Tag: leeds town hall

I’d Like Your Opinion, Please

On By chrisnickson2In leeds26 Comments

I’m trying something new, set in Leeds of course, this time in 1862 (although the section coming up in 1858, to confuse you). It’s a little different – I have about 20,000 written. This is the opening – I really like the characters – but I’d honestly love to know what you think.

Meet Virginia Cooper. Her husband will be along shortly

‘Mrs Cooper,’ the chief constable said, ‘allow me to be blunt.’

            Finally, she thought, but made sure her face showed nothing. For the last five minutes he’d been going round the houses, offering hesitant comments about the weather, the roads, anything but the reason she was here.

            ‘Of course, sir.’

Virginia had arrived at the town hall half an hour earlier, nine o’clock on the dot, stomach fluttering as she patted the stone lions on the steps for luck. Just a month before she’d been a speck in the crowd that had gathered along the road to watch Queen Victoria arrive in her carriage and open the building. Now she was inside, and the splendour of it all, with its polished marble and granite, captured her breath for a second.

She was in her finery, the dress and she and daughter Ellie had sewn at the start of spring, a pale, spotted muslin with false sleeves, embroidered belt and a tiered skirt that cascaded to the ground, copied from a London magazine, all topped by a hat prettily decorated with flowers and ribbons. The button boots on her feet were polished to a brilliant shine. She’d been up early, fussing over every little detail, desperate to make a strong impression. As she sat across from him, with Her Majesty’s portrait gazing down from the wall, she felt up to the mark, pushing down the nerves she’d had before she met Chief Constable Broadbent.

He was a fastidious, exact man. His appearance made that obvious, with a well-cut suit, a high, crisp collar and neat tie held in place by a small gold pin. Pale, soft skin, a double chin, and luxurious combed mutton-chop sideboards that spread across his cheeks. Long, thin fingers with clean nails that kept toying with a pen to try and hide his awkwardness. An outstanding policeman, her husband had told her; the men would follow him anywhere. A bachelor, she knew that, too; obviously hesitant and uncomfortable around women. Seeing that made her feel easier.

            ‘I’ll ask you plainly: would you be interested in working with the police force, Mrs Cooper? Your husband has, hmm, praised you as a woman of intelligence and rare perception.’

            ‘He’s very generous to say so, sir.’ Woe betide him if he’d said anything less, she thought. ‘What would you require me to do?’

No skivvying, no ironing shirts or cleaning. She’d made that plain to Rob when he first raised the idea two evenings before. He’d shaken his head and laughed, then put his arm around her shoulders. ‘I wouldn’t dare. No, this is something to exercise that brain of yours.’

            She narrowed her eyes. ‘What do you mean? Something like your duties?’ Robert Cooper was the inspector of detectives in Leeds police, with a sergeant and two men in plain clothes under his command.

Virginia thought she’d kept her restlessness well hidden. The wish for something more in her life. She didn’t know what, she couldn’t name it, but it was there inside her.

But he’d seen, and he’d been sharp enough to come up with this, something that might settle the ache inside. But never in a million years would she have imagined an involvement with the police as the answer. How could she? Female detectives simply didn’t exist.

            ‘A little similar,’ he allowed. ‘Doing things that a man can’t manage so easily.’

            Her pulse had begun to beat faster. But…

‘Does it pay?’ she asked sharply. The job sounded intriguing. But if the police wanted a woman, they could pay her a wage.

He nodded. ‘If things go well, it could become fairly regular paid employment.’

If things go well. Virginia saw that satisfied look in his eye; he knew he’d piqued her curiosity.

‘I’ve been, hmm, considering the idea of a woman to work with our detective police,’ the chief constable continued. ‘A couple of other forces have enjoyed success using women in, hmm, certain situations. Often the wives of policemen. They deal with females who are breaking the law, for instance, searching them when they’re arrested or following them around town.’

‘I understand, sir,’ she said, fingers tight around the reticule in her lap, lips pressed together, trying to keep the hope out of her voice.

‘It will require discretion and a certain amount of skill,’ he said. ‘A person of a certain maturity. More than that, Mrs Cooper, you have to understand, any arrangement must remain, hmm, completely unofficial. You won’t have the power to arrest anyone, of course, and you can’t tell people what you do. I’m sure you can see that the majority in Leeds – throughout England, for that matter – would never, hmm, condone the idea of a policewoman.’ He offered her a fleeting, earnest smile. ‘I can’t imagine her majesty would approve, either.’

‘I’m sure she wouldn’t, sir.’ Her heart was pounding. The job felt close enough to taste.

Then the questions about herself. Did she have children? Two, from her first marriage. A grown son named Tom, now an assistant manager at Queen’s Mill in Castleford, and a daughter aged sixteen, Eleanor, living at home and apprenticed to a dressmaker. There’d been one more, the very first. He’d died of diphtheria before his second birthday.

