Tag: heartbeat North Yorkshire

Off to School in a Heartbeat

(This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times  on 10th August, & the Gazette & Herald on 8th August 2018)

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My dad failed his English so joined the police as a 16-year-old cadet

I was thrilled to learn that Heartbeat has been voted the greatest Yorkshire Television programme of all time by readers of The Dalesman magazine, which is fitting in the year that marks 50 years since YTV was born (It came third in the overall poll behind two wonderful rivals, Last of the Summer Wine (2nd) and All Creatures Great and Small (1st), both made by the BBC).

More than 3,000 people voted and, were he here, my dad would be amazed to know that the programme is still held in such high esteem more than 26 years after the first episode aired. Fans continue to visit Goathland, where the series was set, to rekindle their nostalgic memories about the lovable characters and beautiful locations featured in the show.

Heartbeat was based upon my dad’s Constable series of books in which he drew upon his 30 years’ experience as a rural policeman. He was born to write, and persisted despite a number of setbacks in the beginning. He didn’t do well in English at school and his teacher was less than encouraging about his writing abilities. But Dad possessed what you need if you are going to make it in the creative industries – a bucketload of self-belief. This took him far, including beyond his first 13 novel rejections. His inspiration was Major Jack Fairfax-Blakeborough, the highly successful author and Countryman’s Diary columnist who hailed from Westerdale on the North York Moors. In 1947, when Dad was just 10, the Major had presented him with one of his books, and I believe that was a turning point in Dad’s life as it made him realise that you could, in fact, earn a living through writing stories.

Dad used to say to me that if you were a male and came from the moors, you usually went in one of two directions, either into farming, or into the uniformed services. At first, Dad did try to buck the trend by asking for a job at the local paper, the Whitby Gazette, when he left school at 16. But they turned him down, and so, not knowing what else to do, he joined the police.

I think leaving school with few qualifications left a very deep impression on him as, after being rejected by the Gazette, and at first unable to immediately fulfil his ambition to write, he didn’t have many qualifications to fall back upon so had to do something ‘conventional’ to earn a living.

So I think it was that which made him believe that getting an education was highly important, and I now understand why he worked so hard to make sure we children went to good schools. In his column from 8th August 1978, he talks about the difficulty of motivating children from rural backgrounds to go to school before it was compulsory in the 19th century: “It must have been very difficult to encourage parents to send their youngsters to school when those same youngsters could be better employed in the house or fields working productively alongside their parents.”

It was only after the Agricultural Children’s Act of 1873 that things began to change, as it forbade children under the age of eight to work on a farm unless it was their own, which meant that children whose parents didn’t own a farm were free to attend school. Three years later, the law was changed again making it compulsory for children under 12 to attend school, with the exception of the six weeks during which the hay and corn needed to be gathered in, which is how the long summer school holidays covering July and August came about.

All working parents today will understand the mixed blessings of a long summer holiday. This year, for the first time in 18 years (thanks to my youngest finishing his GCSEs) I was able to plan and take a two-week holiday when most children were still at school. So by the last week of June, we were all free and hotfooted it to France while the going was so good.

While in France, like most of us Brits do, I worked very hard on my tan, only to come home and find I had no boasting rights to speak of as, thanks to this amazing spell of hot weather, everyone else was the same colour as me! Life just isn’t fair sometimes.

Visit my blog at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug.

Raising a toast to Dad

(This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times  on 27th July, & the Gazette & Herald on 25th July 2018).

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Next week marks the most important day of the year which, as all who read this newspaper know, is August 1st, or Yorkshire Day.

According to my Dad’s column from 29 July 1978, the day was established to mark the demise in 1974 of the three Yorkshire Ridings when county boundaries were rearranged and Cleveland and Humberside were established. It was originally more commonly known as Minden Day, a commemoration of the 1759 Battle of Minden in which the soldiers were said to have plucked roses from the hedgerows on their way into battle. So on Minden Day, soldiers place red roses in their ceremonial headwear as a tribute to their predecessors and Yorkshire soldiers use white roses instead to represent their county.

My dad loved his food and one of the things he most looked forward to on Yorkshire Day was the traditional meal with Yorkshire puddings eaten in the classic way, as a starter with gravy, followed by roast beef and vegetables. He would particularly enjoy it if it was accompanied by a glass of good red wine. On our recent holiday to France, we stayed near Bordeaux, and as I drove past field upon field of vines, I couldn’t help but think of my dad, and recall a special family holiday we had to the same area eleven years ago in 2007.

We’d gone to celebrate my parents’ 70th birthdays, but also because we’d had a difficult year. Dad had been diagnosed with prostate cancer a few months earlier and his diagnosis had been very serious. But thankfully he responded remarkably well to the treatment and was in relatively good health, even through we still had no idea what the future might hold. So my mum decided that a special family holiday was in order and found a splendid manor house between Bordeaux and Perigueux in south-west France that could accommodate all 16 of us.

It was a truly memorable holiday, and Dad was in his element, enjoying the local food and wine to the full. He found himself a special little corner in the garden where he could write up column notes while enjoying a glass of something lovely.

