24th September 2025
Brian Groom: Made in Manchester - the story that shaped the world.
The new season of talks to Hebden Bridge Local History Society began with a broad sweep view of local history, as writer and journalist Brian Groom outlined the astonishing growth and achievements of Manchester and its influence across its satellite towns, including Hebden Bridge.
The Romans, of course, left their mark, (though the Castlefield site was largely buried by the rush of 19th century development) and by the time of the Norman conquest Manchester was still a small village in a sparsely populated area. At the time of the Civil War Manchester was a Parliamentarian stronghold, playing a significant role in withstanding a Royalist siege from its Salford neighbours. But a general war-weariness meant that with the Restoration of the Monarchy, Manchester put its energy into its rapidly growing textile industry. Soon the landscape was changed, with the Bridgewater Canal and Arkwright’s mill marking the rise of industrialisation.
Rapid change led to prosperity for some, but also considerable unrest. This was the time when Manchester’s radicalism took hold. The most famous event was the brutal suppression of protest at ‘Peterloo’, but there was also a groundswell of radical thinking growing from Chartism, Trades Unionism, Communism and later the demand for Women’s Suffrage.
The power and influence of manufacturers was also strong: Manchester after all was the home of Free Trade, and grew prosperous on the basis of trade in cotton produced by slaves in America. So, there was a conflict of ideals: Manchester people could be strong in campaigning for abolition of slavery but others were very much the beneficiaries of the system, amassing great fortunes.
The difficult days of the mid-19th century saw horrific poverty alongside growing wealth, documented by writers such as Mary Gaskell and political thinkers such as Friedrich Engels. But change was unstoppable, with canals and railways transforming the landscape, especially visible in the narrow Calder Valley. In Manchester the industrial projects were even bigger, with the Manchester Ship Canal successfully moving essential port access away from Liverpool and close to the manufacturing heart of its Lancashire rival. Alongside, the Industrial Estate of Trafford Park saw engineering entrepreneurs becoming massive employers and boosting Manchester’s place in the world as the source of invention.
Manchester’s fortunes may have suffered a post-war decline, but there has undoubtedly been a resurgence of growth in the 21st century. It is making a physical mark on the skyline with the proliferation of shiny office blocks. Manchester remains a powerhouse of business and culture, and a strong influence on its surrounding towns. Though that gulf between the wealth of the city (and its closest towns) with the deprivation of old industrial centres such as Oldham.
Brian’s books Northerners and Made in Manchester, available in bookshops and on-line, tell the wider story, expanding on the city’s musical and cultural heritage, its world-wide influence and other social trends.
8th October 2025
David Smalley: The stained glass of St James's Church, Hebden Bridge.
Scotland Yard, the Titanic, Rochdale Town Hall… and St James’s Church, Hebden Bridge: how did a church in a small town like Hebden Bridge come to be listed in such illustrious company? As Dave Smalley explained, the answer lies in its wonderful array of stained glass windows and their illustrious designers and craftsmen. In the late 19th century the clergy and congregation of St James’s embarked at great cost on a programme of restoration including windows by the firm of Heaton, Butler and Bayne, one of the best in the business.
St James’s was just one of the hundreds of churches being built or restored in the 1870s. This boom of church building arose from a fear that the Anglican Church was being side-lined as the Non-conformist chapels became more dominant in people’s lives and in the landscape. Population moves from country to town, driven by industrialisation, had left many places without a nearby church, and attendances were falling.
An added complication was the deep and often bitter theological differences in the Church, which led different clergy to want very different things in the design of the church building. There was a middle ‘broad’ church, but at the extremes was mutual suspicion. For the ‘low’, church the essence was the sermon, the scriptures and therefore the pulpit. ‘High’ churchmen valued the rituals and symbols of the mysteries of their faith, with a focus on the altar, set in a theatrically dramatic space, with rich colourful hangings and illuminated by decorative stained glass windows. At St James’s, the minister George Sowden, a high church man, was a driving force to restore the church, with a new chancel and changes which included the very best stained glass windows. Somehow he guided his congregation to support the costly project, selecting Richard Norman Shaw, a prominent architect, to take charge. It was he who brought in the firm of Heaton, Butler and Bayne.
