Has the way we speak changed?

A few years ago I asked one of the girls at work how she was and she said "champion!" I was a bit taken aback by that response because I'd not heard anyone say they were "champion" for the best part of thirty years and she was no more than eighteen or nineteen years old. When I was that age and younger however, adults in West Cumbria would often answer "champion" to an enquiry about their health ( an enquiry that might have been "what fettle?") or about anything else to which a standard english response of "fine " or "perfectly allright" might be a suitable response.

Growing up in Cumbria in the 1960's, and particulary among the farming community, almost everyone I mixed with spoke with a definite regional accent and many, the family in particular, peppered their conversation with dialect words not heard elsewhere. No-one born here would use southern vowel sounds and any one who did was thought to be rather posh. "Champion" was one word that seems to have all but gone, "starvation", used to describe a very cold day is another (ie as in "let me get near the fire, its starvation out there"!) and "whisht!", an instruction to be quiet, was another which I heard rather a lot!

I remember the 1960's as a time when everybody spoke with a definite Cumbrian or at least northern accent but I wonder whether that's just a reflection of the people I mixed with or whether fewer people nowadays do have accents. I suspect its a bit of both - I certainly came across children at the Grammar School who had been brought up here but spoke with non local accents (because their parents were from elsewhere) but its only in recent years that I've come across entirely local youngsters - ie those with Cumbrian parents - with neutral accents and often southern vowel sounds.

Have other Today Generationers any thoughts on this with regard to their home regions? A few weeks ago my stepdaughter had a visit from eight or nine friends from University - they came from as far apart as London, the Midlands, the North West, the North East and Edinburgh but I couldn't tell their accents apart. If you'd asked me to place them I couldn't have done it - am I alone in thinking this a great shame?

Other changes in the way we speak are perhaps even easier to explain - words have come into existence during the last fifty years to describe things that simply didn't exist in the past (internet, fax, blog to name the most obvious) and other phrases and expressions are invented almost weekly. Who'd heard of anything not being "fit for purpose" until last year, or "sub prime lending" before last month! The meaning of long established words has also changed - something odd or unusual was still "queer" when we were young, "regular" was to do with timing and applied to buses and bowels and had nothing to do with the size of coffee cups or pizzas! "Gay" appeared in childrens books to describe something cheerful and happy and in Cumbrian dialect means "very". "Regular" of course is an americanism, as is the use of "Hi" as a greeting - not something I'd heard in Cumbria much before I was an adult.

Another change, not directly to do with speech, is the way we address strangers and the way children address adults. I notice that older people I speak to at work sometimes insist on addressing me as Mr Troughton long after I've introduced myself as Roger, asked them to call me Roger and then told them to stop calling me Mr Troughton. Younger people on the other hand, often who've never met or spoken to me before, will address me informally from the outset as if we were old friends (they are usually trying to sell me something!).

Places and lives - how they've changed

Frizington

Looking back to the 1960's and 1970's, remembering things that have happened and places I've been, makes me realise just how great the changes have been both in the physical appearance of the towns, villages and countryside I grew up in, and the lives of the people who live here. West Cumberland as it then was, between the Lake District hills and the Irish Sea, had been built on mining - coal mines to the north and west, iron ore mines to the south. Frizington, where we lived, had been built in the mid 19th century to house an influx of miners and their families coming to work in the Iron Ore mines and, since these had closed in the decade or so after the first world war, it had been somewhat in decline.

Built along one main Road about a mile long most houses were of the small terraced variety and, towards the southern end of the village particularly, were already in a poor condition by the 1960's. Some houses had been demolished leaving gaps in the rows where cars would be parked, games of football and cricket played and bonfires built for 5 November each year. Frizington had a population of (and I'm guessing here) maybe 3500 people but had three churches, three schools, six or seven pubs and two private members clubs. In the middle of the village I can remember at least five general stores where groceries, sweets and chocolate, cigarettes etc could be bought, two butchers shops, two greengrocers, a bakers shop, a hardware shop, two fish and chip shops, a post office, a bank, a newsagents, a barber shop (short back and sides only), a ladies hairdresser and a chemist. There were two or three more corner shops - away from the centre of the village where we would call for drinks during a long walk - and, bang in the centre, The Palace Cinema or "Biddalls" as it was known, where films could be seen within a few short years of their release! At either end of the village there was a filling station with a garage which carried out motor repairs and for a short time in the mid/late sixties one of these sold a cheap russian car called a Moskvitch - a forerunner of the Lada, I suppose!

