Sir James Roberts Bart: the Haworth weaver's lad who bought the Parsonage (and Saltaire)

 As part of our programme to celebrate our 120th year, join Brontë expert Stephen Whitehead as he discusses local man Sir James Roberts. The mill owner and philanthropist who bought the Haworth Parsonage for The Brontë Society which ensured it was saved for the nation.

Tickets £5.

To book tickets contact louisa.briggs@bronte.org.uk / 01535 640188, book online at  http://www.bronte.org.uk/whats-on or tickets will be available on the door. 

Sir James Roberts (1848-1935), was a legend in my family. In quest of him I, two years short of seventy, went to Saltaire. Then pieced together his story from what documents I have, my parents' dual autobiography, Professor Anthony Cross's inaugural lecture as professor of the Roberts Chair of Russian at Leeds University, correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement, and Charles Lemon's accounts of the purchase by Sir James Roberts of the Brontë's Haworth Parsonage to bequeath to the nation, as well as information from the exhibition in Salts Mills and books published about Sir Titus Salt whom he succeeded as owner of Saltaire.

My great-grandfather came from a large and poor farming family near Haworth and went to work at Saltaire, built by Titus Salt in 1850 as a model mill town, at twelve years of age, then the legal minimum age for such employment, walking barefoot across the Moors to do so. We recall Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poem 'The Cry of the Children' which influenced legislation in the House of Lords and was translated into Russian by Dostoeivsky's brother, Mikhail. James Roberts met Charlotte Brontë in Haworth but did not attend her father's church as his family were Dissenters. I like to think that Charlotte Brontë's Shirley (1848) reflects her knowledge of such innovative Yorkshire millowners as Titus Salt.

At eighteen James Roberts was made manager of Saltaire. Lacking formal schooling he had taught himself fluent Russian, journeying each year to trade cloth for angora wool, Saltaire using both angora and alpaca wool in its fine cloth. I like to think that Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol's The Overcoat (1842), with its St Petersburg setting, owes something to this Yorkshire wool and cloth trade. James Roberts also travelled to Australia and to South America to buy wool, to Russia and North America to sell cloth. From: Sir James Roberts