Dates

• Existence: 1915 - 2006

Biography

Nigel Hudleston was born in 1915 into a landowning family and spent his childhood at Rillington, near Malton in North Yorkshire. He graduated with a B.A. from Trinity College Cambridge and inherited Cayton Hall, at South Stainley near Harrogate, in 1943. He moved in during the 1960s, after he married Mary (Robinson), the daughter of a Wharfedale farmer. Nigel Hudleston died in December 2006 at the age of 91. In the 1940s, Mary Robinson (born in 1918) had set up a project to collect folk songs while she was working as an infant school teacher in Bradford. Nigel Hudleston was taken on as a male chaperon for her visits to record folk singers in pubs. For over 20 years, the couple travelled throughout Yorkshire and beyond, recording local folk songs and singers, but also collecting material relating to many other local customs and activities. Mary Hudleston died in 1986. Songs of the Ridings – a collection of Yorkshire folk songs – was published in 2001.