People
Abraham Holroyd

Abraham Holroyd
1815 - 1888
Holroyd's autobiography
Holroyd Bibliography
Abraham Holroyd Saltaire and its Founder
republished for the first time since 1873
.
"Mr Holroyd's career (was) an eventful and
interesting one"
William Scruton,1888
Abraham Holroyd, Bradford poet, publisher and antiquary, was born
at Clayton in Bradford Dale on 2nd April 1815 to a family of handloom
weavers.

View of Clayton from Thornton
Clayton Church can be seen on the ridge in
the middle distance a quarter of the way across
from the left-hand side.
It was across these fields
that the young Holroyd was taken to hear the
Rev Patrick Brontė
Thornton Heights
Near where Holroyd's Father was born.
It was from communities such as this one that many of the people who worked at Saltaire originally came.
At the beginning of the 19thC the population of Thornton township (including Denholme) was just over 4,000 while Shipley where Saltaire was later to be built was only 1,600.
As the worsted trade developed in the early 19thC they migrated four miles down the valley to Bradford and in the mid-century moved with their work to Sir Titus Salt's model village. Abraham Holroyd's trajectory was a more complicated version of the same although not unique - Peter Bussey the Chartist and John Hartley the Halifax dialect poet both spent time in the USA before returning to the Bradford area.
The valley in the middle distance is one of two which join at Leaventhorpe to form Bradford Dale. Airedale runs from left to right across the two pictures behind the prominent ridge. The hill in the distance in the right-hand picture is Otley Chevin dividing Airedale from Wharfedale. The long range of hills in the distance in the left-hand picture is Rombald's Moor better known , although inaccurately so, as Ilkley Moor. At the top left-hand corner of that picture and in the far distance can be glimpsed Great Whernside in Upper Wharfedale
Holroyd's family were Anglicans - church not chapel - and many years later when he went to
Haworth to see Charlotte Brontė he recognised the Rev Patrick Brontė
who had been curate of t'owd Bell Chapel, Thornton to which he
had been taken by his father and grandfather presumably at the age of four.
The period of his youth was that when the weaving trade was being
mechanized, that is when the introduction of power looms was destroying
the old relations between craft-workers, who were becoming proletarians, and
the wool masters who were becoming capitalists.
He began in the family business as soon as his feet could reach
the treadles.
The Holme as it is today.
The road is Thornton Rd built in the 1820s across the flat meadow known as the Holme. Bradford Beck flows behind the buildings to the left of the pictures and half-way up the slope to the right runs the Mill Goit - the medieval waterway built to serve Bradford's Cornmill which stood at Aldermanbury.
In the decades after 1825 Goitside became developed as one of Bradford's most notorious slums.
The Odd Fellows Hall - which was built in 1837 and demolished in the 1960s - stood in the area outlined in green on the left-hand picture.
In 1825, the year in which he turned ten, two events showed unmistakably
what was happening. On the 3rd February of that year the young Abraham Holroyd had stood where the Oddfellows Hall was later built watching the septennial Bishop Blaise
festival the traditional expression of the unity of masters and men under the
old manufacturing system, on the Holme - a flat area beside
the Beck just to the west of the town and the site of Bradford's earliest
worsted mill.
On the 8th June the weavers and the woolcombers struck work.
This was the defining moment in the development of Bradford as the worsted capital
of the world. For five months the craft-workers held out before being forced
back to work.
In December the leading local bank failed one of the many
provincial banks affected by the first international commercial crisis.
Like many working class intellectuals Holroyd's formal education was limited;
he spent only one term at school paid for by his grandfather who found the necessary 3d(1.5p) per week but he succeeded in learning to read and taught
himself to write at home. In time he acquired a library of five books - the works of Benjamin
Franklin the poetry ofRobert Burns,
the ' translation' of Ossian, the works of Alexander Pope, including the Homer translations, and the Pilgrim's Progress -
and, at the age of seventeen began writing his own verse. These were issued as chapbooks by
Bradford publisher Henry Wardman in 1834.
