BANGING THE DRUM FOR HEPTONSTALL

Continuing our series on English counties,

Paul Barker reveals the fierce rivalries in

the West Riding of Yorkshire

THE EXCELLENT city art gallery in Leeds is packed with the fantasies which kept the captains of industry happy at their work: Lord Leighton's 'The Return of Persephone' and William Etty's 'Pando- ra Crowned by the Seasons'. It also has a Canova Venus. Grandest of all is the lus- cious Art Nouveau fireplace designed by Alfred Gilbert in 11-ft-high bronze for Sam Wilson, JP. Portraits of Mr and Mrs Wilson hang on either side. Sam has his watch-chain, cigar and paunch, like Alder- man Foodbotham in the old Peter Simple columns in the Daily Telegraph: 'The 25- stone, crag-visaged, iron, watch-chained, grim-booted perpetual chairman of the Bradford City Tramway and Fine Arts Committee.'

But that was Bradford (where Michael Wharton, aka Peter Simple, grew up). This is Leeds. When Mrs Thatcher dismantled the West Yorkshire metropolitan county council, invented in the Peter Walker local government reorganisation, not a single tear was shed. The towns and cities of what I still prefer to call the West Riding have always been divided by more than barriers of hill and moorland.

Manchester was the undisputed heart of Greater Manchester. Even in Walsall and Wednesbury, Birmingham couldn't be denied the slightly shabby starring role (Archie Rice, perhaps) in the West Mid- lands metro county. But the mere idea of `Greater Leeds' is enough to stiffen the Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.' sinews, summon up the blood, from Ilkley to Ossett, from Halifax to Heckmondwike. For anyone, like me, from this corner of England, the most shocking thing in the first news of the proposed merger between the Halifax Building Society and the Leeds Permanent was the very idea of such a col- laboration. The trauma eased when it became clear that, in reality, it would be a takeover. One up to the Halifax.

From this, you will gather that I grew up in the narrow Pennine moorland valleys of what to the Middle Ages was Halifax parish and is now the metropolitan borough of Calderdale. But the rivalry continues down to the level of village or hamlet. In my grandfather's day, rival villagers had kick- ing matches, with the metalled toes of clogs. When my wife's grandfather went a- courting, local boys ran up in the dark to chalk on the backs of visitors' jackets, to mark them out as alien. This was in Hep- tonstall, where Ted Hughes set an early poem, 'Dick Straightup':

Past eighty, but never in eighty years Eighty winters on the windy ridge Of England — has he buttoned his shirt or his jacket.

He sits in the bar-room seat he has been Polishing with his backside sixty-odd years Where nobody else sits. White is his head, But his cheek high, hale as when he emptied Every Saturday the twelve-pint tankard at a tilt And banged the big bass drum for Hepton- stall - With a hundred other great works, still talked of.

Straightup wasn't a poetic invention. He always drank his pint at the Cross Inn in Heptonstall. Hughes's father, Billy, was a local tobacconist. His father and mine played bowls together. Both of them knew Dick, and many men like him.

As well as never buttoning his shirt, Dick never — I would bet — said 'sir' to anyone. It was a land of small masters, where workmen spoke to their bosses by name. (I still remember, and regret, the one occasion in my working life when I was tripped, or trapped, into calling any- body `sir'.) When Samuel Smiles wrote his Victorian classic, Self Help, in Leeds, he needed only to look around him. For bet- ter or worse, this was, and is, the heartland of individualism. 'If tha wants summat done reight, do it for thissen.'

Heptonstall is now almost entirely peo- pled by producers and researchers for Granada Television. The streets of Heb- den Bridge, in the valley below, are a regu- lar film location for beer and Hovis advertisements. Ted Hughes runs a branch of his Arvon Foundation for aspirant writ- ers in a local farmhouse. A century ago, Hebden Bridge made more corduroy than anywhere else on the globe: workers of the world united to buy cheap trousers. It called itself Pustianopolis'. Now there are so many media people and crafts folk that it is the Greenwich Village of the North.

Virginia Woolf noted in her diary that Yorkshiremen feel proprietorial towards Yorkshire. It was true then, and it is true now. I must stop it. No place stands still. But the West Riding pattern of rivalry remains — displaced now onto cultural competition, rather than industry. Hebden Bridge, which turned out to be rather beautiful once the smoke of manufacture lifted, showed the way. At one point, a Civic Trust front had a majority on the local council, and stopped the public health officer demolishing half the houses as 'unfit for human habitation'. Halifax was next off the mark. Unlike Bradford, it was dilatory and conservative in the 1960s. It never demolished its central streets in the name of progress, or strangled itself with ring-roads, like Huddersfield or Leeds.

