Yorkshire Almanac William Hirst, “father of the Yorkshire woollen trade,” composes a press advert pleading for rescue from ruin

12 June 1832: William Hirst, “father of the Yorkshire woollen trade,” composes a press advert pleading for rescue from ruin

William Hirst. 1832/06/16. Mr. William Hirst. Leeds Mercury. Leeds. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

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

MR. WILLIAM HIRST. TO MY YORKSHIRE FRIENDS.
This is the last Time I intend to Appeal to the Public through the Medium of the Papers. For the grounds of my Appeal I will state a few leading Facts as well as I can. Near Twenty Years back I hit upon a new System of Manufacturing and Finishing, which has redeemed Yorkshire from the disgrace it was in as a Manufacturing County: for before then the name of Yorkshire Cloth to buyers of a certain quality would cause them to turn away from listening to what the seller had to say. At the time I began the new system I was not worth £500, the System itself enabled me in a short time to lay out in Mills and Machinery upwards of £80,000, and in 1824 I gave up Business with a great Income, but left all in the Concern, but 1825 was the ruin of the Concern. I thought I could save it, and in 1826 I mortgaged my Property for that purpose, but the new Tariff in America, in 1828, blasted all hope. I then in 1829 released those who had the Concern, and took the decayed Concern into my Hands again, and engaged to pay their Debts in a way that has before been mentioned. For three or four months all went on well, but from an unforeseen event, and I say a most cruel one, my credit was stopped on account of it; the result was I had to appear in the Gazette, though I proved before my Assignees I had made a profit of £3,000 that very same year. My Assignees being well satisfied, set me to work again; the first five months, as I have before stated, I made a profit of £5,000, and since then up to now I have made £5,000 more, admitted by Letters from those who have got about £20,000 odd of my Goods, but the change in the American market being so great, if sold now, though admitted good value, and that they could get me a profit on invoice price, yet it is probable to sell them at present they would not realise more than the advances; but the persons who have them have no authority to sell less than invoice, nor shall they have any, for if they do sell them for less I shall look to them for the difference, as I will prove by letters they were good value.

I have about £6,000 locked up this way, and about £6,000 more in Machinery. This is the case. I make this last Appeal and I make it as hundreds of different persons have expressed so much in my favour. There was a number of Gentlemen last year met to raise a Subscription, but how it dropped I never knew; James Browne, Esq. wrote from the country to his partners that he would give me £100 and lend me £20; Thomas Beckett, Esq. has said many times he would give £100 towards a piece of Plate; he says so now; I advised him to put his £100 with some others to come to my present relief; £3,000 would relieve me better now than £10,000 afterwards. Lyndon Bolton has said many times that if Yorkshire was to give me £100,000, they would not pay me for what I have done. Mr. Field, Banker, in Leeds, has said many times I had done more for my Country than any man in it; hundreds have said so beside him, and will the People of Yorkshire see me sink for about £3,000, after so much has been said, and when I prove in every instance that I have done good in Business, and I can do good yet, if I had something more to work on, to enable me to work a little until next good Trade? If I can keep going on with a little and be ready to take advantage of the trade as it improves I have no doubt, if spared, with health and strength, as I now have, of realising as much as will keep me and my family comfortable through life; and were some of you in my place and I in yours, I should come forward myself to do all that was wanted. None, after this, can complain they have not had an opportunity to do one good, whom they admit to have done so much good to them. I can honestly and fairly say, that two months back I was worth £10,000, as much so as any other tradesman can say he is worth any other sum that is embarked in trade, but to stop now it might all be wasted, and I fully believe about £3,000 would be the means of saving me, for my life has been a life of struggle and disappointment since 1825, from causes not of my making. I appeal to you this last time to save me and my Family from ruin, that is, to get over this present bad time, and then I have no fear for the future; put into practice what you acknowledge is my due, and all will be well, and I shall ever remain a debtor in gratitude to such as do assist me now, and you will have a pleasure in doing good to one you acknowledge yourselves has done much good, and, though distressed now, I have never regretted having opened my heart and place to all inquirers, and there are thousands who have inquired and are now reaping the benefit which it is more than probable had I kept all to myself I might have been as wealthy by my new System is I could have wished; for I still say I do not regret if you do not let me sink while a trifle for what has been done would save me and my family for ever. I was reading in a book a short time back about a Man fishing and falling into the water, and he would have been drowned but for a Shepherd watching his flock, and saw him fall in and ran and saved him at the risk of his life; the Gentleman took the Shepherd home, made him his equal, and at his death left all he had to him. Now I do say and can prove that to establish my new System for Two Years I was in danger of my Life, and never appeared in public but in danger of my Life. Having saved Yorkshire from the ruin of its Trade, will you let him sink that has saved you for a mere trifle in proportion to the Object obtained for you? All I want at present is to be assisted to carry on my Business, to be ready to share in the good Business that is sure to come when the Corn Laws are repealed, for in my opinion Corn Laws are one cause of the present bad Trade. The Corn from America now lodged in Warehouses in Liverpool, if it could have been sold, the proceeds would have been wanted back to America in our Articles, and the Thousands that are now wanting Bread in England would have been relieved in two ways; they would have bread at Half-price, and as much more work to raise means to buy it with.

I could give a list of names that would fill a whole column. I only will mention two more,-Mr. Gott said he would give as much as any one; Mr. John Haley, of Bramley, said he would give £50. Now if the hundreds of expressions of this kind had never been used, I should never have made one appeal at all, and whether it is attended to or not, it is the last I shall make in this way. Amongst great people, debts of honour are always attended to with strlctness. I should mot have made this appeal now, but my Assignees set me to work, and from the meetings that took place then about, my Assignees expected I should have had assistance from the public, but Instead of that assistance coming in about two months after I had begun to work, Mr. Nevins, at the head of the meetings, called on me, and considered I then had no need, but at any future time, if I wanted, they would assist me. This is one ground I append. I feel more pleasure in giving myself, than in pleading for a debt of honour.
WM. HIRST.

P.S. The Thousands that have visited my Mill since I began, if I was to say Tens of Thousands í should not be wrong, and all expressing the great benefit I had rendered my Country, and those of all Trades, and in all capacities of life, therefore as all have felt the benefit, let all come forward, from 1d. to 1s, and £1 to £100, or more, as they are disposed. I will give one proof of the high esteem my Cloth was in – it sold by auction at New York for £7 10s. per yard. I will show you that this drawback and backening in trade is not my doing; for the very Goods I want about £6,000 of their invoice Value, and admitted good value by Letters.- Had they been at New York in Spring, 1831, they would have realized me £6,000 above the Invoice; and by the state of the Market now, or what is said of it, if sold, would not fetch more than what I have received; and I dare venture to say, if the Corn Laws had been repealed this Session, they would sell for as much as they did in the Spring, 1831. I want to keep in trade till the Corn Laws are repealed, and for which purpose I crave a small proportion of a Debt of Honor.
Leeds, June 12, 1832.

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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

Apparently he died in 1858 in poverty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/makhist10_prog13a.shtml

A remarkable memoir.

Something to say? Get in touch

Comment

Apparently he died in 1858 in poverty.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/making_history/makhist10_prog13a.shtml

A remarkable memoir.

Something to say? Get in touch

25 September 1705: Daniel Defoe is amazed by Leeds’s outdoor cloth market on Briggate, shortly before the opening of the white cloth hall

1 July 1788: Leeds textile workers celebrate the banning of exports of live sheep

25 March 1667: Burials must henceforth be in wool, in order to support woollen manufacturers and reduce linen imports

8 June 1561: A York official explains why textile manufacturing has left his city for the West Riding

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

4 October 1831: The end of a 33-week strike by weavers at Gott’s, Leeds

7 May 1818: London merchant Abraham Dixon writes to the Prince Regent requesting a royal warrant for Leeds manufacturer William Hirst’s superfine cloth

3 February 1825: The last great festival at Bradford for Bishop Blaize, the wool-combers’ patron

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

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Comment

Austin’s parents were married in 1829 in Barnsley, so Ashwood was built in the early 1830s. It is listed, and Historic England has some fine photos by Martin Pitt. Austin’s father died in the winter of 1857, the same year in which Austin was called to the London Bar, and it sounds like his mother and sister moved from Ashwood to Adel in 1858. Then, presumably, Ashwood Villas and Hilton Court were built on parts of the garden. Ashwood makes far more sense without them. Headingley Hill Congregational Church was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, architect of Leeds Town Hall, and built in the mid-1860s.

The first home of Alfred Austin: Ashwood, 48 Headingley Lane, Leeds, viewed from the forecourt of Hilton Court (Cobb 2018/01/26)

Eveleigh Bradford and Jane Bower have published profiles of Austin. A cosmopolitan Catholic Tory patriot, he clearly preferred Italy to his birthplace, which he doesn’t seem to have versified, and where the Leeds Civic Trust has demonstrated what some regard as embarrassing smallness of mind in denying him a blue plaque. However, there’s a lot to be said for this contemporary view:

Mr. Alfred Austin is another poet who takes himself very seriously, in six or seven volumes of verse (it does not matter counting precisely, for they are all very much alike), admirably printed, with Pegasus on the cover, and everything proper. Mr. Austin writes for the most part in smooth and polished metre, and he does not make any ostentatious attempt to mimic the style of greater poets, except in the portentous array of eight hundred and eighty-six stanzas, under the title ‘The Human Tragedy’ (why this particular story should be the human tragedy par excellence, Heaven only knows!), which was probably what provoked Browning’s reference to the author as

Banjo-Byron, that twangs the strum-strum there.

On the other hand, Mr. Austin is absolutely without ‘style’ of his own. He has never achieved style, never risen to it; and his volumes, considering that they are mostly fairly written verse and not without pleasing ideas of a simple and obvious kind, are the most absolutely colourless poetry, to have any pretence to be called poetry at all, that we have ever turned over. The matter is made worse by the author’s utter deficiency in the sense of humour – a deficiency which he shares with some great poets (Wordsworth, for example), but which is a peculiarly dangerous defect for a ‘minor poet.’ A sense of humour would have saved him at all events from such extraordinary bathos, for instance, as when the hero of ‘the human tragedy’ encounters his faithless fiancée:

The shop whence they that moment had emerged
Plainly bespoke their errand up to town (!!)

and would have saved him from making himself a laughing-stock in the conclusion of his poem ‘At Delphi,’ where he professes to have hesitated about crowning his head with the indigenous laurel, lest he should court the fate of Marsyas, but is emboldened by the voice of the god assuring him that there is no ill feeling:

Take it! wear it! ’tis for thee,
Singer from the Northern Sea.

(Edinburgh Review 1893)

I’ve only read vol. 1 of the autobiography, which is very good on mid-century Italy, but contains several delightful anecdotes of 1830s and 1840s Leeds. For example:

Wool-stapling, as followed by my Father, Grandfather, and Great-grandfather — the last two had passed away before I reached the age of memory — seemed to me at the time a singularly light occupation. We all had to be in the breakfast-room at nine o’clock; and Morning Prayers, read by my Father, always preceded the morning meal. When it was over, he lingered among the flowers, the poultry, and the pigeons, and not till about ten o’clock did he leave for Leeds, where, in Albion Street, his office and warehouses were. He invariably walked there and back, a distance of about two and a half miles each way; for, with the masculine habit of the time, he looked on driving in carriages, save for pleasure or very long distances, as suitable only to women. In those days, people dined at a much earlier hour than now; hence he was always home by five, frequently by four o’clock, and on Saturdays yet earlier. I mention these otherwise insignificant facts to show under what leisurely conditions business was then conducted. His remaining share in it consisted in periodical visits to London when the Wool-Sales took place, where he bought what his judgment told him the cloth manufacturers of the West Riding would be likely to require, warehousing what he bought, and selling to them the number of bales they needed. Such was the trade of Wool-stapling in those days. I am told it no longer exists; since the mill-owners, their manufactures being now on so large a scale, purchase for themselves in London and elsewhere what they require. Sometimes my Father would pay a visit to Germany, in connection with his interests at home; and for years I kept a letter from him, from Breslau, with a coloured picture of a Prussian Hussar in the corner of the first page. I remember that his judgment, in all matters of life and conduct, was regarded as a superior one, and he was frequently asked for advice, which they who sought it believed to be deliberately and impartially formed. More than once pressed to be Mayor of the Borough, all the more remarkable in those days, since he was a Roman Catholic, he thought it wiser to decline the office, though he accepted the duties of Magistrate. As the sequel of this narrative will show, he died when I was only twenty-two years of age, and within a few weeks after I had been called to the Bar. But I well remember the even cheerfulness of his temper, and on his face that philosophic smile which testifies to a knowledge of human nature, and a kindly indulgence towards it. No University education was then accessible in England to Roman Catholics, and, save for ecclesiastical purposes, hardly a collegiate one. But, on the other hand, the Grammar Schools of England still offered sound mental training of no narrow character, and his acquaintance with the best Literature was remarked by me from my earliest days. He was, in no filially conventional sense, the best of Fathers; solicitous for the education of his children, comprehensive as regards study, severe in respect of conduct, and reasonably strict as a mentor in morals. The most devoted and domestic of husbands, he was, I could not help observing, much liked and trusted by women of every condition; for his attitude towards them was essentially chivalrous, and he impressed on his sons its supreme importance. The phrases most frequent on his lips were “Fairplay” and “Honour bright.” His piety was simple and sincere, but never intolerant.

Re Catholic Emancipation:

Catholics at that time were on the side of the Whigs, who had long been advocates of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, which was passed a year after his marriage, which had been compulsorily celebrated in a Protestant Church before being sanctioned in the Roman Catholic one of Saint Anne’s. To me, when a child, differences of Party bias naturally signified nothing. But I took a keen interest in the hoisting of a large Orange Flag, the Whig-Colour in the Borough, on our house at election time. Many years later, my Father, as was and is still the case with most Roman Catholics, transferred his sympathies to the Conservative Cause ; and I recollect a Mr. Beecroft, who had been returned by a very small majority as Conservative member for Leeds, telling me in the lobby of the House of Commons he owed that majority entirely to the local influence of my Father.

Re his childhood at Ashwood, Headingley:

Reminiscences of early childhood, especially if told by oneself, are apt to be rather naif, and only raise a smile. If I say that I have a clear and loving recollection of my own special nurse, Mary Wilkinson, whose prattle was of the ordinary pattern of such; and for no other reason I can imagine, than that she had certain vague ideas concerning Alfred the Great, and my Christian name was the same as that of England’s Darling, she was fond of iterating and reiterating the misappropriate words, “He shall be King of all England, he shall.” I equally well remember our nursery governess, Ann Ingleson, who afterwards married the Manager of a prosperous cotton-mill. My earliest recollections are of a disposition to wander alone in meadows, gathering wild-flowers, and humming to myself songs I had heard others sing. At night I used to steal as quietly as I could out of my bed, and creep into the day nursery, from the window of which could be seen the rising of the moon, or the afterglow of sunset in summer. Anything of a more active character in which I took part arose from the suggestions of my elder brother and sister, the former of whom thought it the most natural because the most hazardous of sports, to wheel me along the top of the kitchen-garden wall, or to inter my sister’s doll with funeral honours, subject to its being dug up again; and the latter of whom displayed the girlish inclination towards mischief from the sheer enjoyment of doing what was forbidden. But my heart was in none of these. A little later I had a genuine pleasure in elementary cricket, flying my kite, and shooting arrows at a fixed target.

When about six, I was sent to a day-school in the village of Headingley, kept by two maiden ladies, the Misses Summers, staid and conscientious experts in teaching young children the rudiments of learn ing. My sister Winifred was my companion as far as their door, and then she went on to a Mrs. Gomoschinska, the English widow of a Pole, who educated one or two “young ladies” in what were then regarded as the necessary “accomplishments” for such. As an indication, possibly, of an inborn romantic tendency, I may recall an indefinable feeling which I cherished for a girl of my own age, who likewise was a pupil of the Misses Summers, and who, it would seem, in some degree shared the sentiment, since it was arranged between us that whichever of the two started schoolward first, placed a stone outside our garden gate as a token. I have always understood that what was there taught me was taught thoroughly.

Holidays in Ilkley:

Our summer holiday was generally passed by my sister and myself at Ilkley, now well known to Hydropathists, but then as primitive a little place as was to be found in the island, and about fourteen miles from Headingley, the road to it being up the lovely valley of the Wharfe through a small township of the name of Otley… But I already loved the [Wharfe], and used to lean for hours over its picturesque bridge at the end of the lane where the elder and the woodbine scented the air. There was what was called the village street, but it was paved roughly, if at all; and a beck, as small streams are called in Yorkshire, and never dry, zigzagged through it. With the exception of the Inn, from which the Daily Coach started for Leeds or Bradford to much blowing of horns, I do not think there was a tiled or slated roof in the place. All the other houses were thatched; and our lodgings were in the chief of these, kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Senior, along whose kitchen ceiling were stretched wires, over which home-made oatcake was dried. Immediately opposite was the equally primitive home of Betty Butterfield, much frequented by us, since she kept donkeys for hire, and had charge of the baths and wells up the hill on Ilkley Moor. It was altogether a place after my young heart; and though I do not think we ever took the baths, we used to walk up the hill every morning to where they were, to drink the cold pellucid water of an adjoining well that was supposed to have special health-giving virtues. I have a clear recollection of seeing an incorrigible drunkard in the Village Stocks, a revival of which I shall shock the sentimentalist by saying I should much like to see; and farmers and their wives who lived in the neighbourhood invariably riding into the village pillion fashion. Every Saturday, during the time we remained at Ilkley, our parents drove over from Headingley. On Sunday morning we all attended Mass in the private chapel in Middleton Park, belonging to the Middleton family, and in the afternoon we were driven to Bolton, six miles from Ilkley, whose ruined Abbey on the Wharfe, whose bounding and flashing waterfall, apparently endless woods, through which the Wharfe flowed and foamed, and well-known “Strid,” filled me with romantic glee. They have all been celebrated, as I discovered later on, by Wordsworth in his poem “Hart-Leap Well.” … I am told that Ilkley is now a model Hydropathic resort, whose once rocky fern-clad slopes are covered with the huge conventional hotels of to-day, spacious Clubs and Concert-Rooms, and all the other concomitants of our much-vaunted material Progress and Civilization. And so one visits it no more, but repairs for rustic refreshment of the spirit to places mayhap such as Garmisch in the Bavarian Highlands, or to Château d’OEx.

Meanwood Beck: