From Wikipedia - the second single released by Sir Rod from his Out of Order album in 1988. He wrote the song with two of his band members: guitarist Jim Cregan and keyboardist Kevin Savigar. The structure of the lyrics is very similar to a Dylan song of the same title. The two men agreed to participate in the ownership of the song and share Sir Rod’s royalties.
Both songs are about hopes and fears for their children. This Dylan verse might also suggest a recipe for ageing well, a preparation for inevitable change which is manageable.
May your hands always be busy
May your feet always be swift
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of change shift
The Sir Rod version is easier on the ear and has been a favourite of mine since the 1990s.
Ageing has some benefits. You don’t have to look your best. You don’t have to speak, but when you do, you have permission to say more or less what you like. I’ve had a lifetime of saying the wrong things and it’s no better now. If your friends and relatives are still talking to you, they might fondly regard you as a grump (or in my case a legend - maybe). You might then have some wisdom to pass on if anyone is still listening.
This is a personal blog. I'm not selling anything other than myself - an inept older person who thinks he can write a bit. Use the search to find what you want. There are humorous senior moments, older role models and a plea for us all to stay mentally and physically active. Garden glimpses, family matters, from the archive, publishing/writing, sports, and my notebook. Otherwise the world is our limpet.
There is also a writing archive which needs some work - watch this space.
He’s actually left but goes back for his GCSE certificates. They’ve been a good year and its obvious every one likes them. Their targets have been met to over 90% academically and their range of awards in sports and music etc is awesome.
The event is fairly boring, but uplifting as well. As with many of these things it encourages reflection of how its all turned out since you were there.
I was DHB and had to do the lower school speech day. Mum comes to watch from the balcony at The Town Hall. I sit out front on the stage and all she can say is thank god I bought you some grey socks for tonight. First year in college, I went back for my certificates and sat with Jim Shoesmith.
Little did I know that within the month of Chris’ last speech day I would be attending Jim’s funeral.
You do relive some of your earlier life through your children. Louise kept me going full time recalling 13-16, trying to understand through my own experiences, what she was trying to say. Chris was less challenging or we were more relaxed. Anyway his development was more how we liked it to be.
I have few bad memories of sixth form.
Jim was an intermittent friend who died recently, and the funeral/cremation was in Crewe. Six hours in the car on the busiest road in Europe is not to be recommended. A small gathering, the chapel was too small to take many more. Jim’s vicar was on leave, so a locum stepped in – a stooping, condescending man who was trying to convince himself that ‘death was not the end’. There were no words that helped me to recognise Jim. I didn’t know him well, another quiet one, but he was the first of our schoolboy group to go (apart from Stephen Cole who died on on his 21st birthday and nearly killed his mother). Our Chris is entering the same stage, hanging out with his pals, drinking, trying to sort the world out. So the funeral left me with unfinished business, not anxiety, but there had been a gap of so many years since the 1960’s – what had happened to all us brave soldiers. Four of us turned up – Edward, Jim’s brother, Graham Cartwright, John Browning and myself. Graham wanted to talk, to have the discussion that might have made up for the vicar. John might have done. Ed never says anything. I was confused the whole thing too immediate. Had I stayed longer and had a few beers, it might have been different. I’ve gone over my life too many times to go over it again. I’m pretty sure who and what I am and funerals only give me a dim regret I didn’t turn out to be somebody else.
But it could’ve been another missed opportunity.
The Shoesmith’s were a mystery. They still are. They appeared from Barnsley in the fourth form, Edward with the awesome IQ who should have gone straight into the rapid stream, and Jim. Jim was competent, like the rest of us. Were they close? Enough for them. But you only found out what was going on by asking somebody else.
Jim was a middle-aged casualty – divorce, depression, estrangement from his daughter, but soon to be connected with his granddaughter, Lois. How do you deal with all that, buggered if I know. Not discussed at the funeral, yet central.
* The railway porter, the coalman and the Irishman. The Hillhouse Addys
The Addys of Hillhouse
The Walker heritage runs back from my dad. His father, Frank, was one of two grandfathers I never knew. On my mother’s side, the Addy line goes back to George who was born in 1845. From Kirkheaton and maybe a farming background, he became a railway porter possibly working on the Kirkburton line from Huddersfield. By the 1880s he and his family were on Willow Lane East, maybe working in Huddersfield. So it’s impressive to have a railway worker in the family, albeit we know nothing about him, though family rumour is that the ‘Shepley’ Addys were teetotal and a touch prim. We have a brown cow, which older brother might still have, in which Edward, his son’s whisky was stored on the mantle shelf.