The three men each brought a different skill to the making of stained glass, emulating the sparkle of Medieval glass. There were some constraints – the subjects were biblical, and the shape of the long windows precluded landscapes. Artist Robert Turnill Bayne produced the paintings. James Butler did the skilful and crucial job of designing the lead framework that held the glass and contributed so much to its final success. John Aldam Heaton was the colour man – selecting the colours for the design which would be fired into the glass. The effects were brilliant, with fluid movements and glowing colours. Inconsistences in the surface produced swirls and sparkles of light.
Such highly skilled craftsmen and the complexity of the technique did not come cheap, but guided by Sowden, over a period of years, the congregation raised enough to pay for a complete scheme. The design team themselves contributed, with Norman Shaw making a gift of money, and Heaton’s wife herself financing a window. It was finally decided to raise the money by encouraging people to pay for Memorial windows, marking the life and loss of their relatives. What we have is beautiful design acting as a social record.
22nd October 2025
Paul Degnan: A CROWS eye view of walkin' round Pecket.
Twenty five years after the passing of the Countryside Rights of Way Act granted a (limited) legal right to roam, CROWS volunteer Paul Degnan explained to Hebden Bridge Local History Society how the volunteers work to maintain the network of footpaths so people can access this special moorland landscape. In the Upper Calder Valley and Ryburn Valley there are about 1000km of path and bridle ways. The volunteers of the Community Rights Of Way Service clear the paths, check drainage, renew stiles and gates, install steps on slippery slopes and improve signage. CROWS is a registered charity, and most of its funding comes from individual donations and legacies, but there is also generous support from businesses and national organisations as well as from Town and Parish Councils. The project to write guided walk leaflets, centred on different villages, was a joint venture with Friends of the Calderdale Countryside. Post-Covid enthusiasm to meet and work as a community gave it impetus and local residents were keen to be involved.
There are three walks centred on Pecket Well, following packhorse routes and causey ways. From 18th century times people practised a dual economy, combining agriculture with weaving. This required routes across the moors to bring the yarn and carry finished pieces of cloth, as well as lime to make the acid soil more productive. Names like weavers’ and limers’ gate still record these routes. The volunteers have uncovered the old stone causey ways which made the trek a little easier. These names and stories like that of a woman from Heptonstall known as the ‘human packhorse’ who tramped to Denholm over hills often thick with snow, carrying the woven cloth, add a special sense of history to the walks.
There are reminders of more recent history too. Smeekin Pike is another sign of a close community which memorialised the local men who died in the First and Second World Wars. Pecket Well Mill with its red striped chimney was a cotton and fustian weaving shed and a major employer in the village right into the 20th century. Walks on the Calderdale Way and on Midgley Moor have vistas across the valley and the heather moorlands. Here the volunteers have to combat the mud, sometimes providing board walks to keep walkers keep on track. On Midgley Moor there are ventilation shafts, reminders of the engineering needed to get water along stone culverts from the reservoirs to the towns. The shafts cause suction which drives the water along its route. Keelham Gutter is an open stone gully from the spring to a reservoir providing essential water to Old Town Mill. Also on the moor are reminders of ancient inhabitants, making art on the stones with their cup and ring marks.
Stones guide today’s walkers, with boundary markers and new stone paths across the water-logged moorland, maintained by the CROWS. Given the wetness of the Pennines, if you fancy volunteering, ask yourself ‘Do you like playing in mud?’ It's obvious that Paul does!
12th November 2025
Paul Knights: Echoes from the Meadows- a history of High Hirst Farm
Idyllic scenes of hay-making in the woodland meadow near where High Hirst Farm used to stand seem to capture old times. Paul Knights, speaking to Hebden Bridge Local History Society, described how the grand 16th century building once dominated the skyline, looking over Hebden Bridge from the hilltop now occupied by the Dodnaze Estate, high above Birchcliffe. The meadow is now home for a community project and once a year local people gather in the harvest, using traditional methods – scything and raking the cut grass, forming small haycocks to speed up the drying and carrying the hay to an improvised baler.
They hold a traditional harvest picnic, celebrating the end of a cycle. Once the harvest is gathered, local people with livestock to feed collect the bales and sheep belonging to a local farmer are brought to graze the aftermath. Volunteers ensure that the sheep are cared for during their short stay, and the slow rhythm of the year continues. The community undertake surveys of the bio-diversity, studying fungi, moths and insects. They coppice hazel and grow fruit in the community orchard. The result is an area richer in species and helping with flood mitigation.
