Yorkshire Almanac Tom Brown of Kirkleatham’s heroics against the French today at Dettingen (Bavaria) lead his general, George II, to grant him a silver prosthetic nose, immortalised in ballad and portrait

27 June 1743: Tom Brown of Kirkleatham’s heroics against the French today at Dettingen (Bavaria) lead his general, George II, to grant him a silver prosthetic nose, immortalised in ballad and portrait

Thomas Brown, after the engraving by Boitard (Anon 1820).

George Young. 1817. A History of Whitby, and Streoneshalh Abbey, Vol. 2. Whitby: Clark and Medd. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

This is another hero, raised from the humble walks of life, yet worthy to be ranked with the great and the noble. He was born about the year 1715. A stately oak, that now graces the entrance to Kirkleatham hospital, marks out the spot near which the cottage of his parents stood. His father, who was a blacksmith, planted the oak in their little garden, on the day that his son was born; alleging, that the plant might come to be a tree when his boy became a man: Tom and his oak grew up together; but it has greatly outlived him; for the days of man are not yet “as the days of a tree.” Tom has long slept in the ground; his oak still flourishes in vigour and beauty: yet the fame of Tom shall remain, when the oak shall have crumbled into dust. He was bred a shoe-maker; but, preferring the profession of arms, he enlisted into the Inniskillen dragoons, from whence he was drafted into Bland’s dragoons, and sent to Flanders. It was in the battle of Dettingen, fought June [27], 1743, when he had not been a year in the service, that he acquired his renown. In the early part of the engagement he had two horses killed under him, and lost two fingers of his left hand; yet, when he saw the standard borne off by some gens d’armes, in consequence of a wound received by the cornet, he galloped into the midst of the enemy, shot the soldier who carried off the standard, and having seized it and thrust it between his thigh and the saddle, he gallantly fought his way back through the hostile ranks, about 80 yards, and, though covered with wounds, he bore the prize in triumph to his comrades, who greeted him with three cheers. In this valiant exploit, our hero received 8 wounds in his face, head, and neck; 3 balls went through his hat, and 2 lodged in his back, from whence they could never be extracted. A pistol shot that grazed his forehead nearly stunned him. The fame of Tom Brown soon spread through the kingdom; his health was drunk with enthusiasm; his achievement was painted on sign-posts, and prints representing his person and heroic deeds were sold in abundance. He recovered of his wounds, so far as to be able to serve for a short time in the lifeguards: the king would have given him a commission, if he had obtained a suitable education; but it was soon found, that, through the effect of his wounds, he was disqualified for further service; and he retired on a pension of £30 yearly, to the town of Yarm, where he died in January, 1746. There is still a sign in Yarm that commemorates his valour. His nephew, Mr. Andrew Smith, farmer at Kirkleatham, preserves, as a precious relic, the sword which he used in the action; and has also a scarce portrait of him, in which his face appears marked with scars. He was 5 ft. 11 in. high.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Bob Scotney says that Teesside Archives have found a baptismal record for 25 June 1710. He has also unearthed a marvellous ballad, which contains all the evidence I have that Tom Brown’s proverbially silver prosthetic nose was given him by George II:

King George was pleased with Tommy Brown.
He gave him a pension of thirty crown,
A walking stick with a golden head
And a silver nose to wear instead
(Scotney 2010).

The British Museum has Boitard’s original in better quality than the National Portrait Gallery, but life is too short to consider negotiating rights.

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Comment

King George was pleased with Tommy Brown.
He gave him a pension of thirty crown,
A walking stick with a golden head
And a silver nose to wear instead
(Scotney 2010).

The British Museum has Boitard’s original in better quality than the National Portrait Gallery, but life is too short to consider negotiating rights.

