Now Then: Times journalist Rich Broadbent explores what it means to be from Yorkshire

As a sports journalist, author and ghostwriter, Rick Broadbent’s normal focus is on other people’s stories. But his fantastic new book ventures into more personal territory during his exploration of the concept of ‘Yorkshireness’ and whether such a thing even exists. Broadbent’s cleverly-titled Now Then: A Biography of Yorkshire explores the present and past of the county, as well as the idiosyncrasies the region is (in)famous for from its supposed personality types to quirky sayings.

His way into such a huge subject is a simple explanation of where the idea for it began; accompanying his mother to take his late father’s ashes out of Tadcaster Cemetery to be scattered at a favourite family spot in Cornwall 25 years after his death at the age of just 51.

It got Broadbent, who left Yorkshire at 19 for university and now lives in Dorset, asking himself the question of “whether, in this life or the next, you ever really leave Yorkshire”.

This book is being published 12 years on from the scattering of his dad’s ashes and ends with another emotional trip with his mum – who also lives in Dorset and is now dealing with Alzheimer’s – back to her home city of Bradford and some of her favourite locations in Yorkshire.

"My dad was always going to be the start of the book,” Broadbent explains to The Yorkshire Post over Zoom. “He’d always wanted to have his ashes scattered in Cornwall. When we did that it got me thinking about leaving Yorkshire and what makes you and does it matter where you live and where you are buried?

"With my mum, I didn’t really plan on writing too much about her. But when she got diagnosed with Alzheimer’s during the writing of the book we wanted to take her back for a bit of a tour to see her roots.

"Doing that got me thinking about how important people and places are. Alzheimer’s is a cruel disease which burgles your own home and messes up your filing cabinet. Going back and realising she did remember things, it makes you realise how important place is really. So I really wanted to end the book with going back to Bradford where she is from.”

Broadbent, who was just 17 when his dad died, adds about his motivations for the book: “I lost my dad young and as I got older than he had ever been I wanted to know about the people and places that made him. In a way it was about getting closer to my dad.”

That personal journey is the springboard for an enlightening, enjoyable and frequently very funny journey into what makes Yorkshire stand out from the crowd.

Broadbent visits the Yorkshire brass band championships, speaks to the man who tried and failed to set up a Yorkshire Studies degree course and seeks the wisdom of everyone from much-loved Sheffield musician Richard Hawley to the (Essex-born) Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell as he tries to get to the bottom of what exactly makes Yorkshire Yorkshire.

Rather than a linear biography of the place’s history and stories, each chapter takes a theme like miners or artists as a central point of focus.

Broadbent laughs when asked if he ever feared he had bitten off more than he could chew by attempting a biography of Yorkshire.

"I still do,” he says with a smile. “Being from Yorkshire, I know what Yorkshire people are like and you are on a hiding to nothing really because obviously you can’t include it all. I keep thinking of towns I haven’t mentioned. I tried to narrow it down to themes and even those can’t include everything.

"It sounds a bit grandiose but in my head I was trying to do something a bit Stuart Maconie and Bill Bryson rather than an encyclopedia. I didn't want to write a dry history but hopefully reexamine the county with a bit of wit."

One chapter of the book, entitled ‘Stereotykes’, explores some of the fun that frequently gets poked at the county – from Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch and the increasingly ludicrous bragging of well to-do characters about their supposedly impoverished upbringings to Hale and Pace’s Yorkshire Airlines skit where a plane of holidaymakers takes off from Leeds Bradford and then lands straight back there on the grounds that ‘if it’s outside Yorkshire, it’s not worth it’.

The book wryly notes that while few places are as picked on, “Yorkshire suffers for the same reason it thrives; it really does love itself”.

Broadbent says he was keen to explore stereotypes about the region and why they have been so persistent over the centuries.

“In every stereotype there is a little grain of truth,” he says.

“There is a quote from Edwin Sandys, a sixteenth-century Archbishop of York, who talked about ‘stiff-necked, wilful and obstinate people’. If somebody is saying that 500 years ago about Yorkshire people and they are still saying it, you think there must be something in it. I think there is but it is clearly not everybody.”

The book does not shy away from some of the county’s darker times. Its interviewees include Al Garthwaite who started Reclaim the Night marches in Leeds in the 1970s in response to the serial killings of women being committed by Peter Sutcliffe that were terrifying the North.

In her powerful story of facing criticism and sexism for organising the marches, as well as having her phone tapped, she recalls: “‘We felt like we were the ones being scrutinised rather than the fruitless attempts to catch this man.”

Broadbent reflects: “I felt I had to really include Peter Sutcliffe in the book. I was a kid at the time and it was so overwhelming for young people with it on the news every night. I didn’t want to do it from his perspective or glamorise him in any way.”

One of the book’s conclusions is that there are both 100 different versions of Yorkshire and just two – “us and them”.

Broadbent says: "Yorkshire is so big and it is different from Wakefield to Leeds and from Leeds to Bradford. They are very close but different worlds in some ways.

"Living outside of Yorkshire, people describe me as ‘that bloke from Yorkshire’. My mum lives in a retirement block in Dorset and gets referred to as ‘that Northern woman’. She wears that as a real badge of honour.”

He says he hopes the book will attract readers from all parts of the country and challenge some of their preconceptions about Yorkshire.

"I hope they realise it is more than Geoffrey Boycott and the Four Yorkshiremen sketch and stiff-necked, wilful, obstinate people and it is a fantastic forward-thinking place that’s also rooted in the past.”

Broadbent cites a line from an Oliver James book called Contented Dementia he has read which suggests “the past should be celebrated, not mourned”.

He says that concept was something of a driving force for his writing.

"I want to celebrate this brilliant place but not sugercoat it,” he says. “Showing the warts and everything else is part of what makes it.

"Yorkshire as a place has often been forgotten, ignored and abandoned by power-brokers, politicians and monarchs.

"I think it is why Yorkshireness still matters, because when you get forgotten by 'them' all you have is 'us'.”

Now Then: A Biography of Yorkshire by Rick Broadbent (Allen & Unwin UK) is published on October 5. RRP £20. Broadbent will be doing a series of tour dates across Yorkshire in October: https://linktr.ee/NowThenBook