More Tales of the West Riding Page 12

  “You’d best walk home quickly or you’ll catch a bad cold,” urged Greenwood.

  “Take my coat,” said Hollis drily.

  Crabtree snorted again but did not refuse the coat thrown over his shoulders. Without more words he turned and walked away through the gate.

  “That was foolish of you, young man,” said Lumb.

  Hollis shrugged and walked off.

  Yes, the whole affair was foolish. Indeed, silly. And all because people lose their tempers and say more than they mean. Silly, yes. But tragic too. For Hollis died of it, you know. Yes. Typhoid. He’d swallowed some of the trough water. They put up a plaque to him on the school wall, inscribed: In Memory of Francis Hollis, first headmaster of this school and a devoted member of Moordale Rural District Council. Of course the plaque vanished with the old school building and wall when the new school—very fine at the time, quite inadequate now—was built.

  “Frank. Oh, Frank,” mourned Tom Greenwood. “Best man I knew.”

  “He was a nice lad,” mused Mr Ormerod, who unveiled the plaque. “Over-enthusiastic, you know. An extremist. Damaged his own cause. But honest.”

  “Foolish,” said Mr Lumb, shaking his head. “Pity.”

  Mr Crabtree was not present at the ceremony.

  The Moordale water supply was a great success. Margaret is an excellent nurse—appointed matron this year in some large southern hospital. She does not often come home.

  “One of Our Heroes”

  1848-1974

  One day several years ago—it was about 1956, I think—I was sitting on a March evening reading the Hudley Star, our little town’s evening newspaper, when I encountered this paragraph.

  A prominent local Esperantist, Mr Joe Dean, of 13, Pickles Street, Hollow Bridge, died, in Hudley General Hospital during the weekend. For nearly half a century he had corresponded with people in over 50 countries in different parts of the world. Among people from whom he had letters were a Tibetan priest, a Paris wine merchant and a Czech miner. Mr Dean had been a textile worker. He leaves a widow.

  I smiled, in fact I actually chuckled, to myself. I looked up Pickles (originally Pighills) Street in my local “Where Is It” directory, and found that it was even more remote than I had thought. Hollow Bridge—I don’t know when it got its name; some time in Queen Elizabeth’s prosperous days, I expect—was a small, active, commercial suburb of Hudley, down in the valley with an old packhorse bridge across the Hollow and quite a sizeable nineteenth-century bridge leading to a main road over the Pennines into Lancashire farther on. But Pickles Street was not in Hollow Bridge but on Hollow Bank, a steep hilly tract running up the side of the Pennines, with a farm and a weaver’s cottage or two here and there scattered about the rough grassy slopes, but really very far away from anywhere. The thought of dear Mr Joe Dean corresponding with people in Tibet, Paris and Czechoslovakia, toiling away at night in Esperanto by the light of a lamp, his good wife knitting at his side, both very proud of his linguistic skill, pleased me. What a race we are in the West Riding, I thought with pride. So obstinate, so individual, with these odd quirks we’re so proud of; it may be pigeons, the Messiah, politics, teetotalism or Esperanto, but whatever it is we do it with our might and defy anybody to be amused.

  Unfortunately, however—and how unfortunate it was I later discovered all too well—I did not pursue Hollow and Mr Dean further at that time. I was in the middle of another novel and held myself sternly on its track, resisting all Esperanto blandishments.

  Time went on and life changed.

  I should now explain that there was a man of Hudley, dead before I was born, who was a great benefactor of the town. I will call him Q, because that has nothing to do with his name. Everything about Q, I felt, was just as it should be. His family had lived, landowners, on a high bleak Pennine outside Hudley for some five hundred years—yes, in 1346 there are records. They stonefaced their big timber house in the reign of the first Elizabeth; but even before that they were Constables of the village, honourable, courteous, trusted men; priests occasionally founding University scholarships. A rather touching story, well documented, is told of them in the fifteenth century about a love affair: a young man of the family fell in love with a girl (poor) who proved to be his cousin and therefore within the proscribed relationships for marriage. He fought this up and down with the authorities, in Hudley, York and eventually in Rome; won a dispensation, married the girl and lived happily ever after. I have told the tale elsewhere, and I feel that all the Q’s resembled this 1434 Q; a man honourable, faithful, capable of devotion.

