April 2022
Welcome
After a break, the rediscovering Ripleyville blog, is again open to visitors. The site went private to allow some time for thinking and planning.
New demands on the site, renewed interest and newer web and social media capabilities mean that the way the Victorian history of Ripley Ville is communicated needs to change.
Ripleyville as heritage and family history; how the name ‘Ripleyville’ is thought of, its place in history, how its buildings and residents are remembered, how residents’ memories are recorded all need to be reviewed.
The demolition and replacement by Accent Housing Association of the mix of housing that have been known as Ripleyville since 1976 and local news coverage make the task more urgent.
rRV Blog : Time-capsule
The rRV blog is a time-capsule. There was an ambitious programme for future blogs set out in 2017 but regular updating of the website stopped the year before; nearly 7 years ago. So, as at today. 2nd April 2022, the rRV blog contains none of the findings from research on Victorian Ripley Ville that has been done in those 7 years. That also needs to be remedied.
Newer findings and thinking about Victorian Ripley Ville, about Bowling Dyeworks and the Ripley family show just how central they were to the growth of Bradford from a town of squalor, conflict and chaos in the 1840s. Over the next thirty years cutting-edge ways of making and dyeing worsteds changed it into a town that was renowned and praised as ‘Worstedopolis’. The original Bowling works that grew from the ‘dyehaase’ of the 1830s, the ‘New Dyeworks’ and what was done in them put the Ripleys at the centre of these changes. New cloths, entirely new articles in the market, made huge profits for the leading manufacturers and dyers.
From their super-profits, merchants, manufacturers, and other magnates from Bradford pitched their schemes to combat the town’s’ many ills. Through the 1860 and 1870s, they funded or part-funded projects to improve living conditions, moderate worker behaviour, or contribute to the health of the town.
Victorian Bradford in Microcosm
Victorian Ripley Ville was one such scheme. Importantly, it was worked up from within the conditions that applied in Bradford. It was not part of an outward movement of mill, workers and their families to a green-field site, like the industrial model village of Saltaire.
Rich and powerful men making money in the town harboured political ambitions with even more say in how the town was run.
Political cartoon c. 1868
Bradford shown as a hatchery for the ambitions of rich and powerful men.
Sponsors, like Henry William Ripley with Ripley Ville, left indelible personal marks on their schemes. A village is, however, a complex mix. Issues of the day for Bradford people; extension of the right to vote for workers, elementary schooling for their children, standards of decent behaviour, temperance, disease prevention, the proper roles of men and women, religious beliefs and non-belief, party politics, Irish politics, the clash of styles in architecture, they all left their marks on Victorian Ripleyville. The village, its industrial setting, the reasons it was built and what was planned and built there between 1864 and 1882, provided a record of a town that had become ‘Worstedopolis’. The village was mid-to-late Victorian Bradford in microcosm.
The Ripleys’ use of water in the Bowling valley,Titus Salt & the Bowling Tough : early 1850s
Before Ripley Ville was built. More on the Ripleys’ use of water from Bowling Beck and elsewhere from the Bowling valley in the early 1850s, the complaints of Walkers Co against them and the connections to Titus Salt and the ‘Bowling Tough’.
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2016 All rights reserved.
The Ripleys’ use of the water of the Bowling valley, Titus Salt and the Bowling Tough : early 1850s
Previous post & this post
I have had a bit more time to look at the archive documents related to the case of Wood & Walkers and the Ripleys in the early 1850s. This post is a follow up to the previous one. I have updated that one from when it was first published last month on April 1st. It now conforms with the newer information. This helped to firm up the date for the original parts of the affidavit of Benjamin Murgatroyd. As Superintendent of Bowling Dyeworks, he had first-hand information about changes at the Works and their use of water and dyewares in worsted dyeing between 1830s and early 1850s; information not available elsewhere.
This post goes into more detail on;
- the grounds for the complaint and the court case of John Wood, William Walker and Charles Walker (Walkers & Co) against Edward and Henry William Ripley (the Ripleys)
- and the defense of the Ripleys’ actions as prepared by their solicitors.
