I jointly dedicate my song today to Facebook friends, Charles W. Abbott, who lives in lives in Rochester, New York, and Debbie Gibbs, who I believe lives in the Bradford area of West Yorkshire. Both Charles and Debbie celebrate their birthdays today. We wish them both a very happy day that is filled with much happiness, love…and…lots of cake and suitable refreshment. Have a nice day.
My song today is a country and western number, ‘Hard Working Man’. This song was written by Ronnie Dunn and was recorded by American country music duo ‘Brooks & Dunn’. The song peaked at Number 4 on the ’US Country Chart’ in 1993. It was released in February 1993 as the first single and title track from their second album ’Hard Working Man’. It also won the duo the ‘Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals in 1994’.
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I was in my early twenties and living in Canada for a couple of years when I became a keen Country & Western music fan. If one listened to music in Canada or any part of the American continent during the mid-1960s, then it would almost certainly be of Jazz, Blues, Hill Billy or Country & Western origin and sound.
While I was in my twenties before becoming fully acquainted with Country & Western songs, as the firstborn in a family of seven children, born to Irish migrants who came to live and work in West Yorkshire during 1945, I was acquainted with the concept of ‘hard work’ being a natural part of daily life before I even started First School in Heckmondwike.
The family lived on a low income but what we lacked in money was more than made up for in parental love and affection. When her seven children had insufficient food to eat or good-enough clothes and shoes to wear, my mother made up the material shortfall in a surfeit of maternal love. As she prepared every one of her children for school on a morning, though the dresses of my sisters may have been second-hand ones from a jumble sale, they would be clean and ironed; and even though our shoes were holed and lined with cardboard cut-outs, they were always polished on top. As we went out the door to catch the school bus, my mother kissed and hugged each of us and told us, “I love you”.
I quickly found out that if any large family works at all, the only way that can be achieved is by cooperation and delegation of responsibilities.
My mother always took each child to school on the first day we started. On our second day at school, she would walk us to the bus stop, put us on the bus and indicate she would collect us at the bus stop at the end of the day. She never accompanied us to school (4 miles away) because there was too much housework to do in her day and hadn’t a minute to waste in getting on with it. It could take over two hours to catch buses to Heckmondwike and back. When my sister Eileen came along one year after sister Mary, the responsibility Eileen to school and back was delegated to her older sister Mary. And so, the line of delegated responsibility was passed down the family line until all the children left school to enter the workplace. Indeed, the only sibling who was never required to look after anyone else in the family other than himself was the youngest in the family, brother Michael.
Throughout all this delegation and reallocation of power, my childhood experiences taught me that with power comes responsibility. After sister Eileen (the third-in-line) had been born, although their next older sibling would be responsible for their charge until safely returned home at the end of the school day, sister Mary would answer to me if she proved neglectful in her delegated duty. It wasn’t that I was a bully, but I knew that if a hair on the head of the youngest school child was harmed, I would be held responsible by my mother, not their next older sibling. The responsibility for my six siblings started and ended with me!
As a general rule (except when she was giving birth to another child) mum rose at 6:00am daily to get my mining father off to work and had finished a pile of washing and hanging out before we’d woken. When we returned from school, all the ironing would have been done and neatly piled, and all the meals ready. Dad rarely ate at the table with us as it would take him an hour each evening when he got home from work to wash off all the coal dust from his body. In the early 1950s miners considered it an easy day’s work if they hadn’t to hack out a coal-seam from a prostrate position in a puddle of water. It would be 1960 before they’d progressed to working from a kneeling position and not before 1970 could miners break sweat hacking the coal-face wall, ‘stood up’; although a hunched back was still more than likely the main posture and stance of a working miner until they substituted man for machine to hack out the coal in the 1980s.
My mother always left the ironing neatly piled until after my father had returned from the pit at the end of his shift. I often wondered why she left the ironed garments out on display and would never put them away in the airing cupboard until dad had seen them. I later learned it was her way of showing my father how busy her day had been. She was essentially communicating to him, that whatever he thought, she hadn’t spent all her day sat on her arse, drinking tea and smoking forty woodbines while he lay in a puddle of water hacking coal!
Then she would darn and repair until bedtime, which was never before midnight chimed. My father, like my mother, would work hard all day. He would often be so tired at the end of his shift that after he’d bathed and eaten, he’d be in bed by 8:00 pm to rest his body before the next day’s hard work.
We always had less income from my father’s mining wage than was required to meet the weekly essentials, and unless my dad was prepared to stay in the foreman’s favour and be given any spare overtime going, seven Forde children would come down to the breakfast table on a morning with food enough on it for no more than four or five. Consequently, we learned early on in our lives that unless we shared, we did not survive.
With insufficient money coming in week by week, we lived and made do with what we had. I cannot remember a week when this week’s food on the family table wasn’t paid for out of dad’s next week’s wage packet. As the family increased to seven children, expenses necessitated my mining father always working overtime, Saturday mornings and even during the summer holidays when he could. The pit would close down for two weeks every summer, but a few men would be employed to do maintenance work in the absence of the full workforce. Dad was usually one of these men working through his holidays.
Being a man who left school to earn money at the age of twelve years, my father had the working ethos of any hard-working man of the time was reared to have. He put less store in the merits of education than he did in keeping one’s word and always doing every job as well as one could, even if one was a factory or road sweeper. One of the things he told me was “Billy, there is no kind of work beneath a man’s dignity. Always do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage, as to do less is to cheat yourself as well as your employer.” (Paraphrased as dad would not speak like that and I can only recall his message and not his precise words).
Dad was reared a ‘hard-working man’ and so was my dear mother in every sense of the word. Like many married couples at the time, ‘life was hard’ and there was little time left when the work was done to ‘feel sorry for oneself’. They always said 'thank you' to God for their day, however hard the day had been. I know that for mum, her philosophy was one I took on board as an adult; 'Every day is a good day'.
