Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

• Terry Robinson (@FleetwoodTerryO, 10 Jan): GOOD TO SEE @YorkshireTea are FELLOW PATRIOTS. YORKSHIRE SOIL MAKES THE BEST TEA [Three Union Jack emojis]
• Rita (@rewindthefilth, 7 Feb): “Yorkshire soil makes the best tea” @Thaa_knows send help I am dying
• Terry Robinson (Feb 7): WHATS SO FUNNY ABOUT THAT LOVE?
• Rita (Feb 7): Just putting that out there … LOVE [Screen shot of blog post from Taylors of Harrogate beginning “Yorkshire Tea is grown in more than 20 different places across Africa and India, then imported to Harrogate and blended – so why is it called ‘Yorkshire Tea’?”]
• Terry Robinson (Feb 7): ABSOLUTE BOLLOCKS. MUST BE SOME OF THAT PHOTOSHOP MALARKEY. IF IT WASNT FROM YORKSHIRE THEY WOULDNT BE ALLOWED TO CALL IT YORKSHIRE TEA AS ITS A FORM OF FRAUD
• Terry Robinson (Feb 7): WHERE IS YOUR TEA GROWN? @YorkshireTea
• Yorkshire Tea (@YorkshireTea, Feb 7): AFRICA AND INDIA. HERE’S A THING YOU CAN READ [same article]
• Terry Robinson (Feb 7): FUCKING DISGRACEFUL. WHY CALL IT YORKSHIRE TEA IF ITS NOT GROWN IN YORKSHIRE. WONT BE BUYING FROM YOU AGAIN
• Yorkshire Tea (Feb 7): SORRY, CAN’T HEAR YOU. CAN YOU SPEAK UP A BIT?

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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.

Comment

Comment

If Terry was fooled, then so were Fortnum & Mason etc etc:

Fraudster made £550,000 selling fake ‘Scottish-grown tea’

A fraudster who tricked luxury hotels and stores into buying “Scottish-grown tea” that was grown abroad has been found guilty of a £550,000 scam.

Thomas Robinson supplied high-end customers such as Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel and the Dorchester in London with varieties with names like Dalreoch White, Highland Green, Silver Needles and Scottish Antlers Tea.

Trading as The Wee Tea Plantation, he claimed they had been grown on farmland in Perthshire.

Instead, the tea had been imported, repackaged and then resold at hugely-inflated prices, Falkirk Sheriff Court was told.

Robinson also defrauded genuine aspiring Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he claimed were grown in Scotland.

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Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Adobe Photoshop (1) W/G ·
• Africa (3) W/G ·
• Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate (1) W/G ·
• Black tea (1) W/G ·
• Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (1) W/G ·
• Fleetwood (1) W/G ·
• Harrogate (13) W/G ·
• India (6) W/G ·
• Lancashire (35) W/G ·
• North Yorkshire (11) W/G ·
• Patriotism (4) W/G ·
• Tea blending and additives (1) W/G ·
• Tea (7) W/G ·
• Trade Descriptions Act 1968 (1) W/G ·
• Twitter (1) W/G ·
• Yorkshire Tea (1) W/G ·

All tags.

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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.

Comment

Comment

If Terry was fooled, then so were Fortnum & Mason etc etc:

Fraudster made £550,000 selling fake ‘Scottish-grown tea’

A fraudster who tricked luxury hotels and stores into buying “Scottish-grown tea” that was grown abroad has been found guilty of a £550,000 scam.

Thomas Robinson supplied high-end customers such as Edinburgh’s Balmoral Hotel and the Dorchester in London with varieties with names like Dalreoch White, Highland Green, Silver Needles and Scottish Antlers Tea.

Trading as The Wee Tea Plantation, he claimed they had been grown on farmland in Perthshire.

Instead, the tea had been imported, repackaged and then resold at hugely-inflated prices, Falkirk Sheriff Court was told.

Robinson also defrauded genuine aspiring Scottish tea growers by selling them plants he claimed were grown in Scotland.

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

23 February 1863: The Rev Samuel Gray of Cundall tries to make school interesting for a nervous William Allison (12)

4 July 1858: Incipient water-baby Tom arrives at Malham Cove, discovered today by Charles Kingsley

29 February 1824: Prophet John Wroe is baptised on the Leap Day in the Aire near Apperley Bridge before an audience of 30,000

12 September 1856: Band-leader John Hope tells an inquest of the life and murder of his daughter, the dancer Jane Banham, by her ex-lover, a Mancunian tailor, at the Malt Mill Inn, Armley

28 January 1069: In the first major northern battle after Hastings, Tynesiders slaughter a Norman army at Durham, whereupon William the Conqueror ravages the north

30 March 1866: On Good Friday, lost northwest of Jan Mayen in the Arctic Ocean and battered by old sea ice in a terrible gale, the crew of the whaler Diana of Hull stoically awaits death

29 June 1876: Uplifted, Harrogate parish church awaits the monstrous £1,800 Schulze organ from Thomas Stuart Kennedy’s Meanwood Towers, Leeds

21 April 1883: Peter Inchbald observes nightingales at Harrogate for the first time, but their popularity is their undoing

30 October 1914: Joseph Colgrave of Sheffield and the 5th Royal Irish Lancers wins a DCM rallying leaderless Punjabi Muslims at Hollebeke (Ypres)

4 December 1990: Paul Sykes – heavyweight boxer, literary prize-winner, habitual criminal – advises the nation from the back garden of his Wakefield council house on shark attack prevention

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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.

Comment

Comment

The excerpt quoted begins around 24:30:

The quote in my title is from the programme intro. A perhaps better one, from Charles Cox: “Notorious memoir of a violent criminal and, briefly, professional boxer. Sykes was a drunken thug who spent much of his life in prison, but his book is nevertheless the work of a sensitive and intelligent man.”

As I understand it, the major threat in the Johore Strait, after the Singapore authorities, is from pollution, not sharks. Does anyone know more about his foreign travel claims, unmentioned in his autobio (Sykes 1991)? Is Wood Street nick the now retired police station in London EC2?

First broadcast dated from the Times TV listings for 4 December 1990:

10.40 First Tuesday.
● CHOICE: Paul Sykes from Wakefield was good enough to fight for the British heavyweight boxing championship, and to take an Open University degree, and his autobiography won an Arthur Koestler literary award. But his life has been a shambles. He has spent nearly half of his 46 years in prison and he has a wild and violent temperament which has often made his high intelligence count for nothing. Nick Lord’s profile follows Sykes through his latest prison sentence and his attempts yet again to build a stable life outside. The signs are not promising. Within three months he is back in trouble. A specialist in roaring invective, a Yorkshire Alf Garnett in manner if not necessarily in substance, Sykes is a rich subject and Lord does him justice. Those looking for the roots of Sykes’s behaviour may find them in his tough upbringing at the hands of a martinet father who, of all things, worked as a prison officer.

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