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

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

PREFACE

AT the York Special Commission in 1812, sixty–six persons were tried for various offences in connection with the Luddite rising against the introduction of machinery. Of these sixty six seventeen were executed, one reprieved, six transported for seven years, seven were acquitted, seventeen were discharged on bail, fifteen by proclamation, and one stood over but was not called on.

The story, Ben o’ Bill’s, is mostly true, and the authors have not felt called upon to vary in any material respects the story as it was gleaned in part from the lips and in part from the papers of the narrator.

It is proper to say that the Ben Walker of the narrative was of kin to neither of the writers.

The thanks of the authors are tendered to Dr. Edwin Dean, of Slaithwaite, and to the Justices of the West Riding for permission to reproduce the portraits of Dr. Dean and of Sir Joseph Radcliffe.

DEDICATED
(Without Permission)
TO
MARY LOUISA SYKES,
THE FRIEND OF BOTH,
AND
WIFE OF ONE OF
THE AUTHORS

CHAPTER I.

IT HURTS me sore that folk in these days should so little understand the doings of us Luddites. To hear young people talk, the Luddites were miscreants that well, deserved the hanging they got—a set of idle, dissolute knaves and cut–throats the country was well rid of. Nay, worse, many young lads with a college learning seem to know next to nothing about them, and talk as though all great deeds were done in far–of parts, and as though of heroes and martyrs England has none to show. I am little apt at writing, and my hand is stiff and cramped with years. But my memory is good still, and I can remember better the things of fifty years ago than those of yesterday. So, before hand and mind fail me altogether, I will set on record all I call mind of those memorable days that closed so black after that bloody York Assize. And if to any reader I should seem garrulous or egotistical, be it remembered in excuse that I can only tell the tale as I now recall it, and that I write of things I saw and things I knew, and of doings I took part in. I risked my own neck, and had the good fortune to escape with my life, and with honour, too, which not all who escaped whole and safe could say. When I was a boy, in the last days of the past century, our folk lived at Lower Holme, above Slaithwaite, in the old homestead in which my father’s father and his father before him had lived. We were tenants of my Lord Dartmouth. The house is still there, and when I close my eyes of an evening, before the fire and my pipe goes out as I sit thinking, I can see the old place yet, as I knew it in my boyhood’s days. My father, William Bamforth—Bill o’ Ben’s—was a manufacturer, a small manufacturer we should say now; but no one thought of calling him a small manufacturer in those days. He was as big as most men thereabouts. He bought his wool of the stapler at Huddersfield—old Abe Hirst;—it was scoured and dyed in the vats in the farmyard; my mother and my cousin Mary, and Martha, the servant lass, that cleaned the house and milked the cows, and kept my mother’s mind on the rack and her tongue on the clack from morning till night, helped with the spinning. The warping and the weaving we did at home in the long upper chamber. We had four looms at home, and, moreover, we put our work out to the neighbours. It was a busy house you may be sure, what with the milking and the churning, and the calves, and the pigs, and the poultry, and the people coming for milk, and the men coming for their warps, and the constant work at the old hand–looms in the long, low chamber above, with its windows stretched right across the front to catch the precious light. What stir, too, there used to be when father and I set off for the fairs at Nottingham and Macclesfield and Newcastle, for all those markets did Bill o’ Ben’s attend regular as the almanac itself. There was the loading, overnight, of the great covered waggon with the pieces of good linsey, and here and there a piece of broadcloth for the clergy and the better classes, and the grooming and shoeing of “Old Bess,” the stout grey mare. Then the start at early dawn, with the first lark in summer, in the starlight of the winter mornings. Oh! it was grand in the summer across the moors, when the roads were plain to see, and only the crusted ruts to jolt our bones; but in the dark mornings of November, when the wind howled about the waggon’s arch, and the rain beat like pellets about the tarpaulin, and the waggon wheels sunk deep in slush, and in the set winter–time, when the roads were lost in snow, it was cruel work for man and beast. It was gamesome, too, at the slimmer statutes at Nottingham and Macclesfield, when I had nothing to do but stand at the stall in the market–place and cut the suit–lengths for the customers, or carry their parcels to their inns. And grand it was to see the men servants and the buxom country lasses at the hiring, making their half–yearly holiday, and spending their money right cheerfully. My father had an old connection, and scarce ever had to return with pieces unsold. Then, when the fair was over, and he sat in the parlour of the Angel at Nottingham, or the Swan at Macclesfield, smoking his long, “churchwarden” and drinking gin and water, I would off into the town to see the booths, and the actors, and the giants, and the fat women, and the dwarfs and two–headed monsters, and many other curiosities that may not now be seen. I used to sit for hours in the winter nights at home telling Mary of the bearded woman, and the hen with five legs, and the learned pig, but of the country lasses, whose cheeks were so rosy and lips so ripe, she cared not to hear.

