Abraham Wildman

People

Abraham Wildman
poet, politician and,
surprisingly, Saltaire pensioner

Come some one behold us
with charity's meed
And see how the heart
in its sorrows can bleed;
For comforts ne'er tasting,
Our bodies are wasting
By inches to death;
With cold shake and shiver
Affection from liver
And gasping while working to
draw the pure breath.

Abraham Wildman
The Lay of the Woolcomber

Abraham Wildman's death at Saltaire Almshouses in March 1870 contains many ironies. A descendant of Yorkshire Quakers he was political activist in the Short-time movement which united Chartists and Tories in opposition to the Liberal Millocracy, failing in business he became a woolworker in Bradford in the mill of Wood and Walker whose founder John Wood had been a leading figure in the campaign against child labour Yet in old age he was thrown on the extensive charity of Titus Salt one of the leading Liberals of the 1840s. We do not know if Salt appreciated the irony of his good work and it is unlikely that the sick and bereaved Wildman did.
This is another example of how little we know of the true motivations of the builder of Saltaire a liberal - read neo-liberal to put him in a modern context - at a time when that ideology was linked to an expanding economy which dominated the world market but who was also a committed Christian even to the extent of helping a former enemy.

Biography

Abraham Wildman was born at Keighley, on the 13th of August, 1803, and was the son of Quaker parents, from whom he inherited the integrety and independence which he shewed in several circumstances of his life. He early wrote verses, and was, for a while, the first relieving officer elected by the Board of Guardians for Keighley, then recently constituted a Union under the New Poor Law Act.

Political and other differences presently arose, and he retired from that position. Mr Wildman then threw himself into the Short Hours' Factory Agitation, and as secretary for the promotion of this movement, corresponded with important political personages, from one of the highest of whom - the Duke of Wellington - he received an autograph letter. He also drew up petitions to both Houses of Parliament, and defended the factory workers before the Court of Quarter Sessions at Keighley; a report of which may be found in the Leeds Intelligencer, of November 4th, 1833.

Mr Wildman had already brought out a Volume of Poems in 1829. He had also sent poems to the papers, some of which were preserved by the late Mr Abraham Holroyd.......

Mr Wildman afterwards engaged in business in Keighley, but was unsuccesful; removing from thence to Bingley, and then to Bradford, where, for some time afterwards, he resided. He entered the service of Messrs. Gurney & Brothers, wool-staplers, and subsequently was a wool-sorter with Messrs Wood & Walker. At length old age overtook him, and he was unable to work. Misfortunes in his family, as well as in business, weighed upon him. One of his daughters was crippled, by an injury to her spine in a mill accident. His only son went to Australia, and was never heard from again. Then his wife died. In order to obtain some pecuniary help, he published by subscription his Lays of Hungary, from which he derived some benefit. It seemed that he must ultimately, and before long, come to the workhouse.

However, in 1868, (Abraham Holroyd), hearing that Mr Wildman was in want, interested himself in his welfare. Friends in n Bradford were, at the same time collecting funds to relieve his pressing necessitiesand ease his anxious care for the future. Through the kind intervention of his former friend, Sir Titus Salt, was moved to render him immediate assistance, and soon after, to allot him one of the Alms-houses at Saltaire, coupled with means of subsistence for the remainder of his life; to which place, with his invalid daughter, he at once removed. But even here his bereaved condition was such a lasting grief to him that his improved circumstances could not entirely allay it. Soon at the beginning of March 1870, he was seized with paralysis, and on the 19th passed away from a world in which others beside him have found the etherial mood of the poet no match for the hard realities of life, or the turbid atmosphere and competitive struggles of a busy, but not unfeeling age.

Source:
Rev. James Gabb
"Abraham Wildman"
in
Charles Forshaw (ed)
The Poets of Keighley,
Bingley, Haworth
and district
being biographies and poems
of various authors of
the above neighbourhood
Bradford,
Thornton and Pearson,
1891
pp171-172

Two Poems by Abraham Wildman

The Factory Child's Complaint
Mercy! wake the slumbering breast,
Wake! to fan the holy fire;
Plead the cause of the oppressed,
Plead for those who now expire

In a land where freedom smiles,
We are worse than negro slaves;
Envy of surrounding isles,
Rouse thy patriots from their graves.