This information comes from ‘Huddersfield Exposed’; Huddersfield railway station opened in 1847. All the different railway companies can be confusing, but I think Huddersfield and Manchester railway and canal company built a connection with Heaton Lodge using Huddersfield as a joint station with Huddersfield and Sheffield railway. Former was acquired by the London and North Western in 1847. Latter by Lancashire and Yorkshire. The line to Leeds ran right through Hillhouse over a long viaduct and embankment. The Kirkburton branch line opened in 1867, with stops at villages like Kirkheaton, so George could have had a choice. A porter was at the bottom of the station pecking order, but a secure job. Willow Lane East wasn’t lower middle class like Clara and Honoria streets, but it was Hillhouse.
Another branch line, owned by the Midland railway was completed in 1910. From Mirfield to Deighton, Fartown and Birkby. Finally Newtown, an ideal site for a goods yard, sidings and a station. The plans were abandoned at outbreak of war in 1914. We think the line carried coal up to the 1950s. Newtown sidings supplied the gas works. My dad needed a pass to cross the line from Willow Lane to our hen-run up under the wall of St John’s Rd.
Alder St coal hoppers. We called them schutes. Coming to living memory, I remember the noise of regular coal deliveries and lights on all night. The coal company sheds are in the yard behind the walls. Already documented the private contract that Wellington Mills had with two dedicated trucks. The line was constructed up Whitestone Lane to join the public tramway on Bradford Rd.This is an idea of what the Wellington Mill coal trucks looked like with hopper behind.
George’s son was Edward, a Fartown fanatic, born 1875. The other unknown grandad. He delivered coal with a horse and cart, out of Hillhouse sidings. Edward married Mary Ann Malone who’s parents came from the west coast of Ireland. There is a lot of duplication about family trees, covered in ‘Letters to my grandchildren’. Suffice to say that Edward came from Willow Lane East and Mary Ann from Turnbridge and they lived on a yard at the back of Whitestone Lane. Mary Ann’s parents traditionally would have first moved into the Upperhead Row area of Huddersfield town centre. But we think the move to Turnbridge address was to some form of early council housing.
So leisure was happening – organised and had to be paid for. Afforded by improved living conditions and wages. Cricket, football and rugby were the usual suspects and they were businesses even back then. Playing, coaching and spectating – and gambling, which was massive. Not as we know them today and there was a deal of hypocrisy. Better than bear-baiting however. Began as unregulated games of ball. Then the public schools, the emerging middle class and rules. Edward was around 20 when the Northern Rugby Union split off. Eventually mutated to Rugby League (1922). As you might expect it was about money and the snotty teachers and businessmen who didn’t approve of business methods in sport. Soccer has always been professional. Cricket grudgingly so I think until the early 20th century when the distinction between amateurs and professionals was abolished. It was as late as 1995 before rugby union went professional.
From Gordon and Enid Minter. The rugby union club first played on Rifle Fields, Greenhead, shared with the athletic club. In 1876, the club amalgamated with St. John’s Cricket Club at Fartown to form the Huddersfield Cricket and Athletic Club. St. John’s cricket field was laid out in the 1860s, home to Huddersfield United, members of the new District Cricket League (1891). Of sufficient quality to be a Yorkshire county ground. The Northern Union rugby team played from 1878 onward. As already mentioned, this team was part of the beginnings of rugby league. After the 1895 split many of the local village teams disbanded. A side representing traditional rugby union reconvened in 1909.
From Jane Springett, ‘Handsome Town’. Hillhouse was within easy walking distance of town whilst avoiding the worst of its noise and pollution. In 1852 the landowners, Thornhills of Fixby drew up plans for three interconnecting residential streets. Honoria, Clara and Eleanor Streets, named after Thornhill daughters. Houses were built, maybe spurred on when the horse drawn omnibuses started running along Bradford Road in 1858. The Willow and Whitestone Lanes building came after.
