Silo Tagging

 

This is unmistakably Brighouse: the giant Sugden Flour silos are as an effective geotag as any map reference. These two concrete monoliths appear almost timeless, but when I took this photo in 1970, one was just seven years old and the other only a few years older. Many of those buildings and chimneys have now gone, of course, but the silos - repurposed as a massive climbing frame - remain.

The Lost Pubs Of Brighouse : No. 5 The Joiners Arms

THE LOST PUBS OF BRIGHOUSE

At one time or another there have been over 100 pubs, inns, beerhouses and taverns in the streets around Brighouse and Rastrick. Today, only a handful are left. Before time is called on too many more, I decided to go on a historical pub-crawl in search of the lost pubs of Brighouse.

No 5. The Joiners Arms, Hove Edge, Brighouse

What's in a name? As far as the history of local pubs is concerned, the answer is all too often a story. Take, for example, the Joiners Arms (my apologies to the Apostrophe Protection Society but there was little call for such frippery amongst nineteenth century signwriters). If you live in the Brighouse area and you are not familiar with the Joiners Arms, don't worry; you would have to be of a fair vintage to have a working knowledge of it as it closed down in 1932. The building still exists, however, huddled up close to the Dusty Miller on the Halifax Road in Hove Edge, a few miles to the north of Brighouse.

These days, Hove Edge is a bit of an afterthought, but there were times when it was one of the four quarters that made up Hipperholme township : along with Hipperholme itself, Norwood Green, and little baby Brighouse. Romans buried coins in Hove Edge (or Hoofedge as they fondly called it), quarrymen quarried stone there, and highwaymen on black horses hid there - but that is another name, another pub and another story. So let us return to our joiner.

According to the 1841 census there was a joiner called Jonas Bell living in Hove Edge. Living in the same cottage was a younger man, also a joiner, called Joseph Crowther. Jonas was 50, which was a good age back in the 1840s; an age when the body begins to slow down, an age when heaving a plank of wood becomes more and more of a challenge. Old Jonas needed to diversify and, luckily for him, this need coincided with that great process of liberalisation of the licensing laws which meant that almost anyone could open up a beerhouse anywhere. Hove Edge was full of so many thirsty stone quarriers that on a cold night they couldn't all fit into the Dusty Miller  (or the Old Pond, or the Black Horse, or the Broad Oak), so Jonas became a beerseller. By the time of the 1851 census, Jonas is listed as the publican of the appropriately named "Joiners Arms", and Joseph Crowther has bought the cottage next door and got married. Pulling pints was obviously less stressful than pulling planks, and Jonas was still listed as the Publican of the Joiners Arms in 1861 by which time he was over 70 years old and his neighbours' daughter, Lizzie Crowther, had moved in to help him.

But things never stay the same, and ten years later Jonas the Joiner is gone - transported to heaven in a fine oak coffin lined with burr walnut one hopes - and so is his old pal and neighbour, Joseph Crowther. But the connection is not broken, because Joseph's widow, Mary Crowther, has moved in and taken over the running of the pub. Keeping order amongst a room full of heavy drinkers could be quite a challenge in the rough and tumble of nineteenth century working class life, and poor Mary discovered this to her cost in 1875. To the cost of £1 8s 6d to be precise, the amount she was fined at the West Riding Court in Halifax for permitting drunkenness in her beerhouse.

The pub lived on into the twentieth century, but when Mary Crowther left in the 1880s, all connections to the original joiners were lost. And in 1932, the pub itself was lost as it ceased trading. For a time, the building got a new lease of life as the village post office, but the decline in local post offices didn't lag too far behind the decline in local pubs, and that also closed down. Now the building is a private house: neatly presented, cheerfully painted, and with a canopy of solar panels nailed to the roof. One can't help wondering whether it was a joiner who fitted them.

