The Carnival Is Over

Yorkshire Square Eight

My last post created some nostalgia for village community life, now remembered only vaguely. Little remained beyond the nineteen-fifties. Much of what we know is second-hand. 

I could have said so much more. Pre-television, pre-car-ownership, pre-eating out, pre-foreign holidays, people created their own entertainment. There were dances, a drama group, a music and opera society, and sports teams. 

I remember the annual fairs on the village green, which my grandma oddly called the village “Fe-ast”, when parts of larger fairs stopped off on their travels around the country, possibly on the way to Hull Fair. The loud piping of fairground organs, the ring of slot machines, the smell of saucy hot dogs, the colour and blur of the rides, the force of bumping cars (dodgems), swings, roundabouts, rifles with rigged sights, brightly coloured wooden ducks swirling through torrents of water, excited voices, all above the hum of diesel generators, still take me back there, to the age of six or seven. 

Then there were the village carnivals, maybe not every year, fading away by my day. So much time, energy, organisation and creativity went into them. There was real talent in the village. The costumes were particularly impressive. 

The 1937 carnival programme named more than 150 participants, mainly children. Proceedings opened with a procession of Heralds, The Lord Chamberlain, the Crown bearer, Standard bearers and Pages, and the crowning of the May Queen. The Queen was presented with a bouquet, and her Courtiers and Maids of Honour received representatives of Britannia, England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and Peace. 

The main proceedings consisted of children’s dances. There was a Yorkshire Square Eight, Butterfly dancers, Milkmaids and Boy Blues, Spring Flower dancers, a nursery rhyme medley, Indians and Palefaces, Fairies and Elves, Sailors hornpipe and signals, and Jockeys. There were two maypole dances, the first creating a single plait and gypsy tent, the second a double plait, spider’s web and barber’s pole. Later there were larger group dances: a Circassian Circle and a “Mage on a Cree”. The day ended with a march led by the Queen, her Court and a band of toy soldiers. No doubt there were other adult activities well into the evening. I don’t have the pages naming the organisers. Nor do I know how the music was provided, or who designed and made the costumes. 

The programme lists the names of my mother, her brother and sister, and many of her “cousins” and friends. She danced in the Yorkshire Square Eight (above, top row, left). Her cousin, Jean, is in front of her. Jean would later lose a son in an awful railway accident. Another cousin, Alfie, is third from the right on the top row. Her friend, Kitty, is fourth from the right on the bottom row. I went with my mother to watch the Coronation on their television. 

Mother’s brother was an elf (below, top row, third from left). Her sister was a milkmaid (second picture below, top row, fourth from left). Her sister was the only one of four siblings to live to a good age. Other cousins and relatives appear in these pictures, too. 

Fairies and Elves

Milkmaids and Boy Blues

What does any of it matter now? The kids aren’t bothered. And those earlier children were soon to be shaken from their idyll, violently thrown into today’s world of conflict and events in far away lands. My uncle, the little boy in the elf outfit, died overseas on National Service in a tragic air force accident at only twenty-three. I can just remember him. He was clever; a plumber. He would have done well in the building boom. His widow, astonished that after sixty-five years without contact I still called her “Aunty R”, told me how she had arrived back on the bus from work to be told the awful news by my grandfather. My poor grandfather, who had lost all his own siblings when young, and now a son. And his own father would have told him how he was only one of two out of eleven to live beyond their thirties, their names and dates recorded carefully in the family bible. It was all so long ago. It’s just nostalgia.  

The Village

Village Dance Class, 1930s.
My mother (top, 3rd from right) is one of four “cousins” in the picture.
She would have been 100 years old today.

“It was a lovely place to grow up”, said Aunty Olga the last time we spoke. “The best anyone could want”. She talked of a High Street with no motor vehicles to stop you playing in the road, all the relations living nearby, and how everyone knew each other and were friends. There were shops with all you could want, and clubs and groups and things to do. The buses ran late so you could get back from the pictures in town. “Not like now”. 

“Aunty” Olga. We called them all “Aunty” or “Uncle", or if they were the same age as us “cousins”, no matter whether they were really great aunts, great uncles, second cousins, half-cousins, cousins once removed, or some other combination. It was simpler. There were loads of them. “Your mother was more of a sister than a cousin to me”, Aunty Olga said. 

I caught it right at the end, and don’t doubt her. I fetched milk from the farm dairy and talked to the pig in the butcher’s sty. I bought pop from the sweet shop, chips from the fish shop, rolls of gun caps for my cowboy pistol and foreign stamps for my collection near The Green. I marvelled at the old village water pump near the church and walked on my own the three-quarters of a mile along the river bank to my aunt’s smallholding at the ferry houses. I knew the local names that appeared on few maps: Gander’ill; Cock’orner; Cuckoo Park. 

A walk down the High Street with my grandma meant talking to everyone we passed. 

“Who was that?”  
“My cousin.”  
“And who was that?” 
“He’s my cousin too.” 

“How many cousins have you got?” 

I’d wish I’d not asked. 

“Well, there was Aunty Bina who had Blanche, Tom, Gladys, Lena, Olga, Fred, Ena, Dolly, Albert and Jack. She brought up our Jean as well, although her mother was really Ena. They had fish and chip shops all over.”

“Then there was Aunty Annie who married Uncle George, and had Mary, Fred, and Bessie.” She pointed to ‘M, F, and B’, scratched long ago into the bricks of number 88 (still visible today). 

“Do you mean Aunty Mary?” I asked. Aunty Mary had the prettiest face I’d ever seen. 

If Grandma was in the mood, she would go on to list the millions of children of uncles Fred, Bill and Horner, who had moved away to run a paper mill in Lancashire.  

All were prefixed “our”: our Fred, our Bessie, and our Mary. Aunty Olga’s children were our Linda, our Sandra, and our Gillian. It distinguished them from Aunts and Uncles who were not relatives at all, such as Aunty Annie ’agyard (3 syllables). What funny names some had. 

And that was only one of Grandma’s sides. The other was worse. 

Even more confusing, my mother’s Great Aunty Bina was married to my dad’s grandpa’s cousin, which meant I was doubly related to Blanche, Tom, Gladys, and the rest. 

I heard it so often I could recite it to my wife decades later: “Blanche, Gladys, Ena, Lena, Gina, Dolly, Molly, Mary, Bessie, Ella, Olga, Linda...”

“They sound like a herd of Uncle Bill’s cows,” she said. 

Uncle Bill (don’t ask), was from across the river and had married into the family. He said that if the Blue Line bus had not started running through the village, they would have all been imbeciles because of inbreeding. 

I went less and less as I grew into my teens, not realising it was coming to an end. It would never be the same again.  

Warp Land

The flatland where the River Humber branches into tributaries was once an expanse of permanent marsh. It dried out gradually over the centuries with the construction of river banks and drainage ditches, making agriculture possible. Some areas were improved by a process known as warping.

In warping, river waters are diverted into the fields to deposit layers of fine, fertile silt. It is carried out by building low embankments around the fields and filling them through a breach or sluice in the river bank. The water flows into the fields at high tide, and after being allowed to settle, is drained back as the tide goes out, leaving silt behind. When carried out regularly over two or three years, three feet of silt might be laid down. 

I remember my uncle, the farmer (see Aunty Bina’s Farm), explaining why he preferred certain fields for crops, and others for his “be-asts”. Potatoes, sugar beet, and wheat grew best on warp land, whereas the cattle grazed on pasture. 

