Yorkshire Almanac 2025

Unedited excerpt

The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

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.”

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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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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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• 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 W/G ·
• Allbutt, Thomas (1), vicar of Dewsbury (1835-62), father of Clifford Allbutt W/G ·
• 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 W/G ·
• Dewsbury Minster (2) W/G ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) W/G ·
• Industrial Revolution (22) W/G ·
• Pollution (10) W/G ·
• Queen Victoria (10) W/G ·
• River Calder, West Yorkshire (5) W/G ·
• Textile manufacturing (59) W/G ·
• Water pollution (4) W/G ·
• Woollen (21) W/G ·

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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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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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Similar

13 September 1816: The greatness of Great Britain

20 September 1853: Ballad composed for the inauguration this day of Titus Salt’s palace for the manufacture of woollen fabrics

9 June 1758: Entry into law of the first dedicated railway enabling act, for Richard Humble and Charles Brandling’s wagonway from Middleton Colliery to the Aire at Leeds

22 May 1711: Leeds’s first white-cloth hall is opened on Kirkgate, replacing the outdoor market on Briggate, and competing with Wakefield’s 1710 building

27 April 1924: In a letter to Edmund Gosse, Clifford Allbutt recalls the Brontës

19 October 1909: Opening a nurses’ home in Dewsbury, Clifford Allbutt describes their predecessors in the Leeds fever hospital in the 1860s

16 February 1886: Clifford Allbutt explains to James Crichton-Browne why three years later he was to trade a lucrative medical consulting career in Leeds for a less well paid Commissionership in Lunacy in London

12 April 1924: The Bloomsbury Group’s Amabel Williams-Ellis finds little art for art’s sake in Leeds

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

8 December 1770: The Rev Henry Venn’s heart and lungs require removal from polluted Huddersfield to Cambridgeshire

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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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In terms of his illness, what has Yelling got that Huddersfield hasn’t? Clean air? Josiah Bateman wrote a century later that the vicarage

was a very old building, in the worst part of the town, with a garden attached, in which nothing green would grow. Close by, a large, old-fashioned inn was standing, which in times past had been built upon the glebe, and now paid a good rent to the vicar. But all was hemmed in by tall chimneys and wretched buildings; and the house proved on trial an unhealthy residence. Again and again, one and another of my family was attacked with illness; again and again we were invited by kind parishioners to make their handsome houses in the outskirts our home for weeks together. But this could not last; and before a year had elapsed, a decision was required whether we should leave or stay; and that turned upon the retention of the old house, or the erection of a new one. I called a meeting in the vestry, and proposed the question with all simplicity. It was responded to with Yorkshire liberality and kindliness; and in the result a beautiful paddock of two acres and more, just outside the town, was exchanged (the exchange being legally necessary) for an equal quantity of glebe land, covered with gorse, five miles away; and two thousand two hundred pounds were raised to build a handsome Gothic vicarage (Bateman 1880).

But how dirty was the Industrial Revolution in Huddersfield at the time of Venn?

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