Foreigners (21 page)

The growth of the woollen industry, and the development
of cloth manufacturing, meant that despite occasional visitations
from the bubonic plague Leeds continued to expand.
By the early seventeenth century, buildings now lined both
sides of the River Aire and the town's leading citizens were
vociferously complaining of overcrowding. In fact,
according to contemporary reports, Leeds Parish Church
could no longer accommodate the hordes of people who
'resorted thither every Sabbath'. This expansion was somewhat
checked by the Civil War, during which Leeds was
idly batted forward and backward by the Royalist and
Parliamentary armies; growth was also interrupted by a
particularly violent mid-century outbreak of bubonic
plague that swept away a fifth of the town's population.
However, by 1660, with the monarchy restored, and a new
charter granted to the town, which included permission to
appoint a lord mayor, things were once again looking
buoyant for Leeds.

In 1700 the population was 7,000, with another 3,000
in outlying townships. In the same year, the opening of
the Aire-Calder Navigation Canal allowed cloth to be transported
by barge out of Leeds and directly to the port of
Hull, and thereafter to London or to the large markets of
Europe. As Leeds began to develop a direct relationship
to the world, her sense of her own importance deepened
accordingly. Around 1720, Daniel Defoe visited Leeds and
described it as 'a large, wealthy and populous town, it
stands on the North Bank of the River Aire, or rather on
both sides of the river, for there is a large suburb on the
South Side of the River, and the whole is joined by a
stately and prodigiously strong Stone Bridge . . . [T]he
High-Street, beginning from the Bridge and running up
North . . . is a large, broad, fair and well-built street . . .
the town of Leeds is very large, and . . . there are an abundance
of wealthy merchants in it.' At the time of Defoe's
visit the banks of the River Aire were already full of warehouses
and mills, and the main street of Briggate held a
twice-weekly market where everything from the town's
famous cloth to pigs or fruits, vegetables or shoes, might
be bought.

The Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century
transformed Agrarian England into Industrial England, and
even greater wealth began to be accumulated by the upper
classes of society. These social changes saw the poorest of
Leeds' citizens became poorer, while the richest became
increasingly accustomed to, and smugly proud of, their
material assets. In 1760, John Colliar, a schoolmaster from
the neighbouring county of Lancashire, compared Leeds
to 'a cunning but wealthy, thriving farmer. Its merchants
hunt worldly wealth, as eager as dogs pursue the hare; they
have in general the pride and haughtiness of Spanish dons
. . . the strong desire they have for yellow dirt (gold), transforms
them into galley-slaves, and their servants are doubly
so; the first being fastened with golden, but the latter with
iron chains.' With a link to Hull in the east already established,
work began on the construction of a canal that
would link Leeds with Liverpool to the west, and thereby
provide opportunities for exporting directly into the new
markets of the Americas. Although it took until 1816 to
complete, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal placed Leeds at the
hub of an extensive water-borne transportation network.
With rail transportation having been introduced, and the
town's roads being continually improved, Leeds began to
develop a reputation for ease of communication, and she
was able to move her cloth swiftly both nationally and
internationally.

In the eighteenth century, larger and more impressive
cloth halls began to be constructed in Leeds. Public
libraries, reading and assembly rooms, concert halls and
theatres were also built to cater to the wealthier classes,
while the working people continued to live in squalor and
entertain themselves with bull-baiting, cockfighting, bareknuckle
fist fights, or drinking and variety entertainment.
Working-class standards of health declined, and living
conditions for the poor deteriorated; inevitably, the
disparity between those who had and those who had not
grew ever wider. By the end of the eighteenth century this
town of 30,000 people, with a further 23,000 in the outlying
townships, had already developed the practice of establishing
a soup kitchen for the indigent, and handing out
blankets to those who could not provide for themselves.
Fines levied for drunkenness and other abuses were used
to help the needy, and food which was 'sold light in weight'
was confiscated and given to the poor. This charity was
motivated as much by goodwill as by a general fear of civil
insurrection and disease.

Hundreds of poor left Leeds in the early nineteenth
century and migrated to the United States in an attempt
to escape ruin, while others turned to crime and prostitution.
The Leeds Workhouse was always full, as was the
prison. As machines began to replace men with increasing
frequency, the poor and unemployed became more vocal
and expressive in the manner in which they made known
their discontent. After all, the daily reminders of widespread
poverty and starvation meant that they had little
to lose. Those who
did
work were always in danger of
being injured in the mill, or factory, or mine, and the worst
abuses were often visited upon young children who were
habitually pressed into service. However, despite the travails
of the working people, and the prevalence of vagrants and
paupers on the streets, the town
was
wealthy. The mistreatment
of oppressed workers who laboured intensively in
dangerous conditions, and the exploitation of child labour
in factories and mills, guaranteed that industry would
prosper and the wealthy become increasingly affluent.
Meanwhile, the area of Mabgate, which was located down
by the river beside the parish church, witnessed the greatest
concentration of misery, and although social problems of
poverty and prostitution were neither confined to Mabgate
nor to Leeds, the town was eventually forced to acknowledge
that it was confronted with a serious situation.

