Dalesfolk: Bill Mitchell

Bill Mitchell, author of 110 books and presenter of thousands of lectures on the Dales, is like that: he collects information about anyone and anything and here in me was a new subject.

So, instead of getting on with my job, I found myself listening with fascination to the social history of the Skipton street I call home. And, of course, he knew more about it than I, which is not surprising as he was born four houses away and his granny lived at the end of the street in a house now owned by close friends.

"There were always rows with the coalmen if their horse drawn carts dirtied the washing that was strung out over the back lane," he remembers.

"You timed your days by the huge buzzer which sounded out the shifts at Dewhurst's Mill. There was even an old lady..."

Hold on Bill. We're here to talk about you and the unique contribution you have made in recording Dales life over half a century and more, efforts which earned you an MBE and an honorary Doctor of Letters degree from Bradford University.

"Oh yes," he said. "You can read about it later," and promptly presented me with a copy of his book about mill town life in Skipton in pre-war days.

To me, it is difficult to imagine that Skipton ever was a mill town and that, in a way, sums up Bill Mitchell's long and distinguished career.

His eagle eye, his ear for a phrase of dialect, his ever present camera and, in more recent years, tape recorder, have recorded the minutiae of Dales life over half a century when, arguably, Craven saw more change than at any time in its history with the possible exception of the Industrial Revolution.

Yet this living history may well never have been written but for an accident of war. And it started badly, I'm afraid, because Bill failed to win a place at Ermysted's Grammar School. In his family, that was more than the usual disappointment because his great, great, great grandfather, Dr William Cartman, had been a legendary headmaster of the school as well as a literary personage in his own right, a close friend of the Brontes of Haworth - he even officiated at Charlotte's funeral.

"I suppose I wasn't good enough to get in," said Bill reflectively. "But I don't think it did me any harm. I had a very good basic education at Brougham Street School, where the teachers were very good and took a great deal of personal interest in the pupils."

He left school at 14 and took a year's business course at Keighley Tech, learning shorthand, book keeping and the like. He left there in 1943, the war at its height, and approached the Craven Herald for a job.

It was a time of critical staff shortages, for most of the young men were away at war, and much to his surprise he was offered a choice: "Would you like to be on the commercial or the journalistic side?"

In his Giggleswick bungalow overlooking the Ribble Valley, he smiles warmly at the recollection: "I thought I was going to be a clerk or something. Journalism sounded much more exciting. That's where it all began. It was one of the many charming accidents which shaped my life."

Another of those "charming accidents" was the presence on the Craven Herald staff of Harry J. Scott, a former Yorkshire Post leader writer who, tired of working nights, had moved to the Dales in 1939 to start a pocket-sized magazine called The Dalesman.

Six months later, war broke out, bringing with it stringent paper restrictions so the magazine's progress went into temporary limbo and Harry took a job as a Herald sub-editor.

He took a shine to young Bill and, when the magazine was back in full production in 1948, asked him to join him in publishing the magazine from the front room of his rented house in Clapham.

The Dalesman became a publishing phenomenon, at one time selling 74,000 copies, many of them dispatched on subscription to Yorkshire folk exiled in every corner of the world - two went to Bhutan, a tiny state in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Bill stayed with the magazine for 40 years, most of them as editor, and retired in 1988 to set up his own publishing imprint, Castleberg Publications, named after the outcrop of limestone he can see from his windows on the far side of Ribblesdale.

"All those years at the Dalesman gave me a unique opportunity to record Dales history," he says. "But I had always longed to publish my own books on subjects in the Dales or Lake District that interested me."

You can find those books, printed by Lamberts of Settle, in hundreds of bookshops and tourist offices between Skipton and Carlisle.

Now, as he prepares articles to celebrate the 60th anniversary of The Dalesman next year, he reflects on the changes of the last half century. In one of his books, Summat & Nowt, he starts with the line: "My Yorkshire Dales is dead. Or should it be are dead? Life in the Dale country has been transformed ..."

So is this a lament for a lost way of life? "No," says Bill emphatically. He explains: "Of course many things have changed.

"The motor car has taken over from the cycle and the horse and cart, many industries like the mills in Skipton have disappeared, but good things are happening too.

"The Settle-Carlisle Railway is as busy as I can remember. Many of the people who move into the Dales are being assimilated and bringing an infusion of new life with great benefits. And people are more aware now of the importance of protecting the landscape than they have every been.

"I go for an hour's walk every morning and every day I feel blessed at being able to live amongst such splendour."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.