Put your walking shoes on for HerStoria’s Women’s History Walk around Bradford By Jo Stanley

radford was one of Britain’s major textile cities – before duvets displaced Bblankets and shell jackets made woollen overcoats redundant. Historically, textile production has always been women’s work, so in a sense this declining Worstedopolis and its neighbouring mill towns such as Leeds, Blackburn and Burnley, are monuments to female industrial labour. Because of the textile revolution, from1790 relatively highly-paid girls and women were very visible members of the overcrowded population, not tucked away doing domestic service in private houses. By 1821 eighty per cent of young Bradford women went straight to the mill at fourteen and stayed until marriage, and sometimes afterwards. What’s special about Bradford is that some men in the textile unions supported women in their demands for both the minimum wage and the vote. Today most of the women’s noisy, loom-filled workplaces are reduced to fancy apartments for commuters into Leeds and Manchester. And now this heavily Asian West Yorkshire city is marketed as the Curry Capital of the UK, and Film City (because the National Media Museum is there). But some of the history remains too. This walk highlights women’s role in that history – as workers, vote-seekers, activists seeking their rights, mothers and media figures. Our walk covers less than three kilometres and takes two hours. The route has unavoidable steep hills but is just about wheelchair accessible. It starts at the City Hall and ends at the main concert venue, St George’s Hall. Both buildings are just five minutes from the main railway station, Bradford Interchange, which is on the Leeds-Manchester line, and so is easily manageable for people wanting to do this walk on a brief day out.

42 HerStoria magazine Spring 2010 www.herstoria.com Some of Bradford’s City Hall, Centenary notable women 1 Square Margaret McMillan (1860-1931) Florence White (1886-1961) Women were important as educational and child health reformer founder of National Spinsters’ legitimate users of this building and Pensions Association as protestors outside it. Inside, one Margaret was born in New York of the first women councillors took but returned to Scotland as a child. Florence was born to a working- her place around 1920. Margaret She moved to Bradford in 1893 and class family in Bradford and, like Laws was a JP (Justice of the Peace was soon elected to the School Board many of her generation who lived or magistrate) and ex-scholar of as a member of the newly-formed through World War One, she never what is claimed to be Britain’s first Independent Labour Party. In the next married. Realising the hardships that Girls’ Grammar School, founded in few years Margaret’s reforming zeal women such as herself suffered in Bradford in 1875. In the early 1900s, and compassion made its mark on older age (most spinsters were not Lady Mayoress Florence Moser the city and improved substantially eligible for pensions) she set up her organised in the then Town Hall to the lives of Bradford’s poorest campaigning organisation in 1935, bring about many improvements children. She pioneered home visits calling for pensions for unmarried in poor women’s and children’s and the inspection of schools, and women at age fifty-five. It struck a welfare. In 1985-8 one of Britain’s implemented reforms to foster child chord and her Spinsters’ Pensions numerous Sex Equality Units was health and well-being. This approach Association soon had over thousands set up here, headed by Lee Comer. was all the more remarkable in the of members across the UK. The unit’s campaigns included context of Bradford, a city which had Occupational pensions expanded job sharing, sexual harassment, made use of child labour in its textile during the time the NSPA was active, discriminatory language, and the industry. When the Education Act of but these changes mostly benefited right to wear trousers at school in 1902 abolished school boards and men. Women were compelled to give inclement weather. The unit initiated transferred their powers to councils, up many jobs with pensions attached a ‘Take Your Daughter to Work women became ineligible for election. on marriage; these were mainly white Day’ and women-only sessions in Margaret left Bradford to use her collar jobs in the private and the swimming pool; it also halted reforming skills in other ways, public sectors. But unmarried the setting up of a sex cinema. including working with the new women, who generally enjoyed The City Hall has long been a Workers’ Educational Association. lower pay, less employment focus for dissent by women outside opportunities and were often the building. During the famous carers of aged parents or Manningham Mills strike of 1890- Julia Varley (1871-1952) other family members 91, the mill girls controlled the union representative and too, did not fare much square in response to attempts to suffragette better. A Government slash wages and cut the workforce; enquiry found dire this was re-enacted in 1990. In the Bradford-born Julia levels of poverty end, poverty and hunger drove the became branch secretary amongst older women strikers back to work in April 1891 of the Weavers and Textile and in 1940 the state (there was no poor relief or help Workers’ Union when just pensionable age for all available for most), leaving the a teenage mill worker; women was reduced Mill owner, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, later she became the to sixty, although victorious and with his profits in tact. first woman member payments were low. A On January 13 1910 a suffragette, of the Bradford Trades new pension system Miss Newton, was distributing Council and served on its was introduced leaflets here when a mob of boys executive committee. She by the Labour picked her up, carried her and her was also active in the Votes government in leaflets up Sunbridge Road, down for Women campaign and 1948 and the Southgate and then back to the was twice imprisoned in 1907 NSPA was wound Town Hall again. But she didn’t let go for militant protest. Union activity up ten years later. of her leaflets. Many demonstrations was not Julia’s only contribution to However the problem of featuring women took place outside reform in Bradford. She also served women’s disproportionate here from the 1970s onwards, in the city as a Poor Law Guardian poverty in old age refuses to go including the 1988 demonstration from 1904-7 and concentrated away; today some thirteen per against Eric Pickles, the controversial in particular on helping vagrant cent of women qualify for the full leader of Bradford council 1988-90 women. Julia continued her trades basic state pension compared whose policies included drastic cuts union activities beyond Bradford with ninety-two per cent of in public services. Women’s ‘Reclaim and in the 1920s served as a rare men. (Statistics from Pat Thane, the Night’ marches still take place woman on the general council of ‘The “Scandal” of women’s pensions here every November and ‘Women in the Trades Union Congress (TUC). in Britain: how did it come about?’, Black’ peace vigils every Wednesday. History and Policy Paper, March 2006.

