The Mississippi Delta comes to Glasshoughton
My Grandmother’s Father was a horsekeeper at Glasshoughton Colliery. He drank his evening pint at the Royal oak pub and otherwise only ventured from his little house in Churchfield Lane to tend his allotment. I wonder what he would have though if someone had told him “In the next century we’re going to knock this coal mine down, do away with the coke ovens and brickworks and on the slag heaps build restaurants, hotels and a great big ski slope with real snow and casll it X-scape.” Actually I know what he would have thought and said, but I don’t need to repeat it here.
Some things seem preposterous, unreal, but then in time comes familiarity. It’s not such a surprise these days to see young people in alpine clothing heading down the motorway with skis on their roof racks following signs to Glasshoughton. But how many of these people know much about the proud industrial heritage of the village? That the glass in Glasshoughton refers to glassblowing and making and that here was a pit that for over a century employed thousands of men?
And how many of you reading this know that Glasshoughton played a minor role in the development of blues music in this country? In the 1950’s the legendary Big Bill Broonzy was one of the first Delta Blues singers to tour Europe. Broonzy had been brought up behind the mule in the cottonfields of Arkansas. His Grandmother was an emancipated slave. Between the 1920’s and 1958 when he died he made thousands of recordings of authentic country blues. In 1956 he found himself in the north of England, he recorded a live session in a theatre in Nottingham and performed in a Jazz club in Leeds. The story goes that a showbiz entrepreneur owed a favour to a cinema owner. The cinema in question was ‘The Cosy’ at Glasshoughton. One saturday night Big Bill Broonzy was despatched from Leeds to play there. What the youth of Cannon Street near the cinema made of it is anybody’s guess. But apparently it was a great night. I have been told by one or two who went that “I should have been there.”
And my mate Kevin Reynolds tells me that when he first started as an apprentice at Atkinson’s Printers in Pontefract that they still had archive copies of the poster. Long before TV adverts enticed shoppers and skiers to Glasshoughton, The Cosy Cinema encouraged music fans to come and see Big Bill Broonzy.
P.S. The Cosy incidentally closed down in the sixties like lots of other Cinemas. It became a clothing factory called Castletex. This was knocked down in the late 1990’s and the area is now a car park.