  Then suddenly the Q’s were landowners no longer. In the seventeenth century they suddenly sell their houses, and we find them down in a well-watered valley becoming cloth-makers. Why? One might easily devise a reason. The Q’s were Cavaliers, perhaps, in the Civil War, and had to pay such a huge Composition, as it was called, to Cromwell’s men, that landlordism was no longer possible, and they had to work. But unfortunately for the historian, the date is not right. The Q’s sold in 1666, that is after Charles II was restored to the throne, and Cavaliers were comfortable again. Of course one could invent a gambling father. I tried this and began a story on these lines, but I could not convincingly create a Q who was a gambler, and tore it up.

  Why did I trouble myself, at various different dates in my life, with the Q family? Because, quite simply, I have for many years regarded myself as a novelist of the West Riding, and I felt I could not honestly do so unless I included the nineteenth century Q. The Q’s prospered tremendously as clothiers, yes, quite tremendously; each generation moved lower down the valley, built a larger mill, acquired a vaster turnover, so that when our Q’s father died he left his sons a million pounds, honestly acquired through making fine cloth. But our Q, you see, when he died, having bought out his brother from the family mill, owned only just over £1,000 in the world.

  What had he done with all that money?

  Well, he built a couple of churches, very fine in the taste of the day; he built rows of solid houses for his workers; he gave a park; he founded a canteen where his workers could buy a cup of tea for a penny-ha’penny; he started a Sunday school, he started education classes for the workers’ children; he started a free library; one Sunday stranded in London with nothing to do, he attended St Paul’s, heard the Rev. Charles Kingsley speak on the need for thrift in the working class, was so impressed that on his return he called together some rich friends and started a special kind of bank, where you could deposit one penny if that was all you had to spare. (This is still a very solid and prosperous affair.) He became a Member of Parliament for a neighbouring town.

  You already see, I am sure, why Q absolutely must go into a novel of mine. I agree warmly. But you see, Q lived the white flower of a blameless life. Nothing is more difficult than to put on paper the story of a good man—because there is no story in it. A love affair, perhaps? Well, no; Q married a most sweet, gentle, ladylike girl from a good East Riding family. Her charming, mild face looks down from the wall of the solid well-planned house Q built for himself on a hillside above Hudley. (In the West Riding we are apt to think of East Riding families as rather soft, genteel people.)

  Q was a man of taste and good manners. He rode well and kept good carriage horses, their harness and the trimmings of his vehicles done in modest silver. He sat on committees, subscribed to charities.

  His life has been written most scrupulously and conscientiously by various members of the Hudley Historical Society. (We have a great many amateur societies in Hudley, you know; well organised and well run, with president, secretary, treasurer, committee, minutes and resolutions and amendments and everything handsome about them.) Yes; Q is well documented. But where is his story? And why should it continually trouble me?

  Let me just add one detail.

  The people of Yorkshire, though warm-hearted, stubborn and loyal to a degree, are not apt to be gracious or forthcoming in gratitude. (During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, in 1588, Jame
s Ryder in his Commendations of Yorkshire wrote of the Hudley people thus:

  “after the rude and arrogant manner of their wild country, they surpass the rest in wealth and wisdom.”

  In the twentieth century—I write in 1974—this is still a good portrait of them, so I don’t suppose they were very different in the 1880’s.) When, therefore, I record that these people gave enough of their own pennies to build a massive statue to Q—the plinth alone stands ten feet high—and that 15,000 persons attended his funeral, you will understand that Hudley really appreciated him, and that he must be celebrated in a story.

  From time to time, therefore, I made very sincere efforts to delve more deeply into Q and really probe him to his depths. Whenever I paused between novels, my thoughts turned to Q. And one day it happened.

  I looked up everything about the Q family in the local reference department of our Municipal Library. I had read it all before, of course; but to re-read was my duty, and should be done. I noticed three rather interesting points about Q’s life.

