West Riding Research Articles

Pioneers of cortical cytoarchitectonics: the forgotten contribution of Herbert Major

The study of cortical cytoarchitectonics and the histology of the human cerebral cortex was pursued by many investigators in the second half of the nineteenth century, such as Jacob Lockhart Clarke, Theodor Meynert, and Vladimir Betz. Another of these pioneers, whose name has largely been lost to posterity, is considered here: Herbert Coddington Major (1850–1921). Working at the West Riding Asylum in Wakefield, United Kingdom, Major’s thesis of 1875 described and illustrated six-layered cortical structure in both non-human primates and man, as well as “giant nerve cells” which corresponded to those cells previously described, but not illustrated, by Betz. Further journal publications by Major in 1876 and 1877 confirmed his finding of six cortical strata. However, Major’s work was almost entirely neglected by his contemporaries, including his colleague and sometime pupil at the West Riding Asylum, William Bevan-Lewis (1847–1929), who later (1878) reported the presence of both pentalaminar and hexalaminar cortices. Bevan-Lewis’s work was also later credited with the first illustration of Betz cells.

Poverty, old age and outdoor relief in late-Victorian England

ABSTRACT While studies dedicated to the extent of poverty in old age under the New Poor Law in nineteenth-century England have grown, gaps still exist in terms of a detailed examination of outdoor relief compared with workhouse populations. Using rarely consulted outdoor relief application and report books for three Poor Law Unions in the early 1880s (Alton Union, Hampshire; Hertford Union, Hertfordshire; and Ripon Union, Yorkshire West Riding), this article provides estimated proportions of older people on outdoor relief by linking the report books with census materials. It also examines variations in allowances prescribed to single and married individuals. Firstly, older people in southern England were more likely to receive outdoor relief compared with their northern counterparts, consistent with the extant literature outlining a ‘north–south’ divide of welfare provision. Secondly, allowances were surprisingly generous in Ripon Union. For married couples, allowances were double the average documented elsewhere and reflect those granted under the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. In conclusion, continuity in the treatment of older-age applicants between the later years of the New Poor Law and the start of the Old Age Pensions Act is emphasised, especially in the context of northern Poor Law Unions such as Ripon.

Conflict, consensus and the vexed question of “policing by consent” in nineteenth-century England

This article explores the concept of “policing by consent” in Britain. It first offers a working definition of the term, derived from the work of Robert Reiner. This definition is then used as a framework within which to analyse a range of evidence relating to different aspects of policing in the West Riding of Yorkshire (in the north of England). The article considers this evidence in the light of David Churchill’s reformulation and reassertion of the pessimistic interpretation of police/public relations (as first argued in Robert Storch’s seminal articles of the 1970s). In conclusion, the article argues that the West Riding evidence provides the basis for a more optimistic conclusion of police/public relations in the nineteenth century.

Turncoats and traitors, rogues and renegades: reviewing labour’s lost leaders in reform-era Yorkshire

ABSTRACT The annals of working-class agitational endeavours in the early nineteenth century contain more than a sprinkling of rogues who ran off with money, and renegades who abjured their earlier beliefs. They also include a few turncoats and traitors who turned their backs on their former colleagues and went over to the ‘other side’. This article explores the public careers of two reform-era renegades from the West Riding woollen textile district: John Tester and George Beaumont. Both were prominent local figures who turned coat in the pivotal year of 1834. An examination of the context and nature of their treachery attests to the importance but also the fragility of local leadership. The article argues that the special place that popular leaders held in their communities went beyond notions of fame and celebrity; but that this bond, once broken, was not easily repaired. Examining the villains as well as the heroes of labour history enables us to appreciate the local energies and tensions that underpinned popular movements and to put into context the resilience of leaders who lasted the course.

Adam Smith revisited: the relationship between the English woollen manufacture and the availability of coal before the use of steam power

AbstractThe timing of textile de-industrialisation in eastern, southern, and western England and the concomitant shift of the woollen manufacture to the West Riding of Yorkshire is examined in temporal detail. The study shows that the manufacture was moving to settlements with cheap coal, low cost of living and running water as early as the sixteenth century. These settlements became key woollen manufacture centres and remained so until the nineteenth century. The industry was located on the West Riding of Yorkshire coal field long before the industrial revolution and the demand for coal to generate steam power.

The West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports: the precursor of Brain?

