This film was made by members of Halifax Cine Club during the heyday of the Club, when it expanded after the war, especially during the 1950s. It was one of many similar clubs across Yorkshire, especially strong in West Yorkshire where every city and town had a cine club.  At its height the Club had nearly a hundred members.  As well as holding their own meetings and social gatherings, with annual public film shows, the clubs would get together for regional events and competitions.  The Club...

This film was made by members of Halifax Cine Club during the heyday of the Club, when it expanded after the war, especially during the 1950s. It was one of many similar clubs across Yorkshire, especially strong in West Yorkshire where every city and town had a cine club.  At its height the Club had nearly a hundred members.  As well as holding their own meetings and social gatherings, with annual public film shows, the clubs would get together for regional events and competitions.  The Club continues to this day.  For more on Halifax Cine Club see the history by two club members, Ernest Jennings and Peter Holroyd, the Context for Supa Bupa and also the transcript of an interview with, Peter and Kate Holroyd Interview (2007).  

An important feature of cine clubs is that they were usually steeped in local history, and they often made films about the history of the places where they lived.  This film is a good example of this, with great care going into presenting a rich historical account of the wool industry in the Halifax area – Sheffield Movie Makers made a similar film on the history of cutlery making in Sheffield, Seven Hundred Years. 

The film highlights some fascinating aspects of the production of woollen articles in the area going back 2,500 years.   By the 1500s the West Riding of Yorkshire was England's third most prosperous woollen textile manufacturing district, with Halifax the most productive area.  Much of the wool was exported to Europe, through places like Hull: half the population of England was directly or indirectly dependent on trade with the Netherlands.  Yet during this period cloth exports began to overtake wool exports, putting a greater premium on domestic weaving.  At the time there were legal restrictions on how many looms a household could have, and also restrictions were brought in for the transportation of wool.  The middlemen who transported the wool to towns to be sold were known as broggers – apparently William Shakespeare’s father, John, as well as being a glove maker, was also a part time brogger.   These were often guilty of hanging on to the wool in order to artificially raise the price, a practice known as forestalling (where have we heard that before?). 

Because of this a law was passed in 1552 to outlaw these middlemen.  In effect the law was hardly put into operation as it made the business impractical.  But Halifax had its own law enacted in 1555, referred to in the film, which allowed broggers to operate in the area, some twenty years or so before other areas.  This was also the year that the first Cloth Hall was built in Halifax by the Waterhouse family of Shibden Hall.  As the Lords of the Manor of Halifax and Heptonstall, they could claim one penny from each piece of cloth sold: quite a fortune given that Halifax market was selling five times more cloth than sold at Leeds and eight times that at Bradford.  For an easy accessible online history see David Hey (References).

 

Also featured in the film are the causeys, or flag paths, made with flat slabs of stone. These provided packhorse and pannier ways in the Pennines and adjacent areas such as the North Yorkshire Moors.  Given that by 1700 textiles employed more people than any other industry in Britain, and accounted for 70% of all domestic exports, these come in for a fair bit of wear and tear.  This was especially true of West Yorkshire, responsible for 20% of all textile production – increasing to a third by 1770.  So in 1735 an Act was passed “for repairing and widening the road from the Town of Rochdale in the County Palatine of Lancaster, leading over a certain craggy mountain called Blackstone Edge, in the same county, and from thence to the Towns of Halifax and Ealand in the County of York'.  Further similar Acts followed, including turnpike acts for the construction of toll roads.

The development of roads led to the old packhorse trails becoming disused and lost. Fortunately the South Pennine Packhorse Trails Trust has been set up to record the public rights of these trails, putting them on a map, and physically restoring the routes.  A photo of one can be found on Alan Burnett’s News From Nowhere website