The echoes of the past are unmistakable and Paul has been drawn to discover as much as he can about the history of High Hirst Farm. The house, demolished in 1960, is thought to date back to the 14th century, when it would have been a timber framed building, but like other grand houses in Calderdale, it was either re-built or encased in stone in the early 17th century. There is evidence from wills and other documents that an Abraham Nayler was the owner of the farm at the time of its rebuilding, dated to 1629 on a surviving plaster datestone.
But by the mid-19th century the house suffered the fate of many grand houses and was divided into five cottages. Censuses confirm that farming continued on the site through the centuries, with one of the cottages occupied by a farmer, while the others housed weavers and tradesmen. No longer an isolated farm, High Hirst grew in the 19th century into a small hamlet of working people.
Auction notices provide an insight into the kind of farming they practised, advertising herds of dairy cattle, a thriving milk round and poultry, alongside traditional agricultural tools. In the farming survey of 1943 the land was largely given to pasture and meadow with a small field growing oats. There was no mechanisation, and a working mare rather than a tractor.
The last person to farm the land was Thomas Greenbank, and in 1946 the farm was bought by Hebden Royd council, the land ear-marked for housing development. There is little sign of the house that once stood there, but celebrations of the harvest echo long gone gatherings at Whit, the cricket clubs and the flower shows. Remarkably, in the audience was a stronger link - someone born on the farm in 1936, one of the Greenbank family, with his own clear memories of the place.
26th November 2025
Stephen Dean: Archaeology, a story of two halves from the Staffordshire Hoard to Hebden Bridge
First, an admission: this wasn’t the advertised talk of two halves. Stephen Dean, Senior Archaeologist with the Environment Agency, had so much to explain at the meeting of Hebden Bridge Local History Society, that the glitter of the Staffordshire Hoard was squeezed out by the potential for rather greyer discoveries on our doorstep. The Hebden Bridge Flood Alleviation scheme has not yet received planning permission, but already the archaeologists are doing preliminary surveys and identifying areas of interest. Steve was keen to make links with local historians to draw on their knowledge and to see what questions they would like answers to. Archaeology in an urban setting is obviously constrained by existing buildings and by the necessity to preserve the heritage assets of the town. Maps identifying the areas of interest and historic value will form part of the planning for the flood alleviation work. The river is part of the town’s identity, and even the sounds of the water over the weirs can be seen as part of the heritage.
The packhorse bridge that gives Hebden Bridge its name is a major focus for potential investigation. The bridge has the protection of being a scheduled monument dating back to 16th century, but repairs and rebuilding over time means that its extent is not entirely clear. The chance to dig into its buried past may reveal evidence of the life around this important river crossing in earlier centuries. There was a manorial corn mill on this site which hasn’t been definitively located and suggestions that there might also have been a smithy and possibly a tannery close by.
Archaeologists like to dig, of course, and small trial pits in Old Gate and the St Pols car park have uncovered different building materials such as hand made bricks, and large flags implying floors below the current ground level. There is nothing glittering hidden here, but to an archaeologist there is significance in the use of lime mortar and the laying of stone sets and slabs – these were buildings that were meant to last, evidence of a settled population. Things will start to get more exciting when finds emerge which are connected with everyday life. Items such as stoneware or porcelain can provide dating evidence and fill in the details of the town’s story. Rubbish dumps provide some of the richest resources.
The Environment Agency archaeologists work to a strict protocol aimed at protecting the built and buried heritage. As well as working on small below ground sites, they have a watching brief to monitor the work as it progresses. If planning permission is successful the first phase of archaeological research should begin in June 2026 with interim reports made available. Steve hopes that there will be some community involvement uncovering new stories and answering old questions about the history of Hebden Bridge.
We were left with some tantalizing pictures of the gold in the hoard uncovered when Steve was County Archaeologist in Staffordshire. He promises to return next season to complete the planned second half of his lecture and to share his thoughts about the people who made and used these highly decorative objects.
10th December 2025
Julian Carr: the making of Sowerby Bridge
As Julian Carr, a local historian living in the Ryburn Valley, reminded Hebden Bridge Local History Society, Sowerby Bridge was more advanced in industrialisation than Halifax, Todmorden or Hebden Bridge. Julian’s original aim was to record the history of the mills of Sowerby Bridge but he was soon questioning why industrialisation started so early in this part of West Yorkshire.
