The Countryman’s Daughter

The son is a preacher man

Joseph Pilmoor, born in Fadmoor, was instrumental in popularising Methodism in the USA

A memorial plaque dedicated to North Yorkshire-born Joseph Pilmoor in North Carolina. Picture by Laura Troy.

At last some readers have come forward following my appeal a few weeks ago to reveal the worst presents you have been given. There are a couple of corkers, such as a car bumper given to Fiona Lyons and an electric toothbrush given to Net Wiles. I don’t know if it is a surprise to learn that both gift-givers are now ex-husbands.

It is sometimes disappointing to receive two of the same thing, but one year Janet Pearce received no less than four Filofaxes (I’m sure most of you will remember these leather-bound personal organisers that were ever-so trendy in the 1980s and 1990s).

In my column, Clare Proctor had revealed that her husband Howard defied the male stereotype, showering her with gorgeous presents, but she confessed that she didn’t possess the same ‘nous’ when it came to choosing for him. One year, her misguided mother-in-law went to Clare rather than her son for advice on what to get them for Christmas, and consequently when Howard opened her gift, a hand-held vacuum cleaner, he declared bluntly: “I expected something more exciting for a present!” Poor Howard.

On another note, Ian Ford got in touch after coming across my column from October 2023 about the water engineer Joseph Foord. He thinks their families might be connected (the spelling of his own name dropping the second ‘o’ courtesy of his great, great, great grandfather, also called Joseph). Although he hasn’t yet firmly established that connection, he went on to talk about Foord’s illegitimate son – yet another Joseph – Joseph Pilmoor.

Pilmoor was born out of wedlock in 1739 after Foord had a liaison with a lady called Sarah Pilmoor from Fadmoor near Kirkbymoorside, and as a result, Foord was thrown out of the Quakers. This inauspicious start did not deter the young Pilmoor from following an extremely interesting path.

Pilmoor was educated at Kingswood School near Bristol, which was established by the founder of Methodism, John Wesley. In 1769, he travelled to Leeds along with his childhood friend, Richard Boardman from the neighbouring village of Gillamoor, to listen to John Wesley speak. Wesley’s passion and devotion to his cause had an immediate impact on the young men from the North York Moors, and they volunteered to become missionaries to the American colonies. Although Wesley had travelled there himself, he’d returned to England following a scandal over a woman who’d spurned his affection and to whom he’d refused to give communion.

Incidentally, this year marks the 250^th anniversary of the publication of John Wesley’s controversial pamphlet, ‘Thoughts Upon Slavery’ in which he lambasts society’s tolerance of such an abhorrent practice upon which the colonies were built.

‘Where is the justice of taking away the lives of innocent, inoffensive men; murdering thousands of them in their own land, by their own countrymen; many thousands, year after year, on shipboard, and then casting them like dung into the sea; and tens of thousands in that cruel slavery to which they are so unjustly reduced?’ he wrote.

Wesley embraced the itinerant lifestyle of the travelling preacher and is said to have journeyed 250,000 miles on horseback and delivered 30,000 sermons during his lifetime. Inspired by their mentor the two young men travelled and preached extensively in the colonies, going to New York, Philadelphia and Georgia, staying in each place only for a short time before moving on. Although he returned to England for 10 years between 1774 and 1784, Pilmoor returned to the US to continue his mission and appears to have been far more successful in recruiting followers than his more famous founder. Today there are around six million Methodists across more than 30,000 churches in the USA.

Pilmoor’s influence is evident by the number of commemorative plaques that have been erected in various places, including in the grounds of St John’s College, Annapolis, where he is said to have delivered the ‘first Methodist sermon in Maryland’ on 11^th July 1772 beneath the college’s famous ‘Liberty Tree’. Another plaque describes him as a ‘Pioneer missionary’ and marks the place where he preached the first sermon in the North Carolina colony at Curritick Courthouse on 28^th September 1772. A church nearby was named after him.

When you think about it, that’s quite the achievement for an illegitimate lad from a tiny North Yorkshire village.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 9th Feb and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 7th Feb 2024.

Facing the hoaxers

It surprises me when I browse Facebook, which celebrates its 20^th birthday this week, that some people are still taken in by posts that are clearly hoaxes.

When Facebook first went live on 4^th February 2004 from the Harvard student room of 19-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, no-one could have predicted what a social behemoth it would become. From its modest beginnings the online networking platform now has more than three billion regular users (more than a third of the global population) and the page on which I share links to my columns or the occasional picture is a minute pinprick on the surface of the social media equivalent of Planet Jupiter.

