Commercial leisure in Halifax 1750-1950. The development of commercialized leisure provision in a northern industrial town. Item Type Thesis Authors Smith, Paul Rights <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by- nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. Download date 28/09/2021 01:11:37 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10454/5375 Commercial leisure in Halifax 1750-1950 Chapter One Introduction This work is a chronological examination of the commercialization of leisure in a northern community between 1750 and 1950. The chosen community, Halifax, is located on the eastern side of the south Pennines in what is now West Yorkshire and was previously a part of the old administrative area of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Halifax was once the second largest parish in England, only Whalley, on the western side of the Pennines in Lancashire, was larger. During the period under consideration Halifax was transformed from a township with a population of 6,360 in 1764, to a county borough of 104,936 in 1901, before declining to 98,404 in 1951.1 Although Halifax is the focus of the study, it also includes the Parish of Halifax, which roughly covers the upper Calder Valley, an area much larger than either the township or the county borough, and which consequently had a larger population. Many of the townships in the parish became a part of the Halifax municipal, and the later county, borough, whilst those remaining outside it relied on Halifax for many services, such as water, gas and electricity. The people of these outlying districts were also attracted by the leisure facilities offered by the larger town. On local government reorganization in 1974 the area covered by the parish became, along with some adjoining areas, a part of the present Metropolitan Borough of Calderdale, with Halifax as its administrative centre. Calderdale takes its name from the river Calder and the major communities along the Calder Valley include, from the west: Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd, Sowerby Bridge, Elland and Brighouse. Halifax itself is situated to the north of the valley alongside the Hebble, a tributary of the Calder. 1 Hargreaves, J., (2003) II Ed., Halifax, Carnegie Publishing Ltd., Lancaster. pp.74, 127 and 228. The work defines commercial leisure as leisure provision where an economic transaction takes place between a seeker and a provider of leisure facilities and which involves an audience, crowd of spectators or a simple coming together such as in that perennial place of commercial leisure, the public house. The specific periods of time, dealt with by the various chapters, reveal changes in leisure and how it was pursued, but they are to some extent arbitrary in the sense that no exact dates can be applied to leisure, its provision and how it developed, with only rare exceptions, such as the development of moving pictures. In this introduction I intend to survey the history of the parish from the medieval period to the middle of the twentieth century. This will provide an assessment of how the town developed both prior to and during the period chosen for study, which takes into account the social diversity of the area and how it changed. There then follows a brief examination of the case study approach and a critical evaluation of the sources and methods used. Key general themes in the historiography of leisure are then outlined, followed by an examination specifically of the development of commercial leisure. Halifax and its hinterland There are signs of people being present in the area from prehistoric times, but the date of permanent settlement is difficult to pinpoint with any accuracy. There is no record of Halifax in the Domesday Book but this is generally agreed to be a simple mistake on the part of the compilers.2 The parish of Halifax was a part of the manor of Wakefield, which had belonged to Edward the Confessor in Saxon times. It was so remote that no vicar chose to live in the town until 1272.3 2 See both Bretton, R., „Halifax Parish Church‟, in Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, 1967, pp.73-91, and for a more detailed explanation of Halifax and its relationship to Domesday, Hargreaves, Halifax, pp.10-13. The Halifax antiquarian papers were published separately from 1901until 1991 and later bound into annual volumes. From 1993 they were published as annual volumes hence the slight difference in referencing. Halifax Central Library has copies of all editions. 3 Hargreaves, Halifax, p.19. 2 There is evidence of local involvement in the textile industry in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but some of the earliest references to the cloth industry in the area are to be found in the thirteenth century court rolls of the manor of Wakefield, which mention many people employed in the textile trade.4 Jennings refers to the fact that the amount of cloth produced locally during this early period in the town‟s history was modest across the parish and low ranking within the county of Yorkshire as a whole.5 By the middle of the fifteenth century the principal cloth making areas were the West Country, East Anglia and Yorkshire. Within Yorkshire a fundamental change was taking place, which saw the decline of York and the east of Yorkshire as wool and cloth producers and the increasing importance of Halifax and other towns in the west of the county. George Sheeran has examined the rise of Halifax in comparison to other medieval towns in Yorkshire and how it came to such prominence in the west of the county, alongside both Leeds and Wakefield, noting that “… Halifax, a place which had only grown into a town by perhaps the fifteenth century, developed far more sophisticated markets and buildings for the sale of cloth than any other town in the county including York.”6 From the late fifteenth century Halifax produced more cloth than any other parish in the West Riding, a position it would retain for over three centuries.7 The area had managed to gain a major concession in the Halifax Act of 1555, which allowed the trading of wool by middlemen, something proscribed by a statute of 1552,8 a privilege which it held, much to the annoyance of other textile producing areas, for thirty years. By the end of the sixteenth century Halifax was a busy market town, with cloth halls that served as commercial centres for the selling of the cloth, not just for 4 Heaton, H., (1920) The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, Oxford University Press, Oxford. p.5. 5 Jennings, B., (1992) Pennine Valley, Smith Settle, Otley. p.41. 6 Sheeran, G., (1998) Medieval Yorkshire Towns, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. p.114. 7Hanson, T.W., (1993) The Story of Old Halifax, M.T.D. Rigg, Leeds. p.80. Edition originally published in 1920. 8 James, J., (1968) History of the Worsted Manufacture in England, F.Cass and Co. Ltd. London. pp.613- 14. 3 the town but for the wider district and with a street of wool shops linking the old and new markets.9 During the period before the Reformation the church was central to the economic life of the nation, being a provider of education and welfare, arbiter in certain legal matters and a promoter of art and architecture. Alongside these functions the Parish Church of St. John the Baptist in Halifax was also the centre of much of the cultural life of the area, including the town‟s fair, held on the feast of St. John the Baptist, the 21 June.10 In the late medieval period it was by far the largest building in the town and probably the only one constructed entirely out of stone. Later many of the town‟s early timber buildings were clad in stone. The parish church was an important indicator of the town‟s increasing wealth and importance and for many years served as a centre of both spiritual sustenance and the more worldly pursuit of leisure.11 As Clunes has noted, the first players in the early theatre were priests before they were superseded by guild players. Priests acting in miracle plays were paid for performing, usually in church, both to entertain and also to attract people to attend church; these actor priests were still in evidence in the early part of the sixteenth century.12 Leacroft has commented at length on how important the church was right up to the Reformation as a theatrical and cultural venue used for staging various mysteries, plays and entertainments.13 The Reformation and the Puritanism of the period that followed were to play an important part in the process of divorcing the church from significant elements of the cultural life of the people. With the establishment of the Church of England elements associated with the pre-Reformation church were removed. As Pounds has stated: “Fantasy, allegory and symbolism gave way to fierce dogma; henceforward justification 9 Betteridge, A., „Halifax before the Industrial Revolution: Part One‟, in Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, 1978, pp.17-41. 10 The church was designated Halifax Minster in late 2009. 11 Sheeran, Medieval Yorkshire Towns, pp.65-77. 12 Clunes, A., (1964) The British Theatre, Cassell and Co. Ltd. London. pp.17-23. 13 Leacroft, R., (1988) II Ed., The Development of the English Playhouse, Methuen, London.