Horse-Drawn Transport in Leeds: William Turton, Corn Merchant and Tramway Entrepreneur

by Andrew Turton

Overview

The golden age of coaching came between 1815 and 1840 as great road improvements occurred allowing trams, carts and buggies to be towed by horses comfortably. As companies vied for market share, one man stood out above the rest. William Turton made his money as a Hay and Corn Merchant but is better known as a founder and long-time chairman of Leeds Tramways Company and with the Busby brothers, founder and director of horse tramways in ten of the largest cities of northern England. It is an exciting mixture of biography, social history and city politics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780750963152
Publisher:	The History Press
Publication date:	01/27/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Andrew Turton is a freelance writer and consultant who spent his career at the British Council and School of Oriental Studies. He was a consultant for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development and is fluent in French, Thai, and German. He is the current chair of the Manor Gardens Welfare Trust, as well as a member of several Leeds learned and other specialist societies.

Read an Excerpt

Horse - Drawn Transport in Leeds

William Turton, Corn Merchant and Tramway Entrepreneur

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By Andrew Turton

The History Press

Copyright © 2015 Andrew Turton
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7509-6315-2

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CHAPTER 1

GOLDEN FLEECE

The Leeds that William Turton was born in, on 2 January 1825, was only just beginning to resemble a major English industrial town. It was not yet a city in the full constitutional sense. Nor did it have a cathedral or even the ruins of a castle. But it was a substantial town, productive and wealthy, proud of its civic self-sufficiency. It had also begun to suffer the social and environmental consequences of industrial capitalism. It was ready for take-off into an unprecedented and unknowable development of industry and urbanisation.

William Turton's life ran in parallel with this development. He helped to make it happen. His story is also the story of Victorian Leeds. His family came to Leeds from the Yorkshire countryside before the end of the eighteenth century. Their arrival was one consequence of the expansion of industry, the industrial revolution. At that time almost all the new influx of people into Leeds came from the surrounding rural areas.

The themes and topics of our story demand that we examine the origins and development of the town of Leeds, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, as well as of the man, merchant and transport entrepreneur, councillor and civic dignitary.

THE WEALTH OF LEEDS: WOOL AND WOOLLEN CLOTH

People have lived at the site of modern Leeds for two millennia or more, and for good reasons. It was well watered and at a good river crossing. It had a hilly eminence close by, a defensible space that became the site of a castle and then a manor house. From at least the seventh to the eleventh century AD Leeds was a substantial settlement. Stone crosses of the ninth and tenth centuries have been found on the site of St Peter's church. The Domesday Book record of 1086 tells us that Leeds (Ledestune) had a church and a priest, a mill and meadowland, and a population of 200. Perhaps we can call it a large village already bidding to be a town.

There had been trade between Ireland and the Baltic passing through the valley of the Aire since the Bronze Age. The area had been at the centre of the kingdom of the Brigantes. It became Saxon in the sixth century AD and by 600–650 was under the Danelaw. The period from the late eleventh century to the early thirteenth century was a time of expansion and proliferation of towns throughout England. These usually grew up according to the needs of State, Church and Trade. Leeds had a castle, but not an important one. Kirkstall Abbey was built by Cistercian monks from Fountains Abbey to the north in 1152 but was dissolved 1539. It also had a substantial 'cathedral like' parish church, St Peter's, which was probably rebuilt in the twelfth century, again in the reign of Edward I (1327–77) and yet again after a fire in 1500. William was to be baptised there.

In the case of Leeds, trade was the main factor in its development as a town. Trade meant wool (especially in the period AD 1200–1600) and woollen cloth (especially 1500–1800). The coat of arms of Leeds city to this day includes a 'golden fleece', whose symbolism needs no unravelling. It had been part of the armorial of Leeds' first alderman Sir John Savile when Leeds received its Royal Charter in 1626. His kinsman Sir William Savile was the Royalist who was defeated by the Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax after a brief battle in 1643 at the western edges of Briggate, where the burghers dug trenches literally in their own back gardens.

