Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be 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 (60) 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

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

28 December 1872: The tower of St Peter’s, Earlsheaton (Dewsbury), rings a true peal of Kent treble bob major (16,608 changes) in 9 hours 50 minutes, setting a new national record

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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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Clifford Allbutt in 1923 in The Cambridge Review:

On prize competition days Church Street, Dewsbury, a fairly wide street, used to be packed with listeners, and very critical listeners they were. Almost everyone had note-book in hand to mark errors in the peal, and few escaped their vigilance. … It was curious, and not without historical causes, that the towers were regarded by the ringers as a domain separate from the church, and the tenor kept the keys. At Dewsbury a barrel of beer was on tap in the chamber; and for a ringer to stray into church must have seemed like a transgression of the etiquette of his calling (Rolleston 1929).

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