Yorkshire Almanac The Huddersfield Improvement Commissioners hear of the unsatisfactory arrangements for married couples in dosshouses

7 November 1866: The Huddersfield Improvement Commissioners hear of the unsatisfactory arrangements for married couples in dosshouses

Leeds Mercury. 1866/11/08. Huddersfield Improvement Commissioners. Leeds. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

HUDDERSFIELD IMPROVEMENT COMMISSIONERS. After some remarks by Mr. Clough on the smoke nuisance, Mr. Joel Denham called the attention of the Board to the fact that in the common lodging-houses of the town partitions were not put up between the beds occupied by married couples, and it was suggested that stringent bye-laws should be passed on the subject.

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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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15 October 1838: Apologies from “imprisoned” Huddersfield workers are read to the great Chartist rally on Peep Green (Hartshead Moor), accusing middle-class radicals of betrayal

28 April 1812: Luddites fatally wound the Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market

30 April 1704: Whitby’s Church of England parish register records a wedding celebrated, perhaps illegally, at the Quakers Meeting

14 August 1673: A retired coal miner, unable to live from carding wool, decides to go down a pit at Royds Hall (Bradford)

10 March 1665: Blizzards and Dutch attacks prolong Restoration-induced shortages of fodder and coal at Northowram (Halifax)

9 May 1757: John Wesley rides into Huddersfield in the Wild West Riding

9 July 1849: Sarah Ann Haldren of Hoxton (London) meets her end at the home of her new husband, William Wilkinson Walley of Holbeck (Leeds)

27 November 1833: Lewis Fenton, Huddersfield MP, falls mysteriously from the upper window of his house

6 August 1861: Future prime minister H.H. Asquith (8) writes to his mother condemning Fulneck (Pudsey) and its Moravian school

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Was any particular mill to blame for the smoke?

Another letter two days before:

My very dear Mamma,

I received letters from Elisabeth and Eva this morning. I am sorry to say that very unhappy here and we don’t want to stay much longer we can’t find what to do and it makes us very miserable we often say to each other and Johnny Shaw that we would rather live in the wood than here. I have not time write much more so believe me ever to remain,

Your loving son,

Bertie.

His recollections are more generous:

In the course of a few years we moved our home from Morley to Mirfield, then little more than a village, within a few miles of Huddersfield. It was there that my father, after an illness of only a few hours, died (June, 1860), at the age of thirty-five. He had not been able to accumulate more than a scanty provision for his family, and my grandfather Willans, a well-to-do and large-hearted man, of whom my mother had always been the favourite child, took charge of us, and established us in a house a few doors from his own in the town of Huddersfield. For a short time my brother and I attended Huddersfield College as day-scholars, but we were very soon sent as boarders to a Moravian school at Fulneck, near Leeds, where the ground floor of my education was laid. The life there was homely, and indeed rough, but the Moravians were excellent teachers, and I am gratefully conscious that I owe them much.

In 1864, aged 11, and following the death of his grandfather, the remaining Asquiths moved south, and he became “to all intents and purposes a Londoner.” (Asquith 1928)

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