UlnrncU Mntoeraity IGibtrarii BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OF THE SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND THE GIFT OF HENRY W. SAGE 1891 .MM — & M.Ej Corned University Library DA 670.Y6F61 Making of modern Yorkshire, 1750-1914, 3 1924 028 042 947 Cornell University Library The original of tiiis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/cletails/cu31924028042947 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE BY THE SAME AUTHOR In Preparation YORKSHIRE IN TRANSITION 1644—1760 (From the Battle of Marston Moor to the completion of Smeaton's Eddystone Lighthouse) THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 1750-1914 BY J. S. FLETCHER Our County, as the Curious observe, is the Epitome of England : whatsoever is excellent in the whole land being to be found in proportion thereto . . . besides, God hath been pleased to make it the birthplace and nursery of many great men. — Dr. George Hickes, sometime Dean of Worcester, in his Sermon at the Yorkshire Feast in London, 1682 LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD, RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. i First published in igiS {All right$ reterveii) TO THE CHANCELLOR, PRO-CHANCELLOR, VICE-CHANCELLOR, AND THE PROFESSORS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS CONTENTS CHAPTER I. YORKSHIRE IN 1750 II. COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT . ni. POWER AND MACHINERY IV. COAL, IRON, STEEL V. THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES VI. AGRICULTURE VII. REFORM .... VIII. RELIGION AND CHARITY IX. EDUCATION X. tHRIFT AND HELP XL NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN XII. YORKSHIRE IN I9I4 INDEX .... PASS 9 42 79 134 161 185 207 230 256 272 299 318 CHAPTER I YORKSHIRE IN 1750 In population, in wealth, in importance, the Yorkshire of 1750 was almost as insignificant as the most obscure of its many divisions and wapentakes is to-day. Probably there were no more than half a million people, men, women, and children, within its four million acres. There were no towns of any size. Leeds was a collection of mean streets clustering about an old bridge. Sheffield was a rookery of squalid houses at the foot of a wild moorland. Bradford was no more than a big village closely packed in a hollow of the hiUs. Htdl sent out a few ships from the quays which lay behind its one street of any importance. Scarborough was a collection of fishermen's cottages, nestling closely together under the protection of a ruinous castle. Harrogate was a hamlet of nondescript buildings, half-inns, half- farmsteads, which stood about a mineral spring, in the middle of a waste. The market-towns, still semi-mediaeval in appearance, were little more than meeting-places for husbandmen and hucksters. There was little noise of machinery in the other towns, and little movement in the land ; folk stayed, from birth to death, where fate had set them down ; of animation, evidence of energy, desire for progress, there was nothing, save amongst a few ardent but unencouraged spirits. In York Minster silence and desolation brooded heavily in the deserted aisles and desecrated sanctuary ; within York Castle they hanged strong men for the theft of a groat, or the steahng of a sheep. And on Micklegate Bar, plainly to be seen by aU who entered the ancient city, stiU stood, firmly fixed on pikes, the grisly heads of the Jacobites of 1745. to THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Whatever observant traveller wandered through Yorkshire at that time must needs have been struck by one all-prevalent feature of its general aspect. While there was Mttle that gave promise of the days to come, there was much that spoke with wordless eloquence of the ages that were gone. From the northern edges of Sherwood Forest, in the south, to Stainmore and Teesdale, in the north, from the wilds of Blackstone and Rowland, on the west, to the Flamborough cUffs and the Holderness flats, on the east, the evidences of the feudal regime and the monastic days were ever5^where. The castles of the great nobles had become gaunt and roofless ruins ; the abbeys and priories of the Benedictines and the Cistercians were silent as the solitudes in which they stood. Many of the Norman strongholds had been so effectively slighted by order of the Parliament that they were no more than shapeless masses of masonry, already overgrown by grass and weed ; those which had escaped with gentler treatment had yet been so dealt with that they could never again be fortified or even tenanted, save as mere hunting lodges or summer retreats. The walls of the rehgious houses still stood, but the roofs were gone, the towers despoiled of their bells, the chancels of their orna- ments ; there was neither wood nor lead within their precincts ; any fcuiner of the neighbourhood might quarry amongst their cloisters for stone, wherewith to build sty or b3n-e. It was then only two hundred years since their desecration, only half that time since the dismantling of the castles — but we of the twentieth century know more of what the monastic house and the feudal castle meant, and were, than our forefathers of George' the Second's day knew. The eighteenth-century townsfolk of Knaresborough and Pontefract, the eighteenth-century peasants of Wharfedale and Wensleydale, who saw these piles of grey stone in the ancient towns and the quiet valleys, were as incurious about them as they were indifferent. To us of this day, accustomed to the crowded conditions of the Yorkshire industrial districts, and to the ever-recurring villages of the purely agricultural portions of the county, the sparsity of population and the wide-spread solitudes YORKSHIRE IN 1750 ii of the Yorkshire of 1750 would be as astonishing as a first prospect of modem Sheffield would seem to an eighteenth- century man. The old forests and wastes were still more or less what they had always been since the Roman legions marched by their outer edges. A few hamlets broke up the Forest of Galtres. Hatfield Chace, although drained by Cornehus Vermuyden in the time of Charles the First, was still a solitude. Wild deer still roamed at will about the lonelier stretches of Wensleydale and Swaledale. A large portion of the Forest of Knaresborough was still unenclosed and was to remain so until 1770. The Forest of Ouse and Derwent, the centre of which may still be seen in the glades and stretches of Escrick, retained much of the character which had distinguished it for centuries as a royal hunting ground. In Holderness, men and villages were almost as scarce as patches of woodland. The wolds were as yet rmenclosed. All over the county there were stretches of common land. Nowadays we are so used to the trim hedgerow, the carefully-preserved fence, that we forget that a hundred and fifty years ago, enclosed land, open land, and common land ran side by side : we forget, too, that Yorkshire, in our day foremost in all matters of improve- ment, was in those days backward. Enclosure and fencing off began' in East Anglia, notably in Suffolk ; it spread to the North by slow degrees. And so the impression made upon the mind of the mid-eighteenth-century traveller through Yorkshire must have been one of great width and space — an impression of vast expanses and far distances, with here and there a little fanning village, and here and there a small town, through which a horseman could ride within a very brief passage of time. For even in the reign of George the Second, a hundred years after the great upheaval of the Civil War, two hundred years after the greater upheaval of the Reformation, the Yorkshire towns were small and insignificant in all that makes a modem town of importance. York itself was no more than the centre of such fashion, amusement, social hfe, as the North Country aristocracy and squirearchy could indulge in with economy. Its size was practically that of 12 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE the Roman Eboracum. Outside Bootham Bar in on« direction, Micklegate in another, Skeldergate in a third. Monk Bar in a fourth, there was nothing but the outer edges of Galtres and of the Ainsty. Leeds may be said to have lain between what an old map-maker called Mr. Harrison's New Church (St. John the Evangelist) and Leeds Bridge, in one direction ; between the Parish Church and the site of the modern Post Office, in another. Bradford clustered closely about its present Market Street, Ivegate and Kirk- gate ; its ancient Parish Church was even then, relatively speaking, outside the heart of the town. Hull had not yet escaped the area laid down in the old map of the Cotton MSB. : it, too, clustered about an ancient church, and had no more than High Street, Market Place, and Whitefriargate to show in the way of important thoroughfares. Halifax, Huddersfield, Rotherham, all old in history, were as yet small in size and value ; the busy modem towns of the crowded Span Valley were mere villages or hamlets. Of the ancient market-towns some have remained to this day so little altered that we can gain from their present aspect some idea of their appearance in 1750. Hedon is much as it was when Leland saw it, Boroughbridge has not greatly altered since the days of its glory as a great coaching centre. Bedale is still the town of one main street that it was two hundred years ago. In Beverley the atmosphere of mediseval religion and old English Ufe still prevails. At Richmond one finds it hard to beheve that one is moving and seeing in the twentieth century. As these towns look nowadays, so they must have looked when they were pocket- boroughs and places of importance. But round Wakefield and Dewsbury and Doncaster, all of a vast antiquity, modernity has woven such new garments that the ancient forms are hard to discern. They were easily to be discerned, however, in 1750. There was little of Wakefield then but its great church, its Kirkgate, and its Westgate, its Six Chimneys, and its time-worn Bridge Chapel ; of Doncaster but its Parish Church, its Frenchgate, and its High Street. In Pontefract, perhaps, of all Yorkshire towns, the new has been least powerful in driving out the old : few market- YORKSHIRE IN 1750 13 towns in England present such a mingling of antiquity and modernity. For there the arrangement of the town and the names of the streets — Horsefair, Gillygate, Finkle Street, Ropergate, Cornmarket- — are as they were in the time of the three sieges of Pontefract Castle, and had been since the Wars of the Roses, and maybe long before that, and Pontefract, in the heart of it, at any rate, looked very much in 1750 as it had looked in 1644 and in 1536 — always saving the fact that its Castle lay in ruins, and that at least two of its religious houses had been so destroyed that not a stone of them wa.s left. While it is possible, because of the existence of old maps, plans, and charts, to form a more or less accurate idea of the size and appearance of the Yorkshire towns in the middle of the eighteenth century, it is not so easy to arrive at even an approxmiate idea of the appearance and size of the purely agricultural villages of the same period. There is scarcely a Yorkshire farming village in existence which has not been almost entirely rebuilt within the last hundred and twenty years. Here and there one comes across an old house which is unmistakably of Tudor origin ; now and then one finds a timbered cottage of early CaroUan days. But the majority of the present Yorkshire farm- houses and labourers' cottages were buUt about the middle or the end of George the Third's reign — a fact which accounts for their eminently plain and utilitarian style of architecture and arrangement. They came into being because of the improvement in agriculture : the farmers wanted more room, the labourers more comfort. What they replaced was probably less roomy, less comfortable, but much more picturesque. The main features of the old English village were certainly in evidence in 1750. There would be the church — ^unrestored — and the hall, or manor ; these remain with us, Httle altered. There would be farmsteads of the Restoration tj^e — many of them Tudor houses renovated and enlarged. There would be cottages which were Mttle more than shelters, and an inn, and the forge of the black- smith and the shop of the wheelwright, and somewhere near the church there would be the stocks, and possibly the 14 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE whipping-post. In some places — but not in many, for the Puritan influence had been strong in Yorkshire — there would be the Maypole. About the edges of the village, country houses would stand, but the parson's house, now usually equal in size to the manor-house, would then be close to the church itself, a dwelhng of comparatively humble sort. As to the population, it is difficult to form an accurate notion : the parish registers are the only material upon which one can base a calculation. Some villages seem not to have increased in size for several cen- turies ; in many the population has decreased : naturally, the village in which agriculture is, and has always been, the only industry, cannot change as even the smallest town changes. Amongst EngHsh counties, Yorkshire to-day stands pre- eminent for the variety of its trades, occupations, crafts, industries. Not even its rival of Lancashire can dispute its pre-eminence. But in 1750 its volume of business was small. Many of the old mediaeval trades were dead. In York itself, in the reign of Edward the Third, no fewer than 180 different trades were being carried on. Many of them expired at the time of the Reformation, many more on the extinction of feudalism. Those trades which have to do with food went on as a matter of course and necessity : man must have butchers, and bakers, and grocers ; so, too, he must have tailors, and drapers, and bootmakers. Those trades, directly concerned with the pressing needs of the individual, covering his back, filling his beUy, shoeing his feet, are in all the towns at all the times. But of the very great trades which now occupy hundreds of thousands of busy Yorkshiremen there were but the faintest fore- shadowings in 1750. Wool, iron, steel, coal, machinery — every Yorkshireman knows what the mere names imply nowadays : in those days the various industries connected with them were all in a very primitive condition. In the woollen trade, of which Leeds had become the Yorkshire centre by the time of the Stuarts, the factory system was yet unborn, and the click of the spinning-wheel and whirr of the hand-loom were heard in the cottages of the towns and YORKSHIRE IN 1750 15 the farmhouses of the dales. Wool-sorting, wool-combing, the spinning of wool into yarn, were all done in elementary hand-fashion. Not less elementary were the methods by which the resultant cloth was sold. The Leeds cloth merchants first congregated on the old bridge over the Aire — then a clean and untainted river ; later they had an open-air market in Briggate ; it was not until 171 1 that, by the influence of Ralph Thoresby, the topographer, they got a covered building in Kirkgate. In that building they were doing their business in 1750 ; twenty-five more years were to elapse before the White Cloth Hall was opened in the Calls, a supplement to one which had been set up in Mill Hill for the sale of coloured cloth, in 1760. Where they now traded^ cloth the Leeds folk had once had a connection with iron : old iron workings have been found imder the houses of Briggate and beneath the cemetery at Burmantofts. But the old iron trade of Leeds had died, and in 1750 there was comparatively little iron smelted in Yorkshire, though the Masborough Works had already been estabhshed — ^in 1746. The development of the iron trade, indeed, did not begin until coal-mining spread itself over the vast areas which he between Sheffield and Leeds : in 1750 the annual output of Yorkshire coal was relatively small. The manufacture of steel was just beginning to be dreamed of at that time, but it was not until 1770 that the notions of Himtsman, the Doncaster clock-maker, became imcontestably successful. And whether in the woollen trade, or in the iron-works, or in the coal-pits, the machinery in use was primitive and elementary, and George the Third had been on his throne many eventful years before steam was generally used to drive engines. Chief of all industries in Yorkshire at that time was farm- ing — poor, backward, unenterprising as it was, compared with what it is now, farming was the first of the great national businesses in which substantial progress had been made during the days of Queen Anne and the earUer Georges. The four-course system had been introduced. The first elementary machines had been tried and adopted. Turnips and clover were seen on all sides. Stock of all sorts had i6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE vastly improved in quality. Men were beginning to study agriculture as a science. None of these things had its beginnings in Yorkshire, and Yorkshiremen were somewhat slow to adopt them, but they were in the air, and they spread. And Yorkshire farming already had great advan- tages. Its horses had been famous for many a century : the monks of Jervaulx had been celebrated far and wide for their breeding of horses. Defoe in his time had marvelled at the incredible number of Yorkshire cattle which were brought into Northallerton eight times in the year. Vast flocks of sheep were to be found in all Three Ridings. The breeding of pigs had received an impetus. The northern acres of Holdemess, the Vale of York, parts of the reclaimed Hatfield Chace, were famous for the gro^png of corn. All things considered, a man who looked well about him in Yorkshire in 1750 would have been justified in calling it a great agricultural county, with some evidences of other important industries. Yet in 1750 there was still much to be done as regards Yorkshire farming, for the old strip system was still in use in many districts, and was to be so for many years, and Sir Christopher Sykes had not yet transformed the vast, open, uncultivated sheep-walk of the unenclosed Wolds into the finely-farmed country which it became before his death. In 1750 there stiU remained one great work to be done before trade and industry of any sort could flourish success- fully, no matter what new forces came as impetus. It seems a strange thing that a nation which had always been distinguished for ingenuity in practical work and appliance, which had produced men who built the most magnificent churches and strongest castles in Europe, had never yet devoted its energies to the making of good roads. EngUsh roads had been notoriously bad for centuries : road-con- struction, indeed, seems to have been lost, as an art, with the departure of the Romans in the fifth century. Through Yorkshire ran many Roman roads, but neither Anglo- Saxon, nor Dane, nor Norman, nor the mixed race which succeeded, had ever done anything to emulate the spirit of the men who drove their streets and causeways in straight YORKSHIRE IN 1750 17 lines and with firm foundations from Doncaster to Catterick and from Blackstone Edge to Aldborough. The stories which are told of the badness of the Yorkshire roads at any period between the Norman Conquest and Hanoverian days are innumerable. The truth is that the care of road and highway was nobody's business. The estabUsh- ment of turnpike trusts in 1663 produced little good and much ill-feeling ; later, one parish was for ever quarrelling with the next over the repairing of some portion of highway, which as often as not was never repaired because of these squabbles. In 1750 there was no really good road in aU the county save the Great North Road and its principal branches ; the fine roads of our time were yet to be made, and it is a truly marvellous fact — one of the most marvellous facts in the whole history of human ingenuity and persever- ance over difficulties — that when the first making of them began, fifteen years later, it was entrusted to a blind man, the wonderful John Metcalf, better known as BUnd Jack of Knaresborough. Naturally, with such poor roads, communication between one place and another was a matter of difficulty, and even of danger. Except on the great main roads, whereon the stage coaches had only just begun to run with regularity, it was no easy matter to convey anything but the Hghtest loads of produce and merchandise. The Great North Road itself was not only as uneven and full of nits as an Irish highway is to-day, but the wide stretches of turf on either side of the middle track were perpetually roughened into dust, or transformed into mud, by the passage of the great droves of Scotch cattle, going southward, whose hoofs it was necessary to shoe with iron at the beginning and in the middle of their long journey. Consequently, there was little transfer of goods from one part of the county to another. Farmers were obliged to content themselves by taking stock and produce to the nearest market-town. Nowadays a farmer drives to market : in those days he rode : if his women-folk wished to accompany him, they either walked at the side of his nag, or rode behind him on a pUhon. Only those people who were absolutely obliged to do so travelled. i8 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Men of Holdemess or of Hallamshire considered it a serious matter to have to attend the Assizes at York ; if a man was forced to go to London, he made his will and took solemn leave of his friends and acquaintance. To travel far afield, or to send goods of any description to a customer who lived a hundred miles away, was a costly undertaking. Consequently, the folk of 1750 were a home-keeping race, and many of them literally never went beyond their parish borders. The tendency or temptation to stray from the place in which a man was born had been checked by severe laws in Tudor days ; in Georgian times it was a matter of necessity for a man to remain where fate had planted him. And no matter how much farmers, merchants, or craftsmen might produce, the difficulties of transit by road or water — for there were few canals and little river na.vigation — made it next to impossible for them to get their goods to far-off markets and populous centres. Of the Ufe lived by these stay-at-home folk, whether in the towns or villages, it is almost impossible for twentieth- century people to form an accurate conception. But we know something from contemporary documents, from old letters and diaries, and they tell us that from the days of Queen Anne to those of the Regency, English life, religious, social, political, was at its very worst. The eighteenth century was a time of dulness, corruption, brutality : never in all its two thousand years of history h^s this country known such a dead level of all that was mediocre and bad as in those first Hanoverian days. There were rare excep- tions in the form of individual talent and briUiance. There were very great men indeed in literature and in art and in science and in rehgion, but this very outstandingness reduced all other men to insignificance — moreover their greatness was as a rule seen but in one place, London. There were great men, too, in poUtics, but even they were rarely honest, and it was thought no disgrace to a leading statesman if he carried off his friend's wife, appropriated as much of the public money as he could lay hands on, threw away his ill-gotten gains at the gaming-table, and lived in perpetual intoxication. Never was such a coarse YORKSHIRE IN 1750 19 or brutal age amongst the better class of folk ; never one so worse than savage amongst the lower. The Established Church was effete and powerless. It had its great scholars : they were chiefly hidden in their own quiet rooms in one or other of the two Universities, or in the obscurity of a Deanery, or in some cotintry parson- age. It had its great preachers : they were rarely to be found elsewhere than in the London pulpits. It had its able administrators : their chief concern was to conserve episcopal revenues for their own and their famiUes' benefit, Yorkshire, during that eighteenth century, gave several men to the bench of bishops : so far as we can learn about them from history they were all chiefly distinguished by the Yorkshireman's inborn love of profit. Profit, love of money, heaping up of revenue, grabbing of tithe and due, was the prevalent characteristic of the Georgian churchman. One has only to go through the episcopal, diocesan, and parish registers of Yorkshire of that time to discover that pluralism was a thing to be sought after, and simony no sin. And it naturally resulted that the spoils went to the strong, and that the weak gleaned but a straw in the already clean- picked acres of ecclesiasticism. Never were there such fat and well-endowed rectors : never such thin and half- starved curates. A man thought it no disgrace to hold Uvings worth in the aggregate three or four thousand pounds a year, to keep his own feet away from each of them, and to plant in each a curate to whom he gave no more than sixteen shillings a week : what was worse, public opinion was with him. Much has been written, sometimes with truth, often with culpable exaggeration, of the cupidity and avarice of the mediaeval clergy, but never, in the worst times of the Middle Ages, were there such avarice, such cupidity, such attention to the material profits of the cure of souls as existed in England in the eighteenth century. In Yorkshire at this period Church life appears to have been particularly dead. Most towns had no more than one church in them. John Harrison, the merchant, had added a new church to Leeds in 1634 ; Lady Elizabeth Hastings gave the town another in 1727 : Leeds, then, in 1750 had 20 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE three churches. Hull had two. Bradford had one : Sheffield had two : York reckoned its churches by half-dozens, most of them as Uttle visited or cared for as the Minster itself. The church services were few and perfunctory ; the fabrics were neglected ; what the town parson did with himself it is difficult to make out ; the country parson was in most instances of the type of Fielding's Parson TruUiber, and when he was not feeding his pigs was cadging for a cup of small beer in the squire's kitchen. One gets some idea of the calibre of these country parsons from the registers which they were supposed to keep with exactness of entry : they were better kept by the parish clerk than by his superior. But if most of the EstabUshed clergy were of the Trulliber type, or corresponding to it, many of them were of the opposite sort, typified by Fielding's Parson Adams, men of learning and piety, whose candles, unfor- tunately, burnt but dimly in the prevalent gloom and thick darkness. Such reUgion as there was in Yorkshire during the eighteenth century was mainly kept alive by the Noncon- formists. Yorkshiremen, from the earliest ages, have always been as zealous in their reUgion as in their ceaseless pursuit of money. They had been good Catholics in the old days : it required armed force on the part of Henry the Eighth and fierce and vindictive persecution on that of his daughter , EUzabeth to stamp CathoHcism out of them. And when in the days of Charles the Second sober-minded and God- fearing men saw the flower of the Established clergy driven out of the church by harsh and arbitrary Acts of Parliament, they followed the ejected ministers as whole-heartedly and zealously as their Cathohc forefathers had followed Robert Aske in 1536 and the Nortons in 1569. When Yorkshiremen were asked to choose between a venal and lax clergy and men like Oliver Heywood, it took but little time for them to make their choice. With OHver Heywood, dispossessed parson of Coley, hcensed to preach the Gospel by Mr Secretary Arlington under Charles the Second, and yet imprisoned for conscience' sake in York Castle more than once, Yorkshire Nonconformity may be said to have had YORKSHIRE IN 1750 21 its serious beginning. It was to do a great work. It was perhaps not a beautiful thing, from an artistic, aesthetic, or even intellectual standpoint. Its apostles and followers were harsh, gaunt, bare of outline as the bleak hills amongst which they reared their tabernacles. The fierce old Puritan spirit was strong amongst them. They were narrow, they were rigid, they were intolerant. Persecuted themselves, they, on occasion, could persecute. The meeting-houses and chapels in which they gathered and on which they bestowed high-sounding names that savoured of Judaism more than of Christianity, were, perhaps, the ugliest and most repulsive features of Enghsh architecture. They themselves to their feUow-men presented an equally unlovely aspect. But there was in them, and in their doings, the true Enghsh spirit, and it is to their sturdiness, to their earnest and maintained endeavour in a bad age, that York- shiremen of this day largely owe the freedom and Uberty in matters rehgious, political, and social, which they now enjoy in such abundant measure. By 1750 the Methodist movement had come into York- shire. Eleven years had gone since John Wesley, newly returned from Georgia, and converted to new ideas of his life-mission through the influence of Peter Bohler, the Moravian, had begim preaching in the open air. His imitators and followers came into Yorkshire pretty much as the Dominicans and Franciscans had come in the Middle Ages. At first they needed no chmrch, nor even a plain and ugly meeting-house : a pile of stones by the wayside, the wall of the parish well, the horse-block outside a friendly farmer's stable, served instead of rostnun or pulpit. But not many farmers were so friendly as to lend a horse-block ; not many villagers were patient enough to hear the good tidings. The itinerant Methodist's first visit to any Yorkshire village usually ended in a visit to the nearest justice of the peace, or in an undignified retreat before rotten eggs and showers of stones ; he was fortunate if he escaped with a sound skin and unbroken bones ; it was rarely that he left with dry garments, for in that age of coarseness and brutality the ducking of an interloper in the squire's fishpond or the 22 THE MAKING OP^ MODERN YORKSHIRE village pool was considered a high form of innocent diversion. Nevertheless (so impossible is it to kill the fervour of con- vinced men) the Methodists endured and prevailed, and folk who had scoffed and reviled began to learn that they had a message. A new spirit came over the land — the same spirit that had stolen into the hearts of men when, in the far-off mediaeval days, some brown-frocked friar, standing up in market-place or on village green, had lifted his crucifix, and asked those who gathered round to pause for one moment and reflect on what it meant. There were no friars, black, brown, or grey, to be seen on village green or in market-place in the Yorkshire of 1750. It was at that time the fate of the adherents of the old religion, the posterity of those who had shed their blood like water for Catholic truth under Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth and EHzabeth, to hide their faces and to skulk in comers. The Penal Laws were still in force — were to be in force, with minor alleviations, for another eighty years. Men still cherished the Puritan hatred, the Puritan mistrust of Catholicism. It was inconceivable, it was not to be believed, that any Catholic could possibly be a good citizen : nay, it was more than doubtful, to folk of education as well as to the ignorant, if any Catholic had a right to the name of Christian. Even such a man as Ralph Thoresby, who, as an antiquary, should have known better, chancing while on a visit to Pontefract, to look into what he caUs the Popish Mass-house, lately set up there, indulges in the old bad jibes and fooUsh misrepresentations of a creed which had been greatly cherished by his own ancestors, one of whom had been a mediaeval Archbishop of York. No mud was too filthy to throw at a Catholic ; no stick too club-Uke to beat him with. We have almost forgotten, in these good times of religious liberty, how our Cathohc fellow-countrymen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Uved. From the accession of Elizabeth to the end of the reign of Charles the Second, law after law was made against those whose sole offence was their refusal to believe that any temporal sovereign can be Head of Christ's Church on earth. It was high treason under YORKSHIRE IN 1750 23 Elizabeth to say or hear Mass ; the possession of a cross or a rosary involved outlawry. No Catholic above sixteen years of age might travel more than five miles. CathoUcs who did not attend the Established Church services regularly were fined twenty pounds a month. No CathoUc might send his child to be educated abroad, on pain of a fine of one hundred pounds ; no Catholic education might be permitted at home. No Catholic might practise law, or medicine, or hold office at court, on in any ship, or in any castle, or in any fort. Cathohcs must be married and buried by the ministers of the Establishment ; a marriage by a Cathohc priest meant a fine of one hundred pounds ; a burial, twenty pounds. No Cathohc might have Catholic books or Cathohc objects of ,4evotion ; the magistrates might search for such things at any time, to burn or deface them. No Catholic might possess arms — even to go a-shoot- ing rabbits with — nor own a horse worth more than five pounds. No Cathohc peer might sit in the House of Lords, no Cathohc gentleman in the House of Commons, unless he first solemnly declared that his own religion was idolatrous. But in those times of bigotry no Catholic peer was wanted in the Lords, no Catholic squire in the Commons. " I would not have so much as a Popish man or a Popish woman to remain among us," said a certain peer, rising in his place in the House of Lords in 1678, when the country was going through one of its periodical outbursts of bigotry and intolerance, " not so much as a Popish dog, nor a Popish bitch ; not so much as a Popish cat to mew and purr." NaturaUy, with such sentiments as these in the air, it became a national sport to hunt Catholics. Informing against them was developed into a lucrative profession. Various Acts of Parliament made fine provision for informers. Persons who gave information as to the harbouring of Catholic clergymen, or the celebration of Mass, were paid one-third of the fines : if the whole sum of the fines exceeded £150, they were to have ;^5o (iii. James I. cap. v.). Whoever gave information of a Catholic going to court, or to London, or within ten miles of London, should have one half the fine, which was ^^loo (the same Act). Persons informing 24 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE of a marriage celebrated by a Catholic clergyman, or of a baptism by one, were rewarded with one-third of the fines in those cases provided — £ioo for each offence (the same Act). Fine, imprisonment, social ostracism — these were the lot of English CathoUcs at any time between 1531 and 1829. Yet they endured and persisted, and none more bravely than the CathoUcs of Yorkshire. For Yorkshire CathoUcs had shining examples before them. EUzabeth had sent hundreds of Catholic Yorkshire folk, men and women, to the scaffold and the gaUows after the Rising of the North in 1569, and in her father's time John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, a Beverley man, had been the one CathoUc bishop in England who had cheerfuUy chosen martyrdom rather than assent to the new tyranny. Those examples served to keep the faith alive in all three Ridings. The numbers of Yorkshire Catholics shrank, but they were always in evidence, despite the informers and the persecutors. The Ust of recusants which are in existence show that they were of all grades of society— nobiUty, country gentry, farmers, tradesmen, artisans, poor labourers. Like their own persecuted brethren in Ireland, Uke the persecuted Covenanters in Scotland, they cherished their reUgion on the open moors and the hillside and behind the locked door of some obscure house : it was thought a strange thing and a terrible innovation when a Catholic church was allowed to be built and used in Leeds in 1790. Since the state of things reUgious was so low, and so essentially material, in the middle of the eighteenth century, it naturaUy foUowed that the social life of the county was of no high order. Education, even amongst the upper classes, was almost unknown, save where some man of means and leisure had a natural love of books and research or where some madam desired to rank herself with the blue- stockings. The aristocracy diverted itself in a purely material way. Some of its members went to London for the season, but most repaired to York. In York the great county famiUes had their town-houses : in York were assembUes, and routs, and drums ; racing had become estabUshed in York long before Doncaster became the most YORKSHIRE IN 1750 25 famous of Yorkshire racing towns ; in York the Yorkshire folk of fashion spent their money ; the Coney Street trades- men of 1750 flourished on them. At home my lord and my lady lived lives which were not greatly different from the lives of the squire and his wife. My lord had his horse, his hound, his gun, his rod ; my lady had the still-room to attend to, and the servants to scold. My lord was not above calling in the parson to drink with him o' nights ; my lady was content with the stitching of her sampler, or an occasional peep into one of Mr. Richardson's novels. Neither my lord nor my lady was quite what their ancestors were, nor what their successors have become. The state and magnificence of the feudal days was not theirs, neither did they mingle with democracy as our great foDc of to-day mingle. They were, indeed, in a transition state at that time ; nevertheless, they were marked off from lesser folk by never riding out in aught less stately than a coach and six, accompanied by running footmen. As to the Yorkshire squire of those days, we get a very good idea of him, his doings, his thoughts, his occupations, from various sources, none of them so interesting and dependable as those which emanated from himself. One such good gentleman, Cuthbert Routh, Esquire, of Snape Hall, near Bedale, whose life was lived abnost wholly in the eighteenth century, left behind him a manuscript book which reveals many pleasant things about a country squire's life of his period : it has never been turned into print, and only a few privileged eyes have had the fehcity of reading it. Its author called it his Stud-Book, and there is certainly much about horses in it, but it is really a commonplace book of family matters, a sort of intimate and informal diary, in which the diarist is almost as confidential as Samuel Pepys or John Evelyn. He tells us the names of his daughters — we become quite famiUar with Miss Dolly, Miss Betty, Miss Judy, Miss Jenny ; they were all appa- rently as fond of horses and racing as their papa was. We become famihar, too, with his horses : he gives us every detail about them, especially as regards his financial trans- actions. " A Little Bay Colt, which I bought of Mr. Curwen 26 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE for £2$. A supposd. Bro. of Dimond. And sold him to Mr. Wm. Ovington, for his Grace of Wharton at 4 years old for two Hundred and forty Gxiineas £262." " Sold Mr. Cuitt near Thirsk, Simon now gone five years old, for 30 Guineas in hand, and 5 more in case he getts money." " Sold a Little Horse call'd Nutmeg to Townsend, at York Races, 1736, for 30 gs. in hand and a note for 10 more upon winning. £31 los." There are many entries of this sort : Mr. Cuthbert Routh might have been consciously prepaiing material for some future historian of Yorkshire racing. He gives a list of the subscribers to Richmond Races : it includes some famous names — the Duke of BoJton, the Duke of Wharton, the Earl of Carlisle, the Earl of TankerviUe. Lord D'Arcy, Sir Marmaduke Wyville. He give? full particulars of the race-meetings at Bedale and at Middleham ; he and his daughters were evidently great figures there. But amidst all this wealth of sporting memoranda, he does not forget domestic matters. He is a great hand at writing down recipes, and to those which he, or Mrs. Routh, or Miss Judy, has personally tested, he appends the highly important word Probat. " How to make Shrubb " ; " The Balsamic Tincture " ; " To make Excellent Ink " ; " The Black Japan for Shoes " ; " For a Droppsy " — ^these are some of the headings of his pre- scriptions. But there are many more ; he tells how to make the best Gooseberry Vinegar, and how to Pickle Salmon to keep Six Months ; he has a recipe for a Restora- tion Jelly which is to be taken in conjunction with the losing of 4 ounces of blood, daily, for 6 weeks ; he writes down a long Infallible Cure for the Bite of a Mad Dog. And all through his big manuscript book he makes remarks on the weather, and on various happenings in his neighbour- hood and on his estate, and we get a very good idea of him as an honest, simple squire who loved horses and dogs and country life and his own hearth and good Uving, and was quite happy in watching Nutmeg at exercise, or in copying out a recipe for a new way of making Herb Beer. As for the folk of lesser degree, their social habits and customs were, as a whole, and as a rule, of no great preten- YORKSHIRE IN 1750 27 sions. The professional men of the towns, the. doctors, the lawyers, were not above spending their evenings with the tradesmen in the taverns. The country parson, as often as not, wound up his day by seeking the chimney corner of the village inn, where he took his liquor and his pipe in company with the farmers, the sexton, the carpenter, and the blacksmith. It was, of course, a great age of drinking. People had a curious notion that strong drink helped to make strong men : to ensure good health, they said, you must gorge yourself with beef, and drink much sound ale. In London about that period there was a terrible craze for drinking gin — in 1736 there were over ten thousand gin- shops in London whereat you could get drunk for twopence — but it fortunately did not spread beyond the London boundaries. Ale was the common drink of the Yorkshire- man — ^good, strong ale, and plenty of it. If the rather superior person who resorted to the town tavern desired something better than ale, he drank brandy — which Dr. Johnson said was the drink of heroes. In towns which had a seafaring element they drank rum. While they drank and smoked in the town tavern parlour, or by the ingle- nook of the village inn, they talked. Their talk, one may be sure, was chiefly of local — strictly local — matters, for an57thing beyond the parish boundaries was as far from them as Central Austraha is from us, and there were next to no newspapers wherefrom to draw inspiration. Certainly, the Leeds Mercury began its career in 1718, and the Leeds Intelligencer, parent of the Yorkshire Post, in 1754, but they were very small and humble sheets, and as the Mercury in 1794, eighty years after its birth, had attained a circu- lation of only three thousand copies, we may be sure that one might have dropped into many town taverns and village inns in Yorkshire during the eighteenth century without being able to pick up a newspaper wherefrom to choose topics of conversation. Therefore, men fell back upon their own news, and these gatherings in tavern and inn, which served the purpose of the modern club, were signaUzed by a free exchange of whatever gossip and scandal was going the round of the parish. 28 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE In 1750 the labouring folk of Yorkshire might have been roughly divided into three classes — the artisans of the towns, the colliers and iron workers, and the agricultural labourers. Of these, the agricultural labourer was then by far the most prosperous. The gradual improvement in farming since the days of Charles the Second had consider- ably ameliorated his lot, and he was better fed, clothed, and housed than at any time during the previous two hundred years. Nevertheless, his was still a hard, grinding, poverty-stricken Ufe, with little comfort, small chance of pleasure, and no prospect but that of a pauper's old age. He worked from dawn till dusk ; his pay was six shillings a week. Yet he was better off than the workers of the towns, who were herded together in wretched slums, who were badly fed, clothed as a rule in coarse garments or in mere rags, and who, brutalized by their life and surroundings, and made callous by all men's neglect of them and their interests, were always ready to rise against society, and to pull down such pillars as it then possessed. Even worse, if that could be, than the life of the town artisan, was the life of the men who tore iron and coal from the deep places of the earth. Wherever mining was carried on there were degradation and brutality, and the crushing of all that might have made for civilization. It is little wonder that a man like John Wesley, burning to preach a gospel of good tidings and love, should have turned himself first of all to the coal miners of Kingswood, who, until that moment, had never known any man to care for their well-being, spiritual or temporal. There would have been less brutality, less degradation, less violence, less intemperance, in that age, if the people had had more opportunity of reasonable recreation and amusement. It is almost impossible for us of this age to imagine how httle amusement the common folk had in that. Nowadays every working man and lad gets as much recrea- tion as labour. Our cricket clubs, football clubs, and athletic organizations are numbered by the thousand ; the worker can go in for gymnastics, pedestrianism, swimming : in many towns there are model yacht clubs ; many working YORKSHIRE IN 1750 29 men have even taken up golf ; everywhere there are rifle- clubs ; pigeon-flying clubs ; at the workmen's clubs there are biUiard-tables, draught-boards, chess-boards, cards. In 1750 there was scarcely a game to which a labourer or an artisan could turn. Cricket was certainly beginning to be played about Shefiield : the earliest cricket match of any importance that we know of in Yorkshire was played at Sheffield, between Sheffield and Nottingham, in 1771. But it was a long time before cricket spread from the Shefiield knife-grinders to the other workers of the county. There was no football — unless a wild scrimmage around a leather- covered bladder between two parishes on Shrove Tuesday, invariably resulting in broken legs and heads, could be digni- fied by the name. In short, of athleticism there was nothing. Once upon a time, in the days when the country was known aU over Europe as Merry England, no nation in the world had had so many sports, games, pastimes, amusements as the EngHsh. Joseph Strutt, in his Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, smnmarized and described them for a generation which had forgotten them. He divides them in quaint fashion. There were Sports, Pastimes, and Mihtary Games Exhibited Pubhcly or Privately. There were Rural Exercises practised by Persons of Rank. There were Rural Exercises Generally Practised — he means, by the common people. There were Pastimes Practised in Towns and Cities. Finally, there were Domestic Amuse- ments. In his book, hundreds of innocent amusements and sports are described : most of them were known in England from the earhest times to the time of the Common- wealth. Then the bhght of bigoted and intolerant Puri- tanism feU on the EngHsh folk, and things which it had never entered the heart of man to think of as anything but iimocent, were pronounced to be sinful. It was sinful to dance round the Maypole. It was sinful to bring home the last load at harvest-time with song and rejoicing. It was sinful to play at prisoner's base — a favourite old English game — or at quoits — another greatly favoured pastime — or at trap-ball, or at bandy-ball. It was sinful to wrestle, or to swing clubs, or to play at casting of the bar and hammer : 30 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE it was vanity, and profitless. Your sour Puritan would not even permit the children to play. " This day " (March lo, 1660), writes one Mr. Ralph Jossehn, puritanical vicar of Earl's Colne in Essex, who kept a diary from which one may learn the bigotry and intolerance of the folk who murdered their king and burned Quakers at the stake, " I heard and saw the youth openly playing at catt on the green. I went up and routed them : their fathers sleeping in the chimney corner." Again, a week later, " Children very profane ; their parents sit at home, and they play openly in the streets at catt and other sports." This was the temper which killed innocent recreation in England : we feel the evil effects of it even in this twentieth century. But the repression had an effect which the Puritans — who were, of course, unfortunate folk, utterly devoid of any sense of humovu, and entirely without imagination — did not anticipate. People who forget how to play become idlers when work is not occupying them, and idleness in man is the devil's opportunity. Idle men drink ; idle men gamble ; idle men lounge at street-comers. And so the only recreations which our working folk of the eighteenth century knew, were drunkenness, and gambling, and street- fighting. Let us pray that their sins have not been put to their account, but to that of the Puritan hypocrites who drove the old EngUsh love of simple sport and innocent gaiety out of the na,tion. The rich folk, of course, always had their amusements, Puritans or no Puritans. It is (in the opinion of the children of this world) the rich man's bounden duty to amuse himself : for what other reason is he rich ? He is to eat, and to drink, and to be merry : that is why gold is given him in good measure. So whether or not the labourer or the artisan went without recreation and amusement, the eighteenth- century gentleman did not. He amused himself very well indeed. He could spend half the night over his bottles, and be found by the morning sun under his table ; nobody thought any the worse of him for that. He could gamble his own and his wife's and his mother's and his sister's fortunes away with one throw of the dice : people said he YORKSHIRE IN 1760 31 was a fine, ventiiresome fellow. He could sit a whole Sunday afternoon round the cock-pit in his shaded garden, betting with his fellow-squires on the skill and pluck of two miserable fowls : it was a fine, manly sport. He had better sports, of course : truly Enghsh sports. But some- how or other they nearly aU had to do with the slaying of fellow-creatures. Chasing the stag, hunting the fox, shoot- ing the pheasant and the hare, catching the fish — all were mixed up with violence and blood and death. Nevertheless, as the century progressed the EngUsh gentleman of means and leisure began to improve. The development of horse- racing did him much good : no Christian man need be ashamed to breed and to run race-horses, or to be found on the race-course, though many Christian men ought to have been bitterly ashamed of setting cocks to fight, and dogs to draw badgers. It did him good, too, to be inducted into cricket, the one sport in England out of which gambling has been kept. But neither cricket nor horse-racing was in great evidence in Yorkshire in 1750, and one is obUged to set down the average Yorkshire gentleman's amusements and recreations as having been of a gross and Pagan nature at that period. It is a strange and curious fact, but it is a fact beyond dispute, that the most important Yorkshire merry-making of the mid-Georgian age was on the occasion of a funeral. There were stated merry-makings at other times, of course. There was Christmas. Christmas was recovering a httle after the fierce attack made upon it by the Puritans, who considered it a Popish and blasphemous thing to celebrate the Nativity of Our Redeemer. There was the village feast, celebrated on the parish saint's day. The Puritans had tried to kiU that, too, having a hatred of aU saints, except those which they made themselves. The Church Ales and the Whitsun Ales were gone altogether — the Puritans stamped them out of existence. But not all the Puritans that ever were made, from foul-mouthed John Bale to OHver CromweU himself, could prevent a Yorkshire- man from burjdng his dead with good provision of meat and drink for all who came to assist at the obsequies. Nothing 32 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE much was expected at a baptism : it was sufficient if the newly-made Christian's health was drunk — ^with liberality. Nor was a wedding of the highest importance — cakes and ale there must be, of course, but a feast in moderation was amply sufficient. But at a funeral there must be no modera- tion in meat or drink— especially in drink. It was neither seemly, nor proper, nor respectable, to bury the dead without the accompaniment of baked meats and freshly-broached ale-casks. Even so good and pious a man as Mr. WiUiam Grimshaw (1708-1763), the famous EvangeUcal parson of Haworth, felt it incumbent upon him to provide for his funeral after the fashion of the time, though to a modified extent. " To attend my funeral," he commanded, in the first of his two wills, " I desire that zo persons be invited (of my next relations and intimatest acquaintance) and intertained in the following manner : — Let 5 quarts of claret (which will be every one a gill) be put into a punch-bowl and drunk in wine-glasses round till done. Let every one have a penny roll of bread to eat therewith ; let every one be come and let all sit down together to the same as an emblem of Christian love. This at home. Let every one have a quart of ale, a 2 penny spiced cake, and afterwards, immediately before rising up, a glass of claret and a paper of biskit (4 papers to the pound) ; distribute the biskits first, then the wine. This at the Drinking-House. [All Yorkshire funerals went to church by way of the public- house, be it remembered.] And as I've by will ordered 5 pounds to bury me with, it will be disburs'd in the follow- ing manner, viz. — To a funeral sermon, ids. 6d. To church dues, 5s. To a horse-Utter, £1 is. To a coffin, £1. To 2 gallon of claret, 6s. 8d. per gallon, 5 qts. at home, 3 qts. at drinking-house. To 20 2 penny cakes, 3s. 4d. To 20 penny rolls, is. 8d. To 25 pr. gloves, £1. To expense of inviting to funeral, 3s. To parson and clerk each a penny cake and other oddments, 2s. 2d. Total, £5." The good man made a second will, altering these instructions a Uttle, but the first shows what even a clergyman was expected to do. Five pounds was a very modest sum to spend on a funeral ; two gallons of claret and twenty quarts of ale a YORKSHIRE IN 1760 33 very insignificant amount of liquor to provide. Nor is there in Mr. Grimshaw's first will much provision made for eating. But there is a good example of the fare provided at a Yorkshire funeral in those days in this extract from an account book of household expenses which was kept during the eighteenth century by the Dawsons, of Wrose Hill : — " The accounts of Martin Dawson ffuneral, who departed this life April 23, 1748. Payd for .winding [enshrouding the corpse], 8s. 6d. ; do. for spices, 12s. 5d. ; do. for mutton, 5s. 8d. ; do. more, 4s. ; do. a pigg, 2s. 6d. ; do. pidgeons, IS. 6d. ; do. mutton, 5s. ; a ham of bacon, gs. 8d. ; 7 henns, 4s. 4^d. ; butter, 10 lbs., 5s. ; 10^ galls, of ale, los. 6d. ; sallett, 6d. ; pipes and tobacco, 6d. ; saman, 5 pounds, 3s. 4d. ; turbut, 7 pounds, 3s. 4d. ; oranges, barm, and bread, is. lod. ; for veal to John Hodgson, 9s. ; paid for 5 dozen plates, is. 5|d. ; for the cook, 3s. ; for his coffin, los. 6d. ; vicar dues for burial ; total, £5 4s. 7d." Here, again, there is not much provision of liquor, but the Dawsons of Wrose Hill may have been folk who wished to discourage undue consumption of it. The general custom was that much hquor was consumed before going to church, and much more after the return from church and the formal eating of the funeral feast ; and at the famous Arvils, kept up, round about the Worth Valley well into the nineteenth century, the day invariably finished with fighting and violence, which was not seldom of a savage description. It is impossible to conceive the existence of such a state of society as this in even the wildest and most primitive corners of Yorkshire in our own day, though there are remote places in the county to which civiUzation has not yet fully penetrated. But during the last hundred and fifty years education has been widely spread, and education makes all the difference in the world to manners and conduct. In 1750 there was very Mttle education in Yorkshire. Not even the upper classes were educated. The country gentle- man could do Uttle more than scrawl his own name ; his daughters were better acquainted with the needle than the pen, with the sampler than the book ; if his wife could cast up the household expenses book it was as much as 3 34 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE was expected of her. Farmers as often as not made their marks when their signatures were necessary ; tradesmen could do no more than keep their accounts in very elementary fashion ; the publican kept his by a system of notches and chequers on the back of his door. As for the working classes they, in the gross, were utterly without book-learning. Here and there in the villages, an old man or aged woman kept a sort of hedge-school at a penny a week per head ; they themselves knew little more than the letters of the alphabet, and their chief duty was to mind the children. The truth was that education in England had steadily decUned since the sixteenth century. The Dissolution of the Monasteries had proved a serious check to the progress of educational reform, for the monks had done valuable teaching work amongst all classes, and the convents had provided good educational advantages for the daughters of the nobihty and gentry. The work of the Grammar Schools, which received an impetus between 1550 and 1660, had steadily deteriorated since the time of the Commonwealth. They continued to deteriorate all through the eighteenth century : in 1795 we find Lord Chief Justice Kenyon saying of them that they were " empty walls without scholars, and everything in them neglected but the receipt of the salaries and emoluments." Arbitrary and harsh legislation had also cramped and narrowed instruction. No Cathohc was allowed to keep, or to teach in, a school ; for a long time the Protestant dissenter was hampered in whatever educational work he wished to undertake. Yet it was due to Noncon- formist effort that whatever improvement in the eighteenth century CEime into being was effected : one-twelfth of the schools which were in existence in 1750 had been founded and were managed by Nonconformists. The foundation of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, in 1698, led to vast improvement in the education of the poor ; by 1730 it had helped to estabhsh over 1,600 schools in the country, with an attendance of well over 30,000 children. But even then, though these charity schools were, as Addison calls them, " the glory of the age," they were mere oases in a desert, and the vast majority of eighteenth-century children YORKSHIRE IN 1750 35 had no means of learning to read or to write. And for their elders there was none of the advantages which our working classes enjoy to-day. There were no institutes in the towns — mechanics', literary, Christian, scientific, or otherwise. There were no hbraries, no reading-rooms, no museums, no art galleries, no collections of local antiquities. There were no parish rooms in the villages, no village clubs, no comfortably appointed places into which the rural labourer could turn of an evening to read the paper and glance at a magazine. There were no Mutual Improvement Societies, no Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, no free lectures, no free concerts, no working-men's clubs, no discussions of things economic and poUtical. There were no bands of music in the parks — there were no parks. All these things that we have now, and, having them, prize so httle — some of us, at any rate — were things undreamed of by our great- grandfathers. All over that terrible eighteenth century, the worst, the most depressing period of our history as a race, illiteracy, ignorance, superstition, hung like black and scarcely penetrable clouds. Nowadays, if a man has not got what he wants, he is quick to ask for it. He asks sharply and insistently. He writes to his newspaper ; he badgers his Member of Parlia- ment : he hfts up his voice in his club, in his ward meeting, in the public square : nothing and nobody is going to silence him or put him down. He is a free man in a free country. He is a citizen of a mighty Empire. He is so proud and confident in the greatness of that Empire, so sure of its strength, so elated by what that strength means, that he feels, even if he is but a mechanic, that he is the Empire — it is crystallized, that tremendously great British system, in him. This is another way of saying that in these days every man has his Rights. He is at last, after two thousand years of hot fighting. Free. But in 1750 very few English men had any rights, very few Enghshmen were free. It is quite true that since 1215, when the EngHsh clergy and the EngHsh barons forced King John to set his unwilling hand to Magna Carta, every Englishman was supposed to h^ve his rights and to be free as the air he breathed. But different 36 THE MAKING OP^ MODERN YORKSHIRE ages have different conceptions of freedom and of human rights : so have different governing powers, whether they be kings, dictators, or republics. No Enghshman was free under Henry the Eighth. No Englishman could call his soul his own under Ehzabeth. No Enghshman had any liberty of either body or soul under Cromwell and his fellow- Puritans. And though two hundred years had gone since Henry burnt Catholic and Protestant alike, with fine imparti- ahty, and Elizabeth hanged six hundred Yorkshire Cathohcs — drawing and quartering many of them " so that her Highness's anger may be made the more apparent " — and a hundred years since the Puritan tyranny turned out three thousand clergymen of the Establishment literally to beg bread for themselves and their families. Englishmen in the reign of George the Second were still far from enjoying free- dom and hberty. Of the men of all classes who hved in York- shire in 1750, very few indeed had a vote. The larger towns were as yet unrepresented — that is, they had no direct representative — in Parliament. It is interesting to con- sider, for a moment, what the state of things was in England at that time, as regards the share which the — theoretically— free Englishman had in governing his own country. There had been no change in our Parliamentary system since 1688. Each county returned two members. It was a somewhat expensive business to return them — expensive to electors and to elected : the Yorkshire county election of 1807 cost two of the candidates ;^ioo,ooo each. Every county elector had to journey — or, rather, to be conducted — to York to give his vote. The poU was taken during fifteen days. Every elector so brought to York had to be fed and lodged : the drink bill was enormous. The conditions of franchise in the boroughs (203 of which enjoyed the privilege of returning two members each) were extra- ordinary. In some towns, only hereditary freemen could vote : in others, only men who paid church and poor rate ; in others, only the holders of ancient tenements. The resultant anomahes were amazing. In Yorkshire, neither Leeds, nor Bradford, nor Sheffield, nor HaUfax, nor Huddersfield, nor Wakefield was represented, while places YORKSHIRE IN 1750 37 like Hedon, and Aldborough, and Boroughbridge had two members each. In some boroughs the franchise was con- fined to a very small percentage of the actual inhabitants ; in several of the Yorkshire towns there were fewer than a hundred voters. And therefore the average citizen was a man Vvithout rights ; it was of no use for him to protest in the fashion in which men protest nowadays, for, politically, he did not exist. The only way in which he could protest was by rebellion — hence the riots, and the unlawful assemblings, and the sullen growUngs, which prefaced the Reform Act of 1832. If the people had possessed more power, if each crowded town had been able to send a man of its own choosing to represent it in Parliament, to look after its own interests, we may be sure that many reforms would have come earher. But the men who were sent to Parliament in those pre-Reform days, though they valued their seats, thought httle of their constituencies. In many cases they did not even know where their constituencies were. Even so conscientious and admirable a man as WilUam Wilberforce, passing by chance through the Sussex village of Bramber in 1819, exclaimed, on accidentally hearing its name, " Why, this is the place I'm Member of Parliament for ! " Bramber returned two members : they were elected by thirty-five voters ; William Wilber- force had never seen a Bramber elector, nor Bramber itself, until that day. This was no unusual thing — and when a Member of Parliament knew nothing of his constitu- ency and its requirements, it was far from likely that he would or could do anything for it or them. But far worse was the case of the towns which had no direct representation. What could a man who represented a tract of land called Yorkshire do for places which, like Leeds, Sheffield, Brad- ford, were only specks on its map ? And so the growing centres of industry were left to themselves, with the result that they grew up as untended and unloved children grow up — anyhow. There was no grandmotherly legislation in those days — there was not even mild paternal government. There were no inspectors. Nobody went round to ask why 38 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE the children were not at school. Nobody examined the drains — as often as not there were no drains to examine. Nobody kept a jealous ej^e on the dangers to which labour might be subjected. Nobody inspected food and drugs — true, in some towns they still kept up the old Assize of bread and ale, and the officials were experts in the quality of ale, if not of bread. But of good local government there was none, and the Justice Shallows and the Dogberrys had things all their own way, in conjunction with the Poor Law and Mr. Bumble. But if we would really know how bad, how very low in the scale of civihzation the English eighteenth century was, we must turn to a consideration of the fashion in which our law-makers then treated three classes of the community — the paupers, the lunatics, the criminals. This is the surest test which can be applied to the standard of civiliza- tion of any nation which calls itself Christian. To relieve the poor, to guard the feeble-minded, to reclaim the criminal — these are surely the first duties of a Christian State. Our eighteenth-century ancestors thought differently : they agreed with writers Uke Bush, like Nicholls, that " society exists for no higher aim than the preservation of Property " — therefore the poor man was a danger and a nuisance, the lunatic something to be flogged into reason, the felon a subject for violence and death. We of this age can scarcely imagine how men of a century and a half ago treated their poorer and unfortunate brethren. That treatment, in the main, dated only from the time of Henry the Eighth. Up to the period of the Reformation the poor and the feeble- minded were the care of the Church : we may doubt if the criminal class were of any great proportion, for crime springs largely from want, and if Froude is to be believed for once, there was no great amount of want in England up to 1536. Our pauper population came into being with the Reformation, and it is significant that our first real Poor Laws began with Elizabeth. They were not greatly altered between the Act of 1601 and the Amendment Act of 1834, and the result of their working, of their harshness, their cruelty, may be read in the pages of Oliver Twist, The YORKSHIRE IN 1750 39 wonder to us of this age is that any men who professed Christianity could either administer them, or stand by to see them administered. But our great-grandfathers shared the opinion of Tennyson's Northern Farmer that the poor in a lump are bad, and it seemed to them the right thing that the pauper child should be starved and beaten, the pauper lunatic flogged mercilessly, and the pauper lame, bUnd, and infirm kept on a pittance which a church mouse might well have refused. Worse than the condition of the pauper and the lunatic was that of the criminal. We hold up hands of pious horror in these days when we hear of the harsh government of some semi-barbarous Oriental potentate, who exercises his power of Ufe and death on the trembling folk dragged before him : we shudder to hear of men being beaten to death, of being instantly decapitated, of being immediately strangled, on conviction, at the very steps of such a monarch's throne. Our eighteenth-century ancestors were not so squeamish — to them the gallows was as famihar as the aeroplane is becoming to us. In London, the centre of aU that was best in the nation, the doing to death of felons was an every-day occurrence. The executions at Newgate were a popular spectacle, a recognized social amusement. ■ The gibbets were everjrwhere. They were on Blackheath, and along the Uxbridge Road ; they were on Hampstead Heath and on Clapham Common, and they were rarely unoccupied. Men and women and even young children were strung up far into George the Third's reign, as readily as gamekeepers hang kites and stoats on our woodland fences. It was so easy to incur the penalty. Let us look at an old record of that time, and see what resulted from the commission of what we should consider minor offences : — Stealing 3s. 6d. in silver — Death ; firing an oat-stack — Death ; stealing a mare, her saddle and bridle — Death ; steahng i pair of new shoes — Death ; steaUng a horse — Transportation for the term of his natural life ; stealing a heifer — Transportation for fourteen years ; steal- ing a lamb — Transportation for seven years. But to be hanged out of hand, or sent, even for Ufe, to an over-seas 40 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE colony, was perhaps preferable to confinement in the prisons and gaols of those days. John Howard, the prison reformer, visiting Yorkshire — 1774-76 — found the condition of the gaols horrible beyond description. Leeds town gaol, he says, consisted of four rooms twelve feet by nine in size, with a smaller one. Some prisoners had escaped from this place just before his visit ; since that episode double bars had been placed in the windows. Escapes were so frequent that both men and women were chained to the walls ; in one place the magistrates sent the gaolers a number of thumb-screws wherewith to secure their captives. There was scarcely any light or ventilation in these gaols, and in many, straw, the only bedding allowed, was laid on floors which were, says Howard, an inch or two deep in water. At Knaresborough, Howard found that the prison for town debtors was a single chamber, twelve feet square, with one window, seventeen inches by six, to light it ; it had an earthen floor ; there was no fireplace ; it was very offensive — and no wonder, for a common sewer from the town ran through it, uncovered. " I was informed," he continues {State of Prisons, p. 413), " that an officer confined here some years since for only a few days, took in with him a dog, to defend him from the vermin ; but the dog was soon destroyed, and the prisoner's face much disfigured by them." Much of the sufferings of prisoners was due to the fact that in many counties the gaol delivery took place but once a year ; at Hull it was only once in three years — which is almost unbelievable, but quite true. Prisoners for debt were worse off than murderers and thieves, for though an Act of Pariiament had been passed in the reign of George the Second to secure such unfortunates fourpence a day subsistence money from their creditors, it had always been a dead letter, and the prisoner had to exist on the slender contributions of the benevolent — if he could get them — and on selling such small things as he could make. Howard says that at the windows of York City and County Gaol he found prisoners selling nets, purses, laces, beneath an inscription on a stone tablet : He that giveth to the poor, Undeth to the Lord^smely placed there either by smug YORKSHIRE IN 1750 41 hypocrisy, or by some official utterly without sense of humour. At Hull he heard of a collection made in the parishes, from which the prisoners received relief on Sundays and Thursdays : on the other five days of the week they starved. There was no inspection of any gaol or prison, every prisoner was at the absolute mercy of his gaoler, and if any magistrate ever felt it his duty to look round, the gaoler made it his duty to warn him seriously of the risk of contracting gaol-fever. Such was the state of Yorkshire in 1750 : such it remained, in some degree, for many years after 1750. There was little religious feeling : there was no political liberty ; there was no social life. Ignorance, materialism, brutaUty were everywhere ; few men cared for the condition of their fellow-men. Darkness, mental and intellectual, hung heavily over the towns ; apathy and patient, ox-Uke acceptance of fate, over the villages. While those who had took care to eat and drink of the best, those who had not found it hard to keep rags on their backs and to earn bread for their mouths. Yet even then the day of better things was at hand : 1750 marks the advent of the new era. Modern Yorkshire, with its wealth, its liberty, its free and enlightened population, was about to be made. It was to be made, too, by its own people, by its inventors, its mechanics, its great captains of industry, its rehgious reformers, its social reformers, its political reformers, but above all by the hard work, the strong endeavour, the thrift and far-seeingness of its men and women. No Yorkshireman of the true breed ever asks another man to do for him what he can do for himself, and no county in England owes less to outside help and influence than that of the broad acres. CHAPTER II COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT Somewhere about the Spring of 1765, the country folk who lived in and between the little hamlets of Ferrensby and Minskip, on the road leading from Knaresborough to Boroughbridge, became aware of an unwonted activity in their neighbourhood. Gangs of workmen and labourers appeared, armed with pick and shovel ; houses and cottages were requisitioned for their accommodation ; wooden huts were built here and there ; an old gravel-pit was opened out, and a large stable built on its edge ; a dozen horses were brought to the stable ; carts and wagons accompanied them ; everywhere on that stretch of road there was anima- tion. Since the memory of the oldest man served him, that piece of highway had always been bad, full of ruts ; now, it appeared, it was to be mended in such fashion that it would endure ; these gangs of strangers, these carts and horses, had been brought there for that purpose. All day they worked, from the early morning until twilight put an end to their labours. Such energy, amongst such slow-going folk, was wonderful — but not so wonderful as another sight which the people of Ferrensby and Minskip saw every day. For soon after the sun rose each morning, dwellers on the roadside, Knaresborough way, saw, hastening along towards Ferrensby, a tall, broad-shouldered man, who carried on his back a sack which usually held some six stones weight of fresh meat, whose right hand wielded a long staff having a crook at its end, with which he tapped his way along at a great pace, never halting, a man to whom that staff was a necessity, seeing that his eyes were sightless. This was the master of these busy gangs of men ; the fresh meat on his COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 43 back was for their rations ; he was with them first thing in the morning ; all day he was up and down the new road with them, or in the gravel-pit from which they took the necessary stone, or amongst the carts and horses ; always he was busy, active, stimulating, knowing as much of what was going on as if he had had eyes on aU sides of his shrewd brain ; not untU night fell did he leave them — to tap his way homeward for a few hours' rest before rising again with the lark. This man was John Metcalf, known to all that neighbourhood, and over a far wider area, as Bhnd Jack of Knaresborough. If courage, perseverance, cheerful determination to do great things despite grievous physical disabilities, entitle a man who shows them in full measure to the honours of real greatness, John Metcalf (1717-1810) was one of the greatest Enghshmen who have ever hved. He is certainly entitled to rank with the greatest of his fellow county- men. No Yorkshireman has ever shown more of that peculiar spirit of grit which is the Yorkshireman's finest quahty. Nowhere in the whole history of mankind is there a finer record of moral bravery than his, nowhere a more wonderful proof of how a great and indomitable spirit can conquer the heavy handicap of a grievous affliction. If there were in Yorkshire a Valhalla, a hall of heroes, in which the statues of famous Yorkshiremen were placed for honour and example, his statue should be of heroic size, for in his manifestation of certain quahties he towered above all his fellows. Stricken with bhndness at the age of six years, he lived eighty-seven years longer in a perpetual atmosphere of cheerfulness and endeavour, doing things which men in possession of their eyesight might well have been proud to do. He had no advantages of birth or education. His parents were poor labouring folk ; when small-pox destroyed his sight, he was such a young child that — especially con- sidering the educational facihties of that age — ^he had probably not even learnt his letters. But his bravery manifested itself at once. Within a few months of his recovery from the sickness which left him totally blind, he could make his way about the town ; before he was ten •44 'THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE years old he knew every inch of the country around Knares- borough, had become famous as a tree-climber, could fearlessly ride a horse, and was such an expert swimmer that he more than once, at that period, rescued folk from drowning in the river Nidd. Not all his time, however, was spent out of doors nor in amusements. At a very early age he learnt to play the vioUn, and long before he reached manhood, he earned his living by fiddling at country merry- makings, and at the assembUes held in the hotels at Harrogate. The career of Metcalf, extending over nearly all of the eighteenth and into part of the nineteenth century, was as full of variety and romance as a man's well could be who was handicapped as he was. A man of splendid health, vigorous constitution, and herculean frame, he seems to have made up his mind at an early period of his life that blindness should not interfere with the pursuits he desired. He was always a clever horseman ; he rode to hounds ; he rode in races ; he had such an accurate knowledge of the country that he could guide benighted travellers from York to Knaresborough, across the wildest moors and bogs, without hesitation : he excelled in wrestling, and even in boxing; he could, by a little management, play bowls with great success, trusting much to his exquisite delicacy of hearing. He set out on his first travels while he was still young ; carrying his fiddle with him, he rode, unaccom- panied, to Whitby, sailed to London, stayed there some time, sailed back to Whitby and thence to Newcastle, finally returning home with money in his pocket, after visiting many towns and places. In 1740 he re-visited London, and went up the Thames Valley. On his return to Yorkshire he married the daughter of the landlord of the Marquis of Granby inn at Harrogate — a fashionable tavern — and built himself a house at Knaresborough : he got the stone for it with his own hands out of the river- bed. His marriage led to his developing the extraordinary taste for business enterprise which henceforward made him a marvel to his contemporaries. He still played his fiddle to the fashionable assembUes at Harrogate, but within a COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 45 very short time he had started several other affairs. He set up a service of vehicles in Harrogate — up to that time the visitors had been obUged to go a-foot. Then he began dealing in fish, fetching his wares himself from the coast, and selling them in Leeds. He was thus engaged when the 1745 rising came to stir the pulse of folk who still cherished a warm comer in their hearts for the Stuarts. Metcalf, however, was no Jacobite ; he proceeded to enlist men for the Hanoverian side ; he rode with them to the North ; he was with General Wade in Northumberland and in Scotland ; he was at Aberdeen and at Culloden — and it was not until that sad affair was over that his fervour for miUtancy cooled. He returned home — to begin the sale of Scotch stockings and Scotch ponies in Yorkshire ; he is said, too, to have done a little iUicit trade in tea about this time. And • between 1750 and 1760 he carried on a very good business as general carrier between York and Knaresborough, and prospered so well that he became a leading man in his native town. Metcalf's first venture in road-making was the repair of the Knaresborough and Boroughbridge highway between Minskip and Ferrensby in 1765. He heard that the con- tract was on offer, he made a tender for it, and the authorities had such confidence in him that he secured the work. To this, henceforward, the great business of his Mfe, he now gave up the whole of his time. He sold his carrier's carts and horses, and the goodwill of his connection. He fully justified the trust which had been reposed in him. Folk marvelled that a blind man could make a road at aU, but no such roads as those which Metcalf made had been seen in England for thirteen centuries : they are still there for modem men to wonder at. His second achievement — the constmction of the highway between Harrogate and Knares- borough — ^was so successful that he soon had as many contracts as he could well undertake, and between 1765 and 1780 he was perpetually at work, either in his own county, or in Lancashire, or in the hilly district where Cheshire, Staffordshire, and Derbyshire join. Smiles, in his Lives of the Engineers, gives a careful account of these various 46 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE undertakings, from which it appears that Metcalf made, in Yorkshire, the roads between Harrogate and Harewood, Chapeltown and Leeds, Broughton and Addingham, Mill Bridge and HaUfax, Wakefield and Dewsbury, Wakefield and Doncaster, Wakefield and Saddleworth, Standish and Thurston Clough, Huddersfield and Highmoor, Huddersfield and Halifax, Knaresborough and Wetherby ; in Lancashire, between Bury and Blackburn, Bury and Haslingden, Haslingden and Accrington ; in the Stafford-Derbyshire- Cheshire district, between Whaley and Buxton, and Maccles- field and Chapel-en-le-Frith. He also made some main roads connecting Yorkshire with Lancashire, notably that between Skipton, Colne, and Burnley. For all these roads he designed and made the necessary culverts, bridges, and embankment walls, and it was a proud boast of his that whatever he had done in this way was able to withstand the floods which often reduced older work of the same sort to mere masses of fallen masonry. Metcalf's methods were, of course, entirely his own. No one probably understood them but himself, yet he never experienced any difficulty in getting their details carried out by the multitudes of men who worked for him. One who knew him well said of him that the plans which he made, and the estimates he prepared, were executed in a manner pecuhar to himself, and that he was unable to convey the meaning of them to any other person. Blind though he was, he made the most searching examination of the surfaces he had to deal with. Armed with his long staff, he went up hills and down valleys, prying into every nook and comer, always alone. It was astonishing, says this eye-witness of the bhnd man's doings, to hear the accuracy with which he described a course, and the nature of the different soils through which it ran. Then, too, he was fuU of extraordinary sagacity, and master of an astonishing readiness of resource. When he was making a stretch of the high road between Huddersfield and Manchester, he foimd himself faced by a serious difficulty at Standish Common. The surveyor had laid the line of the road across an expanse of marsh — and the line must be kept to. To COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 47 have trenched the bog would have been a tremendous task, occupying months of labour which might, after all, have been fruitless. Metcalf accordingly hit on a plan of his own — one which was afterwards adopted by George Stephenson for carrying the railway over Chat Moss, between Liverpool and Manchester. On either side of the marsh grew vast quantities of heather and ling. Metcalf employed hundreds of men to bind this into small bundles ; these bimdles were placed in transverse layers on the surface of the bog and were then firmly pressed down ; on the upper surface of this strange priming layers of stone and gravel were spread : the result, contrary to the prophecies of scoffers, was perfectly satisfactory, and that part of the road remained firm and dry for a long time subsequent to its construction. Metcalf was over seventy years of age when he made his last road. But he was one of those men who cannot be idle, and he was busily engaged in some trade or other to the end of his life. About 1793 he retired to a small farm which he had taken at Spofforth, near Wetherby, and there he combined farming with speculations in hay and wood. At Spofforth he dictated an accoimt of his life's work to an amanuensis, and it was duly pubhshed : a copy of the rare first edition hes before the writer, and here is a tran- script of its title-page : — ^The Life of John Metcalf, commonly called Blind Jack of Knaresborough, with many Entertaining Anecdotes of his Exploits in Hunting, Card-Playing, etc. ; some Particulars relative to the Expedition against the Rebels in 1745, in which he bore A personal share ; and also a Succinct Account of his various Contracts for making Roads, erecting Bridges, and other undertakings in Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derby- shire, and Cheshire, which, for a series of years, have brought him into Public Notice, as a most Extraordinary Character. EmbeUished with A Striking Half-length Portrait. York : Printed by E. & R. Peck, Low Ouse- Gate, 1795. The old man hved fifteen years after the pub- lication of his httle book, dying peacefully at his Spofforth farm in 1810, and leaving behind him a great record : he 48 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE also left four children, twenty grandchildren, and ninety great-grandchildren. There is a monument to his memory in Spofforth Church, but a more worthy one is in the work which he accompUshed. Much of John Metcalf's work was done for the various Turnpike Trusts which had been formed in Yorkshire during the eighteenth century. In 1663 an Act of Parlia- ment had brought toll-bars into existence at various points along the Great North Road, and at that time and for a long period afterwards, the old Act of Philip and Mary (1555) threw the maintenance of the highways upon the parishes. But in 1706 