Caldervale after the Luddites: Industry and Poverty 1820-2000

Despite the disappearance of the Luddites and the revival of trade in 1814, the Colne and Calder Valleys were frequently subject to unemployment and poverty during the 19th and 20th century. The upheaval caused by mass industrialisation and post-industrialisation enters the language through the texts as different as the artifice of occasional verse and the utility of street names.

Some Street Names:

'Factory Lane' in Milnsbridge has cottages dated 1869. 'Enoch Lane' near Taylor’s Hill is ambiguous. Does it commemorate Enoch Taylor as the maker of machines

They look well-built but must originally have been or the 'Enoch' hammer used by Luddites to break machines?

soot-stained and lacking in modern amenities such 'Enoch has made them and Enoch shall break them'.

as running water and inside toilets. Vickerman's Mill on Taylor Hill was the

object of a successful Luddite attack on March 15 1812

(Kipling/Hall, p 7)

'Station Court' at Fenay Bridge 'Smithy Lane' off the Wakefield Road. A noun that sums up

remembers the Kirkburton Branch line. the transition to the industrial age. Before factories and mills a

'smithy' would have been an artisan's workplace, after

industrialisation it could signify a mechanised workshop.

A couple of street names commemorate the casualties of the Luddite conflicts:

'William Horsfall Street' is on Crosland Moor around 'John Booth Close' is in Roberttown near The Star Inn

where the mill-owner was assassinated. where John Booth, mortally injured in the attack on

Rawfolds died.

Though there is a plaque at The Star Inn, near 'John Booth Close' anyone living in or passing by the street would remain unaware of who these men are.

Amelioration and Charity:

At Nab End, overlooking the Colne and the Huddersfield-Marsden rail line is Nab End Tower, a dry-stone construction, rather like a broach, that was built by unemployed workers in 1861. The Huddersfield Examiner of 17th August 1861 starts with statistics: 'It stands about 20 feet high and 12 or 15 feet wide at the base. It is entirely solid throughout, being built of dry stones,' and claims it was built 'by the working men of the neighbourhood, who having a great deal of idle time on their hands, in consequence of the slackness of trade, took it into their heads to build a memorial to their industry and good habits instead of wasting their time and money in the public house.' Note that the word 'industry' here is ambiguous. Does it refer to the workmen's energy or profession? The newspaper turns the building into a spontaneous act by workers to show themselves as part of the deserving not undeserving poor. It mentions that the dinner at least of the 'festivities' that follow was paid for by 'subscription' without saying who made the subscriptions and finally celebrates the building as a ‘wonderful tower’ , the subject of ‘poesy.

Nab End Tower from the north.

Jim Jarret’s website quotes a later part of the piece in the Huddersfield Daily Examiner :

The inauguration commenced on Saturday last and continued several days. A grand dinner, got up by subscription, was partaken of on the ground by upwards of a hundred working men. Fireworks were set off, and other proceedings of a festive character were liberally engaged in. Even poesy lent its aid to immortalise the occasion. Two pieces, composed expressly in honour of the wonderful tower, by Mr. Collier of Milnsbridge, and Mr. John Smith of Golcar, were recited and sung.

On Longwood Edge there stands a Tower,

that end near Quarmby Clough,

and if you stand out by the church,

you'll see it plain enough.

This Tower was built by men and boys

of Longwood that is true,

and if you want the height of it

it's twenty nine feet two.

So come my lads and lasses gay,

come, and join the throng,

We'll have a spree this Longwood Thump

in eighteen sixty one.

George Collier

http://www.jimjarratt.co.uk/follies/page22.html

Jim Jarret the author of Ivory Towers (Yorkshire), the text of which is now online at the website above, suspects the Collier poem was originally longer. Neither he nor Huddersfield Local Library has come across a text for the John Smith poem. It may not have been published.

Collier does not mention any social purpose behind the construction of the tower. Instead he offers deliberately informal cheerful verse employs simple, monosyllabic words like ‘spree’ and ‘fun’, though it may be ambitious enough to satirise the notorious stanza in Wordsworth’s ‘The Thorn’ that gives the dimensions of a pond.

