‘We’ll miss old Rhodri.’
As people offer their condolences at the family reception after the patriarch of the Thomas family has been laid to rest in Presteigne’s St Andrew’s churchyard, there are many similar hollow platitudes. Disappointingly few people went to the service and even fewer have turned up to the wake, even though the Duke’s Arms always does a nice shoulder of ham with fresh bread, and the family has provided half a dozen flagons of beer.
Hywel and the others smile appreciatively at the gestures of kindness. But, if truth be told, their father was always a curmudgeonly sort, who got worse as he got older and became so insufferable after his wife died that he ended up with few friends. Cathy Griffiths was the glue that held the family together, and when she contracted pneumonia during the cold January of 1912 and died within the week, life became an increasing strain at Pentry Farm. Rhodri’s pride was shattered. For generations, Pentry had been able to keep a large family and the old man blamed himself that it could do so no longer.
Money became tighter as the value of lamb plummeted. And with every fall in price, Rhodri’s mood darkened. All three boys had to earn extra money by working on neighbouring farms and, despite being a good scholar at school, Bronwyn was forced to take up cleaning work in Presteigne.
As the wake empties and Morgan and Geraint pour more and more beer into themselves from the still half-full flagons, Hywel, Tom and Bronwyn are left huddled together in a dingy corner of the Duke’s back parlour. It is not one of the pub’s better rooms, dark and chilly with a flagstone floor and cream distemper walls. It is four in the afternoon and the pub is quiet. The shopworkers, factorymen and artisans will not be in for another half an hour and, as it is early June, the farmers are busy in their fields.
Bronwyn has put on her mother’s black dress and coat and is as pretty as a picture, her long black tresses tied into a fashionable pompadour. It is the first time she has worn her hair up but, at eighteen, she is old enough. Indeed, it is not thought ‘proper’ that a grown woman should wear her hair down unless in the privacy of her bedroom.
The room is suddenly made much darker as the huge frame of Philip Davies blocks the light. He greets them all warmly and thanks them for the food and ale, then turns to Bronwyn.
‘Bronwyn, I hear you’re doing some cleaning. Clara is not too well at the moment, could you do two or three half days for us?’
‘Yes, I could, Mr Davies …’
She pauses, delighted by the offer of more work, but also a little overawed. Philip Davies is the most prominent man in the village, a towering presence, both physically and in local esteem.
‘Thank you, sir. When should I come?’
‘When are you next available?’
‘Wednesday afternoon?’
‘That’s perfect.’
Davies shakes everybody by the hand before leaving. Even without his top hat, he has to lower his head to pass under the door to the back room.
Hywel is looking tired and pensive. Tom, who has taken a day off from his work as a carpenter, tries to distract him.
‘No, ta, Tom. I should get those two boys home afore they empty those flagons.’
‘Come on, have another! Tell him, Bron.’
Bron grasps her brother’s arm.
‘Come on, big brother, I’m goin’ to ’ave one. Will you buy me a milk stout, Tom?’
‘Of course.’
‘No, you won’t.’ Hywel turns to his sister. ‘I don’t want you drinkin’ at Da’s funeral, it’s not proper.’
Bronwyn is feeling raw.
‘Hywel, don’t you dare! I’m eighteen, a grown woman. You men are drinkin’; if I want a drink, I’ll ’ave one. Tom, a milk stout, and a glass o’ port wine, please.’
Tom, sensitive as always, knows that emotions are brittle and that a row is looming.
‘Bron, perhaps Hywel’s right. Why don’t we take some beer home?’
Bronwyn sees a chance to be yet more provocative.
‘Good idea, I can stay with you tonight.’
Bronwyn knows that there is no possibility of staying with Tom; he lives with his parents, plus his two younger brothers and two sisters, in a small terraced house in Presteigne. Her remark is simply intended to antagonize her brother. Quite apart from the impracticality, even if Tom lived in a palace, his parents would be horrified – except for a formal family gathering – at the thought of a girl of marriageable age crossing their threshold, especially to spend the night.