First published in 1878, Brain: A Journal of Neurology is generally considered to be the world's first neuroscientific journal. However, this claim might be challenged since the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports, another journal with significant neuroscientific content, was published between 1871 and 1876. Some have suggested this journal was the precursor of Brain, since it shared similar subject matter as well as editorial and authorial contributors, including James Crichton-Browne, David Ferrier and John Hughlings Jackson. To address this question, this article examines the origins, aims, structure and contents of, and some of the contributors and contributions to, the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports and compares these elements to the first six volumes of Brain (1878-9 to 1883-4). Although the two journals did overlap in terms of some shared neuroscientific interests, Brain evidently had a broader scope and a more international authorship. Nevertheless, this analysis suggests that, through the agency of Crichton-Browne, Ferrier and Hughlings Jackson, it is appropriate to regard the West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports as not only the antecedent but also the precursor of Brain.

A month in the country: The sesquicentenary of David Ferrier's classical cerebral localisation researches of 1873.

The experimental studies of David Ferrier (1843-1928), establishing many of the principles of cerebral localisation which still underpin neurological reasoning in clinical practice, were first reported 150 years ago. This paper briefly reviews Ferrier's experimental work, first undertaken in the laboratory at the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield, West Yorkshire and his resulting publications of 1873, as well as some contemporaneous responses to his findings. These not only established 'motor centres' pertinent to physiology and the signs of cerebral disease but also, from the outset, had ramifications for Ferrier's understanding of higher mental functions. That linguistic, mnemonic and perceptual cognitive functions might be related to localised areas within the brain received its most emphatic initial impetus from Ferrier's work.

Out of Obscurity: Local Leadership and Cultural Wealth in the Radical Communities of the West Riding Textile District, 1825–40

Abstract This paper revisits the local leadership of the various inter-related campaigns, agitations and oppositional activities that animated many of the communities of the West Riding textile district during the 1825–40 period. After examining different levels and types of leadership, it explores how people became leaders, the attractions and drawbacks of their role, and the challenges they faced. The study argues that the emergence of a generation of leaders who tapped into and contributed to the cultural wealth of their communities helps to explain the vitality of popular radicalism and the easy replenishment of early Chartist leadership in these localities.

John Douthwaite and ‘John Powlett’: Trades’ Unionism and Conflict in Early 1830s Yorkshire

This article examines two of ‘the great [trades’] Unions of the North’, represented by John Douthwaite and the mythical ‘John Powlett’, during the ‘revolutionary era’ of general unionism. These were built on tried and tested organizational forms and operational tactics, and featured traditional ritualistic elements backed up by strong bonds of secrecy. However, they also activated close mutual ties within their broad trades, explored new tactics of cooperative production, and developed strong links with other like-minded trades. The West Riding unions were at the heart of general union developments of the era and were closely involved in key industrial conflicts, the fate of the Dorchester labourers, and the brief life of the GNCTU. Far from a being a separate and largely discrete branch of working-class endeavour, trades’ unionism was intimately connected to other contemporary struggles, notably the fight for the political reform, cooperative self-reliance, and factory reform. The smashing of the Yorkshire unions, following the Dorchester prosecution and a concerted employers’ counterattack using ‘the document’, fed into the powerful narrative of Whig betrayal - through the Reform Act, the dashing of hopes for a ten-hour day, and the new Poor law - that underpinned early Chartism.

‘Drops in the Ocean’: The Politics and Practice of Policing the West Riding of Yorkshire in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

The article examines the development of the superintending constable system in the West Riding and argues that the system, despite its limitations, was more acceptable and successful than contemporary critics and many later historians have claimed. Further, it also played an important but overlooked part in the transition to a county-wide police force following the 1856 County and Borough Police Act. Rather than being on the wrong side of history, the superintending constable system in the West Riding was an important part of a complex and evolving pattern of policing. Misleading distinctions between ‘old’ and ‘new’ policing obscure the realities of police reform in which continuities, downplayed by reformers at Westminster, played a crucial role.

The Voice of the ‘Shoeless, Shirtless and Shameless’: Community Radicalism in the West Riding, 1829 to 1839

This paper argues that the local dimension of working-class radicalism has been underestimated in accounts of the campaigns and agitations that fed into early Chartism. It illustrates this by examining three overlapping aspects of community radicalism in the West Riding textile district, from the late 1820s to the late 1830s. It looks firstly at informal, one-off actions and agitational endeavours rooted in a deep-seated radical culture. Secondly, it considers how leaders sought to initiate or influence campaigns and agitations on locally significant issues. Thirdly, it explores radical engagement in parochial administration and contests for the offices of local government. In all these spheres, working-class radicals and their allies were at the forefront of attempts to challenge the power of local elites and to articulate an alternative vision of democracy in action. Their engagement enhanced their leadership role and tapped into the deep reservoir of community support for radicalism that sustained early Chartism.