Abraham Holroyd continued in the trade until he was 21 but the
continual cutting of rates for the job made him decide to join the Army:
His regiment was stationed at Montreal, Lower Canada and when, in 1837
both provinces rose in rebellion against British colonial rule.
Holroyd took part in the fighting at St Eustache and was
later transferred, with his regiment, to London in Upper Canada
where they arrested rebels who were later hanged. After the
end of hostilities he was able to buy himself out with a loan from one of the acquitted rebels whose wife he had helped during the husband's imprisonment and in time moved across the border to the newly founded town of Rockford, Illinois
where his employer had been appointed probate judge.
Holroyd made his way south via the tiny new city of Chicago to Peoria and then by steamboat to St Louis and on down the Mississippi, suffering
from malaria and in great poverty, seeing on his journey the works of the
Moundbuilders which fired his interest in antiquity. He spent the next
decade in Lousiana and Texas, most of it in New Orleans, where he married a Cornishwoman,
Amelia Martyn Jenkin, and began selling books in the market.
Advised to return to England for the good of his health Holroyd arrived in Bradford with his family
in 1851.
The town had doubled in size while he was away. Holroyd had missed
the bitter divisions of the 1840s. Now the abolition of the Corn Laws and the
upturn in trade had created optimism amongst the manufacturers and the promise
of better times for the working class; at the Great Exhibition Bradford's development
was greeted with amazement. Holroyd started a bookshop in tiny premises
at the top of Westgate opposite the old Zoar Chapel and near the end
of middle-class Lumb Lane, the family moving into a house in Picton
St, Manningham where their neighbours were small trades people.
The Lumb Lane area
The picture on the left shows the entrance to Picton St. The blocks of flats in the background replaced the houses where Holroyd and his neighbours lived and are typical of those built in Bradford after the 2nd World War.
On the right restored Southfield Square
gives an impression of a Bradford middle-class residential street 150 years ago.
In the centre Peel Square built in 1851 the year that Holroyd returned to Bradford from New Orleans. Sir Robert Peel became a hero of industrial Britain when he abolished the protectionist Corn Laws. Peel had been killed in an accident the year before this block was built thus becoming the only British Prime Minister to die as the result of a horse falling on him.
Westgate
is one of the medieval streets of Bradford and is an ancient trackway which may have been a Roman road. Just beyond the tall building in the distance Grattan Rd once known as Silsbridge Lane branches off towards Great Horton . it was there that Titus Salt began spinning Donskoi Wool in the late 1820s. Beyond that the road drops steeply towards the Beck becoming Ivegate at the medieval Market Place.
Holroyd's shop stood on the site of the block in the middle of the picture. Presumably it was the building of this block which caused the writer to move to Saltaire.
In the 1840s the revolutionary German poet Georg Weerth
had described Bradford's culture as dominated by work but this was not completely
true: it had had a theatre, albeit a dilapidated one, a middle class book club
and, until his death in 1843, its resident poet the former woolsorter and later
woolcomber John Nicholson. There was a Mechanics' Institute.
Within a short time Holroyd's shop had become a centre for Bradford cultural
life. Here could be found John James FSA the town's first modern historian
and Ben Preston the dialect poet, George Ackroyd poet-banker and
William Scruton journalist, historian and later Holroyd's biographer .

John James FSA
Between 1851 and 1868 Holroyd published many historical and literary
works including the poetry of Ben Preston, John James' lecture on Francis Bacon, A Garland of Poetry by Yorkshire Authors and Mial's
Physical Geography of Bradford. He also republished work including the
autobiography of Joseph Lister with its account of the Civil War
siege of Bradford and Patrick Brontė's The Cottage in the Wood.
He founded a literary magazine, the Bradfordian. He supplied Sabine
Baring-Gould with material for Yorkshire Oddities and became
regarded as a compendium of Bradford history and lore. He edited a series of
papers on Bradford history which were published as Collectanea Bradfordiana
One early publishing venture, however, caused Holroyd some difficulty and led
to his first meeting with Titus Salt.
