Inheritance
Phyllis Bentley and the history of the West Riding
I came to Phyllis Bentley via Winifred Holtby. Her name comes up in the collected letters of Winifred Holtby and Vera Brittain as the three writers knew each other. [1] Like Holtby, Bentley was an author from Yorkshire but their reference points were very different. Winifred Holtby came from rural East Yorkshire, her novels like ‘Anderby Wold’ (1923) and ‘South Riding’ (1936) draw on her family background of farming in the Yorkshire Wolds. Phyllis Bentley on the other hand, was born in Halifax and brought up in Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. She attended Halifax High School for Girls and Cheltenham Ladies College, where she passed a University of London external examination which gained her a B.A. Her father was a textile manufacturer and this is the world she brings to life in her most famous novel ‘Inheritance’ (1932). As well as fiction, she wrote more academic works on the Brontës, the woollen industry, West Yorkshire’s history and topography.
‘Inheritance’ tells the story of a number of interconnected families in the West Riding. The Oldroyds own Syke Mill and the book is as much the story of the mill as it is of the Oldroyds, the Bamforths and the Briggs.
“There have been Oldroyds of Syke Mill for a hundred and nineteen years to my knowledge,” said Henry emphatically. “And they were in the cloth trade generations upon generations before that.”
The 600 pages cover a broad sweep of history, from the 1810s and the Luddites [2] to the economic slump of the 1920s. The prose is accessible and the story runs along at a nice pace, with well drawn characters so I was engaged all the way through and thoroughly enjoyed the book. In some sprawling novels, keeping up with the family trees can be a challenge and I did start sketching this one out at the half way point, just in case. However, I found that I could do it easily from memory, and it wasn’t really needed for reference anyway.
It turned out to be an unexpectedly personal read too.
Twenty odd years ago I wrote my dissertation on ‘Sunday Schools and Society: Bradford 1780-1870’. Like many students, I chose to focus on a piece of local history so that I could make use of reference libraries and archives during the summer break. The topic picked up a number of themes that I was interested in – religious non-conformity, education, working conditions in the mills and community life. I was fascinated to see how Phyllis Bentley had woven many of these into ‘Inheritance’.
The Oldroyds might be mill owners but the voice of the workers is heard most passionately through the character of Jonathan Bamforth, the illegitimate son of Will Oldroyd. The novel includes the decade long campaign to limit the hours that children and women could work in the mills, which resulted in The Factories Act of 1847 (often known as The Ten Hours Act). Prominent local campaigners included Richard Oastler from Leeds and John Wood who was a textile manufacturer in Bradford. Wood opened a factory school for the children who worked for him and provided a doctor to examine them regularly. Both Oastler and Wood feature in ‘Inheritance’.
The Chartist movement is another of the radical campaigns explored in the book. This was a working class movement for political reform which started in 1838. Amongst other demands, they wanted a more democratic system with a vote for all men over 21 and a secret ballot to stop pressure being applied. This was a period where calls for political reform were made alongside strikes over poor wages and working conditions.[3] Jonathan encourages these early moves towards unionism and collective bargaining in his newspaper.
The industrial north was associated with non-conformity. In 1851 76% of Sunday School pupils in Bradford attended dissenting Sunday Schools, with only 20% attached to the Church of England. This pattern matched church attendance more generally and showed the failure of the Established Church to react to the problems faced by a rapidly changing industrial society. The Methodist Church and other dissenting denominations were seen as much more in touch with the realities of everyday life.
The Wesleyan Minister Rev Singleton (Jonathan’s brother-in-law) in ‘Inheritance’ is shown to be sympathetic to the radical politics of the day, reflecting the concerns of his community. Both Singleton and Jonathan are advocates for education. For many children the only education they received was via Sunday Schools. These were free and taught children who worked in the mills during the week the basics of reading and writing, along with religious instruction. Sunday Schools offered a solution to a very real problem and help explain the popularity of non-conformity in West Yorkshire. Some Sunday Schools also ran evening classes for older children and adults or provided lending libraries.
Bradford MP William Forster’s 1870 Education Act started the process that would lead to compulsory universal education by allowing local school boards to be set up in areas where no religious voluntary schools existed. By 1800 all children under the age of 13 were required to attend school. ‘Inheritance’ also touches on the importance of the new lending libraries of the period and the development of more widely available secondary education.
These historical moments and themes were very familiar to me, but I also enjoyed discovering more about the later period. This included the introduction of the McKinley Tariff (1890) on imports of cloth to the United States which increased costs for West Yorkshire manufacturers, and the need for khaki for soldiers’ uniforms in the First World War which helped revive the fortunes of many mills.
Fittingly for a novel called ‘Inheritance’, the story was also personal for its links to my own family history. Like many people with roots in West Yorkshire, occupations like cloth dresser, yarn drier, weaver, dyer and wool feeder turn up on the census returns. My ancestors would have been working in mills like that owned by the Oldroyds. I’m glad that people like Jonathan Bamforth were fighting for better conditions for them.
‘Inheritance’ is a vibrant novel about people, place and belonging. It’s one I know I’ll be revisiting in the future.
“…while I’ve walked up and down the West Riding all these years, and loved the hills and moors and the winds and steep valleys and the cold rocky streams, and the curlews and the heather, and the funny little country mills, and the way the people talk, and the Yorkshire character, and all that sort of thing – while I’ve simply loved all that, I never felt that it had anything much to do with me.”
[1] ‘Between Friends. Letters of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby.’ Eds. Showalter and Showalter (Virago, 2022)
[2] Charlotte Brontë’s novel ‘Shirley’ is also set during the Luddite riots in West Yorkshire. Her father, Rev Patrick Brontë, served in Hartshead, near Huddersfield, between 1810-1815 at the height of the uprisings. The Luddite riots were focused on destroying the new machinery which was taking jobs away from textile workers.
[3] Elizabeth Gaskell’s novels such as ‘North and South’ deal with the impact of strikes and poor wages on Manchester mill workers.
Thank you! I learned a lot from this. Moving to think of how many people quietly did fundamental things like teaching children or ensuring access to books.
Lots of great info here about an author I was unfamiliar with. Thanks.