Christmas Post from Bill's Mother's: December 2024
A thank you to all subscribers. And are you roaring or singing this Christmas?
Season’s greetings to all our subscribers. This is an extra pre-Christmas post to thank you all for reading, with a special Hail Smiling Morn feature on a noisy north Sheffield tradition spreading southwards this December.
I launched It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s with some nervousness and a lot of hope just two years ago. I’d worked as a feature writer and photographer for the Sheffield Telegraph (and other national and local publications) for over 30 years, often covering the wild outdoors around this city and the Peak District.
But in recent times, it was becoming impossible for freelance local media journalists to make a living, after the social media billionaires siphoned off income and readership through their ‘we don’t care’ disruption models.
Then the Sheffield Tribune arrived, with new ideas, a reader-based model of making local newspapers work online, and after a few features for them, the editor suggested I try my own Substack magazine on the things I wanted to cover.
Would it work? Only one way to find out, I speculated. And yes, thanks to the 255 of you who’ve taken out a full subscription, so far, it has. So thank you so very much!
I had (and still have) several targets:
120 paying members : yes, it’s working, I should keep going.
200 paying members : yes, I can start to pay the bills.
250 paying members : wow, it really is working, try to stop worrying about the overdraft and cover more stuff.
305 paying members : sustainable, paying the bills, more and longer features.
380 paying members : heading for the future, commissioning freelancers.
We now also have over 1,400 free trial subscribers, and 15-20,000 readers a month. All thanks to the 256 people in what I call our publishing social enterprise. (That is, generating a living wage instead of vast profits for shareholders, and aiming to communicate some useful stuff for the common good of the city.)
As with all new online newspapers and magazines, I had to decide how to balance free and paid-for material. I plan to keep Sunday at Bill’s Mother’s a free, easy going weekend read for everyone. So, if you like it, please do forward the posts to as many friends and colleagues as possible. The other posts will be a mixture, with free previews for all, and the full posts for full subscribers.
I wanted to make our subscription rate affordable. There may well be a few readers who really can’t afford £4 a month, for any number of reasons. That’s fine. But if you can run to that kind of outlay, you’re helping those less well off readers, as well as the publication as a whole.
Bonus Seasonal Reads
To celebrate the season, I’ve opened up a couple of earlier posts for new readers who won’t have seen all our 200+ archive features (all of which are accessible all the time to full paying members).
Firstly, I heard this week that the local feasibility study on Eurasian Beaver reintroductions is now almost completed, with several potential sites identified. We’re just waiting for the green flag from the government now, really. Background here:
And I hope to get back to astral photographer Martin Bradley soon. Here’s the feature from 18 month ago about his amazing images of stars and the Peak District.
Sheffield Values V Pricey Aftershave
Now here’s where I remind you all that I’m a Sheffielder. Generally, that means straight talking, easy going, not full of ourselves.
With that in mind, I have to try and convince all the people who’ve been trying out this publication for several months (or longer) that when I cheerily say, ‘Yes, do try us out for free for a few weeks,’ I sort of mean it.
I don’t need to remind you our £4 a month subscription is less than a pint of beer, and after the most recent surreal USA news, I can reveal you could sign the whole family up for annual ILABBOBM subscriptions for less than a bottle of Trump aftershave.
This magazine is not my side hustle, it’s the real thing. I occasionally find a bit of PR or promotional work, and I still write a couple of features a month for other local media, but my other job, as some of you know if you read the Tribune (and you should), is as an unpaid foster carer, which takes up quite a bit of my time.
So to keep this publication going, and move on to better things for all our readers, please think about whether having Sunday at Bill’s Mother’s and our other posts in your life is worth a small sum of digital pocket money. The sign up or upgrade button is at the bottom of the post. Thanks again for your readership and support.
(And yes, of course you can order a gift subscription as a Christmas gift. Just email me at bbobillsmothers@gmail.com if you want a special card for the recipient.)
Hail, Smiling Morn!
Forget Away In A Manger. The real carols of Sheffield are not for the faint hearted. You need to be blasting out Mount Moriah or Sweet Chiming Christmas Bells.
I’ve encountered the traditional local carols at a range of very specific local pubs, but over the years, I’ve found attitudes changing. Academics have studied the history of the hyper-local carolling traditions of the villages of northern Sheffield and parts of the north Peak District, and note how the same carol may be sung in very different ways at pubs only a few miles apart.
Carol roarers from villages like Dungworth, Little Matlock and Worrall seemed a little protective of their traditions in the past, but this year the traditional local carols have spread south, and might now be heard in far flung places like Woodseats and Nether Edge. The Sheffield carols seem to be opening out to a new generation.
