ANDREW WHITEHEAD
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Morley Town Hall ... and the Asquith connection

16/9/2017

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Morley may not be the grandest town in the country - but it has got one of the grandest town halls. Take a look! It's glorious - and what a statement of municipal confidence in a town which then had a population of, according to the 1891 census, just 35,000.

Morley got its charter of incorporation as a borough at the end of 1885. The new borough council quickly got on with building a town hall. A competition was held for design - the foundation stone was laid in 1892 - and on 16th October 1895, the Morley-born Home Secretary, H.H. Asquith, came to open the building (the photo below was taken on that day).  
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It's a Grade 1 listed building and said to bear a resemblance to Bolton Town Hall - though the more obvious comparison is with neighbouring Leeds, where a bigger town hall but in similar style was completed in 1858.

So much for the outside. But inside? Even grander! A revelation. Sixteen exquisite pieces of stained glass, most sponsored by individual members of the council, were unveiled in 1902 - and they are there still along with a white marble bust of Queen Victoria, a black marble bust of Asquith and a wonderful staircase.
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If ever you are passing by, pop in. That's what I did. I just had a saunter round - nobody seemed to mind. One of the caretakers was quite chatty and helpful.
The council room was closed, but I was able to take a peep into the Alexandra Hall - still in regular use (I see Wayne Fontana is playing there soon). And on the balcony, there's an extraordinary piece of stained glass - I couldn't get proper access, so I've lifted a couple of photos from the web -
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I wonder if this is the only town hall to have stained glass depicting ... itself! The other panels show the Crank Mill (still standing after 250 years but I see up for sale), Gillroyd Mills (demolished in the 1990s) and St Mary's old and new (the latter now a fire ravaged ruin, a sad sight on the Morley skyline).
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H.H. Asquith returned to Morley Town Hall in 1913 when he was made a freeman of the borough. He left Morley when still very young and moved from Yorkshire when he was about eleven. The family worshipped at the Rehoboth chapel on Dawson's Hill - the chapel is long gone, but the crowded and overgrown graveyard remains. I found the gravestone of Asquith's mother Emily, who died in 1888 aged sixty and was obviously keen to be buried back in Morley - though not alongside her husband. 
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The memorial - not in the top picture, but centre above right - reads 'Also of / Emily Willans / Asquith / widow of / Joseph Dixon / Asquith / who died in London / December 12th 1888 / aged 60 years'. On the other side is an inscription to 'Joseph Asquith of Morley' who died in 1855 aged 77, and his wife Esther.

And on a personal note - my father, a Liberal (like Asquith) was a member of Morley Council for a few years at the close of the 1950s. My grandfather was chairman of Gildersome Urban District Council for quite a while until its absorption into Morley in 1937. He was a JP and chair of the local magistrates' bench when the Queen came to Morley Town Hall on 28th October 1954.
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My grand-father Joseph Whitehead - towards left of main photo.
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A Carnegie library in Morley ... and it's a dazzler!

2/7/2017

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This is the view looking out of Morley library - it has a wonderful art house aspect, not often I capture an image which has something special about it.

​And Morley? Well, as this photo suggests, it's an old mill town. Morley, just south of Leeds, is where I was born. I've not lived here for more than forty years, but of late - perhaps age, my father's death, all sorts of stuff - I've been drawn back. The other day, I stopped here for an hour and discovered - perhaps rediscovered, but if I did know once I had forgotten - the majesty of Morley library.

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It's a Carnegie library - built with the financial support of Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish businessman and philanthropist. He funded the construction of approaching 2,000 libraries in the United States and more than 600 in Britain and Ireland. And judging from this wonderful building - with a striking tiled lobby (Burmantofts tiles, I was told)  - which stretches over three floors, these were substantial libraries befitting the ambition than underlay his generosity.

Hall Caine was one of the most popular novelists and dramatists of the era. According to Wikipedia: '
Writing fifteen novels on subjects of adultery, divorce, domestic violence, illegitimacy, infanticide, religious bigotry and women’s rights he became an international literary celebrity, selling ten million books. Caine was the most highly paid novelist of his day. The Eternal City is the first novel to sell over a million copies worldwide.' So it sounds like he was quite a catch to open the library - and Morley was on a roll at this time ... Morley-born Herbert Henry Asquith was Chancellor of the Exchequer and became Prime Minister two years later.