The Lost Pubs Of Brighouse : 4. The Albion Inn

THE LOST PUBS OF BRIGHOUSE

At one time or another there have been over 100 pubs, inns, beerhouses and taverns in the streets around Brighouse and Rastrick. Today, only a handful are left. Before time is called on too many more, I decided to go on a historical pub-crawl in search of the lost pubs of Brighouse.

No 4. The Albion Inn, Lane Head, Brighouse

We often think of our towns and villages growing organically, like some garden bloom, starting with a bud and then slowly expanding around the edges to become the finely crafted communities that we know today. But it didn't happen like that, it never does. Towns grow in fits and starts, first this way and then that. They consume the surrounding fields and meadows, spurred on by bridges, roads and industry. A visitor to the Brighouse area at the start of the nineteenth century would have found a one sided town, weighted towards the ancient parish of Rastrick to the south of the river and as sparsely populated as a Lancastrian nunnery to the north of the River. And then came the Turnpike Trusts, tarmacadam tendrils linking Brighouse to Huddersfield, Bradford, Halifax and Keighley and opening up the way to the development of the north of the town.

The Brighouse to Denholmegate Turnpike was opened in 1826, climbing out of the centre of the town, through Lane Head to Hove Edge, Hipperholme and beyond. And where roads went, houses soon followed. And where there were houses, there were pubs. The Albion Inn was built at the junction of Halifax Road and Waterloo Road in 1853, directly opposite the old Toll House. The area was on the up, a trend accelerated by the installation of new-fangled gas street lighting in 1861 and by the abolition of toll charges on the Turnpike in the following year. The expanding grid of terraced streets brought a boom in trade for the Albion and the many other pubs and beerhouses which were also established in this part of North Brighouse.

Over the years, the Albion saw its fair share of local life. Like many local pubs, it was often used as a venue for inquests, and many an unfortunate resident has had their final hours investigated by the visiting coroner in its upstairs lounge. In 1876 it was the landlady of the Inn itself, Elizabeth Shackleton, who nearly met an unfortunate end when she was assaulted by one of her clients, one Frederick Rayner, who was fined £5 plus costs for the assault and a further £5 for refusing to leave the pub when requested.

In the twentieth century its' publicans included Albert "Alty" Farrar, a professional sportsman of some repute. He not only played first class cricket for Yorkshire but he also turned out for the Rochdale Hornets Rugby League team : a sporting success story in charge of a pub that was equally successful. And so the pub moved forward into the twenty-first century, no doubt believing that it was as fixed a part of the local scene as the road that still made its way up the hill and towards romantic places such as Shelf, Queensbury and Denholme. But the change in habits, in tastes, in culture, all meant that by 2007, success was no longer been measured in the volume of pints pulled or bottles uncorked. The pub closed down and reopened as a Chinese Restaurant. Appropriately named, "Success".

Picture Post 1123 : Thornhill Briggs WMC

I was having some problems with my camera on Friday, and believing that I had fixed it (note to self : take off the bloody lens hood) I took a few test shots. At the time I was down in Brighouse and close to the area called Thornhill Briggs. One of the shots was of Thornhill Briggs Working Men's Club which was taken for no other reason than to test whether the shutter was working properly. Experience from the photographs I took forty or so years ago suggests that it is such throw-away shots that are the most fascinating to look back on a few decades later. They provide a record of reality, a picture of normality.

The Lost Pubs Of Brighouse : 3. The Vulcan Inn

THE LOST PUBS OF BRIGHOUSE

At one time or another there have been over 100 pubs, inns, beerhouses and taverns in the streets around Brighouse and Rastrick. Today, only a handful are left. Before time is called on too many more, I decided to go on a historical pub-crawl in search of the lost pubs of Brighouse.

