I Opened My Eyes and Saw …

In my childhood, the air was thick with chimneys belching from coal fires and furnaces from the teeming houses and from the giant mill chimneys that stood like massive cricket stumps row on row up to the skylines. When they were rousing their sleeping coal-fired boilers in the early morning, clouds of thick black smoke poured out of their tops before sweeping down onto the houses below to hide them from the day’s sun still struggling to rise above the horizon. The sun had its work cut out for it, and never managed to cope too well. It rained a bit, and the people grumbled and put up with it.

Hills are everywhere in the West Riding. They are especially noticeable if you want to go anywhere on foot or on a bicycle, and always manage to get in the way. It is a rare outing that doesn’t involve climbing at least one steep, long hill. Coming back is no better. There is always a big hill to go up before coasting down one. Even coming down them makes the backs of young legs with fixed gear cycles ache like Billy-ho.

Life was hard, very hard. How we got through I’ll never know, and neither will anyone else. I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if universities all over the world had made studies of how Yorkshire folk managed to stay alive in such a hilly landscape and in such harsh conditions that prevailed in my Yorkshire Ladhood.

Chapter

In Whom Can We Trust?
‘a sense of community that became legendary’

When the country folk trooped into the towns during the industrial revolution, they left behind one kind of poverty for another. While factory work guaranteed economic independence in a way, it replaced the less certain poverty of agriculture.

Burgeoning towns were ill equipped to cope with the massive influx of workers, but a solution was to build compact, high-density housing adjacent to the mills that swallowed the workers, including small children, during the daytime.

The beginning of industrialisation with mass production was undertaken with little thought for the comfort or health of those attracted to the new workplaces. People were reduced to being no more than a pair of hands. Factoryisation drove down the cost of goods formerly manufactured in cottages across the whole country, rendering cottage industry redundant overnight.

Men resisted inroads into their trades and incomes made by labour-saving inventions, spawned by the seemingly limitless inventiveness of early Victorians. Luddites from the vicinity of Huddersfield smashed machines with a great hammer that they christened Enoch. Enoch was the name of a cropping frame maker, and Luddites shouted their war cry, “Enoch makes them, and Enoch shall break them.” Some mill owners lost their lives in the struggles.

In spite of understandable opposition from the noveau pauvre, whose home-based skills were no longer marketable, they bowed in defeat and trooped passively into factories to learn new ways in alien surroundings, and harsh, often dangerous, conditions

Mill workers, having left their primitive villages and cottages, were dependent upon employers providing dwellings. Later generations, which did not remember their deserted villages, never rose to financial independence, and so the dependence on provided houses continued. The mill houses, small, squat, stone-floored terraced dwellings, built close to the mills, were little more than hovels. The single downstairs room served as living room, kitchen, dining room, and bathroom. The privy middens were at the end of the row, and several families would have to share. Some middens had more than one accommodation so that families could sit and talk or hold hands whilst taking care of business. Going to the bathroom was always referred to as going to do one’s business or going to see a man about a dog.

There was no plumbing in the houses apart from a cold-water tap over a stone sink at the side of the cast iron Yorkshire Range. Light was by candles or paraffin lamps, until gas became more widely available, and then the living room would have a gas light in the centre of its ceiling, and the bedrooms in later houses had a light on a wall bracket.

The Yorkshire Range had three sections: a central fire basket with a manual closing plate at the opening to the chimney, usually sporting a rod in a closed fist for its control knob, an oven to the left of the fire basket, and a water boiler at the right. Heat was directed to the oven or boiler by a collection of dampers that pulled the heat from the fire around the selected appliance. Most cooking was done on the hob at the front of the fire, on which cast iron pans balanced precariously cooked their contents with their long handles sticking out into the room. The pot-bellied pans summoned the cook, when they began to boil, by hissing loudly as water spilled out onto the glowing coals.

The first floor was reached by a stone stairway reaching a landing whose floor, like the bedroom or bedrooms, two at most, had, in common with the downstairs room, a slab stone floor. The living room floor was paved with two feet by three feet slabs, but the upstairs floors were monolithic slabs resting across the outside walls of the building. These were beautifully cool in summer, and chilling cold in winter.

Windows were small sliding casements. To stop people seeing in, a net “mind-your-business” curtain was fixed across windows, ensuring a level of privacy in a world that offered little privacy.

In a two-bedroom house, the parents had one room and the children would share the other, more often than not all piling into one large bed regardless of age or sex. Modesty was secured according to the inventiveness of those who needed it, but it was never easy.