‘No, Bronwyn, don’t be silly. I meant home to Pentry. I can stay in the barn.’
‘Tom, I’m not bein’ “silly”; you sound like Hywel, or my father. Well, neither of you is my father. He’s dead!’
She bursts into tears and rushes from the parlour. Tom gets up to follow her, but Hywel puts his hand on his friend’s arm.
‘Leave her be for a minute or two.’
Hywel looks severe, trying to sound like a man of forty, rather than a youth of nineteen.
‘Sit down, we need to talk.’
Tom knows what is coming. It is a conversation he has been dreading since Monday, when Hywel realized how close he and Bronwyn have become.
‘So how long ’as it been goin’ on?’
‘Hywel, Bron’s of age –’
‘That’s as maybe, but I’m entitled to ask. I’m head o’ the family now.’
Tom knows he has a point.
‘Since Christmas.’
‘Are you bein’ careful?’
‘Course we are; we’re not daft.’
‘How do yer find somewhere to do yer courtin’?’
‘Hywel, come on, man. Be fair.’
‘All right, sorry … but she is my little sister.’
‘I know! I have sisters too.’
‘I assume you’ll be makin’ an ’onest woman of ’er?’
‘I will, Hywel, but I’ve nothin’ to offer her at the moment.’
‘Well, we’re all in that boat. But remember, you’ll answer to me if you hurt her.’
Tom takes the warning without rancour, knowing full well that it is no affront to the friendship he shares with Hywel, merely a genuine expression of the affection of an elder brother for his little sister.
‘What will you do now that Rhodri’s gone?’
‘I don’t know; it’s a right bugger. Pentry can’t keep four of us. Geraint and Morgan need to find more work, or I do.’
‘What about that girl from Knighton you’ve been seeing? She was very keen on you last time I saw her.’
‘Cari? She’s keen, all right; fair makes me get a stalk on. But she’s not a future Mrs Thomas.’
‘Hywel, if things are tight, would you consider me moving into Pentry with Bron? I pay my ma and pa rent, but they can get by without it, so I could put that into the Thomas family’s pot.’
‘There’s no room, Tom. Bron only gets some privacy by sleepin’ in the parlour.’
‘I’ll do up your wood store. It’s got good thick walls, and the roof is sound.’
‘You’ve been checking it out, then.’
‘I have … Bron and I have done a bit of courting in there.’
‘I bet you ’ave! But what will I do for a wood store?’
‘Put the logs in the barn; there’s room.’
‘Suppose you’ve been doin’ a bit of courting in there as well?’
Tom just smiles.
‘Well?’ Hywel grins back. ‘Very well, let’s shake on it.’
Tom is elated and jumps to his feet.
‘I’ll go and get Bron, and give her the news. Then you can take her home.’
‘No, bring ’er back ’ere. The boys can carry on drinkin’ a while, and I’ll buy ’er that stout and glass o’ port. You can come and stay with us tonight. As it seems it’s not the first time you’ve spent the night in there, you and Bron can ’ave the barn!’
Keighley Green Working Men’s Club is one of dozens of spit-and-sawdust drinking dens that help Burnley’s weavers and colliers rinse from their throats the dust and dirt of the town’s cotton and coal industries. Burnley is not called ‘King Cotton’ for nothing. The mountains of bales that roll out from its 100,000 looms mean that, by some distance, it is the world’s leading producer of cotton.
Like every Saturday night, Keighley Green Club is packed. The steward, retired cricketer and local hero John-Tommy Crabtree, has his sleeves rolled up to reveal the powerful forearms of one of the town’s most prodigious fast bowlers. He is pulling pints while keeping a wary eye on the rowdier tables. His starched white apron has seen better days and his stiff Gladstone collar and black bow tie are the same ones he has worn for twenty years. Prominent above the back of the bar is the heavy, lead-filled shillelagh he wields most weekend nights when the lads get a bellyful of ale inside them and lose all reason. Massey’s prize-winning King’s Ale is not called ‘fighting ale’ for nothing.