One of the key factors in the success of Sowerby Bridge was its transport links. The turnpike road opened in the 1730s, allowing innovations from the Lancashire textile industry to spread. Perhaps more important was the coming of the canal. In 1770 the Calder and Hebble Navigation opened the route to Hull, then to London and beyond. So Sowerby Bridge became an important hub for the textile trade. Soon transport companies were advertising their services carrying raw materials and finished goods from Manchester to Hull and onwards, via Sowerby Wharf. Such opportunities contributed to innovation, expansion and greater wealth. Entrepreneurs such as the textile manufacturer Sam Hill, exported his fine cloth to exotic places. James Royd of Beeston Hall Farm also grew rich through the production of cloth, and in 1766 his son built the elegant Somerset House in a fashionable part of Halifax.
The mechanisation of the processes of cloth production grew from the ingenuity of local men as engineers, able to adapt machinery designed for cotton to the different requirements of wool. Sowerby Bridge became a place where engineers and machine makers prospered. One example was William Greenup whose company made all the mechanical parts that harnessed water power and processed raw materials to cloth. So Sowerby Bridge had the first integrated mill in the woollen industry.
Entrepreneurs saw the advantages of building premises close to the canal in Sowerby Bridge, and the town expanded in the Georgian era. The canal basin is lined with impressive buildings, including warehouses and a Wesleyan Chapel. The success of trade led to a growth in fine residential houses as well as the landscape of an industrial village with the courtyards and squares where the workers lived.
As a thriving town, Sowerby Bridge also had a rich cultural life, with particular emphasis on music performed in the concert room. A new National School opened in 1838 and in 1839 was the venue for a great exhibition celebrating art and crafts, including achievements in engineering. Sowerby Bridge in 1905 was perhaps at its peak, with nearly 300 shops and more than 24 working mills.
Some Sowerby Bridge mill workers have left reminiscences which bring to life the experience of living and working in the mill town, collected in Ryburn Valley Reflections, a pamphlet held in the Library. Julian has also recorded conversations with people who worked in the mills up until the 1970s. There was a pride in skills gained and the interaction of different ages helped young workers to negotiate their adult lives. Strongest of all was the sense of belonging to a special community in the mill town of Sowerby Bridge.
Julian’s book ‘The Making of Sowerby Bridge’ is available in local bookshops.
14th January 2026
Anne Kirker: Sam Hill of Soyland
It was the vibrant colours in the old pattern book that fired up Anne Kirker’s fascination with Sam Hill of Soyland. The survival of Sam Hill’s extensive archive, held in the Calderdale Archives, has made him one of the best known of the 18th century textile manufacturers. Reading his letters – business and personal – brought the man to life, and Anne’s talk to Hebden Bridge Local History Society aimed to show us there was more to Sam Hill than textiles.
One of the most striking things was his immense wealth - an annual turnover of more than £30,000. He was an innovative entrepreneur, moving in the 1730s from kerseys to the finer and more valuable worsted cloths whose bright colours glow in the pattern book. His letters and order books reveal the extent of his workforce and his exports of cloth across Europe. His workforce was massive as he directly employed people across the whole process of producing and transporting his pieces of cloth.
Making Place was Sam’s grand house in Soyland and the centre of his business empire. It had great vistas over the fields of Soyland. Letters and invoices show that it was elegantly and expensively furnished with fashionable items such as tea tables. Sam seems to have been a sociable and generous man whose business associates and customers were also his friends. He expressed his pleasure in spending an evening of convivial talk, and was frequently sending gifts of Yorkshire hams to his friends.
He was a Church trustee and used his skills and contacts to raise money for charity. He received pleas for financial assistance and would try to persuade creditors to settle the debts, underwriting the loans. He argued that by helping the needy they could help themselves get to heaven.
Like other wealthy citizens Sam looked for profitable investments, and turned to property. A list drawn up in his own hand in the year before his death in 1759 details more than fifty properties in the Soyland, Sowerby and the Ryburn Valley. He assigns a value to each of them. Among the most valuable were the Soyland mills and kilns at Mill Bank worth more than £2000. Many of these properties have been substantially changed or rebuilt, but it is still the case that the small town of Soyland has some of the best Georgian houses in Calderdale, and in many of them it is possible to see something that Sam Hill would have recognised.
