Luddism: The Yorkshire Setting

 The Centres of Yorkshire Luddism

1] Almondbury & Castle Hill 2] Milnsbridge 3] Warren House 4] Rawfolds 5] Hartshead 6] Dumb Steeple 7 Three Nuns 7] The Shears 8] The Yew Tree 9] The Star 10] Brighouse and Raistrick 11] Bradley Woods 

Luddism in Yorkshire

The movement appears to have started in Nottinghamshire, but spread rapidly to Lancashire and the South Pennines of Yorkshire. 

See http://spartacus-educational.com/PRluddites.htm and http://www.nottsheritagegateway.org.uk/people/luddites.htm

In Kevin Binfield’s view, the Luddites of the West Riding of Yorkshire employed a more consistently political and radical tone than Luddites of the Midlands or the North West.  He bases this on the anonymous, threatening letters Luddites used to intimidate their enemies.  Yorkshire letters include phrases such as ‘that Rascally letter of the Prince Regents [sic] to Lords Grey & Greville,’ (Y5, Binfield, p219) and ‘Above 40,000 Heroes are ready to break out, to crush the old Goverment [sic]  & establish a new one,’ ’Y4, Binfield, p208) He attributes this to a political awareness gained during a period of ‘twenty years preceding the Luddite risings’, when ‘the cloth dressers of Yorkshire and the West of England had fought against the legalization of shearing frames and gig mills,’  (Binfield, p48).

By contrast Kipling and Hall quote E P Thompson as claiming ‘Luddism of Lancashire revealed the highest political content, as well as the greatest spontaneity and confusion,’ (Kipling/Hall, p52).     However, as far as the public imagination goes, it was in Yorkshire that the defining events of Luddism took place.   

The Physical Setting:

The early landscape

At the start of the 19th century many roads were pack horse trails with slab paving and narrow bridges. 

                      A packhorse bridge near Marsden Church                                   Paved Pathway on Hollins Lane

These are the kind of tracks followed by  Wat in Bond Slaves.   Ironically, in the last chapter of  Inheritance David discovers the packhorse bridge in Marsden (called 'Marthwaite' in the novel).  It has survived intact, though the mills David's family, the oldroyds, ran have gone out of business.    The packhorses and their owners are  commemorated by the Packhorse Shopping Mall  in Huddersfield on site of Packhorse Inn 

The entrance to the Packhorse in Church Street

More advanced roads were privately built and charged tolls.    Many centred on Huddersfield and some of the Toll Booths survive today.

Toll Booth, Leeds Road, Liversedge

The turnpike roads built in the 18th century by men like 'Blind Jack' Metcalf of Knaresborough used techniques similar to the Romans, laying stone surfaces which drained well.  Metcalf's turnpike that runs over Thieves Clough towards Marsden may well follow the line of a Roman road.  Some paving is left, possibly restored by the National Trust, and a bridge.

       Thieves Clough Road looking west.  The road was                                                    Thieves Clough Bridge 

             probably as wide as the area between the russet

                                         bog-grass. 

From the early years of the 19th century the transport system was transformed by the introduction of canals that allowed the transporting of bulky and delicate cargoes.    These laid out a completely new transport network with routes determined by ground that would support the basins that held the canals' water.

Huddersfield has two canal systems, the Broad Canal (Ramsden's) shown above

and the Narrow Canal (see below).  to cope with gradients canal used locks like the one above. 

Finally railways were built along the Colne and Calder valley, often close beside existing roads and canals because these occupied the flat parts of the valley

At Marsden the railway (left) and canal (right) are separated only by a rough road. 

 Millscape

Industrialisation transformed this existing scene, mostly through the construction of large factories called ‘mills’.   Mills still dominate the valleys  of the Calder and the Colne. Contemporary names for the mills can be confusing.    They could be called either by their location or by the name of their owner.   Rawfolds Mill is also referred to as ‘Cartwright’s Mill’  and ‘Taylors Hill’ is ‘Vickerman’s’.  Many have high architectural pretensions, deploying signifiers derived from the past.  

         There are Renaissance derived brick arches on this tower                               Folly Hall mill sports Greek pediments.

              opposite Huddersfield Station Platform 8 

 The choice of eclectic detail might seem to anticipate the playfulness of Post-Modern architecture were it not for the monumental earnestness of the buildings.   Their very vastness proved their downfall.  Many are now ruins and survivors are sub-divided and seeking new uses.  Charlotte’s version of Rawfolds, set in a ‘glen’ looks more like Parkwood Mill in Longwood.   This is now a luxury dwelling: http://www.pjlivesey-group.co.uk/parkwood-mills/

Parkwood Mill from Longwood Edge

The original mills were founded where there was water-power, usually some distance outside Huddersfield.   The mills became centres for small settlements based on workers’ houses and these gradually spread down the valleys until they reached Huddersfield.   Many were sited alongside canals to ship out their goods or, once steam power predominated, to bring in coal for their boilers;

     The orange and white tower of the Mechanics' institute in Marsden                            The Town Hall, Cleckheaton 

             catches the sun and throws a shadow across New Mill

Though Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England is mostly a grim catalogue of privation in the centre of vast cities such as Manchester, he spares a few appreciative words for the West Riding:  ‘The houses of rough grey stone look so neat and clean in comparison with the blackened brick buildings of Lancashire, that it is a pleasure to look at them,’ (Ch 3 ‘The Great Towns’ p 78).

