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."

fine lace work

This item was described as Lot 89 "Lace - work by the Bronte sisters", in the Sotheby & Wilkinson auction on 2nd of July 1898. It is now offered once again for sale 110 years later. This item comprises of two pieces of fine lace work in an oak frame. The frame measures 13" x 13". On the reverse there is a note written in pencil by the original 1898 purchaser " Lace worked by the Bronte sisters bought at a sale of Martha Brown's effects at Sotheby & Wilkinson London July 2, 1898 - 3 pounds, 3 shillings". There is a paper label on the top right hand corner with the number 89 written in pen. This is a Bronte relic with an impeccable provenance.

Birthplace of Charlotte, (Patrick) Branwell, Emily Jane and Anne Bronte in Thornton.

This week I received an e-mail from Jar Bancroft, he is the maker of bancrofts from yorkshire.blog

Earlier I found his weblog and loved it very much. Interesting articles about the history of Yorkshire and the Bancroft family. In my weblog I posted allready an article I took over from Jar. Benjamin Babbage Report
He wrote to me that his great grandparents were living in the house in Thornton were Branwell, Charlotte, Emily and Anne Bronte were born.

Today I received an article from him, that tells  more about the Bronte birthday house.

Thank you very much, Jar, for your kindness to mail to me. And I appreciate it  so much that you, who are living so near to the place where this weblog is telling about, make the effort to write to me.  If there are other people who can tell me stories about the Brontes, please, don' t hesitate.
 

It's very difficult to miss the plaque pointing out that this really is the birthplace of Charlotte, (Patrick) Branwell, Emily Jane and Anne Bronte. For a number of years the house has been owned by novelist Barbara Whitehead who has not only restored many of the house's original features but has been more than happy to open it to the public by arrangement. Now Barbara is retiring and has to sell the house. The Grade II listed building will be auctioned at Elland Road football stadium, the home of Leeds United, on Monday June 25th, 2007.

The property has four bedrooms and three staircases! A stone above the front door suggests the house was built in 1802. When Patrick Bronte moved here as Curate to St James' Church, Thornton, in 1815, he was accompanied by his wife Maria and their two little girls. While Maria and Elizabeth were not to survive into adulthood the Bronte children born here grew up to take the literary world by storm.

Barbara Whitehead says on her website: "People sometimes wonder why the birthplaces of famous people are so important. Charlotte, Emily and Anne were small children here; it was not the place where they wrote their books. But the first years of life are very formative and this was a family home with their mother and their two elder sisters still living, the house where little Charlotte stood watching her mother playing with baby Branwell on the rug."

Angela takes us into what would have been the Parlour: "This is where they took tea with the Firth family from Kipping House and of course they went down to Kipping House quite a lot. In fact they had a lovely friendship with the Firth family." In the 1830s Patrick Bronte wrote a letter to one of the Firths. Angela says: "He came back in 1835 and he looked around Thornton and he looked at all the places that he loved and the old friends that he knew and in this letter he said, 'I've never quite been well since I left Thornton. My happiest days were spent there'. I think that says a lot."
 

The heart of the house would have been the dining room and it's also where the Bronte children were born. Continuing on through the back kitchen we reach an old stone staircase which goes up to the maids' room: "Sarah and Nancy Garrs came from the School of Industry in Bradford and Nancy was 13 when she had the job and she was their housemaid and I suppose you'd call it a children's nanny these days. They slept in here and this leads directly into what was the nursery."

Angela points out a bathroom which in the Bronte's day was a dressing room: "When Aunt Branwell came to stay she stayed in there because the house was quite full." Just along the passageway is what would have been the Reverend and Mrs Bronte's bedroom. "There was nothing opposite except a sweep of green fields going down and then climbing up to Clayton Heights so they'd get a lovely view of those lush green fields around Thornton which you still see through little walkways and ginnels."

If you want to read the complete article click here

Magherally Presbyterian Church and Drumballyroney

The sisters were born in West Yorkshire, England where you can still visit Brontë Country. However, their family originated in beautiful county Down in Northern Ireland, the Bronte Homeland. Their father Patrick Brontë had been a preacher and a teacher at the tiny village of Drumballyroney.