Behind the success story however there is a more tragic family drama. Sam outlived all his children except for his son Richard, who at first was an active partner in the business. However he and his father had a serious quarrel arising from Sam’s hostility to Richard’s choice of wife. Richard had been bankrupted and imprisoned for debt, so at his death Sam disinherited his son, leaving his money to his grand-daughter. His affairs were so complicated and family feelings so acrimonious that it took forty five years to settle his will.
28th January 2026
Ann KIlby: from Westerman to Website
No-one knows more than Ann Kilbey about the story of the origins and development of the archive of local photographs known as Pennine Horizons Digital Archive. She was there at its inception and has been central to its growth over many years. Unsurprisingly, her talk to Hebden Bridge Local History Society was illustrated by fascinating historical photographs. Many of these came from the collection of Alice Longstaff who is most famous for her shop at West End in Hebden Bridge.
The Westerman in question was Crossley Westerman a tailor’s cutter from Hebden Bridge, who started that photography business at 25 West End in 1892. It was very successful and after his death his daughter Ada Westerman, an accomplished portrait photographer, took over. In 1921, needing an apprentice, she placed an advertisement in the shop window. 14 year old Alice Longstaff saw it, applied and began her long career.
Alice was born in 1907 at Little Learings in Colden. Wonderfully, we heard from Alice herself about her education at Colden School in an interview recorded in 1984. She was obviously an intelligent girl, gaining a county minor scholarship that allowed her to have a better education, but which she was willing to give up (at a financial cost) to start her career at Westerman’s photographers. By 1935 she was able to buy the business.
She focused on portraiture, recording the high days of people’s lives. Alice described the heavy glass plates that she had to carry to weddings – only six at a time, which meant some very careful rationing of possible shots. Unthinkable today, when we have forgotten the restriction of even the 36 shot rolls of film that Alice found so liberating when she acquired her beloved Rolleiflex. Another important staple of a time before colour photography was the skill of tinting the portraits, which involved meticulous colour matching.
People loved to have their portraits taken, not only for weddings and fancy evening events but also to capture smiling children in chapel processions and loved family members in unfamiliar uniform on the eve of war. Alice Longstaff’s shop became an institution in the town, and to get your photo displayed in the window was a source of pride. She died in 1992 after 70 years in the business and left the shop and its contents to Frank Woolrych.
This was the beginning of a project that has grown into something so much bigger. Frank believed that you could not own such a collection and that something had to be done to safeguard and make that heritage available to the community. There was a dynamic coincidence of people of vision and determination who saw beyond the collection. Frank Woolrych and Ann Kilbey were at its heart.
The key to expansion was digitisation and publicity. Ann and Frank worked with Pennine Heritage and many volunteers to create the archive at Birchcliffe which now holds over 71,000 images of people, places and buildings. Publicising the collection through exhibitions, publications and events led others to offer their own photographs to be digitised and preserved. Plans are underway to make the website better yet.
11th February 2026
Anne Mealia: Did he leave me anything? The history and traditions of will making.
Wills can be a cause of controversy: who’s in favour and who has been scorned? How is property distributed? The fascination of wills lies in what they say about people and their relationships. As Anne Mealia, a professional genealogist and historical researcher, told Hebden Bridge Local History Society, wills can bring family and social history to life. They contain details which fill in the gaps in family trees, often providing names across three generations and details of where people lived and how they made their living.
Even back in Anglo-Saxon times people wanted to ensure that they passed on property to the next generation, though these early wills were often spoken rather than written. By the Medieval period the dominance of the Church led to the process being formalised, encouraging people to make charitable bequests and pay for the prayers that might ensure a happy afterlife.
Not everybody made a will of course. Most people did not have much property to hand on or complicated affairs to resolve. Even in the 19th century only 20% of men made wills or had their goods assessed for probate. The proportion of women was even smaller, as a married woman’s property customarily belonged to her husband, so it was mainly unmarried or widowed women who were able to dispose of their own property through a will.
The nature of bequests raises questions, but context is important in proposing answers: why did Shakespeare choose to leave his second best bed to his wife? (Maybe she preferred it) Was Dickens being particularly unkind when he didn’t leave money to his estranged wife? (He had been paying her an allowance of £600 as well as paying for his children’s upbringing). In a will from 1761, Edward Pickersgill excluded his wife from benefiting, even removing the responsibility for the tuition of their children. Further research shows that his wife had been guilty of scandalous and immoral and behaviour and was living apart from him. Another testator made the risky decision to leave property to a daughter in law, excluding his own son, but this decision was a prudent one, since the son was bankrupt and all of the property could have gone to his creditors.