Hillhouse 1850 – maybe before it was HillhouseModern map
From Gordon and Enid Minter, ‘Old Huddersfield’ and David Jenkins, ‘Handsome Town’. Mary’s dad was Patrick who eventually, according to family legend, did a runner and died in a workhouse. Before that he laboured at a chemical works. That term in Huddersfield usually means dye works, so does that mean LB Holidays? The 1850 map, whilst showing very little, includes a small chemical works, but I’m not sure how important it was – could it have been Robinson’s? Also the small settlement called Newtown (10-14 terrace) dwellings, a Collegiate school and a corn mill. The Huddersfield Collegiate School was founded in 1838 as a fee-paying school administered by the Church of England and the headmaster was always an Anglican clergyman. The Collegiate was never as successful as its undenominational rival, Huddersfield College, and by the 1870s was in financial difficulties. They merged and moved to New North Road. The empty building was developed as a printing works by Alfred Jubb.
Looking at the history of Hollidays, in the 1830s, they were a company with many chemical interests, located at Tanfield. The connection with textiles began with distillation of the gas company ammonia waste for use in wool scouring, presumably Jarmain’s amongst others. They moved to Turnbridge to try and manage pollution. In the 1860s they began synthetic dye manufacture. The business had ups and downs, especially in the late nineteenth century, as a result of competition from Germany. By the 1920s it had become ICI. James Robinson and Co of Hillhouse Lane manufactured natural dyes. They suffered the same fate as Hollidays and moved on to other products after 1900.
The story, much as Lindley, is about the second half of the nineteenth century. Population increase, pressure on public health in overcrowded towns, factory and suburb development and eventual improved living conditions and wages. The railway revolution and coal helped power the economy. And we have an Irish couple in the family. Most of us have. Great grandmother Malone and Patrick emigrated from the West of Ireland later than the 1845-49 famine. Daughter Granny Addy was raised a catholic. So we need to summarise context in the next piece – coal, wool, transport and some of the social and political realities of the late nineteenth century. That will bring us to the twentieth century.
Mum’s mum, a widow, lived five minutes away next to the coal sidings and engine sheds on the main railway line. Another stone built terrace end and shared yard. When we slept over it seemed the coal siding lights were on all night and every few minutes there was a sudden noisy rush as a railway truck tipped its load into a chute. The chamber pot stunk. Newspaper, candle, matches and outside toilet key were looped with string on a bobbin hung behind the front door, but you didn’t go outside and down the yard once you were in bed. She had two kitchens. One at the back, a cellar really, dark and damp with bare stonework and a permanent smell of gas coming from the stove. The other was the one downstairs room with a big cast iron range, an upright piano, a single window with blackout curtains, a view of the yard and a sink in a cupboard. She also had a amazing floor-to-ceiling sideboard. Illuminated, with mirrors and carved pillars. It looked like a fairground organ. A large wicker armchair stood next to the table, in front of the window. Which child got to sit there had to win a war. As I was the smallest and youngest of the lot, tagging on at the end of the line, it was never me. This was where my mum grew up and it was here we spent Christmas Day.
When you work out ages, granny was seventy three in 1953, and looked it, with a round wrinkled face, hair in grey braids wrapped up around her head and circular glasses in black health service frames. I didn’t recognise her one morning with her hair down, younger somehow. Whatever the weather, she wore thick stockings and a hat and coat. Her toast was like eating a crisp biscuit. Mum worked, so granny looked after me when I was ill or during school holidays. One morning, between mum going and granny arriving, older brother broke my arm. He always had his nose in a comic or a book and an easy way to get at him was to hide them. That morning I threw one down the stairs and hid under my bed. Big mistake. The bedsprings got very close to my face each time he bounced. I used my arm as a pitprop, wedged between the floor and the bed. I still had the pot on when they took my tonsils out.
I went to Birkby primary school for a short time. There was nowhere for the boys to do a crap, so you’d either to ask a teacher about their lavs and they usually said no, or brave the girls’. A queue of them outside the WC chanting and pushing the door open. Not good. I shouted out very loud in the middle of a class for no reason, other than it had been on children’s TV the night before. Sent to the headmistress.
Older brother passed the 11+ and started at the high school in 1953. Huddersfield College, before it merged with Hillhouse and became Huddersfield New College.
