Sir Bernard says he knows what it takes to be a Yorkshire great...

SIR Bernard Ingham is braced for the flak. It's dangerous enough nominating the 50 greatest men and women of any county. But to proclaim the 50 greatest Yorkshire men and women is asking for trouble.

After all, in the words of the late BBC cricket commentator Don Mosey, Yorkshiremen are "aggressive, argumentative, intolerant and just plain downright bloody-minded". Yorkshire women, Sir Bernard adds, are even fiercer.

So he is expecting to come in for some stick over his new book, Yorkshire Greats. His choice of the 50 greatest Yorkshire men and women is his own, he stresses. This being Yorkshire and Sir Bernard himself a Yorkshireman, whittling the list down to 50 greats was a tall order.

"I sweated blood writing this book," he writes in the introduction. "I hope you will not be after more of it when you have read it."

You can imagine his bushy eyebrows beetling with enjoyment at his own humour.

In fact, many of the Yorkshire men and women selected for inclusion in Sir Bernard's book - published today by Dalesman, priced £19.99 - are entirely uncontroversial. Margaret Thatcher's former press secretary asserts that the greatest of them all is Captain James Cook, the farm-labourer's son from Marton-in-Cleveland who "opened up the world in tiny Whitby colliers scarcely 100 feet long".

Running Cook close is the great abolitionist William Wilberforce, who ended the British slave trade, and the inventor John Harrison, who solved the problem of how to fix longitude at sea.

Other Yorkshire greats eulogised by Sir Bernard include King Edwin, who converted Yorkshire to Christianity in 627 AD, Amy Johnson, Sir George Cayley, the pioneer of manned flight, and General Sir Thomas Fairfax, the great Parliamentary commander in the English Civil War.

Modern greats include cricketers Fred Trueman and Sir Len Hutton, former poet laureate Ted Hughes, sculptor Henry Moore, writer Alan Bennett and York's own Oscar-winning composer John Barry.

So far, so uncontroversial. The inclusion of Guy Fawkes is a little more risqu.

"You cannot ignore a man who lights up the whole of Britain... on November 5," says Sir Bernard, seemingly unaware of the pun, when questioned on the telephone about Fawkes' inclusion.

"I don't think he was terribly bright, but I think he was an honest, dedicated Roman Catholic. Some will say he was a freedom fighter, others will say he was a terrorist. He was certainly going to blow people up if he could. But I think he's provided more for community life over the centuries than probably anybody else by making November 5 such a great day for children."

Guy Fawkes apart, however, Sir Bernard's list is more controversial for the people it leaves out than those it puts in.

There is no room for Seebohm Rowntree, and no place either for the poet WH Auden, the actors James Mason (Huddersfield), Ben Kingsley (Snainton) and Tom Courtenay (Hull), or comedian and former Python Michael Palin (Sheffield).

Most glaring of all, however, is the absence of women. Despite Sir Bernard's faith in the fierceness of Yorkshire women, only five make it into his 50 Greatest list.

Amy Johnson is in, as is the former speaker of the House of Commons Betty (now Baroness) Boothroyd - but there is no room for Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut, from Sheffield. Emily Bronte makes it, but not her sister Charlotte; Dame Janet Baker is in, but not York's own Dame Judi Dench; and Sir Bernard accommodates Barbara Harrison, the young air hostess from Bradford who won a posthumous George Cross after giving her life to save passengers when her Boeing 707 crashed at Heathrow Airport in 1968, but not York martyr Margaret Clitheroe.

Surely he could have included a few more women his list?

"It is a fact of history that women didn't come to prominence very often," he says. But what about Dame Judi - voted the Evening Press's own Millennium Person of the Present not so long ago, and apparently now more inspirational than the Queen?

"I did have terrible pangs of conscience about leaving Judi Dench out," Sir Bernard says. "She was number 51 on the list."

A likely story. Sir Bernard's list seems likely only to make the women of Yorkshire even more fierce - and perhaps a little angry.

Yorkshire Greats: The County's Fifty Finest by Sir Bernard Ingham is published by Dalesman today, priced £19.99.