Morley achieved borough status in 1886, and a few years later its remarkable - and magnificent - town hall was built. It still stands, just a stone's throw from the library, though Morley was absorbed into Leeds back in 1974.
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The library lobby has a wonderful mosaic floor featuring Morley's coat of arms, devised when it became a borough. The legend 'Industria Omnia Vincit' translates as industry conquers all - you can see why that might appeal to the millocrats who were the dominant political force in late Victorian Morley.

​And the emblem - well, top row a couple of cannon balls to represent the civil war battles of the 1640s fought in and around the town, and in the middle a cotton boll (this puzzles me, Morley was part of the heavy woollen district - Lancashire was cotton). Then a shuttle representing textiles which at this time was Morley's defining industry. And below a shove and pick to reflect the small coal mines which dotted the town and adjoining villages, and which by this date were starting to peter out.


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This same splendid coat of army features on stained glass in the doors on the library's first floor. A classy touch! And that floor is also now home to the community archive and local history collection. On this version you can see more clearly the ram's head representing the woollen industry - alas now all gone (though a few of the mills, and rather more of the chapels, remain). Below is an aerial view of the town from 1922 from an excellent history and planning document.

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Morley Town Hall with its clock tower is in the centre of the photo towards the top. The library is probably the building with the light coloured roof about 100 yards to its right.
Once upon a time, E.P. Thompson taught extra-mural classes at the library and made good use of a stout oval wooden table in the reading room. I asked if it was still around. There's a solid wooden table in the computer room upstairs, but it doesn't quite fit the bill. ​
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In 1964, Thompson commented of his Morley classes: 'Within living memory ... it seems, miners have worked lying down in eighteen-inch seams, children have been in the mills at the age of nine, urine has been collected from pub urinals for scouring, while the brother of one of the students still uses teazles to raise the 'nap'. It is difficult to believe that the industrial revolution has yet occurred in Morley, and next year's syllabus (in the later 19th century) will seem like a tour through the space age'.

There are wonderful design touches to the library - no wonder it's a listed building (and, happily, well used). What a bobby dazzler!

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Morley's Prime Minister

6/12/2016

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One-hundred years ago yesterday, the last Morley man (alright, the only Morley man) to become Prime Minister lost office. Herbert Henry Asquith was also the last man to lead a single party Liberal government. The photograph above shows Asquith opening Morley's distinctly grand Town Hall in October 1895 - by which time he had already held the office of Home Secretary.

To tell the truth, Asquith's links with Morley were fairly tenuous. He was born in September 1852, and his childhood home was Croft House, which still stands. It's a 'solidly built dwelling of dark Yorkshire stone', in the words of Roy Jenkins, Asquith's biographer. His father was 'a minor employer' in the local woollen industry - he inherited Gillroyd Mill, it seems - but died in his mid-thirties, leaving four young children. The family were Congregationalists and regular attenders at the Rehoboth Chapel which stood close to Morley Hall.

The young Asquith only spent a few years of his life in Morley - he was six or seven when the family moved, shortly before his father's death. He had only the vaguest memories of the place: attending chapel stiffly attired, and leading a children's procession around town to mark the end of the Crimean War.
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His association with Morley was sufficient to make him guest of honor at the opening of the Town Hall. There's a primary school named after him. And the first big road project of Morley Borough Council - between Morley and Gildersome - was named Asquith Avenue.

The Liberal tradition he represented still finds a foothold in some corners of the West Riding - but not Morley. This was the constituency which Ed Balls contrived to lose (to the Tories) in the last election.


Below is Gillroyd Mill in Morley as Asquith would have seen. The mill dated from the 1830s and was rebuilt over five storeys in 1860 - this drawing shows the new mill a few years after it opened. Gillroyd Mill closed in 1966 and has now been demolished.
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The Rehoboth Chapel on Dawson's Hill had a similar history - built in the 1830s, with the last services in the 1960s. It too is now demolished, though the graveyard survives - it's where Asquith's mother and some of his siblings are buried.
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Another voyage round my father

22/10/2016

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I've been on a sentimental journey back to Gildersome and Morley, the corner of West Yorkshire where I - and my father - grew up. This locality, just outside Leeds, was once part of the Heavy Woollen District. The Whiteheads had a mill in Gildersome - though producing fine worsted cloth rather than heavy woollens. It was called W. Whitehead & Sons - Willie Whitehead was my great-grandfather.

​The journey, and this post, has been prompted by the recent death of my father, Arthur Whitehead, at the age of 91. He worked for a while in the family mill, and lived for much of his life in Gildersome.


​Hilly Croft ...

