Yorkshire Almanac Band-leader John Hope tells an inquest of the life and murder of his daughter, the dancer Jane Banham, by her ex-lover, a Mancunian tailor, at the Malt Mill Inn, Armley

12 September 1856: Band-leader John Hope tells an inquest of the life and murder of his daughter, the dancer Jane Banham, by her ex-lover, a Mancunian tailor, at the Malt Mill Inn, Armley

Leeds Mercury. 1856/09/13. Horrible Murder at Armley, Leeds. Leeds. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

John Hope said: I am an artist and musician [and leader of the band of Mr. Wild’s company], and live at Armley at present. The deceased was my daughter [the company’s principal dancer]. She had been married. Her husband’s name is William Banham. He is an equestrian. He was in Australia when I last heard of him. My daughter was 25 years of age. I saw my daughter last alive at half-past twelve p.m. yesterday, in front of this house, with her throat cut from ear to ear. I was on the hillside, facing the public house. Ten minutes before this, I was in the same public house with the prisoner and my daughter. We were in the parlour below, and I remained two or three minutes. He was attempting to prevail on her to go back to Manchester or some other place. He appealed to me. I said, “I will have nothing to do with it. Settle these matters among yourselves.” They had previously lived together, but I cannot say how long. To the best of my knowledge, they lived as man and wife for two years, and had two children. I am not sure as to the time, as I went to India in 1852, as band master. I am not aware of their disagreements, but about last Christmas she left him, and came home to me at Blackburn, where I was then keeping house. She has resided with me ever since. She came with me here. I am one of Mr. Wild’s company. While I was with them in the room below, they were not quarrelling. He was entreating her, and she refused to go with him. When I saw her rush from the house, I had her youngest child in my arms [the eldest had remained in the room], and was so horror-struck I could not move. I did not go towards her. I walked about, and Mrs. Myers, the landlady of the house where we lodged, took her into her house. I did not see my daughter again alive.
[John Hannah was hanged at York on 27 December.]

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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.

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7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle

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Some background to the novel:

D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.

Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)

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