Members of the Brussels Brontë Group enjoyed a wonderful trip to Haworth last weekend to visit the Parsonage and the surrounding Brontë Country, including stops at the Brontë Birthplace and Roe Head School.
The excursion, organized by the indomitable Helen MacEwan and Joanne Wilcock, also featured a trek over the moors to Top Withens, as well as visits to Oakwell Hall in Birstall and Shibden Hall in Halifax. Farther afield, there was also an expedition to Scarborough, where Anne Brontë died.
The weekend started with cream tea Friday afternoon at the Old Post Office near the top of Haworth’s Main Street. Now a café, this is where Charlotte, Emily and Anne posted the manuscripts of their novels to their London publishers. Above the outdoor seating area in the back of the café is a blue plaque describing how the original early Victorian post-office counter is still in use in the building.
The rear of the Old Post Office is across a narrow "snicket" or "gennel" from St. Michael and All Angels’ Church, where the Brontë sisters’ father served as perpetual curate. All the Brontë family members are buried in the church, except for Anne, whose grave is in Scarborough.
As folks enjoyed their cream tea, a lively debate broke out about whether it was more proper to apply the jam or the clotted cream first on one’s scone. It was the first of many delightful repasts over the weekend, including dinner later Friday just down the street at the Old White Lion, affectionately called the OWL.
Brontë Birthplace
On Saturday, the group set out on a coach tour of Thornton and Shirley Country, with commentary along the way by Joanne, who gave a talk to the BBG last October on Brontë-related places in northern England. The first stop was the newly opened Brontë Birthplace in Thornton, followed by visits to Oakwell Hall, Roe Head School and Shibden Hall.
The Brontë Birthplace in Thornton is where Patrick and Maria Brontë lived while he was curate there from 1815-1820. It is where Charlotte, Branwell, Emily and Anne were all born. The two eldest children, Maria and Elizabeth, who later died in childhood, were born in the family’s previous home near Hartshead.
Under the expert leadership of Joanne, who is a volunteer guide at the Birthplace, the group started the visit at the atmospheric ruins of the “Bell Chapel” in the graveyard. This is the name given locally to the church of St. James where Patrick preached. It fell into disuse when a new church was built in the 1870s. Joanne encouraged the group to imagine Patrick striding with his shillelagh up the hill from the Bell Chapel to his home on Market Street.
At the Brontë Birthplace itself, there was a surprise: BBG member Marina Saegerman was presented with a large print of the calligraphy and drawing she executed with a poem by Liliana Pasterska. A framed print of Marina's work was presented to Queen Camilla in mid-May when the Brontë Birthplace was officially opened to the public by the monarch. Nigel West, a patron and fundraiser at the project who has a link with the family of Charlotte Brontë’s husband, Arthur Nicholls, made the presentation to Marina.
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| Marina Saegerman holds her artwork as the Brussels Brontë Group visits the Brontë Birthplace |
The group then took a tour of the Brontë Birthplace, which has been purchased by a community trust and is now in public ownership for the first time in its 200-year history. As part of the fundraising for the project, the former family bedrooms in the building will be available as B&B accommodations. Patrick and Maria Brontë enjoyed five happy years in Thornton, before moving to Haworth in 1820.
Oakwell Hall
Oakwell Hall in Birstall was the next stop, where the group's guide in period costume started the tour by reading a bit of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Shirley. Oakwell Hall inspired Fieldhead, the home of Shirley Keeldar in Charlotte’s 1849 novel.
Fieldhead is described in the novel as “antique and rambling ... a Gothic old barrack,” with a parlour “lined with oak: fine, dark, glossy panels compassed the walls gloomily and grandly.” The description in Shirley continues:
If Fieldhead had few other merits as a building, it might at least be
termed picturesque. Its regular architecture, and the gray and mossy
colouring communicated by time, gave it a just claim to this epithet.