As far as employment was concerned, many of the older men and some young ones were miners who worked in the coal mines in and around Whitehaven and in the area's remaining iron mines five or six miles away near Egremont. One of my earliest memories is of looking out of a bedroom window early in the morning and seeing one of the neighbours return from a nightshift at Walkmill Colliery at Moresby, his clogs clattering down the road as he went. By the time I was a teenager however, there was only one coal mine left (Haig pit at Whitehaven) and two iron ore mines (Florence and Haile Moor mines outside Egremont), and even in the 1960's the predominant employers were the nuclear industry at Sellafield and Marchon Products, a chemical plant on the outskirts of Whitehaven. Both of these provided relatively well paid, clean and healthy jobs and counted their workforce in the thousands. Some people travelled further afield to the Steelworks at Workington and of course there was still demand for farmworkers although mechanisation had reduced the numbers of those some time before I came on the scene. In Frizington itself there was Fezco Mill ("The Fez") which housed a Kangol hat factory employing just enough people to create a small crowd when they walked home at the end of the day.

In addition to these large employers there were many small businesses which would have employees - the shops I've mentioned in Frizington would all have a couple of assistants as well as the proprietor, the three schools would have dinner ladies, caretakers etc., there were road sweepers, road repair men who laid grit with shovels and emptied drains, Insurance agents and door to door salesmen knocking on doors, the dustcart which came for our rubbish had half a dozen men carrying and emptying bins, Frizington had at least two coal merchants with a couple of lorries delivering nutty slack - they had employees (there was still one who delivered coal with a horse and cart - a man so old that his claim to have seen Queen Victoria when he was a lad was quite believable!). Frizington also had two undertakers who had joinery businesses as well and they too would probably provide employment from time to time. There was a branch of the Co-op where you stood at a counter and ordered your groceries and they were brought to you by one of a number of staff before you took your "dividend" book to another counter where someone else added up the entries, said "that'll be 5/11d please", took your cash and signed your book. The Co-op had a drapery department, where I was taken for school clothes, and a butchery department (which brings my total of butchers up to three!) These too would have three or four employees between them some of whom had been there for most of their working lives.

In short there were lots of people who earned their living without ever leaving the village and who were known by almost everyone who lived in it. My mother and most other houswives went shopping in Frizington almost every morning and there would be half a dozen shopkeepers who would see her two or three times a week - despite this, manners of the time dictated that she addressed them as Mr or Mrs whoever and they addressed her as Mrs Troughton. One shopkeeper I remember in particular was Mrs Hodgson who had the corner shop at the end of our street. Mrs Hodgson couldn't remember names and for years addressed my mother (and presumably many others) as Mrs Er?. Even when she retired and we called to see her in her new home, sitting in her front room my mother called her Mrs Hodgson and she replied with Mrs Er? !

Another significant employer in the area generally was the local bus company, Cumberland Motor Services. By no means did every family have a car and there was a regular and frequent bus service running from Frizington to Whitehaven and to other places throughout West Cumberland. It was not uncommon, up to the early 1970's, to see three or four red double decker buses in Frizington at the same time and each one had both a driver and a conductor. There were even more buses around in Whitehaven and Cleator Moor (a small market town on the way to Whitehaven from Frizington) and recalling that both of those two had a bus station with staff and a garage manned by mechanics etc., I guess the company must have had quite a large staff. By the mid seventies however, car ownership had grown and bus sevices were cut back - conductors became a thing of the past, and the double deckers were gradually replaced by single deckers and eventually by vehicles not much bigger than a mini bus. You still see the occasional double decker (I saw one today, inexplicably winding along a country lane with a driver but no passengers!) but the number of people employed in public transport can only be a fraction of what it was forty years ago.

Frizington today is a very different place. I think only one corner shop remains, only one butcher, the bakers shop and the chemist have survived but there's no greengrocer, no hardware store, no barber shop, no bank and no filling station. The main fish and chip shop has long since been demolished and the other has had various incarnations sometimes selling fish and chips sometimes other fast food. The Co-op and the Cinema are now both mini markets and the co-op drapery building now houses a Pizza and Kebab take-away and one of the former general stores on the main street is now a chinese take-away. Coal merchants are a thing of the past, the Kangol factory has gone and only one of the seven pubs survives - the two clubs, I think, are still in business and one of the schools closed its doors a year or so after I left it in 1969! Many of the older properties have been demolished and either replaced by modern semi detached or "link" houses or left as green spaces or car parks. It would be wrong and over nostalgic to say that village life had gone altogether but I doubt very much whether you could say the same sense of community still exists - modern life, supermarkets, widespread car ownership and a host of other factors have, at least for the younger and more affluent people, widened horizons and weakened the connection with their immediate neighbours which existed forty or so years ago.

Employment for Frizington people continues to be provided principally by the Nuclear industry although there is a trend towards indirect employment through agencies, proprietor owned companies etc. - the secure, life long jobs on offer thirty and forty years ago are no longer as easy to come by. I imagine far fewer people will now work in the village itself and those not employed by Sellafield and associated businesses will often be travelling to Whitehaven, Workington or further away.

Whitehaven

Five miles west of Frizington, just north of the pointy bit of Cumbria that juts out into the Irish Sea, lies the port of Whitehaven. Whitehaven, I'm told, started life as a fishing village but began to grow when coal deposits were found about three hundred years ago. Later, it became an important place in the trade with the American colonies and with the Caribbean and by the late 1700's was one of the busiest ports in Britain. In 1788 it was important enough to be attacked by the fledgling United States navy when John Paul Jones landed in the harbour and set fire to a number of ships - the last time mainland Britain was invaded by a foreign power!

By the time I came along though, Whitehaven's glory days were over and it was in a sorry state. The harbour was used for exporting coal to Ireland and for receiving shiploads of phosphate rock for the Marchon chemical plant which stood on the high ground overlooking the town between the harbour and St Bees Head (the pointy bit referred to above). The fine georgian buildings which had been built on wealth generated by the transatlantic trade 150 or so years earlier were frequently in a state of disrepair and the town had a general air of grubby neglect.

As our nearest shopping center of any size it was where we went to buy things unobtainable in Frizington, where we went to the bank, the dentist, the cinema (after Biddall's closed down) and for any number of other reasons. I would often be taken there on the bus by my mother on a Saturday afternoon where she would drag me round the shops until she'd managed to buy what we went for. At that point we'd go to a store called "The Beehive" which had a toy department in the basement and I'd look at the train sets, model cars and planes and meccano sets and usually come out with a "Matchbox" or "Dinky" car, another wagon for my "Hornby 00" train set or another pack of parts for my lego! The Beehive was memorable for its peculiar arrangement for taking money and giving change; your payment and receipt were placed in a metal canister and put in a system of pipes which went "whoosh"as the canister was sucked in and sent flying away to some distant cash office. After a few minutes another canister would be taken from the pipe and be found to contain your change. It intrigued and baffled me for years but I doubt if there was anyone in West Cumbria who didn't mourn the passing of the Beehive!

We would then trudge along "Tangier Street" to the Bus station and join the queue for the bus home to Frizington. There is quite a stiff climb out of Whitehaven and my memory of those rides home are of sitting on the lower deck (my Mother wouldn't go upstairs because she didn't like the cigarette smoke!) with my nose pressed to the glass as the bus crawled up the hill at 15mph. It is strange the things that stick in my mind - the day the bus had to stop while the driver knocked on a door to ask for water to top up the radiator; the confused old lady who talked to her reflection in the window one dark winter evening and who I was told couldn't help it, she'd "gone funny"; and on one of the few occasions we did sit upstairs how there were a group of teenagers, one with a radio playing the Beatles' latest hit, " A Hard Days Night".

Whitehaven's shops were largely privately owned in those days - there was Woolworths and Burtons but the majority, like The Beehive, was under private management and owned by local families. There were all manner of types of shop including one where you could buy clogs - not the ornamental type brought home from visits to Holland but heavy industrial ones worn by miners and farmers. The shop window contained a selection of brightly coloured child sized clogs but, if you peered into the gloom beyond, you could see the clogger furiously hammering nails into the wooden soles of pair of size nines. I had a pair for farm use up until my mid teens when the shop closed - they were very comfortable (when you got used to the fact that the sole wouldn't bend) and extremely warm in frosty weather.

Beyond the shopping area was the harbour along the side of which ran a steam train hauling wagons of coal from the point where they'd descended from Haig Pit on the headland above, to the dock where the coal would be tipped into a waiting ship. At the same dock stood two large silos used to store the phosphate rock until it could be shipped by road up to Marchon. As a result the whole area was covered with coal dust and the off-white phosphate, many of the buildings along the edge of the harbour were unoccupied and a walk along the harbour was often a bit of an obstacle course! However, people did walk along it and in particular out on one of the two stone piers which jut out into the sea and provide splendid views of the Solway Firth.

By the mid 1970's only Haig Pit remained in operation in the whole of the West Cumbria coalfield and mining was no longer the major source of employment it had once been. A major disaster in another Whitehaven mine in 1947 had led to the loss of over 100 lives and that one had closed shortly afterwards, others being exhausted and closed in the 1950's and 1960's. British Nuclear Fuels bought various old properties in Whitehaven during the 1970's and helped to kick-start a process of renovation which led to many an old ruin being restored to it former glory. After the harbour ceased to be used for either coal or phosphates it too was restored, cleaned up, the railway lines replaced by pedestrain walkways and today is an extremely attractive marina hosting the biennial Maritime Festival which, in 2007, attracted nationwide, even international interest.

Like everywhere the lives of people in Whitehaven have changed enormously in the last fifty years. The dirty, dangerous jobs of mining and heavy industry have been replaced with clean high tech jobs. The mines and Marchon have now gone but people find employment in the nuclear industry, in tourism and in public services (the West Cumberland Hospital which I saw the Queen Mother open in 1964 is on the outskirts of Whitehaven and also provides several hundred jobs). For some reason Whitehaven has declined as a shopping centre, a major development in its neighbour and rival Workington having attracted some big high street names, but is nevertheless an interesting and pleasant town to visit. The idea forty years ago that it could attract tourists would have been laughable but it now makes much of its maritime past, links to the Caribbean and of its proximity to the Lake District.