E.P. Thompson, Shirley , and the Antinomian Tradition in West Riding Luddism and Popular Protest

The novelist Charlotte Brontë and the historian E.P. Thompson both claimed that the Yorkshire Luddites of the 1810s were Antinomians, descendants of the seventeenth-century radical Christian sects who claimed, as Christ’s elect, that they were not bound by the (moral) law. This article follows a thread that links Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (in which he made this claim) with his later study of William Blake, Witness against the Beast, which, far from being just an esoteric study of an esoteric figure, uncovered an antinomian tradition that linked the radicalism and protest of the ‘age of reason’ with the seventeenth century. In doing so, it revisits the relationship between Thompson and religion, still an underexplored aspect and too overshadowed by his polemical attacks on Methodism. Having sketched this antinomian tradition, the article then turns to Brontë’s novel Shirley, which recounts the Luddism of the West Riding, and situates it in the context of Thompson’s antinomian tradition, exploring why Brontë chose to present the Luddites as Antinomians. The final section tests the hypothesis of Brontë and Thompson that Luddites may have been Antinomians through a case study of Luddism in the West Riding and the place of religious enthusiasm in working-class protest and culture in the early nineteenth century.

Meningococcal Meningitis and Coal Mining in Provincial England: Geographical Perspectives on a Major Epidemic, 1929–33

This article presents the first systematic study of the spatial transmission of the 1929–33 epidemic of meningococcal meningitis and its association with local coal mining communities in three adjacent high incidence counties of England; Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Drawing on a robust method of spatial epidemiological analysis (swash‐backwash model), we demonstrate a gradient response with local levels of employment in coal mining for each of three key parameters of the epidemic wave: spatial velocity of transmission; duration of infectivity; and spatial reach. Partial least squares regression analysis identifies the relatively young and fertile demographic of local mining communities as the principal determinant of the resulting epidemic burden. Other sociodemographic parameters, including established risk factors for invasive meningococcal disease (low social class, high residential density, and overcrowding) are found to play little, or no, role in the spatial distribution of the disease. Our findings have importance for understanding the historic links between the coal mining industry and epidemic meningococcal meningitis, and point to possible present‐day opportunities for intervention through the designation of coal mining communities as defined risk groups for meningococcal vaccines.

A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools by Laura Tisdall

Reviewed by: A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools by Laura Tisdall Gary McCulloch A Progressive Education? How Childhood Changed in Mid-Twentieth-Century English and Welsh Schools. By Laura Tisdall. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. xii + 280 pp. Cloth £80. progressive education has long attracted the attention of many of our finest historians of education—and with good reason, as it has been associated with some of the most admired and simultaneously most controversial educators of the twentieth century. It is this rich topic to which Laura Tisdall's book, A Progressive Education?, seeks to contribute. In her wide-ranging and often provocative study, she takes issue with earlier interpretations, proposes a key distinction in the history of progressive education, and suggests a key shift in the understanding of childhood. Nevertheless, while these features take the headlines, this account is also and fundamentally a history of teachers. Tisdall's first point is that previous writers have supported a myth in which progressive education attained its zenith in the 1960s and then suffered a backlash by the end of the century. This view is mistaken, according to Tisdall, because progressive education was not a single movement but involved a number of competing and often irreconcilable ideas. In particular, she identifies two distinct and mutually opposing notions of progressivism: utopian and nonutopian. The utopian project, at its strongest in the interwar years, she links with the new ventures such as A. S. Neill's Summerhill and Homer Lane's Little Commonwealth, which aimed to free the child from adult interference and ultimately to create a new generation and world. Nonutopian progressivism, on the other hand, sought a child-centered curriculum supported by teachers that would help the child to develop into a psychologically healthy adult. Tisdall argues that whereas utopian progressives had little effect on mainstream schools or the state education system, nonutopian progressivism became popular after World War Two, based on Piagetian developmental psychology, and articulated in 1967 in the Plowden report on primary schools. Nonetheless, she claims that even at this time, educational practices were no more than half reformed, as, in her words, "reluctant teachers were pressed to use half-understood child-centered methods in crowded, ill-equipped classrooms" (131). Meanwhile, ideals of childhood shifted from the quiet, attentive, individualistic pupil emphasized in the 1920s and 1930s [End Page 161] to the extrovert and sociable team member whose virtues were extolled from the 1950s onwards. A Progressive Education? pursues these issues with the help of sources that include inspectors' reports, logbooks, magazines, and an array of local archival source material that comprise overall an impressively rich set of data. Much of this provides interesting details of teachers' attitudes to progressive education that effectively generates a fascinating subplot in the work as a whole. This traces the attitudes of teachers to progressive education, presenting these along the way as largely resistant, dissident, critical, and reluctant. Chapter 3, for example, explores what it sees as teachers' resistance to "airy-fairy methods," based on a narrowly conceived typology of teacher professionalism as a learned craft or skill as opposed to a body of theoretical knowledge. Chapter 4 emphasizes teacher antipathy to progressively minded (but out-of-touch) inspectors, and chapter 5 argues that ill-trained primary school teachers tended to misunderstand and misinterpret the subtleties of Piagetian theory. Then, in chapter 6, it is claimed that the nonutopian progressive curriculum developed in secondary modern and comprehensive schools helped to sustain older stereotypes of social class, gender, ethnicity, and special educational needs. Indeed, "Pupils with special educational needs and pupils of color were especially othered and marginalized" (208). There is thus an underlying story of teacher negativity toward nonutopian progressive education that comes in some ways to dominate the text. Moreover, the work is sometimes marred by glib and dubious judgments made in passing. Alec Clegg, usually regarded as a (progressive) chief education officer in the West Riding of Yorkshire, here makes his only appearance in the unexpected guise of an influential school inspector [HMI] (110); an assertion that there has been very little consideration of secondary modern curricula itself pays little regard to the...

Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices, by Jennifer Wallis

Reviewed by: Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices by Jennifer Wallis Athena Vrettos (bio) Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices, by Jennifer Wallis; pp. xvi + 276. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, $31.00, €29.12. Jennifer Wallis’s Investigating the Body in the Victorian Asylum: Doctors, Patients, and Practices dives into the scientific practices and procedures of the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Yorkshire in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Seeking to address the place of the body in the history of psychiatry, Wallis’s study reveals how a number of large public asylums like West Riding linked the task of patient care to a broad range of scientific research into the somatic origins of mental disease. Delving into records that include patient photographs, microscopic slides, lab reports, and postmortem examinations, Wallis illuminates the Victorian asylum’s dual function as scientific laboratory and medical ward. Investigating the Body thus highlights the role that physiological, pathological, and bacteriological work played in the care of mental patients in this era, and the role that asylum doctors played in the search for biological bases of mental disease. In particular, Wallis focuses on a diagnosis that preoccupied the doctors of West Riding and many other asylums in this era. “General paralysis of the insane,” or “general paralysis,” was a progressive and chronic condition that combined mental and physical symptoms ranging from hallucinations and delusions to disturbed reflexes, fragile bones, and diminished muscle control (10). General paralytic patients were numerous at West Riding and other lunatic asylums, and their prognosis was grim. But their combination of mental and physical symptoms seemed to offer an unusually promising vehicle for studying the somatic basis of mental disease, a theory that was increasingly being embraced by the field of psychiatry. Though late-Victorian doctors were only beginning to speculate about possible links between general paralysis and syphilis, by the early twentieth century, with the discovery of the spirochete, the amorphous diagnostic category of general paralysis was replaced by neurosyphilis. Wallis makes it clear, however, that her interest is [End Page 710] in neither retrospective diagnosis nor the celebration of scientific discovery, but rather in “bringing to the surface” previously unrecognized scientific investigations that general paralysis inspired in Victorian asylums (7). This metaphor of surface and depth runs throughout Investigating the Body, most conspicuously and successfully in the structure of its chapters. Using the postmortem examination as her organizing principle, Wallis takes the reader through a series of investigations—moving from skin to muscle to bone to brain to fluids—with each chapter probing a deeper layer of the body and pairing that layer with a related socio-historical question or controversy. This approach yields some surprising insights, transforming a potentially narrow focus on a few decades of asylum records into a much wider and richer exploration in the social history of science. Wallis’s first chapter, “Skin,” for example, analyzes the use of medical photography in the Victorian asylum and its specific role in studying and treating skin conditions. Wallis notes that in the West Riding catalog, patients were photographed both clothed and unclothed, in the wards and the gardens, during life and after death. One doctor appears in a photograph with a patient’s brain being removed from the skull at postmortem; other lab photos record microscopic slides of brain and muscle tissues. Wallis situates these records as part of a wider investigative enterprise, including contemporary debates about the ethical implications of clinical photography. She notes that the motivations behind the photographs could vary widely, blurring the boundaries between public and private, medical and nonmedical functions. This occasionally produced jarring conjunctions. While an asylum in Surrey dressed up residents as literary characters, a patient from West Riding is photographed naked to record his skin lesions, arms crossed defiantly and staring at the camera against a decorative backdrop of clouds. In the chapter “Muscle,” Wallis demonstrates how doctors studying the body-brain relationship through the muscle wasting of general paralysis intersected with contemporary research on cerebral localization. Keen to prove the scientific value of psychiatric hospitals, one of West Riding’s most prominent supervisors, James...

