Thriddingsfest Garland of Poets (l-r: Keith Fenton, Emma Storr, Bruce Barnes, Laura Strickland, Mike Farren, Faye Marshall) Credit: Deb Meynell.
Each month Keith Fenton, a Leeds-based performance poet, broadcaster and host of Poets Talking Bollocks podcast, explores the events, people and debates shaping literary culture in the North. In this month’s article, Keith shares his experiences with language, highlighting its significance within our cultural idenitity and heritage and explains why Thriddingsfest, a festival celebrating the language of Yorkshire, is such an important event.
At the end of my last column, I spoke of the importance of planting seeds and not being put off when many – or even most – don’t grow. I hope by the end of this one, I’ll have illustrated this even more. Two years ago this month, I saw an article about a retired German teacher from Bradford named Rod Dimbleby, a champion of Yorkshire Language and Dialect, who was offering a 6-week introductory course at Keighley Library, starting the following month. There was a phone number. I called it, spoke to Rod, who said there were still places available, and I signed up.
I am not a Yorkshireman. I am a Londoner whose family immigrated from Ireland shortly before I was born. I have always been fascinated by language, and had learned some Yorkshire language and dialect through living in the region for two decades. I thought the course would be fun and informative, and it was. I did not become an expert or achieve fluency, but it did square me up to my own heritages and ways of speaking, and would transform my poetic and cultural life.
This did not happen overnight, but seeds were quickly planted. One week, Rod brought in his friend, the poet and campaigner Colin Speakman, to give us a talk. Colin introduced us to the work of Tolkein’s predecessor as Professor of English at the University of Leeds, Fred Moorman. Moorman died tragically young in the River Wharfe in 1919, aged just 47, but had time first to leave behind an important legacy. In between teaching a young Herbert Read, editing Shakespeare texts, writing papers on the history of Germanic influence on Yorkshire language and – despite being a Devonian – producing collections of his own poems and stories in Yorkshire dialect, he managed too to produce a number of dialect plays, which as far as Colin knew, had not been produced on stage in over a century. His passion for reviving them gave me an idea and, after the talk, I made a beeline for Colin and suggested we see if they could be done at Chapel FM Arts Centre in Seacroft.
This did not quite happen, but what did wasn’t far off. Colin did bring his ideas to Chapel FM, in an interview with Peter Spafford, and the following year I set up a Yorkshire Dialect event as part of Chapel FM’s annual Writing on Air Festival, at which Colin was the main guest. Meanwhile, Colin had engaged me in other related ideas – one was that he persuaded me to be a signatory to the Yorkshire Declaration (of independence) and the other was that he wanted to revive another dream of Moorman’s, to have a Festival of Yorkshire Language and Culture, like the Welsh Eistedfodd. Not only did this happen, in Ben Rhydding on the weekend of 2-3 August 2025 under the title Thriddingsfest, but one of the highlight’s of the show was the Burley Theatre Group‘s brilliant production of All Soul’s Night, one of the Moorman plays, so what we had spoken about when we met did happen after all, just in a different way. After the new Bradford Live was opened with Ben Crick and Ian McMillan‘s triumphant Yorkshire Calling on Friday 1 August -Yorkshire Day – Thriddingsfest gave us a wonderful programme of events over the weekend.
But what does any of this matter to an outsider like me? The importance of preserving and reviving a language is not just about that language. Our languages and dialects are hugely important to all of us, no matter where we are from. For me, this came at a time when I had started an MA in Creative Writing, which I hope will lead to a collection at some point in the next year or two, my main themes being borders, migration, trespass and identity. The more I got into the ideas around Yorkshire’s unique dialects and how they had been – by accident or design – suppressed, the more I realised that my own heritages had been weakened by the suppression of my own ways of speaking, and that of my forebears.
I was constantly told off, at home and at school, for my south-east London drawl, with its glottal stops, coarse language and mangled grammar, to the extent that, even though I was a natural chatterbox – some might go further and say gobshite – I would curl up into a ball of anxiety when asked to speak publicly. This followed me into adulthood, where I used alcohol to loosen my tongue and drive the anxiety away. Meanwhile, my family was from a country which had another language – Irish – which I didn’t speak, and that felt like the loss of a birthright. I tried to learn it, but it was hard to get traction in London, and in any case my Mum hardly spoke it beyond a few words from school. My Dad was fluent, but he had left.
His mum was the only grandparent I knew, and when back over in Ireland I aked her to teach me some, she told me “not to be bothering with it, it’s the language of the ignorant”. I realised that this blocking of language was a border in itself, and this opened up ways for me to develop these themes in the poems I am developing on the course. It has also made me more attuned to the way other poets speak of language and dialect. During this time, I have also become friends with one of my favourite people in the West Yorkshire poetry community, Nabeela Ahmed, whom I met first at the events she runs at City Library in Bradford. Through these, I had heard poetry spoken – and often sung – in south Asian languages, such as Urdu and Pahari. When she set up an event at Loading Bay as part of Bradford25, a night of Pahari poetry, I went along expecting nothing more than a pleasant and interesting evening. Instead I found myself profoundly moved by the passion of the community, particularly in the readings of local teenagers, who had in most cases dressed up especially for the evening and were proud as punch to share their poems and take the plaudits. Nabeela spoke at the start about going back to Kashmir as a child, and how there was a hierarchy of language, with Pahari firmly at the bottom of the pile, and this reminded me of my Gran’s words.
I thought, as I watched these kids perform, how much it would have meant to me if when I was their age, someone had said “right, we’re going to have a night of poetry and stories in Irish (and if your Irish isn’t very good, we’ll give you lots of help)”. My chest would have swollen with pride like theirs did. When I was about 12, I played the part of a thief in a Nativity play, and I was encouraged to play it for laughs by giving full voice to my south-east London accent. I still remember the freedom I felt, how well I performed (for once) and the pride I took in being able to express myself my way.
I feel like I am now coming to terms with what was taken from me as a lad, and that only increases my determination to try to make sure that other lads and lasses are not cut off from their linguistic heritage and cultural ties. With that, and the connections I have made in the dialect world, and the events I have been part of, the enrichment of my poetic themes, and not least my privilege to have been involved with the first ever Thriddingsfest, enrolling on Rod’s course has brought me far more cultural and community riches than I could ever have imagined. Next year, it will be bigger and even better. Keep planting those seeds!
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To find out more about the Let’s Talk Tyke! dialect courses, you can email Rod Dimbleby at [email protected] or call/text 07545 308346. You can learn more about Thriddingsfest and keep an eye out for future ticket releases here. Finally, Nabeela Ahmed’s and Peter Spafford’s recent books can be found on this list.
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