Bill Mitchell’s Yorkshire David Mitchell

‘The city man queried which creature had made such a blood-curdling sound. The dalesman said, ‘It was an owl’. ‘I know that,’ was the reply, ‘but what was ’owling?’’ Yorkshire folk may drop their ‘aitches’ but get a good laugh about life in Bill Mitchell’s insightful perspective. His ‘Yorkshire’ compiled by his son celebrates their home county with special focus on the Yorkshire Dales. Bill joined the staff of ‘The Dalesman’ in 1949 and his journalism ‘putting people before things’ has wide-range and warmth captured in this selection from his two hundred books and booklets about Yorkshire life.

Alan Bennett writes ‘Bill can draw on forty years of experience in travelling the valleys and trumping across the hills, talking to all and sundry’. As former Settle residents my family enjoyed such talk with Bill up to his death in 2015 as well as with his late wife Freda. They met on the trademark Settle bus, the orange-sided Pennine variety. ‘In the ten minutes twixt Gargrave and Skipton I had a John Wesley experience, though in a different context. My heart was ‘strangely warmed’. Freda might have recognised me from a recent dance, at which my companion had been a somewhat staid young woman who, I suspected, was more interested in dancing than me’. Pennine buses were known to ‘carry owt’ which included a sheep, ‘a calf swathed in sacking’ as well as fish and chips collected in Settle for delivery at stops en route to Skipton.

Settle market is on Tuesday following its ancient charter but any geese you see there no longer arrive on foot, feet tarred to reinforce them for a long walk. In the past goose wings were used for spring cleaning and goose grease as an embrocation for a bad chest. In ‘Yorkshire’ Bill writes of dry stone walls which ‘walk the fells like a grey millipede on slow stone hooves’. As one of his farming friends put it: ‘I’ve got a wall that shuffles. Then it gives (ie readily becomes ‘gapped’)’. Such poetic images celebrate the Yorkshire Dales. In ‘Nineteen forty-seven’ we read how the railway above Ribblehead closed for eight weeks in the freeze. ‘T’ sheep were forivver bleating for a bit o’ fodder.. and the cows were bawling all day’. Air drops of food and fodder were necessary. David Mitchell’s compilation includes ‘Shuttle service to the underworld’ with Bill’s description of descending Gaping Ghyll pothole by winch ‘feeling like a spider dangling from its silken thread under the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral… The tumbling water breaking into blobs all around me… it cost ‘nowt’ to descend. I was paying ten bob for the return journey’.

Ribblehead Viaduct crowns the Yorkshire Dales. We read how at its building from 1870 ‘human dwellings sprang up like mushrooms’ and over 2000 folk lived in shanties with outlandish names. ‘Jerusalem and Jericho… were topographically correct, Jerusalem having the highest elevation… Sebastopol and Inkerman were names familiar...from the Crimean War. Belgravia was the home of families who regarded themselves as somewhat superior to the common herd. Salt Lake… to the zest of Mormons… who sent missionaries to the Dales’. Bill, himself a lay preacher, recounts the Methodist railway mission at Batty Green and their bemusing encounters with the drunken navvies of Jericho.

‘There’s Methodism in my madness’ contains this amusing personal anecdote. ‘When I showed nervousness in a Dales vestry before the service, a steward remarked: ‘Nay, lad - we should be frightened o’ thee. Not thee of us!’. During sermons at Austwick he’d known people shout “Hallelujah’ if they agreed and ‘No, Lord’ if they disagreed! More sermon advice came from the chapel keeper at Barden who lived on site: ‘Cut thee sermon short when tha’ smells t’ Yorkshire pudding’. Preachers without a car listened elsewhere for the last bus and, by arrangement, left the pulpit with a member of the congregation invoking the closing Benediction. Changing times were addressed in preaching: ‘Who’d have thought, years ago, when devout folk used to cover up the bare legs of the table on a Sunday, that members of a dale-country Women’s Institute would strip for a calendar photograph?’

‘Yorkshire is my work’ Bill concludes. ‘I enjoy writing about it and its people’. You don’t have to be Yorkshire to enjoy this distillation from the author’s million words written over his lifetime out of love putting people above place whilst celebrating ‘there’s nowt so queer as fowk’.

Bill Mitchell’s Yorkshire David Mitchell. A lifetime of Yorkshire memories

Dalesman 2016 £9.99 ISBN 978-1-85568-354-9 160pp

Canon John Twisleton        28th January 2019