Lancashire Humour Part 1

Lancas.h.i.+re Humour.

by Thomas Newbigging.

PREFACE

In the present volume I have included a number of Anecdotes and Sketches which I had previously introduced into my _History of the Forest of Rossendale_, and also a subsequent book of mine, ent.i.tled _Lancas.h.i.+re Characters and Places_. I felt that it was admissible to do this in a volume dealing specifically with the subject of Lancas.h.i.+re Humour, and I am in hopes that readers who already possess copies of the works named will not object to their being reproduced here. They were worth giving in this connection, and, indeed, their omission could scarcely be justified in a book of humorous Lancas.h.i.+re incidents and anecdotes.

There is surely a want of discernment shown by those who object to the use of dialect in literature as occasion offers. A truth, or a stroke of wit, or a touch of humour, can often be conveyed in dialect (_rustice loqui_) when it would fail of effect in polite English. All language is conventional. Use and wont settles much in this world.

Dialect has its use and wont, and because it differs from something else is surely no reason for pa.s.sing it by on the other side.

I don't know whether many of my readers have read the poems of T. E.

Brown. They are chiefly in the Manx dialect, not Manx as a language--a branch of the Keltic--but _Manx dialect English_. Here was a man steeped to the eyes in cla.s.sical learning; a Greek and Latin scholar of the first quality, as his recently published Letters testify. But he was wise as well as learned, and his poetry, not less than his Letters, will give him a place among the immortals, just as the dialect poems of Edwin Waugh will give _him_ a like place. Brown did not shrink from using the speech of the common people around him if haply he could reach their understandings and their hearts.

The proper study of Mankind is man. Not the superfine man, not the cultured man, only, but the man as we encounter him in our daily walk--Hodge in homespun as well as de Vere in velvet.

It will not be disputed that, apart from the use of dialect, there is a substratum of humour in the Lancas.h.i.+re character which evinces itself spontaneously and freely on occasions. There can be no doubt, also, that this humour, whether conscious or unconscious, is usually accentuated or emphasised when the dialect is the conveying medium, because its quaintness is in keeping with the peculiarities of the race. Besides, there is a naturalness, a primitivity, and therefore a special attractiveness in _all_ dialect forms of speech which does not invariably characterise the expression of the same ideas in literary English.

Now, humour is such a desirable ingredient in the potion of our human existence, that it would be nothing less than a dire misfortune to make a point of eschewing the setting which best harmonises with its fullest and fairest presentation, whether it emanates from the man in clogs or from the most cultured of our kind.

Our greatest writers have recognised the worth of dialect as a medium for humour, and hence many of the most memorable and amusing characters in Scott and d.i.c.kens--to take the two writers that occur to us most readily by way of ill.u.s.tration--portray themselves in the dialect of their native heath.

These remarks must be taken in a general sense, and not as having any special bearing on the present contribution. The two, else, would not be in proportion. My object has simply been to gather up the waifs and strays of humorous incident and anecdote, with a view to enlivening a pa.s.sing hour.

Some of the stories that I give are related of incidents that are said to have occurred in, or of persons belonging to, both Lancas.h.i.+re and the West Riding. It is difficult to locate all of them so as to be quite certain of their parentage. I have tried, however, to limit myself to such as have a genuine Lancas.h.i.+re origin, without trenching on the domain of our neighbours in Yorks.h.i.+re.

The present collection by no means exhausts the number of good stories that are to be found on Lancas.h.i.+re soil. It is highly probable that were half-a-dozen writers to devote some time to the subject, they would each be able to present a collection differing from all the rest in the characteristic anecdotes which they would select.

Readers outside of the County Palatine will not have any difficulty in perusing the stories. The dialect in each has been so modified as to admit of its being readily understood by every intelligent reader.

T. N.

MANCHESTER, _December 10th, 1900_.

_Lancas.h.i.+re Humour_

"Come, Robin, sit deawn, an' aw'll tell thee a tale."

_Songs of the Wilsons._

If we would find the unadulterated Lancas.h.i.+re character, we must seek for it on and near to the eastern border of the county, where the latter joins up to the West Riding of Yorks.h.i.+re.[1] Roughly, a line drawn from Manchester on the south, by way of Bolton and Blackburn and terminating at c.l.i.theroe in the north, will cut a slice out of the county Palatine, equal on the eastward side of this line, to about one-third of its whole area; and it is in this portion that the purest breed of Lancas.h.i.+re men and women will be found. A more circ.u.mscribed area still, embracing Oldham, Bury, Rochdale, the Rossendale Valley, and the country beyond to Burnley and Colne, contains in large proportion the choicest examples of Lancas.h.i.+re people, and it is within the narrower limit that John Collier ("Tim Bobbin") first of all, then Oliver Ormerod, and, later, Waugh, Brierley, and other writers in the vernacular, have placed the scenes of their Lancas.h.i.+re Stories and Sketches, and found the best and most original of their characters.

