Embedded Files
Liberal, Conservative and Socialist clubs
Various political clubs dot the landscape of the industrial valleys near Huddersfield. They are mostly Conservative and Liberal clubs, but there is a ’Socialist club’ in Milnsbridge. Some have been converted to other purposes.
The Conservative Club in Marsden. The Conservative Club in Almondsbury occupying a
genuine Tudor house.
The Liberal club in Marsden. The Liberal club in Marsh.
The sign is still functional, the Milnsbridge Socialist Club is not
Radical Landscapes
Castle Hill, Huddersfield
Castle Hill from the west.
Castle Hill is an outcrop of Grenoside Sandstone, laid down as the bed of a shallow, warm sea about 300 million years ago. It was
lifted by tectonic shifts in the Permian period and eroded to its present shape over the intervening years by weather and ice.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Hill,_Huddersfield; http://www.huddersfieldgeology.org.uk/featurescastlehil.html
This geology has determined the course of significant parts of local history ever since.
When defence was important it became an Iron Age hill-fort and later a Medieval castle.
Its prominence later made it an unmissable meeting place, set outside the limits and limitations of Huddersfield
The political clubs and societies were urban, fixed and part of a tolerated scheme of political discourse. Larger more radical meetings took place outside towns. The impulse to meet on ground outside the towns might be more than a practical move to avoid law enforcement. The men might have wished to claim access to the moors and mosses above the towns in a similar spirit to the mass trespassers on Kinder Scout on April 24 1932. Some of the protesters were arrested for ‘unlawful assembly’ as they returned from Kinder Scout:
http://kindertrespass.com/index.asp?ID=137 .
The more overtly political meetings of the Chartists would have been even more vulnerable to such a charge. Nevertheless certain landmarks like Castle Hill, overlooking Huddersfield, were established as popular and political sites throughout the 19th century. In the ample enclosure of the upper and lower baileys was plenty of room for cock-fighting and political meetings:
Castle Hill, Lower Bailey
Castle Hill, Upper Bailey
Building Queen Victoria tower at the west end of Castle Hill in 1899 not only celebrated 60 years of Victoria’s reign (http://www.visitleeds.co.uk/thedms.aspx?dms=3&venue=1584286) but also reclaimed a radical landscape.
Queen Victoria Tower
Radical Forest, Huddersfield
Another meeting place for protest meetings was a small wood on Almondbury Bank that took on the nickname 'Radical Forest'.
https://undergroundhistories.wordpress.com/we-are-weary-of-slavery/
Almondbury Bank. 'Radical Forest'
Suburbs have gradually submerged the western edge of ‘Radical Forest’.
Peep Green, Huddersfield
Holding a Chartist Monster Meeting here had powerful associations. This moor had been crossed by Luddites going to attack Rawfolds Mill in 1812 and stood uncomfortably close to the sucessor of Rawfolds Mill. Meetings were held in October 1838, May 1839 and March 1848. The 1839 gathering may have been attended by about a quarter of a million people.
http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/sources/themes/chartism.html
Each time the authorities might have wondered if the implicit threat was going to become an actual threat.
More symbolically to the west lies Kirklees, the site of Robin Hood’s Grave. Any radicals with a similar imagination to Samuel Bamforth might have been delighted to think Robin's spirit was incarnated by the meeting.
A view over Peep Green Moor (now Hartshead Moor) from Peep Green Lane.
Though none of the sites mentioned above seem to have attracted literary attention this is not the case with Blackstone Edge.
Blackstone Edge, Yorkshire/Lancashire Border
Self-taught Poets and Radical Pantheism
The site, on the borders of Yorkshire and Lancashire, was chosen for a Chartist Monster Meeting in 1846 partly because it allowed workers of Yorkshire and Lancashire to meet but also because it would be difficult for law-enforcement to reach or police.
