Barnsley Cocktail anybody?
A thought occurred to me at the beginning of this season concerning away travel. It was that I would try and visit as many football grounds as possible which my home town team Morecambe would play at that are within striking distance of my house in Carnforth. I particularly wanted to visit the home venues of the clubs fallen on (relatively) Hard Times most of all during the latest campaign. This was because I thought that this season might be the last time our paths could actually cross in (my) foreseeable future at least for two main reasons: they could well be promoted or we – perish the thought – might get relegated. Or worse…
I’d never been to Derby’s Pride Park prior to this season, for example and today, I decided to travel to a ground I’ve passed a few times in the past but had never actually visited before – Barnsley FC’s Oakwell.
My other usual Partners in Crime were not interested in today’s Day Trip for various reasons. Other Partner Annie is planning for her Easter Extravaganza at Hawkshead Crafts Fair next weekend and couldn’t spare the time – so I decided to travel on my own.
I thus bought single return tickets for the remarkably cheap price of less than twenty quid online; got up at seven on Saturday morning, April the First and – hoping there would be no Practical Jokes on the way – walked down to Carnforth Station to catch the 8.39am train going south.
This was quite exciting in itself for a sad old nerd like me who doesn’t get out –or possibly isn’t fit to be let out – a lot these days. Later, I would return from my South Yorkshire adventure via Leeds and the old Midland line via Skipton and the stretched version of my first stop on the way – Long Preston – which veers back to Carnforth on its journey to Lancaster from just short of the Settle-Carlisle section.
But I started the Morecambe Missionary Work in Yorkshire by taking a train which was going the other way via the presumably shorter Preston on the Barrow to Manchester Airport train. This goes along the West Coast main line and changes at the home of North End to take another route; one I have never travelled on before.
This one went to Leeds via Blackburn; Accrington; Burnley Manchester Road; Hebden Bridge; Halifax; Bradford Interchange and New Pudsey.
(How many football league clubs? How many ex-Football League clubs?)
Got an answer? Good – because your time’s up.
(Five Football League members; eight if you include Preston and the `Manchester’ bit of Manchester Road and two ex-members: Halifax and Bradford Park Avenue if I’ve got my ducks all in a line.)
There’s a big Bonus Point for a sensible answer to the final question too:
How much time will the Levelling-Up Secretary Michael `Groovy’ Gove save on this journey across the backbone of England once his HS2 and other agendas are finally actually completed?
Is it:
- None;
- Nobody knows or
- Nobody south of Watford actually cares?
The answer is actually d): he can do it in a world record time with police outriders in his chauffeur-driven Jag along the M6/M61/M60 /M62 and M1. If that fails – as we all know – a helicopter ride will usually fix it. So – as he might have expressed this dilemma in his own softly-spoken Scottish brogue – What’s the problem, Peasants?)
Anyway, as Stephenson’s Rocket steamed out of the station in Preston and headed eastwards, the trip was down Memory Lane for me, too. I lived for over two wonderful years near Bradford and then another two rather less than wonderful ones near Burnley back in the 1980s.
It had been sunny although cold as I marched down the hill from where I live to Carnforth station on the great day. And the Sun continued to smile on myself and my fellow-passengers until we got about as far east as Blackburn. Then the skies clouded over as our nearest star hid itself for the rest of the day.
Maybe it was an omen…
We travelled past the extraordinary fly-tipping reality that is illustrated by the embankments adjacent to Manchester Road station in down-at-heel Burnley. There must be literally tons of rubbish there – and you can smell the reek of urban decay from the town itself even from the train. By contrast, Halifax is still a very handsome place with some really impressive sandstone buildings. And the old Mackintosh factory: “The Home of Quality Street and After Eight” – yummy… But the wasteland of industrial dereliction around Bradford in particular was a stark reality of the post-industrial society that so much of Brexit Britain has been reduced to.
Today, it was All Change at Leeds (where I was once a postgrad student at the University – I love this city) via Wakefield to beautiful Barnsley. Yes – Barnsley, home of Michael Parkinson and his beloved Skinner Normanton; ex-coal Miner and genuinely tough Tykes Hard Man and, of course – the Barnsley Cocktail (thanks to my mate Bill for this particularly useful bit of information):
(Shouldn’t there be a fancy cocktail stick poking out of the pie?)
I’ve not been to Barnsley for literally years. I think the last time I did so was behind the wheel of a great big yellow recovery truck, where I remember dropping a car off there within sight of Oakwell Stadium. This would be twenty to twenty-five years ago but I suspect the town – or at least the centre of it – hasn’t changed much in the intervening period.
So what do we call a native of Barnsley? A Tyke, if we are going to be polite. According to The Yorkshire Society, though, maybe this isn’t so polite:
“A familiar name for a Yorkshireman (but strangely, not usually for a Yorkshirewoman) and which is still often used by people from other areas of England, most especially Lancashire, is a “Tyke”.
