Yorkshire by Richard Morris review – England's greatest county?

Is Yorkshire England’s greatest county? With an area of nearly 12,000 sq km, much greater than Sussex, Surrey and Kent combined, it’s certainly the largest. Thanks to conurbations such as Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford, it’s also the most populous outside Greater London. And none can match its claim to heavenly dispensation (“God’s own country”). But other aspects of Yorkshire are less great. The proverbial wisdom associated with Tykes – “’Ear all, see all, say nowt; / Eat all, sup all, pay nowt. / An’ if ivver tha does owt fer nowt – / Allus do it for thissen” – celebrates parsimony, narrow-mindedness and self-interest. And then, if you are a remainer, there was Brexit. In June 2016, only three out of 21 Yorkshire districts voted remain; Hull, for instance – once famous as a portal to Europe and for its openness to continental immigration – had a two-thirds majority to leave the EU.

Known for being “a continent unto itself”, more like an empire than a county, Yorkshire defies easy definition. As well as being divided into separate Ridings it has varied landscapes: “mountains, caverns, plains, precipices, chalk downs, valleys and vales, estuaries, marshland, peatbogs and upland heath”. It has also seen the loss of its traditional industries (coal, cotton, wool and silk) and changes in its urban population (nearly half of Dewsbury’s inhabitants, for example, are Muslim). No writer can encompass all that in a single volume; those who have tried, whether visitors or natives, resort to caricature. An archaeologist by profession, and historian and composer on the side, Richard Morris gets round the problem by resisting comprehensiveness. What he offers instead is a kind of bio-topography, a whisk through assorted lives (not all of them famous) and the places in which they flourished.

“There are different ways to come to Yorkshire,” he says, “in a poem, through an image, on a ferry from Rotterdam, by train.” His own starting point is a family photo depicting his mother, grandmother and great-grandmother posed in a beach photographer’s car. Through impressive detective work – the picture turned up 20 years after his mother’s death – he locates the place where it was taken: Scarborough, even today a popular holiday destination despite its faded grandeur. From Scarborough he proceeds to Carlin How, just along the coast, where his mother grew up and where a man called Alf Myers taught at the Methodist Sunday school she attended. Myers became a conscientious objector during the first world war and served time in prison. Morris gives a fascinating account of the episode (and of the experience of other COs), before moving on, in the same chapter, to discuss railways, coal mines, the Brontës and the recent discovery of the grave of a Saxon princess.

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A “lyrical history”, his publishers call it, though “fragmented”, “episodic” or even “random” might be nearer the mark. As the author skips back and forth, determinedly banishing any suggestion of Pennine stolidity, it can be hard to follow the logic and keep up. One chapter at the end, in the section on the West Riding, returns to Scarborough, dips into the spas of Harrogate, then moves on to fly fishing, the numbering of trunk roads, and factory Wakes (holiday) weeks. There is a wealth of fascinating information – I’d not known, for example, that the fashion for naming houses “Windyridge” (as both my father and grandfather called theirs) derived from the popularity of a 1912 novel of that title by Willie Riley, which sold more than half a million copies – but you’re never quite sure where you are. Reading the book is like watching the author sift through layers of time: whatever will he turn up next?

In the best passages he allows himself to be personal, recalling his torchlit exploration of a Roman culvert in York, a childhood trip to Canada, or the time when he lived close to the A1 and the local farmer would stop the traffic to usher his herd of Friesians across the carriageway. Other sequences score by focusing on a single theme: the Whitby whaling industry, or Amy Johnson’s arrival at Hull Municipal airport after her solo flight from Australia in 1930, or the battles fought by Leeds-born Richard Oastler to abolish child labour and the slave trade. But the structure is confusing, and you start to wish Morris had made more of his family history instead of digging through material already well covered by others, such as the battle of Marston Moor or the draining of marshland by Cornelius Vermuyden.

For what’s meant to be a lyrical history, the book has some odd gaps. JMW Turner is there but there’s nothing about David Hockney’s paintings of the Yorkshire Wolds; Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes are there but not Tony Harrison or Simon Armitage; JB Priestley and Winifred Holtby are there but not John Braine, Keith Waterhouse or David Peace. Even so, what the book lacks in cultural contemporaneity, it makes up for in geology and early history. The chapter comparing the early warning radar system at Fylingdales RAF station, the coastal chain of observation posts established by the Romans and a church window depicting Armageddon is worth the price alone.