I may be mistaken, but looking now on Streetview, I fancy that the line of the low bank around the field followed the line of the lane. The fields were for crops, while the cows grazed behind the house. 

But thinking about it now, it puzzled me. The buildings in the far distance are on the other side of a railway line, and there is a canal beyond that, with the river at the other side of the canal. How could the river water have been diverted into the fields? 

Perhaps the water came from a different river. The River Aire is around two miles to the North behind the camera, and the River Ouse about three miles to the East, but I think these would have been too far, and several main roads, the villages of Rawcliffe and Airmyn, and the town of Goole were in the way. My guess is that the warp water must have come from the river beyond the railway, canal, and buildings - the Dutch River (or River Don). 

Wikipedia provides an answer: “The first reliable report of warping seems to come in the 1730s from Rawcliffe, which is near the confluences of the Ouse with the Aire and the Don, where a small farmer called Barker used the technique.” Neither the railway nor the canal would have been there then. The Knottingley and Goole Canal was opened in 1826, and the Wakefield, Pontefract and Goole section of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway in 1846. The warping must have been done before these dates. Some of the brick outhouses at the farm could easily have dated from that time, and knowledge of the warping would have been passed down by word of mouth. 

The railway, canal, and Dutch River can be seen running parallel in the lower left quarter of this 1962 map (pre-motorway). The oddly straight Dutch River is clearly another man-made feature. It was constructed in the 1630s by Dutch engineers, who diverted the River Don to drain the moors of Hatfield Chase, hence the name “The Dutch River”. The River Don originally flowed further East into the River Trent. Warping of my uncle’s land must have used water from the diverted river Don. 

More extensive warping schemes were carried out in the Nineteenth Century along the original course of the Don, as far East as Adlingfleet on the Trent, and as far South as Crowle. One large area is served by the enormous Swinefleet Warping Drain (centre bottom of map) which runs for 5.6 miles (9 km) and has a permanent sluice into the River Ouse. The drain and much of the network of drainage ditches are deep and wide. Some are stocked with fish for anglers, and all provide habitats for frogs, sticklebacks, water voles, and other wildlife. It is astonishing to think it was all dug out by hand. But, we do not only alter our landscape. Families with Dutch names still live in the area, and the local name for drainage ditches is dykes. 

Swinefleet Warping Drain

Swinefleet Sluice where the warping drain enters the Ouse

Two areas of unreclaimed land remain just to the South: Thorne and Hatfield Moors, which together form the largest expanse of lowland peat bog in the country. Even the intrepid Yorkshire Pudding’s Geograph project has not much ventured there.  

One last piece of trivia. In the film “The Dam Busters” (1955), the aeroplanes are shown flying along a Dutch canal. It was actually filmed flying East along the Dutch River. The Goole shipyard cranes can be seen as the planes approach the River Ouse and then bank left over the town. Please don’t tell the East Riding Council. It will give them ideas about what to do with the place. 

Dave Northsider is now trying to work out how he can divert river water into his polytunnel. 

The Ghost of Airmyn Crossings

A SEASONAL TALE
New Month Old Post: first posted 9th December, 2014. A fictional story set in a real time and place. I had recently been reading Thomas Hardy’s short stories. 

We grow up, we move away, we make our lives in distant places, yet, something draws us back. We tell nostalgic tales of times past, wonder at any mention of our town on television and look for the home team football result. Even after all formal and familial ties are gone, we make special detours to pass our old homes and schools.

But not Matt Wetherell. He keeps well away. When work takes him to Hull from his home across the Pennines, he turns off and enters the city over the Humber Bridge. Anything to avoid Goole.

Fifty years ago when still in the sixth form, Matt and his friends became regulars at the Percy Arms. In those days, sixth formers in a public house would have been in serious trouble, even when legally old enough to drink. It was an abuse of privilege, squandering their opportunities while those less fortunate were cleaning railway engines or keeping the peace in Cyprus. Matt and his friends kept discreetly out of sight in the taproom and the handful of teachers who frequented the same establishment carefully stayed in the lounge so as not to notice them.

The comforts of the taproom were basic: plain walls, wooden floorboards, bench seats and bare tables, but there was always a warm fire burning. It was perfectly adequate for the main activities there: drinking, smoking, playing cards and dominoes, and telling yarns. Matt and company tested each others’ memories of the Latin fish names on the faded chart on the wall. They became familiar with the other regulars: the farmer, the garage owner and the cinema manager who always arrived late with his wife after the last show, never removed his trilby and always had a rude story to tell.

To reach the Percy Arms, Matt and his friends walked the mile or so across the fields using the track known as Airmyn Crossings. It was lonely and remote in those days before the roaring motorway was built, and a housing estate sprawled across it. It was a pleasant stroll on a warm evening, more of a challenge in wind and rain, and undeniably menacing after dark, especially where the trees and bushes joined overhead. The darkness added adventure to the walk home which was always late. Pubs were not supposed to serve drinks after half-past ten, but the landlord bent this rule a little, especially if the cinema manager was delayed. The local police knew when to be diplomatic. Sometimes, it could be nearly midnight before Matt and his friends started home along the pitch black track with several pints of John Smith’s inside them, their apprehension kept at bay by vulgar songs and loud bravado. Sometimes a couple of the group would steal ahead to hide in the bushes ready to jump out and frighten the others with piercing cries. It was rowdy, but innocuous enough compared to what some teenagers get up to nowadays.

Matt never finished his sixth form studies. Before his friends went off to university he had left school for a job in a local office, his ambition diverted by a girl friend, the accomplished and beautiful daughter of an affluent local solicitor. They made plans and imagined their future together, but much to her father’s relief, she left for university too. Despite ardent promises to remain true, she gradually drifted away. When Matt last heard of her, she was organising famine relief in Africa.

Thus, one Christmas Eve, Matt found himself alone. He decided for old times’ sake to walk the path to Airmyn. Nothing had changed. The taproom was just as it had been. The floorboards still knocked to his footsteps, the seats remained hard, the tables, bare, the fading fish were still on the wall. There were few signs it was Christmas, but the coal fire had a more cheerful glow than usual and everyone was in a happy frame of mind. Matt played dominoes with the farmer. The garage owner enquired as to his well-being. The cinema manager arrived late with his hat, wife and rude story.

When Matt eventually started back along the deserted track, a little unsteadily due to the beer inside him, it was late and an ominous fog had descended. It was thick, the kind you get when moisture from the rivers and low-lying fields conceives a dense, cold vapour that penetrates your lungs and shrouds the sight and sound of your footsteps. Matt’s shadow hung eerily in the mist around him; shapes and silhouettes moved in and out of the bushes; dark forms ahead and behind gave the impression of something approaching and then dissolving away. The only thing Matt heard was the sound of his own breathing. It intensified his unease.

Suddenly, just where the path bends beneath overhanging trees, Matt sensed something tumbling from above, as if someone was falling on him. Inches from his own face was another face, a terrifying face with hollowed-out eyes and grimacing, uneven teeth. Matt raised his arm to push it away. His hand slipped into the mouth; it felt wet and cold; his fingers scraped across rough teeth. He shuddered and screamed, and staggered sideways into the adjacent field, the surface of which lay some two or three feet below the level of the path.