began the formation of the Turnpike Trusts, which came to be numbered by thousands. The various Acts of ParHament which created these trusts empowered certain private persons to make and maintain specific stretches of road, and to levy tolls at stated places, bars, or toll-houses, on all who used them. In each case the power was limited to a period of so many years, but an extension could be had on application. These extensions were invariably granted until about fifty or sixty years ago : many of us can easily remember the old toU-bars, for it is only a little over twenty years since the last trust expired. These trusts were never popular with the people ; folk invariably grumbled about them in the nineteenth century : in the eighteenth century they led to rioting and bloodshed. They were particularly unpopular in York- shire : some years before Metcalf began his labours the setting up of the pikes and toll-houses had roused the local populations to fury. At Selby the town-crier went round with his bell and called on the townsfolk to bring axes and crowbars to cut and break the offending structures : there was a ready response to his summons, much damage was done, and it became necessary to call out the mihtary. In the summer of 1753 an organized mob made an attack on the turnpike in the Harrogate and Wharfedale districts ; many of the toll-houses were wrecked or burned ; a number of the rioters were arrested, and their friends attempting to rescue them on the way to York Castle, several lives were lost in an ensuing fight between the soldiers and the COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 49 rioters. The chief opposition to the trusts came from the farmers, who believed that the extension of good roads would be their ruin. So long as they themselves could get to the only market which they knew and which had served their fathers before them, they cared nothing about the better transit of goods between widely-separated places. But from 1750 onwards improvement in transit and communication was steadily growing. The stage-coach seems to have appeared in Yorkshire in Charles the Second's time, for Ralph Thoresby, the topographer, records in his diary that in 1679 he travelled by coach from Hull to York. Thirty years later we find him coaching from York to Leeds : he blesses God that it was a quick journey, yet he rose between three and four in the morning to begin it, and he was not set down in Leeds until noon. In 1700 it took a week to get to York from London : in 1763 a fortnight was consumed between London and Edinburgh. Ten years before that, according to the learned Dr. Whitaker, the roads in the neighbourhood of Leeds were no more than narrow, hollow ways, no better than ditches, with paved causeways on one side of them, whereon the pack-h6rses carried goods. It may have been for this reason that Whitaker much preferred travelling on horseback to travel- ling by coach : in a stage-coach, he said, helpless individuals were at the mercy of a drunken brute. Yet, whether the coachmen were generally given to intoxication or not, the stage-coach had come to stay for a while, and as Metcalf and other engineers improved the highways, stage-coaching also improved. By 1770 the journey between Leeds and London had been shortened to one of four days : in 18 15 it was accomplished in twenty-one hours — a marvellous feat, in the opinion of folk of that memorable year. By the early years of the nineteenth century, indeed, Yorkshire was beginning to be able to boast of good roads and excellent service on them. Other road-makers than Metcalf had been at work : the great Telford himself had been called in by some of the numerous Turnpike Trusts, and to him is due the fine highway between Leeds and Bamsdale, byway of Pontefract : Macadam, too, had shown how a better 4 50 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE surface can be obtained by the use of stone broken into small fragments. By the time the first whispers of the wonderful railwa3's began to circulate, the Yorkshire roads were full of traffic. Stage-coaches ran between all the principal towns. Hull and Leeds were brought within five hours of each other ; York and Leeds within three. At places hke Boroughbridge and Ferrybridge the coaches came and went all day, . and many rattled through in the night. Also there was an excellent system of goods-wagons between the principal trading towns, and an exceptionally well-organized one from Leeds to London, through Sheffield, Nottingham, and the larger centres of the South Midlands. And it was thought a marvellous thing that a tradesman could send his goods from Yorkshire to the capital by these goods-expresses, as they were called, in thirty-six hours, and that stage-coach passengers began to be numbered by the tens of thousands in any one year. Just about the time that John Metcalf was making his first essay in road-construction, James Brindley was making the iirst English canal. In the making of water-ways as a means of internal communication, we in this country had been culpably behind our continental neighbours, and far behind the ancients. There were canals in use in India and Egypt and China hundreds of years before the Christian era : Herodotus tells of a canal which was cut across the Isthmus of Suez about 500 B.C. In Europe canals do not seem to have made any great headway until the fifteenth century : the difficulty of raising craft from one level to another was greatly against them. But about 1487 Leon- ardo da Vinci showed the Milanese how to make locks, and the brothers Dominico constructed gates for them, and canals approximating to the modern type came into being in Lombardy. Early in the sixteenth century the canal system spread to France, and the great Languedoc canal, 148 miles in length, was constructed to connect the Mediterranean with the Bay of Biscay. But there was nothing done in England until 1755, when the Duke of Bridgewater, anxious to transport the coal from his collieries at Worsley to Manchester, called in Brindley, already of COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 51 some celebrity as an engineer, to accomplish the making of the famous water-way which has ever since been known as the Bridgewater Canal. This great engineering feat, success- fully achieved in face of apparently insurmountable diffi- culties, led to the designing of similar canals in all parts of the country, and in the closing decade of the century there was almost as much speculation and feverish activity in canal shares and schemes as there was in railway enterprise fifty years later. The number of Navigation Acts passed by Parliament was immense. One issue of the Gazette — August i8th — in 1792 contained no fewer than eighteen prospectuses of new canals. Surveying went on all over the country : prehminary cuttings and workings sprang up everywhere. In 1793-4 forty-five Canal and Navigation Bills received assent : the expenditure on these involved a sum of well over five millions. Speculation became wild and almost frenzied, and — also as in the case of the railways — folk who wanted to become rich too quickly suffered serious losses. Still the work went on, and within thirty years of the completion of the Bridgewater Canal by Brindley there were nearly three thousand miles of new water-ways in England. Communication by water had not been wholly neglected in Yorkshire. The river Aire had been rendered navigable as far as Leeds in the last years of the seventeenth century, and in 1770, Smeaton, the famous builder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, himself a Yorkshireman and a native of Austhorpe, near Whitkirk, made the Ure navigable up to Ripon. About the same time a cut, or broad dyke, was made between the Aire and the Ouse in the neighbourhood of Selby ; many years previously river communication had been estabhshed between the Ouse and Malton, by way of the Derwent. But the first great canalizing work in the county came with the making of the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, which, begun in 1770, was not fully completed until the year of Waterloo. This, one of the most important water-ways in England, connecting the great Lancashire shipping port and the busy Lancashire industrial centres with the rapidly-rising towns of the West Riding, linking 52 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Leeds and Bradford and Keighley with the sea, was designed by Brindley. It was upon the results of his survey, and on his estimate of the expense, that the necessary apphcation to Parliament was made, and when the Act was passed in 1769 the directors of this great venture offered him the post of engineer. But Brindley at that time was making canals, and accomplishing other engineering work, aU over the country, and he was obliged to dechne the offer. The work was necessarily of an arduous sort : nevertheless, twenty miles (the total length is nearly 150) of the canal were opened between Bingley and Shipley within four years. Those who witnessed the construction of this stretch were amazed at the magnitude of the deeds achieved ; within a few miles at this point there is a five-fold lock, a three-fold, a two-fold, and a single lock, having altogether a fall of 120 feet ; there is also an aqueduct of seven arches which carries the canal over the river Aire, and another of vast proportions which carries it on an embankment over a deep valley. No wonder that the bells of the neighbouring towns and villages rang out merry peals on the day of the opening, or that the spectators were amazed to see the first fleet of boats pass through locks having a fall of nearly seventy feet, in the short space of half an hour. From this time onward canal communication in Yorkshire developed rapidly : it spread between Yorkshire and Lancashire in the West, between Yorkshire and the Midland counties in the South, between the West Riding and the Humber in the East. As far back as 1757 the Hahfax merchants had endeavoured to make better use of the river Calder ; they called in Smeaton to give advice, and eventu- ally to begin work. Smeaton laboured for many years with little success ; it was not until Brindley's counsel and practical co-operation were obtained that a triumphant issue was found out of the natural difficulties. It was no easy matter to make a canal through these wilds, bordering on the harsh outlines of the Pennine Range ; Smeaton and Brindley fbund it necessary to lift their level nearly 300 feet between Sowerby Bridge and the summit of the high ground beyond ; to lower it over 400 feet from that point to the COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 53 level of the river Invell, running towards Manchester ; the number of locks to be constructed, therefore, was multitudinous ; between Sowerby Bridge and Halifax, for example, they seem to occur every half-mile or so. A less difficult task was the making of the canal between Goole and Knottingley, which connects the Calder and the Aire, two West Riding rivers meeting at Castleford, with the great estuary of the Humber. This was undertaken in 1820 by a newly-formed corporate body calling itself the Aire and Calder Navigation Company ; to its labours, enterprise, and pubUc spirit, the river port of Goole owes its modem importance. A mere riverside viUage until a hundred years ago, Goole now boasts of fine docks and a great import and export trade with Russia, France, and Holland. Vast sums of money have been laid out on Goole by this canal company, and though the canal itself had only been in use a short time when the railway system arrived to compete with it, it is to its construction that Goole primarily owes its flourishing condition amongst our lesser seaports. Numerous smaller canals were made in various parts of the county between 1790 and the coming of the railways. It is usually said that the railways killed the canals, but the real truth is that our responsible authorities have never realised the great advantages of internal navigation. When railways spread their network over the country, canals were largely suffered to fall into disuse and decay ; here and there, in all parts of England, one finds their surfaces covered with weed and slime, and in some cases their beds bereft of water. Of late years there has been an attempt to revive their use and develop their construction ; the Royal Com- mission which sat from 1906 to 1909, to inquire into the whole question of EngUsh canals and water-ways, and issued a report in the last-named year, strongly recommended that our canals should at least be put into the same state of efficiency as those of our foreign neighbours, who have always made much more use of this method of communica- tion and transit than we have : it further made the practical suggestion that a new Board should be formed to link up the canals which connect the Thames, the Severn, the 54 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Mersey, and the Humber with the Midland Counties, and that a sum of nearly twenty millions should be expended on the project. Such a scheme, properly carried out, would have been of vast use during the last three years for the conveyance of war material from the inland centres to the sea. At the end of the sixty years which had elapsed since John Metcalf began road-making at Ferrensby, and Brindley designed the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, the means of communication and transit in Yorkshire were vastly changed from what they had been in the eighteenth century. Good roads had sprung up all over the county : they were found in the dales of the north-west, and even amongst the moor- lands of Cleveland. Stage-coaches ran from point to point with the regularity of present-day railway trains : time- tables showed the precise hour of their arrival and departure. Regular services of goods-wagons conveyed manufactured goods and merchandise of all descriptions from one part of the county to another, and far across its borders. The old strings of pack-horses, which made their way along the causeways at the sides of the bad roads, had disappeared. Farmers no longer rode to market, but drove light carts, in which their hghter produce, the eggs, the butter, the cheese, formerly carried in baskets on their wives' arms, could be conveyed with no fear of damage. Canal-boats bore heavy loads of goods. The highway and the water- way had been developed in such a fashion as no eighteenth- century man would have dreamed of, and further develop- ment was in the air. Stage-coach proprietors vied with each other in accelerating the speed of their teams, the comfort of their passengers. Projectors were considering the making of new canals ; road-making had by no means come to a stop. Splendid bridges were being built ; river navigation was being developed. Even in the last years of George the Fourth's reign, no one foresaw the extra- ordinary change which was about to take place. The lajdng out of the Stockton and Darhngton Railway in 1825 does not appear to have excited any apprehension in the breasts of the folk who had money invested in the Turnpike COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 55 Trusts, or in stage-coaches, or in the goods-wagon», or in the canals : probably they regarded it as a merely local affair which would not be imitated to any great extent, and then only on the sidings of some coUiery. So sure were road authorities that nothing could drive the coaches and post-chaises and travelling carriages off the highways that they went on road-making and road-improving. In 1824 Telford was called upon by the Post Office authorities to lay out an entirely new road between London and Northumberland ; he was survejdng the route for five years, and the work was about to be begun, when, in October, 1829, the news spread round England that a hitherto obscure mechanic had achieved what many wise men had pronounced an impossibility. At Rainhill, near Liverpool, in the presence of an eager, wondering crowd, George Stephenson drove his Rocket steam-engine over a prepared length of railway at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour. From that moment a new era came into being ; the stage-coach, the goods-wagon, in some measure the canal-boat, were doomed : the great means of transit for the nineteenth century was to be the locomotive engine, worked by steam, and running on rails. There had been railroads in England for two hundred years ; in Yorkshire they were well known to men who worked at coal-getting : it was, indeed, only in the vicinities of collieries that they were found. They at first consisted of Hnes of wooden planking, laid down from the pit mouth to some quayside or convenient staith. But in 1776 iron came into use, when one John Curr laid down a cast-iron tramway at a Sheffield colhery. At the Middleton Collieries, in the neighbourhood of Leeds, a railroad had been in use for many years — in one form and another, as far back as 1760 — and since 1812 its trucks were worked by a primitive form of steam-engine, the driving-wheel of which was fitted with cogs that corresponded with those of a rail which ran alongside the lines. According to an account of this railway which appeared in the Leeds Mercury of June 27, 1812, this engine could draw eight wagons, each holding three and a half tons of coal, a mile and a half in twenty-three minutes. 56 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE This is, perhaps, the earliest, or, at any rate, one of the earliest instances of the use of steam on an elementary railroad, but the engine was a vastly different affair from Stephenson's Rocket, though this, seen nowadays, is so primitive in appearance that one is astonished to know that it ran at the rate of thirty-five miles an hour at the close of the epoch-making trials at Rainhill. But the performance of the Rocket definitely settled the most important matter in connection with the railways. The Rainhill trials were held for the special purpose of deciding between stationary and locomotive engines : when the trials were over, and the prize awarded to George Stephenson, even the most obtuse man present must have known that in a very few years he would see steam-impelled locomotive engines rushing along from shire to shire of an astonished country. But the railway system did not come into existence with- out opposition, nor without full expression of doubts and fear, nor without prophecies of a dark and doleful nature. No similar revolution — for it was nothing less — ever took place with less welcome. There need be no wonder that folk did not welcome it. Let us endeavour to enter into the feelings of that age. No one, except a few scientists and experimenters, knew much about steam, except that it seemed remarkably easy to get blown up by it. The idea of being whirled through space — even at the height of only a few feet above solid earth — at the rate of thirty, or even of twenty miles an hour, was disconcerting and often terrify- ing to people who considered it a direct tempting of Provi- dence to ride in one of the express mail-coaches. So far Englishmen had avoided haste — their temperament inclined them to leisurely movement. Then there was the danger that would arise from the fires of these swift-moving engines — Chouses would be set on fire ; growing crops, ripening to harvest, would be fired ; a spark faUing on a rickyard might set up a conflagration which would easily damage a farmer to the extent of hundreds of pounds. Cattle, innocently grazing in the fields, sheep, horses — to say nothing of aged persons and young children — would be frightened to madness by the sight of these new-fangled monsters. \ \ \ \ COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 57 There would be no peace, quiet, restfulness in the country again. And — there were the vested interests to consider. Members of Parhament spoke almost tearfully on their behalf. What of the innocent people who had invested their money, their savings, their httle all, in the Turnpike Trusts ? What of the people whose capital was locked up in the recently-opened canals ? And what of the innumer- able folk who made their living out of the now firmly- established highroad traffic — the stage-coach proprietors, the owners of post-chaises, of flys, of goods-wagons, the inn-keepers, the coachmen, the post-boys, the ostlers, the hundred-and-one hangers-on, aU necessary, all earning an honest living ? A chorus of indignation and of lamentation went up all over the country : we in our time have heard something like it — a faint echo only — when our four-wheeled cabs and our hansoms were driven off the streets by the automobile. But the railways had come — with startling swiftness. For ten years after the opening of the Liverpool and Man- chester hne in 1830 they arrived in sections — here a little and there a little. One neighbouring town found itself linked to another neighbouring town by an iron highway along which people first ventured out of curiosity and unmediately afterwards for business. And on September 22, 1834, Yorkshiremen saw the first Yorkshire hne of railway at work. On that first day of a new Autumn, one hundred and fifty privileged townsfolk of Leeds got into a railway train, and journeyed to Selby. According to the Leeds Mercury, it took two hours to cover the first four-and-a-half miles : something, surely, must have gone wrong with the engine. But to Selby they got at last, and there they spent two hours in exchanging congratulations with the Selby folk and — possibly — in congratulating themselves that they were safe and sound. However, they went back to Leeds in fine style, leaving Selby at 11. 15 and actually arriving at Leeds by 12.30 — a marvellous feat. The writer in the Mercury is properly eloquent about it, and he adds that now it has once begun to go, the railway train wiU start from Leeds for Selby precisely at 6.30 in the morning, and at 58 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 1.30 in the afternoon. So the thing is done — here in the midst of the greatest and proudest shire of England, with its wide-flung four millions of acres, is a little stretch of iron highway, along which runs a steam-engine. It is eimazing — but it is only a taste of the wonderful things that are at hand. If, bearing in mind the fact that little more than eighty years ago there was not one single mile of railway line in the county, we look at a modem map of Yorkshire, we shall see what this modest beginning in the corner between Leeds and Selby in 1834 has grown into. The railroad is every- where. Its great trunk lines cross the county from north to south, from east to west. It is in the dales ; it is on the moorlands. It spans the dead levels of Hatfield Chace, of Lower Holderness ; it has penetrated the dark valleys that lie beneath Blackstone Edge ; it has wound itself into the fastnesses of Swaledale ; it crosses the solitudes of Stainmore. In one place it keeps a dead straight level, as between York and the Durham border ; in another it climbs and twists, and edges precipices and goes round fearsome corners, as on the coast between Whitby and Scarborough. It is only on the high table-lands from which Wharfe and Ure and Nidd have their beginnings, or on the wild moors of Smilesworth and Spainton that men are unfamiliar with it ; even there a strong wind carries with it the steam-engine's cry as it rushes along in the not far-off valleys. Eighty years ago, seventy years ago, sixty years ago, a Yorkshire- man had to travel many miles before he came to the railway and its locomotive : nowadays, even the dwellers in the solitudes are within comfortable reach of some wayside station whence they can be transported to the ends of the earth — or set down at the nearest market-town. Their grandfathers were born in a world of vast, unconquerable distance : they themselves live next door to everjrwhere. All this facility of communication and transit in Yorkshire sprang from small initial efforts : the great railway corpora- tions with which we are familiar had no existence seventy years ago : the very names, styles, titles of the first lines are forgotten, save by historians and the curious. The COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 59 first lines of railway were made by groups of men who desired to connect one centre with another ; they were, in short, purely local endeavours to improve transport of goods. Between 1834 and 1850 several short lines were laid. In 1836 one of the most picturesque and interesting railway routes in Yorkshire was opened — the Une through the hills and moors between Pickering and Whitby, and at first it was worked by horses. Rotherham and Sheffield became connected by railway in 1838 ; Manchester, Nor- manton, York, and Darlington in 1841 ; York and Scar- borough in 1845 ; 1846 saw the linking up of Leeds and Bradford, and of Hull and Bridlington ; in 1848 a hne was laid between Dewsbury and Leeds, and from Wakefield to Goole : a year later communication was established between Leeds and Thirsk. There were thus quite a number of small companies in existence in the county, and the amalga- mation of them under the present great railway corporations had not yet arrived. Nowadays, when we think of railway enterprise in Yorkshire, we associate it with the names of the North-Eastem, the Lancashire and Yorkshire, the! Mid- land, the Great Central, the London and North- Western. But in 1850 these powerful combinations had not sprung into existence, or were only in a feeble sort of infancy. Nevertheless, few as the small companies were, and meagre the accommodation, competition had already set in, and on the two alternative routes to Thirsk, tickets were offered to the travelling public for next to nothing by the rival companies. Some idea of the number of companies which came into being as the railway industry prospered may be gathered from the fact that between 1854 and 1910 the North-Eastern Railway Company bought up and drew within its own system no fewer than forty different lines. But it is difficult for us of this day to form any idea of the primitive fashion in which those first lines carried either passengers or goods. Those of us who know the present magnificent railway station at York can scarcely believe that the station of 1840 was a mere wooden shed at the end of the present Queen Street, without the city walls, near Micklegate. It con- 6o THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE tained two rooms ; in one of them sat the Secretary ; in the other, the Booking-Clerk. To book one's passage by train in those days had a Hteral meaning : there was writing to be done. The intending passenger told the clerk to what station he wished to travel — not a very difficult task, for there were few stations to which he could travel. The clerk, being thus informed, wrote down on the ticket — a slip of paper — the date and the hour and moment of departure, and the name of the place to which the ticket was issued, and the amount of the fare. Then he inscribed the passenger's name on the counterfoil of the ticket. Then he cut ticket and counterfoil in two, with a handy pair of scissors. Then he presented the ticket to the passenger, who, having paid his money, went to take his seat. But we are not to imagine that the train in which he seated himself was anything like the trains we know nowadays. There were no drawing-room cars ; no dining and tea and breakfast cars ; no lavishly upholstered, cushioned, and anti-macassared compartments in which travellers are as comfortable as in their favourite arm-chairs. The first- class passenger certainly had a roof over his head, but the inferior-class passenger had none. He sat in a sort of truck, on a plank. He was exposed to the summer sun, the winter snow, to the beating rain, the nipping east wind. Also he was exposed to the showers of soot and of cinders which poured upon him from the engine's high chimney. Little wonder that the grandees brought their private carriages to the railway stations, had them placed on trucks, and sat in them, shawled and muffled, with drawn windows, while the engine dragged them to their destination. Whenever new things of this sort appear, there are always men who desire to make money out of them while the fever of novelty lasts. Students of political economy and its history are familiar with the details of those periodical outbursts of furious and unreasoning speculation which have occurred in our midst at certain periods ; those periods, of course, have only been in modem times, for our ancestors had no money to gamble with, save at the gaming-table. There was the affair of the South Sea Bubble in the time of COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 6i George the First, when folk were so eager to become rich all at once that they bought up shares in aU sorts of com- panies to such an extent that the value— nominal value — of those shares is said to have been ;f5oo,ooo,ooo — ^which was just about twice the then value of the whole country. In lesser degree,' further on in the same century, people went mad over canal shares : in our own times we have seen men lose their heads over dealings in rubber, in electrical undertakings, in automobile transactions. And in 1845 everybody went similarly crazy over railway speculation. Stocks and shares in railways were handed about as readily as bank-notes ; nay, many folk much preferred them to bank-notes. Men of straw, men who would have found it difficult, perhaps impossible, to find five pounds in cash, bought railway shares on credit, hoping to sell them at an enormous profit as soon as they touched some fabulous market-price. Many a man of this sort became a million- aire — on paper. Everybody either wanted to make a rail- way, or to have a share in making one. On November 30, 1845, there was a scene at the Board of Trade such as England had never previously known — not even in the days of the South Sea scheme. That day had been fixed as the last day for receiving proposals and plans for new railways. Notice had been given that all plans lodged before midnight would be attended to. But from an early hour in the morning the ante-room, the hall, the street without, were blocked up by projectors ; aU day they continued to arrive ; many of them arrived after midnight, and forced their belated proposals and their deposits through whatever crannies they could find, through the door-slits, under the doors, through a window left open by chance — to see them thrown out again into the open street. It was calculated that the sum involved in their schemes was of a frightening magnitude — that represented by the nearly 800 proposals which received proper consideration amounted to six hundred millions of money. Now if a man desires to make his fortune by buying shares in anything, whether it is in railways or in rubber or in canals or in cocoa, there is one thing which he must not 62 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE do — he must not give more for his shares than they are worth. Many people — thousands of people — during the railway mania of 1845-50 bought shares for far more than they were worth, and a very considerable number of such people were ruined in consequence. Between the years 1847-49 English railways passed through a series of financial crises of a drastic and very searching nature, and numerous speculators found themselves well-nigh beggared, while lesser folk literally lost all they had. Men who had made themselves of a Napoleonic stature in railway matters were rudely thrown down from their pedestals — for them, too, as for Napoleon Buonaparte, there were an Elba and a St. Helena, wherein to reflect on the foolishness of daring too much. One such example we had in Yorkshire — perhaps the greatest example of the foUy of speculation, so far as railway history is concerned. If any man's name was familiar in the county between 1840 and 1850 it was that of George Hudson, whom his fellow-Yorkshiremen then called the Railway King, whom Thomas Carlyle bluntly styled the Big Swollen Gambler. Some people see romance —of a great sort — in Hudson's life : certainly it was a life of exciting commercial adventure, which ended in failure, comparative poverty, and not a little disgrace. He was born at Howsham in 1800, the son of a fanner who in due course apprenticed him to the draper j' trade in York. He followed that trade until 1828, when he inherited a fortune of £30,000. A man of great business abihty and foresight, he saw the vast possibihties of the newly-born railway system, and he used his capital in speculation and in railway development. Within a very short space of time he had become a man of considerable importance in York, and a director of one of the principal banks in the city, and in 1837 he was elected Lord Mayor. He became chairman or deputy chairman of many of the newly-formed railway companies of the North of England, and was much associated with George Stephenson in their working. He was the principal opponent of the schemes and plans of what is now the Great Northern Railway Company, and he had the mortification of seeing his opposition completely broken COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 63 down. But from 1840 until 1849 his power was great, and his own profits enormous ; he became so wealthy, indeed, that he bought Londesborough Park, one of the finest properties in the East Riding, from the Duke of Devonshire, and gave nearly half a million of money for it. He was Lord Mayor of York again in 1846— but within three years he was a beaten man. The railway crisis of 1849 brought him and many other venturers and speculators to the ground, and he was obliged to relinquish his various posts, not before ugly rumours of peculation and fraud had centred round his name. And just as his rivals, the Great Northern, established themselves in Yorkshire, he left England for some retreat on the Continent, his kingship of the railway system over for ever. He had made vast sums of money in his time, but he died — 1871 — in straitened circumstances. Out of the mass of small railway concerns and from the larger ones originated by Hudson and similar speculators and projectors, the present weU-known railway corporations of Yorkshire eventually emerged. The North-Eastern Railway Company sprang into existence in 1854 from an amalgamation of three existing fines — the York and North Midland, which connected the centre and south of York- shire with Derby and London ; the Great North of England, which connected York with Darlington, Durham, and Newcastle ; and the Leeds Northern, which ran between Leeds and Thirsk, by way of Arthington and Ripon. The Great Central sprang from the Manchester, Sheffield, and Lincolnshire — a fine connecting Lancashire with South Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire — which had been estab- lished as far back as 1837. From the Manchester and Leeds Railway, and the extension between Wakefield and Goole, sprang the important company known as the Lancashire and Yorkshire. The various lines which connected Leeds and Dewsbury with Huddersfield, Stalybridge, and Man- chester were taken over by the London and North-Westem Railway. In 1844 the three companies hitherto known as the North Midland, the Midland Counties, and the Birming- ' ham and Derby, were amalgamated as the Midland Railway, which presently took over the line between Leeds and 64 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Bradford, and in due course extended it in sections, through Keighley, Skipton, and Hellifield to Ingleton. Thence the Midland trains were obliged to run northward over the London and North- Western line, by way of Tebay and Sedbergh, until 1875, when the new Midland through-Une between Settle and Carlisle was opened. This was the first great railway company definitely to connect Yorkshire with London and the South, but in the early 'fifties its rival, the Great Northern, came into being, and established direct communication with the county by way of Peter- borough, Grantham, Newark, and Retford — all important centres from which to reach Cambridgeshire, Northampton- shire, and Nottinghamshire. True, the Great Northern line proper, as was drily observed at the time, came to a sudden halt in the middle of a ploughed field near Askern, but the company soon had running powers by way of Wakefield to the great West Riding towns, and through Knottingley and Burton Salmon to York, and when in 1871 a new line was opened from York to Doncaster, through Selby, a straight run between London, York, and Edinburgh became possible b}' what is now called the East Coast Route : nowadays, indeed, a man may step into a Great Northern carriage at King's Cross, and remain in it until it pulls up at Perth or Inverness. Railway affairs in Yorkshire, then, are, and long have been, in the hands of six great companies, whose lines were for the most part in existence and firmly established by 1870. But since then important developments have been made in constructing new portions of line, new branches, new links between one line and another. Forty years ago a line which involved much engineering and construction was made between Swinton, near Rotherham, and a point close to Knottingley, through Pontefract — where a remarkable cutting was made on the side of Baghill, the eminence on which the Parliamentary generals had set their cannon during the sieges of Pontefract Castle at the time of the Civil War ; this linked up two highly important centres — York and Sheffield — by a direct route. Soon after the making of this another line was constructed from the coal- COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 65 fields of South Yorkshire to the Humber — the Hull and Barnsley, which runs from Cudworth, through Howden, to the great East Riding port. This Une traverses a purely agricultural district ; it touches nothing but villages and hamlets ; Howden, one of the quietest places in the count}', is the only market-town on its route : its great traffic, therefore, is the carrying coal from the South York- shire coalfield, and steel and iron from the workshops of Rotherham and Sheffield. Since the building of the Swinton and Knottingley, and the Hull and Barnsley, no important new railway line has been made in Yorkshire, but in 1891 Yorkshire had the distinction of registering the smallest railway company in England, the Easingwold, which works a line a httle over two miles in length by means of one engine and three carriages. To the old-fashioned, leisurely-going folk of the Early Victorian era, the substitution of railway traveUing for the old coaching and posting methods was anything but welcome. Such good people grumbled ceaselessly and profoundly. One of them, writing to the Morning Post in July, 1863, over the suggestive signature Jonathan Oldbuck, thus voices his complaint : — " I long again," he says, " for the luxury of a roadside inn of moderate dimensions, with a smiling damsel to wait, and a landlady to enquire what fare you prefer. . . . The perfection of inns of former days were those on the North Road — Barnby Moor, Ferry- bridge, York — ^where the respectable landlords knew some- thing of their visitor, and saw to the comforts and provisions of their' houses ; had good waiters and cheerful chamber- maids, the houses furnished with quiet simplicity and kept remarkably clean, for the landlords came generally out of noblemen's families." Similar lamentations are voiced in the following extract from a Times article of July, 1861 : — " We heard some time since," observes the writer, " the complaints of an old gentleman who has never ceased twice a year to travel the Great North Road from London to York. He says that every time he travels he finds some new grievance. Inns he has known all his life-time are turned into bams or cottages, or are falling into ruin, 5 6i THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Instead of the signal given of his approach, by a watchman placed in a turret of the posting-house, he has to wait while the servants are knocking up the inmates. Instead of four horses ready harnessed coming at a quick trot out of the stable-yard, he is obliged to stand in the cold while they are fetching four rough beasts from the plough. As to post- boys, there is hardly a man left who can ride postillion. The road is going out of repair, and the tolls are doubled, and the North Road is hardly fit for a gentleman to travel upon. In vain is the old gentleman told that the establish- ment of the North Road has gradually fallen to a level with the demands upon it : that, with the exception of himself, and perhaps half a dozen others, no one posts along it nowadays : that it is impossible to keep up four hundred miles of active posting business, with good roads, smiling hostesses, ready post-boys, and harnessed relays of horses, and all for travellers who do not come. He does not beUeve this. He says they ought to have built beautiful hotels along the road, such as they are building in London, and they ought to have improved their breed of post-horses, and then their customers would never have deserted them, and the North Road would be the North Road still." Nevertheless, old-fashioned people were compelled to admit that it was much cheaper to travel by the new method than by the old one of horse and carriage. Sheardown, in a pamphlet published at Doncaster in 1863, gives a table of the expenses, carefully calculated, and the time occupied in traveUing, in the bygone days of posting and coaching, of a nobleman who lived in the South-West of Scotland, and, with his family and servants, made an annual journey to London — the figures being furnished by the nobleman himself, who makes a memorandum to the effect that the journey was performed with strict attention to economy : — Carriage and four, and carriage and pair : post- horses to London, with the family ... ... ;^I20 o Expenses of 12 persons, in two carriages, on the road; waiters, etc. ... ... ... ... X26 'o 10 servants, in addition to those with the carriage, and horses ^ £^00 o COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 67 Expenses of 2 stablemen and a boy, with 5 horses ; 14 days' journey £2^, 10 Extra luggage and stores ^ip o o Extra occasional leaders to the pair-horse carriage, etc £ifi 10 o This amounted to precisely ^^350 ; the return journey from London cost, of course, the same amount. The distance covered — one way — ^was 405 miles. Thus the in-and-out journey cost this nobleman, every year, mih economy, ^Ijoo. It occupied— -one way — six days in winter, five in summer. Now, he states, he can do it — one way — in fifteen hours for £107 los., or ^^215 for the double journey. Therefore, the coming of the railways had saved him, in this little matter of the annual family jaunt to London and back, no less than £485 a year — a handsome sum, even for a nobleman. But this was travelling in something of a big way — there were, we observe, somewhere about a couple of dozen persons concerned. Sheardown, in the same pamphlet, gives us some particulars of what it cost a small family to travel by road in the old days, and by rail, when the horses and carriages were driven off the road by railway competi- tion. Here is the bill of a lady and gentleman, who with a man-servant and maid-servant travelled from Doncaster to London in their private carriage, drawn by post-horses : the distance being 163 miles. They paid for posting (at eighteenpence a mile), £14 3s. ; for post-boys, fjz ; for tolls at the turnpike gates, £l ; their hotel expenses on the way (two nights) were £i, i6s. Therefore, it cost these four persons £zx 19s. to get to London in, say, 1840 — in fact, at any time up to 1850. By the railway it cost about one- third of that amount : — Two first-class fares, -^2 15s. ; two second-class fares, £2 2s. ; conveyance of the gentle- man's carriage, £2 19s. — total, £7 i6s. So much for a small party ; now for an individual. The mail-coach outside fare from Doncaster to London was £1 los. ; the inside, £3. The — obUgatory — fees to coachman and guard were 5s. each ; the road expenses, 12s. 6d. ; it therefore cost a singlg traveller £2 12s. 6d. to reach London riding outside thg 68 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE mail-coach ; £s 2S. 6d. if he rode inside ; the time spent was twenty-one hours. It was, of course, cheaper to travel by the ordinary stage-coach. The outside fare by that, from Doncaster to London, was £i 5s. ; the inside, £2 los, ; coachmen, guards, and expenses carried off £1 2s. 6d. more. Thus the inside stage-coach passenger got to town for ^3 12s. 6d. ; the outside for £2 js. 6d. ; he spent exactly twenty-four hours on his journey. But by rail he could travel to London for very much less money. If he cared to go by the parliamentary train, which took six and a half hours to cover the 162 miles, he could go for 13s. ; by the faster trains, taking four hours, a first-class ticket cost him £1 7s 6d. ; a second-class, one guinea. Much as the old gentleman of the type alluded to, in the letters just quoted, loved coaching days and coaching inns, and all the leisurely movement of the road, folk soon discovered that the rail saved money for them. It cost a family of five people at the very least £30 to post the two hundred miles between York and London ; it cost 2s. 8d. to send a small paixel, weighing four ounces, from Yorkshire to London by the guard of the mail-coach ; a shilling less by the guard of the stage-coach ; the railways made it possible for five people to travel from York to London for much less than ;^5, and the railway guards soon began to carry parcels up to three pounds in weight two hundred miles for 6d. Just as they relieved people of the necessity of dipping so deeply into their pockets when they were obhged to travel, so the railways put money into the pockets of quite a new class of the community — distinct from the directors and shareholders, who naturally expected to make money out of them. Let us consider for one moment to what proportions the railway industry which began so very humbly in 1825 had grown in the United Kingdom by the year 1914. In 1825 the amount of capital invested in railway working was represented by the insignificant amount put together to make the Stockton and Darlington line ; the number of people employed could have been reckoned by the dozen, or at most by the score. On December 31, 1914, the total amount of capital which had at various times been authorized COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 69 by Act of Parliament to be raised for the making of railways in the United Kingdom was ;{i,447,557,ooo — one thousand, four hundred and forty-seven and a half millions. In 19 14 the number of persons engaged on railway work was 643,135. In 1914 we possessed 24,818 locomotive engines ; 79,539 coaching vehicles ; 49,629 service vehicles ; 759,910 goods- wagons. The gross earnings of our railways in that year amounted to £139,098,000 ; they carried 568,201,000 tons of goods in 1913 ; the average number of passengers carried annually of late years is thirteen hundred millions, travelling on approximately twenty-three thousand miles of lines. The six hundred and fort5'-three thousand individuals employed in railway work are divided into some sixty separate occupations ; of these about ninety thousand are mechanics and artisans. In Yorkshire this last class is found at two great centres of industry which sprang direct from the establishment of railways — the famous railway plants at Doncaster and York. When the Great Northern Railway had become firmly established, its directors selected Doncaster as the most fitting place on their system whereat to set up workshops for the making of their rolling stock ; the North Eastern Company established a similar industry at York. At these great establishments, rivalling Crewe and Derby and Swindon, where the corresponding plants of the London and North Western, the Midland, and the Great Western are situated, thousands of men and boys are employed, and everything necessary to the making and fitting of a railway train, from engine to guard's van, is manufactured. While this extraordinary development of the means of communication and transit between one town and another had taken place well before 1870, it was not until between that year and 1890 that similar facilities came into being within city and borough boundaries and from suburban districts into towns. During the nineteenth century the Yorkshire towns spread out over vast areas — Leeds, Sheilield, Bradford took in what had really been outlying villages and hamlets ; the folk who lived in these outskirts found it difficult to reach the centre of the modern town. A man 70 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE might live within the boundary of Leeds, and yet be four miles from Boar Lane ; in Sheffield, and be three miles from Fargate ; in Bradford, and be two miles from Market Street. It was some time before internal means of getting quickly from suburb to centre were provided. True, there was the omnibus, primitive at first, improved later, but the omnibus was never the feature of provincial town life that it was of London daily routine. It was not until the last twenty years of the nineteenth century that the tramway system, now so evident in Yorkshire cities and towns, and in the crowded industrial districts, began to flourish and to count as a means of transit. Yet the tram system had had its origin in Yorkshire as far back as 1776, when James Outram, an engineer at the Duke of Norfolk's colliery at Sheffield, laid down iron rails for the corves to run upon. The rail principle, however, was a long time in arriving at the practical stage in oiir own towns : England knew nothing of tramways in her streets, though they were in use at collieries, and had been carrying passengers in America for many years, until i860, when one Francis Train laid down a street line at Birkenhead. Eight years later they came into use at Liverpool. Gradually they spread to all the large towns. But they were never of real use and value until, towards the end of the century, two important things happened in connection with them— their acquisition and development by the municipalities, and the application of electric power to their working. In Yorkshire, Leeds set an excellent example by buying out the rights — in 1894 — of the old Tramway Company which had been founded in 1871. The first trams had, of course, been drawn by horses ; for awhile steam was tried ; but when the new line between Briggate and Roundhay was started in 1891, electricity was adopted as the motive power, and after the Corporation acquired the various lines in the city, the whole system was electrified. Nowadays there are tramways all over the great Yorkshire centres, and in the big villages ; they run up the steep and dangerous gradients of, hilly towns Hke HaUfax and Bradford as easily as on the dead levels of Hull and Doncaster, impelled in almost every instance by one COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 71 or other of the three principal systems of electric traction — the surface contact, the conduit, or the overhead trolley. There are no underground railways in Leeds or Sheffield as 3'et, but no citizen need walk very far to his office, his shop, or his factory, and so complete is the system in the crowded districts between the West Riding and Lancashire, that any person curious — and patient — enough to do so, may, if he pleases, board a tram-car at Leeds, and ride on it, and on cars that are in touch with it, as far as Manchester. While these developments of communication by road, rail, and water were in progress the Yorkshire sea-borne trade was also in process of development. In the middle of the eighteenth century that trade, outside Hull, was of no great volume ; Hull itself, in 1750, was still a small place. True, Daniel Defoe, visiting it early in the century, compared it to Hamburg and Rotterdam, and believed that relatively there was more business done in Hull than in any town in Europe : all the trade of Leeds, Halifax, and Wakefield, he remarks, was negotiated at Hull — a question- able statement — and most of the produce of the Midland Counties was shipped from it. But Defoe judged things by the low standard of that time, and although Hull was then certainly the most important shipping town on the East Coast — always saving London — its traffic was not so great as that dealt with by a fifth-rate port of to-day. The town itself — now having a frontage of nearly five miles along the Humber — was of very circumscribed area ; the docks had not been built ; ships had to Me in the river Hull ; the whahng trade had not developed ; the m^eans of trans- port from the inland centres were poor and limited : all the shipping that Hull possessed could easily have been put in one of the smallest of its modem docks. Beyond Hull there was little doing in th# way of sea-service. The old port of Ravenspur had disappeared beneath the encroach- ments of the North Sea centuries ago, with the coast villages of Holderness ; Hedon, once a fair port, had been found in a state of decay by Leland in the sixteenth century, and was nov/ well inland, its connecting channel to the Humber filled with sand and pebble. Goole and Middlesbrough 72 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE had not sprung into life : Goole was a riverside hamlet of a few cottages ; Middlesbrough an almost uninhabited flat at the mouth of the Tees. There was an old harbour, holding a few small vessels, at Bridlington ; places like Staithes and Runswick could boast a tiny fleet of cobles between them. Scarborough was of rather more import- ance ; in 1730 it possessed about ninety small ships of an aggregate tonnage of 12,000 tons, and in 1733 its pier and harbour were enlarged at a cost of ^12,000. But much more important than Scarborough was Whitby, which, by 1750, really had some claim to rank as a flourishing shipping town. In 1742, when a certain boy named James Cook, weary of being a grocer's apprentice, ran away from his master's shop at Staithes, and walked into Whitby to find a ship whereon to begin the career which ended in f^reat honour and glory, the Whitby on which he gazed from the cliffs by which he came was quite a busy seaport. It had then a population of some ten thousand people. The Whitby folk built ships. They found ships and crews for the fast- developing coal trade between the Northern Counties and London. From WTiitby ships of the port sailed between the ancient town of Caedmon and St. Hilda to the far-off ports of the Baltic, even to St. Petersburg. There was already a fleet of whaling ships at Whitby. The Whitby shipowners, the Whitby merchants, were fat, prosperous, wealthy men who stood on the quays and rattled good guineas in their pockets as they watched the squat sailing ships tumbling over the bar with their cargoes of stone and iron and alum from the Cleveland quarries and jet from the Whitby foreshore. At Whitb^^ too, in addition to building ships, they made all that ships then needed — masts, yards, blocks, sails, ropes : all was of home manufacture. Moreover, apart from this purely commercial shipping, Whitby possessed a considerable fishing fleet : the Whitby cobles, with their picturesque red sails, were already famous. Nowadays the statue of the great Captain Cook looks down on Whitby and sees a romantic town which has become a fashionable seaside resort ; as a seaport, Whitby is not of as much consequence as it was when he apprenticed himself COMMUNICATION A^D TRANSIT 73 to the two Quaker merchants, John and Henry Walker, who put him on board their ship the Freelove, little thinking that in the quiet-looking peasant lad who had presented himself, cap in hand, to them, they saw the worthy compeer of Drake and Raleigh. At the very time that James Cook was on his first Whitby ship, another Yorkshireman of humble origin, John Harrison, was busy with the invention and making of an instrument which was destined to be the most useful thing ever put into the hands of seamen. For two hundred and fifty years navigators had been asking for a device which should super- sede the log in helping them to find their longitude. Philip the Third of Spkin had offered a prize of 100,000 crowns for such an invention : the Dutch Government had offered 30,000 florins : our own Charles the Second had charged Flamsteed, his Astronomer-Royal, to bend all his energies to devise a method ; in Queen Anne's day, shipowners, ships' captains, and London merchants had petitioned Parhament to offer a reward to the successful inventor. The reward was sanctioned by Act of Parliament in 1714 ; Sir Christopher Wren made an attempt to gain it in 1720 — fruitlessly. Great scientists racked their brains over the problem and produced no result : the invention of the chronometer was left to John Harrison, son of a Yorkshire carpenter. Bom at Foulby, a hamlet in the parish of Wragby, near Wakefield, in 1693, Harrison received so little education that to the end of his life he was never able clearly to convey his ideas to anyone either in speech or by written word. But from the age of six years he manifested an extraordinary interest in any sort of mechanism, and by the time he was twenty-one had invented a wonderful clock. He then proceeded to experiment in the construction of time-keepers specially intended for the use of navigators, and in 1728 he went to London and showed a desgn to Halley, the Astronomer-Royal. Halley sent him to Graham, the first hving authority on horology ; Graham recognised the genius in him., and advised him to construct his intended instrument before placing his ideas before the Board of Longitude. Harrison bought certain necessary tools in 74 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE London and went home : such other tools as he required he made with his own hands, from his own designs. After seven years of ceaseless labour, he produced his first chrono- meter, and after testing it on ships sailing the Humiber^ took it to London, and showed it to the members of the Royal Society. It was then tried on a voyage to Lisbon and back, the inventor being given a passage in-and-out on ships of the Royal Navy. The result was a grant of £500 to enable Harrison to make improvements. By 1739 he had made his second chronometer ; not satisfied with its results he gave two years' further labour to the invention, and in 1741 placed his third instrument before the Royal Society. Still he continued to improve and to add to his work, and Government aided him with sums of £500 on two occasions between 1741 and 1746. But it was not until 1749 that the finished chronometer was placed before the authorities. In November of that year, the Royal Society awarded him its Gold Medal, being satisfied that he had achieved the desired object. But the Admiralty made no definite test of the chronometer until 1761-62, and though it was then found to be all that was wanted, delay of the most callous and vexatious kind was made in the handing over of the reward of £20,000 which had been offered by the Act of 1728. It was not until Captain Cook himself had fully tested the instrument during his voyage in the Resolution in 1772-73, and until George the Third — trrged thereto, it is said, by Dr. Johnson — had personally interested himself in the affair, that the aged inventor's claim was recognised, aiid the reward paid to him. He survived its receipt three years Just as it was due to the extraordinary mechanical genius of a Yorkfihireman that the chronometer was placed in the hands of navigators, so it was due to the extraordinary business ability of another Yorkshireman that the Yorkshire shipping trade rece'ved its greatest impetus, and that Hull developed during the nineteenth centuiy into the third principal seaport of the kingdom. When Queen Victoria came to the throne, Hull was still of no great importance as a shipping centre. Its first docks had been made in 1776, COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 75 and the number of its ships had increased. But the whaling trade, which A\as of considerable propiortions between 1760 and 1830, had died out, and when the first railway li!ie was made to Hull — from Selby — in 1840, there was need of new vessels to carry away the produce which began to be hurried there by the new method of transport. There was also need of a man to provide them — ^he was found in Thomas Wilson, a native of the East Riding, who, about the time of the beginning of railways, founded at Hull, in conjunction with his partners, Beckinton and Hudson, a firm styled Beckinton, Wilson & Co. Beckinton and Hudson soon retired from. this. Thomas Wilson's son David came into the business, and the world-famous Thomas Wilson, Sons & Co. originated. From 1840 onwards their undertakings increased at a marvellous rate. They began by running paddle steamers to the Norwegian, Swedish, and Baltic ports. They imported Russian and Swedish iron. They opened up a trade to France. By 1850 they had developed a vast Scandinavian business : in 1852 they began carrying the Royal Mails between this country and Sweden. After 1867, when Mr. Charles Wilson (afterwards Lord Nunburn- holme) and his brother, Mr. Arthur Wilson, had become sole proprietors, the business assumed such proportions that before the end of the nineteenth century, the Wilson Line was known as the largest private ship-owning concern in the world. At the time of the Franco-Prussian War, when trade to Stettin was perforce discontinued for a time, the firm opened out a trade with the Adriatic, improved its communications with Drontheim, Bergen, and Stavanger, and began a regular service of large steamers between Hull, Constantinople, and the Black Sea. When the Suez Canal became available, it built a new fleet of steamers which ran to Colombo, Madras, and Calcutta. In 1875 another fleet was built for service between Hull and New York ; in 1878 a new service was inaugurated to Hamburg, Antwerp, and Dunkirk ; in 1883 Wilson liners began to run between HuU and Bombay. All this extraordinary development meant shipbuilding on a large scale ; most of the ships were built at the great yards of Earle, in Hull. But the development 76 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE went on year by year. The Wilson Line instituted weekly services to Ghent, to Rouen, to Liverpool, and to Newcastle ; fortnightly services to Marseilles, Genoa, Leghorn, Naples, and Sicily ; a new seiA'ice was started to the Scandinavian and Baltic ports from Manchester and Liverpool. Other lines were absorbed as years went on ; in 1894, the firm bought up the entire coasting trade between Hull and Newcastle ; in 1903 they purchased the old-established business and the large fleet of another well-known Hull firm, Bailey & Leetham, Limited ; in igo6, in conjunction with the North-Eastern Railway Company they established a new service of steamers between Hull and the German, Dutch, and Belgian ports. But no summary can give any idea of the immense influence upon trade which the Wilson Line has exercised in Hull and Yorkshire, nor any notion of what the Wilson family did for Hull as a town during the last half of the nineteenth century, and it was with feeUngs of genuine regret (for sentimental reasons only) that York- shire folk recently learned that this vast concern had been sold to Sir John Ellerman and that the line will henceforth be known as the Ellerman-Wilson. While Hull thus grew in importance, while the ancient ports of Whitby and Scarborough were transformed into seaside resorts, two new shipping centres sprang up in Yorkshire. Goole, a small village in 1840, had become by the end of the century one of the chief river ports in the kingdom, having an extensive trade in farm-produce, wood, stone, iron, oil, and champagne — the last-named hixury being carried from the northern ports of France. It also had a trade almost pecuhar to itself — the carrying of potatoes from the Channel Islands. Its large and well-appointed docks were annually entered and cleared of over 5,000 vessels. The value of its imports by 1900 had come to £4,000,000 a year ; of its exports to a miUion more : its population was reckoned by the score in 1801 ; by 1911 it had increased to over twenty thousand. Still more marvellous is the history of Middlesbrough, which has a strong claim to be looked upon as the most wonderful town of the nineteenth century in respect of development and COMMUNICATION AND TRANSIT 77 progress. It is not quite so absolutely new as some of its historians would have it to be, for there were inhabitants of Middlesbrough many a century ago. But at the beginning of the' nineteenth century Middlesbrough was represented by a cottage or two, standing on a miserable fiat washed by the broad mouth of the Tees ; now it is a bustling and thriving community of at least 120,000 souls, and its rateable value as a borough is well over £550,000. Not all of this rise to prosperity is due to its development as a seaport, but if Middlesbrough had not stood on the Tees it would not be what it is to-day. Its history is as romantic as the history of a purely commercial town can be. In 1830 a group of far-seeing men, calling themselves the Middles- brough Owners, purchased 500 acres of land which lay around a solitary farmstead on the shore of the Tees : on thirty-two acres of this they built the first streets and houses of the town. That same year, the Stockton and Darlington Railway was extended to the new venture. Next year a cut was made in the river, and a steamboat service begun between Middlesbrough and London. In 1842 the big docks, which had been in course of con- struction for nearly four years, were opened, and Middles- brough's career as a seaport started. About the same time began its vast and world-famous trade in iron ; henceforward the prosperity of town and port increased by leaps and bounds. Money was spent upon its development with amazing generosity, and while it still wears the aspect of newness, its buildings are worthy and handsome. Thus by the development of road, of railway, of canal, of shipping, distance was lessened, far-off places were put in communication with each other, man's opportuni- ties of going quickly from his own door to wherever it was necessary he should travel were extended, and the maker of goods, the grower of produce, found it possible to avail himself of his desired markets. It has meant more than is easily conceivable that a man can travel from Leeds to London within four hours, and that he can send his wares wherever he likes in quick time, and that merchandise can be brought to his workshop and factory from the very ends 78 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE of the earth. But the modem development of transit and communication has meant still more. With the coming of the railways came increased facility in postal communica- tion. We of this age cannot imagine the rude and elemen- tary condition of our postal service previous to 1840. There are still living ancient folk who can tell of the days when village people only got their letters once a week, in ordinary circumstances ; of having to walk many miles to fetch a letter from some place where the mail-coach dropped a bag ; of the inconvenience which resulted from the perfunctory service. Nowadays, the dweller in a Yorkshire village can get a letter from New York in less time than he could get one from London in 1840 ; he can despatch a parcel from his own village post-office with the certainty that it will be dehvered anywhere in England within twenty-four hours. Nothing but railway development could have brought that about ; nothing but the labours of James Watt and George Stephenson could have made it possible for men to become acquainted with the world lying beyond the boundaries of their own parishes. Our grandfathers in their early days received few letters and went nowhere ; nowadays the lad who leaves his native village for far-off places can keep, if he likes, in daily com- munication with his home ; nowadays there are few York- shire village folk who have not taken advantage of the excursion trains to visit Scarborough, and Harrogate, and Hull, and even London. But all this extraordinary easiness of transport has become commonplace ; there are no Yorkshire villages in these times in which the post-office is not to be found ; there are few in which the telegraph- poles are not set up ; it is no unusual thing to find a York- shire farmstead, a Yorkshire inn, fitted with the telephone. It is only when we pause to remember that our almost immediate ancestors had no railways, no proper postal service, no telegrams, no steamships, that they were cut off, literally, from aU but a little of the world, that we begin to realise the value and the meaning of our own advantages. CHAPTER III POWER AND MACHINERY Some years ago, there came back to a Yorkshire agricultural village a man who had left it fifty years before in order to emigrate to America. He had gone, as a lad of fifteen, direct to one of the Western States, where he had first foimd work on a farm, afterwards got a farm of his own, and subsequently prospered very successfully. During the fifty years of his American hfe he had seen no great towns or cities, beyond glancing at New York as he entered his adopted country, and inspecting it a little more leisurely as he left it for a trip to England. On his lonely Western farm he had heard much of the world's progress between 1845 and 1895, but of its actual working he had seen little. At the age of sixty-five he had a great longing to visit his native place, and being by that time a wealthy man, he came over. In spite of his fifty years of American citizen- ship, he had never forgotten that he was a Yorkshireman, and his first proceeding, after looking round the scenes of his childhood, was to make an extensive tour through the county of his birth. He inspected everything within its borders — old towns, modem towns, coal-fields, iron-fields, factory districts, seaports, ancient ruins, new workshops. During a whole year he traversed the Three Ridings thoroughly. And asked, at the end of his travels, what had impressed him most in the modern Yorkshire which he had just seen, he answered readily enough — the wide- spread and enormous use of Machinery. It is easy to see why this old American farmer of a far Western State was so impressed by the multipHcity of mechanical processes which he found in Yorkshire in 1895. 79 8o THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE When he left his native village fifty years previously, he had seen nothing of the world outside the boundaries of his own parish. Within that parish there was at that time next to nothing in the shape of machinery, with the exception of the primitive apparatus of the village windmill, the one form of mechanical aid known to farmers ; the turnip- drill was not even then in universal use. There were no thrashing-machines. There were no reaping-machines. There were no horse-rakes. The ploughs were still heavy and cumbrous things, made by the village carpenter and the village blacksmith. The harrows were heavy and clumsy, too ; they also were of home manufacture. There were no chopping machines, no potato-washers, no elevators. Everything in farm work was done by hand. The flaU was in use for many a year after this man had emigrated. Countrywomen still made butter in the old-fashioned chum — the separator and the Hght box chum had riot been invented. His idea of farming life in Yorkshire, then, based on what he remembered of 1845, would be of a primi- tive sort. But on his return in 1895 he found a mighty, a wonderful change. He found the farmers surrounded by machinery. He saw ploughs driven by steam ; steam thrashing - machines, furnished with powerful traction engines ; self-binding reaping machines ; straw and grain elevators ; patent horse-rakes ; patent hay tossers ; machines for washing potatoes and unearthing potatoes ; turnip-slicing machines ; machines for breaking cake, for pressing and binding hay and straw, and for compressing manure ; machines for almost every process known to farming. He found light ploughs and harrows ; new forms of cart and wagon ; inventions from his own country and from Canada — he found, in short, that where a farmer used to employ a dozen pairs of human hands, he now made use of a machine which one pair could manipulate. All this in itself was surprising enough to a man who remembered the old thrashing-floors in the barns, the slow and leisurely process when what was now done by cogs and springs was done laboriously and painfully by human fingers. But bis wonder, vastly excited by what he saw in his native POWER AND MACHINERY 8i village, would, of course, be changed to amazement by what he found otitside it. Let it be remembered that this was a man who had lived during fifty years in a lonely part of a far Western State, and had never visited any crowded centre during the whole of that time. Imagine this man — as he was — suddenly caught up from his prairie farm, and set down — as he was— in the middle of the Sheffield workshops, or in one of the great forges at Leeds, or in a great spinning shed at Bradford, or alongside the Alexandra Dock at Hull, or in one of the big carpet-making factories at Halifax, or in the heart of the iron-works at Middlesbrough, or in the railway plants at Doncaster or York, or amidst the top- hamper of a Bamsley or a Normanton colliery, or in one of the factories of the Span Valley, or in the monster silk miU at Manningham — imagine it even faintly, and you wiU soon reaHse that his chief and abiding impression of the Yorkshire to which he had returned, at the end of the wonderful nineteenth century, was as of a land wherein men did nothing but put their hands all day long to marvellous and cunningly-devised inventions. There was httle machinery in Yorkshire in the middle of the eighteenth century. Nowadays no man can walk about the streets of an industrial town of the West Riding without being perpetually reminded of its existence and importance. The crash of the steam-hammer, the ring of metal on metal, the whirring of looms, the hiss of steam, the perpetual beat and throb which seems as if it came from a giant heart that never wiU cease pulsating — these, with the smell of oil and grease, the odour of wool in various stages of prepara- tion, the pecuUar aroma which arises around aU industrial process, are as familiar to the folk of these towns as their own grey skies. It was far different in the days when men did -with their own hands what machines now do for them at the touch of a lever. Nothing better illustrates the paucity of mechanical aid to labour in Yorkshire, previous to the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, than a consideration of the processes then carried out in the pre- paration of woven goods. Weaving, of course, has always beea the great Yorkshire industry ; it seemed to Daniel 6 82 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Defoe, when he visited the county, that Yorkshire folk did little else but grow, spin, weave, dye, and sell wool. But the work was done at home and by hand — as it had been since the days of the seventh Henry, when the little towns and villages on the spurs and edges of the Pennine Range began to grow famous for their production of good cloth. Let us look at the wool producer of those days and see what he did, and what others did with him, before he got the finished article on the market. He had two great advan- tages, to start with : excellent pasture for his flocks, and abundance of the right sort of water for dressing and clean- ing the wool which he sheared off their backs. The various processes began, of course, with the shearing. That done, the fleeces were sorted, before being weU scoured in great vats filled with the water which came down so plentifully from the moors and mountains. An elementary form of wool-picking freed the scoured fleece of the odds and ends which its first possessor had gathered on his coat during his rambles amongst the heather and the briars. Then came the question — was the wool to be used for worsted or woollen stuffs ? If for woollen, it was carded — but the carding of that time was vastly different from the process carried out by the elaborately-contrived carding machine of to-day : the primitive manipulator put his wool between two strips of board, which were furnished with teeth of bent wire — one board remained stationary ; the other was dragged over it and the layer of wool between. But if the wool was intended for worsted goods, it was combed. Nowa- days we have combing machines of great ingenuity ; in those days, they hung a strand of wool on a nail projecting from a post, and ran a comb through it. Even then the two terms so familiar still in the Bradford district were in use — the short hairs which were combed away were called noils ; the long hairs left attached to the post were called tops. All this was done by men, as a rule, though the children sometimes helped at the carding. But now came in a process which was peculiarly associated with woman — spinning. In well-nigh every house in that district, farm- house or labourer's cottage, the women were always busy POWER AND MACHINERY 83 with the spinning-wheel and the distaff. They turned to distaff and wheel in the intervals of household labour ; they were transforming the wool into yam first thing in the morning and last thing at night. As the yarn was accumu- lated, it was transferred to the men, who wove it into cloth on their hand-looms. And after that came a process for which machinery was invented long before it was made for the processes of combing or spinning — fulUng. The fulling or thickening of the woven cloth was first done by stamping on it in troughs of water, but fuUing mills, run by water- power, in which great hammers beat upon the fabric, were in use in these districts before the fifteenth century. There, however, mechanical work stopped. The necessary roughen- ing of the surface to produce a nap was done by dragging teazles over it ; that accomplished, it was dyed — and so passed into the hands of the merchants, with whom at present we are not concerned. What we are concerned with is the fact that whether it was woollen goods or worsted goods which were being manufactured, all were made at home in a man's house, by his own hands and the hands of his wi''e and children, and not in factories and workshops by machines which only require a touch to set them in motion, and due care to keep them working in the way they are intended to work. The old hand-loom weavers of Yorkshire are now an extinct race — though it may be that here and there in the far comers of the most inaccessible dales one or two still exist. Many Uving people, however, remember them when they were stiU plentiful, and cherish a clear recollection of the conditions under which they worked. The loom itself fiUed the front room of the little solidly-built stone cottage ; at it, backward and forward, the weaver toiled aU day and often far into the night : he knew nothing of trades-unionism nor of an eight-hours day. His occupation gave him abun- dant opportunity for thought and reflection ; some men contrived to amass a considerable amount of book-learning while they laboured — ^propping a book on some convenient corrier of the loom, and getting off a sentence or a fact as they moved to and fro. They were a shrewd, speculative, 84 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE ruminating set of men ; much given to abstract argument when they talked with their fellows, and, as a class, given also to exchange of dry and pungent wit. Beginning to disappear in the big towns as soon as the factory system and machinery made an appearance, they survived here and there in the small villages of the West Riding for many a year after the most elaborate of the inventions which replaced their hand-labour had been perfected ; they were to be found in some of the outlying parishes of Airedale and Wharfedale up to thirty-five years ago, and the cloth which they produced was as solid and sound as their own characters. When they vanished, as a class, Yorkshire society lost something that no modem progress, no modern improvement, can ever replace in equal satisfaction or value. It was in connection with its great industry of weaving hat Yorkshire first became familiar with machinery. Early in the eighteenth century a serious difficulty arose amongst weavers. There were plenty of them — too many of them, indeed, for the conditions under which they laboured — and they could have turned out immense quantities of cloth by their primitive methods, but for one thing — the spinners could not keep pace with them. Hand-loom weavers were half their time idle — they had no yam to weave. Instead of human ingenuity coming to their aid, one great exponent of it, John Kaye, a Lancashire man, who lived much of his time in Yorkshire, did something in 1733 which made matters worse : he invented and brought out the flying shuttle, by the aid of which weavers could work faster, and produce more cloth, than ever. It was some time before any inventor turned his attention to improvement in spin- ning. The first improvements made were not in relation to the making of woollen goods, but in an endeavour to improve the manufacture of cotton ; the principle, however, being the same in both cases, whatever invention accelerated the speedier output of cotton, necessarily benefited the makers of cloth from wool. The great thing to be desired in the middle of the eighteenth century was a quicker and better provision of yam ; weavers at that time were so ill-supplied that they often spent several hours of a working POWER AND MACHINERY 8$ day In going about to collect yam before they could set to work on the making of a length of cloth or cotton, and it was a common sa5dng that it took ten spinners to keep one weaver busy. But in 1764, a working carpenter of Black- burn, James Hargreaves, hit, by sheer luck, on an idea which was destined to shape itself into a practical achieve- ment. Chancing to see his wife's spinning-wheel over- turned on the floor of their cottage, he noticed that the wheel continued to revolve while the spindle was still in a vertical position, and was immediately seized by the notion of a spinning-frame which should contain several spindles worked by one power. The machine which he subsequently made was of great simplicity in construction, and was speedily improved upon ; Hargreaves himself only inserted eight spindles in his frame ; his imitators made frames which would take twelve times that number. Within a few years, another Lancashire man, Richard Arkwright, whose original trade was that of a barber, developed a principle which had already been made known by two previous inventors, Wyatt and Paul, and tended to the introduction of a much finer yarn. And before 1780 yet another Lancashire man, Samuel Crompton, of Barrow, perfected the spinning-jenny of Hargreaves, and the roller or water-frame of Arkwright, by combining their principles in a new machine which produced a yarn that was not only stronger and finer, but less liable to breakage during use. Henceforth, yarn, whether for cotton or for woollen goods, was able to be spun by machines in large and increasing quantities. The situation as regards spinning and weaving was now reversed, with a suddenness that must have seemed startling to the folk of those times. Yarn was being produced by machine — but the only method of weaving as yet known was by hand. It was impossible for the hand-loom weavers to transform the yarn into clbth or cotton as fast as the spinning machine supplied it. But the age of invention had dawned, and many men were working at important problems. The great need of the weaving trade was a loom which could be worked by some power other than that of 86 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE the hand. Several folk interested in the industry conceived ideas of a more or less elementary sort ; it was left to a clerg3Tnan, Edmund Cartwright, to make the first important departure from the ancient methods. Cartwright, a Notting- hamshire man, after an academic career at Oxford, took holy orders, and became rector of Goadby-Marwood in Leicestershire. Always interested in experiments, he con- ceived the idea of a power-loom after a visit to Arkwright's Cotton MiUs, and, in 1785 he patented and set up at Doncaster his first machine. As then made, Cartwright's invention was of little use ; it was heavily built, and clumsy of construction, but the principle was there, and was seen to be sound, and for many years its maker continued to improve upon his original conception. Other inventors, too, were at work, and between 1790 and 1812 the power- loom was so far perfected that in the last-named year it had come into general use in both cotton and woollen industries. The foDc to whom these new inventions were introduced, and for whose benefit they were intended, were not inclined to receive them with gratitude, nor with even the indulgence of consideration. Before machinery came into its full estate in Yorkshire, its advocates and users had been obliged to pass through troublous times. Two periods of active opposition occurred before the new industrial regime became established — one came when steam and machinery had fairly joined forces, and the new factory system had sprung into being ; the other made itself evident at the very parting of the ways. The inventors met with little encour- agement from anybody : not even from the people in high places. Cartwright, now elevated to the position of a chief pioneer in the history of the textile industries, and specially commemorated and glorified in Bradford by the Memorial Hall which bears his narpe, was almost entirely neglected during his lifetime and until just before the end of his useful career, when the Government, which had treated him pretty much as another administration had treated John Harrison, gave him a reward of ten thousand pounds — a sum which bears about the same relation to the millions POWER AND MACHINERY 87 which have been made out of his invention, that one drop of water does to the Atlantic Ocean. The afterwards prevalent practice of breaking up the new machines was indulged in to some extent long before it became general on a big and organized scale, thirty years later. Opposition was much worse in some districts than in others. Arkwright, who had established cotton miUs in Lancashire, was obhged to close them, and to take his objectionable machines across the border into Derbyshire ; another inventor, Heathcote, who had produced a machine for the better and easier manufacture of lace, was hounded out of Leicestershire to a far-off town in the West of England. The old hand-loom workers were, of course, at the bottom of all this opposition ; in spite of their shrewdness, they had no power of seeing into the near future, or, if they had, they preferred to \^onsider their own present needs rather than the outlook for posterity. Then, as later, whether in textile industry, or in the introduction of railways, or the application of machinery to agriculture, the worker had the same fear and the same cry — the more machines, the fewer men. He was right — and he was wrong. But between 1785 when Edmund Cartwright first showed his clumsy power-loom to the doubtful, the scoffer, and the would-be S5mipathetic, and 1812, when it, and various imitations and improvements of it, had become things to be reckoned with, inventors had been faced by a question which was much more serious, much more important than any question of dislike and opposition. That question was — By what power are these new machines going to be moved ? Motive-power there must be — but what motive- power ? It seems almost ludicrous to think of, but Cart- wright's first power-loom, when it was set up at Doncaster, was worked by a bull. Yet there is nothing ludicrous in that fact — man had been learning about motive-power for countless ages. He himself was his own source of power at first — he did everything with his own hand. He found out how to pull water from a well ; how to lift weights by leverage ; how to move a boat with a paddle ; in the course of centuries he discovered many tricks of muscle and sinew. 