The numbers above make you realise just what a powerfully malevolent tool it could be when the wrong hands get hold of it. A friend of mine is a performer and regularly posts about upcoming events. I had a notification about a show that, unusually, he hadn’t told me about. When I clicked on it, it took me to a page that was selling something far more shocking than show tickets. My friend’s page had been hacked.

So you do have to be vigilant about what you click on, what you comment upon and what you share on these public platforms. One popular current scam is about lost or missing pets that don’t actually exist, and yet they get countless ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ from sympathetic people wanting to help, but who haven’t gone to the trouble of finding out if the appeal is genuine. Facebook declares that it removed 1.5 billion fake accounts in the last quarter of 2022 alone. There must be money to be made in them because why otherwise would they go to the trouble of creating them? Perhaps because I am a trained journalist, I am automatically skeptical, and check sources out for myself before I expose something to my friends on Facebook.

There was one post labelled ‘Life in the 1500s’ that caught my eye. It started like this (please forgive the coarse terminology): “People used to use urine to tan animal skins, so families used to all pee in a pot and then once a day it was taken and sold to the tannery. If you had to do this to survive you were ‘piss poor’. But worse than that were the really poor folk who couldn’t even afford to buy a pot. They ‘didn’t have a pot to piss in’ and were the lowest of the low.”

The long post featured other well-known phrases that it declared had all originated in 16^th century England, such as ‘dirt poor’ which came about because the rich had formal floor coverings in their homes while the poor only had mud. The saying ‘don’t throw the baby out with the bath water’, so it claimed, evolved as a result of the youngest child being the last in the queue for the bi-annual bath and could disappear in the filthy water; ‘upper crust’ referred to rich people because they got to eat the best bit of the bread loaf, which was the top.

As it turns out, although fun to read, this purported account of the etymology of these well-known sayings, is in reality a load of hogwash that has been doing the rounds for even longer than Facebook has existed. It first appeared in 1999 and was perpetuated by round-robin emails that often landed in your inbox on a Friday afternoon to entertain you before knocking off for the weekend. It was debunked by historical experts almost as soon as it appeared.

Just so you know, there is no written record of those phrases involving poor people and urination having been used before the 20^th century, so the claim that they are 16^th century is rubbish. The one about urine being used in the tanning process is, however, true. As for babies in bath water, that saying was originally a German proverb dating from 1512. The first trace of it in English dates from 1849. As for ‘upper crust’, this phrase dates from the 19^th century, referring to the aristocracy, and ‘dirt poor’ is not even an English phrase but originated in America.

Despite all this, though, I can’t help but admire the creativity of whoever wrote it, and wonder if they are surprised it is still fooling readers 25 years later.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 2nd Feb and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 31st Jan 2024.

Birthdays as planned?

Fred Bradshaw, whose birthday was on Christmas Day. It was celebrated in the morning before the festive celebrations began

My lovely colleague Karen Darley at the Ryedale Gazette and Herald sent me a message after reading my column which mentioned taking the Christmas decorations down on or before the Feast of the Epiphany on 6^th January.

She said: “It is always a dilemma in our house as my birthday is January 5th, so I have often spent the day taking decorations down – not the most exciting day!”

She adds: “Apparently when I was born, after a difficult day or so, my dad returned home on January 6^th and our neighbour was in a panic that all the decorations had to be down to avoid bad luck…It’s a standing joke that my birthday is at the one of the most miserable times of the year. I often got joint Christmas and birthday presents and sometimes in Christmas wrapping paper!”

This made me think about those of you who have birthdays around the festive period, and I started to wonder if you felt it was a good thing or a bad thing. And what is your experience of having a birthday at a time of the year where people are preoccupied with another massive and expensive celebration where everyone, not just you, gets presents?

There is a lady in my home village who turned 100 on December 29^th and she held a large party in the church hall where most of the village attended. She made a moving speech in which she declared she was so happy to be able to have a party because during her childhood, she was never given one because of it being so close to Christmas. I felt a bit cross when I heard that because it is not the fault of the child when they are born, but rather down to the parents’ bad (or lack of) planning, and so surely the onus is on them to put in the effort to make the child feel special on their big day, keeping it separate from Christmas.

Karen’s birthday experiences influenced her decisions on when her babies were born: “I made a point to plan, as much as these things can be planned, to not have a baby at this time of year, so fortunately the eldest daughter’s birthday is in March and the younger one in May.”