Looking up from the ground, Matt realised he was alone. No one else was on the path. Yet, he was certain it had been real. His fingers were wet where they had entered the mouth, and sore where they had rubbed across the teeth. Beside him, on the ground, was something round. It took a few moments to realise it was a human skull. It had the same uneven teeth as the face that had materialised in front of him. Matt cursed. Stone cold sober, he scrambled back up to the path and ran fast to the safety of the street lights on the main road.

Rationalising afterwards, Matt decided the skull had indeed been real. He had a graze on his hand to prove it. In his drunken state, he must have fallen from the path, dislodging the skull from the loose earth at the side of the field. The rest was illusion. It had only seemed to drop from above as the ground came up towards him. He had probably covered it up again as he scrambled back up to the track. He never related the incident to anyone, and there was never any report of human remains found on Airmyn Crossings.

The following week, Matt’s employer offered him a promotion in Lancashire. It was several years before he visited the Percy Arms again. When he did, reluctantly, but necessarily because of a family function, much had changed. Outwardly, it looked the same, but inside it had become a single large, refurbished lounge. There was no sign that the taproom had ever existed. He drove there by car, but passing along Airmyn Road, he just had time to register that the route of the old Airmyn Crossings had been diverted to accommodate the new motorway.

All of this was over fifty years ago. The farmer, the garage owner, the cinema manager and his wife must be long gone.

Recently, Matt heard a tale that seemed to have some bearing on the events of that Christmas Eve of long ago. A distant cousin, Louisa, whom he knew only vaguely, visited him in the course of tracing her family history. Matt was unable to add much to her findings, but she told him a tale that had been passed down to her grandmother from her grandmother’s grandmother.

The name, Matt, or Matthew, had run through the Wetherell family for generations. An earlier Matthew had been born in a village many miles away to the North. That Matthew had worked on the lands of the Northumberland estates belonging to the Percy family. One summer he had transgressed unwritten social expectations by becoming too familiar with the daughter of the incumbent of the local Parish. To prevent the friendship developing into anything more serious, it had been arranged that Matthew would be moved away to other lands owned by the same family in distant Airmyn. Matthew’s brother Mark had to move with him for no reason other than that he was Matthew’s brother. In due course, the news arrived that the vicar’s daughter of whom Matthew had been so fond, had married a tea trader and moved to the colonies. Matthew, distressed, took to wandering like a tramp in the woods and fields. He disappeared one Christmas and nothing was heard of him again.

More happily, Matthew’s brother, Mark, remained in Airmyn. He married and had a large family. He was the ancestor of both the present day Matt and his distant cousin, Louisa. If you care to look in the Airmyn Parish registers for the early years of the nineteenth century, you will find mention of a Mark Wetherell, servant in husbandry, son of John and Mary Wetherell of Melsonby, which is in North Yorkshire, near Richmond.

The exact location of Matt’s disturbing experience that dark Christmas Eve, must now be buried beneath the Eastbound carriageway of the M62 motorway. Strange things happen there. Engines misfire, sudden gusts of wind cause vehicles to swerve, drivers slow down for no apparent reason. You should concentrate and take extra care there, especially on Christmas Eve. Matt Wetherell avoids it like it was haunted.

Andrew Lloyd Webber

A treat on BBC Television last night: ‘Andrew Lloyd Webber at the BBC’, a collection of performances over the years. It had some commentary, including from Lloyd Webber himself, but nothing shouty or intrusive, no one ‘emoting’ like an open mouthed idiot, just quiet, intelligent and sensible. The BBC at its best. It was first shown in March earlier this year but I missed it then. It is still on iPlayer.

I have long been a Lloyd Webber fan. I first became aware of him in the Joseph days of the nineteen-sixties, but it was Jesus Christ Superstar that won me over, particularly the film - the one with Ted Neely and Yvonne Elliman. I saw it three or four times. My friend Brendan, from the shared house, went to see it about ten times. He knew all the words and harmonies, and could imitate the actors’ bass/baritone/tenor voices:  “We need a more permanent solution to our problem. ...What then to do about Jesus of Nazareth? Miracle wonderman, hero of fools ...” If you know the original you can imagine the hilarious effect.

Then I bought the first recording of Evita and was absolutely entranced by it, especially the scene where Peron meets Eva for the first time:  “...Colonel Peron / Eva Duarte, I’ve heard so much about you. ... but I’m only an actress / a soldier ... But when you act, the things you do affect us all. But when you act, you take us away from the squalor of the real world. ...I’d be good for you, I’d be surprisingly good for you.”

For me, the highlight of the programme was Lesley Garrett and Michael Ball singing The Phantom of the Opera in 2001. I love Lesley Garrett. She is of my era and from Thorne in Yorkshire, my part of the country. She went to Thorne Grammar School. Goole, Thorne and the villages in between and around used to be as one. They even had the same telephone dialling code. Then some government factotum with apparently no understanding of the social geography of the area thought it would be more convenient to split them off into different administrative regions.

When Lesley Garrett speaks, much of her native Thorne accent still bubbles through. When she sings, she is spellbinding.

Lesley Garrett and Michael Ball: The Phantom of the Opera - https://youtu.be/yAYeqyrFWWU
I don’t know why the sub-titles to this video misleadingly implies that they are married.

We Know Where You’re From

New Month Old Post (revised): first posted 10th March 2019.

The British-Irish Dialect Quiz

Not such an old post, but most followers came after this date. Recent discussion of accents and language on this and other blogs reminded me of it. Yorkshire Pudding wrote about it around the same time. The results show me to be more East Yorkshire than he is.  

I can no longer access the quiz directly without hitting the New York Times paywall, but if I search for “The British-Irish Dialect Quiz” and go in from Google or Bing then it works. There is also an American version, “The U.S. Dialect Quiz”, but that always hits the paywall however I try to enter. 

Growing up in a unicultural Yorkshire town (as they nearly all were in the nineteen-fifties), I’m not sure when I first realised there were variations in the way people spoke. I remember a boy climbing around on Filey Brigg with a hammer who said he was “Luckin’ fer forwssls”, and the pen-friends from Bingley, organized by one of the teachers at junior school, who, when we met them, sounded different and used strange words. To my childhood eyes, they even looked different. Goodness, even people from across the river looked and spoke differently, even though they lived only a few miles away.  

Later, meeting different people and living around the country, accents fascinated me. I love hearing Buchan Scots and Yorkshire Asian, and used to have great fun winding-up my South London mother-in-law.  She could give as good as she got.

So, when I heard about the British-Irish Dialect Quiz, it was irresistible. I was bound to try it out and join the thousands of other bloggers writing about it.

It asks 25 questions about how you pronounce various words, such as “scone” or “last”, and what words you use for certain things, such as for feeling cold or for the playground game in which one child chases the rest and the first person touched becomes the pursuer. It then gives you a map of Great Britain with your area of origin shaded in. If you want, you can continue with a further 71 questions to refine the results further.

It got me pretty much spot-on. Words like “breadcake” and “twagging”, and the way I say ‘a’ and ‘u’, give me away most.

The explanation of the results is interesting too. It mentions that in Britain and Ireland, unlike North America, local dialect sometimes changed wildly within ten or twenty miles. Village-by-village distinctions have now eroded, but the article suggests there is no evidence that regional differences are disappearing, even in the face of technological influences. I find that reassuring.