88 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE As he grew still wiser and more observant, he pressed animals into his service ; he taught the dog how to turn a spit ; the donkey to draw water by treading a revolving wheel ; the horse to grind a mill by walking round and round with a shaft attached to its harness. He discovered how the winds can be used ; he invented mUls, set up where their sails could catch each favourable breeze ; in time he foimd out how to turn the tops of his mUls so that it mattered nothing to him whether the winds came from north or south, east or west. He began to use water as a force ; he used it in many ingenious ways, from the construction of water- clocks to the making of hydraulic presses ; he made mill- dams and water-wheels ; the real reason why East Lancashire and West Yorkshire make one great industrial district, Hterally packed with factory towns and villages, is because water comes pouring down from the dark summits of the Pennine Range in vast quantity, through the fissures which bear the local names of goits and stocks, and men went to that country to avail themselves of it when it seemed as if water would have to be the principal motive- power for the newly-invented machiner}^ But even then, as they were beginning to build their mills and factories, and to construct the dams and wheels by which the con- necting cranks and shaftings were to be turned, the revolu- tionizing force which was to supersede water and wind, animal and man, was being born. Men who earnestly desired to know how to set a machine going, and to keep it going, when they had once seen the working of a steam- engine, knew that there, before them, was the power they had dreamed of, and had scarcely beUeved possible of achievement. Such men had been hearing of steam-power for a long time. Men had coquetted with steam for three hundred years before they finally took it captive. Ages before that, at least a century before the Christian Era, a Greek doctor named Hero, who practised medicine at Alexandria, con- structed a sort of suction-wheel which was worked by what he called heated air. After that, sixteen centuries went by before men began experimenting again. Hero left a POWER AND MACHINERY 89 manuscript treatise behind him in which he described his endeavour ; it was discovered, translated into Italian, and, published at Bologna in 1547, ^^^d fresh interest was aroused. But it was not until the end of the seventeenth century that the curious and the scientific really began to devote themselves seriously to the problem. Then attention to the development of steam-power arose in England, and also in France. About the beginning of Charles the Second's reign, the Marquis of Worcester published an account of his experiments ; twenty years later, Sir Samuel Morland made further investigations ; between 1685 and the end of the century, a Frenchman, Dr. Papin, who became a Fellow of our own Royal Society, invented steam - engines for pumping water. They were clumsy and only partially effective, for Papin was a theorist who knew little of the principles of mechanics. But he pointed a way to men of more practical knowledge, and in England his ideas were taken up by persons who had gained working acquaintance with engines and machines in their following of various crafts. The first English pioneers of steam-power were all men of experience in some mechanical trade. Watt had made mathematical instruments. Brindley was a mill- wright. Newcomen had been a working blacksmith. Savery, maker of the first steam-engine that worked success- fully, had previously been a clock-maker. To Savery and to Newcomen we must look for the actual beginnings of the union between steam and machinery. Savery, a Devonshire man, born near Modbury about 1650, struck by the difficul- ties experienced by the tin-miners of Cornwall in deaUng with irruption of water, invented an engine, worked by steam, which successfully drew water from a depth of over two hundred feet, and was in much use amongst the Cornish mines during its maker's lifetime. But Savery's engine, after all, was but a primitive attempt, and it failed when applied to the deep coal-pits of Staffordshire, and to the task of pumping water from the Thames for the purpose of affording a supply to London. What Savery failed to do, however, his successor, Newcomen, accompUshed. Repeated experiments — and many failures in the course of 90 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE them — enabled the Dartmouth blacksmith to perfect a steam-engine for pumping purposes which performed its task so satisfactorily that early in the eighteenth century it was installed in many of the North Country collieries, and subsequently in the tin-mines about Penzance and Truro. Newcomen's engine was extensively used in mining work for many years, and it was improved considerably by subsequent inventors, amongst whom were the two famous engineers, Smeaton and Brindley. But it was not until half the century had gone that the idea of applying steam- power to the working of wheels was suggested to James Watt, mathematical-instrument maker and surveyor, a Scotsman of Greenock, who had already thought much about steam as a motive force. Watt, about 1764, had occasion to overhaul a model of one of Newcomen's steam-engines, and he hit upon the secret of its waste of power. The result was his own invention of the separate condenser. Watt himself used to tell that the idea flashed upon him suddenly during a solitary walk one Sunday morning — but when the idea had come, it took many years of patient work and investigation to develop, and it was not until 1769 that the inventor, by that time in partnership with a Birmingham engineer named Boulton, patented the Watt Steam-Engine, and inaugurated a new era. Even then the application of steam - power to machinery was of comparatively slow growth. The first experiments, oddly enough, were made, not on land but on water. Twenty years after Watt's first patent had been granted, another Scotsman, William Sjonington, suggested the application of steam - power to the paddle-wheels of a river-boat, and after various experi- ments a steam-boat called the Charlotte Dundas, propelled by wheels driven by one of Watt's rotatory engines, was at work on the Forth and Clyde Canal. This was in 1802 ; some ten or eleven years later a similar steam-propelled craft was to be seen on the River Aire in Yorkshire, and before 1820 the first steamer had successfully crossed the Atlantic. Steam was first applied to machinery in Yorkshire about POWER AND MACHINERY 91 the year 1790 — ^first in the case of pumping-englnes at the collieries ; secondly, for propelling the trucks which ran on the already constructed tramways at the mines ; even- tually in the rapidly rising mills and factories. With its coming came an entirely new situation. The old hand- worker, who had carried out his labours in his own house, whose only competition had been that arising from the efforts of his similarly situated fellows, now found himself faced by conditions of an altogether perplexing sort. In the textile trades the new state of things amounted to nothing less than a revolution. The spinning wheel and the distaff were superseded by the recently invented spinning-frame. The old hand-loom was confronted by the new power-loom. Spinning-frame, power-loom, carding-machine, machines of all sorts, were to be worked by steam. Men would no longer work singly, at their own speed in their own homes ; they woiild be driven to work in gangs, in the new and ugly factories and mills, which were rising as fast as masons could build them in every valley of Yorkshire and Lancashire ; they would become operatives instead of craftsmen ; nay, they would be no more than machines themselves, and all the craftsman's individual pride in his work, all his sense of personal ownership in it, would dis- appear ! Small wonder that in the bleak, gloomy valleys, and on the dark hillsides of the West Riding, hard-faced men and anxious-eyed women met together, and asked fearfully if the new order of things did not mean that for every machine set up, a man would go down ? But the machines had come, and men were making more, as fast as they could turn them out, and now that the new and adequate motive power, steam, had been discovered, it was only too evident to the observant that the single- handed craftsman was doomed to forsake his looms and become a machine minder. During the last years of the eighteenth, and the first years of the nineteenth century, machine-makers in Yorkshire were working day and night to turn out the new inventions. No better example of the feverish industry of those days can be found than is afforded by a brief account of what happened in one town — Leeds. 92 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE It had its romantic side as wftll as its business aspect. Some- where between 1790 and 1795 there walked into Leeds one night a man named Matthew Murray. He was a mechanic. He came from Stockton-on-Tees, a long way off. He had walked all the way from his native place. Whatever money he had in his pocket when he left Stockton, he had none when he got to Leeds — he had not even sixpence to pay for his bed at the humble tavern into which he turned. The landlord trusted him for food and lodging — he was, surely, a shrewd Yorkshireman, that landlord, who saw that the new-comer, though poor in pocket, was exceed- ing rich in brain-power. Anyway, Matthew Murray's pockets were not long empty. He immediately got a situation as mechanic in Marshall's Flax MiU, at Holbeck — - almost as quickly, he became father, originator, moving spirit of the machine-making trade of the town into which he had just walked, a penniless stranger. By 1795 he was head of Murray, Fenton, & Wood, machine-makers of Holbeck, and for many years he continued to make his influence felt. He set machine-making on a firm basis in Leeds : Leeds folk have gone on making machines ever since ; they have a natural aptitude to machine-making. He not only made machines of his own, but dared to improve the machines of other people. He improved James Watt's steam-engine ; he improved the steam locomotive which Trevi thick had made. He persuaded the managers of the Middleton Collieries, just outside the town, to use a steam engine on their tram-lines. Altogether, Matthew Murray was a very wonderful man, and the landlord of the old Bay Horse Inn, who trusted him when he came there with nothing in his pocket, and no more than a bundle on his back, had good cause to be proud that he knew genius when he saw it. Many other wonderful men came to Leeds in those early days of the new industrial system. The factories were established in Leeds almost as soon as the machines were invented to put in them. When Matthew Murray trudged into the town, there were several big factories in evidence. Flax was spun in some ; wooUen goods were manufactured POWER AND MACHINERY 93 in others. The names of old and good Leeds families are associated with these first outposts of modem industrialism — Gotts, Marshalls, Wormalds. There were several of the first steam-engines at work in Leeds by 1796. Between 1800 and 1825 trade of this sort received one impetus after another. Ambitious men were attracted to Leeds. Girard, the Frenchman, who invented new machinery for the spinning of flax, came to Leeds because he could get no proper recognition in his own country : Leeds welcomed him with both hands. That was in 1816 ; twelve years later came another enterprising soul, Peter Fairbaim, a young Scotsman, who had begun the active business of life by going to work in a colliery at eleven years of age, and had subsequently turned his attention to mechanics and engineering. Peter Fairbaim, like Philippe de Girard, had ideas about flax-spinning machinery ; he introduced himself to the MarshaUs of Holbeck, and told them of those ideas — epitomized, they came to this : he proposed to use just twice as many spindles in a machine as were in use at that time. He met with a reception of the proper sort — he was told to go away and make his machines as fast as possible. Peter Fairbaim answered that he had neither workshop to make them in, nor money to make them with. Thereupon the senior partner bade him go and take a certain Wellington Foundry, then vacant, and look to him for all he wanted. Fairbaim went out and followed the manu- facturer's advice— to found, quietly but surely, one of the greatest machine-making businesses in the world. Soon after Peter Fairbaim had that momentous interview with the flax-spinners of Holbeck, and the MarshaUs had given him his first step to riches, power, and a title, the locomotive engine of George Stephenson triumphed over its various rivals, and a new field of enterprise was laid open to makers of machinery. Here again Leeds came at once to the front. A Leeds man named Kitson in 1836 built a locomotive engine in an old mill at Hunslet, and had to pull down a wall of the building to get it out when finished. But this private enterprise, put together under such curious conditions, was a great success when tested, and Kitson 94 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE thereupon founded the great engine-building works with which the name of his family is still associated. It became one of the principal industrial affairs of the town, and year by year it continued to increase in size, until it ranked amongst the leading foundries of the world. Other men followed in Kitson's footsteps. Within twenty years of the making of his first engine in the old wool-mill, some five thousand men were at work in Leeds on the building of locomotive and stationary steam-engines — that five thousand has now increased by twelve times. The names of the Leeds machine-makers are familiar all the world over — Kitson, Manning, Taylor, Lawson, Greenwood, Fowler. Nor has this making of mechanical appliance been confined to giant locomotives — Leeds sends out to all parts of the world from its foundries and workshops every conceivable sort and variety of machine and implement, from a traction engine, capable of dragging a modern gun of colossal size, to the finest tool and the tiniest nail. All this activity in the making of machinery, and the appHcation of steam power to manufactures, led inevitably to the sure and firm establishment of the factory system. It seems impossible, now, to think of any of the great industrial centres of Yorkshire without their mills, their workshops, and their factories. But a hundred and twenty years ago those modern edifices, in which human beings work side by side in their hundreds and thousands, were only just coming into evidence in towns Uke Halifax and Bradford and Huddersfield. Many of the first mills still remain ; dark, ugly, insanitary places they are, when com- pared to the palace-like manufactories of recent foundation. They are usually found, these first factories, in. some ravine or vaUey, in company with a dam of water, a monster wheel, and a roaring cataract, which descends from moor or mountain high above their stone roofs and high chimney stacks. The rooms within them are low-ceilinged ; the windows are small ; the chances of ventilation are bad ; one wonders how the first factory workers managed to do a long day's work under such conditions. And as one looks round one begins to understand why the folk whom this new POWER AND MACHINERY 95 order of things had forced into the factories so hated and abhorred factory hfe. In the old days there had been Uberty, and spaciousness, and air. The man who worked at his hand-loom in his own cottage could step outside whenever he liked, and for as long as he liked — ^he was his own master. The woman who spun yarn with wheel and distaff cotdd take up her work and lay it down at her pleasure. The children who took a turn at the carding were not kept at their task until they dropped on the floor from sheer fatigue. Whatever drawbacks there had been, whatever hardships, whatever poverty, the craftsman had enjoyed Uberty. He had not been tied down to hours ; he was not forced to do this or that at a specified moment ; his labour, inasmuch as he himself controlled it, was voluntary. And — above everything — ^he worked in his own house, and for his own hand. Vastly different, in every single particular, was the hfe of the factory. The folk who had been their own masters found themselves under a system of management which rapidly became oppressive and tyrannical. They were herded together Uke sheep or cattle, men and women, old and young. There were no inspectors to see to the condi- tions under which they laboured. Their employers had no more consideration for their health or their morals than the Egyptian taskmaster had for his Israelitish slaves. The one thought of the capitaUst of those days was to get as much out of his men and his machines as both could produce between them. The demand for EngUsh goods was increasing by leaps and bounds — it could only be suppHed by the toil of the factory folk. English exports in 1793 were valued at £17,000,000 ; in 1815 they stood at close upon £60,000,000. Production was carried on at a feverish rate — the mills and factories were running by night as well as by day. Consequently, the hours of labour were long — ^many men worked twelve, fourteen, even sixteen hours out of the twenty-four. Such conditions of daily toil would have been bad enough in properly built, well- arranged, ventilated and drained mills — but the first factories were little better than death-traps. In the first rush to 96 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE make use of the new machines, any old building was seized upon, enlarged, converted into a factory — anything with four walls round it, and a roof over it, was good enough to install as many power looms as could be got inside. And if this state of things was bad for men, it was worse for women, and far worse for children. The employment of children in the first factories led to the most awful abuses which have ever disgraced our indus- trial history. It was soon found that a boy or girl could satisfactorily manage three or four of the new power- looms, and child-labour was quickly introduced. Parents, badly paid themselves, had no option but to allow their children to enter the mills ; employers made no difference between children and adults. Children of tender age were expected to work from first thing in the morning until last thing at night : if they dropped to sleep by the machinery which they were set to mind, it was only to be awakened by the lash which the overseer applied as freely in these places as slave-drivers applied it to negroes on the other shores of the Atlantic. Ill-fed, brutally treated, deprived of the fresh air and long sleep which all growing children require, kept on their feet throughout the whole of the day, forced to rise from their beds and begin their work again while still exhausted and unrefreshed, living always in unhealthy atmospheres and surroundings, exposed to all the resultant evils of bad sanitation and overcrowding, there is little wonder that these factory children at times died like flies, and that folk who strayed by accident into an industrial centre were horrified, when they saw the white faces, stunted bodies, and worn limbs of the living. But there was a lower depth than this in the original factory system. These children had parents, and homes, and were thus protected to a certain degi;ee, however small. But there were other children in the land who had none to protect them — ^not even the Law. Manufacturers, wanting human labour, having exhausted all the supply of human labour they could find round their mills and factories, looked further afield, wondering what other white slaves they could draw within their toils. There was no need to look far. POWER AND MACHINERY 97 There were at that time large numbers of pauper orphans in the land, dependent upon the parish authorities for bite and sup, bed and clothing. What easier, what more fitting, than to hand these unfortunates over to the mill-owners, to do something towards keeping themselves ? No sooner thought of than done — and imder legal protection. Formjil arrangements between employer and parish authorities handed over the children as apprentices. It was no great matter if some of them were mentally deficient — some manufacturers actually agreed to take one imbecile child for every twenty mentally sound ones. As regards the age at which these children were thus put to work, it was, as a rule, nine years, but many cases were discovered, during investigation, of children of five being found minding a loom. The conditions under which they Hved while under- going this so-caUed apprenticeship were such that it would be almost impossible to credit their existence, at any time in the world's history, were it not for unimpeachable evidence. Their average daily hours of working were sixteen. They were just sufficiently clothed for decency. They were given just sufficient food to keep fife in them. They were cruelly and systematically beaten and iU-used. If one of them plucked up sufficient spirit to rebel, or showed an inclination to run away, he was first flogged within an inch of death, and then put in irons — which he continued to wear. AU these horrors — and worse — ^were proved before various Royal Commissions of Enquiry. Nowadays such a state of things could not exist for a week — once it had become known — ^without redress : a himdred years ago, it existed for a long, long time. It was difficult to arouse any pubhc feeling on behalf of such undesirables as pauper children, for it was a hard, unsympathetic age. Moreover, most of these abominations were practised in parts of the country which, in those days, were almost as far off civilization as one Pole is from the other. Those manufacturers who had fixed their factories in out-of-the-way valleys, because of the water-power by which they ran their new machinery, were the worst offenders, for they were safe from observation and exposure. Never- 7 98 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE theless, the truth crept out, and a certain amount of indignation arose, and the Government of the day had to make an attempt at interference. For thirty years it did Uttle — it was not until Reform was in the air to the exclusion of every other idea that the bettering of the lot of factory operatives began in real earnest. But in 1802 an Act was passed which was intended to do something for the unfor- tunate pauper 'prentices. Henceforth they were not to work for more than twelve hours a day. They were not to work at all during the night. They were to receive a certain amount of education during their apprenticeship. The places in which they worked were to be put under proper sanitary conditions. So were their sleeping-rooms — in which, up to then, they had herded together without any distinction of sex. And they themselves were to be inspected, now and then, by a visiting magistrate, or a clergyman. But this Act was dead before it was born, for its framers forgot to include any penalizing clauses in it, and the manu- facturers treated it as if it had never been. They were equally defiant of another Act, passed in 1819, which pro- hibited the emplojonent of children in miUs before they had attained the age of nine, and limited the daily working hours of all persons under the age of sixteen, to twelve : that Act, too, did no good. For the first thirty years of the nineteenth century, life for the folk of the factories was a foretaste of the hell to which they daily consigned their oppressors. It was only to be expected that the conditions under which the operatives were now Uving and working should breed discontent, and that some recourse to physical violence should follow by way of protest. But while the nineteenth century was stiU young, other causes of suffering arose. They were almost entirely economic — but people who are half-starved, badly treated, sullen of spirit, chafing under a sense of wrong, have no inclination to consider economic causes and effects, even if they could be made to understand them. In 1811 the country found itself in a serious condition as regards trade and finance. The injury done to English commerce by what was known as the Continental System, by which England was shut off from the rest of Europe, and POWER AND MACHINERY 99 the closing of the foreign com ports, produced a depression of the most searching nature. Our own home production was utterly inadequate to supply the vastly-increased population. Wheat went up in August, 1810, to £4 l6s. a quarter. Meat, which had been obtainable for many years at 4d. a pound, rose to lod. And by the winter of 1811 the wages of factory workers sank to less than 8s. a week, while agricultural labourers could get no more than a shilling a day. The people began to starve during that winter ; petition after petition, signed by vast bodies of industrial workers, begged Parliament for relief. To their woes, and to those, of the rural populations, were added those of yet another and still considerable class — the hand- loom workers who had not yet been driven out of existence by machinery, and who, at this crisis, could get no work to do. Amongst them originated the idea that the sole cause of the national distress lay in the recently-introduced machines. It was soon shared in by the working classes throughout the country, and by the Spring of 1812 the Luddite Riots were in full force. These risings, seen at their worst in the manufacturing districts, derived their peculiar name from one Ludd, a mentally deficient Leicestershire lad, who, some thirty years previously, having been tormented by his fellow- workers in a stocking mill, and being unable to revenge himself on them personally, had broken up the machines at which they worked. Ludd's performance gave an idea to the disaffected of 1812, but they proceeded to do in cold blood what he had done in a fit of unreasoning temper. The various gangs of Luddites went about their labours with considerable care and method — their doings were much like those of the Moonlighters of Ireland at a later date. They formed themselves into secret societies, with pass-words and private methods of communication ; they used disguise of a clever sort, even if it were only by the blackening of faces and wearing of cloth masks ; they carried out a species of miUtary organization, and when they attacked any particular place or factory, set armed sentinels to guard their outposts. The conditions of the loo THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE time favoured their proceedings — the modern police system was not yet in existence, and there is no doubt that they were joined, aided, and marshalled by soldiers who had recently been disbanded from the Army. Their operations were carried out as a rule with a suddenness which prevented much resistance. They would gather together at some factory or mill, at an agreed hour of the night, set their guards round the district or viUage, perform their work of breaking and burning with great celerity, and immediately separate and vanish in various directions. Detection of individuals was difficult, and the risings continued in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, Derbyshire and Yorkshire until 1818. One of the first and most notable of the Luddite Riots in Yorkshire gave Charlotte Bronte material for a well- known episode in her novel of Shirley. In 1812 a woollen mill known as Rawfold's, situate near Liversedge, an indus- trial village at the southern end of the Spen Valley, was owned by a manufacturer named Cartwright, who appears to have been of a considerably superior type to his fellow mill-owners of that day. Mrs. Gaskell in her Life of Charlotte Bronte goes so far as to call him a remarkable man — he was at any rate a man of character and education, who had lived much in foreign countries, and who spoke French like a native — an accomplishment which was not calculated to do him much good in England in the days when the French were hated and loathed as devil's spawn. He was one of the first Yorkshire manufacturers to introduce the new machinery into his mill, and his enterprise further aggravated his unpopularity with the ignorant and conser- vative-minded folk of the district. When the first riotings broke out in the manufacturing counties, Cartwright was quick to reahze that he himself would be an early victim. A man of indomitable courage he made swift and resolute preparation. He turned his miU into a fortress. He trained four loyal workmen to resist a possible attack, and procured five soldiers to assist him ; all, of course, were armed, and he laid in a good supply of ammunition for their use. As leader he took up his quarters in the mill, never POWER AND MACHINERY loi leaving it by day or night. Every night the various entrances were barricaded. He derived means for preventing access to the upper stories, where the obnoxious machinery was placed. On every step of the stairs he placed a spiked roller — to make ascent more difficult if his assailants succeeded in effecting an entrance at the ground floor. Early in April, 1812, he was all ready for an assault, and on Saturday night, April 11, he learned that it was at hand. The folk of the immediate neighbourhood were in a starving and thoroughly desperate condition, and that night hundreds of men assembled at a previously-appointed meeting-place, between Kirklees, famous in the annals of Robin Hood, and Liversedge, and after being supplied by their leaders with firearms, axes, and clubs, marched in a sohd body on Rawfold's Mill, where Cartwright and his garrison of nine were ready to receive them. A sharp and sanguinary fight, over in less than half-an-hour, resulted, ending in the com- plete beating-off of the besiegers, who left two of their ntunber lying dead outside the walls of the mill and carried off a considerable percentage of wounded. Cartwright's anxiety about his mill was further deepened by his fears for the safety of his private house and his wife and family, for the ringleaders, in demanding the mill's surrender, threatened that if he did not open the doors and allow them to break up the machines, they would go to his residence and murder Mrs. Cartwright and her children. Mrs. Cartwright herself, unprotected save by a couple of soldiers whom her husband had left in the house, spent an anxious time until the assault failed and the rioters retired. At one period of the fight, hearing men approaching the house, she caught up two very young children, packed them in a market-basket, and hid the basket in the wide chimney. One of those children, so strangely harboured on that night of terror, used to show in after-years the traces of the fight on the walls of Rawfold's Mill. The manufacturers of the neighbourhood, few of whom seem to have been possessed of even a httle of the courage which Cartwright showed, marked their sense of their fellow mill-owner's pluck by presenting him with £3,000 102 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE as a testimonial to his bravery. But the rio tings still went on. Three days after the attack on Rawfold's, a Sheffield mob broke into the armoury at the barracks in that town, and destroyed nearly a thousand muskets. A fortnight later, one Horsfall, a mill-owner of Marsden, near Hudders- field, who had made himself nearly as obnoxious as Cart- wright by his emplo5mient of the hated machinery, was shot dead on Crosland Moor by a band of Luddites, who had concealed themselves, at a lonely place, in a covert which he had to pass. Riot, murder, damage to property, was rampant all over the district : the disaffection lasted for many years. The actual Luddite outrages came to an end about 1818, but there was a serious machine-breaking riot at Bradford in 1822, and again in 1826, when a mob of Bradford men attacked Horsfall's Mills, smashed up the power-looms, and saw two of their number killed in the struggle. Not indeed until many reforms had taken place, did these rebellions against the new order of things cease — the Reform Act itself, and the numerous improvements and ameliorations which came in its train, had been in force ten years when, in 1842, the famous Plug Riots took place in Lancashire and Yorkshire. In these there was no assem- bling for unlawful purpose, no use of fire-arms, no assault on the person^ — damage was done in an easy and skilful fashion by individual workmen, who forced in the plugs of the mighty boilers, and thereby put out the furnace fires, and brought the working of their respective factories and workshops to a sudden stop. In all this the people were, of course, utterly in the wrong —as misguided democracy invariably is. They had terrible grievances. They were badly treated. They were oppressed by their masters ; their economic and social condition was horrible. The Governments which were in power at any time from 1790 to 1830 did nothing for them. Every- thing to their prejudiced eyes looked as if they and their children were to descend to the level of slaves. They saw the manufacturers rolling in money while they themselves had scarcely enough bread — they were quick to see, too, that no man of power and influence stretched out a hand POWER AND MACHIN]ERY 103 to help them. The policy of laissez-faire was paramount in England at that time, and the very men who shed tears in the House of Commons over the often-imaginary woes of the Negro slave had none to squeeze out for the stunted and starved and bruised children of Yorkshire and Lancashire. Later, three men, of whom we shall presently hear more, rose up to demand Factory Reform, but in the days of George the Third and of that despicable scoundrel, his son, no man amongst our great pubhcists thought — pubhcly, at any rate — that things were other than they should be : the spirit of Adam Smith and the leading doctrine of his Wealth of Nations was stiU strong in high places. Little wonder that the worker in textiles, who remembered the old days when spinning and weaving were domestic industries, should curse the new times, and the new mills, and the new machines, and should look, in his bhnd, unreasoning fashion on the spinning-frame, and the power-loom, and the steam-engine as the direct inventions of the devils who gnawed at his empty stomach and tore the very rags off his dying child's back. But he was wrong — ^just as wrong as the labourer of the fields who, many years later, broke up with crow-bar and sledge-hammer the first reaping-machines. It is hard to exercise patience under privation — too hard for most of us — but the workman of that terrible time who was able, by circumstance, or by sheer force of character, to be patient and to endure, and who lived to see far better and happier times, learnt several facts, as fortunate as they were real. He discovered that machinery makes work. He saw the factory system settle itself, become revolutionized, suffer a complete transformation — in favour of the worker. He saw the bad, vicious old laissez-faire policy die, and the State step in to protect the most valuable asset which any State can ever have— the lives and health and comfort of its people. He learnt, too, that nothing can put an arresting hand on human ingenuity. If the Luddites had reduced to powder and ashes every machine in England, more machines, better machines, would have been made. In these matters — whatever it may do in spiritual and moral 104 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE affairs — the world never goes back. Once men began to make machines, men were bound to go on making them, improving them, adding to their number in every successive age. Such a man, too, learnt that just as you cannot stop the development and increase of machinery, so you cannot arrest the development of motive power. An observant man, watching the world's progress from 1800 to 1850, saw many wonderful things, but nothing more wonderful than the development of motion. He saw the first factories driven by water-power ; probably he thought that their wheels and shaftings would never be turned by anything more powerful. But then came steam, and he saw locomo- tive engines, and stationary engines ; he saw trains of carriages whirled along iron and steel rails at sixty miles an hour ; he saw great ships driven across the seas ; he saw huge manufactories full of intricate machinery, all controlled by one steam-engine — and he probably said to himself that here was the end^nothing ever would or could supersede steam. And yet even then, in 1850, a new force was before him, which will drive out steam as steam drove out water and wind. In his address to the Institute of Electrical Engineers, Mr. Ferranti, its President in 1910, foreshadowed the future of electricity as motive power. He saw the establishment of a great national scheme. He foresaw vast power stations, set here and there in the country with engines of marvellous capacity. He saw these stations and engines supplying energy all over and across the land — to cities and towns and villages, to railways, to tramwtys, to workshops, mills, factories ; all at a price at which we should marvel nowadays. He saw, too, the enormous development of trade which will result ; the saving of our rapidly-diminishing coal stores ; the new, vastly different conditions of life itself. And he indulged in no wild dream — some of us may live to see his prophecies [fulfilled. In motive-power, the future lies with electricity. CHAPTER IV COAL, IRON, STEEL The first builders of tlie new mills and factories went to the ravines and valleys of the Pennine Range for water- power ; their immediate successors, and theirs after them, turned to the districts wherein they would be close to two minerals whose presence and help were of absolute necessity to success in manufacturing under the changed conditions which followed the introduction of machinery and steam. By the enterprising men of the early nineteenth century, coal was wanted in vast quantity ; so was iron ; so, later on, was steel. In Yorkshire there was coal in plenty ; there was a good deal of iron ; the invention and use and improvement of steel were quickly to follow on all the other inventions. But coal first, and as much of it as could be got — ^men must have steam ; and coal, acting with water, was the best and quickest agent for the production of steam. Consequently, the new factories rose as near as possible to the coalfields which were already in existence, and to those which were being developed — which is why a man who travels through the greater part of the West Riding of Yorkshire is never out of sight of colliery villages and factory towns : they are all bits of one great whole, the name of which is Industry. Separate .that whole into individual parts and one finds that those parts are coal, iron, steel, water, steam, machines, labour, all pieced together by man, and that — at present — if any one part were taken away from the others, the entire fabric of modern industriahsm would fall to pieces. In minerals, Yorkshire is one of the wealthiest counties in England. Its coalfield is of vast extent ; it yields every io6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE year an enonnous quantity of iron. One hears so much of Yorkshire iron and of Yorkshire coal, that one forgets that other minerals have been worked in the county from the earliest times of which we can say anything. Certainly both coal and iron were known in the time of the Roman occupation of the land — but one feels sure that the Celts who were here before the Romans did something in the way of quarrying and using stone before men found out that coal would bum, or that iron may be put to many uses. In stone of fine and enduring quality, Yorkshire is particularly rich. Modern towns like Bradford are almost entirely built of stone, as any careful observer would suppose they would be after seeing the vast stone quarries of the neighbour- hood, such as those at Idle and Windhill. Similar quarries exist all along the high ground on the south bank of the Calder — from them has come the stone which built Halifax and Huddersfield and Dewsbury and Wakefield. Here and there in the West Riding one finds brick houses and cottages — but only here and there ; whoever wants to raise mill or mansion, church or cottage in that region has splendid stone lying ready to his hand. Yorkshire stone built the Yorkshire churches — none of the grand old masonry of Ripon and Beverley, Howden and Selby, Hedon and Patrington, was fetched from any far distant quarry ; the great Minster at York is fashioned out of stone given by the Percies and Vavasours from the quarries on their estates, close by the ancient city. Of Yorkshire stone, too, were the castles and religious houses, the ruins of which, in their turn, have become quarries for modern Vandals, who have fashioned cow-sheds out of cloisters and pig-styes out of presbyteries. This, of course, is all building-stone, but the county possesses stone useful for other purposes. No historian has ever told us when limestone began to be burned in Yorkshire, but Camden says that he saw the process in his day, round about Knottingley, where it still exists, and where there are limestone quarries so obviously ancient — as also at Womersley and Brotherton, and along the highway-side north of Ferrybridge — that they must have been in existence hundreds of years before Camden's COAL, IRON, STEEL 107 time. Lime-burning, indeed, seems to be one of the decay- ing industries. The working of alum is another. The alum industry of Yorkshire had its romance. Sir Thomas Chaloner, a Cleveland man, who had travelled extensively in the Papal States in Italy, in Queen EHzabeth's time, noticed that the soil and vegetation in the neighbourhood of the alum works belonging to the Papal Government very closely resembled those of his own neighbourhood in York- shire, and he brought Italian workmen skilled in the getting of alum to prospect and develop in the region of Guisborough. They found alum in plenty, and it continued to be worked between Guisborough and the coast until about fifty years ago, when the industry in that particular region died out. Seventy years before that, another mineral industry, entirely peculiar to the north-east Yorkshire coast, and closely associated with the name and fortunes of Whitby, came to an end in the exhaustion of jet. How long jet had been dug out of the rocks and chffs of Whitby and its neighbourhood no man knows, but jet ornaments have often been discovered in the burial mounds and burrows of the adjacent moors : they must have lain so hidden for certainly not less than twelve hundred years, and probably much longer. The making of these ornaments was a considerable industry at Whitby in the fourteenth century, and Camden says that he saw jet "growing" among the rocks when he visited the old seaport two hundred years later, and he describes it as being of " a reddish and rustic colour " that turned to a " radiant black " when pohshed. No jet has been found in any quantity at Whitby for many years, and though jet articles are still made, the raw material is imported. Nor has any lead been worked in Yorkshire of late years — not because the Yorkshire lead mines are wholly exhausted, but because foreign competition and the working cost have conspired to make any working unprofit- able. But lead mining was in progress in Nidderdale two thousand years ago, and it was in all probability the know- ledge that there was lead in the Yorkshire dales which led the Romans northwards soon after their first coming, and made them cut their first Yorkshire road direct to the io8 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE vicinity of the pits which the Brigantes were already work- ing. That they themselves immediately began to get lead is proved by the fact that in 1735 two pigs of lead bearing Latin inscriptions, which showed that they had been smelted in Nidderdale in the year a.d. 87, were unearthed on Hay- shaw Moor, in the neighbourhood of Pateley Bridge. These mines at a much later date were assiduously worked by the Abbots of Fountains Abbey, whose lands extended over a vast part of Nidderdale. They had one lead-smelting works near Dacre, of which some remains are still visible ; there were probably others in the district. To these they brought the lead which they got from the mines on Greenhow Hill and in Blayshaw Gill, carrying the ore across the rough country on the backs of mules. At a still later date, lead- smelting was carried on in Ashfield Gill : a few years ago, the remains of an old lead-works still stood there, in com- pany with a great water-wheel, by which motive-power had been applied. In this district, too, copper was found and worked at one time, but never to any great extent, though Camden, basing his statement on what was doubtless told to him in the neighbourhood, reports that all the dales in that part of Yorkshire were richly stored with it. The Yorkshire coalfield is in reality but a part — though the most considerable part — of a vast coal region which, roughly outhned, stretches from Leeds to Derby, going from north to south, and from (at its widest part) Penistone to Thome, going from west to east. Anywhere between Leeds and Sheffield one way, and Barnsley and Doncaster another, a man is walking over what is — leaving Wales out of reckoning — the biggest continuous coalfield in this island : under him there are not far off nine hundred square miles of coal-producing area. The coal measures in their full development run to a thickness of about 3,000 ft. ; the sixteen seams have a thickness of nearly 50 ft. The seam known as the Top-Hand increases from a thickness of six feet in Derbyshire to one of nine or ten feet about Barnsley, in Yorkshire — and at Barnsley one may be said to be in the very heart of the best and most important colliery district in England. It needs httle observation, COAL, IRON, STEEL 109 an3rwhare about Barnsley, to see that the town Itself and its whole neighbourhood are entirely devoted to coal-mining. Every village in the outskirts is a colliery village ; the streets, roads, and lanes are for ever thronged with miners, going to or from the various pits ; the very skies seem to be in sjmipathy with the black earth beneath ; the atmosphere is charged with coal-dust ; the most important building in Barnsley itself is the fine block which houses the officials and staff of the Miners' Association. Still further north, about half-way between Barnsley and Leeds, is yet another important centre of coal-mining, Normanton, an ancient place in which all traces of antiquity have long since dis- appeared under the top-hamper of the collieries and the long, grimly dismal rows of miners' cottages. Of late years yet another centre of the Yorkshire coal-trade has been established at Doncaster, up to fifteen years ago a purely agricultural town, but now the heart of a district in which the old, sleepy farming villages are being one by one trans- formed into something vastly different by the sinking and working of new' pits. In going back to the beginnings of coal-mining in York- shire we are once more in touch with the Romans. There is good evidence that they made some use of coal at Bierley, near Bradford; outside the county they certainly worked coal to considerable extent at Wroxeter, in Shropshire, and they appear — from the cinders unearthed during modern excavations — to have burned it in their military outposts in Northumberland. But after the Romans had gone, their Anglo-Saxon and Danish successors made no use of it at all, and wood and peat seerp to have been the only fuel used in the country up to the time of the Norman invasion. By the thirteenth century, however, it had come into considerable use — about 1230 a grant by Adam de Cambour to the Abbot of Newminster gave the grantee the right to convey sea-coal to the shore from his mines ; about the same time it began to be sold in London. It was got in those days by very primitive methods, and from very near the surface, but by 1350' deeper pits were made, and what is known as the pit-and-adit method came into use, no THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE and coal began to be burnt all orer the country. Old documents prove that it was extensively used in the abbeys and priories ; during this century, too, its value was dis- covered by the great folk of the halls and castles. The monastic bodies, always the pioneers in industry and invention, were using coal instead of wood for smelting and salt-making, and, to considerable extent, by 1500, but it was not for nearly two hundred years that it came into commercial use for the first of these industries. About 1530 the corf, or basket made of strong hazel twigs, was in use for drawing coal from the shallow mines ; about this time, too, the pits began to be in evidence in all parts of the coal-regions. As regards its history in Yorkshire, coal is known to have been used by the monks of Bolton Priory in the thirteenth century, and by 1400 there were many coal pits roimd about Leeds. And when Leland came into Yorkshire, preparing his Itinerary for the use of Henry VIII, he was much struck by the number of pits which he saw in traveUing between Wakefield and Pontefract — following, as he did, a road which is now in the very heart of the Yorkshire coalfield ; a little further north, there were, about that period, many pits in the neighbourhood of Garforth and Micklefield. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, coal was in general use in households, and in the North of England there were fears that the supply would soon become exhausted — nevertheless, whether it was to last or not, it began to be associated with manufactures, and the first to which it was applied was that of glass-making at Newcastle-on-Tjme, about 1620-25, where one firm, estabUshed by Robert Mansell, a famous seaman of his day, employed four thousand workpeople, with the result that glass began to appear in place of the old lattices in house-windows. About this period considerable improve- ments were made in the working and appliances of the mines ; by 1650 tram-rails, d^in-pumps, and horse-gins were in use, and coal-mining wSin a good way of progress. But the managers of all these mines had one great trouble, which was to last for well over another hundred years — the difficulty of keeping the mines free of water. COAL, IRON, STEEL in No one, surely, would imagine that superstition would ever gather round such a very material thing as coal is, yet about this time, when the coal folk were striving with might and main to improve the meaijs of getting it, there were other people in England who desired to get even a small lump of it for quite another purpose than burning. There were, in fact, two purposes for which coal, dug from the earth, was desired by superstitious folk in the last half of the seventeenth century — according to contemporary writers. Hill, in his Natural and Artificial Conclusions, published in London, 1650, writes of " the vertue of a rare cole, that is to be found but one houre in the day, and one day in the year. Divers authors," he proceeds, " affirm concerning the vertue and veritie of this cole, that it is onely to be found upon Midsummer Eve, just at noon, under every root of plantine and of ringwort ; the effects whereof are wonderful : for whosoever weareth or beareth the same about with them, shall be freed from the plague, ague, and sundry other diseases. And one author especially writeth, and constantly averreth that he never knew any that used to carry of this marvellous cole about him, who ever were, to his knowledge, sick of the plague, or, indeed, complained of any other maladie." So much for one reason why the precious piece of coal was desired ; Aubrey gives the other in his Miscellanies, pubUshed in London in 1696. " Last summer," he writes, " on the day of St. John Baptist (June 24) I accidentally was walking in the pasture behind Montague House : it was twelve o'clock. I saw there about two or three and twenty young women, most of them weU habited, on their knees, very busie, as if they had been weeding. A young man told me that they were looking for coal under the root of a plantain, to put under their heads that night, and they should dream who would be their husbands. It was to be that day and night." But in an old book entitled The Practice of Paul Barbette, published in London in 1675 (Barbette was a Dutch physician who practised at Amsterdam and had a great reputation in his day, especially in England, where several of his works appeared, in translations, about this period) 112 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE there is an explanation of these superstitions. " For the fEiIling sickness," he writes, " some ascribe much [virtue] to coals, pulled out on St. John Baptist from under the roots of ringwort : but these authors are deceived, for they are not coals, but old acid roots, consisting of much volatile salts, and are almost always to be found imder ringwort : so that it is only a certain superstition that those old dead roots ought to be pulled up on the eve of St. John Baptist about twelve at night." Famous, however, as Barbette was, his advice had evidently not permeated London society by Aubrey's time, for it was twenty-one years after the pubhcation of the Practice that the old antiquary saw young well-dressed women searching for coal in the fields, not at midnight on St. John's Eve, but in broad dayhght on St. John's Day. In the quaintly-worded and deeply interesting diaries and memoranda left by Ohver Heywood, one of the ejected clergy of 1662, who, though a Lancashire man by birth, lived most of his hfe in Yorkshire, and was imprisoned for conscience' sake in York Castle, more than once, there are several entries relating to coal-mining in the West Riding as it existed in his day : they give a very good idea of some of its conditions. " A strange and wonderfull providence," he writes, " hath fallen out at Norwood Green [near Halifax] this day being June 26 [1673-4] Thomas Oates having sunk a cole-pit near his hous (the house where formerly I hved) let down one George Harrison to get out some water that was in it ; being got to the bottom his breath was almost gone with the damp, he called to be pulled up again, they drew, but as he was ascending, he let hold of the rope goe and dropt down to the bottom. — James Oates (Thomas Oates' son) one of our conference young men, was let down to help him up, who, striving to Hft him up in the bottom, fell under him (being overcome with the damp) and there they lay in the bottom, they cryed out hideously at the top, many people flockt together, and there was a fearful outcry and uproare, they could not tell that they were ahve, but that Harrison made a moaning noyse. Tho. Oates cryed out will no one goe to fetch my COAL, IRON, STEEL 113 child out of the pit ? at last James Mitchell was willing to be let down, but coming near the middle his breath beginning to fail, cryed out to be pulled up, who coming up lay over- powered at the top, panting for breath a good while ; at last they persuaded one William Whitiker to goe down, he did so, and stirred in the water (tho' I know not whether he was at bottom) perceived they were alive, the rope was let down, G. Harrison was drawn up, alive, onely his head wounded with the fall, then they drew' up James Gates, who went by himself into the house, was laid upon the bed, both of them through the wonderful power of God aUve and likely to Uve, blessed be God, an old man (experienced in these cases) told them since that stirring in the water did help against the damp^ — however it was a strange deliver- ance worthy to be perpetuate." Worthy to be perpetuate, too, in Mr. Hej^vood's opinion, was another accident. He writes on " Feb. 4, 1679-80, at Mr. Hen. Ramsden's Colepit near Ealand [Elland] a boy of about 12 or 13 years of age of a Scotchwoman's near Hahfax fell into the colepit 40 yards, both his legs broken, armes, collar, etc., yet alive, March i ; he fell 40 yards but colepit was 80, it was a wonder." He writes of very different, but perhaps more interesting matters in the next passage, which has reference to the Restoration of Charles the Second and certain matters which followed thereafter. " Upon the Revolution of affaires in the nation," he observes, " and at the king's coming in, there was excessive joy and among the testi- monys thereof that of making bonefires was more than ordinarily tirible and extravagant, so that in great townes there was an intollerable wast of coales, and now there hath been exceeding scarcity of sea-coals in great towns that have been supplied from New-Castle, especially London, Hul, and York, by reason that the Hollanders lye upon the sea-coast and hinder passage, insomuch as coal is at 5 li a chauldron, and very difficult to be gotten, and this sharp winter many poore people have been in great danger of perishing by cold : the Lord is holy in aU his ways and righteous in al his workes." The exact co-relation of the last two clauses is not quite clear — the old diarist is much 8 114 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE more explicit when he writes of exact circumstance. Here is his account of another tragedy — this time a fatal one : — " A poor man that hath been a colUer 40 years," he notes, " having carded wool for his living upon Aug. 14, 1673, and got .but two pence that day sd nothing is got with this working He into the colepit again to-morrow, and He never come up again ; in the morning he went to the colepit belong- ing to Mr. Rooks at Rhodes-Hall, they let him down in a scoop or basket, there being a peece of wood at the other end of the rope to poyse it, when he was near the bottom, the peece of wood slipt out, fell downe upon him and killed him, he was taken up dead, tho' no wound appeared on him." Water at the bottom of the mines ; choke-damp ; primi- tive methods of winding — these are all apparent from the old Nonconformist's diary-extracts. But already in his time things were beginning to move. We learn from what he tells us about Mr. Henry Ramsden's coalpit at Elland that it was 240 feet in depth ; by 1708 the depth of north- country mines had been increased to 400 feet, though such depths were certainly exceptional. All through the eighteenth century, developments increased. Ventilation of mines was attended to : fire-lamps of a primitive sort were introduced ; the atmospheric engine came into being ; first Savery, and then Newcomen, showed how to pump water out of the workings ; the union between the coal and iron industries was effected ; finally, M'^att's low-pressure, condensing steam-engine marked the beginning of a new era. That era has included all manner of wonderful technical improvements in the use of steam, of winding, of lighting, of ventilation, of machinery — and it is best epitomized in figures. In the year 1800, the entire coal- output of the United Kingdom was estimated at 10 million tons : in 1914 it was nearly 266 million tons, the value of which at the pit-head was £132,596,853. In 1911 there were 3,300 separate coal mines in the United Kingdom ; they then employed 1,049,897 workers. Four counties only produce more than 20,000,000 tons of coal per year ; Yorkshire stands second amongst them, preceded by COAL, IRON, STEEL 115 Durham, and followed by Glamorganshire and Lancashire. In Yorkshire the coalfields are being considerably extended, and the output bids fair before long to surpass that of its neighbour-county across the Tees. Lovers of the ancient and the picturesque are apt to say hard things of the Yorkshire colliery districts. It is no doubt trying to the artists and to the archaeologists, in search of the ruins of a fine mediaeval castle, or of a notable village church, to find them set in the midst of long, unlovely streets of mean, red brick cottages, surrounded by the enormous slag-heaps of the coUiery yards, and the great scaffoldings above the pit-shafts — as is so- constantly the case in the South Yorkshire coal-region, where so many beautiful, old-world places have been seized upon by the unrelenting fingers of Giant Industry. But the workaday, practical world recks httle of the aesthetic senses, and it is now too late to regret that Conisbrough Castle looks down on a valley which is filled from end to end with coUieries, or that oases like Hickleton Church and Houghton Old Hall are set in the midst of grime and soot : too late to repine because the rustic-aired, thoroughly old-world environs of Doncaster are being utterly transformed. What is much more to the purpose is to make the best of things and to see that in town-planning, cottage-building, sanitation, and due provision of baths, wash-houses, and the Hke, the new colliery centres shall ensure healthy con- ditions for the tens of thousands of folk who will flock into them. The colliery village of the old regime was one of the most awful, desolate, and brutaUzing places to be found on the face of the earth, where people hved under dreadful conditions, and children were brought up in a fashion which no decent farmer would have used in the rearing of his swine and cattle. It is in the power of the folk who are so widely extending coal-mining operations in Yorkshire to see that their workers are weU housed, have proper sanitation, plenty of water, and the means of reheving the tedium of their lives by turning to hbraries, and reading rooms, and museums, and playing fields. And they will do well to consider utility before they think of beauty. Ii6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Not all the town-planning experts in the world can ever make a colliery village beautiful ; they can never make it anything but ugly — but they can give it a pleasant and a healthy ugliness. If Yorkshire is only second to Durham in its output of coal, it ranks first in England as regards its output of the chief of our metallic minerals — iron ore. In 1913 the United Kingdom produced 5,138,958 tons of iron from its own ironstone, valued at £22,096,984 — of this, Yorkshire found more than one- third. And as it is the first in output of iron, so iron-working is its oldest industry — agriculture, of course, always excepted. There are traces of very ancient ironworks in many places. According to the late Canon Atkinson, who devotes a chapter of his Forty Years in a Moorland Parish to a careful examination of the subject, the so-called British villages on the moors around Danby are old iron-workings. Documentary evidence proves that the monks of Guisborough had iron mines in that district, and in Glaisdale ; the monks of Whitby had forges at Hackness, on the Derwent ; the forge of the Augustinian Canons at Bolton was somewhat famous in later mediaeval ages ; the Abbots of Fountains were iron- masters on an extensive scale in Nidderdale, and in its offshoot valleys : it is said, indeed, that the timber of the adjoining Forest of Knaresborough was exhausted by them in collecting fuel for their forges, just as the historic Andreds- weald, the vast wood which ran through the middle of Sussex, from the borders of Kent to those of Hampshire, was burnt up, in the course of years, by feeding the forges of Sussex. The cinder-heaps which betray the presence of iron-smelting works in past ages have been unearthed all over the county — in Airedale and Wharfedale, in Hallamshire and Craven, in out-of-the-way places like Rosedale, on the North York Moors, and even beneath the houses in the heart of Leeds. All the first iron-smelting was effected by burning charcoal ; it was not until some centuries later that wood was used, and wood was a costly fuel, for it needed a great many loads to smelt one ton of iron. But it continued in use until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when COAL, IRON, STEEL 117 coal came into general use at the iron forges. It had previously been tried and pronounced wanting in result and effect — a sufficiently strong blast could not be pro- duced, and the iron so made was brittle. Then, presumably about 1730 — for the exact date has never been recorded — Abraham Darby began to use a mixture of coke and charcoal at the famous Foundry of Coalbrookdale in Shropshire, and an enormous impetus was given to both coal and iron industries. Later in that century, John Smeaton, buUder of the Eddystone Lighthouse, a Yorkshireman, hit upon a plan for improving the blast in iron furnaces, and by 1800 coal, as fuel for smelting iron, had completely taken the place of wood and the coke-charcoal mixture, though the latter was used here and there for a few years longer. Mean- while many large and important ironworks had come into being in Yorkshire. Round about Sheffield and its Hallam- shire environs, iron had been worked for many centuries. Sheffield blades, fashioned of iron, were famous in the fourteenth century : the Miller of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales carried a Sheffield whittle in his hose, and Edward III possessed a knife which had been made by a Sheffield cutler. The cutlers of Sheffield, indeed, were powerful and important enough to be made into a Company, with a Master Cutler at its head, and many rights and privileges attaching to it, early in the reign of Charles the First, and if there were not quite thirty thousand people in the district engaged in the lighter iron trade when Daniel Defoe visited Sheffield (he remarks that he had been told there were, but doubted, on examining the place himself, if he had been correctly informed) there were not far short of that number if the adjoining town of Rotherham was taken into reckon- ing. Near Rotherham in 1746 were founded the Masborough Ironworks, at one time reputed the largest in Europe ; Leland, passing through that very district, two hundred years before, had noticed that it contained very good pits of coal, and that all around them were many good iron- smiths. Some forty years after the establishment of the Masborough Works the great ironworks at Low Moor, near Bradford, came into existence. Romance — yet of a n8 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE sad nature, if sadness and romance can ever be associated — attached to their foundation. During a considerable part of the eighteenth century, there hved at a fine old mansion called Royds Hall, near Bierley, a tj^ical country squire named Edward Leeds, who loved horses and dogs and cock- fighting, and the pleasures of the table, and a merry hfe, and went the pace of such men so thoroughly, that his income, though a handsome one, was never sufficient for his needs. And in 1787 the inevitable result came ; his creditors sold him up, lock, stock, and barrel, and he himself, broken and ashamed, ended his maimed career by taking his life. Part of his estate, a stretch of unfruitful country — on the surface — called, from its situation, Low Moor, was sold, after two or three attempts, to a company which felt pretty sure of something that Mr. Leeds had apparently not even guessed at — that beneath it lay vast stores of iron-ore. One man "in the neighbourhood, however, had guessed at it — he was Joseph Dawson, a dissenting minister, a close friend of the famous scientist and philosopher. Dr. Priestley, and it was due to him that the Low Moor Ironworks, one of the most important industrial estabUsh- ments in the world, ultimately sprang into existence. Dawson himself ; a country gentleman named Richard Hird ; and a Bradford solicitor named John Hardy, before very long acquired the entire rights of the company which had originally bought the old squire's bit of low-lying land, and as Hird, Dawson, and Hardy they proceeded in a practical and shrewd fashion to unearth the riches lying beneath it. They were not without competition, for several ironworks were started in the neighbourhood about the same time, . and notably those at Bowling, a suburb of Bradford, and close to Low Moor. But each of the three partners amassed vast fortunes, and Hardy became pro- genitor of a noble family, and grandfather of the statesman, Gathome Hardy, who, born at Bradford in 1814, filled many important offices in various administrations, and was created Earl of Cranbrook in 1892. But even when the iron-fields and iron-works of the districts around Sheffield and Rotherham, Leeds and COAL, IRON, STEEL 119 Bradford, were in full progress, the really great and import- ant ironstone region of Yorkshire had yet to be developed — it had, indeed, yet to be discovered. It was left to nine- teenth-century enterprise to discover and develop it. In 1841 two men, Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan, appeared in the rising town of Middlesbrough, and estabhshed a business which was destined to become within a few years one of the greatest industrial concerns in the world. They were men of great foresight and vast enterprise, who had been quick to see the possibilities of the union between steam and iron, and some rare instinct prompted them to select the Yorkshire edge of the Tees estuary as the proper field of their labours. They immediately began the manu- facture of machinery, and in 1843 built the engines of the first steamship ever launched on the Tees. They became large employers of labour, and during the first ten years of their Middlesbrough career, the increase of the town in area and population was largely due to their enterprise. But the work of those ten years was as nothing to what followed. In 1850, John Vaughan, who for some time had suspected the presence of rich stores of iron ore in the adja- cent Cleveland Hills, the northern spurs of which look down on Middlesbrough, called in the help of a famous mining expert, Marley, to examine the ridge of high land about Eston and its neighbourhood. Marley's investigations resulted in a report of so promising a nature that trial quarries were opened at Eston Bank in the summer of the same year, and four thousand tons of ore were taken from them, and sent to the blast furnaces which Bolckow and Vaughan had erected in readiness at Wit ton, close by. Next year the great ironstone mines at Eston were formally opened out, a railway was made, and more blast furnaces built at Middlesbrough. Two years later the workings were extended further into the heart of the district, and a hne for the conveyance of ore made as far as Guisborough. Enormous wealth and prosperity flowed in upon the pioneers of the new industry, and upon Middlesbrough itself — the town literally grew before men's eyes. In 1864 the business of Bolckow and Vaughan was turned into a Umited Uability 120 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE company with a capital of two and a half millions ; about the same time Middlesbrough began to rank as a port of importance ; within twenty years of Marley's discovery of the ironstone, it stood amongst the larger towns of York- shire. No Enghsh town has ever grown as Middlesbrough grew in less than a century. In 1829 one house stood where Middlesbrough now stands ; it was a farmstead, set in the midst of a marshy and unproductive low-lying level of land on the bank of the Tees, and it belonged to one William Chilton, of Billingham. From him in 1830, a company calling itself the Middlesbrough Owners, and including two members of the famous Pease family of Darlington, bought, for £30,000, five hundred acres of land, and began to build a town. In 1841, when Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan came to Middlesbrough, the population was 5,709 ; even in 1851 it had only increased to 7,893. But by 1869 it was exporting well over a million's worth of its produce, and by 1881 its population was 55,288. To-day Middles- brough folk number at least 120,000, and the rateable value of their town is not less than £600,000. All this prosperity, in the main, came from the presence of iron-ore close by ; and from the business aptitude and foresight of the pioneers who first worked it. They had many advan- tages : they showed their cleverness by making the most of them. To begin with, what is known as the Lower Cleveland Bed of iron-ore is the best and biggest in this country. It is never less than ten, it is often as much as seventeen feet in thickness ; its percentage of iron is thirty. The Main Bed at Eston, where it reaches its greatest thick- ness, has an average yield of 50,000 tons an acre. To the entire British product of iron-ore, Cleveland contributes well over 40 per cent. Thus the pioneers of the iron industry hereabouts had a rich field to draw upon. But they were fortunately situated in other respects. They were on the very edge of a fine, navigable river, within a few miles of the open sea, and not many hours away from the Continent. And close by them they had the most productive of all the English coal-fields, Durham, the coke from which is pecuUarly adapted for use in blast-furnaces. Whether the COAL, IRON, STEEL 121 Cleveland iron-mines will eventually become exhausted is a question for experts : the decline in British production of late years has been marked, but up to now, Yorkshire stiU remains ahead of all the other iron-producing counties as regards output of raw material. Very few of us, non-experts, if we were fairly put to the test, could teU an enquirer what iron is, what steel is, what the difference is — if any — between steel and iron. It may be well to attempt some elementary definition of iron and steel before considering some features of the rise and progress of the steel trade in Yorkshire. Iron is a metallic chemical element ; of great abundance in the world ; rarely found in a free state, but easily obtained from the principal iron- ores — ^magnetite, haematite, limonite, siderite, and pyrites ; it is extracted from thfese ores by heat, and the heating process produces pig-iron, from which again are produced wrought iron and steel, by various conversive processes. Cast iron, the first form of iron produced by the melting of pig-iron, is easily breakable ; wrought iron is ductile ; between wrought iron and steel there is what one may call so much S5anpathy that it is difficult for an amateur to teU where the precise line of difference between steel and wrought iron should be drawn. Yet there is a difference — and there are millions of people amongst us, and indeed all over the world, who see and handle steel articles every day of their lives who are under the impression that the difference between iron and steel is so great that there is no con- nection whatever between them. Yet steel is iron — it is iron which, either being pure or alloyed, is cast while fluid, and is capable of being worked into desired forms by mechanical process. Whether we ought to speak of the old Sheffield whittles, or thwytels, as Chaucer called them, which were famous six hundred years ago, as steel, is a question for the expert, but their existence and their fame prove that Sheffield cutlery makers had found out that it was possible to put a fine, sharp edge on iron long before steel became known by its now world-wide appellation. The manufacture of steel by the melting of iron, however, is of entirely modern 121 THE MAKING OP' MODERN YORKSHIRE origin. It began about 1742, when Benjamin Hvintsman, a Doncaster man, who up to that time had achieved nothing of more importance than the making of clocks, invented or discovered the process of manufacturing steel by hquefying iron in a crucible. British iron is not well adapted for this process, and most of the tools made of steel which has been prepared by the Huntsman process have their source in the magnetic ore of Sweden. It was not until quite a hundred years had elapsed since Huntsman's invention that the great revolution in the steel-making industry began ; its birthday was a day in the August of 1856 on which Henry Bessemer read a paper On the Manufacture of Malleable Iron and Steel without Fuel before the British Association. That day was as important in the annals of steel as was the day in the history of steam on which James Watt first got the idea of his engine. Henry Bessemer was one of those men who are bom with a genius for invention. Born at Charlton in Hertfordshire in 1813, he went to London before he was twenty, and at once entered on a career of making things which no one had ever made before, or improving things already in existence. He invented a secret method of embossing ; he invented the first perforated stamp, and was scurvily treated by the Government of the day in connection with it ; he invented smooth-bore guns, and got Napoleon the Third and the French War Ofhce staff to be greatly interested in them ; eventually he began to experiment in iron and steel. The suggestions which he made in his British Association paper set the whole steel-making community by the ears, and led to curious manifestations of opinion. First of all, steel-makers were enthusiastic, and rushed to buy licences from Bessemer for the use of his idea ; experiments, hastily and foolishly made, were not successful, and popular opinion amongst iron and steel workers ran to the other extreme. Bessemer paid no attention to the resultant coldness of feeling. He proceeded to manufacture steel himself. After spending several months and many thousands of pounds he produced steel worth £60 a ton, which it had only cost about one-tenth of that amount to make. He carried off COAL, IRON, STEEL 123 some bars of this steel to the works of his friends, the Gallo- ways, of Manchester, whose workmen used it, not knowing that it was not the best steel of the then processes. But even then Bessemer could get no recognition from the Sheffield makers. Accordingly, he borrowed capital, and himself began steel-making in Sheffield, with the result that he was very soon underselling his rivals by as much as £15 per ton. The works which he thus started, really in order to demonstrate the practicabihty of his own theories, proved enormously profitable and were subsequently sold at a vast profit, and Bessemer within a comparatively short time took his place among the millionaire manufacturers of the day. His process spread all over the iron and steel producing districts of the world, especially in the United States, and the first refusal of the Sheffield steel workers to use it lost the town its ancient monopoly of the steel trade of this country. The Bessemer process, briefly explained, appears to be extraordinarily simple. It is really a process for freeing what is known as low carbon steel and wrought iron from cinder by forcing through molten pig-iron a number of fine streams of air, thus generating intense heat, and oxidizing such impurities as silicon, carbon, phosphorus and sulphur. Twenty-two years after Bessemer first outhned it to the British Association, the process was improved upon by the introduction of the Thomas-Gilchrist method — so called from the names of its two inventors— which, by the use of a new converter, lined with a base of powdered magnesia, limestone mixed with anhydrous tar, effected a dephos- phorizing condition in the product. A few years previously, a third method of producing steel had been experimented in by Sir WiUiam Siemens and Messrs. Martin, who desired to evolve the desired result from ore, scrap, and pig-iron by melting all three in an open hearth, the necessary heat of which was to be supplied by gas. This process was eventually perfected to the satisfaction of its inventors and users, and the Siemens-Martin method has long been used in all steel centres. Until recently, indeed, only three great processes of making steel have been known — the Huntsman, 124 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE or crucible ; the Bessemer or converter (basic) process ; and the Siemens-Martin, or open-hearth (acid) process. But of late years, electric furnaces, of the Kjellin, Herault, Stassaus, and Roching-Rodenhauser type have been used on the European Continent and in America, and, to some slight extent, in this country. One of the first supporters of Bessemer, who had a firm faith in his process, and who himself did much to develop its use in steel manufacture, was a typical Yorkshireman of the sort only found in the great Yorkshire industrial towns — John Brown, who, at a comparatively early stage of his wonderful career, was known as the Father of the South Yorkshire Iron Trade. His life was a romance in itself — although it was a romance, first and last, of business. A Sheffield man by birth, the son of a working slater, his native town at the time he came into it — 1816 — was but a small and infinitely squalid place. The very little education he received as a child was from a man who kept a cheap school in a garret : one of his school-fellows was a girl rather older than himself, Margaret Schofield, whom he afterwards married. His father wished to make a linen- draper of him when the boy had reached the age of fourteen, but John Brown had no ambition for the counter — his desire, even at that age, was to be a great merchant, doing business with the whole world, as he put it. He was accord- ingly apprenticed to Earl, Horton, and Company, a Sheffield firm which in 1836 took up the steel trade. Brown's wages with them were six shillings a week ; when his apprentice- ship was over, his father presented him with a sovereign and a suit of clothes— all he could do for him. But in his twenty-first year. Earl, senior partner in his old firm, offered him a share in it, and Brown being unable to accept the offer because of his want of capital, Earl persuaded him to take over the factoring business which he and Horton had relin- quished to start their Hallamshire Steel Works, and provided him with the necessary funds, his relatives guaranteeing still more. For some time he travelled about country in a horse and gig, selling his goods, but before many years had elapsed he turned his energies to the manufacture of COAL, IRON, STEEL 125 steel, and in 1844 ^^ started a small foundry in Orchard Street. Here he prospered so well that he sold his factoring business and removed to larger premises in Furnival Street, where he began to make railway springs, files, and other steel goods, and to invent articles which modern enterprise was clearly demanding. His first great success was the conical spring buffer, which he supplied to a Welsh, a Scottish, and an Irish railway, and finally, in England, to the London and North Western. Henceforth his career was one of unbroken success, and his readiness of resource, his diligence, and his promptitude in executing orders, were spoken of admiringly wherever he did business. On January i, 1856, Brown opened his famous Atlas Works in Brightside, a suburb of Sheffield which at that time was almost rural in its surroundings. For some time he had wanted to centralize his workshops ; he had been making one thing in one place, another in another ; now he brought his workmen together on a site of three acres, one acre of which accommodated the works. Before three years were over, the whole three acres was built upon ; a few years more, and ten times as much acreage was being used. In the first year at the Atlas Works Brown began the manufacture of iron for conversion into steel. Up to then, most of the iron used at Sheffield had come from Russia and Sweden, and his fellow-manufacturers derided the notion of using English ore. But ere long they were buying the product of the new furnace erected by Brown, and he had such a demand for his goods that he had to buy more land, build new works and furnaces, and double his operations. It was at this time that he began to produce steel by the Bessemer process ; he had been one of Besse- mer's first supporters, and though he was not encouraged by the earlier results, he was soon awake to the value of Bessemer-produced steel, and he began to make rails for the rapidly-extending railroads from it. This was in 1859 ; in i860 he turned his attention to a matter of even greater importance. Happening to be at Toulon, during a hoUday which he took in the South of France, he there saw the French armotired ship La Gloire, and inspecting her plates T26 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE closely, saw that they were made by hammering. This was quite sufficient to give Brown an idea ; he returned home, built a rolling mill, and after superintending all the work in person, was able to submit armour for ships which successfully stood a most severe test at Portsmouth in 1862. He obtained gold medals for his armour plates in England in that year, and in France five years later. With Brown's introduction of rolled armour plates, began the great battle between defence and attack. The maker of armour for ships aroused the mettle of the maker of guns. Sir Joseph Whitworth, the famous ordnance maker, said about this time that whatever armour was made and fitted to war ships, he would make a gun that would send a projectile through it. Brown, however, continued to make his rolled plates thicker and thicker, and more resisting than ever, and they withstood the severest tests. Foreign countries showered offers of contracts upon him, but he confined his work to the needs of his own nation first, and by 1867 he had put his plates around three-fourths of the British Navy. Three years previously, just eight years after the opening of the original Atlas Works, his business was transformed into a limited liability company with a capital of £1,000,000 ; three years after this conversion, the founder was honoured with a knighthood. Sir John Brown was a very remarkable man, one of the foremost Yorkshiremen of his age, and nothing better illustrates his truly Yorkshire character than a story of his resourcefulness and determination at the outset of his career as a steel manufacturer. In his early days of spring- making for the railways, he happened to visit Edinburgh, where the engineer of a new line, which was just about to be opened from the Scottish capital to Dundee, told him that all was in readiness with the exception of certain brake springs, the maker of which had failed to fulfil his contract. He asked Brown if he could make and supply the springs within five days. There was no direct communication between Sheffield and Edinburgh in those days, but Brown, after a few minutes' reflection, promised to supply the desired goods. This conversation took place on a Saturday COAL, IRON, STEEL 127 — Brown immediately left Edinburgh for Berwick, by stage- coach, and, travelling southward without delay, reached Sheffield on Sunday. He at once sought out his foreman, and arranged for the manufacture of the springs to begin first thing on Monday morning. By Monday evening they were finished, and Brown himself set out with them on his return journey to Scotland. His ingenuity suggested the shortest and quickest way. Travelling by rail to Man- chester, he caught a coasting steamer to Fleetwood, where he transferred his goods to the railway station. But here a serious hitch occurred — the springs were so heavy that the railway officials refused to carry them by passenger train. Brown, however, was not the man to be put down by objections, and after much trouble he induced the manager to attach a horse-box to the train, wherein, with his goods, he made his way North. He was in Scotland again, and had delivered the springs, by the afternoon of the fourth day, and the engineer was so pleased with his promptitude, that he not only paid all the expenses of the journeys, but spread the news of the Sheffield manufacturer's energy with such enthusiasm