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My parents moved to Hilly Croft on Gildersome Lane in 1960, when I was four, and it was their home for the next thirty years. The house had been built in the early years of last century, I believe by the Booth family, the main mill owners in the area. It's a solid building - spacious and in its own grounds. The photos don't do it justice as the front of the house faced away from the road, over fields towards Harthill. This wooden relief representation which my parents commissioned gives you an idea of the more imposing and elegant aspect of the house.
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​Gildersome Baptist Church ...

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There has been a Baptist church in Gildersome since 1707 - and the present church, built in 1865, is the grandest place of worship in the village. It's still in use, though much of the building is given over to sheltered accommodation. This was once where the mill owners, and many of the mill hands, worshipped. And it was where my parents married in July 1953.

The cemetery at the back has been landscaped, but many of the gravestones are still there. The most imposing memorial, in Cleopatra's Needle style, is to one of the Booths, Joseph Booth 'Cloth Manufacturer, Gildersome' and his wife Elizabeth, both of whom died in 1874. 
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My Dad once mentioned that some of his ancestors were buried at the back of the Baptist Church - but it was still something of a shock to come across the gravestone of one of them.
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The inscription reads: 'In Loving Memory of Eunice, dearly beloved wife of Leonard Whitehead, who died March 5th 1919 aged 31 years'.

Leonard was my father's uncle - Eunice died five years before Dad was born. Leonard later married Eunice's sister, Agnes.
Their nephew  - Geoffrey Crowther, Baron Crowther of Headingley - was editor of the Economist for almost twenty years.


​Family footsteps ...

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Neither of my parents was born in Gildersome - but both spent most of their childhood there. On the left is 6 College Road, at the back of the family mill, which was my father's home when he was growing up. On the right is Grove View, a terrace of six houses in the centre of Gildersome, where my mother once lived - the terrace is now Grade 2 listed.

Whiteheads' mill - Deanhurst Mill on Gelderd Road - was sold by my grandfather in about 1960. It carried on operating until, I'd guess, the 1970s. It was demolished quite a while back. The photo below shows the view from the site of the mill, across Gelderd Road, on to what was farmland, with the stump of an old windmill once visible. As you can see, it's now being developed. On the skyline you can make out the clock tower of Morley Town Hall. 
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​Morley Hall ...

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I was born at Morley Hall, a remarkable seventeenth century building plumb in the middle of the town but very tucked away. It was then a maternity home. It is now the private home of a Sikh family who allowed me to take these photographs.
There's a fairly non-descript plaque - a building of such  antiquity deserves better. Below is how the place looked in 1960, when it was still a maternity home ... and then another image of how it is today.
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​Morley's churches ...

On Morley's skyline, alongside the Town Hall, another building dominates - the burnt out ruins of St Mary's-in-the Woods. It wasn't the parish church but non-conformist. There's isn't a C of E church in the town centre - though the place is stuffed full of grand non-conformist chapels, many still in use.
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What a delightful and impressive Baptist Tabernacle!
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The Methodist Church above, with a Whitehead gravestone; below, what was the Primitive Methodists
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Then there's the Spiritualist Church and the Church of Christ, standing opposite each other. The Zoar Particular Baptist Chapel was more recently Labour's Unity Hall - no wonder it looks forlorn, this is the seat Ed Balls contrived to lose at the 2015 general election. Much grander is the nearby church school rooms now occupied by the United Reformed Church.
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Commercial Street in Morley must be the most God-fearing street in the country. And it still has room for a municipal library and what was once a Masonic institute. Not far away there's a former Temperance Hall, and still going strong, Morley's Working Men's Club. Some other time, I'll blog about the old mill and industrial buildings - not least the wonderful, ancient Crank Mill - which still mark Morley out.

And during my promenade, I popped into The Royal in Morley Bottoms where a pint of John Smith's set me back £1.89. Not happy hour, not a special offer - that's the price!
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A voyage round my father

11/10/2016

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My father died earlier this month at the age of 91. I've written this tribute for the Morley Observer in West Yorkshire - I'm posting the piece as submitted, along with some memory-rich photos:
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My father outside his childhood home in College Road, Gildersome

The death on October 6 of my father Arthur Whitehead - from a Gildersome mill family and a former Morley councillor - breaks another link with the textile industry which once defined the area.

With his passing, there are no longer any Whiteheads around who worked at Whiteheads' mill.
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Arthur was 91 and had for the last few years been living in Easingwold near York, but the greater part of his life was spent in Gildersome and Morley. He married a Gildersome girl, Margaret Graham - born in Glasgow, her family moved to the village when she was a child - in the local Baptist Church in the coronation summer of 1953.

His grandfather Willie Whitehead, who began his working life as a loom tuner, established the mill just over a century ago. According to family folklore, he borrowed money from an aunt who had inherited after (accidentally) giving her husband disinfectant to drink.

In the 1920s, the business moved to purpose-built premises at Deanhurst Mill on Gelderd Road - a small worsted mill in an area more noted for shoddy and mungo manufacture. 
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Joseph Whitehead and Ethel Brooksbank, married April 1917
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Arthur Whitehead and Margaret Graham, married July 1953
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Joseph Whitehead, my grandfather, was the main force behind the mill's success. He was a typical, strong-willed tyke and chairman of what was then the Gildersome Urban District Council.  

His wife, Ethel Brooksbank - one of the first women graduates from Leeds University - was every bit as formidable. Both served as magistrates in Morley. They were also active in Gildersome Cricket Club - and I remember as a child going with my Dad to see the occasional game at the ground at the back of Street Lane.

My father and his twin brother, Bernard - older than him by ten minutes - were born in Wibsey in Bradford and moved when very young to College Road in Gildersome, at the back of the family mill. They went to Gelderd Road primary school and Batley Grammar School; my father took a two-year wartime degree in the textile department at the University of Leeds.

During the war, he trained as a pilot in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). He was still there when the war ended - and can remember his instructor saying: if you are signing up to stay in the air force we'll keep on with the training, if not just clear off.
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On his return, he qualified as an accountant and worked in the family firm; so too did Bernard, who had a flair for design (Bernard died in 1984). I remember visiting Deanhurst Mill as a toddler, and being assailed by the deafening clack-clack of the looms and delighting in tumbling around among the cloth off-cuts.
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Bernard and Arthur and their older brother Donald ... and on the right, my parents when they were courting
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When my parents married, they moved to Bruntcliffe Lane in Morley. My father was elected to the council - he was a Liberal. I was born at Morley Hall maternity home in 1956; my brother Malcolm, now a vet in North Yorkshire, came along three years later.
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In 1960, the family moved back to Gildersome - to Hilly Croft on Gildersome Lane, which like most of  the more imposing buildings in the area had been constructed decades earlier with mill money. That was my childhood home. My bedroom looked out to Harthill. There were blackberries in the surrounding fields, partridges used to stroll across the lawn - it was a curiously rural corner of the West Riding.


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Malcolm and I with our parents outside Hilly Croft

At about that time, Joseph Whitehead took his family by surprise and sold the mill. It continued to make fine worsted cloth for a while longer. But my father left the business and went on to a highly successful career in carpets, working variously at Heckmondwike Carpets, Kosset Carpets at Brighouse, and becoming managing director of Carpets International, which included the renowned Crossleys Carpets of Halifax.

On retirement, my father worked as an investment adviser to a leading enterpreneur. And by a curious twist of fate, that took him back to Gildersome's mills. He tried against the odds in the 1980s to  devise a recovery plan for the village's last working mill - Booth's mill, also known as Moorhead Mill, which specialised in cloth for billiard tables and army uniforms.

That failed, and the mill closed - and with it a tradition of textile manufacture in Gildersome which stretched back over two centuries. I have in my home in London the mill's wind-up 'clocking-in' clock and a batch of time cards.
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After sixty or so years in Gildersome and Morley, my parents moved to Hunmanby Gap on the coast near Filey. My mother very sadly died three years short of their golden wedding anniversary. My father then moved first to Huby, and for the last few years he has shared a home in Easingwold with a childhood friend and distant cousin, Betty Richards. 


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Dad and Betty at an Oxford summer school

Arthur's interests included painting 'op' art in the style of Bridget Riley and tapestry. He enjoyed good health almost to the end. Friends have described him as a true gentleman - courteous, contented, kind and well groomed.

On a couple of occasions in recent years, I have driven Dad around Gildersome and Morley. He wasn't particularly sentimental and it was difficult to tease out tales from his younger days, but he enjoyed revisiting places which had been important in his life.

We knew that the woollen mills in Gildersome had long since closed - we hadn't quite expected that all seven would have disappeared almost without a trace. But there were some places where we could feel in touch with the mill era. He relished having lunch at Woodlands off Gelderd Road, built in the 1870s as a local mill owner's mansion and now a boutique hotel.
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And we drove past the Baptist Church, which now has a good claim to being the grandest building in Gildersome. My father wasn't religious, but he - and I - have rekindled a link with Gildersome Baptists in recent years.
I've made my career as a BBC journalist and, when reporting on a visit to Martin Luther King's Baptist church in Atlanta, happened to mention my family's roots in Gildersome's Baptist tradition. The minister David Newton was listening and got in touch. We've stayed in touch. He passed on the congregation's good wishes when my Dad celebrated his ninetieth birthday - it was great to maintain that Gildersome connection. 