As we were so close to some famous wine-producing domaines, he and my mum spent one day visiting a chateau near St Emilion. Although one might imagine chateaus being ancient castles with turrets and towers (of which France has many), the word also refers simply to an estate upon which wine is produced and sold.

I managed to find the column he wrote in 2007 following that holiday, and it’s interesting to read back on it now, especially following last week’s column in which I wrote about how much better the French road network is compared to ours. Dad apparently felt the same way. “I must say that the French roads, whether urban, rural or motorways, are splendid,” he wrote.

During my holiday this year, I was also determined to visit a chateau and sample a local vintage so the boys and I set out one day along a long straight local road which was lined with vineyards.

We pulled into Chateau Haute-Goujon, a smart, modern-looking place, and were very fortunate to be shown around by the owner himself, Monsieur Vincent Garde, whose family have produced red wine there since the early 20th century. In excellent English, he explained the process, taking us through the vinification room, with huge stainless steel vats where the grape juice is fermented and turned into wine, then to a room full of hand-made oak barrels, where the wine is aged, to a vast cellar-like room full of resting bottles, and then finally to the labelling facility. The labels are only put on last minute to deter thieves. If the wine is unmarked, they will have no idea what they are stealing, explained Mr Garde.

Of course, I had to buy some and was pleasantly surprised to find the choices weren’t as expensive as I’d imagined, with prices starting at £10 and the most expensive being around £50. I bought some at the average price, and then a couple of a more expensive one. It’s just a shame Dad isn’t here to enjoy it with me, but I will raise a toast to him when I open it.

For more information visit chateauhautegoujon.com.

Visit my blog at countrymansdaughter.com. Follow me on Twitter @countrymansdaug

From memories to remembrance

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(This column appeared in the Darlington & Stockton Times  on 25th May, & the Gazette & Herald on 23rd May 2018).

Sometimes, researching material for these columns is a bit like being a detective. I read Dad’s words from the corresponding week 40 years ago, and that triggers off an idea which can require me to delve into the archives of cuttings and photographs that we have stored at my parents’ home. Usually this, along with a few targeted questions to my mum and siblings, and some rummaging around the internet, helps me to build up a picture of what was going on in the world at the time Dad was writing the column.

This week, I was reading his column from May 27th 1978, in which he talks about the visit by Prince Charles to Great Ayton. That is just about all he says about the visit itself, and he goes on to talk about the school in the village where Captain James Cook was educated as a young boy.

I then recalled having seen a picture in our archives of Prince Charles with my dad standing in the background and wondered if it was that same occasion at Great Ayton. If I could find it, then wouldn’t it be a good accompanying picture to this week’s column!

So I called my mum and asked about said picture, at which point she put me straight, “Oh no, that was Whitby up at the Captain Cook memorial,” she said.

Momentarily disappointed, I thought my quest had come to an end. But when I googled ‘Prince Charles visit to Great Ayton 1978’, the results also showed that his visit to Whitby was on 1st June 1978. And going back to the first paragraph of my dad’s column, he said the visit to Great Ayton was ‘on the following Thursday’, i.e. 1st June 1978 too, so of course Charles would be visiting both places on the same day! My quest was back on track.

The visit was part of the Royal Tour of Cleveland, which included celebrations for the 250th anniversary of Cook’s birth, and so Prince Charles was visiting some of the spots that were significant in Cook’s life. He unveiled a plaque at the Cook Memorial, which is where the picture showing my dad in the background was taken. Unfortunately I don’t possess an original, just a copy of the photo from the paper. Annoyingly, I couldn’t lay my hands on the original cutting either, despite raiding my dad’s mind-boggling collection of cuttings, and so had to continue my Poirot-esque quest for information elsewhere.

What Dad fails to mention in his article is that at the time, he was press officer for North Yorkshire Police, and as such, was heavily involved in all royal visits to the region. Another search of the internet threw up some photographs from that day, and sure enough, Dad can be spotted lurking in some of them. It’s an odd feeling when you find photos of your loved ones that you never knew existed, and it added another small piece to the jigsaw of my dad’s life that I am piecing together now he’s gone. The pictures were taken during Dad’s thankfully short-lived ‘moustache’ phase, when, in his uniform, he wouldn’t have looked out of place next to a line-up of the Village People.

Dad worked for North Yorkshire Police for 30 years until he retired in 1982 to write full time. He was always very proud of his police career, and, as a gifted storyteller, particularly enjoyed his time as press officer. I was honoured to be invited along with my mum, sister and brother, to the North Yorkshire Police headquarters for a service on 13th May to remember the lives of those men and women who have either died during their service, or after they left. It was a very moving occasion, particularly hearing about the tragic cases of officers who had fallen while on duty.

One of the most memorable cases Dad dealt with while press officer was the hunt for killer Barry Prudom, who was on the run in North Yorkshire in 1982. Dad’s approach when dealing with the media in this case was quite revolutionary, and he received a commendation as a result, as well as a personal call from Scotland Yard to say it would be adopted nationally. So when the two officers murdered by Prudom were remembered at the service, it was especially poignant.

So please take a moment to remember, and never forget, the names of PC David Haigh and Sergeant David Winter.