The "stupendous works at Saltaire" were the first of the big mills
which were to be built with the capital accumulated during the second quarter
of the nineteenth century - nothing like them had been seen before. Holroyd decided
in 1853-54 to publish an engraving of them. He gathered the names of subscribers
but when the time came to pay found that he was £15 short. After puzzling what
to do he approached "the Founder" himself.
Salt's response to Holroyd's plea was typical of the man.
He asked for the money which had been collected and then wrote
out a cheque for the full amount.
We can speculate that he saw the engraving as good publicity
but there seems to be more to it than that for the two men became close. Salt
"was to me ever a staunch and true friend" Holroyd later wrote - the manufacturer supporting one of his publications. and leaving him a pension.
It seems that he would also pass money privately to Holroyd for
individuals in need.
Holroyd's shop on the corner of
Caroline St and Victoria Rd, Saltaire

View of Caroline St from
the upper floor of Holroyd's shop
In 1868 Salt was able to do Holroyd another great service; having
to move out of his Westgate shop the writer found that there were no other premises
suitable. Salt offered him the shop at the south-east corner of the Victoria
Rd - Caroline St junction in Saltaire. Here Holroyd re-opened his bookshop and
continued publication.Holroyd became an important figure in the village joining the Swedenborgian congregation which was led by Ben Preston's brother John Preston

Harmony cottage, Eldwick
Holroyd's retirement home
In 1874 Holroyd retired at first to Eldwick, on
the hills to the north of the village, and later to the house of his daughter
in Alexandra Rd, Shipley.
It was here that he died on 1st January 1888.
Following a Swedenborgian ceremony at Saltaire his body was taken to Clayton where he was buried in the churchyard
in the presence of
the three great Bradford historians of the next generation William Cudworth,
William Scruton and J.Horsfall Turner</b>.
Bibliography of Abraham Holroyd
as given by J.Horsfall Turner in
Ancient Bingley
with 19thC prices as he gives them.
but with the titles expanded where the information is available
and with two additions.
Eldwick Glen: A Poem. 20 pages. (By Abraham Holroyd.) Bradford, Woodhead
and Worsnop, for Abraham Holroyd, Westgate, 1854.
The Life of Joseph Lister, of Bradford, born 1627, died 1709. 48 pages,
3d. Shipley, J. Pratt for Abraham Holroyd, Westgate, Bradford, 1860.
Holroyd's Collectanea Bradfordiana.a Collection of papers on the history of Bradford and the neighbourhood Issued in parts. 184 pp. 1873. 3s.
Reprints of papers on Bradford History.
A Garland of Poetry by Yorkshire authors or relating to Yorkshire. Edited by A. H. 2s. pp. xi, 199, 1873.
printed at Pateley Bridge.
Dialect Poems of Benjamin Preston; with notice of the Author, by
John Emanuel Preston (nephew). ls.
Saltaire & its Founder: Sir Titus Salt. 3 editions; 1s. &c.
n.d. 1871, 40 pp.; 1873, 91 pp.; printed by Harrison,
Bingley.
Now republished by the Piroisms Press in collaboration with Falcon Books of Saltaire,2000.
John James'lecture The Philosophy of Lord Bacon and the Systems which preceded it. 1d.
Spice Islands passed in the Sea of Reading.
The Bradfordian, in parts. 236 pp. 1860-62.
P. Bronte's Cottage in the Wood; prose only. Harrison, Bingley, 1865, 16 pp.
Holroyd's Bradford Historical Almanack, 1860 to 1865.
The Poetry of John Nicholson 1876
Welcome to the Prince and Princess of Wales to Milner Field, June 23, 1882.
Louis Miall's Physical Geography &c. of Bradford and Neighbourhood, 1863.
The Galaxy, 4 pp. only, 1867.
Published posthumously
Holroyd's Collection of Yorkshire Ballads.