that Brown very soon obtained a virtual monopoly of the trade in railway material in Scotland. It is a fine characteristic of the self-made Yorkshireman that he almost invariably desires his fellow-Yorkshiremen to share in and profit by his own good fortune. The York- shireman is usually represented as a close-fisted, money- grabbing, keen-bargaining man who takes good care to keep a tight grip on all that comes within his fist, but public record proves that wherever Yorkshiremen have risen to affluence they have spent their money like water in the towns wherein it was made. Sir John Brown, as a Sheffield man, had always an eye on the material and mental pros- perity of his native place. He was a model employer — and the hardest- working man on his own vast premises. He himself planned the building of his own works ; he was his own architect ; every scrap of machinery made there was manufactured to his own design and under his own super- vision ; he was always encouraging his workmen by personal presence and precept. Like all busy and hard-toiling men, 128 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE he always had abundance of leisure for other matters. He worked hard at municipal business ; he was Councillor, and Mayor, and a magistrate ; he took vast interest in education. He was twice elevated to the proudest position to which any Sheffield man can attain — that of Master Cutler ; he was Chairman of Sheffield's first School Board ; he was a zealous guardian of the poor, a Town Trustee, a Church Burgess ; he built a fine church in Sheffield, which to this day is known by his name rather than by the name under which it was dedicated. In all things he was a fine type of the self-made man, who, starting from small beginnings and becoming a prince amongst his own people, nevertheless retained simplicity, honesty, and an unassuming character, allied with a firm affection for the folk to whom he belonged. The long association of Sheffield with iron and steel has made the name of the great South Yorkshire city better known, perhaps, throughout the world than that of any other town or city in England — London only excepted. Sheffield goods are found ever3Avhere, in every Continent, in every country ; there are few regions in the inhabited parts of the earth into which a Sheffield knife has not been introduced. The names of the Sheffield manufacturers are as household words — Bessemer, Brown, Cammell, Vickers, Rogers, Mappin, Firth ; all these have been seen impressed on goods of one sort or another in all sorts of strange places, civilized and uncivilized, on land or sea, for many a long year. But only a man deeply versed in the mysteries of the Sheffield trade knows what a vast quantity of various goods is produced every year from the city's workshops. Of late years the production of steel goods in Sheffield has increased by leaps and bounds. To the three older and firmly estabhshed methods of converting iron into steel, the Huntsman, the Bessemer, and the Siemens-Martin, two more modern processes have been added — the solid oxidizing and puddling process of Heaton, and the fusion with carbonaceous process of Mushet. These have tended to the production of a higher class of steel goods in the way of cutlery and edged tools, and the variety COAL, IRON, STEEL 139 of the articles so produced is amazing. Where. In the old days, Sheffield turned out little more than knives, awl- blades, and the flat-backs of the old cutler's songs, it now sends out to the four quarters of the globe armour-plates, guns, great and small, rails for railroads and tramways, axles, machine-parts of all descriptions, girders for bridges and scaffolding, frames for houses, drills, machine-planes, circular saws, automatic tools, tools for blacksmiths and carpenters, tools for agriculturists and gardeners, razors, cutlery, axes, hatchets, ratchets, shears, scissors, and machine knives — it has also, quite recently, produced steel which will neither stain nor rust : a specimen of it, sent to the writer on its first production, and since put to severe tests, hes before him as bright and stainless as when it was brand-new. But Sheffield turns out still more, far more, in the way of steel goods. One of its oldest industries is the making of edge tools, saws, and files — especially files — and of these things an amazing variety is manufactured. Edge tools — divided into a Ught class and a heavy class — are supplied for every conceivable purpose ; saws, some for machine and some for hand, are made in all sorts of sizes, from the huge circular machine saw which will cut through iron and steel as easily as a grocer cuts through a cheese, to the thread-like bit of serrated steel which a boy uses in his fret-saw. As regards files — the making of any one of which necessitates nine or ten different operations — there are no less than seventy varieties specified in the latest list of the Cutlers' Company. In the Cutlers' Company, Sheffield possesses a corporate body which is well-nigh unique in England, perhaps in the world — a sort of survival of the old, powerful Trade-Guild, and akin to the ancient companies of Merchant Venturers in its rules, provisions, and privileges. From a very early period the Sheffield cutlers appear to have had regulations of their own ; during the reign of Queen Ehzabeth pariia- mentary sanction was given to some of these " for the better relief and comodytie of the porer sorte of the said fellowshippe " — a phrase which shows that some sort of guild was already in existence. Some of the ordinance^ 9 I30 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE thus sanctioned are noteworthy as showing the condition of labour in Sheffield in the sixteenth century. Amongst other provisions appeared the following : — No person engaged in the making of Sheffield cutlery, whether as master, workman, or apprentice, might do any work at his trade from August 8 to September 5 in any year, under heavy penalty. No man might follow the trade who had not been taught it by his own father for seven years, or been apprenticed to a master for a hke period. No man might follow it who had not learnt its mysteries and craft within the boimds of the Lordship of Hallamshire. No master might have more than one apprentice at a time. The meaning and significance of these regulations are plain ; there is another, however, which is not so easy to understand — it provided that knife-blades made in Sheffield should only be disposed of to folk living within the Hallam- shire liberties — which seems to be a curious limitation of trade. By the time of Charles the First, the cutlery trade of Sheffield had developed so much that further legislation was desirable, and in 1624 a Bill was presented to the House of Commons by Sir John Savile, considered by a Select Committee, and passed into law soon afterwards. This measure was entitled " An Act for the good order and government of the makers of knives, sickles, shears, scissors, and other cutlery wares in Hallamshire, in the county of York, and parts near adjoining," and it provided for the legal estabhshment, by charter, of the Cutlers' Company, as a body, incorporate and perpetual, of all persons engaged in making cutlery ware within the liberties of Hallamshire, and to be governed by a master, two wardens, six searchers, and twenty-four assistants. These officials were to remain in office for one year, and to appoint their successors on each succeeding Feast of St. Bartholomew, August 24th. The Company received power to make laws and regulations for the government of all masters, workmen, and appren- tices engaged in the Sheffield cutlery trade, and to inflict penalties — of a reasonable nature — on all disobedient members. The first Master was Robert Sorsby ; the first two Assistants, Godfrey Birley and John Rawson ; the COAL, IRON, STEEL 131 first roll of members included three hundred and sixty names. Having no property of its own at its inception, the Cutlers' Company had to await the accumulation of revenue from mark-rents, admissions to freedom, and indenture fees, before it could build its HaU, which was erected in 1638, near the Parish Church, and was used for company purposes until 1832, when, instead of being carefully preserved and estabUshed as a relic of Old Sheffield, it was pulled down to make way for a modem building. Here is annually held the Master Cutlers' Feast — a grand occasion invariably attended by some man of great pubUc eminence as chief guest ; of these feasts there has been an unbroken sequence since 1682, when John Winter, Master Cutler of that year, entertained the Duke of Norfolk and a brilliant assem- blage of the great folk of the county. Amongst the folk who sat down to feast with Master Cutler Winter on that occasion was probably one William Walker, a man of high respectability and much learning, who had been made an honorary freeman of the Company during the previous year, and to whose memory there used to be a cross in the chancel of Sheffield Parish Church, the inscription on which is quoted by Hunter in his History of Hallamshire. This William Walker was not only a scholar and a gentleman, but to the people of the neighbourhood a person of intense interest and of aversion — despite the fact that the better sort of them elected him to freemanship of the Cutlers' Company. In short, WiUiam Walker, of Darnall, was believed by his neighbours to be the mysterious, masked headsman who executed Charles the First on the scaffold at Whitehall. Their grounds for this beUef were ample — in their own opinion. It was commonly understood through- out England at that time that Walker was the name of the man who cut off the king's head ; moreover, Wilham Walker, of DamaU, was well known by his neighbours (who were mistaken in their conjectures) to be the translator of the notorious pamphlet, Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos — therefore, he must be the man : why, else, was he so grave, so darkly reserved, why had he buried himself in a remote village hke Darnall ? The Darnall folk of that period were sure that 133 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE the instniment of the Regicides dwelt among them ; never- theless, one must still hold to the more prosaic impression that Charles the First met his death at the hands of the common executioner, Richard Brandon, whose father Gregory had exercised that gruesome office before him. To look down upon modern Sheffield from any of its surrounding hills, to see its masses of drifting and gathering smoke by day, its flashes of lurid flame by night, one would think it to be a town of purely industrial interest, founded but yesterday, without a history, without a past. Yet, as we have seen, its trade is of great antiquity, and it has been carried on for at least seven centuries amongst sur- roundings which have many historical associations. Smiths, working in iron, were established in Sheffield when the Lovetots, successors of the Buslis, to whom WiUiam the Conqueror had given Hallamshire, built their castle, the last ruins of which have long disappeared, at the junction of the river Don and its tributary the Sheaf. They were there, increased in number, when a successor of the Lovetots, Thomas, Lord de Furnival, obtained for them and their fellow townsmen, their first market-charter from Edward the First. Always, through the succeeding centuries, the Sheffield men worked in iron, their smithies increasing in number beneath the walls of the Castle, and along the banks of the two rivers. From the walls of the Castle and from its windows, and from the terraces and windows of Sheffield Manor, built by the fourth Earl of Shrewsbury, whose monument is in the Parish Church — ^now the Cathedral — many great men and women have looked down on the smoke of the Sheffield forges in past centuries. While the Talbots, Earls of Shrewsbury, held Sheffield, they acted, on more occasions than one, as state gaolers, and they had many illustrious captives in charge. Cardinal Wolsey was brought a prisoner to Sheffield Castle after his dramatic arrest at his manor-house of Cawood; at Sheffield he remained in the Earl of Shrewsbury's custody for eighteen days — " and once every day," writes his faithful servant and biographer, George Cavendish, " the Earl would resort unto him, and lit with him communing upon a bench in a great window in COAL, IRON, STEEL 133 the gallery." It may be that, not so many years afterwards, Mary, Queen of Scots, looked out of the same great window upon the Sheffield smoke. Here, at any rate, she passed thirteen years in the custody of the sixth Earl of Shrewsbury, and as her gaoler allowed her aU the Uberty that he could, she must have made intimate acquaintance with the town and its then romantic and wild surroundings. But with the demohtion of the Castle by the Parliamentarians in 1648, all the old associations of Sheffield with the historic past began to vanish — so far as visible presentment of them is concerned. The modern Sheffield came into being, steadily encroaching on the liiUsides and valleys of Hallamshire, extending along the banks of the Don, up those of the Sheaf, into the recesses of the Rivelin. Instead of the battlements and turrets of the middle ages, the townsfolk grew familiar with the unlovely workshop, the high, naked smoke-stack ; instead of breathing the heather-scented breezes blown down from the Hallamshire moors, they found themselves wrapped in a thickening atmosphere of steams and gases and fumes from the ever-burning furnaces. At the time of the Domesday Survey there was a wood in Sheffield Manor, of four square miles in size ; nowadays, one square yard of Sheffield land is worth the four square miles of that wood. CHAPTER V THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES Few people who, having read Robinson Crusoe once, have fallen under the spell of its author for ever, are aware that Daniel Defoe, in addition to being novelist, pamphleteer, topographer, dealer in hosiery and in bricks and pantiles was also a trafficker in cloth. But so he was — which fact explains the enthusiasm shown in a certain passage in his Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (published 1724-1726), wherein he describes a visit which he paid to the Leeds Cloth Market at some time during Queen Anne's reign, when he was journeying in his accustomed prying fashion through Yorkshire. He gives an interesting account of how cloth was sold at Leeds at the bi-weekly gatherings of Yorkshire clothiers. " Early in the morning," he writes, " tressels are placed in two rows in the streets, sometimes two rows on a side, across which boards are laid, which make a kind of temporary counter on either side from one end of the street to the other. The clothiers come early in the morning with their cloth, and as few bring more than one piece, the market days being so frequent, they go into the inns and public-houses with it, and there set it down. At about six o'clock in the summer and about seven in the winter, the clothiers being all come by that time, the market bell at the Old Chapel by the bridge rings ; upon which it would surprise a stranger to see in how few minutes without hurry, noise, or the least disorder the whole market is filled and all the boards upon the tressels covered with cloth so close one another as the pieces can lie long ways, each proprietor standing behind his own piece, who form a mercantile regiment, as it were, drawn up in a double line >34 THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 135 in as great order as a military one. As soon as the bell has ceased ringing the factors and buyers of all sorts enter the market and walk up and down between the rows as their occasions direct. Some of them have their foreign letters of orders with patterns on them in their hands, the colours of which they match by holding them to the cloths they think they agree with. When they have pitched upon their cloth they lean over to the clothier and by a whisper in the fewest words imaginable the price is stated ; one asks, the other bids, and they agree or disagree in a moment. . . . You see ten or twenty thousand pounds' worth of cloth and sometimes much more bought and sold in little more than an hour." Defoe here refers, of course, to the old open market which used to be held at the bottom of Briggate, near Leeds Bridge, and his visit must have been paid before 1711, when, largely through the influence of Ralph Thoresby, the topographer, a covered cloth-hall was built in Kirkgate. When the Yorkshireman is not cultivating land, or making machinery, or engaged in one or other of the many minor industries of his county, or in that rare thing in Yorkshire, a man who does nothing, he is invariably found busied with wool — in one form or another. Wool is a commodity with which Yorkshiremen have been closely familiar for nearly as long as with the tiUing of land and smelting of ironstone. It forms the basis of nearly aU the textile industries which they have built up. It is called by different names in different places and under different processes — ^but it is always wool. There are many technical names connected with wool : it may be well to attempt some simple definitions of them. From a purely trade point of view, wool is the short fibres of the combed fleece — noils. Worsted is the long fibres — tops. Mungo is the shreds of clothing which has already been manufactured. Shoddy is the shreds of soft materials already manufactured, such as shawls, rugs, and blankets. Flock is made up of scraps collected from the machines used in one process or another. In the cloths-producing districts of Yorkshire all these various industries — each based on wool — ^have their proper centres. 136 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Leeds makes both woollens and worsteds ; if you want cheap woollen goods, you must go to the Colne Valley, beyond Huddersfield ; in Huddersfield itself, you get fine woollen cloths, and the best make of worsteds for men's use. Bradford devotes itself almost entirely to worsted — chiefly for dress material for women. Round about Batlej and Dewsbury, and the big town-like villages of the Spen Valley, mungo and shoddy have been made for the last hundred years — shoddy is by no means the despised stuff which some folk think it should be. In the Wakefield neighbourhood there is considerable production of yam ; yam, too, is made at Bingley and Keighley, and in the growing villages beyond Bradford. Halifax makes worsted yarn ; it also makes carpets which, of course, though the heaviest form of textile goods, have their basis in wool. Altogether, Yorkshiremen are much concerned with wool in its various stages of manufacture, and out of the entire wool-working population of the country, the West Riding provides more than two-thirds of its number. Wool is, therefore, the basis of the principal textile indus- tries of Yorkshire. But there are others. There is alpaca — which, to be sure, is also wool, but being taken from an animal which is not a sheep, but a cameloid mammal, is regarded as a product that stands in a class of its own. No man ever worked alpaca until Titus Salt discovered its uses in 1836, and the working of it may be said to be confined to Yorkshire. Then there is silk, and there is velvet — these are manufactured at Manningham, in the huge mill which overlooks Bradford. There is a certain amount of cotton-working in the extreme west of the county ; Ark Wright himself founded a cotton mill at Keighley in 1780. But cotton is the Lancashire industry — almost its monopoly : Yorkshiremen have never taken enthusiastically to cotton. There used to be a good deal of making of hosiery in the Dales, and at one time the poor folk' made lace— Defoe saw them making bone-lace at Beverley, and learnt that the school-children there were brought up to it. But all that has largely disappeared. So, too, has almost everything relating to the old flax and linen industry, though there is THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 137 still some growing of flax in the Barkston Ash district and some spinning of it at Selby, close by. But the most famous linen manufacture in Yorkshire, that carried on by the Marshalls, at Holbeck, a suburb of Leeds, has long been discontinued, and linen is no longer made in Nidderdale, where, just a hundred years ago, the river Nidd and its tributary streams gave motive-power to eighteen flax mills. An excellent example of how an ancient industry can die out is afforded in the case of Knaresborough, which was a manufacturing town from a very early period of its history. Cloth used to be made at Knaresborough ; a certain district of the place is still called Tentergate from the tenters, or hooks, on which the cloth was stretched after being fulled. Linen began to be made at Knaresborough long before the modem factory system was introduced. The manufacturer, having collected the prepared flax (technically known as line) distributed it to the women of the neighbouring villages, who spun it into yarn at their own homes, the yarn thus prepared being then handed over to the hand weavers. Grainge, in his History of Knaresborough, says that in 1788 the quantity of linen manufactured weekly in Knaresborough and the neighbourhood, was 1,000 pieces of 20 yard- in length by 35 inches in breadth, and worth from 13s. 6d. to 30s. the piece. The town at that time did an extensive trade in sheetings, and Knaresborough linen had a great reputation for quality and durability. During the Napoleonic Wars, Knaresborough trade was remarkably active, and the town had a long run of great prosperity, which continued for some years after Waterloo. In 1818 no less than 2,500 tons of flax were converted into linen in the Knaresborough and Pateley Bridge neighbourhood, and in 1822 there were over forty separate firms in Knaresborough engaged in the industry. But the era of prosperity came to an end in 1825, when the workmen struck, and places nearer London, and better situated as regards transit and communication, got the trade which Knaresborough had enjoyed ; in York- shire, Leeds and Bamsley cut out their smaller neighbour and the old industry gradually died out. Yet at the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a Knaresborough man 138 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE exhibited a linen shirt, without seams, which had been woven by a hand-loom. Wool, then, is the great foundation of the textile industries in Yorkshire, and it has been manufactured in Yorkshire for much longer than most people are aware of. One common impression as to the first beginnings of the woollen trade in the county is an absolutely erroneous one. When Edward the Third returned to England, after his victory over the Scots at Halidon Hill in 1333, one of his first measures was to invite all weavers and workers in cloth to come from anywhere, and to settle in this country. About the same time he sent letters of protection to two Flemish weavers who had settled at York, in which he expressed his opinion that the business which they were engaged upon would be of great advantage to the English people. It has been commonly said because of these facts that Edward the Third was the first man to introduce the woollen manufacturer into England. But here popular opinion has always been wrong. Up to Edward the Third's time, certainly, the weaving of wool in this country was very limited in propor- tion, and nearly the whole of our wool was exported to Flanders, where it was woven into cloth. But wool manu- facture had existed in England for some thirteen hundred years before Edward the Third's day, for, like the smelting of ironstone and the spinning of flax into linen, it was intro- duced into the country by the Romans. They had a large woollen manufactory at Winchester ; they established other factories in Yorkshire ; spinning and weaving thus begun, never died out. The Anglo-Saxon women were great hands at spinning ; we have old pictures of them, distaff in hand and wheel at side ; the unmarried ones got the name of spinsters from this occupation. A large number of weavers, chiefly from Flanders, came to England under the protection of William the Conqueror and were gradually settled at Carlisle, and in Pembrokeshire, and at Norwich ; at Norwich began the manufacture of worsted. What Edward the Third did, therefore, was not to found a new industry, but to develop a very ancient one. He did it in no half-hearted fashion — but truth compels one THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 139 to say that his chief object was to put money into his own pocket. The 2nd of Edward III, 1337, made some pro- visions which are well worth considering. No merchant, foreign or denizen, might bring any wool out of the realm, without the King and Council's consent. No man or woman (the King, Queen, and their children only excepted) might wear cloth other than that made in England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. No merchant might import cloth from abroad. No man or woman (excepting the Royal Family, the Archbishops, and Bishops, the Peers, Knights, and their Ladies, and the Clergy) might wear fur on their garments. Finally, all workers in cloth, of whatsoever nationality, coming to England, should have protection and safe conduct and be in England enfranchised. The plain meaning of all this is that Edward, who was always in need of money for his wars, had turned, or was turning, wool-merchant himself : while he forbade his subjects to export wool, he himself secured a monopoly in its export and made full use of it. In 1338 — the year following the passing of the Act just quoted — he persuaded Parliament to grant him the right to purchase in England 20,000 sacks of wool ; according to Knighton, the chronicler, he bought that wool for three pounds the sack, and sold it in Antwerp for twenty pounds the sack ; his profit on this one trans- action was, accordingly, £340,000. Moreover, he took due care to see that there was no competition with his own private business. In March, 1338, he wrote from West- minster to the Sheriff of York, forbidding the purchase of wool by anyone until the wool granted to himself by ParHament had been gathered together, and delivered to him. Further, he derived a considerable income from the duty on such wool as he permitted to be sent abroad : in 1354 his dues in this way amounted to £80,000 in the currency of that time — a truly marvellous amount, reckoned up in ours. Then it was that the Staple Towns became established : any man who had wool to sell was forced to sell it at the King's Staple, a town or place appointed by law, and he had to pay duty on it before he could either sell or export it. In the whole of Yorkshire there was only I40 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE one Staple Town — York : its two nearest neighbours were Lincoln in one direction, and Newcastle in another. These Staple Towns did vast injury to trade by the limitation of markets — and altogether, the popular superstition that Edward the Third benefited the woollen trade of the country is at best nothing but a superstition. His foreign- export policy, however, remained in force until Queen Elizabeth's time ; it was revived after her temporary relaxation of it, and it continued to exist until 1825. The modem development of the wool and worsted indus- tries in Yorkshire dates, almost wholly, from the time of the introduction of machinery, and the establishment of the factory system. It is naturally associated with certain places, and with certain pioneers. The early days of the new system were days of adventure, often as thrilling as those of the first explorers, and the Yorkshire manufacturers, inventors, and captains of industry of the first half of the nineteenth century were men of daring and enterprise — and of great character. The capitalist manufacturer of the Victorian age has long been misrepresented as a grad- grind whose sole desire was to amass enormous wealth out of the labour of his workpeople — as often as not he was a man who began life under the humblest conditions, and built up a colossal business, and a great fortune, by sheer ability and perseverance. There are certain names closely identified with the woollen and worsted industries and their kindred manufactures in Yorkshire which occur readily : if one goes into the family history of the folk to whom they belong it is not long be 'ore one is back at the grandfather, or, at most, great-grandfather, who was a hand-loom weaver, or an artisan, or something even less considerable. In every one of the great industrial towns of the West Riding, it is an easy matter to point to family after family, now high in social position and rich in money, whose forbears were, comparatively recently, poor, honest, hard-working folk who spun and wove the cloth which covered their own backs, and lived lives of a frugality which was little removed from poverty. Nowhere in the world are there finer examples of how men can raise themselves above the THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 141 rack by the exercise of shrewdness, perseverance, far- sightedness, and energy, than are evident on all sides in Yorkshire wherever woollen manufacture is to the front. Some day, perhaps, some enthusiast will gather up the chronicles of all these early pioneers and adventurers into the great ocean of commerce, and wiU form them into Acts and Monuments of the Yorkshire Worthies in a fashion which wiU fire the ambition of Yorkshiremen yet to be bom : all that one can do here is to consider the careers of a few men whose names are as familiar to the industrial masses of ;their native county as that of Welhngton is to a soldier, and that of Nelson to a sailor. If there is not romance of the truest, the most genuine sort in their doings, then there is no romance in the world. One of the first of the great worsted manufacturers of Yorkshire was John Foster, founder of the vast industrial concern at Queensbury, near Bradford, which is known as Black Dyke Mills. Born in 1798, the son of a yeoman farmer who worked a small coal-pit on his own land, he was educated at the old Grammar School of Thornton, the village which has the honour of being the birthplace of Charlotte Bronte. On leaving school, at the early age usual in those days, he worked on his father's farm, and in the coal-pit, until his parents, anxious to give him more education, sent him to a private school near Hahfax, where he met and formed a warm friendship with Jonathan Ackroyd, a Halifax native who was subsequently to found a vast business in his own tawn. On leaving this second school, John Foster learnt the process of worsted manu- facture, and in 1819 he set up a worsted factory of his own at Low Fold, near Queensbury, and signahzed his own confidence in himself by marrying. Within a very short space of time he was employing nearly all the hand-loom weavers in the district — a wild and remote one, for Queens- bury stands on the summit of the highest hill between Bradford and Halifax — to make worsteds for him ; he was also manufacturing the stout textile known as lasting, and the more dehcate one called damask, and he sold all these things readily in the markets of the adjacent towns. Within 143 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE seven years of his marriage, he built himself a fine house ; by 1835 his business had so increased that he began the building of what came to be known as the Old Mill — the first part of the extensive works which arose as time went on — and, like Sir John Brown at Sheffield, he was his own architect, clerk of works, and foreman. His neighbours said that he was laying out capital improvidently, but as soon as the mill was finished, Foster had four thousand spindles at work in it, and was producing yam in unparalleled quantity. The Old Mill was considered a grand affair in its day : it came to be but a speck in the midst of buildings which dwarfed and overshadowed it. Those buildings were soon in evidence ; mUls, offices, workshops, machine sheds ; the flooring space began to be reckoned by the acre ; the four thousand spindles became fifty thousand. And to his spinning business, John Foster had by that time added weaving and wool-combing, and the number of his workpeople increased until they were counted by the thousand instead of by the hundred. Their employer had more than once shown his native shrewdness in dealing with labour conditions. The situation in 1826 was a delicate one. Down in Bradford there had been machinery riots, resulting in loss of life ; at Queensbury, Foster had seven hundred employees of the old-fashioned type, hand-loom weavers who naturally looked upon the power-loom with dire misgiving. He managed them with much address, and with keen appreciation of their ideas and foibles. Those who cared to do so were put to work on the machinery which he determinedly introduced — but those who pre- ferred the old methods were allowed, without 'demur, to work their time out on the familiar hand-loom. These hand-looms and power-looms were at work side by side, as it were, for many years at Queensbury, and the prejudices of the older folk were respected and satisfied. It was not until 1836 that the Foster workshops were fully equipped with power-looms ; from that date until the middle of the century the fortunes of his business not only developed tremendously, but were at their very height of enterprise. In 1837 Foster began to experiment with the alpaca wool THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 143 which is chiefly associated with the name of his neighbour, Titus Salt ; a little later he experimented with mohair ; he produced goods from both. In 1842 he had the satis- faction of seeing his eldest son, WilHam, come of age, and into partnership ; thenceforward there was still more energy in the ever-increasing business. William Foster had been specially trained in the craft of worsted manu- facture ; he was also gifted with aU the quaUties so remark- able in his father ; the combination of father and son led to wonderful results. Just as the partnership was formed, the firm was faced with another of the riots which had marked industrial life in Yorkshire for nearly forty years ; the Fosters feared nothing from their own people, but a good deal from a riotous section in the neighbouring town of Halifax ; they took a leaf out of Cartwright's book, and imitated his example during the Luddite riots by organizing their workmen and arming them, with the result that when a Halifax party of disaffected made a demonstration against Queensbury, it saw the warm welcome prepared for it, and retired in discomfiture. The Fosters soon had other things than riots to think of. One great problem in those days was that of transit. Queensbury stands on the highest part of a range of hills inaccessible by railway or canal ; in order to get their goods away, or to bring their materials in, the Fosters used powerful waggons, drawn by the best horses, to ply between their mills and Bradford. But they were quick to see the advantages of the new railway system, and from the time of his joining the firm, William Foster became active in getting the railroads brought as near as was geographically possible to its doors ; eventually he became leading spirit and chairman of a line made between Bradford and Hahfax, which brought the mountain-placed Queensbury within a mile of the new means of communi- cation. Probably, as father and son talked over the question of the coming and going of goods, John Foster remembered that when he was a young man, and there were no railways, and no coaches in those rugged parts, he thought nothing of walking to and from Leeds, fifteen miles away, when he wanted to do business at the centre of the cloth trade. He 144 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE must have had many interesting memories of this sort — ^if he was not too busy to remember the past. For John Foster appears to have been much busied at all times ; he built his enormous range of mills ; he managed one of the biggest businesses in the world ; he set up a sort of model village on his bleak heights and furnished it with church and schools and lecture hall ; he built at least two fine mansions, one for himself, one for his son ; finally, in 1864, he bought Hornby Castle, in Lancashire, and became a great landed proprietor. But though he spent much time in his new domain, once the home of the Mont- eagles, his heart was ever at Queensbury, and at Queensbury he died in 1878, in the house which he had built fifty years before, out of the first fruits of his industry. About a year before the death of John Foster of Queens- bury, died Titus Salt of Saltaire, who had developed to a vast extent the trade in alpaca at which Foster had only worked tentatively. Like Foster, Salt came of a farming stock : his father, Daniel Salt, was a farmer at Morley, and there, in the Old Manor House, Titus was born in 1803. While he was being educated at Wakefield, his father gave up farming, and started in business as a woolstapler at Bradford, and with him, he, in due course, became a partner. He appears to have been a man of originality from the first, for at a very early stage of his business career he is found endeavouring to impress upon his fellow-manufac- turers the possibilities of a certain Donskoi wool, which one and all rejected as being utterly unsuitable for worsted manufacture. Salt was of a contrary opinion, and he was so confident that he could make good worsted out of the unlikely-looking stuff that he took an old mill in the town, and began to spin and manufacture worsted on his own account. Up to that time Donskoi wool had only been considered useful for the making of cloth ; he soon con- vinced the Bradford folk that he could make excellent worsted from it. His success established his reputation as a man of ideas and resource — but his great achievements were yet to come. A comparatively unworked field lay open, and it was by accident that he walked into it. About THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 145 the beginning of the century, British troops, returning from South America, brought with them some specimens of the wool of the alpaca, an animal closely allied to the llama and the guanaco, domesticated, and herded in large flocks on the Peruvian slopes of the Andes. The fleece, varying in colour from a dusky yellow to black, fine and silky in texture, had long been used by the Peruvian Indians for the making of cloth, and on their specimens reaching England in 1807, some attempt to manufacture it was made here. The first man to succeed in evolving any fabric from it was Outrara, a Halifax manufacturer, but he was so disappointed with his results that he went no further with his experiments. Many years afterwards, the Horsfalls, of Bradford, tried their hands at it ; they, too, failed to produce anything that satisfied themselves or the merchants. This was in 1832. In that year, a firm of wool-importers at Liverpool, Messrs. Hegan, Hall, & Company, instructed their South American agent to forward them some consignments of alpaca wool — these came to hand in due course, and again certain manufacturers experimented and failed, and the Liverpool agents found themselves with a considerable stock of the disappointing fabric on their hands. On their hands it remained for four years. But one day in 1836 — Charles Dickens told the story years afterwards in Household Words — Titus Salt was in Liverpool, buying wool, and he saw the bales of alpaca. There were over three hundred of them, and one at any rate had burst open. He took a handful of the stuff, examined it closely — " did all but taste it," says Dickens — and went off with it in his pocket to the ofiices of Hegsin, HaU, & Company. There he offered to buy the whole consignment at eightpence per pound, and his offer was thankfully and promptly accepted. He got his purchase home to Bradford, and set to work experimenting on it. His great difficulty was to get a satisfactory warp ; eventually, the use of a cotton- warp gave him what he wanted, and thenceforward his success was assured — alpaca, itt fine and handsome dress- pieces, came on the market. Demands for the new material poured in upon the courageous adventurer at such a rate 10 146 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE that he soon had four large mills in operation. Naturally, having pointed the way to others, he had competitors struggling after him, but for many years he almost monopo- lized the trade, and most of the alpaca wool which came to England came to him. Its importation increased vastly. In 1840 about 500,000 pounds of the wool were imported. In 1852 this had increased to well over 2,000,000 pounds ; twenty years later nearly 4,000,000 pounds came in : the price paid by Salt in 1836 — eightpence per pound — had risen by i860 to three shillings. As a virtual monopolist, he began to amass a considerable fortune, and in 185 1 he proceeded to carry out an enterprise which had been slowly shaping itself in his mind for some years — that of building a model industrial centre. Such ideas have been plentiful in our own time ; few men had them in those, and there were people who looked upon Salt as a foolish crank. But Salt was a man of a generous and humanitarian disposition ; his own Bradford mills were ancient, dark, and insanitary ; he wanted to see his vast throngs of workpeople not only working under good conditions as to space, hght, and air, but comfortably housed and pleasantly surrounded. That his ideas were wholly benevolent is proved by the fact that at this time he had already become an exceedingly wealthy man, and had he pleased, he could have retired from business altogether, and Uved the life of a millionaire. Instead, he determined to carry out his project. He secured a finely- situated expanse of land in Airedale, a little outside the Bradford suburb of Shipley, commenced building at once, and in 1853 opened the biggest factory which the world had then seen. Some idea of its size may be gathered from the fact that three thousand five hundred guests, made up of the great folk of the land and his own workpeople, sat down to a banquet which was spread in one room — the combing-shed. The new mill, indeed, covered an area of ten acres, and had a frontage of nearly six hundred feet, and was six stories in height. But it was only the centre. In close proximity. Salt erected eight hundred cottages, arranged on a uniform plan, each with every convenience and a plot of garden, and all, like the mill, built of the THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 147 splendid stone of the district and in the Italian style of architecture. Nor was 'this aU — Salt was never the man who does things by halves. He built a church, schools, a splendid institute, baths, wash-houses, almshouses, and laid out a park of considerable extent, on the banks of the River Aire. Up above all these, looking down on the model village and unique factory, he built himself a fine house, after the approved fashion of all self-made Yorkshiremen, who do not beheve that fools build houses for wise men to live in. But whatever Titus Salt spent on his own pgt schemes, he was equally ready in spending on charity, both pubhc and private. He is known to have given away £500,000 in pubUc benefactions ; what he gave away privately will never be known. Like all men of his stamp, he was a staunch believer in education, and he made lavish provision for the schools at Saltaire, and for scholarships at Brad- ford Grammar School. Honours came to him in the evening of his life : Napoleon the Third conferred upon him the decoration of the Legion of Honour in 1867 ; two years later, Mr. Gladstone, in writing to announce that the Queen was pleased to give him a baronetcy, spoke of the ample title which he had estabhshed to that honourable distinction. And in addition to these honours he received one which is rarely accorded to a living man — in 1874, three years before his death. Sir Titus Salt's statue was publicly set up in Bradford as a tribute to his many and great qualities. Not less remarkable in the history of wool-combing, than that of Salt in the annals of alpaca, was the career of Isaac Holden, who, though not a native of the county, became so closely connected with Yorkshire, and with Bradford, that enquirers are often astonished to discover that he hailed from Scotland. Nevertheless, he was only a Scotsman by accident — his father was a Cumberland man who, having been a fanner and lead-miner near Alston, was obliged by stress of circumstance to seek employment at a colliery near Hurtlet, in the neighbourhood of Paisley, where Isaac Holden was bom in 1807. The father was a man of ability and character, who made every possible 148 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE effort to educate his son, but he was a poor man, and Isaac Holden's scholarship, which became considerable, was chiefly gained at night-schools and by his own efforts. He worked as a weaver's draw-boy at a very early age, and subsequently in a cotton-mill, and, when he was fifteen, was apprenticed to the shawl-weaving trade. But by the time he was twenty-one, he had learnt sufficient mathematics, Latin, and Greek to fit him for scholastic work, and in 1828 he went to Leeds as teacher in a well-known boarding- school of that time. Queen Square Academy. He subse- quently filled similar positions at schools in Huddersfield and at Reading ; at Reading his inventive genius first showed itself in his production of the lucifer match — which, as he told a Select Committee of the House of Commons, many years later, he then considered so small a matter that he did not take the trouble to patent it. He left Reading in 1830 for Glasgow, where he opened a school of his own, but he had hardly settled down to teaching his first pupils, when a firm of Yorkshire manufacturers, the Townends, of CuUingworth, a village set in the moors above Bradford, offered him a post as book-keeper. He sold his school, and repaired to CuUingworth at once, and remained in Townends' employ for sixteen years. During the whole of that time he devoted his spare moments and energies to the invention of a new woo^ -combing machine intended to supersede the imperfect machines then in use. Since the days of Cart- wright, many improvements had been made on his first epoch-making invention, notably by Collier, Noble, Donis- thorpe, and by Lister, with whom Holden was shortly to be closely associated. Doubtless each inventor profited more or less by the ingenuity and achievement of his fellow- workers in the same field, and everybody who knows any- thing of the wool-combing industry is well aware that many long and painful disputes have arisen' from time to time as to where proper credit should be given for the main principles of the notable invention. Holden, however, during all his years of trial and experiment, costly enough in't"me and money (he once told the House of Commons that he had spent not Jess than £50,000 in experiments) stuck pertin- THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES X49 aciously to one principal idea— the closest possible imitation of the work of the hand-comber. In 1846 he left Townends', and set up a mill of his own in Bradford, and at this time he joined hands with Lister, who had long been experimenting on his own account, with the result that in the following year the Lister-Holden wool-combing machine was patented. In 1848 Lister and Holden went into partnership with the view of establishing a wool-combing business in France, and this was shortly afterwards set up at St. Denis, subse- quently at Rheims, and later on at Roubaix. Holden personally superintended the working of these three factories, and he frequently crossed the Channel five times a week, in order to transact business on both sides. The Lister- Holden partnership lasted for ten years : in 1858 Lister sold all his interest to Holden, who in 1859 took in his two sons as partners, and estabhshed the world-famous firm of Isaac Holden & Sons. An eventful period followed. In i860 the works at St. Denis were given up, and for four years Holden occupied himself in a complete re-modelling of his existing machinery, his experiments and improve- ments being carried out in a speciaUy adapted and fitted workshop at Bradford. In 1864 his firm opened the Alston Works, in Thornton Road, one of the greatest wool-combing and worsted-preparing factories in the world, having at its inception an area of eight acres, and a vast corresponding acreage of flooring. Here thousands of workpeople found employment ; thousands more were employed at the two French establishments, Rheims and Roubaix. When Holden first set up his miUs at Roubaix, Croix, the village close by, in which he found a suitable site, was a mere farming hamlet ; he quickly transformed it into a bustling industrial town. A considerable number of English work- folk went over there ; for their benefit he built houses, a church, an institute, and schools. Similar provision was made in connection with the factory at Rheims. where there has always been a certain proportion of English workers employed — the successors of the httle band of Yorkshiremen taken over to France by Holden himself, when he first began operations across the Channel. Both ISO THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE at Roubaix and at Rheims the working conditions were somewhat different from those obtaining in England — Miss Betham-Edwards in her memories of the Northern part of France, notes that at Rheims, which she had been in the habit of visiting for nearly half a century, " Mr. Holden's chimneys are kept going night and day — Simdays excepted — with alternating shifts of workmen." At both these great factories, work was kept up from six o'clock on Monday morning to midnight of Saturday, with day-shifts and night-shifts ; the day-shift working twelve hours, the night- shift, ten — but each being paid the same amount in wages. To the material prosperity of both places the Holden enter- prise has greatly contributed ; Croix, which numbered its population by the hundreds in 1850, was at the beginning of the present war a thriving town of nearly twenty thousand inhabitants. With the French Government, and with their thousands of French work-people, the Holden pro- prietorship has always been on the most cordial and friendly footing. CordiaUty with, and friendship for, working folk, indeed, was always a marked characteristic of Isaac Holden ; like his neighbour, Titus Salt, he was sympathetic, liberal-minded, and generous ; Hke him, too, he was a staunch believer in affording the widest opportunities of education to the people, and he did much to further elemen- tary, secondary, and technical education in Bradford and Yorkshire. From 1865 to 1868 he represented Knares- borough in the House of Commons ; later on, he sat for the Northern Division of the West Riding ; as a Parliamen- tarian, he was regarded as a great authority on all social, economic, and industrial questions ; eventually, his great services to the community were rewarded with a baronetcy. He lived, in full possession of his remarkable faculties, until 1897 ; his eldest son and partner, Angus, was raised to the peerage as Baron Holden of Alston, in 1908. Isaac Holden's partner in the 1848 — 1858 period, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, was perhaps, the most remarkable of all the truly remarkable business men which Yorkshire has produced. Amongst inventors he was a veritable giant ; as much a prodigy, in that way, amongst Englishmen, as THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 151 Edison is amongst Americans. He is said to have taken out more patents than any Enghshman who ever lived — and to his inventive powers and ingenuity he added the peculiarly Yorkshire qualities of indomitable courage and unconquerable resolution to achieve success. Like Salt, he received the highest honours possible from the people amongst whom his hfe-work had been done, during his life-time ; his statue, in marble, was erected by public subscription in Bradford thirty years before his death. Certain words used by another Bradford man of great note, W. E. Forster, on that occasion, admirably sum up Lister's character and qualities : — " A man who was endowed with industry, with intellect, with energy, with courage, with perseverance ; who spared himself no pains in first ascer- taining the conditions of the problems he had to solve, and then whose heart never fainted, whose wiU never relaxed, in determining to carry out those conditions." This — coming from the Ups of a man who was anything but a maker of phrases, and who meant every word that he ever spoke, in private or in public — was a great tribute, but the subject of Forster's oration was a great man. Unlike most of his famous Yorkshire contemporaries. Lister came of an ancient family, the Listers of Manningham. But he was a fifth son, and the best thing his family could think of for him as a career was the Church, and his grandmother left him by will the advowson of the Uving of Addingham in Wharfedale, on the strict condition that he should take orders in the Church of England. Lister's ideas were other- wise. He had a love for commerce, and as soon as he left school, he betook himself to a Liverpool counting-house, in preference to an undergraduate's rooms at Oxford. As a clerk to Sands, Turner & Company, of Liverpool, he made several voyages to the United States, in the days of the old sailing ships, and during that period gained a knowledge of American ideas and enterprise which he subsequently turned to good account. In 1836, when he attained his twenty-first year, he persuaded his father to build a miU at Manningham for himself and a brother, and there he began spinning and weaving after the old-fashioned, clumsy 152 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE methods. He was soon faced by the problems to which he was to devote so much time, labour, and money. Successful as he was in his smaU business, he knew that what he, and all other men in the same trade, wanted, was a machine which would comb wool as thoroughly and well as it could be combed by hand. He knew that an enormous fortune lay waiting to be literally picked up by the man who could invent such a machine. Inventors were already at work on the desired object in England, and in America, and in France. It seemed to Lister that Donisthorpe was the most likely of them to succeed ; he took Donisthorpe into partnership. Eventually they produced a machine which was vastly superior to anything that had been seen before. Naturally, they met with difficulties. Heilman, an Alsatian, had invented a combing machine, and had taken out an English patent for it ; the proprietors of that patent sued Lister and Donisthorpe, and got a verdict against them. Thereupon Lister — characteristically — bought Heilman's patent for £30,000, and instead of making any use of it, threw it aside. He went on inventing and perfecting. He was mixed up, in one way or another, with almost every inventor of that particular sort of machinery. He had his time of joint-labour with Holden : many of the other inventors said he got his ideas from them ; he had litigation and law-suits by the dozen. He worked like a willing horse ; he once said in conversation, that for twenty years at that time he was never in his bed after five in the morning nor in it again until midnight had come round ; he spent money as he spent his labour and his time ; he made models at frightful expense, and broke them up as they were finished and found wanting ; according to his own account, he spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on his wool-combing machine before it yielded him one penny. But in the end, the really satisfactory machine was finished, and a success, and his reward came in its universal adoption — and in the royalties, which ran to as much as a thousand pounds on every machine manufactured. This may be said to have marked the first stage of Lister's career. He entered upon a second. The beginnings of it were very much like those THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 153 ol his neighbour Titus Salt's first adventures with alpaca wool. Lister was one day in a warehouse in London, when his attention was drawn to some dirty stuff, clogged with twigs and leaves of the mulberry tree, which he found, on enquiry, to be silk waste— with which, said his informant, nothing whatever could be done. Lister, after examining this so-called rubbish, offered to buy all there was of it, at a halfpenny per pound, had his offer accepted with alacrity, and carried his purchase home to Bradford. He soon came to the conclusion that he could make silk fabrics from it, if he could get the necessary machinery. But no such machinery was in existence — obviously, then, the only thing to do was to invent it. In order to devote himself entirely to this. Lister gave up wool-combing and began to spend vast sums out of his royalties and patent rights on his new departure ; he is said to have laid out nearly £400,000 on his silk manufacturing machines before he succeeded in getting what he wanted. But in the end he did succeed, and by 1865 a new and wonderful industry was estabhshed in Yorkshire. In addition to his own inventions. Lister about this time bought the patent of the velvet loom invented by Reixach ; thenceforward, he began to manufacture silk, velvet, and plush. He had already brought skilled workmen in silk from the Continent ; now he had literally to teach his Yorkshire work-folk the new craft, and the use of the new machines. And he had scarcely got to work on this new departure when his mills at Manningham were burned to the ground — in 1871. Thereupon he built the great pile which is one of the chief features of Bradford, and a landmark for many miles of the surrounding hills and vaUfeys. It ranks amongst the largest miUs in the world ; the areas of its floors and sheds are reckoned by acres ; its great chimney towers to a height of 250 feet. Close by the mill is a sort of model village for the accommodation of workers ; in front of it hes the park which was once the private domain of the Listers, and was some years later given by the great inventor to the people of Bradford. Even with the founding of this enormous establishment, which affords occupation to thousands of 154 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE people, and with his development of the silk, velvet, and plush industries, Lister's adventures in the fields of labour did not cease. Towards the end of his career he turned to another industry, and buying what had up to then been a comparatively small coUiery at Featherstone, developed it into one of the most important coal-mines in Yorkshire, around which, from a village of a few hundred inhabitants, was quickly evolved a town with a population which is now not far short of twenty thousand. Unlike Salt and Holden, Lister took little part in municipal or public life, and never entered Parliament as an elected representative. But in 1891 he was raised to the peerage as first Baron Masham of Swindon, taking his title from the old lands of the Danby family in Wensleydale, which he had purchased, and on vvhich he lived, until his death in 1906. While Holden and Lister were helping to build the for- tunes of modem Bradford, and Foster and Salt were making their model industrial communities of Queensbury and Saltaire, two HaHfax men were improving the economic conditions of that ancient town by manufacturing certain of the stronger fabrics which have their basis in the all- important wool : in each case they represented families whose careers had already been closely concerned in, and built up by, the two industries which these two men developed so extensively during the nineteenth century. In Halifax the names of Akroyd and Crossley are as famous as those of Lister, Holden, lUingworth, and Ripley are in Bradford, and those of Marshall and Barran in Leeds. Halifax, as a town, had been making woollen goods from a very early period ; it obtained a world-wide fame through the stringency of its notorious Gibbet Law, which imposed the penalty of death upon aU purloiners of cloth. The provisions of this ancient Statute are so curious that it is worth while to re-read them as they are given in a scarce old pamphlet pubUshed by J. How in London, for WiUiam Bentley of Halifax, in 1708 : — " The Inhabitants of the Forest of Hardwick [the district immediately surrounding and including Halifax] being a mix'd People of Free-holders and Copy-holders, all of them subject to the Lord of the THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES iSS Manner of Wakefield, formerly the Inheritance of the Kings of England, and is still part of the Dutchy of Lancaster, which was sometime the Inheritance of the Earl of Warren, but now the Inheritance of his Grace the Duke of Leeds, have and do claim a Custom, by the Usage and Continuance of Time, since when is not in the Memory of Man to the contrary, as was acknowledged in the days of King Philip and Queen Mary, who have by their Statutes of the second and third of their Reigns, confirmed unto them their Usage, Custom, and Freedom, to buy and sell Wooll by retail, in order to the carrying on of that Manufacture, which gave an Occasion to the encouraging Custom : — That if a Felon be taken within their Liberty, with Goods stolen out or within the Liberty or Precincts of the said Forest, either Hand-habend, Back-berand, or Confessand [having the goods in hand, or bearing them on his back, or admitting his guilt] or any other Commodity of the Value of Thirteen Pence halfpenny, that they shall after Three Markets, or Meeting Days, within the Town of Hallifax, next after such his Apprehension, and being condemned [they were tried by a jury of townsmen] he shall be taken to the Gibbet, and there have his Head cut off from his Body." Forty- nine persons are known to have suffered death under this law — five in the time of Henry VIII ; twenty-five during EUzabeth's reign ; seven under James I ; ten under Charles I ; and two during the Commonwealth. The two last victims were John Wilkinson and Anthony Mitchell, who were gibbeted in April, 1650. In the registers of Halifax Parish Church there are several entries relating to these summary executions, sometimes in Latin, sometimes in Enghsh — " John Waters was headed at Halifax, March 16, 1578 " ; " Jeremy Bowcock, de Warley, decoUatus, April 14, 1632 " — they are all grimly significant. Gibbeting, however, had been out of fashion a hundred and twenty years, when, in 1770, James and Jonathan Akroyd, who sprang from an ancient family of yeomen of the Forest of Hardwick, began to make goods which were locally known as Amens and Little Johns. Amens were the HaUfax counterparts of the figured stuff goods of Amiens ; Little 156 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Johns were lastings, wildbores, and calimancoes. Later on, James Akroyd took his two sons into partnership, and founded a more important firm ; his son, another James, was the first Hahfax manufacturer to introduce power- looms into the town, and at the same time — about 1822 — he built himself a fireproof mill ; five years later, he brought the first Jacquard machine into the town. James Akroyd, indeed, was a man of the fertihty of idea and perseverance in effort shared in so largely by Lister and Holden ; he introduced a vast number of novelties into Halifax trade — James, in his History of the Worsted Manufacture in England, pubhshed at Bradford in 1857, gives a hst of the fabrics and goods made by him, and the dates at which he began their manufacture. In 1798, ribbed calimancoes, lastings, and pruneUes ; in 1803, serges, shalloons, russells, wild- bores ; in 1811, moreens, says, duroys ; in 1813, bom- bazetts ; in 1819, bombazines and crapes ; in 1829, camlets, taborines, fancy russells, dobbies ; in 1824, damasks ; in 1827 French merinoes and fuU twills ; in 1834 French- figured damasks ; in 1836, alpaca figures and figured Orleans. Meanwhile, his fellow-townsfolk, the Crossleys, were building up the biggest carpet-making industry in England. The original founder of the firm, John Crossley, had been appren- ticed to the carpet-weaving business in his youth. He was nearly sixty years of age when he and his three sons, John, Joseph, and Francis, bought a business previously carried on by the Abbot family, and began to develop carpet- making on an enormous scale. When John Crossley the elder died in 1837, the firm had only three hundred men in its employ ; thirty-three years later, it had buUt the vast mills at Dean Clough, had over five thousand hands at work, and was sending carpets, rugs, mats, tapestry, velvet, and kindred articles all over the world. The Crossleys made enormous fortunes ; what they did with some of their gains we shall consider in another place. To Halifax, in conse- quence of their enterprise, came the carpet-making trade which had been associated in previous ages with other English towns ; carpets are no longer made — or are only made in small quantities — at the places from which they THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 157 derive their special names. Not many Kidderminster carpets are actually made at Kidderminster, but enormous numbers of them are manufactured in Yorkshire, and the man who lays down a Brussels carpet in his house may feel pretty confident that it was made in Halifax. Out of that rich and wonderful basis of wool many other things than cloths, worsted materials, and carpets are manufactured in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Every- thing that springs from wool is used. When shoddy began to be manufactured in the Spen Valley district, about a hundred years ago, some stern devotee of the highly- respectable and superior walks of the cloth trade, poured wrath upon it as an industry which could not be too strongly denounced or too severely exposed. But shoddy, and mungo, and the kindred things fashioned by human ingenuity out of the scraps and leavings and remnants of the other wooUen and worsted industries, have had, and have, their uses, and proved themselves of value ; their invention has a direct relation to the Yorkshireman's axiom — Waste naught, and make the most of everything. During the last hundred years Yorkshiremen aU round have ceaselessly racked their brains in their endeavour to waste no product, to make much out of the unHkeUest materials, and to add to existing industries. Two instances, one relating to heavy goods, the other to lighter fabrics, are worthy of special mention. Many years ago, a Leeds man, John Barran, who was subsequently rewarded with a baronetcy, and represented his city in Parliament for a considerable period, hit upon the notion of making clothing by machinery. Until his time, such a thing as ready-made clothing had scarcely been heard of — if the poorest man needed a suit of clothes, he must perforce go to a taUor, and order it. No tailor-made suit of clothes could ever be made cheaply, even if the materials were the coarsest cloth, or even corduroy. Barran conceived the idea of turning'out" cheap, ready-made suits, to seU at low prices, and in Leeds he estabUshed a business of gigantic proportions with machines which cut out, sew, trim, and finish coats, waistcoats, and ta-ousers by the dozen and the 158 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE score. Nowadays the poor man of London and Liverpool, Newcastle and Plymouth, Bullocksmithy and Hogley- cum-Pogley, can walk into a ready-made clothier's shop in city or market-town and buy a good, handsome, service- able suit, all ready for wear, for half the amount which he would otherwise have had to pay to a tailor. So much for one use of cloth — let us turn to another by which cloth, even to the hghtest weights of it, is made waterproof by a process that originated in Bradford. To Bradford some years ago came Thomas Fernley Wiley, a scion of an old Essex family whose name appears in the Domesday Book records. He began his business career in the famous house of Jacob Behrens, of Manchester and Bradford, subsequently transferring his services to Isaac Holden's old employers, the Townends of Cullingworth. Having strong Ukings for anything that related to machinery, he eventually started a business for the exploitation and development of patents and inventions, in partnership with the Hon. F. C. Howard and Mr. Bertie Hallett, the three trading under the style of W. H. Craven & Company. Wiley about this time invented a certain waterproofing solution, and after his firm had made considerable supplies of it to Bradford dyers and manufacturers, who found it to yield highly satisfactory results, he was approached by Mr. John Maddocks, a well-known Bradford merchant of great enterprise, with a view to the establishment of a monopoly. Wiley thereupon bought out Hallett and Howard, and entered into an arrangement with Maddocks which proyided that Maddocks should find premises, plant, machinery, and labour, and finance the entire business, while Wiley undertook to manage the works and supply all the solution required at an agreed price. After a prolonged trial, it was found that although very satisfactory work was turned out, the cost was too great, and Maddocks, regarding the undertaking as commercially disappointing, decided to discontinue it. Meanwhile, however, Wiley had been experimenting, with a view to dispensing with a solvent and applying the hard proofing material by friction, and in designing a machine for carrying out this new method THE TEXTILE INDUSTRIES 159 in such a manner as to do no injury to the most dehcate fabrics. He was thoroughly successful in this attempt, and he and Haddocks then entered into a new partnership, so far as waterproofing was concerned. A process which reduced the proofing of a piece of cloth from 15s. 6d. to less than half, naturally created a sensation, and overtures were made almost immediately by Messrs. Priestleys, Limited, for acquiring an interest in the business. The result was the foundation of the Cravenette Company. With Wiley as inanaging director, the business was carried on from its inception till some years after the expiration of the patents involved, when it was taken over by the Bradford Dyers' Association for a valuable consideration. The success of Cravenette as a waterproofing material has been phenomenal, and owing to the nominal cost of the process, the proofing of cloths has become universal. It has largely ousted the mackintosh, over which it has many real and admitted advantages, and it has indirectly benefited Brad- ford trade to the extent of millions of pounds annually. In the United States the Cravenette process is even more widely known than in this country, and it is now in use in all parts of the world. Once upon a time whatever wool was manufactured in Yorkshire was either of Yorkshire origin or came from the immediately adjacent counties. Things are far different now, and have long been so. Between the old woollen trade of Yorkshire and the modern one there is a marvellous difference. It has been brought about by various causes — chiefly by the invention of machinery and the apphcation of steam-power in the factories, but also by the wonderful development of sheep-breeding in our colonies and in foreign countries. Wool now comes to the manufacturer, not only from the farming districts at his door, but from all parts of the world — India, AustraUa, New Zealand, South Africa, which are our own ; from foreign countries, Russia, China,- Spain, Persia, South America, North Africa, Portugal- even from Iceland. At the beginning of the last century, the average annual value of the woollen goods manufactured in England was not more than £17,000,000 ; of late years i6o THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE it has been quite £55,000,000. In 1913 our total import of wool was 1,016,000,000 pounds ; our home product was 125,000,000 ; the woollen piece goods which we exported that year measured 185,000,000 yards. A wonderful, a marvellous trade ! — and yet it is dependent upon another trade for its very existence — a trade which we shall do well to see to — the dye trade. Our textile industry was recently computed by Sir Albert Stanley to be worth ;£ioo,ooo,ooo a year ; he reckoned the dye industry to be worth £2,000,000 a year. Previous to the year 1915 almost all the sjTithetic dyestuff used by British manufacturers came from Germany or Switzerland ; British manufacturers of dyes contri- buted scarcely any proportion of the two millions of pounds' worth which was used — in spite of the fact that the coal- tar colour industry had its origin in our own country as far back as 1856. Nothing can be more important to the future of the textile industries of England than that the Government experiments recently instituted in dye-making at Huddersfield, should be brought to a successful issue as speedily as may be. CHAPTER VI AGRICULTURE There is a story told in a bleak and mountainous district in the North-west of Yorkshire which has a humorous and significant bearing on a certain aspect of Yorkshire agri- cultural conditions. A man who came from the South of England was walking across one of the heather-clad moors in that lonely part of the country, wherein he saw next to nothing in the shape of Uving creatures but a few sheep and birds, when he met a shepherd, with whom he entered into conversation on pastoral subjects. " And how many sheep do you reckon to an acre in these parts ? " he presently asked of his chance acquaintance. The shepherd shook his head and smiled. " Eh, man I " he answered. " Thoo begins at wrang end — thoo should ask hoo many acres do we reckon ti a sheep ! " Most people — in Yorkshire at any rate — are aware that there are ad many acres in the three Ridings as there are letters in the Bible, or thereabouts. But a great many of these acres are not suitable for agriculture of any descrip- tion. Yorkshire, indeed, is not an agricultural coimty of the first class, though there is plenty of first-class land and high farming within its widespread boundaries. Whoever will take a map of Yorkshire, arranged and coloured on what the map-makers call the economic principle, will see that a very considerable part of the big territory outlined is devoted to other industries than the mother one. All the big towns must be taken out — and their respective areas in these days of municipal extension are large. The coal district must be subtracted — and it makes a huge slice. The ironstone and freestone areas must be left out — they i62 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE are smaller slices. But the area of the purely industrial districts is a big one ; not much farming can be done any- where within reach of mUls and workshops. There is, however, a still larger area to take out when we come to consider what land in Yorkshire is available for what we may call general agriculture — the area of the vast moorlands of several parts of the county, and of the great hills on its western border. On the Hallamshire Moors, on the North York Moors, on the moorlands of the Dales, a few mountain sheep may scratch up a Uving ; they may get perhaps rather more sustenance on the slopes of Whernside and Penyghent, Ingleborough and Bow FeU, but it will not be much more. General farming of the high sort there is Uttle in either the West Riding or the North ; nevertheless, they produce certain valuable things : fine sheep, noted cattle, splendid horses, excellent pigs ; from the Craven district, they send out some of the best milk and butter to be got in England ; in the Dales, the folk still make cheese — which ought to be better known than it is, seeing that cheese epicures much prefer a Wensleydale to a Stilton, and a Cotherstone to a Cheddar. There are good land and good farming in that middle part of Yorkshire which, under its various names of the Vale of Mowbray, the Vale of York, and the Barnsdale-Hatfield district, runs right down from north to south, but neither land nor farming can come into the same class in which one would put, say, Norfolk and Lincolnshire. The real agricultural area of Yorkshire is its East Riding, where there are no coal-fields, no iron districts, no great industrial centres ; here, at any rate, on the slopes of the Wolds, or on the levels of Holderness, a man may feel that his path lies through a genuine farming country, and may see wheat, barley, oats, turnips being well produced on all sides of him — and without factory walls, mill chimneys, and coUiery top-hamper for background. Fanning in Yorkshire in the middle of the eighteenth century was pretty much what farming was all over England at that period — except that it was somewhat behindhand, as indeed it always has been. Yorkshire manufacturers have always been the men to walk first ; the Yorkshire AGRICULTURE 163 farmers, as a class, have always been the men who waited to abide the results of other men's experiments. None of the great improvements in English agriculture which came into evidence between 1700 and 1800 originated in York- shire : they had usually been tried pretty thoroughly before Yorkshiremen tested them. Those improvements may be said to have begun when Jethro Tull, the man of law who cast off wig and gown in favour of a farmer's life, invented his drill for sowing turnip and clover seed, and taught his brother agriculturists the tremendous importance of clean, weed-free land wherein to sow this seed. At the same time came Townshend, who, after making his mark as a statesman, gave up politics in 1730 and went off to Norfolk to convert the sandy wastes of his estate into a fine farming property by mixing marl with the sand, and to develop the hence- forward famous Four-Course System, in which wheat is followed by roots, roots by barley or oats, barley or oats by clover. Even more celebrated than Lord Townshend was another Norfolk landowner-farmer. Coke, afterwards Earl of Leicester, who took many leaves of Townshend's book into his own, by following his precepts about mixing marl and sand, and adopting the four-course method. But Coke became a great sheep-farmer and wool-grower, profit- ing, no doubt, by the experiments and results of his contem- porary BakeweU, who between 1725 and 1794 completely revolutionized the sheep-breeding system in England. BakeweU, a Leicestershire man, originated the now world- famous Leicester breed, and by sending his rams all over England enabled sheep-farmers vastly to improve their stocks. At the same time Colling improved the breed of cattle by his famous short-horns : to Colling and to BakeweU aU English farmers owe it that our cattle and sheep are very different animals from the sheep and cattle seen in England before the Hanoverian regime began. There were other pioneers of the eighteenth century to whom farmers owed much. One of them, Arthur Young, who was Secretary of the first Board of Agriculture we ever had in England, was, curiously enough, a faUure as a farmer when he farmed on his own account. But he was no failure as an adviser, i64 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE an experimentalist, and a writer on practical fanning, and he gave English farmers the best and soundest advice on agriculture which they had ever had offered to them up to his day. Farming method's owed a great deal to him between 1780 and 1820 ; they received much improve- ment about the same time from two other pioneers, Smith and Elkington, who showed landlords and farmers more advantageous methods of draining low-lying areas. New interest was beginning to show itself in farming before the year 1800 arrived ; nothing proves that so much as the fact that certain agricultural societies and the now celebrated Smithfield Club had been founded before that year, and that in at any rate one university a Chair of Agriculture had been endowed in 1790. But that imiver- sity was a Scottish one — Edinburgh ; many long years were to pass before any English university dreamed of adding a Professor of Agriculture to its staff. During the eighteenth century one of the most important changes in the conditions of Enghsh agriculture which had ever been made, took place, and produced exceedingly varying results, the effects of which are still with us. Put into plain language that change robbed the peasantry of England of seven millions of acres of land which from time immemorial had been theirs. It passed into the hands of men who had no right to it — save the right given by force. It killed the EngUsh peasant — and created in his place the English labourer — the landless, defenceless man : it was a change of the precise nature which Goldsmith describes in The Deserted Village : — A time there was, ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintain'd its man ; For him light labour spread her wholesome store, Just gave what life required, but gave no more : His best companions, innocence and health, And his best riches, ignorance of wealth. Ill fares the land, to hast'ning ills a prey, ' Where wealth accumulates, and men decay : Princes and lords may flourish and may fade, A breath can make them, as a breath has made ; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied, AGRICULTURE 165 Up to about 1760 the rural populations of England had, and had always had, considerable rights over what was then .called common land. The practical result of the ancient system was that every villager had his own small plot of land, which he cultivated in his own time ; he also had the right of feeding his cow, his pig, his poultry on the common land of the village community. It requires little imagina- tion to see what difference this made to the poor man. He was able to supplement the wages which he earned as a farm labourer by raising his own vegetables, supplying his family with milk, adding bacon to his larder, and eating his own eggs and fowls. The Enclosure Acts, which, between 1760 and 1867, gradually absorbed seven millions of acres which until then had either been cultivated by the peasantry, or upon which they had exercised the old grazing rights, reduced the rural populations to a condition of poverty which has been, as dangerous as it is disgraceful. Few writers on agricul- tural economy dispute this, even if they agree that the old system of farming — open-field and enclosure — was no longer suited to the ever-increasing needs of a rapidly- growing population. From Arthur Young to the latest authorities, all emphasize the injury done to the peasantry by the Enclosure Acts — of which, between 1760 and i860 about foiu" thousand received the assent of Government. Let us see what some of these authorities have to say on the matter. Young himself, writing about the time of the earher enclosures, says that by nineteen out of every twenty Enclosure Acts the poor were greatly injured. " In every way, both directly and indirectly," says A. H. Johnson in his Disappearance of the Small Landowner (Clarendon Press, 1909), " enclosure tended to divorce the poor man from the soil." " The commons were the patrimony of the poor," say Mr. and Mrs. Hammond in their valuable book The Village Labourer (Longmans, 1911). " The commoner's child, however needy, came into a world in which he had a share and a place. The civilization which was now submerged had spelt a sort of independence for the obscure lineage of the village. It had represented, i66 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE too, the importance of the interest of the community in its soil, and in this aspect also the robbery of the present was less important than the robbery of the future. The peasant with rights and a status, with a share in the fortunes and government of his village, standing in rags, but standing on his feet, makes way for the labourer." Apologists for the new system pointed to the needs of the new populations of the great towns ; with such an increase of hfe, they said, fresh provision for its maintenance must needs be made — but, as Dr. Slater observes in his work, The English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields (Constables, 1907), " an increase of human life was obtained at the expense of a decrease in its quality." Perhaps the true aspects and consequences of the Enclosures Acts are but summed up by the present President of the Board of Agriculture in his book English Farming : Past and Present (Longmans, 1912). When the enclosures took effect, says Mr. Prothero, " rural society was convulsed, and its general conditions revolutionized. The divorce of a peasantry from the soil, and the extinction of commoners, open-field farmers, and eventually of small freeholders, were the heavy price which the nation ultimately paid for the supply of bread and meat to its manufacturing population. The decision was made under an economic pressure which completely overrode the social considerations that should have controlled and modified the process of enclosure. Some of the practical evils of open fields and their attendant pasture commons might have been with skill, time, and patience, mitigated." Again, writing of the condition of the despoiled peasantry at the beginning of the last century and of the writers who spoke against its habits, Mr. Prothero remarks : " Contem- porary writers who comment on the increasing degradation of the labouring classes too often treat as its causes changes which were really its consequences. They note the increase of drunkenness, but forget that the occupation of the labourers' idle moments was gone ; they attack the mis- chievous practice of giving children tea, but forget that milk was no longer procurable ; they condemn the rising generation as incapable for farm labour, but forget that AGRICULTURE 167 the parents no longer occupied land on which their children could learn to work ; they deplore the helplessness of the modem wives of cottagers who had become dependant on the village baker, but forget that they were now obliged to buy flour, and had lost their free fuel ; they denounce their improvident marriages, but forget that the motive of thrift was removed." To the dispossessed themselves, the various Enclosure Acts represented so much extraordinary and un-understandable oppression. Mr. Robertson Scott quotes the sayings of two poor men of the time in his book The Land Problem (Collins, 1912) : " I kept four cows before the common was enclosed," said one ; " and you ask me what I lose by it ! " " All I know," said another, " is that I had a cow, and an Act of Parliament has taken it from me." Yet these things were being done at the very time when Edmund Burke was declaring that a prosperous and contented peasantry was the best guarantee of a nation's safety. The truth is that in those days, and for many days to come, no man was either far-sighted enough or courageous enough to stand up for the old peasantry — with the result that they were not only robbed of what they had but cheated out of what they were promised. In order to make some compensation to the men thus deprived of their land and their common rights, many of the Enclosure Acts provided that garden allotments should be provided in the villages. How this precious provision worked may be judged by the fact that out of 500,000 acres of land summarily enclosed between 1845 and 1847, only 2,000 acres were apportioned in these allotments. When allot- ments were granted in the villages, they were usually placed where they were of no use whatever to the people. In the Yorkshire vUlage with which the writer is best acquainted, where there had been much common land in the old days, all enclosed a hundred years ago, one field of land of very poor quaUty was set aside as allotments for the despoiled labourers — at a distance of a mile from the nearest man who could use it. Landowners and farmers of the nineteenth century had no wish to see a labourer work- ing an allotment — the poorer and more defenceless the working-man, the cheaper his labour. i68 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE That the enclosures benefited landowner, farmer, and the teeming populations of the great industrial towns and districts, it is impossible to deny. In some parts of the country the introduction of the new system did ahnost general good — but where this was so, it was almost solely due to the headship and guiding spirit of a great landlord. Yorkshire afforded such an instance in the case of Sir Christopher Sykes, who not only enclosed but brought into cultivation the vast sheep-walks of the Wolds, and, in the somewhat high-flown, but quite justifiable language of Hinderwell, the historian of Scarborough, clothed the land with the beauties of a new creation, converted the barren waste into a fertile region, and diffused peace, plenty, and cheerfulness through an extensive district. This was good work, and all true Yorkshiremen have blessed the memory of its doer ever since. But not all landlords, and not all controllers of the newly-enclosed lands were of the type of Sir Christopher Sykes, nor of his son, the more famous Sir Tatton, and though there still remained certain good old English squires of the Sir Roger de Coverley tradition, who would never have slept in their beds if they had thought that any soul on their estates was wanting bread, they were few in number. The general result of the Enclosures Acts was that the peasantry were utterly impoverished, and the small holders were swept out of existence. The condition of the agricultural villages during the last years of the eighteenth and first years of the nineteenth centuries was bad beyond belief. Paupers increased by the thousand. All the old charm and gaiety of rustic life dis- appeared before hunger and privation. The rural industries died out before the onward rush of urban industrialism. The price of wheat rose to an alarming figure ; food of any sort was difficult to procure, now that men could no longer raise their own milk, bread, vegetables, and bacon. The wages of the new class of village labourer fell to six shillings a week, and he had no means of supplementing them — except by stealing and poaching. He poached a great deal in those days — no doubt feeUng that he had a perfect right to do what his forbears had done, unchecked and unques- AGRICULTURE 169 tioned, for hundreds of years. But his poverty and his abjectness became so great that it became absolutely neces- sary to do something for him, and at Speenhamland, in Buckinghamshire, in 1795, a meeting of local wiseacres, clergymen and magistrates put its several wits together, and adopted a plan of assistance, which, between then and 1835, was taken up by every county in England excepting Durham and Northumberland, and is thus described by Mr. Montague Fordham in his Short History of English Rural Life : — " A scale of wages was drawn up, var3dng according to the price of bread. For example, when the gallon loaf of seconds flour weighing 8 pounds 11 ounces cost IS., a man was held to be entitled to receive 3s. a week for himself, is. 6d. a week for his wife, and the same for each child. Such a man could, therefore, when the gallon loaf cost IS. be entitled, if he had a wife and four children, to los. 6d. a week and, if the price of bread was higher, the wages went up in proportion. Who, then, was to see that the man received his due wage ? The responsibihty was placed on the parish, and the labourer who was out of work had to apply to the overseer, whose duty it was to secure him emplojnnent. Sometimes the men collected on Saturdays, and were put up for auction amongst the employers, going to the highest bidder. Sometimes they were sent from house to house, ' on the rounds,' as it was called, asking for work. The farmers who secured the men paid them a low wage, perhaps 6d. to is. a day, the balance fell on the parish rates, out of which the wages were supple- mented to make the total amount up to the scale figure. The introduction of such drastic new regulations without the need of special legislation is an astonishing instance of the power of the justices of the peace. The system was naturally accompanied by a considerable rise in rates, which are said to have doubled in the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, but the gain to the farmers in reduced wages must have counter-balanced their increased rates, or the system could hardly have continued, as it did, for about forty years. But if farmers benefited, labourers lost ; we see indeed, the rapid degradation of almost the lyo THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE whole of the latter class. To illustrate the effect of this system : it was almost hopeless for a man who was not willing to become a pauper, to obtain work, for to live he must receive full wage from the farmer : this the latter would not be prepared to give, as he could hire a pauper for much less. Everyone, therefore, tended to drift into the pauper class. Again, under the regulations, the larger the family, the more a man earned. As a result there was no inducement to restraint or thrift, and the pauper popula- tion increased rapidly. The position of an unmarried man, or of a young married man with a wife and, for example, one chUd, wovild be the worst, as the wages might be only 3s. or 6s. a week respectively." This, then, was the position of English farming from, say, 1795 to 1837 • — the landlords, who had added vastly to their lands by the Enclosures Acts, were getting very high rents ; the farmers were flourishing, through the big prices of stock and grain (wheat stood at an average price of 85s. a quarter from 1800 to 1815) and labourers were half starved. From 1816 to the beginning of the Victorian era, things were not quite so good for landlord and farmer as from 1745 to 1815 ; rents fell a little, prices dropped a little. But up to 1857 neither farmer nor landlord had anything to com- plain of ; the labourer had everything to repine at. He followed his usual plan of saying nothing — as a rule. The workers of the townSj had they been treated as the villagers were treated, would have razed every mill and factory to the ground in righteous anger. But as the authors of The Village Labourer rightly observe, " Circumstances make the spirit of combination falter in the country. In towns men are face to face with the brutal realities of their Uves, unsoftened by any of the assuaging influences of brook and glade and valley. Men and women who work in the fields, breathe something of the resignation and peace of Nature ; they bear trouble and wrong with a dangerous patience. That is one reason why the history of the anguish of the English agricultural labourer so rarely breaks into violence." Nevertheless, during the days of the Speenhamland System, and Icurgely resulting from it, the rural labourers lost patience, AGRICULTURE 171 and turned on their oppressors. In 1830 revolution broke out in several counties. The revolutionaries killed nobody ; hurt no one seriously ; did no real damage. But three of their ringleaders were hanged, and iive hundred of the rank-and-file suffered transportation. It has always seemed to those who have studied the social and economic condition of the rural labourers during the last hundred and fifty years that a strong and vigorous and well-managed Union, akin to those to which the town workers and the coal-miners belong, would have done much towards the betterment of their position as wage-earners and citizens. But if one looks back a Uttle and considers what sort of treatment was accorded to the men who endeavoured to aid in the formation of such unions a century ago — and later — one does not wonder that Joseph Arch met with little encouragement — comparatively speaking — when he founded his National Agricultural Labourers' Union in 1872. A hundred years ago, one of the most remarkable Englishmen who ever lived, William Cobbett, used an irrepressible voice and a tireless and vigorous pen in his efforts to promote some sort of combination, and in denouncing the system under which the rural popula- tions existed. He came of a labouring stock, and he knew his folk, and their needs — and their value to the nation. We most of us consider Cobbett to have been a wise, shrewd man, nowadays ; our great-grandfathers branded him as a pestilent knave. Pohtical force though he was in his time, Cobbett failed to do much for the men he wanted to assist, and he died while things were stUl locked in the old, bad fortunes of cruelty and carelessness. Yet before his death some attempt at union had been made. The first labourers to begin it were those — or some of those — of Hampshire, who in 1832 formed a Labourers' Society and by its means induced the Hampshire farmers to pay higher wages. 