Yorkshire Almanac The local newspaper reproves a Rothwell councillor who called on women not to sew for the troops

29 August 1914: The local newspaper reproves a Rothwell councillor who called on women not to sew for the troops

Rothwell Courier and Times. 1914/08/29. Rothwell Council. Rothwell. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

One of the Rothwell councillors was on the warpath at the last meeting, and he condemned the efforts of ladies who are making shirts, etc., for soldiers when there are so many women and girls in the clothing factories out of employment. My sympathies are with him to a certain extent. It must, however, be remembered that some women who cannot give money desire to be associated with the movement, and the only way by which they can accomplish this is by sewing garments themselves, but, on the other hand, women who can afford to give money have no call to do sewing, and if they got garments made by paid workers they would be doing a double service – benefitting the soldiers and relieving distress.

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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

Via Howard Benson (Benson N.d.).

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Comment

Via Howard Benson (Benson N.d.).

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2 May 1844: The Bradford Observer reports a 10% increase in the borough’s population in two years

21 October 1555: Wool middlemen are readmitted to Halifax to avoid the destruction of the local economy

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

15 May 1841: Patience Kershaw (17) tells the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) about her work at Joseph Stocks’ Booth Town Pit, Halifax

28 April 1730: John Hobson meets a nematicide at Woodall (Rotherham)

3 February 1825: The last great festival at Bradford for Bishop Blaize, the wool-combers’ patron

13 September 1816: The greatness of Great Britain

30 October 1914: Joseph Colgrave of Sheffield and the 5th Royal Irish Lancers wins a DCM rallying leaderless Punjabi Muslims at Hollebeke (Ypres)

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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