Dates

• Existence: 1850 - 1918

Biography

Richard Blakeborough (1850-1918), collector of folklore and author, was born in Ripon, North Yorkshire, on January 24th 1850, the son of Richard Blakeborough, a jeweller and clock maker. He was descended on his mother’s side from the Fairfax family and was also distantly related to the Brontës. Blakeborough was educated at St. Agnesgate Grammar School, and from his childhood acquired a keen interest in nature and the lore and legends of his county of birth. After leaving school he assisted his father in his business but was allowed later to fulfil his ambition to become a doctor.

As a folklorist, Blakeborough’s most important contribution was in the collection of folklore and dialect in the North Riding of Yorkshire. In the early 1870s he copied large portions of the manuscript notebooks of David Naitby (1774-1838) and Robert Hird (1768-1841), who were themselves North Riding collectors and had obtained material dating from the seventeenth century and earlier. Blakeborough was not, however, an armchair scholar, and he obtained his information (including the Naitby and Hird items) by fieldwork, as he noted in his ‘Oddments Gathered from All Manner of People at Various Times, Dating from 1865’. A small part of the vast amount of material he amassed is contained in his books Wit, Character, Folklore and Customs of the North Riding of Yorkshire (1898), Yorkshire Toasts, Proverbs, Similes and Sayings (1907) and the posthumous The Hand of Glory and Further Grandfather’s Tales and Legends of Highwaymen and Others (edited by his son, John Fairfax-Blakeborough, and published in 1924). Further examples from his collections appear in his extensive newspaper articles. As with other nineteenth-century collectors, he adapted the language slightly for publication, or even ‘suppressed’ (his own word) certain lines or whole verses where he regarded the original as being ‘too free’.

Blakeborough’s dialect recitations and writings were equally important aspects of his enthusiasm for Yorkshire lore and speech. Two volumes of the former, based largely on his character Mrs. Waddleton, appeared in 1921 and 1924. The Waddleton sketches were humorous dialect readings, sometimes commenting on contemporary events, such as ‘The Relief of Maficking’ or ‘The Sufferjettes’. In a serious vein were his dramatic poems in the Cleveland dialect T’ Hunt o’ Yatton Brigg (1899) and Aud Nan o’ Sexhow. Other works included a novel, More than a Dream, and the comedies Tomboy, Auntie and Downhill, which were toured by the Dacre Company.

Richard Blakeborough was a member of the Folklore Society and the local (Ripon) archaeological society, and was, for a time, curator of the Ripon Scientific Society. In his last years he lived in Norton-on-Tees where he died on April 23rd 1918. He left one son, Major John Fairfax-Blakeborough. An older child, Derrick (‘Rick’), had died in July 1899.

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