Malaria, Mallorca and a strange link to life at home
AFTER 40 years of writing wildlife articles and two million published words, I am hoping my first book, The Crowden Years - Volume 1, will be ready for the printers soon. Big thanks to all readers who have asked, and look out for my new website www.laughingbadger-ink.com
Here’s the last snippet before publication, describing how I discovered an amazing connection between Mallorca and Longdendale.
I was in the Albufera Marshes and first up was a brace of hoopoes, a bird I would later record outside Crowden Youth Hostel and which would also be the subject of my first article to appear in the Sunday Times in 1988, which for me was a great achievement on its own.
When my words were accompanied by a black-and-white image of the bird taken by Eric Hosking, the undisputed king of bird photography at the time, well, ‘who’d a thought it?’, as they say in these parts.
It was while chasing down a dusty lane trying to photograph the little blighters that I was stopped in my tracks on a small stone bridge which straddled a murky, milky white dyke. By the side of the bridge was a very familiar sight, a cast iron valve-wheel, and on further inspection a cast iron sluice gate identical to the ones I used daily in Longdendale. What’s more, the masonry work appeared to be a carbon copy of similar constructions in the valley.
Curiosity aroused, I went on to discover all manner of stonework and water-workings across the length and breadth of the reserve, before finally checking out a stone building I had already seen several times but ignored, where all was explained. It was called Casa Bateman.
The drainage of the Albufera Marshes it turned out, was one of La Trobe Bateman’s overseas commissions, when his own company, The Majorca Land Company, was employed by the Island’s government to reclaim the vast area of wetland, and put it to good use. Casa Bateman, (Bateman’s House) was originally part of the ‘works’ but, as of the early 1980s had been turned into a small museum.
Bateman was of course responsible for the Longdendale Chain of Reservoirs, at the time the largest system in the world.
Bateman, who went on the buy the marsh, was revered and criticised in equal measure for his efforts. In the first instance he brought jobs, but one publication of the time, if my translation is accurate, said, ‘The rich but unhealthy territory of the Albufera was more or less a common treasure of the local villages until ‘the English’ arrived’.
As most people in rural areas hesitate to embrace change until it is forced upon them, Crowden included, the Mallorcan locals of the marshes were probably most fearful of losing the annual arrival of eels.
These slippery critters teemed into the marshes in mid-January.
Having said that, another publication around the same time characterized the Albufera as, ‘an extensive and gloomy reed land, in whose mist there hovers the dreadful image of death’.
This gloomy observation may have referred to the endemic malaria of the marshes. Bateman predicted a reduction in malaria when his works were complete.
The works were described as pharaonic, in the manner of the pharaohs across the Nile Delta, and involved the construction of 138 km of channel widths of between 4 and 60 meters, 13 siphons, 40 km of roads, 11 bridges, and a sea jetty of 300 meters. It ambitiously aimed to reclaim 1,700 hectares but fell woefully short, and only 280 hectares were suitable for cultivation. It was an economic failure.
Bateman packed his bags, financially stung by the whole episode, briefly passed on the business to his son, before all of their ‘interests in the land were liquidated.
On the plus side, malaria cases fell.
The Mallorquine workers hired by Bateman, often complained about the conditions imposed on them, sometimes, even in song. It is not reported what Bateman thought of this, if he every heard it: “The first drops of rain have arrived, the stream started to grow: May the devil take the engineer, the boards and the barracks!”