Tag: Calderdale

Getting along with the neighbours

There’s a big difference between love thy neighbour and love thy neighbours. Just how far should that love for our neighbours extend? To the next street – to fellow citizens – why not the whole wide world?

I heard a few days ago about a local church helping Iranian Christians, refugees living in a local hotel, who’d escaped from persecution in Iran. This is in stark contrast with the much-publicised demonstrations, elsewhere in England, against immigrants housed in local hotels, with the likes of Tommy Robinson and Elon Musk pulling the strings.

I read later about a mother and daughters in South Africa, refugees from the Congo Republic, being hounded out of their home, and the door locked against them – left in the street.

I was in Calderdale last week. It’s an area of the West Riding of Yorkshire where I’ve a family connection. The towns and villages of the hill country voted Green and Labour in the council elections back in May. The conurbations voted uniformly for Reform. Reform has some pretty unpalatable things to say about refugees, and immigrants more broadly, and brutal policies toward boat people.

At the other extreme is a poem I read last week from the Cold War era, by Wendell Berry. He bridged the gap between himself and Russia by imagining a conversation with a Siberian woodsman (OK, not quite your ordinary Russian!):

‘Who has imagined that I would not speak familiarly with you,/ or laugh with you, or visit your house and go to work with you in the forest?…’

I felt a connection with the poem. But he was imagining himself as a visitor. What if they were living side by side? When two peoples with different nations, beliefs, lifestyles find themselves in close proximity they look to put up boundaries, to create exclusion zones. And if they can’t, and divisions become politicised, tolerance and co-habitation morphs into division and hatred. 

The key word is ‘politicised’. There is always a leader or leaders who draws up battle lines, metaphorical or literal, usually arguing a case based on a very partial interpretation of history. Once they are drawn, people have to take sides.

Putin has etched out the battle lines in brutal fashion in eastern Europe. Given their history is there any basis for Ukrainians to trust Russians, or vice versa? We may have our own outsiders’ views of that conflict, but that’s not a relevant consideration.

Likewise Palestinian and Israeli. Many early Zionists imagined Jews and Palestinians living side by side. But so much hatred has been screamed and blood spilt since then. Today we’ve reports of West Bank settlers attacking Palestinian Arab villages, and burning mosques.

Remove a central authority, which could be, as with Austro-Hungary in 1918, an empire (the one-time Habsburg empire) of many centuries standing, and you may just reap a whirlwind. Languages and cultures long interwoven are too easily polarised. Think Ethiopia and the bitter battle between ethnic groups. Migrations following on from population expansions wreck cultures as they have in the Darfur region of Sudan, pitching agricultural against pastoral, villager against nomad.

In there, somewhere, always, a charismatic leader.

Or impose a central authority: I’m thinking of Han domination in China, and the brutal suppression of Tibetans and Uyghers. Above all, we have religion. ‘Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition,’ was a famous Monty Python line. We can laugh now. The reality was brutal, as with so much religious persecution down the centuries. Missionary zeal too often tipped over into violence.

I remember minarets and churches side by side when travelling through Yugoslavia in 1969 and how in the early 90s they somehow forged enmities not ploughshares and fought each other. I remember hot sleepy days, and people rubbing along.

It was too easy for Wendell Berry, looking at photographs. The face-to-face reality is something very different.  We may imagine a warm relationship but if we’ve disputed borders, disputed territories, disputed histories, we may find we have to take sides. We are locked in, like it or not.

Immigration also sets up pressures and, again, we have to take sides. We may simply not be safe sitting in the fence. ‘Which side are you in’ is title of a famous American trade union song from the 1930s, also recorded by Billy Bragg.

I should on this argument be going face-to-face with Reform voters in Calderdale. But I can’t easily gainsay their responses if they feel threatened by new arrivals. But they should beware their self-appointed leaders.

Empire in the North Country

The legacy of the British Empire is everywhere. Some empires collapse in dramatic fashion, others fade away. At home, we came to terms with its demise. Or did we? Still we argue. And the legacy beyond our shores is vast. China doesn’t remember kindly the Opium Wars, and Narendra Modi has a very different concept of India, as a ‘Hindutva’ nation, to the liberal democracy we attempted via Nehru to bequeath.

My history of Hebden Bridge in the late nineteenth century (see my previous post) describes a village which cotton manufacture turned into a town. It looked over the border to Lancashire for supply and routes to market. Supply came from slave plantations before and after the American Civil War, and as the century progressed more and more from India. Raw cotton in India was shipped to England and it left the vast Indian market open to imports from England, from Lancashire mills, via Manchester. It was in the UK’s interests to keep India impoverished, the better to govern it, as Orwell characterised British policy.

We sing ‘Rule Britannia’ at the Proms. That kind of pride in Empire is a false emotion. But it was very real in late Victorian England. Trade was its lifeblood and Empire was the (initially) accidental legacy of trade. In India and the Caribbean, and later in China, trade was a single-minded and ruthless activity. But as Empire put down roots it took on a moral, and a spiritual, aspect. With that went a sense of superiority, and arrogance. And pride. We did rule the waves.

Army and government, and the Church of England, were the backbone of Empire. But while Empire was physically distant from the non-conformist populations of upper Calderdale they too made their contribution, not just through the output of their mills but also in the money, and compassion, they vested in missions to the big cities – and overseas.

