Preacher branded village 'ignorant and profane'

David Knights takes a look at some other memorable people from Haworth's past, in her new book - a follow-up to Curious Tales of Old West Yorkshire.

A walk to Haworth Fair during rush-bearing time took a farm hand called Jose nearly as far as the Atlantic Ocean.

But his quick thinking saved him from the press gang scouring the village for recruits for English man-o-war ships.

Mingling with crowds in a fairground near Butt Lane, Jose was snatched by the press gang and taken to a Keighley doctor for a medical examination.

Jose immediately fell "quivering and quaking" to the surgery floor and complained of his "warks", or aches.

"Mi heead warks, mi back warks, mi belly warks, mi legs wark, ah wark all over," he moaned. "Ah can only get eease when ah lig dahn!"

The doctor refused to sign the required medical certificate and Jose hobbled away, only to break into a run once he was out of sight.

Jose's experience with the press gang, recounted in the pub that evening, earned him the lifelong nickname "Jose Wark".

Heavily-pregnant Haworth woman Mrs Ramsden had other things on her mind when a runaway horse raced along a village street in September 1673.

She was looking in her apron at some of the items she had bought at John Brearcliff's shop and did not hear warning shouts.

"The horse came full but upon her, threw her down, trod on her, she lay with her coats up very shamefully," said a witness.

Isaac Hopkinson, the horse's owner, soon found himself before the assizes where Mrs Ramsden's husband called for him to be hanged.

Ramsden's gripe wasn't because his wife had died, but because Hopkinson had failed to provide a replacement!

l The 1660s brought preacher Oliver Heywood to Haworth, where his experiences led him to brand the village a "very ignorant and profane" place.

One elderly villager didn't hear Heywood's sermon because on the way he passed an ale house, went inside, and became drunk with "fiddlers and loafers".

Another man Heywood encountered, John Appleyard, wed a Haworth girl and turned his elderly mother out of her home as soon as his father died.

Old Susannah ended her days in the poor room at Halifax, dying of a broken heart, while the young couple spent the family money.

Heywood also wrote about his hard day gathering dues from villagers, ending with just a few sixpences. He complained: "Christ mad me to chuse the laborious, painfull part of the ministry with persecution."

Joseph Redman, a clerk of Haworth Parish Church during the 1800s, once fell asleep in his pew beneath the long gallery while Patrick Bront was preaching.

The reverend delivered the words "as it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end".

Joseph, thinking the ceremony was at an end, called out loudly "amen!" bringing the service to a premature close.

l Jack Toothill lived in Haworth all his life and took over the Main Street barbershop - a wooden shack as the top of Butt Lane - from his father.

He remembered that Rev Patrick Bront - the father of the famous sisters - had been his own father's most awkward customer.

He recalled Patrick once wrote a carol and "chanted the old music while the wind moaned outside in the Haworth streets".

Another customer at the barbershop was Patrick's son Branwell, who wanted his red hair crested-up in the hope of adding an inch or two to his height.

l The landlord at the former New Inn on Sun Street decided to give his regulars a treat by making them a big meat pie.

When thanked for his kindness the host let slip that the rat catcher had left him with a bag full of rodents during a recent visit.

It took only a few seconds for the information to sink into the customers - and even less seconds for them to rush outside to be sick.

l A man of God was branded a cheat, a skinflint and a gambler by trainee minister John Sutcliffe in November 1803.

In a letter to his father Timothy Sutcliffe, of Haworth, John lays out his ordeal at the hands of the clergyman he works under.

"I have wished a thousand times I had never comed," wrote John. "The trouble and anxiety which I at present labour under here, is better felt than expressed.

"My rector is a gentleman only in appearance, he minds nothing he says. I believe he will never pay me a farthing willingly. He cheats me every way he can.

"Card playing and other kinds of gaming is the constant evening diversion of him and his family and I am resolved never to follow such practices, and even abhor them. I am looked on as a ridiculous young man and despised by them."

l Emily Northrop was not happy when her father Josewa agreed to let a young man from the town stay at their moorland cottage.

The girl, whose idea of heaven was reading Emily Bront's poetry while sitting amongst the heather, immediately clashed with Roland, who had been sent to the country to cure his "bad habits".

On the eve of his departure he told an indignant Emily: "I wouldn't be paid fifty pounds to come moping up here a second time!

"You may rile, and pout, and sulk, little country puss, but I do hate your nasty ling, which harbours vermin, covers your trousers with shives and burrs, and isn't half so poetic as a leaf of a tobacco plant!

"What you see in black bogs and coffee-coloured pulps, which attempt to swallow you up directly you put your foot outside the house, I'm sure I don't know.

"I wouldn't live in a world where the winds are always riving, where there's nothing to see and nobody to talk to, where there are earwigs on every wall, and sheep and birds making noises hideous enough to drive anyone silly!"

Emily responded that she loved it all because she was born there - and hoped that on her death she would be buried under the heather.

l The same Haworth moors that infuriated Roland Rothsay put Stanbury chiropodist Alfred Holdsworth in a mood for poetry.

He waxed lyrical about the "wild and windy heights" during a talk to Keighley Photographic Society in 1951.

"To understand these moors requires more than a knowledge of their contour and line," he said after spending many years tramping the moors.

"They may be seen as wild stretches of heather and ling, of deep valleys and crags, windy escarpments and solitary as a symphony of light, of wild wind and limpid silences.

"They are like the sea that every change of sky re-creates and makes a new splendour. Word, camera or brush are utterly inadequate to give shape to the everchanging mood."

lNancy Ickringill - described as "a big powerful woman, six feet tall, with a Roman nose" - carted weaver's pieces on her back from her Haworth farm to the market place in Halifax.

Meanwhile Denholme woman Grace Southwell was dubbed "the Packhorse" after hiring herself out as a transporter of pieces to the highest bidder.

Such work carried a serious penalty, disfiguring the shoulder and leaving the sufferer lop-sided due to the heavy weight of the cloth.

l Strange World of the Bronts is a follow-up to Marie Campbell's popular book Curious Tales of Old West Yorkshire.

The Keighley writer this time confined herself to stories of people, places and events in Haworth and the surrounding countryside.

The 237-page book contains hundreds of anecdotes culled from Marie's research in local libraries and archives.

Some of the stories - which range over several hundred years - were originally printed in the Keighley News.

Marie retells some of the darker stories concerning the Bront family itself, including its fascination with the supernatural.

Then she tells "tales of the Bront villagers" and devotes chapters to the religious aspects of Haworth, hauntings, murders and the occult.

Strange World of the Bronts costs £9.95 in paperback from Reids Bookshop in Cavendish Street, or by contacting Sigma Leisure on 01625 531035.