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Gildersome Baptist Church
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E.P. Thompson and Morley

25/5/2014

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Back in 1963, E.P. Thompson wrote the most influential post-war book of British history, The Making of the English Working Class. I came across it a decade or more later, and dipped into it repeatedly rather than read it throughout (it's a bit of a doorstopper). It made its mark on me, prompting me to do a postgraduate degree at the Centre for the Study of Social History at Warwick, where Edward Thompson had been the presiding genius.

By the time I got there, he had left academia behind. I came across him only occasionally - attending a seminar he gave when he, as I recall, unilaterally changed the subject to the haunting death of his older  brother, Frank, in Bulgaria towards the end of the Second World War; I chaired a meeting at which he spoke, calling for the release of the East German dissident Rudolf Bahro; and much later, in 1991, I interviewed Edward and his wife Dorothy about their years in the Communist Party, and the audio is posted elsewhere on this site.


I knew that in the early 1950s in particular, E.P. Thompson was an active member of the CP in Halifax, and teaching in the Extramural Studies department at the University of Leeds - and that both these aspects of his life fed into the writing of The Making. What I had not appreciated, and this I have to confess is a very personal obsession, is that Edward Thompson had more than a passing acquaintance with my home town of Morley.

David Goodway's contribution to a new book entitled E.P. Thompson and English Radicalism (edited by Roger Fieldhouse and Richard Taylor and published by Manchester University Press) spells out how Thompson's role as an adult educator informed the making of The Making. Morley was one of fourteen venues where Thompson held classes. He found the large oval table in the Library's reading room ideal for his purpose. And in 1963-4, after the publication of his seminal work, he commented of Morley: 'Within living memory ... it seems, miners have worked lying down in eighteen-inch seams, children have been in the mills at the age of nine, urine has been collected from pub urinals for scouring, while the brother of one of the students still uses teazles to raise the 'nap'. It is difficult to believe that the industrial revolution has yet occurred in Morley, and next year's syllabus (in the later 19th century) will seem like a tour through the space age'.

My own association with Morley Library is restricted to attending stamp club sessions there, rather unwillingly, as a child. My father was on Morley council at the time Thompson was writing his book. My father was an independent, which usually meant Tory but in his case Liberal. He never came across E.P. Thompson, but much to my surprise talked of attending Workers' Educational Association classes - one on history held at Morley Grammar School, and another during the war which he attended with his mother (a JP and National Liberal) at the unlikely venue of the Gildersome Conservative Club.

All this is incidental, but out of a web of such tenuous links, affinities and association are built. And I am more than a little chuffed to discover that E.P. Thompson taught in Morley.

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Morley Library with the Town Hall in the distance
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Rhubarb, rhubarb

5/4/2011

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I was brought up in the rhubarb capital of the world. It grew in clumps in my childhood garden. But I never greatly liked the stuff. The stewed rhubarb and custard that was compulsory weekly fare at school dinner was enough to put anyone off for life.

Well, not quite for life. The other day a friend (thanks, Erica!) gave me a few excellent sticks of home-grown rhubarb. And spurred on by this generosity, I have cooked a very passable - even if I say so myself - rhubarb and blueberry crumble. Blueberry because rhubarb is so tart it needs a countervailing sweet fruit for full satisfaction. And we had some blueberries in the freezer. It worked well. Patent pending - full recipe on request.

So I have recommuned with my culinary heritage. The rhubarb triangle is, in case you don't know, a small enclave of west Yorkshire, encompassing Morley (my birthplace), Wakefield and Rothwell. Indeed, the 'Morley Observer' once commented, with a straight face: 'With the demise of the mills and mines in Morley rhubarb production is the only traditional industry left to the town.'

That was back in 2004. Since then, the sun of good fortune has not shined on Morley's rhubarb forcing sheds. (Like mushrooms, the best stuff grows in the dark). There are, at most, only a dozen rhubarb growers still in business in the triangle - and I'm not sure that any of them are in Morley proper. But if rhubarb and blueberry crumble catches on, perhaps there's hope yet for my home town.

UPDATE: There's a site which has a range of remarkable rhubarb recipes - including rhubarb mojito and rhubarb margarita. Strange - don't remember them from my early years in Morley.
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