Something to say? Get in touch

15 March 1715: Frustrated lovers Martha Railton and Roger Wrightson of Bowes (North Riding) are buried together

31 December 1848: A fragment of the Richmond Hagmena song, performed this New Year’s Eve by the town pinder

1 August 1813: The Leeds-based 51st Foot wear bay leaves, not white roses, on Minden (now Yorkshire) Day, as they drive Napoleon’s troops back over the Pyrenees

10 October 1760: The road surface between Yarm to Guisborough; freight transport in the north

27 December 1745: A correspondent from Stokesley (Hambleton) recounts the destruction of their Catholic chapel by a youthful mob during the Jacobite invasion of England

26 June 1794: The editor of the Sheffield Register fires off a final broadside against Georgian despotism, and flees to the continent and thence to the United States

3 January 1638: On the eve of the civil war, Henry Slingsby witnesses Royalist cavalry exercising near Wetherby on Bramham Moor, scene of the defeat of the Percy Rebellion in 1408

30 July 1820: Primitive Methodists try to disrupt the traditional Maudlin Fair football match between Hedon and Preston (Holderness)

30 May 1835: Alfred Austin, future poet laureate, “Banjo-Byron that twangs the strum-strum,” is born into rural splendour at Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds

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Austin’s parents were married in 1829 in Barnsley, so Ashwood was built in the early 1830s. It is listed, and Historic England has some fine photos by Martin Pitt. Austin’s father died in the winter of 1857, the same year in which Austin was called to the London Bar, and it sounds like his mother and sister moved from Ashwood to Adel in 1858. Then, presumably, Ashwood Villas and Hilton Court were built on parts of the garden. Ashwood makes far more sense without them. Headingley Hill Congregational Church was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, architect of Leeds Town Hall, and built in the mid-1860s.

The first home of Alfred Austin: Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds, viewed from the forecourt of Hilton Court (Cobb 2018/01/26)

Eveleigh Bradford and Jane Bower have published profiles of Austin. A cosmopolitan Catholic Tory patriot, he clearly preferred Italy to his birthplace, which he doesn’t seem to have versified, and where the Leeds Civic Trust has demonstrated what some regard as embarrassing smallness of mind in denying him a blue plaque. However, there’s a lot to be said for this contemporary view:

Mr. Alfred Austin is another poet who takes himself very seriously, in six or seven volumes of verse (it does not matter counting precisely, for they are all very much alike), admirably printed, with Pegasus on the cover, and everything proper. Mr. Austin writes for the most part in smooth and polished metre, and he does not make any ostentatious attempt to mimic the style of greater poets, except in the portentous array of eight hundred and eighty-six stanzas, under the title ‘The Human Tragedy’ (why this particular story should be the human tragedy par excellence, Heaven only knows!), which was probably what provoked Browning’s reference to the author as

Banjo-Byron, that twangs the strum-strum there.

On the other hand, Mr. Austin is absolutely without ‘style’ of his own. He has never achieved style, never risen to it; and his volumes, considering that they are mostly fairly written verse and not without pleasing ideas of a simple and obvious kind, are the most absolutely colourless poetry, to have any pretence to be called poetry at all, that we have ever turned over. The matter is made worse by the author’s utter deficiency in the sense of humour – a deficiency which he shares with some great poets (Wordsworth, for example), but which is a peculiarly dangerous defect for a ‘minor poet.’ A sense of humour would have saved him at all events from such extraordinary bathos, for instance, as when the hero of ‘the human tragedy’ encounters his faithless fiancée:

The shop whence they that moment had emerged
Plainly bespoke their errand up to town (!!)

and would have saved him from making himself a laughing-stock in the conclusion of his poem ‘At Delphi,’ where he professes to have hesitated about crowning his head with the indigenous laurel, lest he should court the fate of Marsyas, but is emboldened by the voice of the god assuring him that there is no ill feeling:

Take it! wear it! ’tis for thee,
Singer from the Northern Sea.

