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Kites, Kilnsey Crag and old King Coal
Our weekly series on the Alternative A-Z of Yorkshire this week reaches the letter K. Readers are invited to submit suggestions for the online version.
kick off (sheffield fc)
Sepp Blatter, the president of Fifa, and Michel Platini, the president of Uefa, will both sit down at Sheffield FC's 150th anniversary dinner at the Cutlers' Hall this autumn, along with the Sports Minister and maybe even the Prime Minister.
The team, which plays in the heady heights of the UniBond League, is one of two to have received the Order of Merit from Fifa. The other is Real Madrid. How does such a lowly club mix in such exalted company? Simple: they are the oldest football club in existence, having been formed on October 24 1857, and their members invented the rules.
Football had developed from the "anything goes" mayhem of the Middle Ages into a more codified sport and Sheffield's interpretation was the one that was followed. Two Old Harrovians, Nathanial Creswick and William Prest, are credited with forming the club, two years after members of Sheffield Cricket Club had begun to amuse themselves in the off-season by arranging informal kick-abouts.
In the beginning, Sheffield had to manufacture matches among their own members – marrieds versus singles being one – but the formation of the neighbouring Hallam club in 1860 provided the first official opposition, and the two clubs still meet every year.
Sheffield was one of the first hotbeds of football and by 1862 there were 15 clubs in the city, all playing to Sheffield rules which were adopted by the Sheffield Football Association when it came into being in 1867.
Sheffield FC were by now looking outside the city for matches to
provide them with competition and in March 1866 played a match against a London XI at Battersea. The club had joined the FA in 1863, but it was not until 1878 that they agreed to play to FA rules and within a few years they had begun to fade as an influence on the club game at the highest level as professionalism began to make inroads.
Heavy defeats at the hands of the professionals of Aston Villa, Nottingham Forest and Notts County signalled the days of the amateur were over, but Sheffield suggested to the FA that they inaugurate a knockout competition purely for the amateur game. This later became the FA Amateur Cup and was won by Sheffield in 1904.
Over the past 150 years Sheffield have played on a number of grounds, starting at Bramall Lane and including spells at the Owlerton and Don Valley Stadiums, but never owned their own headquarters until they bought land adjacent to the Coach and Horses public house in Dronfield. A membership drive has recently netted England (cricket) captain Michael Vaughan.
Bill Bridge
kilburn white horse
The largest and most northerly of England's white horses, the Kilburn figure, covering just over an acre of Roulston Scar not far from Sutton Bank, is 150 years old this year. Created by schoolmaster John Hodgson and his pupils, the horse was based on a drawing by artist Harrison Weir and paid for by Thomas Taylor, a businessman who travelled extensively and was inspired to finance the project after seeing similar figures in the south of the country. The horse fell into disrepair after the First World War but a public appeal launched by the Yorkshire Evening Post in 1925 raised the money to have it restored, and the landmark remained visible from across the Vale of York until it was covered in 1939 so it could not be useful to enemy aircraft.
After being uncovered and whitened in 1946, the horse suffered badly when hit by a storm three years later and Robert Thompson, the famous furniture maker from Kilburn – who decorated his work with a trademark mouse – was among those who helped to restore the horse again. Now the Kilburn White Horse Association, a charity, raises funds to maintain the horse, an on-going project fraught with difficulty given the size of the site and its position on a steep, unstable surface. The future of Kilburn's famous landmark seems secure.
BB
kilnsey crag
Cut by one of those glaciers which did so much to shape the Dales, Kilnsey Crag has for years been a source of disappointment, verging on depression. Its unique shape and position, seemingly hanging over the B6160 connecting Grassington and Kettlewell have made it one of the best-known landmarks in the country, the equal of Malham Cove and Gordale Scar in any Yorkshireman's catalogue of Dales gems.
The taunting began in childhood, when the school bus would stop at Kilnsey on the way to Littondale, Hubberholme or wherever, on one of those rare summer treats. The slope of the crag with its awesome overhang – used in training, we were always told, by Sir John Hunt's Everest heroes of 1953 – is so close anyone could hit it with a stone prised from the wall. No chance. Even the best thrower of a cricket ball among us could never get near.
In the teens there was a flirtation with climbing, nothing serious, more a walk with a bit of a stretch than anything like the Eiger. Kilnsey Crag boasts any number of routes of varying degrees of difficulty and, that overhang apart, does not look overly difficult. Until, that is, you stand at the bottom looking up. Forget it; let's go to the Tennant Arms and have a little lunch. No more climbing, vertigo did not have the chance to kick in.
