Sid Calderbank

A native speaker of Lancashire Dialect, Sid has been collecting songs and stories from Lancashire for over 40 years.

I have been collecting and researching the songs, stories and poems of old Lancashire for over 40 years, interpreting them for modern day audiences and performing them at folk, arts and literary festivals anywhere from Aberdeen to Dartmoor! Along the way I have developed a range of talks for our local social and historical societies as these songs are our history – our heritage. They are the words of cotton workers, of coal miners and quarrymen, of housewives and mothers – and they represent their story, written in their own language and they were as real to them as were the looms and shovels they worked with. Over the years I have become active in every dialect society in the County and I am currently Chairman of The Lancashire Society and President of the Lancashire Authors’ Association. Since 2008 I have appeared regularly on BBC TV and radio, speaking on the Lancashire Dialect. Flog It!; Countryfile; Michael Portillo’s Railway Journeys; Radio 4’s “Tongue and the Talk”, Celebrity Antiques Road Trip, and I once went all the way to London to say 12 words to Shirley Bassey, live on The One Show!

It’s all been about trying to preserve our “intangible heritage” for future generations, but most of all it’s great fun! There’s lots of information on here – I hope you like it. SID