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 back to Keighley:
Her dainty feet. Everyone notices this about her as she walks. True, they don't have a deal of weight to carry. But still, her feet are no bigger than a child's - and one that has yet to reach an age of double figures. Those feet are here now, tapping onto the wooden floor of the shop. There is something about her tread today. It has never been a light and girlish step, her adult years arrived far too soon. It has always been purposeful, careful. When she browses my stock it is a short and decisive process. Today though, there is some hesitation. She questions what right her feet have to be here.
She is the parson's daughter, the most respectable of the young ladies of the village. But her conduct today…. It is something more than maudlin. Her face is white and her eyes are rimmed with pink. And in between the feet and the face? Only black. That faded and too often worn dress that is out of the closet again. She is the last of them. In the years that it takes a child to grow into a young woman an entire family has waxed and waned until she is the only fragment left in the parson's firmament.
“I would like thread.” She tells me, indicating her dress. Her skirt is rent. It looks like her negligible boot has somehow caught in the worn fabric, probably as she walked her tragedy around the Moor, feeling its expanse.
“I have some from a mill in Skipton,” I tell her “the quality is very good. Mr Dewhurst has become quite the name for thread.”
I place a wooden bobbin on the counter, the thread is wrapped tightly around it and shines like jet. It is too black for her faded dress, but it is all I have to offer. The black thread moves quickly these days, just look at all the fresh mounds in the graveyard. She must be able to see the graves being dug from the window of her chamber, hear the mason carving out the names. What life does she have when death is there every day, from the window and in her heart?
She buys the thread like it is a loaf of bread, a transaction of necessity, barely considered. The rent in her skirt will be repaired with tiny, neat stitches - I have seen them before in a pair of gloves that she left on the counter. Her handwriting is as tiny, I have heard. There is nothing about her that is not as small as a dandelion seed, but she is proving as difficult for the Lord to grasp her in his palm and take her from the earth. Miss Charlotte alone endures.
Click here to see my Message in a Bobbin
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