Of course, you can argue that people with festive birthdays get double the presents – but do they actually? If your birthday is around Christmas, would you prefer two distinct celebrations and presents, or a joint celebration, with doubly expensive gifts?

My sister’s father-in-law, Fred, was born on Christmas Day and her husband remembers that when he was a child, they always celebrated Fred’s birthday on the morning of 25^th December, then started the Christmas shenanigans in the afternoon. His mum was adamant that the birthday got the attention it deserved, and there were presents to match.

It may not have been the case when Fred was a child though. As his wife Margaret points out, Fred grew up on a farm, so there were always jobs you had to do on Christmas Day, such as feeding the livestock and milking the cows, and as such it was unlikely there was much time to celebrate Christmas, let alone a birthday too.

It is an interesting fact that the most popular time to give birth is in mid to late September, and if you count nine months backwards to when conception occurred, then guess what? It happens around Christmas and New Year, when many people are celebrating, perhaps with a drink or ten, and so they are footloose and fancy free. And hey presto, more babies are conceived at that time of year than any other. Another explanation is, apparently, that children born in September are more likely to do well in school, because they are the oldest in the class, and therefore more developed and ready to start their educational career.

But that sounds far too organised to me. It is a fact that many babies are conceived when we are relaxed, having fun, and possibly a bit tipsy. That seems to be borne out in my own experience. When I count back from when my children were born, the eldest was conceived on a summer holiday, the middle one during the Christmas/New Year holiday and the youngest around about my birthday.

And I can honestly say, there was very little planning involved in any of them.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 26th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 24th Jan 2024.

Counting our blessings

I was disappointed that readers didn’t come forward following my column about unromantic Christmas gifts. I’m dying to learn what rubbish items you’ve received and yet, having said that, I understand that the giver of the awful present might also read this column and so a certain reticence is perfectly understandable. If I guarantee your anonymity, would that help?

I did hear from a reader who declares that her husband defies the stereotype and is the ‘perfect’ gift-giver. Clare Proctor has never suffered the misery of unwrapping a set of pans, writing of husband Howard: “He always buys me great gifts, jewellery, gorgeous perfume, my favourite Florentines, lovely scarves…the list goes on.” She says she sometimes struggles buying gifts for him but adds: “You can never have too many pairs of socks or boxes of chocolate! Also, this year, we treated each other to tickets to see Nicole Scherzinger in Sunset Boulevard in the West End in January – my wish; Howard’s gift!” I think we all need a Howard in our lives!

On another note, Peter Allen from Gilling near Helmsley got in touch following my column about Plough Monday. He had himself composed a piece on that very subject for his parish magazine and includes more detail, saying the custom “was especially prevalent in the North and consisted of a gang of youths, sometimes as many as forty, dragging a plough through the streets. Dressed in white shirts, with a warmer coat underneath, they sometimes blackened their faces. Colour was added with the use of ribbons attached front and back, and knots of ribbons in their hats…An old lady was dressed up and joined the group. More often than not this was a boy in women’s clothing. George Young in his ‘History of Whitby’ refers to these as ‘Madgies’, or ‘Madgy Pegs’ and they went round from house to house, rattling collection tins. When they received money, they shouted “Huzzah”, but if nothing was forthcoming the cry was, “Hunger and starvation”.”

He also mentioned a play that was performed in the village where I grew up. “There is an Ampleforth Play which incorporates sword dancing. The Ampleforth Play contains elements of a traditional Plough Play and as it was performed around Christmas, it would therefore seem safe to assume that it was part of a Plough Monday festival. Some features of it are that the music was provided by a fiddler and a drummer but that songs were unaccompanied. The troupe of players moved from place to place in procession thus: The two musicians, a flag bearer, Clown and Queen, the King and the rest of the dancers/actors in pairs. Interestingly the Queen was always played by a man who had not had his hair cut for twelve months before the performance. Preparation for the play had begun months before…and dancing masters toured the villages of Cleveland teaching the words of the play and the sword dances en route. The Ampleforth Play does not seem to have been performed locally for well over 100 years, although there is a reference to it having been produced in London in the early 1920s.”

