Brontës (22 page)

Much of the scenery remains as it was in the Brontës' day, but the insatiable greed of the twenty-first century is swallowing it up at a frightening pace. The narrow valleys were heavily wooded then but are now rapidly filling with housing estates; the River Worth and its tributaries, once powerful enough to drive the machinery that provided employment for most of the population, are considerably depleted by the building of reservoirs on the tops; even the very moors are under threat as giant wind turbines stalk the horizons, invading the wilderness and destroying the blanket bog upon which so much once familiar, but now rare wildlife depends.

Haworth itself has become a monument to the grosser excesses of the tourism industry: the village, surrounded by a sea of carparks, is often choked with coaches and cars; the shops and cafés, with a few honourable exceptions serving the people who live there, are full of tat, prostituting the Brontë name. It is the power of the legend, not the reality, that continues to lure the visitor to Haworth.

It requires some perseverance to find the remnants of the Brontës' Haworth,
¹⁴
though the distinctive shape of Main Street is still clearly visible, the houses following the contour of the road which snakes up the hill to the church. Tucked away in the valley bottom are some of the mills on which the local economy depended: Ebor Mill, owned for many generations by the Merrall family, and the vast complex of Bridgehouse Mills. Just above the latter and set well back from the road in several acres of grounds, now considerably reduced by new building, stands Woodlands, perhaps the most gracious mill owner's house in early nineteenth-century Haworth. It had a chequered history, changing hands according to the fortunes of trade.
¹⁵

From Bridgehouse the road begins to climb steeply and is lined with late-nineteenth-century cottages which overlook open fields where Haworth Fair was held in the Brontë era. Just below the junction with the bottom of Main Street was the old toll gate, its site marked by a white milestone in the wall; travellers, carriers and even pedestrians and animal droves were stopped at the toll gates and charged for the right to continue their
journey. At the junction itself the large, stone-built Hall Green Baptist Chapel, built in 1824, stands facing Haworth Old Hall, a seventeenth-century manor house which was divided into tenements in the Brontës' day. In front of the Old Hall, just along Sun Street, then known as Stubbing Lane, was the old village green and beyond that was a ducking well for nagging wives: both have long since disappeared. Sun Street is little changed, its cottages petering out as the road climbs along and up the hill, past the old Haworth Grammar School, to Marsh and Oxenhope.
¹⁶

A row of houses near the bottom of Main Street was demolished in the 1960s, but once past this point it remains much the same as it was in the Brontës' day. On each side of the road there is an unbroken stretch of two-storey cottages jostling for position with three-storey houses; most of them date from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The small frontages are deceptive, particularly on the lower side of Main Street, where the hill falls away so steeply that a house with only two or three storeys fronting the street sometimes has five or six storeys behind. Invariably built of stone, begrimed with the factory smoke and peat fires of many generations, the houses seem to crowd in over the narrow street separating them. The road itself, from Bridgehouse to the top of Main Street, was once paved with setts, rectangular blocks of stone larger and flatter than cobbles but much smaller than flags, though only the Main Street section has escaped tarmac today.
¹⁷
The hill rises so steeply that many of the shops and houses are only accessible by a series of steps and raised pavements built two or three feet above the road.

As late as 1850, there were still no sewers and few covered drains; the surface water, combined with household waste and what a report into the sanitation of Haworth politely called the ‘effluvium' of privies and midden-steads, ran along open channels and gutters down the streets. The alleys and sidestreets which once honeycombed the lower side and top of Main Street were simply narrow dirt tracks, six to eight feet wide, with a pavement of stone flags to keep the pedestrian out of the muck.
¹⁸