1834 saw the formation of another similar society, at the obscure village of Tolpuddle, in Dorsetshire, where men were then subsisting on seven shilhngs a week. But that attempt was promptly crushed — the principal officials of this inoffensive village society were arrested, tried, condemned, and trans- 172 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE ported — for administering unlawful oaths ! Here, however, for almost the first time in our history, the Government iornid itself confronting that inconvenient thing, public opinion. Robert Owen was much to the fore in those days, and he so stirred up the nation in the matter of the Tol- puddle sentences, that the condemned and transported men were restored to their families. Nevertheless, attempts at combination amongst rural labourers came to an end, for that time, and for a long period. Yorkshiremen shared in all these matters in the degree in which Yorkshiremen would share. No Yorkshireman is ever as badly off as any other man — not even a Lancashire man is as resourceful as he is. No Yorkshire agricultural labourer ever sank to the depths to which his brothers of Essex and Wiltshire were reduced. Put a Yorkshireman in the tightest place conceivable, and he will find solne way of wriggling out of it ; condemn him to ten shillings a week, and he will devise a means of earning another five. Things agricultural were never as bad in Yorkshire as in other counties ; all the same, farming in Yorkshire was not of a very high class, nor anything to boast about at any time up to the beginning of the Victorian age. William Cobbett, at any rate, had no very grand opinion of Yorkshire farming — and he was the first authority on farming in his day. Writing from Sheffield, January 31, 1830, he says : — " As to the land, viewed in the way of agriculture, it really does appear to be worth very little. I have not seen, except at Harewood and Ripley, a stack of wheat since I came into Yorkshire ; and even these, the whole I saw, and all that I have seen during a ride of six miles that I took . . . the day before yesterday . . . would not make the one-half of what I have many times seen in one single rick-yard of the vales of Wiltshire." However, in April of the same year, he was in Holderness, where he had nothing but praise for the farmers and goodness of the grazing land, which, flat as it was, he declared to be for its special purpose, " one of the very finest spots in the whole kingdom." He has more to say about Yorkshire in 1832, when, in September, he travelled across part of the West AGRICULTURE 173 Riding, and found it " the poorest country I have ever set my eyes on," wherein he saw " nothing produced by the earth but the natural grass," and " very miserable oats." He rode thence to the North Riding — " there is not as much corn grown in the North Riding of Yorkshire which begins at Ripon," he writes, "and in the whole county of Durham, as is grown in the Isle of Wight alone " — what is grown, he adds, is " most miserable." No North Riding farmer, he observes later on in the same letter, has more than ten or twelve little stacks of com in his yard ; his property is nearly aU in cattle and sheep ; he employs very Uttle labour. Clearly, William Cobbett did not regard Yorkshire as an agricultural county of any moment — ^let Yorkshire, he said, stick to its coal, its iron, and its machines. Nevertheless, agriculture in Yorkshire was then even in Cobbett's day, and as it began to improve in other parts of England, so it improved in the three Ridings. An import- ant date is 1838, when the Royal Agricultural Society was founded. It instituted a Show — and agricultural shows have been mighty factors in the development and encourage- ment of good farming. In the old days agriculturists had few opportunities of meeting, of seeing new things, of comparing results, of inspecting each other's stock, of having machinery and seed and appliances brought to their notice ; the instituting of shows has given them opportunity in plenty. Nowadays, in addition to the Yorkshire Show, every considerable district, almost every market-town has its agricultural and horticultural show ; even the villages have their annual shows, mainly intended for the exhibition of cottagers' produce. These gatherings have done much good — men exchange notes, make comparisons, learn a great deal, lose much insularity of notion and habit. About the same time, and particularly in the early 'forties, artificial manures began to be introduced, and generally used, all over the country. Some use of them had been made before. The use of bone manure, indeed, may be said to have begun in Yorkshire. Sir Tatton Sykes, son of the Sir Christopher who enclosed and transformed the Wolds, discovered the 174 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE ases of bone manure In a curious — and accidental — fashion. He noticed that on the patches of grass on which his fox- hounds were fed at their kennels at Eddlethorpe, the vegeta- tion was much thicker and more luxurious than elsewhere, and he forthwith tried the experiment of crushing bones for manure. Very early in the century Sir Humphry Davy recommended the use of salts of magnesia, phosphate of hme, and sulphate of potash. Nitrate of soda and guano began to be imported in 1830. But the universal employment of artificial manures chiefly sprang from the results of the investigations of the great chemist, Liebig, and from the practical experiments of Sir John Lawes, who at his model farm at Rothamsted, did much to improve the farming of his time. From 1800 onwards great improve- ment took place in the preparation and selection of seed ; Knight introduced the principle of crossing of wheat ; Shirreff first, and Hallett, many years later, introduced the practice of selection of cereals : on all hands the necessity of using clean seed began to be recognized. There was similar improvement in regard to live stock ; greater and more scientific knowledge began to be shown in breeding, and at the same period the use of artificial foods, such as linseed and cotton cake, came into vogue, men began to pay more attention to the diseases and health of animals, and the modern treatment of plant diseases had a beginning. On all sides farming began to be developed on serious and scientific Unes in the Middle Victorian age, and the old, careless, haphazard methods died out, except amongst the incorrigibly conservative class, which held to the notions of its grandfathers. . Just as machinery had been inevitable in the textile industries, so it became a necessity in modern farming. Up to the 'forties, hand-labour was practised almost every- where. The old threshing-floors and the flails were in use ; wheat, barley, oats were cut by scythe and sickle ; the fields were raked by hand ; there was little evidence of agricultural machine or implement ; the very tools used were of primitive construction. To-day, any inquisitive searcher, pottering around some ancient farmstead, wiU AGRICULTURE 175 often find, hidden away in the comers of tumble-down bams, the things with which our grandfathers made shift sixty and seventy years ago ; handrakes so heavy that it must have needed the strength of two stout men to pull them over the stubble ; pitch forks of an amazing weight ; manure-forks, hoes, spades, not of the light steel of to-day but of massive, solid iron. Such machinery as they had at first, survivals of which are often similarly discoverable, were clumsy and heavy — ^winnowing machines, chaff- cutters, hand and horse miUs for grinding stable corn — all were in an elementary stage up to the 'sixties. But agri- cultural machinery was steadily introduced from 1840 onwards — here again the agricultural shows were of vast benefit — for in their yards machine-makers could exhibit the newest inventions and contrivances. Yorkshire farmers got most of their first machinery from the neighbouring county of Lincoln, in which, at Lincoln, Grantham, and Gainsborough, works for the manufacture of agricultural implements and machines were founded about 1850. Thence came the steam threshing machine, first with portable, later with traction engines ; horse-rakes ; rollers for field and road ; chaff-cutters ; turnip-slicing machines ; troughs ; potato-washers ; winnowing and screening machines, and some of the earlier reaping machines. From these works, and from the Leeds forges, began to come Ughter tools, spades, forks, hoes, rakes, especially after the development of the steel industry ; from various firms of agricultural implement makers came in time the light plough, the hght harrow, and improved drUls. But the modern reaping machine, in its latest forms, came from beyond the At-lantic, from either Canada or the United States ; the self-binding reaping machine and the straw elevator, of all the machinery invented for the farmer's use, have done most to supersede manual labour, with the result that where a dozen hands used to be found in a harvest field, two only are needed, and where a score of men would be required for a day's threshing, half that number wUl now suffice. While there was never the active revolt against agricultural machinery amongst labourers that there was against the power-loon? 176 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE amongst textile workers, there were much dislike and bitter feeling in the purely rural districts when labour-saving machinery was introduced, and in not a few instances wholesale destruction took place — the writer has a very clear recollection of the breaking up of the first self-binding reaper introduced into his village, and of the savage deter- mination of the labourers to deal out similar treatment to any like successor. There was some reason in their case — the machinery of the towns has made work ; but machinery in the farming village has not made work ; there is not a family living in England to-day who employs as many men, women and children as his grandfather would have employed on a farm of the same size, and our harvest fields, instead of being scenes of general labour which had an atmosphere of gaiety, and even jollity about them, have become deserts. But machinery, once introduced, spreads, and nowadays on all well-equipped farms there are multitudinous stocks of the produce of Sheffield and Pittsburg, Leeds, Gains- borough, and Bedford, and if there are still a few horses somewhere about the place, there are also motors, and steam engines, and oil-engines — and not seldom electric lighting, even in the cow-house. Long before the latest product of nineteenth-century mechanical ingenuity had invaded the villages, another change had come over agricultural conditions, which was, in some degree, just as epoch-making as the introduction of the self-binding reaper. 1846 saw the repeal of the Corn Laws. Not many years previously. Lord Melbourne had said that any British minister who tried to carry the total abolition of the Corn Laws must be considered fit for a lunatic asylum. Yet in 1846 Sir Robert Peel found himself obUged to carry the repeal. We have heard much of the Corn Laws ever since, but there are many amongst us who have but the faintest and mistiest ideas as to what the Com Laws were. In modern times the only Corn Law of any importance to our increasing population was that of 1815, which was practically the Corn Law of 1670. That had imposed a duty on foreign grain of such a character that it was not worth while bringing it into the country. AGRICULTURE 177 " Such legislation," observes the late Justin McCarthy in his Life of Sir Robert Peel, " was, of course, founded on the principle that the corn grew for the benefit of the grower in the first instance, and that, until a handsome profit had been secured to him, the public had no right to any reduction in the cost of food. When the harvest was good, then the grower began to get frightened, and he appealed to ParUa- ment to protect him against the disaster of having to sell his com any cheaper than in a year of scarcity or even of famine." The Corn Law of 1815, in plain terms, enacted that no foreign com might be brought into England until the price of the wheat produced at home touched 80s. a quarter. It was almost at once followed by much distress. The price of bread rose to an alarming figure. Rioting took place in many districts. Houses and rick-yards were fired. Rioters, whatever their shades of guilt, were sum- marily tried and punished — often at the hands of the hangman. An impression was originated, and gradually grew amongst the working classes, that the price of bread was legally increased for the general benefit of the landlords and their tenant-farmers. In 1822 some legislative — and abortive — attempt was made to mitigate the effect of the 1815 measure. In 1827 George Canning made a resolute endeavour to carry further legislation. On March 15 of that year he introduced a measure to the House of Commons which proposed a sliding scale of duties on imported corn, arranged in such fashion that the average price of wheat would be 60s. the quarter. He pointed out that under the existing — and broken-down — system " the ports had been shut when the home supply was deficient, and opened when the home market was glutted." He carried his motion through the House of Commons, but the Lords, led by the Duke of Wellington, threw it out— whereupon Canning solemnly warned the Peers against hastening the struggle between " People and Property " which he saw in the near future. The struggle was already beginning — in 1836 systematic agitation began in Manchester and Lancashire for the utter abolition of the Corn Laws, and in the following year Richard Cobden, having for his principal 12 178 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE lieutenants John Bright and Charles Villiers, founded the Anti-Corn Law League. Less than ten years of strenuous agitation, ceaseless speech-making, voluminous writing and publishing, brought about the success of the agitators, who were helped considerably by the undoubted distress amongst the people, as when the high prices of bread and food pressed heavily, and finally by the terrible famine which broke out in Ireland. Naturally, the crowded towns and industrial districts of the North were Anti-Corn Law to a man ; in Yorkshire, Cobden's ideas were rapidly estab- lished in favour, and were much helped by the fiery and often pathetic verses of Ebenezer Elliot, a Sheffield iron- merchant, who attained great celebrity as the Corn Law Rh}Tner. It was not until the last year of the campaign, however, that anything like sympathy to the movement was gained in the House of Commons. The landed interest, backed by the farmers, fought tooth and nail against the Cobden heresy. Sir Robert Peel — who is said to have always been a Free Trader at heart — endeavoured to introduce and pass a sliding-scale, but already — 1842 — it was a question of all or nothing. A letter written by Lord John RusseU, then Member for the City of London, to his constituents, in November, 1845, heralded the end. of the agitation and the triumph of Cobden. Having reviewed the situation, declared himself a Free Trader, and denounced the then state of things as heartily as any Anti-Corn-Law Leaguer could have desired, he concluded : " Let us unite to put an end to a system which has been proved to be the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions among classes, the cause of penury, fever, mortaUty, and crime among the people. The Government appears to be waiting for some excuse to give up the present Corn Law. Let the people, by petition, by address, by remonstrance, afford them the excuse they seek." Support for the League, however, had never been lacking. Money it had always had in plenty. According to some figures given by John Bright, in speaking of its history, when it first asked for pecuniary help in 1839 it got ;^5,ooo ; in Z840 it got ;(8,ooo ; a bazaar at Manchester in 1842 yielded AGRICULTURE 179 £10,000 ; an appeal made in 1843 brought in £50,000 ; another in 1844 produced £ioo,ooo; Against the growing demand for repeal Peel could no longer stand, and in 1846, he followed Lord John Russell's example, declared himself a convert to the Free Trade principles, and succeeded in carrying a measure for the virtual sweeping away of the much-hated — and much-debated— Corn Law. It was passed by the House of Lords on June 25th ; the same day saw Peel defeated on a Coercion Bill for Ireland, and a few days later his long lease of power came to an end. It was a strange— almost a sinister — coincidence that his defeat in the House of Commons — ^which led to his resignation on the following Monday — took place just two hours after he heard that the bill for the Repeal of the Corn Laws had got safely through the Upper Chamber. According to the speeches and tracts and pamphlets of the Anti-Corn-Law Leaguers, made and flung broadcast over the country during nearly ten years of agitation, a species of millennium was to follow the desired Repeal. All sorts of things were to occur : what really did occur was that nothing very different resulted — at that time. There was no great fall in the price of corn. A temporary drop in prices in 1849 upset farmers for a while, but it was only temporary ; possibly it stirred agriculturists to more ambitious projects in other directions. And just as the prophets of the Repeal party had been — comparatively — wrong in their prognostications, so the upholders of the olJ protective system had been wrong in affirming that farming would go to the dogs as soon as the Corn Laws were repealed. For one reason or another — and there were many reasons — ■ the EngUsh farmers entered in 1850 upon nearly a twenty- five years' run of prosperity. Foreign competition was not yet powerful enough to hurt them ; the Atlantic journey was still one of weeks rather than of hours ; Australia was still very far off ; neither corn, nor wool, nor stock, nor dairy produce, was dumped into the land, as they began to be thirty years later ; prices remained good ; the various improvements were having an effect ; machinery was helpful ; steam was helpful ; the roads had been put in i8o THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE good order ; markets were opened out ; everything seemed to have conspired to give the farmers prosperity and con- tentment. From 1850 to 1875 — or very nearly — he made money. More roomy and comfortable farmhouses began to be bmlt ; there was a higher standard of Uving all round ; men began to say that the fears of the Protectionists had been groundless. That Mid- Victorian generation, at any rate, found farming an agreeable pursuit and a very profit- able thing. Also, there began to be some hope for the labourers. The bad old days of the Speenhamland system had long since disappeared ; the condition of the rural populations had improved ; the administration of the Poor Law had been entirely re-modelled, and by 1870 wages were much higher than they ever had been. In 1872 a new movement arose amongst the labourers, and gained much success which would have been impossible forty years before. In February of that year — the winter of which had been a bad one, with resultant privations amongst the village people — Joseph Arch, himself a labouring man, addressed two thousand of his fellow-workers at Welles- bourne in Warwickshire and inaugurated the National Agricultural Labourers' Union. Times had changed con- siderably since the Tolpuddle affair in 1834, and the new movement spread until eighty thousand labourers had enrolled themselves as members of one or other of its branches. Its demands were modest — a minimum wage of i6s. a week — yet it met with strong opposition from landowners, the country clergy, and farmers ; in many places farmers formed unions of their own as safeguards against Arch and his following. Nevertheless, the right of the rural workers to band themselves together in self- defence met with recognition, and no less a personage than Lord Beaconsfield made it in his way to inform a meeting of farmers (which was doubtless far from pleased to hear his sentiments) that " an agricultural labourer has as much right to combine for the bettering of his condition as a manufacturing labourer or a worker in metal " — sad and bad doctrines, subversive of all moral and social order, in the opinion of rustic autocrats. The usual features of AGRICULTURE i8t unionism were resultant upon Arch's endeavours — there were disputes between employers and employees, and in some districts the equivalent of the strike and the lockrout took place. But this new union of men who until that time had never had the energy, spirit, or knowledge to make common cause, did good, for there was a general raising of wages, and the status of the labourer became considerably improved. In 1875, however, there came that which made farmers think of other things than labour problems, and labourers realize that agriculture is dependent upon other factors than labour. 1875 saw the beginning of the great Agri- cultural Disaster which pessimistic folk had been foretelling ever since 1846. It did not entirely arise because of and through the repeal of the Corn Laws. It began with some- thing which it is beyond the power of man to legislate about — bad weather. For some years in the 'seventies bad season followed bad season. Crops were ruined ; com stood rotting in the fields far into Autumn, never to be garnered. Upon bad weather followed bad fortune — the terrible outbreak of sheep-rot in 1879 resulted in the loss of millions of sheep ; it was succeeded in 1883 by an equally serious epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease, which carried off enormous quantities of sheep, swine, and cattle. And upon aU this came, at last, the drop in prices which the anti-Cobdenites had foreseen, and had warned their feIlow-countr5mien against. The world had shrunk. Countries which in 1846 were a long way off had by 1876 been brought, so to speak, to our very thresholds. Increased and speedy facilities of communication and transit enabled the owners of the vast surpluses of grain in the United States of America to pour wheat into this country quicker than a Yorkshire farmer could get his potatoes to Shoreditch —and far more cheaply. Dairy produce began to pour in from the Scandinavian countries and the Continent ; wool came from all parts of the world ; by 1885 stock, live and dead, came roUing in at every port ; the home markets were glutted with foreign produce. There was no longer any talk of high prices ; but there was much concern i8j the making of MODERN YORKSHIRE amongst farmers about low prices. From 1880 to igoo the average price of wheat was no more than 33s. a quarter ; in 1894 it touched less than 23s. ; more than once, about that time, in certain districts, it fell to 19s. In the 'nineties, bad weather came again — to endure for several seasons in succession. From 1875 onwards land became less and less profitable to owner and worker. The landlords began to make substantial abatements in the 'seventies ; reductions of a heavy nature followed in the 'eighties ; by the 'nineties land which twenty years before had been successfully and profitably farmed at 70s. an acre was going begging at 25s. A considerable acreage of land went out of cultivation ; fields which had produced wheat were turned over to grass ; by the beginning of the present century some two and a half million acres of wheat-producing land had been trans- formed into pasture. The financial ruin amongst farmers was widespread, and hundreds of broken men, having seen their last penny of capital gone, sank to the level of day- labourers, or, scraping a few pounds together, went off to try their luck in the newer countries. Only those whose capital was considerable, who had sufficient ingeimity and courage to develop new forms, and who by lavish intro- duction of the latest methods, and the introduction of the most modern machinery, saved labour, were able to weather the storm, and to look to economists and politicians to devise some means of putting English agriculture on a sound basis in the future. So far those means have not yet been successfully devised — but there are signs and indications that they may be, in time. During this period of agricultural depression — or, rather, of downright disaster — began the movement amongst the village populations which has come to be called the Rural Exodus. Up to 1870 there was no considerable or alarming quitting of the villages for the towns. Here and there a young man went away from his native place, and worked as a carter or a railway porter in town or city, but even if he returned, and gave cheering accounts of his new employ- ment, he failed as a rule to draw his like away with him. But as machinery was introduced, and times became bad. AGRICULTURE 183 and farmers were at their wits' end, and were glad to cut down their labour to the minimum, the villages began to be depleted of their population in serious fashion, and the towns and cities received additions to theirs of folk to whom town hfe was by no means fitted or suitable. Much of the more squalid poverty which has been so noticeable in the city and town slums of late years is amongst the country people who have crowded into centres where they are not of the least use because of their sheer inability to adapt themselves to circumstances which are utterly foreign to their antecedents and nature. But — who wonders, if he knows what village life was, any time from 1875 to 1900, that the more youthful portion of the village community should have wished to go elsewhere — and as quickly as possible ? What was there to induce young men and women to remain ? Farming was evidently on its last legs — a few more years, and there would be no farming ; aU the com would come from America, all the wool from Australia, all the meat from Argentina, and all the butter from Denmark. What could a man do in a place where the good com land was being turned into pasture year by year, where machines forced out men, in which there was no life, no hope, not one cheerful prospect ? Mr. Robertson Scott, in his book The Land Problem, sets down the observation of an old labourer's wife : " The country is better than the town to live in, sir, for sartin', but can ye tell me, sir, can ye honestly tell me, sir, that a lad or a maid has the chance in the country of bettering theirselves, all ways, than they can have, if they have a mind, in the towns ? " In that question, as shrewd as it is simple, lies the whole problem of rural prosperity— more, of the very future of EngHsh agriculture. If land cannot be farmed in such a fashion as to keep the people on the land, then farming may just as well become an extinct industry. But the early years of the present century showed some improvement. The Agricultural Disaster of 1875-1900 produced certain good and wholesome effects. It cleared off the out-of-date landlord and the hopelessly-retrograde farmer. It brought into existence a new class of land- i84 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE owners and farmers, inclined to treat agriculture, not as a haphazard, take-your-luck-as-you-find-it affair, but as what it is, and must henceforth be, if it is to prosper — a very serious business. Under them, and aided by science, farm- ing began to improve : to put the matter in few words, men began to give more attention to farming methods. The farmer of the new school recognizes that he can learn something, even from professors of agriculture and from books ; his predecessor turned up his nose at books, and regarded professors with grave suspicion, if not with absolute contempt. Similarly, the status of the labourer underwent much improvement. He got his rights as a citizen ; his children began to receive something in the way of better education ; village life became brighter ; village people were encouraged to cultivate their gardens, to develop small home industries ; between the rural life of 1914 and that of 1 8 14 an enormous gulf lies. The Yorkshire farm labourer of these modern times is an independent man where his grandfather was a poor serf. He has his unions, his clubs, his friendly societies, his village institutes, his village Hbraries — he can read his newspaper ; above all, he can speak his mind without fear of farmer, squire, or parson. Present events have put a temporary stoppage to the development which certainly began a few years ago — it may be that those events will prove to have been highly important factors in establishing such an era of prosperity in British agriculture as none of us have yet dreamed of. CHAPTER VII REFORM On a certain day in the June of 1832 there was lighted in the centre of Scarborough, where King Street on the one hand, and Queen Street on the other, meet at Newborough, a huge bonfire, which was fed by as much wood and wreckage as the townsfolk could carry up and collect from the adjacent beach. Around it were wild and triumphant manifestations of rejoicing ; they terminated at last in the forming of a procession of townsfolk of all degrees. The procession escorted forty-four puppets, or dolls, dressed up and robed in imitation of the forty-four members of the Scarborough Corporation. These effigies were solemnly carried down to the shore, and there, at low tide, were buried with due ceremony in a deep hole dug in the sands, amidst loud cheering from the assembled multitudes. A strange sight ! — which signified that the Reform Bill was now an Act of ParUament, and that henceforth the Members of Parliament for Scarborough would be elected by the burgesses of the town instead of by the Corporation. It was high time that Reform came — and particularly in this matter of Parhamentary representation. Represen- tation, indeed) was a farce ; scarcely any Englishman was represented in the House of Commons. When Lord John Russell introduced the Reform Bill to an astonished House, in March, 183 1, he asked his hearers what an intelligent foreigner would think, who, having heard of our wealth, our civilization, our renown, came to England to examine our institutions at first hand. " Would not such a foreigner," he asked, in a passage of telhng sarcasm, " be much astonished if he were taken to a green mound, and 185 i86 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE informed that it sent two Members to the British Parliament ; if he were shown a stone wall, and told that it also sent two Members to the British ParUament ; or, if he walked into a park, without the vestige of a dwelUng, and was told that it, too, sent two Members to the British Parliament ? But if he were surprised at this, how much more would he be astonished if he were carried into the North of England, where he would see large flourishing towns, full of trade, activity, and intelligence, vast magazines of wealth and manufactures, and were told that these places sent no representatives to Parliament ? But his wonder would not end here : he would be astonished if he were carried to such a place as Liverpool, and were there told that he might see a specimen of a popular election ; what would be the result ? He would see bribery employed in the most unblushing manner, he would see every voter receiving a number of guineas in a box as the price of his corruption ; and after such a spectacle would he not be indeed surprised that representatives so chosen could possibly perform the functions of legislators, or enjoy respect in anj? degree ? " In this passage, of course, the evils of the old system are merely hinted at with the skill of the orator ; everybody who listened knew what they were in practice. England was full of rotten boroughs, and of towns, of no population worth mentioning, from which members were returned by the nomination of some great landlord, and of places where, as in the case of Scarborough, the members were elected by a few privileged persons. Fifty-six boroughs, each with a population of less than two thousand, returned one hundred and eleven members ; many of the great towns had no members at all. Little obscure towns like Hedon and Boroughbridge in Yorkshire had two members each ; places like Sheffield and Leeds had none. The restriction of the franchise was another evil : in some, only freemen were allowed to vote ; in others, a score of men exercised the privilege denied to thousands : ever5Avhere there were bribery and corruption, and the House of Commons was virtually packed by the landed interest. Looking back upon those times from the standpoint of our own, it seems REFORM * 187 little short of marvellous that any wise man could raise his voice against reform — and yet we find the Duke of Welling- ton speaking of the Reform Act as " the waters of destruc- tion " and praying that his country may not be ruined by it. But the mental' and intellectual calibre of the opponents of Reform may be viewed in Lord Sidmouth's remark to Earl Grey. " God may, and, I hope, will forgive you for this bill," he said, plaintively. " but I do not think I ever can ! " An excellent illustration of the methods by which Parlia- mentary representation was afforded to a Yorkshire town in the pre-Reform days is ready to hand in the case of Knaresborough. Knaresborough was a borough by pre- scription : it was created a free town by Edward the Second in 131 1 ; it did not send representatives to ParHament, however, until 1553. The right of franchise was at first confined to a specified number of houses called burgages ; the number of these burgages in 161 1 was between eighty and ninety. Until 1720 the elections in Knaresborough continued to be free, but about that year the burgages began to be bought up, gradually, by the Cavendish family, and the place became a pocket borough for the Duke of Devonshire, and remained so until the Reform Act 1832. The method of election was as characteristic of those days as it is amusing to read of in these. Scarcely a voter either Hved in the town or was a Knaresborough man. The voters, nominal holders of the eighty-odd burgages, were tenants of the Duke of Devonshire, who as a rule lived on their farms on the Duke's Derbyshire estates around Chatsworth, or on his Wharfedale estates near Bolton Abbey, or on his East Riding estates near Market Weighton : most of them, probably, never saw the parti- cular burgage with which their names were identified. On the day of election they were brought from their various homes, at the Duke's expense, to Knaresborough. There they gave their votes for the Duke's nominee, who was of course, elected. They were then treated — also at the Duke's expense — to the best dinner procurable, which, in those days, would be a very good dinner indeed, with i88 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE excellent wine to wash it down. After that — still at the Duke's expense — they were carried home — and at home they remained, one supposes, until they were required to repeat the performance of the same duties. But we are not to suppose that this sort of thing was at all pleasing to the townsfolk. As time got on they became more and more restive under it, and they occasionally showed them- selves to the non-resident voters in anything but a friendly attitude, and in July, 1804, when Viscount Duncannon was to be elected, they broke out into open rioting, which resulted in the stoppage of the election proceedings, and the trial of six Knaresborough men at York Assizes in August, 1805 : three were acquitted ; the other three — who had been kept in prison since arrest — were sent to Newgate and the King's Bench. Perhaps the most interesting of all the old pre- Reform elections in Yorkshire was that of 1807, when the county electors returned William Wilberforce to the House of Commons for the sixth time. To understand the signifi- cance and interest of it, one. must remember that in those days, Yorkshire as a county returned two members, that the period during which votes could be recorded lasted fifteen days, and that those votes could only be recorded at one place, York — to which every voter in the wide- spread county had to be brought, at the expense of one or other of the candidates. On this occasion William Wilber- force was the Whig candidate ; the Tory nominees were Lord Milton and Mr. Lascelles : the contest was thus a triangular one— but in the sense that two must win and one be beaten. Feeling was very high ; the Tories were deter- mined to return both their men. Lord Harewood, head of the Lascelles family, publicly declared himself ready to spend the whole of his West Indian property in the Tory interest ; Earl Fitzwilliam, head of the family to which Lord Milton belonged, expressed similar sentiments. Wilber- force, although a rich man, knew that the contest would be ruinous, and his friends endeavoured to dissuade him from entering upon it, but he refused to take tjieir advice, feeling the " moral importance " of the election, and on REFORM 189 April 27, having heard the King's Speech dissolving I'ar- liament read by the Speaker in the House of Commons, he set out, full of determination, for Yorkshire. He spent the afternoon of the 29th at Doncaster, and received encour- aging news ; reaching York that night, he sat up until one o'clock next morning, discussing his prospects with his supporters, and learning from them that Milton and LasceUes had already engaged canvassing agents, houses of enter- tainment, and every species of conveyance in every con- siderable town. It was not until May 4 that Wilberforce's supporters could meet at York and organize his campaign ; in the meantime, he himself set out for a tour round the principal towns of the West Riding. On May 14 the nomina- tion was held at York ; it was followed by a meeting of Wilberforce's friends, whereat the question of expenses was brought up for consideration. Wilberforce himself reminded the meeting of the promises of support which had been made, and called upon the county to assert its inde- pendence. One of his adherents followed with a speech which consisted of one sentence : " It is impossible," he said, " that we can desert Mr. Wilberforce ; therefore put down my name for £500." This produced an immediate subscription of £18,000, and next day Wilberforce went off to canvass the East Riding voters, with whom he remained until the day of the election, May 20. At that stage the actual fight began, and at first its fortunes went against him. The show of hands always taken in those days was not in his favour ; at night he was second on the poll ; the next day he was lowest. The barrister who had come from London as his professional adviser was very gloomy on the evening of that second day. " I can see, gentlemen, clearly enough, how this will turn out," he said, as the Wilberforce committee sat down to dinner that night ; "Mr. Wilberforce has obviously no chance, and the sooner he resigns the better." But the third day showed things of a different complexion : the men of Holderness began to come in. " No carriages are to be procured," wrote a Hull corres- pondent, " but boats are proceeding up the river heavily laden with voters ; farmers lend their waggons ; even 190 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE donkeys have the honour of carrying voters for Wilberforce, and hundreds are proceeding on foot." On that day, too, a large body of North Riding freeholders entered York, headed by Sir Robert HUdyard, with the intention of sphtting their votes between Wilberforce and Lascelles ; hearing that Wilberforce was in danger, they one and all voted solidly for him. On the evening of the third day the position was thus : — Milton, 3,032 ; Wilberforce, 2,847 ; Lascelles, 2,698. But on the night of the fourth day the old member was in front : the figures then read : — Wilber- force, 4,269 ; Milton, 4,158 ; Lascelles, 3,894. Henceforth he continued to lead, and when, after fifteen days, the poll was finally closed, and the result of the election declared by the High Sheriff of Yorkshire, the figures were : — Wilberforce, 11,806 ; Milton, 11,177 ; Lascelles, 10,989. " It gives me pleasure as an Englishman," wrote Lord St. Helens to the successful senior member for Yorkshire, " that in a county which from its size and population has been justly styled an epitome of the kingdom at large, the claims of sheer personal worth and services have obtained so decided a preference over those of title and wealth, even when accompanied by no ordinary recommendations of a higher and better sort." Never indeed before — perhaps never since — was any English election fought with such vigour. " Nothing since the days of the Revolution," remarked a contemporary writer, setting down his impressions in the York Herald newspaper, " has ever presented to the world such a scene as this great county for fifteen days and nights. Repose or rest has been unknown in it, except it was seen in a messenger asleep upon his post-horse, or in his carriage. Every day the roads in every direction to and from every remote corner of the county have been covered with vehicles loaded with voters ; and barouches, curricles, gigs, flpng waggons, and military cars with eight horses, crowded sometimes with forty voters, have been scouring the country, leaving not the slightest chance for the quiet traveller to urge his humble journey, or find a chair at an inn to sit down upon." When this contest was over, and those who had taken REFORM 191 part in it had time to draw breath, they doubtless began to consider what they probably thought nothing of during the heat of the struggle — the cost. Nowadays, a wise and paternal administration limits the cost of an election ; in those days all Governments were so filled with the laissez- faire principle (except when hungry men poached rabbits, or a desperate man stole three-halfpence) that they allowed parliamentary candidates and their agents and their sup- porters to throw money around as if sovereigns were shillings and shillings of no more value than pebbles. It is commonly believed that this was the most costly election ever heard of. The joint expenses of Lord Milton and Mr. Lascelles amounted to £200,000. As to the subscription made on Wilberforce's behalf, it eventualty reached a sum of nearly £70,000, money pouring in upon it from all parts of the country. Not one-half of it was needed ; Wilberforce's entire expenses amounted to £28,600. How these vast sums came to be spent is easily explained — in addition to the carrying of the voters to the poll at York, from places as remote as Stanmore in one direction, and Spurn in another, they had to be fed and lodged — and nothing but the best was good enough for them. The landlords of the wayside inns, who kept open house during the fifteen days of an election, had lengthy and costly bills to send in to the candidates who employed them : here is one, rendered by the host of the Skip Bridge Inn to the agents of Milton and Lascelles after the contest of 1807. Account during the County Election : — ^Wines, £1,389 4s. od. ; Liquors, £200 OS. od. ; Ale and Porter, £195 os. 8d. ; Meat, £55 4s. i^d. ; Hams, £88 8s. od. ; Bread, £59 i8s. od. ; Tea and Coffee, £18 lis. 4d. ; Tobacco and Pipes, £18 19s. 7d. ; Hay and Corn, £199 12s. od. ; Sugar, Lemons, Cheese, £55 3s. 9d. ; Mustard, Pepper, Vegetables, £2 19s. id. ; Glasses and Pot Measures, £12 14s. 3d. ; Butter, £23 6s. 8d. ; Post-Boy, £2 i6s. od. ; Chaises and Horses, £15 4s. 6d. ; Total, £2,337 is. iijd. But there was nothing new in all this : it iiad been the custom for a very long time to provide voters with as much food and drink as they pleased to demand; Sir Henry 192 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Slingsby, who was Member for Knaresborough for many years in the time of Charles the First, notes that what he calls the " evil custom " of bestowing wine in this way cost him at least £i6 at his election in 1640. To Yorkshiremen, the passing of the Reform Act in 1832 meant a serious and tremendous change. Lord St. Helens in his letter to William WUberforce spoke of Yorkshire as " An epitome of the kindgom," but until 1832 very few of the people who made up that epitome had any pohtical rights. The county itself returned two members, who were elected by the forty-shiUing freeholders ; fourteen boroughs (Aldborough, Beverley, Boroughbridge, Hedon, HuU, Knaresborough, Malton, Northallerton, Pontefract, Rich- mond, Ripon, Scarborough, Thirsk, and York) returned two members each, who were elected under varying con- ditions of franchise. There were several pocket boroughs besides Knaresborough ; Malton was the preserve of the Fitzwilliams ; the Darcies had Richmond ; the Lascelles, Northallerton ; the Dukes of Newcastle elected the members for Aldborough and Boroughbridge. . At York all freemen could vote. At Northallerton, only people hving in or close to the main street had the voter's privilege. At Thirsk the voters were the owners of certain tenements, fifty-two in number, and at one time forty-nine of these belonged to one man. In all these places bribery and corruption was rampant and open, and even if the boroughs were represented by statesmen of note, as Malton was at one period by Henry Grattan and Edmund Burke, those statesmen were obliged to wink at what they could not put an end to. But the Reform Act of 1832 changed a great deal by disfranchising Aldborough, Boroughbridge, and Hedon ; taking away one member from Thirsk, and one from Northallerton ; splitting the county into three Ridings with two members each ; giving one member each to Whitby, Wakefield, and Huddersfield, and two each to Sheffield, Hahfax, Bradford and Leeds. This was a good beginning : it was improved upon in 1867, and again in 1885, and since the last date Yorkshire has been represented in Parliament by fifty-two members, one-half representing REFORM 193 single-member county divisions, and the other half twelve cities and boroughs. Nowadays no man can spend £100,000 on his election. Every man can vote in secret. Almost every man has a vote. Nearly everything is different from the state of things which existed when WilUam Wilberforce was senior member for Yorkshire. But he would be a bold man who would solemnly afhrm his conviction that bribery and corruption have completely disappeared. The Yorkshireman is a fine specimen of humanity, and a great Enghshman, but he has one sad and terrible weakness — -an inordinate love of money — and if he can profit a Uttle by a quiet electioneering transaction it needs very Uttle casuistry on his part to make things right with his conscience. There were people who beUeved that the Millennium would come as soon as Wilham the Fourth gave his Royal Assent to the Reform Act of 1832. But as Walter Bagehot pointed out, later on, the Reform Act was powerless to affect the worst of the evils from which the nation suffered at that time, for those evils were not political, but economic and social. The worst evil, undoubtedly, was the condition of the workers in the newly-created industries. A terrible epidemic of fever which broke out in Manchester in 1784 and was directly attributable to the crowded and noisome conditions of the factories, aroused some feeble remonstrance and public attention, but it was not until eighteen years had elapsed that the Morals and Public Health Act of 1802 was passed — to effect very little real good. Nor did the more drastic Cotton MiUs Act of 1819, chiefly brought into being through the instrumentality of Robert Owen, do much to bring about a thorough reform of the factory system. Lord Ashley, afterwards Earl of Shaftesbury, began a reform movement in that direction in the early 'twenties, but it was not until 1830 that the real movement began, under the leadership of three Yorkshiremen — Richard Oastler, John Fielden, and Michael Sadler. Oastler was a Yorkshire land-agent ; Fielden a well-to-do mill- owner of the Yorkshire-Lancashire town of Todmorden ; Sadler, a Leeds man, was a Member of ParUament. The agitation in favour of reform, led by these three, who 13 194 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE became known as the Factory Reformers, originated in an outspoken letter which Richard Oastler addressed to the Leeds Mercury in September, 1830, and was reprinted far and wide. After drawing attention to the fact that Yorkshire at that very moment was represented in Parlia- ment by William Wilberforce, leader of the movement for the Abolition of Slavery, Oastler continued, " Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, are at this very moment existing in a state of slavery more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system, colonial slavery. These innocent creatures drawl out, unpitied, their short but miserable existence in a place famed for its profession of religious zeal, whose inhabitants are ever foremost in professing temperance and reformation, and are striving to outrun their neighbours in missionary exertions, and would fain send the Bible to the farthest corner of the globe ; aye, in the very place where the anti- slavery fever rages most furiously, her apparent charity is not more admired on earth than her real cruelty is abhorred in heaven. The very streets which receive the droppings of an Anti-Slavery Society are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled, not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver, but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the overlooker, to hasten, half-dressed, but not half-fed, to those magazines of British infantile slavery— the worsted mills in the town and neighbourhood of Bradford. Thousands of little children, both male and female, but principally female, from seven to fourteen years of age, are daily compelled to labour from six o'clock in the morning to seven in the evening, with only . . . thirty minutes allowed for eating and recreation. Poor infants ! ye are indeed sacrificed at the shrine of avarice, without even the solace of the negro slave ; ye are no more than he is free agents ; ye are compelled to work as long as the necessity of your needy parents may require, or the cold-blooded avarice of your worse than barbarian masters may draneind." Widespread indignation followed the publi- REFORM 195 cation of this letter, and a movement for the amehoration of the conditions of labour in factories, and especially amongst children, began and was taken up in the reformed House of Commons by Lord Ashley, Mr. Sadler, and parti- cularly by Mr. Fielden, who, though a mill-owner himself, was thoroughly alive to the evUs of the system, had worked hard for reform in his own district, and had pubhshed many letters and a book in advocacy of a better state of things. Chiefly owing to their endeavours and to the efforts of Richard Oastler (to whom there is now a statue in that very Bradford whose manufacturers he so bitterly denounced) a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the whole question. The results of its inquiries were appalhng ; it was soon recognized that not even in the worst days of the old Feudal System had English folk known such conditions of cruel oppression as tens of thousands of them were then Uving under in the manufacturing and industrial districts. The evidence brought before the Royal Commission proved that women were working half- naked in the coal-mines ; children were literally bound to the looms and kept awake by the foreman's whip ; men, women, and children ahke were made to work until they could work no longer, there being no restriction on the hours of labour ; the sanitary conditions of the factories and workshops was terrible ; medical evidence proved that in the industrial centres there was a rapid spread of malform- ation of the bones, curvature of the spine, heart diseases, rupture, arrested growth, asthma, and premature old age among children and young persons. Legislation followed the issuing of the Royal Commission's Report — always strenuously and bitterly opposed by the upholders of the laissez-faire policy. Owen's bUl of 1819 (the Cotton Mills Act) had already limited the age at which children might work in factories, and had reduced their hours of labour to 72 a week — an average of twelve hours a day. In 1844 another Act limited chUd-labour in cahco print works to six and a half hours a day ; in 1845 Lord Ashley got through Parliament a measure which prohibited the emplojnnent of women in night work, and laid down certain necessary 196 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE regulations about safety, ' meal-hours, and holidays of women and children. And in 1847, John Fielden, who had never ceased his arduous campaign in the House of Commons, in which he sat as Member for Oldham, had the satisfaction of hearing the Royal Assent given to the Ten Hours Bill. Since that time an enormous body of legislative enactment has been put on the Statute Book in relation to the con- ditions under which men and women work in factories, mills and mines. The first measures, like that of 1819, were faulty in that no pro^dsion for enforcement was made — the administration was left to the local authorities, who were too often biassed in favour of employers. The thin end of the wedge of inspection was first introduced in very tentative fashion in 1825 ; the safeguards by means of inspection were not brought into full use for many years. It was not, indeed, until 1878, when the Consohdating Act of that date was passed, that factorj' and workshop legisla- tion became scientific and thorough. Between 1878 and 1895 much drastic revision of laws took place ; notably in 1889 and 1891, but there still remained many things to be done, and a second Consolidating Act was passed in 1901. And the result is, that whereas a hundred years ago there was scarcely a law in the Statute Book which had for its object the safe-guarding of labour; labour is now so securely fenced, guarded, and provided for by the State, that it is difficult to see where it can possibly receive evU or oppression. The State, through a thorough-going system of inspection, carried on by women as well as men, has a jealous eye constantly fixed on all matters relating to the health, environment, and protection of all workers, and if Richard Oastler could see a modern Bradford factory he would be amazed at the results of the movement which his indignant letter of 1830 mainly originated. About the same time that Oastler aroused indignation against the factory-owners who were making hitherto vmheard-of profit out of their exploitation of the unfortunates of the manufacturing districts, attention began to be directed to the administration of the existing Poor Laws by the parochial authorities, and four years before Charles Dickens REFORM 197 began the publication of Oliver Twist in Bentley's Mis- cellany, a Royal Commission was at work diligently inquiring into the doings of the Bumbles and their superiors, the overseers and churchwardens. There had been little alteration in the law since the days of Elizabeth. The first Poor Law made after the Reformation — that of 1552 — seemed to recognize that there is such a thing as charity and compassion, for it provided that in each parish a register of poor and needy folk should be kept, and that more prosperous parishioners should be " gently exhorted and admonished " to open the bowels of their mercy on behalf of them. Gentle exhortation and admonition, however, had small effect on a society which was rapidly becoming materialized and utilitarian, and was already inclined to agree that the poor in a lump are bad, and in 1563 com- pulsion had to be resorted to, while in 1597-1601, a sort of consohdating legislature brought into use the enactments which obtained until 1834. Under this, the overseers of every parish were empowered to set at work all persons who had no ordinary trade by which to earn a living, and for the purpose of providing such with materials, wool, flax, and the like, to work in, they were authorized to levy taxation (poor rate) on the better-off. Provision was made, by assessment, for the relief of the old, the impotent, the crippled, and the blind ; for the apprenticing of pauper children, and for the building of poor-houses, and persons of sufficient means were made liable for the maintenance of children, parents, and grandchildren. Poor-houses, however, were only to be built for the impotent — there was little resemblance between them and the modern workhouse ; from what one can learn of them from the orders made at Quarter Sessions, they appear to have been cheap cottages, probably little better than sheds. Of one fact we may be certain beyond doubt — from 1563 to 1832 there was little, if any, sympathy wasted on the poor. For three hundred years English folk clung to the notion that a poor man is but one remove from a criminal, and the entire trend of opinion— sedulously fostered by the clergy and the educated — was towards the axiom that society 198 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE only exists for the preservation of property. The lot of the pauper was a hard one. He was starved, beaten, ill-used ; he was often quietly murdered. He was thrown about from one parish to another. The cripple cart was a famiUar object on the highways. Worse off than the cripples were the imbeciles ; much worse off than either were the pauper children. The great wonder about Oliver Twist is not that Dickens wrote it : it is that Dickens was the first man to expose what might have been exposed at any time during the previous hundred years. Unfor- tunately, there were few people in the Hanoverian days who cared much, if at all, whether pauper children were starved or not, or whether imbeciles were or were not lashed into insensibility, or if a parish 'prentice was systema- tically flogged every day of his life ; English society had by that time reached a stage of indifference to everything but self from which it has even now not wholly emerged. Before Oliver Twist had aroused a sentimental compassion in the breasts of its author's wide-spread circle of readers, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had been passed. In spite of many modifications — and of the changes brought about in it, through the Local Government Board, by the recommendations of the Royal Commission of 1905 — this Act, taken in conjunction with the Act of 1601, still governs poor-law administration in this country. It made no change in the then existing law as regards the rating of property or the method of collecting the sums so raised, nor did it alter the regulations about settlement and removal. But it provided in these respects two important improve- ments—a more equitable distribution of the sums collected in rates, and a better chance for a poor man to find work. As regards change it was characterized by four distinct improvements : (i) The creation of a central authority, now called the Local Government Board, with control of all poor-law funds, and power to erect workhouses in con- junction with (2) newly-constituted guardians of the poor, who were to be annually elected by ratepayers ; (3) the union of parishes, to be managed by these elected boards of guardians ; and (4) the abolition of the system of paying REFORM 199 wages out of poor-rates, and the prohibition of relief to able-bodied paupers, except within a union workhouse. When a powerful Royal Commission met in 1905 to examine and report on the poor-law system, it made many recom- mendations and suggestions in development and improve- ment of this Act of 1834, but it has not been greatly altered. The difference between the administration of poor relief of all sorts nowadays, and its administration even fifty years ago, lies in another difference — popular feeling and opinion. All the improvements which have been carried out in the way of labour exchanges, labour colonies. Old Age Pensions, better treatment of thp poor and infirm, due care of pauper children and imbeciles, have sprung from a growing sense of duty towards the helpless and the destitute, and though we spent £17,784,579 in poor relief in 1913, we may feel gure that every penny of it was well and wisely laid out, and that none of it became lodged in the pockets of Mr. Bumble or replenished the cupboard of Mrs. Corney. Not many years before the appointment of the Royal Commission of 1905, the present writer, at the request of the editor of a leading daily newspaper, visited a considerable number of the Yorkshire union workhouses, and during an inspection which eventually spread itself over many weeks, was enabled to examine the working of' the poor-law system at first hand. He visited workhouses of all sizes, from the monster institutions of the great industrial cities, which needed several visits to inspect, to the small ones in obscure country towns, which could be looked through in a few hours. As a rule, his visits were in the nature of surprises to the various officials ; they were only formally arranged for in the case of the larger workhouses. Every facility was afforded to him ; no hindrances were put in his way ; so far as he is aware, he made himself acquainted with every detail of the system as it applies to indoor and outdoor reUef, to the care of pauper children, pauper sick, pauper imbeciles. And at the end of his investigations — in which he was assisted very materially by the Chairman of one of the principal Boards of Guardians in the county. 200 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE who devoted many days of his valuable time to the purpose — he came to certain conclusions which it may be of some use to set down here : — (i) That the various officials of the Poor Law system, from the Guardians downwards, as a whole, perform their duties with thoroughness, and with much consideration and humanity ; (2) that the Union Workhouses are very well conducted ; that their accommo- dation is good and suitable ; and that the food supplied to the inmates is excellent in quality, and plentiful ; (3) that the arrangements for the treatment of the sick, the infirm, and the feeble-minded, are particularly good, and that medical supervision is thorough and painstaking ; (4) that the Guardians take special pains in considering the claims of applicants for instant outdoor relief ; and (5) that if improvements are necessary they lie in the direction of providing more occupation and amusement for the elderly inmates of the workhouses, and in exercising more discrimination amongst the casual paupers who present themselves for the night ; in this respect, one man should not be expected to eat the same fare and do the same task as another, nor should any task at all be assigned to a man who is obviously unfit to do it. The result of two side-issues in this investigation occasioned the writer much surprise. One was the discovery, after much careful inquiry, that there are comparatively few old married couples who desire to spend their last days together in a cottage, provided by the Guardians ; they prefer separation and the workhouse, on the ground that they will be better looked after. The other, arrived at after many attendances at meetings of Boards of Guardians, was that the applications for outdoor relief, and for immediate assistance in the matter of food, are by no means confined to what are commonly called the lower classes. Just as Charles Dickens's book, Oliver Twist, had much to do with the reform of our system of dealing with paupers, so two other books exercised considerable influence in our dealings of recent times with those other unfortunates, prisoners and lunatics. Charles Reade, in his novel entitled Hard Cash, exposed the iniquities of the private madhouses. REFORM 30I of which there were so many in his day, and his revelations and denunciations drew attention to the system — or lack of system — under which imbeciles were cared for. Until well into recent times the insane were shamefully neglected : the pauper lunatic was cruelly abused ; it was indeed not until the Lunacy Act of 1890 that drastic and satisfactory reform was effected. Since then the plenary and summary rights of the Masters and Commissioners in Lunacy over all asylums, public and private, have wrought a complete change, and those Yorkshire folk who are unfortunate enough to have friends or relatives in the vast establish- ments at Wadsley and Menston, which rank amongst the largest and best-equipped asylums in the world, may feel assured that due and proper care and consideration are given to them. But while reform in asylums followed fairly promptly on the heels of Hard Cash, and improvements in workhouses on those of Oliver Twist, it was some time before John Howard's book. The State of Prisons in England and Wales, published in 1775, exercised a similar effect on our general system, and transformed what were then rightly described as " hells above ground " into properly-conducted gaols. It is quite true that Howard received the thanks of the House of Commons for his labours, but no Parliamen- tary interference with the then existing system resulted. All reform of the far-reaching sort was hindered by the new method of transportation, which bundled men to the other end of the world for the mildest of offences. But other humanitarians, such as Mrs. Fry, Jeremy Bentham, and certain mem.bers of the Society of Friends, followed in Howard's footsteps, and transportation was eventually stopped, so-called model prisons came into existence, and the Prison Act of 1865 heralded the dawn of a better day. Nowadays our prisoners are neither starved nor beaten nor kept in chains — and on the other hand they are not allowed to drink as much liquor as they can pay for, as their fellows of a hundred years ago were when they happened to see the inside of York Castle. Nothing perhaps marks the difference between, say, 1800 and 1900 so strongly as that which is seen in the reform of 202 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE administration. Previous to the Reform period — which may be said to have begun when the fourth George was nearing the end of his scandalous career — Yorkshire was administered in something of the old feudal fashion. There was a High Sheriff of the county, and in some of the old boroughs there were Mayors and Corporations ; many of the rising towns, having no charters, were governed by bailiffs or stewards ; there were innumerable justices of the peace, and every village had its constable. But of capable, thorough-going, far-reaching, all-seeing adminis- tration there was nothing. Nowadays administration is all around us. Each of the three Ridings has its County Council and its County Hall — the West Riding governs its district from Wakefield ; the North, from Northallerton ; the East, from Beverley. They are veritable Parhaments, these Councils — only those who are members of them know what an enormous amount of legislative work they do in one year. As for the cities and towns, they have their own corporations, presided over by that ancient English institu- tion, the Mayor- — but in the case of York, Leeds, Bradford, Hull, and Sheffield he is the Lord Mayor. Then there are Urban District Councils, and Rural District Councils, and Parish Councils, and there is the Parish Meeting, which very much resembles the ancient moot of many a hundred years ago. These various bodies control almost everjlhing that has to do with the life and business of Yorkshiremen — nowadays a man is so much governed that he does not know he is governed at all — which shows that good government is the surest security of personal liberty. All manners of duties have devolved upon these various bodies ; wide, deep, full powers have been given to them ; they govern on the spot. In these times a man does not feel that he is being managed for by some vague power sitting in an obscure room in London ; he knows that what is being done for him is being done by men who know what he wants ; in other words, he knows that we are all doing for ourselves — through the men whom we put into office. Not aU of us ever take the trouble to consider what a fine thing it is to have a County Council managing a county, a REFORM 203 Borough Council a borough, a Parish Council a parish ; very few of us ever reflect on what these bodies are able to give us, what excellent reforms they are able to carry out, what improvements they are able to make as regards health, comfort, convenience, safety. Let us take one example out of many — water-supply. Neither our fathers nor our grandfathers were great on water. In the old-fashioned houses there are no bath-rooms. They had primitive ideas, our ancestors, aboiit drinking water. Many of them never drank water at all— many who did, conscientiously mixed spirits with it, to take off the chill. Nowadays we attach great importance to water. Our drinking water must be good and pure ; we must have plenty of water for our pri- vate bath-rooms ; we must have water, hot and cold, laid on in every room ; we must have oceans of water for the pubhc baths, the public wash-houses. And so it is curious to read of what was being done in such an important town as Leeds about a water-supply in the year 1815, when the population numbered about 64,000. Nowadays, when Leeds possesses nearly half a miUion inhabitants, it gets a plentiful supply of water from its great reservoirs at various outlying places, and notably from those in the beautiful valley of the Washburn, which runs out of Wharfedale into the open moorlands. No Leeds man of these times would ever dream of drinking the water of the River Aire, nay, he would not even wash himself in that water, unless he desired to imitate the ancient Britons, and appear stained and dyed. But in 1815, the sixty-four thousand townsfolk of Leeds did drink the waters of the Aire ; it was all they had to drink, unless they happened — as many no doubt did — to have wells of their own, sunk by their own private enter- prise. The water for the supply of the town (about seven thousand houses) was raised from the river by two pumps, which were worked by a water-wheel — a very ancient one. The water was stored in three reservoirs — one, near St. John's Church, was called the New Street reservoir ; a second, in Albion Street, was called the Albion reservoir ; the third, known as the Lands Reservoir, was near the Alms Houses. In 1815 this system began to cause some 204 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE anxiety to the authorities, and they called in the famous engineer, Sir John Rennie, to advise them. Sir John, having carefully considered matters, advised the purchase of a steam engine to replace the old water-wheel ; it should be of 1 6 horse-power, and its cost would be £3,000 ; he further suggested, in view of the probabihties of the town's expansion, that provision for a purer supply of water should be made, and he gave details of what might be done in that way, at a cost of £5,700. Doubtless these seemed vast sums to spend on such a commodity of such apparent cheap- ness, and there were probably many men in Leeds who frowned at the second item, little dreaming that within the next eighty or ninety years Leeds would spend no less than £4,000,000 in providing its citizens with good water. But that is not the present point — which is, that even after Sir John Rennie had been called in, the Leeds folk of a hundred years ago continued to drink the water of the River Aire, and would doubtless have been much astonished if anyone had questioned its purity. Now let us see what our reformed administrations do in these days as regards suppljdng the folk who are under their care with good water. Nothing is more remarkable in the whole history of nineteenth century reform than the attention which has been paid to water-supply ; even the sleepiest of small boroughs has stirred itself in this direction, and as for the great towns they fetch their water from dis- tances which to our fathers would have seemed prodigious. Manchester brings water all the way from Thirknere, far up in the Lake District ; Liverpool has laid hands on Lake Vjnrnwy, in Montgomeryshire ; Glasgow has appropriated Loch Katrine ; a few years ago Birmingham spent £6,000,000 in conducting water from the Welsh mountains to its crowded streets and mighty workshops. All these were great under- takings ; Yorkshiremen had one of their own, a typical example of the ingenuity and resource of modern engineers, and a good example, too, of how modern towns will spend money on sound hygienic principles, when the Bradford authorities turned to Nidderdale for a new water supply. They were already bringing water to their rapidly-spreading REFORM 205 town from Airedale, Wharfedale, the high ground about Denhobne, and from the Worth Valley, but they wanted more. A highly favourable area presented itself in Nidder- dale, at Gowthwaite, a district full of romantic associations, and closely connected with the early history of Eugene Aram. Here, a reservoir — which now resembles a natural lake so closely as to be usually taken to be one — two miles in length by a third of a mUe in width, was constructed, into which water drains from the surrounding hills, moors, and ravines. The water is carried to Bradford by an aqueduct which in certain places pierces the hills. It runs under Rain Stang, at a depth of 500 feet from the summit, for nearly two miles ; it runs under Heathfield Moor for nearly a mUe ; it nins under Greenhow HiU for over 6,000 yards. It has traversed nearly thirty-two. miles of moun- tainous country by the time it reaches Bradford^ whose authorities laid out close upon £1,500,000 on this one under- taking. Truly we have progressed greatly since the days when Leeds folk got their water from the Aire by means of an ancient water-wheel, and were asked to consider a new scheme which was to cost them six thousand pounds. Nevertheless, we must not forget that the River Aire, out of which no one would drink nowadays — south of Keighley, at any rate — has been made what it is by modern commerce. The rivers in the Yorkshire valleys were pure enough until mUls, factories, and workshops began to be built on their banks. Who that sees the Calder in these days would ever believe that salmon used to be caught plentifully in it ? — ^yet in the old indentures of the Wake- field apprentices there were provisions which ensured that they were not to be expected to eat salmon more than three times a week. The pollution of our rivers by trade has obhged the various authorities to turn elsewhere for pure water — ^just as the modern conditions of industrial life have obhged them to give heed to many other matters affecting the health of the great, overgrown communities. Through them, the State keeps an eye on almost every affair of life. Where everything used to be done in hap-hazard, careless fashion, the modern spirit of reform now does most things 2o6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE with care and in order. Even private houses may not be built save under supervision. No speculator may lay out a street or square according to his own whim. Sanitation has developed into a cult. Towns vie with each other in such matters as street-cleaning and street-lighting. If there are still sltims amongst our crowded centres, they are rapidly disappearing ; scientists are for ever experimenting in such matters as drainage and sewage. This is the era of local government, and it is not the least important of its accomplishments that it not only sends out one army of inspectors, men and women, to watch the doings of workers, but another to inspect the food by which those workers are fed. CHAPTER VIII RELIGION AND CHARITY One of the most marked and extraordinary defects of the average EngUshman is in his utter ignorance of the past, and his entire carelessness about the future. He cares nothing about what happened in his father's day, and less about what may happen in the day of his son. He is apt to believe that because a thing Is, it always Was, and will ever Be. Accordingly, when he talks about England and Englishmen, and all the doings and attributes of both, he means the England and the Enghshmen which he himself knows : it is beyond his powers to conceive of any England save that which exists at the moment, or of any English- man but such as he himself is. He is never so fatuous in this respect as when he talks about religion. " Look at Us ! " he says. " We are the most religious people in the world ; our land is full of cathedrals, and churches, and chapels, and even convents : we are so high-minded, and so wide-minded, and so tolerant, and so charitable in word, and thought, and deed, that we aUow, nay, we encourage, we foster, we make much of religious liberty, as one of the brightest gems in our crown ! Search me the world over, search its history, ever since there was a history, ever since there was a world — never, anjrwhere, at any time, will you find such a country as ours is for either Religion or Religious Liberty — I defy you ! " And such a man is neither a liar nor a hypocrite ; he is merely an ignorant fool, who would be genuinely surprised if you proved to him that ninety years ago there was no reUgious liberty in England, and that religion itself, so far as the English folk of that period were concerned, was almost dead. 2o8 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Ninety years ago — that is, in the year 1827 — a vast body of Englishmen lay under disability. The Corporation Act of 1661 was stUl in force. The Test Act of 1673 was still unrepealed. No Dissenter (in which general term are included Catholics, Protestants, and unclassified sects) could be legally married in his own place of worship ; no Dissenting minister or clergyman might enter a parish burjdng-ground to ofhciate at the funeral of one of his own people. No Dissenter, either CathoUc or Protestant, might take a degree at either Oxford or Cambridge. The CathoHcs were not yet emancipated. No Jew might be a freeman of the City of London, nor might he be elected to municipal office without incurring heavy penalties if he failed to take the oaths which no Jew could take ; nor could he sit in the House of Commons ; nor was he ehgible for a peerage. Outside the Estabhshed Church there was no freedom, no liberty. There were some, strange drawings-together in those days — they exemplified the truth of the vulgar saying that adversity makes strange bedfellows. In May, 1828, a meeting was held at the town-house of the leading Catholic peer, the Duke of Norfolk, which was attended by English Cathohcs of ancient lineage, by Jew merchants, bankers, and leaders of commerce from the City, and by prominent Unitarians, such as Robert Aspland and W. J. Fox. -Catholic, Jew, and Unitarian were united by a common cause — they were pariahs in the land to which they belonged, which they loved, which they desired to serve, and in which they demanded their rights as Englishmen, and their object in meeting at the Duke of Norfolk's, on this occasion, was to discuss the expediency of forming an association for the advancement of religious liberty. Such meetings were held in many places, and by men who felt keenly the cruelty and injustice of the existing