Peter asked if I could find anything in my dad’s files, and sure enough, I dug out a newspaper clipping from 1966 which suggests it was performed more recently. I don’t know who the writer was, nor which paper it came from, but it states that the Goathland Plough Stots ‘performed a play very similar to that acted by the Ampleforth Plough Stots…The Rev. Patrick Rowley, vicar of Ampleforth, is at present collecting information regarding the Plough Monday celebrations which I remember being regularly observed in Cleveland when I was a boy.’ The writer adds that the tradition was a ‘relic of pre-Reformation days’ and describes an event that has remained more or less the same for centuries. One difference was that by 1966, the donations collected were spent on a community celebration at the local inn, whereas originally, it was to ‘pay for the votive lights in church. These were renewed and burned throughout the octave of their feast and were associated with their prayers that God would speed the plough and give a bounteous harvest.’

With the incessantly wet conditions we’ve had recently playing havoc for many farmers trying to grow winter crops, let’s hope the blessings of the ploughs work and we can expect far better weather in 2024.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 19th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 17th Jan 2024.

A past to be Pict apart

20231229_100121 — The now disused St Hilary’s Church in Picton near Yarm.

This Saturday (13^th January) was St Hilary’s Day and it is said to be the coldest day of the year. Its chilly reputation came about after a severe frost in 1205 which started on 13^th January and lasted until 22^nd March.

Reader Jim Ackrill from Picton near Yarm got in touch with a lovely message connected to St Hilary. He said: “I was doing some research into my local parish church (now closed and sold) and came across an article by someone you may know! A certain Nicholas Rhea published the article in the Darlington and Stockton Times on the 13th of January 2012. It interested me as our local church was dedicated to St. Hilary when it was built in 1911.”

My dad’s article explained that St Hilary was born in 315 in Poitiers, a town in France known for its architecture and hill-top setting. Hilary followed the beliefs of his prominent pagan parents until the age of 35 when he became a Catholic priest and pledged to lead a life of abstinence, despite the fact he was already married with a daughter. He was elected Bishop of Poitiers in 353, and travelled extensively visiting the Middle East, Greece, and Italy.

He was known for being outspoken, and his writings upset Emperor Constantine II, leading to him being banished to Phrygia (now in modern central Turkey) and then back to Poitiers. St Augustine refers to him as an illustrious doctor and, as a progressive thinker, was said to be keen to educate children with learning difficulties. St Hilary died in Poitiers on or around 13^th January 368 and is known as St Hilary of Poitiers, Pope Pius IX having named him Doctor of the Church in 1851.

Jim Ackrill wonders more about the connection of St Hilary to his home village: “Now this is the interesting information which I discovered. Poitiers is in western France and was founded by the Celtic Pictones tribe (also known as Pictavi or Picts) and which, after Roman influence, became known as Pictavium. As Christianity was officialised across the Roman Empire during the 3rd and 4th centuries, the first Bishop of Poitiers from 350-367 was St. Hilarius (Hilary). The connection between Picton and the Pictones cannot be a coincidence. I believe some well-read cleric connected the two and suggested St Hilary for the church at Picton.”

It is possible that Jim’s theory about how St Hilary’s in Picton came by its name is correct. It was closed to worship in 2004, and hence St Martin’s Church in neighbouring Kirklevington was rededicated to St Martin and St Hilary in 2011, the centenary of the original St Hilary’s Church. The village name has evolved from Pyketon to Pykton, then Pickton to Picton, and has been said to mean ‘peak town’ which would fit in very well with its hilltop location and as such, echoes its French counterpart.

However, there is a possibility that ‘peak town’ is wrong, if an historical link with Poitiers can be established. Could Picton actually come from ‘Picts town’? As Jim says, Poitiers was called ‘Pictavium’ during St Hilary’s lifetime and is believed to mean ‘painted people’, referencing the Gallic Picts’ habit of painting or tattooing their skin.

It could of course just be a remarkable coincidence that Picton and the Pictones have similar names as well as a link to St Hilary. During the reign of Edward 1^st (1272 – 1307), the family that owned the village took the name Picton to symbolise their ownership of it and the surrounding land. It is interesting to note that as a youth, King Edward I was heavily influenced by his relatives from the Poitou region of France (known as Pictavia) of which Poitiers was the capital.

It is also worth mentioning the Scottish Picts, a tribe with a ferocious reputation from the far north and east. Like their Gallic cousins they were named by the invading Romans, thanks to their habit of painting their skin to make them seem more ferocious in battle. Although they have links to the French, I think it is unlikely they have any connection to the village of Picton.

