FTX-410 - NAY NOT A BIT ON'T

LAKE DISTRICT TRADITIONS

Here are some of the dialectical sounds of the lakes & fells of Westmoreland, Cumberland & West Yorkshire performed by some outstanding characters of the region - including Miles Wilson of Cockermouth, John Moore Sedgwick of Sedbergh, Alan Nelson of Orton and 85 year old John Oliver, the Keswick fiddler and Fred Clarke, melodeon player of Kirkby Stephen. Margaret Dalton, grand-daughter of huntsman, Jim Dalton, recites a Cumberland poem.

1. JOE BOWMAN (Song followed by sound of the hunting horn which sets the dogs barking) - Miles Wilson, Mockerkin, near Cockermouth rec 1959 - 3.22

2. Story about a local fox hunt and talk about hunting songs - 6.42

3. ULLSWATER PACK (Song/ talk after) - 2.45

4. IT'S NOBBUT ME - a poem composed by John Richardson of St John's-in-the-Vale & published in "Cummerlan Talk" by John Russell Smith, London 1871 - recited by Margaret Dalton (21), Thirlmere, Cumberland - 1.48

5. HOWGILL LADS Song & talk - John Moore Sedgwick, rec 1954 - 7.30

6. Talk about fox-hunting in the family & song-making followed by a demonstration of the hunting horn (0.28) - 2.48

7. NAY NOT A BIT ON'T Dialect Song - Alan Nelson, Brackenthwaite, Cumberland - 2.35

8. Talk about previous song and story of courting in the old days - 4.03

9. WI' MY COURTIN' COAT ON - 0.51

10. Talk about previous song & another courting story - 2.40

11. THE SQUARE EIGHT & THE HOOLIGAN (Local Country Dances) with talk about playing - John Oliver (fiddle) - 1.50

12. DRINK, PUPPY, DRINK & story of a hound falling into a frozen tarn (lake) and its rescue - 3.37

13. JOHN PEEL played for a Barn Dance - Fred Clarke (mel) rec Kirkby Stephen, Westmoreland 1954

Recorded by Peter Kennedy 1954 & 1959, edited by Peter and first published on Folktrax cassettes 1978.

27/8/59: Subject: John Richardson - from Grace Birkett - Thought you might find this interesting, its from a book " Lore of the Lake Country " p1970

, John was William Robinson 1811`s brother-in-law. The new church of the parish of St John's-in-the-Vale is certainly distinguishable from the usual run of Lake Country churches, but it is still plain, low and small, and has a miniature tower at the west which is not much bigger than a chimney. It is still very much a dales chapel and the secret of this preservation of a traditional shape in what was virtually a new chapel lies partly in the fact that the man who carried
out the rebuilding was a dalesman himself, a native of the parish, John
Richardson. Richardson is, perhaps, the most famous son of the parish, and he
achieved his fame without ever leaving the place. Born in 1817 in Stone
house (later Piper House), he was expected to follow in his father's
trade. The father was styled a mason, but masons usually built walls, so
with the directness so typical of Cumberland dialect, he was called
simply a 'waller' or, to be more exact, a 'wa'er'. He could and did,
turn his hand to anything in the building line, the country craftsmen of
the time being unconcerned about who did what in any branch of their
industries. Richardson was soon taking contracts on his own in the district. He
built Derwent Place in Keswick, and other houses and rows and clusters
of houses in the district, but he took the greatest care in his work in
the parish for he built the little school next to the church; he built
the parsonage; and the restoration of the church was left in his hands.
  From the lucrative but physically demanding trade of building he
turned, after twenty-five years, to teaching: to building up the
characters and forming the minds of the children of the parish. Living
at Bridge House at the foot of the road which rises to the Church, he
was schoolmaster for about twenty-seven years. His wife, Grace, a
daughter of the house of Birkett, of City , Wythburn, went
wholeheartedly along with John in his change of career, not least
because they had eight children of their own to educate. Before he changed his career, John Richardson had laid down his blueprint for a full life and happiness in a dialect poem which he entitled "What I'd wish for", and in which he gave full sway to a youthful, rustic philosophy. If "Providence with bounteous hand" were to grant all John's wishes, he would have no empty power or heaps of wealth,

  Bit furst I'd wish for peace of mind,
  conscience free frae owt 'at's wrang,
  An' than, whativver comes amiss,
  I cudden't be unhappy lang.

  A snug cottage with a rustic porch,
  a bit of garden ground;
  some shelves o' beuks, lang neets to cheer";
  a newspaper twice a week,

  And a beck: Where I wi' fishing rod could gang
  An' flog an' watch for t' risin' troot.

  He wanted "just brass enough to pay his way,"
  a wife to love and trust, and barns (bairns)
  whom he would have, Industrious, sober,
  free frae pride; Upreet, an' oppen-heartit still.