Blackstone Edge
The assembly was celebrated by the poet Ernest Jones:
‘THE BLACKSTONE-EDGE GATHERING.’
On the 2nd of August, 1846
AIR—"THE BATTLE OF HOHENLINDEN"
O'er plains and cities far away,
All lorn and lost the morning lay,
When sunk the sun at break of day,
In smoke of mill and factory.
But waved the wind on Blackstone height 5
A standard of the broad sunlight,
And sung, that morn, with trumpet might,
A sounding song of Liberty.
And grew the glorious music higher,
When pouring with his heart on fire, 10
Old Yorkshire came, with Lancashire,
And all its noblest chivalry.
The men, who give,—not those, who take;
The hands, that bless,—yet hearts that break;
Those toilers for their foemen's sake; 15
Our England's true nobility!
So brave a host hath never met,
For truth shall be their bayonet,
Whose bloodless thrusts shall scatter yet
The force of false finality! 20
Though hunger stamped each forehead spare,
And eyes were dim with factory glare,
Loud swelled the nation's battle prayer,
Of—death to class monopoly!
Then every eye grew keen and bright, 25
And every pulse was dancing light,
For every heart had felt its might
The might of labour's chivalry.
And up to Heaven the descant ran,
With no cold roof 'twixt God and man, 30
To dash back from its frowning span,
A church prayer's listless blasphemy.
How distant cities quaked to hear,
When rolled from that high hill the cheer,
Of—Hope to slaves! to tyrants fear! 35
And God and man for liberty!
Ernest Jones
The intensity of the wind's 'song of Liberty' can be seen in the angle of the grass...
Though Jones does not mention it this site has a Robin Hood connection like Peep Green. South of the main ridge of Blackstone Edge is an area called ‘Robin Hoodis Bed’.
Robin Hoodis Bed looking south. Robin Hoodis Bed looking north.
Possibly the idea of a ‘bed’ was suggested by the four-poster bed-like appearance of the oblong chunks of stone to the right in the first picture and to the left in the second.
Some of the tropes Jones uses with particular intensity embody themes common in the work of self-taught poets from a working class background.
There is the celebration of Nature as God created and clean and the town as man-made and polluted. Against the ‘smoke of mill and factory’ (4), ‘sunlight’ itself is liberating: ‘A standard of the broad sunlight’ (6). ‘Standard’ embeds a pun. It can be read as either a radical banner, similar to those carried by the Chartists or as a grade of life unobtainable in the towns. On Blackstone Edge the workers, though their eyes are ‘dim with factory glare’ (22) get a chance to experience the rhythms and vision of a natural day. They are accustomed to a world in which sunlight is absorbed by pollution:
When sunk the sun at break of day,
In smoke of mill and factory, (3-4)
whereas on Blackstone Edge the wind itself sings ‘a sound of Liberty!’ (8). The adjective attached to ‘song’ is significant. ‘Sounding’ can be taken literally as in ‘resounding’ but also in the sense of ‘sounding out’ or ‘exploring’. The Chartists are taking soundings of the depth of popular opinion in their struggle for political reform. Cunningly Jones studs the poem with aggressive words that imply an armed struggle will take place: ‘bayonet’ (17), ‘battle ‘ (23) but these are modified by words that render them symbolic: ‘truth shall be their bayonet’, ‘battle prayer’. This allows the poem to pick its way carefully between different factions of Chartism, the aggressive ‘Physical Force’ Chartism of the north and Newport and the political Chartism of the mainstream of the movement. Whatever the tactics it is clear that this is a holy war that unites: ‘God and man for liberty! (36) in the final line.
This concept is intensified by the appropriation of ‘chivalry’(12) and ‘nobility’ (16 ) by the poem. These words are taken away from the knights and peers who fill an undemocratic House of Lords and are granted to the workers that create the wealth that allows the existence of a leisure class.
Old Yorkshire came, with Lancashire,
And all its noblest chivalry.