 

The old church on the summit of 450 ft hill, was built in 1770 (see above left ) and was described in 1836 as a plain building capable of holding about 300 people. It is 30 feet to the north of where the even 'older' church stood. The Glebe House is a little to the north east of the church near the new church. It stood proudly on the little hill and one of its earliest marriages was that of Hugh Bronte and Alice McClory, grandparents of the famous Bronte sisters, who eloped here from Emdale in 1776. It was abandoned & left roofless in 1886.

 

The school where Patrick taught still stands and has been restored and functions as a little museum.

Branwell and the station of Sowerby Bridge

Sowerby Bridge

 

The Jubilee Refreshment Rooms, Sowerby Bridge, is in the old ticket office where Branwell Bronte, worked.

In 1840, Branwell was appointed assistant clerk at Sowerby Bridge’s recently opened railway station where he earned an annual wage of £75 working in a wooden and corrugated shack.

 

 

 

 

 Luddenden Foot

After a brief time at Sowerby Bridge, Branwell was promoted to clerk in charge of Luddenden Foot station where he earned £130 a year.

However, he found the position more taxing and when he was not idling away the hours sketching and doing freehand portraits of local characters, he often took himself off to the Lord Nelson, the village’s main inn.

When the Manchester and Leeds Railway came to check its accounts for the year ending 1841, it discovered a discrepancy of more than £11 - a sizeable sum in those days - and he was subsequently dismissed for neglect of duty.
 

Brothers Andrew and Chris Wright

 

Railway enthusiasts and life members of the Campaign for Real Ale, had a dream. They wanted to open an old-style railway refreshment room with a new twist – the pub was to serve commuters, but it was also to be a mecca for railway and real ale aficionados.

 

 

lostrailwayswestyorkshire/Sowerby Bridge/Station

 

.beerintheevening/Jubilee_Refreshment_Rooms/Sowerby_Bridge

The place they found had been a Victorian station, built in 1876, at Sowerby Bridge. Most of it had been demolished, but there remained part of the structure, the old booking and parcels office. It took 12 years of negotiations, but finally a deal was done and financial help appeared, from the Railway Heritage Trust.

Train operators call for disused railway lines to reopenTwo years of hard work followed. Problems included dry rot, wet rot, asbestos and even a panic about anthrax. Excavation revealed treasures, too. There were no clues, however, about Branwell Bronte, the brother of the famous sisters, who was Clerk in Charge here in 1840, when the line opened.

The restoration is faithful to the 1876 design – the original paint scheme and sash windows.

So here it is, up and running since July. The pub opens a window – "the whistle-stop café" – from 7.30-9.30am for drinks and snacks, then offer bigger breakfasts indoors –"the fireman's shovel" – from 9.30am to noon. From midday to 11pm, the bar is open, offering at least six different real ales, all sourced from microbreweries within a 50-mile radius.
 

The Wrights want the Jubilee to become a convivial meeting place. Local breweriana collectors, plus local Camra branches, have already been. Earlier this month, the Sowerby Bridge Rushcart procession, with scores of Morris dancers, arrived and drank the place dry.  

Birthday Emily Bronte

Vandaag

 is het

192  jaar geleden

dat Emily Bronte

 werd geboren.

Emily Brontë was born at Thornton, Bradford, Yorkshire, and just after the birth of her sister Anne (20 April 1820), she moved with her family to Haworth, near Keighley, Yorkshire, where she spent most of her life. Today remembered chiefly as the author of the eighteenth-century romance Wuthering Heights (1847), set in her native Yorkshire.

Travelling Companion

Travelling Companion
Augustus Leopold Egg
1862

Oil on canvas

Haworth was (and is) the first Fairtrade Village in the world.

READ MOREhaworthfairtrade
READ MOREhaworthtrust

Several annual events are held in Haworth, many of which include dressing up. Among the most popular is the 1940s weekend, held in early May.

There's also carnival in August, a Halloween weekend, bonfire night fireworks, "Scroggling the Holly" in November where the Holly Queen is crowned and villagers dress up in Victorian costume, "Pipes, Bows and Bells" in early December which celebrates the region's industrial heritage, and also in December, the "Torchlit Weekend" where a torch-lit procession walks through the village and up to the church for the traditional Carol service.