laws. But alteration of those laws was slow. 1828 witnessed the repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts ; Catholic Emancipation followed in 1829 ; in 1836, the Dissenters' Marriage Act allowed Catholics and Nonconformists to marry in their own churches and chapels — by giving notice to the registrar of the district. But it was not until 1858 that Jews were admitted to RELIGION AND CHARITY 309 Parliament ; not until 1871 that Jews, Protestant Dissenters, and Catholics were enabled to graduate at the universities ; not until 1880 that clergy other than those of the Establish- ment were allowed to perform the rites of Christian burial in parish graveyards. The growth of rehgious liberty in England during the last ninety years has been gradual ; we are not yet the generously tolerant nation that we so confidently believe ourselves to be. To Yorkshiremen, keenly alive to all matters affecting the liberty of the individual, it should be of great interest to remember that much of Sydney Smith's bold and fearless work for Catholic Emancipation was done during the years in which he held his Yorkshire living of Foston. Theologic- ally, Sydney Smith was the last man in the world to have any sympathy with the Catholic cause, but he was a staunch and determined supporter of liberty, religious and civil, and in his Letters of Peter Plymley, and in his public speeches, he advocated CathoUc Emancipation as zealously as man could. More than twenty years before Catholic Emancipa- tion came, he declared in the Edinburgh Review that the treatment of Catholics in the United Kingdom reflected " indehble disgrace upon the English character, and explained but too clearly the cause of that hatred in which the English name has so long been held in Ireland." The clergy amongst whom Sydney Smith Uved and moved in Yorkshire during the years of his incumbency of Foston (1807-1829) were against Catholic Emancipation, with one or two rare exceptions, and the witty Edinburgh Reviewer had some smart passages at arms with them when he and they met at clerical meetings. " In March, 1825," writes Mr. Stuart Reid in his Life and Times of Sydney Smith, " a crowded meeting of the clergy of Cleveland was held at Thirsk, and on that occasion Sydney Smith made his first appearance on a poUtical platform. Beginning his speech with the unexpected declaration that he had never even attended a public political meeting before in his hfe, he proceeded in a genial vein of pleasantry to ridicule the childish prophecies of danger which filled the air, and to protest against the false and mischievous iio THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE assertions of a number of loyal but foolish Churchmen, who seemed to imagine, if any conclusion at all could be gathered from their language, that the Church of England, instead of being, as he believed, the strongest, wisest, and best establishment in the world, was the most fainting, sickly, hysterical institution that ever existed in it. If the meeting was determined to address Parliament on the subject, he ventured to submit a petition which, in deference to the opinions of others, he had endeavoured to render as moderate and mild as possible, requesting the House of Commons to inquire whether the opportune moment had not arrived for the immediate repeal of the laws which affect the Roman Catholics of Great Britain and Ireland. . . . His petition received only two signatures, those of Archdeacon Wrangham [a well-known man of letters of his time] and the Rev. WilUam Vernon Harcourt [son of the Archbishop of York, and father of the late Sir Wniiam Vernon Harcourt, the famous statesman] ; and an address of a very different character was adopted by an overwhelming majority." Sydney Smith's generous sentiments, indeed, found no support from the Yorkshire clergy of the Establishment. A month after the meeting at Thirsk, a similar meeting was held at the Tiger Inn, at Beverley, for the purpose of adopting a petition to ParUa- ment against Catholic Emancipation ; thither proceeded Sydney Smith to protest once more, and there, addressing his fellow-clergy, he indulged in raillery which doubtless gave considerable offence to men who had not much sense of either humour or fitness. " If you go into a parsonage- house in the country, Mr. Archdeacon," he said, addressing the chairman, " you see sometimes a style and fashion of furniture which does for us very well, but which has had its day in London. It is seen in London no more ; it is banished to the provinces ; from the gentlemen's houses of the provinces these pieces of furniture, as soon as they are discovered to be unfashionable, descend to the farmhouses, then to cottages, then to the faggot-heap, then to the dung- hill. As it is with furniture, so it is with arguments. I hear at country meetings many arguments against the RELIGION AND CHARITY 211 Catholics which are never heard in London ; their London existence is over — they are only to be met with in the provinces, and there they are fast hastening down, with clumsy chairs and ill-fashioned sofas, to another order of men. But, sir, as they are not yet gone where I am sure they are going, I shall endeavour to point out their defects, and to accelerate their descent." Try as he might, all Sydney Smith's strong common sense, ready wit, skill in argument, and power in debate produced no effect upon the clerical meeting at the Tiger Inn. Bigotry was still strong in Yorkshire, and at the end of the gathering the author of Peter Plymley found himself the only person present who desired toleration of other people's religious opinions. It is difficult, nowadays, to understand the mental attitude of these rigid opponents of what were, after all, nothing but measures of very elementary justice ; just as it is difficult to understand how no fewer than twenty-one bishops of the EstabUshed Church could find it in their minds to vote against the Reform Bill. If the Church of England of those days had been what it afterwards became under the enhvening influence of the Oxford Movement ; if it had enjoyed the love, respect, confidence of the people ; if its clergy had been zealous pastors ; if it had held up the example and pattern of a great spirituality to the nation, one could have understood, in some degree, its claim to exclusive prerogative. But it was in very little better case in 1830 than it had been in at any time since Queen Anne's day. Its staunchest defenders, either as a Christian church, or as an Establishment, cannot find a word to say in defence of its condition in the years immedi- ately preceding the stirrings which began in 1833. Mr. Gladstone, recording his recollections of that time in an article which he published in the Contemporary Review in 1874, said that the state of things in the Church of England, previous to the Anglican Revival, was " dishonouring to Christianity, disgraceful to the nation ; disgraceful most of all to that much-vaunted reUgious sentiment of the EngUsh pubHc, which in impenetrable somnolence endured it, and resented all interference with it . . . our services 213 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE were probably without a parallel in the world for their debasement . . . they could hardly have been endured had not the faculty of taste, and the perception of the seemly or unseemly, been as dead as the spirit of devotion." Those who wrote of these things at the time spoke with equal strength. " The Church, as it now stands, no human power can save," wrote Dr. Arnold in June, 1832 ; " the Church has been here for one hundred years without any govern- ment," wrote Archbishop Whately, a month later, " and in such a stormy season it will not go on much longer without a rudder." Men in high places began openly to threaten and to prophesy. Joseph Himie, the financier and humani- tarian, told his fellow-members of the House of Commons that the Established Church was " a body condemned by the country," and that its " charter was on the eve of being cancelled by the authority that gave it." Earl Grey, then Prime Minister, solemnly — and with something of contempt — ^warned the bishops to " set their houses in order." With the people, the bishops were as much out of favour as Prelacy had been in Scotland at any time since the days of John Knox. In some places — after the affairs of the twenty-one Episcopal votes against Reform — they were burnt in effigy ; at Bristol the mob went further, and burnt the bishop's palace over his head ; at Lichfield, Dr. Ryder, the occupant of the see, sadly told his clergy when parting from them at a diocesan conference in 1832 that he felt " a more than common uncertainty " about their ever meeting again. That the Church of England at this period was moribund is certain : the explanation of its evil fortunes may be found, perhaps, in a passage of a letter written by Newman in 1829, and in a sentence written by Dean Church sixty years later. " AU parties seem to acknowledge," says Newman, " that the stream of opinion is setting against the Chiirch . . . the talent of the day is against the Church. The Church party ... is poor in mental endowments. It has not activity, shrewdness, dexterity, eloquence, practical power. On what, then, does it depend ? On prejudice and bigotry." This was said at the time, and by a young man ; Dean Church, writing of the cause of RELIGION AND CHARITY 213 the Church's stagnation, with the added experience of many years, goes, perhaps, to a deeper and a realer explana- tion. " Men were afraid of principles," he says, " the one thing they most shrank from was the suspicion of enthusiasm." It is not within the present purpose to describe the rise and progress of the Oxford Movement, nor to tell in detail how its principles spread into Yorkshire. But from that Movement came the new life which manifested itself in the Church of England in Yorkshire to an amazing extent, aided, encouraged, and fostered by a man who was not precisely of the Movement, nor in the Movement, but who made the principles of the Movement known to the masses more than ever did Keble, or Pusey, or any one of the leaders of the Oxford school which sprang into power in the day when the Church was at its feeblest. The Church of England revived in Yorkshire when Walter Farquhar Hook came to Leeds in 1837. No Churchman ever did more for his church than Dr. Hook did for his in the great, unwieldy, growing Yorkshire town ; no historical sketch of Yorkshire in the nineteenth century can be complete without some account, however brief, of the big, rugged, many-sided man, who, before he left them, was loved by every man, woman, and child in his big parish, and was talked of with affectionate regret as " "T owd Doctor " long after his death. " The person who first gave body and force to Church theology, not to be mistaken or ignored," says Dean Church in his book. The Oxford Movement, " was Dr. Hook. His massive and thorough Churchmanship was the independent growth of his own thoughts and read- ing. Resolute, through good report and evil report, rough, but very generous, stern both against Popery and Puri- tanism, he had become a power in the Midlands and the North, and first Coventry, then Leeds, were the centres of a new influence. He was the Apostle of the Church to the great middle class." The condition of Church affairs in Yorkshire when Dr. Hook was elected Vicar of Leeds in 1837 may be summed up in one word — bad. Absenteeism and pluralism were still 214 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE rampant amongst the clergy ; there was little, if any, church feeling amongst the laity ; laity and clergy alike were permeated by a spirit of coldness and indifference. The services of the Church were performed in a careless and often irreverent manner ; in many places they were hurried through by a curate who had three parishes to attend to. The Sacraments were administered as perfunctorily as if meaning attached to them no longer : Sacrament Sunday, an institution peculiarly belonging to this period, and surviving in many districts for long afterwards, came round three or four times a year ; a clergjnnan who made it a monthly occasion was looked upon as a dangerous, possibly a Popish innovator. Nowhere was the general apathy more noticeable than in the great churches of the county — York, Ripon, Beverley, Selby, Howden, which had become desolate and neglected, mere strolling-places for the idle and the curious. Daily services Were unheard of : that any Christian should desire to say his prayers in these ancient shrines seemed to those who had charge of them a foolish and preposterous notion. Dr, Hook, in a letter to a friend, describes a visit which he paid to Beverley Minster in 1840. " Yesterday," he writes, " was Augusta's eleventh birthday, so what did Mrs. Gilpin and your humble servant but take her and Anna some sixty or seventy miles (a mere trifle, three hours' work by railroad) to say her prayers in Beverley Minster. The day was beautiful ; we went at seven o'clock in the morning ; saw the mud at Hull, a kind of northern Southampton, at nine ; and when we got to Beverley, there were no prayers ; but such a Minster ! York and Lincoln only surpass it. The verger, the great man of Beverley, told the Vicar, the great man of Leeds, that the living belonged to the Simeonites ; the Vicar (innocently) ' The Simeonites, who are they ? ' ' The followers of Mr. Simeon.' ' Oh, really, the followers ! I hope (very innocently) they do not pray to him ? ' ' Oh, no, sir ! ' ' Ah well ! tell the trustees that a Catholic priest who prays to God only, hopes they do not pray to St. Simeon, and wishes they would permit him to pray to God.' " Dr. Hook doubtless mystified the Beverley verger ; RELIGION AND CHARITY 215 most Yorkshire church-folk of that period would have been equally mystified by the suggestion that their magnificent churches were intended to be used on other occasions than the scarcely-attended Sunday services. Nothing perhaps better shows the utter carelessness which had fallen upon the adherents of the Church of England, real or nominal, than the neglect of the mere fabrics — cathedral, minsters, and parish churches were all falling into decay, and in not a few cases were being subjected to the vandalism which had already turned the ruins of the old religious houses into quarries for stone. A hundred years before the Oxford Movement, two notable Church despoilers had been at work in East Yorkshire, tearing down the fine old chancel screens and generally transforming the churches into bleak and barn-Uke structures — one of them was Heneage Bering, Dean of Ripon and Archdeacon of the East Riding ; the other was Richard Osbaldeston, Dean of York — and their work had been zealously continued ever since, and was still to be continued ; even as late as 1868, Archbishop Thomson of York did his best to destroy the chancel screen at St. Mary's, Beverley. Few men, even amongst the clergy, saw any beauty in the churches, had any affection for them, recognized any necessity of reverence for them, or in the services held in them. What Dr. Hook found at Leeds was typical of the whole of Yorkshire. Leeds, on his coming in 1837, already had a population of about 125,000. The parish included the whole of the town, and a good deal of its immediate surroundings. In 1825 there had been only four churches in the town besides the parish church, and nine in the suburbs ; these thirteen churches were served by eighteen clergy. In 1835 three churches were built in Leeds under the Peel Scheme, and were abso- lutely useless, for no one attended them. At the parish church the churchwardens were either Dissenters or men inimical to church interests. They were elected, as a rule, for the express purpose of controlling church matters in the interest of the Dissenters — Leeds being at that time a hot- bed of a peculiarly vicious form of Dissent. Dr. Hook came to warfare with them as soon as he entered on his new 2i6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE duties. " The parish churchwardens," writes the late Dean Stephens, in his Life of Dean Hook, " proved true to the spirit in which they had been elected The Vicar on his arrival found the surpHces in rags and the service books in tatters, but the churchwardens doggedly refused to expend a farthing upon such things. When they assembled at the church for a vestry meeting, thej? and others like minded piled their hats and coats upon the holy table, and sometimes even sat upon it ; but the new Vicar with stem resolution quickly put a stop to such profane outrages. He told them that he should take the keys of the church, and that no meetings would be held there in future. ' Eh ! ' said one, ' but how will you prevent it ? We shall get in if we like.' ' You will pass over my dead body, then,' replied the Vicar." But it was not merely with malignant churchwardens that Dr. Hook had to deal ; his great foes were slackness and indifference — and worse. " The whole number of communicants when he entered on his charge at the Parish Church," says Dean Stephens, " was little more than fifty, and amongst these there were no young men, and very few men of any age. One who had been Vicar of St. John's for thirty years declared he had never seen a young man at the Lord's Table." Far graver matters had to be dealt with in the question of Confirmation services. Up to that time these " had taken place once in seven years only, when a vast number of ill-prepared young people were brought together from great distances. They were frequently the occasions of scandalous festivities and improprieties, and many of the candidates returned to their homes initiated in vice instead of being confirmed in goodness." Not a Yorkshireman by birth, the energy with which Dr. Hook set to work in doing the hundred-and-one things necessary to be done in his new parish, was eminently Yorkshire in its force and persistence. He beat down, by sheer force of character, and by constant unassuming display of the qualities which Yorkshiremen most love — resolution, plain speech, and candour in action as well as in word — all the strong and even malignant opposition RELIGION AND CHARITY 217 which had faced him on his coining from Coventry. He secured the warm affection of his own people, and the deep respect of the Dissenters. He became a force in the town ; he was the best known Churchman in the county. Not Pusey, nor Keble, nor any leader of the Oxford Movement revived Church life in Yorkshire — that revival sprang from the doings of the big, red-headed, energetic man who was as much at home in talking to the working men of Leeds as he was in his study, busily engaged on a pamphlet or a treatise. Within fifteen years of his coming to Leeds he was able to point to some results — giving the credit of them to his people, who knew very well that all the credit was due to him. The parish church had been rebuilt at a cost of £28,000. Ten new churches had been erected, some of them at a cost of not less than £20,000. Seventeen new parsonage-houses had been supplied. The old parish of Leeds, undivided when he came to it, had by 1851 been split up into seventeen parishes, every one of them endowed ; the number of clergy had increased from twenty-five to sixty. Twenty-one schools had been provided with accom- modation for many thousands of children. But he did still more before he left Leeds in 1859, when he was pre- ferred to the Deanery of Chichester. His biographer sums up his twenty-two years' work in a few sentences : — " He found it a stronghold of Dissent, he left it a stronghold of the Church ; he found it one parish, he left it many parishes ; he found it with fifteen churches, he left it with thirty-six ; he found it with three schools, he left it with thirty ; he found it with six parsonage-houses, he left it with twenty- nine." And the late Dean of Winchester might have added that he left it the Hook tradition, which is stronger than ever — even after sixty years. The influence and example of Dr. Hook at Leeds, the gradual spread of the teachings and principles of the Oxford Movement, the improvement in tone and quaUty of the clergy, and the awakening interest of the laity in matters relating to a church in which they found something worth considering, after all, led during the middle of the nineteenth century to a wonderful revival of Church life in Yorkshire. 2i8 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE It began to be manifested in many ways — outwardly, in the building of numbers of new churches and in the restora- tion of the existing ones. York Minster was gradually restored between the 'forties and the 'eighties ; Beverley Minster was taken in hand by Sir Gilbert Scott in 1866 ; between 1861 and 1869 the same famous architect repaired Ripon Minster at a cost of £35,000 ; in 1880, the parish church of Sheffield, now the cathedral, was restored at a cost of £20,000 ; another parish church, now a cathedral, Wakefield, was under renovation for thirty years, and in 1861 its fine spire was completely rebuilt. In 1880 Sir Gilbert Scott restored the splendid old parish church of Halifax ; eleven years previousl}' he had built in Halifax a new church given to the town by Mr. Akroyd at a cost of £70,000. Vast sums of money were spent on church building and restoration in Yorkshire about this period, not only in the big towns, but in the new industrial districts and in the obscure farming villages. The restorations were not always wise or even in good taste, and many valuable things were often sacrificed and swept away by the restorers, but a strong will to make for improvement was everjAvhere in the air, and even villages began to vie with each other, as in the old pre-Reformation days, in preserving and beautifying their churches. At the same period a similar movement sprang up towards the care and preservation of the old monastic ruins, and nowadays, save in rare instances, men may no longer fetch material for road-making and farm-buildings from the fallen masonry of abbey and priory. In 1836 there was only one diocese in Yorkshire — the Archdiocese of York — but in that year the new see of Ripon was founded, to take in the great towns and rapidly- growing industrial villages of the West Riding. Since then two other new dioceses have been created — Wakefield in 1888 ; Sheffield in 1913. In two of these dioceses there are suffragan bishops in addition to the diocesan — York has its Bishops Suffragan of Beverley and of Hull ; Ripon, of Richmond and Knaresborough. The Church of England, therefore, possesses in Yorkshire a formidable clerical staff — RELIGION AND CHARITY 219 an Archbishop, four Bishops, four Suffragan Bishops, a multitude of Deans, Archdeacons, Canons, and Prebendaries, and, in its four dioceses, no fewer than 1,141 beneficed clergy, who are assisted by some hundreds of curates. It has also nowadays what, until 1852, it had not had for nearly a century and a half — the right to meet in Convocation. It has also its Diocesan Conferences, and a multitude of other organizations of great use and value, not the least important of which is the Church of England Men's Society, to which large numbers of Yorkshire artisans and working- men belong. Nowadays we hear much talk of the failure of the Established Church : it is difficult to reconcile the idea of faUur^ with the solid and substantial structure which has certainly been erected in Yorkshire since the days wherein Dr. Hook first came to Leeds — to find that zealous and thorough-going Churchmen were then believed to be Jesuits in disguise. With the increase of fervour and zeal in the Church of England came a similar development of energy in the other churches — of which Yorkshire possesses a plenitude. From 1829, when Catholic Emancipation was at last success- fully accomplished. Catholics began to come out of the holes and corners into which the harsh and cruel Penal Laws had driven them. In Yorkshire, Catholicism had never died out. Many of the oldest families in the county were Catholic in rehgion. In a few places the services of the Catholic Church had been kept up — in a very few without break. Mass had been said continuously at Hazelwood, the seat of the ancient family of Vavasour ; at Middleton, in Wharfedale ; at Egton Bridge, in Glaisdale ; and at Ugthorpe, on the Cleveland Moors. In every town of any antiquity, in not a few of the villages, Catholics existed — they belonged to all ranks of society, from the peer to the peasant. In spite of fine, persecution, often of violence and cruelty, they kept the Faith. They were continually being haled before the justices for non-attendance at the services of the Establishment. They paid their fines — over and over again — becoming poorer and poorer in the process (the fine was £20 for every month of absence) and 220 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE retaining their self-respect. In the Yorkshire Sessions Rolls for the year 1598 there are particulars of 121 prosecu- tions of CathoUcs for non-attendance ; in those of the West Riding for the years 1638-42 there are 156. Not even during the eighteenth century was the civil position of the Catholic much better than in the seventeenth and sixteenth. " The position of CathoUcs," observes Lecky in his History of England in the Eighteenth Century, " and especially of Catholic landowners, was always one of extreme precarious- ness. . . . They were at the mercy of their Protestant relatives, who might easily deprive them of their land ; at the mercy of common informers ; at the mercy of any two justices, who might at any moment tender to them the oath of supremacy. They were virtually outlawed in their own country, doomed to a hfe of secrecy and retirement, and sometimes obliged to purchase by regular contributions an exemption from prosecution." " Blue and red baboons," remarked Sydney Smith, " are better treated than CathoUcs. When a country squire hears of an ape, his first impulse is to give it nuts and apples ; if he hears of a CathoUc, his immediate impulse is to commit it to the county jail, to shave its head, to alter its customary food, and to have it brutally whipped. This is no exaggeration," he concluded, " but an accurate picture of national feelings, as they endanger and degrade us." Some measure of reUef had been accorded to EngUsh CathoUcs by legislation in 1778 and 1791, but when the great measure of 1829 was passed, and they were allowed to take their rightful place as free men in a state which was rapidly approaching freedom, they were still a feeble folk in numbers. To-day there are in England and Wales, of the Catholic Church, four Archbishops, thirteen Bishops (not including Bishops Auxiliary) and about 3,900 clergy ; in 1830 there were only 434 clergy, who were governed by Vicars Apostolic. In 1830 there were only 16 convents in England — to-day they are found in almost every town. In 1830 there were no religious houses of men^to-day nearly elU the monastic orders are represented. To suggest the existence of monks and nuns in England in 1830 was RELIGION AND CHARITY 221 equivalent to brandishing a red rag before a bull ; to-day there are thousands of religious in our midst, and the Empire is still safe. In the opinion of many of those who favoured Catholic Emancipation as a measure of justice which could not be kept back any longer, Catholicism was not likely to spread in this country — Sydney Smith was of that opinion. There was reason for such an opinion at that time. In Yorkshire, for example, where, as in the sister-county of Lancashire, Catholicism had never died out, the churches in any one of the larger towns could easUy have been counted on the fingers of one hand, even up to 1850. One hears of a church here and there — somehow or other, through some extraordinary favour, or for some reason which does not transpire, the Jesuits had a mission at Pontefract in the eighteenth ceiitury. But in many — or most — cases, the services were kept up in humble fashion, and amidst strange surroundings — not seldom in a room or loft, hired at an inn, or in a cottage in some obscure part of the town ; at the best, in a building which served as church and school. Little by little, churches began to be built ; some of them before Catholic Emancipation came. There was some excite- ment in Leeds in 1790 when a new church was opened ; there would probably have been much more if the folk of that time had been told that before another hundred years had elapsed Leeas would give a name to the diocese of a Catholic Bishop, and contain many Catholic churches, convents, religious houses, and seminaries, to say nothing of charitable institutions and schools. But the time of activity began after 1830, when, being no longer outlaws in their own country, Catholics began to build churches — there are records of these beginnings in the local histories. Knaresborough, quite a small place, builds a Cathohc church in 1831, and spends ;^2,ooo upon it ; it is a substantial building of stone, says Grainge, the town's later historian ; it will hold five hundred people — and it is self-supporting. Baker, in his History of Scarborough, tells us what the Catholics of that now fashionable resort did from some period in the eighteenth century which he does not particu- larize. " This body of Christians," he writes, " had its 222 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE first place of worship in the Apple Market, now King Street, and afterwards assembled for public service in a house in Westgate. They then purchased premises of the Rev. Cornelius Berg in Aubro' Street, and in 1783, having built a chapel, removed thither. In 1809 a more commodious place of worship was erected which would accommodate 400 persons. In 1858 the present Church of St. Peter in Castle Road was erected through the instrumentality of the Rev. Canon Walker, who for thirty-six years was the beloved pastor of the congregation ; the late Cardinal Wiseman preached the opening sermon." Here we see, duly set forth, the various stages, from the garret in the Apple Market to the fine church on top of the hiU. So it was, all over Yorkshire. But the real increase of Catholicism in the county, and the widespread building of Catholic churches and institutions did not set in until after 1850. The restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy in England by Pope Pius the Ninth in that year, and the secession from the AngUcan to the Catholic Church of a large number of prominent men, laity as well as clergy, about the same time, had considerable results in the North. The Yorkshire church extension and building amongst CathoUcs progressed greatly during the second half of the nineteenth century ; the original diocese of Beverley was spl^ into the two present dioceses of Leeds and Middlesbrough in 1879 ; large and well-appointed churches were built in the great towns, and smaller ones here and there in the farming districts ; religious houses were founded ; seminaries, schools, orphanages, and homes for the sick and infirm were set up ; at Ampleforth the Benedictine Order opened a college which has become famous as an educational centre. In Leeds a new cathedral has been built ; in Sheffield a handsome church bears witness to the generosity of the late Duke of Norfolk ; of late years a fine modem church has replaced one in Hull which had many associations for East Riding Cathohcs. And in Bradford, where Catholicism flourishes more, perhaps, than in any other Yorkshire town, several large churches, schools, and kiildred institu- tions serve as memorials of the life-work of a singularly RELIGION AND CHARITY 223 devoted and greatly-respected priest, the late Monsignor Motler, who was to the Catholic communities of the enter- prising worsted capital what Dr. Hook was to the Church of England in Leeds. Nonconformity in Yorkshire has always been a plant of a singularly sturdy and vigorous growth. It sprang from soimd seed. Its early apostles — often martyrs in some degree — were the clergy who left the Church of England for conscience' sake in 1662. Many of those clergy — " the most learned and active of their order," as Green calls them — were beneficed in Yorkshire. One such, Oliver Heywood, a bachelor of arts of Trinity CoUege, Cambridge, ejected from his curacy of Coley, near HaUfax, became the leader, forerunner, pattern, of the Yorkshire Nonconformists who were particularly strong in numbers and in influence in the West Riding during the eighteenth century. Fifteen years before the passing of the Toleration Act — 1679 — OUver Heywood received the Royal hcense to preach — a copy of this, taken from the original, which, some years ago, was in the possession of the Reverend R. Astley, of Halifax, is prefixed, in facsimile, to the second volume of He5n\rood's Diaries and Journals, edited by the late Horsfall Turner : its wording is curious and instructive, especially in view of what afterwards happened to its holder. Charles R. Charles by the Grace of God, King of England, Scotland, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith etc., To all Mayors, Bayliffs, Constables, and other Our Officers and Ministers, Civil and Military, whom it may concern. Greeting. In pursuance of Our Declaration of the 15th March, 167^ We do humbly permit and license Oliver Heywood of ye Presbyterian Persuasion to be a Preacher of the Congregation allowed by CJs in a Room or Rooms in the house of John Butlerworth in ye p'ish of Hallifax in ye County of Yorks for the use of such as do not conform to the Church of England, who are of the Persuasion commonly called Presbyterian with further license and permission to him the said Oliver Heywood to teach in any other place licensed and allowed by Us, according to our said Declaration. Given at Our Court at Whitehall the 25th. day of July in the 24th year of Our Reign 1672. By His Majesties Command, Arlingtpn, 224 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE In spite of this license, and of Mr. Secretary Arlington's signature at its foot, Oliver Heywood was not allowed to do his " teaching " in peace. He was persistently perse- cuted by the clergy and the magistrates of his neighbourhood, and he spent some time as a prisoner in York Castle. Equally persecuted were his fellow-Nonconformists of that period. But the Nonconformists were too powerful to be ignored, and in 1689 the Act of Toleration gave them a liberty which was denied to Catholics and to Unitarians — the liberty to open meeting-houses for public worship, and to register them under a system which carried legal protection with it. Within forty years some four thousand Nonconformist chapels were thus registered — a large number of them in Yorkshire. And though all the disabilities under which Nonconformists suffered were not removed until quite recent times, Nonconformists from the time of the Act of Toleration have always played a weighty part in English life — principally in two highly important and valuable directions, the fostering of education, and the strenuous endeavour for civil and religious liberty. There was a reason for the first — the ejected clergy of 1662, being deprived of their livings, turned to teaching as a means of livelihood. Being men of one university or the other, they were well equipped for their work, and the private schools of the Nonconformists became well known as the best educational estabHshments available in an age when the old grammar schools were falling into decay. To the Nonconformist love of learning, and to the continual and persistent endea- vour of the Nonconformist communities to achieve freedom in religious and civil matters, not only for themselves but for all their feUow-countrymen, Englishmen owe a mighty debt, and not a little of it is owing in Yorkshire. In the roU of names of Yorkshiremen who during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fought ceaselessly, bravely, in season and out of season, for the removal of all religious disabilities, for the breaking down of barriers set against progress, for the widening of opportunity to all men, irrespective of creed and class, and above all for the provision of education and of the necessary machinery for RELIGION AND CHARITY 225 the betterment of the people, those which are most pro- minent belong to Nonconformists. One has heard much gibing against what is called the political Dissenter at one time or another — but without his work the vast masses of our fellow countrymen would not be as well educated as they are (compared with what their grandfathers were) nor would a large percentage of Englishmen be able to worship God in accord with the dictates of their own consciences. If Nonconformity found a warm welcome in the West Riding of Yorkshire between 1662 and modem times, it was because Yorkshiremen, as a race, hate aU oppression and love freedom, and whether it be true or not that Non- conformity is dying out, nothing can alter the fact that for two centuries it did a work for righteousness which none else came forward to undertake. Looked at from a merely utilitarian point of view, there can be no doubt that reUgion, as religion, improved greatly in Yorkshire from 1830 onwards. So also did something which is supposed to spring from religion — charity. Whether modem manifestations of the charitable impulse have come from improvement in rehgious spirit, or from an increase of mere humanitarianism, or are the result of growing civilization, one need not discuss — the fact remains that charit^', and benevolence, and good deeds have been much more in evidence in Yorkshire during the past hundred years than they had ever been at any time since the Reforma- tion. The Dissolution of the Monasteries, and the sweeping away of the Guilds and the rehgious foundations, in the sixteenth century, robbed the poor, the sick, and the infirm of their principal means of help, and for nearly three hundred years httle was done for their relief by either the State or by private individuals. Here and there in the duU history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries one hears of pious folk whose bowels of mercy were opened to their poorer brethren. In many of our large towns one comes across ancient almshouses founded by such people. In 1643 for example, one Jenkinson founded an almshouse in Leeds ; ten years later, one of Leeds's greatest men, John Harrison, builder of St. John's Church, instituted his 15 326 THE MAKING OF MUDJiKM YUKKbrtiKi^ hospital for the Indigent Poor ; in 1737 another Leeds man, Potter, founded almshouses of a similar sort in Wade Lane. But these were rare instances of charitable dis- position in ages of greed, avarice, and general selfishness ; it is only in comparatively recent times that men have come to see their plain duty. And in all the story of commercial prosperity, no fact is more pleasing or refreshing than that the great magnates of our Yorkshire cities and towns, having amassed vast fortunes by their enterprise, were quick to share them with the people who had assisted in their creation. Most of our industrial towns possess solid instances of the benevolence and generosity of the Yorkshire manufacturers. We have already seen what was done by men like Salt, Holden, Foster in this way — but these are only three names out of many. There is scarcely a town in industrial Yorkshire which does not owe much to the men who made fortunes in it. Halifax is a notable example ; it is full of visible instances of the benevolence of its prominent and successful towns- men. Early in the seventeenth century, one Nathaniel Waterhouse founded in Halifax a hospital for the reUef of the poor; it was rebuilt by his successors in 1856. Another HaUfax man, John Abbot, left sixty thousand pounds to various charities of the town ; the Akroyd family laid out a large portion of their wealth for the benefit of the folk amidst whom they had made it. But the great benefactors of Halifax were the Crossleys. There is a Halifax tradition that when the Crossleys, father and sons, began the business of carpet-making which was to assume such gigantic pro- portions, the mother, a pious woman of the old-fashioned Yorkshire type, declared that if her husband and sons profited by their venture, the poor should not be forgotten. Whether the sons took this as a parental admonition to be kept in perpetual remembrance, one does not know- probably they did. Their prosperity came quickly : they hastened to share it with their fellow townsfolk just as quickly. Francis Crossley in 1855 built and endowed one big range of almshouses ; in 1863 Joseph Crossley built another, which he further enlarged seven years later. In RELIGION AND CHARITY 227 1857 the three brothers, Francis, Joseph and John, began the erection of a splendid orphanage for children of both sexes, planned to accommodate five hundred inmates, who are clothed, boarded, lodged and exceptionally well educated ; the building itself, a palatial structure set on the edge of a great moor above the valley of the Calder, cost fifty-six thousand pounds ; they further endowed it with three thousand pounds a year. During the time that Francis Crossley was Member of ParUament for Halifax he presented a park to the town ; Sir Joseph Paxton, designer of the Crystal Palace, laid it out at a cost to the donor of forty thousand pounds. Francis Crossley also gave large sums to the local institutions ; he gave one of ten thousand pounds to the HaUfax Infirmary ; he spent the same sum in estabhshing a Loan Fund for the benefit of young tradesmen just beginning business. Truly here was a hteral carrying out of the command Gratis accepistis, gratis date. As it has been with private benevolence in Yorkshire, so with public charity. Not a town nowadays is without its hospitals, infirmaries, institutions, societies, associations for the rehef of the sick and poor — most of them are sup- ported by voluntary subscriptions. Each of them has its history ; each history tells of the enormous effort made by the leisured and the well-to-do to enlist the sympathies of their hke and of the comfortably-off, and of the regular wage-earner on behalf of the needy. Recently, Mr. Richard Jackson, of Leeds, has pubhshed a deeply interesting account of the rise and progress of the General Infirmary in that city, which, as the author rightly observes, " indis- putably ranks first of charitable institutions, not only in the city but in Yorkshire, its age, and the work it has done, having won for it a reputation which the best hospitals in London justly recognize." Leeds General Infirmary, now a colossal building, sprang into being in 1767, in a house in Kirkgate, which was taken at a rental of £16 a year. Two physicians and four surgeons were appointed ; a matron was engaged at a salary of j^io ; a nurse was chosen at a salary of £5. The first house was soon found inadequate ; 228 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE a new one was built, and opened in 1771 ; seventeen years later, John Howard visited this, and pronounced it one of the best hospitals in England. Everything, however, in those days was very elementary. Some of the early rules are quaint and characteristic of the age. " That the patients be supplied with a pair of clean sheets once in three weeks." " That there be provided for the use of the lame patients half a dozen stools to rest their legs upon." " That wooden legs be supplied to all patients going out of the Infirmary who have need of them." Improvements, of course, were always being made, and at the end of fifty years of work, the committee could report many achieve- ments : over 40,000 patients had been cured, over 5,000 relieved ; 2,843 had died. Meanwhile Leeds had vastly increased in size, and it continued to increase, and in 1864 the foundation stone of a new building, of which Sir Gilbert Scott was the architect, was laid by a well-known Leeds citizen, James Kitson ; the estimate for its cost was nearly £123,000. This was opened in 1869 ; since then many additions and enlargements have been made, until nowadays the area covered by the various departments is an enormous one. But the importance of such an institution as this is best judged by figures — which also show how it has grown in the one hundred and thirty years of its existence. In 1768 (the population of Leeds being then about 17,000) there were 12 beds in the Infirmary ; it received 76 in- patients and 155 out-patients ; its total receipts by sub- scriptions and benefactions amounted to £3,010 ; its total expenditure was £469. In 1900 it had 440 beds ; it treated 6,071 in-patients and 31,961 out-patients ; its total receipts were £28,349 ; its total expenditure, £32,773. Since its inception it had dealt with — up to 1900 — 256,207 in-patients who cost on an average £3 2s. 6d. each ; and 953,500 out- patients, whose average cost was is. 6d. each ; it therefore spent between 1767 and 1900, £872,159. Since 1900 many important events have occurred in the history of this wonder- ful institution. A special appeal made by Mr. Charles Lupton, the treasurer, in 1902 produced £30,000. In 1905 £117,000 came to the management through the wiU of RELIGION AND CHARITY 229 C. S. Weatherlll, a Leeds tradesman ; a few years previously, a well-known Leeds man, Robert Arthington, had left the Infirmary £12,000. On the death of the late King Edward the Seventh a memorial fund bearing his name was begun — by 1914, ;£iii,ooo had been paid into it. All these figures and statistics tell their own tale — but the great point in the history of this and of all kindred institutions is that those who have done this and similar work have done it gratuitously. There may come a da}' in which our infirm- aries, hospitals, orphanages, charitable institutions will all be paid for bj^ the State ; that may be better for us, and it may be worse. But if such a day comes, the folk who live in it may perhaps look back and consider the voluntary effort of these days with feelings of admiration. Not the least gratifying feature in the mass of statistics relating to the finances of the Leeds General Infirmary, is the fact that since 1887 the Leeds Workpeople's Hospital Fund has provided well over ;^i30,ooo towards the work of that institution : a proof, incontestable, that charity walks, open-handed, in our public places. CHAPTER IX EDUCATION On April 25th, 1917, Dr. Herbert Fisher, the first professional educationist ever appointed Minister of Education in this country, rising in the House of Commons to explain the Education Estimates for the year, remarked that those Estimates do not and should not stand alone in our national spending. " The total expenditure in this country, in England and Wales," he continued, " may seem to be large. Some 16 million pounds are paid out of the taxes, another 17 millions out of the rates, perhaps some seven miUions more come out of fees, voluntary contributions, and endowments. This makes the large sum which amounts to ;^40,ooo,ooo. But it must be taken in the general context of national expenditure. It is eight times the value of the estimated saving of this country through the partial substi- tution of margarine for butter. It is one and one-third times the value of the annual expenditure on tobacco ; and it is almost one-fomlh the value of the annual expendi- tinre on alcohol. I have stated articles of luxurious expen- diture, with respect to which it is always a matter for us whether we can afford to spend the money. When we are considering a form of productive expenditure, which is not only an investment, but an insurance, the question cannot stand alone. We must ask not only whether we can afford to spend the money, but whether we can afford not to spend the money." Forty millions of pounds sterling on Education, in one county, in one year ! — we have travelled far since 1833, when the first Government grant for educational purposes was made, not too wUhngly. That was a grant of £20,000 ; EDUCATION ip it had only increased to £500,000 by 1870. One hundred years ago, no one except a few enthusiasts, coldly regarded by the folk in authority, ever thought of educating the people. In a growing town like Leeds, for example, there were no schools in the eighteenth century, except the Grammar School, and certain private estabhshments for the children of the middle classes. So it was, all over the land. If it had not been for the brave efforts, first of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, which estab- lished fifteen hundred free schools between 1700 and 1750, and of Robert Raikes, of Gloucester, who founded Sunday schools in 1780, the children of the poor would have had no education at all in the Georgian era — as it was, only a very small percentage of their number received any. But early in the nineteenth century two important societies, which were destined to do great service, came into exist- ence — each through the efforts of private individuals. In 1805 began the work of the British and Foreign School Society : it was a development of the endeavours of a philanthropic member of the Society of Friends, Joseph Lancaster, who in 1798 had opened, at his own cost, a school in Southwark, wherein he taught a hundred poor children. The British and Foreign Schools Society opened schools in many places,- aU over the country— the fact that they were undenominational, and that the Scriptures were read in them (according to the Society's provisions) without note or comment, occasioned alarm in Church circles, and in 1811, under the leadership of Dr. BeU, at one time a military chaplain, churchmen started the important associa- tion known as the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Church of England, which presently took over the schools already founded by the older Society for Promoting Christian Know- ledge. The National Society— and the Church of England, working through and in conjunction with it — did an immense amount of good ; between the years 1811 and 1870 church people laid out — voluntarily, it should be remembered — over ;^I5, 000,000 in education, and in the last-named year there were 6,382 Church of England schools in existence. 232 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Supplementary work to that of the National Society and the British Society was done, in degree, by the various Christian churches, Catholic, Methodist, Baptist, as time went on ; the efforts of Robert Owen, James Buchanan, and Samuel Wilderspin set up special schools for infants, and as far back as 1836, the modem kindergarten and other kindred methods were anticipated by the Home and Colonial Society, which in that year was founded for the purpose of training teachers to undertake the charge of young children, after the fashion introduced by the Swiss educational reformer, Pestalozzi. But in spite of all these societies, and efforts, and move- ments, education in England was a much neglected plant, which the State did next to nothing to water and develop. The House of Commons occasionally made niggardly grants- in-aid, and invariably insisted on controlling their laying out without any very clear instructions as to how the laying out was to be done. Always there were men in Parhament who strenuously objected to the expenditure of national funds on education ; if parents could not afford to educate their children, said they, let the children go without education ; if the parents could afford sixpence, let the children receive sixpennyworth ; to provide education for nothing, even to subsidize education, was bad in princi- ple, and would produce evil effects of a far-reaching nature. No vote of money for education ever came before the House of Commons in those days without encountering opposition ; one such occasion provided Lord Macaulay with an oppor- tunity for one of his most trenchant Parliamentary speeches. On April 18, 1847, Lord John Russell, then Prime Minister, asked the House of Commons for ;£ioo,ooo for education. An amendment condemning this proposal was moved by Duncombe, Member for Finsbury. Thereupon, Macaulay, at that time Member for Edinburgh, made a speech wherein he presented the House with certain facts which doubtless caused as much astonishment to some of his hearers as they do to those who read his presentation of them to-day. Having referred to differences of opinion existing on the subject of the debate, he remarked that on one point all EDUCATION 233 disputants were agreed — that it is the duty of every govern- ment to take order for the security of the persons and property of the members of the community. Could it be denied, he then asked, that the education of the common people is the most effectual means of securing the safety of property and persons ? " This, then, is my argument," he continued. " It is the duty of government to protect our persons and property from danger. The gross ignorance of the common people is a principal cause of danger to our persons and property. Therefore, it is the duty of the government to take care that the common people shall not be grossly ignorant." But what was the educational status of the common people — what, even, was the status of the men to whom such education as they received was entrusted? He pro- ceeded to deal with both these matters. " You tell us that schools will multiply and flourish exceedingly, if the government will only abstain from interfering with them. Has not the government long abstained from interfering with them ? Has not everything been left, through many years, to individual exertion ? If it were true that educa- tion, Uke trade, thrives most where the magistrate meddles least, the common people of England would now be the best educated in the world. Our schools would be model schools. Our schoolmasters would be as eminently expert in all that relates to teaching as our cutlers, our cotton- spinners, our engineers. ... Is this the case ? Look at the charges of the judges, at the resolutions of the grand juries, at. the reports of public of&cers, at the reports of voluntary associations. AU tell the same sad and ignomini- ous story. Take the reports of the inspectors of prisons, In the House of Correction at Hertford, of seven hundred prisoners one half coiild not read at all ; only eight could read and write well. Of eight thousand prisoners who had passed through Maidstone Gaol only fifty could read and write well. In Coldbath Fields Prison, the proportion . . . seems to have been still smaller. Turn from the registers of prisoners to the registers of marriages. You will find that about a hundred and thirty thousand couples were i34 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE married in the year 1844. More than forty thousand of the bridegi-ooms, and more than sixty thousand of the brides did not sign their names, but made their marks. Nearly one-third of the men, and nearly one-half of the women, who are in the prime of life, who are to be the parents of the Englishmen of the next generation, who are to bear a chief part in forming the minds of the Englishmen of the next generation, cannot write their own names. Remember, too, that though people who cannot write their own names must be grossly ignorant, people may write their own names and yet have very little knowledge. Tens of thousands who were able to write their names had in all probability received only the wretched education of a common day-school. We know what such a school too often is ; a room crusted with filth, without light, without air, with a heap of fuel in one comer and a brood of chickens in another ; the only machinery of instruction a dog-eared speUing-book and a broken slate ; the masters the refuse of all other callings ; discarded footmen, ruined pedlars, men who cannot write a common letter without blunders, men who do not know whether the earth is a sphere or a cube, men who do not know whether Jerusalem is in Asia or America. And to such men, men to whom none of us would entrust the key of his cellar, we have entrusted the mind of the rising generation, and, with the mind of the rising generation the freedom, the happiness, the glory of our country." Lord Macaulay, as Matthew Arnold once remarked, had his own heightened and telling way of putting tUings, and in most cases in which his opinion is in question we must make allowance for it. But there was no undue heightening of his case in this instance. One of the astonishing features of the debate on this £100,000 grant of 1847 is that the opposition came from the Nonconformist Members of the House of Commons, who had similarly opposed a grant in 1843. Mostly men of the Adam Smith school, they objected to State interference in education as strenuously as they opposed it in economic affairs. But the principle was already planted, and was growing, and during the next EDUCATION 235 twenty-three years it developed, slowly perhaps, but steadily. In 1853 the existing Council on Education was transferred into the Education Department ; three years later a Vice- President of the Council was appointed, whose special duty was to be in the way of responsibihty to ParMament for the allocation of grants. In 1858 the Education Grant had increased to £663,400, and soon afterward a Royal Com- mission was appointed for the purpose of inquiring into the whole question of elementary education in the country. In 1861 it issued its report, in which there were three princi- pal recommendations : — (i) That the existing system of direct payment of grants to teachers and pupil teachers should be abolished, and that aU grants should in future be paid direct to school managers ; (2) that grants should be conditional on efficiency, to be ascertained by strict examina- tion, and (3) that a portion of the grant should come out of local rates. In the following year, Mr. Robert Lowe, the then Vice-President, instituted the Revised Code which made all grants dependent on results, the best being ability to pass examinations in reading, writing, and arithmetic. The direct payment to teachers was abolished, but the third recommendation of the Royal Commission was not adopted. In spite of these and other improvements elementary educa- tion was still far from satisfactory in 1869. In that year, according to the returns, 1,300,000 children were being educated in state-aided schools ; 1,000,000 in schools which received no grant, were not under inspection, and were beheved to be totally inefficient, while 2,000,000 of school age were not attending school at all. And investiga- tion showed that the entire burden of education was being borne by 200,000 persons, whose voluntary subscriptions kept up the existing schools. A general feehng that an end must be put to this unsatisfactory condition of things spread through the country, and in 1870 the first great step towards perfecting a modem system of State-aided and State-controUed education was taken when Mr. W. E. Forster, Vice-President of the Council in Mr. Gladstone's Government of 1868-74, introduced and carried the historic Elementary Education Act, which has ever since been so closely associated with his name. 236 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE With Yorkshire, and especially with Bradford, the neime and fame of William Edward Forster are intimately identi- fied. Not a Yorkshireman by birth, he became at an early age so closely connected with the county, and such a promin- ent figure in its commercial, economic, political, educational, and charitable affairs, that his aUen birth was forgotten — all his characteristics, his s5Tnpathies, his qualities, were eminently Yorkshire in essence and manifestation. And though Forster himself was bom at the little village of Bradpole, near Bridport, in Dorsetshire, in 1818, he sprang from a Yorkshire stock; his people, staunch adherents of the Society of Friends since the days of George Fox, are believed to have gone to the South of England from one of the Yorkshire Dales. Forster himself came North early in hfe, when he joined the manufacturing concern of the Peases at Darlington. His association with Bradford began in 1842, when he and Mr. William Fison went into partnership as worsted manufacturers at the Waterloo Mill. By 1850 their business had developed to such an extent that they built large mills, and their necessary adjuncts, at Burley-in-Wharfedale, in which village Forster lived for the rest of his life — when he was not busied with municipal affairs in Bradford, or national and imperial affairs in London. From an early period of his career he was connected with great causes and famous people. He knew Elizabeth Fry, the prisoner reformer ; his uncle, Sir Fowell Buxton, was one of the foremost champions of the Hberty of the negro slaves. Before he was of middle age, he was the personal friend of Thomas Carlyle and his wife, of John Sterling, of Emerson, of Richard Monckton Milnes, afterwards Lord Houghton, and of many other people of note in the intellectual world of the day. A reformer of the best type, he devoted himself at an early age to a close study of social and political problems ; in 1848 he delivered a course of lectures in Bradford on " Pauperism and its Proposed Remedies." Two years previously, on behalf of the Society of Friends, he went over to Ireland, during the time of the Famine, distributing relief, and examining into the condition of the peasantry. A remark which he EDUCATION 237 subsequently made to Thomas Cooper, the Chartist, is significant, in view of the fact that Forster was afterwards Minister of Education in 1870, and Secretary for Ireland in 1880. " If I had to take a part in the administration of affairs in this country," he said, " I would strive to accomplish two purposes — to give lasting relief to Ireland, and to get the children of the working-classes out of the gutter by educating them." Forster 's public career began in 1861, when he was elected Member of Parliament for Bradford (unopposed) in succession to Sir Titus Salt. In Parliament, as Member for Bradford, he remained uhtU his death in 1886. Viscount Morley in his Life of Gladstone thus sums up Forster's qualities as a Parliamentarian : " Mr. Forster was a man of sterling force of character, with resolute and effective power of work, a fervid love of country, and a warm and true humanity. No orator, he was yet an excellent speaker of a sound order, for his speaking, though plain, and even rough in style, abounded in substance ; he always went as near to the root of the matter as his vision allowed, and always with marked effect for his own purposes. A quaker origin is not incompatible with a militant spirit, and Forster was sturdy in combat. He had rather a full share of self- esteem, and he sometimes exhibited a want of tact that unluckily irritated or estranged many whom more suavity might have retained." In respect to this quality — or defect — Mr. Gladstone remarked of Forster that : " Destiny threw him on the main occasions of his parliamentary career into open or qualified conflict with friends as well as foes, perhaps rather more with friends than foes." Forster's pubhc fife, indeed, was marked by constant fighting ; it would have been strange if it had been otherwise, consider- ing that he possessed in a very marked degree what Mr. Gladstone, speaking of him in the House of Commons, after his death, called his " thoroughly genuine and independ- ent character." But such it was — he fought with friends as weU as foes over Education ; he fought with friends over Imperial Federation ; he fought with friends over Ireland. But whether as Under Secretary for the Colonies in 1865, 238 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Vice-President of the Council in 1870, or Irish Secretary in 1880, he was always the same convinced, courageous, pertinacious man, cleaving steadfastly to the ideals in which he had his own strong personal faith. The Elementary Education Act of 1870 was almost entirely the conception and work of Forster. Although Mr. Gladstone was Prime Minister at the time, he had little to do with the BUI. " His responsibility," says Viscount Morley, quoting Mr. Gladstone's own words, " was that of concurrence rather than of authorship . . . more than this . . . his private interest in public education did not amount to zeal, and it was at bottom the interest of a Church- man." " I have never made greater personal concessions of opinion than I did on the Education Bill," wrote Mr. Gladstone to Lord Granville, four years after the bill had passed. Concessions had to be made. Forster was con- fronted with opposition on two sides. On one were the Churchmen, anxious about their own schools ; on the other, a large section of Nonconformists, headed by men like Dr. Dale, Edward Miall, and John Bright, whose opinion of the Education Act of 1870 was that it was " the worst Act passed by any Liberal Parliament since 1832." Forster had to fight, therefore, on two fronts : into the merits of the cause of this warfare we need not go, except to remark that the Act, instead of producing peace, only began a thirty-six years' war ; what is pertinent here is that Forster passed his biU into law, and that as regards machinery, opportunity, and provision, elementary educa- tion in this country was placed on a new and much firmer basis. Briefly analysed, the new Act provided that in any district, where, within a specified period, school accom- modation of a sufficient sort was not in existence, a School Board, controlled by the Education Department, should be elected (in boroughs by parliamentary voters ; in parishes by ratepayers) and have power to raise money by local levy for btiilding schools. It further provided that in all schools where rehgious teaching was imparted, such teaching should henceforth be given at the beginning or end of each session ; an unbroken period of two hours was to be davotad to EDUCATION 239 secular instruction, while in all schools set up and adminis- tered by school boards the religious instruction was to be entirely undenominational in character. Encouragement was given to the teaching of additional subjects, and the leaving age was raised to 13 instead of 12. Obviously, these provisions afforded excellent excuse for social war- fare : for over thirty years every School Board election produced a fight between Denominationalists and Unde- nominationaUsts — the Churchmen, the Catholics and the Wesleyans being, as a rule, united in the first camp ; the Liberals and Nonconformists in the other. Between 1870 and the present time, elementary education has advanced towards some stage of perfection which is not yet quite clearly seen, though it is beginning to be outlined in the mists which veil the future. In 1876 the power to enforce compulsory attendance at school which had been provided for in the Act of 1870, but not insisted upon, became generally used throughout the country, and at the same time the leaving age was raised to 14 — ^with the proviso that a child might leave at an earlier age, if it could pass a specified examination. In 1880 a new Act was passed which compelled school authorities to enforce the law as to attendance, considerable laxity having been detected. In 1882 the kindergarten system was introduced into infant schools, and the curriculum of the other schools considerably extended. In 1891, following the reports of a Royal Commission which had been appointed in 1886, , education was made absolutely free to all children between the ages of three and fourteen : in 1900 the system of making a block grant per head was introduced, and the set and formal annual examinations were abolished in favour of inspection at any moment and without previous notice. In 1902 followed the most important legislation since that of 1870. All elementary schools, of whatever nature or origin, were placed under the local authority ; in urban districts under the Urban Councils ; in boroughs under the Borough Council ; in all other places under the County Council ; thus the School Boards disappeared. Within five years, two measures eminently characteristic of the 240 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE age followed — one provided for the feeding of necessitous school children ; the other for the medical inspection of all children attending elementary schools. In 1913 the existing government began to hint at a new vast scheme of national education ; in 1914 the outbreak of war put an end to most schemes but those of a miUtary nature. But in 1916 an experienced and practical educational authority, Dr. Fisher, until then Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, was made President of the Board of Education, and from him the nation expects what he will spare no effort to give it. One reform the nation must make, and make ungrudg- ingly, if it wants efficiency. The great disgrace of our elementary education system at present lies in the payment of the men and women to whom are entrusted, as Lord Macaulay put it, " the freedom, the happiness, the glory of our country." We are at this moment spending well over £6,000,000 a day in war ; when war broke out, there were no fewer than 70,000 elementary school teachers in our midst whose salaries were less than £100 a year each. Secondary education in England was in just as bad a state as elementary education from 1536 to 1869. At the time of the Reformation, there was an excellent system established and flourishing ; there were schools attached to the monasteries, there were chantry schools, there were choir schools at the cathedrals and collegiate churches ; Mr. A. F. Leach in his English Schools at the Reformation says there were over two hundred endowed schools at this period. The Reformation swept them all away ; for nearly a century it swept out nearly all the learning that was in, or might have been brought into the country. The Edwardian and Elizabethan Grammar Schools did much to replace the despoiled institutions, but continued legisla- tion on behalf of the State Church threw their management entirely into the hands of churchmen, who were uncontrolled and unsupervised, with the result that by the end of the eighteenth century these foundations were notorious as being everything that they ought not to have been. Many schools were without scholars ; some had less than half-a- dozen ; all were neglected, dirty, ill-provided ; the masters, EDUCATION a4i a* a rule, were men who readily took salaries for which they were rendering no service or equivalent. Even the great public schools, richly endowed as they were, and patronized only by the aristocracy and the wealthy, were by no means the sort of places to which a twentieth-century Etonian or Wykhamite woxild care to go. There was Uttle that was better in the private schools — these indeed, a hundred years ago, save with rare and notable exceptions, had fallen far below the level of the academies set up by the Noncon- formists in the later Stuart period. In Yorkshire, a hundred years ago, the private school attained a remarkable notoriety, and though Charles Dickens did much towards sweeping away estabhshments of the Dotheboys Hall type when he wrote Nicholas Nickleby, many of them existed, and flourished, and were winked at until recent times — ^places which, under high-sounding names, were kept by men whose ignorance was as colossal as their greed was great, and who, had they been put to the test, would have been as sorely perplexed as to which was Latin and which Greek as the Tichborne Claimant was when the late Lord Brampton had the pleasure of cross-examining him. Over such places no Government has ever exercised control — some day some wise Government will sweep the last private school clean away — over such as stiU exist it is not yet in the power of the Education Department to exercise the rights of in- spection and examination. Nor did any government pay much attention to the old foundation and grammar schools imtil 1868, when the PubUc Schools Act dealt with several of the principal schools, including Winchester, Eton, and Harrow. In the following year, the grammar schools came under the operation, thorough and drastic, of the Endowed Schools Act, under which Special Commissioners were appointed, whose power was transferred in 1874 to the County Commissioners, who in their turn handed it on in 1899 to the Board of Education. In 1902 the Education Act of Mr. Balfour estabUshed, in supplement of the old granmiar schools, a large number of municipal and county schools, in which secondary education of a modern type is given, and to these girls are admitted as freely as boys. 16 242 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE In Yorkshire these schools are fovmd in all the principal towns ; and in the densely packed industrial centres, which are not yet towns in the legal sense ; they are even present in certain large villages. Not the least satisfactory feature of modem legislation about secondary education is that the grammar schools, which existed in so many Yorkshire towns, and had fallen into a state of decay and neglect, have been reconstituted, reorganized, and made fuUy worthy of their origin and traditions. It was only in accordance with the proper nature of things that technical education, once introduced into our midst, should flourish in such a manufacturing county as Yorkshire. Technical education may be said to have begun when the Science and Art Department instituted its examinations some seventy years ago, but it received no great assistance from the State until 1889, when an Act of Parhament gave local authorities power to raise a penny rate, and gave an annual grant of £750,000 for pur- poses of technical instruction. Now there is a Techno- logical Branch of the Board of Education, with a full staff of inspectors of technical institutes and evening schools whereat technology is taught, and in 1913 there were 6,876 technical schools (or schools wherein technical instruction is given) in the country, which were attended by nearly 800,000 students. Almost every principal Yorkshire town possesses its Technical School or Institute, apart from those in which evening classes are held ; there are at least twelve such institutions of considerable size and import- ance, possessing handsome buildings and large stafEs of teachers. They are supplemented by art and science schools and classes ; at Bradford there is a City School of Art ; at Leeds an Institute of Science, Art, and Literature ; at Huddersfield, art and science are taught at the Technical College. Where there was no opportunity for the boy or girl of talent a hundred years ago, nay, fifty years ago, there is now opportunity unlimited. Until recent times it was exceedingly difhcult for the son of a poor Enghshman to proceed to one or other of the only two Universities which we possessed previous to 1831, EDUCATION 443 Trae, many great and famous Yorkshiremen, who became alumni of Oxford or Cambridge, like Richard Bentley, and John Tillotson, and John Potter, sprang from humble Yorkshire stock ; true, also, that pious folk, of whom Lady Elizabeth Hastings, of Ledstone, was an excellent example, founded scholarships and exhibitions for the assistance of Yorkshire lads of ability and promise. But many a York- shire boy who ought to have been at a University in the old days, had no chance of going to one, whatever his promise, whatever his abihty. What was really needed in Yorkshire was a university of its own. In the eighteenth century there was some talk of founding one in York ; about a hundred years ago, one of the Marshalls of Holbeck was anxious to set up a university in Leeds. But it was not until 1874 that the movement which eventually resulted in the foimdation of the University of Leeds began by the estabhshing of the Yorkshire College of Science. This was done, by private effort, on a comparatively insignificant scale, and in temporary buildings ; it was not until 1885, a year after the Leeds Medical School had been united with the College, that new buildings of a handsome and suitable sort were erected on the edge of Woodhouse Moor and opened by the Prince of Wales (King Edward VII). In 1887 the Yorkshire College, in association with Owens College at Manchester and University College at Liverpool, was incorporated as the Victoria University. In 1903 this arrangement came to an end, Liverpool and Manchester being incorporated as separate universities, and in the following year Leeds received its own Royal Charter, and became the University of Leeds. But it is to all intents and purposes a county university, for though it receives a government grant of £2,000 a year, and a special grant out of the Leeds city rates, it has always been largely supported by the county at large, and has received valuable assistance from prominent Yorkshiremen of aU three Ridings. Its sister University of Sheffield, incorporated by Royal Charter in 1905, also sprang from private effort. A well-known Sheffield steel manufacturer, the late Mark Firth, founded in 1879 a coUege to which he gave his own 244 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE name and liberal endowments ; since its reconstitution as a university in recent times, it has been added to by the erection of a fine university library which cost £10,000. Each of these Yorkshire imiversities is designedly adapted to modern requirements, and each is largely given up to speciaUzed work in science. Before the vast changes in elementary, secondary, and university education of the last fifty years, a certain form of education, not of children, but for young men and adults, sprang up in Yorkshire and became of inestimable benefit to the working classes. This was foimd in the Mechanics' Institutes — admirable centres from which instruction and knowledge spread quickly amongst a class of people who were hungry for intellectual food. They provided evening classes ; libraries ; lectures ; reading-rooms ; no institu- tions more worthy of praise have ever been set up amongst us, for they did much — all that was done for many years — to supply a long felt want. Most of them began in humble fashion ; most of them were founded by obscure individuals who decided to give poorer men the opportunity of reading and learning. Nowadays, the Mechanics' Institutes of our large towns are palatially housed ; their membership runs into the thousands ; they have classes for instruction in a hundred subjects ; very often they have art schools and science schools attached to them ; they are, in short, the Poor Man's Universities. Not the least of their usefulness lies in their splendid reading-rooms and libraries ; in such a reading-room as that of the Bradford Mechanics' Institute, for instance, the working man may consult all the leading newspapers and weekly journals in England ; the libraries were in existence, and doing great work, long before the PubUc Libraries Act of 1850. In these things, and in the provision of first-class lectures by men and women of note and authority, the Mechanics' Institutes have accompUshed educational work of supreme importance and value. But outside universities, schools, and institutes there are other means of education — if one uses the word in a wide sense. Whoever has travelled much in Yorkshire and has kept an observant eye on its people, must have EDUCATION ^45 observed that Yorkshire folk are great and persistent readers of newspapers. Ahnost every small town has its own local joiimal ; some very small towns can boast of two or three rival journals. The morning newspapers are found all over the county by breakfast time ; there are comparatively few villages into which the evening paper has not penetrated by the time the day's work is done ; at the cost of a halfpenny, the agricultural labourer can read the day's news by his own fireside. And next year — 1918 — it wiU be precisely two hundred years since the Leeds Mercury sprang into existence as a quarto sheet of twelve pages, sold for three-halfpence, and published once a week — it was made up as a rule of cuttings from the London press ; now and then it gave its readers a httle local news. There was a break in its existence between 1755 and 1767 ; in the first-named year, its then proprietor, James Lister, retired ; twelve years later one Bowling revived the paper and ran it untU 1794, by which year it had attained a circulation of 3,000 copies. About that time, in consequence of the old stamp duty, which existed from 1712 to 1755, the price of the Mercury was ^xpence. In 1794 Bowling sold it to two partners named Binns and Brown ; they in 1801 disposed of it to Edward Baines for fifteen hundred pounds. He was a Lancashire man, who had served an apprenticeship to a printer at Preston and in Leeds ; he became a man of some note. He was Member of Parliament for Leeds from 1834 to 1841, and was an earnest supporter of factory reform, and of all movements intended to improve the condition of the working-classes, yet, like many of his feUow Nonconformists, he was a strong opponent of State interference in matters relating to education. During his busy life as printer, newspaper proprietor, and publicist, Edward Baines found time to write two works of considerable value and interest, a History of the Reign of George the Third and a History of the County of York. The Leeds Mercury continued to be a weekly during the whole time of his proprietorship, but when his son, another Edward, became principal proprietor in succes- sion to his father, various developments and improvements 246 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE began, and in 1855 the paper was turned out thrice a week — on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, its price to sub- scribers being sevenpence for the three issues. In 1861, the various taxes and stamp duties on newspapers having been finally aboHshed, the Mercury became a daily and penny newspaper. Under the care of Edward Baines the second — subsequently given a knighthood — and his family, and, later, during the editorship of Sir Wemyss Reid, it became a power, not merely in Leeds and Yorkshire, but in England. It represented a type of Liberalism and of Nonconformity which is, perhaps, now almost extinct, and eventually, in its old form, it ceased to be. For during the last thirty years of its existence as a penny newspaper, the Leeds Mercury had been confronted by a powerful rival in the Yorkshire Post. This journal, one of the best daily morning newspapers in England, is also of a venerable age. It was fomided in Leeds in 1754 by one Griffith Wright, and it remained in the hands of his successors until 1818. But it was then called the Leeds Intelligencer ; about 1830 it was being published on Thursday mornings in Com- mercial Street by people named Hemaman & Perring ; at a little later period of its existence it was edited for a time by Alaric Watts, who enjoyed a certain amount of fame in his day as a poet and man of letters. Eventually the venerable Leeds Intelligencer disappeared in the Yorkshire Post, but it was not until 1866 that the now famous journal came out as a daily, in the ranks of the penny newspapers. It is said to have had something of a fight with fortune in the early stages of its new career, but under the manage- ment of two unusually able editors, the late Charles Pebody (author of a History of English Journalism) and the late H. J. Palmer, it became a great force in the North of England, the principal organ of the Unionist party, a first-class commercial newspaper, and a source of considerable gratifi- cation to its shareholders. Wherever Yorkshiremen are found, the Yorkshire Post is to be found, too, and most joumaHsts will agree that it is not only a great institution of the county, but also worthy to rank with the Scotsman, the Manchester Guardian, and the Birmingham Daily Post, EDUCATION 247 which — outside London — are surely the three greatest and best-conducted British newspapers. Many of the other great Yorkshire towns possess daily newspapers. Bradford, in the Yorkshire Observer, which has only been so called of late years, and has been familiar to folk of the Bradford district for three generations as the Bradford Observer, possesses a first-class journal, emin- ently characteristic of the town. It owes its quality to its founder, WiUiam Byles, who was to -Bradford journalism and pubhc matters what the two Edward Baineses were to Leeds. The Observer has always made a feature of com- mercial matters, and its market reports, published in special editions on the Bradford market days, are famous in journa- listic as well as in trade circles. Of similar commercial importance in its own district is the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, founded by one of tvvo brothers, the Lengs, sons of a Hull bookseller and printer, both of whom became famous as newspaper proprietors and editors, and were each eventually awarded the honours of knighthood. Sir John Leng became editor of the Dundee Advertiser in 185 1, and quickly brought it to the very front rank of Scottish newspapers ; eight years later he founded the widely-circulated People's Journal, and in 1877 established the Evening Telegraph. Sir William Leng remained true to Yorkshire, and was fated to pilot his paper through some eventful years in Sheffield, where he and it took a very strong and firm fine during the famous and trying times of the great strife between labour and capital which are graphically described in the late Charles Reade's novel. Put Yourself in His Place. Of old-fashioned newspapers, published in the purely agricultural towns, Yorkshire possesses numerous examples. Whether they are of an educating quality is something of a question — but they are certainly full of information — usually of a purely local nature. One of the stiff est problems presented to the modern journalist who, at the beginning, or in some early stage of his career, finds himself in charge of a local newspaper, circulating in a purely rural district is — what to give his readers ? But he is soon convinced that his readers know what they want — that is, the class 248 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE of readers to which his special appeal is made. There are two sets of newspaper readers in the rural parishes; one set takes in a morning paper or an evening paper — it wants the news of the world. The other set takes in the local paper — it wants the news of its own and the next parish. Smart young men who wish to educate the rural communities through their Gazettes or Advertisers, and who publish leading articles of the college essay sort, and para- graphs which are meant to be clever and are only cryptic, soon discover that the news of a calf with two tails, or of a potato weighing five pounds, is vastly preferred. How to get at this class of readers, how to educate it to a taste for something better, is a perplexing problem which will never be solved until the last instincts of parochiaUsm die out. Those instincts are, of course, very natural : simple, unlearned people are much more interested in their own little world, than in that big, unrealizable world which begins at their own parish boundary, and few men are interested in what they have never seen. The rustic will read with avidity a mere list of names of men who have gone to war from his own immediate neighbourhood, but he will yawn after two sentences of a description of any foreign place to which they have proceeded. He cannot conceive that place. And some day, perhaps, some inventive genius will bit upon the idea of how to produce the perfect village newspaper, which will be all about the village, and its Hfe, and its history, and, above everything, about its true relation to the great world, and will lead its readers towards the idea of participation in national and imperial affairs. But that day will not be just yet, and for some time the educative power of the local press will be discounted by the taste for village gossip, and the full reports of the Petty Sessions, and the murder in Farmer Styles's bam, and the two- headed duck, and the paragraphs about the best gooseberries of the season — which