Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

About one I preached at Daw-Green. I judged the congregation, closely wedged together, to extend forty yards one way, and about a hundred the other. Now, suppose five to stand in a yard square, they would amount to twenty thousand people. I began preaching at Leeds between five and six, to just such another congregation. This was the hardest day’s work I have had since I left London; being obliged to speak at each place from the beginning to the end, to the utmost: extent of my voice: but my strength was as my day.

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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.

Comment

Comment

He had preached there several days before:

I preached at one in Great Gummersal; in the evening at Dewsbury. The congregation was as large as at Bradford, and as attentive. Although a few years since the people of Daw Green were as eminently savage and irreligious, as even the colliers of Kingswood.

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Tags

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• Crowd counting (1) W/G ·
• 📌Daw Green (1) W/G ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) W/G ·
• Gomersal (3) W/G ·
• Kingswood, South Gloucestershire (1) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (248) W/G ·
• Wesley, John (1703-91) (21), cleric and leader of a evangelical revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism W/G ·

All tags.

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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.

Comment

Comment

He had preached there several days before:

I preached at one in Great Gummersal; in the evening at Dewsbury. The congregation was as large as at Bradford, and as attentive. Although a few years since the people of Daw Green were as eminently savage and irreligious, as even the colliers of Kingswood.

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Similar

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

29 April 1969: Jimmy Savile sexually assaults a 15-year-old girl at Staincliffe Hospital (later Dewsbury and District Hospital), to the amusement of bystanders

25 August 1840: Debating the teetotal vegetarian Frederic Lees at Rotherham, the Wesleyan James Bromley calls the pledge unchristian, and “alcohol-free” wine undrinkable

28 April 1747: John Wesley visits “the new house of the Germans” (the Moravians) at Pudsey, which is financed by overseas donations

3 July 1761: John Wesley visits an unjustly bankrupted Yarm liquor smuggler in York Castle

19 July 1761: John Wesley speaks at the first love-feast at Birstall

24 July 1761: Jonas Rushford (14) of Bradford tells a perhaps envious John Wesley how the Skipton magician Timothy Crowther helped him find a missing man

15 November 1894: Application is made to move Maria Squires (11) of Dewsbury from a girls’ shelter in Wakefield to St Chad’s Home For Girls, Far Headingley

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

22 September 1896: Clifford Allbutt on the threat to industry from anti-scientific manufacturers and workers, and colonialism

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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.

Comment

Comment

I haven’t read the Thomas Thorpe piece which triggered Allbutt, but the Leeds industrialist James Kitson II rebutted Allbutt’s claims, and Allbutt gave as good as he got. Etsuo Abé’s analysis of the decline of Middlesbrough iron- and steelmakers Bolckow, Vaughan & Co. is a textbook example of what Allbutt was describing: while they were comparatively early adopters in the 1870s of the Bessemer process, which allowed the replacement in rails of wrought iron by mass-produced mild steel, it wasn’t until just before World War I that they made a full transition from basic Bessemer converters to the basic open hearth furnaces which had been producing high quality steel for ship plates and increasingly rails in the United States and Germany since the 1890s (Abé 1996).

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