NOT SO DAFT AFTER ALL?

I was a little surprised, not to say alarmed, to see that Swindon in Wiltshire had come last in a survey carried out by BBC2 to find Britain`s `most ignorant town.`  One of the reasons for my alarm is that my mother`s side of the family all came from Swindon.  My mother, her brother and three sisters were all born there and my grandfather spent his  working life as a pattern maker in the Great Western Railway works before spending his long retirement until he died, aged 98, in what was then the GWR enclave of Rodbourne.   I still have relatives living there, so you can imagine the shock of discovering that the good folk of Swindon have apparently been revealed as the dimmest in the country. 

The survey tested the intelligence of 50 residents of each of 17 towns and Swindon`s residents seemingly struggled to name the colour of oranges, were confused about the number of legs an octopus has and hadn`t a clue as to when Advent began.  Now, over the years people from Wiltshire had gained something of a reputation for being slow witted but that reputation was founded almost entirely on the story of the Wiltshire moonrakers.

The story is simple and its message clear. A pair of Wiltshiremen, engaged in smuggling brandy, hide a barrel of the contraband from the excisemen in a nearby pond and when they return at some later time, in the dark, they are caught in the act of raking the barrel back to land.   They immediately claim that they are trying to rake cheese - the reflection of the moon - from the pond and the excisemen, amused by the apparently simple-minded rustics, leave them to it.

The moral of the story is that, despite their earthy accents, Wiltshire folk are not as slow-witted as some would believe and, to this day, people born in the county are proud to call themselves moonrakers.  Maybe they`re not as daft as the survey suggests or maybe, like the excisemen of old, BBC2 had simply misinterpreted their answers.   After all, a town that has given us Melinda Messenger, Diana Dors, Justin Hayward, Gilbert O`Sullivan and half my forebears surely can`t be as dim as all that.  Can it?