Philobiblon

p. 26 Yorkshire as a political concept became blurred during the 19^th century, first by the Reform Act of 1832, which replaced the county constituency centred on York with parliamentary divisions for each Riding, and then from 1888 by the Local Government Act, which turned each of the three Ridings into an administrative county in its own right. This concluded a process beguan at the Restoration whereby each riding acquired its own personality, reflected in separate quarter sessions, militias, lieutenancies, and occasions like race meetings, performances, hunts and social seasons that enabled normally dispersed gentry to come together. With this went the gradual displacement of York by the emergence of county towns for each of the Ridings: Wakefield, Northallerton and Beverley. .. The Yorkshire County Cricket Club was formed in Sheffield in 1863, but for a time it was only one of several clubs that claimed to represent Yorkshire, and at least one of its rivals was likewise based in the West Riding.”

p. 204 “At the start of English Journey (1934) Priestley compared sparkling white art deco factories with the image of a ‘grim blackened rectable with a chimney at one corner’ that had been fixed by his Bradford boyhood. The concept of such a ‘proper factory’ went back to the late 18^th century, when a start was made to bring tasks hitherto performed separately under one roof. Attempts to mechanise stages of textile production had been tried for decades, but it was pioneers like Benjamin Gott (1762-1840) who brough them together. In 1792 Gott introduced a system on a site in Leeds (at Bean Ing Mill) in which the entire sequence of scribbling, carding, fulling, spinning, dyeing and finishing was integrated. In result, 40 years later, virtually everything that mattered to people was changed: attitudes to time, where you lived, family life, ecology, public health, social relations… Even pathogens changed. By 1850 Bradford was importing wool from Iran, Russia and South Africa, and with it, sometimes, came spores of anthrax. The ubiquity of the factor format, and generalising labels like ‘heavy woolen’ give an impression that the same things were going on all over the West Riding. In fact, as Asa Briggs emphasised, industrialisation did not homogenise 19^th-century towns so much as tell between them. Different places developed individual cultures and traditions.. Communities or urban weeds evolved variously from town to town, according to their landuse histories, or the character of their parks and allotments. An ecologist led blindfold onto waste ground in Sheffield could tell it apart from Bradford.

p. 206 Batley, Morley, Dewsbury and Ossett specialised in rag collection and sorting for the production of shoddy and mungo. Soddy is recycled wool, recovered from textile waste by a grinding process that was introduced in 1813 and respun as yarn. Machinery devised in 1835 to mince hard rags, old clothes and tailors’ offcuts yielded fibrous material for another fabric called mungo. Mungo and shoddy could be blended with new wool, while a cotton warp and a mungo/shoddy weft could be combined as union cloth. Such a hybrid fabric was cheaper and coarser than textile woven from pure fibres, and thus ideal for mass-produced garments like uniforms and greatcoats. For many decades, a large proportion of the world’s police, armed forces and marching bands was clothed from Yorkshire.”

p. 222 “During the Victorian period the weaving towns did much for the development of working-class holidays that lasted for several consecutive days. In places where employment was centralised, if a labour force took a customary holiday by voting with its feet it could do so without reprisal. Such solicarity assisted collective saving through ‘going off clubs’, and the application of pressure for the incremental extension of days granted. By the 1890s the result was a system whereby entire towns boarded trains together to go on holiday in staggered rotation. Lancashire cotton workers ‘had longer consecutive recognized summer holidays at an earlier date than anywhere else in industrial England’… it also came to suit the employers, who used the holiday period to service machinery and inspect their chimneys. .. in Sheffield, ‘well-paid aristocracies’ in the steel, cutlery and light-metalworking industries went to holiday in Scarborough and Cleethorpes and Bridlington by the 1900s had come to be known as ‘Sheffield-by-the-Sea’.”