A wise Texan who’d travelled here a few years ago for what he saw as a vibrant folk tradition put it this way: “I like singing, I like Christmas carols, and I like drinking beer, and this combines them all.”
We talked about how the carols of Bradfield Parish were spreading into urban pub chains : “The Sheffield carols are quite unique, I’ve never seen anything like it anywhere else. But gaining traction is a good thing. The smaller things are, the more likely they are to die out.”
At a church on the inner ring road six years ago, I pondered what Sheffield Park blacksmith John Hall might have made of his carol Hark Hark, What News being studied 230 years after its creation in a ‘carol workshop’ hosted by Sheffield University.
After trying to survive on a carol writer’s allowance of two shillings a week, the creator of one of South Yorkshire’s most popular local carols died in the poorhouse, said workshop leader Nigel Russell-Sewell.
Singers at the workshop were trying out carols they’d never sung before. “They’re really surprised to be singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing to the tune of Malin Bridge, which until they walked in here, they thought was a tram stop,” said Nigel.
We learned that several hundred years ago, local carols would have been belted out in people’s homes, after the choristers trekked round isolated farms and cottages, carrying their cellos and violins through the snow.
“They’d also go to the poorhouse and the hospital, and you’d go and visit the lord of the manor, where you’d scrape your boots off, be given a drink and made to perform,” said pianist Stephen Vickers.
The traditional sings in north Sheffield pubs start just after Remembrance Sunday and carry on until Christmas week. The carols are part of our heritage, said Stephen. “Everyone enjoys them, and I think they’re spreading to even more pubs now.”
The worksop considered the common carols, too, and how many were written by poverty-stricken poets of the eighteenth century, while some date back much further: Ding Dong Merrily on High was first noted in records during the reign of Elizabeth 1st, for example, while other carols seem to have spread around the country in the voices of industrial revolution miners and factory workers.
And we learned the logistics of more vigorous pub-based singing: there’s a sound reason for the minute-long ‘symphonies,’ played by enthusiastic pub keyboardists. “They give a chance for everyone to take a breath and have another drink and gird their loins for the next verse,” Steven explained.
“They’re living things, always evolving and changing,” said Nigel.
Over recent years the carols have spread to (gasp) southern Sheffield, where Millennials might have picked up treasured copies of the famed Worrall Choir Blue Book of carols to make their start on the multiple variants of While Shepherds Watched.
“The fact that the carols are becoming more and more popular has to be a good thing,” said a member of the Loxley Silver Band during a break at a pub with Range Rovers in the car park, well south of the Rivelin.
“If you go to one of the northern pubs, it’s absolutely rammed, so it’s nice to be a bit more comfortable while you’re singing.”
There were other noticeable south of the river differences: you could walk about between the songs, and most carollers weren’t singing as if their listeners were in the next valley. Many were even sipping white wine.
This year’s sings: www.localcarols.org.uk
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Finally, some slightly tedious operational stuff.
Like the Sheffield Tribune, I looked at different hosting models when launching It’s Looking A Bit Black Over Bill’s Mother’s. In those early days, Substack hit the mark, as it was simple to use (for an IT idiot like me).
But Dan and I also encountered the more open and nice Ghost publishing operation, and you may know that the Tribune have now moved there. In order to keep our subs as they are for now, I’m minded to follow suit, as Ghost have a fixed price hosting model, rather than a fairly steep percentage, which will reduce our expenses a bit.
I’ll be letting the Tribune try Ghost out first, so I can quiz them about any problems before risking it ourselves (honest and straightforward, you see). And if and when things change, I’ll keep everyone posted.
It shouldn’t make much difference, all your subscriptions etc. will cary through, but you’ll need to be reading via email or browser, not the Substack app. Any thoughts, do let me know.
Finally, social media is not something I spend much time thinking about, but Twitter was fairly useful until, well, you know. Like many, I’ve found that BlueSky is working very much like Twitter did before it became nefarious. So if you want to keep up with more sudden stuff, we’re at @bbobillsmothers.bsky.social
Thanks for reading.
Having sung in a West Gallery Quire in Bedford, before moving to (south) Sheffield, which sang many 'Sheffield' carols because they are contemporary to West Gallery music I learned that the other area where these traditional and very local carols survived into modern times is Cornwall. Also, most parishes, even those much further south than south Sheffield, would have had their own tune for Whilst Shepherds Watched. This was because until relatively recent times it was the only carol - or more properly - Christmas Hymn that could be sung in church, rather than in the pub, or to your neighbours at midnight on Christmas Eve, It was universally sung, but only to whatever turn the parish band could play. The words fit well into all sorts of tunes - try it to the tune for Amazing Grace, or House of the Rising Sun.
Local carols in the Top Red,Grenoside every Friday evening. Usually packed!