There must be a lot more to be discussed in this story, but it will need someone with a bigger and more knowledgeable brain than mine to get to the bottom of it.

Contact me via my webpage at countrymansdaughter.com, or email gazette@gazetteherald.co.uk or dst@nne.co.uk.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 12th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 10th Jan 2024.

The blessed plough

a111e9e8-a072-4284-b7b9-22e898bf8993 — The plough has been a fundamental piece of farming equipment for centuries, enabling the population to feed themselves.

Blessing the plough outside Ripon Cathedral (Photo courtesy of Ripon Cathedral).

I’m sure you know that it is traditional to remove Christmas decorations by the Feast of the Epiphany on 6^th January, although it is still debated as to whether you have to take them down before the 6^th or on the 6^th to avoid inviting bad luck into the house. I’m still unsure which is right.

What you might not know is that the day after is St Distaff’s Day. St Who? I hear you cry. Well, Distaff is no-one and there is no such saint. It actually refers to the cleft stick used by spinners to hold yarn in place and appeared this country in around 1505. St Distaff’s Day was symbolic of women resuming their regular household chores after the 12 days of festive fun. Spinning was an essential skill, and women would spin most evenings, turning raw wool and flax into thread to be used for clothing, footwear, bedding, baskets and for mending all of the above.

St Distaff’s Day precedes the more well-known Plough Monday. This is the first Monday after the Epiphany when the men of the household would resume their labouring duties. In the days before mechanisation, the plough was the most important piece of farming equipment that the community would rely on to enable them to plant crops and feed themselves for the coming year.

In Mediaeval times, small villages would have just one plough to be shared by residents, and a ploughman would carve out each person’s plot in the ‘ridge and furrow’ method of open agriculture. Once the autumn harvest was complete this revered piece of equipment would usually be stored in the local church for the winter. A candle, or ‘plough light’, would be kept permanently burning to protect the plough from any malevolent crop-ruining spirits that might be lurking about.

Then, on Plough Monday this sacred machine would be brought out of hibernation to mark the start of the new agricultural year. It would be blessed by the priest, and the good folk would ask the Lord to grant them a successful growing year ahead. Men would dress up in costumes, similar to that of Mummers or Morris Dancers, and then parade to music through the village, knocking on doors asking for alms. Anyone who declined to give a few coins would likely find that overnight, their front path had been ploughed up. The plough posse would end up at the local inn and spend the rest of the day feasting, drinking and having a merry old time.

Today, it is not uncommon to see this tradition marked on the Sunday before Plough Monday, which is known as Plough Sunday, and I am a bit confused as to when or if one came before the other. Some sources suggest the plough was blessed on the Sunday, and then the parade would take place the next day. Other sources have the events happening on the same day, whether it be the Sunday or the Monday.

The custom has disappeared from many places, but not all, and in our region is marked most notably in Ripon Cathedral (which this year takes place on 14^th January), and in my dad’s old stomping ground, Goathland (7^th January).

In fact, I was looking at one of my dad’s books, ‘Yorkshire Days’, in which he mentions Plough Sunday and Monday, and also the ‘Goathland Plough Stots’. The Goathland tradition is to bless the plough on the Sunday after the Epiphany, and then follow that up the following Saturday with their ‘Annual Day of Dance’, a traditional sword dance practiced by the Goathland ‘Stots’. ‘Stot’ is an old Yorkshire word for the oxen or bullocks that pulled the plough, and therefore was given to the men who pulled it through the village during the celebrations.

As I was writing this column, the words to ‘There’s a hole in my bucket, dear Liza’ popped into my head. As a young child, I used to be very confused as to why Liza would suggest that Henry mended his holey bucket with straw when the buckets I knew were made of plastic or metal. But it has only now dawned on me that back in the day they’d be made from wood, clay or some kind of woven yarn or straw, and repairs would likely have been with whatever natural material was to hand.

Unless you can think of a better explanation?

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 5th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 3rd Jan 2024.

Totting things up for new year

I love to see in the new year with a bit of a shindig with friends

With Christmas done and dusted, I hope that Santa resisted giving you something practical for the house – unless that’s what you wanted of course! Thankfully these days I benefit from a more reliable set of gift-givers than my ex-husband.

As much as I enjoy it, I am quite relieved that the stress of the preparations for December 25th are over and await the start of the next year with mixed feelings. I don’t look forward to the coming couple of months because the fun times are over and the weather is generally rubbish. To compensate, I organise visits to old friends and walks in North Yorkshire’s beautiful countryside to cheer myself up.