Like so many towns of importance, Leeds is well placed in terms of access by various means of transport. There is evidence of several Roman roads meeting and crossing the River Aire near or at Leeds, most notably the road from Chester to York. At first there was a ford and later a bridge, probably from the eleventh century or earlier, though the first written record of a bridge is in 1322. A weir, the 'Leeds Dam', was constructed to deepen the port and provide water power for mills. Until 1829 Leeds Bridge was the only bridge over the Aire for many miles. It gives its name to the street Briggate (brig meaning bridge and gata meaning street in Saxon), which remains the core, the axis, the commercial and transport hub of the city. It was here that William Turton had offices.

Leeds has the privilege of being situated almost exactly half way between London and Edinburgh, and half way between the Irish Sea and the North Sea. The River Aire rises at the limestone cliffs near Malham Tarn, which is to the west of the Pennines. The Aire valley links east and west and at one point it is only about 10 miles from the River Ribble with which it was later to form a canal route to Preston and Liverpool. Seen from the other end, the Aire joins the Calder near Goole and briefly becomes a tributary of the Ouse before entering the Humber. This river route from the North Sea had long been navigable by small craft up to Leeds. With the general development of production and trade from the late sixteenth century, water transport became more sophisticated. The pound lock, which allowed boats to bypass weirs, was widely in use by the end of the sixteenth century. Various canal systems began to be discussed in the seventeenth century, with technical advice from Dutch engineers. After decades of debate, the merchants of Leeds put up their money to build the Aire and Calder Navigation, founded in 1688 and opened in 1689. The main route had few locks and little canal length along the river, so it was faster and cheaper than many such systems. The route went from Leeds to Wakefield and Goole, which became a substantial inland seaport linked with Hull. Goole was strategic enough to be a target for enemy bombing in the First World War. To the south the network extended to Barnsley and Sheffield, to the south-east to Doncaster and to the north-east Selby. It has been described as 'the country's most successful commercial inland waterway'. The system as a whole continued working until late in the twentieth century, and parts have never closed.

Leeds was exceptionally well placed to be a centre of the wool trade. At times it was the most important centre in England. It was close to the sheep rearing, wool producing and weaving districts of Airedale and Calderdale to the west and southwest. These areas were connected to the network of suppliers, variously known as chapmen, hucksters and (wool-) broggers, who bought wool and cloth from small producers at village fairs and farms. These traders sent the wool and cloth on packhorses, combining with river transport when possible, to merchants in Leeds. Leeds also had its water-powered mills and a fulling mill. The rural producers began to add value to their products by spinning and weaving their own wool. Certain districts specialised in worsted (long staple, fine cloth) or kersey (short staple, coarse cloth), and in dyed ('coloured') or undyed and unbleached ('white') cloth. Leeds became more of a finishing centre in the chain of production, shearing, raising the nap, dyeing and so on. By 1534 the historian John Leland visited Leeds on his travels and declared that 'The Town standith [sic] most by Clothing'.

At first the export had been of wool, unspun and unwoven. In 1331 John Kempe of Flanders is recorded as having come to England and started to develop woollen cloth weaving. There were others, possibly before and certainly afterwards.

For some time exports of woollen cloth were small. In the period approximately 1375–1420 wool prices were high. Even by present standards Cotswold wool at £4–6 pounds a sack (c.ad 1400) sounds high. In the sixteenth century woollen cloth exports expanded and seem not to have looked back for another 300 years or more.