Nation blessed from above,
Must thy children wear the chain?
Land of Bibles - Christian love,
Justice pleads for us in vain.

Short our slumbers, brief our rest,
Long the labour that we bear;
Grief corroding in our breast,
Sinks our spirits to despair

Ere the lark salutes the skies,
O the sun on us doth smile,
From our wretched beds we rise,
Weary of the last days toil.

There confined till his bright rays
All have fled the western sky,
Blush, ye Christians of these days -
Blush at this foul tyranny!

Summoned by yon hateful bell,
Morn and noon we're doomed to hear,
Yes it sounds like death's dull knell,
We its victims of despair.

Give support to Sadler's measure
Lend O lend a helping hand;
Charity - that heavenly treasure -
Should adorn a Christian land.

Wake, then, Mercy! fan the flame;
Plead for them who dare not speak;
Wipe the guilt from Britain's name,
And the chains of slavery break.

from C.Forshaw(ed)The Poets
of Keighley, Bingley,
Haworth &c
Bradford 1891
pp173-174

The Lay of the Woolcomber

Wearied with labour, exhausted with toil,
A heartfull of sorrow, a brow without smile;
Oh! wretched condition,
Is this my position?
For long seems the day;
With bones aching weary.
With prospects alldreary,
I've scarcely sufficient to nourish my lay.

My cell dark, deep,is dug out of earth,
Where young ones around me ne'er gambol in mirth;
In garments of sorrow
We beg, buy or borrow
To clothe them some way;
Our fondest affection
Is cruel correction
To bar and to limit their innocent play

The sweet breath of morning ne'er enters my dwelling,
To clear out the old fumes from the damp-colour'd ceiling
Which constantly oozing,
Keep soul-body dozing
In this dismal hole;
Whatever the weather
We're huddled together
And breathe the slow poison arisng from coal

Six children and wife, with self, number eight;
A bed of deal shavings, our couch for the night;
We rise in the morning,
The same rags adorning,
To toil at the comb;
Like-quarry men digging,
We're snatching and jigging
One room is our workshop, and cookshop and home!

Alaswhat instruction can render them civil?
Examples around them creating more evil!
A cheerless commotion
Flies far from devotion
And renders all vain;
The clothes on the Sunday
Are worn on the Monday,
Disease and dark poverty over us reign.

Come some one behold us with charity's meed
And see how the heart in its sorrows can bleed;
For comforts ne'er tasting,
Our bodies are wasting
By inches to death;
With cold shake and shiver
Affection from liver
And gasping while working to draw the pure breath.

Come rouse up, my young ones, half-starved and in blight;
The comb-pots our altar from morning to night
Then stir up the fire,
There's death in the fume;
Work,work while you can,
Pale shreds of a man,
Thank God there's a rest and a peace in the Tomb

quoted in
J.A.Jowitt's introduction to
Mechanization and Misery
-the Bradford Woolcombers'
report of 1845
1991. pp15-16
I cannot agree with Jowitt's
view that this is poor poetry.

negro slaves

The contrast between expenditure to free black slaves and the lack of concern shown for factory workers shown by the British system of government was a common one at the time.

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Blush

It was a theme of the campaign against child labour that forcing children to work for twelve hours a day in a mill was un-Christians. The fact that liberal millocrats were predominantly non-conformist suggested to their mainly anglican opponents, such as Rev George Bull of Bierley that there was some hypocrisy involved in the behaviour such as the Horton Lane Chapel group who formed Bradford's alternative elite - and of which Titus Salt was a part.

yet the situation was more complicated than that. If you compare Samuel Cunliffe Lister with Titus Salt you find in Lister a man for whom the established church was part of the natural order of things. He was left the living of Addingham in Wharfedale by his grandmother but preferred not to take holy orders instead going into business. Salt, born in a house, Morley Old Hall which been the home of a non-conformist martyr hanged in the 1660s for his part in the Farnley Wood Plot, saw religion as something which needed more effort and which, from his role as head of the Sunday School at Horton Lane to the building of Saltaire, with impressive Comgregational Church, he was constantly giving witness.