Bath night, always on a Friday, was problematic. Water, obtained from a nearby well or spring, before indoor plumbing was common, was heated in the boiler of the Yorkshire Range, lifted out with a small jug-like vessel known as a ‘piggin,’ and emptied into the zinc-plated tin bath that hung on a six-inch nail on the outside wall. Due to the small capacity of the boiler and the length of time required to heat sufficient for six inches of water in the tub, all the family bathed in the same water, father going first then the rest of the family in order of descending importance. This was amusingly referred to as The Order of the Bath. Some, who were not hard to detect, managed without ever taking a bath.

From the conurbations of these impoverished homes grew a sense of community that became legendary in the North. People looked after each other; bore one another’s burdens, shared grief, disappointments, joys, and celebrations. Boys married neighbour girls, and developed strong familial communities.

It was a time of making do, adapting, of doing without, and of having less and less. However, the less necessities became, the spirit of the people and the place increased. Strangers did not pass in the street without a familiar salutation. The times and conditions nurtured a brotherhood of gritty folk with attitudes to life that saw them through all the hard times.

After the Second World War, England was slow to update manufacturing processes and under pressure from developing nations, the textile industry was quickly decimated. Textile giants built in a passion of confidence by Victorian entrepreneurs, who thought they would stand forever, fell one by one, victims of a changing world for which they were unprepared.

Close on the heels of factory shutdowns came the clearance of dying communities as bulldozers moved in and people moved out. Neighbourhoods were divided, and then shattered, the support they had extended was torn away, leaving people lost, dazed, shunted away from generations of history, roots, and familiar voices. Neighbours whose families had lived cheek by jowl since Victoria ascended the throne were separated, never to meet again. Hearts were broken, and some sensitive minds disintegrated in the train of their crumbled world.

Though their stories are sad, similar ones are repeated generation after generation, as the institutions in which mankind places its trust turn aside from what they were, either to become something else, or to vanish. Well might they ask, "In whom can mankind trust?" Nephi supplies the answer:

O Lord, I have trusted in thee
and I will trust in thee forever.
I will not put my trust in an arm of flesh.

When we trust in the Lord, though all human agencies fail, we find him trustworthy, for he will not forsake us, but keeps his promises down to the least.

As I pass the places where the Titans stood, and picture the ghostly scene of huddled men and women shuffling into the silence of the far away, I remember and contrast the steadfastness of a Heavenly Father who never abandons his children, and who hears them when they call.

Chapter

Between the Mills and the Stars
‘welcome reminders of the place that was my home, in a time that is gone’

When I was preparing to leave my beloved Yorkshire to live in the desert of Arizona, the treed ridges of Tennessee, and the fir-clad mountains of Montana, I looked lovingly at the scenes of my childhood, hoping to press their images deep into my memory, so that in exile I could conjure them up in graphic detail, and so that when the lamp of my life shall burn low in the years of my old age, sweeping me along in the rush towards eternity, I can bask in the fading glory of people, days, and places that once were so real, but which now, phantomlike, grow dimmer, making me wonder if they were ever real at all.

Most of the giant mills are gone, their machinery silent, their workers gone to their graves or fast approaching them, and their chimneys felled or truncated. Those that remain are turned to other uses than making worsted cloth whose quality has been seldom equalled and never surpassed. My memory rejoices not only by the images of these stone massives, but also from the recollection of the sound of their rumbling machinery complete with familiar thuds, and from the smells, whose memories, whilst not pleasant, are vivid and welcome reminders of the place that was my home, in a time that is gone.

Into these mills on many a dark wet morning went quiet people wrapped up against the cold, inured to their misery, too familiar with poverty and its attendant ills, but harbouring a secret cheerfulness that their circumstances should have denied them.

Children went to work in the mill, leaving, if they were lucky, some fifty or sixty years later with broken and bent bodies, no savings, and no homes of their own. The factories broke their bodies whilst distorting and impoverishing their spirits, and not a few succumbed to the combination of cruel toil and deficient health services..

After the steam whistle blew its last signal of the day, these morning mutes spilled themselves out onto the streets a little more erect than when they entered the confines of their place of imprisonment and labour in the dark morning hours, and more vocal.

Flowing from the strangely silent mills at hometime gave workers pause to breathe clear air and leave the din of noisy machinery behind.

Grimy day had no claim on their souls when their hours of bondage ended, and they were freed until the morning hooter recalled their soulless bodies from warm blankets to a thraldom whose release came only with death.

Dinner was eaten at teatime, and passed with some sense of relief. Children were warned to be quiet while father ate, after which some time for them might be stolen from the evening’s ration before bed called.