The first town charter for Leeds was granted in 1207 when it was already trading in wool. The quality of English wool had a high reputation, even higher than that of Spain. By the end of the twelfth century and early thirteenth century there were considerable exports of wool, especially to Flanders, which is roughly equivalent to modern Belgium. The annual export of wool amounted to some 30–50,000 sacks. It has been estimated that 50,000 sacks, the equivalent of the wool of 6 million sheep, was the commodity used to pay the ransom of King Richard I (the 'Lionheart') in 1194, which had been set at 300,000 livres. Leeds became the wealthiest town in West Riding after Wakefield and Pontefract. By 1470 wool production in England was concentrated in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Leeds had an important market by 1258 and Briggate became the town centre that had formerly been Kirkgate and St Peter's. In 1615 a new Leeds auction market was built. Leeds Moot Hall, or Town Hall, was completed in 1618. Leeds was granted a Royal Charter of Incorporation as a 'free borough' in 1626 by King Charles I. The chief purpose and value of this status was to protect its cloth production and trade. Leeds was now the fourth largest town in England. This epoch was epitomised by the very wealthy and civic minded cloth merchant, mill and landowner John Harrison (1579–1656). He paid for the building of the moot hall (1615–18) and built St John's church, the second church in Leeds, in 1634. He also built almshouses and a small grammar school (founded 1552) in 1624. He was an alderman. One of the most famous figures in Leeds' history, he served as a kind of model for the merchant prince philanthropists of the Victorian age. It is of note that the history of Leeds is not marked much by the participation of great lords and aristocrats.

Two generations later Ralph Thoresby (1658–1725) continued this bourgeois benevolence and civic pride. He too was wealthy from the woollen trade and industry and also inevitably a member of the Town Corporation. He helped raise funds for both the first White Cloth Hall in 1711 and Leeds' third church, Trinity, which was completed in 1727 just after his death. The Leeds Tramways Company was to have its main offices in a yard facing this church. Thoresby was primarily a scholar and antiquarian and he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. His diaries cover more than forty years of life in Leeds. His collections and scholarly example were honoured in the setting up of The Thoresby Society in 1889, which still flourishes. His book Ducatus Leodiensis (published 1715) is the first historical account of Leeds and is another sign of the growing pride and self-consciousness of the town.

Thorseby commented on the corn market at Leeds as being 'very profitable; and the more so, because the Populousness of the Places makes it yield greater profit to the Husband-men than other markets do'.

The town doubled its population during the seventeenth century, despite severe mortality in the plague of 1666 when the parish record listed 1,325 deaths. At about 6,000 in 1700 it was not of great size. Nonetheless, Celia Fiennes (1662–1741) writing of her travels to Yorkshire in 1697–98 says that it was 'the wealthiest town of its size in the country'. And she had visited almost every county in England. Its merchants lived in fine houses of stone and brick. But as in the nineteenth century, both rich and poor could suffer from terrible epidemics such as bubonic plague in 1604, 1644 and 1645. A civic response to health needs was the provision of piped water, one of the earliest systems in provincial England. Many of the town's wealthy citizens had adopted Puritan paths of Christianity and when the political climate allowed, the first 'non-conformist' meeting house was established.

The wool trade expanded throughout the eighteenth century. It was now chiefly woollen manufactures: white cloth, coloured cloth and broadloom, a mixed weave. The grand first White Cloth Hall was built in 1711 and a few years later, 1724, Daniel Defoe saw the market in action and wrote that it was 'a prodigy of its kind unequalled in the world'. A new Coloured Cloth Hall was built in 1758; a third cloth hall was added in 1776. This was in Calls Lane, close to what is now the Corn Exchange; it had 1,000 stalls.

Woollen manufacturing industrialised early. In 1792 Benjamin Gott opened his Bean Ing factory on a 16-acre site to the west of the town. This concentrated all processes under one roof for the first time. It was not only the largest in Leeds but was the largest single employer of industrial workers in Western Europe at the time, with a workforce of 1,200. In 1792 John Marshall (1765–1845) moved his woollen factory to Water Lane in Holbeck, just south of Leeds. His collaborations in developing machinery for both wool and flax manufacture led to important advances, especially in mechanical spinning. By the end of the century, in 1797, Leeds had 130 woollen merchants who controlled the major share of the Yorkshire wool trade. In 1800 Gott expanded and built Armley Mills to the south-west, which is now an industrial museum.