The West Riding of Yorkshire pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield, 1814–1995 – psychiatry in pictures

The West Riding of Yorkshire pauper Lunatic Asylum at Wakefield, 1814–1995 – psychiatry in pictures

‘THE PAST NO LONGER CASTS LIGHT UPON THE FUTURE; OUR MINDS ADVANCE IN DARKNESS’1: THE IMPACT AND LEGACY OF SIR ALEC CLEGG’S EDUCATIONAL IDEAS AND PRACTICES IN THE WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE (1945-1974)

ABSTRACT This paper examines and evaluates some aspects of the legacy of the West Riding of Yorkshire County Council and its long serving Chief Education Officer, Sir Alec Clegg, who held the post between 1945 and 1974. Against a subsequent political discourse of markets, choice and autonomy which portrays local authorities as the cause of poor educational outcomes and school failure, political developments have led to a diminution of the role of local authorities, destruction of local democratic accountability and greater centralisation of power and control of education. Drawing on interviews and email correspondence with former pupils, teachers, officers and others of the West Riding, its successor authorities and beyond, we explore the context, tensions, successes and lasting impact of Clegg’s ideas and practice, particularly in relation to support for community development and the arts and creativity. The paper also looks at Clegg’s influence and legacy with regard to selection for secondary education and the role of middle schools, the development of primary education and the impact on successor authorities to the West Riding and beyond.

CATHOLIC SPIRIT OF ASSOCIATION: CATHOLIC POPULAR CULTURE, CONFRATERNITIES, GUILDS AND a RESTORED COMMUNITY IN THE INDUSTRIAL DIOCESE OF LATE VICTORIAN-EARLY EDWARDIAN WEST RIDING OF YORKSHIRE

If we wish to test the strength of the Catholic spirit in the industrial Diocese of late Victorian early Edwardian West Riding of Yorkshire, we should first consider what types of institutions and societies existed among them. Thus, wherever the spirit of Catholicism flourished in the hearts of the laity, it should manifest itself in the Church’s different confraternities, guilds and societies. These Catholic institutions functioned mostly independent of each other but controlled by the central council of the Church. They were an effective means of developing a new Catholic identity with forms of self-legitimisation that would come to increase Irish Catholic communal and religious life. They were indispensable to the cultural expansion of the Church and the spirit of Catholic association. The immediate purpose of these societies was a moral and spiritual provision, but they achieved much more than this. These societies worked side by side with the Catholic Church and mutually supplemented each other, becoming the twin children of the same spirit. They owed their existence to the same powerful reaction of the Church against the moral and material deterioration of English Protestant society.

Sheriff’s Tourns, Wapentakes and the Liberties of the West Riding

Historians of the early modern period have not sufficiently considered the variety of local heritable jurisdictions that continued from the middle ages into the nineteenth century. The central roles of these jurisdictions and their courts in local government, law-enforcement and civil litigation have thus been overlooked. This study first describes the extent of the major liberties in the West Riding in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and their legal and administrative significance. The existence both inside and outside these major liberties of a second tier of liberties that held sheriff’s tourns without the sheriff is then discussed. This tier not only included six wapentake courts, but also parallel courts for distant parts of those wapentakes, alongside other private liberties, whose extents interlocked. Collectively they performed an exclusive role in appointing the law-enforcement officers in every township and in providing local and central oversight of them, even where the county sheriff had no jurisdiction. It is important to emphasise the long continuity of these liberties, notwithstanding many changes in ownership, from the thirteenth century (and before) into the nineteenth century. The study suggests that similar long-lasting institutions may have existed in other counties.

The Wapentake Courts of The Honour of Pontefract, 1427–1877

Wapentake courts continued to play an important role in the administration of the West Riding throughout the early-modern period and for much of the nineteenth century. This can be demonstrated from the surviving court records of the six wapentake courts of the honour of Pontefract. These show that wapentake courts, acting as sheriff's tourns, performed a central function in early-modern local administration. All the township officers within their jurisdictions, including constables, sworn men (bye-law men) and pinders, were sworn into office at sittings of these courts. The roles of these different township officers are made clear. These courts and the seigneurial courts with jurisdiction over civil suits were inter-dependant, as were the wapentake courts and the courts of quarter sessions. Evolutionary changes in the sittings and functions of these courts are described. The wapentake courts were undermined by nineteenth century reforms of policing and to courts for debt litigation, which eventually led to the final abandonment of these courts despite local support for their continuation.