The Marble Likeness of their Liberal Master

"The first part of this chapter will be devoted to a description of two scenes in which Mr Salt appears , first as the entertainer of his workpeople; and second, as the recipient, in a tangible form, of their gratitude and love."
So wrote the Rev Robert Balgarnie (Chap 12 - see bibliography) describing the events of 20th September 1856. Salts Mill had been open for exactly three years to the day (the day was the Founder's birthday); the housing between Albert Terrace and Caroline Street had been completed for two and that between Caroline and Titus Streets would be finished in the following year. Titus Salt had created a big mill in which all the newly mechanised processes of worsted production could be concentrated; he had housed his hands in through-terraces with service roads to the back built to a standard unimaginable in Bradford where small scale private developments, often in the form of enclosd courtyads, had been the response to the increasing population. By contrast the streets of Saltaire were streets - open at both ends - which allowed proper ventilation. Now, we are told, it was their turn to honour him
On their way to Crownest the workers, transferring from one railway station to the other, marched through Bradford, 3000 strong with flags flying and preceded by the Saltaire drum and fife band. On arrival at Lightcliffe they entered the drive; here they saw for the first time a herd of alpaca the animal whose wool they had been processing throughout their working lives.

Mr Salt was, by all accounts that we have of him, a genial and a liberal host and he had provided a meal and a "monster marquee" in which to eat it. The food, according to Balgarnie amounted to:1380lbs beef, 1300lbs ham, 520lbs tongues and pies,580lbs plum bread, 3000 currant cakes, 3000 plain cakes, 1080lbs plain bread, 600lbs currant bread, 200lbs butter, 50lbs tea,700lbs sugar and 42gallons of cream.Games were played.
In the evening the party adjourned to Bradford where St George's Hall had been hired for the evening. There a presentation took place. Titus Salt received a bust of himself from his grateful employees.
The memory of that day still lived in December 1857 when old Chartist Edwin Smith wrote an account of a certain Tim Pepper, the identity of whom can not be in doubt for we are told that he "has belt a gurt pleace aat o't taan that caps all ivver wor. Whoy its a taan in itsel"and Smith goes on "Tim belt a lot of haases and kersen'd em 'Pepper-taan' an famlees flitted tul em as fast as they wur reddy"The Voice of the People and Labour Advocate 19th December 1857 p2 cmn 2

Note on Broad Yorkshire

"Some o'the best and gurtest benefactors o'mankind ha moniments ereckted wen they're deead: but Tim wanted his put while he wur wick. Wen all wur reddy, a gurt stir wor made, an bans o'musick played i'front, an t'Busk o' Tim wur exhibited e San George's Hall, fur wot reason nobbody cud tell, as they cud see Tim heseln onny day."

We know that the workforce gave him the bust but we do not know whose idea it was to commission it, whose signature was on the contract and on whose authority he acted. Who organised and marshalled the workforce on the journey. We do not know and it would be dangerous to project back into the past images of mass mobilisation from the Twentieth century.
......it wur time fur Tim to think abaat hissen; but afore ne'd start reight he thout he'd hev a moniment erected to his honnur and glory, for beeldin a miln for his own benefit. So th'overlookers got agate, an "collected" brass through t'miln - some poor lasses volluntary(?) givin a weeks wage, for to pay an artist for a marrable likeness o'their liberal meastur.
How liberal a master Tim Pepper is is suggested by the assertion that he offered high wages to attract workers and then Tim thout 'twar time he gat back t'brass he ligg'd aat e plessur trips an sturs, so he began dockin t'wage an pokin t'high wage chaps to mak low wage uns tak their places.
Smith is suggesting that Salt deliberately attracted workers with high wages and then when they were committed to living in his village cut their pay. There seems to be little evidence for this but the strike at Saltaire in 1868 was provoked by the belief that wages were lower than at other mills and he certainly demanded high working standards - discharging hands who did not achieve them..
What is known is that 1856 was a bad year for the worsted trade and it is part of nature of the wage contract that worker faces the market through the medium of the employer who in turn faces it directly. So Salt could well be faced with the need to reduce labour costs a fact of little comfort to his workforce who still had bills to pay.
What does seem certain is that Salt was not cynical in is intentions - he wished to provide good housing because his experience of Bradford showed the demoralising effect of bad.
However the bust displays an important side of his character he felt that he should the recipient of his workforce's "gratitude and love".

T'Busk

Titus Salt by Thomas Milnes
now in Saltaire United Reformed Church

The bust was installed in the entrance hall at Salt's home at Crow Nest, Lightcliffe and, by the terms of his will, was, after his death to be put on show at the Institute. It is now in the entrance to the United Reformed Church (formerly the Congregational Church) at Saltaire. It is not known when it came there.
The sculptor was Thomas Milnes whose lions, later placed outside the Salt Schools in Victoria Rd and the Institute opposite, were, so contemporary legend claimed, originally intended for Trafalgar Sq in London,

Milnes was forty years old. He had joined the Royal Academy Schools in 1841 recomended by Edward Hodges Baily, a sculptor with an extensive decorative and monumental practice - he had sculpted the freize on the National Gallery and worked at Buckingham Palace.
Twenty-eight is rather late to start training so was Milnes himself a working man 'made good' - a former assistant of Baily's?
Milnes had first exhibited at Westminster Hall in 1843 when his 'The Death of Harold at the Battle of Hastings' was described by the Literary Gazette as "the strangest collection of short trunks and consumptive legs ever congregated together." Presumably this was intended for the new Palace of Westminster, then building. Despite failure he was soon working on statues of Nelson for Norwich and of Wellington for the Tower of London. He then seems to have settled into a fairly succesful monumental practice.