Titus Salt became involved in an earlier case, a more general objection by Bradford’s worsted manufacturers to the Ripleys’ actions in 1853 and more directly in the case of Walkers & Co and the Ripleys.
The ‘Bowling Tough’, so called, played a part in the Ripleys’ defense.
Benjamin Murgatroyd & Bowling Dyeworks 1835 to 1855
Before Ripley Ville was built. In this post; a first-hand description of changes to Bowling Dyeworks and worsted dyeing from Works’ Superintendent and practical dyer, Benjamin Murgatroyd, circa 1835 to 1855 and evidence on how Bowling Beck was used and misused.
Copyright R L Walker 2016 All rights reserved
This nearly had to be a post about not doing a post. Its seven weeks since the last one. I have been reviewing archive documents for south Bradford, covering the ten years 1852-1862 and related to the ‘Water Dispute, Messrs Ripley v. Bradford Corporation’ . It has been a long slog and I’m still not finished. I was planning to post an apology explaining the silence, then on Monday last week I had a jack-in-a-box moment. From all the archive boxes and documents over the previous weeks one just jumped out at me.
Benjamin Murgatroyd & Bowling Dyeworks 1835 to 1855
The Water Dispute
The document was in a group of papers connected to the ‘Water Dispute’ but not directly involved in the Ripleys’ dispute with Bradford Corporation. The Dispute itself was about water supply in Bradford; who should have control of it and how best the town could be served. At its heart was the gap between the needs of the town and what was available.(1) The engineer J F Bateman (1810-1889), fresh from working on the water supply of Manchester, reported in 1852 that there was a twenty-fold gap. Where supply was around half a million gallons a day, from Bradford Waterworks, he calculated that between ten and twenty million gallons a day would be needed for all the town’s needs. In a series of letters he outlined the works and costs of getting to that level of supply.(2)
Affidavit of Benjamin Murgatroyd
The Document
The jack-in-a-box document was the draft of an affidavit, in manuscript form, with crossings out and additions in a second and possibly a third person’s hand.(3)
Unsigned and undated in this draft form, it’s opening paragraph – before crossing outs and additions – stated;
1850s Lustrous Orleans : natural or dyed alpaca worsted?
Copyright R L (Bob) Walker 2015 All rights reserved. (see sidebar right →)
Ripley Ville was the last of the Victorian industrial model villages to be built in the old West Riding of Yorkshire. Built between 1866 and 1881, it contained; Workmens Dwellings, a schools building and a school master’s house, an Anglican church, vicarage and alms houses. It was built across two sites to the north and south of Bowling Dyeworks in Bowling to the south of Bradford near what later became Bowling Park.
This post looks again at the relationship between Bowling Dyeworks and Salts Mill in the mid-Victorian period. This is a largely unexplored relationship but what went on between the two businesses may help us understand why the industrial model villages of Ripley Ville and Saltaire were built, how they compare and how they were paid for. Because you are probably in holiday mood or even on holiday, the post also includes some photographs of alpacas. Most of these are of one being sheared. The more serious aim of the post is to set up a sequence of questions about how the mixed worsted cloths called ‘lustrous Orleans’ were finished. Three questions in that sequence are:-
In the mid 1840s,
- Would the lustrous Orleans that used alpaca fibre have been dyed or not?
- Would the dye for lustrous Orleans or other alpaca worsteds be applied to the fibres before weaving, or to the woven cloth?
- Were Bowling Dyeworks and Messrs Ripley in Bowling likely to have done the dyeing for Salts Mill?
Copyright R L Walker 2014
1840s Lustrous worsteds : natural or dyed alpaca fibre?
