Now! Then! A rambunctious Leeds wedding

25 November 1978: A rambunctious Leeds wedding

David Kitchen. 2021. The Feeling of What Happened. Norfolk: David Kitchen. Reproduction by kind permission of the author. Get it:

Excerpt

In the morning she pulled back the covers and said, “You had better go and get married now.” I showered, put on my wedding suit and went straight to a bar, where I drank beer and shorts for hours. I could not get drunk, but did spend the funds which were supposed to pay for the church and service. My best man pulled me off to Meanwood Road and we caught a bus to St Matthew’s. I thought I looked like John Travolta, but there might have been a lack of self-awareness. The reception was at the Stainbeck Community Hall, which was somehow linked to the church. This is where the fighting happened. Tony, Betty’s husband was the cause of the violence. He got very drunk, as everyone did, but he also became belligerent with it. He took on management of the dancing and somehow got everyone to link arms in one long line with him in the middle, and then he spun them all around, just like a Catherine wheel. He had a silliness in him, though, and let go of one arm, which sent half a dozen women collapsing over some wooden trestle tables. A husband confronted Tony, and that’s when it all kicked off. I only got to hear about this afterwards from my brothers. Lynn and I had seen the way it was all going and decided to get out and leave the keeping of the peace to someone else. That’s when we did the long walk home and spent our last 10p on the Banjo bar.

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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.

Abbreviations

Comment

Dave Kitchen’s tale recalls Richard Brathwait’s perhaps fictionalised account in Drunken Barnaby’s Four Journeys to the North of England of his wedding on 4 May 1617 to Frances Lawson (bouse is booze, drink to excess):

Thence to Nesham, now translated,
Once a nunnery dedicated:
Valleys smiling, bottoms pleasing,
Streaming rivers never ceasing;
Deck’d with tufty woods and shady,
Graced by a lovely lady.

Thence to Darlington, where I boused
Till at last I was espoused:
Marriage feast and all prepared,
Not a fig for th’ world I cared;
All night long by th’ pot I tarry’d,
As if I had ne’er been marry’d.
(Brathwait 1762)

Unfortunately Hurworth lies on the north bank of the Tees, beyond the ambit of this anthology.

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Original

We organised the wedding over the space of a few weeks. We settled on St Matthew’s Church in Chapel Allerton. The meeting was booked with the vicar. He did not look well. I bought the wedding rings £5 for me, £10 for Lynn. Mine saved me from getting my finger bitten off in a violent assault a few weeks after, Lynn’s burnt her when she did something wrong, but more on that later. In the days before the wedding on the 25th November 1978 there was a serious fire at the church, and the vicar had a heart attack. An emergency meeting was set up with the curate. Did we want to go ahead with things or rearrange with another church? He mentioned not feeling confident. He was new to the job and sometimes stammered on formal occasions when he spoke. There was also a smell of smoke lingering in the church. He didn’t want to spoil things for us. We decided to go ahead with it.

The 25th was an intensely cold day. We filled the church. Lynn’s very large family predominated, most from the locality but some from as far away as the mining districts around Castleford. It was uncertain if my father was coming. He had an engagement that day. That was the professional phrase he used, which meant he was doing a Punch and Judy plus magic show across town. He would never cancel on commitments and that had been made first. My brother Neil had been having a long night of the conscience. He woke up convinced that he had to put a stop to the wedding. Unbeknown to me this was debated with my elder brother Ian all day long, and Neil did come very close to making the objection. A large number of patients from one of the women’s wards at Meanwood Park filled one quarter of the church. They came dressed in their best. Lynn gave them a peg doll each for reasons I cannot remember. All were old. I’m fairly sure this would have been the only wedding they would ever have got to go to. Curate and I both stammered our way through the spoken bits. Lynn got uncontrollable giggles and then ran down the aisle ahead of me. She said the wedding dress was a summer one and had no warmth to it. There were one or two photos taken outside, but it was even colder there, and presumably Lynn and me were driven by one of her family to a community hall somewhere on the estate.

There had been a week of stag nights before the wedding. The first night was a party at a house on Woodhouse Ridge; then in the early hours stumbling home through woods on the down slope of the ridge as lost as if I was in an Amazonian rain forest. Another time rolling about (uncaring of the felt) on a snooker table with a girl that I had always lusted after. She wouldn’t do it but we did snog a lot. What was going on here was that I had seen a film and I wanted to do something just like the main character did on the night before he got married. The film was ‘That’ll be the day’ starring Ringo Starr and David Essex about a young lad who ditches responsibility and after many adventures working at fair grounds and holiday camps, becomes a rock star, very English and wonderfully poignant.

I did go to bed with someone on the very last night, by this time I think I was begging everyone I knew and a very nice woman, a beautiful woman eventually gave in. We were extremely drunk and I 100% do not know if we did it or not. In the morning she pulled back the covers and said “You had better go and get married now.” I showered, put on my wedding suit and went straight to a bar where I drank beer and shorts for hours. I could not get drunk but did spend the funds which were supposed to pay for the church and service. My best man pulled me off to Meanwood Road and we caught a bus to St Matthew’s. I thought I looked like John Travolta but there might have been a lack of self awareness. The reception was at the Stainbeck Community Hall, which was somehow linked to the church. This is where the fighting happened. The place was due for some refurbishment. The female guests complained the floor boards were up in their toilets, and some had twisted their ankle as a result. Not a country hotel, but it was near the Miles Hill estate and came as part of the wedding package.

Tony, Betty’s husband was the cause of the violence. He got very drunk, as everyone did, but he also became belligerent with it. He took on management of the dancing and somehow got everyone to link arms in one long line with him in the middle, and then he spun them all around just like a Catherine wheel. He had a silliness in him, though, and let go of one arm, which sent half a dozen women collapsing over some wooden trestle tables. A husband confronted Tony, and that’s when it all kicked off. I only got to hear about this afterwards from my brothers. Lynn and I had seen the way it was all going and decided to get out and leave the keeping of the peace to someone else. That’s when we did the long walk home and spent our last 10p on the Banjo Bar.

958 words.