My wife’s results were interesting. She answered the questions twice, once using her words and speech growing up in Hertfordshire, and then again how she is now. It got her pretty much right on both counts. Living in the north and working as an occupational therapist, she soon realised it did not go down well to go into peoples’ homes and ask how well they could manage in the “baarthrums”.  

Do Elephants Get Seasick?

Although not a mariner, I imagine that if you want to sail a ship across the North Sea from the Humber to the Elbe, from Hull to Hamburg, you set the satnav, and the autopilot and diesel engines do much of the rest.

It was not always so. Until maybe 50 years ago, you left the Humber on a compass bearing, made adjustments for the wind and tides, and hoped you ended up in the right place fifteen to twenty hours later. In winter, at night, in bad weather, it was not for the faint hearted. Lives were lost. What a risky venture it seemed.  

A while ago, in a post about family photograph albums, I showed a picture of my great grandfather as a newly qualified master mariner. He first went to sea on a ketch at the age of 13, carrying bathroom ware from Leeds to London and returning with broken glass. Later, he spent two years on a brigantine trading to South America, once sailing 900 miles up the Amazon to Manaus. But he always said that if a man can sail the North Sea, he can sail anywhere in the world. And sailing the North Sea is what he did for many years, as captain of ships from Goole in Yorkshire, Britain’s most inland port. Frequent destinations were Jersey, Ghent, Antwerp, Rotterdam and Hamburg.

We still have some of his log books. Here is an account of a voyage from Goole to Hamburg on the 1,116 tonnne steamship Aire during the nineteen-thirties. The ship had a total crew of around 25.  

They left Goole Victoria Lock at 8 p.m. on a Saturday evening, and sailed out into the River Ouse. It may seem a strange time to leave, but it depended on the tides. “We would be off to sea  while the ship owners were dressed up singing psalms at chapel.” The ship’s crew, even the officers, were expected to touch their caps to the local landowner, Colonel Saltmarshe, if he was out in his grounds near the river as they sailed past. If not, he would complain that the ship had been travelling too fast and washing away the river banks, and the captain would have to appear before the shipping company Directors like a naughty schoolboy.

In a strong Westerly wind, but with good visibility between showers, it took four hours to reach the Bull Sands lightship off Spurn Point at the mouth of the Humber. Two and a half hours later, they passed the Outer Dowsing light vessel, moored in the shallow waters off the Lincolnshire coast (today the site of a proposed offshore wind farm). It was now 2.30 in the morning, with a strong westerly gale and heavy following sea, and there would be no further navigation aids until the Frisian islands some fifteen hours away. They set a course almost due East, and sailed on.

At 7.30 on Sunday morning, they sighted sister-ship the S.S. Blyth returning from Hamburg in the opposite direction. There had originally been three sister-ships, the third being the Calder which had foundered in bad weather on the same route in 1931, with the loss of all 26 men.  

Nothing more is logged until Borkum island light house off the Frisian coast near the Dutch-German border, which they sighted at 5.30 in the afternoon. Sometimes they would miss it, and have to look for the next sightings at Norderney or even Cuxhaven, eight hours further on. At Cuxhaven, they took on a pilot to take them into the Elbe estuary. It was now 1.30 on Monday morning. At Brunsbittel the estuary pilot made way for a river pilot, and they proceeded up the Elbe to Hamburg, mooring at No. 9 berth just before 6 a.m.  

The main cargo is not recorded, other than that it was sent by Rafferty and Watson of Sheffield. It was probably coal from the Yorkshire coal fields, the export of coal being the reason the port of Goole and its adjoining canal were built.

Also on board were three saloon passengers, three deck passenders, a horse, a dog and four elephants. Do elephants get seasick?

Presumably, the passengers and animals disembarked on arrival, but it was not until 48 hours later, at 6 a.m. on Wednesday morning, that the ship moved to the Altona wharf to discharge the final 675 tons, after which it moved back to berth No. 8. 

The return voyage began at 6.25 p.m. on Friday evening, carrying 275 tons of cargo and one alien passenger. They had a clear run down the river in good visibility, passing Borkum at 9.40 on Saturday morning and reaching the Bull lightship at 6.15 a.m. on Sunday. 

As usual, they moored briefly at Hull to discharge some of the cargo. Sometimes, my great grandmother or other family members would take the train to Hull and sail back up river on the ship. My dad did this a few times when young. My grandfather, as a boy, even went on trips overseas, on one occasion being gently pushed back into the cabin on becoming excited at the sight of foreign troops on the quayside at Rotterdam. “Look, Dad, Boers,” was not a sensible thing to shout in 1903.

On the current trip, vessels for Goole were held up at Hull by fog, and missed the tide, but they eventually arrived at 4.30 on the Monday morning, and docked three quarters of an hour later. They had been away for 9 days.

Click on maps to enlarge

Airmyn Clock

This delightful folly is Airmyn Clock. It was erected in 1865 by the tenants of the Airmyn Estates to honour their beneficent landlord, George Percy, the second Earl of Beverley, who had funded  the village school some years earlier.

It greeted me regularly throughout childhood: on the way to Grandma’s on Saturday mornings, visiting friends by bicycle, on cross-country runs from school, learning to drive round its awkward bend, walking to sixth-form parties and under-age drinking in the Percy Arms. I never took much notice of it in those days. What I could not then have imagined is its connection to my wife, despite her being from the South of England.

Airmyn Clock was designed by Henry Francis Lockwood, an architect best-known for his grand buildings around Bradford, such as the City Hall, St. George’s Hall, Salts Mill and the whole of the associated town of Saltaire where a Lockwood Street is named after him. The clock bears a strong resemblance to his larger Italianate designs, Bradford Wool Exchange in particular. He may have been known in the Airmyn area because of his earlier practice in Hull.

Henry had around ten children, which makes for a complicated genealogy. One line, by way of Ireland and Devon, found its way to the Home Counties where my wife was born. She is a direct descendant of Henry Francis Lockwood.

My wife therefore claims strong Yorkshire antecedents. When we moved (back in my case) to Yorkshire, she took to pronouncing the short Northern As like a local. It would not have gone down at all too well to be asking her Bradford service users whether they were managing all right in the “baarthrum”. 

Image from Geograph. Creative Commons Licence. Copyright Neil Theasby.

Aunty Bina’s Farm

NEW MONTH OLD POST

First posted as on 14th October, 2014

About 1300 words. Contains local dialect.

 

In a quiet southern corner of Yorkshire where the tributaries of the River Humber lock fingers with the Vale of York, there lies an expanse of pancake-flat country that geographers call the Humberhead Levels. It was once the bed of a glacial lake. Stand on the slightest rise and to the East you see the welcoming, chalky yellow-green hills of the Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Wolds. Look to the West and you can just make out the menacing, inky-brown smudge of the Yorkshire Pennines.

In winter, there is little protection from the North and East winds that blow up and down the Vale or in along the estuary. In autumn, thick fogs rise up from the fields and drift in from the rivers. In summer, the baking sun cracks the earth into deep fissures. Spring reveals the richness of the soil. Parts of it are warp land, where turbid river waters were once diverted into the fields to leave layers of fine, fertile silt.

The region is dotted with remote villages and isolated farms. Aunty Bina lived at the end of a long lane that stretched straight and level from my grandma’s village, past silent fields of sugar beet, wheat, potatoes and fallow grass. Hardly anyone goes down that lane now if not in a motor vehicle or dressed in lycra, but in days gone by we walked from the village, a good two miles, me and my brother running happily ahead of grandma wheeling baby cousin Anna in her pram. It lives in my imagination as an expedition through an extraordinary landscape. 

