Bolton author Allen Clarke got on his bike to create history

ONE hundred years ago former Bolton mill lad Allen Clarke produced a masterpiece called Moorlands and Memories, sub-titled ‘rambles and rides in the fair places of Steam-Engine Land’.

The book was first published by the newspaper company Tillotson’s of Bolton in 1920, publishers of The Bolton Evening News, predecessor of today’s Bolton News.

It was based mostly on a series of articles that Clarke wrote for Tillotson’s publications in the previous couple of years.

As the title suggests, it is more than a book about the moors. The ‘memories’ go back to his childhood and upbringing in mid-Victorian Bolton. It is an intensely personal account, speaking of people and places he knew and loved.

It is a truly remarkable collection of anecdote, history, literature, philosophy and fine descriptions of Lancashire scenery.

Some of the articles were written when the First World War was still raging. It was published less than two years after it had ended leaving millions of dead and bereaved.

The war casts a shadow across the book, though Clarke is never despondent.

His attitude towards ‘the war to end all wars’ is sadness and at times outrage. There is no glorification of war but great compassion for those who fought and died in the conflict.

Clarke’s book was conversational, philosophical, entertaining and lyrical. He wrote about handloom weavers, dialect writers, secret meetings of Chartist revolutionaries on the moors, the Winter Hill ‘mass trespass’ of 1896, Bolton’s links to Walt Whitman and that fearsome Lancashire creature, the boggart.

The book meanders and explores, venturing into urban, industrialised Bolton as well as the prettier places such as Barrow Bridge, which he adored and helped popularise through his stories in Tales of a Deserted Village, published in 1893.

He talks about characters on Halliwell Road and its ‘artistic’ street names which still survive – Virgil, Wordsworth, Raphael, Horace, Haydon, Handel and others.

He weaves local characters into his stories including ‘Owd Shappey’, a refugee from the French Revolution who arrived in Barrow Bridge and then settled down on Halliwell Road.

Clarke was naturally sympathetic towards refugees – his father and grandfather fled Ireland during the Potato Famine of the 1840s.

He wrote fondly of ‘Owd Shappey’ saying: “What a sad thing it must be to be a compulsory exile, fleeing to save your life, even if you find such a sweet harbour as Barrow Bridge.”

Clarke was both a keen cyclist and walker. His book included rides and rambles from Bolton over Belmont and on to Preston and his ‘second home’, Blackpool. Sometimes he takes us up Tonge Moor Road to Bradshaw and across to Holcombe and Ramsbottom, venturing through Rossendale. He loved the area around Turton, writing of the ‘children’s homes’ at Edgworth and the beautiful railway viaduct at Entwistle.

The book is more than description; he stops to chat with people, explore legends and folklore and really get under the skin of places he loved. His bike is a constant companion:

He wrote: “Of course you’re hardly absolutely alone when out on a bicycle for a bicycle is a companion, as well as a machine to ride.

!Indeed I believe my bicycle is a sentient being, only a little lower than angels. It seems to share my every thought and feeling; responding with a sympathy as sweet as rare.

“It is a chum. It is myself extended and spread out in wheels and steel. It is a pulsing amplification of my own personality; an artificial elaboration of my own hands and feet – and may I add – heart and soul? It is a comrade.”

He always maintained that there were ‘three Lancashires’: the Lancashire of the factories, mines and mills and the softer face of the county, stretching from Preston to Blackpool and the Fylde, the area he christened ‘Windmill Land’.

But there was also the ‘Moorland Lancashire’ and its characters whom he celebrated in Moorlands and Memories and found deeper meanings.

He said: “I never go out but I see something, or hear something, of which I make a note – something to serve as a gem for a future tale or sketch. There is always something to see; always something to learn.

“Every new day makes revelations. I stretch out my soul into other men, their souls flow into mine – sometimes with dancing, sometimes with mourning.”

Allen Clarke became one of Lancashire’s most popular writers but is virtually forgotten today.

He was born in Bolton in 1863, at 58 Parrot Street, Daubhill, the son of mill workers.

He went to work in the mill himself at the age of 11 but was fortunate in having parents who encouraged his love of reading and writing.

In the face of huge difficulties, he developed his own brand of popular journalism, mixing Labour politics with Lancashire dialect, humour and wisdom.

He became better known by his pseudonym of ‘Teddy Ashton’, though he had several others. His Tum Fowt Sketches, written in an accessible Bolton dialect, featured the anarchic doings of Bill and Bet Spriggs of ‘Tum Fowt’ (Tonge Fold).

They became hugely popular amongst working class readers in the textile towns of South Lancashire and the West Riding.

His newspapers – notably The Trotter and subsequently Teddy Ashton’s Northern Weekly - were read by tens of thousands.

Clarke was an amazingly diverse and prolific writer. Between 1896 and 1908 he managed to bring out a weekly newspaper, printed and published at 54 Higher Bridge Street, which he mostly wrote himself.

But that was only part of his work. Over 20 novels were serialised in his papers and some later appeared in book form. He wrote poetry, short stories, social and political commentaries and philosophical essays such as What is Man? and The Eternal Question, about spiritualism.

His Effects of the Factory System (translated into Russian by his friend and correspondent Leo Tolstoy) exposed working conditions in Lancashire’s mills and set out a vision for a new Lancashire.

Clarke was a ‘green’ before his time. In his novel A Daughter of the Factory, serialised in his paper the Northern Weekly, the heroine Rose tells her lover, Frank, as they stand together on a hillside overlooking the polluted town of ‘Slagbourne’ (possibly Blackburn): “Ah Frank, there is much to do to make this world bright and clean....We must make Lancashire clean again. We must wash the smoky dust off the petals of the red rose.”

Allen Clarke died in December 1935, walking and cycling right up to the end.

It’s a pity there is no memorial to him in his home town of Bolton. However, Little Marton Mill, on the outskirts of Blackpool, has been preserved as a monument to this ‘man who loved windmills’, thanks to the efforts of local volunteers.

Allen Clarke’s Moorlands and Memories is the subject of a new book by Paul Salveson. Moorlands, Memories and Reflections explores the moors and villages which Clarke described and reflects on the changes to our moorland landscape, as well as our towns and villages. It is published by Lancashire Loominary and includes a foreword by Maxine Peake. Full details on www.lancashireloominary.co.uk or info@lancashireloominary.co.uk