BRADFORD: BACKGROUND & BRITAIN’S WOOL TRADE

It’s in the very nature of this green and pleasant land
you’re bound to find a watercourse runs very close at hand—
our rivers and canals are full of good ol’ English rain,
but if you come to Bradford you will look for one in vain!
From somewhere up near Allerton, I tumble down to town
but the pleasure ends near Four Lane Ends as I’m shoved underground.
And what goes on as I flow on
nobody gives a damn
Instead of being a chuckling stream
a sewer’s what I am!
Lyrics from “Bradford Beck,” composed and sung by Eddie Lawler, 2002.

    Bradford grew incredibly during the Industrial Revolution, exploding from a population of just 13,264 in the 1801 census to 104,000 by 1850.  Historically a center for Yorkshire-region wool, it had started to become the national center for woolens and worsteds  in the 18th century as new mechanical processing replaced the hand-spinning techniques that were still guild-protected in the older wool centers to the south. As steam power began to be used around 1800, Bradford and its neighbor Leeds also found themselves to be perfectly positioned “where the coal supply of south Yorkshire [met] the wool supply of north Yorkshire.”  By 1819, Bradford was considered the “centre and principal seat of the stuff  trade in the kingdom.” 
    The wool trade continued to centralize around Bradford and Leeds throughout the 19th century, each specializing in certain types of production—Bradford’s specialty was made clear by its nickname “Worstedopolis.” As the processing centers for most of Britain’s wool, it would be hard to overstate the importance of these two cities to the economy of the Empire.  “Only light and frivolous persons,” one historian wrote sternly, “will consider wool as too slight a basis for the foundation stone of the empire on which the sun never sets.”  Wool had long been the country’s chief export, and poetic descriptions from prior centuries had called it “the flower and strength and revenue and blood of England” and “eminently the foundation of English riches.”   Wool from the British Isles had been valued on the Continent since Roman days, and since the 14th century the official seat of the Lord Chancellor of England has been the ‘Woolsack,’ quite literally a sack filled with wool as a symbol the nation’s trade and wealth.   Through the rest of the 19th century and into the 20th, Bradford would have a key role in producing that wealth.

BRADFORD: PREPARING FOR THE BRADFORD BECK

    To see what we could of Bradford’s underlying history, John, Chris, and I hoped to visit the Bradford Beck, a river that now runs underneath Bradford in a series of culverts and bypasses. The river flows toward Bradford in a nearly straight line from the west, curves in a U-shape beneath the very heart of the city, and then meanders north-east to join the River Aire, about four miles away. Along the way it passes nearly underneath the 19th-century City Hall building, and flows along the side of the 15th-century Bradford Cathedral.
    We met with Will, a Bradford native, who would guide us through the Beck. “It’s not as big as Sheffield’s tunnels,” he told us, “but it’s a lot longer. It goes about six or seven kilometers underground.”
    With Will, we had two cars, which was convenient in allowing us to leave one car at our exit, instead of having to walk back wet to one car through sub-freezing weather. (It would be much warmer than that underground, protected from the wind and warmed by the city above.) We deposited the car and drove back toward our entrance, where we suited up with hip- or chest-high waders, jackets, gloves, hats and headlamps, a carbon monoxide and hydrogen sulfide gas meter, and more.
    In the parking lot where were getting dressed, our preparations seemed a little ludicrous for what was, essentially, a walk through a city. We’d never be more than a few dozen linear feet distant from busy roads and sidewalks where people in normal clothes went about their lives without worrying about backup headlamps, spare batteries, or gas meters. Nonetheless, I was enjoying our preparations. They helped to accent the fact that we weren’t simply visiting the Bradford that everyone else sees. Venturing into this unfrequented and usually unseen layer of the urban fabric, we would indeed be cut off from the surface, and the fact that our destination was so removed from the contemporary, aboveground city made it all the easier for me to imagine that we were actually journeying into the city’s past.
    When we were finally ready, we climbed down an embankment and into shallow but fast-moving water in a wide open-cut channel. We followed it downstream, and soon came to the beginning of the main culvert under Ingleby Road. We were under the eastern neighborhood of Four Lane Ends; we would not come back aboveground until we had passed Canal Road near Frizinghall, having covered more than half of the distance between the Bradford city center and the Bradford Beck’s outfall into the River Aire.