I do like to end the year with a bit of a shindig on New Year’s Eve though, followed by a big roast dinner the next day, a kind of end of season blowout before settling down to a healthier lifestyle for the coming 12 months (yeah, right!).

New Year parties are not everyone’s cup of tea. “At every party there are two kinds of people – those who want to go home and those who don’t. The trouble is, they are usually married to each other,” said Ann Landers (‘Ask Ann Landers’ was an advice column in the Chicago Sun-Tribune). And Bill Vaughan, another American columnist, wrote: “Nothing is more irritating than not being invited to a party you wouldn’t be caught dead at.”

There are many superstitions associated with New Year, and if the most notable one bears any truth, then I might be in trouble. It states that whatever activity you are engaged in when the clock strikes midnight will influence your life for the coming 12 months. Back in the day, few people would go to bed before 12, and even the old and sick would force themselves to stay awake in the hope that it would mean they would not be permanently asleep by the following New Year.

You were not to wear black at the crucial moment either because you would be inviting death into the house. People who were still in mourning would try to get around this by tying a white apron over their clothes in an attempt to shoo the chance of another death away. It made me think of Queen Victoria, who famously wore black for 40 years after the death of her beloved husband Albert. The Victorians were notoriously superstitious, so did the Queen don a white apron each year too, I wonder?

The dawn of a new year was also the chance for a new start, if one was needed, and it was customary in the week between Christmas and New Year to give the home a good old spruce up, signifying the dispensing of the old and tarnished, and welcoming a fresh, unblemished start. The fire, which would be cleared of old ashes and a new one laid, had to burn all night on the last day of the old year until the end of the first day of the new one. If it went out, bad luck would follow.

My dad wrote about a custom with which he was very familiar, that of ‘first footing’. Indeed, when he became the village bobby in Oswaldkirk in 1964, he was asked by a number of households to perform the task of first footer, which he describes in the third book of his Constable series, Constable Around the Village.

The term means “first into the house” and it should be a man, ideally a stranger, with dark hair, who is not cross-eyed, not flat-footed, and must not have eyebrows that meet in the middle. He must arrive as soon after midnight as possible and bring with him a piece of coal to symbolise heat and light, a coin or some salt to symbolise wealth, and a piece of bread to symbolise sustenance. In Oswaldkirk, a sprig of holly was also traditionally carried to represent everlasting life.

The villagers were delighted when this new bobby arrived, because he ticked all of those boxes and thus was asked to fulfil this important task by no less than eight different homes. Even though he was on duty, Dad ended his shift by falling into bed at 2am New Year’s Day rather the worse for wear after being too polite to turn down the warming tots he was offered at every household he visited.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 29th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 27th December 2023.

The giving spirit of Christmas

Even if Christmas has become too commercial I still want to get a luxurious present!

I can’t quite believe that this is my last column before Christmas, and as I write, I am wondering what to wear for my annual works night out tonight. We usually end up having a great time, thanks to the free-flowing wine and cocktails, and end the night embarrassing ourselves with some energetic mum/dad dancing in a local bar. It was American stand-up comedian and actress Phyllis Diller who said: “What I hate about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day.” I’m hoping I will still have mine in the morning!

I’m sure these sentiments are familiar to many of you, and I’d be interested to hear your cringe-worthy party stories. If you do have any, don’t keep them to yourself but share them with us by getting in touch via the contact details at the bottom of this column (of course, anonymity is guaranteed!).

Good old Les Dawson bemoaned the fact that his family didn’t have much money with which to celebrate: “We were so poor that we couldn’t afford a turkey. We gave the budgie chest expanders. It was five a side to a cracker.”

This time of year can be stressful, especially with having to buy presents for a lot of people, all with different personalities and tastes. There is a stereotype that suggests men are not very good at buying gifts for their other halves. Now I know it is a sweeping generalisation, but stereotypes are stereotypes because they are, on the whole, true. One year, my mum was less than enamoured by the fact that my dad had bought her some pans, and my ex-husband would buy me practical things for the house, like towels, or crockery. It’s not exactly romantic and is an indication of how they see us – as their domestic home helps rather than the love of their lives.