(Edinburgh Review 1893)

I’ve only read vol. 1 of the autobiography, which is very good on mid-century Italy, but contains several delightful anecdotes of 1830s and 1840s Leeds. For example:

Wool-stapling, as followed by my Father, Grandfather, and Great-grandfather — the last two had passed away before I reached the age of memory — seemed to me at the time a singularly light occupation. We all had to be in the breakfast-room at nine o’clock; and Morning Prayers, read by my Father, always preceded the morning meal. When it was over, he lingered among the flowers, the poultry, and the pigeons, and not till about ten o’clock did he leave for Leeds, where, in Albion Street, his office and warehouses were. He invariably walked there and back, a distance of about two and a half miles each way; for, with the masculine habit of the time, he looked on driving in carriages, save for pleasure or very long distances, as suitable only to women. In those days, people dined at a much earlier hour than now; hence he was always home by five, frequently by four o’clock, and on Saturdays yet earlier. I mention these otherwise insignificant facts to show under what leisurely conditions business was then conducted. His remaining share in it consisted in periodical visits to London when the Wool-Sales took place, where he bought what his judgment told him the cloth manufacturers of the West Riding would be likely to require, warehousing what he bought, and selling to them the number of bales they needed. Such was the trade of Wool-stapling in those days. I am told it no longer exists; since the mill-owners, their manufactures being now on so large a scale, purchase for themselves in London and elsewhere what they require. Sometimes my Father would pay a visit to Germany, in connection with his interests at home; and for years I kept a letter from him, from Breslau, with a coloured picture of a Prussian Hussar in the corner of the first page. I remember that his judgment, in all matters of life and conduct, was regarded as a superior one, and he was frequently asked for advice, which they who sought it believed to be deliberately and impartially formed. More than once pressed to be Mayor of the Borough, all the more remarkable in those days, since he was a Roman Catholic, he thought it wiser to decline the office, though he accepted the duties of Magistrate. As the sequel of this narrative will show, he died when I was only twenty-two years of age, and within a few weeks after I had been called to the Bar. But I well remember the even cheerfulness of his temper, and on his face that philosophic smile which testifies to a knowledge of human nature, and a kindly indulgence towards it. No University education was then accessible in England to Roman Catholics, and, save for ecclesiastical purposes, hardly a collegiate one. But, on the other hand, the Grammar Schools of England still offered sound mental training of no narrow character, and his acquaintance with the best Literature was remarked by me from my earliest days. He was, in no filially conventional sense, the best of Fathers; solicitous for the education of his children, comprehensive as regards study, severe in respect of conduct, and reasonably strict as a mentor in morals. The most devoted and domestic of husbands, he was, I could not help observing, much liked and trusted by women of every condition; for his attitude towards them was essentially chivalrous, and he impressed on his sons its supreme importance. The phrases most frequent on his lips were “Fairplay” and “Honour bright.” His piety was simple and sincere, but never intolerant.

Re Catholic Emancipation:

Catholics at that time were on the side of the Whigs, who had long been advocates of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, which was passed a year after his marriage, which had been compulsorily celebrated in a Protestant Church before being sanctioned in the Roman Catholic one of Saint Anne’s. To me, when a child, differences of Party bias naturally signified nothing. But I took a keen interest in the hoisting of a large Orange Flag, the Whig-Colour in the Borough, on our house at election time. Many years later, my Father, as was and is still the case with most Roman Catholics, transferred his sympathies to the Conservative Cause ; and I recollect a Mr. Beecroft, who had been returned by a very small majority as Conservative member for Leeds, telling me in the lobby of the House of Commons he owed that majority entirely to the local influence of my Father.