A few years later, when the delights of Kilnsey Show had been discovered – always at the end of August in the fields between the road and the infant Wharfe – the mocking became yet more serious as the expert fell-racers battled their way to the top of the crag, then hurtled themselves fearless into the descent over scree and boulders to finish, proud and perhaps bloodied, back in the showfield. Even worse, the fresh-faced youngsters did the same thing, putting to shame those of us who had long since lost the desire – or the will – to run uphill. It is the same every time that road is used. There it is, standing there, silent but confident, knowing its strength, its place in the world. It's sad that such a magnificent sight should have been such an intractable opponent.
BB
king coal
Who could ever have imagined that the day would come when Yorkshire had more doctors, lawyers or accountants than miners? Coal defined the language, lifestyle and landscape of vast swathes of Yorkshire, ran its mills, forges and factories, paid its bills, heated its homes and kept its lights burning. Coal was king, and when it was toppled from its throne it fell hard, taking thousands with it into a twilight of poverty.
All the old iconic names of pits that were bywords for hard, sometimes dangerous, work and a breed of men who descended the shafts and came back up black-faced and exhausted became instead shorthand for deprivation, unemployment and desperation as communities came to terms with the loss of an industry that had sustained successive generations.
Grimethorpe, Houghton Main, Brookhouse, Manvers, Hickleton, Markham Main, Prince of Wales, Wheldale, Sharlston and the rest – all the pits whose winding gear towered over their communities died one by one. And in their dying, all the coal towns, like Barnsley, Wakefield and Doncaster felt the pain. Prosperity went overnight, leaving behind it uncertainty and often the breakdown of social structures forged over a century or more.
Pit villages had their own atmosphere, their own way of doing things, their own community spirit and values, all of them moulded by life down the mine. Often enough, they had their own mountain ranges too, as the houses looked across at the giant spoil heaps. The decline of the coalfields started off slowly, and then accelerated with alarming speed. In 1983, the year before the miners' strike that played its part in killing the industry, Yorkshire had 56 pits employing 59,300 men, who produced 31m tonnes of coal. They were among 191 collieries nationally that employed 207,600 men. A decade later, Yorkshire had just six pits left. Now there are only three, Kellingley, Maltby and Hatfield, and the numbers of men they employ is measured in the hundreds. The year-long miners' strike of 1984-5 – seen by
so many then and now as a class war between the working man and Thatcherism – had its roots in a programme of pit closures.
The sheer muscle of the National Union of Mineworkers had shaken governments to their core in the past, particularly during the three-day weeks and power cuts of 1974. But this time, the lights stayed on, and as the nation watched in shock the vicious battles between pickets and police at Orgreave and Cortonwood, it became apparent that Britain could be fuelled by imported coal and North Sea gas.
The blackest single day for the industry came on October 30 1992, when the then Trade and Industry Secretary, Michael Heseltine, announced the closure of 31 pits, and then as the 21st century dawned, coal was characterised as a mucky anachronism, the arch-polluter of global warming that belonged to a bygone age and had no part to play in a bright, shiny, hi-tech Britain zooming down the information superhighway of the internet age.
One by one, the pits shut. One by one, the last shift came up and the pithead wheels came to rest for a final time. One by one, the NUM branches left their pits carrying their standards in a last gesture of defiance. And in the miners' welfare clubs all over South and West Yorkshire, an atmosphere of gloom hung as heavily in the air as the cigarette smoke. The bitter irony for the miners was that Britain's appetite for coal remained voracious. Hi-tech Britain would conk out on the information superhighway if it were not for the 40 per cent of electricity still produced from coal. In 2006, 56m tonnes of it was burned, the overwhelming majority coming from Russia, China, Indonesia and Colombia, freighted half-way round the world to the power stations of the Aire Valley instead of travelling the few miles from Yorkshire's coalfields, where millions of tonnes still await mining. But the picture for coal in Yorkshire may not be as bleak as first appears. As the gas starts to run out and the search for "clean" power gathers pace, pioneering work at Hatfield Colliery, near Doncaster, has come up with a cost-effective way to produce electricity from Yorkshire coal without causing environmentally-damaging emissions. Making coal go green opens up a whole new future for the industry – and potentially for Yorkshire pits. It could yet turn out that King Coal has the last laugh.
Andrew Vine
kites (red)
In many parts of Europe, the red kite is as common as buzzards now are here. In much of Britain the kite died out, hanging on only in Wales – where a dozen pairs survived in the 1950s. Today the wonderfully acrobatic milvus milvus is back. Yorkshire nature lovers have taken it to their bosom and their binoculars.
