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THE industrial revolution
everywhere led to a vast
disturbance and new assortment of population.
Country people deprived of their domestic industries
flocked to the manufacturing mills and to the
mining and ironwork localities. In the Bradford
district the revolution seemingly worked itself out
up to about 1830 more gradually than in the
majority of similar cases. In this district the old
communities were, till the time mentioned, half
rural. Bradford itself was surrounded with small
farms, all of which are now covered with streets,
roads, railways, and buildings, or as parks dedicated
to urban amenity and recreation. Sanitation did
not proceed pari passu with enlargement. The
formerly clean waters of becks were polluted, and
the necessity came for bringing pure water supply
from afar. The canal connecting Bradford with
Shipley was a stinking sink before it was remedied)
and so was the beck in the valley before it was
covered in, as earlier had been done with its
tributary rivulets which passed through the town,
and which old people said they saw running clear
and bordered with banks beautified by wild flowers.
As far up as Keighley the river Aire itself was so
polluted that trout could not live in it. The whole
district is hilly and naturally attractive, even to a
Highlander, but it got sadly spoiled by smoke-laden
atmosphere and polluted waters before energetic,
costly, and, to a large degree, effective means were
taken to remedy what had grown into intolerable
evils, and to restore to the scenery a part of what
God had originally bestowed upon it.
The earliest incomers were
from the rural
districts of the West Riding itself. They were the
same in race dialect and habits as the native
population. Next came others from both the north
and south of England to try their luck in a place
which offered many chances. So far the gathering
muster was almost exclusively English. After 1830
the flowing-in stream changed its character a good
deal. Scotchmen, Irish, and Germans poured in,
first in driblets, and then in large numbers. In
1860, Mr Robert Milligan, the head of one of the
largest merchant firms in the town, kept in his
lobby at Acacia, with honest pride, the travelling
merchant's pack with which he had began his
strictly honourable and exceptionally successful
career in England. Other Scotchmen of the past
generation were then leading merchants, manufacturers, doctors, ministers, professors, teachers,
and shopkeepers, or trusted officials in various
kinds of employment. With their better education
and, as a rule, prudent conduct, the Scotch incomers
had good chances of prospering. They made themselves respected. So did the Germans whether
they belonged to the Teutonic race or the ubiquitous
race of Jacob. The Scotch mingled, as they were
sure to do, with the native population, and kept
their names and numbers, but after the defeat of
France and the founding of the German Empire,
many of the sons of the Fatherland, taking with
them the commercial and mechanical knowledge
they acquired in England, returned home to take
part in the fierce trade rivalry which has since been
going on between their country and ours.
It is a probable supposition
that when the
primitive race of cave dwellers who have left so many
traces behind them, came into our land, there was a
broad dry land connection between England and
France at the Strait of Dover, and another between
Scotland and Ireland at the promontory of Cantyre.
On this supposition the United Kingdom in a far
off era would have been an antler-like horn of the
European continent. But as far back as we have
any gleam of historic light to guide us, Great
Britain and the Lesser Britain, or Ireland, were
separate islands as they are now, and the diverse
races which founded our composite nation came in
at successive periods by sea. Ireland and Alba
or Scotland north of the firths of Forth and Clyde
escaped the Roman Empire rule to which the rest
of Great Britain had to submit. It is likely that
they were places of asylum to British fugitives who
rebelled against Roman rule, or had committed
crimes which put their lives in peril from Roman
justice. The Romans meditated the conquest of
Ireland, but the intention was never carried out.
The subjection of that country to England in the
reign of Henry II. was brought about, not by
Saxons, but by Norman and Welsh adventurers,
who, in a generation or two, became more Irish
than the Irish themselves. The conquest and
settlement of Ulster, and the "strike down the
Amalekites" of Cromwell, might, with more truth,
be called the "Saxon Conquest." It is a strange
fact that the early conquest was nominally carried
out with Papal warrant to bring Ireland under
complete subjection to the Holy See, and that the
latter conquest was nominally intended to make
Ireland a Protestant country. Irish politics got
curiously twisted with Irish religion. Had the
audaciously priest-predicted son been given to Mary
Tudor, and the anti-Protestant policy of her reign
been continued with success under her successor, it
is more than likely that Ireland would have become
ultra-Protestant. As matters otherwise turned out,
Ireland fought for Catholicism and the cause of
expelled James II. and his successors. For all the
bitter hatreds begotten by race and religious
differences, plottings, rebellions, and suppressions
thereof, the Irish did their share as soldiers, sailors,
colonists, and daring adventurers in defending and
extending the British Empire.