  The first was that in 1847 Q and his brother withdrew from Hudley for a couple of years. They went to live in a less industrialised part of Yorkshire, establishing themselves in a pleasant country estate. Of course it was in a way all quite natural. There had been a big row throughout the nation about a Parliament Bill dealing with religious education in schools. Some people thought the Church of England unduly favoured above those of Nonconformist belief in the Bill, others thought the reverse. The row was very real and bitter. Indeed Q’s father, presiding at a public meeting where the matter was being discussed with the usual West Riding bluntness, was so upset by the vehemence of the quarrel that he quietly fell forward, dead. This was enough to anger the Q brothers against the West Riding, of course. Or was it? At any rate, they shook the dust of Hudley off their feet for a few years and settled down elsewhere. What were they doing in those years? Anything? Probably nothing. They were far too decent and well-behaved to be suspected of any disreputable act. Still, I noticed the absence. It was said they came back full of plans for the good of their work people. Interesting.

  Then I observed that when Q returned to active West Riding life and became a Member of Parliament for the neighbouring town of Annotsfield, in 1857 Palmerston invited him to second the Commons’ Address of thanks on the Queen’s speech at the opening of the session. Of course this is a familiar gambit for encouraging new young members, giving them a start, getting them up on their feet, bringing them to the notice of the House under favourable circumstances, and so on. Very pleasant and agreeable for the young member concerned. But one wonders a little—or at least I did—why Palmerston showed this favour to Q.

  To understand at all why the great Lord Palmerston was hated by some Englishmen, adored by others, consecutively and even sometimes simultaneously throughout his political life, it is necessary to plunge a little into what was happening in Europe at this time. It was the period when Northern Italy was trying to throw off the Austrian yoke, and Hungary, alleged by Imperial Austria to be a vital part of the Austrian empire, was alleged by many Hungarians, led by Kossuth, to be by ancient treaty an independent republic, merely allied to Austria.

  It seemed clear to some people that Palmerston approved of these attempts at freedom. Indeed he was all too often in trouble on this score with Queen Victoria, who, being connected by kinship with several courts and not liking rebellious subjects much in any case, took a different view. One has only to read the Queen’s letters—and of course I read them—to see how sharply and often she rapped him over the knuckles for sending off despatches unfavourable to Austrian and other Powers without submitting them first to his Sovereign, how bitterly she complained of his various phrases too favourable to insurgents. When scolded, this able but difficult man remarked cheerfully that he regarded the sight of any people struggling for liberation from a foreign yoke as a happy event in which all well-wishers to mankind should rejoice. Queen Victoria replied crossly that she was not to be regarded as someone who was not a well-wisher to mankind, but really Viscount Palmerston’s behaviour was quite out of line. (I am sure Albert found it shocking; speaking procedurally, he was right.)

  And yet England did nothing to help the insurgents openly.

  In point of fact Palmerston was in a very difficult situation. Austria’s European duty, as he saw it, was to provide a barricade against the encroachments of Czarist Russia. He therefore did not wish to weaken Austria too severely. Neither did he want France to take the opportunity of revolts in Italy to pop down and install herself there. It was awkward. But he managed it on the whole well—these complex situations suited him; he had all the courage necessary and was always ready to plough through them, if the worst came to the worst, with a gunboat. That he sympathised, as a true-born Englishman, with struggling Italians and Hungarians, while deprecating their weakening of a central power, is perhaps a fairly accurate statement of the case. What Q had to do with all this however seems—

  But what, what, what is this? What about that third interesting point? Did I not read also that in later life, twenty years or so after Kossuth’s rebellion, Mrs Q opened a bazaar in Hudley on behalf of her husband, who was absent, travelling in south-eastern Europe? What was Q doing down in the Balkans, travelling alone? Why? Nostalgia? Could it possibly be that Q approved of Kossuth? Surely not. Never let it be said. It was said, and with a good deal of emphasis, that Kossuth had sent a letter to Palmerston by an Englishman. Could it be? Well, hardly. But of course that would explain why this tall, fair, quiet, rich manufacturer with a genteel wife and tasteful silver harness was agreeable to the dominating, autocratic Palmerston.

  At this point there vaguely floated across my mind a remembrance of Mr Joe Dean, who had corresponded, it was said, with a Czech miner. What was a Czech miner in those days, for heaven’s sake? I must see Mr Dean. But he was dead. When did he die? I hadn’t the faintest idea. Then find out, I exhorted myself. Then since his address then might give some clue as to his recent whereabouts I went to the local Registrar’s and secured Mr Dean’s death certificate, took the death certificate to the Hudley Star and looked him up in the paper. Yes, there he was, address 13 Pickles Street, Hollow Bridge, 1956.

