very ordinary place distinguished for me only because my mum was born there. Shortly afterwards, it was attacked by the Luftwaffe, but I don’t think there was any connection.

The best Bester name in TSMD is Dagenham, largely because the place itself is utterly mundane.

Nempnett Thrubwell

Rockaway, Parsippany, Nutley, Hackensack, Teaneck, Passaic, Secaucus, Weequahic, Weehawken, Hoboken, they’re all right there.

But is there really a Salt Pork, West Virginia?

Miss Victoria Wood: “Scotland, where everywhere is spelled ‘Ecclefechan’ and pronounced ‘Kirkcudbright’.
(Americans may care to guess how that latter is pronounced.)

Steeple Bumpstead south of Cambridge.

Gilbert & Sullivan used the name “Basingstoke” as a watchword for dull respectability–in Ruddigore there is a character prone to fits of madness, whose oncoming hysteria can be forestalled by saying “Basingstoke!” in a soothing yet reproachful voice.

A bit like Milton Keynes, I’d say.

Oh come along, Milton Keynes is a great place! Amongst other things it is planting so many trees in urban areas it is the biggest forestry plantation project in the UK.

Great to find someone else who knows about Stephen Potter’s books. I lost all my copies in some move or other decades ago, but fond memories… Yeovil has some interesting bits and pieces in it, including the village of East Coker (where I met the future mother of my son)celebrated in ‘Four Quartets’.

re 9 above – Accrington Stanley is the name of their local soccer team.

No, no, no. You’re supposed to say, “Accrington Stanlely? Who’re they?”

Basingstoke in Westphalia?

Why Schenectady?

The old rule of comedy: K sounds are funny.

The most comic part of the address you quote, to me, is the idea that a “Station Road” in Yeovil could have close to seven hundred addresses on it.

That wouldn’t even have registered for me, in part because street addresses in some places in the US are assigned according to a large grid, and will either skip many numbers here and there, start in the tens of thousands, or both.

Keynsham … I remember Keynsham.

In terms of comic potential, I believe my own part of Manchester – Crumpsall – still awaits discovery, so I’m glad to offer it to an erudite international audience. Make of it what you will.

School for Scoundrels is based on the Lifemanship books. I don’t think it really catches their spirit – virtue is finally rewarded – but it’s quite watchable.

Favourite placenames: I like the way that Shepreth and Meldreth make the train journey to Cambridge seem like a trek through the Valley of the Shadow of Death.

Jamie, come on now. Mike Harding? The 81 to Crumpsall Green? I think he recorded it in about 1972.

I think I drove past Yeovil, once.

re 34 above: Exactly!

I also wonder what the British translation of “hick” is?

Chav does not seem right. Pikey? Or Bumpkin? Or perhaps hicks are unique to America.

Anyway, may I quote Betjeman? It seems faintly topical.

Alright, I’ll just post a link…

http://www-cdr.stanford.edu/intuition/Slough.html

Chav does not seem right. Pikey? Or Bumpkin? Or perhaps hicks are unique to America.

I thought “Pikey” was specific for the gypies or Irish Traveler groups, although the movie “Snatch” may have misled me on this.

When you think about it, the television series Avengers has a lot of Harry Potter in it. Stead is always driving off to Lower Snicclesfeld in a very Stephen Potter automobile.

The funny thing about American placenames is hearing the tourists try to pronounce them. To a local, it seems inexplicable that anyone could mangle a simple name like ‘Walla Walla’. But we give a modest handicap for ‘Puyallup’.

This is not what the people on the ground were saying when I was in Munster Lager.

I’m pretty sure that Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (a timid spinster who ends up covorting with Satan & becoming a witch) in the book of the same name lives in Yeovil. More recently, I seem to recall it as the hometown of Polly Jean Harvey. Combined, those two things have made me curious about the place, and it’s strange spelling. Anyone know the derrivation?

Mianus, Connecticut?

Let us not overlook, either, Muir & Norden’s
Balham, gateway to the south
(“Time has passed by old Balham. So shall we.”)
and Jenning’s original dictionary of English placenames
(“Ilkely: having large ankles”)
later ripped off by The Meaning of Liff.

One of the joys of returning to Potter in later life is discovering the dirty jokes – having T. Driberg, for example, the source of various usages of ‘cottaging’.

There are in the village of Erith
Men who nobody seeth or heareth;
And there is by the marge
Of the river a barge
That nobody roweth or steereth.

and of course the at first surreal
“I come from Hampton Wick, so I’m used to innuendo.”
From whence came the Goon’s Major Hugh Jamtin.

If you hadn’t mentioned the Slaughters, I would have. I’ve also always been fond of Braughton-under-Water, and Upton Downs.
Not so far from Yeovil, Ottery St. Mary may not be totally absurd, but it still looks pretty funny when you’re driving past it late at night. I guess Wookey Hole was hardly funny at all before 1977. Woolfardisworthy, in North Devon, has almost totally given up on its wilfull spelling and gone with the more phonetic Woolsery, mostly, I think, because the cramped roads that lead to it just don’t have room for the longer name to be put on signs.

I myself come from Perranarworthal (no longer hyphenated, alas) so I can’t talk much. Since I moved to the US I’ve had to deal with Horseheads and Painted Post, but my US favourite is Truth or Consequences, charmingly close to Elephant Butte, New Mexico.