The men, who give,—not those, who take;
The hands, that bless,—yet hearts that break;
Those toilers for their foemen’s sake;
Our England’s true nobility! (11-16)
The line ‘The might of labour's chivalry’ (28) crystallises the concept.
The poem pursues its distinction between the godly and the man-made to the point of pantheism. The open heights of Blackstone Edge becomes a true church:
And up to Heaven the descant ran,
With no cold roof 'twixt God and man,
To dash back from its frowning span,
A church prayer's listless blasphemy. (29-32)
In this space the song of liberty sung by the wind and illuminated by the sun cannot be enclosed and distorted by the ‘blasphemy’ of a church. Jones’ target is the Church of England. Like many religious and political thinkers of the day he was acutely aware that the Church of England was part of the state; both the government of Britain and the Church of England were ruled by the same person: the king or queen of the United Kingdom. Implicitly the message of Blackstone Edge echoes through ‘distant cities’ (33) to reach the seat of government.
Such a vison may be lying behind poems in which the attraction of country versus town is expressed more passively. This may take the form of G R Emerson’s ‘The Dream of the Artisan’, a dream of ‘overhanging forest trees and clear sparkling wells’, preceding an awakening in a ‘squalid city’, (The Poorhouse Fugitives: Self-taught Poets and Poetry in Victorian Britain, ed Brian Maidment, Manchester, Carcanet, pps 224-6).
The narrator of ‘The Dalesman’s Litany’ is luckier. He escapes from the hellish landscape of industrial Yorkshire: ‘Where furnaces thrust out tongues of fire/And reared [roared] like t’wind on t’fell’ to live on the moors with ‘fourty [sic] miles a heathery moor/’Twixt us an’ t’ coilpits’ slack,’ (A Touch on the Times: Songs of Social Change 1770-1914, ed. Roy Palmer, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974, p 71-2). The origin of this verse is vague; Palmer notes it as being ‘written (or collected) by Dr Moorman, President of the Yorkshire Dialect society about 1900’ (Palmer, note 71, p 329), so it may be a faux-naïve imitation of untaught verse. https://mainlynorfolk.info/steeleye.span/songs/thedalesmanslitany.html
Ebenezer Elliot
Certainly neither of these poems opens up a radical perspective on the landscape. Not only does the Sheffield poet Ebenezer Elliot see the hills as a refuge from the towns but also a place where the poor may ‘drink the breath of heaven’ (7). Initially in ‘The People’s Sabbath Prayer’ published in The People’s Journal of 1847 seems simply an escape from pollution, the ‘black town’s dust and gloom’ (6), but Eliot echoes Jones in introducing a political and pantheist dimension. The churches of the town enforce class divisions:
The stately temple, built with hands,
Throws wide its door to pomp and pride;
But in the porch their beadle stands,
And thrusts the child of toil aside.’(8-11)
In the hills above the town the poor escape the authority of both beadle and church:
Where, wheeling wide, the plover flies,
Where sings the wood-lark on the tree,
Beneath the music of thy skies,
Is it a crime to worship thee?’ (20-24)
A view looking north from the footpath to Hoober Stand.
Hoober Stand a wood north of Rotheram. Its edge is visible on
the right of the preceding picture.
Ebenezer Eliot would recognise the views, but not the tractor...
In a different vein Elliot shows his interest in exploring the ‘heartland’ trope present in many of the Luddite novels. Here he hopes William IV will prove a just ruler like the Saxon Alfred not a rapacious ruler like William the Conquer. Simultaneously the old 17th century Leveller political myth of the ‘Norman Yoke’ imposed on democratic Saxons is subliminally deployed.
‘Song’
WHEN freedom's foes mock'd labour's groan,
And, drunk with power, contemn'd the throne,
God bade great William rule the waves;
And William scorn'd to govern slaves.
Rule, great William, rule the free! 5
William Britain's shield will be!
