Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

There was wonder, and perhaps some dismay, in the university when, in the year 1899, descended into one of its principal chairs a fair-haired blue-eyed man from the north, a champion sprinter and footballer, and one supposed to hold those subversive opinions which were known to thrive among the hardy folk of Yorkshire and Lancashire. And rumour was not idle. The new professor was reported to be a sturdy nonconformist, a militant teetotaller, and a stiff-necked radical; moreover to belong to a sect, at that time in ill repute in society, called resisters – or non-resisters was it? – it matters not, the heresy is long dead. And not all this only; furthermore the new colleague was said also to speak his mind with the ingenuous and unflinching candour characteristic of his race. So the professor’s further acquaintance was awaited with the good manners of Cambridge yet with some wariness and a little distrust. But the freedom he claimed for himself he gave ungrudgingly to others. In him Cambridge learned the truth of the words of Coleridge: “that religion, in its essence, is the most gentlemanly thing in the world”.

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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

Allbutt’s obit in the BMJ is quite different.

My impression is that nonconformist tax resistance began after Woodhead’s arrival in Cambridge with the passing of the 1902 Education Act, but maybe Allbutt is referring to something else.

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Original

On the death on December 29, 1921, at Aisthorpe Hall, Lincolnshire, of German Sims Woodhead, Professor of Pathology in the University since 1899, Allbutt wrote sympathetic appreciations of his colleague’s sterling qualities of heart and brain. The notice in The Cambridge Review began:

There was wonder, and perhaps some dismay, in the University when, in the year 1899, descended into one of its principal chairs a fair-haired blue-eyed man from the North, a champion sprinter and footballer, and one supposed to hold those subversive opinions which were known to thrive among the hardy folk of Yorkshire and Lancashire. And rumour was not idle. The new professor was reported to be a sturdy nonconformist, a militant teetotaller, and a stiff-necked radical; moreover to belong to a sect, at that time in ill repute in society, called Resisters—or non-Resisters was it?—it matters not, the heresy is long dead. And not all this only; furthermore the new colleague was said also to speak his mind with the ingenuous and unflinching candour characteristic of his race. So the Professor’s further acquaintance was awaited with the good manners of Cambridge yet with some wariness and a little distrust…. The freedom he claimed for himself he gave ungrudgingly to others. In him Cambridge learned the truth of the words of Coleridge: “that religion, in its essence, is the most gentlemanly thing in the world”.

232 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 ·
• Association football (5) ·
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834) (2), poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian; with Wordsworth, founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets ·
• Education Act 1902 (1) ·
• Ethnic stereotype (7) ·
• 📌Huddersfield (29) ·
• Lancashire (34) ·
• Nonconformism (47) ·
• Obituary (2) ·
• Pathology (1) ·
• Running (3) ·
• Teetotalism (6) ·
• University of Cambridge (5) ·
• West Riding of Yorkshire (147) ·
• Woodhead, German Sims (1855-1921) (1), Huddersfield-born pathologist, director of the combined labs of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Surgeons, Professor of Pathology at Cambridge ·
• Yorkshire (8) ·

All tags.

Similar

• 22 September 1896: Clifford Allbutt on the threat to industry from anti-scientific manufacturers and workers, and colonialism
• 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
• 13 April 1915: During the wartime Serbian typhus epidemic, Clifford Allbutt recalls the open-air treatment he used in the 1865-66 outbreak in Leeds
• 9 July 1903: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, tells a Bradford sanitary congress to reject the view that (preventive) medicine is antagonistic to the survival of the fittest
• 2 October 1893: Clifford Allbutt, late of Leeds, now a Cambridge professor, explains to Yorkshire College medics why university life is superior to a purely technical education
• 5 February 1691: Approaching 60, Oliver Heywood contemplates his place in the cosmos
• 20 August 1919: Two months after the Treaty of Versailles, the Daily News reports the arrival in a Sheffield garden of a balloon released by German POWs in Skipton
• 2 July 1829: An elderly postman and a one-legged Waterloo veteran set out in ironed clogs to walk from Hebden Bridge to Heptonstall during a thunderstorm
• 18 August 1889: Eight survivors of prostate surgery present themselves to a meeting of the BMA in Leeds
• 23 October 1679: Presbyterian emotion at Gisburn, Ribble Valley (WR/Lancs)