Hello Members all and welcome to the third and last in my miniseries of Yorkshire’s history, for tourers and all interested parties alike.
When you look at the amount of change we’ve covered in the first two episodes, let’s say 1700 years of written history, and compare it to the 250 years or so we’re going to cover in this one, the speed of change gets faster and faster. And even in first segment, the long 18th century, from 1660 to about 1780 ish, it realluy kicks off with the introduction of the modern, industrial age.
The place to start is that from 1660 something extraordinary happens in English history. A previously impervious line is breached – the 5 million population barrier. And it’s not just breached, it’s smashed into smithereens. Whenever the population had approached that number in the past, a Malthusian crisis had slid into place, and down it went again. Not this time; by 1801, the population of England and Wales was over 9 million. And a drift of the population to the towns also begins; traditionally only 10-15% lived in towns; by 1800, it would be 30% and would rocket after that. And finally the national and regional distribution changes of wealth; northern England becomes the economic and social powerhouse, not the south. Even within Yorkshire the distribution will change; by 1800 two out of three of Yorkshire’s population of 860,000 will live in the West Riding, and the economic advantage of the East riding and York will be gone
The scale of industrial and population change in the West Riding left North and East in the shade, but the growth of towns is a general feature of the 18th century. It was boom times for regional centres like Bedale, Thirsk, Northallerton, Masham, Beverley and on and on; you can walk into any number of lovely towns in Yorkshire which were rebuilt in brick in Georgian years, and still retain that character; and even the growing industrial towns were focussed on their markets. These larger wool towns built greater and greater cloth halls to bring small manufacturers, merchants and sellers together; if you want to see the very best of them, go to the great Piece hall in Halifax, which has been renewed relatively recently, and which I finally got to see. The original was built in 1779,called the Piece Hall because it was a place where makers could sell their ‘Pieces’ of wool or cloth to merchants. But There were cloth halls in Leeds, and Wakefield and Huddersfield, among others.
Sheffield meanwhile remained primarily a cutlery town, although in 1742, the first sign of a new future arrived, when Benjamin Huntsman started his experiments with Crucible steel, a new process for producing harder steel. This, in the end, would help turn Sheffield into the steel capital of the world.
Across Yorkshire, the 18th and 19th centuries were a time of massive growth, confidence and civic pride in towns of all size, which contrasts with the struggles many have today, hollowed out by the internet and online selling.
Economic growth was super charged by ever improving communication. There were new water ways, and the arrival of canals – the opening of the Rivers Calder and Aire to navigation to Leeds and Wakefield was completed by 1704 for example, and John Smeaton carried the canal on to Halifax in 1758; there were improvement on the River Ouse, with trade carried by the traditional all-purpose Humber, keel, single-masted and square-rigged. The same happened on the Rivers Derwent, Don and Hull.
The, the earliest Yorkshire Turnpike trust, improving major trunk roads, was set up in 1736; the system of stage coaches also improved speed of communication. This was a national phenomenon of course, but how many other counties have Blind Jack of Knaresborough, more properly John Metcalf, a diver, swimmer, card player and fiddler, who managed to build 180 miles of turnpike between 1765 and 1792. Individuals and Familes like this were making fortunes left right and centre.
Although industry grows and expands, we are still shy of the steam driven factory age, by and large, although Richard Arkwright opened Cromford Mill in Derbyshire in 1771. Steam engines were introduced into many industries though – such as into coal mines from about the 1730s; but small scale producers continue to drive production; coal miners often remained farmers as well for example. Many branches of the iron industry could be done locally – nail making was a rural craft which required little capital, and so was seasonal – it came to an end during harvest time. It’s the same general story in woollens, but despite that strength of domestic production the West Riding outstripped its competitors even before the factory system – production of broad cloth was 3 ½ times larger in 1770 than in 1730. And you can see it many places in Yorkshire – the Dales profited too, it’s not about massive industrial complexes yet – so small mills appeared, using the power of water in places like Hawes in Wensleydale.
This dual employment made the West Riding comparatively rich – I mean folks would look pretty poor to us now, but by comparison by the 18th century the West Riding was a high wage economy for all. The influence of industrialisation spread more widely than you might think, because it also meant agricultural employers now had to compete with wages offered by iron, coal or woollen manufacturer. This is completely different in southern counties like Oxfordshire; their, rural wages were soon the lowest in the country.
