[Diggers350] Commoners Choir from Leeds, singing radical songs on hill-walks

[Mark Simon Brown]

  Commoners Choir in Calderdale

Ramblings on <https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006xrr2>BBC Radio-4
<https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006xrr2>

First broadcast on Thursday 2nd February 2023

Commoners Choir are a group of people based in Leeds who sing and also 
love to walk. They formed around the idea of starting a choir to go out 
into the countryside and sing songs about the peoples' history connected 
with land, the world around them and about inequality and injustice.  
They also compose songs around these issues too.  One of the places they 
have converged for walks where they have sung is Kinder Scout in 
Derbyshire, famous of course as being the place of the first 
mass-trespass in the UK.  The choir was founded by Boff Whalley who is 
best known for the song Tubthumping with the band Chumbawamba.

Listen now on the BBC website. here is the link: 
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hnmg

 From the BBC website: Cath Long, a fellow member, wrote to Ramblings to 
ask Ramblings presenter Clare to join them on a hike in the South 
Pennines near Todmorden in Calderdale, West Yorkshire. So, on a chilly, 
wet and blustery Saturday in early January, they met by the Shepherd’s 
Rest pub and headed into the hills to ramble and sing. Boff created a 
choir manifesto, and one aim was to 'rehearse until we're brilliant' and 
they really are. Their Skelmanthorpe Flag Song, which they performed at 
the historic Basin Stone, was heard by fellow walkers at least two miles 
down in the valley. On a circular hike, which began and ended at the 
pub, they stopped off at Gaddings Dam, often described as the highest 
beach in the UK, where some choir members took the plunge and sang out 
from the wind-blown waves of the reservoir.





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