Like many words in Yorkshire and Northern dialect it originated from Old Norse tika where curiously enough, for its present gender orientation, it meant a female dog or bitch – especially a mongrel good at catching rats.
But it came to be used in medieval times for a naughty or mischievous boy or urchin. Over the years, certainly by the 17th and 18th centuries, its meaning became more localised to include not just the inhabitants of Yorkshire but also from Tyneside.
A Tyke was rough, unkempt, combative but also sly, shrewd, and careful with money (another alleged Yorkshire attribute) – a tight Tyke.”
A `Dingle’ is a seemingly even less polite word – this is the name the local tribe of Sheffielders reserve for their northern neighbour. Why?
Well – you can basically make up your own explanation.
A Dingle (noun) is a small, wooded valley.
But Barnsley isn’t built in a valley, wooded or otherwise. The centre actually straddles the top of a hill.
So what other meaning is there? It’s a vaguely rude word for the male member which some children might use. It is also a verb, used when someone denies that a belief they have expressed is completely mistaken but continues to insist that they are right and everyone else is wrong.
(See Donald Trump; Liz Truss and anyone who claims that the Earth is flat and continues to dingle about it.)
The most both confusingly convincing yet definitely unconvincing explanation of the word I’ve heard, though, is that there is apparently a family called Dingle in the soap opera Emmerdale. They are supposed to be from Burnley (which is why the Blackburn tribe refer to their generally despised neighbours in the Lancashire town as Dingles, apparently.) But the Dingles on the telly are seemingly a bunch of chavs and chancers – and not terribly bright with it either, hence – I am told – the pejorative term used by Barnsley’s Sheffield neighbours as well.
But how long has Emmerdale and even precursor Emmerdale Farm been around?
Exactly.
I suspect the term `Dingle’ precedes both of them, Doctor Watson.
So what do you think?
Let’s move on.
Whenever I go anywhere, I wonder what the historical links between the town and the past are.
Here in Carnforth, we have Lord of Tory `Family Values’ Hypocrisy, Mr Cecil Parkinson; The Beatless (only just superseded in terms of fame by a group from Liverpool who couldn’t spell), Steamtown and M6 Junction 35).
Home town Morecambe has Eric; Thora Hird; The Bay; The Eden Project, Tyson Fury and too many others to fit in an article as short as this one needs to be.
So what famous Tykes has history provided?
Springfield in the USA famously has Bart and Homer but Barnsley has its own upcoming Simpson: boxing star Callum. Should he change his name immediately to Tykeson Fury? Callum was interviewed live over the PA system at Oakwell on Saturday at half time. Then he was paraded around the home part of the ground. If he’d come down to our end as well, I would be astonished if he wouldn’t have got a similarly warm reception: good luck to the lad.
Cricketer Darren Gough and iconic Umpire `Dickie’ Bird; footballers the Greenhoff brothers; John Stones and the incomparable Mick McCarthy (among others) also originate in Barnsley.
Then there’s Charlie Williams, one of the first black footballers to play the professional game in this country, who later made an even greater impact as a brilliant stand-up Comedian on the northern Working Men’s’ Clubs circuit and then, eventually, television. “Tha‘d better laugh, Luv – or Ah’ll come and live next door to thee!”
In my view, he was far funnier than fellow-Tyke Harry Worth – another name from the past whose alleged `humour’ was completely lost on me, for one: I thought it was stupid as opposed to funny, personally.
Uncle Arthur Scargill (who needs no introduction to people of a certain age) also originates from Barnsley as do the worthies – (Michael) Parky and Skinner – already mentioned.
I thought that Radio Four’s beloved Poet and acceptable face/voice of Northern-ness to Home Counties as well as The Home Programme listeners – Ian Macmillan – was from Barnsley as well but this is a myth. He comes from Darfield, which is a distinctive place miles away (six to be exact.)
I can’t find any famous rock bands, artists (in the sense of painters or sculptors such as the ones that nearby Wakefield once produced by the dozens) or writers but I stand to be corrected about this.
There’s a nice mix of buildings, though. This is the magnificent Town Hall, which can be seen from literally miles away in its dominant position right at the top of the town centre:
I had no idea of what the purpose of this almost Gothic pile on York Street was or is when I first set eyes upon it:
Why does it have a huge stone chimney at the back? I thought it might have once been a Hospital but the adjacent church also suggested there might once have been a religious significance. A church school, maybe? Methodism was once a very influential belief system in Barnsley, apparently.
But Dr Google tells me that this is the Grade II listed Kingstone Public Baths which were active in the town until as recently as 1989.