BRADFORD: WOOL PRODUCTION AND BRADFORD’S EARLY HISTORY

    Between 1066, when the De Laci (or De Lacy) patriarch had come to the country with William the Conqueror, and 1311, when the last heir of the family died, the entire region under which we walked had been the estate of the De Lacis. The region was conducive to sheep farming and many of their tenants and burgesses raised sheep. In the first recorded use of the Bradford Beck to power wool-processing machinery, the De Lacis built a water-powered fulling mill, of which their many sheep-herding tenants and burgesses were permitted free use.     Fulling was a difficult process of agitating and beating wool cloth to both lock the fibers together and to clean them; it was a vital finishing step for cloth woven or knitted from yarn, and was even more important in the process of making more primitive felted cloth.
    The labor-saving water mill was the first step in the centralization of the region’s wool productions. Along with a mill for grinding grain (also built by the De Lacis, and powered by a waterwheel on the Beck), it was the focal point for a slow agglomeration of sheep-farmers and others into a village that would eventually grow into the world’s largest center for processing wool. By the early 16th century, Bradford had already begun to grow on the basis of its wool and cloth production. “[It is] a pretty, quick, market town….It standeth much by clothing,” the writer John Leland wrote in his Itinerary after a visit in 1536. 
    In many respects, Bradford was ideally located in terms of its natural resources. The Bradford Beck, though the largest, was not the only stream serving the town; there were more than a dozen tributaries that fed into it, ranging in size from the large Bowling Beck to small streams known as “sykes.”    As in Nottingham, this plethora of watercourses assisted in irrigation and in raising livestock, and because they were generally fast-flowing, with large vertical drops from the surrounding hills, these streams also easily served to power watermills. The many streams also helped in washing wool, a process that required constantly moving water to carry away the large deposits of grease, lanolin, and dirt that accumulated on sheep. More importantly, the water of the region was particularly soft, which was ideal for washing wool. Along with these natural advantages, “the persevering industry of the inhabitants, and the abundant supplies of water-power, of coal, and of building stone….maintained Bradford in its position as one of the great manufacturing towns of West Riding,” wrote the historian Thomas Baines about 17th- and early 18th-century Bradford.
    However, Bradford lacked a navigable watercourse. The Beck was rapid but shallow, despite its many tributaries. Leeds was less than ten miles away from Bradford, but it was connected to the coast by the large River Aire, and this was probably a factor in the huge success of its cloth market—described by Daniel Defoe in 1724 as “a Prodigy of its Kind, and perhaps not to be equaled in the World.” 
    Doubtless inspired by the success of its neighbor, Bradford began two ambitious projects in the 1770s: the construction of Piece Hall, where weavers and merchants could buy and sell “pieces” of finished cloth, and the Bradford Canal, which would connect the city to the River Aire and to the Liverpool & Leeds Canal. Piece Hall, finished in 1773, was one of the first dedicated marketplace buildings of its kind in the country, though soon similar venues would be built in many other cities as well.  Even more important was the Bradford Canal, completed in 1774. It ran four miles to the Aire, and was probably the most vital infrastructure investment that Bradford could have made for its future. Via the Aire, the canal connected to the Humber Estuary on the east coast, and in 1816, the completion of the Leeds & Liverpool Canal connected it with the Liverpool’s port on the west coast as well. The water of the Bradford Beck was diverted into the canal to fill it, and the cheap waterborne shipping the canal provided—on Bradford Beck water—was in a large part what paved the way for the explosion of population and industry over the next seventy-five years.