On their hard hearts they ground their words,
And made them sharp as traitor's swords,
But cower'd, like dogs, beneath his eye,
When millions shouted to the sky, 10
Rule, great William, rule the free!
William Freedom's shield shall be!
He broke his bonds o'er Rapine's head;
"Free men! Free bread!" great William said,
And like a second Alfred stood, 15
King of the happy and the good;
While the free, from sea to sea,
Sang, Great William rules the free!
(Corn Law Rhymes 1833)
At times Eliot’s pantheism loses its political edge and becomes Wordsworthian. The ‘gnarled oak and holly’ (1) become embodiments of the genius of the place like the daffodils of ‘I Wondered Lonely as a Cloud’ and Brimham rocks becomes a natural church or temple. The trees are tough as the rocks yet both belong to a temporal world as insubstantial as a shadow: ‘let the shadow pass!’ (7). Nonetheless the actual shadows cast by these objects hint at the presence of God in a manner as much Platonic as Pantheist: ‘ye cast /The Almighty's shadow’ (9/10).
‘Trees at Brimham’
Gnarled oak and holly! stone-cropped like the stone!
Are ye of it, or is it part of you?
Your union strange is marvellously true,
And makes the granite which I stand upon
Seem like the vision of an empire gone, 5
Gone, yet still present, though it never was
Save as a shadow,—let the shadow pass!
So perish human glories, every one!
But, rocks! ye are not shadows; trees! ye cast
The Almighty's shadow over the homeward bee, 10
His name on Brimham! yea, the coming blast
Beneath his curtains reads it here with me,
And pauses not to number marvels past
But speeds the thunder on over land and sea.
There are two counterbalancing sonnets on Brimham where Elliot speculates that the rocks may be a pagan temple. In ‘Brimham Rocks’ he speculates about the ‘eldest fraud’ (1) and ‘cruel worship’ (3) that may have been practised in the place. In ‘Rock Idol’ he moves from the idea that the rocks are man-made by ‘sacredotal fraud’ (1) through a realisation of the natural processes and immense time taken to shape the rocks ‘a million winters’ (3) to end, like ‘Trees at Brimham’ asserting ‘God is here’.
http://www.route57.group.shef.ac.uk/issue08/EbenezerElliottSheffieldPoems.pdf p85/87
Brimham rocks; tough trees grow amidst the eroded Millstone Grit
Equally Wordsworthian is a nostalgic lament over the beauties of the ruin of Fountains Abbey. Politics have been kept at a distance. There is no mention that these are ruins of a Catholic place of worship, once part of the ‘Norman Yoke’ than dominated not only this world but the next.
‘Fountains Abbey’
Abbey! for ever smiling pensively,
Amid her loveliest works! as if the skies,
Clouded with grief, were arched thy roof to be,
And the tall trees were copied all from thee!
Mourning thy fortunes—while the waters dim 5
Flow like the memory of thy evening hymn,
Beautiful in their sorrowing sympathy;
As if they with a weeping sister wept,
Winds name thy name! But thou, though sad, art calm,
And Time with thee his plighted troth hath kept; 10
For harebells deck thy brow, and, at thy feet,
Where sleep the proud, the bee and redbreast meet,
Mixing thy sighs with Nature's lonely psalm.
http://gerald-massey.org.uk/elliott/b_misc_poems.htm
The tower of Fountains Abbey from a footpath to the south.
The abbey was built in an isolated location and functioned as a 'prayer factory' sustained by the wealth of its flocks tended to by lay-brothers.
It was not a church for public use.
Returning to Jones’ ‘Blackstone Edge’ and Elliot’s ‘The People’s Sabbath Prayer’ both present the moors and fells as an arena of freedom and equality presided over by a welcoming God not an exclusive God. Such sites aligned the power of geology and the power of a mass movement in a subliminal association. Against this background, a Chartist meeting, like that at the Basin Stone, Tomorden, painted by Alfred Walter Bayes in 1842 becomes more complex. http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/paintings/a-chartist-meeting-at-basin-stones-todmorden-1842-21747
The Basin Stone above Todmorden from the south.
