A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District/Parts of a Letter from Wakefield
PARTS OF
A LETTER FROM WAKEFIELD.
By E. L.
(Reprinted by permission from 'Fors Glavigera' of July and September, 1875.[1])
What long years have passed since my eyes first saw the calm sweet scene beyond Wakefield Bridge! I was but a small creature then, and had never been far from my mother's door. It was a memorable day for me when I toddled a full mile from the shady up-town street where we lived, past strange windows, over unfamiliar flags, to see the big weir and the chapel on the Bridge. Standing on tiptoe, I could just see over the parapet and look down-stream.
That was my first peep into fair, green England, and destined never to be forgotten. The grey old chapel, the shining water below, the far-winding green banks spangled with butted cups, the grove-clad hills of Heath and Kirkthorpe,—all seemed to pass into my heart for ever.
There was no railway then, only the Doncaster coach careering over the Bridge with a brave sound of horn; fields and farmsteads stood where the Kirkgate Station is; where the twenty black throats of the foundry belch out flame and soot, there were only strawberry-grounds and blossoming pear-orchards, among which the throstles and blackbirds were shouting for gladness.
The chapel lay neglected in a nest of wild willows, and a peaceful cobbler dwelt in it. As I looked at it, Duke Richard and King Edward became living realities to me; the dry bones of Pinnock's Catechism started suddenly into life. That was the real old chapel of the fifteenth century. Some years after, they ousted the cobbler, pulled down the old stones, restored it, and opened it for ritualistic worship; but the cheap stonework has crumbled away again, and it now looks as ancient as in days of yore. Only, as I remember it, it had a white hoariness: the foundry smoke has made it black at the present day.
Some of my companions had been farther out in the world than myself. They pointed out the dusky shape of Heath Hall, seen through the thinly-clad elm-trees, and told me how old Lady ———'s ghost still walked there on stormy nights. Beyond was Kirkthorpe, where the forlorn shapes of the exiled Spanish nuns had been seen flitting about their graves in the churchyard.
There on the right was the tree-crowned mound of Sandal Castle, which Cromwell had blown down; the dry ditch was full of primroses, they told me; those woods bounded Crofton, famous for its cowslip fields; and in Heath Wood you would see the ground white with snowdrops in March.
I do not think that it is the partiality of a native that makes me think you could hardly find a fairer inland pastoral scene, than the one I beheld from Wakefield Bridge the first time I stood there. On the chapel side there was the soft green English landscape, with woods and spires and halls, and the brown sails of boats silently moving among the flowery banks; on the town side there were picturesque traffic and life; the thundering weir, the wide still water beyond, the big dark-red granaries, with balconies and archways to the water, and the lofty white mills grinding out their cheering music.
But there were no worse shapes than honest, dusty millers men, and browned boatmen, decent people; no open vileness and foul language were rampant in our quiet clean town in those days. I can remember how clean the pavement used to look there, and at Doncaster. Both towns are incredibly dirty now. I cannot bear to look at the filthy beslavered causeway, in places where I remember to have never seen anything worse than the big round thunder-drops I used to watch with gleeful interest.
In those days we were proud of the cleanness and sweet air and gentility of Wakefield. Leeds was then considered rather vulgar, as a factory town, and Bradford was obscure, rough, and wild; but Wakefield prided itself in refined living on moderate means, and cultured people of small income were fond of settling there.
Market day used to be a great event for us all.
I wish that you could have seen the handsome farmers' wives ranged round the church walls, with their baskets of apricots and cream cheese, before reform came, and they swept away my dear old school-house of the seventeenth century, to make an ugly barren desert of a market ground. You might have seen, too, the pretty cottagers' daughters, with their bunches of lavender and baskets of fruit, or heaps of cowslips and primroses for the wine and vinegar Wakefield housewives prided themselves upon. On certain days they stood to be hired as maid-servants, and were prized in the country round as neat, clean, modest-spoken girls.
I do not know where they are gone to now,—I suppose to the factories. Anyhow, Wakefield ladies cry out that they must get servants from London, and Stafford, and Wales. So class gets parted from class.
Things were different then. Well-to-do ladies prided themselves on doing their marketing in person, and kindly feeling and acquaintanceship sprang up between town and country folk. My Wakefield friends nowadays laugh at the idea of going to market. They order everything through the cook, and hardly know their own tradespeople by sight. We used to get delicious butter at tenpence a pound, and such curds and cream cheese as I never taste now. 'Cook' brings in indifferent butter mostly, at near two shillings.