The stillness of outside nights was broken by occasionally raised voices from those who didn’t know how to behave in public. Shouts of intemperate laughter echoed through empty thoroughfares, ran around courtyards, jiggled down muddy lanes, rattling off the walls of the tiny back-to-back terraced houses, while shared jokes, and quips giggled outside curtained closed windows, coming louder then softer as they faded into darkness, and the night closed in again on hushed and dim gas-lit streets.

No textile worker got rich. Mill owners and merchants drove Rolls-Royces as big as workers’ houses, and lived in houses as large as their mills. They lived different lives and spoke a different language, unaware of the things their workers spoke about, for they were of another world and another culture that denied them insight into the misery of the miserly world of their employees.

Mill workers did without essentials as well as luxuries, because they could not afford interest on credit, yet could not afford to live without it, so debt, with all its demands and fears, was ever present. They lived between the devil and the deep blue sea; tossed between the mills and the stars, but few turned their eyes and minds outward or upward.

Nevertheless, after work, some listened to the radio, read newspapers, magazines and books, and broadened their horizons by attending evening classes at a worker’s educational institute. These few discovered worlds outside of the circumscribed environment that was the lot of their kind for generations.

In the strange nights that come after long hours of hard labour, while some lost their pain through drink, these cerebral argonauts and entered realms through imaginations and longings that refused to accept the limits set upon it by birth and circumstance. Intellectual rebellion was frowned upon, and frequently condemned. The smallest expression of self-improvement was denounced as disloyalty to one’s family, community, and class.

Yet, as the minds of those who dared dream of other worlds rose to the stars, wondering what was beyond the world of their bodily captivity, their souls were liberated by a sense of freedom that was often no more than an illusion. Yet, it was these almost frivolous reveries that eventually opened the doors of their minds and made liberation a reality. If not for them, then for their children and grandchildren.

We owe the opportunities we have enjoyed to those courageous spirits, who in the gut of dark satanic mills dared to dream when others said they could not and must not, ignoring the limitations of their world to set their minds free to bathe in the sunlight of other places, other times, even from the very bellies of the dark mill-tombs.

And it is these I shall miss most. The gritty men and women of the hard land of the North who, though their lives were moulded by the unyielding landscape and by the iron discipline imposed by their work and culture, harboured esoteric hopes that blazed avenues of escape for them and especially for those who would succeed them.

These are my heroes. These, who held fast to their dreams in the face of hostility, who, in houses made of stone as hard as their own existence, played out their wretched lives and dared to dream their dreams, somewhere between the mill and the stars.
Chapter

Huddersfield and its History
‘the town that bought itself’

The town of Huddersfield was pleasant to the refined sensibilities of a distinguished German visitor. Frederick Engels wrote of it in extremely warm terms. He was right to do so because the town has much that is pleasant, although I believe that in some respects there was more pleasantness in 1935 than there is now. But it could be that the longing for what has been may be nothing more than the pathological inclination of old people to remember the past as Golden and the present as moth eaten. Whether that is so, I haven’t quite figured out, but I believe that some of the things that have gone were better than some of the things that have replaced them.

The earliest settlement around Huddersfield’s was at Castle Hill, an ancient place that still bears evidence of Iron-Age fortifications and a Castle dating back to Norman times. The Huddersfield of today grew through the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, and was granted County Borough status in 1868, due to the industry of the Ramsden Family who were Lords of the Manor.

Huddersfield’s reputation and prosperity was built around the textile industry and its fine woollen worsteds are still sent to customers all over the world. The boom created by the textile industry provided a rich legacy of fine Victorian buildings such as the neo-classic railway station and the ornate town Hall.

In 1920, the Huddersfield Corporation bought the Ramsden Estate including almost all the town centre. Because of this, Huddersfield is known as ‘the town that bought itself’.

Came the war and on 29 August 1940, bombs fell on Hall Bower. No one is quote sure what they were targeting, but the first two bombs dropped did slight damage to houses, several townspeople were blown out of bed, and a Mrs O'Shea's jam tarts were devastated. War can be Hell!

On the night of 14th and 15th of March, fire parties were called out for the first time to deal with hundreds of incendiary bombs. Twenty high explosive bombs were dropped on and around Huddersfield, whose anti-aircraft gun encampments were engaged in almost non-stop operation through the night.

The last air raid over Huddersfield was on the 12th June 1941.

In Roman Times

Earliest information about Huddersfield is from Roman historians who make mention of fierce and warlike Brigantes that occupied all the north of England. Of the 40 nations that inhabited Britain at the time these were the most numerous and powerful. They were eventually made subjects of Rome by Petilius Cerealis c. AD 75.