I love this Art Nouveau masterpiece too:
Lots of Tykes fans were lubricating themselves in a bar shown at the end of this picture and I must say that all of them who I encountered before, during and after the game were extraordinarily friendly: “Hey Up!” “’Ow Do!” and whatnot. “Good luck later, Mate” was the one I liked the best. “To you or us?” I asked him. He laughed – “To us to be honest!” Fair enough – and this sort of banter makes a nice change from some other places where I have wandered the streets alone wearing my Shrimps paraphernalia.
On the way back from Oakwell once the demolition of mighty Morecambe had been completed, I got talking to two very friendly policemen. One of them was a local copper. But the other was from Lancashire Constabulary. “You get paid for following Morecambe around the country?” I asked him. “Yeah!” he replied – as if this was the most natural thing in the world. “And most of it’s on Overtime as well!” I think I went into the wrong line of work… I’d asked the local Bobby for directions back to the station and they both expressed astonishment that anyone would travel from Lancashire to Barnsley by train. Why? Do hooligans and other criminal types not use trains according to the Police’s Bible of Miscreants? So just make a note of that, any terrorists reading this – it might come in very handy one day…
At the Interchange after the game, another young Tykes fan asked me where I was going; how long it would take me to get there and wished me luck. (I probably reminded him of his Granddad come to think of it – he was probably taking pity on me…) As I got off the train at Leeds, another Barnsley supporter offered me commiserations… and we had a brief chat about the likely fate of both of our clubs this season.
In a way, that was the highlight of the day. I got a really positive impression of the club and its supporters and I genuinely wish them luck for the rest of the campaign – and beyond.
On the inside cover of the football programme, though, was this announcement:
Elsewhere, there was this message:
So not everybody in Barnsley is a little angel, are they? Vey sadly, there are bigots and morons among the ranks of all football club supporters – including our own. What struck me about this though, is that these announcements at Barnsley FC are clearly not just empty words. About twenty-five minutes into the second half of the match, there was a stadium announcement saying that racist or homophobic abuse had been reported in the South Stand. The announcer was clearly incensed by this behaviour by home fans and asked others to report the people responsible for it to Stewards so they could be ejected and banned. Good for him – good for the club – this says a lot about them – and the town itself too.
But I get ahead of myself. I got off the train at Barnsley Interchange when I arrived from Leeds and – like the Pied Piper’s rats – was lured straight into the beating heart of Barnsley by an iconic Yorkshire sound: a genuine Brass Band:
They aren’t actually from Barnsley: they are the Carlton Main former colliery band from Frickley. And they were really excellent, too. But going back to cultural influences on the town, perhaps this is not all that surprising: the film Brassed Off was set in Barnsley. (As was the old classic Kes as well…)
Next door to where the band was playing is the modern Barnsley Market: big; loads of proper, traditional stalls and a vast variety of cuisine – from Mexican to Thai to Stick-to-Yer-Ribs pie and peas with gravy and authentically Yorkshire Puds: you name it.
And who can resist wandering around a place where the name of the first stall you set eyes upon is Sailor Sid’s Sweets?
I was going to eat upstairs in the Market Hall later but I blundered across Eldon Arcade Cafe as I wandered around the town centre. Rough and ready but it was really busy – always a good sign. I had a Veggie Breakfast without the egg (uggh!): baked beans; buttered toast; tomatoes; mushrooms and a hash brown washed down with a mug of tea. Four quid. How much is a Latte in Starbucks? It was great – but how do they do it for this price? How do they make a profit?
I walked to the ground next. Five minutes from the centre of the town, Oakwell is built right in the heart of the local community:
The interior reflects its status as a former member of the Premiership:
But in its iconic corner pylon floodlights and this, it also reflects its history as one of the oldest football clubs in the country:
This is the West Stand, which was built in the early 1900s. Note the television gantry on the roof – I suspect this wasn’t in the original plans…
What happened during the next two hours in this stadium was truly depressing from my own and my fellow 278 Shrimps fans’ points of view.
You can read my match report – if you can stand to relive the horror which we all witnessed – here:
Sadly, I don’t expect to be visiting Barnsley again in the foreseeable future. Certainly not for footballing matters. But for those of the Tykes fraternity who are going to miss us, there’s always a solution:
(Shouldn’t that be Mazuma not Globe Holidays?) Shall I get Morecambe co-Chairman Rod Taylor to write to them as he once did to me instructing Yours Truly to update my images of the ground back by the seaside? (By the way, I’m still waiting for the photos Rod…)
There is apparently a real possibility that the latest of several financial crises which have engulfed Morecambe FC in recent times could result in our club going bust altogether. If this actually happens – god forbid – I have a Business Proposal for Globe Holidays. I would like to humbly suggest that they organise coaches going the other way too. I’d go, for one. After all, I wouldn’t even have to change my red and white scarf. So what do we say at the end of our brief visit to Barnsley? We say:
Come on you Tykes!!!!!
shrimplythebestfootball 