Yorkshire Almanac Commander John R. Ward, R.N., rescues Ann Millanby from the Tees at Stockton

8 November 1852: Commander John R. Ward, R.N., rescues Ann Millanby from the Tees at Stockton

Lambton Young. 1872. Acts of Gallantry. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

J.R. Ward, Commander, R.N.
On the 8th of November 1852, a female, in a fit of derangement, threw herself from the quay into the river at Stockton-on-Tees, and would have been drowned but for the gallant and humane conduct of Commander J. R. Ward, R.N., who immediately threw off his great-coat, jumped into the water, a height of nine feet, and swam to the woman, who lay motionless, and drifting down with the tide with her face under water. Captain Ward succeeded in holding her head above the surface, and swimming towards the quay-wall obtained a footing, from whence they were rescued by a boat and conveyed to shore.

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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

But was “the quay” on the Yorkshire bank?! Probably not at that time.

The victim’s name is in the report on 13 January 1853 of the Royal Humane Society’s AGM. The Newcastle Courant says she was “in a state of intoxication” (Newcastle Courant 1852/11/19). George and Ann Millanby had had several children by the time she fell or jumped.

The famous-ish Royal Navy John Ward wasn’t yet a commander on this date.

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Comment

But was “the quay” on the Yorkshire bank?! Probably not at that time.

The famous-ish Royal Navy John Ward wasn’t yet a commander on this date.

Something to say? Get in touch

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Comment

Shirley is set in 1811 and 1812, and Luddism became a serious threat in the West Riding in early 1812. Easter Sunday was 29 March that year, so Whit Tuesday was 19 May – although Charlotte Brontë’s imagination, perhaps inspired by weather reports in the Leeds Mercury, which she consulted extensively, locates it in the last week of May. John Lock and Canon W.T. Dixon say (p.63) that the scene reworks a confrontation between Patrick Brontë and a drunk when he led the Whitsun procession in Dewsbury in 1810 (Lock 1965), but Herbert Wroot (p.78) has found in the Dewsbury Reporter of 12 December 1896 the report of an interview conducted by P.F. Lee in which the Rev. James Chesterton Bradley, the original of “Mr. Sweeting,” says that Charlotte Brontë reused more or less literally an actual episode:

At the head of the steep main street of Haworth is a narrow lane, which on a certain Whitsuntide was the scene of a similar event to the one related in this seventeenth chapter of ‘Shirley.’ The Church School procession had defiled into the lane, ‘had gained the middle of it,’ when ‘lo and behold! another – an opposition procession’ – was entering the other end of the lane at the same time, ‘headed also by men in black.’

It was interesting, Mr. Lee went on to say, “to hear from Mr. Bradley how Patrick Bronté, seeing the situation, at once assumed the offensive, and charging the enemy with his forces soon cleared the way.”

Wroot also says that “immediately upon the publication of the novel, Briarfield was identified, by all acquainted with the district, as Birstall” (Wroot 1966).

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