Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

He recalled his childish recollections of the village of Dewsbury with a beautiful little beck running through it past the vicarage gardens, where there were some stepping-stones to the parish clerk’s dairy-farm on the other side, and so ran on to join the river Calder, where there was a pretty little strand of silver sand and shells. He then went on: “When I came back again some time later for my school holidays, the first thing I did was to run down to the little strand where we used to play, and I was very sad to see the dirty slime on the silver sand and dyes and soaps and all other foul things swimming down what was our pure rural river Calder. And from that time, by leaps and bounds, Dewsbury has grown, as this church has grown, from small beginnings into a great and populous and wealthy town – and I had almost said city. It is not for me to say what my father’s part in that growth was, but he had the presence of God’s spirit within him, and he was one of the practical saints.”

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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.

Abbreviations:

• ER: East Riding
• GM: Greater Manchester
• NR: North Riding
• NY: North Yorkshire
• SY: South Yorkshire
• WR: West Riding
• WY: West Yorkshire

Comment

Comment

All Saints, Dewsbury in Allbutt’s early-ish years, with the footbridge over Dewsbury Beck to Bridge End:

All and any saints are now subject to the car:

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Original

Long after, when preaching the evening sermon in Dewsbury Parish Church on November 7, 1920, he recalled his childish recollections of the village of Dewsbury with a beautiful little beck running through it past the vicarage gardens, where there were some stepping-stones to the parish clerk’s dairy-farm on the other side, and so ran on to join the river Calder, where there was a pretty little strand of silver sand and shells. He then went on: “When I came back again some time later for my school holidays, the first thing I did was to run down to the little strand where we used to play, and I was very sad to see the dirty slime on the silver sand and dyes and soaps and all other foul things swimming down what was our pure rural river Calder. And from that time, by leaps and bounds, Dewsbury has grown, as this church has grown, from small beginnings into a great and populous and wealthy town – and I had almost said city. It is not for me to say what my father’s part in that growth was, but he had the presence of God’s spirit within him, and he was one of the practical saints.”

207 words.

Tags

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.

• Allbutt, Clifford (1836-1925) (22), Dewsbury-born physician (Leeds Infirmary 1861-89), inventor of the clinical thermometer, Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Cambridge 1892-his death ·
• Allbutt, Thomas (1), vicar of Dewsbury (1835-62), father of Clifford Allbutt ·
• Dewsbury Beck (1), culverted tributary of the River Calder, flows north-south just to the east of Dewsbury Minster and drains at 53.687636,-1.627470 ·
• Dewsbury Minster (2) ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) ·
• Industrial Revolution (22) ·
• Pollution (10) ·
• Queen Victoria (9) ·
• River Calder, West Yorkshire (5) ·
• Textile manufacturing (59) ·
• Water pollution (4) ·
• Woollen (21) ·

All tags.

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