Slowly, industries did became consolidated, as wealthy merchants began to dominate the access to market, and enforce piece work on cottagers; but independent rural producers remain active well into the 19th century. Their houses were often clustered together in villages, with upper stories with outsized mullioned windows to let in maximum light for the family loom.
The whole West Riding set up was designed for innovation and investment. There was a variety of industries side by side – different types of woollen production, worsted and kerseys, different industries, iron and coal and colliers, and a dual economy of farming and rural craft. It gave ordinary people a variety of opportunities, and the chance to switch when times were hard in one sector. The density of skilled workers gave regional merchants the economies of scale that led them to outperform their competitors, and build the kind of capital that would be used by the later large scale industrialisation, and railway building.
In the countryside the big stories are about ‘improvement’, in little inverted commas, the ideas of the enlightenment, crop rotation, new crops, fertilsation that sort of thing – and enclosure. It’s difficult to express just how much confidence in the future there was for many; anything was possible, with new crops, new rotation techniques – potatoes, clover, turnips. Technical improvements such as the lighter more efficient Rotherham plough which was invented in 1730 – I am told it would be used by George Washington, presumably he went back to it like Cincinnatus and Elton John. The progressive spirit obviously didn’t get everywhere; one steward described his tenants as
Like old cart horses, one can’t thrust them out of their old beaten track
And there were many family farms in Yorkshire, of less that 50 acres. But the point is – the steward was complaining, because now change was no longer the dirty word it had been in medieval times, when custom and the old ways were what mattered.
And all over Yorkshire, the 18th and early 19 centuries was a time when common field systems are very often enclosed, either by agreement or enforced by the larger more influential local bigwigs through parliamentary enclosure, and the process took off from 1729 onwards. I think this is the period when as a result the Dales are covered and parcelled up into neat fields with dry stone walls; the walls had existed before, but in by no means such a number as they do know. Enclosure is of course a very controversial process; it may have increased efficiency, though to a much lesser extent than once thought; but many poorer people lost access to common land with very little compensation. At least in the north of England there was alternative employment available – but that will bring us at some point to the hideous conditions of the shock cities of the 19th century as the stream to urban centres becomes a flood.
It meant, though, that the 18th century was a time of great wealth for gentry, and you can see the evidence etched in stone – large improved and stone built gentry houses from the period are common survivals – Shibden Hall, Ilkley Manor house are just two examples if you want to go and have a look. There is little new building in timber in any part of Yorkshire by this stage. The new houses are comfortable and regular, and their design also show a new social trend. Servants are now fewer in number, and rather than being almost part of the family, a social separation begins; many now have their own quarters, a habit which began to spread with the return of Charles II in 1660..
It is also the period of great estates, some absolute leviathans, as several peers consolidated their estates and made money from industry and mineral extraction – this is the time of Castle Howard for example, and the Marquis of Rockingham and the Palladian extravaganza that is Wentworth Woodhouse. Another masterpiece of architecture relied on a darker source of wealth, which also of course contributed directly or indirectly to many in society. So, in 1759, Edwin Lascelles commissioned Robert Adam to create Harewood House, and Capability Brown to landscape its grounds. Edwin Lascelles used the wealth generated by his father Henry Lascelles, who had created a plantation business in Barbados. It was based on the most brutal form of chattel slavery, a form that reduced the lives of innumerable people from West Africa to mere objects. The debate about how far slavery contributed to the industrial revolution is one marked by a full and frank exchange of views which is far from finished, but it is impossible to look at Harewood House and conclude anything other than the impact there must have been at least significant.
Growing and spreading wealth had another impact in the first faltering steps of a new industry, still small in the 18th century, but now leading the inhabitants of places as diverse as Barcelona and Bibury to please tell visitors to please leave them alone and never come back. I speak of tourism. Leisure time for the well off. It really is small – but people like Celia Fiennes and Lybbe Powys are travelling round the countryside, arranging to see houses and writing about what they find. And also – visiting Spas.
Spas were not entirely new; Buxton and Bath had been famous since the 16th century at least – I think Dudley’s favourite Dudley went to Buxton or Bath, and Marty Queen of Scots to Buxton. But more and more spas were opening up in other places too now, and among the middle and upper classes they were just the place for social mixing. This I s a century when the middle classes get to talk on more equal terms with the aristocracy – because they can now buy access, and in many ways this is great, society is opening up, and unusually high in England compared to the continent. But it is not even – working classes get increasingly left behind.