What makes a Yorkshire great?

Sir Bernard's defining qualities include "gritty determination", "wilful refusal to give up" and "sheer bloody-mindedness".

He chose more historical than contemporary figures, "because we can better see their contribution to human development. The modern cult of the television celebrity... tends to handicap a living candidate. Too many of them are here today and gone tomorrow".

Sir Bernard's 50 Yorkshire Greats

Captain Cook

William Wilberforce

John Harrison

King Edwin

Alcuin

John Wycliffe

William Bradford

John Smeaton

William Bateson

Joseph Bramah

Augustus Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers

Joseph Priestley

Henry Briggs

Sir George Cayley

Sir John Cockcroft

Sir Fred Hoyle

Sir Almroth Edward Wright

Amy Johnson

Baroness Boothroyd

Harold Wilson

Lord Asquith

The Second Marquis of Rockingham

Sir Titus Salt

Sir Michael Sadler

John Curwen

Sir Thomas Fairfax

St John Fisher Guy Fawkes

Thomas Chippendale

Percy Shaw

Harry Brearley

J Arthur Rank

Emily Bronte

William Congreve

JB Priestley

Alan Bennett

Charles Laughton

Andrew Marvell

Ted Hughes

David Hockney

Henry Moore

Frederick Delius

John Barry

Dame Janet Baker

Sir Len Hutton

Freddie Trueman

Brian Clough

Alan Hinkes

Barbara Harrison

CSM Stanley Hollis VC

Yorkshire Greats who didn't make it

Seebohm Rowntree

Dame Judi Dench

Margaret Clitheroe

Lady Sue Ryder

Helen Sharman

Dame Diana Rigg

Michael Palin

Michael Parkinson

Martin Frobisher

Joseph Aloysius Hansom

Wilfred Rhodes

WH Auden

Any list of Yorkshire's greatest people is going to be personal. We asked a few true Yorkshire men (and one Yorkshire woman) for their own suggestions

York historian and war novelist Charles Whiting

William Wilberforce (a hero for his efforts in abolishing the slave trade) and Captain Cook both top Mr Whiting's list. In some ways he thinks Cook has a lot to answer for. "I don't know whether the discovery of Australia and New Zealand was a good thing or a bad one, knowing some Aussies!" He appreciates the explorer, however, because he was "an ordinary working fellow who came up from nothing and did it for himself".

Paul Willey, York street sweeper and occasional Evening Press columnist

There is one glaring omission from Sir Bernard's list, Paul says - late Evening Press newspaper seller Les Richardson MBE. "He was out in all weathers, everybody knew him, he got decorated by the Queen," says Paul. "He was a simple man doing a simple job all his life but he typified Yorkshire spirit, did Les. People used to send cards to the Evening Press man in St Helen's Square from all over the world and he got them."

Dr Arnold Kellett, Yorkshire dialectician from Knaresborough

Dr Kellett has no argument with Captain Cook topping the list of Yorkshire's greatest, and is also glad Sir Bernard chose Sir Titus Salt, the textile manufacturer and philanthropist whose model village of Saltaire is still a monument to attempts to improve the living conditions of working men and women.

Dr Kellett is disappointed, however, that sir Bernard did not feature Knaresborough's own 'Blind Jack', the road-building pioneer John Metcalfe. Dr Kellett also thinks Sir Bernard should have including more women, among them Huddersfield's Yorkshire "Queen of Song" Susan Sunderland. She earned her title following a visit by Queen Victoria, says Dr Kellett. "The Queen is supposed to have said: 'I'm the Queen of England, you are the Queen of song'."

Dorothy Dawson, chair of the York Conservative Supper Club

"Margaret Clitheroe should be in. A woman of great courage who died for her faith in York. And he didn't put Dame Judi in? I used to go to school on the same bus as her, and she was just the same then as she is now. Very capable and very funny. She should obviously be in."

Being a staunch Conservative, Dorothy has one more nomination too - Margaret Thatcher. Ummm... but she wasn't actually a Yorkshirewoman. "She came to York once!"

Updated: 10:05 Wednesday, October 12, 2005