Photo of Florence White provided by West Yorkshire HerArchiveStoria Service, magazine Bradford Spring (78D86/4/2) 2010 43 Walk west up Centenary Julia Cameron (1815-1879) photographer. the middle-class womenfolk of textile Square, through an underpass Julia was one of the earliest female lords joined together to help working- and stop in front of the library. photographers to gain a reputation. She class women. The Women’s Centre was was a friend of the astronomer John the home of many radical campaigns, 2 Central Library Herschel who sat for some of her most including the National Abortion celebrated portraits. Julia photographed Campaign, and produced the local There is a room here dedicated to many well known people of the day, women’s newsletter, Irregular Periods. Andrea Dunbar (1962-1990). In her including Alfred Lord Tennyson. Her In the 1970s Little Horton Lane late teens, Dunbar wrote the famously women sitters were frequently depicted was also the site for the firstWomen’s raw play about life on the Buttershaw romantically and she made an elaborate Refuge in Bradford which provided Estate, on which the 1986 movie use of props. In 1864 Julia was elected to shelter for women fleeing domestic Rita, Sue and Bob too was based. the Photographic Society of London and violence. Since then, a number of Looking south east towards showed work at its annual exhibition. local refuges have been set up. They Manchester Road, all along here are now under the national umbrella were dense housing and mills, Dorothy Wilding (1893-1976) photographer. of Women’s Aid and no longer run some of which you can still see. Dorothy served as apprentice to a as purely voluntary initiatives. In Kent Street, east of Manchester retoucher in London and this gave her Road, the Cinderella Club was access to the world of photographic Heading west, cross over Little founded by Lord Mayor’s wife Florence portraiture. She opened her first studio Horton Lane and go along Edmund Moser. In the late-nineteenth century in London in 1914 and became very Street to its junction with Morley Street. it provided needy children with successful, employing a team comprised clothes and clogs, days out, and almost exclusively of women. In the early Edmund St/Morley Street holidays in Hest Bank, Morecambe. 1920s her work was used to promote 5 health centre In the 1840s this was an area of the image of glamorous actresses, strong Chartist activity. Chartism was including Tallulah Bankhead. Soon The clinic (now gone) was one of an early socialist campaign for political Dorothy was being commissioned by the first permanent municipal sites reform and universal male franchise. By royalty (and royal ‘want to be’ Wallace dedicated to assisting women’s welfare. 1841 there was also a Female Chartist Simpson). She became the first female It built upon the charitable private Association. On Monday May 29 1848, official coronation photographer, efforts made in the late-nineteenth nearby Chartist stronghold Adelaide taking portraits of George VI (1937) and century, a time when major social Street (to the east, off Manchester Elizabeth II (1952). Dorothy’s images problems, and a climate of middle- Road) was besieged. ‘Amazon’ Mary were adapted for stamps, including class moral responsibility, led women Mortimer helped hold at bay up the iconic image of the Queen which of mill-owning families to set up many to fifty police, five hundred special appeared on stamps from 1952-1967. Christian organisations to rescue constables and two hundred dragoons fallen or vulnerable women. This was a and infantry. Women threw objects crowded city full of mill girls far away from their houses. Mary was pinned to from the family guidance of home a door by a trooper’s sabre. She yelled villages. At times of textile slumps, these ‘I’m a Chartist and will die a Chartist’ as women may turn to prostitution to feed they dragged her away. Eighteen were their children; other women were too arrested for rioting, with Mary the only poor or uneducated to look after their woman. She and fifteen others were families’ health. Many refuges were set tried but released for lack of evidence. up for pregnant and destitute women, often aimed at getting them back to Facing the library, turn right respectable work, for example (ill-paid) and walk around to the entrance needlework. Some cynics said that good of the National Media museum. was being done by the wives of the Continue south west alongside industrialists who had caused many of 3 National Media Museum the National Media Museum until the social problems in the first place. just before a roundabout. Cross over This building was the focus of (carefully!) here to Little Horton Lane. much work to improve the health of Bradford’s poorest people, especially 4 Little Horton Lane children and pregnant mothers. Bradford had the second highest Although it is now disrupted by a infant mortality rate in Britain by major roundabout, Little Horton Lane 1900, and the birth rate was low too used to continue north east down (nineteen per thousand in 1921, by towards the centre of town. Bradford comparison to twenty-five per thousand Women’s Centre was here in the 1980s. nationally). The main causes of this were Bradford feminists tried to work with defective sanitation, overcrowding, Notable women with collections each other across the class divide, the employment of women in heavy in the museum include: unlike in the nineteenth century when industrial work before, during and after

