Yorkshire Almanac With the assizes leaving York for the West Riding, manufacturers suffer a surprise defeat by landowners in the Lords in the choice of the new county town

13 June 1864: With the assizes leaving York for the West Riding, manufacturers suffer a surprise defeat by landowners in the Lords in the choice of the new county town

Spectator. 1864/06/18. County Capitals. London. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

COUNTY CAPITALS.
WE do not suppose that many persons not Yorkshiremen read the odd little debate in the Lords on Monday which ended in the defeat of the Government, but it had an interest of its own. It was an episode in a curious social contest which has raged for some years in Yorkshire, and which is raging every day in half the counties of England. The conflict, seldom recorded, but always perceptible, arises from the struggle of the great employers of labour to assert their social equality with the great owners of land. Their political equality they have asserted, have in some places acquired even too great a superiority, the power of property being in reality with them rather than with their rivals. The man who pays thirty thousand a year in wages is not, of course, as rich as the proprietor with thirty thousand a year; but he has just as much of “property influence” over a rather greater number of people. On imperial questions the manufacturer holds his own, not to say more than his own, and naturally seeks to assert himself as successfully in all matters of social import. Naturally also under the English system his mode of self-assertion, of registering, as it were, his new position, is by a struggle for “county influence,” weight on the Bench, a consultative voice, if possible a governing voice, on all questions in which “the county” is or is supposed to be deeply interested, highway acts, prison management, selection of assize towns, payment of Catholic Chaplains, and in many places the severe or lenient working of the game laws. In most counties the manufacturer has as yet not been very successful in his efforts, in some he has utterly failed. Lord Palmerston could tell a good story about an attempt to raise a successful professional man to the Hampshire bench, which broke down chiefly because he was a professional man. Tradition is completely on the side of the landowner, the really great magnates support him by preference, the conservative class is more united than the invading one, and the new men are not always thoroughly trained to the work. When they are they are apt to win for themselves individually, rather than to break down the old barrier for friends less efficient or less lucky. As a rule, the lords of the soil, though frequently defeated in Parliament, are pretty completely masters in the counties, and in some places guard their power with an exclusive jealousy which excites no little ill-will, resisting every attempt at what they call “centralization,” i.e., the diminution of their authority in favour of that of the nation, with a bigoted pertinacity which is very seldom defeated.

In the West Riding, however, the influence of the landowners, though perhaps still in the ascendant, is by no means so great. So large and so numerous are the mills, so well educated is the class which creates them, so enormous and so visible is the deposit of wealth which trade has left and is leaving on the soil, that the “tradesmen,” as with true Yorkshire pride they are apt to call themselves – being about as much tradesmen as the Peers who deal in slate, iron, brickfields, and mines are tradesmen – have fought their way to a very fair degree of social equality. Backed by the populations of the towns, they are inclined to have that equality recognized, and years ago chose as their cheval de bataille, their test of strength, the selection of a new capital for the Riding. The first point was to secure the condemnation of York as the fitting assize town, but the first effort for this end, made forty years ago, failed. The respectable old city had very few arguments to produce in its own favour, being too distant from the centres of activity in the Riding, without any particular advantage in the way of buildings, with a comparatively small population, and few attractions beyond its Minster. The country gentlemen, however, who then filled the Bench almost exclusively were accustomed to go to York, they and their fathers bad always looked upon it as the “Northern capital,” they knew the people and the inns, and their way about, and they did not want any change. They reported in favour of York unconditionally. The agitation, however, continued, and though the majority of magistrates were still against any change the Government, pressed “by the manufacturing and mercantile classes,” at last resolved that the assizes should be extended to some point nearer the great seats of activity and therefore of crime. This settled, it remained to decide on the new capital, and on this the two “interests” openly split. The manufacturers were determined the assize should be held at Leeds, and the landowners that it should be held at Wakefield. The argument the latter brought forward in Parliament was that Wakefield was the “capital” of the West Riding, – a petitio principii – that the gaol was already there, and that any other selection would cost the county hundreds a year in the removal of prisoners; but their real ground of opinion as expressed at county meetings was a very different one. They did not want to be forced to go to a nasty black manufacturing town, where they met all kinds of people they did not want to meet, where manufacturers were completely in the ascendant, where Mr. Baines could make them ridiculous every day before thousands of Yorkshire readers, where they knew very few people, and where a great body of workmen might some day or other hoot them for an unpopular decision. So strong was in some quarters this distaste for Leeds, that the more bigoted landowners spoke as if they were Bedouins, actually afraid to enter a walled city, lest it should have some mystic charm to deprive them of their freedom. One thought justice would suffer greatly from the mental obfuscation produced by the thick canopy of smoke which is still allowed to hang over Leeds, and another said openly that if magistrates were deprived of their country-rides even for two days at a time the accused would be the victims. Government, however, pressed by the manufacturing and mercantile interests, according to Earl de Grey, or by the Leeds Mercury, according to Lord Faversham, or by considerations of sound general policy, as we are inclined to believe, expressed an opinion in favour of Leeds, a vote in the House of Commons supported that view, and Leeds was at last selected. Great was the gratulation among the townsmen, and considerable the satisfaction of the “tradesmen” of the Riding; but the “gentry” were not yet defeated. Beaten in the Privy Council and the Commons, they fell back on their natural allies the Peers, the social screw was put on every Yorkshireman with a title, the Peers, who are generally content with sending from five to fifteen representatives to perform their functions, voted to the number of 134, and an address praying Her Majesty to reconsider her Privy Council’s decision was carried by 80 to 54. Mr. Sotheron Estcourt, fortified by the victory, promises a similar motion in the Commons, and as the country gentry will support him there is every chance that Wakefield, despite its want of accommodation, may become the assize town after all, and the manufacturers have to register one more county defeat.