The air is a pungent fug of honest sweat and tobacco smoke. Dozens of cheap clay pipes are being enjoyed by the older men, while ‘coffin nails’ (rolled tobacco cigarettes) are the more popular choice among the younger ones.
The spittoons that sit by the bar and in the corners of the club will be full by the end of the night as the men rid themselves of the residue of the working week. Accurate and fulsome spitting is a matter of pride. Working men have to spit wads of it: grey-green in hue for weavers, black for colliers.
The tables are full of heavy glazed earthenware beer mugs, which are replenished at regular intervals by ‘pot lads’ carrying huge pitchers of frothy ale. They wear brown aprons with a large pocket at the front for copper change, keeping silver coins in their pockets, well away from wandering hands.
Sporting big moustaches and dressed in their creased and threadbare black jackets, collarless union shirts and cotton mufflers, the men look like siblings of one another. There are no single women to be seen; only a few mature wives of the older men are permitted to cross the threshold of the club. And those wives need to have strong bladders, robust bowels, or few inhibitions, as the only sanitation is a long tin lant-trough in the yard, which serves as a urinal, and a single long-drop privy with no door.
A painted white line, across which not even the older women may step, runs past the fringe of the bar and marks out a large open area where two billiard tables sit. They are surrounded by knots of animated men watching the challenge matches that are taking place. Adding significantly to the tension, considerable sums of money are being bet on the outcome of the contests.
At the dozen or so Britannia tables that circle the room, three-card brag – that uniquely brutal game for ardent bluffers with nerves of steel – is being played for piles of shillings and sixpences that none of the players can afford.
Close to the bar, beyond the ‘lasses’ scratch’ – the members’ name for the strict frontier between the sexes – there is a particularly raucous table of half a dozen young men. Tommy Broxup, a burly weaver a few years older than the others, is holding court.
‘So t’new foreman, a cocky little bugger fra’ Rochdale, comes up to me and says I were slackin’.’
The young lad next to Tommy is Vincent Sagar, only seventeen, his face full of freckles and mischief. A novice at nights of heavy drinking, he is all ears, obviously in awe of Tommy’s bravado.
‘What did tha say to ’im?’
‘Nowt. But after a bit, t’lad went for a piss, so I followed ’im. Waited until he were in full flow, then I put me ’and on his shoulder. He looked round, freetened to death, and pissed down his pants. I told ’im if he ever spoke to me like that again I’d knock his fuckin’ block off.’
Vinny nearly falls off his chair laughing at Tommy’s story.
‘Tha’s a rum bugger, our Tommy!’
Weavers are in the vast majority and rule the roost in Burnley. But there are always clashes with their redoubtable rivals in the working-class pecking order, men without peers in working-class mythology, the local colliers.
Colliers are easily identified at the end of a shift as they trudge home to wash away the grime of the pit in the tin bath that hangs on a nail outside the back door of every terraced house. Black-faced and red-eyed, they are men coarsened by their back-breaking toil, who think weaving is ‘work for women and girls’.
The antipathies between pit men and mill men invariably escalate into fisticuffs at closing time on Saturday nights, and again during the many cricket and football matches that are played on the town’s asphalt recreation grounds every Sunday.
Tommy Broxup is a frequent participant in tussles with the town’s colliers, many of whom drink at the Princess Royal on Yorkshire Street, not far from Keighley Green, on the other side of the canal culvert.
The Leeds and Liverpool Canal cuts through the middle of Burnley like a Victorian Offa’s Dyke. Its ‘Straight Mile’, which runs along a huge embankment sixty feet above the town centre, is said to be one of the ‘Seven Wonders of Britain’s Waterways’. However, the older locals have a different view; they can remember their grandparents telling them how it ruined the town: ‘Five years o’ mess, £25,000 o’ brass – fer what? Nowt but a long bath o’ water!’
