In fact, the machines that replaced them were not new. The technology had been around for hundreds of years. Gig mills were outlawed under Charles I to protect the livelihoods of workers, but the government repealed all the protective legislation in 1809, and everything that seemed to secure the position of the shearsmen was swept away.
Now, the term Luddite often unfairly refers to someone who is opposed to new technology, rather than men who in desperation fought for their livelihoods. Before reaching the point of attack, the workers had written letters to the mill owners, signing them ‘yours faithfully, General Ludd’. The idea was to strike fear into them. These men were caught in a trap of poor harvests, high food prices and economic depression caused by the Napoleonic Wars. How desperate does a man have to get before he is willing to risk his neck?
I cut through a meadow of buttercup and ragged-robin. The path meanders through the wild flowers before opening out into a new housing estate of topiary hedges, neatly mowed lawns, polished cars and freshly swept block-paved driveways. At the main road, I approach the Red House Museum, situated next to Gomersal Public Hall. The Red House is famous because it also appears in Shirley. It was home to Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor and was renamed ‘Briarmains’ in the novel, although curiously there is also a house called the Red House in the book. Charlotte and Mary were school friends together at Roe Head, along with Ellen Nussey. Charlotte visited both Oakwell Hall and the Red House in the 1830s. She spent a good deal of time here and became friendly with the family. Mary’s father, Joshua Taylor, was the owner of Hunsworth Mill. He could speak fluent French. He was also a radical, and Charlotte’s establishment values would sometimes lead to heated discussions between the pair. Joshua Taylor was the inspiration for Hiram Yorke in Shirley, a cloth manufacturer who lives in Briarmains with his family and who also speaks fluent French. In fact, Joshua, his wife Anne and some of their six children found their way into the book.
Until a few years ago, the house was a museum, restored carefully to how it was in the 1830s. Despite numerous attempts to save the place, it is now closed up, and Kirklees Council are selling the building and the grounds. All the Georgian furniture and interior features have been stripped, repurposed or sold off. Its open gardens attract local stoners.
I follow a walkway behind the house and turn right at the main road to St Mary’s Church, where Mary Taylor is buried. From the church, I walk down Shirley Road, past Shirley Walk, past another street called Shirley Square. Kirklees Council, who built this estate, seem keen to capitalise on the connection to Charlotte’s novel. The path crosses a recreational field, past Gomersal Lodge. Here the view opens out over fields and hedges. I can see Emley Mast to the south, and to the west, the edges of the moors. Rooks strut through freshly cropped yellow-green grass. I walk down a dirt track and across a field full of cows, their udders so full of milk they almost touch the ground. The one nearest to me drags the bag of her udder along the grass like a sack of coal.
I walk down New Street to the main road, through Liversedge and the outskirts of the area known locally as Rawfolds. I cross the River Spen, stopping to look at the area where William Cartwright’s mill once stood. There’s a half-demolished building and gypsy caravans close by. Three men standing around a bonfire of pallet wood and joists chat and smoke roll-ups. Dogs play fight. I can feel the heat of the fire from where I’m standing close to the river, which powered the mill.
It was here on the night of Saturday, 11 April 1812, that an organised paramilitary force of between 150 and 300 men met in a field beneath the Dumb Steeple about three miles south, near Cooper Bridge on the edges of Brighouse and Mirfield, not far from The Three Nuns pub. These men were the West Riding Luddites, and they had gathered to attack Cartwright’s mill. They probably met there because it was an easy access point for various towns that the men were travelling from, but it is also a stone’s throw from Robin Hood’s grave in the Kirklees Park Estate, where he was supposed to have been bled to death by the prioress, and I like to think that this would have been another factor in choosing this meeting place.