No 3. The Vulcan Inn, Foundry Street, Off Birds Royd Lane, Brighouse

Few people wander around the Birds Royd Lane area of Brighouse these days unless they work in one of the industrial units or unless they took a wrong turning whilst searching for somewhere better. There are a few houses left, but not many. One or two old stone-built mills and warehouses appear to have been forgotten in the push towards sterile modern industrial units with over-sized car parks and under-sized architectural ambitions. But just one or two. The rest is corrugated steel and breezeblock. It is easy to forget that this part of Brighouse was once a place where factories, mills, foundries, dye-works and breweries fought for space with row upon row of smoke-encrusted back-to-back houses. And where there were houses and work and life, there were, of course, pubs. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century you could have called for a pint in the Dyers' Arms, or the Sportsman, or the Woodman, or the Railway Hotel, .....or the Vulcan Inn.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the Sportsman and the Dyers had gone and by the end of the twentieth century the rest had followed. One of the buildings, however, remains in place, although it ceased to be a pub in 1926 and that is - that was - the Vulcan Inn on the corner of Foundry Street and Vulcan Street. It now provides a home for a sewing and knitting shop and a music rehearsal room, but you can still make out the shape of the pub that was, and you can still see the carved initials "B&B 1869" on the stone pediment. This, no doubt, will be the initials of the brewers, Brook and Booth, whose brewery stood across the street.

The Red Cross Brewery was a grand affair, perhaps the foremost of the band of Brighouse breweries. The brewery was based around a large courtyard within which all the usual departments of the brewing industry could be found. The main fermenting room was located in a six storey tower, and there were cool cellars capable of holding 1,000 barrels. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the brewery passed through a variety of owners and in the twentieth century it was acquired by the Halifax brewer, Samuel Webster. Brewing ceased on the site not too long after the Vulcan stopped serving pints, although the brewery was not as successful in leaving a physical footprint on the land - all trace of it is now long gone.

One of the occupational hazards of writing about times gone by is the danger of sanitised nostalgia. In areas such as this, the nineteenth century was a hard and cruel era. The following article in the Huddersfield Chronicle in October 1876 illustrates the point perfectly.

"CHILD KILLED - On Monday morning Edward Moore, aged three or four years, son of Mr Moore, brewer at Messrs. Booth and Ogden's Brewery, Birds Royd, Rastrick, was running across the road to his home near the brewery, when he went too close to the wheels of a cart conveying coals to the brewery, and was knocked down, one of the wheels passed over the child's head and crushed out its brains so it died on the spot. The body was carried to Mr Moore's house, and Dr Brown was sent for to certify the cause of death for it was impossible to do more. On Tuesday morning an inquest was held on the remains at the Railway Hotel, before Mr Wm Barstow, coroner, when the facts reported were given in evidence and the juru returned a verdict of "Accidental death" no blame attaching to any one"

Perhaps there is something to be said for those modern industrial estates built far away from the people's houses.

The Day The Quack Doctor Came To Town

Today I decided to write a short book (what Sherlock Holmes would have referred to as a Monograph) about the history of the inns and taverns of Brighouse and district. As far as I know it has never been done and it certainly needs doing before the last local pubs vanish for ever. It is the kind of scheme even I should be capable of both initiating and bringing to fruition. All it needs is a little application, a fair bit of research and a measure of determination. So down I went to the local library to start the research. And that is where I met my Waterloo.

I was browsing through R Mitchell's 1953 book "Brighouse : Portrait of a Town" looking for references to the origin of various Brighouse pubs when I came across a table entitled "Trades and Occupations in 1822". This shows the various trades followed by the inhabitants of not only Brighouse, but the surrounding villages of Clifton, Lightcliffe, Hipperholme, Rastrick and Southowram.

Now the thing I should have been noting was the comparatively small number of licensed victuallers in Brighouse (4) compared to some of the surrounding villages such as Rastrick (9) and Southowram (10). What I should have been asking myself were the two central questions : which were the four pubs of Brighouse in 1822, and why were there so few in what was the central town of the district? But all I could do was ask myself the question "what on earth is a Quack Doctor"? When I got home, instead of writing up my notes on some of the pubs I researched I went in search of a history of quackery on the web. I always thought of it as a term of abuse for a fraudster without medical qualifications, but here it seems to be used in a less prejudicial sense. I still haven't found a satisfactory explanation for the term being used in an official listing of trades, but I will continue to search until I find an answer or ....

