Category Archives: Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns

The church across the water

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St Stephen's Church, Copley, West Yorkshire

St Stephen’s Church, Copley, West Yorkshire

I find it hard to imagine the sheer power of churches in nineteenth-century England.

There’s a specific reason why the magnificent parish church of St Stephen, Copley, West Yorkshire, was built on the opposite side of the River Calder from Colonel Edward Akroyd’s model village beside the mill.

The vicar of All Saints’, Dudwell, objected having a new church so near his own, so the site was moved from the main road to the woods beyond the village.

The £4,000 cost of the building was raised by public subscription, and Colonel Akroyd spent a further £5,000 of his own money on the furnishings, stained glass, and building the chancel and sacristy.

Consecrated in 1865, it’s a complete essay in Victorian church design by the Huddersfield architect William Henry Crossland (1835-1908) – rich in stained-glass, some of it by Hardman & Co, carving, mosaic and painted decoration.

Furthermore, according to Malcolm Bull’s informative Calderdale Companion website http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~calderdalecompanion/qq_12.html, Colonel Akroyd contributed to the vicar’s stipend.

In 1872 Colonel Akroyd took against the practices of the vicar he’d appointed, Rev J B Sidgwick, and stopped paying his voluntary contribution.  A group of parishioners promptly made up the deficiency, while others decamped to the local Methodist church.

St Stephen’s, which is big enough to seat a third of the village, is now redundant, and is maintained by the Churches Conservation Trust:  http://www.visitchurches.org.uk/Ourchurches/Completelistofchurches/St-Stephens-Church-Copley-West-Yorkshire.

Graham White has an admirable series of photographs of the interior at http://www.flickr.com/photos/strabod72/sets/72157627628722184/with/6227123155.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Housing the workers

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Copley, West Yorkshire

Copley, West Yorkshire

Tucked by the river Calder, the village of terraced houses at Copley, West Yorkshire, looks a pleasant place to live.

That was exactly the intention of its builder, Edward Akroyd – always known as Colonel Akroyd – when his family firm transferred the business and employees to their new mill at Copley in 1846.

In the political conflicts of the time, Colonel Akroyd became one of the driving forces in the movement to reconcile the interests of workers and capitalists.

To house the workforce at this unpopulated spot beside the River Calder he began a small community which eventually consisted of 136 houses, accommodating by the 1870s a population of about seven hundred.

This was anything but cheap housing, but the village provided excellent facilities, including allotments, a co-operative store, an employees’ canteen-shed seating 600 and serving dinners of meat and potatoes at three-halfpence or twopence each, boys’ and girls’ schools (1849), a burial club (1849), a lending library (1850 – free until 1863), a branch of the Yorkshire Penny Savings Bank (1862) and a clothing club (1863).

Colonel Akroyd admitted he didn’t make much money out of renting houses to his workers, but he believed his business gained “from a more attached and contented population”.

It’s tempting to think of the building-society movement as a nineteenth-century workers’ enterprise, sponsored by radical politicians, but in some cases it was the product of employers’ enlightened self-interest.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Wainsgate Baptist Church

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Wainsgate Baptist Church, Old Town, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Wainsgate Baptist Church, Old Town, Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Visitors to Hebden Bridge often find their way to the older hilltop town of Heptonstall, but few find their way to the other hilltop settlement on the opposite side of the valley of the Hebden Water – Old Town.

Up the hill above Old Town stands the Wainsgate Baptist Church, founded by the Particular Baptists c1750.

The second minister, Rev John Fawcett (1740-1817), had packed up ready to move to a better-placed ministry in London, when the distress of his Yorkshire congregation at losing him made him change his mind and remain in Hebden Bridge for the rest of his life.  He used this experience when he wrote the great nonconformist hymn, ‘Blest be the tie that binds’.

The present church dates from 1859-60, a typically robust, elegant classical, galleried chapel, expensively embellished at the end of the nineteenth century.

It’s hard to imagine how the houses scattered along the hillside could fill the chapel and the Sunday school – and the graveyard – year in, year out, but they did.

This fine Grade II* listed building was taken over by the Historic Chapels Trust after it closed in 2001 [http://www.hct.org.uk/chapels/yorkshire/wainsgate-baptist-church/21], and it’s now used as a venue for musical events.

To see what’s on, go to http://wainsgate.co.uk.  It’s worth turning up in good time to be sure of a parking place.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Honest John’s memorial

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Unitarian Church, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Unitarian Church, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Todmorden Unitarian Church (1864-9) is a highly unusual piece of nonconformist architecture, designed and built as a splendid recreation of a fourteenth-century Gothic church, with a spire 192 feet high and internal arrangements which – but for the absence of an altar – are largely Anglican in layout and design.