By 11 p.m., all the men had gathered. They had decided on this night because it was a new moon, and the sky was black. They wore dark clothing and covered their faces with rags and masks, and they were divided by the tools they packed: hammers, hatchets, pistols, muskets. The Enoch hammers some of them carried were so named after the smith who had invented them, Enoch Taylor. Along with his brother James, Enoch also built the cropping machines that had replaced the men’s labour. The hammers were huge tools, bigger even than sledgehammers. A couple of months earlier, in February, the Luddites had ambushed a cart bringing these cropping frames to Cartwright’s mill, smashing them to smithereens using Enoch hammers. I’m sure the irony would not have been lost on the Taylor brothers. The drivers were blindfolded and tied up. This scene from real life is accurately fictionalised in Shirley.
They had been training for this mill attack for weeks, perhaps even months. The men glugged from bottles of rum. April evenings can be cold, and records show that this particular night was especially chilly, but no doubt the rum was also to strengthen their mettle. Then, under the moonless sky, they marched across Hartshead Moor to Hightown. You can recreate this walk today – it’s clearly marked up with signs saying ‘The Luddite Trail’. However, when I attempted it in the middle of October, after three weeks of unrelenting rain, it was almost impossible to do. The trail took a left past a steak house and over several farmers’ fields that had been ploughed up and the path turned into mud, so that I was wading through a soggy quagmire.
As the masked men marched over the moor, Cartwright was getting ready for them. He’d received a warning two weeks before from Abraham Pule, a cropper and former worker, and had assembled his own army: employees of the mill. But out of hundreds, only six men actually showed up. He had also asked the Cumberland Militia for help. They brought five soldiers. Despite the lack of numbers, the mill was well positioned to be defended, high up on a hill and surrounded on one side by the moat-like Spen Beck. Cartwright had replaced the main door with one studded with iron and had fitted, at great expense, an alarm bell to the roof. Men were positioned strategically on the first floor, ready to fire muskets, and the mill owner had also fitted secret weapons. The staircase was modified with sixteen-inch spiked rollers to impale any intruders, and at the top there were huge carboy jars full of sulphuric acid to tip on the head of anyone who got too close.
By midnight, Cartwright decided it was a no-show and time to retire to bed, but the Luddites were now close by. Then, the sentries heard gunshot, and out of the pitch-black night the army of masked men made their attack. They quickly overpowered Cartwright’s guards outside. The windows of the mill were smashed. Men with Enochs pounded the main door. Men with pistols fired shots. Cartwright’s men retaliated. One man tried to raise the alarm, but as he yanked on the bell rope it snapped. Another man climbed onto the roof and rang the bell by hand. Cartwright’s men took aim behind raised flagstones. Bullets flew back and forth. Some Luddites were wounded, lying on the floor in pain. Despite their best efforts, the men failed to batter the door down. And seeing many men shot at, the Luddite leaders decided to retreat.
It is estimated that 140 rounds were fired during a twenty-minute attack. The Luddites left two men behind, Sam Hartley and John Booth. They were tortured by Cartwright and later died, according to social historian Robert Reid. Thousands attended Sam’s funeral to show solidarity with the cause. Because of this support, John was buried in secret. In the light of the following day, the yard was strewn with discarded weapons, masks, pools of blood and even a finger. Fifty panes of glass had been smashed either by hammer, axe, pistol or musket. In fact, the Luddites had almost got through the main door, and it was so damaged that it had to be replaced rather than repaired. Having successfully smashed machines, this was the first defeat of the West Riding Luddites. By 1820, the job of cropping by hand was no more.
Patrick, a s
ingle man at the time, was lodging at Lousey Thorn Farm, close to his place of work, when the West Riding Luddites struck. On the night of the attack, he was likely woken by the sound of the men’s hobnailed boots as they marched past. And if not by that, then by the alarm bell rung shortly after. Surely Patrick, from humble stock, and someone who fought for workers’ rights, would have had some sympathy for their plight? Unlike his friend Reverend Hammond Roberson, he did not answer Cartwright’s alarm call with a sword in hand. Roberson is said to be the model for Matthew Helstone in Charlotte’s novel. She only met Roberson once, but his anti-Luddite stance was well known.