Or, if I am honest, until I find another fascinating but unrelated question to ask myself. Then I will forget the Brighouse Quack and go chasing after some other mirage. Which is why I never managed to write the "Lives Of The Great Brewers" or any of the other wonderful books I have dreamt up. And it is why, most likely, the history of the great inns and taverns of Brighouse and District will forever go unrecorded.

Cholera Outbreak in Brighouse Follows Devastating Earthquake

My apologies to all those people who have been trying to contact me to see whether I survived last night's earthquake. As you can clearly see, I did. I have been a little busy today making right the earthquake damage and attempting to submit my own personal experience of the quake to the interactive news media.

The damage resulting from what one newspaper described as a "super-quake" was significant. In the excitement of the event I sat on my glasses. Thus, this morning I had to take a trip to the opticians for repairs. Expecting a large queue of fellow-citizens who had equally suffered such collateral damage, I was agreeably surprised when the opthaltromologist (or whatever they are called these days) agreed to see me almost immediately and fit me with a new set of frames (wholesale price £4.99p) for just £30. It is heartening they way communities pull together at times of crisis.

Watching the news reports of the disaster - with the help of my good-as-new-glasses - I was disappointed with the low-key and unambitious nature of the viewer-feedback. Such e-mails, text messages and photos are now such a part of the news culture that one expected more. The BBC claimed that they had received a text from a man in Barnsley which said "Earthquake in Barnsley" which makes you glad you paid your license fee on time. The only footage they could manage was taken from a petrol station security camera which - according to them - showed the trees shaking. Oh come on, we can do better than this. So this morning, Amy and I went out and snapped this view of Fixby Road in the aftermath of the quake.

Equally I have texted the following message to both the BBC and ITV :

Quake thru wife + me out of bed + dmolished house. cholera outbreak in Brighouse following mass dstruction. need lp fast from red x

Not sure if they will broadcast it on the evening news. We will have to wait and see.

Calder and Hebble Navigation

I have some old black and white prints taken by the canal in Brighouse some forty years ago. This isn't one of them. This was, in fact, taken yesterday. But turn the colour into black and white and the years roll away.

Salt And Pepper

A beautiful sunny day today so Amy and I decided to take a walk along the canal towpath in Brighouse. The photograph is of one of the hoppers of what used to be Sugden's Flour Mill. The building is now empty and awaiting re-development. The two giant towers used to be known by the locals as salt and pepper.

Swollen But Not Much Stirred

I managed to get down the hill into Brighouse yesterday. The TV news programmes were still doing the "alarm and disaster" thing with stories about people being evacuated from their homes, but it must have been a different Brighouse they were talking about. There was a bit of mud in one of the car parks but that was about it. The river was swollen but well below its retaining banks. It was all a bit disappointing and reminded me a little of Young Albert who was taken to Blackpool by his parents :

"They didn't think much to the ocean;

The waves, they was fiddlin' and small ;

There was no wrecks... nobody drownded';

Fact, nothing to laugh at, at all.

So, after walking around for a bit and taking a few photographs, I took my stick with its horse's head handle and went looking for a zoo.

The Yorkshire Floods And A River Of Snot

A streaming, energy-sapping, spirit-crushing cold has kept me largely indoors for the last 48 hours where I have occupied myself by watching BBC News 24. Two stories dominated the news - the crashing stock market and the flooded streets. The streets in question were in West Yorkshire, indeed they were within a mile or two of where I sat. But I live on the top of a hill and all I could do was to sit up here and watch the water flow away. By mid-afternoon, the television was saying that children were being rescued in Brighouse and houses were being evacuated. The newshound in me dragged me out of my sick-bed and, camera in hand, I set out for Brighouse. But a few hundred yards down the road I began to realise the impossibility of the task : traffic was stacked up as roads were grid-locked. I turned the car and headed home for bed. So no photographs, no first hand reports, no tales of wading through flooded streets. Just a very red nose and a river of snot.