paragraphs, alas ! are too often sent in by the village schoolmaster, as special and exclusive correspondent. The rustic folk are not yet under the influence of the book as mind-and-soul opener, but the town peoples have EDUCATION 249 been under it for a good fifty years — with admirable results. Not in all England, not even in Lancashire, is there a county like Yorkshire for Ubraries great and small. A hundred years ago, there were few books in it — outside the private collections. Books were to be found in the great houses of the country, of course — some of them at this day are particularly rich in books of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — and in the libraries of some of the earlier learned societies, and here and there in the country parsonages of book-loving clergy like Archdeacon Wrangham, whose house at Hunmanby was said to be packed with books from cellar to garret ; here and there, too, men like Edward Hailstone began to collect books relating to the county. But in the 'forties of the last century there were probably not as many books in the whole of Yorkshire as there are to be found now in one of the great Public Libraries of our big Yorkshire towns. Up to 1850, however much the poor man loved a book, he had small chance of indulging his liking. There were libraries, humble and Umited, attached to the first Mechanics' Institutes ; some of the churches and chapels had libraries of a sort ; the lending library of a bookseller's back shop, or run in conjunction with a fancy-work shop, was for the young ladies who patronized fiction. In the smaller towns, scarcely a book was to be had ; in the villages, scarcely one person in twenty could read ; books therefore were not wanted, except by the squire, who was satisfied with half-a-dozen works on sport or farming, and the parson, who had a shelf or two of worn- out divinity. In the opinion of the superior folk, reading, like education, was a bad thing for the people ; education and reading made them uneasy and restless ; it was a short step from either to RadicaUsm, and Chartism, and Atheism. This is one of the reasons why Tract Societies flourished in such poisonous profusion in the middle- Victorian age ; everybody who wished to keep the working man in a proper state of subjection and ignorance subscribed to a Tract Society. The tracts of that age were fearsome and wonderful productions, but a deep design lay behind all of them — they were solemn warnings to the poor 250 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE to remain submissive in the state to which they had been called. There were, however, people in that age who saw that the great, rapidly-increasing masses of the towns were demanding something more in the way of Uterature than tracts about temperance and pamphlets against Popery. One of them was WilUam Ewart, Member of ParUament for Dumfries, who in 1850, after much earnest endeavour, succeeded in passing a PubUc Libraries Act for England, the operation of which was extended to Ireland three years later. This Act gave power to municipalities to establish free and open Mbraries in their towns out of public funds. But the power to estabUsh was — and still is — a permissive power. Up to 1893 the question of setting up public libraries in towns was decided by the townsfolk themselves, who were asked to vote on it ; in many towns where such elections took place the ratepayers strenuously opposed the adoption of the Act on the ground of expense. And yet the rate — originally a halfpenny — is only a penny in the pound, which seems a ridiculous amount to spend on books — one penny in every two hundred and forty ! — until we remember that there are many people stiU existing who, of their own accord, never buy books at all, and therefore resent being forced to help to buy them for other people. And in certain enlightened towns, special permission has been sought and obtained to exceed the penny rate ; in less favoured towns the Ubrarian must do the best he can. Even now every- thing is not as it might be with our public Hbraries. One blot on the system is in evidence in more than one Yorkshire town. Some years ago Mr. Carnegie announced his inten- tion of presenting suitable buildings to municipahties adopting the Public Libraries Act. Small boroughs hastened to fall in with the suggestion, and secured the promised building, often a fine erection. But though the buildings are there, and the officials in the buildings, the books are — comparatively — wanting, and so they will be, as long as ratepayers are niggardly, and the penny rate remains as a Mmitation of spending power. This, however, is perhaps but a modern, and a temporary defect — it is pleasant — EDUCATION 251 and amazing — to turn to the great libraries which have been built up in almost every town and city during the last fifty years. When one reflects on the bookless condition of Yorkshire in one's grandfather's time, when one remepi- bers how utterly impossible it was to read books, to turn to books of reference, to consult maps, or statistics, in their day, one is amazed by even a casual inspection of the lend- ing and reference departments of such libraries as those presided over by Mr. Hand at Leeds, and Mr. Wood at Bradford. , And so it is all over the county — ^in Hull, and Sheffield, and Huddersfield and Hahfax, and Wakefield and Dewsbury ; wherever one goes, if one cares to look for them, there are books in scores, hundreds, of thousands. It is often said of Yorkshiremen that they are not book- buyers — ^but no one doubts that they are book-borrowers and book-readers. The lending departments of the York- shire libraries are always thronged ; the reference depart- ments are fuUy occupied, morning, afternoon, evening. Never was there an age wherein men had such opportunities for reading — never an age in which reading was so much appreciated as a means of education. But the free public hbrary is not the only municipal institution of an educative nature which the Yorkshire townsman profits by. Yorkshire is pre-eminently a county of museums : some of them belong to the municipalities ; some to learned societies ; some are of private foundation ; a few are business speculations — but they are ever5Avhere : your true Yorkshireman has a natural instinct for anything that is curious. That instinct has been seen in many famous Yorkshiremen. Ralph Thoresby, the great topo- grapher, spent much of his time in forming a museum of rare and curious objects. From a list of the things in it, one cannot help suspecting that the worthy collector was rather more prompted by a love of the curious than an affection for science, for he possessed the hand and arm, severed at the elbow, of the Marquis of Montrose ; and a round hairy ball, taken from the stomach of a calf ; and a sea-tortoise, ten feet in circumference. Thoresby' s private collection ought to have been carefully inspected, and 252 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE all his good specimens and exhibits preserved for Leeds, but his son and administrators threw much away as rubbish, and the rest became dispersed. Leeds had two museums a hundred years ago ; one belonged to the Literary and Philosophical Society ; another, kept by a man named Calvert, contained 15,000 specimens of birds, beasts, minerals, fish, and fossils. Always there appear to have been these store-houses of the curious, wherein folk strolled, open-mouthed and wondering. But the modem museum is quite different. It has now been taken in hand by folk who do not regard it as a source of mere amusement, but as a means of education. And the town museums are indeed centres of education : the work which they do, and can do, is wonderful. In the old days, few people knew anything about the places they lived in : to-day a man can visit the museum of his town and find out a great deal about its history. Splendid work, work which cannot be praised sufficiently, is being done in this direction at HuU. HuU possesses a system of Municipal Museums ; a special sub-committee of the Corporation attends to their interests ; they are in charge of a singularly able and well-equipped curator, Mr. Thomas Shepperd, a member of several learned societies, and an erudite and interesting writer of local history. Here the true lines on which a municipal museum should be run are firmly laid down — they are admirable lines. For a town museum should be a museum of the town : it should not be a place for the housing of the diplodocus and the whale ; it should show and tell townsfolk all that is possible to show and tell of the town's history, how it began, how it grew, how its trade expanded, what changes took place in it, what and who its principal folk were. This is the sort of work which is being done so well at Hull, and in certain other Yorkshire towns ; in time it will spread to aU the towns, in many of which, unfortunately, precious records of the past, price- less relics and antiquities, have been allowed to perish. Who would not give a great deal if, for instance, there had been a town museum in Pontefract, or in Beverley, or in Ripon, carefully attended to, added to, jealously guarded EDUCATION 353 dtirlng the last three centuries ! What a wealth of infonna* tion, what a source of interest, what an educating force, such a museum would have been, handing down to us of the twentieth, the treasures which had already been col- lected in the seventeenth century ! Not all of our City Fathers or Borough Big-wigs, however, are wise in such matters, and in many of our oldest towns little care has been taken to preserve ancient papers and objects. We are, indeed, richer in our store of antiquities of two thousand years ago than in our rehcs of the middle period of English history. The Museum of the Yorkshire Philosophical Society at York contains a wonderful store of remains of the Roman period in England ; at Drifi&eld there is an extra- ordinary and perhaps unique collection of objects taken from the British and Saxon burial mounds of East Yorkshire by the late Mr. J. R. Mortimer, who in his time investigated and excavated some nine hundred tumuli on the Yorkshire Wolds and the neighbouring moorlands. No Yorkshireman can plead lack of opportunity to learn something of his ancestors of the Saxon, the Roman, and the Celtic ages with these museums at hand, any more than the workman of Sheffield can deny that the late John Ruskin stirred him up to instincts of a high sort in arts and crafts, when he founded the museum which bears his name in the great steel centre. The desire of the Yorkshireman for knowledge and inform- ation is rarely better illustrated than in his persistent attendance, year after year, on the lecturers who appear at the various Mechanics' Institutes, Literary Societies, and under the auspices of kindred associations. Most people have no more liking for a lecture than for a sermon ; the Yorkshireman, however, is certainly a persistent lecture- goer. In the great Yorkshire towns, literally thousands of lectures must be delivered in any one year. The range of subjects is extraordinarily wide, extending from science and philosophy, art and literature, history and archaeology, to travel and exploration. Lectures capable of illustration are immensely popular, but a distinguished microscopist will draw just as large an audience as a man who has made 254 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE his reputation as an exponent of wit and humour, and an authority on social questions is hstened to as eagerly as a man who has discovered a new tribe in the heart of Africa. Simday afternoon lectures are well attended, and those who have made a study of working-class hfe in the industrial towns are well aware that excellent lectures on pohtics and economics may be heard any Sunday evening in the working-men's clubs, followed by debates of a highly- interesting nature. A lecture followed by a good discussion is, indeed, the Yorkshire working-man's peculiar dehght, and outsiders, who until then had known httle of him, would be astonished at his prowess as a debater, and his anxiety to thrash out the subject of discussion until it has yielded its last grain. Libraries, museums, lecture-halls — these are all sources of education ; the folk who frequent them cannot fail to be the better and happier. But there are still three other sources of intellectual betterment in Yorkshire — all particu- larly appealing to the Yorkshire spirit. Every Yorkshire- man loves a good picture, good music, a good play. And nowadays in aU our great towns there are municipal art galleries wherein are stored fine examples of acknowledged masters — but the finest thing about those galleries is that they also contain pictures painted by local artists. There, of course, lies their greatest value — in the encouraging and developing of talent. Far better to do a thing one's self than merely to enjoy the sight of what others have done — no matter . how much better they have done it. That principle applies particularly to the Yorkshire love and practice of music. Nowhere in England is there so much music as in Yorkshire — from the grand music of the Leeds Festivals, and of the Sheffield Choir, down to the music in the parks, the congregational singing in the churches and chapels, and the performances of the folk who keep a harmonium in the front parlour. Moreover, the Yorkshire lover of music is not only a good performer, but an excellent critic — ^which is why Yorkshire concerts are so uniformly superior. As to the drama, there is a movement afoot, and spreading, if only slowly, in the direction of Yorkshire EDUCATION 255 drama in Yorkshire dialect. It would be an excellent thing, a great factor in the educational life of the county if it spread widely — especially to the villages. Few things in the direction of wholesome amusement could be better for village hfe than the production of village plays in village theatres, written by village authors, and played by village actors. CHAPTER X THRIFT AND HELP Nothing can give us a better idea of how the people of our great industrial centres have progressed in all matters relating to social and economic welfare than a comparison of their present condition with that of their ancestors of a hundred years ago. In 1817 the working classes of England, especially in the new manufacturing districts, were seethed in misery, angry from hopelessness, rebellious through sheer desperation. Democracy then was indeed a many-headed beast ; each separate head showed its teeth. Mob-law was making itself manifest ; the propertied classes were in secret terror. An attack on the Prince Regent in June, as he returned from the opening of Parlia- ment, led to much coercive legislation ; the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended ; public meetings were prohibited. A Committee appointed by the House of Lords to enquire into affairs, reported the existence of numerous revolutionary societies. In 1818 insurrections of a feeble nature broke out in certain districts and were violently suppressed. The Government was led to beheve that its repressive measures had been effectual, and by 1819 there was some relaxation of them. But in the summer of that year meetings of the disaffected began to be held again ; rumours reached Ministers that secret drilling was going on, and that arms were being collected and stored, and in consequence of their alarming nature, a meeting announced for August 9 at Manchester was proclaimed. Its promoters — who, in truth, knew nothing about arms, and had only drilled their followers in the formation of orderly processions — deter- mined to hold it, in spite of the Government, and on 356 THRIFT AND HELP 257 August ifl eighty thousand men assembled in St, Peter's Field. The Manchester magistrates had brought together a considerable military force, amongst which were six troops of the 15th Hussars and a troop of the Manchester Yeomanry. An iU-advised attempt by the magistrates .to effect the arrest of one of the leaders led to a coUision between military and people, with the result that seventy persons were woimded. This affair, which speedily became famous as the Peterloo Massacre, led to the passing of six Acts of Parhament before the end of the year, all of a stringently repressive nature ; it also led to such a bitter feeling on the part of the people against the Government that the wonder is that revolution akin to that of the French, thirty years before, did not break out all over the country. The lot of the artisan was at that time a hard and a miserable one : how hard and miserable it is difficult for us of these times to appreciate. He had no rights ; he had no vote ; no one represented his interests in Parliament. When he was employed he was badly paid ; when he was out of employment — as tens of thousands constantly were — he and his family were brought to literal starvation. At any time, even when in full employment, he was badly clothed, badly housed, badly fed. His children had no opportunities of education ; he himself had no chance of improving his position. He was never able to save. He had no pleasures save those of a coarse and brutal nature. He had nothing of the many things which his successor of to-day enjoys — no free libraries, museums, art-gaUeries, lectures, concerts ; no parks to walk in, or to turn his children into ; he had no games. The State neither inspected the place in which he worked, nor the sanitary condition of the street or alley in which he lived ; dirt, disease, degradation were his constant companions from childhood. Forty years ago there were many old folk living in our great industrial towns who could remember the terrible days before Factory Reform was effected, and whose own stunted bodies and misshapen limbs bore sad witness to the cruelties of an industrial system under which children were put to work at an age barely beyond mere infancy, 17 258 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Far different is the condition of things to-day. It is true there are still many abuses. There is slum property yet, even in the most modern industrial town. Sweating still exists. Many problems have yet to be solved before Labour and Capital are adjusted in their proper relations to each other, and to the State. But the artisan or operative of the twentieth century is in a very different position from the oppressed and down-trodden worker of a hundred, or of fifty years ago. He has a vote. He is protected in many highly important ways by legislation. He has his Trade Union to defend his interests as a worker. He earns good wages. He lives in a good house — he has all the advantages of proper lighting, pure water-supply, and modern sanitation. His children receive an excellent education at no cost to him ; if he has a clever son, there is no reason why that son should not leave the elementary for the secondary school, the secondary school for the technical college or the university. A century, even half- a-century, ago, such a man had no prospect of anything but poor relief and the workhouse for himself and his wife ; to-day, many thousands of such men retire on modest but sufficient competences at sixty. The main reason of the prevalent standard of comfort amongst the working classes of the great Yorkshire towns lies in the enormous impetus which was communicated to thrift during the nineteenth century. We are so constantly reminded that the present age is one of luxury and extrava- gance that we are apt to forget that the nineteenth century was pre-eminently the age of saving. Never was there so much money saved in England as between 1830 and 1890. The taste for saving spread to aU classes. The bank, which up to a hundred years ago had been an institution exclusively reserved to the rich and the trading circles of society, gradually opened its door to the folk who managed to save something out of their earnings. But the first opening of the door was not done by any of the big banks, nor by the State, but by a private individual, and that individual a woman, Miss PriscUla Wakefield, a benevolent lady who, in 1804, estabhshed a savings-bank for working THRIFT AND HELP 259 people at Tottenham. Even in those days of commercial depression and bad times there were folk who contrived to save a little, and Miss Wakefield's experiment was so success- ful, and so many similar institutions sprang up, that by 18 17 Parliament took notice of them, and passed certain laws materially affecting their welfare. Managers and trustees were henceforward prohibited from making profit out of these institutions ; they were further obliged to supply copies of their rules to the local authorities. Further legislation followed in 1824, 1828, and 1844, when the Savings Bank Act was passed, and when there were nearly six hundred savings banks in the United Kingdom, with well over a million depositors, and deposits amounting to £29,504,861. Some idea of the business done by these banks in those days may be gained from the fact that, in a small town like Knaresborough, the deposits at the Knares- borough and Claro Savings Bank in 1836 amounted to nearly ninety thousand pounds. Nevertheless, that very little time was required to transact this class of business would appear from the other fact that the Leeds, Sk5Tack, and Morley Savings Bank, in Leeds, was only open on two days a week — Tuesdays and Saturdays— for an hour and a half each day. These trustee savings banks were highly useful institutions when they had the field to themselves, but an enormous impetus to thrift was given in 1861 when the GoT/ernment estabUshed the Post Office Savings Bank. Sine? then the two classes of banks have gone on side by side, each with its own particular set of business, and in both trustee savings banks and post office banks the number of depositors and the amounts deposited have steadily increased. The statistics relating to each prove what a vast increase in .thrift there has been since Miss Priscilla Wakefield founded her modest establishment a hundred years ago. In 1912 there were, in the Post Office Savings Banks, 8,868,008 accounts open at the end of the year ; £50,708,852 had been deposited during the year ; and the total amount due to depositors was £182,104,564. At the end of the same year 1,870,510 accounts were open in the trustee savings banks ; the deposits for the year amounted 26o THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE to £14,752,145; and there was owing to depositors £53,811,899. It is a reasonable thing to suppose that the very large majority of the depositors in these two classes of savings banks are wage-earning people — their savings in these banks alone, then, at the end of 1912, amounted to no less than £235,916,463. Yorkshiremen can claim a considerable portion of this huge sum — but the savings of a Yorkshireman, of the wage- earning and small-salaried classes, are invested in other institutions, as well as in the trustee and post office banks. For some reason or other- — probably because he is not only what is called in the North house-proud, but is keenly desirous of living in a house of his own — the modern York- shireman has always cherished a great fondness for building societies. The building society, to such a man, presents various great advantages. Every member may in course of time become his own landlord. An excellent return is made on the investment of small amounts of capital : loans are made upon mortgage of personal and real estate. In some of the greater Yorkshire towns, the building society as an investing institution is preferred above everything else of like nature. Bradford, in particular, has long been famous for its building societies. Such societies, of an elementary nature, had been in existence some years before the first Bradford society was founded — there was one at Birmingham, for example, in 1781, and another at Greenwich in 1809 — but the Bradford Union Building Society, formed at the private house of Thomas Holroyd in Ebenezer Street, in January, 1823, and registered in the following year, was one of the earliest and principal associations founded before 1836, in which year Parliament took these societies under its fostering care and protection. The provisions of this society, set out in its first rule, explain the ideas and ambitions of its founders, who were all probably of humble sort : " Resolved that we, whose names are hereunto subscribed, do form ourselves into a Society, and by the contribution of our savings to one common fund, and on the principle of mutual insurance for the maintenance and assistance of ourselves, wives, and children in sickness, THRIFT AND HELP 261 infancy, advanced age, or any other natural state or con- tingency, we do hereby undertake to build thirty-three cottages or dwelling-houses." Each member was to pay half-a-guinea every four weeks. Members were not to withdraw their money. The houses, alike in size, were to be balloted for amongst the members previous to election ; the rents were to be uniform, and were to be paid into the Society's funds. These houses were conveyed to their owners in 1833— but before that time several other societies had sprung up in the town : Bradford, indeed, seemed to be devoting itself to building societies as zealously as specu- lators were to the first railway shares. Seven new societies were founded in 1825. In 1838, after the recognition of these societies by Parhament, the Bradford Improved Commercial came into existence, and, according to the rules, paid its book-keeper " a salary of 24 shillings a year," and laid upon each member an injunction " to spend four- pence per month in liquor " — presumably for the good of the bouse at the Crown Inn in Ivegate, where the meetings were held. In 1846 the first of the Equitable Societies for which Bradford is famous came into being under the title of the Bradford Equitable Building and Investment Society, its object being to enable shareholders " to purchase free- hold or leasehold property, or to pay off mortgages on property." This, hke all the previous societies, was estab- lished on the terminating principle — which means that its work was to terminate at a fixed date, or when a result duly set out in the rules was achieved. The Bradford Second Equitable Building Society, founded in August, 1851, was the first to adopt the permanent principle ; it has been a remarkably successful corporation, and in 1909 ranked eighth in the building societies of the United King- dom. In 1854 the Bradford Third Equitable was estab- lished, and its original prospectus shows how building societies had come to be regarded ; the aims of the first Bradford society had been mainly restricted to the erection of houses for members ; the objects of the Third Equitable were more ambitious. Setting out the great advantages of the Societies " in encouraging provident habits and assist- 262 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE ing the industrious classes to improve their social position," it specified its own special work as : (i) the erection or purchase of property or paying off of mortgages ; (2) " to enable parties to accumulate tjieir savings monthly, with perfect safety, and to withdraw the same at a month's notice, with 5 per cent, compound interest, according to the tables. A fund may thus be provided for sickness or old age, for apprenticing children, to emigrate, to furnish a house . . . " ; (3) to afford trade, sick, and other societies and persons having funds to invest, the means of investing them with safety at four per cent., to be paid half-yearly and with no deduction. One begins to understand from these rules why the Yorkshire working man infinitely prefers the Building Society to the savings bank — investments at five per cent, compound interest, and four per cent, without deduction, and each " with safety " are not to be despised. Little wonder that by 1861 the assets of the Bradford Third Equitable Building Society amounted to £108,985, that by 1871 it had to be housed in big offices, and that from 1875 onwards, in which year it was incor- porated under the Building Societies Act of 1874, it pro- gressed and developed so rapidly that it has for some years ranked as the foremost Building Society in the United Kingdom. One of the chief mainstays of the Bradford Third Equit- able Building Society, an original founder. President for sixteen years, a joint-secretary for twelve, was the late J. A. Binns, who did such valuable work in connection with it, and with other movements and associations intended for the benefit of the people, that he is certainly entitled to remembrance as a pioneer in the modem development of Yorkshire. Born at Bingley in 1826, and educated at a well-known school in that town, he was almost all his life associated professionally with the Bradford County Court, where he was Examiner of Accounts until 1853, when the Board of Trade appointed him Official Receiver in Bank- ruptcy. A man of considerable poetic gifts, he frequently contributed striking verses to the Spectator, and he did much literary work in connection with Chambers's Encyclopadia, THRIFT AND HELP 263 for which he wrote the articles on Chartism, Socialism, Trade Unions, Friendly Societies, and Savings Banks. On the work of building societies he was an acknowledged authority ; in 1859 he addressed the Social Science Con- gress, which met in Bradford that year, on the aims and objects of the societies, and in 1873 read a paper on the same subject before the British Association. Deeply interested in art and literature, he did very valuable work in connection with the Public Library and the Art Gallery of Bradford, where he was Chairman of the Library Com- mittee of the Town Council for many years. From the old Burial Club in which the Friendly Society had its origin, to the modern Approved Society, which helps to achninister the National Health Insurance Act of our own day, is a long step. Small local, voluntary associa- tions, not unlike the old Church guilds in their nature and work, seem to have been in existence as far back as two hundred years ago, in certain towns and districts, but the Friendly Societies of modern times assumed their present importance during the nineteenth century. There were so many of them in existence by 1870 that the Royal Com- mission's report of that year divided them into no less than thirteen separate classes ; by 1910 there were over 35,000 registered and unregistered societies ; the total member- ship was nearly 20,000,000 and the accumulated funds were over £200,000,000. When the National Health Insur- ance Act was passed, the more important of these various associations became Approved Societies (societies with memberships of not less than five thousand, and not carried on for profit, or where the membership, being less than five thousand, a society is associated with other societies, of Uke membership, in a group) and by them, acting under State supervision, the provisions of the Act are being carried out. The Friendly Society, then, is now a quasi- State institution, and has assumed a new phase of activity. Its value and usefulness have been widened and deepened ; how much, one may see by a comparison of what the member of a village club meeting at the Grey Goose in the old days received in benefit, with what members of the approved 264 THE MAKING OK MOUEKN YUKKSHlKC, societies, and the people who are known as deposit contri- butors under the Act, receive to-day. The rustic beneficiary got from his lodge or club a few shillings a week when he was ill ; his widow received a few pounds when he died ; other benefits he got none ; he and his were thankful enough for these slender mercies. To-day, under the pro- visions of the National Health Insurance Act, administered through the approved societies or otherwise, men and women, beneficiaries, get medical treatment, medicine, medical appliances ; benefits in sickness and in disable- ment, while a maternity benefit is available to single as well as to married women. Special provision is made for sufferers from tuberculosis, for whom sanatoria are pro- vided ; if such have relations dependent upon them, the sickness benefit is applied to their relief. So much results from State aid, worked through the approved societies ; but the friendly societies themselves have other benefits and principles for their members. The modern working man has long recognized the value of these organizations, as is proved by the fact that the famous Manchester Unity, founded in 18 10, had, exactly a hundred years later, an adult membership of 890,000 and funds amounting to £15,000,000, while another celebrated society, the Ancient Order of Foresters, established in 1834, had in 1910 a total membership of 1,250,000 and funds aggregating nearly £10,000,000. All this, radically analysed, means saving and thrift on the part of the working-man : the times have indeed changed since artisans, operatives, labourers, met at Birmingham and in Manchester to proclaim that they not only had no chance to save, but scarcely bread enough for their hungry children. Closely allied with the work of the building societies and the friendly societies so far as all these make for thrift is that of the life insurance societies which specially arrange the inclusion of the industrial classes. It would be highly interesting to know how many working men were insured under the rules and provisions of any life insurance society a century ago — the number must have been infinitesimal. But during the last half-century definitely industrial life THRIFT AND HELP 265 insurance companies have come into existence, and the life-funds of seven of them amount, combined, to no less than close upon £60,000,000, while the Ufe premium incomes represent a sum of nearly £17,500,000. One of these companies, the industrial branch of the Prudential Assur- ance Company, established in 1848, and having a vast business in Yorkshire, is responsible for the larger share in these figures — its life funds amount to over £43,000,000, and its hfe premium income to £8,500,000. In this, as in the other industrial companies, the system is one peculiarly fitted to working-class requirements ; instead of the pre- miums being paid yearly, half-yearly, or quarterly, as in the case of the ordinary societies, they are collected weekly, at the policy-holder's door, by agents, and policies for such small sums as £20 and £10 are granted. Nowadays, in the great industrial towns, there are few working men who do not hold some policy in one or other of these societies. Provided for alike by his own thrift, and by State aid, in these matters of life, death, and sickness, the modern working man has yet still further advantages arising from what one may call the latter-day Gospel of Help. The fierce, unlovely spirit of isolated individualism in life, though not dead, is gradually dying ; men are beginning to believe really and truly that union is strength, that combination has vast uses, and that a man who helps his fellows is, in very truth, helping himself. No greater event in the whole history of thrift and help in England has ever happened than when Co-operation sprang into being — curiously enough at that period which has been so aptly called the Hungry 'Forties. As far back as 1799 Robert Owen made the first attempt at co-operative work by estabUshing certain cotton-mills at New Lanark, and for nearly thirty years the experiment was highly successful, and was imitated, with varpng degrees of success in other places. Owen's theories, however, broke down in practice, chiefly owing to religious and political differences amongst his followers, and by 1830, these first attempts at co-operation had come to an end. The modern co-operative movement began in 1844, when twenty-eight weavers of Rochdale,. 266 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE calling themselves the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers, founded a small stores on the now well-known — and well- tried — principle. Their method was simple. Each of the twenty-eight found £i as capital. With the combined capital of £28 they bought goods — the sort of food wanted by themselves. Then they bought their supplies, each according to his necessities, from themselves, and divided the profits in proportion to the purchases. A humble beginning — but that society is still in existence ; its member- ship has spread from 28 to over 16,000 ; its annual turn- over exceeds £500,000. Its name was happily chosen — these Rochdale weavers were indeed the pioneers of a great movement, which has well kept the spirit of its motto, " Each for All and All for Each." Some idea of the vastness of the results in these islands may be gained from the statistics for 1913. In that year 1,520 separate societies made returns to the Co-operative Union of Great Britain and Ireland, which was founded in 1869, just twenty-iive years after the humble beginnings at Rochdale. The aggregate membership was 2,876,892. The total capital was ;f56,495,529. The total sales for the year amounted to £122,885,411. The profits were £13,289,306. The number of persons employed was 135,190. These statistics are amazing — but there are more. In 1863 a federation of co-operative societies was established under the title of the English Co-operative Wholesale Society, for the purpose of producing and suppljdng the goods necessary for the retail stores. In 1864 its sales were represented by the sum of £51,000 ; in 1885 these had grown to £4,675,371 ; in the March- June quarter of 1913 they reached £9,632,893. This society has its own bank, its own factories, its own fleet of steamers ; it is allied with a similar Scottish society which was founded in 1869. All these figures and facts are significant ; if Co-operation has not, perhaps, become the political and social force which some of its earliest supporters desired it to be, and if there are stiU differences amongst its leaders on certain points of management, it has achieved tremendous results in the making for thrift, for self-help, and for mutual assistance. In Yorkshire it THRIFT AND HELP 267 has always had widespread support ; in one town, Keighley, the population of which is 43,000, no less than 12,500 people belong to the Co-operative societies established there. Co-partnership in industry is, in comparison with co- operation in supply, still in its infancy, but since it began, some fifty years ago, it has had a special connection with Yorkshire. In 1865, Henry Briggs & Son, colliery pro- prietors, at Whitwood, near Leeds, made the first serious attempt to estabHsh a system of profit-sharing with employees. Converting their business into a joint-stock, limited liability company, they offered one-third of the shares to the public, with preference to their own customers, officials, and workmen, and with a special inducement of a specified bonus to the two last. This experiment, which was watched with great interest by economists, worked very successfully for some years, but in 1872 trouble arose with the Miners' Union ; disputes followed on details of management a little later, and in 1875 a strike brought the venture to an end. Nevertheless, it had had certain satisfactory results, and had shown the way to other pioneers of the co-partnership movement. Other Yorkshire ven- tures, begun some years later, have been much more success- ful. In 1884 Messrs. Blundell, Spence & Company, of Hull, founded a cash-bonus system of profit-sharing with their workmen, two-thirds of whom share to the average extent of three per cent, on their yearly wages, while a large number of such participants have invested their profits in the company's shares. In 1886 Mr. George Thomson, proprietor of a worsted business of long standing at Hudders- field, began an experiment which has been highly successful. According to an account furnished in the Board of Trade Report on " Profit-Sharing and Labour Co-Partnership in the United Kingdom " (19 12) Mr. Thomson in that year converted his business, up to then known as William Thomson & Sons, into a society, registered under the Indus- trial and Provident Society's Act. The share capital of this is ;fi3,ooo, of which about £4,000 is held by retail Co-operative Societies, ;^3,ooo by the society's employees, and the balance by private investors. Of the loan capital 268 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE of £13,000, £11,000 is held by the founder ; £2,000 is in the hands of certain Trades Unions. After five per cent, has been paid on share and loan capital, the surplus profit is divided into two equal parts — one-half goes to customers in proportion to purchases ; the other half to workmen in proportion to wages. The founder is manager for life, assisted by a committee drawn from the employees, the share-holding societies, the local Trades Council, and the Weavers' Association. At the outset of this venture the Society's sales were about £22,000 a year ; in 1911 they were well over £46,000, and the average clear share in profits of the employees has been over three per cent, on the wages paid. In 1912 the profit remaining after the five per cent, interest on share and loan capital had b^n deducted was £4,148. Another highly successful Yorkshire experiment in co-partnership of the most modern type has been that established by Mr. T. C. Taylor, M.P., at Batley. In 1892 Mr. Taylor became sole proprietor of the well-known firm of J. T. & J. Taylor, wooUen manufacturers, and at once instituted a system of profit-sharing with his managers and foremen, which, four years later, was extended to the general body of workmen. In 1913 over half the capital of the company was owned by the 1,600 workpeople, half of them women. The arrangement is that all surplus profit over five per cent, is shared at the same percentage rate between capital and wages, and each employee is bound to allow his or her profits to accumulate in shares until they reach an amount equal to one year's earnings. Between the estab- Ushment of this scheme and 19 14 the employees have received in shares and dividend well over £100,000, and the dividends for the whole period have averaged eleven per cent, on capital and seven per cent, on wages. But during two years of that period — 1897 and 1898 — there were no dividends at all — " yet," remarked Mr. Taylor in an article contributed by him to the Contemporary Review in May, 1912, " there was no word of reproach or mistrust from any one of my co-partners." Another co-operative effort, born in Yorkshire, and as yet in its very infancy, but, in one case at any rate, already THRIFT AND HELP 269 showing signs of great sturdiness, is one relating to the communal preparation and cooking of food. It will prob- ably be a long time yet before the folk of our big industrial centres breakfast, dine and sup in communal eating-halls, served from communal kitchens, but that day will come, and meanwhile there is at Bradford a striking example of what the communal kitchen can do. In Bradford some ten years ago certain enterprising spirits converted the wing of a g5annasimn, which was no longer required for its original purpose, into a cooking-establishment, with the primary idea of supplying ready-cooked meals to school-children. Here there is now a staff of twelve persons, which has at its command nine enormous steam cookers, four roasting ovens, a gigantic bread-baking oven, machinery for mixing, kneading, and cutting up bread (which is made in loaves a yard in length), aU sorts of mechanical appliances for packing and keeping hot the prepared meals, and motor- cars for carrying them out. It can turn out 10,000 dinners a day. The menus of these dinners were prepared by experts in food values. They are of such quality that one large secondary school takes them for all its pupils. Hun- dreds of Bradford children take their meals on the days which find their own mothers particularly busy. Up to the outbreak of the present war, the cost worked out at 2d. per head ; in 1916 it was a fraction over 3d. One striking and remarkable fact is that the only fuel used for cooking is steam — obtained from adjacent baths. The whole institution and system form a veritable triumph, and open up a vast range of possibilities. For here are made manifest certain things highly desirable in an industrial community — variety (there are twenty different menus for as many consecutive days), good cooking, no waste, saving of fuel and of labour, and economy in bujnng of material. Some day the State will suddenly recognize the value of these efforts, and we shall take another step forward. If the thoughtful working-man were asked to what he chiefly attributes the enormous improvement which has taken place in the material and social state of his class during the last hundred years, he would be weU advised if he answered that it is chiefly due to the steady and per- 70 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE iistent work of the Trades Unions. No progress of any >ort can come to the man who is defenceless against the )ther man who employs him. The weakness of labour in ;he old days lay in the fact that the labourer was but an ndividual, who had but one commodity to sell — his labour —and who must sell it quickly, and at any price, or starve. [t was only by slow stages that the workman arrived at the dea of combination, and when he had arrived at it, he :ound the law against him. What the first apostles of Trades Unionism called combination, the law called con- spiracy. How all the original attempts of workers to band rhemselves together were suppressed by law, often with mnecessary violence, and with harsh and cruel punishment 3f leaders, is well known to all students of modem history ; :t was not until the Repeal of the Combination Laws in [824, that the artisans, operatives, and workers of all iegrees were free to form associations having for their abject the aU-round improvement of the wage-earner's lot. That men were glad to combine, that experience showed the value of combination, that trades unionism has ^own in favour with workers are fully proved by statistics. By 1861 nearly 2,000 unions were established in 405 towns, ind their annual income was then well over £1,000,000. [n 1914 the membership was close upon 4,000,000 — or ibout one-ninth of the population — and whUe the total imount of the finances at its command is not easily ascer- tainable at any time, that Trades Unionism has vast sums it its disposal is proved by the fact that in the year 1912, 100 of the principal Trade Unions of the United Kingdom tiad no less than £5,121,529 in hand. In Yorkshire, amongst miners, textile-workers, glass-bottle makers, mechanics, ind workers in the many other less important industries, trades unionism has always flourished exceedingly. Whether the Yorkshire trade unionist is quite so much in love with the pohtical side of trades unionism which has developed 50 much of late years, as some people would have us believe tiim to be, is a dif&cult question to decide. But out of the fifty-two members who represent Yorkshire in Parliament, Yorkshire labour only sends six definite Labour representa- tives, and close observers of trades unionism in the county THRIFT AND HELP 271 usually agree that the Yorkshireman's love of his union is due, not so much to any political side which it may have, as to the valuable material help and comfort which member- ship in it affords him. With all these advantages — facihties for saving, for investing savings in building and friendly societies, for life insurance at convenient rates — ^with the benefits arising from co-operative endeavour — ^with the protection of powerful trades unions ; with the further advantages which arise out of modern ideas as to the standards of comfort, and with the cleaner and healthier conditions of life, the Yorkshire workman of to-day is a fortunate individual — a fact of which he is well aware, even if he exhibits the characteristic Yorkshire cautiousness, and quaUfies his admission of his good fortunes by pointing out in plain fashion how his lot might be improved. But he has still further advantages. In two respects the Yorkshire worker of this age differs from his ancestor of a hundred years ago in a degree which is perhaps more remarkable than he irealizes ; one is his abundant leisure ; the other is his opportunity for play. A century ago, men worked till they dropped ; they toiled without ceasing from dawn on Monday till dark on Saturday. They had no restriction on their hours of labour ; no half-holidays ; no pubUc hohdays. A century ago, no man of the working class ever played at an3rthing ; he had no time to play ; what it is more important to remember, he had no strength left to play with. There were no cricket-clubs, no football clubs ; no g5minastic societies ; no rifle-clubs ; men never sailed model yachts on the mill-dams ; they never played bowls in the parks. Nowadays there are thousands of cricket and football clubs in the county ; the working men are as familiar with all the great exponents of football and cricket as with their own looms or forges; the man who wishes for recreation can get it almost at his own door. It is a marvellous transformation — a hundred years ago, sullen, hungry, desperate groups of ill-clad men, hanging about some filthy street or alley ; to-day, tens of thousands of healthy workers, as keen about their pastime as they are about the labour that alternates with it. CHAPTER XI NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN For seven hundred years Yorkshire has given to England a succession of great and remarkable men. She produced great men when she was still but a part, first of Deira, afterwards of Northumbria. Caedmon belongs to that age, and Alcuin, and St. John of Beverley, and St. Wilfrid of York. Great men sprang up in her when the troubled times of the Norman Conquest were over — mediaeval Arch- bishops ; powerful Abbots ; historians and chroniclers, hke Roger of Howden, and Ailred of Rievaulx, and William of Newburgh ; feudal lords like the Scropes, and the Mow- brays, and the Nevilles. But it is not until the fourteenth century is reached that we begin to get a definite roll of famous Yorkshiremen. By the nineteenth century it has become a formidable roU, with many hundred names on it — one can only look, in this present instance, at a few of the more conspicuous amongst them. Richard Rolle, 1290-1349, poet, mystic, known as the Hermit of Hampole, and author of The Pricke of Conscience, was a native of Thornton, near Pickering. John Wychf, theologian and reformer, 1324-1384, is commonly held to have been bom at the village of Wycliffe in Teesdale. Lord Chief Justice Gascoigne, one of the greatest of English jurists, 1350- 1419, belonged to the Gascoignes of whom so many are buried at Harewood, where he first saw the light. John, Cardinal Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, scholar, martyr, was bom at Beverley in 1459 and beheaded on Tower Hill in 1535. Miles Coverdale, 1488-1568, scholar, translator of the Bible, some time Bishop of Exeter, took his name from his NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 273 birthplace, one of the valleys opening into Wensleydale. Roger Ascham, 1515-1568, scholar, Hellenist, tutor of royalty, was a native of Kirby Wiske, a hamlet-Uke place near Northallerton. Martin Frobisher, seaman and explorer, 1535-1594. was born at Altofts, in the neighbourhood of Wakefield. Sir Henry Saville, 1549-1622, mathematician, classical scholar, tutor of Queen Elizabeth in mathematics and in Greek, translator of St. Chrysostom, founder of two professorships at Oxford, Warden of Merton College, 1585, Provost of Eton, 1596, came of a famous family settled at Halifax, where he was born ; there, too, was born Henry Briggs, 1556-1630, another mathematician who was appointed Savillian Professor of Geometry at Oxford in 1619, and is buried in Merton College Chapel. John Harri- son, 1579-1656, merchant, philanthropist, founder of many notable institutions in Leeds, was a native of the town. Edward Fairfax, poet, translator of Tasso, 1580-1635, was born at Denton, the Wharfedale home of his famous family, where also was born Thomas, Lord Fairfax, states- man, soldier, Commander-in-Chief of the ParUamentarian Army, who lived during the stirring period between 1612 and 1671. Roger Dodsworth, antiquary, 1585-1654, born at Oswaldkirk, had many connections with the great Parha- mentary general. Lord Fairfax intervened at the siege of York to save Dodsworth's priceless collection of papers relating to Yorkshire history ; to Lord Fairfax, Dodsworth bequeathed aU these materials at his death ; by Lord Fairfax they were left to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Andrew Marvell, poet and statesman, 1621-1678, was a native of Winestead, near Hull, was educated at the old grammar school of Hull, and served Hull in Parliament. John Lake, 1623-1689, Bishop of Chichester, one of the seven non-juring bishops, was born at HaUfax, and entered St. John's College, Cambridge, in his thirteenth year. John Tillotson, 1630-1694, was another Halifax man who became Dean of St. Paul's in 1689 and Archbishop of Canterbury two years later. Sir John Reresby, soldier and traveller, one of the most interesting and picturesque figures of Stuart times, 1634-1689, was bom at Thrybergh, 18 274 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE the ancient seat of his family, where he is also buried. Sir George Savile, first Marquis of Halifax, one of the greatest statesmen and most notable - .en of the Restoration Period, who lived from 1633 to 169^ and saw some extraordinary changes in his native country without suffering any serious vicissitudes of fortune in his own person or situation, was born at ThomhiU, where his father was married, a mere boy of seventeen, to Lady Anne Coventry. John RadcUffe, 1650-1714, physician, some time Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, founder of the Radcliffe Observatory and bene- factor of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, was a native of Wakefield. Abraham Sharp, 1651-1742, astronomer and mathematician, who did excellent work at Greenwich Observatory from 1676 to 1690 and designed many import- ant instruments, was born at Horton, a suburb of Bradford. Ralph Thoresby, 1658-1725, antiquary and topographer, was born at Leeds, and to Leeds and its history he devoted most of his remarkable talents for the rest of his life — not forgetting, however, being a man of means and leisure, to spend much time in London amongst the Uterary and scientific men of his day, nor restraining his taste for travel- ling up and down the country in search of the curious. Richard Bentley, 1662-1742, went from his birthplace, Oulton, near Leeds, to Cambridge — there to enter upon an extraordinary career of learning, arrogance, and quarrelling — and to become Master of Trinity, and Regius Professor of Divinity. John Potter, 1674-1747, the son of a Wakefield linen-draper, was Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, 1707, Bishop of Oxford 1715, and Archbishop of Canterbury 1737. Beilby Porteus, 1731-1808, born at York, became a noted ecclesiastical administrator, and was preferred to the Bishopric of Chester in 1776, and to that of London in 1787. John Smeaton, 1724-1794, a native of Whitkirk, near Leeds, helped to revolutionize engineering in England, and built the Eddystone Lighthouse outside Plymouth Bay. James Cook, navigator, 1728-1779, was bom at Marton in Cleveland. Joseph Bramah, inventor of the hydraulic press, and of a famous lock which bears his name, and who lived 1748-18 14, wa« the son of a farmer at Silk- N4NETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 275 stone, near Bamsley. John Flaxman, 1755-1826, sculptor, who was elected a Royal Academician in 1800, and appointed Professor of Sculpture to the Royal Academy ten years later, was a York man ; so, too, was Wilham Etty, 1787- 1849, who, having begun life as a printer's apprentice at Hull, became, like his fellow-townsman, a Royal Academician, and as famous in painting as Flaxman was in sculpture. Two other Yorkshiremen of that period formed links between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — Sir Tatton Sykes, sportsman, farmer, great landlord, was born in 1772, succeeded to his Sledmere estates in 1823, and Mved on, breeding sheep and horses, until 1863 ; Charles Waterton, of Walton, famous as a traveller, a naturalist, and an eccentric, was born in 1785, and lived, hale and hearty to the last, for eighty years longer. Of notable Yorkshiremen of the nineteenth century, eminent not only for talent, but for rich endowment in the qualities which are particularly characteristic of Yorkshire folk, energy, resourcefulness, and perseverance, one of the most remarkable was William Lawies Jackson, first Baron Allerton of Chapel Allerton — 1840-1917. The eldest son of William Jackson, a leather-merchant and tanner of Leeds, he was born at Otley, educated at a private school at Adel, and at the Moravian School at Fulneck, and at the age of seventeen found himself confronted by as difficult a position as any lad could well be placed against. His father, who had been obliged to compound with his creditors a few years previously, died, leaving his business in a very poor condition. The boy of seventeen set to work, rising early, remaining at the tan-yard until late at night ; within a short space of time he had pulled the business together, and developed it in surprising fashion, and at an age when other young men are thinking of starting on a life's career he had paid off all his father's creditors, and found himself proprietor of what eventually became one of the most important tanning and currying concerns in the country. Throughout his subsequent career he took a deep interest in his own trade. He assisted in originating the Leeds Leather Fair, He was for a long time President of the 276 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Leeds Leather Trades Association, and when the Univer- sity of Leeds was founded he became a member of its Leather Industries Committee. But pubUc Ufa claimed him ahnost as soon as he had completed his first private achievements. He became an enthusiastic worker for the Conservative party in Leeds, and in 1869 was himself elected to the Town Council as representative of Headingley. He spent eleven years on the Council, where he was known as an expert financier ; it was at his suggestion that the Council funded the heavy debts of the borough, and largely got rid of the old mortgage system. In 1876 he contested Leeds as Conservative candidate, and though he failed to win a seat, he polled 13,774 votes. Four years later he was returned as third member for the town — his fellow-members being Mr. Gladstone (simultaneously elected for Midlothian) and Mr. (afterwards Sir) John Barran. Thenceforward, until his elevation to the House of Lords in 1902, he was always Member for Leeds, though after 1885, he was one of five instead of one of three, and his own particular con- stituency was North Leeds instead of the undivided borough. Within five years of his entry into the House of Commons he was appointed — largely through the influence of Lord Randolph Churchill, who much appreciated his business abnities — Financial Secretary to the Treasury, an ofiice which he filled for six years. In 1891 he succeeded Mr. Arthur Balfour as Chief Secretary for Ireland, and in the following year introduced his Irish Education Bill. In 1890 he was sworn of the Privy Council ; in 1895 he was Chairman of the Committee appointed to hold the Inquiry into the Jameson Raid ; in that year, too, he became Chairman of the Great Northern Railway. Few ParUa- mentarians have ever served on so many or on such import- ant commissions and committees ; he was a valuable member of the Royal Commission which in 1895-1900 sat to inquire into civil and military expenditure in India ; he was Chairman of the Royal Commission on Coal Supplies, 1891 ; he was on the Select Committee on War Office Contracts, subsequent to the South African War. One of his greatest Parliamentary achievements lay in his measure NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 277 of Building Society refoma, produced by his own personal and close investigations into the finances of building societies after the terrible Liberator Building Society calamity, which involved so many thousands in ruin. As Chairman of the Great Northern Railway, he was a great administrator, and he devoted himself to his duties with astonishing energy. And in spite of all his multifarious duties, he never neglected his own business, nor his own town. He remained in active work with his firm until 1912, when he retired, and' the business was closed. He was equally active in all schemes relating to the development and welfare of Leeds. He was its first Conservative Mayor ; he was a hfe governor of the Yorkshire College ; he helped to estabhsh the Univer- sity, which conferred on him the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws. He was a devoted Churchman ; a generous sup- porter of all religious and educational funds ; he was also Provincial Grand Master of the Freemasons of West York- shire, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. It may be that no distinction pleased Lord AUerton more than that which came to him in 1908, when the freedom of the city of Leeds was given to him in the midst of an admiring crowd of his fellow citizens. Many of our most famous Yorkshiremen of modern times, while retaining their essentially Yorkshire character- istics, carry their talents out of the county, and become so celebrated in other spheres that their origin is almost lost sight of. Such a Yorkshireman was the late Henry Ramsden Bramley, one of the best known Oxford men of his day, which was a long one, for he went to Oxford in 1852 and remained permanently there until 1895. Born at Adding- ham, in Wharf edale, in 1833, he matriculated at Oriel College in 1852, but transferred himself to University CoUege in the following year. In 1856 he took his B.A. degree, was ordained deacon by Samuel Wilberforce, then Bishop of Oxford, and was admitted to a Yorkshire Fellowship on the old foundation at Magdalen College, as Probationer Fellow. He became tutor in 1858, continued the work until 1868 ; gave it up for three years, resumed it in 1871, and carried it on until 1883. He was Dean of Arts from 278 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE 187X to 1882 ; Vice-President in 1883, and Dean of Divinity in 1885, in which year he became Examining Chaplain to Dr. King, Bishop of Lincoln, who in 1887 appointed him a Prebendary of Lincoln Cathedral. In 1889, having •inherited considerable property, he resigned his life Fellow- ship for an Official Fellowship ; in the same year he was re-appointed Dean of Divinity, the ofhce having been made tenable for a certain number of years. He was re-elected Fellow in 1890 and again in 1898, but in 1895 he left Oxford after forty-three years' continuous residence, and went to Lincoln as Canon and Precentor, which positions he held until 1902. A man of deep learning, his chief hterary work was found in tracts and pamphlets of importance at the time of their publication ; his most noteworthy perform- ance, a scholarly edition of " The Psalter and Certain Canticles with a Translation and Exposition in English by Richard RoUe, of Hampole," possesses a special interest for Yorkshiremen because of its connection with the hermit- mystic of the fourteenth century. During his long residence in Oxford, Bramley was a famUiar figure. " A distinct High Churchman," writes one who contributed a memoir of him to the Times, " ... he himself was a Tory rather than a Conservative, fervently attached to the Stuart dynasty, and on one occasion he professed himself . . . ' in favour of progress, but of progress backward.' What- ever his views, however, he was a very engaging personality, his affectionate sympathy and his unfailing courtesy con- ciliating even those who took advantage of him, and who often perceived that though gentle and slow to punish he had formed a very shrewd opinion of their real merits. . . . He was a great favourite with many generations both of seniors and juniors, and the memory of his picturesque figure, with the long silky beard he was so fond of stroking, and his shrewd Yorkshire wit, will be long cherished by all Magdalen men who fell under his influence." Another clever Yorkshireman who went far afield to exercise his abihties was one of the comparatively few Englishmen who seek their fortunes in Scotland. Charles Alfred Cooper, for thirty years editor of the Scotsman NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 279 newspaper, was the son of an architect at Hull, was educated at Hull Grafnmar School, and was apprenticed to the proprietors of the old Hull Advertiser, which, according to his own memory of it, was a paper of good size and fair circulation, printed on a wooden press. He became sub- editor and manager of this journal, but in 1861, being then in his thirty-second year, he went to London, to join the Parliamentary Staff of the Morning Star. One of his directors was John Bright ; among his colleagues were such well-known men as Edmund Yates, Archibald Forbes, Justin McCarthy, and WiUiam Black. He began to take a strong interest in politics at this period, but in 1868 he left London for Edinburgh, to become assistant to Alexander Russell, the editor of the Scotsman, to which Cooper had been appointed London Correspondent two years previ- ously. He succeeded Russell as editor in 1876, and during the next thirty years brought the Scotsman into the very front rank of the great newspapers of the world. His period of editorship saw journalism revolutionized — especi- ally in the provinces. Until 1880 the Press Gallery of the House of Commons had been closed against representatives of provincial papers ; it was largely due to Cooper's per- sistence that they were admitted in that year. He introduced the rotary web-printing machine in the Scotsman office ; to the Scotsman he not only contributed remarkably power- ful and direct leading articles on home and foreign affairs, but two series of letters descriptive of travel in Egypt and in South Africa, which were subsequently published in volume form in 1891 and 1895. In 1896 he published a book of reminiscences, " An Editor's Retrospect," full of entertaining memories of the famous Scottish elections, in which he had taken a journalist's part and interest, and of the celebrated statesmen — Mr. Gladstone, Lord Rosebery, Viscount Morley, Lord Goschen, and others— with whom he had been brought in contact. In 1906 he retired, and in the following year the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon him by the University of Edinburgh. He lived to the age of 87, and died at Bournemouth in April, 1916. a8o THE MAKING Or MUUtKN YUKKSHIKE One of the notable stay-at-home Yorkshiremen was Mark Firth, the virtual founder of the University of Sheffield, who, between 1819 and 1880 combined practical and far- reaching philanthropy with the making of steel ordnance. He came of a steel-making stock — ^his father was an expert in steel manufacture in the days when the various modern processes were in their infancy. When Mark Firth was twenty-six years of age, he, his brother, and their father were all employees, working at Sanderson Brothers ; it was due to Mark's initiative that the father and sons began a business of their own. That business spread, from very small beginnings, until it was one of the greatest steel- making firms in the world. The steel supplied by the Firths was specially adapted for ordnance and armament, and at one time they enjoyed something like a monopoly of making it for big guns. Mark Firth quickly became a wealthy man ; he also entered public life in Sheffield at a comparatively early age. As a member of the Town Council he was a strenuous and consistent advocate of improvement in sanitation ; as Mayor of Sheffield in 1874 he was a dispenser of hospitality on a lavish scale. Some years previously, he had enjoyed an honour which was then unique — he occupied the high office of Master Cutler for three years in succession — 1867-68-69. Like most men who are the architects of their own fortunes, he built himself a fine house at Ranmoor, a suburb of Sheffield which he did much to develop. And, like most Yorkshire- men who have made money, he did not forget the folk amongst whom he had made it, and at Ranmoor, in addition to his own mansion of Oakbrook, he erected and endowed Almshouses for the poor, at a cost of £30,000. During the year of his Mayoralty, 1875, he presented to Sheffield the park which bears his name, and spent £29,000 in laying it out ; four years later he spent another £20,000 in building Firth College, which, in 1905, was transformed into a University. Yorkshire has always been prolific in producing the sturdy Nonconformist — a later and much-to-be-preferred survival of the old Puritan, but fortunately devoid of that worthy's NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 281 narrowness, bigotry, and intolerance. The nineteenth- century Nonconformist was usually a man who dissented from the Church of England on strictly conscientious grounds, who desired to see absolute religious hberty and equality, and was particularly interested in the education of the people. An excellent type of this class was the late Alfred Illingworth, one of the best-known and most respected Bradford men of his day. A member of one of the leading manufacturing firms in the city, he entered public life in 1868, when he succeeded his father-in-law. Sir Isaac Holden, as Member of Parliament for Knaresborough. A little later he forsook Knaresborough for Bradford, and first as junior member to W. E. Forster, and subsequently as Member for the newly-constituted Western Division, he remained Member for Bradford until 1895. In his day one of the most familiar figures in the city, Alfred Ilhngworth was a deeply interesting personality. He was a Liberal of the old school ; an economist of the Manchester school ; a staunch beUever in Free Trade ; a good deal of a believer in the doctrines of Adam Smith and the laissez-faire theories ; a strict and conscientious opponent of the modern move- ments of Socialism and Collectivism. Radical enough in his ideas about religious equality, education, and social opportunity, he was somewhat of a deep-dyed Tory when confronted with questions closely affecting capital and labour, and it was curious that he retained the confidence and affection of the Bradford working men while opposing, tooth and nail, many of the new-fangled ideas of their leaders. He, more than any man of his time, represented the Political Dissenter ; he was for many years Chairman of the Liberation Society, and worked hard for Disestablish- ment. Greatly respected in the House of Commons, and by all leading statesmen, he could never be persuaded, though constantly pressed, to take high office, but since his death the Illingworth family has been ably represented in two Governments by the late Percy Illingworth, who died in the first years of a most promising career, and by the present Postmaster-General, Mr. Albert Illingworth. Considering the vast number of pictures stored in York- 283 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE shire, in her great country houses, her private collections, and in her numerous public art-galleries, it would be strange indeed if emulation to excel in painting had not been stirred in the breasts of Yorkshire artists, and one, at any rate, of her nineteenth-century painters attained all the honour and fame which an English artist can win. Frederick Leighton, first — and last — Baron Leighton, the son of a Scarborough physician, was born in that town in 1830. At an early age he went to Italy, and in Florence studied painting under some of the most famous Itahan masters of the day. He spent four years in the studios of Zanetti, Bezzuoti, and Segnolini, and subsequently passed some time at Frankfort a ' in Brussels, whence he proceeded to Paris, where he settled for a time in the atelier of Edward Steinle. His first English success was his picture " Cimabue's Madonna carried in Procession through Florence," which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1855, and bought by Queen Victoria. By 1866 he had definitely settled in London, in a house in Holland Park Road, on which he lavished money, care, and taste to such an extent thac it became a veritable palace of beauty, and is now— remaining as he left it — the property of the nation. Here he painted a succession of wonderful pictures, familiar to the world through the numerous engravings of them. He was essen- tially a lover of classical subjects, and year by year the walls of the Royal Academy showed some notable example of his marvellous draughtsmanship, his sense of the value of decoration, and his love of beauty in form and colour. His " Venus disrobing for the Bath " was shown in 1867 ; " Clytemnestra " in 1874 ; " Phryne " in 1882 ; " Cymon and Iphegenia " in 1884 ; " The Last Watch of Hero " in 1887. His " Bath of Psyche," 1890, was bought by the Chantry Trustees under the terms of the famous sculptor's bequest ; his " Perseus and Andromeda " and the " Return of Persephone " are in the Leeds Art Gallery. " Clytie " was exhibited in the year of his death, 1896. Long before that he had become the most notable painter in England and a conspicuous figure in society. He was elected an Academician in 1868 ; in 1878 he succeeded the late Sir NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 383 Francis Grant as President of the Royal Academy. He was a member of nearly all the great foreign Academies : he was the recipient of orders and distinctions from nearly every sovereign in Europe ; engravings of his pictures — especially of the highly popular " Wedded " — ^were spread broadcast aU over the world ; given the honour of a knight- hood on his becoming President, he was raised to the peerage a short time before his death. But Lord Leighton's artistic talents were not confined to painting. He did notable work in book-illustration during the golden age of English black-and-white art, 1860-1870 ; he contributed some fine mosaic and fresco work to the Victoria and Albert Museum ; his work in sculpture suggested that if he had not been a great painter he would have rivalled Thorwaldsen and Rodin, and his well-known group, " An Athlete struggling with a Python," was bought for the Chantry Bequest in 1877. He possessed a marvellous love of the beautiful, and a keenly developed sense of colour ; in his Holland Park House he built a superb Arab hall, and brought the necessary tiles and material for it from Syria. A man of rare talents and impressive personality, he was perhaps the most notably distinguished in presence and address of all the Presidents of the Royal Academy, and it might truly be said of him that no man of his time was so well fitted to preside over the distinguished gatherings whereat he dispensed the famous Royal Academy hospitality for eighteen years. A Yorkshireman of a vastly different type, who also had a connection with Scarborough because he made his favourite home in close proximity to it, was Frank Lockwood, one of the best-known, most popular, and most engaging legal luminaries of his day. No Yorkshireman was ever more thoroughly Yorkshire — few better loved by his fellow- Yorkshiremen ; none more implicitly trusted. Many a Yorkshireman visited Leeds Assizes on the mere chance of finding Frank Lockwood holding a brief there ; no Yorkshireman ever neglected the opportunity of hearing him speak if he happened to be addressing a Yorkshire political meeting. His wit, his humour, his dry fashion 284 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE of telling a story, his love of telling stories against himself, were all essentially Yorkshire, and when he died at a much too early age, every Yorkshireman felt as if a vital part of the county life had gone out of it. Lockwood came of a genuine Yorkshire stock. His great-grandfather was Mayor of Doncaster in 1823 ; his grandfather in 1832 ; Lockwood himself was born at Doncaster — on the way to the famous Town Moor — in 1846. His people were stone- quarriers in the neighbourhood ; there is a bust of his grandfather, who was Mayor, in the building which was once the old Betting Rooms. In i860 his father left Don- caster for Manchester, where Lockwood attended the Grammar School, whence in 1865 he proceeded to Caius College, Cambridge, it being his intention at that time to take holy orders. At Cambridge he was affectionately known as Daniel Lambert, because of his bulk— though that indeed was only notable as regards height, for he was in no other way like his prototype, and " Dan'l " he remained to his college friends to the day of his death. He duly proceeded to his, degree at Cambridge, " going-out " in Political Economy, but by the time he had reached this desirable consummation all taste for the church had vanished, for medicine he had no quahfications, and at law, for the time being, he looked askance. His father, however, advised him to go to London and look about him — with the happy result that he determined to be a barrister. His proceedings were eminently characteristic. Having decided, on the spur of the moment, to go to the Bar, he telegraphed to his father to send hira a hundred pounds. The father sent the hundred pounds ; armed therewith Lockwood paid his fees and entered at Lincoln's Inn. This was in April, 1869, but before he became a full-fledged barrister he flirted a little with the stage. In 1870 he joined an adventurous theatrical company and went on tour at Bath, Exeter, Torquay, and Scarborough ; in 1872 he joined Mr. and Mrs. Kendal in a tour of six weeks, which began at Nottingham and ended at HuU. He played under the name of Daniel Macpherson. Years later, when he was a famous man, and presiding at the forty-sixth Anniver- NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 285 saxy of the Royal Theatrical Fund, he gave his hearers an account of his own stage experiences in his own initoitable manner : — " I made my first appearance," he said, " upon any stage at the old theatre at Bath. I suppose it was the old theatre. It was a very dingy and somewhat dirty theatre. Therefore I suppose it was the old theatre. But I have noticed that whenever the record of a great theatrical career comes to be written, it always begins at the ' old theatre.' And I have no doubt that many a theatrical reputation has been begun at the old theatre at Bath. It has been the cradle of many a theatrical reputation, but, gentlemen, it was the coffin of mine. I was cast for the part of a servant — one of those faithful creatures to whom wages are not so much an object as a thoroughly uncom- fortable home, and through five acts of an old English comedy I traced the mysteries of a child until that mysterious child must have been completely sick of me. It was an Irish part, and for its delineation I had studied, and, as I thought, had acquired the rich brogue racy of the Emerald Isle. I was not sure how I was getting on. I was conscious that when I came on to the stage there was a certain amount of indifference as to what I said, and what I did, and I was more conscious that there was a sense of relief when I left the stage. But still I did not know how things were going on until, as I left the stage, I met at the wing the stage-manager, who was an outspoken man. Many of you may know him. He addressed to me these very remarkable words. Said he, looking at me, ' Scotch or Irish ? ' For the moment I mistook his meaning. I thought he was hospitably inclined, and was offering me an alternative choice in the matter of whisky. But he went on — ' No,' he said, ' I have been wondering what dialect you have been playing that part in. Some say it is Scotch, and some say it is Irish ; but the gas man, who tells me that he has often played the part, says it is Zomerset.' I assured him that it was an Irish part — real old Irish. He made some frivolous observation as to its being a blend, but I said, ' This is no time for badinage,' and I returned to track the wretched person on the stage. And I remember 286 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE at the end of the performance, some of the company went to the front of the curtain, and I appeared before the curtain also, but somebody laughed. It was a comic piece, but no one had laughed at me up till then. I still did not know whether I was successful or not. The next day I went to a kind friend with whom I was staying, determined to settle the matter, and I said to him : ' You heard me play ; you were there ; tell me, was I a success ? ' I waited for his words. He said, ' I did not hear a word you said.' That settled it. It was of no use attempting to take the Crystal Palace to play ' Hamlet ' on a Saturday afternoon after that. There are such failures every day, but it is not the luck of every man to fail at the beginning." But Lockwood was no failure at the Bar — in his first year he earned 120 guineas ; in the second, 265 guineas ; in his third, 600 guineas ; in a few years more he was steadily earning 2,000 guineas — a handsome sum which ere long looked small by comparison. He became famous, aUke in London and on the North-Eastem circuit ; on one of his visits to Leeds Assizes he was asked by Mr. Justice Lopes to defend Charles Peace, the famous — or infamous — murderer ; when the trial was over Peace presented his advocate with an iron finger-ring, which Lockwood, highly dehghted with the gift, carried home to London, intending to preserve it as a great curiosity. But his wife refused it admittance to the house, and Lockwood never saw it again. In 1882 he was appointed Queen's Counsel ; in in 1885, after two previous defeats, he was elected Member of Parliament for York ; in 1890, having prospered greatly, he built himself a house at Cober Hill, near Scarborough ; in 1894 Lord Rosebery, who had succeeded Mr. Gladstone as Prime Minister, appointed him Solicitor-General, and in November of that year he received the honours of knight- hood — and 800 congratulatory letters. There seemed at that time to be a great future in store for him — but in his fifty-second year he was suddenly stricken down and died, to the vast grief of a whole county and of thousands beyond its borders. In Sir Clements Markham — 1830-1916 — there was the NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 287 somewhat unusual combination of the man of action and the man of letters. Son of the Rev. D. F. Markham, Vicar of Stillingfleet and Canon of Windsor, and grandson of Archbishop Markham of York, he was born at Stillingfleet, and educated first at Cheam , and then at Westminster, whence, in 1844, he entered the Royal Navy, to which many members of his family had belonged in previous generations. During 1850-1851 he took part in the Franklin Search Expedition, under Captain Austin, and in 1852 pubUshed his record of it in a volume entitled " Franklin's Footsteps." Henceforth he devoted himself to literature and to travel. Retiring from the Navy that year, with the rank of lieutenant, he went to Peru and made extensive travels in the interior during the next two years, embodying the results in a book called " Cuzco and Peru," which was issued in 1856. His acquaintance with these regions led the Secretary of State for India to enlist his services in introducing the cinchona plant into that country, and in i860 he went to South America again to make the necessary arrangements. He carried out this mission with complete success, and the price of quinine was consequently reduced from many shilUngs to a few pence per ounce. In 1862, having returned from South America and India, he pubUshed another work, " Travels in Peru and India," and between that year and 1910 he manifested his great interest in the first-named country by writing several important books about it. He was a writer of great versatility, as a list of his principal works will show : — " History of the Indian Surveys " ; " Missions to Tibet " ; " The Fighting Veres " ; " The Sea Fathers " ; " The Paladins of King Edwin " ; Lives of Christopher Columbus, John Davis, Sir John Harrington, and Sir Leopold McClintock ; a book with a special appeal to Yorkshiremen, " The Great Lord Fairfax " ; and volumes on the history of Persia, and on irrigation in Spain, to say nothing of countless smaller volumes and pamphlets. But his great work was done in connection with the Royal Geographical Society, which he first joined in 1854 and of which he became the leading spirit. He wa« elected honorary secretary in 1863 ; and held that 288 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE position for twenty-five years, when he was made a recipient of the Founder's Medal. In 1893 he was elected President, and held office until 1905, when he became Vice-President. During all these years he was to all intents and purposes master of the Society, which he ruled in a fashion pecuUar to himself, not always without friction, but with eminently good results. To him, to his perseverance under difficulties, the success of the National Antarctic Expedition was mainly due. He at first received little support for that great undertaking. The pubhc cared nothing about it ; the learned societies were niggardly ; the Government remained obdurate. It was not until Colonel Longstaff contributed ;f30,ooo, and the aid of the Royal Society (of which Sir Clement Markham had been a Fellow since 1873) was obtained that the Government consented to find £45,000 towards the expenses of the expedition which was eventually sent out under Captain Scott, who was Markham' s own special selection for the leadership. The result of the enterprise is given in Scott's Voyage of the " Discovery " ; it was a great scientific triumph, and it was, as Scott says in the first chapter of that work, due to Markham's unique, unconquerable personality that it ever became a hving fact. It was in 1893 that he first resolved on such an expedi- tion ; it was not until 1901 that the " Discovery " dropped down the Thames on her outward voyage, and the eight years which had elapsed had been years of disappointment, trial, and annoyance to Markham, chiefly through the opposition of those on whom he had most counted for assistance. But he hved to see Scott return and to read Scott's account of the voyage, dedicated to him as " The Father of the Expedition and its most Constant Friend " — hved, too, to see Scott return to the Antarctic — that time to come back no more. Nearly every great Yorkshire town has had at some time or other in its midst a particular man who has helped above all other men to build its fortunes. In its long career as town and seaport, Hull has had many notable men, from William de la Pole to William Wilberforce ; its outstanding figure of the nineteenth century was undoubtedly Charles NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 289 Henry Wilson, first Baron Nunburnholme, head of the biggest private shipping concern in the world, and throughout his life one of the busiest pubhc men in England. He was essentially a Hull man, born in Hull, educated in Hull, having his chief interests in Hull, never living far away from Hull. Born in 1833, the son of Thomas Wilson, founder of the great shipping firm of Thomas Wilson, Sons & Co., he became head of the family business in 1867, and thereafter developed it to an amazing extent. Although he was Sheriff of Hull in 1870 he took httle part in pubhc Ufe until 1874, when he was elected Member of ParUament for Hull. He represented his native town in the House of Commons for thirty-two years, and was just about to contest another election when in 1906 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Nunburnholme of Kingston-upon- HuU. Previous to this he