How did she feel about a wife working? When it was something like this, it was a service to the town, she replied and looked at him. Didn’t he feel that way?

Broadbent reddened slightly and turned away for a second.

A few more things, but she’d been reading men’s expressions for most of her forty-five years. He was satisfied, he’d made up his mind. The chief constable gathered his papers together, tapped them into a neat pile and took a breath.

‘Mrs Cooper, if you’re willing, I would like to have you work with Leeds police. One job to begin, a, hmm, trial, as it were. Then possibly more to follow. We’d pay you by the case to start.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’d be very pleased with that.’ She didn’t try to hide her broad smile. A female detective. The eagerness overflowed in her voice. ‘Do you have something in mind to begin?’

‘I do,’ he said. He steepled his forearms on the desk and delicately rested his chin on his fingertips, eyes down to avoid her stare. ‘I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but a pair of fortune tellers arrived in town at the end of last week.’

‘Yes, sir.’ It had been common gossip at the covered market on Kirkgate. They’d come and set up in a house on Trafalgar Street in the Leylands.

‘I’d like you to make an appointment and, hmm, have your fortune told. A woman will raise no suspicion. Make a note of everything, and report back here afterwards. Fortune telling is an offence under the Vagrancy Act, you see. We’ll take care of the prosecution.’ His face clouded. ‘You realise that the, hmm, the nature of your work must largely stay in the shadows, Mrs Cooper. You’d only step out of them if you have to give evidence in court.’ He cocked his head. ‘Would you be comfortable doing that?’

For a moment, Virginia felt a panic rise in her chest. Rob had never mentioned anything about that. He’d probably never thought about it; facing judges and counsel was second nature to him. But she only needed a moment to make up her mind: she didn’t know if she could do this work, but she was desperate to try, to see if it could provide what was missing.

‘Yes, sir.’ Her voice was firm. ‘I would be willing to do that.’

‘Excellent.’ He smiled, a real look of warmth on his face. ‘Detective Sergeant Bell will give you the details.’ Broadbent extended his hand. ‘Welcome, Mrs Cooper.’

Four years had gone by since then. She’d learned how to spot frauds, been scratched and bruised as she searched female prisoners, and trailed pickpockets all over Leeds. She’d seen heartbreaks and horrors that returned to haunt her through the nights. Tried to comfort a young woman whose drunken husband had beaten her halfway to death simply because she answered him back. Heard the anguish of a woman whose man had just murdered her young child. She’d spent five hours in a dark, muddy cellar along Marsh Lane with a female killer, while water leaked through the wall to lap over her ankles, constantly alert in case the woman tried to attack her.

            She’d watched the harm people did to each other, more of it than she could ever have conceived. Known their fears and violence and learned to develop a shell to protect herself. Along the way, she’d come to understand that she had a gift for this. Rob must have seen that in her. But now she understood why he never wanted to discuss the job when he came home; it kept his family safe from the demons that lived inside him.

While silent, unspoken, she kept her own well of sorrows hidden.

The Character Of Leeds

On By chrisnickson2In leeds, richard nottingham, Uncategorized2 Comments

Last Saturday I was invited to give a talk to  the Family History Section of the Yorkshire Archaeological & Historical Society on Leeds as a character. Something to set me thinking about this place I love and how to define and describe it. I made plenty of notes, and soon very away from them.

But this is a more condensed and controlled version…

A couple of reviewers suggested that if you cut me open, the words Leeds would run through me like Blackpool through a stick of rock. I’m not suggesting anyone does that, of course, but I think it does sum up to an extent how I feel about the damned, bloody place.

Leeds is a character in my novels. A shifting one, from 1730 to 1957, as the town’s grown and grown, swallowing up more ground than anyone could have imagined.

Celia Fiennes (1698), Daniel Defoe (1720), Thomas Gent (1733), Richard Pococke (1750) and others throughout the 18th century praised Leeds for its buildings and its market.

That Leeds has a lovely aspect. Take a look at the prospects drawn from Cavalier Hill or across the river, and we’re genteel and beautiful. It wasn’t, of course; you simply didn’t see the poor.

1715prospect

Yet it’s the results of the industrial revolution that have defined Leeds, where we really start to take on our character and identity. Forged it, if you like. Bean Ing, Temple Mill, the Round foundry. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the most Yorkshire of sayings is ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass.’

In 1828 a German nobleman, described “a transparent cloud of smoke was diffused over the whole space…a hundred hot fires shot upwards into the sky and as many towering chimneys poured forth columns of black smoke” over Leeds.

