00:00So we're here at Wensby Library with Black Country musician, poet Brendan Hawthorne.
00:06Hello sir. Oh yeah, how you doing? I'm good thank you matey.
00:09Warrapalava, what's going on? Right, Warrapalava, we've got a show coming up on the 22nd of March
00:15at 7 o'clock, the doors open for a 7.30 start. All stories Black Country, songs,
00:23poems, sketches. There's a group of five of us who put together the show now and
00:29we've had quite a bit of success and some great feedback with it so. Yeah, so
00:34you'll be doing what on the night Brendan, a poem or? We'll be doing, I'll be doing
00:38poetry and songs. We work in different sort of combinations of people on the
00:44stage. Yeah. So sometimes I'll be on with somebody and then we move around and it
00:49just gives a different combination on, you know, performance styles and that. So
00:53you're going to give us a little treat, a little snippet. Yeah, this is a new
00:56poem which is going to be one of the ones read out on the night and it's
01:01called Industrial Romance and it's about how when times were really tough. Yeah.
01:07For the working class. A babby's swinging hammocks over cottage workshop benches
01:14Like pendulums they mark out time before clocking on to work her fingers down to
01:20the bone. Her industrial romance lives in twilight, encircled by forges, furnaces
01:27and press shops. Places where dutiful wives would down tools to go and wait at
01:34the old man's factory gates on payday Thursdays. They'd receive their hubby's
01:39pay packets from the clerk so the sots couldn't drain the coin down at the
01:44nearest boozer. You can still sense those women walking the old canal ways
01:49as they took lunchtime snap of bread and dripping to be left at the gatehouse for
01:55their blokes to fill their bellies before getting back to cottage industry
01:59production and to feed their babbies that swinging hammocks over cottage
02:04workshop benches like pendulums marking time.
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