Two other related features in the film worthy of special comment are the Gibbet and the tenterframes.  The Gibbet was a sort of forerunner to the French guillotine: the replica, built on the original site, looks very much like it.  In fact the guillotine, named after Dr Guillotine but devised by a committee, was directly influenced by it – although initially used for a rather different class of victim!  (It was still in use as late as 1977).  The Gibbet too was a contraption for decapitation, and the Halifax Gibbet was the first of its kind in England, going back at least to the 16th century, as well as being the last one in operation.  It was used as an alternative to beheading by axe or sword – such is the way of the progress of civilisation.  Gibbeting was originally a common law punishment for all kinds of offences, although Cromwell banned it for petty theft, presumably when it was last used in 1650 – there is a story that Cromwell's body was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and was beheaded.  Gibbets were often placed next to public highways, such as crossroads, for deterrent value.  Andrew Plumridge gives a full account, including a list of those who suffered being beheaded by it, and this: Halifax's reputation for strict law enforcement was noted by the "Water Poet" John Taylor, who penned the Beggar's Litany: "From Hell, Hull, and Halifax, Good Lord, deliver us!"  Why Hull?  Apparently Hull ‘law enforcers’ were also notorious for their strictness.

This leads us nicely on to tenterframes, as Daniel Defoe, in his record of Halifax given in his A tour thro' the whole island of Great Britain, maintains that “it was first erected purely, or at least principally, for such thieves as were apprehended stealing cloth from the tenters”.  These large outdoor structures were made mainly for drying kersey, a hardwearing and inexpensive woollen fabric, often used for military uniforms.  By the 16th century Halifax and the Calder Valley was the largest producer of kersey in England.  It is from these that the phrase being on ‘tenter hooks’ derives: being stretched on the metal hooks used to fix the cloth to the frame.  Fortunately the phrase is only used in a figurative sense – although who knows whether the good citizens of Halifax might once have given it a literal meaning.

The film betrays some of the common characteristics of documentaries of the time, especially with the commentary, which was added at a later date.  This was done by Club member Charles Thomas  – on whom see the Context for Glenys’s Birthday.   Charles, although coming from a well-to-do family, went to elocution lessons, and in his commentary uses Received Pronunciation (RP) or ‘Standard English’: a Yorkshire accent is reserved for the readings from Daniel Defoe, who was born and brought up in London!  RP was early on adopted by Lord Reith at the BBC, and practised by the BBC until quite recently: they did not really officially drop it until 1982. This was basically typical public school pronunciation of the Victorian period (although it can be traced back to the eighteenth-century). It was common on BBC radio and early TV, and in the public information films of the time.  Originally the commentary was on a separate magnetic tape, and when the film was shown the projector had to be run at the correct speed to allow for audio synchronisation.

One wonders whether speaking the commentary in this way was influenced by the reception that Halifax born Wilfred Pickles received when he was employed in 1941 for BBC broadcasts – to make it difficult for the Germans to imitate!  Apparently, many weren’t happy with Pickles, as Melanie East puts it, “An indignant public rejected Pickles as a national newsreader and some listeners actually questioned the accuracy of the news when Pickles read it.”  This despite recent estimates suggesting that only 2% of the UK population speak RP.  In fact the Yorkshire accent of Pickles, which can still be heard in the recordings of these broadcasts that still exist, is not that strong. 

It is now claimed that BBC broadcasters use a neutralized version of their own regional accents that is intelligible to all listeners.  Nevertheless, despite a move towards the acceptance of regional accents – listen to the song ‘RIP RP’ by the Leeds based band Chumbawamba – this remains a highly contentious issue.   The fact remains that having a strong regional accent can be a disadvantage, as witnessed by the large agreement with Middlesbrough Head teacher Carol Walker, who recently decided to teach her pupils “about knowing when it is appropriate to use one voice rather than another.”

References

Ernest E Jennings and Peter R Holroyd, Halifax Cine & Video Club, 75 Years Of Film Making, 1938 - 2013

Daniel Defoe: The Weaving Country around Halifax

News From Nowhere

Received Pronunciation, British Library

Melanie East, The Rise, Reign, and (declining?) Reputation of Received Pronunciation, 2008

David Hey Yorkshire from A.D. 1000

The Piece Hall Halifax; Its History And Importance

Calderdale History Online

Solved: John Shakespeare's "reversal of fortune"

South Pennine Packhorse Trails Trust

Andrew Plumridge The Halifax gibbet