Anna had been staying with us while Aunty Bina was in hospital for an operation. It was supposed to take a couple of weeks but things went wrong and it was four months before she got out. Even then, she was still too ill to cope with a one-year old, so Anna stayed with us a lot longer. We loved it. It was like having a new baby sister. She learned to walk and talk before she went home. Neighbours thought my mother had had another baby. 

We visited regularly for Bina to see Anna. It meant we could play on the farm with cousin Brian. It never failed to bring new adventures. Some of the buildings were two hundred years old. There were sweet smelling hay stacks to climb and burrow in, quiet shady barns to explore, nests of semi-wild, warm, furry kittens to stroke and befriend, and, away across a field, a mysterious, dark wood with fallen trees to scramble over. 

In summer you could channel mazes and crawl through the long wheat, provided Brian’s dad, Uncle Ben, didn’t spot you. The one time he caught us flattening his corn just before harvest there was hell to pay, especially by Brian after we had gone home.

Uncle Ben worked hard lonely hours on the farm, and had the farmers’ pragmatic acceptance of life and death. Once, making our way along the lane, we spotted him across a field, standing motionless with his gun, “shuttin’ t’crows an’ t’rabbits” [shooting crows and rabbits]. He had sheds of egg-laying hens, but, for farmers, there is no room for sentiment when a hen’s egg-laying begins to decline. He had a series of farm dogs, loud, ferocious, vicious things that sprang up at your face on chains, snarling as you edged past against the wall. I never thought to ask what happened when they got old, or what became of the litters of kittens produced by the semi-wild farm cats. In later years, he bought white Charolais calves and raised them like his own family, but in the end they were always sold on for slaughter and replaced by younger ones. He called them “be-asts”, splitting the word into two syllables.

I once sat behind him at a wedding and marvelled at the breadth of his back, like one of his ‘be-asts’. He thoroughly knew his job, the diverse skills involved, how to operate complicated machinery, how to calculate quantities of feeds and fertilisers, how to fill in government forms, how to buy calves, when to sow and harvest crops, when the weather said to wait a little longer, and when the weather said it was all right to hide indoors out of harm’s way and play pool with Brian, or watch cricket on television. Aunty Bina would have been quite happy to retire to a little cottage in the village, but Ben would not entertain the idea, and continued to raise Charolais, even when he was “pushin’ eighty”, as Bina put it.

His rural toughness applied to his dealings with people too. He could seem rude and aggressive, and more than one relative refused to have anything to do with him. We used to tell ourselves we visited the farm to be insulted. As I got older he always looked me critically in the beard and said, “You scruffy bugger! Can’t th’afford a razor?” And when it started to go white it was, “Well! Bloody ‘ell! Look who it is! It’s bloody Father Christmas.”

I once drove my dad there and Ben came in saying, “Ah cou’n’t see who it wa’ from ove’ thee-’re across o’t’ field, except it were a rich bugger wi’ a new car an’ a scruffy bugger wi’ whiskers.” [I couldn’t see who it was from over there across the field, except it was a rich b- with a new car and a scruffy b- with whiskers]. I wish I’d been brave enough to tell him the new car was mine.

This confrontational humour came straight out of pre-war village life, from the days of communal field work, laughing, joking and exchanging banter as they forked hay or straw on to horse-drawn wagons. But by the nineteen sixties things had changed. Farmers worked long hours on their own, driving up and down, up and down on their tractors. So Ben saved his acerbic wit for visitors. If you were in tune, he was one of the most amusing people you could ever hope to meet.

“What! y’don’t ‘ave sugar in y’tea? Bloody ‘ell! What d’y’think we grow it fo’?” [You don’t take sugar? Why do you think we grow it?]

“Vegetarian? Y’r a vegetarian? We wo’k our bloody guts out raisin’ t’be-asts fo’t’market, and y’come in ‘ere sayin’ y’r a vegetarian!” [We work hard raising be-asts for market and you dare to say you are a vegetarian!]

Ben had been born in another village, some distance across the river, and implied he married Aunty Bina only to improve the local bloodstock.

“If t’Blue Line bus ‘adn’t started comin’ thro’ t’village, th’d ‘ave all bin imbecil’s ‘cos o’ t’inbreedin’.” [If the Blue Line bus hadn’t started coming through the village they would have all been imbeciles because of inbreeding]

If ever I had an accent like that, I’m sorry to have lost it in pretentious jobs and places. One day over the phone, I was dismayed to hear Ben telling Bina “th’s some posh bugger askin’ fo’ y’r on t’phone.” Bina defended me. “Why, it’s not anybody posh,” she said, “it’s on’y our Tasker,” and then to me said “I suppose y‘ave to talk like that when y’r at work.”

One way to handle Ben’s prickly comments was to ignore him. That’s what Bina did, but there were others who returned as good as they got. One day, they were visited by ‘our Mary’, an overweight elderly relative, and an equally overweight friend, who arrived side by side on bicycles, gliding slowly along the lane, tyres bulging to bursting point, saddles submerged in the overhanging folds of their abundant bottoms, skirts gathered under to reveal thighs wobbling like jelly as they pumped against the pedals.

“Look who it is!” shouted Ben from his stackyard. “It’s t’Rolly Pollies.”

“Bugger off Ben Smith, y’mucky farmer blattered up in cow clap,” came the reply. “Get back on t’land whe-‘re y’belong!” [Go away you dirty farmer covered in cow muck. Get back on the land where you belong]

When you think what else they spread on t’land, that’s a pretty good put down.

Ray Gosling’s Goole

(First posted 15th October 2017. The YouTube videos linked below are quite long. I don’t expect many will want to watch them through.)

Gosling’s Travels: Goole (1975, 26 minutes)

In 1975, the radio and television broadcaster, Ray Gosling, made a film about Goole: a place I used to know well. The inhabitants were appalled. They had been looking forward to a film about a pleasant little town on the banks of the Ouse, with friendly folk in homely homes, about canals and railways, brave mariners who sailed the North Sea, the strange salt and pepper pot water towers, and the proud rise of a town from nothing to one of the country’s busiest ports in less than a hundred years: the story of the port in green fields.

But Ray Gosling was never going to stick to that. He homed in on the eccentric linguist who sought out foreign sailors to practise his Russian, businessmen who looked shifty and evasive, dockers who appeared scheming and workshy, the mysterious world of pigeon keepers, and, most embarrassing of all, the star turn, some young ladies who also liked to consort with foreign seamen, although not to practise their language skills. Goole: working-town low life in ragged abundance.

Watching again on YouTube, I see the problem. Right from the start, he goes for the jugular:

I’m walking the streets of a flat little town in Yorkshire that most of you will never have heard of: Goole. And those who do know where it is, between Doncaster and Hull, have nicknamed it Sleepy Hollow, because nothing has ever happened here that’s made the headlines in a newspaper. The place has no history worth putting into history books, and they don’t really manufacture anything. 

You might say: “What did you expect?” It was what Ray Gosling did. He was different from other broadcasters. He was cheeky and a bit common, working-class with an East Midlands accent, a university dropout, C-stream and proud of it. He made films about the little things of life, to him more important than the big things: caravans, allotments, sheds, the seedy, the left behind, the small-scale concerns of ordinary people. He was one of them. He wrote about them, ran things and campaigned for them.