Love and peace Bill xxx
My song today is a country and western number, ‘Hard Working Man’. This song was written by Ronnie Dunn and was recorded by American country music duo ‘Brooks & Dunn’. The song peaked at Number 4 on the ’US Country Chart’ in 1993. It was released in February 1993 as the first single and title track from their second album ’Hard Working Man’. It also won the duo the ‘Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals in 1994’.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I was in my early twenties and living in Canada for a couple of years when I became a keen Country & Western music fan. If one listened to music in Canada or any part of the American continent during the mid-1960s, then it would almost certainly be of Jazz, Blues, Hill Billy or Country & Western origin and sound.
While I was in my twenties before becoming fully acquainted with Country & Western songs, as the firstborn in a family of seven children, born to Irish migrants who came to live and work in West Yorkshire during 1945, I was acquainted with the concept of ‘hard work’ being a natural part of daily life before I even started First School in Heckmondwike.
The family lived on a low income but what we lacked in money was more than made up for in parental love and affection. When her seven children had insufficient food to eat or good-enough clothes and shoes to wear, my mother made up the material shortfall in a surfeit of maternal love. As she prepared every one of her children for school on a morning, though the dresses of my sisters may have been second-hand ones from a jumble sale, they would be clean and ironed; and even though our shoes were holed and lined with cardboard cut-outs, they were always polished on top. As we went out the door to catch the school bus, my mother kissed and hugged each of us and told us, “I love you”.
I quickly found out that if any large family works at all, the only way that can be achieved is by cooperation and delegation of responsibilities.
My mother always took each child to school on the first day we started. On our second day at school, she would walk us to the bus stop, put us on the bus and indicate she would collect us at the bus stop at the end of the day. She never accompanied us to school (4 miles away) because there was too much housework to do in her day and hadn’t a minute to waste in getting on with it. It could take over two hours to catch buses to Heckmondwike and back. When my sister Eileen came along one year after sister Mary, the responsibility Eileen to school and back was delegated to her older sister Mary. And so, the line of delegated responsibility was passed down the family line until all the children left school to enter the workplace. Indeed, the only sibling who was never required to look after anyone else in the family other than himself was the youngest in the family, brother Michael.
Throughout all this delegation and reallocation of power, my childhood experiences taught me that with power comes responsibility. After sister Eileen (the third-in-line) had been born, although their next older sibling would be responsible for their charge until safely returned home at the end of the school day, sister Mary would answer to me if she proved neglectful in her delegated duty. It wasn’t that I was a bully, but I knew that if a hair on the head of the youngest school child was harmed, I would be held responsible by my mother, not their next older sibling. The responsibility for my six siblings started and ended with me!
As a general rule (except when she was giving birth to another child) mum rose at 6:00am daily to get my mining father off to work and had finished a pile of washing and hanging out before we’d woken. When we returned from school, all the ironing would have been done and neatly piled, and all the meals ready. Dad rarely ate at the table with us as it would take him an hour each evening when he got home from work to wash off all the coal dust from his body. In the early 1950s miners considered it an easy day’s work if they hadn’t to hack out a coal-seam from a prostrate position in a puddle of water. It would be 1960 before they’d progressed to working from a kneeling position and not before 1970 could miners break sweat hacking the coal-face wall, ‘stood up’; although a hunched back was still more than likely the main posture and stance of a working miner until they substituted man for machine to hack out the coal in the 1980s.
My mother always left the ironing neatly piled until after my father had returned from the pit at the end of his shift. I often wondered why she left the ironed garments out on display and would never put them away in the airing cupboard until dad had seen them. I later learned it was her way of showing my father how busy her day had been. She was essentially communicating to him, that whatever he thought, she hadn’t spent all her day sat on her arse, drinking tea and smoking forty woodbines while he lay in a puddle of water hacking coal!
Then she would darn and repair until bedtime, which was never before midnight chimed. My father, like my mother, would work hard all day. He would often be so tired at the end of his shift that after he’d bathed and eaten, he’d be in bed by 8:00 pm to rest his body before the next day’s hard work.
We always had less income from my father’s mining wage than was required to meet the weekly essentials, and unless my dad was prepared to stay in the foreman’s favour and be given any spare overtime going, seven Forde children would come down to the breakfast table on a morning with food enough on it for no more than four or five. Consequently, we learned early on in our lives that unless we shared, we did not survive.
With insufficient money coming in week by week, we lived and made do with what we had. I cannot remember a week when this week’s food on the family table wasn’t paid for out of dad’s next week’s wage packet. As the family increased to seven children, expenses necessitated my mining father always working overtime, Saturday mornings and even during the summer holidays when he could. The pit would close down for two weeks every summer, but a few men would be employed to do maintenance work in the absence of the full workforce. Dad was usually one of these men working through his holidays.
Being a man who left school to earn money at the age of twelve years, my father had the working ethos of any hard-working man of the time was reared to have. He put less store in the merits of education than he did in keeping one’s word and always doing every job as well as one could, even if one was a factory or road sweeper. One of the things he told me was “Billy, there is no kind of work beneath a man’s dignity. Always do an honest day’s work for an honest day’s wage, as to do less is to cheat yourself as well as your employer.” (Paraphrased as dad would not speak like that and I can only recall his message and not his precise words).
Dad was reared a ‘hard-working man’ and so was my dear mother in every sense of the word. Like many married couples at the time, ‘life was hard’ and there was little time left when the work was done to ‘feel sorry for oneself’. They always said 'thank you' to God for their day, however hard the day had been. I know that for mum, her philosophy was one I took on board as an adult; 'Every day is a good day'.
Love and peace Bill xxx
