Forward.
There was mention recently on the "Lancashire Steeplejack" thread of Titus Salt, the Bradford Victorian entrepreneur. He was the founder of Salt's Mill at Saltaire, and was undoubtedly philanthropic to his workers. However there was discussion, as to whether this was altruistic, or he was just another Victorian slave driver, using worker benefit, as a mechanism of social control.
To give a bit more background to his character, to set the scene of his times, and perhaps help you form a better judgment, I have transcribed Chapter two of Jim Greenhalf's book "Salt and Silver - A story of hope". (Published by Bradford Libraries - Prince's way, Bradford BD1 1NN. ISBN 0-9-07734-52-9). Published here by kind permission of the author.
My verdict - for what it's worth...I lean just slightly towards the philanthropy side, and think that if you were a worker in the mid 19th century, you were better working for Salt in Bradford than many other employers, despite the social restrictions he placed upon his workers. I recommend a visit to Saltaire, which remains intact, and of great interest, though I'm not much of a David Hockney fan. Just put your mind back 150 years and have a wander round.

tripps.

The road descended towards Bradford's vast bowl, the crucible carved out of the Ice Age, which on six days a week boiled, smoked and stank like a witch's cauldron. The skyline was punctuated by hundreds of factory chimneys emitting neither smoke nor steam. Under the cold sky they looked liked obelisks in a cemetery. Ropes cracked on flagpoles, union Jacks rippled at half-mast. Warehouses flanked the streets, rising up like the decks of ships or canyon walls. Estimates vary, but the number of people lining the route probably exceeded 100.000. Among them may have been 14-year-old Frederick Delius whose father Julius, a wool merchant, would certainly have been acquainted with Salt or his son Titus junior. Delius, his mind on music even then, was six years away from leaving Bradford for Florida. The funeral was a spectacle to behold; not to have watched it pass would have been thought perverse. Each person standing in the mucky, churned up footpaths perhaps sensed that he or she was witnessing the passing of history. The crowd was reportedly in subdued mood, nevertheless the route into town was lined by policemen.

Bradford, 20 years away from city status, was in the throes of transforming itself from the filthiest hole in the country to a place of grandeur. Focal point and chief symbol of pride was the new Town Hall, its pale gold sandstone like the freshly shaved face of an alderman on his first civic day. In the central Tuscan tower the huge bell tolled. The exterior sculpture gallery of England's monarchs, each one recessed on its own stone pedestal, gazed down at the VIP's filling the town hall square. Such a congregation of notables the town had never seen - not even when Lord Palmerston laid the foundation stone of the Wool Exchange and Charles Dickens - the 'Boz' who had satirised Salt's discovery of Alpaca - gave a reading at St George's Hall.

The great and the good were shepherded to their allotted places before the town hall steps by policeman holding up numbered placards. There were MP's, peers of the realm, eminent clergymen, members of Bradford Town Council, borough and county magistrates, representatives of the Chamber of Commerce, and about a hundred from the Liberal Club. They came from Bradford Grammar School, the Infirmary, Bradford Mechanics' Institute, the Board of Hope Union, Bradford Nurses' Training Institution, The Sailors' Orphanage in Hull, the Yorkshire College of Science, the Royal Albert Asylum in Lancaster. The throng included about ninety members of the Independent Order of Oddfellows, representatives from the Licensed Victuallers' association (ironic bearing in mind Salt's views on the bad influence of public houses on working people), the Conservative association, as well as numerous charities to which Salt had distributed many thousands of pounds.

The arrival of the cortege was the signal for this vast concourse of uniforms, black suits, sable frocks and crepe hats to start the journey to Saltaire. Seventy carriages carrying 13 chief mourners and 65 mourners churned up the rutted road. The respective bands of the 2nd West Yorkshire Artillery Volunteers and 3rd West Yorkshire Rifle Volunteers played the Dead March as the bells of both the Town Hall and the parish church boomed. The procession passed the seated marble statue of Sir Titus by J. Adams -Acton, for which the people of Bradford had raised the money. Placed in front of the town hall in 1874, it was removed a mere 20 years after Salt's death and carted down Manningham Lane to an obscure corner of Lister Park. Thereafter Salt, alone on his pedestal, was left to erode, gazing forlornly in the direction of his beloved Saltaire.That morning however, the black wrought iron railings round the statue were festooned with evergreens; the statue itself was draped with a black cloth. Thirty minutes after the head of the procession had started to move, the rear of the column left the square.

