In the countdown to the Gargrave Autoharp Festival, the weekend of Saturday June 1 2013, and seeing if we could develop something specific and local, I have started a project about Robert Story, who died in 1860, and who is Gargrave's very own poet and lyricist.

On one of my web sites

www.songlyric.co.uk

I have put texts, links, and an outline of his life. And in Gargrave Village Hall I have placed a little exhibition, the Robert Story Story Board, to make the material available there.

I won't repeat here observations made in those places, but it seems to me that there is interesting Mudcat work to be done in rescuing such writers from what E. P. Thompson called 'the enormous condescension of posterity'...

Patrick O'Sullivan