My song today is, ‘The Night Hank Williams Came to Town’ which the country singer, Johnny Cash sung in the 1960s. At the time when Johnny Cash was forging a singing career out for himself, the top singer on the country scene of the day was his idol, Hank Williams.
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I was born in 1942 and this was an era where we all grew up with an idol. Our idols might be singers, footballers, film stars, or fictitious characters out of adventure novels. For my part, as a child aged seven or eight, my idols included the fictional characters Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, Sir Lancelot, William Tell: The Lone Ranger: Hopalong Cassidy, Sitting Bull, Roy Rogers, and Billy The Kid. My singing idols were Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby, Vera Lynne, Mario Lanza, Caruso, Doris Day, Johnnie Ray, and Josef Locke. My film idols were John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara, Rita Haworth, Margaret Lockwood, and Kim Novak. My sports idols were Stanley Matthews and athlete, Roger Bannister, and Jessie Owens. My historical idols were Nelson, Napoleon, Oliver Cromwell, and Robert the Bruce.
As I grew from childhood, every boy had some person who was either real or fictional whom they idolised, hero-worshipped, or tried to be like. Even my father held up the film star, John Wayne, as being a person worthy of emulation, and someone he regularly quoted to his wife and children. Dad saw every movie John Wayne appeared in and could even repeat all his lines verbatim spoken in the film. All of my father’s most-quoted lines would have originated from some character in a John Wayne film which had been spoken by the man himself. I grew up with hearing quotations from dad like, “A man’s a man” and ‘’Never apologise; it’s a sign of weakness!” and “The first is first and the second is nobody!” (From the film ’She Wore A Yellow Ribbon’ and ‘Custer’s Last Stand’). When dad came home from a day’s work at the pit, as soon as he came through the door, he would taunt my dear mum with the words, “Get the Tea on, woman!” (From the film, ‘The Quiet Man’).
I worked as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield between 1970 and 1995; during which my growing involvement with Yorkshire schoolchildren eventually led me to deal with the issue of 'having idols'.
In 1990 I had my first children’s book published and by the time I had retired as a Probation Officer in 1995 on the grounds of ill health, I was an established children’s author with dozens of publications behind my name. Between 1990 and 2003, I would visit one school daily somewhere in Yorkshire, where I would hold a story-telling assembly for the whole school. On 840 occasions, I was accompanied by a famous person who was of national or international recognition and celebrity.
During all 2,000 assemblies I held in Yorkshire schools between 1990 and 2003, I would emphasise one major theme or aspect that I knew adversely affected young children’s lives and which they often found difficult to deal with. The issue could be bullying, discrimination, bereavement, separation, loss, homelessness, parental divorce, etc. However, after the Miner’s Strike (1984-85), I regularly spoke about the issue of child ‘idolisation’ and ‘celebrity’, either during or after holding my school storytelling assemblies.
For much of my childhood years, my father had worked down the coal mines as a collier. I was working as a Probation Officer in Huddersfield during the miners’ strike of 1984-85. This strike was a major industrial action in an attempt to prevent colliery closures. The strike was led by Arthur Scargill of the ‘National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) against the ‘National Coal Board’ (NCB), a government agency. Opposition to the strike was led by the Conservative government of Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who wanted to reduce the power of the trade unions and to close uneconomic pits. The NUM was deeply divided over the action and many mineworkers, especially in the Midlands, worked through the dispute. In most respects, the strike deeply divided opinion in the country and revealed a political and social divide between the north and the south of England, and between the political opinions of the Conservatives, and the Socialist political parties. One half of the country generally supported the Prime Minister’s side of the dispute and saw the striking miners as undemocratic trouble makers, whereas most people in the north of England saw the miners as working-class heroes and the Prime Minister and the ‘National Coal Board’ as provoking a confrontation in order to close down the coal mines across the country.
Having been brought up in a working-class home in the English north, and being the son of a miner in my youth, my loyalties naturally lay with the cause of the miners, although in truth, I had little time for the miner’s Trade Union leader, the militant Arthur Scargill.
Among my list of published books, I had even written one book which recognised the long-established contribution to this country the miners had played over the centuries. The book is the one book from all my 64 published books which I enjoyed writing the most. It is called, ‘Tales From The Allotments’ and can be purchased from www.amazon.com or www.smashwords.com in either e-book format or hard copy, with all profits going to charitable causes in perpetuity (£200,000 given to charity between 1990-2002).
During the height of my popularity as a Yorkshire children’s author during the 1990s, after every storytelling assembly I held, I usually spent at least half an hour selling books to children and signing autographs. Each school visit would attract hundreds of little autograph hunters wanting me to sign my name on a book of mine they had either bought that day or had purchased during a previous school visit of mine.
There were approximately 200 Yorkshire schools that I visited annually, of which half could always be guaranteed to pre-order 100 copies of my next book. Being the bread and butter supporters of my charitable book projects, and the largest contributors to the £200,000 profits from sales I made for charity during that decade, I never hurried my visits and would often remain a few hours in the school and pop into each classroom after the morning assembly I had just held.
When the miner’s strike was on, and whenever I visited a school in a mining area of Yorkshire, if a young child asked for my autograph I would suggest that they get the autograph of a much more important person in their lives than I was; their father. I would go out of my way to emphasise the importance of the role that miners had played in this and other countries of the world for centuries.
I continued with this practice in all subsequent years of reminding children that if they chose to idolise anyone, there was no better person than their father or mother to ‘look up to’. If they were the children of miners, I would tell them that their father’s autograph would prove to be far more important in their lives than mine could ever be! Such was no altruistic message on my part, as I believe that assertion to be true.
I would advise everyone not to make any person in their life an idol (outside a parent or family member), however worthy of an individual that person might appear to be. I reminded them to regard all others as being every bit as good and as important as themselves and to regard oneself as being equal to all others.
This advice, I believe to be wise for all of us to follow; child or adult. Do this and respect will live in you and in all whom you regard.
Love and peace Bill xxx