Between 1999 and 2003 a red kite project released 69 on the Harewood Estate, between Leeds and Harrogate (grouse moor owners didn't want them released in the Dales). Last year, Doug Simpson, the project's leader, counted 240 young kites. Last month, Mr Simpson was awarded the MBE for his work with falcons and kites.
The Yorkshire stock came from Oxfordshire, where kites were released in 1989 in the Chilterns. More were introduced near Inverness. These kites had been imported from Spain and Sweden. There have been deaths, either from natural causes, such as flying into fences or wires, and other reasons (such as the gamekeeper conserving his boss's cash crop of game birds by lacing carrion with poison to kill predators). The kite, being a carrion eater, and not a killer, is a victim.
Most of us should be able to identify a kite from a buzzard or a harrier with a little knowledge. Look for the distinguishing, deeply forked tail, which it twists to great visual and aeronautic effect. Not to be confused with the rarer black kite, which does not have such a deeply forked tail.
Kites have had a hard time of it for centuries. The first Yorkshire record was 1727 in the southerly country round Hatfield Chase. Records in the 19th century have it as a rare sight, when they were often shot or trapped as an item of interest to the killer. In a publication of 1835 the eminent conservationist Charles Waterton, of Walton, Wakefield, lamented that of all the large wild birds formerly common in that part of Yorkshire, only the heron could still be seen. "The kite, the buzzard, and the raven have been exterminated long ago by our merciless gamekeepers... kites were frequent here in the days of my father but I, myself, have never seen one near this place".
Frederic Manby
knavesmire
It has seen highwaymen and common criminals hanged, provided the space for His Holiness Pope Paul II to celebrate Mass with thousands in attendance and been bombed by Hitler's Luftwaffe and still echoes to the shouts and guffaws of Sunday morning footballers, but for most of its admirers, Knavesmire is a racecourse.
Racing began in York in Roman times but the profile of York races has never been higher than it is today, thanks to the astute management of York Race Committee and their staff, which enabled the 2005 Royal Ascot meeting and the 2006 St Leger Festival to be staged so successfully at the course.
York has won so many awards and attracted so much positive comment over the past decade and more, not least for the development of facilities for both corporate and individual race-goers that it now ranks alongside the best in the world.
The one thing, though, which York can never totally control is the weather, and Knavesmire, given its propensity to flooding, is fiendishly difficult to judge when such a crucial issue to successful racing as the state of the ground is under discussion.
The man prodding his stick into the ground on the morning of racing is the man with a furrowed brow. But that apart, York's annual pageant of racing is a constant pleasure: the five days of Royal Ascot were perhaps five of the best days of top-quality sport the good people of Yorkshire have ever seen, Test cricket at Headingley included. The May meeting with its Derby trial the Dante Stakes, the Musidora and the Yorkshire Cup; August with its superb Juddmonte International, Yorkshire Oaks, Great Voltigeur, Nunthorpe and Gimcrack Stakes; and the great handicaps, the Ebor and the John Smith's Cup have all become highlights of the Yorkshire racing year and innovations like the Music Showcase days are bringing in a new audience which will guarantee that York continues to stand proud. One veteran Yorkshire racing journalist many years ago passed on the best advice to a would-be visitor to York: take the train and always, always take a raincoat.
It is not called Knavesmire for nothing.
BB
ko (richard dunn)
It's said that when Muhammad Ali took off his gloves after defeating Richard Dunn (fifth round, fifth knockdown) written inside one was "Ali wins" and inside the other "round five". It didn't take a genius to forecast the outcome in the Olympiahalle in Munich on May 24, 1976. The 6ft 4in Bradford scaffolder, the British and Commonwealth heavyweight champion, was way out of his league in challenging for the world title. The silky skills of the greatest heavyweight boxer ever to step into a ring easily dealt with the Yorkshireman's clumsy southpaw rushes and Ali won on a technical knock-out. But Dunn had done good, so far as he was able, and a grateful city named its new sports centre after him on Odsal top. It was the site Richard Dunn had been working on before he went off to train for his Ali fight – which was to be the last of any significance in his career. Now 62 and somewhat arthritic, the grandfather of 11 is chairman of Scarborough Amateur Boxing Club in the town where he retired.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Saturday 11 February 2012
Today
Cloudy
Temperature: -1 C to 1 C
Wind Speed: 9 mph
Wind direction: South east
Tomorrow
Light rain
Temperature: 1 C to 6 C
Wind Speed: 8 mph
Wind direction: North west