If, until you began to read this, you were considering buying your dearest love pans or crockery, I suggest you take this advice from English comedian Jeff Green: “Women do not consider the following to be gifts: diet books, cooking utensils, cleaning products, petrol for the car, anything from the Pound Shop”. I would add to that that if you want to make sure that you and your partner are still talking to each other once the presents have been unwrapped, then you can’t go far wrong with jewellery (made from precious metals and stones and not from the supermarket), expensive perfume or after shave (not the sort you get from the garage shop), or fancy toiletries (again, not from the supermarket). If you’re struggling, go to your local Boots or department store, follow the waft of perfume to the luxury scent counter and ask the assistant for advice. Believe you me, most of us would prefer one thing of high quality than a whole drawerful of cheap tat. And by high quality, I don’t mean a Dyson vacuum cleaner. Your gift has to leave the recipient with the feeling that they are being spoiled and, more importantly, that you have thought about what they might actually like to receive rather than what you think will make the job of cleaning the house easier.

I’m not the sort of person who will let on how disappointed I am when I get a rubbish present but I think I was justified on what I now call My Worst Christmas Ever. A receipt for a pair of expensive earrings had been carelessly left on the desk in our study weeks before Christmas, and I’d pretended I hadn’t seen it, awaiting the big day with eager anticipation. For once, I thought, I was not getting something useful, but something luxurious and just for me.

Unfortunately, the earrings ended up under another woman’s tree.

Of course, there are those who complain that the true meaning of Christmas has been lost, a victim to commercialism, overindulgence and greed. And I do think it does us good to remember how it all began, and who we should be thinking about at this time of year. With that in mind, I’m going to wish you happiness and joy over the coming festive period, and will give my last words to someone with a great deal more wisdom than me, Bart Simpson:

“Aren’t we forgetting the true meaning of Christmas – the birth of Santa?”

Contact me via my webpage at countrymansdaughter.com, or email gazette@gazetteherald.co.uk.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 22nd and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 20th December 2023.

Race to the finish

Trainers come from miles around to use Langton Wold Gallops

Gallops manager Andy Bennison inspects the quality of the all-weather track surface

A couple of weeks ago, I had the pleasure of having a tour around Langton Wold Gallops, a facility used by racehorse trainers who come from miles around to use it. Run by manager Andy Bennison, the 200-acre site sits atop a hill on the Langton Road, about three miles south of Malton on the edge of the Yorkshire Wolds.

Andy was asked to help turn the place around by trainers Nigel Tinkler, Brian Ellison and Steve Brown, who as a committee lease the land from the Langton Estate. The gallops were in a bad way, mainly due to lack of funding. Since Andy took over, the committee have invested significantly to create a facility that is unrivalled locally. He has developed six-furlong and 10-furlong all-weather tracks, as well as grass gallops, both on the flat and uphill. There are starting gates to acclimatise young mounts to the sensation of being in the gates, as well fences and hurdles of various widths and heights. Horses who are at the start of their training journey have a special enclosed narrow strip of track with a few hurdles which encourages them to jump the obstacles in front of them rather than run around them.

We joined Andy at 9am, but he had already been there for several hours as patrons had been arriving since daybreak. Trailers queued up for their turn and some had travelled from as far away as Darlington for a chance to train on the best ground available. Andy explained how much works goes in to maintaining it, and it is evident that he is passionate, and deservedly proud, about what he does. In the summer, the grass grows so quickly that as soon as he finishes cutting, he has to start at the beginning all over again ‘like the Forth Road Bridge’ he says. Thankfully he has the help of his young assistant Tom, and it is clear that they are both supremely dedicated to what they do, demonstrated by the fact that if it snows overnight, they sleep on-site, each taking two-hour shifts to constantly clear the tracks so that everything is ready for when the jockeys start arriving the following morning. It’s the kind of commitment that is born out of love for the job.

Malton has been associated with horse racing for centuries, with meetings recorded as far back as 1686, although they likely occurred even before then. Under Puritan ruler Oliver Cromwell, the belief had been that the harder you worked, the closer you were to God. Anything deemed fun would lead you to the Devil and thus all sport and entertainment, such as horse racing and gambling, had been banned. But by the mid-1650s, the population had grown tired of Crowell’s strict rules, and by his death in 1658, he was a figure of hate. The monarchy was restored under Charles II in 1660 and, liberated from the shackles of Puritanism, the ‘sport of kings’ boomed.

By 1692, the official Malton Racecourse was on common land just across the road from the current Langton Wold Gallops, and trainers and horse breeders began to congregate around the town, sealing its reputation as a hub of the sport. Owners and enthusiasts descended from all over the country and hotels like the Talbot Inn were bursting at the seams with the racing elite. Such was Langton Wold’s reputation that in 1747, King George III offered 100 guineas in prize money, around. £20,000 today.