44 HerStoria magazine Spring 2010 www.herstoria.com Map of Women’s History Walk of Bradford

Sunbridge Road 11 12 Kirkgate

Bridge Street

Tetley St

Godwin St

Thornton Road 10 Centenary Square Hall Ings 1 13 Drake St

Market St 14 Bridge Street

9 8

Hall Ings Great Horton Road Morley Street 7 Chester Street 3

Manchester Road 2

Edmund Street 4 Ash Grove 5 Sharpe Street

Morley Street

Little Horton Lane

6

pregnancy, and impure cows’ milk. a third of all Bradford’s children into 6 MacMillan Building An Infant Clinic was based in this the world. In the 1980s this clinic building. This offered health advice also operated as a family planning This was named after education and care to mothers and pre-school centre, partly in response to feminist and health campaigner, Margaret children. It was run by chief medical agitation for contraceptive advice. Macmillan. In the 1970s and 1980s officer,Dr Helen Campbell, and staffed Bradford College led the way in mainly by female nurses. Health visitors Walk south west along Morley developing women-only courses in were based here, and so too were Street, to to see the MacMillan motor mechanics and manual trades. midwives (fifty-two were registered in Building, part of Bradford College. 1921). Bradford was the first council in Walk along Ash Grove up Britain to set up a municipal midwifery to Great Horton Road. service. In 1921 these midwives brought

HerStoria magazine Spring 2010 45 Caribbean women, habituated to such road to the site of Bradford’s first mill, 7 Great Horton Road/University baths back home, were regular bathers. Holme Mill, marked with a plaque. Despite local objections, the baths were At number 18 was the Ladies’ Charity, closed in the 1980s. which operated round the end of the nineteenth century. It helped pregnant 9 The Alhambra Theatre women with second-hand clothes and sometimes blankets and coal. Along much of the length of Great Horton Road is The University of Bradford which was, in 1981, one of the first in the country to have a Women’s Studies course. When Professor Shahina Pardham was working at the university (early 2000s) she was voted Asian Woman of the Year. Cross Thornton Road and walk up Tetley St, until you get to Sunbridge Road. Turn right to return to the centre and you will come to the trades The Alhambra Theatre is Bradford’s main council building at number 90. theatre space. The job architect on its redesign in 1982 was a rare woman 11 Trades Council Building architect, Christine Leyland. Textile trades unionist Julia Varley The Odeon cinema, formerly on was a delegate in the 1890s, then in Godwin Street, to the north of the her very early teens. In 1901 she was Alhambra, was, in1998, the site of also elected as a Poor Law Guardian. the British premiere of Fairy Tale: a Julia was a suffragist and came from a true story of the Cottingley fairies. This local left-wing family. Two of her sisters film retold the story of the successful shared her views and went to London photographic hoax perpetrated by to join suffrage demonstrations. Julia two little girls from nearby Cottingley, went on to be women’s organiser of Elsie Wright and Frances Griffiths. Their the Transport and General Workers’ photographs of fairies were widely Union. At number 148/50, in 1898, believed to be authentic proof of an you would have found the 100-bed ‘other world’, and they even convinced Bradford Women’s Home and Shelter Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of which continued till at least 1969. Sherlock Holmes. In 1921he arranged Continue to walk down Great for a medium to come and talk to Continuing along Sunbridge Road to Horton Road downhill (northeast) the girls and wrote a book about the the junction of Godwin Street you’ll find towards the Alhambra Theatre. phenomenon the following year. the TJ Hughes building, formerly the Co-op. Like women up and down the country, Bradford women often In Bradford the Co-op was founded 8 Women’s Baths picketed the cinema in protest in 1860 in a cottage off Bowling Old against the increase in films Lane. Bradford Central Co-operative advocating violence towards women, Women’s Guild claims to be the oldest including Dressed To Kill (1980). women’s organisation in Bradford still in existence. It started in 1891. 10 Thornton Road Despite its progressive ethos, the Co-op famously refused to extend credit to Moving north past the Odeon the Manningham mills strikers in 1890. turn into Thornton Road. Where the NCP car park is now, the radical 12 Mechanics Institute Library Fourth Idea Bookshop and café once stood. It was the Women’s Liberation On Kirkgate is the Mechanics Institute contact address in the 1970s and 80s, which was a cultural centre with a and used to offer pregnancy testing. library, which was used by women as Further west along Thornton Road well as men. It was here that the first was the site of Bradford Community exploratory meeting of the National Just before the Alhambra, in what is now Printshop, another collective, where Spinsters’ Pensions Association took place The Sir Titus Salt pub, was once the site Irregular Periods was sometimes in 1935. Organised by Florence White of the Women’s Baths. East European and produced. Continue along Thortnton from over her confectionary shop in