10 years later, Barclay Fox noted “a vast dingy canopy formed by the impure exhalation of a hundred furnaces. It sits on the town like an everlasting incubus, shutting out the light of heaven and the breath of summer. I pity the poor denizens. London is a joke to it. Our inn was consistent with its locality; one doesn’t look for a clean floor in a colliery or a decent hotel in Leeds.”

leeds late c19

And just this year a WHO report noted that people in Leeds endure worse levels of air pollution than many parts of the country, including London.

Engels, Dickens, and many others saw the dirt and human misery in Leeds. It was hardly a secret.

1842 Report of Robert Baker, town surgeon, after the cholera epidemic. In Boot and Shoe Yard, the commissioners removed 75 cartloads of manure from the yard. Human excrement. The houses here were reputed to pay the best annual interest of any cottage property in the borough.

Yet there are plenty of beautiful architectural examples of Victorian wealth and civic buildings. The Town Hall, the Corn Exchange, the Pearl Assurance building and many more. Leeds is a dichotomy.

We might not have cartloads of manure sitting in the ginnels any more. Maybe we don’t have the pea-souper fogs and our shirt collars aren’t black by the time we get home from work, but Leeds is a dirty as it was 150 years ago.  We have a different kind of pollution. Most of the industries have long gone. We build very little now. But we transport, often ourselves, to get to a job that sells things or moves it, or is involved in digital business. But the bad air has the same effect. The hangover of the dirty old town won’t disperse. The difference is that the powers that be have put their eggs in tow baskets – digital and retail.

There is continuity, though. So many of the old poor neighbourhoods remain the new poor neighbourhoods, the donut of despair that surrounds the city centre. Some don’t really exist any more, of course. We don’t have the Leylands and Sheepscar is all warehouses now. But you walk on those streets and you can hear the faint echoes of the people who made their lives there, in English, or the Irish accent of the Bank, or the Yiddish outside the corner shop on Copenhagen Street.

Buildings create a place, but it’s the people who give it character.

While we remember the great and the good, the Thoresbys, the Gotts, the Marshalls and Murrays, it’s the ones without memorials or their names in the history books who really made Leeds. They worked the machines and the looms, they built those grand places on Park Row. People like that are where I find my character of Leeds.

When I look at the city, I see it in layers that build one up the other. Zara at the top of Kirkgate? Take away that building and what was there before and before and you reach the White Swan Inn and the gaol where Richard Nottingham – a real person, not just my creation – was constable. The strange thing is that while virtually every building would be alien to him, his feet would readily find their way around a number of the streets between the Headrow and the river. That layout hasn’t changed a bit. But it might be the only thing that’s remained the same.

In many ways, our history began, not with the founding of Briggate or a settlement growing up around the church on Kirkgate, but with the opening of Bean Ing Mill. That’s when people began pouring in. We’re children of the industrial revolution. Whatever history we had remade itself in the machine age. It’s probably one reason why Leeds has very few folk tales. There’s Jenny White’s Hole, but even that seems 19th century, and the Town Hall lions – the same. About the only old one isn’t even a tale, more a little joke that John Harrison, the merchant and benefactor, loved cats so much that when he had his house built on Briggate, at the corner of what’s not Duncan Street, he had holes cut in all the interior doors so the cats could move around freely.

That said, there is one small story, not a folk tale, that someone typifies Leeds to me. In 1812, with corn prices high, there was a riot during the market in on Briggate to protest the prices ordinary folk had to pay in order to eat. It was led by a figure named Lady Ludd – the Luddites or machine breakers were feared working-class figures back then.

lady ludd

Now, Lady Ludd might well have been a man in a frock and boots and rouge. Or it might actually have been a woman. The rumours still persist that it was either radical bookseller James Mann or his wife Alice. It doesn’t matter either way, although I do like the idea of a man in bad drag leading a rioting mob. It does my heart good.

We were bolshie long before the word was invented. Leeds was a hotbed of radicalism – pretty much from the start of industrialisation. The Northern Star was published here, we were important in the history of Chartism. From the 10-hour act to the later part of the century when Isabella Ford and Tom Maguire worked with unions to get better pay and eight-hour days, Leeds people have stood up for their rights.

We love a good riot, even over dripping. When Mosley brought his fascists to town, 30,000 Leeds people went out to Holbeck Moor to let him know he wasn’t welcome. We stand up and be counted and we’ll make fun of and humiliate those who get above themselves. Humour has long been a British weapon, but round here we’ve refined it into a deadly one.

I’m lucky. The factor that my writing covers more than 200 years in Leeds gives me the chance to look at it in different eras. Of course, you could ask why I set most of my books in Leeds. To me, the answer is simple. I grew up here, I moved back here. I know the streets, I’ve walked them, I know how they feel under the soles of my shoes. I know how all the pieces fit together. I understand the people, I don’t have to imagine their voices, I can hear them in my ear.