   John added to his list of wishes "a friend or two 'at I could trust through clood an' shine", and ended his recipe for happiness: I think theer`s nowt I want beside, Bit oh! We're hard to satisfy; Oor real wants ur nobbut few, If we to limit them wad try. This was indeed the sort of life John Richardson was to lead while he built and mended walls, and when he taught school at St John's. He was the supreme example of one of the popular images of the Lake
Country dalesmen - quiet, resolute, kind-hearted and self-effacing. The
other popular image was of the lusty, loud man, not averse to boasting
(especially if talking about his own Herdwicks in comparison with a
neighbour's), or bursting into sudden song when well lubricated after a
day's hunting on the fells.
His work, when studied, is characteristic of all that is known about
the author: the product of a thoughtful mind and a sympathetic heart. He
did not aim high: his quest for ideas seldom took him beyond the actual
experiences of his life or the tranquil scenes in which he moved. He never followed the examples of some of the 'classic' writers of dialect in looking into the rowdy, bawdy atmosphere of 'murry neets' or village weddings for his poetry. He wrote only of the placid life he knew; the life for which he had wished when he was young, and which he knew he had achieved when he reached old age. It has often been said that it is impossible to get anything romantic out of the Cumbrian dialect; that it is a language for fratching and fighting rather than for loving, but John Richardson achieved the
impossible in what has become one of the classics of Cumberland dialect. Like the foxes of the fells around them the men who lived in the dales made long night love journeys to meet, or often just to catch a glimpse of the girls of their choice, or on whom their hopes were pinned, and it
is a tender incident at the end of such a journey that is the subject of
"It's nobbut me!" It was a long walk to City, Wythburn, where Grace lived, from John's home in St John's Vale, and since social gatherings, at which meetings
were possible and where courtships began, were few and far between, it
seems that John had taken a shy sort of initiative; that is if "It's
nobbut me ! " is truly the story of his courtship as most who knew the
pair said it was. The poem tells the story from the girl's side:

  Ya winter neet; I mind it weel,
  Oor lads 'ed been at t' fell,
  An' bein' tir't, went seun to bed,
  An' I sat be messel.
  I hard a jike on t' window pane,
  An' deftly went to see;
  Bit when I ax't 'Who's jiken theer?'
  Says t' chap, 'It's nobbut me!'

  'Who's me? says I, 'What want ye here?
  Oor fwoak ur aw abed?' -
  'I dunnet want your fwok at aw,
  It's thee I want,' he said.
  'What can t'e want wi' me,' says I;
  'An' who the deuce can 't be?
  Just tell me who it is an' then'
  -Says he, 'It's nobbut me.'

  'I want a sweetheart, an' I thowt
  Thoo mebby wad an' aw;
  I'd been a bit down t' deal to-neet,
  An' thowt 'at I wad caw;
  What, can t' like me dus t'e think?
  I think I wad like thee'
  -'I dunnet know who 'tis,' says I;
  Says he, 'It's nobbut me.'

  We pestit on a canny while,
  I thowt his voice I kennt;
  An' than I steall quite whisht away,
  An' oot at t' dooer I went.
  I creapp, an' gat 'im be t' cwoat laps,
  'Twas dark, he cuddent see;
  He startit roond, an' said, 'Who's that?'
  Says I, 'It's nobbut me.'

  An' meanny a time he come ageann,
  An' menny a time I went,
  An' said, 'Who's that 'at's jiken theer?'
  When gaily well I kent;
  An' mainly what t' seamm answer com,
  Fray back o' t' laylick tree;
  He sed, 'I think thoo knows who't is;
  Thoo knows it's nobbut me.'

  It's twenty year an' mair Sen than,
  An' ups an' doons we've hed;
  An' six fine barns hey blest us beath,
  Sen Jim an' me war wed.
  An' many a time I've known 'im steal,
  When I'd yan on me knee,
  To mak me start, an' than wad laugh
  --'Ha! Ha! It's nobbut me.'