These have long gone and, as recently as the 1960s, so have the jumble of cottages, built round cobbled yards and reached by narrow alleyways and ginnels, which once covered the triangle of land at the top of Main Street between Changegate, West Lane and Back Lane (now North Street) and the hillside below.
¹⁹
This was the most populous part of Haworth in the nineteenth century where the working classes lived, the shopkeepers and professionals preferring the larger houses in Main Street and the outskirts
of the town. Most of the cottages were back-to-back and many had stone stairs and railed landings outside, with doors, separately numbered, at this level and in the cellar, indicating that, small though they were, they were shared by several families. The cellar dwellings, of which there were twenty-five in Haworth in 1850, consisted of just two rooms: damp, because they were below street level and poorly ventilated; one room would serve as a wool-combing shop, the other as kitchen, living room and bedroom for six or seven people.
²⁰

Ill health was exacerbated by the poor quality of the water supply. By 1850 there were eleven pumps, only nine of which were in use, and seven wells (one belonging to the parsonage) of which only two were public. One hundred and fifty inhabitants were dependent on the supply from Head Well which, in summer, ran so slowly that the poor had to start queuing there at two or three o'clock in the morning in order to get their water for the Monday wash; sometimes it ran so green and putrid that even the cattle refused to drink it. The water was tainted by the overflow from the midden-steads, which every house with access to a back yard seems to have possessed. These were walled enclosures into which all the solid household waste was thrown, including offal, ashes and the refuse of the privies. Every now and again, the local farmers would come round and take away the contents to spread on the fields, but sometimes the tips were overflowing, as in the case of the druggist's house where the midden-stead was actually against the back wall of the house and was piled up to the height of the larder window.
²¹
There was not a single water closet in the whole of Haworth and only sixty-nine privies: some two dozen houses, including the parsonage, had their own, but most households had to share and there were at least two instances where twenty-four households were sharing a single privy. The 1850 report notes that

Two of the privies used, by a dozen families each, are in the public street, not only within view of the houses, but exposed to the gaze of passers by, whilst a third, as though even such a situation were too private, is perched upon an eminence, commanding the whole length of the main street.
²²

It was no surprise to the inspector to find that the mortality rates in Haworth rivalled those in the worst districts of London: in Haworth, as Patrick was soon to discover, over forty-one per cent of children died before reaching their sixth birthday and the average age at death was twenty-five.
His own bereavements were no worse than those suffered by his parishioners.
²³

At the top of Main Street the road widens and divides into West Lane and Changegate. Among the houses and cottages are old warehouses three or four storeys high, with winches and pulleys set in the gables: here the wool, at varying stages of treatment, was stored. This part of Haworth is also notable for a remarkable number of public houses, perhaps to serve pedestrians who have slogged the three-quarters of a mile up the hill from the valley bottom. At the foot of the church steps is the Black Bull, notorious as the supposed haunt of Branwell Brontë, which then boasted its own barn, stables and brew-house; facing it is the King's Arms, where the manorial courts of Haworth were held.
²⁴

There has been a church, or more properly, a chapel-of-ease, in Haworth since medieval times, but the building during Patrick's ministry was substantially one of the eighteenth century. Only fifty-seven feet long and thirty-two feet wide internally, it was demolished in 1879 and swallowed up in a new church thirty-six feet longer and twenty feet wider; only the tower, with the addition of an extra few feet above the second window to take the clock, remains from the original church.
²⁵
The old church had a double-gabled roof with three arched windows in the gables facing out over the top of Haworth; on each side of the church there were six similar arched windows, all set with eighteenth-century glazing bars rather than leaded lights. With so many large windows, the interior should have been light and airy but, over the years, as the population increased, wooden galleries were built which effectively blocked out much of the light. On the north side, a butcher's shop and house, back kitchen, stable and privy belonging to Joseph Hartley stood so close to the church that they blocked up the windows and created what the parish clerk euphemistically called ‘an intolerable nuisance'.
²⁶

A row of pillars, supporting the roof, ran down the centre of the church and every available space was filled with waist-high box pews, each one painted with the name and address of its owner, who paid for the privilege of sitting in that particular pew for each of the three Sunday services. The square Brontë pew, with its green baize seats and worn hassocks, was on the east wall, next to the altar, and the two were uncomfortably crammed in beneath the organ loft. Charlotte apparently preferred the corner seat, even though it meant she sat with her back to the pulpit, perhaps because it avoided the problem of facing the rest of the congregation.
²⁷