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Sadler's measure

Michael Sadler, Tory MP for Leeds, introduced a bill into the House of Commons to limit labour for those under the age of 18 to not more than 10 hours per day. This outrageous suggestion which would be the ruin of British Industry was defeated. This reference dates the poem to 1831 - 32.
Following the loss of the bill Sadler chaired a Committee which took evidence on the effects of long hours on young people. He found during the course of the enquiry that factory workers who dared give evidence were being victimised.
Amongst those who gave evidence was Abraham Wildmanwho stated that his four sisters worked at Castle Mill for 12 hours per day except when there was a "strong order on hand to finish when they got up at 4.30 in the morning and returned home at 11.00 in the evening.(quoted Ian Dewhirst A History of Keighley, Keighley Corporation, 1974 p 17)

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Woolcomber

The woolcomber's was the last trade in wool processing to be mechanised and thus the last working-class skill to be made uncommercial by large-scale investment in machinery.
The power of this poem comes from its expressing the feelings of the woolcombers and their families. However hard they work, however skillful they are at their trade their conditions have become intolerable and are becoming more so.
While the narrator of this poem describes his life and his fears for his children in a cellar in Goitside at Manningham Hall, two miles away, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, gentleman ( for so he describes himself in Ibbetson's Directory of the Borough of Bradford, 1845 - and he was the descendant of two of the oldest gentry families in the North of England) is buying up the patents of experimental woolcombing machinery so as to get a monopoly; and five miles away at Crow Nest, Lightcliffe Titus Salt is plotting to snatch the last patent from under Lister's nose so that he can trade it for a license to build woolcombing machines for himself.

During the 1830s the number of woolcombers had increased partly because of the mechanisation of weaving and partly because of immigration by Irish textile workers whose industries had been destroyed by English competition following the Act of Union of 1801. During that decade woolcombers' incomes seem to have declined by almost two-thirds. After the Lister Nip-comb was introduced in 1845 the number of hand-comber halved in 5 years.

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Cell

A prisoner is confined in a cell but then a monk lives in a cell and Wildman may have had both ideas in mind ( see the reference to the altar in the last stanza).
However the first is the predominate idea. The Woolcombers Report of 1845 mentions places such as these:
Wapping - This dwelling is four feet ten inches below the surface. No ventilation

White Abbey, Spinks Buildings - 4ft below surface. In this miserable apartment, a man, his wife and four children, sleep in one bed composed of shavings. General bad health.

New Leeds (about half way up Leeds Rd) - In addition to the other unfavourable circumstances detailed below, the smoke and sulphur arising from the Bowling Iron Works, add to the unhealthiness of this place
.......A miserable cellar in which four persons work, and five, including three females sleep: four feet below the surface. Walls black with damp - stench intolerable.

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Slow poison arising from coal
Hand Combing involved using heated iron combs to separate the long and short fibres of the fleece - tops and noils. In order that the combs be at the right working temperature a pot filled with coal, coke or charcoal had to be kept burning at all times.
The Woolcombers Report noted of Millbank - the area where Sunbridge Rd was later to be built:
...Situate in a low part of the town, behind the Sun Inn stables. It is filthy in the extreme - the street is narrow - drainage bad- stagnant water suffered to accumulate, and a most offensive smell continually emitted from the refuse which lies about in various directions....the foul atmosphere.....is augmented to afearful extent from the crowded stae of the appartments in which the parties follow their occupations; and also increased by using cokes at their work, which emits a most noxious effluvia.

