Yorkshire Almanac A satirical London magazine congratulates the Yorkshire Tannery and Boot Manufactory on its embrace of meritocracy

10 June 1882: A satirical London magazine congratulates the Yorkshire Tannery and Boot Manufactory on its embrace of meritocracy

Vanity Fair. 1882/06/10. The Yorkshire Tannery and Boot Manufactory. London. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

THE YORKSHIRE TANNERY AND BOOT MANUFACTORY.
This is something in quite a new line. We have studied the list of directors, and we remark with surprise that it does not contain one single general, admiral, baronet, honourable, or even a Member of Parliament. The ubiquitous Sir Henry Tyler is not there. Sir Edward Watkin, owing perhaps to the dryness of the Channel chalk in which his navvies will, as he hopes, have to work, takes no interest in boots or in leather; but in the place of all these great characters we have a lot of Leeds leather merchants and boot and shoe manufacturers whose names, valuable, we believe, on cheques, are utterly unknown to fame. It must be admitted that these gentlemen ought to know what they are about, and it may be assumed that they do. In that case this Company ought to be a good thing, for even supposing for a moment that a bootmaker can be as crooked as a financing baronet, which we doubt, at any rate he knows something about leather, and in a leather business such knowledge must be useful. Personally, we have no knowledge in the matter. We never knew a bootmaker we did not wish to kill, but we should rather go into a business of this kind under the protection of our natural torturers than under the care of the conventional guinea-pigs.
Thursday, June 8th, 1882.

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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

Bristol merchant John Cary commented on this 200 years earlier in his influential Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes:

I confess for my own part I value nothing that cannot be reduced to a certainty in its practice, things seem difficult to those who do not understand them, if we are to besiege a town we make use of soldiers, if to storm a castle, engineers, if to build a ship, carpenters, and so in lesser things, and yet gentlemen are thought fit to sit at helm, and steer the ship wherein is embarked the treasure of our trade, who are altogether unskilled therein, on whose good conduct the nation’s weal or woe depends; thus things do fall into confusion, whilst men undertake what they do not understand and set the nation in a flame, whilst they injudiciously guide the chariot of the sun (Cary 1695).

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Comment

Bristol merchant John Cary commented on this 200 years earlier in his influential Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade, Its Poor, and Its Taxes:

I confess for my own part I value nothing that cannot be reduced to a certainty in its practice, things seem difficult to those who do not understand them, if we are to besiege a town we make use of soldiers, if to storm a castle, engineers, if to build a ship, carpenters, and so in lesser things, and yet gentlemen are thought fit to sit at helm, and steer the ship wherein is embarked the treasure of our trade, who are altogether unskilled therein, on whose good conduct the nation’s weal or woe depends; thus things do fall into confusion, whilst men undertake what they do not understand and set the nation in a flame, whilst they injudiciously guide the chariot of the sun (Cary 1695).

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31 July 1667: Thomas Danby, Leeds’s first mayor, is stabbed to death late at night in London

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)

30 May 1835: Alfred Austin, future poet laureate, “Banjo-Byron that twangs the strum-strum,” is born into rural splendour at Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds

17 July 1844: Tory Radical Joshua Hobson tells Leeds council that Liberal mayor Hamer Stansfield was wrong to prohibit public meetings on the semi-privatised Kirkgate market

3 November 1826: “Nimrod” of London gets to know a coachman during a journey from Leeds to York

Reproduction by kind permission of Michael Paraskos.20 December 1966: Greek-Cypriot cook and artist Stass Paraskos appears before Leeds magistrates charged with obscenity under the Vagrancy Act 1838

19 December 1958: A London dock strike features in Dick Whittington at ready-to-wear clothing manufacturer John Barran’s, Leeds

20 August 1852: Leeds unveils a statue modelled by someone believed to resemble Robert Peel (RIP)

Reproduction through the blind benevolence of Leeds Other Paper (RIP).1 April 1979: Amid motorway mania in Leeds, West Yorkshire Council is today to reveal plans to link Chapeltown and Woodhouse by a ¼-mile suspension bridge across Meanwood Beck

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Comment

Via Remember LOP, a feed by Tony Harcup which pays tribute to some splendid local journalism, unimaginable today.

Council sources claim the scheme was a victim of the first wave of cuts imposed by Margaret Thatcher following her General Election victory a month later.

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