It has an elaborate font and pulpit, a William Hill organ originally powered by a water-powered air pump, and very fine stained glass by the Belgian designer, Jean-Baptiste Capronnier.  The tower contains a clock, carillon and a ring of eight bells hung for change-ringing.  The final cost amounted to £35,000, almost six times the initial estimate.

It was paid for by the Fielden brothers, Samuel, Joshua and John, as a memorial to their father, “Honest John” Fielden (1784-1849) by John Gibson, who also built Todmorden Town Hall and John Jnr’s residence, Dobroyd Castle, overlooking the town and the Unitarian Church.

John Gibson (1814–1892) is an under-rated architect, otherwise best known for his “Marble Church”, St Margaret’s, Bodelwyddan, in Denbighshire.

William Gaskell, the widower of the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell and the respected minister of Cross Street Chapel in Manchester gave the address in the inaugural service.  He suggested that it was entirely proper to enlist art to serve religious observance – if it was done sincerely.

The Fieldens transferred ownership to a trust in 1882, and inevitably over the years the available income became increasingly unequal to the costs of maintaining the structure.

After a centenary refurbishment, the building became increasingly impractical, and in 1987 the diminished congregation moved down to the lodge at the bottom of the drive.  The decaying and increasingly vandalised Grade I listed church was taken over by the Historic Chapels Trust in 1994 and is now cared for by local volunteers:  http://todunitarianchurch.caldercats.com/index.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Survivals & Revivals:  past views of English architecture, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Honest John and his sons

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Dobroyd Castle, West Yorkshire (2007)

Dobroyd Castle, West Yorkshire (2007)

The Pennine border-town of Todmorden is founded on the acumen and discipline of the Fielden family, and particularly “Honest John” Fielden (1784-1849).  The son of a clothier, he built up the Fielden Brothers’ cotton-spinning business and pursued an energetic political career as MP for Oldham alongside William Cobbett.  As a successful millowner, he argued a powerful case for an eight-hour day, saying that shorter working days would equally benefit factory-owners and workers by restricting production and thereby increasing prices and wages.

He also founded the first Unitarian church in Todmorden, and served as its Sunday School superintendent, exerting a “severe and wholesome discipline”.

He handed on the business, first to his brother Thomas (1790-1869), and then to his three sons, Samuel (1816-1889), John (1822-1893) and Joshua Fielden (1827-1887).

Fielden Brothers became an extremely powerful business, employing at its peak two thousand workers with, in addition to the Todmorden mills, trading offices in Manchester, Liverpool, London and New York.  In the period 1850-65 it generated net profits of around £1.2 million.  During the cotton famine of 1861-5, Fieldens paid half wages to their unemployed workers for road-building and other public works.

Of the three, Joshua was the most prominent.  He became a Conservative MP, retired from the business in 1869 and bought Nutfield Park, Surrey.  There and on his yacht, Zingara, he lived an opulent lifestyle, particularly after giving up his parliamentary seat in 1880.  He died at Cannes, and was brought back to Todmorden for burial:  despite his expensive tastes he left an estate of half a million pounds.

John Jnr lived a quite different lifestyle.  He chose as his wife a mill-girl called Ruth, for whom he built Dobroyd Castle, designed by John Gibson and completed in 1869 at a cost of £71,589.  This sombre, domineering pile on a hill high above the town remained in family ownership until 1942, when it became a Home Office approved school for boys and later an independent boarding school for boys with emotional and behavioural difficulties.

In 1995 it was purchased for £320,000 by the New Kadampa Buddhist Tradition and opened as the Losang Dragpa Centre for meditational retreats.  The Buddhists peremptorily moved out in August 2007, and the Castle reopened as an outdoor pursuits centre, operated by Robinwood Activity Centres [http://www.robinwood.co.uk/activitycentres/dobroydcastle], in March 2009.

Dobroyd Castle is not open to the public.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Border town

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Town Hall, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Town Hall, Todmorden, West Yorkshire

Todmorden is essentially a border town.  The River Calder was the historic border between Yorkshire and Lancashire until 1888, since when the town has been in the West Riding and latterly West Yorkshire.

It’s not a big place, and its centre is dominated by the grandiose Town Hall financed by the three cotton-spinning Fielden brothers, Samuel, Joshua and John, and designed by their favourite architect John Gibson as a magnificent Roman temple on the lines of Birmingham Town Hall and St George’s Hall, Bradford.  It cost of £54,000.

The pediment of the south façade contains two carved female figures, the left-hand, western one symbolising cotton-spinning Lancashire, while the other represents the agriculture and engineering of Yorkshire.