Mum said Denis Compton was a dashing playboy. To me, he was about as remote as the royal family. When he scored the winning runs his hair flopped over his forehead. He became the man in the brylcreem adverts. According to dad, Len Hutton was the best cricket player in the world.
We moved to the suburbs in 1953. Three miles east of Huddersfield town centre and a two bedroom semi with a garden. Dad said later he’d got a mortgage for £4 a month. He’d a head for figures and skill with wood. His mum and dad ran a shop on Leeds Road. School at Hillhouse ‘Redcaps’ which offered a technical type of education and no qualifications. Then office jobs, The Pays Corps during the war, and ‘wages’ at The Yorkshire Electricity Board from 1947 to his retirement.
I remember the day we moved. Granny took me on the bus. Two buses to be accurate. I struggled back to my old school for a few weeks, but then changed to the new local primary. I was six years old.
More additional notes in 2022 following a visit with cousin Colin
Colin is quite a bit older than me. He recently had a dominant stroke which sadly affected his preferred hand as well as his speech. He came to Huddersfield to visit old haunts and see old friends. And us. He has received the best of care, and still is. He retains his computer skills and the following is a copy of his memories of the Addy’s of Whitestone Lane, Hillhouse.
They differ from mine and my family folklore. So grandad, Edward, was a coop employee who tended the horses which went out delivering coal. It seems he never was a teamster like it says on one of the certificates. Colin says he had an office job. Granny may have been millhand, but Colin remembers her as a coop cleaner. Our memories of the outside toilets and coal chutes are the same.
Since the Linlithgow talk for Big Dave and Joan, I wondered about making a permanent record – audiovisual presentation maybe. Looking at the literature, there’s miles and miles on both industrial and cricket history, but very little on the relationship between the two. 1700-1900 was important for both and both subjects are huge and often confusing – a chronological muddle. Who did what, when and where? I’ve just realised that I’ve written an introduction 6/7 times and left them all. Some sort of OCD and no completion. So, the solution or should I say one solution is to pick out a small number of moments that mean something to me, rather than labour through dates and names, though they can be relevant. I’ve chosen two such moments, the first being hand-loom weavers.
The handloom weavers.
Around 1810, a time of massive change, my great great great grandparents had a small holding up in Lindley in which there was a hand-loom. It’s a personal connection to this period. And there’s s bit of cricket as well.
In 1470, Yorkshire, mostly the West Riding, was the third largest wool cloth producer in Britain. In 1668, two-thirds of Britain’s exports were wool cloth. The remote hills and dales near Huddersfield and Halifax were dotted with family dwellings. A cottage industry. A plot for crops and animals. Indoor space for receiving and preparing wool for spinning, carried out by women and children. A hand loom on which the men produced cloth for market. There was a pecking order. Master clothiers, or groups of them, employed journeyman weavers working in the ‘shop’ of the clothier or in their own homes. Credit was easy and start-up costs were low. Also family and friends or religious organisations financed the workshops. They provided prepared wool and sold the finished cloth to merchants. At the bottom of the pile were less skilled weavers who only received work when it was plentiful. This way of working was the same for many backstreet unregulated workshops which produced pots and pans, shoes, firearms and locks as well as textiles.
The skilled journeymen had the best of things. They’d no need to travel to work, other farming and household tasks could be shared and they had spare time which many used for reading and self-education and leisure. They may also have aspired to the next level of master clothier.
These families were reputed to be fierce and independent, their remote locations well away from landowners, their agents and churches. Society was thus structured. Elite landowners, aristocrats and working labourers, albeit skilled and possibly well off. In between, a small middle class of business men, schoolteachers and vicars. The elite ran everything from parliament to the local courts. Like this for hundreds of years. A short hard life for many. Poor quality food, clothing and hygiene. No one moved. Time measured in seasons. Nothing changed.
Labour intensive preindustrial agriculture
There were games, including a form of cricket down in the South East of England. Impromptu folk cricket between villages and parishes. Landowners and workers side by side. And one-off stake matches arranged by wealthy patrons to indulge their passion in gambling. They hired talented locals to make up their teams – the first professionals. The games were popular – the first spectators. The game wasn’t played in the midlands and the north until the nineteenth century.