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Standing
Note by Holroyd published in Forshaw p.74 . Bradford chroniclerJames Parker, was also present and remembered seeing, from his father's shoulders, the men walk about with enormous sandwiches in their hands, shivering with cold in the bleak February wind(Illustrated History from Hipperholm to Tong[1904] p.83.)
It was shortly after this that Thornton Rd was built through the Holme joining the West End of the town to Girlington in Manningham township.
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Bishop Blaise
The Bishop was for reasons unknown - but probably because of the role played by steel combs in his martyrdom - regarded as the patron of woolcombers and his festival was celebrated in the wool trade. The 1825 parade was led by Horton manufacturer Richard Fawcett, known as "the father of the worsted trade",the owner of Holme Mill and the employer of Ben Preston's father but included representatives of all the working class trade organisations.
It is not known if the young wool-buyer Titus Salt - then in his 22nd year - took part but he certainly was one of those agitating for the abolition of the Septennial in the following years
It was, wrote Robert Balgarnie in his biography of Salt, a relic of semi-barbarous times, and strangely out character with the present. It was an anachronism which evidently ought to be brought to an end. so thought the intelligent part of the community.........To this question the efforts of Mr Forbes, Mr Titus Salt, and others were directed Public meetings were held at which methods for the moral and intellectual improvement of the people were discussed. Lectures to the working classes themselves were commenced to promote this end. What was the result? The Blaize festival was never celebrated again.
Balgarnie p52
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Library
Compare the library of Sarah Ann Atkinson Wright,Windhill housewife and the mother of Joseph Wright:
It was her devotion to (Our Joe) and her desire to enter as far as lay within her reach into the new sphere which was just then opening out to him, that made her set herself the task of learning to read when she was forty-five years old She had three books; they were: the New Testament, the Pilgrim's Progress and an English translation of Klopstock's Messiah.
Elizabeth Mary Wright The Life of Joseph WrightOxford, 1932.
Alternatively compare the youthful library of John Ruskin - son of a wealthy wine merchant and living in South London :
I had Walter Scott's novels and the Iliad, (Pope's translation,) for constant reading when I was a child, on weekdays: on Sunday their effect was tempered by Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim's Progress..........My mother forced me, by steady daily toil, to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart.......
John Ruskin Præterita outlines of scenes and thoughts perhaps worthy of memory in my past life
George Allen 1886, Vol 1 pp1 - 2
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Mississippi
Mark Twain's Autobiography gives a picture of this part of the United States at that time:
I was born the 30th of November, 1835, in the almost invisible village of Florida, Monroe County, Missouri.......The village contained a hundred people and I increased the population by 1 per cent. It is more than many of the best men in history could have done for a town........The village had two streets, each a couple of hundred yards long; the rest of the avenues mere lanes, with rail fences and cornfields on either side. Both the streets and the lanes were paved with the same material - tough black mud in wet times, deep dust in dry.........
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Martyn
At least this is the name given by Holroyd in his letter to Scruton. However a sampler in the possession of Nancy Pullan of Shipley, Abraham and Amelia's great-grandaughter, gives her name as Amelia Marshall Jenkin. Since we must presume that Holroyd knew his wife's name and that she, even as a child knew her own name there the matter must rest awaiting future research.
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Cornishwoman
Although she appears to give her place of birth as Yorkshire in the 1871 census this is probably a misunderstanding by the enumerator. Holroyd described her place of birth as "St Stephens in Bramwell,Cornwall". (letter to Scruton).
Presumably the place is St Stephen in Brannel near St Austel.
Amelia Holroyd died at Shipley in August 1888.
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Back to census
Bitter Divisions
Bradford in the 1840s was divided into factions. The positions of the Tory Anglicans and Liberal Noncomformist Manufacturers( organised through Horton Lane Congregationalist Chapel of which Titus Salt was a member ) were clear.
The Liberals opposed the Church Rate which they had to pay although they were not members of the Anglican Church. in this they were supported by the working class Chartists.
(At least the were until the General Election of 1847 when a degree of consensus appeared between all the Bradford midle class candidates - and the liberals managed to unite enough to win thus begining their domination of Bradford government which was to last until 1885.)