It is close to the border of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Unlike Blackstone Edge it is part of Lancashire.
Bayes arranges his crowd not as a drilled or militant mass but as a group of picnickers. In this world a holiday is also a holy-day, dedicated to the material and spiritual advancement of the working class. It is significant that Inheritance has no similar scenes. The Chartists irrupt into the novel as the angry mob of Book III, Chapter 2 and vanish just as abruptly.
Chartism itself moved from a movement capable of generating visions of a peoples’ religion and a peoples’ government to a movement nostalgic for an imagined rural Britain where everyone was a small-holder. From a dream of transforming the state it became a dream of existing independently from the state. In 1845 Fergus O’ Connor created the Chartist Land Plan designed to give subscribers a cottage and three to four acres to sustain them and their families.
O'Connor promised that his Land Scheme would "change the whole face of society in twelve
months" and would "make a paradise of England in less than five years".
By May 1847, O'Connor had persuaded 70,000 people to pay £100,000 into a fund that enabled
him to purchase Heronsgate (renamed O'Connorville) in Gloucestershire. O'Connor's Land Scheme
was a disaster and by 1850 the company was virtually bankrupt and the settlers were being evicted.
John Simkin 2104 http://spartacus-educational.com/CHoconnor.htm
Luddism contained similar polarities. Some Luddites, like George Mellor associated themselves with the petitions for political reform, others attacked factories hoping the old ways could be preserved. The myth of ‘good old days’ continues to play an important and distorting role in British politics not only within the party calling itself ‘Conservative’ but also within the labour movement, informing many decisions within the E U Referendum of 2106.
An English Heritage: 21st Century
Luddite trail
The Luddite trail is inevitably anti-climactic.
The Luddite Trail on Hartshead Moor overlapping with the Brighouse Boundary Walk
Following this trail across Hartshead Moor leads to nothing. The original Rawfolds Mill and even its replacement have been demolished. All there is to see is a couple of street names:
Cartwright Street; named after the owner of Rawfolds Mill. The building above the sign is a gym. Its slogan
The victors write history. 'Welcome to a world of Health and Fitness'
is ironic considering the violence and pollution embedded in the history of the site.
Luddite statue
The contradictions embedded within the ‘heritage’ of Luddism were exposed by the construction of a memorial to the Luddites in 2012. A statue of a cropper and his daughter, together with an information board has been constructed on the road just down from Rawfolds. http://www.spenboroughguardian.co.uk/news/local/luddite-memorial-unveiled-1-4464775
Luddite and Daughter: Peter Rogers and Alex Hallowes, 2012
From the front the statue rears up against the incongruous backdrop of a modern semi-detached.
The sculpture is realistic and gives an idea of how physical the croppers’ work would have been and how the shears would have caused ‘croppers’ hoof’, a permanent lump on the arm where the shears rested. What is anomalous is that what is depicted is not a Luddite, a protesting unemployed worker, but a pre-Luddite, from the days cropping was a skilled trade in high demand.
The anomaly was explored by members of Huddersfield Luddites 200 and Luddites 200 Organising Forum, who held a ceremony of their own after the official opening was over. They were dressed like the masked Luddites who attacked Rawfolds Mill and held a black banner bearing a skull and the slogan ‘Liberty or Death’. This framed a speech commemorating the Luddite dead. It was heckled but afterwards this alternative commemoration proceeded uninterrupted with a recreation of a 'twising in' oath.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWbOnxhv0PY
In this perspective the monument is shown to embody Reid’s ‘Land of Lost Content’, more than Brooke and Kiplings’ ‘Liberty or Death’.
The statue faces traditional stone. It is surrounded by a walled area with information boards.
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