The film is pure genius. He had seen the times they were a-changin’  long before Bob Dylan. He had tried to help the lively working-class community of St. Ann’s in Nottingham when the local council wanted to flatten and redevelop the whole district, but the community was lost in the end. He could see that Goole’s canal trains of coal-loaded compartments known as ‘Tom Puddings’, hydraulically hoisted into the air and tipped into the holds of ships, were nearing their end. Goole was a working museum that could not last, no more than the well-meaning vicar and police chief in the film, gullible anachronisms innocently trying to set up a wholesome mariners’ club not run by mariners. It was never going to supplant the Dock Tavern.

He had read On the Road and seen Rebel Without a Cause and The Wild One (a film banned in Britain) and understood the implications. He saw change in the hearts of young people rejecting their fuddy-duddy parents’ expectations. His autobiographies, Sum Total and Personal Copy are fascinating memoirs of the fifties and sixties. “We were the first generation to be able to busk with our lives” he reflected in 2006 in one of his last films, Ray Gosling OAP. And as he sat waiting for his cluttered Mapperley house to be forcibly sold due to bankruptcy, unable to move around the heaped accumulations of a lifetime’s work: piles of files, mountains of books, scattered nick-nacks; he said:

All my life, I’ve known we are what we collect, what we pick up, so my room with all the detail I’ve kept is what made my work, it was important, to me. The silly nick-nacks are not just nick-nacks, and they’re not silly.

That is truly uplifting to hoarders like me: the glorious antithesis of decluttering.

Ray Gosling OAP (2006, 59 minutes)

Hopefully, the links to his films on YouTube will remain active, but they might get blocked for copyright reasons. There is also an archive of his work at Nottingham Trent University.

I'll leave the last word to Ray himself, part of an article in the TV Times in 1975:

... I don’t think facts always tell the truth. And I’m not a promotion man for God, Queen and the Ruling Class in Britain Beautiful – but we do search for the good in a place. And try to film what people naturally do. Try to avoid dwelling on obvious eccentrics, though that’s difficult. We are such an individual fruit and nutcase lot. I’m not hawking any pet philosophy or seeking hidden meanings. The films are simply place-tasters.

I don’t know what you’re going to make of Goole. People live nearby refer to it as Sleepy Hollow, because nothing ever happens in Goole. That’s why I went. It’s one of the most forgotten places of England. Britain’s most inland port, 50 miles from the sea. Just as Bath doesn’t make enough of its spa water, Goole doesn’t make enough of its dirty canal water. Still it is the 11th port of the land. Behind the parish church, you can see hanging from the jib of a crane, Britain’s balance of payments. Steel: in and out. Russian timber imported. We got turfed-off a Russian boat, camera and all – nicely, but firmly. And Goole exports: coals for every purpose.

The great local row was in the pigeon club. Should the birds be flown, next season, from north to south? Opinion divided. I like Goole, I do hope I’ve done it justice.

There was a nice man we wanted to film there; Albert Gunn, dental mechanic, pigeon racer and performer in the amateur Kiss Me Kate at the Grammar School – but Albert was ill, so we couldn’t.

That’s the problem I find filming as against writing. With pictures we have to prove it. Our folks have got to perform in front of the camera.

The Song Book

If by chance I loose this book 

If by chance you find it 

Remember Kathleen is my name 

And Clayton comes behind it. 

 

 

Around 1960, my father came home with a copy of The News Chronicle Song Book given to him by an acquaintance who lived in the East Riding village of Asselby. It was in a terrible state, but he stuck it back together and fitted a brown paper jacket on which he wrote: “This book was paper backed and repaired on a wet Thursday afternoon February 25th 1960 by [him, me and my brother]”. A father on his half-day off keeping his two children occupied during school half-term.

 

The introduction suggests:

Singing together is a form of amusement and delight. It is a glorious way in which we can, in large bodies, express something which we could not tell in any other way. But the love for Community Singing should be started and finished in the home. … With this Song Book the “News-Chronicle” hopes to encourage and bring back singing in our home. The Community Singing will take care of itself.

I wholeheartedly agree but have never been much of a community singer. Despite a good sense of pitch, I find it difficult to hear my own voice in groups. At home, though, yes. What fun it gave us. No one played an instrument, we just turned the pages and sang. 

 

The cover gives an idea of what it contains. Looking again now turns up some great favourites: 

• Dashing Away With a Smoothing Iron 
• Come Lasses and Lads 
• Billy Boy 
• David of the White Rock 
• Ye Banks and Braes
  
• Marching Through Georgia 
• Camptown Races 
• Go Down Moses 
• A Roving 
• Eternal Father 
• O Come, All Ye Faithful 

Wow! How long a list can get I away with? All two hundred? I feel a sing-song coming on. 

‘Twas on a Monday morning … me Nancy kittl’d me fancy … doo-dah doo-dah … to trip it up and down … tell old Pharoah to … bring me the harp I adore … I’ll go no more a roving … in peril on the sea. 

                                                *                          *                          *

 

We have a tape recording from 1963 of one of my dad’s unselfconscious performances. His granddad had been a sea captain which, he said, conferred upon him an inherited natural aptitude in the delivery and interpretation of sea shanties. 

 

“And now from my sea shanty series,” he announces, his tongue in a twist, “the old song book page one hundred and twenty four: Bound for the Rio Grande.”

 

Two children mutter and snigger in the background. 

 

“One moment please.” 

 

Struggling to keep a serious demeanour and in tune, he begins to sing: “I’ll sing you a song of the fish of the sea ...” 

 

That must be one of the daftest opening lines of any song, ever, and it defeats him. A hesitant pause is followed by a total breakdown into helpless laughter. All three of us. 

 

 

I suppose the lyrics of some of these songs are questionable these days, but not as questionable as the lyrics we used to sing on guitar nights in Leeds where I lived after leaving school, where familiarity with these songs gave me malign influence. Imagine four twenty-ish-year-old lads in a shared house with guitars and bottles of beer.  

 

Tavern in the Town became a song about the television rent collector who was a creep, and what he did with sheep. So did Camptown Races with the “doo-dah”s changed to “dildo”s. They are stuck in my head forever, and, of course, unrepeatable. Except for the one to the tune of The Ball of Kirrimuir about the owner of the house who knew we would never do any cleaning so did it all himself in return for us doing his washing up: 

Dave does all the cleaning, and that’s a job he hates, 

And so to appease him we have to wash the plates. 

… possibly the only case where our version was less deplorable than the original (although you won’t find any such words in the book). 

 

The book has given sixty years of pleasure and continues to do so (perhaps that’s for a later post), more than twice as long as the original owner assuming she got it new when published in 1931. Who was she, I often wondered, the girl who misspelt “lose”? I never thought to ask. The wonders of internet genealogy reveal she was born in 1924, married someone called Roantree in 1951, moved in later life to Bridlington and died in 2010. By the time her book passed to us, she had three children of her own. I never knew them despite being of similar age and from the same area. She must have written the inscription in the nineteen-thirties. Did she ever think of it again? 

 

I don’t know if anything remains of Sycamore Farm. All I remember of Asselby is a village on a road to nowhere, on a tongue of heavy mudstone between the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Derwent, where there was once an awkward bend through a disused railway crossing. I went once or twice to the Black Swan pub there but preferred the Kings Head at the end of the road in Barmby-on-the-Marsh. They had a better dartboard.

