Graham Turner reported on the ‘moors, mills and millionaires’ of Yorkshire for the Observer Magazine of 28 May 1967, headlined ‘Yorkshire – Britain’s Texas, TV’s richest prize’, though given the recent extreme weather in Texas, perhaps Texas is now America’s Yorkshire.
‘Yorkshiremen, like Texans, love to boast about the size of their homeland,’ wrote Turner. ‘One of their proudest claims is that the three Ridings contain more acres than there are letters in the Bible.’ Not a claim I was expecting (or one I’d want to factcheck).
Turner reported that Yorkshire was to get its own TV station, ‘the richest prize among the new contracts for the six years beginning in 1968’, along with the famous ident and its confident blast of fanfare. How to summarise Yorkshire? ‘It gave the world the alpaca jacket, the Dreadnought, the fish finger and the Band of Hope. It’s the Northern county which has beaten the South, and everyone else, 29 times at cricket. Home of plain speaking and gave birth to the stone enigmas of Barbara Hepworth, the riddling poetry of Ted Hughes.’
Not to forget ‘Britain’s first transmountain motorway’, the Yorkshire-Lancashire M62: ‘One odd problem was posed by the agile Pennine sheep. West Riding Council tested to see how high they could jump and decided that 5ft fences would be required to keep them from the motorway.’
In Hull, Turner spoke to one of the ‘bobbers’ who unloaded fishing catches from the trawlers. ‘I get up at about a quarter past one in the morning four or five days a week,’ Stan said.
Turner couldn’t quite place Sheffield, with its ‘parochial air’, into the scheme of things: ‘Whatever steel nationalisation brings, it will not hustle Sheffield along faster than it wants to go. “There’s never a vast change in Yorkshire,” said one steel boss confidently. “It’s only in Lancashire that you’re a bit on T-swings.”’
