THE BRONTES OF HAWORTH

Ebor Mills Fire - Haworth

Ebor Mill

Original

We hear today via The Telegraph & Argus of the sad fire (14 August) and demolition (17 August) of one of Haworth's last mills, Ebor Mill, which now housed not a worsted company as it did when it was first built in/around 1819 but a spring factory, Airedale Springs. In 1849, the mill was bought by the well-known Haworth family, the Merralls, who were prominent in the village and had many connections with the Brontës at differente points in their lives. Most famously, Branwell Brontë was friends with Hartley and/or Michael Merrall (sources differ; he probably knew both of them anyway). Branwell was dead by the time Michael Merrall took responsibility of Ebor in 1849 and the mill was in the Merrall family's hands until 1965 when it passed onto the current hands.

Ebor Mill is only the latest mill to have been devoured by the flames in recent years, which is a shame, apart from the loss to its current owner and workers, because it was part of the landscape the Brontës knew well and part of Haworth's history. The Haworth the Brontës lived in would have been dominated by the mills, both in the landscape and the lives of its inhabitants.

Picture: Ebor Mill, Haworth (Tim Green)

Ebor Mills in Ebor Lane, Haworth

The boss of a mill destroyed in a massive blaze today reassured his workforce over the firm’s future as demolition began on the factory. Timothy Parkinson, chairman of Airedale Springs, which owns Ebor Mills in Ebor Lane, Haworth, said the company would continue.
Many of the 44 people employed by the spring manufacturer had feared for their livelihoods.
But Mr Parkinson said today: “We had a meeting with the staff this morning. I told them that it was sad that it occurred, but reassured them that the insurance people are on with the job and in the long-term the company will continue.”

Structural engineers from Bradford Council made the decision to start the Victorian mill’s demolition after the blaze burned itself out.
The company has found a temporary home at The Masonic Lodge in Mill Hey.
At the height of the fire, flames could be seen leaping from the top three floors of the six-storey building and smoke billowed across the valley.

More than 70 firefighters were involved in bringing the fire under control following reports of the blaze at 8.20pm on Saturday.

West Yorkshire’s assistant chief fire officer Martyn Redfearne previously told the Telegraph & Argus the building could have been saved had its sprinkler system been working.

A West Yorkshire Fire Service spokesman said fire investigation officers were working with insurance investigators to establish the cause of the blaze.

e-mail: marc.meneaud@telegraphandargus.co.uk


Click here

Anne Bronte 'The Bluebell' poem

Breaking the Idol of the Marriage Plot in Yeast and Villette


Timothy L. Carens

Victorian Literature and Culture (2010), 38:337-353



Nineteenth-century Protestant culture generally held marriage in high esteem, and the notion that marriage was “made in heaven” often explicitly undergirds the conventional resolution of domestic fiction. Despite many indications of a harmonious relationship between human love and religious faith, a countervailing cultural trend reveals a deep conflict between the two. Victorian Protestants worried that passionate love for another mortal creature might lead to heretical extremes, that human love might slip into idolatry, the worship of false and material gods. Jane Eyre memorably confesses that she has “made an idol” of Rochester, although she, of course, looks back upon this transgression from the vantage of marital happiness (274). In this essay, I focus on works in which misgivings about idolatrous love arise with more disruptive force. The marriage plots of Charles Kingsley's Yeast: A Problem (1851) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853) both abruptly collapse, bringing into sharp focus a Protestant religious anxiety that subverts the conventional device with which Victorian domestic novels achieve closure.

Charlotte Bronte and the sea

In the summer of 1839, Charlotte Bronte, then working as a governess in Skipton, Yorkshire, wrote to her friend Ellen Nussey about her holiday plans. At the age of 23, she said, she'd never been to the coast, never seen a beach, never clapped eyes on rolling waves. The prospect of doing so, on a proposed trip to Bridlington, was intensely exciting: "The idea of seeing the sea – of being near it – watching its changes by sunrise, sunset, moonlight and noonday – in calm, perhaps in storm – fills and satisfies my mind. I shall be discontented at nothing." Did she feel a big anticlimax on finally clapping eyes on the briny? Not at all. According to Ms Nussey, she "was quite overpowered, she could not speak until she had shed some tears ... her eyes were red and swollen, she was still trembling ... for the remainder of the day she was very quiet, subdued and exhausted."