STONE FATHERS
A powerful new song from Mind The Trams looks at Lancashire fathers, working lives and the emotions rarely spoken aloud
They built walls from it.
Houses.
Mills.
Chapels.
Schools.
Entire Lancashire towns rose from stone pulled from the ground beneath them.
And sometimes, it seemed, the men were made from much the same material.
“Stone Fathers,” from Gabriel Undici’s developing Mind The Trams Accrington musical, turns its attention towards a generation of Lancashire men for whom strength was not considered a virtue.
It was simply expected.
Men who worked until their hands hardened.
Men who carried responsibility without announcing it.
Men who rarely said they were frightened, tired or worried.
And almost never said they were proud.
But frequently were.
MEN MADE OF LANCASHIRE
Walk through Accrington or Oswaldtwistle and their presence remains everywhere.
In terraces built shoulder to shoulder.
In old mill walls.
In workshops, pits and factory buildings.
In names scratched into stone.
They were miners, weavers, engineers, labourers, tradesmen, railwaymen and countless other working men whose individual lives rarely troubled the history books.
They rose early.
They worked.
They came home.
Tomorrow they did it again.
There was little romantic about it.
And yet generations were built upon those ordinary days.
LOVE WITHOUT THE WORD
Stone Fathers follows territory familiar to many Lancashire families.
Affection existed.
It simply wasn’t always discussed.
A father might never tell his son that he loved him.
Instead he repaired his bicycle.
Waited outside in the rain.
Slipped him a few bob when nobody was watching.
Showed him how to hold a tool properly.
Or silently moved the better piece of meat onto his plate.
Ask him whether any of this meant something and you might receive little more than:
“Don’t be daft.”
But the son understood.
Eventually.
WHEN STONE CRACKS
The title carries another meaning.
Stone appears permanent.
It isn’t.
Weather finds it.
Water enters tiny cracks.
Winter comes.
And slowly even the strongest surface changes.
So too with the fathers remembered in the song.
Behind the work clothes, hard hands and occasional impatience were men carrying worries of their own — mortgages, children, unemployment, illness and, as 1939 approached its conclusion, the growing possibility that another generation of sons might soon be asked to go to war.
Strength did not mean they felt nothing.
Sometimes it meant feeling everything and saying nothing.
FATHERS AND SONS
That gives Stone Fathers an interesting place beside My Father’s Song.
Where the earlier number looks inward towards one relationship and the things a son eventually understands about his father, Stone Fathers widens the lens.
Now we see a generation.
Fathers standing in doorways.
Fathers walking home from work.
Fathers sitting silently beside sons who are becoming men themselves.
And sons who occasionally swear they will be completely different…
before discovering, years later, their father’s hands at the ends of their own arms.
AN ACCRINGTON MUSICAL BUILT FROM ORDINARY LIVES
The developing Accrington musical continues to find its stories away from grand historical events.
Instead, Mind The Trams looks towards the bakery counter, the tram stop, the mill gate, the ballroom and the terraced streets where ordinary people lived lives that mattered enormously to those around them.
Stone Fathers belongs firmly amongst them.
Because monuments are not always built in town squares.
Sometimes they are found in the things a man leaves behind.
A house kept warm.
A bicycle repaired.
A trade taught.
A family provided for.
A son who finally understands him.
And perhaps that is why Lancashire never really lost its stone fathers.
We are still living inside the things they built.
THE HERALD VERDICT
★★★★★
“THEY DIDN’T SAY MUCH. THEY DIDN’T NEED TO.”
Powerful, restrained and unmistakably Lancashire. Stone Fathers finds tenderness beneath hard hands and weathered faces — remembering a generation of men whose greatest achievements often carried somebody else’s name.
FROM THE WORLD OF MIND THE TRAMS
An Accrington and Oswaldtwistle musical about love, friendship, family, community and the ordinary Lancashire lives history so easily forgets.
Gabriel Undici — Lancashire author, songwriter and creator of the Mind The Trams musical project.
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