Re his childhood at Ashwood, Headingley:

Reminiscences of early childhood, especially if told by oneself, are apt to be rather naif, and only raise a smile. If I say that I have a clear and loving recollection of my own special nurse, Mary Wilkinson, whose prattle was of the ordinary pattern of such; and for no other reason I can imagine, than that she had certain vague ideas concerning Alfred the Great, and my Christian name was the same as that of England’s Darling, she was fond of iterating and reiterating the misappropriate words, “He shall be King of all England, he shall.” I equally well remember our nursery governess, Ann Ingleson, who afterwards married the Manager of a prosperous cotton-mill. My earliest recollections are of a disposition to wander alone in meadows, gathering wild-flowers, and humming to myself songs I had heard others sing. At night I used to steal as quietly as I could out of my bed, and creep into the day nursery, from the window of which could be seen the rising of the moon, or the afterglow of sunset in summer. Anything of a more active character in which I took part arose from the suggestions of my elder brother and sister, the former of whom thought it the most natural because the most hazardous of sports, to wheel me along the top of the kitchen-garden wall, or to inter my sister’s doll with funeral honours, subject to its being dug up again; and the latter of whom displayed the girlish inclination towards mischief from the sheer enjoyment of doing what was forbidden. But my heart was in none of these. A little later I had a genuine pleasure in elementary cricket, flying my kite, and shooting arrows at a fixed target.

When about six, I was sent to a day-school in the village of Headingley, kept by two maiden ladies, the Misses Summers, staid and conscientious experts in teaching young children the rudiments of learn ing. My sister Winifred was my companion as far as their door, and then she went on to a Mrs. Gomoschinska, the English widow of a Pole, who educated one or two “young ladies” in what were then regarded as the necessary “accomplishments” for such. As an indication, possibly, of an inborn romantic tendency, I may recall an indefinable feeling which I cherished for a girl of my own age, who likewise was a pupil of the Misses Summers, and who, it would seem, in some degree shared the sentiment, since it was arranged between us that whichever of the two started schoolward first, placed a stone outside our garden gate as a token. I have always understood that what was there taught me was taught thoroughly.

Holidays in Ilkley:

Our summer holiday was generally passed by my sister and myself at Ilkley, now well known to Hydropathists, but then as primitive a little place as was to be found in the island, and about fourteen miles from Headingley, the road to it being up the lovely valley of the Wharfe through a small township of the name of Otley… But I already loved the [Wharfe], and used to lean for hours over its picturesque bridge at the end of the lane where the elder and the woodbine scented the air. There was what was called the village street, but it was paved roughly, if at all; and a beck, as small streams are called in Yorkshire, and never dry, zigzagged through it. With the exception of the Inn, from which the Daily Coach started for Leeds or Bradford to much blowing of horns, I do not think there was a tiled or slated roof in the place. All the other houses were thatched; and our lodgings were in the chief of these, kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Senior, along whose kitchen ceiling were stretched wires, over which home-made oatcake was dried. Immediately opposite was the equally primitive home of Betty Butterfield, much frequented by us, since she kept donkeys for hire, and had charge of the baths and wells up the hill on Ilkley Moor. It was altogether a place after my young heart; and though I do not think we ever took the baths, we used to walk up the hill every morning to where they were, to drink the cold pellucid water of an adjoining well that was supposed to have special health-giving virtues. I have a clear recollection of seeing an incorrigible drunkard in the Village Stocks, a revival of which I shall shock the sentimentalist by saying I should much like to see; and farmers and their wives who lived in the neighbourhood invariably riding into the village pillion fashion. Every Saturday, during the time we remained at Ilkley, our parents drove over from Headingley. On Sunday morning we all attended Mass in the private chapel in Middleton Park, belonging to the Middleton family, and in the afternoon we were driven to Bolton, six miles from Ilkley, whose ruined Abbey on the Wharfe, whose bounding and flashing waterfall, apparently endless woods, through which the Wharfe flowed and foamed, and well-known “Strid,” filled me with romantic glee. They have all been celebrated, as I discovered later on, by Wordsworth in his poem “Hart-Leap Well.” … I am told that Ilkley is now a model Hydropathic resort, whose once rocky fern-clad slopes are covered with the huge conventional hotels of to-day, spacious Clubs and Concert-Rooms, and all the other concomitants of our much-vaunted material Progress and Civilization. And so one visits it no more, but repairs for rustic refreshment of the spirit to places mayhap such as Garmisch in the Bavarian Highlands, or to Château d’OEx.

Meanwood Beck: