Yorkshire Day: Celebrating all four Ridings

GOD’S OWN COUNTRY: Beautiful Yorkshire

The Way it Was

By Martin Taylor, city archivist at Hull History Centre

Happy Yorkshire Day!

August 1 is Yorkshire Day, designated as such in 1975, and since 1985 coordinated by the Yorkshire Society.

The original intention was to celebrate and campaign to restore the ancient administrative divisions – the three Ridings – of Yorkshire in the wake of the local government reorganisation which had seen their abolition.

The main events of Yorkshire Day are a civic service, reception and parade hosted in turn by different local authorities across the historic county of Yorkshire.

In 2023 it was the turn of Rotherham, and the assembled mayors attended a ‘do’ at Yorkshire’s grandest stately home, Wentworth Woodhouse.

The date of August 1 was chosen to commemorate the episode when 51st Foot, predecessor-regiment to the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, wore white roses in their headdresses at the Battle of Minden on that day in 1759.

NOVELIST: Winifred Holtby

An additional Hull resonance is that August 1, 1834 was the date of the emancipation of enslaved people in the British Empire, the culmination of the parliamentary campaign of Hull-born Yorkshire MP William Wilberforce.

There were of course three Ridings historically, North, East and West – the word Riding is derived from a Danish word ‘thridding’, meaning a third.

In some ways they were as different from each other as Wensleydale cheese and the chalk from which the Wolds are made. Yet they were united by a common river-network, a shared history, and a unique outlook towards life, Lancashire, and the south of England!

Hull has arguably always stood apart a little. From 1440 it has not, for administrative purposes, been part of Yorkshire.

In that year King Henry IV removed Hull from the remit of the sheriff of Yorkshire and gave us our own.

Hull looks out to sea, towards Europe, and developed under more diverse influences than perhaps the rest of the historic county. Folk from Sheffield, Leeds and Bradford, holidaying on the coast, were, after all, known as “Wezzies”!

‘MONOTONOUS STREETS’: Holderness Road, east Hull

There may have been three Ridings but here at Hull History Centre we know of a fourth Riding, created by novelist and feminist, the Rudston-born Winifred Holtby (1898–1935).

The fictional South Riding of Yorkshire lends its name to and is the setting for Holtby’s greatest novel, published in 1936 after her death a year earlier.

Holtby’s archive was given to the city by her literary executor and great friend Vera Brittain. The city council is proud to be Holtby’s literary executor.

As well as the collection of intense, emotional letters between Holtby and Brittain, the archive includes the corrected typescript of the novel, as well as Holtby’s manuscript map of her South Riding.

The map is an invaluable insight into her vision of the South Riding. Even in rough outline it presents a familiar landscape; only the names are not what we expect.

Holtby’s South Riding lies on the north bank of the great Leam Estuary – the Humber of course.

CHARACTER: Alice Holtby

At the heart of the estuary is the City of Kingsport – “blank cliffs of warehouses, stores and offices…powdered from the fine white dust of flour-mills and cement works”, a vivid description of 1930s Hull with a “salty tarry fishy smell of docks” and off the main road eastwards (which we know as Holderness Road), “monotonous streets of two-storied houses, bay-windowed and unvarying”.

Beyond Kingsport stretches the “bare level plain” of the South Riding, miles of “patterned country, the corn ripening to gold, the arsenic green of turnip tops, the tawny dun-colour of the sun-baked grass” – our Holderness, under sunshine we’ve seen too little of this year.

Apart from Kingsport being Hull there are other equivalencies. The county town of Flintonbridge is Beverley; the seaside resort Hardrascliffe is Bridlington; and the location of much of the story, the isolated seaside town of Kiplington, is Withernsea.

Sunk Island inspired the bleak farming community of ex-servicemen at Cold Harbour, and on the east coast of the South Riding sit the twin villages of Pidsea Buttock and Ledsea Buttock, with “ancient and honourable” names, whose inspiration were places like Hornsea and Skipsea. In the novel, Mr Tadman, school governor of Kiplington and concerned about class sizes, was always demanding “a little more accommodation for the Buttocks”.

Some of the characters and themes of the novel were inspired by real people and events in East Yorkshire in Holtby’s lifetime. The generous, formidable Alderman Mrs Beddows is clearly based – although she denied it – on Winifred’s mother Alice, the first woman councillor in the East Riding.

And the council land purchase scandal centred on weak-willed Councillor Alfred Huggins which is one of the main threads of the plot, is based on a similar scandal in Hull in 1932.

FICTIONAL: Map of the South Riding

Throughout the novel, the landscape and people of the real East Riding are reflected in the fictional South Riding. But they aren’t idealised. The South Riding isn’t the hobbits’ Shire or Aslan’s Narnia. It feels like a real place, as it was in the 1930s and still recognisable today.

The great 1974 TV adaptation of South Riding, with Dorothy Tutin and Nigel Davenport in the lead roles, was filmed in the East Riding at a time when it looked far more like Holtby’s 1930s picture than it does in the 21st century.

It’s a fine version of a great novel, adapted by another Yorkshire novelist Stan Barstow, and is highly recommended – we have DVDs to lend at the History Centre.

There are other fictional Yorkshires such as James Heriot’s Darrowby, or Emily Bronte’s bleak Pennine moorlands.

But this Yorkshire Day, let’s see our part of the ‘County of the Broad Acres’ through the eyes of one of its greatest and less well-known writers, Winifred Hotlby.

Once again, happy Yorkshire Day from all of us at Hull History Centre.