In the middle of the mile, a circular tunnelled culvert connects the two sides of the town. Once a fine piece of late-eighteenth-century engineering, it is now dripping with seepage from the canal above and offers dark shadows for those whose business is less than wholesome. It is home to several ‘loose lasses’ who hide in its murk and is one of the most popular venues for the town’s ‘cock’ fights, in which its young lads use their fists and clogs to earn the title ‘cock’ of their district, or even of the whole borough.
There are seven pubs and three clubs within fifty yards of the culvert, which provide a baying audience for the frequent brawls that take place in the dank confines beneath the canal. Wisely, the police usually arrive when the mayhem is over and encourage the throng to go home to their beds.
Tommy’s most famous encounter ‘under t’culvert’ happened a few months earlier. It was a pre-arranged fight with Joe Smalley, a big lad with a lot less brain than brawn. Joe had heard tales of the speed of Tommy’s fists and the strength of his blows and had tucked a 3lb blacksmith’s hammer into the back of his belt. Before blows were exchanged, following the usual courtesies, Tommy went to shake Joe’s hand.
‘No gougin’, reet?’
Joe did not accept Tommy’s handshake and seemed very tense; his answer was only a mumble, hardly audible.
‘Aye.’
‘Cloggin’ or not?’
Joe did not answer but, to the dismay of everyone there, pulled out his concealed hammer and started swinging it. He was suddenly like a man possessed.
‘Come on, Broxup, let’s see ’ow fuckin’ ’ard y’are.’
Tommy ducked several times, but Joe caught him with a heavy blow to the edge of his right shoulder, making his renowned right fist all but useless. Tommy had to think quickly and attacked in any way he could. He threw himself at the big collier, knocking him to the floor, taking the wind out of him. He used his right knee to pin Joe’s left arm to the ground and his own left hand to hold his opponent’s right wrist.
Without a good right hand, Tommy had nothing to attack with. He thought of head-butting the collier, but with Joe’s head supported by the ground, it would probably do Tommy more damage than his opponent.
Joe was a strong lad and began to wriggle free, so Tommy had to act fast and decided to sink his teeth into his adversary’s side, just below his ribs. Like a bull terrier, he did not let go and blood began to flow copiously. Joe tried to free his hammer but a fellow collier, outraged that a colleague had brought a weapon to a fist fight, stood on its shaft and pinned it to the ground.
Joe bellowed in pain; Tommy bit harder until the agony was too much to bear, forcing a cry of ‘Enough!’ from his stricken foe. Tommy relaxed the grip of his teeth and spat out the blood that had filled his mouth. Joe, his shirt and jacket crimson with blood, was helped up by his fellow colliers.
Although Joe had surrendered, he felt humiliated. For him the fight was not over. He pushed his helpers away and wrested free his hammer. By then, Tommy had turned his back and Joe lunged at him, his weapon held high. There were gasps and cries and looks of horror, alerting Tommy to the danger. He turned in an instant and used his good left arm to parry the blow that might well have killed him. A swift but powerful kick to the groin made Joe double up in pain, which gave Tommy the chance to deliver a rabbit punch to the back of his opponent’s neck, rendering him immobile until he collapsed to the ground.
Once more, Joe’s colleagues took him away, this time more roughly, indignant about their fellow collier’s behaviour. As they did so, a craggy old veteran of the pit approached Tommy and shook his hand.
‘Yon Joe’s a wrong ’un. But tha’s fettled ’im reet enough; mind you, it’s a reet good job tha’s got thy own teeth!’
For weeks afterwards, the story of ‘Tommy Broxup’s ’ammer and teeth feight’ was repeated across the town to the great amusement of all who heard it. Unfortunately, Tommy’s collarbone had been broken by the hammer blow and he was unable to work for five weeks. His employers, knowing full well that he had injured himself in a fight, held no sympathy for him. They kept his job open, but he got no sick pay and his union could only offer him a third of his weekly earnings, a paltry 4 shillings a week.
However, every Friday evening, there was a knock on Tommy’s door, 54 Hart Street, the last terraced house on the long row of identical homes all owned by Daneshouse Mill, his employers. It sat directly beneath the looming bank of the canal in one of the town’s poorest districts.