Collier:

and if you want the height of it

it's twenty nine feet two. (7-8)

Wordsworth:

I’ve measured it from side to side:

‘Tis three feet long and two feet wide’. (III, 32-3)

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/9622/9622-h/9622-h.htm#poem12

This original version from Lyrical Ballads in 1798 was changed because of mockery by many, including Lord Byron, to become

Though but of compass small, and bare

To thirsty suns and parching air. (III,32-3)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/52996

The 'Longwood Thump' mentioned in line 11 of Collier's piece is the local name given to the festivities associated with rushbearing that took place on the second weekend of August in the village of Longwood below Nab End.

Before the comments on Nab End tower The Huddersfield Examiner mentions that the 'annual feast' 'has gone off with the usual eclat.'

The facetious tone is maintained as it goes on: 'There was the usual turnout of itinerant establishments of all kinds, to the great delight of our juvenile population. On the whole there was the utmost decorum throughout the proceedings which lasted several days and, as folks say "it passed off well." ' (The Huddersfield Examiner, 17 August, 1861) It is a frustratingly brief notice; folklorists of today would be interested to know if there was ever Morris dancing at the event. It is significant that the fact the festivities were marked by 'utmost decorum' is considered newsworthy. Evidently this was not true of past celebrations...

Originally 'rushbearing' meant bringing rushes in a cart to put on the floor of the local church. By the middle of the nineteenth century these celebrations had become integrated into an industrail timetable, fitting in with or determining factory holidays. Often the rushbearing would be dropped, which may well have happened at Longwood by 1861 but elsewhere the tradition was elaborated. At Upper Mill near Saddleworth, close to Huddersfield, the cart was decorated with the rushes built up into a fiteen foot high structure ridden by a 'jockey' and pulled through the streets accompanied by Morris dancing of the north-western type. At some point in time the Upper Mill rushcart got called the 'Longwood Thump'. An old painting shows a rush-bearing at Saddleworth Church

Old Saddleworth Church, Rushbearing, anonymous 19th century oil painting.

Here can be seen four rushcarts with their tent-shaped rush-loads, the colourful awnings of booths of 'itinerant establishments' with, on the left Morris dancing and on the right a fight. 'Utmost decorum' does not characterise the scene...

Saddleworth Morris have continues the tradition of dragging round the Upper Mill rushcart.

Pulling the 'Longwood Thump' through Upper Mill 2004. Note the 'jockey'perched on top of the rushcart.

The rushcart at rest outside Upper Mill Church, slightly askew after the pulling.

Nab End Tower looking towards Castle Hill

The Huddersfield Weekly News, 06.11 1880

'Starved to Death'

Line on reading of the death of the man found on the roadside near Meltham, in last Saturday’s Weekly News, as follows: - “STARVED TO DEATH. – On Wednesday morning the body of a man was found lying under the wall on the roadside near what is known as the ‘Stoop’. He asked some females who were proceeding to their work about half-past five, where he could obtain a night’s lodging, but they were afraid of him and fled. Between seven and eight o’ clock the same morning, a man named Frith was driving to Meltham in his milk cart, when he saw the man and called out to him, but receiving no answer he dismounted, and went to the man and shook him, and found that he was dead. His ankle was broken. Starvation is evidently the cause of death:’ –

Out in the bitter cold he died, poor wretch,

While at the miss’s side the lap-dog sleek

Luxuriously was snoring and the horse

Well fed and groomed almost as cosy couched

As its rich master. Yes, [yet?] the being who bore 5

The image of his Maker, ratlike died –

Nay, like no other thing on earth than man –

Denied a hole to creep into, crushed mortal,

Not having power to execute his will,

With broken limbs beneath the roadside wall 10

He crouched and moaned ‘Have mercy on me God!’

A nameless, houseless battered wanderer,

Spurned even by his fellow-toiling kind!

The heavens abashed to look upon his corpse

Were veiled in cloud; and when the moon, late rising, 15

At times broke through the mask, her pensive face

Lowered into sadness, as she gleamed upon

That starved-out heap of humanity wretchedness:

Did not e’en the hard earth tremble and shake

Beneath him as if roused by vengeful wrath 20

Longing to gulp the brothers of his race?

