I have to admit that my consumption/utilisation of the communications media has a random quality about it. I tend to bump into things rather than hear or see them as part of a programme of selection. The results can sometimes be very interesting. Yesterday morning, for example, I happened to come across a programme entitled Only Artists.* The format of the series is simply a series of conversations between artists engaged in different disciplines, in which they explore the similarities and contrasts between their experiences.
This week’s conversation took place between a poet, Tony Walsh, and an actor, Julie Hesmondhalgh. The aspect of their discussion that caught and held my attention was their comparing experiences arising from their regional origins. Both are from Lancashire, and preserve quite prominent regional accents. They regarded the preservation of their regional identities as a positively important thing, and indeed as an artistic asset, even in a cultural scene dominated by metropolitan values and practices.
I found this very interesting, because in two phases of my life I have found myself attempting to minimise the regional specificity of the way I speak. Brought up in rural Norfolk for the first seven years of my life, I then moved to industrial Lancashire, and it didn’t take long for pressure to mount in Bentley Street Junior School, in Nelson, ensuring that my East Anglian accent was minimised. I didn’t realise that this was happening, and made no conscious effort to change the way I spoke. Its didn’t take long, however, for me to end up speaking rather like Julie Hesmondhalgh.
My school days were passed in Lancashire, but I went to study at Leicester University, where I was accommodated throughout my three years with Londoners. Here I was openly mocked for the way I spoke, and without making any conscious effort to disguise my speech, evidently it became modified. Then on graduating I went to Canada to study for an MA, and a part of my duties as a Graduate Fellow was to tutor first year undergraduates. Soon I discovered that they coped better with the standard English to which they had been exposed through the media, and for the first time I found myself consciously compromising with respect to my pronunciation.
My professional life as a university teacher later saw me adopting research areas in which I spent substantial amounts of time working with foreign scholars, and even when I made the effort to learn their language, English being a common medium of communication in the academic world, I learned that I was more readily intelligible using a standardised English.
I have never acquired “BBC English”, and I realise that after living in Yorkshire for fifty years I have to some extend “re-northernised” the way I talk, and there are occasionally still bits of East Anglian lurking in there. Nevertheless, I have come to realise that unlike Tony Walsh and Julie Hesmondhaugh I have never regarded my regional identity as an important asset. Certainly I regard myself as a “northerner”, but this is not something to be positively “treasured”, and in relation to my current activity as a painter is not anything to be traded on. Unlike the two of them, the medium of expression in which I work does not involve speech.
When my wife and I went to London last we noticed that the train on which we travelled was named after Ashley Jackson, described (contentiously, I thought) on the name-plate as “The Yorkshire Artist”. Then I began to realise that, despite his unchallengeable regional credentials, David Hockey doesn’t make a virtue of his Bradford origins and his Bradford accent. Others do this for him, but I have never heard him do so. He doesn’t need it. So I have been musing over the extent to which, and the possible nature and relevance of an identity as a “Yorkshire artist”. Is it an asset, that locates for me a place in the world and a standard of relevance, or is it just an arbitrary and irrelevant qualification, when all I want to be known as is as “an artist”?
*On BBC Radio 4