For each of the five weeks that Tommy could not work, the source of the knock was a little lad, no more than twelve, who would hand Tommy a crumpled manila envelope, saying, ‘From t’lads at pit.’ It contained between 8 and 10 shillings in both copper and silver. It was the proceeds of a regular collection taken at the pithead of Joe Smalley’s Bee Hole Colliery, a small pit just behind Burnley’s football ground at Turf Moor and only a few hundred yards from the famous ‘’ammer and teeth feight’.
After the final delivery, Tommy went to the pit to thank the colliers. As is their way, they were forthright with their responses.
‘No need to thank us, lad. We made Big Joe put in a bob a week. He won’t be feightin’ again fer a bit.’
Despite its prominence, Burnley’s canal is not the defining feature of the town. That honour goes to the forest of mill chimneys that stretches as far as the eye can see. When they can see them through the heavy smoke that belches out, the local children count the stacks. They say there are ‘six dozen when it’s reet murky’ and ‘eight dozen if tha can sken Pendle Hill’.
The acrid smoke that the chimneys vomit into the air sits over the town like a heavy shroud and masks the sun on all but the freshest days. In winter, when every household is burning ‘best slack’ in their grates to add to the puke of the mills, the air is so thick with soot it stings the eyes and makes it impossible to keep clothes clean, or even breathe without wheezing.
Paradoxically, Burnley, for all its ills and sins, sits in a hollow in the high undulating moors of the Pennines, a vast landscape of austere beauty. Tarnished only by the black infernos of the local cotton towns, Colne, Nelson, Burnley and Accrington, the moors offer welcome relief to the gloom and drudgery of daily life.
Almost everything in the area is built from Pennines’ millstone grit, an attractive, soft yellow sandstone akin to the renowned limestones of the Cotswolds and Somerset in southern England. However, in the rural south, stone retains its golden hue for generations. In Burnley, gleaming new stone is black with grime within ten years.
The old adage, ‘Where there’s muck there’s brass,’ is of little comfort to the ordinary folk of Burnley, to whom ‘brass’ is never plentiful. They live huddled together in their endless rows of terraced houses that make linear patterns on the steep slopes descending towards the town centre. Most of the town’s housing and many of its public buildings have been built within the last fifty years of rapid growth. They sit cheek by jowl with older, haphazard housing stock close to the town centre, the squalid homes of the old and the poor.
Burnley has all the seedy characteristics of a frontier town, its population exploding from 4,000 in 1800 to over 110,000 in 1910, often mixing the sons and daughters of impoverished Pennine hill farmers with even more destitute Irish migrants. Diphtheria, scarlet fever, polio, bronchitis and pneumonia are commonplace, as is the extreme bow-legged gait of childhood rickets, what the locals call ‘bandy-legs’.
There are a few large and splendid Victorian homes for the mill owners on the fringes of the borough and a scattering of not quite so grand Edwardian houses for the middle classes who serve them. But the vast majority of people live in identical two-up-two-down boxes, many of them back-to-back hovels, while a few have to endure the ravages of cellar dwellings, where large families live in almost medieval filth beneath street level.
‘Long drop’ and ‘tipple’ lavatories, emptied every week by the soil men with their horse-drawn carts, are the only sanitation, and the stench is usually overpowering in the poorest districts, especially in the summer. Flat caps, old Lancashire shawls and weavers’ clogs are standard dress, and most people only possess the clothes they stand up in.
However, even though poverty is endemic for many, hard graft, long shifts and overtime bring in enough money to keep the market stalls busy and the pubs full.
Keighley Green was once an open, low-lying meadow between the old market town of antiquity and the new nineteenth-century boom town. But it is now one of those rough-house areas where the police walk their beats in squads of four with a horse-drawn Black Maria nearby to sweep up any miscreants. It is also home to the new police station and town lock-up, deliberately situated in the rowdiest part of the borough.
As a typical Saturday night in Burnley unfolds – this one warmer and more humid than most – Tommy Broxup continues to keep his friends amused. But his focus suddenly shifts to a face at the club bar he has not seen before.
