Brontës (9 page)

The decision was not entirely simple, however, for Patrick was once more at a crossroads in his life and had to make a decision that would determine his future. Just before he accepted Dewsbury, he had a letter from James Wood, his old tutor at St John's, offering him the post of chaplain to the governor of Martinique in the West Indies.
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The island, a French colony, had recently been captured by the British, placing virtually all the West Indies under British rule. The appointment of a governor (and his chaplain) was therefore a new one, resulting from military success in the war against Napoleon. The position would offer prestige, excitement (as Martinique was still in the war zone) and an opportunity to be ‘useful' converting the Negroes and attempting to work towards the abolition of slavery, a cause dear to Evangelical hearts.

It is not clear whether Patrick had solicited Wood's aid in trying to find
another post, or whether Wood, remembering his former pupil's Evangelical commitment, simply thought he would be a suitable man for the job. The letter took some three weeks to find him, which suggests that the latter explanation was the more likely. When Patrick eventually replied at the end of November 1809, it was with two questions: was the post likely to be permanent and would he receive any salary in advance that would enable him to pay for the expense of his voyage? The questions were extremely pertinent and Wood's answers, which are not known, may have been the deciding factor in Patrick's decision.
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In any event, Martinique lost its potential chaplain and Yorkshire gained the father of its most famous family.

Patrick performed his last marriage at Wellington on 18 November 1809, though he no doubt continued his other duties until his departure on 4 December.
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His residence in Wellington had been very brief, less than a year, but the spiritual influences and the friendships of the Madeley circle were to remain with him for life. William Morgan, who, like John Fennell, was soon to follow Patrick to Yorkshire, presented him with a practical farewell present: a leather-bound volume of
Sermons or Homilies appointed to be read in churches on
the flyleaf of which he wrote:

The Reverend P. Bronte's Book – Presented to him by his Friend W: Morgan as a Memorial of the pleasant & agreeable friendship, which subsisted between them at Wellington, – & as a Token of the same Friendship, which, as is hoped, will continue for ever.
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Armed with his letters testimonial from Wethersfield, signed by Joseph Jowett, Robert Storry and John Thurlow, vicar of Gosfield, and from Wellington, signed by John Eyton, Joshua Gilpin and Thomas Stedman,
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Patrick set off for Yorkshire.

Chapter Two

THE PROMISED LAND

The fell hand of the twentieth century has destroyed most of the Dewsbury that Patrick Brontë knew. Its once proud and separate identity has been lost, swallowed up in the vast and characterless urban sprawl which oozes southwards from Bradford and Leeds. Today, its most dominant feature is the road system – a Gordian knot of flyovers, dual carriageways and underpasses apparently designed to prevent anyone either entering or leaving the town. The shabby remnants of late Victorian municipal splendour are dwarfed by the concrete stanchions of modern bridges. Despite recent regeneration schemes, there are still too many semi-derelict mills, empty warehouses and demolition sites which are a depressing foretaste of the town centre. Yet in December 1809, when Patrick arrived, Dewsbury was a distinct entity, a town with a venerable history and a prosperous future in the boom years of the late-nineteenth-century wool trade.

Dewsbury lies in a natural basin, on a loop in the River Calder which flows wide and deep down towards the Yorkshire coast. Surrounded then
by fields and woods, the town had an open and pleasant aspect. Dotted about the hill tops overlooking it were many small villages which have now become indistinguishable parts of the Kirklees district. The town was built of grey stone, long since blackened with soot, and had many fine buildings, all of which have been demolished. There were some beautiful medieval buildings, including the large, timber-framed fourteenth-century vicarage, with its rows of tiny stone mullions and its huge chimneys, and, just behind it, a stone moot hall dating from the thirteenth century or even earlier. There was a late-seventeenth-century manor house and, at Crow Nest, a mid-eighteenth-century mansion set amid parkland. Most of the architectural splendour of the town dated from the prosperous years of the eighteenth century. Three free schools had been founded by local philanthropists, including the Wheelwright Charity school for boys and girls. Great improvements in communications also took place over these years. Two new bridges were built over the Calder to replace the ferries, two new canals had been constructed to make the river navigable down its entire length and three turnpike roads connected the town to Halifax, Elland and Wakefield.
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The mid-eighteenth century had also seen the rebuilding of the medieval parish church. Tradition had it that All Saints' had been founded by Paulinus on a preaching mission to the Northumbrians in 627. In fact, Dewsbury lay within the old British kingdom of Elmet and it seems most likely that the story evolved from the preservation of Paulinus' altar in a monastery at Dewsbury after a devastating Welsh raid on a nearby Northumbrian royal palace in 633. The monastery had disappeared by 1066, but fragments of ninth- and tenth-century stone crosses and gravestones were still preserved in All Saints' when Patrick came. In consequence of the church having once been a minster, sending out priests to serve the outlying communities, many churches in the West Riding, including those of Bradford and Huddersfield, still paid tithes to Dewsbury.
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The town itself had a rapidly growing population which, in 1811, stood at 5,059; the parish also included the 7,539 inhabitants of Soothill, Ossett and Hartshead-cum-Clifton, which were separately administered by their own clergymen, subject to the vicar of Dewsbury.
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The textile trade dominated the town. At least five mills had been established as early as the 1780s, their numbers increasing rapidly after the invention of the steam loom in 1807, but a large proportion of the population still produced cloth on hand-looms in their own homes.
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As in both Patrick's previous parishes, there was a very strong element of religious nonconformity. John Wesley had preached there in 1742 on the first day of his tour of Yorkshire and thereafter both he and his brother were regular visitors. The Methodists had established their own meeting house in 1764 but remained on good terms with the vicar and his congregation. There were also several small Moravian settlements in the area. They seem to have been tolerated, if not actively encouraged, by the Anglicans, though their relations with the Methodists, whom they saw as rivals, were less happy.
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In Dewsbury, Patrick had his hands full. John Buckworth performed a marriage on the day his new curate arrived, 5 December 1809, but thereafter the full burden of the church offices was carried almost singlehandedly by Patrick. In the sixteen months of his curacy he personally performed nearly 130 marriages. Four hundred and twenty-six baptisms were carried out in the parish church, most of them during the Sunday services or on church festivals. Most onerous of all was the number of burials. At first these averaged around twenty a month, but then they rose sharply: from October 1810 to February 1811 there were over fifty a month, peaking at seventy-three in November when, on two occasions, there were eight burials in one day.
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Almost two-thirds of the burials occurred within the last six months of Patrick's curacy, suggesting that Dewsbury had suffered one of the outbreaks of typhus or influenza which periodically struck the population. There was immense hardship at this time, the failure of the harvest adding to the problems of industrial depression and unemployment.