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rest...peace

An unorthodox and ironic theology.
It is, of course, a constant of religion that if the poor confine themselves to their station in life as a reward they will enter into bliss hereafter. Since they have learnt about camels and needle's eyes they can, as it were, gain strength to put up with the behaviour of their betters in this life.
The classic musical attack on the position that you should put up with not being able get any pie to eat now is Joe Hill's The Preacher and the Slave written 50 or 60 years after the Lay of the Woolcomber; it is sung to the tune of the Sweet Bye and Bye and contains the refrain: 'Pie in the Sky when you Die"
Wildman's woolcomber seems past such sarcasm able only to thank God that in the tomb there will be a rest from such unrelenting horror.

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Quaker

The name Wildman has other Yorkshire Quaker associations. In 1675 Matthew Wildman of Selside near Horton in Ribblesdale, West Riding of Yorkshire was excomunicated for non-payment of tithes and imprisoned for two years.
In the following year just over the Lancashire border at Tatham the Rev Thomas Sharp committed Quaker Elizabeth Wildman "a widow about sixty years of age...to Lancaster Gaol" where, after nine months she died.

Source:
Matthew Wildman
"Yorkshire Quakers
- The Sufferings of 'Friends'"
in William Smith (ed)
Old Yorkshire Vol I
London,
Longmans, Green & co,
1881
p250

and
Horton Local History Group
Horton-in-Ribblesdale
the story of an upland parish
Settle,North Craven Heritage Trust,1984
p30

Elizabeth Wildman
Donald A. Rooksby
The Quakers of North-West England 3:
And Sometime Upon These Hills:
a guidebook to places of Quaker
interest in Cumbria, North Lancashire, the
Yorkshire Dales and the Pennines
Colwyn Bay,published by the author,1998
p83

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Volume

This would appear to be very scarce. There is no copy in the British Library Catalogue nor can any be found by a search using COPAC.
The same is true of the Lays of Hungary mentioned later.

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Misfortunes

Keighley historian Ian Dewhirst makes the point that

in common with many another writer whose manuscripts have survived, (he) can be glimpsed more forcibly in what he never published. Occasionally he would jot ideas down on the back of his Poor Law documents. 'I have no hope - but deep despair' begins one pencilled stanza before scribbling off into incoherence.
Ian Dewhirst
The Doctor the Druggist and the
Relieving Officer...Some Haworth and
District Writers of the Brontë era
Brontë Society Transactions
the journal of Brontë Studies
Vol 23 Part I, April 1998 p65

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Bradford

In Bradford he lived in one of the poorest parts of the town - Adelaide St between Nelson St and Manchester Rd which in 1848 was the centre of the insurrectionary movement which arose following the rejection by the House of Commons of the Chartist Petition
It was here that Bradford's 'Wat Tyler' - Isaac Jefferson (?1812 -25th December 1874) also from a
Quaker background, had hung up pike heads for sale outside his blacksmith's shop. Ike Jefferson's fate was better than Wildman's after serving a short prison sentence he returned to Bradford where he seems have treated as something of a pet - he is mentioned in virtually every book about the town published in the subsequent decades. He worked for many years at Waud's Britannia Mills, was mixed up in anti-Catholic riots (odd because his customers at Adelaide St had been predominantly Irish), was wheeled on to support a Liberal Candidate in an election, became a Primitive Methodist at Great Horton living with his sons at Brownroyd, Thornton Road, where the younger Jeffersons built up a foundry business.

See J.A.Jowett
Introduction to
Mechanization and Misery: the
Bradford Woolcombers' Report of 1845
Krumlin, Halifax, Ryburn Publishing,1991
p15

Isaac Jefferson's biography can be
re-constructed to some extent from
Cudworth's History of Bowling, the
History of Primitive Methodism in
Great Horton and other sources.
There is much in D.G.Wright's
work on Bradford Chartism
The only 'complete' biography is
very scarce (copy in the
British Library and in the
Brotherton Library) an unrepublished article
by William Cudworth in James Burnley's
The Yorkshireman Volume 8, no 155,
5th July 1879 p9
which includes a sketch of him by
the paper's resident cartoonist Ant.
This latter is reproduced in
a more common source Harry Fieldhouse
Old Bradford Illustrated Bradford 1889 p64

Ike Jefferson
in later life
by Ant

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