A man was supposed to ensure that his widow and his children would be cared for after his death, and widow would usually be entitled to live in the family home. After her death or remarriage it would pass to one or more of the children. There is a strong theme of keeping property within the family, and all kinds of complicated bequests were made to ensure equity in a father’s provision for his children. Sometimes bequests for a nominal amount of a shilling are made to someone who might otherwise dispute the fairness of a will. The existence of the tiny bequest showed that the omission of a larger legacy was not accidental.
If you are interested in finding family wills, discover more from the HBLHS website or join one of the regular drop-in Family History meetings at the Birchcliffe Centre.
25th February 2026
Kim Pearson: the Wainstall Waifs
Kim Pearson has been researching the history of the child workers at Wainstalls Mills for more than twenty years. They were known as the Wainstalls Waifs, a name that conjures up the worst of Victorian squalor and exploitation. Kim told Hebden Bridge Local History Society how the story first caught her imagination when she came across the so-called Orphans’ Grave in Luddenden Dean which records seven girls who died there. Inevitably there were horror stories about the cause of the deaths – was it an industrial accident or shameful exploitation? In fact it was neither, and far from hiding a scandalous tragedy, mill owner Jonathan Calvert paid for and put up the memorial stone.
So the story that Kim discovered as she searched the written records and talked to people in the village, was one with happier endings. Towards the end of the 19th century, Wainstalls, like many small hillside villages, was dependent on the textile mills and Calverts were the major employers, owning or renting several mills. With textiles booming there were plenty of jobs but not too many people in the remote hillside area. So the Calverts, like many other mill-owners, looked towards the poor of the growing towns, in this case children in Liverpool Workhouse.
From 1876 more than 250 girls came from the Industrial School in Liverpool to an entirely different environment a thousand feet above Halifax. This was a formal arrangement, with girls suited to the work checked to see that they were in sound health. The register records how the doctor rejected girls with weak chests, and records that one child cried to be able to go. It was recorded that the girls nearly always did well in the fresh air of Wainstalls.
The girls would arrive by train, alighting at Luddenden Foot and walking up into the ‘wild and neglected’ district of Wainstalls. They were housed in cottages described as orphanages, though many of the girls had parents, often a father who was a seaman and unable to care for his family. The girls may sometimes have suffered some discrimination, looked down on by some because of their Irish roots, but their lives were not much different from those of the local children, who would also be working in the mills at this time. One villager recalled the girls whose lives were ‘gradually woven into the life of the village.’ Some local children were envious of the Sunday best clothes, leather boots and straw hats that the girls wore to Chapel.
Kim has unearthed some of their friendships. Two girls brought to Wainstalls aged six became lifelong friends and bought their own grave where they were buried after dying within two months of each other in their seventies. When the girls were ‘loosed’ from their contract about 70% of them stayed in the village, and Kim has been able to make contact with descendants, including on one memorable occasion a woman of 94 who recognised her mother as ‘a waif’ on a photograph of a group of girls.
The fascination remains: twenty years of research have made the Wainstalls waifs seem like family, and Kim feels as if she is a conduit for them to tell their own story.
11th March
Matilda Wilding: Murder at Snow Booth - gender and justice between the wars.
It’s midsummer 1933. Hill top farmers above Hebden Bridge are taking in the hay. Evening is falling. The final act of a cruel and brutal marriage is about to play out.’ Matilda Wilding, speaking to Hebden Bridge Local History Society explained why she was drawn to the story of a murder at Snow Booth, a remote farmhouse on Midgley Moor. It was a story that revealed attitudes to gender and justice and which also appealed to the historical researcher trying to get to the heart of what happened.
Matilda gave us some idea of the challenges and excitement of exploring official documents, newspapers and the treasures of the National Archives at Kew, which had that frisson of connection with people and events from the past. She could unravel the basic biographies of some of the protagonists in the story of how Elizabeth Agnes Rhodes was found guilty of murdering her husband, Samuel Redmain Rhodes. Elizabeth was born into a large Roman Catholic family in County Dublin. Described as semi-educated she had attended school till fourteen then followed the common path into domestic service. Samuel Rhodes was the son of George Rhodes living in Lancashire. He had served in the British army in world war one, but his records are incomplete. In 1919 he met and married Elizabeth and over the years they lived and worked at various farms in the Hebden Bridge area, including Egypt Farm at Colden, Old Chamber in Erringden and finally at Snow Booth, Wadsworth.