[1] In their speech, their employments, their habits and general character, there is much in common between the natives of Lancas.h.i.+re and their neighbours of the West Riding.

The Authors I have specifically named are themselves good examples of that character, Waugh paramountly so--distinguished as they are by a kindly hard-headedness, a droll and often broad wit, which exhibits itself not only in the quality of their writings, but also in their modes of expression, and a blending in their nature of the humorous with the pathetic, lending pungency, naturalness and charm to their best work.

The peculiarities to which I have referred are due to what in times past was the retiredness of this belt of the county; its isolation, its comparative inaccessibility, its immunity from invasion. As the coast of any country is approached, the breed of the inhabitants will be found to become more and more mixed, losing to a large extent its distinctive characteristics; and it is only by an incursion into the interior that the unadulterated aborigines are to be found in their native purity. Even here, these conditions no longer exist with anything like the old force, excepting, it may be, in some obscure nook out of sound of the locomotive whistle. Of these there are still a few left, though not many.

The old barriers of time and distance have been obliterated. The means of, and incentives to, migration, have become so easy and great that our "Besom Bens" and "Ab-o' th'-Yates" are grown as scarce as spade guineas, or as the wild roses in our Lancas.h.i.+re hedges, and will ere long exist only in the pages of our native humorists.

The writer of the Introduction to the 1833 edition of John Collier's "Tummus and Meary" makes a wide claim for the antiquity and universality of the Lancas.h.i.+re dialect in England in the past. He says: "Having had occasion, in the course of interpreting the following pages, to refer to the ancient English compositions of such as Chaucer, Wycliffe, other poets, historians, etc., I have been led almost to conclude that the present Lancas.h.i.+re dialect was the universal language of the earliest days in England."

Without going quite so far as the writer just quoted, it may be admitted that his contention is not without warrant, as is proved by the very large number of words and phrases of the dialect that are to be found in the Works of Gower, Chaucer, Spenser, Ben Jonson, Shakespeare, and other of our older authors, as well as in the earlier translations of the Bible. The conclusion may certainly be drawn that in the Lancas.h.i.+re dialect as spoken to-day there are more archaic words, both Celtic and Gothic, than are to be found elsewhere in England.

The Rev. W. Gaskell, M.A., in his lectures on the dialect, says with truth that:--"There are many more forms of speech and peculiarities of p.r.o.nunciation in Lancas.h.i.+re that would yet sound strange, and, to use a Lancas.h.i.+re expression, strangely 'potter' a southern; but these are often not, as some ignorantly suppose, mere vulgar corruptions of modern English, but genuine relics of the old mother tongue. They are bits of the old granite, which have perhaps been polished into smoother forms, but lost in the process a good deal of their original strength."[2]

[2] Two Lectures on the Lancas.h.i.+re Dialect, by the Rev. W. Gaskell, M.A., Chapman & Hall, 193 Piccadilly, London, 1854, p. 13.

There have been of recent years many observant gleaners in these fruitful Lancas.h.i.+re fields. Waugh, Brierley, Oliver Ormerod, Samuel Layc.o.c.k, Miss Lahee, J. T. Staton, Trafford Clegg and other writers have done much to ill.u.s.trate the character and habits of the people of the County Palatine in their Sketches, Stories and Songs. We owe ungrudging thanks to the writers in the vernacular for the treasures with which, during the last thirty or forty years, they have adorned our Lancas.h.i.+re literature; for the rich legacy they have left us; for having taught us so much of homely wisdom in the quaint tongue of our people, and opened up to us in wider measure than we previously knew, the bright commonsense and humour that are enshrined in their hearts.

They have ill.u.s.trated for us the various phases, both in speech and thought, of a virile and otherwise important section of the people that go to make up the inhabitants of this Island of ours. They have exhibited the genuine homeliness and simplicity of the people of the county, as well as their native shrewdness and strength of character; their kindliness of heart, their natural insight and apt.i.tude; their characteristic humour--for the gracious gift of humour is theirs in a remarkable degree--their flashes of wit and repartee; their peccadilloes and graver faults, as well as their many admirable virtues; their strenuous working lives, and their abandonment to play as occasion serves--for it is a marked feature of Lancas.h.i.+re people that they work hard and play hard.

They have shown us, also, how rich in resource is the dialect of the county, compacting and crystallizing its phrases and proverbs, and have proved how capable it is of giving expression to the natural affections. It is only of comparatively recent years that we have been able to appreciate the wealth of the dialect in these respects. All the material was in existence before, but it needed the cunning hand of the master to make literature of it; to weave up the warp and woof, and present them to us in an embodied form.