Apart from the social contest, the arguments openly used on both sides seem to us almost equally balanced. If Wakefield has no courts Leeds has no gaol, and if Wakefield has a smaller “mob,” it has also a much less active and vigorous public opinion. ‘England is not yet reduced to the condition of the Western States, where the capital is always in a village, lest the Legislature should be overawed. But there is one argument which has not been employed, and which seems to us to tell strongly in favour of the Privy Council’s decision. All over England, and more especially north of the Humber, new and great cities are gradually rising up, growing wealthy, drawing to themselves vast aggregations of people. As a rule they grow up of themselves, ill-built, ill-drained, ill-governed, with nothing great about them except their size, and nothing beautiful at all. The rich find life intolerable in them, and fly on the first day they can to the outskirts, while the poor swelter on amidst sights and sounds and stenches fatal to any progress in civilization. Life is possible in a square hovel with black walls opposite its windows, black gutters in front of the door, and a black canopy overhead; but civilization needs some aid from light, and form, and colour. Everything which tends in such places to increase municipal feeling, to give the citizens a pride in their town, to tempt them or shame them into good drainage, and open streets, and even pavement, into respect for the purity of their streams, and care for the colour of their gutters, into building as if architecture had an object other than protection from the weather, is a direct and positive good. The establishment of an episcopate, the transfer of the assizes, the erection of public buildings, all tend to transform places like Leeds, – which is better than most of them, having a certain dingy stateliness of its own, – from mere -collections of houses into cities, places with real municipal life, in which refinement can be cultivated as well as industry, in which the rich, in short, will consent to live as they do in the bright, many-coloured, civilized cities of Italy and France. If the assizes are transferred to Leeds the “gentry,” instead of studiously avoiding the centre of Yorkshire activity, must visit it, will before long catch the habit of visiting it, and will consciously or unconsciously stir up the ruling citizens to seek a somewhat higher ideal. It may be said that the occasional presence of fifty or sixty gentlemen of no municipal influence, even though two or three are judges and four or five are Peers, can have no such result, nor could it by itself. But status affects the tone of cities just as much as the tone of individuals, and the change registers the right of Leeds to a new and higher status. It is a patent of precedence, and the gift will, we believe, be followed, as in individuals, by an effort at a higher mode of living very beneficial to Leeds. The municipality will do more, individuals will do more, corporations will do more for the “capital of the West Riding” than for the same place as a manufacturing borough, and it is essential that more should be done. Nearly half our population now lives in great cities which, compared with the cities of the Continent, are styes, and everything which can develop their self-respect, increase their pride in their habitations, give them the sense of an aggregate political status which it is as incumbent on them to maintain as to maintain their personal position, inspire for their cities the feeling the gentry express for their counties, ought to be carefully encouraged. If social status is not a delusion Leeds is right in trying to be the assize town, Government right in acknowledging that she has earned her claim to official acknowledgment as the chief place of the West Riding.

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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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8 June 1561: A York official explains why textile manufacturing has left his city for the West Riding

13 August 1821: The laments of the adulterous poisoner Ann Barber on the scaffold at York

1 July 1840: The opening of the Hull and Selby Railway terminates the threat to Hull’s port from Goole, Scarborough and Bridlington

4 May 1807: Lord Milton welcomes 10,000 to his 21st birthday barbecue at Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, during his campaign to be elected MP for the Whigs

23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

25 September 1705: Daniel Defoe is amazed by Leeds’s outdoor cloth market on Briggate, shortly before the opening of the white cloth hall

20 October 1836: The West Riding Sessions contemplates the potential consequences of a post-dated watermark

11 November 1918: George Ellison of Richmond Hill, Leeds, is the last British soldier to be killed in action in the First World War

21 February 1835: The Spectator sketches the preoccupations of Leeds’s Tory and Whig establishments – respectively, partying, and preventing implementation of the child labour provisions of the Factory Act

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The full Mercury article:

The mill-owners and their operatives in the woollen district are becoming alive to the great importance of taking immediate measures, to obtain such an amendment of the Factory Act as will enable them to continue the working of their mills. After the first of March next, it will be unlawful to work any child under twelve years of age more than eight hours per day in any woollen, worsted, flax, or cotton mill. In many places it is already found difficult to obtain a sufficient number of children for the mills, owing to the restriction in the Act, preventing children under eleven years from working more than eight hours. The effect of this has every where been to prevent the employment of such children altogether, as it is found impossible to work with relays of children, or to provide for their education in the way prescribed by the Act. On the first of next month, that very numerous class of children between eleven and twelve years of age, amounting to many thousands, will have to be dismissed from their employment, if the Act is put into effect. consequence will be, that the children will be turned idle upon the streets to learn vagabond habits, that the families to whom they belong will lose a considerable part of their weekly income, that both parents and children will be pinched for food and clothing, and that the mill-owners must stop their mills, as in most places it will be quite impossible to obtain a sufficient number of children above twelve years of age.