Two of the most important spa towns were in Yorkshire. Harrogate is a stunningly attractive town which displays all the signs of great Georgian & Victorian civic pride with public buildings – assembly rooms, theatres, with public paths and gardens. The springs at Harrogate had been discovered as far back as the 16th century, now towards the end of the 18th, Harrogate became a destination town, and one of the greatest in the country in the 19th century.
And then medicinal springs were also discovered at Scarborough. Scarborough was a major fishing port, as were many others up and down the East coast, a crucial part of the wealth of the north and east ridings; and in fact Whitby was home to Captain James Cook for a while. But Scarborough also became known for a radical new concept – bathing in the sea, not because you’d been tipped off your fishing ketch and were drowning, but for fun! On Health grounds! I mean Weymouth might have words with this claim, but Scarborough is one of the very first places where sea bathing became popular; there’s a painting by Ramsey in 1770 which shows a purpose built hotel the Red House, and lots of pavilions on the beach, and assistants rushing around with towels and costumes for the great and the good, though knotted hankies, deck chairs and rolled up trousers not yet a feature. Nor naughty postcards – but that will all arrive in time, of course. Scarborough was of course first and foremost a vibrant and very large fishing port, with hundreds of boats – lord knows what the fishermen must have thought.
Right now, since I have brought you up to the end of the 18th century – now things get serious. Here is a visitor to Leeds in 1884
Leeds like all great manufacturing cities in England is a dirty, smoky, disagreeable town – perhaps the ugliest and least attractive town in all England
You could find plenty of quotes like this; in 1909 a journalist from the Boston Globe described walking through Sheffield
What struck every observant delegate was the utter blankness of the faces …stooped shoulders, hollow chests, ash coloured faces, lightless eyes…
And were are not talking about members of parliament here. This is the great period of muck and brass, cities worshipping what the Victorian critic John Ruskin called, the ‘great Goddess of getting on’.
19th century England is a fascinating period; so full of energy, opportunity, innovation, progress and life; so full of exploitation, dirt, death, disease and deprivation.
First things first; population goes utterly bonkers – well certainly it does from a historical perspective. Yorkshire goes from 860,000 people in 1801, to 3½ million a hundred years later. All three ridings increase, but the West Riding outstrips them all, 2.7m in 1901. A time traveller to the North and East ridings would remark on some change maybe; in the West Riding their heads would explode. But of course it’s not just the numbers, it’s where they live and how crowded they are; it’s about galloping, uncontrolled and unplanned urbanisation. And York is no longer anywhere near the top of the population tree; it did increase, and hit 65,000 by 1901, but in 1851 Sheffield had 135,000; in Bradford the growth was extraordinary; in 1780 had just 4,000 people, 70 years later, by 1851 it had increased 25 fold to over 100,000. I could go on.
Hand in hand with the population explosion is of course mechanisation and the factory system. The all famous Boulton and Watt steam machines were initially expensive and high investment, so the change did not happen overnight. But the first steam powered factory in Yorkshire was at Leeds, Bean Ing Mill in 1797; here for the first time, a steam powered factory integrated the entire process of carding, fulling, spinning, dyeing and finishing into one, enormous, complex installation.
Mills then proliferated and by 1820s the factory system was in full flow. Whereas the first century of industrialisation had been powered by Water, built on a human scale along rivers often in quite remote or rural situations, now king coal steadily took over. That meant smoke, dirt, pollution, churned out from factories and domestic fires. Most historians would agree that while there are a whole raft of contributory factors why England industrialised first – from finance, politics, social change, population growth, the slave trade and on and on, the big one, the one common dominating factor was the transformation of energy supply which coal provided. No other single factor had anything like the same impact.
Coal production itself was industrialised in the vast expansion of demand and trade. The first planned colliery village was Waterloo, built in the West riding by the Fentons who became so wealthy they became known as the ‘coal kings’. But it’s a business where aristocracy succeed primarily, because they own the land, and have the capital to invest. This included peers like the Duke of Norfolk, and particularly the Earls Fitzwilliam. They designed a model colliery at Elscar with miners’ cottages which unlike many appear to have been well designed and worth living in. By the late 19th century pit villages were built for high density living, with pubs, shops churches – and pretty awful water closets.