The Liberals also waged a succesful campaign for the incorporation of the town as a borough. This was correctly seen as an attempt to create a new power structurewhich they would dominate.; it was also seen by both Tory and Chartist as an attempt to get the public to pay for cleaning up the mess which Liberal-led economic expansion had made of the town.
The Tories had opposed incorporation because it would destroy the existing power structure but they had popular campaigns against the Whig Government of the 1830s, Utilitarian reform and the liberal Millocracy particularly over the questions of the New Poor Law, the limitation of hours of work and child labour. In this they received the tactical support of the Chartists
For the working class the Reform Act of 1832 had meant that they had been abandoned by their middle-class allies as working conditions became worse with the destruction of the economic power of working-class skills they saw a Parliament elected by their masters and which they were unable to influence. The result was widespread support for the Peoples' Charter
The decade which Holroyd spent in America entered memory as the Hungry Forties and ,in Bradford was framed by two attempts, in 1839 and 1848, at armed insurrection.
The complicated nature of these divisions can be demonstrated by reference to the Woolcombers report of 1845.
The Woolcombers were the last trade to be destroyed by mechanisation; by the 1840s they still existed as independent craftsmen but were having to work long hours in slum dwellings order to get by. The appointment of a Royal Commission into the state of large towns gave them an opportunity to reveal the conditions under which they lived and worked to the country. A sanitary commision was set up to produce a statistical report. Its secretary was George White the leading trade unionist and Chartist in the town but it was supported by William Scoresby, former Whitby whaling captain, arctic scientist and now Vicar of Bradford. Scoresby had been appointed to retrieve the position of the Church of England in Bradford. (His predescessor had died after collapsing at a particularly lively meeting on the issue of the church rate.)
Scoresby had none of the qualities needed for this delicate task since the ability to run a tight ship in high latitudes did not necessarily fit one for the diplomacy needed in a town divided by religious affiliation. He ended up quarrelling with everyone - including tory evangelical anglicans like George Bull the "Ten Hour Parson"- and being mobbed in the streets.
Thus the leading figures in the campaign had opposing political views Chartist and Tory but both opposed the new liberal elite in the town.
The Liberals realising that they were being outflanked decided to embrace the report themselves and a number of leading liberal nonconformists led by Rev Jonathan Glyde of Horton Lane Chapel . became members of the Committee - amongst these was Titus Salt .
The years which followed the abolition of the Corn Laws, those when Saltaire was being developed and when Holroyd was publishing his historical works, were those of consensus - amongst the middle class -sealed by the election of Robert Milligan to Parliament in 1851 and of Titus Salt in 1859 years of as the Bradford Observer put it : "almighty stillness".
It is to be noticed that although the Non-conformists had emphasised the importance of cleaning up the town this was only slowly accomplished; the most significant technical achievement being a private initiative - the building of Saltaire.
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Hungry forties
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Dr F.W.Moorman, chair of the Yorkshire Dialect Society,
published a poem of this title in
the early years of the last century
it represents a conversation between a retired
Yorkshireman from Elland in Calderdale and a
Conservative Party candidate advocating the protectionist policies
of Joseph Chamberlain Although the authors sympathies are clearly on the side of free trade - and Bradford liberalism was a bastion of the cause until well into the 20thC - the poem does reflect popular memories the 'bad old times':
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Thou wants my vote, young man wi t'carpet bags,
Weel ,sit thee down, an hark what I've to say.
It's noan so varry oft wer kitchen flags,
Are mucked by real live lords down Yelland way
I've read thy speyks i' t' paper of a neet,
Thou lets a vast o' words flow off thy toungue;
Thou's gotten facts and figures, plain as t' leet
An arguments to slocken owd and young.
...............................................................................
'Twere "hungry forties" when I were a lad,
An fowks were clemmed, an weak i' t' airm an' brain;
we lived on demick'd taties, bread gone sad,
An wakkened up o' neets croodled wi' pain
................................................................................