Over the next 150 years or so, everything changed. Not neatly in a straight line. Many old and new practices existed side by side until the new took over. By the 1890s the population had quadrupled, living mostly in towns where the new industrial processes were flourishing. The landowners and aristocrats had become remote. The workers were organising and had the vote. Wages were rising, working and living conditions were improving. Mechanisation produced cheap quality goods and the workers were the market.
There was time and space for pursuits like cricket which spread northwards from its South East and London origins. Many clubs were founded in the Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire. The big stake games died out, leagues were formed. The number of professionals expanded and thrived as did the crowds. Making money out of sport however, particularly cricket, was disapproved of by the new large powerful middle classes and brought about the ‘amateur backlash’.
The period between the pre-industrial and late Victorian times was very painful. If it were possible, the new life in the towns was worse than in the country. Lots of people living close together in small terraces was an epidemic waiting to happen, especially cholera. Women and children worked 14 hour days with the new industrial processes. Time was measured by shifts and whistles. Leisure more or less stopped.
Hand loom workshop
So where did the handloom weavers fit? Mechanisation proceeded apace in Lancashire cotton and was soon adopted by the Yorkshire wool industry. Hand power was replaced by water and then steam. By the late nineteenth century handloom weaving was more or less dead. It did have a life up until then alongside industrial development – 1840s before power looms became sufficiently reliable to compete. After the Napoleonic Wars however (1815), the returning servicemen and the general population rise inflated the labour market. Sadly, employers in the ‘shops’ were able to cut wages and many weavers fell among hard times, the family income being made up from women and children’s wages. Eventually the weavers moved into the factories, or found work on building and railway sites.
Industrial landscape with farmer looking on
I’m grateful to Andrew Smith for his masters thesis reference to Dalton CC, formed in 1831 from local handloom weavers. From the club secretary, Johnathan Bradley – Dalton were the second club to be formed in Huddersfield, following Lascelles Hall (1822). They played at Carr Pit, moving to the current ground in 1859. A time of uncertainty, yet opportunity to practice and play. So, in 1842, good enough to challenge Sheffield CC for the championship of Yorkshire according to the Sheffield Independent, presumably at Carr Pit or Sheffield.
Dalton CC play overlooking Kilner Bank in a new incarnation with Edgerton CC. Dad and I, in the late 1950s, early 1960s, frequently got the bus to Moldgreen and walked over the bank to watch ‘Town’. In summer, just a few times, we stopped for the cricket, maybe a lemonade and a bite of tea. There was one memorable occasion. Turning slight left off Broad Lane to go up hill beyond the Brooks Arms. A learner driver turned right and followed us up the pavement. I ran on, the car soon got stuck between a wall and a trolley pole. Dad simply stepped into the road – cool as you like. We carried on to the match. Around 1966, when I stopped going to matches with dad, our gang from New College pitched up one Bonfire Night. Can’t remember how we got to know about beer, food and amazing pickled onions at the cricket club. We had a great time, welcomed by 90% of the members.
From my research which I have now given up, the Walkers go back to 1813 when Eli Walker was born in Golcar. So my GGGgrandfather. Aged 41 in 1854 he was described as a woollen weaver. As we have seen, this could mean a number of things, but I’d like to think he worked from home up in a small Lindley small holding. We can thus assume he became surplus to requirements and moved to a factory. His son, William, in 1882 was a stoker, presumably keeping the steam going in Sykes’ mill. The very trade that put his dad out of work.
Interesting if loose connections between the messy stuttering start of industry and the overlap between power and handlooms, and the freedoms afforded by the pace of living before industry which continued with domestic patterns of work prior to factory life. It’s great to be able to say I am a direct descendants of these times. And a beneficiary. Trolley buses, cars, organised sports, boys’ grammar schools and spending money. And I have inherited the handloom weaver fierceness and independence – a prickly dislike of authority which many people call a shoulder chip. I keep it nice and sharp. This matches my hunter-gatherer fight and flight emotional traits and not being good enough, taught me on my father’s knee. Difficult maybe, but not dogged by feelings of failure.
Anyone want to come right up to date? Social upheaval, working from home, pandemic, redundancies. Ring any bells? Within less than a year. Immediate government financial help. In contrast, the industrial revolution took 100 years and more and 50 years or so of hardship before government intervened. Yet it was capitalist free enterprise that eventually lead to improved living and working conditions. I wonder?
