Ben o' Bill's, the Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale

by D. F. E. Sykes; George Henry Walker

With my father Jack’s converse was on sterner matters. It seemed the Soldier was not without a little money laid by, and he was anxious to engage his modest capital in some enterprise in which his want of experience, would not be fatal. Farming he rejected with little consideration as being too tame a pursuit, tho’ Mr. Webster, who was also taken into council, pointed out the excellency of beating the sword into a plowshare and the spear into a pruning hook.

Jack’s doubts were, as often happens to man, rather solved for him than by him. Say what folk will, Rawfolds was not attacked nor Horsfall shot in vain. Those two events pleaded harder with our masters in Parliament than Mr. Brougham. They were arguments that could not be resisted. In June of that year, on the 18th to be exact, the Orders in Council were repealed, and our Valley and all the West Riding was soon busy with the stir of a revived industry. It was as tho’ we breathed free after the weight and pressure of a long nightmare. The markets briskened at once, as tho’ under a fairy’s touch. Men went about shaking each other by the hand and with glad smiles upon their faces and in their eyes. The idle looms began to click, the roads were again busy as of yore with the traffic of great waggons departing laden and returning empty of their load. The canal began to be used freely for the carriage of piles of pieces. We could not make goods fast enough. The ports were once more open, and it seemed as if, all the world over, the nations were crying for our goods. It was as if the waters of commerce, frozen and banked up, had been thawed by a sudden heat and hounded forth in tumultuous volume. The church bells all over the Riding rang out the glad news. The manufacturers of our parts had a great dinner at the Cherry Tree and many another hostelry besides, and for the first time in my life and the last, I saw my father overcome by strong waters. He held down his head many a day at after before the awful face of my mother.

We shared in this great outburst of glorious sunshine. Our house was filled with pieces that my mother had vowed could have no other end than to be eaten by moths and rats. They found now a ready market, and the cry was still for more. We were all as busy as Thropp’s wife from morning till night. I could not be spared from my own loom and from the warping and seeing to the bunting and country work. And so it came about that Jack went with my father on one of his rounds and proved himself so apt at cozening customers and became so great a favourite with the farmers’ wives that came to buy suit lengths, that he was in time deemed fit to be trusted with a load on his own account. He bought a horse and waggon, established a round of his own, where he wouldn’t clash with us, purchased his goods for the most part of us, and in a smallish way began to build a business, and laid the foundations of a thriving trade for his son and his son’s son.

But with it all Soldier ever delighted to spend his nights at Holme and his Sundays at Powle Moor. I soon found he wanted none of my company. He had eyes only for Faith. He would talk to Faith by the hour of the singular virtues and the unparalleled learning of poor John, and that was a theme Faith never wearied of. What a saint, what a hero, what a philosopher they made of him between them! I only hope Jack believed half of what he said: else, there was a heavy account scoring against him somewhere.

We were all very happy during those months of summer and early autumn, lulled in a false security. We might have known that sooner or later the authorities were bound to get the information for which they never ceased to seek. In the middle of October it was rumoured in the market that George Mellor and Ben Walker had been arrested by Justice Radcliffe, but after a few hours detention had been released for lack of evidence. I breathed freely after this, and itched to go to George and hear all he had to tell. But I had to bite my thumb and wait, for, apart altogether from the coolness between George and me, it would never have done to be seen in his company just then. Still it was something to know that the police could make out no case against him and Walker, and we all felt that was more than a little in our favour. Then, like a bolt from the blue, came a piece of news in the “Leeds Mercury.” Mr. Webster was the first to tell us of it, for we did not, at Holme, see the daily paper till after Mr. Mellor the schoolmaster had done with it, he and my father joining at the cost of it. I have the paper still before me as I write, tho’ it is now yellow with age and hangs together very loosely and it is worn through at the creases. I may as well copy out what Mr. Webster read to us, and you may judge for yourself what a flustration it threw us into:

“A man has been taken up and examined by that indefatigable magistrate, Joseph Radcliffe, Esq., and has given the most complete and satisfactory evidence of the murder of Mr. Horsfall. The villains accused have been frequently examined before.”—I never heard of but once—”but have always been discharged for want of sufficient evidence. The man charged behaved with the greatest effrontery till he saw the informer, when he changed colour and gasped for breath. When he came out of the room after hearing, the informer’s evidence, he exclaimed ‘Damn that fellow, he has done me.’ It appears that this man and another have been the chief in all the disgraceful transactions that have occurred in this part of the country, especially at Rawfolds. This will lead to many more apprehensions.”

When he had read this aloud Mr. Webster handed the paper to me, and I read the bit he pointed out to me again and again, for I was too stunned to take the sense of it in at first. The paragraph referred to the murderers of Mr. Horsfall. Well, I was clear of that at all events. You see my first thoughts were of myself and my own neck. It is no use pretending to be different from what I am, and I may as well confess that my first feeling was one of relief that the murderers of Mr. Horsfall only were indicated by the paragraph. But the feeling was short–lived. If Walker, for of course it must be Walker, it never entered my mind to question that, if Walker had told about the murder of Horsfall, would he hold his tongue about other matters. And if he told about the doings at Rawfolds, how many weeks purchase was my life worth. “This will lead to many more apprehensions.” These words stood out and stared me in the face, and I broke out into a cold sweat and my hand trembled as I gave the paper back to Mr. Webster.

What was to be done? My father was all for flight, but Mr. Webster thought that would be of little use, for, said he, six feet two are not so easy hid as three feet one. He should like to see Ben Walker’s father, who was or had been one of his deacons, and learn from him the exact truth of the matter. But he was fearful lest he should bungle the business, being as he said little used to the subtleties of the law and having a fatal habit of being prodigal in the matter of the truth.

“There’s Soldier,” said my father, who had unbounded confidence in our new foreman’s resources, and who also probably felt that whatever qualms Jack might feel about parsimony in the matter in which the parson was prodigal he would be able to overcome.

“But Jack’s in it knee deep,” I objected.