Evidence of the Roman settlement of Cambodunum situated at Slack, above Outlane, on the Roman road between Tadcaster (Calcarice) and Manchester (Mancunium). The name Cambodunum may have originated from the Celtic word dun, meaning a high place of strength, and from the name of the British war god Camul.

In 1736, the Rev. Mr Watson discovered a Roman altar at Slack. Other discoveries over the years, at the same site, suggest that this was the location for a permanent garrison. Finds have included the foundations of buildings and several hypercausts or heating chambers. From markings on the bricks at the site it would appear that the soldiers who built the buildings were Breuch, a people of Celtic origin who settled in Pannonia, now modern Hungary. When the Romans subjugated a race and took their men into the armed forces they would post them to outposts far from their home country to limit the number of desertions and revolts in the ranks. Thus, any Britons captured by the Romans would have been sent to distant outposts.

After the Romans withdrew from Britain in 418 AD, caused by the attack on the Roman Empire by the Gauls, the area became the target of the Picts and the Scots raiders.

Despite desperate please to the Romans no help was forthcoming therefore the Britons turned to the Angles for help.

In due course, the marauders were driven away by the Angles with the help of the Jutes and Saxons, who then settled in the area. Unfortunately, they also chose to conquer the native Britons whom they had come to help.

Evidence of Saxon settlement are indicated by place names that had such endings as Ham, Ley or Ton as well as Burgh, Worth and Stead. Hence, Meltham, Honley, Bradley, Dalton, Deighton, and Almondbury all indicate Saxon settlement.

After the Saxon settlement, the area was an invasion by the Norsemen who affected settlements in the area, among the Saxons, by force or by treaty. Birkby, Fixby, Quarmby, Linthwaite, Slaithwaite, Lingards, Upperthong, Netherthong, (from the Danish 'Thing', a place of military gathering) Kirkheaton, and Kirkburton all have names of Danish origin.

In the time of the Saxons, Almondbury was a place of some importance.

It was then a royal seat and graced with a church, built by Paulinus, dedicated to St Alban.

In the cruel war between Ceadwall the Briton and Penda the Mercian waged upon Edwin, the Prince of these territories, the church was burnt down.

Edwin was the first Christian monarch of Northumbria - made king in AD 547.

Paulinus, the Companion of St Augustine, first came into these parts having been consecrated Bishop of York in July 625.

1066 And Beyond

The earliest mention of the district in which Huddersfield now stands is in the Domesday Book where Odersfelt is mentioned.

“Huddersfield” probably means "The Field of an Englishman called Huthhere, or of a Scandinavian called Hather.”

Also, from the Domesday Book the following place names local to Huddersfield can be gathered.

Bradley (Bradeleia)
Lindley (Lillaia)
Quarmby (Camebi) Cornebi
Golcar (Gudlagsare)
Crosland (Croisland)
Thornhill (Torni)
Almondbury (Almondeberie)
Farnley (Fereleia)
Honley (Haneleia)
Meltham (Meltha)
Hopton (Hoptone)
Lepton (Leptone)
Whitley (Witelai)
Mirfield (Mirefelt)
Dalton (Daltone)
Elland (Elant)

According to the Domesday Book 'in Odersfelt, Godwin had six carucates of land to be taxed, affording occupation of eight ploughs.

Now the same has it of Ilbert (Ilbert de Laci) but it is waste.'

In the time of King Edward, it was valued at 100 shillings. (A carucate, hide, or plow of land was about 120 acres. The pound was the value of a pound of silver.)

The barbarity of the Conqueror can be noted by the word 'waste', especially as Huddersfield was deemed fertile and advanced in civilisation than most of Britain at the time.

It transpires that while William was in Normandy the British subjects rebelled against the oppressive regime of the Normans.

Whilst under the command of the earls Morcar and Edwin they attacked the city of York, expelling the garrison, slew the governor and killed many of his retainers. The battle, in 1069, resulted in 3,000 Norman dead.

William, in his fury, exacted terrible revenge on York and levelled it to the ground.

Still dissatisfied he sent his followers over the whole country of Yorkshire with orders to kill, burn, and destroy. True to his word 100,000 men, women and children were killed and all their chattels destroyed.

William then bestowed the Barony of Pontefract on Ilbert de Lacy who became founder of one of the most powerful families of the north (AD 1092).

The de Lacy's founded the religious houses of Nostell, Pontefract, and Kirkstall. They also obtained the Earldom of Lincoln, the extensive lordship of Blackburnshire in the county of Lancaster: they had no less than 25 towns in the Wapentake of Morley and the greater part of 150 manors in the West Riding, one of the families is believed to be the founders of the Parish Church of Huddersfield.