The piano was a middle class signal of wealth and status. My grannie had one, so not just middle class then – grandad delivered coal for the Coop.
* Handloom weavers (2)
I’ve deleted my first version of this, by accident, because WordPress have gone to a new editing process which is a minefield.
Hilary Pollard informs us – The handloom Weaver you show is Ishmael Whittle who lived in Lepton and was a Churchwarden for many years. He married Anne Spivey of Almondbury and they adopted Louisa Duran’s, the daughter of Anne’ sister after the sister’s death and the father could not cope with a child. Though we are not related to him we always call him Uncle Ishmael as that was how Louie always referred to him. My son has the writing slope which the congregation of T John’s Church Lepton gave to him when he retired as Churchwarden and Sunday School teacher. Brilliant Hilary thank you.
I need to point out that my kin, Eli, is not in the pic.
The point of this piece is a random discovery of historical contexts around the time of my hand loom weaver, Eli. That is 1820s to 1870s. It’s the Regency period which can refer, according to Wiki, ‘to various stretches of time; some are longer than the decade of the formal Regency, which lasted from 1811 to 1820. The period from 1795 to 1837, which includes the latter part of George III’s reign and the reigns of his sons George IV and William IV, is sometimes regarded as the Regency era, characterised by distinctive trends in British architecture, literature, fashions, politics, and culture.’
Note: French Revolution 1789-99; Napoleonic wars 1803-15; American Civil war 1860s.
Andrew Taylor, Times November 7th reviews ‘The Time Traveller’s Guide to Regency Britain’ by Ian Mortimer. It is a cheat and a cheek, but I will not be buying the book. Time of extremes, ‘Britain attained unparalleled wealth and power, but more than a quarter of its population needed poor relief, and almost one in five died before their fifth birthday. … the Earl Of Essex spent £10000 a year merely on maintaining his garden and park. Forty odd miles away by contrast, an agricultural labourer and his wife were trying to feed themselves and their five children under eight on a combined annual income of £22 2s.’ There was the expensive war with France. Sewage-strewn squalor as 300 people in Liverpool shared a couple of privies. Huge alcohol intake. Time of Beau Brummell, wit, elegance and simplicity in clothes, gambling in all classes. Yet a glimmer of change – an evangelical movement concerned with slavery, the condition of the poor and feminism.
My handloom weaver would not have been aware of all this, isolated up in Cowrakes, Lindley. I like to think of him as a skilled weaver, so life was hard but his family would have been reasonably comfortable. Cowrakes is still a bit out of the way, but the housing estates are gradually taking over.
In addition to the Times curation, I’m grateful to Derran, one of my coffee-zoom pals for reminding me of ‘The 4 loom weaver’ from an album called ‘Gallant Lads are We; Songs of the British Industrial Revolution’. The ‘4 loom weaver’ comes from the Lancashire cotton industry, starting in the 1790s as the ‘Oldham Weaver’, then ‘Poor Cotton Weaver’ or ‘The Poor Cotton Wayver’, published on a broadsheet during the depression years that followed The Battle of Waterloo and the close of the Napoleonic Wars. Ewan MacColl some twenty-five years ago, sang it in the earliest days of the folk song revival. He collected it from Becket Whitehead of Delph, near Oldham, Lancashire. The current version of the ‘4 loom weaver’ is factory version from the 1860s during the Lancashire Cotton famine. The mills were on short time due to American Civil War when north blockaded the south and cotton could be not exported.
Michael Morpurgo of ‘Warhorse’ fame has recorded a series of Radio4 podcasts about folk songs – songs of the people. The ‘4 loom weaver’ is one of his examples of a protest song, a long tradition maintained to the present. The best come from personal tales of lived experience rather than a call to action advert more about the singer than the song. We live in times of economic uncertainty when stuff is not our fault which we did not sign up for. Poverty and inequality are still with us. These are some of the injustices found in protest folk songs.
* The handloom weaver (3), the stoker and the greengrocer. The Lindley Walkers.
