Yorkshire Almanac Tom Palliser, a Kilvington drunk, denies to a York court that a half crown received from Col. Dawnay, Conservative candidate for Thirsk, was an electoral bribe

30 June 1880: Tom Palliser, a Kilvington drunk, denies to a York court that a half crown received from Col. Dawnay, Conservative candidate for Thirsk, was an electoral bribe

William Allison. 1920. “My Kingdom for a Horse!”. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

The most amusing incident of all, however, was the examination of our old Kilvington factotum, Tom Palliser, to whose long career of drunkenness I have already called attention. Never in his life had he dreamed of voting other than blue, and, being the oldest inhabitant, he had been asked, when Colonel Dawnay came to canvass at Kilvington, to show the party round to the various voters. He was given half-a-crown for his trouble, and it was urged that this was a bribe. He had gone away after the election to near Huddersfield, where he had a married daughter, and the contention was that he had been sent there to keep out of the way. Anyhow, he was served with a witness summons and given one pound conduct money. He arrived in the witness-box in a semi-insolent state of intoxication, and made defiant answers to questions about who had canvassed him. Then, to quote from the report which I have before me:

Justice Denman: “You have recollected several that you said you could not remember at first. Tell us all. You are in considerable peril of being sent to prison.”
“Indeed, sir!”
“Yes; you are.”

Then came a long series of questions about the half-crown, and presently Mr Atherley Jones, for the petitioner, asked:

“Where did you get drunk?”
“In the town. The same places that others get drunk. I get drunk whenever I have the chance.”
Justice Denman: “You need not make yourself out a greater blackguard than you are.”
“I am not a blackguard, sir.”

The above is all from the printed report, but I remember most clearly that Mr Justice Denman pursued his theme, and said: “Yes, you are; a great blackguard, by your own admission.” To which Tom Palliser responded: “Why, mebbe aboot that!”

I suggested the cross-examination of him, and it runs thus in the report:

“I have been a voter for forty-three years in the borough. During all that time I have supported the blues. That is well known. The gentlemen gave me half-a-crown for going round Kilvington with them. No reference was made to my vote. It took me an hour or more to show them where the voters lived.”

On leaving the box he went away mumbling to himself, and more than once looking back defiantly at Mr Justice Denman. The court was just rising for lunch, and I was fearful that he might get himself into some sort of trouble, so went out after him.

On seeing me he at once asked: “Whea was yon au’d chap ‘at called me a blackguard? Ar’d have gi’en him a bit o’ lip if he’d said owt more te me!”

He had never been in any but a magistrates’ court before, and seemed to think the judges were merely clerks or other officers of the court. I warned him to be very careful or he would be imprisoned for contempt before he knew where he was. He was highly indignant, however, at the way he had been treated, for to him as can be seen from his evidence drunkenness was merely an agreeable condition, and the idea of it involving blackguardism was too preposterous to entertain for a moment.

The proceedings on the petition lasted for two days, and finally the petition was dismissed with costs, Mr Justice Lopes saying it “had been an unusually pure election,” and Mr Justice Denman added that it was “a frivolous petition recklessly conducted.”

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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

The date is established by the article which appears to have been Allison’s verbatim source (Leeds Mercury 1880/07/01).

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Comment

The date is established by the article which appears to have been Allison’s verbatim source (Leeds Mercury 1880/07/01).

Something to say? Get in touch

19 December 1881: Sir William Payne-Gallwey (73), ex-MP for Thirsk, is bested by a turnip while out shooting

22 January 1863: Young William Allison sees Bob Gowland, Kilvington’s blacksmith, slaughter a pig while drunk

12 September 1865: An unexpected gesture from Richard Scurr, watchmaker, at the Thirsk burial of John Pick Allison, solicitor

18 January 1966: Barbara Castle (Lab.) swings the Hull North by-election with a bridge over the Humber, convincing Harold Wilson that he has the momentum to win a general election

23 February 1863: The Rev Samuel Gray of Cundall tries to make school interesting for a nervous William Allison (12)

2 January 1863: William Allison (11) fails to shoot any rabbits at Coxwold

9 August 1845: Young George Boothby of Honley goes to Huddersfield for a night out, and four women are later transported for ten years

30 May 1835: The (Tory-dominated) Leeds Corporation gives its assets to three cronies to prevent their being inherited by the new (Whiggish) town council created by the Municipal Corporations Act

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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Comment

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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