Conditions in the town, brought forcibly home to him by the number of burials he was called upon to perform, must have been a severe test of Patrick's faith and commitment to his pastoral work. But he did not shirk the task. In his vicar he had a shining exemplar of a parish priest. Cheerful, kind and courteous, John Buckworth was outstanding, even among Evangelicals, for his personal faith and humility and for his public exertions on behalf of his parishioners. He had been converted at the age of sixteen and, although apprenticed to a chemist, had been head-hunted by the Evangelicals, who paid for him to go to St Edmund Hall, Oxford. He had spent all his clerical career in Dewsbury, arriving there in 1804 as a curate and taking over as vicar, at the age of twenty-six, on the death of the previous incumbent in December 1806. Two years younger than Patrick, he was a talented preacher; determined to save sinners, he went about it with characteristic energy, as his biographer describes:

The sacred truths of the Gospel, he felt were of eternal importance to his hearers; and under the influence of this feeling, he would sometimes declare the terrors of the law in language sufficient to make the ears of every one that heard him to tingle. On these occasions, his manner might be regarded by some as too vehement, but he had before the eyes of his mind the awful realities of sin, and he felt excited to stretch every nerve to place them before his people in the strongest language possible.
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He had filled the half-empty parish church by his preaching skills, but he also seized every opportunity to preach and teach while out fulfilling his parish duties. A typical occasion was recorded in his journal for 1808; visiting a sick woman at Daw Green he called in her neighbours, some fifteen or twenty of whom came straight from their looms, so that he could spend three-quarters of an hour with them expounding the scriptures and praying.
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With so many of his parishioners scattered over a large area, he had to make the most of such opportunities to ‘preach in the kitchen' like the Methodists. Before his death in 1835, three more churches would have been built within the bounds of his own parish, but in 1810 there was only himself and his curate to minister to the needs of the whole population. There is no doubt that Patrick would have been drawn into Buckworth's habits and, indeed, the vicar actually drew up a set of notes for the guidance of his curate. Whether or not they were intended for Patrick personally, they clearly had an influence on his conduct, as the same traits were discerned in him by later observers:

Preach to the feelings, as well as to the understanding; and to the understanding as well as to the feelings. Let a due proportion of close and weighty application be made to different classes of hearers, either by way of inference or pointed address, in every sermon …

The mornings seem to be best for private reading, and preparing for the pulpit; and the afternoons are usually found most convenient to the people to be visited …

Guard, as you would against the plague, against a newsy, chit-chat, familiar trifling with them. Elevate the standard of Christian experience and conduct as high as possible, in your conversations with them …
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Buckworth also expected his curate to take a leading role in the Sunday school, the first in Yorkshire, which had been established in 1783. In addition
to supervising the erection of a new building, which was funded by subscription and opened in 1810, Patrick had to attend the classes each week, opening the meetings with prayers and a hymn, then addressing the whole school and inspecting the pupils.
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As well as religious instruction, Patrick also taught the basic skills of reading and writing; one of his former pupils declared that he was ‘resolute about being obeyed, but was very kind, and we always liked him'.
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Buckworth was also an enthusiastic supporter of the Church Missionary Society, so no doubt Patrick would also have had to assist at his twice-weekly evening meetings, held in the vicarage, for the instruction and preparation of pious young men for potential ordination. The young men, many of whom went on to be missionaries in India or ministers of the Church, were taught the rudiments of Latin and Greek, as well as theological subjects, so Patrick, whose own background was similar to theirs, was ideally placed to help them.
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Between his formal duties and pastoral visiting, there can have been little time available for pleasure. He is said to have enjoyed walking along the banks of the River Calder, which flowed just behind the church.
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On one such occasion in the winter of 1809–10, as he walked past a group of boys playing rough and tumble near the flooded river, a simple boy was pushed, lost his balance and fell in. Hearing the commotion, Patrick turned back and plunged into the river to rescue the boy, who was being swept away by the current. He then carried him back to his mother, a poor widow living at Daw Green, before returning to the vicarage to change his clothes. On the way back he met the boys again and stopped to lecture them; when the culprit (whose son recounted the story) confessed, saying ‘I only picked [pushed] him, to make him wet his shoon' Patrick relented, and let them off after making them promise to go and apologize to the victim and his mother.
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