The pacific invasion of
England by masses of Irish
working people, who came to stay, commenced in
last century, when the industrial revolution was
pretty far advanced. Previously there used to
come bands of harvesters, men and women, who
returned home with the wages they had earned in
England when the crops were gathered in. Railway construction, mining, manufacturing, caused by
degrees many of them to take up permanent
residence among the "Saxons." Next followed the
dispersion which the potato famine time enforced,
and ever after the Irish invasion of England
assumed, in places, a conquering aspect. In the
worsted district, however, the Irish incomers found
themselves submerged amidst a native population
that always could, and always calmly did, hold the
first place. Divided between Church of England
and Dissenting Churches, that population was very
Protestant, and yet very tolerant. As far as I am
aware, there was not, before the incoming of the
Irish, a single Catholic place of worship in the whole
parish of Bradford, which was of far wider extent than
the area of the town. Church and Dissent, while
fighting between themselves on other questions,
were united in defence of the Revolution Settlement
and the Protestant Faith. The Irish incomers had
to put up with the Gunpowder Plot annual saturnalia of the 5th of November, when the youth of the
town and district indulged in a sportive riot of
crackers and bonfires which often led to police court
cases, and sometimes produced serious injuries, or
ended in tragedies. But, on the other hand, they
could be a little riotous themselves on St. Patrick's
Day, and noisy enough at municipal and Parliamentary elections. From Ulster and Dublin came
Orangemen who, although comparatively few in
number, exercised counteracting influence as men of
a much higher standard of acquired knowledge and
superior social status. As a body, the Catholic
Irishmen sympathised with all the separatist and
rebellious proceedings of their people at home, and,
when they got them, gave their votes to the English
candidates for seats in Parliament who promised the
biggest surrender. But in every-day life and conduct
they were a hard-working, orderly, warm-hearted,
lovable people, who attended well to their family and
religious duties, and sent a good deal of the money
they earned to old parents and needy friends they
left behind them in Ireland. Under the provocation
of what they had just cause to consider a gross
attack on the Catholic Church, they got up a tremendous riot, when the Frenchman called Baron de Carnin came to hold open-air meetings in Bradford,
at which to denounce papal policy, Jesuit intrigues,
and alleged immoralities of continental monks and
nuns. But they learned moderation and respect
for freedom of speech from their surroundings and
the manner in which their most Radical friends and
allies resented the mobbing of Baron de Gamin,
whose worst allegations were mere echoes of the
language used by the anti-clericals of France, Italy,
and Spain. Having learned by sharp experience
that to get they must give toleration, and that in
respect to freedom of speech and action within the
wide limits of law there was a broad difference
between Bradford and Cork, they kept prudently
quiet when Gavazzi thundered to a crowded audience
against the Church from which he had openly
revolted, belauded Cavour and Mazzini, crowned
Garibaldi with the hero chaplet of Italian patriotism,
and in floods of stirring eloquence advocated the
complete unity and independence of the whole
Italian peninsula, which in a short time afterwards
came to be effected.
Those of the young people
from Ireland who
entered into domestic service quickly learned their
various duties, and, remaining true to their Church,
assimilated themselves with their new environment,
and, in a manner reminding one of Highland clannishness, attached themselves to the families they
served. When we married, my young wife brought
with her as our servant, Kate Carty, from Nenagh,
Tipperaray, who had been servant to her father
and mother for three years. Kate and her young
mistress were of the same age. They had been
girls together, and had, under Mrs Aspinall's super-
vision, gone through the same excellent English
domestic training. Kate remained with us for
seventeen years. She went with us to the Cape,
came back with us to England, and when we came
from England to Inverness, she accompanied us, and
stopped with us until her mother, getting helpless
by age and infirmity, called her home to her birth-place in a manner which a dutiful and affectionate
only daughter felt at once bound to obey. She
saved while in our service a good bit over a
hundred pounds, which she took to Ireland with
her, and yet she had been annually paying out of
her not-exorbitant wages the rent of her mother's
little house and holding. Her day of departure
was a day of sorrow to my wife and myself, and,
still more so, to our large group of young children,
who looked upon her as a permanent and indispensable member of the family. She had been like a
sort of second mother to them all, but the boys were
her special favourites. She took one of them out to
the Cape, and two of them home, and these first
two were her special favourites until a younger boy
worked himself forward into the front rank, by promising to adopt her as his daughter. In telling them
the story of her early Irish life, and how the death
of her father had left her an orphan, four years old,
Willie cried out "Kate, I'll be your father."
That infantile promise of paternal protection tickled
Kate's fancy; but the little boy took a rather artful
advantage of the position he had so easily gained.
When she had to refuse any of his requests or to
rebuke his restlessness, he got round her by the
threat "Kate, I'll not be your father." |