So at the time that he carved the Salt bust he had a history of official iconography and private commemoration. Both these elements seem present in Titus Salt's fiftieth birthday present from his workforce.
The Founder is seen in lose toga-like robes with impassive face framed by a neatly trimmed beard.The bust itself stands on an octagonal pillar at the base of which sit an angora goat and an alpaca. Their position means that they appear as heraldic supporters to Salt's crest but also as actors in the drama which unfolds below.

Salt had been using the crest from at least 1850 - it is possible that this was a statement of his relationship to those of gentle birth. He was more than equal to them in wealth and he had created in Saltaire a testament to his to his practical concern for the conditions created by industrialism.(Compare Dorothea's failed attempt to build almshouses in George Eliot's Middlemarch). But it seems that he aspired to some of the signs of gentility himself - hence the crest.
Despite this Salt knew his place. He told Lord Harewood : "as a landed proprietor I felt that I would be out of my element." So he built the most up-to-date mill inYorkshire and the most advanced housing to go with it.

Yet the base of the sculpture shows something rather odd; the supporters of the Founder's crest lie with their legs on a cornucopia from which pour the fruits of the world and they pour over the mill. The Mill is thus shown as the benficiary of its own raw materials. This is a partial view of the process of production by which the Founder was able to maintain his philanthropy and his interest in Town Planning
Perhaps we should end with that fine example of a Yorkshire put-down already quoted from Edwin Smith: Salt wanted this bust but fur wot reason nobbody cud tell, as they cud see Tim heseln onny day.

Note on Broad Yorkshire
Edwin Smith's account of the presentation shows several of the characteristics of Yorkshire dialect prose: the use of non-Standard English vocabulary, grammar and syntax , a - more-or-less - consistent, but again non - standard, orthography and humour. The first two are not the result of slovenly use of Standard English but of the particular development of the language. The first speakers of Old English in Yorkshire were Anglians whose speech was separate from that of the Saxons who settled the south of England. but they shared the land with Viking and Norse settlers who spoke Old Norse.The language that developed from their interactions - consider how the Anglians of Settle could discuss important matters with the Norse at Giggleswick on the opposite bank of the Ribble - became a northern form of Middle English with distinct features such as fewer words of Norman-French origin and many more of Scandanavian than the language of the South.. Unlike the South Midlands dialect ( the language of Chaucer) it was not associated with the polite uses of the court but remained the language of the people.
. There are literary sources which use Yorkshire particularly the York and Wakefield Mystery Plays but in general it was not until the early 18th century that dialect verse began to appear in print(Although John Aubery published the Lyke Wake Dirge in 1686.). Dialect prose followed in the 19th century. An important example of the latter being Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights(1847) where, as K.M.Petyt showed, in the speech of Joseph the author accurately transcribed the dialect of Haworth. (Typically when Charlotte Bronte came to revise her late sister's work with a view to making it more reader-friendly she changed the spelling of many words to that of Standard English and thus diluted its value as a speech transcription.)
The third characteristic - humour - is the result of the way in which dialect prose was published. From the second quarter of the century and for the next 100 years most dialect prose was published in the form of Almanacs produced annually and sold to working people these contained stories and verse of an amusing kind.(one almanac - John Hartley's Clock Almanac was published annually for fifty years and almost all of it written by Hartley.) Smith's satire is in this tradition being a discussion between two ghosts in which the newly arrived one describes the changes which have taken place in Bradford over the previous years.
Vocabulary
agate = going; beeldin = building; brass = money; caps all ivver wor = surpasses anything that ever was; deead = dead; flitted = moved; gurtest = greatest; hisseln/ hissen = himself; kersened = named, christened; lasses = women; ligged aat = laid out( in this case spent money on); miln = mill; plessur trips = pleasure trips; pokin = discharging, sacking( presumably a mid-19th century usage);sturs = eventstaan = town; wick = alive;

Sources:Balgarnie Sir Titus Salt
Smith reproduced in Saltaire the origins of a model industrial community(1976)
The identification of the author of the satire on Tim Pepper with Edwin Smith is in Jack Reynolds The Great Paternalist
Fuller details of the above works: Books about Saltaire

Milnes and Baily in Rupert Gunnis Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660 - 1851 New Revised Edition London, the Abbey Library (nd)[?1970s]
For a systematic exposition of Broad Yorkshire see Arnold Kellett Basic Broad Yorkshire, Otley, Smith Settle, in print
On Wuthering Heights see K.M.Petyt Emily Brontë and the Haworth Dialect, Yorkshire Dialect Society

Yorkshire Dialect Society
Examples of Yorkshire Dialect:Yorkshire Folk Talking

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