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Geoff Wood
Geoff Wood has taken a particular interest in the songs of Yorkshire, and has spent many a year collecting songs. He is prepared to share them with others, and in future there will be many more in these pages.
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Industrial change in Yorkshire
Dalesman’s Litany: song of industrial change
A young farmworker leaves the dales to work in the urban industries of Yorkshire. He marries and takes care of his family.
Later he returns to the dales to reflect on his experiences.
Dalesman’s Litany
Geoff Wood has had an interest in collecting Yorkshire songs over many years. Recently Geoff spoke of A Dalesman’s Litany in conversation with Sam Dodds.
Phillip Moorman, President of The Dialect Society in 1900, collected 'A Dalesman’s Litany' and published it in the Yorkshire magazine The Dalesman, and in the book Songs of the Ridings.
About 40 years ago David Keddie, a founder member of The Topic Folk Club in Bradford, read the poem and composed a widely performed tune.
The farmer’s ultimatum
The farmworker receives an ultimatum from the farmer, and he leaves the land to find work in the industries of Yorkshire.
There was good reason for this. In those times cheap board went with the job, but there was no room for a wife and family.
The squire bluntly tells him: ‘stay single, or leave with your lass.’ But the young farm hand didn’t want to lose his lass. If he got married, then he had to leave his employment on the farm.
T’old squire he says one day, ‘ I’ve got na bield for wedded folk, Choose will ta wed or stay.’ So the young man leaves with his wife to be, and heads for the city.
Search for work
He searches of work in the industries of Yorkshire to support his family. It is obvious that the work was not to his liking after farm work in the clean open air. This faced the many men who migrated to the towns for work in the new industries of the time: in mills, cargo boats, down the coalpits, smelting in the iron-works; and the necessity to live in industrial housing.
The Bradford Beck
Tainted with industrial grime, the snow melted into the black water of the beck which flowed under the city of Bradford:
‘I’ve seen snow float down Bradford Beck, As black as ebony.’
Geoff tells us that it was known by the locals as the mucky beck and that he recalls his mother talking of this work being done when she was a child in the early 1900s.
The manholes are still there, and the beck still runs under the streets of Bradford, flowing down from the Thornton valley, and comes out on Canal road at the river Aire, in Shipley.
They built the canal parallel to the beck, and at one time it was possible to travel right into the centre of Bradford by canal boat. Bradford Beck
and Geoff carries on chatting about hilly Bradford, the wooden blocks set into the hilly stretches so that the horses drawing the carts could get a good grip with their hooves ... but cars slip ... ‘the fecks are the granite blocks ...’
Large music notation (pdf) and lyrics