Podcasting: I love it; have been listening to podcasts almost incessantly since July. For ages I've been thinking about doing my own podcast, about Bury. Here's number one, and it features retired coal man Doug Theobald talking about growing up in Risby and establishing his coal business after the war.
Doug's stories include working all hours in the dark and freezing cold to make a living, how he managed with Bury's pavement coal holes, and keeping up with demand for fuel in the terrible winter of 1963 with help from Basil the poacher. There's wildlife too: a jackdaw and two pheasants meet untimely deaths in this interview, and some pigs go to market.
Download it here.
Theme tune: Walking in the Beautiful Sunshine by Pauline Taylor
7 comments:
I've just listened - brilliant. Are you going to make a collection of this sort of reminisence? I hope so. What a great resource.
Thanks Ruby, glad you liked it. There will be more, yes.
Hi Buryblogger. I am DR's Don Smith's (as mentioned in Doug's interview) son in law and as such know Doug and Dennis well as indeed do DR's family. This is most excellent. Thank you for providing this delightful listening. We have a memorial site for DR www.donsmithtrials.co.uk and I would like to find out how to do this type of recording so that we can interview some of DR's closest friends and associates and place on the site. How do you do that then?
John
Hi John, thanks for your comments, much appreciated. It's a great idea to record some DR stories for your site, good luck with that. It's certainly not difficult to do, but there's a fair amount to it. A good place to start is a tutorial by Alex Bellinger here http://www.verbalism.net/2005/11/podcast_how_to_.html
Send me an email or contact me via Den and I can give you more info.
Many thanks for that.
John
That was really enjoyable to listen to.As a boy I lived in a victorian house and it was always exciting when the coalman used to call. we had a small round coal hole next to the grate and it would require a bit of a poke with a stick to get it to flow. It reminds me of many of the other traders who used to call such as the rag and bone man for the old iron and scrap and the breadvan with its wonderful smells.
Sooper, BB. I've just bin a lisnen to Sooperman, hisself, ol Doug Theobold rabbiten on about the good ol days an, I gotta tell yer, it hed me larfin til the tears wer streamin down me face.
I was born in Risby in 1957 and Doug delivered our coal. He was quite a frightening sight then as he was the first black man I'd ever seen!
When I was growing up it seems that all old boys, all my uncles and so on, had an endless supply of stories, just like Doug now, about the scrapes they got into as kids and how they'd ever so slightly managed to get one over on the law or played a cheeky trick on someone.
Ah, jumpers for goalposts, isn't it ... Marvellous!
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