The Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, which is based in Bainbridge, a village in Wensleydale, North Yorkshire is asking people to vote for Yorkshire "cultural icons". For this they helpfully provide a list of eligible persons - you have to choose from both the living and dead. From the deceased, the exhaustive list is Adam Sedgwick, geologist, departed 1873; Alf Wight, deceased 1995, better known as author James Herriot; Arthur Raistrick, a Yorkshire writer and lecturer, who departed this life in 1991; and Marie Hartley, a historian who specialised in recording lost Dales life, who died in 2006.
For an exhaustive list, one omission is glaring - Kit Calvert MBE (1903 - 1984), the farmer, Methodist local preacher, founder of Associated Dairies - as a farmers' co-operative, saviour of Hawes Creamery (that's right; he saved Wensleydale cheese - where would Wallace and Grommit have been without him!) and famed Dalesman - indeed nicknamed the "Complete Dalesman - is missing from the list. The omission is all the more startling because Bainbridge is only four miles from Hawes, where Calvert spent his entire life.
Whoever did the research for the iconic list certainly didn't know the area, or its heroes too well, did they?
The list of the living is equally interesting. You can choose from writer Bill Mitchell, artist David Hockney and broadcaster and writer Mike Harding (a Lancastrian!!), struck from the list, however, is Alan Bennett, writer and national treasure: although originally listed, votes are no longer being taken for this truly illustrious son of the broad acres - why?
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