We direct the attention of our readers to the resolutions passed at a numerous meeting of the mill owners of Pudsey, on Wednesday last, published in our advertising columns. These resolutions express the unanimous sense of the mill-owners in that whole district, and they point out very clearly the evils of the restrictions above mentioned. Nor is the alarm felt by the masters alone; the workmen and their families are equally alive to the mischief which is coming upon them, and are aware that if the Act is not amended, they will be deprived of the earnings of all their children under twelve years of age, and will have to support them in idleness. On Saturday last the operatives of Pudsey met, and passed resolutions entirely concurring with those of the masters, except that, instead of petitioning that children of nine years of age may be allowed to work eleven hours in the day, they ask that children of eight years may be allowed to work those hours. Their resolutions to this effect will be found in another column. We think the request of the masters is perfectly reasonable and consistent with humanity; but we should not like to see children below nine years employed for eleven hours per day in the mills. The operatives of Bramley, Farsley, and Calverley, met on Wednesday night, and came to a similar conclusion with their fellow-operatives of Pudsey. It is the intention of these parties to petition for an amendment of the Act, on the principles we have mentioned. The parents of the children are fully concurring with the work-people in this object. The mill-owners have already prepared their petition, and it will be sent up so as to be presented at the opening of Parliament.

It is evident that the emergency is such as to call upon all persons interested in mills, whether as masters or workmen, to bestir themselves immediately in order to obtain an alteration in the Act. That alteration cannot be procured by the first of March; but we hope, if the, mill-owners and their workmen generally should petition, the Factory Inspectors would think it consistent with their duty to abstain from rigorously enforcing the Act till a Bill can be passed for its amendment. Of this, however, we cannot be certain; and it is manifest that the Inspectors will not take upon themselves such a responsibility unless the movement among the mill-owners and operatives is very general, as nothing less than a general declaration of the impossibility of complying with the Act would justify them in suspending its operation. We have not the slightest hesitation in saying that an alteration of the Act is necessary, for the preservation of our trade, and for the interests of all classes connected with it.

It is now the almost universal opinion both of the mill-owners and the operatives in the woollen district, that an Eleven Hours Bill, i. e. a bill restricting the labour to eleven hours a day, and not allowing children under ten years to work those hours, would be most conducive to the interests and happiness of all parties, including the children themselves. This opinion was found to be the average of the opinions expressed by a great number of the operatives in the cotton mills of Manchester, at a meeting with Mr. RICKARDS, the Factory Inspector, last Saturday. The same conclusion was come to at a meeting of the overlookers in the worsted mills of Bradford, held on Wednesday evening-all the overlookers being favourable to eleven hours, except those of Mr. Jous WOOD, who preferred ten hours, and the age at which children were to be admissible being ten years. We must say, however, that the masters in the worsted and flax mills are favourable to eleven hours and a half, and in the cotton mills to twelve hours. Many of the operatives in this town have sent memorials to government in favour of an Eleven Hours Bill.

We understand that a circular was lately sent by Mr. BAKER, the Factory Superintendent, to the Medical men who grant certificates to Factory Children in the West Riding, inquiring if in their opinion children ten years of age might be allowed to work twelve hours a day without injury to their health. Out of 59 answers received, 40 replied in the affirmative; 14 in the negative; and 5 were dubious. We may therefore venture to assume that there could at least be no objection to children of that age working eleven hours a day, i. e. one hour less.

It is worthy of being known that the number of children in this town alone, who might be employed in the mills if children of ten years were admissible, but who would, be prevented from working if children were not admissible under twelve, is 960. Of course several hundred poor families. would be prevented from obtaining the earnings they might receive, if the present Act should be put in force on the 1st of March. And this is no advantage to the children themselves, but the reverse: it leaves them to idle habits, and renders it impossible for workmen to pay for the education even of those who are under ten years of age.

MR. RICKARDS, the active and humane Inspector, who is now making a circuit to ascertain the opinions of the work- people and the masters on the Factory Act, will be in Leeds next Wednesday; on Monday next he will be in Halifax; on Tuesday in Bradford; and after remaining four or five days in Leeds, he will go to Wakefield and Huddersfield. This week he has been in Bolton, Bury, Rochdale, and other Lancashire towns. We believe Mr. RICKARDS is exceedingly desirous to meet with deputations both from the masters and the workmen, especially the latter, that he may be the better prepared to recommend such an amendment of the Factory Act as may meet their interests and wishes.

(Leeds Mercury 1835/02/14)