The Town Hall actually straddles the River Calder which runs in a culvert underneath.  Before the boundary-change of 1888 it was possible to dance in the main hall from one county to the other and back again.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Dyed in the wool

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Bradford Industrial Museum, Moorside Mills, Eccleshill, Bradford, West Yorkshire

Bradford Industrial Museum, Moorside Mills, Eccleshill, Bradford, West Yorkshire

I once worked for a man who was born and brought up in Bradford.  Though he’d worked among the coal of South Yorkshire and the steel of Sheffield for much of his adult life he was steeped in the traditions of his native city.

He once drew my attention to his habit of always stowing a couple of pins in the inside of his lapel.  I’m assured by a knowledgeable West Yorkshireman that “No man connected with cloth (Huddersfield perhaps rather than Bradford, but perhaps Bradford too) would feel properly dressed to go out without a couple of pins – a sort of ‘just in case’.”

My former boss was born at the beginning of the First World War, and he told me that he was taken by his parents to the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924-5 – a remarkable event that deserves an article of its own:  http://www.20thcenturylondon.org.uk/server.php?show=conInformationRecord.86.

He described being taken to an auditorium where he and his parents sat in the second row seats.  The front row was reserved, and after a pause in walked the then Duke and Duchess of York, later King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

The Duke sat directly in front of my boss’s father, who gently reached across the open seat-back to make a discreet examination of the royal suit-cloth.  “Not very good wool,” he remarked to his wife and son.

Nobody knows wool like Bradford people.

Those of us who don’t share the woollen-district heritage can pick up some insight at the excellent Bradford Industrial Museum, which is based at Moorside Mills at Eccleshill (built in 1875 and since much added to).

This is one of the admirable municipal museums that soldiers on through hard times without charging admission.

Here in the textile galleries – if you turn up at the right time – you can observe machinery in operation illustrating the successive processes of combing, drawing, spinning and weaving, with informative operators to answer questions.

You can even feel the fabric at every stage from just off the sheep’s back to finished cloth.

There’s much more to see – the millowner’s residence, stables with horses at work, terraced houses furnished at different periods, a fine collection of Bradford-built Jowett cars, a Bradford trolleybus and the only surviving fully intact Bradford tram.

For details of opening times and what’s on when, see http://www.bradfordmuseums.org/venues/industrialmuseum/index.php.  It’s worth a couple of hours at least.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Preacher man 1

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Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

John Wesley (1703-1791) is a towering figure in the history of the English church.

He forms part of a huge dynasty of clergymen and poets, the son of the writer Samuel Wesley (1662-1735) and older brother of the hymn-writer Charles Wesley (1707-1788), who wrote ‘Love Divine, all loves excelling’ and the basis for ‘Hark, the herald angels sing’ among much else.

Though he is recognised as one of the founders of the Methodist church, he was in fact an ordained Anglican priest until his death.  He regarded his ministry as additional to, rather than a replacement for, the Established Church.

Dr Samuel Johnson found his energy irritating:  “John Wesley’s conversation is good, but he is never at leisure.  He is always obliged to go at a certain hour.  This is very disagreeable to a man who loves to fold his legs and have out his talk, as I do.”

This isn’t surprising.  During his long life, his workload as a preacher was prodigious.  One biographer says that he “rode 250,000 miles, gave away 30,000 pounds,…and preached more than 40,000 sermons”.

More often than not, he preached out of doors.  When his followers built their own chapels, he favoured an octagonal plan, of which the best survivor is the Octagon Chapel, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire (1764).  Originally built as a pure octagon, it was extended in 1802 by lengthening two sides to accommodate regular congregations of over a thousand.

It’s still in use, and visitors are welcome.  It’s a delightful place to be quiet in.  It must be a particularly satisfying space to preach in.  For contact details see http://www.methodistheritage.org.uk/heptonstalloctagonalchapel.htm.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Trouser town

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Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire

The steep downhill walk from Heptonstall into the Calder valley gives spectacular views of the town of Hebden Bridge which stands at the confluence of the River Calder and the Hebden Water.   Glaciers formed these valleys, so they have hanging tributaries which maximise the head of water available to mill engineers.

As the textile industry became mechanised from the late eighteenth century onwards, the old domestic industry of gave way to the first generation of water mills.  Then, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, steam-powered mills, no longer dependent on a rapid flow of water, moved out into the flatter land of the valley-floor.

Transport became industrialised too.   The packhorse system was replaced by turnpikes from 1771-2, the Rochdale Canal, built 1794-8, and the railway (1840-1).