Yet man, the callous judge of other men

Not knowing their wrongs, and proud of his own place,

Dooming the soul whose body’s patched in rags,

Left him alone to hunger, thirst and storm.

Alas! That when a country’s wrapped in gold, 25

Its heart should take the nature of the ore,

Its glittering hardness, deaf to charity,

And let the helpless on the public road

Become the victim of an o’erstrained law!

A freezing censure on the Christian land 30

Whose wealth is like the Himalayas, piled up

Yet whose prevailing cry for more, more, more,

Beats down the fainting murmurs of the starving,

Until astounded at the horrid end

Of some neglected creature-man like this, 35

It drops a tear, but soon resumes its cry.

J.D.

The poem is Christian rather than revolutionary. It is pointing out the moral rather than economic contradictions of the Capitalism that has arisen under the aegis of Christianity but it doesn’t expect the system to collapse. Instead, like Dickens the poem see charity as the essence of Christianity.

In so far as mankind is ‘the image of his Maker,’ (6) all men are equal and the poem rejects attempts to dehumanise the poor as vermin. The vagrant’s death is described as ‘ratlike’,(6) unfit for one of God’s chosen species; the man himself is a ‘creature’ but a ‘creature-man’ (35), a fellow human who has been degraded by circumstance and ‘hardness’ (27). He is not part of an underclass who should be repressed but part of an unspecified group whose need should not be supressed by greed:

Yet whose prevailing cry for more, more, more,

Beats down the fainting murmurs of the starving, (32-3)

However he easily fits into Biblical paradigms of charity. Like the seamstress of Thomas Hood’s 1843 ‘song of the shirt’ he is an isolated ‘poor wretch’, he is not part of a unified body trying to establis for their political, social or human rights. The poem gives no hint of a world in which discontented workers might strike to improve their living or working conditions, as the Huddersfield weavers did in 1883: https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/mills-of-the-huddersfield-area/ Charity presupposes a passive relationship between given and receiver.

The poem marvels that God did not exact vengeance for this act against a ‘brother’

Did not e’en the hard earth tremble and shake

Beneath him as if roused by vengeful wrath

Longing to gulp the brothers of his race? (19-21)

However, as the poem admits, there was no earthquake or social revolution. The last line has an odd pre-echo of Auden’s confused 1937 poem ‘Spain’:

JD: 'It drops a tear, but soon resumes its cry.' (36)

Auden: 'History to the defeated

May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.'

https://sites.google.com/a/upr.edu/modernpoetry/Student-Blogs/ivan-andres-rodriguez/spainbywhauden

In each case suffering is more evident than solution.

This is a picture of the ‘stoop’ (guide stone, http://www.yorkshire-milestones.co.uk/articles-a-news/78-coming-soon-1) at the crossroads outside Meltham where the Netherthong and Wilshaw Road are crossed by the Thick Hollins Road. This may be the place mentioned in the poem ‘Starved to Death’, though there are other stoops surviving nearby, like this one on the outskirts of Meltham:

A Stoop near Meltham

At Beestoneley is the house of John Alfred Bearder, founder of the Bearder Charity [Lud 6.53]. In the words of its website the charity exists to:

RELIEVE PERSONS WHO ARE IN A CONDITION OF POVERTY HARDSHIP AND OF DISTRESS

ARISING THEREFROM WHO ARE PERMANENTLY OR TEMPORARILY RESIDENT [sic]

METROPOLITAN BOROUGH OF CALDERDALE AND TO MEET THE NEED OR GIVE ANY NEW

BENEFIT TO THE PEOPLE OF CALDERDALE BENEFIT IN ANY WAY OTHER CHARITABLE

INSTITUTIONS OR CHARITABLE OBJECTS AS THE TRUSTEES IN THEIR ABSOLUTE DISCRETION

SELECT EVEN IF OUTSIDE CALDERDALE AREA http://opencharities.org/charities/1010529

Despite the age of the house the charity is not Victorian; it was set up in 1992. According to the plaque on the building Bearder lived there from 1949-98, not 1849-98. One hundred years on from ‘Starved to Death’ the poor of Calderdale still need charity.

Bearder's House

The plaque.