When two young people of Catwick or its neighbourhood feel they can live no longer without each other, they in local phrase “put in the banns.”  They then, of course, expect to have them published, or again in local idiom “thrown over the pulpit.”  On all such occasions, according to a very old custom, after the rector had read out the names, with the usual injunction following, from the middle compartment of the three-decker, Dixon would rise from his seat below, and slowly and clearly cry out, “God speed ’em weel” (God speed them well).  By this pious wish he prayed for a blessing on those about to be wed, and in this the congregation joined, for they responded with Amen.

Dixon was the last of the Catwick clerks to keep this custom.  Much more recently, however, than the time he held office, members of the congregation, usually those seated in the loft, on the publication of the banns of some well-known people, have called out the time-honoured phrase.  But it is now heard no more.  The custom has gone into a like oblivion to that of the parish clerk himself, once so important a person, in his own estimation if in that of no other, both in church and parish.  “The old order changeth.”

Thomas Dixon died at Catwick when sixty-seven years of age.  He was buried in the churchyard on January 2, 1833, and by the Rev. John Torre, the rector he served so faithfully.

When Sydney Smith went to see the out-of-the-way Yorkshire village of Foston-le-Clay, to which benefice he had been presented, his arrival occasioned great excitement.  The parish clerk came forward to welcome him, a man eighty years of age, with long grey hair, thread-bare coat, deep wrinkles, stooping gait, and a crutch stick.  He looked at the new parson for some time from under his grey shaggy eyebrows, and talked, and showed that age had not quenched the natural shrewdness of the Yorkshireman.

At last, after a pause, he said, striking his crutch stick on the ground: 

“Master Smith, it often stroikes moy moind that folks as come frae London be such fools.  But you,” he added, giving Sydney Smith a nudge with his stick, “I see you be no fool.”  The new vicar was gratified.

Yorkshiremen are keen songsters, and fortissimo is their favourite note of expression.  “Straack up a bit, Jock! straack up a bit,” a Yorkshire parson used to shout to his clerk, when he wanted the Old Hundredth to be sung.  Well do I remember a delightful old clerk in the Craven district, who used to give out the hymn in the accustomed form with charming manner.  He liked not itinerant choirs, which were not uncommon forty or fifty years ago, and used to migrate from church to church, and sometimes to chapel, in the district where the members lived.  One of these choirs visited the church where the Rev. ——­ Morris was rector, and he was directed to give out the anthem which the itinerant strangers were prepared to sing.  He neither knew nor cared what an anthem was; and he gave the following somewhat confused notice: