Yorkshire Almanac 2026

Unedited excerpt

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

Backward “Prophecy.” Old News Leads to the Police Court.
A policeman’s wife at Scarborough called on a local practitioner in the “prophecy line” with the main object of obtaining evidence to warrant police court proceedings.
She received plenty of information for her money, but, as it happened, there was a “twist” about it which was not acceptable.
In the police court yesterday the policeman’s wife said that “Madame Morlee” took her hand, which was gloved, and told her that she had a boy and a girl.
Her husband, continued Madame Morlee, was under Government, and would change his occupation at thirty-two years of age, and go into the “eating line.” Mrs. PHilpott, the visitor, said that she had two children, who were girls, and that her husband was thirty-five years of age.
Madame Morlee’s defence was that she did not profess to foretell the future, nor did she practise palmistry.
She merely gave advice, and in the course of conversation told her visitor that she had two children, one of the girls having the temperament of a boy, and that if it was not a boy it ought to have been. As a matter of fact, the visitor’s husband was an Army cook, thirty-two years old.
Madame Morlee was fined seven guineas.

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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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• Gender (1) W/G ·
• Magic (supernatural) (4) W/G ·
• Palmistry (2) W/G ·
• Police (11) W/G ·
• 📌Scarborough (21) W/G ·
• Sex (12) W/G ·

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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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Similar

22 February 1865: Rioters besiege the Park Square, Leeds, home of surgeon and magistrate Henry Chorley, on the release from Armley Gaol of his dripping-thief cook Eliza Stafford

12 March 1900: The South African speaker Samuel Cronwright meets Marion Rowntree among other anti-Boer-War activists waiting to run the gauntlet of a riotous Tory mob at Scarborough

30 September 1859: A popular village brass band contest at the Golden Lion, Loftus (near Saltburn)

26 July 1802: Dorothy Wordsworth travels with brother William from Scarborough across the Wolds to Beverley and Hull

9 August 1661: John Ray encounters kelp-makers on the coast between Scarborough and Whitby

26 October 1869: Joshua Rowntree, a young solicitor, joins the party trying to rescue survivors of the wreck of the Ellen south of Scarborough Spa

16 April 1883: General Booth rebuts the Bishop of Oxford’s claim that the Salvation Army organises mixed darkroom sessions at York

20 April 1631: Quoting Elizabeth I’s 1572 Vagabonds Act, justices of the peace in Thirsk order a crackdown on a variety of layabouts

26 August 1600: Following the Restoration, powerful local Catholics invade the Hackness (Scarborough) home of Sir Thomas Hoby, Puritan commissioner and newcomer

30 July 1882: On his way to play with the Muker church band, Richard Guy of Hill Top Farm climbs over a wall to inspect a fertile heifer

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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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Dates. Malise McGuire has discovered a mention in the press (the Northern Echo? I can’t find it) of this tragedy. It is dated 4 August 1882, so Sunday was 30 July: “On Sunday at Hill Top Farm, near Gunnerside, Richard GUY went out to look at some young cattle and was soon afterwards found in a field dead. His clothes were literally torn to shreds.” I haven’t looked on Ancestry, but this is the Richard Guy born in 1833 at Scar House, Muker, and present in the 1881 census:

70. Hill Top Farm
GUY/Richard S/Head/M/47/Farmer 158 Acres/Yks Muker
GUY/Rosomond/wife/M/47/Farmers wife/Yks Muker
GUY/Thomas/son/U/20/Farmers son/Yks Muker
GUY/Robert J/son/U/17/Farmers son/Yks Muker
GUY/Richard/son//13/scholar/Yks Muker
GUY/Elizebeth/dau//8/scholar/Yks Muker

The anecdote also turns up in abbreviated form, perhaps abstracted from the above, in an outstanding book by Marie Hartley and Joan Ingilby (Hartley 1982).

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