“You can always tell a Yorkshireman...but you can’t tell him much!”
So says Mirfield-born Hollywood actor Sir Patrick Stewart in a new portrait book Yorkshire Made Me.
Sir Patrick, chancellor of Huddersfield University, is one of a host of Yorkshire men and women featured in a book celebrating God’s own county.
From Dame Judi Dench to Dickie Bird, Geoffrey Boycott to Brian Blessed famous Yorkshire faces have posed for Halifax-based photographers Jennifer Robertson and Lynne Fletcher.
Sir Patrick was pictured wearing jeans with hands in pockets knee-deep in grass at Emley Moor in July 2012.
Other stars were captured over the years in various locations and all the shots are published in atmospheric black and white.
Kirklees and Calderdale people also figure heavily with Chocolat author Joanne Harris posing in pumps at her Almondbury home.
Also in there is Huddersfield-born playwright and TV producer Sally Wainwright, Halifax paralympian Hannah Cockroft, Dewsbury-born former Speaker of the House of Commons Baroness Betty Boothroyd, Mirfield’s Brian Robinson, the first British cyclist to win a stage of the Tour de France, Huddersfield-born radio presenter Liz Green, Rastrick-born wacky inventor Wilf Lunn and Huddersfield Giants star Luke Robinson.
Some of the best photographs feature a bare-chested Luke Robinson tenderly holding his baby son Leo and Wilf Lunn, now 72, wearing a bird cage helmet astride a scooter.
Wilf, best remembered for the children’s TV show Vision On in the 1970s, was pictured at the West Yorkshire Print Workshop in Mirfield in 2011.
Asked for his favourite part of Yorkshire he says: “Well, at my age it’s anywhere there’s a decent toilet nearby!”
Fortunately for Wilf Mirfield Town Council stepped in to save the public conveniences when Kirklees Council wanted to shut them down last year.
The foreword to the book was written by Barnsley-born Joanne Harris who says she is proud to live in ‘Uddersfield.
She says people show “polite disbelief” when she tells them she likes living in the town.
It’s better than London or Los Angeles “where there’s a Starbucks every ten yards and no one looks you in the eye.”
She adds: “Even now, lots of people still assume I live in France or in London or somewhere more urban and closer to the centre of what the press thinks of as ‘the literary world’ – that is somewhere between Bloomsbury and South Kensington.”
Joanne said Yorkshire had a “magical, elusive charm” but its people were what made the county great.
One of the authors, Jennifer Robertson, said the book was three years in the making and was a celebration of “Yorkshireness.”
She added: “We couldn’t believe how keen people were to be involved and how loudly they wanted to shout about the place that made them who they are.”
Yorkshire Made Me costs £12.99 and is available from book shops or post free from the publishers Carnegie Publishing on 01524 840111 or via the web.
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