Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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A personal contribution of his was his doctrine of lightheartedness: dangerous, perhaps, in Oxford, necessary in Yorkshire. No Yorkshireman, or woman, was ever in danger of regarding his class in finals as a matter of indifference (even if it did not have a lifelong effect on his salary as a school teacher): the poet might ‘sit in the third and laugh’, but the Yorkshire student would not. But he could be, and was, encouraged to play a little, to look outside the ‘syllabus’, to regard his studies as something larger and more amusing than a subject for an examination. This note Gordon struck and insisted on, and even expressed in print in the little brochure which he had made for the use of his students. There was very little false solemnity, except rarely and that among the students.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Tags

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• English literature (3) W/G ·
• Gordon, George Stuart (1881-1942) (1), literary scholar, professor of English literature at Leeds 1913-22 W/G ·
• Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1892-1973) (4), writer and philologist, Reader in English at Leeds University (1920-26) W/G ·
• University of Leeds (8) W/G ·
• Yorkshireness (9) W/G ·

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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Similar

27 June 1925: Tolkien on the increasing importance of language within Leeds’ English department during his readership in the early 1920s

24 August 1870: Fakesong by an army captain about the sights of the St. Bartholomew’s Fair today at Reeth, Swaledale

27 March 1634: In commercial Gothic urban legend, John Bartendale, a piper, is hung and buried at York, but awakes, is rescued and pardoned, and returns to the music business

26 May 1941: Headingley’s Shire Oak falls, legendary site of Anglo-Saxon local government between Aire and Wharfe

5 May 1546: Sir Henry Savile invites William Plumpton to a cockfight at Sheffield between Derbyshire, Lancashire and … Hallamshire

6 July 1915: The Tory MP for York joins in the persecution of the professor of German at Leeds University, A.W. Schüddekopf, who is sacked and dies of a stroke

17 March 1914: Months before murdering his lover, the painter John Currie lectures at Leeds University and has a late-night heart-to-heart with its vice-chancellor, Michael Sadler

16 December 1913: Michael Sadler, vice-chancellor of Leeds University, writes to his son about the successful use of students to break the Leeds Corporation Strike

24 February 1777: Penniless bohemian Tom Fashion calls on redneck Yorkshire moneybags Sir Tunbelly Clumsy during tonight’s London première of a Sheridan play

3 January 1915: Ex-prime minister Asquith on the Yorkshireness of his then chief whip, Percy Illingworth (Bradford), who died this day of typhoid

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

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In his tribute in the Commons a month after Illingworth’s death, Asquith was less geographically specific:

He was a man of stern, clean-cut convictions, indisposed by nature to compromise, with pronounced likes and dislikes, a manlike combustible temper, and with the full endowment of a Northern Englishman’s lust for battle and joy in the victory (Asquith 1915/02/03)

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