Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

The child’s father had previously been sent to prison for assaulting the child’s mother. The child’s mother left the family, taking the child with her. The mother then abandoned the child by the side of the road and the child was taken into Dewsbury Workhouse. The child was then taken out of the workhouse by the child’s father. The family appeared to be very poor and the child appeared to have been sexually abused by the child’s father. The child ran away from home and went back to Dewsbury Workhouse. From there the child was taken into a home not operated by The Society: a shelter in Wakefield run by Wakefield Ladies Association for Care of Girls.

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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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Then:

27 November 1894 – Received into St Chad’s Home For Girls, Far Headingley,
Leeds, Yorkshire [just before the move to the new building]
22 April 1897 – Went to Leeds Union Workhouse

What happened thereafter? Case file 4570 estimates Maria’s DOB as 1881, giving her age as roughly 13, but the 1901 census for the Ledgard household, Huddersfield Road, Ravensthorpe, Dewsbury lists an 18-year-old Maria Squires born in Dewsbury in ca. 1883, single, and employed as “GENERAL SERVANT (DOMESTIC)” – hence the age of 11 I give.

If ever I return to London, I hope to read the docs relating to this case in the archive.

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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.

• Child abandonment (1) W/G ·
• Child abuse (3) W/G ·
• Child labour (8) W/G ·
• Child sexual abuse (7) W/G ·
• 📌Dewsbury (21) W/G ·
• Domestic violence (7) W/G ·
• 📌Far Headingley (2) W/G ·
• 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
• Neglect (1) W/G ·
• Poverty (16) W/G ·
• Ravensthorpe, West Yorkshire (1) W/G ·
• Runaway (dependent) (1) W/G ·
• Sexual assault (5) W/G ·
• 📌St Chad's Home For Girls (1889-1939) (1), 29th children's home set up by the Waifs and Strays' Society, originally Glebe House, Hollin Lane/Glebe Terrace, Far Headingley, but from 1894 in the purpose-built Hollin Hall, on Hollin Road, now Weetwood Primary School W/G ·
• The Children’s Society (1) W/G ·
• 📌Wakefield (37), cathedral city on the River Calder in the West Riding/West Yorkshire W/G ·
• Weetwood (3) W/G ·
• Workhouse (3) 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.

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Then:

27 November 1894 – Received into St Chad’s Home For Girls, Far Headingley,
Leeds, Yorkshire [just before the move to the new building]
22 April 1897 – Went to Leeds Union Workhouse

What happened thereafter? Case file 4570 estimates Maria’s DOB as 1881, giving her age as roughly 13, but the 1901 census for the Ledgard household, Huddersfield Road, Ravensthorpe, Dewsbury lists an 18-year-old Maria Squires born in Dewsbury in ca. 1883, single, and employed as “GENERAL SERVANT (DOMESTIC)” – hence the age of 11 I give.

If ever I return to London, I hope to read the docs relating to this case in the archive.

Something to say? Get in touch

Similar

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

27 January 1830: William Cobbett rides from Leeds to black Sheffield

23 April 1832: “Pilgrims” arrive at Leeds on Easter Monday on their way to York to hear Richard Oastler call for a 10-hour working day for mill children

16 December 1722: Thomas Nettleton of Halifax recounts to James Jurin his success in inoculating against smallpox

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

6 June 1817: A government agent-provocateur on his way to a meeting of pro-democracy radicals at Thornhill encounters Thomas Murray, weaver and reform activist

15 May 1841: Patience Kershaw (17) tells the Children’s Employment Commission (Mines) about her work at Joseph Stocks’ Booth Town Pit, Halifax

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

2 June 1867: Dr Clifford Allbutt tells the Epidemiological Society that the market will not provide decent housing for Leeds’s poorest

30 May 1835: The (Tory-dominated) Leeds Corporation gives its assets to three cronies to prevent their being inherited by the new (Whiggish) town council created by the Municipal Corporations Act

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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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£7K was about £0.75m in May 2024 – chicken-feed for Covid-era embezzlers.

They were not the only beneficiaries:

When the functions of the late Corporation of Leeds were about to cease, by virtue of the Municipal Bill, the members voted to Mr. Adolphus jun., the son of the eminent barrister and Deputy Recorder of that Corporation, the sum of one hundred guineas, in testimony of their esteem, and as a small but grateful record of their estimation of his services. Mr. Adolphus refused to accept the tribute, excusing himself upon the plea that he could not ???? to himself the idea of allowing the last act of the corporation to be that of giving a sum of money to one of its legal advisers (Morning Post 1836/04/06)

The Spectator has a follow-up (Gale doesn’t have Leeds Mercury scans for 1836!):

The Solicitor-General has given his opinion, that the conduct of the old Leeds Corporation, in alienating their funds, was illegal and fraudulent, and that the seven thousand pounds may be recovered on an application to the Court of Chancery. We are sure the burgesses of Leeds will require their Council to institute proceedings for the recovery of the property without delay, if the old Corporation should have the audacity to persist in their wrongful act, and that the borough will support the Council in those proceedings.—Leeds Mercury.(Spectator 1836/04/09)

This was during the period of Whig rule nationally 1835-41 under Viscount Melbourne, and there is probably a Tory response to the Solicitor General somewhere. But what happened eventually? Were there sanctions for the guilty members of the Corporation? Who were they? For that at least John Mayhall has the answer:

LEEDS CORPORATE BODY, 1834-5.
MAYOR: Griffith Wright.
RECORDER: Charles Milner.
DEPUTY RECORDER: John Leycester Adolphus.
ALDERMEN:-Henry Hall, George Banks, Christopher Beckett, William Hey, Benjamin Sadler, Thomas Beckett, Thomas Blayds, Ralph Markland, Rt. William Dinsey Thorp, Richard Bramley, Joseph Robert Atkinson, William Perfect.
ASSISTANTS:-Jonathan Wilks, Joseph Ingham, John G. Uppleby, Fountain Brown, Michael Thomas Sadler, Joseph Henry Ridsdale, William Wilks, Joseph Mason Tennant, William Hey, junr., John Wilkinson, Charles Brown, William Waite, Benjamin Holroyd, William Osburn, junr., John Upton, William Gott, Thomas Motley, Francis Chorley, Robert Harrison, John Cawood, William Milnes, Thomas Charlesworth, George Hirst.
TOWN CLERK: James Nicholson.
CORONER: Robert Barr.
CHIEF CONSTABLE: Edward Read.
DEPUTY CONSTABLE: James Ingham.
SERJEANT AT MACE: George Hanson.
CLERK OF THE MARKETS, AND BILLET MASTER: James Fairclough.
BEADLE: J. Handley.
CAPTAIN OF THE WATCH. Benjamin Wool.
GAOLER: James Lancaster
TOWN’S CRIER: Benjamin Spencer.
(Mayhall 1860)

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