Victorian Leeds boasted an extraordinary number of
alehouses, which exacerbated the atmosphere of misery,
and although many temperance societies grew up in the
wake of this excessive drinking, neither church nor local
government could arrest the decline in the social fabric of
the town. These were dark times for Leeds, and not
even the air was pure, for the toxic industrial soot blackened
the lungs of the high and the low alike. By the middle
of the nineteenth century the population, including the
townships, had surged to 150,000 and overcrowding was
endemic. In 1836 the Leeds police force had been formed
and, shortly thereafter, they were armed with cutlasses and
heavy batons. It was understood that the police were obliged
to defend the rights of the mill owners and prevent the
'mobs' from attacking the mills, and soon after the establishment
of the police force their numbers, and powers,
were extended in order that they might deal effectively with
growing working-class resentment. In 1847 a new borough
jail was constructed at Armley to cope with vagrants and
other undesirables, and during this period of rapid urban
growth, the wealthier citizens quickly learned that they
must vigorously monitor the underclasses for these people
were not, under any circumstances, to be allowed to gain
the upper hand. Aside from wealthy mill owners and industrialists,
by 1845 there were over one hundred stockbrokers
in Leeds, and the town enjoyed its own stock exchange.
There were, in effect, two towns of Leeds, and although
Mabgate bore no relationship, social or otherwise, to
cosmopolitan Leeds, the underclass also wished to participate
in the success story of their town. They too wished
to belong, and be a part of this miraculous adventure in
growth and development which had witnessed a small river
crossing grow to the point where it now stood ready to
make a magical transformation into a city. The disenfranchised
of Leeds were refusing to go anywhere. They
insisted on being heard, and they demanded that they be
allowed to participate. They would not disappear. Nobody
disappears. People don't just disappear.

I never saw him and I never knew him, but it's a big place.
Massive. In fact, I never saw no coloured people at all. But
then again it's difficult because of the drugs. They affect
your memory. The medication, as they like to call it, it
can make you scream and then they just look at you and
that's when they remind you that you're mad and that you'll
not be going anywhere. I would find myself walking up
and down corridors, talking to myself, thinking who the
hell is this crazy bastard in my head, and then before I
knew what was happening the nurses would be all over
me, holding me down, forcing more stuff down my throat.
They used to talk to me like they were my friends, then
suddenly they would turn on me and that would be it. All
men, never any women nurses, and they would trick you
into thinking that everything was fine and okay, but it
wasn't like that. And slowly, you know, I think I began to
get the idea of what was going on. You'd see people coming
in who looked alright, like you could go up to them and
ask them how things were on the outside. Then the next
time you'd see them they were zombies and they didn't
know you, and that's when you realised that something was
seriously wrong. But like I said, I didn't see no coloureds.
I didn't see anybody like David Oluwale. I decided I had
to get out of High Royds, but it wasn't that easy. I must
have been getting better because I saw a doctor one day,
and you didn't get to see them that often. But I saw this
doctor and he even smiled, and before I knew where I was
I found myself in an open ward. I thought to myself, you
know, this is your big chance so you better take it. And
so I absconded, but they caught me in the next village, or
so they said, I don't remember. In Guiseley, I think it was.
They brought me back and this time they locked me in a
room by myself with only a bucket for a toilet. They let
me out in the morning, but kept an eye on me. I went to
Occupational Therapy, which everybody called OT, and I
learned a bit about printing. The females did sewing and
knitting, or they made baskets, but they gave the males
different things to do. I used to wish I was back in prison,
because you have more freedom in prison. Also, they don't
give you medication in there, so you don't twitch as much
and there's less nightmares. There's plenty of coloured
blokes in prison. I might have seen this Oluwale fellow in
there. At night they'd take me from OT back to the room
with the bucket, and they'd lock me in. After I'd gone down
the drainpipe and absconded the first time I thought, I'm
not doing this again. But they weren't going to take any
risks now. They watched me like a hawk. I never really did
see how big this place was, but it was huge, I knew that.
But by now all I wanted was to get out of there. It had
been years, and nobody visited anymore, and I was sick
of seeing old men picking up tabs from off the floor and
shuffling around like they didn't know their name or care
anymore. I didn't want to be like them. They were in their
seventies some of them, and I didn't want to end up like
that. If somebody gave them a sweet they were so grateful
they looked like they might cry, but they were the ones
who gave me the will to get out. It wasn't the doctors, for
I hardly ever saw them. In fact, there was nobody to talk
to about how you really felt about things, so you just kept
your mouth shut and pretended to behave and hoped that
the drugs wouldn't make you any more mad. Eventually it
worked for me because one day they didn't take me back
to the room and lock me in. They put me in a Nissen
hut type of place which was a more open kind of ward,
and I slept in there for a while. Maybe a year, I don't know.
You never really knew much about time in High Royds.
This place was better, but I'd still rather have been in
Armley jail, because there you definitely knew about time
and you've got your wits about you. But it's hopeless once
they put you in the loony bin. It's hopeless trying to hang
on to anything. Before you know what's going on they turn
you into a bloody zombie and there's nobody to talk to.
The nurses have got their jobs to do, but they're more like
guards or prison officers. And the guys in OT, they sometimes
told you straight out that it would be easier training
chimpanzees. Basically, you've lost control of your life, but
I was lucky. Luckier than most of them, because I got
called into the doctor's office and he told me that I was
going to be discharged. I said nothing because I didn't
believe him. Then I realised that I didn't want to go because
I didn't have any connection with the world anymore. Not
since I'd gone down the drainpipe then been dragged back
again. I didn't know anybody. I didn't know anything about
life out there and it was frightening to me. The thing is,
not only had I not seen any coloureds in High Royds, I
don't know if I'd ever seen any at this time, apart from
when I was in prison. I was more of a country person,
not a city type, and we just didn't have any. But he could
have been there and nobody would have known as the place
was so big. But when they eventually said to him 'You're
discharged' he'd have had the same worries as the rest of
us. I mean, where are you supposed to go?