I went to wark when I were eight yeer old
I tended galloways an' sammed up coils
'Twere warm i' t' pit, aboon 't were despert cowd
An' clothes were nobbut spetches, darns an' hoils.
Thro' six to eight I worked, then two mile walk
Across yon sumpy fields to t' kitchen door.
I've often fainted, face as white as chalk,
Then fall'n lang-face upon wer cobble floor
My mother addled seven and six a week,
Slavin' all t' day at Akeroyd's weyvin-shed
Fayther at t' grunstone wrowt, while he fell sick;
Steel filin's gate intul his lungs, he said
.
.........................................................................
"Corn laws be damned" said dad i' forty-eight;
"Corn laws be damned", say I i' nineteen-five.
Tariff reform, choose, how, will have to wait
Down Yelland way, so lang as I'm alive.
If thou an' thine sud tax us workers' fooid,
An thrust us back in our owd misery,
May t' tears o' our deead childer thin thy blooid,
An' t' curse o' t' "hungry forties" leet on thee.
F.W.Moorman Songs of the Ridings London, Elkin Mathews 1918 pp 49-50
The best known poem in this collection is the Dalesman's Litany
The result of this election was the 1906 Liberal landslide.
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Family
The following is a transciption of the 1871 Census return for 36 Victoria Rd Saltaire (since renumbered as 79).
| Name |
relationship to head of household |
marital status |
age |
profession |
place of birth |
| Abraham Holroyd |
head |
Married |
56 |
Bookseller and stationer |
Clayton, Yorkshire |
| Amelia Holroyd |
wife |
married |
48 |
|
Yorkshire ?St Stephens |
| John L Holroyd |
son |
unmarried |
18 |
mohair sorter |
Bradford, Yorkshire |
| Edwin M Holroyd |
son |
unmarried |
14 |
alpaca spinner |
Manningham, Yorkshire |
| George A Holroyd |
son |
unmarried |
9 |
scholar |
Manningham, Yorkshire |
| Elizabeth A. Easterbrook |
cousin |
unmarried |
19 |
alpaca weaver |
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (British) |
However there was at least one more child, a daughter Georgiana Holroyd, who as
Mrs Thornton welcomed her parents to her home after they left Eldwick and was closely involved in the plans for the memorial stone erected in Clayton churchyard.
In his 1888 obituary J.Horsfall Turner states that "Mr Holroyd leaves a widow, two sons and a daughter."
Holroyd's great-gradaughter, Nancy Pullan, tells me that the couple had in all 13 children including 4 called Fred, presumably they died in New Orleans one after aniother.
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I would like to thank Clive Woods of the Saltaire Village Society for providing this Census extract.
Ben Preston
Bradford dialect poet

Ben Preston
1819 -1902
Born in 1819, and, like Holroyd the son of handloom weaver Preston was brought up at Waterside a fold (ie an isolated group of cottages) next to the Beck at Girlington ( the site is roughly that occupied by the Lidl store, Duncombe Rd and Mother Hubbard's Fish restaurant , Ingleby Rd ,while the road which separates the Morrisons petrol station and the site of old Morrisons supermarket - now demolished - is the lane which served the hamlet.)
Having to move back to Bradford when his father was forced to seek employment at Fawcetts Preston remembered the time spent at Waterside as an idylic country childhood.
In his nephew, John Emmanuel Preston's, words: (He) became a witness of the way in which purse-proud tyranny ground down the poor and weak......To experiences of this kind we trace that contempt for the "Factory Lord" which peeps out in "Aw niver can call hur mi wife" which shows itself more plainly in "Uncle Ben" and which culminates in scourging, slashing sarcasm in "T'short Timer". In May, 1865 Preston was able to move to Gilstead above Bingley where he started a pub which is now the Glen Hotel, Gilstead Lane. In 1876 he moved to Eldwick where Holroyd was now living.
He is described thus :
...from the upper portion of his grounds he casts his eye on varied and lovely scenery; sometimes at early morn, looking to the south-east, where, far away lies old Bradford, the smouldering Sodom from which he has escaped.