The scale of the increase was mind blowing, as mines became deeper and bigger. In the words of the Beatles, here comes the stats – coal production in Yorkshire went from 8 million tons in 1851, to 783 million tons in 1913. Good golly, miss Molley. What percentage increase is that? Answers on a postcard, but whatever it is it’s a big number. Along the way of course came disasters – the worst individual disaster being the Oaks Colliery in 1866 where 361 men were killed. It is one of the least attractive aspects of the industrial revolution that the mine had suffered a smaller disaster in 1847, an inquiry followed which had made a series of safety recommendations – none of which were implemented by the colliery owner. Who knew eh?.
By the end of the 19th century coal was dominated by powerful employers and the Miners Federation of Great Britain organised strikes to improve the appalling conditions; the 1913 strike called out a million men. By this stage, Yorkshire had acquired a reputation for militancy – the strike support in Yorkshire at 6:1 far outstripped the national average of supports for strikes of 4:1.
The other big enabler of industrialisation of course were the railways. In 1834 the merchants of Hull, which had been incredibly successful and become England’s fourth largest port by the way, was worried by competition from nearby Goole. So they got together with businessmen from Leeds, and commissioned one George Stephenson to open a line from Leeds to Selby and by 1840 to Hull. It was a time of ambitious rail magnates, none bigger than George Hudson, the so-called Railway King, who established the York and Midland railway company and had a massive influence on the early development of railway in England. He was also twice mayor of York, and responsible for breaching the city walls to bring the railways into York. That might be why the National Railway museum is in York and well worth a visit for sure, stupendous big engineering which I promise you don’t have to be an enthusiast to love. Sadly Railway king George was forced to flee the country in 1849 for financial chicanery, and only able to return in 1870, only a year before his death.
By then also King Cotton had also arrived in Yorkshire from Lancashire, into the Craven district of the West Riding. The most successful in early days was Joshua Fielden from Todmorden, who is a great example of the potential for ordinary people to make it big. He came from a long line of farmer-weavers the kind of multi tasking small producers I talked about earlier. By 1832, from a small start he had a fully powered industry, with 39,000 mechanised spindles, 684 power looms, and 1000 dependant handloom weavers. They remained patriarchs of Todmarden for 4 generations. Sadly, and unlike some other more philanthropic employers, they provided very little by way of public facilities. We’ll talk about a better employer in Titus Salt, in a few minutes.
Iron and steel production continued to expand at a similar rate to Coal; Sheffield continued to grow and innovate, especially with the invention in 1856 of a new process, which made steel easier, quicker and cheaper to manufacture. It was patented by one Thomass Bessemer, and modestly, he called it the Bessemer Process, and this would live for ever in textbooks. He was also duly awarded a gong. By 1850, the Sheffield district produced 90% of British steel, and half all European Steel. It still led the world in cutlery production which had not been forgotten, and which was helped in 1743 by the invention of plate silver by one Thomas Boulsover. Plate silver, as in the Antiques Roadshow and ‘Oh that’s only plate, not worth very much at auction’, plate silver as you may or may not know, is an alloy of copper and silver. It is at least shiny, looks pretty, and you can keep small children occupied by getting them to clean it every time they complain of being bored.
In the second half of the 19th century, Middlesborough, right in the North of Yorkshire, saw enormous growth in steel production also so that by 1913 it contributed half the national steel output. As Middlesborough grew, Sheffield reckoned it needed to find blue waters, and added tool making to their armoury.
This could become a procession of industrial stories, and that would take for ever, so I think I’ll not do that, but start to generalise a bit. You might think industrialisation would include a deadening process of homogenisation, with all towns and cities looking the same, big smokey factories churning out the same stuff. But actually, as the great historian Asa Briggs emphasised, the opposite happened. Well, I mean yes to the smokey thing, but each place developed their own specialisation, and built cultures and traditions around that and their local history. Rivalries emerged between them all, and in this time of enormous civic pride, each city and their associated business families and elites sought to express that in grand public buildings and architecture. Each town and city developed strategies; Bradford began to take over as the centre of the textile industry, so Leeds started to concentrate in Engineering. Essentially we are talking a period by the end of the 19th century when Britain was the workshop of the world, and the West Riding of Yorkshire led Britain.
But while of course there were many winners, and the pride of place was felt by most, rich and poor, it also had a dreadful human cost for some.