Business had been suspended for the morning at Lockwood and Mawson's Wool Exchange, the Italianate building which the mighty John Ruskin had pooh - poohed. Hatless woolmen stood at every window. Directly opposite, the columns and arches of Swan's Arcade were rising from the builders' scaffolding. Its corridors would one day echo with the footsteps of a young and flamboyantly dressed J.B.Priestly, hurrying from his clerk's office to Lyons Tea and Coffee House or the Talbot Hotel, where Branwell Bronte had once done his drinking. Later, the building would be the object of open faced admiration of a young Bradford art student wheeling his home made cart of paint and brushes about the city. David Hockney was to say the Swan Arcade was as good as anything in Paris. That however did not come into the reckoning of Stanley Wardley, who crassly ordered its demolition 90-odd years after Salt's funeral.

Out of Market Street, left into Cheapside, and then the gradient up to Manningham Lane with its ornate gas lamps and trees. Salt's first family home had been here. Manningham Lane, cut into he side of a hill below which ran Bradford's first railway, was the main artery into the blue blooded part of the town. Large houses and villas were set back from the dirt and dust of the road. One such suburban arcadia was Clifton Villas. The architects William Mawson and his brother Richard lived at number 2. Eighty years after Salt's death, Jonathon Silver was growing up at 4 Clifton Villas. These days, Manningham Lane with its unbecoming jumble of old and modern facades, its flagstone pavements replaced by characterless bitumen, its once gracious homes converted into offices or takeaways, resembles downtown Los Angeles. Bradford's post-industrial decline, its loss of self respect and confidence in the future, can be measured in the slump from elegance to decadence of this once dignified and handsome thoroughfare. On the second night of rioting by Muslim youths in June 1995, more than 100 businesses were attacked and 66 cars burned. Many plate glass windows were cracked or smashed. Some remained boarded up for weeks afterwards. Central Bradford looked as though it was being crated up for removal.


Salt's funeral procession reached back for three quarters of a mile. It was joined at the bottom end of Lister Park by 320 people from Shipley and Saltaire. As they clambered over the banked up slush shovelled out of the road by specially employed scavengers, the commotion alarmed one of the Police horses which bolted, scattering spectators in the coconut ice of snow and mud. The frightened animal was caught and pacified at Frizinghall. More than four hours had passed since the cortege had disturbed the crows at Halifax. Now more than a mile long started the descent along unmade-up roads to Saltaire. The day was proving to be a long one for the 160 constables, 11 sergeants, three inspectors and two superintendents on duty. That after noon they were to receive the civic thanks of Bradford's mayor, George Motley Waud. The Bradford Observer's anonymous correspondents - reporters did not get by-lines in those days - took the temperature of the crowd's mood. "The general feeling seemed to be one which is natural on such occasions when a great loss is fresh ion the mind. - that such a loss could never be sustained again," they reported in the following day's paper.
However some present seemed not to regret the old man's passing. They remembered the strikes of 1868 and 1876 - the latter had gone on for two weeks, Salt got his way as usual. For all his good works he was still a boss, one of 'them', a rich man who ruled the resentments of others. But for the majority of those lining Victoria Road, blinds closed in all the houses, Salt was "as complete an example of Christian manliness" whose like they would not see again.

Salt's chapel stands across the road from the mill. The siting of each building, the relation of one to the other, is pithily summed up by Jack Reynolds in his book The Great Paternalist.

'Church and factory stood closely juxtaposed on opposite sides of the road, for the business of God was the business of the world, and the business of the world was the business of God'.

Twelve foremen from the works carried he double-coffin on a wooden frame made for the occasion. More than 400 people who had worked for Salt for just under 20 years congregated in the chapel's grounds; another 70 or so who had remained in his employ for 20 to 40 years waited inside. John Firth the organist played Mendelssohn's Funeral March in A minor, and appropriately part of Beethoven's Eroica. The service began at 1;30 pm. Afterwards thousands filed past the coffin which remained in its wooden catafalque outside the family mausoleum until the following day. So great was the number of people who wished to say goodbye that the mausoleum was kept unsealed for a week.

Later that day, perhaps by the light of a flickering candle, Abraham Holroyd sat down in his Saltaire house and wrote a five-verse lament of a man whose profile he had written in 1873. The final verse is as follows.

Toll the bell! then toll the bell!
Toll the good man's funeral knell
Beat the solemn muffled drum,
Let the moaning music come:
Thousands mourn the loss today.
Of a good man passed away;
And words will fail to tell his worth
Who has seen the last of earth.

The following Sunday, funeral sermons were preached in Salt's memory in many churches. At Lightcliffe, the Rev J. Thompson summed up the founder of Salt's Mill and the Saltaire village.

"The rising from one position to another in the social scale, had no effect on his friendships. The friends of his youth were with him to the close; or, if not, it was they who had fallen asleep, or fallen away from him, and those noble enterprises to which he had consecrated his strength and resources. He was a pioneer, a creator of a new era."