Marshall powered forward the flax industry, using home grown and imported flax. This was a major diversification of the Leeds economy, the first of many, and made Leeds the centre of the flax industry.

This commercial and industrial development of Leeds placed demands on transport systems, and helped to stimulate their development. The Aire and Calder canal served them well from 1699. It is still in use after 300 years, for most of which barges were towed by horses, or horses alongside steam tugs. The Leeds to Liverpool canal was started in 1777 and although its 127-mile length – the longest in Britain – was not fully open until 1816, some stretches were usable from the start. From 1758 a four-mile 'horse railroad' delivered coal from the Middleton colliery to Leeds. The packhorse continued to be essential in the capillary stages of transport of cloth and other goods to distribution points on the canals.

THE GROWTH OF CIVIL SOCIETY

In terms of 'civil society', in just about any sense of the term, Leeds was on an improving curve in the eighteenth century. The new Town Hall, or rather 'moot hall', a perennial index of the development of Leeds, was rebuilt in 1710 and a small marble statue of Queen Anne was erected on its façade in 1713, the year before her death. In 1787 the moot hall clock was added. Public meetings, however, even those called by the mayor and council, often took place in pubs, a tradition still in use in Turton's time as a councillor. Cossin's cartography of 1726 literally put Leeds on the map. This map is illustrated with eighteen drawings of the façades of the house of the most prominent merchants. None of these survive. It is interesting that the general scale and proportion of these town houses are similar to those of the house William Turton built for himself at the height of his career. Civic infrastructural improvements resulted in the introduction in 1755 of street lighting and paving in some central parts of the town. The Leeds Infirmary was inaugurated in 1767 (expanded twice in the 1780s and again in the 1820s). It moved to Great George Street in 1868.

The eighteenth century was largely peaceful for Leeds. The threat of a Jacobite army attacking Leeds in 1745 led to the town preparing its defences and levying volunteer soldiers. Even worse to contemplate, in 1793 a French invasion was thought to be imminent. Once again Leeds braced itself, and once again the threat was not realised. This led to the forming of the Leeds Volunteers, a paramilitary unit. This was also in part a precaution against a perceived threat by the élite that the English lower classes might emulate their revolutionary neighbours in France. There had been a number of popular protests and riots during the century. In the corn riots of 1715 there were three deaths, but there was nothing on the scale of nineteenth-century militancy to come.

The rise of non-conformism was furthered by the advent of Methodism from 1742, but the established Church of England was still the predominant form of Christian association, a position it was to lose by the 1830s. But in the middle of the eighteenth century St Peter's, still 'the Parish Church of Leeds', had a congregation of 3–4,000 and was reportedly packed for services, with wooden galleries being added to accommodate the faithful. Various forms of Methodism together constituted a plurality of all religious sects in the nineteenth century. John Wesley had visited Leeds several times. On the last occasion, among weightier matters, he is said to have held a nine-month baby on his knee and blessed him. This was Richard Oastler, the 'radical Tory' whose campaigns against 'child slavery' in Leeds and nationally we shall return to later.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title,
Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Picture Credits,
Preface,
Introduction,
Part I Leeds,
Golden Fleece,
'Unhappy abodes of filthy misery',
Part II Initial Capital 1844–1870,
William – Apprentice Mechanic; Mary – Flax Mill Worker,
William Turton, Corn & Hay Merchant,
New King Coal,
Horsepower,
Turton's Buses,
Part III Society and Politics 1860–1900,
A Resurgent Borough,
Hayfield House,
'Turton and Victory',
Councillor Turton,
Cellars and Sewers,
Part IV Tramways 1870–1900,
Enter the Tram,
Leeds Tramways Company – Infrastructure,
Leeds Tramways Company – Stakeholders,
Gathering Steam,
Municipalisation,
Turton & Busby in the North,
Electric Shock,
Part V Succession 1900–1925,
Passing On,
Inheritance,
Heritage,
Bibliography,
Plates,
About the Author,
Copyright,