History
Ridley sang the song at a concert in Balmbra's Music Hall on 5 June 1862. It is likely that on this occasion the song ended with the exhortation to see Ridley's show on the 9 June, and that the final verse was added for that later performance. Although the account of the trip to Blaydon is a fiction, the heavy rain and missing cuddy (horses) were reported in the local press.
The song was adopted as its marching anthem by the fighting men of the Northumberland Fusiliers (a Royal regiment from 1935) of Fenham Barracks, Newcastle upon Tyne.
Read more about this topic: Blaydon Races
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)