[BITList] Alpacas and the Parsonage

[John Feltham]

I wonder what £200,000 of 1935 money, would be worth today?

ooroo




To read this Life of the Day complete with a picture of the subject,
visit http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/lotw/2014-11-15



Roberts, Sir  James, first baronet  (1848-1935), mill owner and benefactor, was born on 30 September 1848 at Lane Ends, Oakworth, near Haworth, Yorkshire, the ninth of the eleven children (five sons and six daughters) of James Roberts (1807-1888), wool weaver and later farmer, from Harden, near Bingley, Yorkshire, and his wife, Jane nee Hartley (bap. 1811, d. 1878). Both parents signed their names to legal documents with a cross. In 1851 the family moved to Haworth, where the writer and painter Branwell Bronte had died at the parsonage in the week of James's birth. As Baptists, they did not attend Haworth's parish church, though according to family legend James spoke with Branwell's sister Charlotte, who died when the boy was six years old. In retirement Roberts was to play a prominent role in the conversion of the Brontes' former home into a museum of international standing. After his mother's death in June 1878, James's father remarried. His second wife was Mary Hartley, nee Windle (1808-1890).

At eleven Roberts had begun work as a worsted spinner at Oxenhope Mill where, by twenty-four, he had risen to become the 'mill manager'  (m. cert.). On 14 May 1873 at All Saints' Church, Bingley, he married Elizabeth Foster (1852-1935), of Harden, daughter of William Foster, a farmer, plumber, and grocer, who was resident at Brass Castle, Harden, in the early 1880s. Her maternal uncle was the writer John Nicholson, known as the Airedale Poet, who drowned in 1843 while crossing the River Aire. Between 1874 and 1893 the couple had four sons and three daughters, two of whom died in childhood. At about the time of his marriage Roberts was employed as a manager for the Bradford firm of worsted spinners J. and W. Hodgson & Co. Soon after he set up in partnership with his cousin, Joe Feather, as James Roberts, wool and top merchants. It was in this period that Roberts learned of the merino sheep bred in Russia and travelled there and elsewhere in the world to obtain wool at the best prices. Roberts's interest in Russian merino wool had parallels with that of the textile manufacturer Sir Titus Salt who, in the 1830s, had discovered the superiority of Peruvian alpaca wool. In the 1850s Salt had built a mill and model village on the River Aire (now a UNESCO world heritage site), which he named Saltaire, and it was to nearby Baildon that Roberts and his family moved in 1883.

When Salt's Mill went into liquidation in 1892, Roberts-along with the spinner Isaac Smith, weaver John Maddocks, and the colliery owner John Rhodes-bought the premises and the village. The initial concerns of Saltaire's 4000 workers were allayed as Roberts's consortium retained their employment and modernized the mill, returning it to profitability and doubling the premises in size. Within a few years Roberts bought out his other partners. In 1903 he acquired Milner Field, Eldwick, the mansion and 150 acre estate that had originally been built for Salt's son. In the same year he erected a bronze statue of Sir Titus Salt-with plinth decorations of an alpaca and an angora goat-which is now situated in Roberts Park, Saltaire. The park was also gifted to the local council by James Roberts in 1920 and was named not for him but to commemorate his second son, Bertram (1876-1912).

In November 1909 Roberts's commercial and philanthropic achievements at Saltaire were recognized with a baronetcy. To mark the occasion, workers at Salt's Mill presented him with a gilded silver casket with enamelled panels depicting, among other scenes, Oxenhope, Milner Field, and Saltaire, and decorated on the lid with an angora goat. In return Roberts established a pension scheme of 5s. a week for retired workers over the age of sixty-five. A year later he purchased and moved to Strathallan Castle, Auchterarder, where he lived until 1925.

Though a staunch liberal with a firm commitment to free trade, Roberts declined an invitation to stand as the Liberal Party candidate for Keighley at the election of 1911. He was for a time joint owner of the Yorkshire Observer and also president of the Saltaire Cricket Club to whose members he presented a pavilion and a competition cup for which teams continue to compete in the early twenty-first century. Other philanthropic acts included the construction, in 1910, of the Roberts Home for Dr Barnardo's Invalid Children, Harrogate, and extensive rebuilding at the Bingley Cottage Hospital in 1918 and 1924. In June 1916 Roberts spoke of his knowledge of the Russian language and his affection for the Russian people  (interview, Yorkshire Observer, 2 June 1916). Later that month he donated £10,000 for the creation of a chair in Russian language and literature at the University of Leeds. The professorship was the country's second endowed chair in the subject, after Liverpool, and was prompted by Roberts's conviction of 'our national need' to study Russian to promote trade and British manufacturing (Roberts to Michael Sadler, vice-chancellor, 15 June 1916, quoted in Cross, 19).