As for the farmers' wives, they would not like to be seen with a butter-basket. They mostly send the dairy produce off by rail to people whom they never see, and thus class is more sundered from class every day, even by the very facilities that railways afford. I can remember that the townspeople had simple merrymakings and neighbourly ways that this generation would scorn. Many a pleasant walk we had to the farms and halls that belted the old town; and boating parties on the Calder, and tea-drinkings and dances—mostly extempore,—in the easy fashion of Vicar Primrose's days.
But pleasure must be sought farther off now. Our young folks go to London or Paris for their recreation. People seem to have no leisure for being neighbourly, or to get settled in their houses. They seem to be all expecting to make a heap of money, and to be much grander presently, and finally to live in halls and villas, and look down on their early friends.
But I am sorry for the young people. They run through everything so soon, and have nothing left to hope for or dream of in a few years. They are better dressed than we were, and have more accomplishments; but I cannot help thinking that we young folks were happier in the old times, though shillings were not half so plentiful, and we had only two frocks a year.
Tradespeople were different, too, in old Wakefield.
They expected to live with us all their lives; they had high notions of honour as tradesmen, and they and their customers respected each other.
They prided themselves on the 'wear' of their goods. If they had passed upon the housewives a piece of sized calico or shoddy flannel, they would have heard of it for years after.
How the richer ladies go to Leeds or Manchester to make purchases; the town tradesmen are soured and jealous. They put up big plate-glass fronts, and send out flaming bills; but one does not know where to get a piece of sound calico or stout linen, well spun and well woven.
Give me back our dingy old shops where everything was genuine, instead of these glass palaces where we often get pins without points, needles without eyes, and sewing thread sixty yards to the hundred—which I actually heard a young Quaker defend the other day as an allowable trade practice.
Yet people tell me that those were very benighted Tory days I am regretting. Wakefield was held to be a Tory place, given up hand and foot to the magnates who owned the great estate around. I know how, when a small thing in frilled slops, but with my bosom full of patriotic pride in our town, I used to feel bitterly depressed at hearing a rising Radical Leeds clothier, who came to see us sometimes, denounce Wakefield as a 'one-eyed hoil,' his emphatic way of indicating our want of sweep of vision. I remember he generally capped his arguments by demanding, in sonorous tones, if any men worthy of the name of Britons would put up with that 'obsolete monopoly' of the (soke)[2] mills.
To tell the truth, I am afraid that we felt a good deal of mean-spirited admiration for the neighbouring squires and lords on the occasions when they showed themselves and their handsome carriages in our streets: but at least the Wentworths and Pilkingtons and Squire Waterton were gentlemen and scholars; our new magnates have nothing to boast of but their money. It seems to me better that people should boast of the old oaks of Walton, and the old pictures of ——— Priory, than tell how many thousands an iron lord made by the last rise in iron: and that is what they talk of now. And if the iron kings have supplanted the landlords, they are not any more free. The old farmers might vote blindly out of blind respect for the old landlords; but is it not better than the newly-enfranchised puddlers and strikers selling votes openly for the price of a gallon of whisky? We have lost a good deal, although we are long rid of the soke monopoly, which used to be a standing reproach to us. I think that the town bought off the soke just after the Corn Law agitation, when the great railways began to enclose the wide meadows about the town with their ugly ramparts and arches, where the trains keep up a continual scream.
But the wool and corn magnates of the place held to their old traditions long after that. I had gone abroad, but my heart was in the old place, and I caught up eagerly all concerning it. Sometimes I heard doleful accounts of its decadence—how the big houses were empty altogether, how the inns were closed, the coaches stopped, the river traffic diminished, and the great corn warehouses by the bridge falling to ruin. There was no trace left of the gaieties that once gave the town the name of 'Merrie Wakefield.' All the smart young men were leaving it to push their way in Leeds or Manchester, and the girls left behind were growing up into a population of old maids.
So the doleful story went on for many a year. But insensibly the key changed. Mills were springing up and shops; and the houses had gone up in rent. The sleepy streets were thronged with workers; in short the town seemed new-born altogether.
And now, on the once green Calder bank, where I used to see garlands of brown pears ripening in the sweet sunshine, there is a desert of dross and ashes, and twenty black throats vomiting fire and fumes into the summer sky; and under the big sheds you see hundreds of the liberated Britons of these improved days, toiling, half-naked, in sweltering heat and din, from morning to evening. This, however, is 'the activity and spread of the iron trade,' which our local paper tells us 'are the most satisfactory pledge of the future progress and prosperity of our town.'
I wish that I could believe it; but it vexes me beyond comfort to see the first landscape I knew and loved blighted by the smoke of the forges, and to find one sweet association after another swept away.
Even Sunday brings no respite to the eye. The forges are fired up shortly after noonday, and many of the long chimneys follow suit. And in the town the noise is so constant, you can scarcely hear the church chimes unless you are close to the tower.
