Jim Greenhalf looks at the links between literary legend Charles Dickens and one of Bradford’s own 19th century pioneers

This week marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, who ranks alongside Shakespeare as the writer who did most to populate the English imagination with memorable characters and sayings.

As a journalist, he took names, places and events from real life and as a novelist he transformed them. Even when writing about Titus Salt’s discovery of alpaca in the November 27, 1852, edition of his twopenny weekly magazine Household Words, Dickens could not resist giving a colourful fictional gloss to sketchy real events.

Salt, who had set up as a textile manufacturer in Bradford in 1834, had already successfully spun Russian Donskoi wool into yarn and woven the yarn into cloth at Thompson’s Mill in Silsbridge Lane (Grattan Road).

Always on the lookout for new ideas – he had examined and rejected seaweed at Scarborough – in 1836, on a business trip to Liverpool docks, he chanced to enter the warehouse of Hagan and Co, and saw 300 unwanted bales of hair from the Peruvian llama.

Salt’s official biographer Robert Balgarnie says he returned to the warehouse at a later date and took a sample of the “useless material” back to Bradford where for the next 18 months, says Bradford historian Jack Reynolds, he and a small team adapted machinery to overcome the problems of spinning alpaca hair into a true and even thread.

Later, of course, they had the brainwave of binding it with cotton or silk, producing a lustrous ‘mixed fabric’, which made Salt’s fortune.

In 1844, young Queen Victoria despatched two alpaca fleeces to Salt in Bradford and was reportedly delighted with the transformation wrought by his machines.

Enter Charles Dickens. In 1836, the year that alpaca came into Salt’s life and transformed it, Dickens’ picaresque comic novel Pickwick Papers was published and established his reputation as a descriptive, dramatising storyteller.

People tend to think of Dickens as primarily a London writer. In fact he drew inspiration from around the country, including Barnard Castle in County Durham, the location for Dotheboys Hall in Nicholas Nickleby; Malton in North Yorkshire, the inspiration for Scrooge’s London counting house in A Christmas Carol; and Bradford (his readings at St George’s Hall packed the place out).

By 1852, both Dickens and Salt were rich and famous. So when Dickens included a piece in Household Words called The Great Yorkshire Llama, Salt’s identity would not have been a mystery.

“It was quite an event in the dark little office of C W Foozle and Co. which had its supply of light from the old grim graveyard. All the establishment stole a peep at the buyer of the ‘South American Stuff’. The chief clerk had the curiosity to speak to him and hear the reply. The cashier touched his coat tails. The bookkeeper, a thin man in spectacles, examined his hat and gloves. The porter openly grinned at him. When the quiet purchaser had departed C W and Foozle and Co. shut themselves up, and gave all their clerks a holiday.”

The inclusion of the graveyard and the description of the bookkeeper might be thought typically Dickensian. However, Dickens didn’t write every issue of Household Words himself – but his group of regular contributors were well aware of the house-style preferred by their famous editor.

In 1859, Titus Salt was elected to Parliament as a Liberal MP. During the two years he occasionally went to London he may well have made the acquaintence of Dickens. By then he was the proud owner of a “palace of industry”.

On a chilly November evening in 1849, Salt, then Mayor of Bradford, walked into the comfortable firelit chambers of architects Lockwood and Mawson to ask them to design him a mill. In 1853, on Salt’s 50th birthday, Salts Mill was ready for making cloth.

Twenty-five years ago in 1987, 10,000 square feet of part of the main building re-opened as the 1853 Hockney Gallery.

The man who rescued Salts Mill from oblivion was another unusual Yorkshireman, Jonathan Silver, a larger-than-life Bradford-born entrepreneur who died in October 1997.