The point of this piece was to expand on handloom (2) on what world my ancestors were living in. I only go back to the early 1800s but this was George III, Regency, George IV and Victoria (1837 onward). Living in villages up in the hills and then in districts of an expanding town, they worked in the mills and industries that supported textiles, be it card clothing, dyeing or the railways and domestic coal delivery. Did they know what was going on? Did they care? Handloom (2) does at least compare what the elite might have been doing compared with their very poor neighbours. I realised however that there was still more to say about our local people in their neighbourhoods.
Even in 1933 Weatherhill and Cowrakes are out in the sticks. Down West Street to the junction with Birchencliff Hill Rd, turn right and that’s where the village building took place. Carry on to the right of the map takes you to Edgerton.
Just a brief reminder that events are not nicely in a straight line. Similarly, accounts of various authors can seem to contradict one other. Suffice to say we are talking about the nineteenth century as if it was in two halves, early and late. For people like my ancestors, early was little more than a step from agricultural poverty. Late was real growth in income and living conditions. Roughly after 1830, more people lived in towns than the country and the factory machines were on the rise, taking over from the domestic textile industry. Water power and then steam. Overlapping these two eras were the Handloom Weavers.
The family information taken from primary sources – death, birth and marriage certificates. The background comes from textbooks and my imagination. For example, I prefer to think of my handloom ancestors working up in the hills with some land for crops and maybe an animal.
So my great great great grandfather, Eli, was a handloom weaver in Lindley. Born in the early nineteenth century. From his son’s birth certificate we know he was working the loom in the 1850s. In 1882 he and his family were living at Yew Tree Rd. Eli was said to be a clothier, but this could mean a number of things. As a romantic family historian, I want Eli to have been a weaver in a workshop or at home.
What sort of cloth did he make? This from David T. Jenkins, ‘Huddersfield: A Most Handsome Town’. By 1851, the year of The Great Exhibition, Huddersfield’s workforce totalled over 30,000. Roughly 3000 men and a little less women were in textiles. The type and quality of cloth was wider than any other area in Britain. Mostly for the home market, with some international trade as well. Intricate fancy woollen cloth required the handloom, especially when production runs were short, and handloom weaving was thus an essential part of the local scene until the 1890s. Fancy waistcoats gradually went out of fashion but there were still plenty of novel and ingenious products like cushions and tablecloths.
From Jennifer Stead, ‘Handsome Town’. As late as 1856 around half of woollen industry was home based. Lindley presumably is a good example of an early village. Self-contained, unplanned and industrial. Insanitary, squalid, feudal in deference to the local factory master (not domestic handloom weavers). Devoid of comfort. Two rooms. With spinning, weaving and winding there was little room for much else. Chairs, table, bakestone, stone sink. Beds on top of looms and perched on stairs. Such conditions persisted in the town, the poorest families sandwiched in courts and yards. By 1850 the outlying villages were changing to single class suburbs. For example, Edgerton for the elite. Hillhouse for the lower middle class – clerks, tradesmen, manufacturers. Lindley presumably similar. 1880s gas lighting, running water and drainage. Carpets, rugs, sideboard. Earth and water closets. One of the downsides was the loss of the queue and gossip at the local well.
From Richard Dennis, ‘Handsome Town’ – Lindley village joined up with Huddersfield around 1867. Newly constructed villas were home to merchants and traders. Solid middle class which I think applies to buildings below the clock and toward Edgerton. My imagination is still up in the hilly section above the clock and toward Salendine Nook. I also have to remember this dream is probably the early part of the nineteenth century and the middle class applies to the second half.
Information from Wiki, ‘Huddersfield Exposed’ and ‘Discovering Old Huddersfield’ (Gordon and Enid Minter). 1841 know as Lindley-cum-Quarmby. 2881 inhabitants in 1848. Home to four textile establishments, two of which are of interest. Acre Mills, makers of card clothing where great grandad William (son of Eli) worked as a stoker in 1880 and later as a joiner’s labourer. He was born in 1854 and died in 1927. Part of the new mechanical steam order. He is variously described as a steam engineer, engine tenter and stoker. I suspect he shovelled coal into the fire under the boiler. He later worked as a joiner’s labourer in a card clothing works, so the other titles in the mill would have been above his pay grade, especially the tenter who was king of the machines and kept the factory going by keeping the machines in tune. Card clothing separates entangled raw wool in preparation for spinning. William had three sisters who remain unknown. Between 1883 and 1922 he lived at Weatherhill Rd.