Take missionaries as an example. They were hero figures right through to the 1950s. They were part of the imperial as well as Christian ‘mission’. Eric Liddell, hero of the 1924 Olympics, died as missionary in China in the 1940s. Old timers might remember the movie the ‘Inn of the Sixth Happiness’, a story of missionaries in China: it seems quaint today. But this was the old Britain, patronising without realising it, exercising an imagined and inbuilt superiority.

I’m resisting the temptation to engage in the current debate about Empire and its legacy. Save to say that I understand the anger. Also the benefits (and disbenefits) of industry and communications that came with Empire. I’ve little time for apologetics. The one lesson we must learn is that we have to look forward.

Implicit in the apparently unstoppable advances of industry and Empire were a confidence and self-belief which don’t come so easily these days. They didn’t look back. That’s the sense I’ve had researching and writing about Hebden Bridge, a small corner of the Empire in which its mighty neighbour Manchester was such an extraordinary player.

April, and no politics

It’s 26th April. We had snow three days three weeks back, and we’ve had sunshine since then, often brilliant sunshine, days on end, and the sky’s been a Siberian blue. But it’s not been enough. Not enough to tempt the blossom to really get going. True, the blackthorn which so brilliantly belies its name has been bursting white for several weeks. Only now is the green peeking through on the lilac and the rowan and the laburnum in the garden. The early beech leaves are that so-perfect lighter shade of green. Oak is poking, reluctant, slow.

And the ash is nowhere to be seen. It’s always late of course. Some branches have a few desultory flowers. But how much will they leaf this spring?

And yet…

Yes, it’s chill. But I’m enjoying ‘slow’. I want to lock in this April, its blue skies, and long-drawn out sense of promise.

I’m even listening to the news. At 8am and 1pm. And Channel 4 at 7pm. It’s not winding me up as it has through these torrid and foolish Brexit years. April has worked wonders.

Ted Hughes maybe overstates it, but I’ll go with

A soft animal of peace/Has come a million years/With shoulders of pre-dawn and shaggy belly

Has got up from under the glacier/And now lies openly sunning/Huge bones and space-weathered hide.

We’re up on the moors, grazing sheep, lambs maybe, above Calderdale where Yorkshire meets Lancashire. Ted Hughes country. Also my grandfather’s.

Imagine, also, if we could hear as once we did the cocks crowing across the morning:

I stood on a dark summit, among dark summits –/Tidal dawn splitting heaven from earth,/The oyster opening to taste gold.

And I heard the cockcrows kindling in the valley/Under the mist –/They were sleepy,/Bubbling deep in the valley cauldron.

Then one or two tossed clear, like soft rockets/And sank back again dimming.

(Others join in, ‘challenge against challenge’)

Till the whole valley brimmed with cockcrows,/A magical soft mixture boiling over,/Spilling and sparkling into other valleys….

Sadly, not into my valley. But we can imagine…

Mill country – from Hebden Bridge to Stroud

[The first paragraphs of this blog originally appeared as the blog, ‘One cheer for enterprise and two for poor’. I’d taken my cue from EM Forster’s short book from 1950, Two Cheers for Democracy. I’ve decided rather late that both title and allusion are too obscure – but there still is a story to tell.]

Back in 1907 there was a creditors’ meeting in Manchester. A low-key winding-up. Not such an unusual occurrence. In this case it was ‘Mr Joseph Spencer, carrying on business… as tailor and outfitter’. He was my great-grandfather.

You saw an opportunity, you seized it, ‘set up shop’, a mill maybe – or literally a shop. That’s what Joseph Spencer did, in Hebden Bridge in Upper Calderdale, that hybrid seriously-Yorkshire but edging-Lancashire area which, with the Rochdale Canal sneaking through the Pennines, linked to Manchester as much as Halifax, and manufactured cotton goods (especially fustian) which traded on the Manchester Exchange.

In the 1890s he looked west, across the border, and opened further shops in Burnley, Accrington and Oldham, and in 1901 transferred his main business to Deansgate Arcade in Manchester. His son, my grandfather, Thomas, aged 22, stayed behind to run the Hebden Bridge business.

I will need to research further whether Joseph simply over-traded and ran out of money, or whether there was a wider slump. Either way, it’s in the nature of enterprise. Our lives run on enterprise, our own, or that of others. Small traders live on the edge, big businesses ossify. Get taken over, or in extremis, they collapse. Shipbuilding and steel. Coal. BHS, Arcadia, Debenhams.

My house in Stroud, in Gloucestershire, is next to the old Severn-Thames canal. An abundance of Cotswold wool, fast-flowing rivers in the ‘five valleys’ and, later, coal brought up the Severn, drove a multitude of mills, many of which, re-purposed, still survive.  It seems I can’t escape from mills, though it was wool in Stroud, and cotton (and especially fustian) in Hebden Bridge.

Across the canal from my house a mill turned out military uniforms, and a few yards to the west two mills co-existed with the railway viaduct which sweeps over both the canal and the river Frome. To the north, up on the hill, was the workhouse, a substantial structure, an ever-present reminder of how the wheel of fortune goes up, and also comes down.

It’s a peaceful landscape now. As indeed is Hebden Bridge. Both places, as I’m finding, have remarkable stories to tell. Once upon a time they were all energy, and noise, the endless working out of success and failure. All has leaked away downriver. (In Hebden Bridge’s case with an occasional big flood. The Frome in Stroud runs a deeper channel.) Downriver – and overseas.

There are many remarkable personal stories to tell. My great-grandfather’s being one. He was fortunate. He wasn’t brought low by his bankruptcy. But it’s a useful reminder to me (if Covid wasn’t enough!) how fickle fortune can be.