John Kershaw (1801-1866), a cloth miller or fuller, was one of my 3 x maternal grandfathers. This is my attempt to bring him to life.

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It is a bright August morning on the hills; sheep, freed of their heavy winter fleeces, graze the lower slopes. Rising higher, grassland gives way to heather and bracken and wind-stunted trees. Man’s presence is visible in the network of drystone walls enclosing patchwork fields of ploughed earth and green pasture where low-roofed stone barns and distant sheep-folds huddle in the undulating landscape.

The hand of man is more visible in the valley bottom. The sky is usually shrouded beneath a pall of soot-laden mist. The stone walls of the back-to-back mill-workers’ cottages clinging to the valley sides suck the moisture from the air, regurgitating it on rough-plastered interior walls as rising damp and black mould. Windows remain barred against the greasy smuts expelled by the static steam engines that power the clanging mills of Calderdale for fourteen hours a day.

One such cottage, on St Bevan’s Road in the parish of Skircoat, is the home of John Kershaw, his wife Betty, and surviving children William, Elizabeth, Joseph, John, Mary Hannah, Hannah, and baby Sarah.

John has worked in the weaving sheds from eight years old. He still remembers that day, thirty-three years earlier when his weaver father, Waterhouse Kershaw, handed him over to Mister Shawcross, the overlooker at Rishworth’s Weaving Shed. It was here that eleven-year-old Martha Lumb taught him to tie the fine knots required to join the broken warf while the power looms were in constant motion above him. He’d learned quickly. Learned to keep his head low and his mind on the job after, on his second day, he saw what happened when another boy had been distracted, just for a moment. That was the only time the looms stopped: long enough to untangle the bleeding boy and pull him away from the frame. They were back at full power by the time his father arrived to take the lad home.

Three of John’s children have followed him through the sturdy gates of Imperial Mill, one of eighteen woollen mills in Halifax, along with associated dye works, foundries, smiths and brewers. Sixteen-year-old William works with his father in the Fulling Shed, feeding lengths of wet woven cloth into the fulling machines for hours on end. It’s back-breaking work and the noise of the wooden hammers pounding the wet cloth is relentless. The men have developed a sign-language of their own; hand and arm signals must suffice when voices cannot be heard. Elizabeth, now fourteen, is training under an experienced weaver and will soon take on her own loom, and nine-year-old Joseph knots the weft threads when they break, and dreams of another life.

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Today is Sunday. Woollen mill and weaving shed, foundry and brewery, quarry and shunting steam engines throughout Calderdale are silent. Boilers have been scoured; fireboxes raked and riddled; kindling and coal stacked close by the boilers. At midnight, engineers and firemen will begin raising steam for the six o’clock Monday morning start.

The Kershaw family attended Sunday worship in Sowerby Bridge with John’s parents and are walking home along the canal. Boats are moored along the bank. The boat-women have spread their washing to dry in the hedgerows, while the men sleep off the excesses of the previous night in the tiny cabins, and dark-eyed children stare as the Kershaws pass by. Joseph lags behind, fascinated by the boats. The only sounds are the calls of wildfowl and the splash of a jumping fish, even the bargees’ horses are silent and still, save the occasional whisk of a tail to dislodge a persistent fly.

The family leaves the canal at Salterhebble Lock and stroll through the village towards home. There are more people on the streets than usual, most would have gone straight home after morning service, but not today. Betty and the younger children walk on to prepare the midday meal, but John, spotting a couple of friends from the mill wanders over to talk to them. All they know is that a meeting has been called for this afternoon by the local union association . . .

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The year is 1842 at the time of the ‘Plug Riots’ when working men, fed up of low wages and poor working conditions, banded together in trade unions and associations push for improvements. Many went further and a wave of dissatisfied workers from the industrial MIdlands and up through Derbyshire, Lancashire and Yorkshire, took matters into their own hands by removing the ‘plugs’ on the steam boilers that powered factories and weaving sheds. In August 1842, the militia were sent to disband a group of workers in the town of Halifax.