A good deal of the humour of our Lancas.h.i.+re writers is of the rollicking kind, no doubt. It does not always belong to the school of high culture. But, on the other hand, we have got the characters true to the life, and he is a fastidious critic, or worse, who would prefer a counterfeit presentment to the genuine portrait.

The subject of Lancas.h.i.+re character, or, indeed, of any peculiarities of local and provincial character in general, with its manifestations either of pathos or humour, may not be one of very great profundity.

That is not any part of the claim we make. It may even be considered trivial by some. Those, however, who take such a view, if there be any such, are surely lacking in breadth of vision. To do what we propose is to come nearer to the hearts of the people and their ways of thinking than is possible in the higher and broader flights of the more general historian. And, indeed, the work of the humble gleaner often a.s.sists the more ambitious and dignified chronicler in his labours to depict the greater personages and events in the history of his country. The ways of thinking of the people, and also the subject-matter of their thoughts, may be good, or they may be commonplace, or they may be mean, but to enter into their thoughts so as to get at their spirit, helps at least to an understanding of them.

Admitting for a moment the triviality of the subject, we cannot always be sitting like Jove on the heights of Olympus; and even when in loftier mood we do emulate the high emprizes of the G.o.ds, we are fain to descend at times--and there is true wisdom in so descending--to refresh ourselves with a touch of Mother Earth--to seek in the vale below that necessary relaxation from the strain and stress of high thinking.

When all is said that can be said, a collection of this kind is a contribution to an important branch of folk-lore and folkspeech, and in that respect, if in no other, should be widely acceptable.

It is not, of course, pretended that all the anecdotes here given are new. Some of them are "chestnuts" I am aware--though chestnuts are generally good or they would not deserve to be chestnuts--but they ill.u.s.trate certain traits of character, and that is a sufficient reason for reproducing them. Neither are we prepared to vouch for the absolute truth of all the stories. Some of them, either in whole or in part, are probably due to an effort of the imagination. In that sense they are true, and certainly they are each characteristic of individuals whom we all know, and who, from our experience of their eccentricities, might safely be set down as the actors in them.

Notwithstanding all that has been done by the writers already named, there is great abundance of good things still ungarnered, in the way of racy anecdotes, wise apothegms, and striking sayings, all too good to be lost--as indeed may be their fate unless pains are taken to record them in permanent form. Even the ludicrous conclusions and remarks of the half-witted--those of whom it is said in the vernacular that "they have a slate off and one slithering,"--are often sufficiently striking or amusing to be worth putting on record.

"The clouted shoe hath oft-times craft in't," as says the rustic proverb.

We have it on the authority of Shakespeare that a jest's prosperity lies in the ear of him that hears it. This is generally so, and especially in those instances where the jest, or the story, is clothed in dialect, and depends for a full appreciation on a knowledge by the listener of the peculiar characteristics of those from whom it emanates. For this reason it is doubtful whether, say, the people of the southern portion of our Island are able to enter into, so as to fully enjoy, our more northerly humour; just as we of the north may not be able to thoroughly enjoy theirs. Antipathy, also, to a particular form and mode of spelling and p.r.o.nunciation intervenes to prevent full enjoyment on both sides. For this reason the writers in dialect are placed at a disadvantage as regards the extent of their audience. Most of their best things are caviere to the general, or, rather, to the particular.

In a letter to a Rossendale friend, John Collier has an interesting reference to the dialect and the extent to which it is used. In this letter the writer offers an apology for, or rather a defence of, his "Tummus and Meary" against certain strictures that had been pa.s.sed upon it on account of its broad Lancas.h.i.+re speech.

He says: "I am obliged to you for a peep at your friend Mr Heape's ingenious letter. When you write, please to return him my compliments, and thanks for his kind remembrance of me; and hint to him that I do not think our country exposed at all by my view of the Lancas.h.i.+re Dialect: but think it commendable, rather than a defect, that Lancas.h.i.+re in general, and Rossendale in particular, retain so much of the speech of their ancestors. For why should the people of Saxony, and the Silesians be commended for speaking the Teutonic or old German, and the Welsh be so proud (and by many authors commended too) for retaining so much of their old British, and we in these parts laughed at for adhering to the speech of our ancestors? For my part I do not see any reason for it, but think it praiseworthy: and am always well pleased when I think at the Rossendale man's answer, who being asked where he wunned, said, 'I wun at th' riggin o' th' Woard, at th'

riggin o' th' Woard, for th' Weter o' th' tone Yeeosing faws into th'

Yeeost, on th' tother into th' West Seeo.'"

Curiously enough, the dialect in "Tim Bobbin's" day was considered as too plebeian in character to deserve notice. It was looked upon simply as the vulgar speech of the common people, and altogether unworthy of attention and study by better-instructed mortals. Even well into the present century, dialect in general was not held in estimation for any useful purpose, and it is only in comparatively recent years that its value as an aid to the study of racial history has been recognised.