In all the Richardsons had ten children, but two died in infancy. Of
the rest, one gained a responsible position in a New Zealand bank, and
all the other sons had good positions in other parts of the country. A
schoolmaster's sons did not have the links which tied the sons of
statesmen to the countryside of their birth. All Richardson's dialect work is about his personal experiences. His "Barrin' Oot", a story of the old Cumberland custom of barring the schoolmaster out of school until he had met the pupils' demands for a non-statutory holiday, and a few pennies besides - a sort of old-time sit-in without violence - was based On an actual experience at St John's School, and the schoolmaster was Priest Wilson, who combined the duties of schoolmaster and priest for the parish, and who set Richardson's
course eventually to become a teacher himself. He seems to have started writing his poetry early in life, but it was not until he became schoolmaster at St John's-in-the-Vale that he gave full rein to his gift. He was 54 when his first book was published in 1871 under the title: Cummerland Talk; being short tales and rhymes in the dialect of that County.
A second book followed in 1876, both published by George Coward of
Carlisle, and they both met with success, so much so that Craig Gibson,
then recognised as the ultimate living authority on dialect writing,
bestowed unstinted praise on the schoolmaster of St John's. At the time, Gibson was in the process of collecting pictures for a sort of Roll of Honour of dialect writers "engaged in a group with Miss Blamire as the centre. WhetherGibson ever succeeded in collecting a complete set of portraits is not known, but since in a letter to John Richardson he suggested that it would make a fine frontispiece to George Coward's collection of Songs and Ballads of Cumberland, and since that book came out with a picture of
Susannah Blamire alone as its frontispiece, it is likely that some of
the best of the then current dialect writers preferred to blush unseen,
unlike Gibson who had his portrait specially taken, of all places, in
Constantinople. John Richardson went on, teaching the children, writing his poetry. He read papers to local Literary and Scientific Societies, and for a long
time contributed dialect stories to the West Cumberland Times entitled
"Stwories Ganny Used To Tell," which were actual scenes and incidents
described to him, and in the original dialect of Mrs Richardson's
mother, Mrs Birkett, who died about 1870 aged over 90. He wrote a well-known hunting song, "John Crozier's Tally-ho", about the man who was responsible for the foundation of the pack of foxhounds which eventually became the Blencathra Foxhounds, and hunted them from Threlkeld.
  "John Crozier's Tally-ho" attracted the attention of William Metcalfe
who set it to music, hoping to achieve with it the success he had made
of "D'ye ken John Peel?" But the Caldbeck hunting song was already up
and away, and no other had a hope of catching it. More successful was
Metcalfe's setting of "It's nobbut me" which became a 'standard' for
concerts all over the county. His other poems included "Jemmy Stubbs' Grunstean", "Jobby Dixon", "The Cockney in Mosedale", "Coming Home Sober", "The Fell King", and "Thowts by Thirlmere." In his successful novel Shadow of a Crime Hall Caine Used a collection of local proverbs which Richardson put together for him, and the dales schoolmaster was also Consulted on points touching the dialect by Dr Murray, editor of the New English Dictionary. John subscribed to the strongly-held Cumbrian belief that it was more important that things should be done properly, than quickly. Time was
held to be cheaper than most other things, and that was why he seldom
hurried over anything.
When he was a working stone-waller he had plenty of visitors at every
job to inspect the work, pass opinions, and perhaps waste some of his
time, but that was the way of the people, and when it came to his turn
to stand and watch; when he had taught his last lesson at the little
school he had himself built beside the church among the mountains, he
spent a great deal of his time there.
In his old age, John Richardson took his visitors to be shown the
progress being made on the wall of the new churchyard extension,
delighting in passing on the know. ledge that this was the first
extension ever to be added to the churchyard since it was licensed for
burials, prior to which all the local people were buried in the parish
church of Crosthwaite.
  Almost every day he spent some of his time watching the wa'er building
the new wall, using new stones from the fellsides, or old stones dug out
of the ruins of the old inn whose site was being incorporated into the
extension. He explained to anybody who happened to be with him that when
the church was first given its licence for burials, the dalesmen of St
John's, who perhaps only attended two or three funerals a year at most,
decided that never, as long as time lasted, would there be sufficient
people dying to fill more than a rood of ground, and so that was the
size they made their new churchyard. That was some time in the early eighteenth century, and for the first twenty years of the existence of the churchyard it seemed that the dalesmen, in allocating a rood of ground, haderred on the side of generosity because the churchyard remained persistently empty. It was not that people had stopped dying in this parish withits people scattered so thinly over its fair face. There was a locally-held belief that the devil was waiting to claim the soul of the first person to be buried in the new churchyard, so the dalesmen continued to insist upon interment at Crosthwaite. The records of St John's Church do not show who it was who first-footed into the new churchyard. Perhaps it was somebody who did not care; traditionally it was a wayfarer found dead by the roadside in the parish. Normally it caused long faces when a parish found itself saddled with the expense of burying a pauper vagrant, but, according to John Richardson, the vagrant who was first to be buried in the churchyard of St John's-in-the-Vale,
He was buried with something approaching civic honours. Slowly the
churchyard filled, and no doubt the people of St John's would have been
content to inter the new dead among the bones of the old dead, but about
1880 a new consciousness in sanitary matters spread through the land and
touched this remote mountain church when the Rural Council called a halt
to burials in the old churchyard, and, on grounds of public health,
issued an ultimatum to the parish either to close the churchyard or
extend it. So they extended it, the folk of the valley subscribing the cash
necessary to buy the land and build the enclosing wall. And there John
Richardson spent many hours, almost gleefully anticipating his own rest
in the shadow of the church he had built. When he was struck down with a paralytic stroke which left him almost helpless, an effort was made to secure a literary pension for him, the
prime movers being Mr Stafford Howard, of Greystoke; the Bishop of Carlisle, and Mrs Lynn Linton, the eminent Victorian novelist. When he died in 1886, the entire valley turned out to pay their last respects,
and were joined by many others from further afield in the sombre
procession winding its way up the feliside road to the little churchyard
beside the church and school he had served so well. His grave is
opposite the east window of the church, just outside where the old
churchyard wall used to stand. Today it is seldom visited because
memories of John Richardson have faded, except in his native parish.