Books

According to the Haworth Village House Repopulation Plan of 1851, the Rev Patrick Bronte’s neighbours included butchers, a tailor, wine merchants, a druggist and a number of combers, handloom weavers and at least one “twister” – John Rushworth.

That was also the year that those responsible for public health accepted the Rev Bronte’s appeal for a local board of health to be set up to look into the village’s sewage and supply of fresh water.

In April, 1850, an inspector had called at the village to investigate its sanitary condition. What Benjamin Herschel Babbage found was stomach-turning.

In the vicinity of the Black Bull Inn, he said: “I found the night-soil from the privy emptied itself into a heap immediately below the druggist’s larder window, while the pigsty was below the kitchen window. Upon inquiring at the druggist’s, I was informed that the contents of the midden-stead (dunghill) frequently came up as high as the sill of the larder window and that 20 loads had been removed from it about three weeks before my visit.

“A woman living in this house said she was always poorly and the stench from the midden-stead and pigsty so bad she frequently was not able to eat her meals.”

No wonder the village wiped out most of the Bronte family, leaving old man Bronte blind and daughterless in the parsonage opposite the graveyard.

As a preliminary to cleaning up the festering village, a detailed map of Haworth was designed by Joseph Brierle,y of Burnley, whose plan, drawn at a scale of 10ft to the mile, is kept at Keighley Local Studies Library.

Local historian Steven Wood has reproduced the Local Board of Health plan in his beautifully illustrated book. You don’t have to be a cartographer to leaf through the variety of 100 maps – from street plans to tithe lands – or to understand Mr Wood’s accompanying explanations, which are clearly written in plain English.

The mid-point of the 19th century also saw the production of detailed tithe maps for Haworth and Oxenhope. Tithes were a tax on the produce of a piece of land which went to support local clergy. This was a payment in kind – corn, eggs, a piglet or lamb. After 1836 Parliament decreed that tithes could be paid in money.

That’s why detailed maps numbering every piece of land were needed. The Haworth tithe map shows eight pastures and meadows. Two immediately adjacent to each other are called “Cockup” and “Lay Close”.

Oxenhope and Stanbury are areas I am not as familiar with as Haworth, so the attention I gave to them was only cursory. However, I dare say there may be much of interest in the plans for Worth Valley’s waterworks to people who live in those parts.

The book’s concluding section concerns building plans for Haworth between 1878 and 1913, ranging from four houses for Victoria Road and the proposed Hippodrome cinema in Bell Isle Road. The frontage of the cinema recalls the historic Rex cinema in Elland’s Coronation Street.

Temporary wooden theatres for travelling fairs were popular more than 100 years ago.

There is a long quote from Lizzie Rignall’s autobiography in which she describes her bosom friend Emily laughing so much at a melodrama in one of these theatres that she fell through the plank seating into the depths below – still laughing.

By Jim Greenhalf