Stone cottages near Fenay Beck.  They have either been cleaned or escaped the smoke of the 19th century. 

Huddersfield he describes as ‘the handsomest by far of all the factory towns of Yorkshire and Lancashire, by reason of its charming situation and modern architecture’ (Ch 3 ‘The Great Towns’ p 80)

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/condition-working-class-england.pdf

The Condition of the Working Class in England was first published in 1845.  Few of the existing buildings of Halifax date back to that period.  There was a George Inn in Huddersfield in 1812 at the north end of the market.  The facade was moved to became 10 St Peter’s Street when the present George Hotel was built in Station square as part of a development of a ‘new town’. http://www.kirklees.gov.uk/visitors/huddersfield/pdf/HuddersfieldTrail.pdf

The facade of the George Inn.  

In the original building mill owners discussed anti-Luddite measures. 

In Lud’s day both the centres and the new housing were likely to have been more ramshackle, caught in the process of transition.

Mills

Surviving mills vary from small mills like this one above Marsh, to the vast building dominating the top of the hill at Salendine Nook, though both are within a mile of each other.    

                   Small mill above Marsh                                                                                       Oakes Mill    

Most of the factories seen nowadays are second or third generation mills that followed on from the original, controversial works.   Though mill owners could see how swiftly mills became obsolete and were pulled down, they built mills that looked set to last for eternity, usually with dates built in. 

                      Upper Mill,  Slaithwaite,                                                                               Entrance to  Upper Mill,  Slaithwaite                                                          

   Even the fire station at Marsden was built of well-dressed local stone and given a date.

Marsden Fire Station, 1909

 As the local cloth trade got undercut by overseas competition, from the 1920s-1960s, so the mills struggle to find a new function.   

Like many others, this small mill near Slaithwaite is boarded up. 

Estates

Despite the evidence of pride of ownership inscribed into the fabric of many surviving buildings, Capitalism devoured its own creations without sentiment.  Milnsbridge House was once the centre of a landscaped estate, owned by Sir John Radcliffe.   First the estate disappeared under houses for the workers of the factories of Milnsbridge and then the house became a shell, used by a small engineering firm, and now (2015) stands as a ruin and a plaque. 

                            Milsnbridge House                                                                                      The Plaque

 'Look at my works ye mighty and despair’.

In 1864 John Ruskin was invited to advise the manufacturers of Bradford about what design they should use for the Wool Exchange.   The lecture was published in The Crown of Wild Olive, 1866.  Ruskin’s first remarks were genially scathing about the project:

‘1. In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange,—because you don't; and because you know perfectly well I cannot make you. Look at the essential circumstances of the case, which you, as business men, know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are going to spend 30,000l., which to you, collectively, is nothing; the buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter of consideration to me than building a new Exchange is to you. But you think you may as well have the right thing for your money. You know there are a great many odd styles of architecture about; you don't want to do anything ridiculous; you hear of me, among others, as a respectable architectural man-milliner: and you send for me, that I may tell you the leading fashion; and what is, in our shops, for the moment, the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles.

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word 'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. 'No,' say many of my antagonists, 'taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no sermons to us.'

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26716/26716-h/26716-h.htm#Page_44

 Bradford Wool Exchange.   

Significantly the statue inside is of Richard Cobden, the Free-Trade Radical MP, not Ruskin:

Richard Cobden.

He gestures like a magician over what is currently a branch of Waterstone's.

Ruskin's central thesis is that societies produce an architecture that reflects their social and moral priorities.  This is the society Ruskin observes in the industrial valleys of Yorkshire which he sees as reflecting the priorities of his mill-owning audience:  

‘79. Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately sized park; a large garden and hot houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in respectful language.

Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you propose to yourselves? It is very pretty indeed seen from above; not at all so pretty, seen from below.’

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26716/26716-h/26716-h.htm#Page_44

Penny Hill Mill.  

Note the 'beautiful mansion' to the left of the chimney.  

Ruskin would have been surprised to discover that many of the fine houses have disappeared and the new prestigious dwelling places are the mills themselves.

Fearney Mill

 Some of the high-status houses occupied by contemporaries of Sir Joseph Radcliffe have survived.   Healds Hall, the house occupied by the vigilant anti-Luddite Rev Hammond Roberson is now a hotel.   He built Liversedge Church where it would act as a focus to the view from his house.  Large trees now obscure this view.

Healds Hall