Evidence provided at her trial in 1933 tell the story of a miserable marriage. Samuel’s family complained about her poor housekeeping, unwillingness to join in family occasions and unreasonable suspicions of her husband. Others thought her a good worker and ‘clean in herself’. Witnesses testified to the brutal and violent behaviour of Samuel to his wife. She had made complaints to the police and there was even a solicitor’s letter demanding that Samuel change his behaviour. But attitudes to divorce probably made it impossible for Elizabeth to escape her situation.
Elizabeth had killed her husband with a hammer, saying later that she didn’t expect it to do such injury. Later that night she tried for a third time to take her own life by throwing herself into the river in Hebden Bridge. It was here that she encountered a police officer, and fatefully, confessed that Sam had been violent to her, so she waited until he was in bed and hit him with a hammer, because ‘he was always on to me’. This would have been ‘wilful murder’ despite the years of brutal treatment. At her trial the judge was very much prejudiced against Elizabeth, dismissing any explanations put on her behalf. The jury found Elizabeth guilty, but the Judge ignored their strong recommendation for mercy and condemned her to death by hanging.
However, the story caught the attention of the local press who ran a petition for mercy, which was granted in August 1933. A final thrill for the researcher: among all the dry court documents at Kew was the telegram which brought the news of her reprieve.
25th March 2026
Barbara Atack: Jowett - the Yorkshire car.
When a last minute problem meant that the planned talk about 'Lawless Ladies' had to be postponed, Jowett cars rode to the rescue with aficionado Barbara Atack's story of the much loved Yorkshire car.
A notice in the Telegraph & Argus in May 1922 invited Jowett owners to join a day trip to Boroughbridge, followed by tea – and so the Jowett Car Club was founded. As Barbara Atack, an officer of the oldest ‘one-make’ car club in the world, told Hebden Bridge Local History Society, love for the Yorkshire car is as strong as ever.
Barbara’s involvement with Jowett cars came in her ‘courting’ days, as she gradually shared in her husband’s love for the car. As they acquired different models – one found in a barn – working on the engines grew from a hobby to a way of life.
Jowett Cars Limited was the brainchild of brothers Benjamin and William Jowett, who had the engineering skills and imagination to see how they could build a successful car manufacturing business in their Bradford works. The ingenious ‘flat twin’ engine gave them the edge over their competitors in the early 1900s, and by using lighter aluminium for the bodies and making parts themselves, they produced a light car which was good on the hills. The Jowett Light Car, a two seater steered with a tiller was very popular (One of these, the oldest Jowett on the road, lives in Oxenhope.)
The first world war paused any further development of the cars, but the firm went from strength to strength with production of components for the war effort. By the end of the war they had a larger workforce and a bigger factory, at Idle, Bradford. Throughout the 1920s more models were produced including commercial vehicles, and a fleet for the London police.
Jowett Cars were imaginative promoters of the brand, with racing successes, such as crossing Africa in 60 days and publicity stunts like driving through a new sewage pipe at Esholt. They had a knack for marketing slogans such as ‘little engine with the big pull’ boasting ‘the pull of an elephant; the appetite of a canary and the docility of a lamb’. Despite the depression, the 30s were a time of innovation and expansion, with new sleeker models along side the commercial workhorses. Again war time saw them gain orders for military supplies. The focus post-war was on exports, and the robust and reliable Bradfords were very successful. But despite this and some sparkling success of the sports model, Javelin, in the Monte Carlo and Le Mans rallies, the days of the Yorkshire car were numbered. Their body maker was taken over by Ford, who were probably not too keen on being part of a rival’s production, and so Jowett’s last car left the factory in 1954. Loyal to their customers, they kept open a spares and repairs garage to keep Jowetts on the road.
The Jowett Car Club has continued that tradition with a members’ spares shop and also regularly welcomes ex-employees to fondly inspect the collection of Jowett cars in the Bradford Industrial Museum. As for Barbara, her last Jowett has moved to new owners, enthusiastic young Jowett Car Club members who will drive it with pride.