BRADFORD: STEAM AND SEWAGE

    Where we had first entered the culvert, it had been constructed of large stone blocks, with a flat floor and a rounded stone arch at the top. The shape and composition of the tunnel varied widely as we waded along, however, ranging from rounded brick conduits that looked like Victorian-era sewers to stone-walled, flat-ceilinged sections that had clearly been open channels before being covered. In some areas the stream ran through foundations of old buildings, which may or may not have still existed on the surface. Shafts of sunlight found us once or twice; some of the older industrial buildings had been built over the Beck before it was completely covered, and when one of them was torn down and replaced with a smaller building, small gaps were left. Side channels connected to the main tunnel occasionally, either outlets for anonymous, culverted tributary streams, or overflow outfalls for the sewer system. Though I couldn’t identify it, I knew that one of the inflowing channels we saw was the Goit, a now-culverted bypass channel that served as a millrace for watermills from as early as the 14th century well into the 19th.
    Steam power had begun to replace waterpower in Bradford in 1798, when the first factory powered by a steam engine was set up on Edmund Street, just a few hundred feet south of where we walked through the tunnel.    (The first attempt to bring in steam power for a mill had been in 1793, but a conservative group of merchants had brought suit against the mill owner to block the installation of the engine, worrying that “the smoke from the engine furnace would be a nuisance.” ) At the time there was still only limited mechanization in the wool industry; fulling was done with water or steam-powered machinery, of course, but the 1801 the census of Bradford recorded only one spinning mill in operation—most was still done by hand.
    By 1841, however, there were thirty-eight worsted spinning mills in Bradford itself, seventy in the region, and an incredible two-thirds of all England’s wool was being processed in or near the city.  By 1850 the city had 129 mills—now running on steam—employing thousands of workers, and drawing labor from throughout Europe.  The result was an eight-fold increase over the 1801 population in a period of just fifty years, with over 100,000 people in the city by mid-century; this would double again to over 200,000 by the end of the century. 
    As with other industrial boom-towns, the surge in population turned the town’s streets and rivers into open sewers. As early as 1837, a sanitary surveyor declared Bradford to be “the most filthy town I visited," full of “open cesspits, pig styes and slaughterhouses and effluent-laden watercourses.”  The greasy wastes from the wool industry were a particular problem, and the nature of the Beck changed almost overnight. Residents of the town could still remember catching trout in a sparkling stream when they’d been boys, but by 1840 both the Beck and the Aire had been turned into “the receptacles of all kinds of filth, and tippings, and the trout, graylings, eels and tench, were exterminated.”   
    By the 1850s, it was even worse. “This brook at present runs the colour of ink,” declared a reporter for London’s Morning Chronicle about the Beck.  The same waters fed the Bradford Canal, and the industrial pollution actually made the waterway flammable. Local boys would light it on fire for fun, and according to testimony at an 1867 commission on river pollution, the flames would rise six feet and would run along the water “for many yards, like a will-o-the-wisp.” Canal boats nearby would be “so enveloped in flame as to frighten persons on board.” 
    Even more dangerous than fire or industrial pollution was disease. “[L]ike a filthy open sewer, [the canal] runs along the border of the town, breathing pestilence and death,” testified another resident in 1866.   This was hardly an exaggeration. As happened with all cities of the era whose expanded population created irredeemably unsanitary conditions, cholera, typhoid, and other diseases were spread through tainted water. Significant cholera epidemics had already occurred in 1832, 1849, 1853, 1854 and 1856. Partly because of diseases, the life expectancy was the lowest in the region, with an average of only about eighteen years. Less than one-third of the children of textile workers would live past the age of fifteen.
    In 1867, the city prohibited the use of Bradford Beck water in the canal, which soon ran dry. The Beck’s only real utility to the town was now as a main sewer, and in that capacity the stream served as the depository for all of the town’s  waste. Even when sewer pipes had first been installed in Bradford, in the mid-19th century, they merely dumped the (untreated) sewage directly into the Beck, to the deep unhappiness of downstream landowners on both the Beck and the Aire. In 1869 one of these landowners, a William Stansfield of Esholt Hall, obtained an injunction mandating that Bradford treat its sewage before releasing it into the river.  The first treatment plant proved to be a failure as the grease from the wool mills made the sewage exceptionally difficult to treat, but continued injunctions forced the city to continue investing in treatment facilities. Ironically, in 1899, the city took over William Stansfield’s Esholt estate on the Aire for a new treatment plant, and the Esholt Sewage Works continues to be Bradford’s main treatment plant today.  In the 1920s, the three-mile Esholt Sewage Disposal tunnel was dug to directly connect the city’s sewer system to the Esholt works, and the Bradford Beck was finally freed of its sewerage burden.  By this time, however, the river had already been completely culverted through the center of town, and so few fully appreciated the change that had taken place.

BRADFORD: AT THE END AND THE BEGINNING

    By now, the tunnel we had come through had varied from all the way from 20th-century concrete with rusted steel girders supporting brick-arch roofs to sections that seemed drawn from the Neolithic era, with rough blocks forming the side walls and huge rectangular slabs of quarried stone stretching ten feet across from wall to wall to form the top of the culvert. We knew we were under Centenary Square at the heart of Bradford, however, when we came out into a magnificent chamber of stone-work arches. It looked like the crypt of a remarkably beautiful cathedral, though in fact the Bradford Cathedral was still a short distance ahead. Instead, we were almost directly under Bradford’s ornate Victorian-era City Hall. In addition the beautiful construction of this underground room—one of the first sections to be covered in the late 19th century—another landmark that showed our location was the confluence of our tunnel with another that contained an almost equally powerful flow of water. This was the Bowling Beck, the Bradford Beck’s largest tributary.
    The combined flow of water, we quickly realized, was powerful enough that it could actually move us slowly along even when we stood still, with both boots planted; there was not enough traction on the slippery floor to resist the push of the current. This made our wading more difficult, and when we reached a wider section we decided to rest along the raised stone path at the side. Small, fibrous tree roots had infiltrated through the rotten mortar between stones, and stalactite formations showed the age of the tunnel. We were approximately next Bradford Cathedral, the oldest building in Bradford. This meant that we were also at Bradford’s origin, as the “broad ford” that gave both the city and the river their names is generally agreed to have been just at the spot where the Beck passes the Cathedral. Somewhere very close to where we sat was the ancient site of the crossing, the original center of Bradford.
    Parts of the Cathedral date back to the 15th century, when it was still the Parish Church of St. Peter, and the 15th century church replaced another from the 14th century or before. Fragments of Saxon crosses have been found on the same site, meaning that some sort of settlement had existed here since at least the 10th century, and probably much earlier than that.
    I looked at the water flowing over my boots. For more than a millennium, people had been right here with this same flow of water, dipping their feet in it, drinking from it, fouling it with waste, wading through it, fishing in it, washing in it.
    In the light of my headlamp, it still sparkled.