Yorkshire Almanac First broadcast of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, on the At Last the 1948 Show

31 October 1967: First broadcast of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, on the At Last the 1948 Show

Tim Brooke-Taylor and others. 1967. Four Yorkshiremen. At Last the 1948 Show. Palo Alto, California: Issuu, Inc. Issuu publishes pirated content, so this may disappear. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

Hezekiah (Marty): Aye and you try and tell the young people of today that and they won’t believe you.

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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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The Four Yorkshiremen sketch was meant to be taking the mickey, not aspirational, and yet

— Ghost Coast (@ThedaBarracuda) January 9, 2023

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The Four Yorkshiremen sketch was meant to be taking the mickey, not aspirational, and yet

— Ghost Coast (@ThedaBarracuda) January 9, 2023

Something to say? Get in touch

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

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First night 24 February 1777 at Covent Garden. Local interest consists of hints of Yorkshire accents. Is it a variant of Aesop’s town and country mice? Is it really worse than Vanbrugh’s Relapse, on which it is based? Had Sheridan ever been to Scarborough, or was it simply proverbial as a second-rate spa town?

A hoyden was a “A rude, or ill-bred girl (or woman); a boisterous noisy girl, a romp” (OED).

I think the reference to Turkey-work is to demonstrate the backwardness of Yorkshire – see e.g. a petition by Bradford in 1689 complaining about the collapse of the industry there.

Sir Tunbelly Clumsy is alive and well in the Yorkshire scene of Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

Scene 19.—Prince Herbert Yearns for a Certain…Someone..
[The scene is a large, rather run-down English castle with several squat towers and one somewhat tall one. Inside the tall tower, standing before the window are FATHER and HERBERT.]
FATHER: One day, lad, all this will be yours!
HERBERT: What, the curtains?
FATHER: [whacking him on the back of the head] No, not the curtains, lad. All that you can see! Stretched out over the hills and valleys of this land! This’ll be your kingdom, lad!
HERBERT: But, Mother—
FATHER: Father. I’m Father.
HERBERT: But Father, I don’t want any of that.
FATHER: [wandering to and fro] Listen, lad. I’ve built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. All the kings said I was daft to build a castle in a swamp, but I built it all the same, just to show ’em. It sank into the swamp—so I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that’s what your gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.
HERBERT: But I don’t want any of that. I’d rather—
FATHER: Rather what?!
HERBERT: I’d rather…just… [music] …sing!
FATHER: Stop that, stop that! You’re not going to do a song while I’m here. Now listen lad, in twenty minutes you’re getting married to a girl whose father owns the biggest tracts of open land in Britain.
(Chapman 2019)

The unofficial annotators must be American:

Then apparently her father is a Danish Viking chieftain, because it was the Viking hordes that owned the biggest parts of the British Isles at that time. The Danelaw, as it was called, was essentially an independent nation on the northeast of ‘England,’ and not beholden to English kings at all. In all likelihood, it was the existence of these people that forced Old Saxon to meld with Old Norse to produce Old English, the precursor of our own language. The name ‘Lucky’ is, however, of later Dutch origin (source: American Heritage Dictionary)… If Herbert is a prince, his father must logically be a king, right? Well, king of what? Mercia? Wessex? There were a lot of petty kings around at that time, but not many kings of swamps. He sounds like he’s from lower London, if you ask me, but London isn’t built on a swamp.

The historical episode almost certainly took place at marshy Skipsea Castle, Holderness, in the kingdom of Deira or its successor, Northumbria. But Skipsea Castle, sadly, is no more, and Bodiam Castle, in East Sussex, played Swamp Castle in the film.