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The Village Voice by Roger Ratcliffe
Copyright Roger Ratcliffe, 2006
 It’s another day for the world’s tourist guides, disgorging coachloads at the Great Wall of China, leading parties round the Taj Mahal or explaining pyramids and pharaohs under the hot Egyptian sun. In Yorkshire they’re describing another pharaoh, perhaps to some smartly dressed United States Senators or to a crowd of denimed East European students, all of them drawn by the vast stone monument to Sir Titus Salt that is the village of Saltaire.
[Photo: Maria Glot (seated) playing Mrs. Dooley in Hattie Townsend's play, Schooling Miss Martha]
“He was pharaoh, Caesar and Saddam Hussein rolled into one.” Maria Glot stands with her guided tour outside the neck-challenging Salts Mill, built to look like a magnificent Italianate palace and centrepiece of a village that’s now exalted as a World Heritage Site, the modern-day name for Wonders of the World. Not even York Minster is on the list.
Salt was among the planet’s super-rich, a Bill Gates of the 19th century who travelled in his own steam train, the executive Learjet of Victorian squillionaires. He was a philanthropist who ignored the law and employed children as young as six, a newspaper owner who suppressed stories about dangerous working conditions, and a Liberal MP who never made one speech to Parliament.
Maria Glot, principal guide to his village of 900 houses and grandiose public buildings, describes him as “offensively wealthy and ruthless, but the best thing that ever happened to Yorkshire.”
She welcomes the latest party of visitors, on a cold afternoon with showers blustering through the Aire Valley north of Bradford. Her style is Victorian music hall burlesque.
“Titus was a Bradford mill owner who invented a process for using alpaca wool that no one else wanted. And he had a friend...you might have heard of him...known as Prince Albert, who was married to a lovely lady...name of Queen Victoria. Well, our Titus made an alpaca frock for her and suddenly the whole world wanted one. So he built Saltaire on the proceeds, telling his architect to give him the biggest mill the world has ever seen...and by the way, could it be made to look like his favourite palace in Italy?”
The garguantuan mill turned Salt into the largest single employer anywhere, and Maria invites visitors to imagine the opening in 1853 when 3,500 guests got stuck into biggest banquet in history. She walks her party across the road to the Roman-Classical church Salt provided for his workers and their families. It was, she says, not built to the glory of God like other churches, but built to the glory of Salt. “In here there are just two crosses, but you’ll find Titus’s initials carved twenty-two times.”
The intertwined TS motif, in fact, is everywhere as Maria takes her tourists around the village. She warns that it’s a real place filled with real people. “This isn’t a virtual tour on the internet or an interactive museum, it’s a walk through the only World Heritage Site in which people live...several thousand of them...so we must go quietly.” Although one villager has sold up grumbling about life in a goldfish bowl, residents mostly appreciate her guided walks, not least because they’re good for security. Several times, she and her party have turned a corner to find burglars in the act of jemmying windows.
The streets of stone houses were all named by Salt, the main thoroughfares after his friends Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and wife Caroline, many of the others after his children. “When he’d done with them,” Maria says, “Titus used the names of his grandchildren, then he started on his personal maids...who were more than maids if you know what I mean.”
Atop one house in Titus Street is a lookout tower built by Salt as an early form of CCTV to guard against street crime. In nearby George Street is the last remaining house with a front door “scrumbled” in the shade of brown once uniform for every door in the village. “Locals hated it,” Maria says. “They had a good name for that colour. They called it ‘Saltaire diarrhoea’.”
Each visitor on the walk receives a bookmark with the name, address and biographical details of a real villager from Victorian times extracted by Maria from census records. Tourists are invited to be that person and to visit their homes. Maria adopts one herself, lapsing into character: “My name’s Elin Dooley and I live in Amelia Street. I’ve got twelve kids and I don’t abide with this schoolin’ lark. They should all be workin’ at t’mill. I hate t’public washhouse. I don’t think it’s reight and proper, my smalls goin’ in with ’is from next door and we’re not even wed.”
The streets bring out stories. “Salt paid knocker-uppers to turf sleep-snoring workers out of bed at five-ish every morning,” she says. And at night he sent round men with barrels on horse and cart to collect household urine, a cheap source of ammonia for cleaning raw wool. “Because red-headed women have a different immune system, their number ones were considered the richest quality and went into a different barrel, as did pee from Methodists because they didn’t drink alcohol.”
Out on the main Victoria Road, Maria shows visitors the original Salts School, fronted by lions said to be a job-lot of rejects from the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square. Across the road, she leads into the lavishly ornate Saltaire Institute, where Salt put his famous visitors on public display. “Napoleon the Third of France came to call, and brought with him a little present called the Legion of Honour. Then there were celebrities like David Livingstone and Charles Dickens, and some of Titus’s mates from Parliament...people like Gladstone and Disraeli.”
The walk finishes back at the tourist centre, where a booking has just been received for a party from Hong Kong. In summer, Maria might even dress up as Elin Dooley for her walks. “I become Elin Dooley. I can be her all day, even though she was ’orrible.”
Copyright Roger Ratcliffe, 2006
Roger Ratcliffe was north of England correspondent for the Sunday Times for a number of years. He is now a free-lance journalist, author of several books and has an office in Saltaire.
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