 

M Dunham Are Crap

Never use a word if you don’t know what it means

(First posted 1st September 2014)

“That’s wrong” said Geoffrey Bullard, with his thick ape-neck and menacing stare. “It should be M Dunham is crap”. His fat finger stabbed at the offending word.

He thought he knew everything, and everyone else was stupid. It was too risky to explain. Football teams are plural: Rawcliffe United are great this year; Howden Town are terrible; M Dunham are crap. You can chant it:

M Dunham are crap,
M Dunham are crap,
Ee aye addio,
M Dunham are crap.

A league match between M Dunham and T Dunham c1960

It was my dad who first pretended we were football teams in a league. He was B Dunham, I was T Dunham, my brother Martin was M Dunham, and M Dunham were crap. It said so in red wax crayon on the back of the asbestos garage where Geoffrey Bullard had spotted it.

I didn’t realise that wax crayon on asbestos panelling is like permanent marker: waterproof, indelible, not-fade-away. There it was, and there it must have stayed for decades. Imagine the disapproving faces that pitied the ignorant child responsible, and wondered who was M Dunham, and why was he crap.

So, Geoffrey Bullard remained oblivious of the imaginary football teams, and, when he wasn’t round at our house bullying me, I could play imaginary football games in the garden. I had a full league of teams and fixtures, and played out each match on my own on the pitch of dried mud we optimistically called “the back grass”. This differed from “the front grass” only by being slightly bigger and by not actually having any grass, except that is for a few odd blades that struggled out of the earth before being unceremoniously stamped back in again by the boots of make-believe footballers.

I ran up and down with the ball, puffing and panting between one goal defined by chalk marks on the wall of the house and the other by the clothes posts near the back hedge, while providing the roars and boos of the crowd, and an excitable commentary. In my head they were all there: two complete teams of players, spectators, a commentator, the referee, the linesmen and the trainer with his ‘magic sponge’.

I drew up team sheets, match day programmes, fixture lists and league tables. I was everyone and did everything. These days, kids do the same with electronic games like ‘Top European Football Manager III’, but my fantasy was played in the back garden, much healthier for all the running around in the fresh air, with better transferrable skills from the manual record keeping, and no less unsociable than games consoles.

T Dunham were of course the best team by far. They always won and hardly ever conceded a goal. They usually beat M Dunham (who really were crap) by several goals to nil, and “The” B Dunham by a similar margin (my dad had once been to watch “The” Arsenal while on holiday in London).

It was not long before T Dunham were promoted out of the league containing the other Dunham teams into the local district league, where they played against proper teams such as the colliery, the dockers and the railwaymen, and teams from pubs and local villages. I picked my players for each match and posted their names on the wall inside our team hut, in other words the yellow shed.

The team was always set out in traditional 1-2-3-5 formation, with a goalkeeper, two full backs, three half-backs and five forwards. In those days we always had a centre forward, inside forwards and wingers; no one had yet heard of modern formations involving sweepers, overlapping midfielders and offensive 4-3-3 game plans.

One day, Geoffrey Bullard noticed a team sheet on the wall of the shed. “What’s that?” he asked, looking carefully. My team was laid out for all to see, ready for the West Riding Cup Final between T Dunham and Norton Woodseats. The captain, ‘Dunham’, in other words me, was on the left wing, my position the only time I had ever been selected for the school team. Some of the other imaginary players were also names from school. ‘Gelder’ was inside-left, ‘Longthwaite’ was centre-forward, and, as I realised to my consternation the same moment he spotted it, ‘Bullard’ was centre-half.

“Why am I only centre-half?” he demanded to know.

I cringed inwardly while he thought about it. He considered himself one of the best footballers in the school and naturally assumed his rightful role was top scorer in the forward line.

“Actually,” he then said weighing it up, “I would make quite a good centre-half,” and let me off the hook by showing no further interest.

But the wax crayon was still on the garage, and in due course my mother saw it.

“It won’t come off,” she sounded annoyed. “And anyway, what does it mean?”

It dawned on me that I didn’t really know what ‘crap’ meant either. I’d heard people say it, and thought it a satisfyingly grown up word to use. It just seemed to mean someone or something wasn’t very good. You could snarl it in real disgust, curling your upper lip, emphasising the ‘r’ and spitting out the final ‘p’. “C-RAP!” I had been saying it as much as I could.

“What’s this word, ‘crap’?” my dad asked. My mother had obviously been talking to him.

It was my dad’s sister, Aunty Dorothy, a hospital nurse, who gently enlightened us as to what it meant. She took me aside and asked in her quiet way: “Was it you who wrote in wax crayon on the back of the garage? You wrote, ‘M Dunham are crap’, didn’t you?”

I nodded.

“Well, you do know what it means, don’t you?”

I shook my head.

“It’s very very rude,” she said looking serious. “It means babba.” *

I wanted to giggle, but tried hard to look horrified and apologetic.

“It’s not a word we should be using at all,” she warned sternly. “And in any case, it’s very wrong to say that. It should be M Dunham is crap.”


* It seems that using the word ‘babba’ to mean poo is not as universal as I once thought. An internet search reveals very few examples. Similarly, ‘trump’ meaning an emission of wind, also seems to be mainly a northern expression. Both were common in the part of Yorkshire where I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. The word ‘crap’, on the other hand, was beyond vulgarity and never heard. It goes to show how much things have changed. 

Carolus II Dei Gratia Mag Br Fra et Hib Rex

(first posted 5th May, 2015)

It is by a long chalk the oldest thing I own apart from the worse-than-senseless blocks and stones in the garden - a 1668 Charles II silver shilling. It is quite worn and the King’s face is damaged but the images are clear. A cautious numismatist would probably describe it as being in F or ‘Fine’ condition, just short of VF or ‘Very Fine’.

The ‘head’ side or obverse is inscribed “CAROLUS II DEI GRATIA” – Charles II by the grace of God – which continues on the ‘tail’ side or reverse, “MAG BR FRA ET HIB REX” – King of Great Britain, France and Ireland. The claim to France was historical but one of the shields on the reverse still displays the fleur de lys, the emblem of the King of France. The other shields portray the three English lions passant (i.e. walking, some heraldrists hold them to be leopards), the Scottish lion rampant (i.e. standing) and the Hibernian (Irish) harp. I think the shilling is the variation known as ‘second bust’ but I have insufficient experience to be sure.

The coin was struck – literally because it is a hammered coin – almost three hundred and fifty years ago, which is so long ago it is hard to imagine. It is dated ten years after the death of Oliver Cromwell and a couple of years after the Great Fire of London. Pepys was writing his diary, John Dryden was Poet Laureate, and Isaac Newton was discovering the calculus or ‘fluxions’ and about to be appointed a Cambridge professor of mathematics. England would soon be at war with the Dutch.

I can tell you how I came by it. My dad swapped it for a pair of boots with a farming acquaintance who found it by chance at the side of a newly ploughed field, the exact location now unknown. It was rare chance because this was well before the days of metal detecting. By now the boots will have dulled and decayed, but the shilling still shines.

A collector wanting a similar example for his or her collection today would have to pay around a hundred and fifty pounds – it could be two or three times that without the damage to the face. I don’t really care. Why sell it?

