Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

On Saturday, several informations were filed in the Excise Court against barbers and chandler’s shop keepers for selling spirits without a licence. It appears that barbers, in low neighbourhoods, are in the habit of charging three-pence for shaving their customers on Sunday morning, and giving them a glass of gin or rum into the bargain. On Sunday morning last the excise officers, after waiting some short time in the shops, proposed to have the spirits without the clean shave, which was acceded to, and the above informations were filed in consequence. The penalty is from £50 to £100 at the discretion of the commissioners of excise.

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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

Comment

I wonder whether this isn’t also or mainly about Sunday trading. Henry Schroeder has an intriguing little item, apparently coincident in time and space, which I haven’t managed to trace to the original press report:

Several barbers being summoned before the magistrates, for shaving on Sunday, the bench held that the scraping of chins was a “work of necessity before nine o’clock, A.M., but not afterwards” (Schroeder 1852).

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Tags

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• Alcohol (drug) (62) W/G ·
• Barber (1) W/G ·
• Gin (5) W/G ·
• HM Excise (3) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• Licensing Act (2) W/G ·
• Rum (5) W/G ·
• Sunday shopping (1) W/G ·

All tags.

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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

Comment

I wonder whether this isn’t also or mainly about Sunday trading. Henry Schroeder has an intriguing little item, apparently coincident in time and space, which I haven’t managed to trace to the original press report:

Several barbers being summoned before the magistrates, for shaving on Sunday, the bench held that the scraping of chins was a “work of necessity before nine o’clock, A.M., but not afterwards” (Schroeder 1852).

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Similar

31 July 1846: Pudsey celebrates repeal of the Corn Laws with a 1.725 tonne free-trade plum pudding

4 December 1841: The York Herald tells of an almost omnivorous sheep

10 October 1908: Morley-born Liberal PM Asquith gives a speech on alcohol licensing at the Leeds Coliseum, as suffragettes, suffragists, unemployment activists and mounted police entertain outside

5 June 1696: The Great Recoinage brings a satellite of the Royal Mint to York and rioting to Rochdale

25 August 1840: Debating the teetotal vegetarian Frederic Lees at Rotherham, the Wesleyan James Bromley calls the pledge unchristian, and “alcohol-free” wine undrinkable

2 October 1880: The Leeds Mercury reproduces a typographical intemperance tree from the 1840s origins of the Band of Hope

3 March 1867: Robbed by a young Leeds prostitute, the elderly captain of a Goole boat keeps his shirt on

12 November 1207: Leeds’s municipal charter seeks to encourage female publicans

4 April 1825: A Leeds jury shows limited sympathy for Job Robinson, a London fashion designer sacked by Hardwick’s of Briggate

9 July 1903: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, tells a Bradford sanitary congress to reject the view that (preventive) medicine is antagonistic to the survival of the fittest

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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

Comment

Date in Rolleston, who has a similar find later:

On Thursday, October 16, [1919] he preached before an audience containing many medical men a sermon for St. Luke’s day in Leeds Parish Church from the text, “Were those upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, sinners above all men that dwelt in Jerusalem?” (St. Luke xiii. 2, 3, and 4), and insisted on the importance of preventive medicine, pointing out that epidemics of disease are not manifestations of an offended deity but the consequence of the nation’s want of wisdom (Rolleston 1929).

I haven’t seen Frederick Maurice’s famous “Where to Get Men,” published in the Contemporary Review in 1902, but here is his apparently similar “National Health” (Maurice 1913).

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