Waking up in the 1970s, it discovered a sleeping beauty. It had a vast, colonnaded 18th-century cloth hall, preserved by the accident of having been used as a storage place for municipal dust-carts. (Most local people had no idea it was there.) The town hall was by Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament. All Souls was, Gilbert Scott thought, 'on the whole, my best church'. Messrs Crossley closed their stupendous carpet mills at Dean Clough. A hard-headed philanthropist called Ernest Hall bought the mills, and converted them into a rabbit warren of arts workshops, studios and no-nonsense offices. The Royal Society of Arts recently awarded him its Albert Medal in honour of his success.

(The Crossleys themselves had long since gone off to Suffolk to play at being aristocrats. They concealed their unglam- orous surname behind the Lloyd George barony of Somerleyton, having bought the mock Jacobean pile of Somerleyton Hall, near Lowestoft, lock, stock and barrel from the bankrupt railway contractor, Morton Peto.) But the rivals started to sneak up. Brad- ford installed Britain's first Imax cinema screen in a derelict music hall, which duly became the National Museum of Photog- raphy, Film and Television. How to fight back? With money from Mrs Vivian Duffield, Halifax built Eureka!, a magical museum for children, on old railway land. It got 400,000 visitors in 1993.

All this is difficult terrain for cultural commentators. They wring their hands over the rampant growth of a museum cul- ture and the horrors of the heritage indus- try. With my heart, I sympathise. I dread the moment when the progenitors of a Poet Laureate Trail put a wax model of Dick Straightup in the repartitioned public bar of the Cross Inn, with a little cast-iron fingerpost outside marking the way to the grave of Sylvia Plath in Heptonstall churchyard. But with my head I suspect that I am wrong. What other economic cards are left to play? And there is a taint of snobbery about many of the objections, an implication that, if something is popu- lar, it must be flawed.

The old West Riding was a vast inland county, the largest in England, stretching diagonally from Sheffield in the south to the upper limestone Dales in the north. Its size was part of what made its inhabitants so insufferably proud of it. For the past 20 years it has occupied less than half of its old territory, and its population has been cut by 40 per cent to about 2 million. Bits were lopped off to benefit Lancashire and Cumbria. The remaining Dales country was turned over to North Yorkshire. Sheffield and its environs became the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire.

But the 1991 census shows what is hap- pening throughout the once (and, I hope, future) Riding. People are leaving the towns and cities. The work has gone, from Sheffield, from Leeds, from Bradford. In Halifax, the outflow is slowed by the prospect of building society jobs. This is one of the few provincial business head- quarters to have survived. When York lost Rowntree to Nestle in the 1980s, the jobs followed. In Bradford, the birth-rate is high, but the sound of feet leaving the city drowns it out.

Where do people flee to? Anywhere that offers a job. That usually means south- wards. The bright logos of new universities — the ex-polytechnics — punctuate the skyline of Huddersfield and Leeds. In an undersung success of Tory government, one sixth former in three now goes on to a degree course. In other words, more and more acquire the credentials to get away.

And if people don't move south, they move out into the countryside. One of the few areas of the old West Riding to show any demographic gain is the Dales district of Craven (now in North Yorkshire). Here you run into a taboo area of social analysis: the phenomenon of white flight. Those who leave Bradford, for example, are pre- dominantly white. Britain as a whole, it cannot be too often repeated, is not a mul- ticultural society. About 95 per cent of the population are of English, Scottish, Irish or Welsh descent. In Bradford, however, almost 10 per cent of the population is Pakistani. Other immigrants make up another 5 per cent. In central Bradford the figures are even higher. As the city's popu- lation drops, it steadily becomes less English.

In retrospect it is clear that, for Britain, cheap labour from the Commonwealth was a device to stave off technological change; one reason why change was so cataclysmic when it came. Nowhere was this truer than in the West Riding. The mills have now closed. The newcomers remain. In the sum- mer, on the grass of Lister Park in Brad- ford, the cricket players are Pakistani. Any time now, some local arts entrepreneur will open a Museum of Immigration.