The times were bad for most people, but at home we did not feel the pinch very much. We had the cows and the poultry and the pigs, and though oatmeal was terribly dear, twenty shillings the hoop, I never knew what it was to miss the oatmeal porridge and the abundant milk for breakfast and bacon and potatoes for dinner. On Sundays we nearly always had beef or mutton and Yorkshire pudding, and my mother’s home–brewed was famous throughout all the country side. Mr. Wilson, the parson of the church, always called when he came to Holme, though my father had grieved him sore by taking a pew at Powle Moor Chapel, and sitting under that godly man, Abraham Webster; and Mr. Wilson always declared to my mother’s own face that her home–brewed was better drinking than any to be got even at the Black Bull Inn, at Kitchen Fold, which boasted the best “tap” outside Huddersfield itself. Sometimes on Sundays, too, my mother had a guests’ tea–drinking, and then we had buttered tea–cakes and eggs, and salad, and tea, and out were brought the silver cream jug and silver sugar tongs and spoons and the little fluted china cups and saucers, with little, pink primroses on them, that belonged to my great aunt, Betty Garside. The women–folk drank tea, but not so much, I think, that they liked it, for they had not the chance of getting used to it, but because the quality drank it, and it served to establish their rank and dignity. My father would never touch it, and I can’t say I was ever partial to it myself. So you see we were not so badly–off at home. My father’s custom lay mainly in the country market towns, and the high price of corn caused by the ceaseless wars kept squire and farmer in rich content, and they paid for their cloth like men. It was the manufacturers who had made and relied on a foreign market for their goods, who cursed Napoleon, and cursed, too, our own Government, that was ever at daggers drawn with him. Why could we not let the French rule their country their own way they said. What was it to us whether king or Directory or Emperor ruled in France? My father was a Whig, and swore by Mr. Fox; yet I think at first he was not sorry to see our corn so high, prices so good, and money so plentiful among the farmers. But in time the war told on all of us, our ships could not sail the seas, the mills and warehouses groaned with piled–up merchandise, and the pieces fetched so little, it was scarce worth while to cart our goods from town to town. Then every manufacturer in the West Riding called for peace, and, in time, peace at any price.

I think it was at Nottingham, in the back–end of 1811, I first saw any signs of a stir because of the new machinery. A man was shot at Bullwell, near that town, when trying to get at some new stocking–frames, I saw his body brought into the town on a stretcher by two constables I can see his eyes and open mouth, with the yellow teeth, and the tongue thrust out between them, and blood trickling down the sides of his chin and his hands, the fingers of one wide outspread, the other gripping tight some grass and sand he had clutched, and his right knee drawn up so rigid they could not stretch the body, and he was buried in a chest. They laid him on a table in the tap–room of the first inn they came to, and I saw him through the window. When we rode home to Slaithwaite, I remember my father was very silent, and would not talk about the new machinery, but I was soon to hear enough of it.