1897 Sykes Mill became part of the English Card Clothing Co Ltd. In the twentieth century, cousin Gordon, son of George Major, worked here when it was known as the ‘wire works’. Lindley benefited hugely from the Sykes family philanthropy and many buildings where they lived and worked are still around today. The mill was sold to the NHS and is now the site of out-patients.
The guy next to the nurse with a bandaged eye, we think is William. He is in the old Royal Infirmary we think for cataract surgery.
The other company of interest is Wellington Mills. Grandad Frank Walker was a cloth finisher here.
William married Harriet Bailey in 1882. Her father was Eneas, a smallholder of Cowrakes, Lindley. He grew crops, kept animals and worked a loom. Harriet was one of 13 children. William had 2 sons, Frank, and Arthur who died of meningitis aged 9. Frank was born in 1883 and died in 1943. He began as a cloth finisher at Pat Martins, Lindley, and lived on Weatherhill Rd, Clara St. Hillhouse and then back to Lindley, West St. By 1940 he was managing a grocers on Leeds Rd. Cloth finishing covers a number of processes which enhance performance and appearance of cloth, such as dyeing. Frank is likely to have been a supervisor.
Pat Martin, a Belfast designer, made fancy woollens on Spring St. in 1859. 1868 the company moved to Wellington Mills, specialising in plain and fancy worsted. His sons carried on when Pat died in 1880. Largest employer in the town. Had it’s own contract coal delivery from Alder St. on the main tramway. Dad remembered the coal trucks.
Frank and Annie Walker. Looks like a wedding. He was respectable middle class shopkeeper.Marriage certificate 1912Much of the early family information comes from certificates
This piece goes back and forward a little, mostly to make sure the information is properly referenced. But it does reflect how history is written or how muddled I can easily become. We are not submitting for a Phd. Some background now from ‘Discovering Old Huddersfield’ by Gordon and Enid Minter. Lindley had over 2000 inhabitants by the middle of the nineteenth century (a village). It still seems to be in two halves. Built up along Lidget St. and this seems to have been a middle class development. Frank Walker on West St. might just qualify. But William and Eli lived out in the country. Lidget St. refers to a Lidgate Lane, a swing gate as an entrance to fields. The Coop was opened here in 1860 and steam trams ran from St George’s Square from 1883.
A brewery operated from 1850 at Weatherhill, supplying 4-5 locals. Netherwood’s, it went out of business around 1900. Just beyond the brewery, West Street becomes Cowrakes Road. Originally a single farmstead called Cowrakes. Rake is an old English word for a steep, narrow track where animals were formed into single file. A workhouse nearby dated from as early as 1813. St Stephen’s parish church, built between 1828-30 to commemorate success at the battle of Waterloo. There is a New Connexion Chapel on Lidget St., but it looks as though Frank Walker and Harriet Bailey were married in High St. Huddersfield. No doubt all the family’s religious affiliations would have been mostly non-conformist.
I need to complete some closing remarks. I think it goes without saying that I identify with these forebears. Independence was fostered in the domestic textile trade and I guess the non-conformist trend in chapels originates here. There are no kings and queens and I wonder if the guys ever bothered. They had enough to worry about. Frank became a shopkeeper and lived in a middle class villa. Otherwise it’s solid working class until my father some 100 years later gets a mortgage. There’s a lot of moving house during the nineteenth century. During a downturn in wages, families would move to lower rents or vice-versa. Flexible, the opposite of experiences in the current pandemic. You’re encouraged to go for broke to buy and house, and then it’s a liability. Small pox was rife in their time. Legislation was passed to ensure children were vaccinated. Not everyone had the vote. The manufacturers held sway, but were also benefactors. Some similarities with today but we have it a lot easier with housing and wages, though some might not think so. We are saturated with news, not always helpful.
So yes I identify with their character and I keep my shoulders nice and sharpened. But they had a hard life. Is it what you get used to?
Forever young
From Wikipedia - the second single released by Sir Rod from his Out of Order album in 1988. He wrote the song with two of his band members: guitarist Jim Cregan and keyboardist Kevin Savigar. The structure of the lyrics is very similar to a Dylan song of the same title. The two men agreed to participate in the ownership of the song and share Sir Rod’s royalties.
