The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 Holiday specials 69M
any of theheadstones in Thetford’s cemetery are modest.
“Dearly beloved” or “In loving memory” they begin, before
stating the bare facts: name, spouse, birth, death. Such stones tend
to mark the graves of people born in or around this small Norfolk
town, roughly halfway between Cambridge and Norwich in east-
ern England. A quiet, understated sort, buried in simple coffins.
“They pass without much fuss,” says Lydia Turner, who runs a fu-
neral parlour nearby.
There is another kind of headstone in Thetford’s cemetery,
which is beginning to outnumber the modest variety. This is made
of shiny black granite. It contains so many effusive, gold-lettered
words that they sometimes spill onto the back of the stone. Mum
(seldom “mother”) was always there when you needed her; Dad
was a king; Nan will be missed for ever. The headstones have lots of
images—not just angels but dartboards, fancy cars and the logos of
Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur football clubs. Underground, the
coffins have brass handles. Many arrived at the cemetery in car-
riages filled with flowers, pulled by beautiful horses. These are the
graves of working-class Cockneys who left London half a century
ago and made new homes in a town in the middle of nowhere.
As they die and are buried, so their descendants live. Although
Thetford is 110km (70 miles) from St Mary-le-Bow in London—the
centre of the Cockney heartland, according to Cockneys—many of
its 25,000 inhabitants belong fully to that flashy, gravel-accented
tribe. In many ways Thetford resembles a 50-year-old East End
transported to the flat rural landscape of East Anglia. Frozen intime and overlooked by outsiders, it is a bit like the
mythical Scottish village of Brigadoon. This makes it
an excellent place to go if you want to understand a
crucial figure in modern society and politics: the
white, southern, working-class Brexiteer.
The seat of the bishops of East Anglia in the Middle
Ages, by the early 20th century Thetford was in a sorry
state. It had hitched its fortunes to a single company,
Charles Burrell & Sons, which made steam-powered
traction engines. The rise of the internal-combustion
engine killed it. Thetford was barely able to keep its
population from falling below 5,000.
In 1957 the town’s leaders decided to do something
drastic. The British government was trying to push fac-
tories and workers out of London; Thetford offered to
take so many that its population would at least triple.
Using money from London County Council, it began to
build social housing for people known then (and now)
as “overspill”. Factories rose on industrial estates, sep-
arated from the houses by strips of woodland.
The Londoners loved their new homes, which were
larger than their digs in the capital and had private in-
door toilets. And some of the locals were pleased to see
them. “There was a bit more talent,” remembers Teresa
Mead, who married a Londoner. Unfortunately, the
work was a let-down. Jobs were easy enough to find:inA Cockney
Brigadoon
What happens when you take thousands
of working-class Londoners and drop them
in the middle of nowhere?Deepest England1