THE LUDDITE NOVELS 8: SYKES/WALKER, BEN O’BILLS

 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 

Ben ’O’ Bills: The Luddite, D.E.F. Sykes, George Walker, 1910 (Huddersfield, Lambsbreath, 1988)

Geography/ Names

Where the landscape of Inheritance is panoramic showing the view over the Colne Valley enjoyed by those owning the estates and houses Ruskin describes, the landscape of Ben ‘O’ Bills is more claustrophobic and intense.   It recreates the labourer’s personal geography of the area, mostly based on isolated pubs, small chapels and large mills.  Where Bond Slaves uses the device of introducing the area through the arrival of an outsider, Ben ‘O’ Bill’s narrator addresses readers as if they are locals.  The assumption is that readers know the area though not the history.

The names of actual characters and places have not been fictionalised.    The mills and the mill-owners keep their actual names, possibly because nearly a century has passed since the Luddite attacks.  

Ben lives in the village of Lower Holme 

Despite being only 2 miles from Golcar, the eastern edge of Huddersfield, Lower Holme is still a scatter of cottages

on the north slope of the Colne Valley.  Lower Holme lies between Slaithwaite at the bottom and Pole Moor at the top. 

His family worships at the dissenting chapel of ‘Powle Moor’, a dialect rendition of ‘Pole Moor’:

Pole Moor chapel, an austere building now converted to luxury flats...

Eventually he returns to the seat of his family’s worship; the Anglican church of Slaithwaite:

Slaithwaite St James' Church showing the Norman styling and annex dating from the 1891 rebuilding. 

 http://www.yorkshireindexers.info/wiki/index.php?title=Slaithwaite_St_James_Church

Reference is made to buildings that still exist, such as Bradley’s Mill (Huddersfield) and Vickerman’s (Taylor's Hill, near Berry Brow) ,

as well as those that have been demolished such as ‘Ottiwells’  (Marsden).    

Bradley's Mill

One of the surviving buildings in the Taylor Mill complex.

One of the successful raids is carried out on a two story mill overlooking Gledholdt (Chp VI, p1290.  The mill is not named but might be this small building in Marsh or its predecessor:

Marsh Mills, 2015.  

Like many mills seeking a commercial future it is subdivided into 'workshops, offices and storage units'.  

The main casualties are public houses.  There no longer appears to be a ‘Nag’s Head’ in Paddock (Chp VI, p 129) or a ‘White Hart Inn’ at Hartshead (Chp VII, p 183) though The Shears (Chp VI, p 126) and The Star Inn survive (Chp XX, p 206).

                                    The Shears, Hightown                                                                           The Star, Robertown

In the novel, as in history, The Shears is associated with Luddite recruiting and the attack on Rawfolds, whereas The Star 

is the site of the death of two of the wounded attackers on Rawfolds (see 6/7 'the attack on Rawfold's Mill/The Aftermath).

The main meeting place for Luddites in the book is ‘The Buck Inn’, Buckstones; drill is carried out ‘in a field at the back of the Buck’ (Chp IV, p 95).  I can find no mention of a ‘Buck Inn’ in the pub websites of the district.    Sykes/Walker place ‘Buckstones’ ‘almost alone on the road from Outland to Manchester’ surrounded by ‘desolate reaches of moorland’ (Chp IV, p 82).    The ‘Buckstones’  recorded on the Ordnance Survey OL 21 is indeed a ‘desolate’ area of Pennine moorland but it is about five miles away from Outlane on the present A 640.  There is only one building there; Buckstones House.  A National Trust information board says nothing about a pub ever existing there.   Possibly Sykes/Walker place a pub there because of the setting:  

Buckstones House is built of local stone and blends in with the surrounding moor. The red tips of the bollards point towards the house.  

Below Buckstone House is a natural amphitheatre.  

Buckstones House is a dot on the skyline of the centre of the picture.  To the left is March Hill.

Above Buckstones House are ‘reaches of moorland’:

                             Windmill on Rocking Stone Hill                                                                 Masts on Pole Hill

 The road through Buckstones is now a tarmac 'A' road (see above) though Crimea Lane, that crosses Pole Hill, is still grit:

Crimea Lane

 At the end Ben’s casual remark about his factory tells readers nothing about whether it is water or steam powered, where it was built and at what cost to the environment. 

Conflict/Moral Struggle

In Chapter IV Ben ‘O Bill’s witnesses starvation in Lower Brow: ‘it’s nobbut a dead woman, improved off the face of the earth,’ (p 80).  The authors place the word ‘improved’ bitterly and ironically into the mouth of a man whose wife has just starved to death.  Ben does not react similarly.  He is ‘filled with an intense sorrow for the suffering I knew to be rife around us,’ but recoils ‘from violence of any kind,’ (p81).   He asks ‘nothing better of the world than to go my own way quietly,’ (p 81).   As Sykes and Walker select him to be the hero of the book, so the latter half of the book becomes concerned with the question will Bill be indicted for his part in the attack on Rawfolds Mill?  Consequently attention is deflected away from the larger question:  was violence a justified response to the suffering in the Colne Valley?    Like Ben the wife of the starved man might have asked for nothing more than ‘to go my own way quietly’, but the economic situation offers him nothing more than the chance to starve quietly. 

In his quest to avoid prosecution Bill finds some unlikely allies, ranging from the doctor who treats him to the soldier Long Tom, who was beaten up by Bill for bothering Mary.  The most unexpected of these supporters is Joseph Radcliffe himself.  Radcliffe knows Ben has been a Luddite but forgives him: ‘’you’d a good father before yo’ and … Justice Radcliffe doesn’t give heed to every idle tale brought to him,’ (Chp IX, p 224).  The contrast between this Radcliffe and the historical magistrate who desperately amassed evidence from any informer, intimidated or voluntary, reliable or fanciful,  could not be more evident.