Did you ever hear Wakefield chimes? We were very proud of them in the old time. They had a round of pleasant sleepy tunes, that never failed us through summer suns and winter frost; and came to be bound up indelibly with the early memories of us children. How I loved to hear them as I bounded, full of morning gladness, across the green Vicar's Croft to school; or at night when lying an unwilling prisoner in bed, before the warm summer evening was ended. To my childish fancy there was a strange wizardry bound up with that dark church steeple, frosted and crumbling with age, which would break out overhead into mysterious music when I was far afield, but expecting it.
Years after, when poor and lonely in a foreign city, I came, one bitter winter's day, upon an obscure cloister church standing by a frozen river. It was a city without bells, and I had often longed for the familiar sound. I was dreadfully homesick that day, and stood upon the bridge, hapless, and listless; looking at the strange spire, the strange houses and frozen-up boats, in a kind of dream. Suddenly the cloister tower struck the hour,—four o'clock of a dark December day, and presently it broke into a chime.
It was a very simple ditty; but what a passion of longing it wakened for England and the old chimes of that little English town! I felt as if my heart could bear no more. I must go home; I must see the old places again, cost what it might. But morning brought fresh counsels, and many a year passed before I revisited the old place.
At last I was there again, after many disappointments, and laid my head to rest once more beneath the shadow of the old steeple.
I woke with an expectant heart. It was a bright May day, such as I remembered twenty years before. The big church bell tolled nine: then came a pause, and my thirsty ears were strained to catch the first sounds of the dear old chimes. 'Ding' went a treble bell high in the air, the first note of 'Tara's Halls,' and then!—a hideous sound I cannot describe, a prolonged malignant yell, broke from the sky and seemed to fill the earth. I stopped my ears and ran indoors, but the sound followed to the innermost chambers. It gathered strength and malignancy every moment, and seemed to blast all within its reach. It lasted nearly two minutes, and ended with a kind of spasm and howl that made every nerve shudder. I do not exaggerate. I cannot adequately describe the hideous sound. When I had recovered my wits, I asked the meaning of this horrible noise. My informant, a rising young townsman of the new stamp, told me that it was the new steam-whistle at the foundry, commonly called the 'American Devil;' that it was the most powerful in the West Riding, and could be heard five miles off.
It was only at half-power then, calling the workmen from breakfast; but at six in the morning I could hear it in double force. I asked if it was possible that people would quietly put up with such a hideous disturbance. He owned that the old inhabitants did not like it; but then, he said, they were a sleepy set, and wanted stirring up.
Indeed, I actually found that the town was infected by four other similar whistles, profaning dawn and eve with their heaven-defying screech.
The nuisance has been abolished since, I hear. They say it actually killed one old lady by starting her up just at the only moment when it was possible for her weary nerves to get sleep. She happened to have a relation in the town council: a stir was made about it, and the whistles were suppressed. But the peaceful, half town, half rural life of Wakefield is gone for ever, I fear.
Silk-mills and dye-works are encroaching on the cornfields and pastures; rows of jerry-built cottages are creeping up Pinder's Fields, where I used to pull orchises; greasy mill-girls elbow ladies in the Westgate, and laugh and jeer at passing young men in a way that would have horrified the old inhabitants. And everywhere there is an indescribable smokiness and dirtiness more demoralizing than any tongue can tell, or mind conceive.
Well, it is the 'march of the times.' It will go on, I suppose, as in other quiet pleasant English towns, until all the sweet Calder valley is swallowed up in the smoke of Tophet. They will cut the snowdrop wood down, and cover Heath Common with cheap villas, and make the old hall into an 'institution.' You know how it will be. A river black with filth, and stagnant with foulness, a wilderness of toiling suburbs such as you saw at Bradford; and where the cowslips and the corn grew, the earth will be thick with 'institutions.' There will be a Blind Institution, and an Eye and Ear Institution, an Orthopædic Institution, and a Magdalen Institution, and Mechanics' Institutions; and we shall hear a great deal of the liberality and beneficence of the cotton and iron kings of the place. But will all this compensate one little child for robbing it of its God-given birthright of earth and sky?
I cannot believe it.
Poor little martyrs! There will be no 'swallow twittering from the straw-built shed' for them,—only the American Devil calling father to his hot, hard day's labour. What can they make of it all? What I saw on the Medlock yesterday—such a hideous sight!—yet my husband remembers catching fish there. The gases would kill a fish like a lightning-stroke, now.
And the poor children! It makes me so sad, having some of my own, to think of those who will be born there, with hearts as hungry for nature and truth as mine was; who will never see God's heaven, save through grimy panes and smoke; who will have no sweet cowslip-fields to walk in,—only the defiled pavement; who will grow hard and sour before childhood is over, with the riddle of their joyless lives.