But what was it worth in the seventeenth century? It depends how you estimate it. In terms of purchasing power it would be the equivalent of around just seven pounds fifty today, but in terms of what someone might earn it would be worth between one and two hundred pounds. It depends whether you use retail price inflation or earnings inflation.

I turn it in my fingers and wonder what other hands held it, and how many. Placing it in history is easy but we can never know who owned it, who it was passed on to, what it bought, who lost it, what its loss meant, how it was lost or for how long it lay in the Howdenshire field where it was re-discovered.

Could it have been lost in drunken reverie? Perhaps it was some unfortunate farm labourer’s wage for the day, or a ‘King’s shilling’ taken by someone newly enlisted in the army or navy. Or did it belong to someone for whom the loss might have been a little more bearable, accidently dropped perhaps by a rich landowner and his farm foreman while paying a group of workers?

Some things we can never know but one day there may be an answer my final question, “Where will it be in another three hundred and fifty years, in 2370?” That is a date that seems like science fiction.

Review - Sabine Baring-Gould: Yorkshire Oddities (and other works)

 

The Dead Sister and The Used Up Characters (illustrations by D. Murray Smith)

Sabine Baring-Gould:
Yorkshire Oddities, Incidents and Strange Events (3*)
A Book of Ghosts (3*)
Curiosities of Olden Times (2*)

No, Sabine Baring-Gould was not one of the three wise men (with Baring-Frankincense and Baring-Myrrh) but was no less spiritual. And Yorkshire Oddities is not a dig at certain other bloggers despite what some might think; it was one of his books.

The Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924) is often remembered as author of the strident hymn Onward Christian Soldiers, written as young curate at Horbury Bridge, Yorkshire, in the eighteen-sixties, later set to the equally strident tune, St. Gertrude, by Sir Arthur Sullivan. Baring-Gould also collected myths and legends, folk songs and sermons, and wrote enormous amounts of other stuff. In his day he was considered one of England’s best novelists. He found time to father fifteen children as well. I bet he wasn’t much help with the housework.

I was hoping for a free Kindle version of Yorkshire Oddities but the cheapest on the Kindle store was £2.29, so I downloaded his Curiosities of Olden Times and A Book of Ghosts instead. Well, I am from Yorkshire. Later, I did find a free copy of Yorkshire Oddities on that wonderful resource The Open Library. I have therefore spent several weeks with the writings of an out-of-fashion Victorian clergyman.

The ghost stories are readable and entertaining. They bring the occasional shiver from anthropological relics that go bump in the night and a very scary railway compartment. There is a dead finger that inhabits the narrator’s body bit by bit in the hope of taking it over, a dead sister who lives the life of a living one, and a caution for writers not to base characters on real people because it uses up their souls leaving lifeless shells that follow you around. Not too scary, in fact it might better be described as playful, but not bad if you want something free for Kindle and can put up with the odd moralistic rant. David Murray Smith’s illustrations in some editions capture the gentle mood quite well.

Curiosities of Olden Times and Yorkshire Oddities are collections of the weird, strange and eccentric, in both fact and fiction. Among the olden curiosities we find descriptions of gruesome medieval punishments and are warned not to sit in church porches between the hours of 11.00 p.m. and 01.00 a.m. on St. Mark’s Eve (24th April) unless we wish to see the ghosts of those due to die in the coming year passing into the church. However, much of Curiosities... is concerned with religious myths and legends discussed in a lengthy academic way, which can be rather tedious.

But it was Yorkshire Oddities that started this quest. In effect, it is a kind of social history of the county. It offers brief biographies of oddities such as Blind Jack of Knaresborough (1717-1810) who learnt to navigate the entire county alone on a horse and built around 180 miles of turnpike road, and Peter Barker, the blind joiner (1808-1873), who taught himself to make or mend just about anything. There are accounts of heinous murders including the drowning of an unwanted husband by his wife, her lover and an accomplice at Dawney Bridge near Easingwold in 1623 where the bodies of the executed murderers were hung in chains on what later became known as Gibbet Hill.

I was greatly amused by Baring-Gould’s rendition of the Yorkshire accent. He had plenty of practice because his wife, Grace Taylor, was an ordinary girl from Ripponden, but I doubt he would have spoken of her as he reports an unnamed butcher speaking of his wife:

Shoo’s made a rare good wife. But shoo’s her mawgrums a’ times. But what women ain’t got ‘em ? They’ve all on ‘em maggots i’ their heads or tempers. Tha sees, sir, when a bone were took out o’ t’ side o’ Adam, to mak a wife for ‘m, ‘t were hot weather, an’ a blue-bottle settled on t’ rib. When shoo’s i’ her tantrums ses I to her, ‘Ma dear,’ ses I, ‘I wish thy great-great-grand ancestress hed chanced ta be made i’ winter.’ [p224, fifth edition]

“mawgrums” is one of several words that appear in the book and hardly anywhere else. Another is the name of a hill near Heptonstall called “Tomtitiman”.

But to return to Yorkshire accents, Baring-Gould writes:

[The locals] speak two languages – English and Yorkshire … every village has its own peculiarity of intonation, its own specialities in words. A Horbury man could be distinguished from a man of Dewsbury, and a Thornhill man from one of Batley. The railways have blended these peculiar dialects into one, and taken off the old peculiar edge of provincialism, so that now it is only to be found in its most pronounced and perfect development among the aged. [p110-111, fifth edition]

This was written in 1874 but I always felt you could still detect local differences amongst my grandparents’ generation in my neck of the woods up to a century later. Depending which way you walked, you could hear West Riding tykes, Linkisheere yellowbellies and East Riding woldies all within a ten-mile radius.

I was therefore especially interested in the stories of three ‘Yorkshire Oddities’ from this area:

Nancy Nicholson “the termagant” lived at Drax, Newland and Asselby between 1785 and 1854. She nagged and complained so much as to ruin the lives of her husband, relatives and almost everyone she came into contact with.

Snowden Dunhill (c1766-1838) from Spaldington near Howden, was a notorious thief: the Rob Roy of the East Riding. He was eventually transported to Van Dieman’s Land where he dictated his life story which found its way back to Howden and was printed and published.

Jemmy Hirst of Rawcliffe (1738-1829) became so famous for his eccentricities that King George III invited him to visit his Court in London. He rode a bull and wore eccentric clothing including an outrageously broad hat, although anyone tempted to joke or play a trick at his expense invariably came off worst. He became wealthy dealing in agricultural produce and built himself an enormous wickerwork carriage drawn by Andalusian horses, causing a sensation at Pontefract and Doncaster races. A true Yorkshire oddity but somehow he sounds like Jimmy Savile.

I knew these villages as a child but had never heard of any of these characters until more recently when we all began to take more interest in local history: e.g. there is now a pub at Rawcliffe named after Jemmy Hirst. Among their stories are glimpses of lost landscapes and ways of life: the woods around Rawcliffe, otter hunting in the marshlands, the steam packet that sailed from Langrick (Long Drax) to York, and the emergence of the railways.

There is a lot to fascinate but much to skip over. As in Curiosities..., some chapters are overly long with too much verbatim source material. A good editor would not have been amiss.


Key to star ratings: 5*** wonderful and hope to read again, 5* wonderful, 4* enjoyed it a lot and would recommend, 3* enjoyable/interesting, 2* didn't enjoy, 1* gave up.