The town’s racing scene peaked in the mid-1800s, and more visitors than ever were arriving, thanks to the extension of the railway network. But disaster struck in 1862. To the horror of the racing community, the beloved Langton Wold track was ploughed up after it was sold to a private buyer under the Enclosure Acts, a series of Acts of Parliament between 1604 and 1914 that chopped up and enclosed vast swathes of common land. Racing in Malton never properly recovered, even though a track was briefly set up at Orchard Fields (1867-1870) then later at HighField House (1882-1903).

Although the town has not seen racing for more than 100 years, it is still home to several successful yards and studs. And with its prestigious history in mind, it is a joy to see the name of Langton Wold thriving once again under the expert stewardship of Andy Bennison.

Contact me via my webpage at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 15th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 13th December 2023.

Giving us an earful

My brother Andrew and I in our ‘posh’ lounge celebrating his 18th birthday in 1980. We were allowed in the room on special occasions, or sometimes to play our records too loudly on the radiogram.

When I sit down to write these columns, I often don’t know what I’m going to write about, and occasionally still turn to my Dad’s archive to inspire me. This week, I’m sitting here in a state of indecision as I’m finding it difficult to choose a topic from one of his columns that I dug out from 1976 in which he writes about various things, including the month of November, noise, magpies, sweet chestnuts, and an old dialect poem. And each little section is fascinating, but I only have enough space to consider one of them. Which one would you choose? And which do you think I will? Read on…

Dad was a countryman through and through and was never more content than when he was sitting in his conservatory with my mum, taking his morning break from writing, chatting over their coffee while overlooking the gorgeous view of their garden and the peaceful valley beyond. The thought of living in a bustling noisy town had always made him shudder, as this 1976 extract reveals: ‘Modern society has produced many more sounds, some of a very aggravating nature.’

He adds: ‘Modern disco dances thrive on brilliant moving lights and outrageous noise, so harmful to the youngsters’ eardrums, and teenagers turn up the volume on their TV sets or record players to a level far higher than necessary.’

Despite these words, Dad was pretty tolerant of the youngsters playing music in his own home. In our ‘posh’ lounge (which was used on special occasions, or when people we wanted to impress visited) we had a mahogany-veneer radiogram. It was roughly the size of a semi-detached house and now and then we’d be allowed in the room to play our vinyl records. Mum and Dad had bought it in the 1960s, and it was considered very ‘with it’ at the time. I remember that my elder sister had been given a Pinky and Perky record called ‘Celebration Day’ one Christmas. It was bright green, and I know Mum and Dad were thrilled to hear the squeaky tones of those two little pigs drifting through the house singing classics like ‘Donald, Where’s Your Troosers’ and ‘Grandfather’s Clock’ over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. How disappointed they must have been when cassette tapes were invented which meant we could play our music on more portable devices that we kept in our bedrooms with the doors shut (although my brother was soon to become a punk fan, and the floorboards that separated the kitchen from his room above were no match for the Sex Pistols on full blast).

We still have concerns today for our teenagers’ eardrums because almost every one of them listens to content through headphones ALL the time. They don’t seem to be able to walk anywhere, or take any journey, without a mobile device attached to them via wireless earphones, and when they get home, they head to their rooms to continue watching stuff on their PC through another, usually bigger and more powerful, set of headphones. At least we parents don’t have to suffer their dodgy taste in music blaring through the house anymore, but we cannot monitor the volume at which they listen to it. You can’t help but think they must be doing long-term damage to their hearing, but will they take notice of our warnings? Of course they won’t, because since the dawn of time, teenagers have ignored all parental portents of doom concerning their health and well-being. It is one of the more enjoyable aspects of being a teenager.

I used to tell my dad off for having the TV on too loud, and it is ironic though, that these days my children tell me off for having the TV on too loud. I warn them that my worsening hearing is a result of not listening to my parents when I was a teenager. They tell me it’s just because I’m getting old.

Whichever is true (and don’t tell them, but I do think it’s actually more to do with ageing) I look forward to the day when they have their own children who, when they become teenagers, won’t listen to a thing their parents say. And I will knowingly look on with more than a degree of smug satisfaction.

Contact me via my webpage at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug.

This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times on Friday 8th and the Ryedale Gazette and Herald on Wednesday 6th December 2023.