Despite any sympathy he might have felt for the men’s cause, he felt so threatened by them that he bought a pair of pistols. At a later date, Patrick must have also bought another pair of pistols. One of these was sold in 2004 to a private collector. It was a flintlock boxlock pistol by Aston Manchester, with Birmingham proof marks dated c. 1815–1820, a bayonet attachment underneath and Branwell’s initials engraved on it. Patrick must have given this pistol to his son. It is not known where he purchased the original pistols, but it must have been around the same time as the attack on the mill. They were a different make and model with no spring bayonets. One of them was part of the Parsonage Museum’s collection, but it was stolen in the sixties.
Patrick was clearly fascinated by guns, and he even wrote to Lord Wellington on one occasion, offering a great deal of technical advice – suggestions for developing firearms for the military. We don’t have a record of that letter, but we do have Wellington’s response: ‘much time would be saved if others in power would follow the Duke’s example and avoid to interfere in matters over which they have no control’. Which basically meant, mind your own business. So that was Patrick told.
According to Lock and Dixon, Patrick’s biographers, he was approached at this time by members of his congregation who informed him that ‘threats against his person had been overheard locally’. As a result, Patrick kept a pistol with him for the rest of his life, firing it each morning to discharge the bullets, but presumably to also practise his aim. Emily also fired Patrick’s pistols and was a good shot according to John Greenwood, the Haworth stationer from whom the Brontës obtained their writing paper.
I walk down Primrose Lane, the opposite way from which the men came, and I imagine passing the tooled-up army of masked militia on a crisp pitch-black Saturday evening. It must have been a fearsome sight. It would have been kicking-out time that night, and I imagine those returning home after an evening in the pub, now half-cut, would have done a double take as they passed. Returning home, they would have told a tale hardly believed by their wives.
The lane meanders until it reaches Halifax Road and the Shears Inn. There is a black plaque on the wall, informing the reader that the pub was owned by the Jackson family, whose cropping shop was further up Halifax Road. It became an ale house in 1803 and was popular with croppers. It was here where much of the West Riding Luddites’ planning was done. The inn is a rather grim-looking building now, with a grey slate roof, whitewashed walls that have turned a dirty shade and patches of plaster that have crumbled to reveal the stone layer beneath. It stands on its own, apart from the other buildings. I think about the conversations the Luddites must have had within the four walls of this inn, discussing all the possible alternatives before concluding that their only hope was to attack the mill itself. It was an act of self-sabotage. But this was a time when a number of laws restricted public assembly and labour unions. I want to go inside to see where the secret meetings took place, but the pub is closed, and the doors are locked. I peer through the mullioned windows, but it’s too dark to see anything.
Next to the pub, a planning notice has been attached to a lamp-post: demolition of existing public house and erection of four dwellings. It looks like that’s the end of the Shears. Despite the grim appearance of this building, I feel sad about its imminent destruction. It is a vital piece of history. The National Trust should extend its remit to protect not just stately homes and other places of interest, but also historic inns like this that have such an important story to tell.
It is clear from Charlotte’s writing where her sympathies lay: not with the workers, but with Robert Moore, the fictional mill owner in Shirley. The Luddites in Charlotte’s book are called ‘vermin’, ‘scoundrels’, ‘ruffians’ and ‘hyenas’ – an animal associated with coarse and cowardly behaviour. Conversely, Moore is called a ‘lion’ – an animal associated with strength and courage. Cartwright, like the fictional Moore, was dark-skinned, with ‘foreign blood’. However, Cartwright was not liked by his workers, and his actions do not fit the description of Moore: ‘a gentleman: his blood is pure and ancient’. Robert Moore would not be the kind of man who would callously leave two men mortally wounded without water or medicine in order to extract a confession of their accomplices’ whereabouts, as Cartwright did in real life.
I carry on down Halifax Road until I come to Clough House. The plaque above the door states that this is the home to which Patrick brought his bride Maria after their marriage, and it was here that Maria and Elizabeth were born. They must have moved here shortly after the attack. It’s a three-storey terrace house of a decent size, at least as big as the parsonage at Thornton. Perhaps he felt that it was a more secure place to raise a family. From here, I turn down Clough Lane, which Clough House overlooks. Patrick would have walked this lane every day as he travelled to and from work. I follow a footpath to my right, through the grounds of a farm, close to the one where Patrick was lodged before his move to Clough House. A little further on and I arrive at Patrick’s church. It’s a low, dumpy building, its squatness necessitated by its exposed spot here on Hartshead Common, overlooking Hartshead Moor.
