Two very busy weeks!

River Pollution in Bradford

On Monday 19th Feb, we discussed the investigation proposal that I put together with Tasha, which aims to make use of late 19th century river pollution data, mostly from the 1868 Rivers Pollution Commission, to map the environmental impact of the textile industry. The proposal is especially interested in mapping these impacts in Bradford, although it will also incorporate data from other parts of the country. A key element of the proposal involves building a relationship with Friends of Bradford’s Becks, who are currently engaged in campaigning to improve river quality in Bradford.

We had a very productive discussion at the investigations meeting, which included questions about how this exercise links with other ongoing investigations ranging from mapping Lost Mills to the digitisation of oral histories. One of the challenges in particular will be identifying ways in which this kind of environmental approach can link up with, and inform, museum collections. A range of approaches to this were put forward, such as focussing on museum collections around particular processes like dyeing, ot incorporating census data and medical officer reports that might help us to understand who lived nearby streams, becks, and rivers, and how their lives were impacted by pollution.

Over the course of the past two weeks, I have been focusing on kicking off with this investigation, and Tasha and I have met twice to discuss progress. After some initial delays due to ABBYY Finereader repeatedly crashing after I instructed it to detect some admittedly quite complex table layouts, we decided to focus for the time being on ‘Part II’ of the Evidence accompanying the Third Report of the Rivers Pollution Commissioners, published in 1871. This has the advantage of being structured as a table, and consists of answers to a detailed set of questions by 611 individual companies around the UK. This has now been neatly extracted into csv/excel formats, with a bit of cleaning and regularising of terms in Open Refine.

The information here is already extremely rich, and because it responds to a questionnaire (the answers of which we have also extracted), we’re hoping to extract answers to specific questions. The questions alone are fascinating, with a different set issued depending on the type of business being asked (Textile Mills, Dyers, Tanners or Paper Manufacturers). One of the questions asks whether waters are polluted by other businesses further upstream, which as you might expect returned a number of responses where businesses blamed each other for the state of the water. The commissioners were also especially keen to find out how businesses dealt with the ‘excrements of your workpeople’. Tasha and I will be deriving ways of analysing this textual data properly over the course of the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I have attempted to match the business names mentioned in the report with other sources at our disposal, in order to locate these on a map using QGIS. Daniel has kindly made some very helpful suggestions here - including some open data sources for river course vectors, and the addition of a 25-inch layer as well as the standard 6-inch on which the GB1900 gazeteer is based. By matching names to possible candidates from both GB1900 (on a national level) and the local business records that have previously been geolocated - followed by some very labourious checking of individual dots on the map - I have now been able to confidently locate c. 120 sites, most of them mills in West Yorkshire. Below you can see these alongside an OS/OpenStreetMap layer of rivercourse vectors. The darker blue and pink lines are from a google map produced by Friends of Bradford’s Becks to trade the current course of the Beck and its tributaries. There may be an opportunity to produce a more complete historical record of the Beck’s course, as many of the business that I’ve been adding to the map were situated alongside small streams or becks that are not part of these larger mapping exercises - where these appear on historical maps, it wouldn’t be too difficult to trace their course.

This work links to questions that Daniel has previously raised about the proximity of mills to rivers and changes to this over time, as well as the uses and locations of mill ponds. This raises the further issue of water rights, which as far as I understand were often attached to land leases in the 18th and 19th centuries. This is especially relevant to Bradford, given that a high profile case relating to water rights (and pollution), as the city was at the centre of a major legal case which put the Bradford Water Coporation and a landowner named Edward Pickles at loggerheads, and was finally resolved in the House of Lords in 1895. I’m hoping to get the chance to read Michael Taggart’s book Private Property and Abuse of Rights in Victorian England: The Story of Edward Pickles and the Bradford Water Supply to learn more about this!

Once Upon a Sheep

This week Tim and I had a very productive meeting with Bradford Movie Makers’ Judith Simpson, who is going to be in charge of producing an ‘updated’ version of the film which will be accessible to a wider audience. We discussed the possibility of arranging a screening of the film alongside a selection of other textile films, perhaps incorporating some more recent examples too. We agreed that using this as an opportunity to learn from audience members who may have local knowledge and memories of the mills depicted would be extremely valuable.

But most importantly… we now have a copy of the film!!!!!

Thanks to Alex F’s cloak-and-dagger meeting at an undisclosed pub in central Bradford, we are now able to watch, analyse, cut up and reconstitute the film as we like. I’ll have to post more updates on the film itself in my reflections next week!