had been presented with the freedom of the city, an honour which he shared with a small group of distinguished men. But his greatest honours, after aU, were those which sprang from his own long and intimate association with Hull industry. Of the vast undertakings of his own firm, particulars have already been given ; he had many other affairs to conduct, many other duties to perform. He was at one time or another a director of the North Eastern Railway, of the Hull Dock Company, and of the HuU and Barnsley Railway ; he was Chairman of the HuU Steam Fishing and Ice Company ; he was a half-proprietor of Amos & Smith, engineers, and the most considerable shareholder in the Central Dry Dock Company. Towards the end of his career he embarked upon an enter- prise from which many a younger man would have shrunk. The old Hull business known as Earle's Shipbuilding and Engineering Company, once one of the foremost concerns ia the town, had coUapsed, and its two thousand workmen were thrown into great distress. Lord Nunburnholme took it over, laid out a large sum of money. — said to be a quarter of a million — ^in modernizing the plant and in re-estabhshing the affair as a thoroughly up-to-date establishment. He was, of course, a large employer of labour — ^with one business or another, some ten thousand men worked under him^ 19 290 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE and though he more than once had serious disputes with the Unions to which they belonged, he was much respected and admired by them for his invariable conscientiousness and rectitude. He kept up the Yorkshire tradition of benevolence, and his charity certainly began at home. He was a munificent contributor to all the funds of the town, and especially to the various charities associated with sea-faring life, and one of his first philanthropic works after becoming Chairman of his firm was to build a new wing of the Sailors' Orphanage as a memorial to his father. UnUke many dispensers of charity, he had no objection to being asked for subscriptions of a minor sort, and it is a tradition in Hull that if his patronage happened to be requested on ~ behalf of some obscure cricket or football club, it was his practice first to ascertain how much money would make the promoters happy, and then to hand them a cheque for the entire amount. Another of the nineteenth century Yorkshiremen who strayed far afield to carve out careers for themselves was the late Archbishop of the West Indies, Dr. Nuttall, who was as well known at the Colonial Office as a statesman, as at Lambeth as a prelate. Enos Nuttall was bom in 1842, the son of a Methodist farmer near Giggleswick. At a very early age he began preaching amongst the Methodists and attained considerable fame as a boy-preacher. In due course he entered the regular ministry, and having been ordained, was sent out to Jamaica as a missionary. He became a highly popular preacher in Kingston, but within a few years he forsook the Methodists for the Church of England, and became Island Curate of Kingston — an old-estabhshed position which he held to the end of his Ufe. In those days the Church was estabUshed in Jamaica ; when disestablishment and disendowment came later on, NuttaU made a special journey to England to enUst sympathy on behalf of the Anglican community, and it was at that time that he began to show his great fitness for organizing and creative work. Under him Anglicanism in Jamaica, left to its own devices, prospered greatly, and he attained immense influence over the coloured congregations who NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 291 form the bulk of its supporters. In July, 1880, Dr. Nuttall was elected Bishop of Jamaica ; in 1893 he succeeded to the Primacy of the West Indies, and at the Lambeth Con- ference of 1897 the title and dignity of Archbishop was conferred upon him. As bishop he was a hard and strenuous worker and administrator, but his interests extended far beyond clerical and spiritual labours. His advice as to commercial undertakings in the West Indies was eagerly sought ; he was held in great esteem at the Colonial Office in London, and the late Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, who was brought much in touch with him, had a high opinion of his talents, and relied a great deal on his advice. Towards the end of his hfe, Archbishop Nuttall's powers as organizer were unhappily put to a severe test. In January, 1907, Kingston, which at that very moment was being visited by many eminent Englishmen, such as the Earl of Dudley, Sir Alfred Jones, Sir James Ferguson, Mr. H. O. Amold-Forster, and others, who had assembled at the Conference of the Imperial Cotton-Growing Association, was visited by one of the most terrible earthquakes of modern times. Hundreds of people lost their lives ; the burnt area extended over fifty-six acres ; of the remaining portion of the city only one house in five was spared. There was vast distress amongst the people, and it became necessary to seek help from England. Archbishop NuttaU, called by general consent to the chairmanship of the reUef com- mittee, came home on behalf of his fellow-islanders and returned in due course, carrying with him not only the proceeds of a loan arranged on business principles but a handsome grant given in aid of the unfortunate victims. He remained in Jamaica until his death in 1916. Yorkshire has given several notable men to the episcopal bench of the Established Church during the last hundred years ; one of them, Samuel Wilberforce, successively Bishop of Oxford and then of Winchester, made Uttle secret of his disappointment that he, a Yorkshireman born, as he was fond of pointing out, was not made Archbishop of York in 1862. But an infinitely greater man than Samuel Wilberforce was a later successor of his in the See of Oxford, 392 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE William Stubbs, who, though removed from the county at an early age, never ceased to love it, constantly re-visited it, and never lost an opportunity of referring with pride to his Yorkshire birth and ancestry. Bom at Knares- borough, in 1825, the son of WiUiam Morley Stubbs, a soUcitor of the town, whose family had been settled in Nidderdale and its neighbourhood since the fourteenth century, William Stubbs, successively Bishop of Chester and Bishop of Oxford, never failed to speak with a historian's interest and delight of his birthplace and its associations. Speaking at Reading in 1889 he said, " I was bom imder the shadow of the great castle in which Becket's murderers found refuge during the year that followed his martyrdom, the year during which the dogs under the table declined to eat their crusts. There, too, as customary tenants of the Forest, my forefathers had done suit and service to Richard, King of the Romans, and after him to Queen PhUippa and John of Gaunt, long before poor King Richard was kept a prisoner in the King's Chamber. My grandfather's house stood on the ground on which Earl Thomas of Lancaster was taken prisoner by Edward the Second on the very site of the battle of Boroughbridge ; he, too, was chm^chwarden of the chapel in which the Earl was captured. The first drive that my father ever took me led us across Marston Moor ; our great-grandfather hved in an old manor-house of the monks of Fountains ; another had a farm in the village where Harold Hardrada fell before the son of God- win." Little wonder that William Stubbs's tastes all turned to history or that he became the most learned historian of an age which produced many great writers of history. At fourteen he proceeded to Ripon Grammar School ; in 1844 he began his long connection with Oxford by entering Christ Church as a servitor, through the influence of the then Dean, Gaisford, and of Dr. Longley, Bishop of Ripon, who saw the great promise in him. He took his bachelor's degree in June, 1848 ; in 1850 he was given the college living of Navestock and was ordained priest, being at that time a Fellow of Trinity. At Navestock he remained until 1866, doing hard work as a country clergyman, occasionally NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 293 taking pupils — one of whom was Algernon Swinburne — and beginning his work as a historian. At Navestock he began his famous contributions to the Rolls Series, his first undertaking being the Chronicles and Memorials of the Reign of Richard I. Those contributions lasted until 1889 ; " they were," says his biographer, Mr. W. H. Hutton, " the fine fruits of years of toil and of an extraordinary aptitude for mediaeval studies. The author had an absorb- ing passion for historical studies. While he deUghted to trace the working out of great principles, he yet loved a fact as a fact — a genealogy, an obscure date, a complicated chain of cause and effect. He knew mediaeval theology and law. He saw the ways of courts and armies, of judges, bishops, merchants, as one who had lived amongst them. And his was no view derived from other's researches. He had read the manuscripts, fixed the readings, investigated difficult passages for himself. His conclusions, when he came to them, were based upon as thorough study as man ever gave to any subject that concerned the life of man." Here it may be well to set down the titles and dates of pubHcation of the principal historical works which Dr. Stubbs gave to the world : — Nine editions (volumes) of the Select Charters of Enghsh Constitutional History between 1870 and 1901 ; the Constitutional History of England, 1873-1878 ; Seventeen Lectures on the Study of Mediaeval and Modern History, 1886 ; The Early Plantagenets, 1874 ; Lectures on Early English History, 1906. Edited, for the Rolls Series : — Chronicles and Memorials of Richard I., 1864-65 ; Gesta Regis Henrici H., 1867 ; Roger of Hoveden, 1868-1871 ; Walter of Coventry, 1872-73 ; Memorials of St. Dunstan, 1874 ; Ralph de Diceto, 1876 ; Gervaise Cantuariensis, 1879-80 ; Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I. and H., 1882-83 ; WiUiam of Mahnesbury, 1887-89. He also edited many other chronicles and his- torical writings ; he published a large number of his own minor historical essays, and he contributed numerous Pre- faces to the books of other writers. He was one of the most indefatigable contributors to the Dictionary of Christian Biography ; he frequently wrote for the Gentleman's Maga- 294 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE zine on archaeological subjects ; he published a number of sermons, charges, and addresses. But his historical work was not confined to writing and editing ; in 1866 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modem History at Oxford in succession to Professor Goldwin Smith, and in November of that year he left his quiet country parish. In 1879 he was appointed Canon of St. Paul's, where Church was then Dean, and Liddon and Gregory, Canons ; in the same year he joined the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Courts and was elected a member of the Athenaeum Club. Honoui's of an academical nature had already been showered upon him, not only by British but by foreign universities ; on the Continent he was held in the highest respect as one of the greatest and most learned of historians of his own or any age. In 1884 further ecclesiastical preferment came to him ; Mr. Gladstone appointed him Bishop of Chester — five years later he was translated to the See of Oxford. He lived Bishop of Oxford until his death in 1901 ; in one of his last letters, written to a Yorkshire correspondent, he concluded, " So long as I last, I continue a devout York- shire man." The final labour on which he engaged was the genealogies of his own family — a portly volume which, through the generosity of his eldest son, has recently been printed for the members of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, in which Dr. Stubbs had always taken a deep and unfailing interest. In the late Professor Silvanus Phillips Thompson, York- shire produced one of the most distinguished physicists of his age. Born at York in 1851, of a well-known family belonging to the Society of Friends, he was educated at the schools of that society at Bootham, in the suburbs of York, and at Ackworth, near Pontefract. He graduated at London University in 1869 ; for a time taught science at the Bootham School, and subsequently proceeded to the Royal School of Mines in London. He took his B.Sc. degree in 1875 and his doctor's in 1878, in which year he was appointed Pro- fessor of Experimental Physics in University College, Bristol. In 1885 he became Principal of the City and Guilds Technical College at Finsbury, and also Professor NINETEENTH-CENTURY YORKSHIREMEN 295 of Physics, and here he remained until his death in 1916. He was one of the first Uving authorities on optics and on the theory of Hght, but if he had a special subject it was electricity. His book, " Dynamo-Electric Machinery," first published in 1884, has passed through several editions. Another, " Elementary Lessons in Electricity and Magnet- ism," has been translated into several foreign languages. He wrote much on dynamos, arc lamps, and wireless tele- graphy, and he published three biographies of eminent scientists. — Reis, one of the first experimenters and inventors of the telephone ; Faraday ; and Lord Kelvin, the last being a full scientific memoir in two volumes. He was the first living authority on the early history of magnetism and acted in his time as President of the Optical Society, the Rontgen Society, the Physical Society, and the Institution of Electrical Engineers. He was a remarkably able and clear exponent of his subjects and was a familiar figure as a lecturer at the Royal Institution. Of the many illustrious Yorkshiremen — and women — of the nineteenth century it is only possible to mention a few of the more distinguished amongst artists, musicians, novelists, poets, scientists, scholars, statesmen, and travellers. Ernest Crofts, 1847-1911, a noted painter of battle scenes, amongst which is at any rate one Yorkshire subject, " Cromwell at Marston Moor," and who gained his A.R.A. in 1878 and his R.A. in 1896, was a native of Leeds. William Powell Frith, R.A., painter of the once highly popular " Derby Day " and " The Railway Station," and who saw many changes in taste and many styles in Art during his long life of ninety years, was a native of Aldfield near Ripon. Leeds was the birthplace of Philip William May, 1864-1903, who ranks with Leech and Keene in the very front rank of Enghsh black-and-white artists whose work was of a humorous nature. Henry Moore, a noted sea painter of his time, 1831-1895, was a York man. From York, too, came Sir Joseph Barnby, 1838-1896, musician and composer, director of music at Eton College, 1875, principal of the Guildhall School of Music, 1892. Sir William Stemdale Bennett, 1816-1875, composer of " The 296 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE May Queen " and " The Wood N5Tiiphs," and Principal of the Royal Academy of Music from 1866, was a Sheffield man. Huddersfield claims Sir Walter Parratt, 1841, so long connected with the Chapel Roj^al at Windsor, Magdalen College, Oxford, and the Royal College of Music. Of the more notable Yorkshire novelists of the last seventy years, the three sisters Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Bronte were natives of Thornton, near Bradford ; Annie Keary was born at Bilton in 1825 ; Mary Linskill at Whitby in 1840 ; Miss Braddon at Beverley in 1837 ; George Gissing at Wakefield in 1857 ; while of well-known hving writers of the first rank in fiction Monsignor Drew is a native of Leeds, Oliver Onions, of Baildon, and Halliwell Sutcliffe, of Bingley. Two poets of more than ordinary fame and power have sprung from Yorkshire in recent times, Sir WiUiam Watson, born near Fewston in the valley of the Washburn, and Alfred Austin, a native of Headingley, who succeeded Tennyson as Poet Laureate in 1892. Of notable scientists Adam Sedgwick, 1785-1873, Professor of Geology at Cam- bridge, came from Dent. F. O. Morris, one of the greatest ornithologists of his time, 1810-1893, was many years Rector of Nunburnholme. J. O. Westwood, 1805-1893, the finest entomological artist ever known. Life President of the Entomological Society, was a Sheffield man who, having already begun its practice, definitely rejected the law for his own particular branch of science and becam.e the first Professor of Zoology at Oxford, and author and illustrator of a large number of entomological works. Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, 1828-1913, one of the greatest of EngUsh surgeons. President of the Royal College of Surgeons, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and the holder of numerous degrees and honours, was a native of Selby, where he was educated previous to entering St. Bartholomew's Hospital. Sir Frank Watson Dyson, the present Astronomer Royal, born at Bradford in 1868, was educated at the Grammar School there and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Second Wrangler, Smith's Prizeman, and winner of the Isaac Newton Studentship — after which he became chief assistant at Greenwich Observatory, Secretary to the NINETEENTH-CENTURV YORKSHIREMEN 297 Royal Astronomical Society, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and Astronomer Royal for Scotland as successive steps to his present position. Of scholars, essayists, historians, and men of letters. Dr. G. F. Browne, ex-Bishop of Bristol, eminent as a historian and tutor at Cambridge and a notable Churchman, was bom at York. C, H . Firth, born at Sheffield 1857, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford since 1904. Fellow of Oriel in the same year, engaged in the teaching of history at Oxford since 1883, is the greatest living authority in England on the Stuart period, and a prominent member of the Historical Manuscripts Com- mission. Dr. Joseph Wright, to whom the monumental English Dialect Dictionary, published by the Clarendon Press at Oxford between 1898 and 1905, is due, and who is moreover one of the greatest of living philologists, is a native of Windhill, near Bradford, and has long been Professor of Comparative Philology in the University of Oxford. Mark Pattison, another of the men who devoted all their lives to Oxford, was bom at Hauxwell, near Richmond, in 1813, went to Oriel College in 1832, became Rector of Lincoln College in 1861 and lived there until he died in 1884. Richard Holt Hutton, the famous Editor of the Spectator, 1826-1897, was a native of Leeds. A Yorkshirewoman of great learning, one of the foremost of EngUsh Hellenic scholars, is Miss Jane Harrison, who, having been educated at Cheltenham and at Newnham College, Cambridge, became Lecturer in Classical Archaeology at the last-named institution and has since published numer- ous learned works on Greek Art. In statesmanship and politics the Yorkshire reputation is always to the fore ; during the last half century certain men have done much to heighten it. John Arthur Roebuck, many years member for Sheffield, represented advanced Radicalism before it came to be as evident as it is now commonplace. Sir James Stansfeld, of Halifax, was successively President of the Poor Law Board and of the Local Government Board. Gathome Hardy, first Earl of Cranbrook, born at Bradford, 1814-1906, was Home Secretary 1867-68 ; Secretary for India 1878-80, and Lord President of the Council 1885-92. 298 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Herbert Henry Asquith, bom at Morley, 1852, became Home Secretary in 1892, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1905, and was Prime Minister from April, 1908, until recent events obliged him to hand over the reins of Government to Mr. Lloyd George. Finally, two Yorkshiremen have in recent times achieved great distinction in the world of travel. James Theodore Bent, 1852-1897, a Leeds man, explored Arabia, Abyssinia, and the ruined cities of Mashona- land ; Douglas Mawson, born in Bradford, 1882, has already made himself famous the world over by his intrepidity as a three-times explorer of the Antarctic Regions. CHAPTER XII YORKSHIRE IN 1914 There are three instructive and interesting methods by which one may arrive at some idea of the development of a county, and at some estimate of the proportions to which that development has attained at a given period — the first is by tabulating the increase in its population ; the second by ascertaining its rateable value ; the third by considering the wealth-producing power of the trades and industries within its borders. If a county has made no great strides in the way of population-increase ; if its rateable value is not appreciably greater now than it was, say, fifty years ago ; if the industries carried on in its towns and villages produce no great amount of wealth, then it cannot be said to be developing in that matter •i purely material prosperity which is, after all, highly important, not only to itself but to the country of which it is either a big or a little shce. And if one would form an idea of the importance of Yorkshire as a part of England in 19 14, one must consider it as it was in that year in relation to what it had been in other ages. Of its rateable value in mediaeval days it is impossible to arrive at any very precise notion — rateable value as we know it, did not then exist. But we know a great deal about the population of Yorkshire at one time and another ; also we know a good deal about the trades and industries in which its people have been engaged at various periods, and nothing can give us a better idea of the importance, the wealth, and the power of the county in this age than a comparison of its present-day conditions with those under which we should have found it two hundred, or five hundred, or nine hundred years ago. When the Domesday Survey of England was completed in 1085, the population of Yorkshire was probably not more 300 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE than 7,000. The county — north of the Humber and the Calder, at any rate — had of course suffered terribly under the devastation which its folk for a long time called the Harrjdng of the North. William the Conqueror's orders to kill, burn, and waste were carried out literally — the wonder is that as many as 7,000 people survived. It must have been possible at any time during the next two centuries for a man to have gone a long day's journey in many parts of Yorkshire without seeing human being or human habita- tion. But by the time of the Poll Tax of 1378-9 we hear of populated towns, small indeed, but making some attempt to flourish— certain of them were quite flourishing. Leav- ing York, the capital, out of calculation, the most important town was Pontefract. It was then the second largest town in Yorkshire. The Poll Tax was paid at Pontefract by no fewer than 608 persons — its population was probably at least three thousand. There were numerous trades and crafts carried on in Pontefract — fifteen of its burgesses ranked as merchants. But the remaining Yorkshire towns were small and insignificant, though Hull was already beginning to supersede Hedon as the chief port of the Humber. In the West Riding, Do'" master came next to Pontefract ; it ranked before Sheffield, as Snaith did before Leeds, and TickhiU before Wakefield. Away up Airedale, Bingley had at that time a population of 500, but there were only 200 souls in Bradford, and Huddersfield had not come into existence. Let us see how three typical towns progressed during the next five centuries. In York at the time of Edward the Confessor there were 8,000 people, who lived in 1,600 houses. About 1085 the 8,000 had been reduced to 2,000 ; there were 500 houses in ruins ; 400 uninhabited ; 500 were tenanted. But by the time of Edward the Third York had become the second city in the kingdom ; it had a population of 11,000 ; the greatest city in England, London, had only 35,000 within its walls. The increase in population in York was slow — in 1801, when the first authoritative census was taken in this country there were only 16,145 people in the city. When the Stuart regime began in England, there were not more than 2,000 people YORKSHIRE IN 1914 301 in Sheffield, where James the First's unfortunate mother had spent so many years in captivity ; there were probably not more than 4,000 when the Revolution of 1688 sent the third James out of the country ; in 1801, the population had risen to 45,000. There may have been 300 people in Leeds about 1085 — it is a Hberal estimate ; in 1378-9, the time of the Poll Tax there were 153 people there who were over the age of sixteen, excluding the clergy and the very poor ; henceforward there was a steady if small increase — the total population of Leeds by 1670 was no more than 7,000 ; by 1770 it had risen to 17,000 ; in 1801 it had reached 53,000. And it is at that date, 1801, that we begin with the vast increase in population which has been such a marked feature of Yorkshire history during modem times. Let us consider the figures for the four chief Yorkshire cities as they are given in the reference books with respect to 1801, 1901, and 191 1. The population of Leeds in 1801 was 53,000 ; in 1901, 428,000 ; in 1911, 459,000 ; of Sheffield, at the same dates, 45,000 ; 380,000 ; 476,000 ; of Bradford, 13,000, 280,000, 292,000 ; of Hull, 30,000, 240,000, 291,000. These are the four towns of Yorkshire which exceed 250,000. There are three towns which exceed 100,000 : Middlesbrough, 117,000 ; Huddersfield, 111,000 ; Hahfax, 101,000. And there are five which have popula- tions of over 50,000 — York, 84,000 ; Rotherham, 65,000 ; Dewsbury, 54,000 ; Barnsley, 54,000 ; Wakefield, 53,000. These are the round figures of the census of 191 1, which showed that the population of the North Riding was then 419,546 ; of the East Riding, 432,759 ; of t^e West Riding, 3,045,377. Six years have elapsed since that reckoning, and the entire population of the county may safely be estimated at considerably over 4,000,000. There are twenty cities and towns in Yorkshire which have populations of over 20,000. The rateable value of these towns in 1916 may be tabulated as foUows : — £ ^ Barnsley . 182,299 Bnghouse . 90,656 Batley . 172,822 Dewsbury . 254,668 Bradford . 1,665,109 Doncaster . 287,774 302 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Halifax . 492,342 Morley 101,725 Harrogate . 274,431 Rotherham ^42,130 Huddersfield 565,562 Scarborough 244,109 Hull . . 1,335.761 Sheffield 2,075,408 Keighley . 207,815 Todmorden 122,909 Leeds . 2,226,552 Wakefield 248,542 Middlesbrough 542,132 York . 425,568 The total rateable value of Yorkshire in 1913 may be reckoned as having been approximately £24,700,000, or, one-ninth of the total rateable value of England and Wales, which in that year was estimated at £223,559,349. Now we come to the question of the development of trades and industries. In the Middle Ages there were few industries in Yorkshire beyond those arising out of agriculture, with some small attention to fishing on the coast, and some equally small attempts at coal, iron, and lead-mining inland. The retail trades, of course, were in existence — ^men began to sell meat, and bread, and groceries to each other at a very early period; so, too, they began to seU clothes, linen, boots. But by the fifteenth century there were a great many trades and industries in the county ; we can get something of an accurate idea of them from old documents. In the British Museum there is preserved a manuscript register of the fugitives, who, fl5^ng from vengeance, sought sanctuary at Beverley Minster between the years 1478 and 1539 ; in that register are set down the various occupations of these sanctuary-seekers, the majority of whom were York- shiremen. They were of widely separated grades of society, but amongst them were : — Arrow makers Bakers Barbers Bedmakers Bowyers Brewers Brickmakers Butchers Cappers Carriers Cartwrights Carpenters Chandlers Chapmen Clothiers Cooks Coopers Cutlers Drapers Dyers Fishermen Fishmongers Fullers Glovers Goldsmiths Grocers Haberdashers YORKSHIRE IN 1914 303 Hatmakers Husbandmen Labourers Maltsters Mariners Masons Mercers Merchants Millers Painters Pewterers Pinners Plumbers Pouch makers Saddlers Salters Shearmen Shepherds Shoe makers Skinners Smiths Tailors Tanners Tapsters Tylers Vintners Weavers Wheelwrights Woodmongers Wool drivers Woolmen Let us go on a hundred years further — here is a list of the trades and industries which were being followed in York, the capital of the county, in the year 1623 : — they are the arts, crafts, or callings of — Armourers Bakers Barbers Blacksmiths Biadesmiths Braziers Bricklayers Butchers Carpenters Cobblers Cooks Coopers Cordwainers Corslet weavers Curriers Drapers Dyers Embroiderers Founders Girdlers Glaziers Glovers Goldsmiths Haberdashers Innkeepers Labourers Linen weavers Locksmiths Mariners Mercers Millers Musicians Panniers Parchment makers Painters Pewterers Pinners Porters Ropers Saddlers Shearmen Silk weavers Skinners Spurriers Tallow Chandlers Tanners Vintners Wax Chandlers Now let us turn to the industries and trades which — outside all retail trading — are carried on in Yorkshire at the present time. Some of them are, it is true, only carried on in a small way ; many of them are carried on in a very large way ; all of them are of an entirely different order from the trades and industries of the York list and of the Beverley Minster register. For in both the Beverley and the York Mst the occupations set dovm were those — as a rule — of men who practised them single-handed, or, at most, in small companies ; those of to-day are industries in which 304 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Tast numbers, often amounting to thousands, are engaged. Outside the ordinary retail trades, modern Yorkshiremen are engaged in the production of or matters relating to— Agriculture Cotton Oil Alpaca Cotton-cake Oil-cake Bacon-curing Cutlery Optical Instruments Blankets Druggets Paints Bleaching Dyeing Paper Boots and Shoei Earthenware Plate Brass Engines Plush Brewing Flagstones Pottery Brushes Flax Printing Building Flour Ropes Cabinet-making Foreign Dairy Saw Mills Cahco Produce S5ed Crushing Canvas Foreign Fruit Shipbuilding Caps Furniture Shipping Carpets Glass Bottles Shoddy Castor Oil Hosiery Silk Cement Iron Silver Refining Chemicals Lead Slates China Ware Leather Soap Clothing Limestone Steel Coal Linseed Starch Coal Tar Liquorice Tanning Cocoa Machinery Thread Colour Printing Malting Tools Combs Manure Velvet Confectionery Mohair Wool Copper Mungo Worsted The vastly different character and scope of these industries from those of the seventeenth and the fifteenth centuries are obvious — the county has become a great area of produc- tion. And as manufactures, industries, and trades have increased, the chief towns have changed and have become busy modem cities, as unlike their old selves of a century ago as the modern American city is unlike the first settle- ment of log-huts in which it had its beginning. It is commonly said that York has changed less than any other of the great Yorkshire towns, and that it still remains a semi-mediaeval city. But while York must ever wear the semblance of antiquity because of its glorious YORKSHIRE IN 19U 305 Minster, its encircling walls, its Castle, its St. Mary's Abbey, its ancient churches, its Guildhall, its Merchants' Hall, its quaint streets and picturesque nooks and corners, it is no longer the York of George the Third's time. York began to change when the last coach rattled over York Bridge, and turned for the last time into Coney Street. The first thing that catches the traveller's attention on his first visit to York is not the Minster, nor the Castle, nor even the walls, but the vast railway establishment outside the walls, standing on ground which was once a Roman cemetery. Modern York is typified in its enormous railway station, one of the largest and finest in the world, and in the adjacent railway hotel, looking over the city from a higher eminence than was ever attained by William the Conqueror's two castles, and in the neighbouring railway plant, where more steel and iron are dealt with in twenty-four hours than the famous Sixth Legion eVer saw or handled in all the course of its victorious career. It is typified again in the great factories which have arisen — the big cocoa-making works of the Rowntrees, and the huge flour-mills of the Leethams. Railways and manufactures have touched York as they have touched aU other towns, and if the heart of the city is stiU mediaeval, its surroundings are twentieth century. Vastly changed is Leeds since a certain map was drawn in 1775 — well within the hundred and seventy years of modem Yorkshire history at which we have taken a few glances. In that map Leeds lies within a very small area. To the North, there was httle outside St. John's Church, save Proctor's Ahns Houses, and a few cottages on the road to Harrogate. Southward, open fields came up to the banks of the Aire, except for the buildings called Simpson's Fold, at the foot of Leeds Bridge, and the houses on either side of Hunslet Lane. Timble Bridge, just beyond the Parish Church, marked the eastward extent ; beyond Sheepscar Beck, over which that bridge carried the road to York, there was Httle but open fields, though in a corner of one of them stood the building known to the map-maker as the Methodist Meeting. Westward, the Cloth Hall formed the outworks of the little town ; it, too, according to this 30 3o6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE map, stood in a field. The madn streets were few. Boar Lane was there, and Swine Gate, and Lady Lane, and Kirk Gate, in which stood the old Vicarage ; Briggate, of course, was there, but from the end of Boar Lane going northward, they called it Market Place, and at one point in it there was a Town Hall, set in the middle of the street, and at another, the Shambles, and at a third, somewhere between Upper Head Row and Lower Head Row, there was a Market Cross. Much of this old-fashioned Leeds existed until the nineteenth century was well advanced. The old Town Hall, then known as the Moot Hall, was not pulled down until 1825 ; the Parish Stocks were stiU set up by the old Court House until 1859 ; there was actually a Pillory in Leeds, in its principal street, until 1837. But when the Leeds folk began to pull down, they also began to build up. In 1858 Queen Victoria came to Leeds and opened for them a Town HaU which they had built at a cost of £140,000. Seventeen years previously they had rebuilt their ancient Parish Church — £40,000 was laid out on that. They began to have transactions of moment in relation to site- values. In 1895 they sold the site of the White Cloth Hall for £40,000 — the Hotel M^tropole sprang up on it ; six years before that it had sold the site of the Coloured Cloth Hall for £66,000 ; on that rose the new Post Office. New buildings rose all over Leeds during the nineteenth century. Viewed from the top of John 0' Gaunt's Hill, Leeds, on a dull day, looks as if there were nothing within its big, far-flung borders but smoke, tall chimneys, and the high roofs of factories, but when one is within it, one finds that it can show some of the finest buildings in England. Its Town Hall, its great Infirmary, its Corporation Buildings, its University, some of its modem churches, and especially the Unitarian Church, built by Pugin, are worthy of any city in the world, and if its streets are too irregular for beauty, it at any rate can show fine architecture in all the principal ones ; it can show, also, what is of even more importance to its welfare as a business city — all the latest and most modern improvements in its factories and workshops. YORKSHIRE IN 1914 307 Bradford has the reputation of being the smartest and most progressive city in Yorkshire ; Bradford men — who are not greatly encimibered with modesty — claim, indeed, that theirs is the first city in England as regards all progress, social, economic, poHtical, and financial, that it has long, since dispossessed Manchester of its business and intellectual pre-eminence in the North, and that no idea is ever taken up in London which did not originate in either Bank Street or Market Street. This is no modem superstition ; it has been firmly held for four hundred years, though never so strongly as to-day. It probably originated with Henry the Eighth's itinerant, Leland, who, when he visited the West Riding of Yorkshire, disparaged Leeds in favour of Bradford — a fact which no true Bradford man has ever forgotten, or allowed his neighbours of Leeds to forget. But Bradford, as men know it to-day, is a very modem town, and while it owes a great deal to the undoubtedly remarkable abilities of its own folk — a strangely shrewd, able, and far-seeing race — ^it also owes much to those of outsiders who at one time or another have been attracted to it, and, having once set foot within its boundaries, have taken firm root there. Of all towns of its sort in England, Bradford is the most cosmopohtan. No man can Uve there long without being aware that if it is a town of thorough-going Yorkshiremen, it is also one in which there are a Scottish element, an Irish element, and a German element. The Scot is aU over Bradford ; the Irishman is there in his thousands ; as for the German, one most important part of the business centre of the town is called Little Germany. Most of these settlers have come to stay : the Scot marries a Yorkshire wife ; the Irishmen become councillors and aldermen ; the Germans hasten to become naturalized; no man of any sense ever leaves Bradford after he has once got his feet firmly planted within it. And nowadays, with all this cosmopohtan element, the old Bradford Ufe, and the old Bradford folk, have disappeared, with the old Bradford houses and factories and cottages, set in "folds" and " yards." The old hand-loom weavers, the old spinners are all gone ; here and there, some ancient man may be 3o8 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE found, or some very old woman, who just remembers the first days of the new order of things and cherishes recollec- tions of the Hungry 'Forties ; here and there are still left a few landmarks of the Bradford which clustered a hundred years ago around its now closed-in Beck, and about the foot of the slope topped by the Parish Church. Bradford, as one sees it to-day, is the most modern, as it is the best-built and best-cared-for town in England. Its builders of forty and fifty years ago were highly fortunate men in respect of the fact that close to Bradford — within its extended area, indeed — are some of the finest stone- quarries in the world. They were fortunate, too, in being directed by architects who were men of taste. No one can walk through the streets of Bradford without being reminded (that is if he has had the good luck to visit Italy) of Florence and Rome, and Naples, for the prevalent style of architecture in Bradford is Italian. The tower of the Town Hall is a replica of that of the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence ; the Exchange might have been transplanted bodily from Venice ; the Arcade in Market Street compares not unfavourably with that under the shadow of Milan Cathedral (which was indeed, built by English architects) ; the big, palatial warehouses of Well Street and the vicinity are quite as imposing as the Vatican — seen from without. It may be that all this fine architecture will in time become smoke- blackened, but at present Bradford, seen on a fine day, gives strangers the impression of a city of lightness in colour allied with strength and solidity of material. There is scarcely a mill or factory in the town which has not much architectural pretension ; the public buildings are certainly the finest in Yorkshire. But there is much more than outward show for Bradford to boast of. Its people have always been great lovers of books, of art, and of music, and while it possesses all the most modern advantages in respect of sanitation, water-supply, and other material matters, it is rich in Hbraries, picture-galleries, and concert- halls, and its schools are without question the best and the best-administered in England. The self-satisfied smile which steals over a Bradford man's well-fed countenance YORKSHIRE IN 1914 309 whenever his native town is mentioned in other places is justified— Bradford still merits the palm which Leland awarded it nearly four hundred years ago, when it was no more than a hamlet of houses gathered on the banks of a brook. Far older than Bradford, so old indeed that all record of its very earliest days has disappeared, Hahfax, also, has become modern.' It, too, was once a small town, set in a ravine ; a town of mean houses and cottages, clustered about a magnificent church of cathedral-like proportions. When the fierce old Gibbet Law of the Forest of Hardwick was in high force at Halifax, the machine to which the unlucky victims were dragged (a forerunner of the French guillotine) must have stood well out of the town. Now the town has spread far up the hillside and the moor. Like the other West Riding towns it has become modernized ; it, like Bradford, owed much of its present good appearance to the abundance of fine stone in its immediate neighbour- hood. So, also, do the adjacent still-spreading towns of Huddersfield, Dewsbury, and Batley. In this Calder dis- trict, stone quarries are a great feature of the landscape — at Elland, and Rastrick, and about Mirfield, vast quantities of stone are torn out of the hillsides. And thus it is that in these industrial centres the monster buildings stand, which, seen from the moorlands above, might easily be taken for palaces ; thus it is that their streets are paved, their side-walks laid in such enduring fashion ; in this part of Yorkshire the street of red-brick houses and cottages, all aHke, all depressing because of sameness and monotony, aU tending to become mean and squalid, is not known. Until it becomes smoke-stained, the modern stone-built town, with its wide, well-arranged streets, its open spaces, its public parks, and its plentiful provision of trees in squares and thoroughfares, is a pleasant thing to see — and nowadays smoke has not half the destructive and despoiling powers which it once had. No town in Yorkshire needed so much rebuilding or so much beautif3dng (if that were possible) as Sheffield. Sheffield in the old days — which ended only yesterday— 310 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE was a strange place for any traveller to visit for the first time. A centre of vast industry ; the source of enoimous wealth ; famous the world over, it was perhaps the meanest- looking, most squalid city of importance which man could set eyes on. There are writers who find Mttle that is good in it at present, even after many years of earnest endeavour at improvement on the part of its authorities. " Sheffield," writes Mr. J. E. Morris in his guide to the West Riding of Yorkshire, " is a place of singular unattractiveness ; most of its streets are squalid and grimy ; and the town, as a rule, is buried under a pall of gloomy smoke." The smoke cannot be helped, though it might be much worse, and used to be far worse, but Sheffield folk have certainly done what they could, individually and collectively, to improve their town. In the old days they had little chance ; all the improvements date from 1843 when the town received its first charter of incorporation — after an existence of several centuries. Almost the first work of the newly-constituted Mayor and Corporation was to clear out a slum area in the very centre of Sheffield, and in that cleared area, still not wholly furnished with buildings stands the fine Town HaU — so fine indeed that it makes most of the other pubhc build- ings insignificant by comparison. A palatial Corn Exchange, the University, the University Library, the Mappin Art GaUery, the Museum, the Observatory, the Cathedral — these are the chief buildings in modern Sheffield and with the newly laid-out streets they redeem it from utter un- attractiveness. But this tendency to erect fine isolated buildings in a big industrial town does not assist materially in the way of beauty — it is like planting a few fine trees here and there in the midst of a waste. Here in Sheffield, as also in Barnsley, a few miles away, the existence of fine architectural edifices only shows up the mean and common- place in the general surroundings ; unfortunately for both towns it is not possible to house iron-workers, steel-workers, and coUiers in the palaces wherein wool-combing is done at Bradford and ready-made clothing shaped and sewn in Leeds. An excellent attempt to blend the new with the old has YORKSHIRE IN 1914 311 been made of late years at Hull. A hundred years ago, Hull was a small and insignificant place, compared with the Hull of to-day. In 1817 one Craggs, a bookseller of HuU, published a Guide to the town, in which appeared a map of Hull as it then was ; a facsimile of this is printed in Mr. Thomas Sheppard's valuable and deeply-interesting book, The Evolution of Kingston-upon-HuU. Craggs' plan shows that Hull in 1817 only extended from about the top of Prospect Street (that is, from the junction of Spring Bank and Beverley Road) to the point called South End, which was where the river Hull runs into the Humber, and from a point between the ends of Carr Lane and Paragon Street, on the east, to the ship yards at the rear of High Street on the west. It was therefore not very much bigger than the old Hull which lay within the town walls shown in Hollar's well-known map of 1640. Craggs' map of 1817 shows but two docks — the Old Dock at the back of Whitefriargate ; the New Dock entered from the Hvmiber. There are numerous churches and chapels in it, but few public build- ings beyond the Trinity House, the Grammar School, the Charterhouse, and the Assembly Rooms. AU the docks of HuU, with the exception of the Old Dock, have been built during the last hundred years ; the Dock Offices, erected near the Junction Dock, were for many years the principal architectural feature of the city. But some years ago, chiefly due to the efforts and enterprise of Sir Alfred Gelder, one of Hull's leading townsmen, and its Mayor during an eventful period, a complete transformation was made in the heart of the place. A considerable area was cleared of slinns and mean streets ; wide spaces opened out ; fine and handsome buildings erected ; new Law Courts, a new Central Pohce Headquarters, a new Post Office built, and the whole city improved in a fashion, which, oddly enough, but very happily, is not out of keeping with its ancient picturesqueness. For old Hull, anywhere within the Hne of the docks and the River Hull, had, with its great church of Holy Trinity, its Grammar School, its High Street, its Market Place, its Whitefriargate, its curiously-named Land of Green Ginger, a remarkable picturesqueness. 312 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE These modem additions have not spoiled that ; in a few years' time they will have added to it. Meanwhile Hull benefits greatly by them, as it does by the enterprise of its rulers. The HuU Corporation vies with that of Bradford in being progressive and modern — it has paid particular attention to the health and cleanliness of the city, and Hull, with its public baths, its municipal gymnasium, its four pubUc parks, and its splendid water supply, is as fortunate as it is in the ample provision made within its boundaries — very wide ones now — for elementary, secondary, and technical education. In the go-ahead cities of the United Kingdom, Hull now holds a highly conspicuous place. Two highly-important Yorkshire towns, whose names are known all over Europe and even farther afield, owe their fame and their importance to the mingling of the quest for health with the search for pleasure. Nowadays both Scarborough, on the sea-€oast, and Harrogate, on the inland moors, can claim to rank amongst the most notable towns of the county : each has attained its present consequence in comparatively recent times. True, Scarborough as an ancient borough has a long history, going back far beyond the Norman Conquest, but as a watering-place and a centre of attraction it is a modern product. It began to attract attention when one Mistress Farrow discovered a medicinal spring in its cUffs, somewhere about 1620, and by the middle of the eighteenth century certain fashionable folk repaired there annually — chiefly Yorkshire squires and merchants. But in 1737 it only possessed three pleasure boats for the use of visitors, and though it had become famous enough forty years later to give Sheridan material for a comedy, trips to Scarborough from any but the Yorkshire towns were uncommon. Nevertheless, the Scarborough folk saw chances of attracting visitors a long time ago, and they began to cater for them quite two hundred years ago. Certain pictures, queer enough, remain of a Spa which was in existence from 1700 onwards and underwent strange vicissitudes of fortune. It was always being washed away by high tides, and always built up again ; in 1739 the Scarborough Corporation made a valiant attempt to render it permanent, and YORKSHIRE IN 1914 313 succeeded in erecting a sort of castle which lasted until 1808, when the sea once more broke in upon it and the authorities were obliged to spend £600 in repairs. In 1825 an unusually high tide did great damage to this gather- ing-place of rank and fashion ; in 1836 a violent storm destroyed it altogether. After that, a sea-wall was built and people began to take the waters in a Gothic edifice, which was presently superseded by one far grander, designed by Sir Joseph Paxton. In 1876 this edifice was burnt to the ground, whereupon the Scarborough folk in order to settle matters once and for all built the present Spa, and laid out its promenades and grounds, and thus presented themselves and their visitors with an establishment which is unequalled in England and is, indeed, only out-rivaUed in Europe by the famous casino at Monte Carlo. But not aU visitors to Scarborough are attracted by the Spa, though it is certainly the chief centre of tourist life. Scarborough possesses extraordinary advantages as a seaside resort. It has perhaps the most romantic situation of any place on otu: coasts to which people flock in large numbers ; its old harbom- and the adjacent streets and alleys are remarkably picturesque ; its great Castle Rock has a Marine Drive at its foot which took a terrible amount of labour to make and is weU over a mile in length ; the immediate surround- ings of the town are delightful — and it has two shores, a North Bay and a South Bay, each of such extent that if the entire population of Leeds or Sheffield were turned out on either there would still be some square miles untenanted. The result is that however many people are in the town, it is never unduly crowded. How many tourists visit Scarborough in the course of a season it is impossible to say — but one can form some idea of the popularity of the town as a seaside resort by glancing at certain figures ■furnished by the North Eastern Railway Company, who, during the five summer months of 1913 collected ordinary tickets at Scarborough as follows :— In May, 66,512 ; in June, 59,243 ; in July, 102,233 ; in August, 192,258 ; and in September, 94,931 — a total of 515. I79- Harrogate, the rival of Homburg, is quite unlike Scar- 314 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE borough in two highly important respects. It has no ancient history. It is not a popular resort — that is for any but superior folk. It is essentially the sort of place in which one expects to meet Aristocracy at every street comer, and to dine with Plutocrats every evening. It is perhaps the healthiest town in England, and one cannot avoid a suspicion that its splendid situation amongst the moors, at a considerable height, and amidst the purest and most invigorating air, has just as much to do with restoring health and vigour, and good spirits to its visitors as the various medicinal waters, of which there are many varieties, no two of them (said to be) ahke. But if Harrogate has no ancient history, such history as appertains to it is interesting, for it shows how a town may spring out of nothing, so to speak, and become a source of vast wealth to those to whom it belongs. In the sixteenth century what is now Harrogate was a mere piece of waste land in the great treeless expanse called the Forest of Knares- borough. A member of the local family of Slingsby dis- covered a well, the waters of which reminded him of the waters he had drunk at Spa ; he noised its virtues abroad ; learned physicians came to taste them and wrote treatises about them ; more weUs and springs were discovered ; invaUds and fashionable folk came, lodging in farmhouses and cottages, and in some cases in tents which they brought with them. It was not until 1687 that the first hotel was built ; not until 1749 that the place was important enough to have a church of its own ; not until 1770 that an Act of Parliament preserved for ever to the growing place the fine stretches of land called the Stray. A hundred years ago Harrogate was still little more than a village. Its total population-;-High Harrogate and Low Harrogate combined — was no more than 3,000 in 1830. There were then nine good inns ; Hargrove, in his History of Knaresborough tells us in a footnote what the people did who came to stay at them. " The company in general," he says, " rise early, and repair to the wells ; whence, after drinking the w'ater, they return, and breakfast at separate tables, as they chance or choose to come in. The time betwixt this and dinner YORKSHIRE IN 1914 315 is usually spent in making excursions into different parts of the neighbourhood . . . when the weather will not permit these excursions, a variety of amusements offer themselves within doors, as reading, playing at billiards, cards. At dinner each person takes his or her seat in the order in which they arrive at the place, and ascend gradually as others leave it." Hargrove teUs us, too, what Harrogate could then offer in the way of public amusement. There was Langdale's Library ; it had a reading-room attached to it ; the proprietor had a choice collection of books on sale, in various bindings ; he also sold stationery. There had been a theatre, since 1788, but it had been converted into dweUing-houses — so there was no theatre. There was a pubHc ball on Monday evenings at the Dragon ; another on Wednesday at the Crown ; another on Friday, at the Marquis of Granby ; you paid three shilUngs to be admitted to each — but gentlemen who chose " the amusement of dancing " paid more : probably they paid for the ladies as well. This was all — except that sometimes ' there were races. Always there was the water to drink — bathing in it seems to have begun later. New springs were always being discovered — never was such a place as Harrogate for medicinal waters. And in 1841 the town began to be stirred up. A body calling itself the Improvement Com- missioners laid hands on it. They built the Royal Pump Room over the old sulphur well ; they covered three other weUs. They built the Victoria Baths and a Market Hall — and, far best of all, they drained the town, which showed what wise folk they were. Then they gave Harrogate the blessings of gas and water — water of an extraordinary purity, brought from the moors. Altogether they did very weU, these Improvement Commissioners, successfully paving the way for the Mayor and Corporation, who came into existence in 1884. But what was done between 1841 and 1884 pales and fades before what has been accomphshed between 1884 and 1914. The boundaries of the town have been widened. The permanent population has increased. At least seventy to eighty thousand visitors — all well-to-do folk, except a certain percentage of poor folk who are sent 3i6 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE out of charity — come to Harrogate every season. New schemes of sanitation and water-supply have been carried out. Fine streets, lined by equally fine buildings, have been made. There is everything that anybody can want in the way of amusement. The old Bog Valley has been turned into beautiful gardens. Music is everj^where ; the Harro- gate concerts are famous. The Royal Baths, opened in 1897, cost ;f 100,000. The Bath Hospital, for the poor, cost £30,000. There are churches and chapels of every creed. There is a magnificent building called, oddly enough, the Kursaal. There is one of the very biggest hotels in the world ; there are scores of other hotels — some of them retain a little of the old-fashioned charm which used to make English hotel life eminently comfortable. There is an Opera House, and there is a Technical School, and there are libraries. There are no fewer than eighty springs of chalybeate, saline, and sulphurous water ; the doctors are numbered by the score ; there is no sort of bath, or massage, or treatment known to the faculty which is not practised, and there is not a luxury which Harrogate cannot produce at a moment's notice. It is all very wonderful, and very illuminative, and very interesting — especially when one remembers that, no more than eighty years ago, Sydney Smith declared Harrogate to be the most heaven-forsaken place under the sun. But the difference between the Harrogate which Hargrove knew, and the Harrogate of to-day, is not one half so strange and wonderful as the difference between the Yorkshire of 1750 and the Yorkshire of 1914. If Blind Jack of Knares- borough, a naturally alert and shrewd man, whose wits were almost pretematurally sharpened by his life-long infirmity, and who loved in his old age to hear of what things were being done in his native county, could come back to listen to some account of the Yorkshire of the twentieth century, he would marvel greatly. For he would hear that nowadays there are good roads all over the three Ridings ; that there are railways with steam engines ; that horseless carriages are everywhere ; that electricity and motor-power have arrived ; that men fly in the air. He would hear of YORKSHIRE IN 1914 317 traffic on the canals and rivers, of Yorkshire ships sailing to the very ends of the earth. He would hear of great miUs, and factories, and workshops wherein folk work under the best of conditions ; he would hear of sanitation, and water-supply, and better housing, of lighting by elec- tricity, of public baths and wash-houses, of communal kitchens, of free libraries art-gaUeries, museums. He would be told of better wages, better clothing, better food. He would hear of the millions upon millions of money which folk have saved and invested. He would Usten with amaze- ment to the stories which might be told him of the wealth of the county, of its store of machinery, and of the wonderful new sources of power by which it is worked, of the new methods used in farming, of the apphances which man has devised for his help and his comfort. He would listen to the tale of the new industries, to the stories of romance associated with them : a giant himself amongst men, he would declare that Yorkshire in the nineteenth century bred a race of giants. He would hear, too, with no less wonder, of the marvellous social changes — that the poor man is no longer a mere serf, that he has rights, that he has a vote, and is at last a citizen ; that he and his children can be educated, and may gain knowledge and culture ; he would learn that religious bigotry and intolerance are fast dpng out, that men are learning to respect other men's opinions, however much they may dissent from them ; he would hear of works of charity and benevolence, and of a great and marvellous uplifting of man as man. He would hear of a vahant fight against dirt, and disease, and ignor- ance ; he would be told of how well that fight was going, and of the growing signs of ultimate victory. Finally, he would hear — and nothing would more amaze him — that in this new and wonderful age men have come to see that poverty is not crime, that the helpless must be helped, that the care of children is a national duty, and that society exists not for the preservation of the few, but for the protection of the many. INDEX Ackroyd, James, 154-6 Jonathan, 141, 155 Agriculture — its extent in 1750, 15-16, 28 development, 1845-1895, 80 Yorkshire not an agricultural county of the first class, 161-2 East Riding the real agricultural area, 162 farming in the 18th century, 162- 70 the Four-Course System, 163 Chair of Agriculture endowed at Edinburgh in 1790, 164 position of English farming, 1795 to 1837, 170 gradual improvement in York- shire, 173 artificial manures introduced, 174 machinery, 174-6 the Corn Laws, 176-81 prosperity, 1850 to 1874, 179-81 disaster, 1875 to 1900, 181-3, and its wholesome efiects, 183-4 Aire and Calder Navigation Com- pany, The, 53 Allerton, Baron. S«e Jackson. W.L., 275 Allotments, 167 Almshouses, 225-6 Alpaca, 136, 145 Alum industry, 107 Ampleforth, Benedictine College at, 222 Anti-Corn Law League, The, 178-9 Arch, Joseph, 171, 180 Arkwright, Richard, cotton-spinner, 85, 87, 136 Armour plates, steel, 126 Artificial manures, 174 Ascham, Roger. i6th century scholar, 273 Ashfield Gill, lead-smelting at, 108 ▲squith, Herbert Henry, ttates- man, zqS 31* Atkinson, Canon, author of Forty years in a Moorland Parish, 116 Austin, Alfred, Poet Laureate, 296 Baghill, railway engineering feat at, 64 Barnby, Sir Joseph, musician, 295 Barnsley, centre of coal-industry, 108 Barran, John, makes clothing at Leeds by machinery, 157 Bennett, William Sterndale, musi- cian, 295 Bent, James Theodore, explorer, 298 Bentley, Richard, 17th century Master of Trinity, 274 Bessemer, Henry, 122-3 Beverley — Minster, 214. 218 masonry of, 106 lace-making, 136 Parliamentary representation, 192 Sydney Smith's meeting at, 210 Binns, J. A., president of Bradford Building Society, 262-3 Black Dyke Mills, 141 Bolckow, Henry, responsible with John Vaughan in 1841 for industrial development of Middlesbrough, 118-9 Bolton, forge of Augustinian Canons at, 116 Braddon, Miss, novelist, 296 Bradford, 307-9 cloth, 158 Grammar School, 147 iron works, 117 Lister's house, 153 Luddite riot, at, 102 Memorial Hall, 86 silk, 136 wool trade, 82, 144 worsted industry, 136 INDEX 319 Bradford — coHiiuued Paxliamentary representation after Reform Act, 192 Statue of Richard Oastler, 195 water supply, 204-5 association of W. E. Forster with, 236 Mechanics' Institute, 244 Public Library, 251 Building Society, 260-3 Communal Kitchens, 269 population, 301 Bramah, Joseph, i8th century inventor, 274 Bramley, Henry Ramsden, divine, 277-8 Bridlington, old harbour, 72 Briggate and Roundhay Tramway, 70 Briggs, Henry, 17th century mathe- matician, 273 Bright, John, 178 Biindley, James, introduces the canal system, 50-2 Bronte, Charlotte, episode from her novel Shirley teken from the first of the Luddite Riots, 100 the sisters, 296 Li *e of, by Mrs. Gaskell, refer- ence to Cartwright the mill- owner, 100 Brotherton, 106 Brown, John, " Father of the South Yorkshire Iron Trade," 124-8 Building societies, 260-4 Camden notes Yorkshire industries, 106-8 Canals — introduced by Brindley, 50 Bridgewater, 51 Leeds and Liverpool, 51 Bingley and Shipley, 52 Goole and Knottingley, 53 Canal shares, 61 Canning, George, attempts to modify the Corn Laws, 177 Carding wool, 82 Cartwright, Edmund, patents a power-loom in 1785, 86 Cartwright, the Yorkshire mill- owner of 1812, 100-2, 143 CathoUc Emancipation, 208-11, 219-23 Chaloner, Sir Thomas, develops alum induitry at Guisborough, 107 Charlotte Dundas, Th>, steam-boat propelled by Watt's engine, 90 Chronometer, invention of the, 73-4 Church of England, The, in York- shire, 218-9 criticisms of, by leading states- men and clergy, 211-13 neglect and mutilation of churches, 215 revival in Yorkshire, 213 Churches, 19-20 Hickleton, 115 Leeds, 12, 18, 24, 215, 217, 222 Sheffield, 131, 218, 222 SpofEorth, 48 York, Ripon, Beverley, Selby, Howden, 214 Wakefield, 218 Halifax, 218 KnareSborough, 221 Hull, 222 Bradford, 222 Cloth, 134, 157-9 Coal used by Romans at Bierley, 109 output in 1750, 15 development, 105, 108-17 at Barnsley, 108-9 at Doncaster, 109 at Normanton, 109 appUed to glass-making at New- castle, no replaces wood, 117 statistics, 1 800-1 900, 114 superstitions concerning coal, 111-12 coal-mining in 17th century, 1 12-14 Cobbett, William — his efforts on behalf of rural population, 171 his opinion of Yorkshire farming, 172-3 Cobden, Richard, 177-8 Coke, Earl of Leicester, sheep- farmer, 163 Collieries — • conditions in 17th century, 114 improvements in iSth century, 114 modem town-planning and hous- ing, 115 Communal kitchens, 269 Condenser, Invention of the Separ- ate, go Conisborough Castle, 115 Cook, Captain, 72-4, 274 Cooper, Charles Alfred, editor of tha Scotsman, iy&~9 320 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Co-operation, 265-7 Co-partnership, 267-8 Copper, said by Camden to be plentiful in Yorkshire, 108 Corf, the, i6th century coal-basket, 110 Crosland Moor, Luddite riot at, 102 Corn Laws, The — of 1815 and 1827, 177 agitation for their aboUtion, 177-9 the Anti-Corn Law League, 1 78-9 repealed in 1846, 176 Corporation Act, repeal of, 208 Cotton, 136 Cotton Mills Act of 1819, The, 193, 195 Coverdale, Miles, 15th century scholar, 273 Cranbrook, Earl of, 118 Cravenette Company, the, water- proofing business, 159 Crofts, Ernest, painter, 295 Crompton, Samuel, perfects the spinning-jenny, 85 Crossleys, the, carpet-makers, 156, 226-7 Curr, John, lays down cast-iron tramway at a Sheffield colliery, 55 Cutlers of Shef&eld, The, 117, 129-31 Cutlery, 129-30 Dacre, lead-smelting works at, io8 Damask, 141 Danby, so-called British villages at, really old iron-workings, 116 Darby, Abraham, mixes coke and charcoal at Coalbrookdale Foundry in Shropshire, 117 Davy, Sir Humphry, introduces artificial manures, 174 Dawson, Joseph, founder of the Low Moor Ironworks, 118 Defoe, Daniel — visits Yorkshire towns, 71, 82, 117. 136 describes Leeds Cloth Market, 134 Dering, Heneage, Dean of Ripon, 215 Deserted Village, The, Goldsinith's, quoted, 164 Dickens, Charles, exposes treatment of paupers in Oliver Twist, 196-201 and evils of private schools in Niekolas Nickltby, 241 Disappearance of the Small Land- owner, A. H. Johnson's, 165 Dissenters, 20-1, 34 their disabilities before 1828, 208 Marriage Act of 1836, 208 their strong hold on Leeds before 1837, 215-6 Doncaster — G.N.R. workshops, 69 transformed by coal industry, 115 Donskoi wool 144 Drew, Monsignor, novelist, 296 Dye-making, 160 Dyson, Sir Frank Watson, Astro- nomer Royal, 296 Edge tools, 129 Education, 230-55 in 1750. 33-5 checked by Dissolution of the Monasteries, 34 professional educationist appoint- ed Minister of Education for the first time, 1917, 230 developed by S.P.C.K., British and Foreign School Society, and National Society, 231-2 development of State-aid and control, 234-5, 239-40 debt of education to W. E. Forster, 238 secondary education at the time of the Reformation, 240 Public Schools Act 1868, 241 Endowed Schools Act 1869, 241 Act of 1902, 241 technical, 242, 244 by newspapers, 245-8 by public libraries, 249-51 Education Act of 1870, criticised by Nonconformists, 238 Elementary Education Act, W. E. Forster's, 235, 238 Elections in pre-Reform days — method of, 188-90 expenses of, 191-2 Electric power — appUed to trams, 70 its future, 104 Elland, coal-pit at, mentioned by Oliver Heywood 1679, 11 3-4 Ellerman-Wilson Line, The, 76 Elliot, Ebenezer, the Corn Law Rhymer, 178 Enclosure Acts, The, 165-70 injustice to rural populations, 165, 167-8 •ompensation by allotmant*, 167 INDEX 321 England in the Eighteenth Century, History of, Lecky's, quoted, 220 English Farming : Past ' and Present, Prothero's, quoted, 166-7 English Peasantry and the Enclosure of Common Fields, Slater's, quoted, 166 English Schools at the Reformation, Leach's, 240 Eston Bank, ironstone mines at, 119 Etty, William, painter, 275 Ewart, WUliam, passes the Public Libraries Act, 250 Factory System, The, 94, 105 conditions, 95-9, 102-3, 193-6 first attempts at improvement, 98 Reform Act, 102-3 Reform in 1819, 193, 195, in 1844-5, 195, in 1847, 196 Consolidating Acts of 1878 and 1901, 196 Fairbairn, Peter, develops machine- making at Holbeck, 93 Fairfax, Thomas, Cromwelhan, born at Denton, 273 Farming — Yorkshire backward in experi- ments, 163 summary of position 1795 to 1S37, 170 prosperity 1850 to 1874, 179-81 disaster 1875 to 1900, 181-3 improved conditions in present century, 183 Ferrensby, road-making in 1765, 42. 45. 54 Ferrybridge, 106 Feudal Castles : Their remains in the i8th century, 10 Fielden, John, Factory Reformer, 193. 195-6 Firth, C. H., historian, 297 Mark, steel-manufacturer, 280 Fisher, Dr. Herbert, and Education Reform 1917, 230, 240 Flax, 136-7 Flaxman, John, sculptor, 275 Flock, 135 Flying shuttle, the, invented 1733, 84 Forests — at Sheffield, mentioned in Domes- day, 133 in iSth century, 1 1 Knaresborough, 11, 116 Forster, William Edward, social reformer and Minister of Edu- cation, 236-8 his remarks on the Irish question, .237 his qualities estimated by Morley and Gladstone, 237-^ Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, Atkinson's, contains reference to ancient iron- workings, 116 Foster, John, founder of the Black Dyke Mills at Queensbury near Bradford, 14 1-4 Foston, Sidney Smith's living at, 2og Fountains Abbey, the Abbots of, 108, 116 Frith, WUliam Powell, painter, 295 Frobisher, Martin, born near Wake- field, 273 Fulling, 83 Funerals, feasting at, 32-3 Garforth, no Gascoignes of Harewood, The, 272 Gibbet Law at Halifax, The, 154-5 Gissing, George, noveUst, 296 Glass-making at Newcastle, no Goiis and stocks of the Pennine Range, 88 Goole in 1750, 71-2 as a river port, 53, 76 Grimshaw, WiUiam, directions for funeral in his will, 32 Guisborough — alum industry, 107 its monks and the iron mines, n6 iron -industry, 119 Halifax — worsted industry, 136 woollen industry, 154-7 Gibbet Law, 154-5, 309 Parliamentary representation, 192 parish church, 218 charities endowed by the Crossleys, 226-7 population, 301, 309 Hallamshire, 133, 162 History of, 131 Hand-looms, 83-4, 87, 91 Hanoverian period, social life in the, 18-20, 24, 26-7, 36, 198 21 322 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Hard Cash, Charles Reade's, c:^- poses iniquities of asylum system, .:oi Hardy, Gathorne, Victorian states- man, grandson of John Hardy, alterwards Earl of Cranbrook, 1 1 8, 297 Hardy, John, joint founder of the Low Moor Ironworks, 118 Hargreaves, James, invents the multiple spinning-frame, 85 Harrison, Jane, scholar, 297 Harrison, John, inventor of the chronometer, 73-4, 86 Harrison, John, 17th century Leeds philanthropist, 273 Harrogate, 313-16 service of vehicles introduced by John Metcalf, 45 as a spa, 315 Hayshaw Moor, Roman pigs of lead discovered at, 108 Hedon, 71, 106, 192 Hero's treatise on " heated air " circ. 100 B.C., 88-9 Heywood, Oliver, 20, 112-4, 223-4 Holbeck — machine-making developed by Mathew Murray in 1795, 92 by Peter Fairbairb in 1828, 93 linen manufacture, 137 Holden, Isaac — wool-comber of Bradford, 147-50 his partnership with Lister, 149 Hook, Dean, his work at Leeds, 213-7 becomes Dean of Chichester, 217 Life of. Dean Stephens', quoted, 216-7 Houghton Old Hall, 115 Howard, John- — visits Yorkshire prisons, 40 visits Leeds Infirmary, 228 Howden, 65, io5 Huddersfield— town of fine woollen cloths, 136 dye-making at, 160 Parliamentary representation after Reform Act, 1^2 population, 301 Hudson, George, Railway King 1840 to 1850, 62 Hull, 311-12 prison, 40 shipping, 71, 74-6 Parliamentary representation, 192 Hull — continued Catholic church, 222 museums, 252 associations of Baron X unburn - holme, 289-90 population, 301 1817 plan of city, 311 dock offices, 311 Huntsman, Benjamin, manufac- tures steel by Uquelying iron in a crucible, 122 Hutchinson, Sir Jonathan, surgeon, 296 Hutton, Richard Holt, editor of the Spectator, 297 lUingworth, Alfred, Bradford manu- facturer and politician, 281 Inns in 1863, 65 Iron, 105-6, 116-22 first used for rails in Yorkshire, 55. 70 imported by the Wilsons at Hull, 75 output in Yorkshire, 116 smelting, 1 16-17 trade at Middlesbrough, 77, 81 Eston Bank Mines, iig Lower Cleveland Bed, 120 Iron-works — Atlas Works, Brightside, 125 Masborough 117 Low Moor, 117-18 Jackson, WiUiam Lawies, tanner, first Baron Allerton. 275-7 Jet industry, 107 Kaye, John, invents the flying- shuttle, 84 Keary, Annie, novelist, 296 Keighley, yarn industry at, 136 Kingston-upon-HuH, The Evolution of, Sheppard's, 311 Kitsoa's engine, 93-4 Knaresborough — Forest, 116 314 History of Knaresborough, quoted, 137. 314 early cloth and linen industries, 137 John Metcalf's house, 44 prison, 40-1 Tentergate. 137 anomalous parliamentary repre- sentation in pre-Reforra days, 187-8 as a pocket borough, 192 INDEX 323 Knaresborough — continued Catholic church built, 221 birthplace of Bishop Stubbs, 292 Knottingley, limestone burning noted by Camden, 106 Lancaster, Joseph, opens a school in Southwark 1798, 231 Land Problem, The, Robertson Scott's, quoted, 167, 183 Lasting, 141 Lead, 107-8 Lectures, popular in Yorkshire, 253-4 Leeds, 305-6 remains of ancient iron-workings, 116 centre of woollen trade, 14-15, 136 not represented in Parliament in 1750, 36 Parliamentary representation after Reform Act, 192 boundaries in 1750, 1, 12, 305-6 iron trade, 15 reached by navigation, 51 growth during 19th century, 69 machine-making introduced, 92-3 Kitson's engine made at, 93 locomotive industry, 94 Cloth Market, 134, 305 Briggate, 135 gaol, 40 churches, 215, 217 Harrison's church, 12, 18, 306 Catholic church built, 24, 221-2 water supply, 203-4 Dr. Hook's Church revival, 213- 217 population 1085 to 191 1, 301, in 1837. 215 hot-bed of Dissent m, 1835, 215 Almshouses, 225-6 General Infirmary, 227-9 Grammar School, 231 University, 243 Library, 251 Museum, 252 Town Hall, 306 Leeds, Edward, bankrupt 1787 though owner of rich iron-ore lands, 118 Leighton, Lord, 282-3 Leland visits Yorkshire, no, 117, 307 Leng. Sir WiUiam, proprietor of Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 247 Letters of Peter Plymley, Sydney Smith's, 209 Libraries, public, 249-51 License to preach, copy of a 17th century, 223 Lije of Gladstone, Morley's, quoted in reference to W. E, Forster. 237 Limestone, 106-7 ' Linskill, Mary, novelist, ~o6 Lister, Samuel Cunliile, 150-4 Lockwood, Frank, Yorkshireman, actor, barrister, 283-6 Low Moor Ironworks, 1800, 117-18 Ludd, 99 Luddite Riots, The, 99-102, 143 Lunacy Act of 1890, 201 Macaulay Lord, his speech on Education vote in 1847, 232-4 Machinery — changes produced by machinery in Yorkshire industries, 8i-2 first applied to weaving, 84 Edmund Cartwright's machine- loom, 86 opposition to machinery, 86-7, 91, 100-3 developments, 91-5, 104, 114 effects on wool and worsted industries, 140 on cloth industry, 157-8 water-power, 87-8 steam-power, 88-9 Savery's engine, 89, 114 Kitson's engine, 93-4 ' invention of separate condenser, 90 Newcomen's steam pump, 90, 114 Watt steam engine, go, 92, 114 Stephenson's locomotive, 93 Lister and Holden's wool-combing machine, 149-52 union between steam and machinery dates from New- comen and Savery, 1650-1700, 89 machinery applied to agriculture, 174-6 Haddocks, John, Bradford mer- chant, 159 Manningham — silk mill, 81, 136 Lister's mills burned in 1871, 153 Mansell, Robert, glass-maker at Newcastle, 1620, no 324 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Markham, Sir Clements, traveller and man of letters, 286-8 Marvell, Andrew, 17th century statesman, 273 Masborough Ironworks, 1746, 117 Master Cutlers' Feast, The, 131 Mawson, Douglas, explorer, 298 May, Philip WilMam (Phil May), 295 Mechanics' Institutes, 244 Metcalf, John, road-maker, 43-7 The Life of, 47 Micklefield, no Middlesbrough — size in i6th century, 72 its wonderful development, 76-7, 119-20 this mainly due to Henry Bolckow and John Vaughan, 119 Mills in Yorkshire, 94, 141 Minerals, 105-21 Mining — conditions in I7thcentury,ii2-i 4 in 1 8th century, 28 difficulties, iio-ii improvements, 114-15 Monastic houses, their remains in the 18th century, 10 Moore, Henry, painter, 295 Moorlands, 162 Morals and Pubhc Health Act of 1802, The, 193 Morris, F. O., ornithologist, 296 Mungo, 135, 157 Murray, Matthew, macliine-maker at Leeds, 1795, 92 Museums, 251-3 National Agricultural Labourers' Union, 1872, 171 Newcomen — applies steam to machinery, 89 invents a steam-engine for pump- ing, 90, 114 Newspapers, 245-8 Hull Advertiser, 279 Leeds Intelligencer, 27, 246 Leeds Mercury, 27, 55, 57, 194, 245-6 Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 247 York Herald. 190 Yorkshire Observer. 247 Yorkshire Post, 27, 246 Nicholas NickUby, Dickens', 241 Nidderdale — lead-mining, 107 largely owned by Abbots of Fountains Abbey, 108, 116 reservoir, 204-g Nonconformity. 20-1. 34, 223-5, 280-1 its influence on education, 34 Methodists, 21-2 Wesley at Kingswood, 28 disabilities of Dissenters, 208 persecution in 17th century, 224 Act of Toleration 1689, 224 opposition to Education, 234, 238-9 Northallerton, conditions of fran- chise at, 192 Nuttall, Enos, Archbishop of the West Indies, 290-1 Oastler Richard, Factory Reformer, 193-6 Oliver Twist, Dickens', 197-201 Onions, Oliver, novelist, 296 Osbaldeston, Richard, Dean of York, 215 Outram, James, introduces the tram system, 70 Owen, Robert — brings about the Cotton Mills Act of 1819, 193, 195 his efforts on behalf of education, 232 pioneer of Co-operation, 265 Oxford Movement, The, 213, 217 Papin, Dr., invents steam-engines for pumping water about 1685, 89 Parliamentary representation, 36, 185-93 Parratt, Sir Walter, musician, 296 Pateley Bridge, Roman lead found near, 108 Patrington, 106 Pattison, Mark, Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford, 297 Paupers, their treatment in the 18th century, 38-9 Peel, Sir Robert, McCarthy's Life of, quoted, 177 Peterloo Massacre, The, 257 Plug Riots, The, 102 Poll Tax of 1378, 300 Pontefract- — survival of its antiquity, 13 mentioned by Leland as a coal region, no Castle, 64 as a borough returns two mem- bers, 192 Jesuit mission in 1 8th century, 221 population in 1378, 300 INDEX 32 s Poor Laws — 1552 to 1832, 197 Amendment Act of 1834, 198-9 Royal Commission of 1905, 198 nearly £18 000 000 spent in relief i° 1913. 199 Porteus, Beilby, i8th century eccle- siastic, 274 Postal communication, develop- ments due to railways, 78 Potter, John, iSth century Arch- bishop of Canterbury, 274 Power-looms, 86, 91, 156 Prisons — Yorkshire, 39-40 in the 18th century, 39-40 Knaresborough, 40 John Howard secures reform, 201 Prison Act of 1865, 201 statistics relating to state of education in 1847, 233 Prisons in England, The State of, John Howard's, 201 Puritanism, 22, 29-31 Queensbury, John Foster's mills at, 141, 143-4 Radclifie, John, 17th century physician, 274 Railways — development of railway system, 55-60 original small Companies, 59 six great Companies since 1870, 64 speculation, 61-2 statistics, 68-9 Easingwold, 65 Great Central, 63 Great Northern, 62-4^ 69 HuU and Bamsley, 65 Hull and Selby, 75 Leeds to Selby, 57 Liverpool and Manchester, 57 London and North Western, 63, 125 Middleton Collieries Railway, 55 Midland, 63-4 North-Eastern, 59, 63, 313 Rotherham and Sheffield, 59 Stockton and Darlington, 54, 59, 68, 77 Swinton and Knottingley, 64 York and Doncaster, 64 Rainhill, steam trials at, 55-6 Rawfolds Mill, Luddite attack upon. in Hard Asylum 208, Rcade, Charles, exposes Cash iniquities of system, 201 Reform Act of 1832, 185-93 its effects, 193 Religion — Nonconformists, 20-1, 34, 223-5 Roman Catholics 22-4, 208-11, 219-23 Jews, 208-9 Church of England previous to Anglican Revival criticised, 211-13 , Rennie, Sir John, and the Leeds water supply, 204 Reresby, Sir John, Stuart soldier and traveller, 273 Riots, the Luddite, 99-102, 143 the Plug, 102 against the Corn Laws, 177 Ripon — masonry at, 106 Cathedral, 214 diocese founded in 1836, 218 Rivers — Aire, 51-3, 90, 203, 205 Calder, 52-3, io6, 205, 309 Ouse, 51 Tees, 77 Ure, 51 Road-making, 42-3, 45-6, 54-5 Turnpikes, 17, 48 Roads, 16-18, 49 Knaresborough to Borough- bridge, 42 deterioration, 66 Rochdale, Co-operation at, 266 Roebuck, John Arthur, member for Sheffield, 297 RoUe,Richard, 14th century poet,272 Roman Catholics — in Yorkshire, 24 their treatment, 22-3 208-11 Emancipation, 20S-9, 219-23 results of increase of Catholicism in Yorkshire after 1850, 222 Roman Yorkshire — Eboracum, as large as 18th cen- tury York, 12 coal and iron workings, 106, 109 lead workings, 107-8 roads, 16, 107 wool manufacture, 138 remains in York museum, 253 cemetery at York, 305 Rosedale, traces of iron-smelting at, 116 326 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Rotherham — the Masborough Ironworks near, 117 population, 301 Routh, Cuthbert, his Slud-Book, 25-6 Royal Agricultural Show, The, founded 1838, 173 Royal Commissions — on factory conditions, 195 on elementary education, 235 on Poor Law administration, 198 Rural Exodus, The, 182 Russell, Lord John, 178-9 Sadler, Michael, Factory Reformer, 193. 195 Salt, Titus, develops alpaca wool trade, 144-7 Savery's engine, 89, 114 Savile, Sir George, first Marquis of Halifax, 274 Saville, Sir Henry. i6th century mathematician, 273 Savings-banks, 258-60 Scarborough, 312-3 in 1730, 72 Catholics at, 221-2 as a Spa, 312-3 History of. Baker's, quoted, 221-2 Schools, primary, rare in the i8th century, 231 secondary, at the time of the Reformation, 240 , private, 241 Sedgwick, Adam, scientist, 296 Selby— masonry of, io6 flax-spinning, 137 opposition to Turnpike Trusts, 48 Navigation engineering, 51 Sharp, Abraham,' i7tli centurj' mathematician, 274 Sheardown, pamphlet in 1S63 showing expenses of travelling, 66-7 Sheffield, 309-10 cricket played there in 1750, 29 the Cutlers, 117, 129-31 development of iron and steel industry, 128-33 steel introduced by Bessemer, 123 and manufactured by John Brown, 124-5 steel manufacturers, 128 " whittles," 121 Luddite attack on Barracks, 102 ShefBeld — continu-ed Castle, 132-3 Parish Church, now the Cathe- dral, 131, 310 Parliamentary representation after Reform Act, 192 Catholic church, 222 University, 243-4, 310 Shipbuilding at Hull, 74-6 Shirley, Charlotte Bronte's, con- tains episode founded on first Luddite Riot, 100 Shoddy, 135, 157 Short History of English Rural Life, Montague Fordham's, quoted, 169 Silk and velvet industry, 153 Smeaton, John — native of Whitkirk, nearLeeds,274 canal-making with James Brind- ley, 52 improves the blast in iron-fur- naces, 117 Smelting iron, 116-7 Smith, Sydney, his work for Catholic Emancipation, 209-10, 221 , Life and Times of, Stuart Reid's, quoted, 209-11 Societies, Building, 260-4 , Friendly, 263—4 , life insurance, 264-5 , co-operative, 265-9 Society, British and Foreign School, 231 for Promoting Christian Know- ledge, The, establishes 1,500 free schools in first half of i8th century, 231 Home and Colonial 232 for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Church of England, the National, 231 Spinning, 82, 85 Spofforth, John Metcalf's monu- ment in the Parish Church, 48 Sports and Pastimes — in 1 8th century, 2S-9, 31 cricket, 29, 31 Squire, the Yorkshire, 25 Stage Coach, The — appears in Yorkshire, 49 regular service, 50, 54 Staple Towns, The, 139-40 Steam-power- — history of, 88-9 early opposition to, 56 applied to machinery, 89 INdeJc 32^ Steam-power — continued first applied to machinery in Yorkshire about 1790, go-r the first steam-boat, 90 Steel, i2i~9 Process invented, 122 Bessemer process, 123, 125, 128 Thomas Gilchrist method, 123 Siemens-Martin method, 123, 128 Steel rails, 125 Armour plates, 126 Springs, 126-7 Heaton process, 12S Mushet process, 1 28 Stephenson, George, 55, 62, 78, 93 Stone-quarrjdng in Yorkshire, 106 Stubbs, William, historian. Bishop of Oxford, 292-4 Sutcliffe, Halliwell, noveUst, 296 Sykes, Sir Christopher,, a good land- lord, 168 Sykes, Sir Tatton, 168, 173-4, 275 Symington, William, applies steam- power to paddle wheels, 90 Taylor, T. C, establishes co-partner- ship at Batley, 268 Tentergate at Knaresborough, origin of the name, 137 Test Act of 1683, Repeal of, 208 Thirsk — cjanditions of franchise at, 192 Sydney Smith's meeting at, 209- 2IO Thompson, Silvanus Phillips, phy- sicist, 294-5 Thomson, George, experiments in co-partnership at Huddersfield, igi2, 268 Thoresby, Ralph, the 17th century topographer, 49, 251, 274 Tillotson, John, r7th century Arch- bishop of Canterbury, native of Halifa,x, 273 Toleration, Act of, 224 Townshend, Lord, develops farm- ing in Norfolk, 163 Tract Societies in mid-Victorian age, 249 Trades and Industries, 302-4 Trades Unions, 270-1 Train, Francis, makes a street tram- line at Birkenhead in i860, 70 Tramways — first iron-way in 1776, 55 origin of name " Tram," 70 development of system at end of 19th century, 70 Travelling, expenses in 1863, 66-8 TuU, Jethro, farmer, 163 Turnpike Trusts, The, 48-g, 54, 57 Union for rural labourers advo- cated, 171 Universities, Yorkshire, 243-4 Vaughan, John — - develops industries of Middles- brough, 119-20 opens ironstone mines at Eston, 119 Village Labourer, The, Hammond's, quoted, 165, 170 Wakefield, no, 136, 144, 192, 301 Walker, William, of Damall, 131 Water-power, 105 Water-supply, 203-5 Watson, Sir William, poet, 296 Watt, James, 90 Watt steam-engine. The, 90, 92, 114 Weaving, 8i, 83-5 weavers invited by Edward III to settle in England, 138 Wesley, John, 28 Westwood, J. O.,^ entomological artist, 296 Whitby— in 1742, 72 Captain Cook's statue, 72 jet industry, 107 monks' forges at, ii6 Parliamentary representation after Reform Act, 192 Whitworth, Sir Joseph, 126 Wilberforce, Bishop, 291 Wilberforce, Wilham, account of his election to Parliament in 1807, 188-92 Wiley, Thomas Fernley, invents process for water-proofing, 158-9 Wilson, Charles Henry, first Baron Nunburnholme, 289-go Wilson Line, The, 75-6 Wilson, Thomas, Sons & Co,, 75 Womersley, io6 Wool industry — introduced by Romans, 138 ; de- veloped by Edward HI, 138 at Leeds by the time of the Stuarts, 14 in 18th century, 82-3 basis of principal textile indus- tries of Yorkshire, 135-6, 138, 157 328 THE MAKING OF MODERN YORKSHIRE Wool industry — continued history of industry in England, 138-40 the Staple Towns, 139-40 developed by machinery, 140, 159 effects on Yorkshire wealth and character, 140-1 worsted from Douskoi wool, 144 experiments with alpaca by Titus » Salt, 145-6 ; wool-combing machine of Lister and Holdeu, 149, 152 Worcester, Marquis of, experi- ments with steam in reign of Charles II, 89 Workhouses^ — visited by the author, 199 his conclusions, 200 Working-classes, The, 256-8, 271 Worsted, 135-6. 144, 156-7 Wright, Dr. Joseph, philologist, 297 Wyclif, John, 272 Yam- produced by machinery, 85 production at Wakefield, Keigh- ley and Bingley, 136 York- Castle, 112, 201, 224, 305 Minster, 106, 214, 218, 305 station, 59-60, 305 the only Staple Town in the county, 140 Parliamentary representation, 192 Museum, 253 York — continued population to 1801, 300-1 Roman cemetery, 305 , History of the County oj, Baines', 245 Yorkshire — in the time of the Romans, 12, 16, 106-9 in 1914, 299-317 population in 1750, 11, 14, 301 character and wealth of York- shiremen, 141, 216, 225-6, 254 Parliamentary representation in 1807, 188 Parliamentary representation after 1832, 192-3 Yorkshire described as "an epitome of the Kingdom " by Lord St. Helens in letter to Wilham Wilberforce, 192 administration before Reform period, 202 Church life revived, 217-9, 225 results in the county of increase of Catholicism after 1850, 222 benevolence of Yorkshire manu- facturers, 226 public charity universal, 227 education, 242-255 famous Yorkshiremen, 272-98 growth of population, 1085 to 1914, 299-301 rateable value, 302 Yorkshire stone, 106, 309 Young, Arthur, stimulates farming between 1780 and 1820, 164-5 PnnUd in (Jreal Britain by \ XJNWIN BEOTHEES, IIMITBU, IHE ORESHiM PKBS3, WOKINQ AND LOSDOH