The book ends with Ben happily married and reintegrated into the society of the valley as the owner of a small mechanised mill.  However his defence of the frames: ‘And no doubt machinery has been a great boom,’ (Chp XI , p 339) is apologetic in tone and abstract in content.  Chapter XIV cannot offer a powerful visual icon of universal prosperity to answer Chapter VII’s tableau of Mellor holding a dead baby up to Horsfall’s angry gaze.   As in Shirley the prosperity of the individual is assured; the prosperity of the community remains ambiguous or unexamined. 

'an' aw held up th' child aboon th' horse's head an' I thrust it right to his face!'

As a contemporary artist might have illustrated the confrontation of Horsfall and poverty in Chapter VII.

This is approximately half-way through the book but the novel offers no equivalent icon of benevolence on the part of the mill-owners to counteract the impression made by this encounter. 

Dissent

Bond Slaves offers consistently anti-radical authorial comments from the start of the book.    Sykes and Walker are more subtle.  They leave explicit commentary to the book’s hero Ben and implicit commentary to the book’s plot.   As in other Luddite novels, Ben’s moral progress is measured by his attitude to the Church of England.  He starts the book attending the Baptist chapel on ‘Powle Moor’ (Pole Moore) (see above)  and ends up married in Slaithwaite Church (see above). When he attends York for Mellor’s trial he admires ‘the great Cathedral of the North [the Minster]’ and ‘marvelled at the piety that had raised so splendid a temple to the glory of God’ (Chp XIII, pps307-8).   

York Minster from above Lendal Bridge 

His ‘steps then turned towards the Castle,’ (Chp XIII, p 308).     

The effect is the same as in Bond Slaves; both God and Man have condemned the Luddites and Ben can only be grateful he has escaped.  

Ben’s pilgrimage is echoed in a comic vein by Soldier Jack.  Jack falls in love with the symbolically named woman Faith.    As a result of her influence Jack abruptly decides his true allegiance lies with the Church of England because it is ‘an army – the church militant … The king, God bless him, is the head o’ th’ Church,’  (Chp XIV,p 324).   Jack still respects Powle Moor’s preacher, Mr Webster, but denounces the chapel:  ‘yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle, an’ heresy an’ schism an’ rebellion against constituted authority are I’ th’ air, so as to speak, on Powle Moor.  Yo’re all Republicans at heart up yonder,’ (Chp XIV,p 323).    He and Faith get married on the same day as Ben ‘in the same church, by the same parson,’ (Chp XIV,p 338).      The feudal and moral authority of the Church and the State has been restored over not only the political but moral lives of Ben and Jack and, by implication, over the Colne Valley.

Slaithwaite Church from the rear.  Note the surviving cobbles. 

Trial

The moral lesson of the trail is clear enough but, apart from the Minster, the geography of York is more symbolic than accurate.    The book reinforces the feudal appearance of York by imagining the prisoners to be held in ‘the gloomy keep,’ (Chp XIII, p 308).  Ben stands and ‘wondered behind which of the barred windows so high and narrow, lay my helpless cousin,’ (Chp XIII, p 308).  In fact the keep of York Castle, Clifford’s Tower, was the roofless shell then that it is today.

Clifford's Tower.  Originally the keep of York Castle it became the centre of the Victorian prison buildings but was not used. 

Even after the Victorians built an extensive range of enclosed prison buildings around the site, Clifford’s Tower remained a ruin, as a 1926 air photos shows:  http://www.britainfromabove.org.uk/sites/all/lib/aerofilms-images/public/england/EPW016071.jpg

Prisoners of the early 19th century were held in the 18th century buildings that housed notorious prisoners like Dick Turpin.   Reid points out these were not designed to process large numbers of condemned men: there was only one condemned cell (Reid, p 233). The cell now shown as the condemned cell is a later 19th century cell, not the cell Turpin would have been housed in: http://www.yorkshireguides.com/images_4/turpin3.jpg, http://www.yorkpress.co.uk/video/72565/read/ but it gives an idea of what conditions in the prison would have been like, though not of the over-crowding.  

Barred window of the Debtors' Prison

As Ben O’Bills shows York itself was overcrowded with visitors coming in to see the execution and a strong military presence to try to prevent riots or escapes: ‘the city was filled with troops, and every avenue to the Castle was strongly guarded;  for a rescue was feared,’ (Chp XIII, p 308/9).    However Sykes/Walker seem to have little idea of where the execution was carried out.   Ben observes ‘a party of gentry, as I supposed they called themselves, that had secured the upper window of a house looking onto the scaffold, ‘  (Chp XIII, p 318).    The detail appears drawn from early 19th century accounts like Thackeray’s on public executions.    Thackeray described the execution of Courvoisier outside Newgate prison in London in July 1840 and mentions:

‘In one of the houses, near us, a gallery has been formed on the roof. Seats were here let, and a number of persons of various degrees were occupying them. Several tipsy dissolute-looking young men, of the Dick Swiveller cast, were in this gallery.’ http://www.exclassics.com/newgate/courv.htm

This would have been impossible in York.  The execution site faces St George’s Fields, a triangle of land at between the Rivers Foss and Ouse.    As the name ‘fields’ implies, there was no housing on this site because of the risk of flooding; a risk demonstrated by the floods of 2015.