Often known as “Trouser Town”, Hebden Bridge prospered until the post-war period, and then its economy crashed.

Between 1955 and 1965 thirty-three mills closed around Hebden Bridge, and 60% of the local shops went out of business.  The Hebden Bridge Co-operative Society went bankrupt when one of its officials defaulted with its reserves.  Cottages changed hands for as little as a penny, and the local planning authorities initially despaired of attracting new industry to the district.

Within a few years, however, the cheap housing, attractive surroundings and easy rail links to Manchester and Leeds brought a variety of incomers – dormitory commuters, home-workers such as writers and artists and a well-assimilated lesbian community [see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16962898].

Houses that couldn’t be given away in the early sixties traded for £300 in 1975 and twenty-five years later were worth £65,000.  Even in the current static market, you can’t find two-bedroomed accommodation in the town for much less than £120,000.

Hebden Bridge now boasts nearly two hundred retailers, including a wide range of antique-dealers, booksellers and music-stores.  It’s also a minor capital of culture.

From the early 1970s it was the one of the homes of the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), who was born down the valley at Mytholmroyd.  His house at Lumb Bank is now one of the writing centres of the Arvon Foundation [http://www.arvonfoundation.org/course.php?genre=&tutor=&month=&centre=2], founded by two of Hughes’ friends, John Fairfax and John Moat.

The Blackburn-born sculptor Edward Cronshaw (born 1959), best known for his statue ‘The Great Escape’, a popular Liverpool meeting-place often referred to as “The Horse’s Balls” [http://www.liverpoolmonuments.co.uk/equestrian/great01.html], lived in Hebden Bridge until he moved up the valley to Todmorden.

And Margaret Thatcher’s famed press secretary, Bernard Ingham, began his career on the Hebden Bridge Times.

Take a look at what’s on in Hebden Bridge – http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/events/index.html:  it’s a hive of activity.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Poets and coiners

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Old Church of St Thomas à Becket, viewed from the porch of the new Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Old Church of St Thomas à Becket, viewed from the porch of the new Church of St Thomas the Apostle, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire

Drive up the steep tortuous hill from the A6033 from Hebden Bridge, or better still catch the bus so you can enjoy the view as you climb, to Heptonstall at the top of the hill, where you find yourself in West Yorkshire at the end of the eighteenth century.

There has been a settlement at since before Domesday, straddling the packhorse route, the “causey”, from Lancashire at the point where it drops steeply down to cross the brook at “Hepton Brig”.

This was a place so bleak that farming was at best an uncertain living, and the inhabitants boosted their income with hand-loom weaving.

The rugged gritstone houses with their mullioned windows, clustered round the medieval church, have changed relatively little since canal transport and water-power, followed by steam-power and railways, altered the scale of local industry and moved the centre of population into the Calder valley below.

The last handloom weaver in Heptonstall worked till the end of the nineteenth century and died in 1902.

Heptonstall churchyard contains two churches.  The Old Church, dedicated to St Thomas à Becket, dates from the mid-thirteenth century.  Repeatedly extended, it has two naves as well as two aisles.  John Wesley described it as “the Ugliest Church I know”.  It was damaged by a gale in 1847 and patched up only until its replacement opened in 1854.  Afterwards it was allowed to fall into ruin.

The New Church, dedicated to St Thomas the Apostle, contains the thirteenth-century font, the 1809 clock, and the Royal Arms of King George III from the Old Church.  The New Church was modernised and extended in 1963-4 by a legacy of Mr Abraham Gibson (d 1956).

Buried in the churchyard is David Hartley, ‘King’ of the Cragg Coiners, hanged for “unlawfully stamping and clipping a public coin” on May 1st 1770.

The poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (1937-1963) is buried in the new churchyard.  Her admirers don’t take kindly to the fact that her stone bears the name of her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes.

Another, less well-known poet, Asa Benveniste (1925-1990), who latterly ran a bookshop in Hebden Bridge, is also buried here.  Roy Fuller wryly describes how the locals automatically assume any stranger in the graveyard must be looking for Plath:  http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoem.do?poemId=1520.

The other significant place of worship in Heptonstall is the Octagon Chapel.

Heptonstall is an oddly mordant place, full of Yorkshire ambiguities, best visited on a sunny day.  To find the real warmth, you need to step inside either of the pubs, the White Lion [http://www.whitelionheptonstall.com] or the Cross Inn [http://heptonstall.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=category&sectionid=26&id=54&Itemid=83] or the Towngate Tea Room & Deli [http://heptonstall.org/mambo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=128&Itemid=102].

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2012 Yorkshire Mills & Mill Towns tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.