Yorkshire Almanac Future Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (14) returns from the tuberculosis hospital to his home in Milnsbridge, Huddersfield

2 January 1931: Future Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson (14) returns from the tuberculosis hospital to his home in Milnsbridge, Huddersfield

Leslie Smith. 1964. Harold Wilson. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Who can tell me more about Leslie Smith? I’m guessing he/she was born in the 1920s. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

When Harold came home on January 2nd, 1931, it was Grandpa Wilson who summed up the whole family’s relief and thankfulness when he observed to his son:
“Herbert, that lad’s been spared for something.”
For nine weeks his sole diet had been milk and water. After the three full months in hospital his weight, at the age of nearly fifteen, had gone down to just over 4½ stone. He was ravenous; and throughout the remainder of his boyhood, he used his period of near-starvation as a jocular justification for any apparent tendency to gorge.
“Don’t forget I had nine weeks on milk and water,” he would reply every time his mother commented on an over-hearty appetite.

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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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15 October 1838: Apologies from “imprisoned” Huddersfield workers are read to the great Chartist rally on Peep Green (Hartshead Moor), accusing middle-class radicals of betrayal

10 August 1870: The foundation stone of Bradford Town Hall is laid today, but not by ex-mayor Edward West, godfather of the project

27 September 1680: The Rev Oliver Heywood manifests disregard for Calvinist views on fasting, for his horses, and for his wife

28 April 1812: Luddites fatally wound the Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market

10 March 1665: Blizzards and Dutch attacks prolong Restoration-induced shortages of fodder and coal at Northowram (Halifax)

9 May 1757: John Wesley rides into Huddersfield in the Wild West Riding

27 November 1833: Lewis Fenton, Huddersfield MP, falls mysteriously from the upper window of his house

6 August 1861: Future prime minister H.H. Asquith (8) writes to his mother condemning Fulneck (Pudsey) and its Moravian school

1 January 1151: Monks from Fountains move into the half-finished mud predecessor of Meaux Abbey (East Riding), built for them by Count William the Fat

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Who were the simple people who met the monks? Were there any local memories of the Harrying of the North 70 years before, or had the area been left tabula rasa? James Boyce on the supposedly grim conditions in which monasteries further down the coast were created at the time:

The mythology that the Fens were an inhospitable and unpopulated land after the Roman withdrawal from Britain in AD 410 was created by the Church. Accounts of the men and women who founded the region’s great monasteries were focused on inspiring piety and pilgrimage, and this required that the saints moved into a harsh and empty wilderness. Nevertheless, there are sufficient clues within even the most fabulous fables to reveal that the new colonisers were not the pioneers penned by the scribes (Boyce 2021).

Count William the Fat founded the abbey because of his size – I’m not being facetious. Here’s editor Bond’s summary of the great backstory:

The story of the foundation of Meaux abbey is very graphically told by the author of our chronicle. He relates how William le Gros, earl of Albemarle, a powerful nobleman, lord of Holderness and of other broad lands in the county of York, had made a vow to go to Jerusalem, which from age and corpulency he felt indisposed to fulfil. The earl was of a liberal as well as devout turn of mind, and had already exhibited his zeal for religion by founding in France the Cluniac abbey of St. Martin, near Aumale [> Albermarle], and in England the abbey of Thornton on Humber, of the order of Augustinian canons, and the Cistercian abbey of Vaudey, or Vallis Dei, in Lincolnshire. In the erection of the buildings of Vaudey the earl seems to have employed the architectural talents of Adam, a monk of Fountains, who had already proved his ability in the construction of the works at Kirkstead and Woburn. In his interviews with the earl, Adam detected his uneasiness on the subject of his unfulfilled vow, and so far played upon it for his own purposes as to suggest to him the foundation of a monastery of the Cistercian order, to which he belonged, as a means of obtaining the pope’s absolution from his engagement. Under the stipulated condition of this being secured to him, the earl pledged himself to the erection of a Cistercian house. Adam had recourse to the great Bernard, father of the order, for assistance in procuring the required dispensation from pope Eugenius III, with complete success, and was invited to survey the earl’s estates for the purpose of selecting a suitable site for the promised foundation. Coming to a place called Melsa, or Meaux, in Holderness, between three and four miles to the east of Beverley, he found just the situation he desired, in a country, it is stated, well planted with woods and orchards, surrounded with rivers and waters, and favoured with a rich soil. In the midst of it was a rising ground, known as St. Mary’s hill; ascending which, the enthusiastic monk struck a staff he carried in his hand forcibly into the ground, exclaiming “Let this place be called a palace of the eternal King, and a vineyard of heaven, and gate of life! Here be established a family of worshippers of Christ!” And turning to a group of followers, he added, “Have you not heard, my dear brethren, what the prophet promised respecting the building of the Lord’s house? ‘In the last days,’ he said, ‘it shall come to pass that the mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established in the top of the mountains.’ These words, not knowing why, I have been repeating all this day; and now I see it was by the providence of God, whose will it is that his temple should be erected on this hill.” Unfortunately the good earl of Albemarle had an objection to giving up this particular property for the monk Adam’s purpose. He had taken a strong liking to it, and had obtained it only a few days before from Sir John de Melsa in exchange for his manor of Bewick, near Aldborough, with six carucates of land. The deed of exchange had not so much as been executed; and already the earl had planned to impark the estate, and had actually begun to enclose it on the west side with a raised bank and broad ditch, still bearing the name of Parkdike. He tried hard to induce the monk to be satisfied with some other situation, offering him liberty of selection from all his property. Adam, however, was not to be diverted from his first choice; and eventually the earl solemnly devoted the whole estate to God and the blessed Virgin Mary, for the foundation of a monastery of Cistercian monks.

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