At the time of the Domesday Book the feudal system consisted of the following hierarchy (in descending order):

Kings

Tenants-in-Chief
(e.g. Ilbert de Lacy)

Sub-Tenants
(e.g. Godwin of Huddersfield - see above)

Dwellers of the Manor
(i.e. Freemen, Socmen, Villeins, Cottars and Bordars

Services, kind, or both, as we understand it, paid for rent. The Tenants-in-Chief gave personal service to the kings in times of war and paid the recognised feudal dues; the villein, on the other hand, worked on the lord's (e.g. Ilbert de Lacy) land (the lord's demesne) so many days a week and also did extra work at such times as harvest (boon work); they could not leave the manors where they were born, could not marry their daughter's without the lord's consent, and had to grind their corn at the kings mill.

(One of the earliest mills of this type could be found on Kings Mill Lane at Aspley close to the confluence of the Colne and Holme rivers and, although the mill has been demolished for many years, following an unfortunate fire, one can still see the damming of the River Colne that diverted the water towards the mill wheel.)

The restrictions on the villeins seem to be harsh at first sight and villeins are considered as slaves. But this was wrong. If they were unable to leave their manor it was no great hardship in those days, for all manors were more or less all the same, and feudal tenure was universal, while travelling was difficult and dangerous. The villein had possibly as much economic freedom as the average workman of the twentieth century, for he had his own holding and was free to cultivate it when he was not working for his lord in lieu of rent

About 1130, King Stephen built a castle at Almondbury (on Castle Hill) which was surrounded by a triple fortification; this castle was afterwards, somewhere around 1137, granted and confirmed to Henri de Laci.

In 1272 Edward I granted to his successor Henry de Laci, the privilege of holding a market at Almondbury every Monday.

Mention of the town’s market was made in 1294.

There was also a court held there around this time, but bribery and corruption were rife leading to very little justice being dispensed.

In the reign of Edward II the deterioration of the West Riding had reached its demise with pestilence and famine aggravated by the miseries of feudal oppression and the calamities of war.

In the first year of Edward II a certain foreigner (not named) was murdered in the castle at Almondbury and then thrown out for the animals to feast upon his body. This is but one of the many deeds of darkness which were committed here.

In 1307, a jury strictly examined the castle and it is probable that after this examination the castle was demolished.

In the "ABBREVIATIO ROTULORUM ORIGINALIUM" of this reign, occurs the following entry, relating to Kings Mill at Huddersfield.

"Edward II
Extracte claus 8c
DE MOLENDINIS R de Huddersfield 8c de Leodes repond 8c
Ebor R 24"

This is the sole information contained in the entry and it is thought that it refers to taxes or rights connected with the Kings Mill.

About this time parts of the rents of the King’s mill on the River Colne in Huddersfield was given to the Monks of Whalley and about AD 1200, Roger de Laci presented to William Bellomonte, ancestor of the Beaumonts of Whitely, 24 bovates of land in Huddersfield, half meadow and half wood and four marks rent on the mill in the same place.

The same Roger de Laci also granted 24 bovates of land in Huddersfield, and all his lordship (dominium) there to Colin de Damville.

In the 10th year of Edward II AD 1317, a charter was granted by the king, at the request of John de Warren, Earl of Warren and Surrey, to John de Eland (afterwards Sir John) to hold a free market on Tuesdays on his manor of Elland, and also two fairs there.

Another deed of this century introduces the name of one John de Gledholt as one of the witnesses.

In the 9th Edward II, (1315) Thomas, Earl of Lancaster was Lord of Huddersfield; but soon after his execution it must have been granted out, for, by deed dated Huddersfield, 1333, Sir Richard de Birton, Knt., gave to his son, John de Birton, all his manor of Hodresfield.

How long it continued in the Birton family is not known, but by indenture bearing the date June, 1537, John Byram Esq., sold the manor of Huddersfield to Sir Gilbert Gerrard.

When the Ramsden family became seized of the manor has not been documented, though Sir John Ramsden, Knt. purchased the manor of Almondbury, in AD 1627.

In the reign of Richard II, free warren of Huddersfield was granted to the prior and canons of Nostell Priory.

During the civil wars between the houses of York and Lancaster, the whole of the district became the scene of rapine and bloodshed although little or no mention is made of Huddersfield and its localities in the records of battles.

(C) 2005-2008 - Ronnie Bray

The History of an Unimportant Yorkshire Lad