46 HerStoria magazine Spring 2010 www.herstoria.com spinsters having contributed to the Department of Social Security all their lives to the tune of around £4.5 million p.a. Membership of White’s Spinsters’ Union was 125,000 in 1938 and there were nearly one hundred branches. The Mechanics Institute was also the venue for a lecture given by London-based suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett to the Bradford Philosophical Society in 1873. Lidget Green, the meeting initiated a the quietude and graces so becoming to campaign to introduce an annual ten Proceed east along Bridge Street, past …(a woman’s) beauty.’ The newspaper shillings (fifty pence) pension for all City Hall until you reach St Georges Hall. warned that it was ‘the shape of things women at age fifty-five. Interest in the to come.’ In fact, it wasn’t, quite. There idea gained national attention and the 13 St George’s Hall were no more large meetings about Association ran until 1958. Concerned women’s suffrage here or anywhere in that only a few women qualified for In 1830—where the steps now stand— Bradford until more than a decade later. a state pension, in the 1930s White this spot was acclaimed the best In November 1881, St George’s organised a Spinsters’ Union. At that time, place in Bradford for catching trout Hall was the location of another huge out of around 175,000 single women from the local streams. This hall, built meeting, this time 3,000-strong, at aged fifty-five to sixty-five, only 80,000 in1853 and one of the largest public which Bradford’s Provisional Women’s qualified for a pension and the rest had halls in Britain at that time, was the Suffrage Committee was established. to keep working, go on public assistance, venue for some important meetings This was the start of local women’s beg or find a generous husband. This in Bradford women’s early history. own organised struggle for the vote. was despite many of these ineligible On May 24 1869, a grand celebratory By 1910 there was much suffragist meeting was held for and suffragette action in the city. Bradford’s Liberal MP Popular meetings were held here and Edward Miall who had just speakers travelled to Bradford from won his seat. Women saw across the UK. On January 13 1910 two him as the means to get the suffragettes hid under the platform for vote and this 4,000-strong twenty-two hours until, grubby and gathering seemed to hungry, they launched themselves promise a new era. Women out to heckle Prime Minister Asquith were transformed by at a Liberal rally, protesting that he seeing what ‘we’ could was not doing enough for women. do together. Edward Miall MP spoke: 14 Law Courts Happy will be the day Finally behind the Victoria Hotel when in England… were the old Law Courts. Some of the and throughout the women tried here include suffragette world… woman Irene Casey who in 1913 was sentenced takes her real and to three months hard labour for setting proper position – as fire to a letterbox in Peel Place. In Armley companion and men’s jail she went on hunger strike and was helpmeets in national so ill that after six days she was released. affairs…We shall have In the 1980s some women peace gentler politics when protestors were tried for demonstrating the gentle sex takes in nearby Forster Square, where they had to politics. dressed as teddy bears, a pantomime This meeting in horse and a sugar plum fairy. Still Bradford was reported resplendent in fancy dress, legal history nationwide. In the opinion was made as one woman won the of the right-wing Globe, right to keep her teddy bear head on. at the event ‘all the horror She claimed that it was a hat and, as of women’s emancipation a woman, she was entitled to wear a could be seen.’ It said that hat in court. Her right was upheld. the cheering and shouting Poster for Spinster’s Rally organised by Florence White. showed women ‘losing all West Yorkshire Archive Service, Bradford (78D86/1/3) their natural dignity … [and]

