Did Charlotte Bronte Buy Skipton's Finest?
On a recent visit to Skipton I decided to make a few days of it. I stayed on Swadford Street, a little down the road and over the canal from Belle Vue Mill. Past reports in the Craven Herald archive mark Swadford Street out as a centre of drunken behaviour and I have to say that little has changed in that respect over the past 150 years! But while I was in the area I went to see the Bronte Parsonage in Haworth for the first time since I was an impressionable pre-teen, when I developed a Charlotte Bronte complex that has never quite gone away. We had the same hair colour. It struck me that there would have been some cross over with Dewhurst's developing cotton thread business and Charlotte's life. Charlotte was an accomplished needlewoman - here's a photo of a dress that she hand sewed herself. It's astonishing. Her stitches are just breathtaking. I couldn't stop staring. And did she ever use Dewhurst's Three Shells thread? A little story developed on the bus ba...