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From: "Roy Stockdill" <>
Subject: Re: [YKS] The Yorkshire Code
Date: Tue, 10 Jan 2006 22:47:30 +0000
In-Reply-To: <009f01c61609$ec2e4590$1ce42552@MINE>


> From: "sue taylor" <>

> Could sks expand on what these 'rights and privileges' are please?
>
> " If you are a Yorkshireman or woman always insist on your Yorkshire
> rights, and privileges whenever they are threatened.">

The Yorkshire Ridings Society supports the traditional geographical
boundaries of the ancient county of Yorkshire. It recognises no
artificial boundaries created by bureaucrats and administrators or
attempts to remove from Yorkshire people that very "Yorkshireness" on
which many generations have been brought up. By "rights" I believe
the society means the right to maintain that one lives in Yorkshire,
whatever the Whitehall civil servants, the Post Office or anyone else
thinks by interfering with those traditional boundaries and
attempting to impose nonsensical artificial ones.

Privileges? Firstly, to be born in Yorkshire or be of Yorkshire
ancestry going back many generations is to be a winner in the lottery
of life, to know that one is a member of the most exclusive and
fortunate breed on earth! Yorkshire folks concede second best to
no-one and we point to the most outstanding feature of our character
- that gene of "awkwardness", stubbornness and sheer
bloody-mindedness that has produced so many great Yorkshire
personalities and famous figures in history.

I can do no better than quote the Halifax novelist Phyllis Bentley
who wrote in the Introduction to the Yorkshire section of the Shell
Guide to England in 1970.....

"The Yorkshire people are by reputation robust in physique though not
especially handsome, efficient and vigorous in their undertakings,
blunt in speech and rather well satisfied with themselves. They
dislike excessive expressions of emotion and are cautious with
strangers, but once they accept you they staunchly if soberly
faithful. They prefer practice to theory. Above all, they are
extremely independent. An Abbot of York wrote to Henry VIII: 'There
be such a company of wilful gentleman within Yorkshire as there not
be in all England besides.' In Queen Elizabeth's day the men of
Halifax were spoken of as behaving 'after the rude and arrogant
manner of their wilde country.' It would be rash to suggest that
Yorkshire folk have changed much since those days, and this applies
to the women as well as to the men. A Yorkshire person has a strong
backbone; lean on it but do not try to bend it."

Or in the words of Sir Bernand Ingham in his new book "Yorkshire
Greats: The county's fifty finest": "Yorkshiremen are aggressive,
argumentative, intolerant and just plain downright
bloody-minded...Yorkshire women are even fiercer. Both have decided
views that they are not inclined to keep to themselves when they
believe an injustice has been done."

In other words, Yorkshire folks know that they are the best. Surely
those are rights and privileges enough?

Roy Stockdill
Web page of the Guild of One-Name Studies:- www.one-name.org
Newbies' Guide to Genealogy & Family History:- www.genuki.org.uk/gs/Newbie.html

"There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about,
and that is not being talked about."

Oscar Wilde

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