There was money to be made, and most industrialists seemed to have been very careless about how it was made, and who paid the price. The demand for labour led to vast, unplanned and hideously inadequate housing, with people crammed into unsanitary conditions, living in the aforesaid smokey hellscape. There was a mass immigration of young people from surrounding villages, not just from general economic growth but because with the factory system, production switched from the home towards central factories. So in came the young in their droves, escaping rural poverty and a new exciting life; the average age in Bradford in 1841 was under 20 for crying aloud.
This is quite a well-trodden story but a few facts; in 1837, 341 people were crammed into 57 rooms in Leeds’ infamous Boot and Shoe Yard. As people were crammed in and development tried and failed to cope with the rapid growth, rows of the back to back houses sprung up. As you probably know, these are long rows of terraced houses, which share a back wall and side walls with others, so with only windows at the front, and there was no garden. For greedy developers, they used less land, and fewer materials such as bricks or drains; there was little sanitation and many turned into diseased death traps. They were widely built in the big industrial cities, Manchester and Birmingham – and Leeds had 260 rows of them, 75,000 houses.
Here’s Friedrich Engels talking about Manchester, who along with Marx came to Britain to develop their world changing theories, fuelled by what they saw here. I mean worth noting that to Yorkshire folk everything’s a bit worse in Lancashire, but still, Engels could also have been writing about Leeds:
Working-people …live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages… the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation…no cleanliness, no convenience, and consequently no comfortable family life is possible.”
The vast majority were knocked down in the slum clearances of the 20th century, but Leeds cherished them, and about 20,000 back to backs still survive there.
Infant mortality was horrendous. So in the 1840s in these shock cities, the average age at death was only 20 years. In Leeds over 2,000 people died of cholera in 1848. It’s no wonder that working class people in the West Riding enthusiastically supported the radical reforming Chartist movement in 1848.
You might wonder why they came, the young immigrants from the villages and rural towns, and indeed quite rightly the historical narrative has been of outrage at the level of capitalist exploitation and focusses on the misery caused by the largely unregulated grasping for profit and gold. But for another perspective you might read Liberty’s Dawn by Emma Griffin. Her research gives a different perspective, of how these people were not simply exploited damned souls, they had their own desires, hope and fears, and to use that slightly hideous but useful phrase, they had agency. She collected very rare writings of contemporary working class people who moved to the cities, and she shows that they came with hope in their hearts and some awareness of the risks. They came to escape the close communities of the villages where everyone knew your business. Quite clearly women were exploited, paid lower wages than men, and once you had children life was hard indeed for women in the cities. But for young single women, it was unimaginable freedom, away from at least some of the stultifying social restrictions of the village, and when it was just you, the pay was really pretty high compared to what you might get back home. I mean there’s no doubt of the exploitation – but many walked into it with their eyes open and hope in their hearts and for some those hopes were proved true at least for a while. Which makes it all more tragic for those who simply found back-breaking work and an early death of course.
I spoke of immigration from the countryside, but there was of course immigration from abroad as well; a large number arrived from Ireland to escape the horrors of the Great Famine, particularly to Bradford, Leeds and York. In 1901 40,000 people in Yorkshire had been born in Ireland. There was a strong Jewish community, fleeing the Russian Empire –the Leyland area in Leeds was 85% Jewish in the late 1880s – hence the a famous name, Michael Marks of Marks and Spencers, who opened a penny bazaar in Leeds. There was a German contingent in Bradford as well, and getting back to protest, it was exactly these sorts of conditions that had Frederick Engels writing from over the Pennines in Manchester. Kasrl Marx spent most of his time in London where he lived from 1849 to 1883, but he had a communist friend in York, John Bray, and he and his daughter Eleanor went to the Dales – Bolton Abbey I think, not to be confused with Bolton Castle. York has its radical history too, in addition to John Bray – you might go and see where the Yorkshire Luddites were executed.
Which brings us to the protest and reaction to mechanisation had started much earlier than Marx and Engles, with the afore mentioned and most famous example, Ned Ludd, a framework knitter from Anstey in Leicestershire who acquired some fame in 1779 by smashing knitting frames, and was adopted in the 1810s as a mythical Captain Ludd, inspiration for machine breakers who called themselves Luddites. A small irony, unknown to the textbooks, and indeed of interest to absolutely nobody but me, is that I had a summer job for a knitwear company in Anstey in my youth. I could feel Ned turning in his grave as I collaborated with the oppressor. Anyway, In 1812 in Yorkshire 150 Luddites attacked mills until in 1813 their leader George Mellor and 16 other Luddites were executed in York – it’s at the back of the Crown Court and the Castle Museum. Seven others were transported to Australia. To be fair, Mellor had assassinated a mill owner.
