Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

The gig-mill of Messrs Willans and Sons, situate near Hunslet Lane, was consumed by fire on Monday night last, with its contents, valued at about £2,000. The apparatus brought to extinguish the flames was of little avail – for the pipes were wilfully cut, and one of the engines choked up with dirt. We are happy to learn that the premises were insured, and particularly so, as the owners, judging from the above, and other circumstances, entertain strong suspicions that the hand of the incendiary had been at work!

Comment

Comment

Also in the Schroeder Annals:

The Gig mill of Willans and Sons, in Hunslet-lane Leeds, was consumed by fire on the 10th of November; and as the pipes of the engines brought to extinguish the flames were wilfully cut, it was strongly suspected that the fire had been lighted by an incendiary, for the purpose of destroying the machinery (Schroeder 1852).

This isn’t the attack in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley:

The novel is set in and around the Spen Valley in what is now called West Yorkshire (then the West Riding of Yorkshire). This area is now known as “Shirley country” to some locals. Briarmains, a house mentioned in the novel, is based on the Red House in Gomersal, where Mary Taylor, a friend of Charlotte, lived. The house is currently closed but previously open as a museum. Fieldhead, another house in the novel, is based on the Elizabethan manor house Oakwell Hall, which is also now a museum. The attack on Robert Moore’s mill was based on the Luddite attack on Cartwright’s Mill at Rawfolds, Liversedge, though it is believed that Charlotte also took some inspiration from Taylor’s Mill at Hunsworth. Charlotte’s father Patrick Bronte had lived in the Hightown area of Liversedge for a while, and Charlotte knew the area well.

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Original

The Gig Mill of Messrs. Willans and Sons, situate near Hunslet-lane, in this vicinity, was consumed by fire on Monday night last, with its contents, valued at about 2000l. The apparatus brought to extinguish the flames was of little avail – for the pipes were wilfully cut, and one of the engines choaked up with dirt! We are happy to learn that the premises were insured, and particularly so, as the owners, judging from the above, and other circumstances, entertain strong suspicions that the hand of the incendiary had been at work! (Leeds Paper.)

97 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Arson (8) ·
• Corn Laws (1815-46) (7), mercantilist tariffs and other restrictions on imported wheat, oats and barley, which, by keeping prices artificially high, favoured (Tory) landowners but made the poor hungry, the middle classes poor, and (Whig) manufacturers less able to develop their businesses ·
• Destruction of Stocking Frames, etc. Act 1812 (1) ·
• Fire engine (1) ·
• Gig-mill (1), machine for raising a nap on cloth by the use of teazles or wire-cards, a building in which such machines are used ·
• Industrialisation (4) ·
• Insurance (4) ·
• 📌Leeds (235) ·
• Luddism (1811-17) (11), in Yorkshire's West Riding, a movement of croppers opposed to the use of shearing frames and gig mills to raise productivity in the finishing woollen cloth, involving machine-breaking, political radicalism, arms raids, and the administration of illegal oaths - brutally suppressed ·
• Napoleonic Wars (1803-15) (19), a series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon (1804-15) and a fluctuating array of European coalitions, which originated in political forces arising from the French Revolution (1789-99) and from the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and produced a period of French domination over Continental Europe ·
• Pentrich rising (1) ·
• Productivity-improving technologies (13) ·
• Productivity (13) ·
• Property insurance (2) ·
• Sabotage (1) ·
• Textile manufacturing (59) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 17 February 1812: Leeds businessmen meeting at the magistrates court act against the authors of the first successful Luddite attack in Yorkshire, at the Oates, Wood, and Smithson works at Oatlands, Woodhouse Carr
• 14 February 1818: 17 girls aged 9-18 die in a fire at Thomas Atkinson’s cotton mill at Colne Bridge (Huddersfield), but the counting house and warehouse are saved
• 28 April 1812: Methodist Luddites fatally wound the textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market
• 4 January 1813: Alexander Thomson, Baron of the Exchequer, fires the Georgian state’s opening salvo in the great trial at York of Luddites from the West Riding
• 18 August 1812: Lady Ludd leads bread rioters through the streets of Leeds
• 13 January 1812: “My neighbours would think I was going to ruin if they could not smell my factory children half an hour after they had gone down the lane”
• 11 January 1825: American comment on William Hirst of Leeds’s revolutionary and controversial labour-saving improvements to spinning and stubbing machines, patented today
• 11 April 1812: On a moonless night, “the army of General Ludd” attacks William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds (Cleckheaton) – later providing inspiration for Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley”
• 19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë
• 15 January 1812: The Leeds authorities foil the first Luddite attack in Yorkshire – at Sheepscar