Echoes From The Hills

Echoes From The Hills is a fascinating insight into a world gone by: a world of pop shops and puddlers, soldiers and sanatoria, brass bands and brickyards.

Bradford-born in 1907, when Britain ruled a mighty empire but some children went to school barefoot, Richard Tempest - a largely self-educated, working-class Yorkshireman who entered employment aged twelve - had a lifelong thirst for knowledge and cultivated many interests, including music, literature, and Yorkshire dialect. He was also a writer; starting in the mid 1950s, he wrote many short stories and poems - some of which, narrated by Richard himself, were featured on the long-running BBC radio programme The Northcountryman. This book, an anthology of some of Richard's recollections and poems, provides a first-hand account of what life in working-class West Yorkshire was like in the first half of the twentieth century.

Despite being raised by a neglected, put-upon mother and a feckless father who abandoned the family on his fifteenth birthday, Richard displayed endless determination, working in various tough manual jobs and volunteering for military service on India's North-West Frontier, where he contracted the illness that eventually saw him invalided home. He met his future wife, Edna, during the four years he spent in Grassington Sanatorium. After their marriage, the couple settled in their beloved 'House on a Hill' near Halifax, and it was here that Richard died, in 1975.