‘Who’s yon big bugger?’
Vinny has no idea, but his best pal from schooldays, Nathaniel ‘Twaites’ Haythornthwaite, has. A short sturdy lad with a mop of white-blond hair, who hails from the Pendle village of Sabden five miles north of Burnley, he recognizes the newcomer immediately.
‘By ’eck, that’s “Mad Mick” Kenny. He’s called “Cock o’ Colne”, not just because he’s an ’ard case, but because o’ t’number of women he’s shagged. He’s a collier; ’is dad were a Paddy.’
‘A Paddy collier from Colne. What’s he doin’ in ’ere?’
Vincent sniffs the prospect of a rumpus.
‘I’ll go an’ ask ’im.’
As he passes the steward, John-Tommy leans across the bar.
‘Did tha laik at cricket today, lad?’
‘I did, John-Tommy, we laiked at Ramsbottom.’
‘And?’
‘Forty-eight not out, and three fer twenty-one.’
‘Good lad.’ John-Tommy nods appreciatively and smiles broadly. ‘But tha needs to be suppin’ less ale if tha’ wants to be a top laiker.’
Vinny walks on, only half listening to the advice. John-Tommy’s look turns rueful, remembering that it was too many pints of Massey’s that brought an early end to his own cricketing career.
Despite the crowd of bodies around the bar, Vinny is soon back with the other lads, looking chastened.
Twaites grins at him.
‘What did t’big bugger say?’
‘He told me to fuck off and mind me own business.’
‘So what did tha say?’
‘Well, he’s an even bigger bugger up close than ’e looks at a distance, so I did as I was told, an’ fucked off!’
They all laugh out loud, except Tommy, who is already pushing through the throng to confront the visitor. He has had a few pints and feels like warming his knuckles and burnishing his clog irons. Almost as tall as Mad Mick, he puts his face far closer to him than is necessary.
‘This is a members’ club, lad.’
The big lad smiles rather than take the offence that is intended.
‘Course it is, wouldn’t be a club if it didn’t ’ave members.’
‘But tha’s not one of ’em.’
Again, no offence is taken; the smile broadens.
‘Neither are ’alf t’lads in ’ere.’ He rests a gentle hand on Tommy’s shoulder. ‘Can a non-member buy a member an’ his pals a pint?’
Tommy is perplexed. He intended to provoke a fight, but gets a grin and a pint instead. The unexpected response draws Tommy’s venom.
‘Aye, we’ll ’ave a pint wi’ thee. But only one, then it’s outside fer a set-to.’
Three pints later, the two men are sharing stories, all talk of fighting forgotten. Then Tommy remembers that his new pal is a stranger to the club.
‘So, Mick lad, why ’as tha come down to Burnley toneet?’
‘To see thee.’
‘Me, what fer?’
‘Two reasons. First, I ’eard about thy set-to wi’ Joe Smalley and I wanted to meet t’lad wi’ teeth like a bulldog. Second, my missus, Cath, is a bit of a firebrand. She supports them suffragettes and ’as just joined t’socialists.’
‘Bloody ’ell; votes fer women! My Mary’s t’same. I can’t vote mesen; I don’t know any lad who can. Mary says we should all ’ave t’vote.’
‘I know, Cath’s ’eard that your Mary speaks ’er mind at t’mill. That’s why I’m ’ere; Cath wants Mary to join t’socialists. But I wanted to speak wi’ thee first.’
‘That’s reet gentlemanly of thee. I’ll talk to Mary. But she knows ’er own mind and will suit ’erself.’
‘Another ale, Tommy?’
‘Aye, ta. ’Ow yer gettin’ ’ome to Colne?’
‘A’ve missed last tram; I’ll ’ave to walk.’
‘No, yer won’t; it’s seven mile to Colne. Tha can sleep in our front room and meet Mary in t’morn.’
‘Good o’ thee to let a collier through thy front door.’
‘That’s alreet. No pissin’ in t’fire back, though. I know what you lads do fer a piss down t’pit.’