Later, protest followed more peaceful lines that the Luddites. There is a strong literary tradition; the Bronte sisters in Haworth were well known for their anger at the inequalities; you might also like to read the work of Elizabeth Gaskill, who though not a Yorkshire woman I’m afraid, exposed the brutalities of industrial life in North and South; again over the other side of the Pennines, Female Reform Societies played a major role in the Peterloo protests and massacre in 1819.
One of the first targets of public anger was the widespread use of child labour, and it does sound unthinkable – paid a pittance, sometimes for 90 hours a week, with all the brutal discipline to go along with it. When Richard Oastler wrote a famous letter to the Leeds Mercury in 1830, protesting of ‘those magazines of British infantile slavery’, and started the movement for a limit of 10 working hours a day – a low bar surely – the mill owners fought tooth and nail to stop them. As a side note, I should say that while this seems unthinkable to us, it’s worth noting that children had always worked, it was not that people didn’t care about their children, but it was the norm, so the mindset was there and needed changing. It took a long time to realise that such intermittent work was utterly different to the long, hard, unhealthy hours in factories.
None the less, legislation did slowly come through the Victorian years, a steady drip drip of gradually improving regulation following the 10 Hour act, which was finally passed in 1847; labour for children under 10 was not banned until 1878, and I think it took until 1933 for children to be defined as 16 or under.
Now, all this heavy industry stuff is all very well, but when I was young my Mum her parents didn’t talk about that, they talked about the smell of Chocolate which apparently constantly hung around York or so they claimed. Yorkshire has something of a history for famous confectioners. When we spent those hours in the car travelling on holiday, my Yorkshire mother would try to stem the tide of whining and plaintive cries of ‘are we half way yet’ with Simpkins of Sheffield’s travel sweets – the boiled sweets ones in tins I continue to search for to this day – so much more practical than sodding Haribo. There’s Quality Street from Halifax, Bassets liquorice allsorts – yuk yuk yuk – and Thorntons, also from Sheffield.
But York had at least two great confectioners; there was Terrys which had its genesis in an apothecary shop in York, before the eponymous Joseph Terry joined and by 1850 had created the business that would, in 1923 create the world’s best chocolate – and you can forget all your fancy Swiss malarky and up themselves French chocolatiers, if you can’t tap it to wrap it, it ain’t proper chocolate. Terry was a victim of late stage capitalism and globalisation who care nothing for place and culture, in the form of Kraft who bought it and took it away – it’s made in Strasbourg now I think, which sucks.
The other company was the one set up by Henry Isaac Rowntree in 1862, who was joined by his rother Joseph, and duly became the pride of York’s confectioners history, 4th largest chocolate manufacturer in the world until it became a victim of late stage capitalism and globalisation and was bought by Nestle. Still they kept its HQ is in York so that’s good. The Rowntrees are very interesting characters, and illustrate a few threads in Yorkshire’s industrial revolution. They came from a family in Pocklington in the East Riding, his father a Master Mariner – the industrial revolution allowed people from all sorts of background to succeed.
The Rowntrees were Quakers, with a strong sense of social conscience. Joseph became a great philanthropist, and one who valued research and data as a way to analyse the causes and impacts of poverty. His son would set up the Rowntree foundation which still carries out its work today. Profit and Exploitation are key themes of the Industrial revolution as discussed; but so too was a search for social improvement. Titus Salt was another Quaker industrialist, who was horrified by the conditions he found in Bradford, and famously set up a model industrial town at Saltaire just north of Leeds, with good quality housing, employment, recreation, educational facilities and social services.
For social reformers, education was the way out of poverty, hence the rash of public libraries built by philanthropists. Joseph Rowntree was deeply involved in education, working with Quaker schools, and establishing new schools for the poor under the auspices of the British and Foreign School Society, the BFSS. Until the 1870s, no education provision was provided by the state in Britain, it was though of as a private matter the state would only use it to impose religious conformity. So it was up to foundations like the non denominational BFSS and the Anglican National Schools.