  “There’s another cutting about that chap somewhere,” said a young man who sat with an immense pile of cuttings before him. “I’m sorting these, you know, ready to throw some out. Rather interesting, I remember thinking. Here you are.”

  “Thanks.”

  It is not in the West Riding nature to exclaim “Eureka!” shrilly. So I merely gave a subdued exclamation and sank into a chair. I was flabbergasted all the same. For the cutting read, in the newspaper dated April 7, 1952

  Was it coincidence? asks Mr J. Dean, of Pickles Street, Hollow Bank, in a reference to the fact that last week’s local page, with its references to Q, appeared in an issue which also recorded the death of Mr K. John Czernowski? Mr Dean goes on to explain the link as follows: “How many Hudley people realise the greatness and fame of Q in the history of Hungarian independence? It was in 1906 that a Hungarian boy-Esperantist (now Professor Bakonyi of Budapest University) asked me to correspond with him from Hudley as he wished to have information about the General Q who played such a major part in the Louis Kossuth liberation of Hungary. I was glad to help him with information, and pictures, but the greatest point of success was when I wrote and told him that my Esperanto pal, John Czernowski, was the son of the personal aide to Q.

  When Q returned to Hudley, he brought his Hungarian protégés with him. John, the Esperantist, the son of one, became a part-time fire-brigade man. Through the medium of Esperanto, Mr Czernowski was able to play, and beat, famous European chess champions.

  Needless to say, I wrote that day joyously to Joe Dean’s widow. She was still alive, asked someone to telephone me, and a few days later received me at the house she still inhabited in Pickles Street.

  Pickles Street is very agreeable when you reach it. A neat terrace tucked along the s
ide of an otherwise very sparsely occupied hill, gazing without interruption across the valley where the little river and the canal run side by side. But the access to the terrace is uncomfortable, at any rate in a car. First one ascends a Pennine hill, then turns sharply down the slope. The lane is steep, narrow, occasionally grassy and always stony, with unexpected corners. The house was small but neat and well cared for, approached by three large flat stone steps and a little iron gate. Mrs Dean was very much a Yorkshirewoman, large, bosomy, active, very honest, very forthright, a little impatient with me and my errand, which she thought not much of, but quite ready as always to accept her duty towards her husband’s fame—clearly she thought Esperanto “silly work”, but Joe had always been like that and for his sake she put up with it. She brought out all the papers which remained to her.

  But here I came upon a bitter disappointment. Absolutely nothing remained except an English-Esperanto dictionary. I pressed Mrs Dean about the boy Bakonyi, later a professor. Yes, she thought she had heard of him. Yes, come to think of it, she had heard of him. Joe had attended a conference when Bakonyi was there—she thought. Had she heard of Q? Well, yes; everyone had heard of Q. About his fighting with Kossuth in Hungary? Well, no. About his bringing back two Hungarians with him to Hudley? Well, Mrs Dean thought they were Poles. There were two, she believed; but did Q bring them? They appeared in Hudley about that time, she thought. The son of one of them, Czernowski, was Joe’s great friend; an Esperantist, you see. Son or grandson, she was not quite sure. That two Poles or Hungarians suddenly appeared in Hudley about the time of Kossuth’s defeat was certain. Their names, so different from our own Yorkshire, and therefore the constant play of friendly jokes, actually figured above shop windows. I had myself, as a child, seen these names in Hudley there. This in itself meant capital; to start a shop needed money. Why should these two strangers come to a smallish West Riding textile town unless somebody brought them, encouraged them, lent them money? Well, if it was anybody it wasn’t Joe, of course, said Mrs Dean firmly. Joe was foreman mechanic down at—she pointed to a large textile mill in the valley; it was convenient-like for him, you see, he just popped down a path through the fields and came out at their door. But as to having money to set somebody up in a shop, of course that was out of the question. Her son knew no more, she was sure, and anyway he was in Canada; her daughter Harriet, though it was true she was always her father’s favourite and might have heard more about Bakonyi, had unfortunately died in childbirth in London, some years ago. Her husband had remarried, said Mrs Dean grimly, sensible, of course, with a girl child to bring up, but all the same one never liked it. Would I have a cup of tea? I accepted, and as we drank together pressed again about Bakonyi.