The main entrance gate has been bricked up, and the church only seems to be open one Saturday every month. The windows are covered with grills and flexiglass. I look around the graveyard, but there is no sign of the unmarked Luddite graves of the men who were executed for their crimes and who Patrick reputedly buried here.
In Shirley, Cartwright’s mill finds its fictional match in Hollows Mill. The book opens with the mill owner, Robert Moore, waiting for delivery of labour-saving machines, which will enable him to lay off some of his employees. Robert’s cousin Caroline Helstone was modelled on Charlotte’s sister Anne and Ellen Nussey. Shirley, who Caroline befriends, was partly based on Emily. Writing the novel so soon after the death of her sisters, it is easy to see why she would want to immortalise them in the pages of a book. In the early part of the novel, Caroline and Shirley overhear some Luddites as they debate whether to murder Robert Moore’s friend the Reverend Helstone. This mimics real events. Again, according to Lock and Dixon in their biography of Patrick Brontë, Patrick was told by members of his congregation that they had overheard men threatening to attack him. In the novel, Caroline and Shirley also hear of a planned attack on some new shearing machines that are being delivered and go to warn Robert. But they are too late. They witness the battle from a concealed place. This also accurately records a real-life incident.
What’s missing from Charlotte’s account is the wider social context of abject poverty caused in part by the Napoleonic Wars, poor harvests, and the already mentioned high food prices, but also by the government’s efforts to repress working-class dissent. There’s a good argument to make that the phenomenon of Luddism helped provide a template of solidarity and mass action that led to successful social campaigns, such as that to reduce factory hours for children to ten hours a day and the one to repeal the punitive new Poor Laws. Lenin called the Luddites ‘the first broad truly mass and politically organised proletarian revolutionary movement’. And the Chartists who followed in the Luddites’ wake, and who were actively campaigning while Charlotte was writing Shirley, changed for the good a number of conditions for the working classes. Trade unions were fully legalised in 1871, and the Representation of the People Act 1884 allowed suffrage for some working-class men for the
first time, although all women and 40 per cent of adult males would have to wait until 1918 to be able to vote.
There were a number of arms thefts reported at this time, carried out in this area, but they didn’t start until after the military were deployed. They were not part of the original Luddite strategy, but rather a reaction to the deployment of soldiers, an act of defence rather than attack. Charlotte reverses this in Shirley. The Reverend Helstone visits a group of curates who are having a social gathering, in order to enlist their help in defending the mill. Helstone asks one of the curates, Malone, if he has ‘any arms?’ Malone comically replies that he does, as well as legs. Here it is the mill owners who need weapons to defend themselves, not the other way around. Helstone informs the curates that fellow mill owners Pearson and Armitage have been shot, one in his own house and the other on the moor. He then goes on to explain that he thinks Moore will be assassinated.
This ‘trouble at t’mill’ scenario is a thrilling start to the novel, and one of the most accomplished scenes Charlotte ever wrote. There is, however, something very strange about Helstone turning to curates for armed help. They are not the obvious choice. We do not assume parsons pack pistols, although Patrick was to do precisely this. Surely her father’s love of firearms must be one of the inspirations for this scene?
In any case, in reversing the order of cause and effect, Charlotte is guilty of the same distortion the BBC carried out in 1984 when reporting the ‘Battle of Orgreave’, the famous violent confrontation between pickets and officers of the South Yorkshire Police at a British steel-coking plant. When they broadcast footage of the conflict, it was edited out of chronological sequence, so that it looked like the mounted police charge was a reaction to stone throwing by the miners. In fact, the miners only threw the stones in response to the unprovoked attack.
Walking the Invisible Page 18