Central to Rowntree’s attitude, then, was his Quaker religion, his non conformism, and that is a very important part of the Yorkshire story. The British Revolution ensured that religious conformity was no longer possible in any of the nations of Britain, despite the efforts of the Anglicans to shove the genie back into the lamp, and the separation between church and chapel was assured. In the 18th century, non conformists made no great effort to appeal to the poor, with the possible exception of the Quakers who were the most widespread. But John Wesley started to put that right from mid century, and Methodism was a mass movement, though only really experienced widespread success from the 19th century, and the religious revival of the 1830s. Methodism and Primitive Methodism was often a very rural phenomenon – there are few villages and towns in Yorkshire which don’t have their chapels of all sorts of denomination; now, rather sadly, too often converted to houses and so on. Robert Colls the social historian writes powerfully of the network of support Methodism provided to poor communities in particular.
The strength of non conformism could depend on where you were; my Grandmother, a methodist of good farmers stock in the Vale of York, proudly told me that she’d signed the pledge against the consumption of alcohol. I think she told me this as she sipped on her G&T one evening. Equally, in 1837 one report from Leeds declared ‘the de facto established religion is Methodism’; Bradford was led by non conformist industrialists in late Victorian years.
Methodism could transcend class, but there was a class component to the church and chapel divide, derived from the exclusion of non conformists from national political life until 1829. This was despite the efforts of the Anglican church 1851 to build new churches and evangelise. This subtle division and its culture is explored in that lovely, lovely book A Month in the Country written by J L Carr, who was born near Thirsk in North Yorkshire; there is a film of the book too with Colin Firth and that dear, dear Thesp, Kenneth Brannagh.
Now we must draw our history to a close – I remind you that I did say I would finish before the First World war, for reasons of exhaustion if nothing else. I am conscious that I have not spoken much of rural Yorkshire in the 19th century, and I am sorry for that. There are of course many changes, particularly the rural depopulation as towns grew, especially after 1851, the impact of the Agricultural depression of the 1870s, and increasing mechanisation. In general, the level of change is not quite as dramatic as the story of the industrial transformation of the West Riding, but it does indeed still transform society.
So then to finish, why don’t we talk about some of the funner things about the Victorian age? Specifically to talk about the arrival of leisure, and leisure time, holiday. It is probably just too obvious a thing to say, but for most of history, any kind of extended leisure was the preserve of the rich. Everyone else had to concentrate on you know, not dying. Well, in the 19th century, that started to change. One of the stories of Victorian England is the appearance of a strong, well heeled middle class, and a well heeled middle class that was able to travel much more widely as the railways connected the country, and trams and public transport connected the city centres. And on the back of that, many towns became entertainment centres. Racecourses, such as York, Doncaster and Ripon; sports grounds, concert halls, theatres, music halls. The Royal Baths were opened in Harrogate in 1897, Ilkley became a spa town, a smaller version of Harrogate. Shopping became a thing – Leeds and Briggate for example became the shopping centre of the north of England.
And later in the century, various factory and employment acts began to have an impact, working hours fell from 70 hours a week to 50 ish, and from the 1860s working class people could contemplate day trips or holidays. For which they had the glorious Yorkshire coast. ‘Going off clubs’ organised collective saving for a bit of a beano; the nature of collective factory working meant that mass holidays could be staggered across July and August; so entire towns boarded together to go on a seaside holiday. They went to Scarborough, Cleethropes; and Bridlington which became known as Sheffield by Sea.
Towns sold themselves for different types of holidays. My mother’s family favourite was Filey, which indeed advertised itself as ideal ‘for the family’; and less positively warned ‘cheap trippers never come here, they are not wanted’. For that, Filey suggested Scarborough or Bridlington. Scarborough and Bridlington would like a word.
Holidays were a sort of liberation, not always for the family. So in 1900 the local paper in Ilkley recorded that a waggonette full of women from Leeds hit town. The paper reported an ‘abundant use of disgusting language’, and stealing of toys and china from shop fronts; several women were ‘so drunk as to be unable to stand’ and a few instances were reported of, um, what you might call ‘sudden illness’ as the paper euphemistically described the action of chundering like a good ‘un.
Another big obsession was sport. Always was of course; now even more. The Knavesmire was an area just south of York, originally a marshy area, and the site of the Gallows – Dick Turpin the famous highwayman was hanged there in 1739, Dick Turpin rides to York and all that. But it became York’s racecourse, wildly popular, so much so that my mother was told not to go near the place when the races were on – inconvenient, because they lived just across the way from the Knavesmire.
But it’s football and cricket we should end on. Football famously became organised and regularised for competition in Victorian Britain; I think the first football club was in Edinburgh, but Sheffield United, known as the Blades for obvious cutlering reasons I assume, is the oldest surviving football club, founded in 1857. And then there was cricket, the greatest game invented by man, as a famous American described it. Though an alternative view from a Irishman was GBShaw’s famous bon mot that
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity
Well, Yorkshire loves its cricket; I remember by Uncle going on about the Scarborough Cricket festival, which started in 1876 and is still going now. Anyway a cricket ground was opened at Brammal Lane in Sheffield, and led to the founding of the Yorkshire Cricket club there in 1863. Cricket became a sort of religion, or in my experience anyway; when I was young, it was still only people born in Yorkshire who could play for the club at first class level, and people reputedly drove over the border to make sure their children would qualify. Some of the greats of the game were Yorkshire men – Wilfred Rhodes, Herbert Sutcliffe, Len Hutton, Freddie Truman, even, dare I say it Geoff Boycott, Joe Root, Rooooot, just got to the second most prolific scorer in world cricket, only Sachin Tendulkar has scored more, I could go on. I could go on for a long time!
David Hey claims that it was popular sport which embedded Yorkshire identity through every level of society, away from the traditional regionalism and localism. Though you have got to think that the social and physical upheaval of industrialisation and urbanisation must also have been a massive factor. It’s not that there had not been a Yorkshire consciousness before; but it had been largely the preserve of the gentry and elites. There there was plenty of writing before that, about Yorkshire dialect, and customs, such as the rich source of stories and pictures, George Walker’s Customs of Yorkshire published in 1814. Then the genius and popularity of the Bronte sisters – that created a massive awareness of Yorkshire from 1850; Elizabeth Gaskill’s books did a similar job, along with her biography of Charlotte Bronte.
But for mass identity and loyalty, football and cricket made the big difference, and the symbol of the House of York, the White Rose became a symbol for all. As ever with identity, rivalries formed a large part, who and what you were not, is also as important, and for the White Rose it would be the Red Rose of Lancashire, of course; the Cricketing Roses Match in 1904, red Vs White, Lancashire vs Yorkshire, attracted 79,00 people. The Roses match was the norm in a relatively gentle way in our household too, since my dad was very much a man of the other side of the Pennines. Though he did like Geoff Boycott.
I had a choice of innumerable possible quotes from cricketers and their love of Yorkshire, but I chose this one from Brian Close. Close was a fine cricketer of the old school, who Captained Yorkshire in the 1960s, and England too. He was called up for the infamous West Indies tour of 1976 when Tony Greig’s outrageous ‘Make then grovel’ quote led to one of the most astounding displays by the finest collection of fast bowlers the world has ever seen, when the Windies made England grovel with a 3-0 series win. There are terrifyingly brave scenes of Brian Close taking massive hits for lightening fast balls directly on his head, from bouncers that would have sent a lesser man straight to the hospital. He staggered, caught himself, took a deep breath – then stood tall and carried on. Probably not a good idea, don’t try this at home, but it helped us recover some pride, and his quote sort of reflects that attitude
“I would have died for Yorkshire. I suppose once or twice I nearly did.”
It reflects something of the passion for both cricket and Yorkshire. More recently Jonny Bairstow reflected the same pride
Anyone who has been born in Yorkshire is very proud of it. It’s something that’s embedded in your character.
I remember my grandfather actually he would announce grandly that he came from York, ,and stand back with a happy, proud glow in his face, and wait for everyone to congratulate him. It drover my Mother up the wall, as she yearned for the bright lights.
Now I think I should finally come to an end. Of course that means I have missed so much from the 20th century, but it is a story that demands much more talent than I have. The hard process of de-industrialisation, the pain of the Miners strikes and eradication of an industry and destruction of communities, inflicted in the most heartless possible way. The transformation of Yorkshire society with immigration with all its glorious modern diversity and new traditions to join the old. But I’m not good at the more modern stuff, and did swear I would finish by 1913, so that’s what I will do. Buit I hope you have enjoyed this regional history, it was a hoot to write. Tricky though; basically a history of somewhere as diverse as Yorkshire, is really as complicated as a history of England. I’d love to do others though, so might be an idea not to encourage me, otherwise you’ll find yourself listening to a history of Loughborough or some such, and I doubt that’d go viral.