To maintain some sort of order and so that the congregation could be seen by the officiating minister, there was a high, three-decker wooden pulpit on the south wall. Above the third level there was a sounding board, on the underside of which was painted ‘I determined not to know anything among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. – I Cor. 2.2. For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. – Ph. 1.21. William Grimshaw A. B. Minister 1742'.
²⁸
The parish clerk, who had to make the responses and lead the congregation through the services, sat at the lowest level; above him sat the minister who conducted the service from that level and then went up to the third level to read the Gospel and preach his sermon. The dominance of the pulpit, rather than the altar, in the arrangement of the church reflected the fact that, at that time, the sermon was the central part of the service and communion was taken much less frequently than it is today. Despite being directly under the eagle eye of the clerk and minister, the congregation sometimes grew restive listening to a service which most of them, being virtually illiterate, could not follow in the prayer books. Ellen Nussey, Charlotte's schoolfriend, visiting in 1833, gives a wonderful description of a service:

The people assembled, but it was apparently to
listen
, any part beyond that was quite out of their reckoning. All through the Prayers a stolid look of apathy was fixed in the generality of their faces, then they sat or leaned in their pews; (some few perhaps were resting after a long walk over the moors). The children from the school pattered in after service had commenced, and pattered out again before the sermon. The sexton with a long staff continually walked round in the aisles ‘knobbing' sleepers when he dare, shaking his head at and threatening unruly children, but when the sermon began there was a change, attitudes took the listening form, eyes were turned on the speaker. It was curious now to note the expression, a rustic untaught intelligence gleamed in their faces, in some a daring doubting questioning look as if the lips would like to say something defiant.
²⁹

Aware of the limitations of his congregation, Patrick usually preached extempore, setting his watch out before him and preaching for exactly one hour; he tended to choose texts from the Gospels and addressed his audience with that ‘simple, yet dignified air, not inaccessible to the poorest, and most illiterate hearer' which he himself had praised in
The Maid of Killarney
.
³⁰

The church, dedicated to St Michael and All Angels, was only a stone's throw from the National Church Sunday School which Patrick had built, and which still stands on the other side of Church Lane, facing the churchyard. The schoolroom was a low, small, single-storey building, with a bell (now replaced by a cross) at the top end. Just above the schoolroom was a low stone barn belonging to the King's Arms but rented by the sexton and his sons to pursue their trade as stonemasons.
³¹
At the top end of Church Lane, the highest point in the village itself, stands the parsonage. Within this comparatively small area, around the churchyard, all the most important elements of Patrick Brontë's life were brought together: his faith represented by the church, his belief in education represented by the school, and his family represented by their home of forty-one years.

In 1820 the parsonage was virtually the last house in the village; it faced down into Haworth but at the back it looked over the miles of open moorland where Yorkshire meets Lancashire. Today it has been surrounded by carparks and modern housing and there is only one window (and that not in the original Brontë home) from which the moors can still be glimpsed. The greater part of the churchyard, where 44,000 burials are said to have taken place, was closed in 1856; the trees, planted eight years later to help disperse the corpses, now obscure the views over Haworth towards Brow Moor, Oakworth Moor and Steeton Moor.
³²
Visitors today understandably receive the impression that the outlook of the house was dominated by the churchyard but, from their vantage point at the parsonage, the Brontës would have looked not down at the churchyard but across and up to the sweep of moorland hills stretching as far as the Yorkshire Dales: even Mrs Gaskell, who preferred the softer scenery of her native Cheshire, was moved to comment, on her visit to the parsonage in September 1853, that the view from the sitting room and her bedroom above it ‘was really beautiful in certain lights, moon-light especially'. She also found the exposed position of the house rather unsettling: ‘The wind goes piping and wailing and sobbing round the square unsheltered house in a very strange unearthly way.'
³³