Salts Mill, Bowling Dyeworks and lustrous worsteds
Salts and lustrous Worsteds
Lustrous mixed worsted cloths of the mid-19th century that were produced in the Worsted District of Yorkshire used a lustrous fibre in the weft. This was commonly mohair and more famously, at Salts Mill, alpaca but could be angora, vicuna or other fibres. The lustrous weft was usually combined with a cotton warp to give a cloth strength. Aided by the fictionalised description given by Charles Dickens in ‘Household Words’, Titus Salt’s role in buying alpaca fibre at Liverpool Docks from ‘C W & F Foozle & Co’ and working out how to spin it are a staple of the Salts Mill story and part of the folklore of the industrial model village of Saltaire – just as they were in Worstedopolis (mid to late Victorian Bradford) a century and a half ago. (see Holroyd A, 1973, pages 9-12)
Alpaca fibre has properties that make it attractive for many reasons. In the mid-nineteenth century it was its lustrous quality and ‘shades and tints’, that led demand in womenswear and fashion cloths.
One of the best contemporary accounts, from Abraham Holroyd, makes this clear. (Holroyd A 1873 page 29)
From page 29, ‘Saltaire and its Founder’ Abraham Holroyd orig 1873
Bowling Dyeworks and lustrous worsteds
The Bowling Dyeworks story and its mid century dominance in worsted dyeing was achieved in two-stages;
circa 1830s : achievement of speed, colour fastness and matching in dyeing worsteds black and most particularly for bombazine and cloths of the range that mixed cotton warps and silk in the weft. (1)
circa 1840s : the dyeing of mixed worsteds in the piece (after weaving) across an increasing range of colours. This included the new lustrous Orleans cloths as they were developed and became fashionable.
It is clear that by the early 1880s Bowling Dyeworks was majoring in dyeing mohair fibre and cloths. But what were Edward Ripley & Son doing from the mid 1840s either within their own works or premises available to them?
Cloth & Memory {2} : Mutable Frame of Reference
Maxine Bristow’s work ‘Mutable Frame of Reference – Installation – Material’, in the Cloth & Memory {2} exhibition in the Spinning Room at Salt’s 1853 Mill, is conceptually challenging. This post gives a personal but historically contexted reading of the installation that acknowledges the fluid frames, mutability and associative resonances of the work. Through these readings and the memories that the structural frameworks and curtaining evoke, the post settles, unsettlingly, on ideas of ‘warded’ space. From there it moves on to an account of an incident in the early 1860s when the ‘Lancashire Cotton Famine’ was near its peak and then comes back by way of the worsted trade to Bowling Dyeworks, the industrial model village of Ripley Ville and Salts Mill.
This is the second in a series of four posts on the Cloth & Memory {2} exhibition. A previous post has reviewed 6 other exhibits adding a commentary, in the form of supplements, that make connections between the exhibits and worsted dyeing, Bowling Dyeworks and Bradford’s ‘other’ industrial model village; Ripley Ville.
Theoretical underpinning
A future post ‘Colour Supplement’ engages with the theoretical positions that inform Maxine Bristow’s work (see Cloth & Memory {2}, page 38) and within their context uses the idea of ‘the supplement’ to critique Bradford’s understanding of its Victorian history and what this means for its heritage offer. This post revolves around and then enters into the exhibit to settle, unsettlingly on the idea of warded space. This is an idea that connects to the theory of a ‘surveillance and a carceral society’ , associated with Michel Foucault and his account of structural (epistemic} changes in the relations between state, society and the individual in the early 19th century.
Cloth & Memory {2} : Mutable Frame of Reference
Occupying a central space in the Spinning Room of Salts 1853 Mill in Saltaire, Maxine Bristow’s work ‘Mutable Frame of Reference – Installation – Material’ is designed to be conceptually challenging. It is one of 23 exhibits in the Cloth & Memory {2} exhibition that runs for its final week until Sunday, November 3rd.
Image : copyright R L Walker 2013
At a distance, in spite of its central location, the tonal values of the cloths and the runs of matt metal rails allow an assimilation of the installation to the space of the Spinning Room. Approached, incongruities appear. The ‘Scandinavian’ blond-wood, the bent-wood components and smaller dimensions of the railings suggest technologies and a modern structure from the late 1950s or 1960s, certainly from a period that came after the hundred years when the Mill was in its prime.
rediscovering Ripley Ville 
Recent Comments