The old latticed windows, the stone porch, the walls, the roof, the
chimney-stacks, were rich in crayon touches and sepia lights and shades.
The trees behind were fine, bold, and spreading; the cedar on the lawn
in front was grand; and the granite urns on the garden wall, the fretted
arch of the gateway, were, for an artist, as the very desire of the eye.
Oakwell Hall is an Elizabethan manor house with a troubled history. The finances of the Batt family, its first owners, suffered after the triumph of the Parliamentarians in the Civil War. In the 1920s, the Hall was in danger of being shipped to the U.S. when the owners planned to sell it to an American buyer, but it was saved, taken over by the council and opened to the public.
The Hall is said to be haunted by the ghost of one owner who was killed in a duel about a gambling debt. This legend is recounted in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Charlotte Brontë. Gaskell also tells how one member of the Batt family “stole the great bell of Birstall Church, for which sacrilegious theft a fine was imposed on the land, and has to be paid by the owner of the Hall to this day.”
Of special interest to the Brussels Brontë Group members was a painting by Daniel Seghers, a seventeenth-century Flemish artist who specialized in floral images and whose work can be found in museums in Belgium and across Europe.
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| Painting by Daniel Seghers at Oakwell Hall |
Charlotte’s friend Ellen Nussey lived in the town of Birstall and at that time Oakwell Hall was a boarding school for girls run by relatives of Ellen’s. Charlotte mentions Oakwell Hall in letters and would have visited it when staying with Ellen. It was only five miles from Roe Head, the school attended by the Brontë sisters.
Roe Head School
Roe Head School happened to be the next stop on the itinerary. The facility in Mirfield is now Hollybank Trust special needs school and its Community Ambassador, John Howard, was kindly there on a Saturday to give a tour.
Unlike the appalling Cowan Bridge School that the Brontë children attended previously (Lowood in Jane Eyre), Roe Head was a well-run school led by the inspiring Margaret Wooler, who became a friend of Charlotte’s. Charlotte was a pupil there in 1831-32 and taught there from 1835-38. Emily and Anne also were students at Roe Head.
Charlotte made two lifelong friends at Roe Head – Ellen Nussey and Mary Taylor. Charlotte was happy there as a pupil, but less so when she returned as a teacher.
Many new buildings have been added to the school, but the original one in which the Brontës studied is still standing. In that room, the group sat around the tables like pupils as Helen read passages from Charlotte’s Roe Head Journal where she complained about her students, including this one:
... am I to spend all the best part of my life in this wretched bondage, forcibly suppressing my rage at the idleness the apathy and the hyperbolical & most asinine stupidity of these fat headed oafs and on compulsion assuming an air of kindness, patience & assiduity? Must I from day to day sit chained to this chair prisoned within these four bare walls, while these glorious summer suns are burning in heaven & the year is revolving in its richest glow & declaring at the close of every summer day the time I am losing will never come again?
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| Roe Head School (now Hollybank Trust) in Mirfield |
Shibden Hall
The next stop was Shibden Hall in Halifax, famous as the home of Anne Lister, the subject of the BBC television series “Gentleman Jack.” Emily Brontë, who spent a few months teaching at Law Hill School in Halifax, a half-mile from Shibden Hall, would have known of Anne Lister, who is described on the blue plaque at the Hall as “diarist, businesswoman, landowner, traveller and lesbian.”
Emily may have used Shibden Hall as partial inspiration for Thrushcross Grange in Wuthering Heights. It’s also speculated that Charlotte may have drawn on Anne Lister for some aspects of Shirley Keeldar in Shirley. In another Brontë connection, the director of “Gentleman Jack” – Sally Wainwright – also directed the Brontë biopic “To Walk Invisible.”
Then it was time to get back on the coach and return to Haworth. Saturday evening, the group enjoyed dinner at The Grouse Inn in the nearby village of Oldfield. The sticky toffee pudding seemed to be the favorite dessert.
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| Brontë Parsonage in Haworth |
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