HerStoria magazine Spring 2010 47 a quarter were in Yorkshire, mainly in BONUS LOCATIONS the textile towns. So we can imagine Need to Know that lots of women textile workers If you can to extend the walk would have come here from their mills, by around forty-five minutes, stroll in their clogs, to pick up leaflets or north up Cheapside and Manor attend meetings. From 1907 the WSPU Dr Jo Stanley, Row from Forster Square. harnessed the political energy of mill FRHisS, is a girls through a major recruiting drive writer and Manor Row, Grammar School House in the north led by Annie Kenney and creative Adela Pankhurst. In June 1908 600 local historian. You Dorothy Keeling (1881-1967), women went to London for the WSPU can find out social worker, was born at Grammar demonstration in Hyde Park. Bradford more about her School House, where her father was women carried a banner designed by at headmaster of Bradford’s Boys’ Grammar Sylvia Pankhurst to include Bradford’s www.jostanley.biz. She is Honorary School. After time spent as a workhouse coat of arms. From September 1908 Research Fellow at Lancaster visitor, Dorothy joined the Bradford Bradford council forbade suffragettes University and her books about Guild of Help, a movement founded to continue chalking the pavements, gender and the sea include Hello in 1905 to foster cross-class friendship so WSPU members came in to Sailor! The hidden history of gay life at and social betterment. She moved these premises to get blackboards sea, with Paul Baker (2002) and Bold to Manchester, and then to Liverpool which they set up in the streets— in her Breeches: Women Pirates Across where she became a significant inventing a form of mobile graffiti. the Ages (Ed, 1995,1996, 2003). figure in social reform in that city. Bradford Girls’ Grammar School Currently Jo is writing Risk! Women Eldon Place on the wartime seas, to be published Around the back of Manningham by Yale University Press. With a Next head towards the Manningham Lane/Eldon Terrace is Hallfield Road. side-career in lifestory exploration, Lane junction with Eldon Place, then In 1875, a new Bradford Girls’ Jo also wrote Writing out your walk left (west) up to Eldon Terrace. Grammar School, founded by the life: a guide to writing creative Here was St Monica’s Home For Fallen Bradford Ladies’ Association, was autobiography (Scarlet Press, 1998). Women until at least 1969. It is likely established here. It opened in to have been in Edith Cavell House, September in cramped accommodation This walk has benefited from the which in 1989 became a crèche for at Hallfield Road School, attached to help of Carol Greenwood and Bradford council workers, and is Busbys Department Store (formerly Helen Broadhead, the late Maureen currently a centre for children. on Manningham Lane). The local Galvin, Deb Collet and Julie Pryke. The National Union of Women’s newspaper envisaged the new school Suffrage Societies (suffragists who as producing girls ‘fit to be intelligent believed in constitutional methods of companions for intelligent men’. The protest) was located at 5 Eldon Terrace school moved to new buildings in 1936. from at least 1913. By that time Greater The Labour MP Barbara Castle Bradford had four NUWSS branches. (1910-2002) attended Bradford Girls’ Grammar School, eventually becoming Proceed east down Eldon Place and Head Girl. In her final year she stand at the junction of Eldon Place organised a mock election to coincide and Manningham Lane. If you look with the 1929 election, with herself right (south) to where the high-banked standing as the labour candidate. row of shops is now, you can see at Barbara Castle credited her years in 61 Manningham Lane the former site Bradford, the ‘cradle of socialism’ and of the Women’s Social and Political location for the founding conference Union offices (the suffragettes, whose of the Independent Labour Party in militant protests were at odds with the 1893, as the formative years of her life. quieter tactics of the older NUWSS). Barbara was elected MP for Blackburn The WSPU was the radical suffrage in1945, retained her seat for thirty four organisation begun in 1903, led by years, and became a cabinet minister in Emmeline Pankhurst who visited Harold Wilson’s government. As Minister Bradford several times. The WSPU office for Transport she promoted legislation was there in at least 1908, and probably on equal pay and as Secretary of State 1906, when the branch was formed. for Social Services she introduced the Barbara Castle campaigning in the sixties. Image courtesy Among its first members wasJulia payment of child benefit to mothers. of Blackburn Labour Party Varley. Many WSPU branches were When she died, aged ninety-one, she founded around this time and of the left her papers and political diaries fifty-eight WSPU branches in the UK, to the University of Bradford.

48 HerStoria magazine Spring 2010 www.herstoria.com