With the outbreak of war in 1914, Roberts initially sought the help of his third son, Joseph Henry (Harry) Nicholson (1887-1946), in the running of the Salt's Mill-his two elder sons having died in 1898 and 1912 aged twenty-four and thirty-six respectively. However, Harry was called up and, having been gravely wounded, was no longer able to work at Saltaire. In the war years Roberts ensured that the families of workers serving in the forces continued to receive their pay; he also refused to raise rents for the mill's workers and helped them purchase war bonds. Having invested heavily in Russia, Roberts suffered serious financial repercussions in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution of October 1917. Afterwards, he paid regular visits to the reparations department of Lloyds Bank in the City of London where he met T. S. Eliot, who was employed in the bank's foreign section between 1917 and 1925; Sir James is most probably the 'Bradford millionaire' in Eliot's The Waste Land ('III. The Fire Sermon'). Roberts's financial difficulties were compounded by his worsening health caused by the strain of maintaining his business. Negotiations to sell Saltaire began in 1917 and were concluded in January 1918 when the mill, village, and Roberts's company were sold for a little under £2 million to a Bradford firm of wool traders who also acquired Milner Field in the following year. After spells resident in Hyde Park Gardens, London, and Newland Park, Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, Sir James and Lady Roberts moved to Fairlight Hall, near Hastings, Sussex, in 1925.

It was here that Lady Roberts read of the decision by the Haworth church land trustees to sell the parsonage, the former home of the Bronte family. She persuaded Sir James to give £3000 to purchase the house for the Bronte Society, of which he was a long-standing member. At the opening ceremony for the Bronte Parsonage Museum, on 4 August 1928, Roberts described himself as one of a 'fast narrowing circle of Haworth veterans who remember the Parsonage family'  (Whitehead, 45). A further donation of £1500 was made to adapt parts of the house for the requirements of a museum and archive. Other bequests from this period include a further £5000 to Leeds University, which came four years after his receipt of an honorary doctorate from this institution. Sir James Roberts died, of cardiac syncope, on the night of 31 December 1935 at Fairlight Hall, near Hastings, and was buried at St Andrew's Church, Fairlight. He was survived by his two remaining daughters and his third son, Harry, his wife having died on 27 July 1935. The baronetcy passed to James Denby Roberts (1904-1973), the son of Sir James's second son, Bertram Foster (1876-1912). Serendipitously, alpaca goats roam the lawns of Fairlight Hall in the early twenty-first century.

Julia Bolton Holloway 

Sources  S. Bolton and G. Bolton, Two lives converge: the dual autobiography of Sybil and Glorney Bolton (1938) + D. King, 'The second Lord of Saltaire: the family history of Sir James Roberts, bart.', Saltaire Journal, 1/5 (March 2012), 1-42 + A. G. Cross, 'By the Neva, by the Aire', inaugural lecture as Sir James Roberts Chair of Russian, Leeds University, 26 April 1982, www.umilta.net/Neva.pdf,  accessed on 14 April 2014 + J. Bolton Holloway, 'Haworth and The Waste Land', Yeats Eliot Review, 6 (1979), 22-3 + J. Bolton Holloway, 'Sir James Roberts', www.umilta.net/SirJamesRoberts.html,  accessed on 14 April 2014 + S. Whitehead, 'Sir James Roberts, BT, LLD', Bronte Studies, 27 (2002), 39-47 + E. Imlay, 'Freemasonry, the Brontes, and the hidden text of Jane Eyre', Secret texts: the literature of secret societies, ed. M. Mulvey Roberts and H. Ormsby-Lennon (1995), 210-27 + C. Lemon, A centenary history of the Bronte Society, 1893-1993 (1993), 25-9 + The Times (2 Jan 1936) + Yorkshire Post (2 Jan 1936) + WWW + b. cert. + m. cert. + d. cert.
Likenesses  oils, 1920-29, priv. coll. [see illus.] · double portrait (with Lady Roberts at Fairlight Hall), priv. coll. · photograph, U. Leeds · photograph, Bronte Parsonage Museum, Haworth · photograph, repro. in Cross, 'By the Neva, by the Aire', 26 April 1982 · photographs, repro. in King, Saltaire Journal (March 2012)
Wealth at death  £196,907 17s. 5d.: resworn probate, CGPLA Eng. & Wales




========================================================================
©    Oxford     University    Press,    2004.    See     legal    notice:
http://www.oup.com/oxforddnb/legal/

We hope you have enjoyed this Life of The Day, but if you do wish to stop
receiving   these   messages,   please   EITHER   send   a   message   to
LISTSERV at WEBBER.UK.HUB.OUP.COM with

signoff ODNBLIFEOFTHEDAY-L

in the body (not the subject line) of the message

OR

send an  email to  epm-oxforddnb at oup.com, asking us  to stop  sending you
these messages.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.bcn.mythic-beasts.com/pipermail/bitlist/attachments/20141115/ccd1ce2b/attachment-0001.html>