Ben Preston died in 1902.
from: A Yorkshire Dialect Poet in W.Smith Old Yorkshire vol2 1881 pp227-230
This biography is attributed to Abraham Holroyd but was in fact by John Emanuel Preston son of Ben Preston's brother John Preston
vide. William Andrews Modern Yorkshire Poets Hull and London 1885 p 106
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Later wrote

William Scruton
The details of Holroyd's biography are almost all derived from an account which he wrote for William Scruton and which formed the basis for a brief biography by the latter included in Old Yorkshire vol 2 1881edited by the Morley historian and publisher William Smith.
On 7th January 1888, after Holroyd's death, Scruton published the account in the Bradford Weekly Telegraph and this was later reprinted amongst the preliminary material to Charles F. Forshaw (ed) Holroyd's Collection of Yorkshire Ballads London George Bell and sons 1892
It is from this account that the details here included are derived.
cf . William Andrews Modern Yorkshire Poets Hull and London 1885 p 177: "The story of (Holroyd's) somewhat eventful career may be read in Mr William Smith's Old Yorkshire"
However more details can be found in J.Horsfall Turner's Ancient Bingley (chapter
12).
The whole text of Turner's scarce work can be downloaded
in PDF format.
There is also an obituary of Holroyd in J.Horsfall Turner(ed) Yorkshire Bibliographer Vol I Bingley 1888 pp227-228
Mrs F.C.Galloway's Souvenir(Bradford privately published 1893) of the dedication of Holroyd's memorial stone at Clayton Churchyard has a certain charm in its description of the ceremony - in particular her fear that she might be the only lady present and thus feel unable to attend - but its account of Holroyd's life is entirely derived from Scruton
The account of Holroyd's meeting with Charlotte Brontė was contained in another letter to Scruton which the latter published in Thornton and the Brontės
Of modern works there is only Martha Vicinus The Industrial Muse a study of
nineteenth century British working class literature 1974
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Money for individuals in need
William Scruton speaking at Holroyd's funeral.reported in the
Bradford Observer January 1888.
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Shop
Then numbered
36 Victoria Rd it is now
79 Victoria Rd,Saltaire,SHIPLEY BD18 3JS and houses
Helen Kemp's shop "Crafts Gifts and Books for Mind Body & Spirit "
tel 01274 584557
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John Preston

John Preston
1822 - 1888
Bradford chemist and homeopath, photographer, painter and actor. Father of
John Emanuel Preston, painter. The Prestons, father and son moved to
Eldwick where they formed, with Ben Preston and Abraham Holroyd a small group of intellectuals of working class origin.
J.Horsfall Turner said of him that:
Ruskin and Swedenborg had lifted him out of his environments.
John Preston died April 29th, 1888.
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Cudworth on Holroyd at Saltaire
"......the news and bookshop, kept by Mr Abraham Holroyd, the historian of Saltaire. Mr Holroyd, although an old Bradford tradesman, may now be considered an "institution" of Saltaire. In addition to being a collector of the notabilia of the district, he is himself a dictionary of district antiquities , proverbs, and local history."
William Cudworth Round about Bradford a series of sketches (descriptive and semi-historical) of forty-two places within six miles of Bradford
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J.Horsfall Turner on Holroyd
We have enjoyed the intimate friendship for nearly twenty years and a great privelege it has been. Few men were ever blessed by a nobler disposition, and we can but regret that his early surroundingswere not favourable to a literary or ministerial career. He was never well fitted for a bookseller and stationer, and marvel upon marvels that he could ever wield a sword or fire a gun. He could use most scathing language and bitter irony, but a more harmless man never lived.....Few men have done more topopularize the study of local antiquities...yet he could scarcely be called an antiquary himself, excepting a passion for folk-lore
Yorkshire Bibliographer, volI,1888. p227.
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Abraham Holroyd Saltaire and its Founder

ISBN 0-9538601-0-8
Read about this
newly published book
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