Yorkshire Almanac Hervey Rhodes tells his fellow lords how, on the abolition of the Ridings in 1974, Saddleworth caused the invention of Greater Manchester

15 April 1985: Hervey Rhodes tells his fellow lords how, on the abolition of the Ridings in 1974, Saddleworth caused the invention of Greater Manchester

House of Lords. 1985/04/15. Local Government Bill. Hansard, Vol. 462. London: UK Parliament. Licensed under Open Parliament Licence, without modification. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

My Lords, Saddleworth, where I live, was in Yorkshire for 800 years. I shall have lived 90 of them this year, and I claim to know a little about what goes on in that part of the world.

The planners got busy to tidy us up, because we are on the Lancashire watershed side of the Pennines. They said that they were going to put us into a county called SELNEC—SELNEC being the initials of South East Lancashire North East Cheshire. Naturally, there was a lot of opposition to the change, and we had meetings galore. One of them, which I remember very well, was organised by some young people. When I got to the civic hall they said “Will you take the chair?” I agreed. Then they said “Will you get a motion negatived that is put on the table?” I said “I’ll try”. The motion was “That the best interests of Saddleworth would be served by going into SELNEC”. Of course, that had a resounding defeat. On going down the steps after the meeting was over, I saw Joe Cartwright, who used to work for me. I said, “How did tha’ vote, Joe?” He said, “How dost tha’ think? Agin!” He said, “I wouldn’t have been so shocked or surprised if we had been going in with Oldham or Manchester, or even Lancashire, but I’ll be jiggered if I want to go in with a set of initials”. The meeting broke up on those terms, and Joe Cartwright’s story went round Manchester like a prairie fire. His ridicule forced the powers that be to adopt my suggestion of “Greater Manchester”.

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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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13 October 1967: Barbara Castle visits the M62 construction site and ponders regional development via road-building

19 June 1984: On the day after the Battle of Orgreave, the Labour MP for Doncaster North contrasts police behaviour towards striking miners under the (Conservative) Heath and Thatcher governments

4 May 1818: At a Radical meeting at Lydgate (Saddleworth), Samuel Bamford proposes giving the vote to women

19 October 1816: Serenaded by the military, decorated barges leave Leeds for Liverpool to celebrate the completion, after almost 50 years, of the canal uniting east and west

3 July 1643: The Royalists take Bradford after the Second Siege, but are warned off massacring the inhabitants by a ghost

18 January 1966: Barbara Castle (Lab.) swings the Hull North by-election with a bridge over the Humber, convincing Harold Wilson that he has the momentum to win a general election

20 November 1697: Smooth-leaved holly as winter fodder for Pennine sheep

20 September 1819: Flags and fasces at a procession from Briggate to Hunslet Moor to protest the Peterloo Massacre

7 January 1974: During his trial the Pontefract architect John Poulson doubts whether entertaining (West Riding) public servants constituted corruption

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From John Calder’s obit of Poulson:

Much of the change in popular perception of the Labour Party during the Wilson era was due to the growing corruption of safe, large, spending Labour councils, particularly in the north-east of England; this benefited the other major parties because it was from 1970 that many traditional but disillusioned Labour electors changed their votes.

[…]

In 1939 Poulson obtained exemption from military service, which enabled him to extend his practice during the war and he was well-placed for the post-war boom. He also by then knew many politicians of all parties.

[…]

By 1949 Poulson was well established and using his political contacts to obtain large-scale civic work. He noted that many councillors had substantial financial power but were themselves living on small incomes and he used bribes as his main weapon, being often surprised how much work he could obtain with small inducements accompanied by lavish hospitality. In the Sixties he built a series of public hospitals and grandiose new town centres with public money – including the Arndale Centre, in Leeds. By 1965 the practice was one of the largest in Europe with a turnover of more than £1m and a net profit of £96,000; in 1966 it was £1.16m, with a net profit of £112,500.

In June 1972, pressed for unpaid tax by the Inland Revenue, Poulson made his first appearance at Wakefield County Court, in Yorkshire, to be examined as a bankrupt. At first his debts were estimated at £250,000, but four years later the figure had risen to some £1m. Reginald Maudling, the Conservative MP, who had formerly been chairman of two of Poulson’s companies, resigned as Home Secretary.

Poulson was prosecuted for conspiracy the following year. It was the largest case of public corruption brought in Britain this century, but it was played down politically because both major parties were involved and the public had only seen the tip of the iceberg: a fraction of the 27,000 files on the case has been made public and, as the Salmon Committee on Standards in Public Life put it: ‘We doubt if Mr Poulson would ever have been prosecuted but for his bankruptcy and his habit of meticulously preserving copies of everything he wrote or that was written to him.’

This contemporary Guardian profile is excellent, and Mark Knights’ piece was a good introduction for me.

The autobiography of T. Dan Smith, another collaborator of Poulson’s, is here. Reginald Maudling’s memoirs shouldn’t be read without comparison with Lewis Baston’s biography.

Investigative journalist Neil Wilby in a piece re Bernard Kenyon’s scandal-prone daughter, Jane Kenyon, says he left his job with West Riding County Council in 1968 following a Yorkshire Post exposé.

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