‘A PLACE TO TELL OUR STORIES’ Heptonstall Museum, Hebden Bridge

 

‘A PLACE TO TELL OUR STORIES’

Heptonstall Museum, Hebden Bridge

uniteLANDWORKER Summer 2023 

Set high up on a rural hill, Heptonstall Museum was the perfect location for the recent BBC 2 Shane Meadows’ period drama The Gallows Pole. This was based on the book of the same name by Benjamin Myers, a fictionalised account of the true story of David Hartley and the Cragg Vale Coiners, a gang of West Yorkshire landworkers and weavers.

Yet it is only thanks to the heroic efforts of a dedicated small team of volunteers that the Museum survived after the 2020 lockdown.

This was when it became clear that Calderdale Council, strapped for cash due to unnecessary Government funding cuts for local authorities, intended closing the 50-year-old museum that is housed in a 17^th century building, which once accommodated the village’s grammar school and a branch of the Yorkshire Penny branch.

“I was on the Heptonstall Historical Society and when we saw council minutes indicating they did not intend re-opening the museum we quickly acted and as Friends of Heptonstall Museum we offered to take on the building under the asset transfer programme,” said local activist Linda Maynard

She continued: “We wanted to retain a building to tell our local history. So did local people as when we surveyed them over 250 overwhelmingly backed our ambitions.” Maynard, as a historian, is fully aware that the stories of rural hilltop villages rarely feature in larger museums.

So she took on the unpaid role of project manager and along with help from seven other board members put together a successful bid enabling the museum to officially re-open as a charitable organisation under community managership on May 28^th.

A few days earlier when Landworker visited the museum, which is around 2 miles from Hebden Bridge’s Fox and Goose pub that featured in Landworker five years ago when it became community owned, it was hosting a successful poetry reading event that is likely to become a regular feature in the future. There have also been many other cultural evenings.

“Our intention is not only to re-open the building as a museum, which we are convinced we can make better than previously as it was a bit old fashioned and overcrowded with large display cabinets that rarely changed, but for it to become more regularly used outside museum hours,” said Michael Crowley, a writer whose most recent book Comrades Come Rally tells the history of Manchester Communist Party between the wars at the heart of which are the International Brigades and the Jewish Community, including Benny Rothman, who fought Franco’s fascism in Spain and at home battled with Mosley’s Blackshirts.

“I love history and Heptonstall has lots. There was, of course, the Coiners led by King David as he was popularly known by at the time as in an age of poverty, his endeavours meant a destitute 100 strong gang of landworkers and weavers could feed their families. When he was executed, we believe the large crowd who attended would have sung ballad songs in his honour. “

The poet laureate Ted Hughes also wrote a lot about the village and Sylvia Plath, one of the greatest poets of the 20^th century, is, along with Hartley, buried there.

“The village was also the heart of the events locally in the 1840s when Chartism, with its demands for a wider electorate, was popular and led to widespread state repression, including many deaths in nearby Halifax in August 1842,” explains Crowley, whose play last year ‘Waiting for Wesley’, which examined the confluence between politics and religious non conformism at that time, packed out the museum. It is now set to be performed on larger venues. Calderdale Trades Council (CTC) is supporting the venture by making a donation.

A CTC member, Nigel Smith, a retired teacher who is now active within the local branch of UNITE Community, was at the poetry reading session and is volunteering at the Museum. “The museum is set in a beautiful location high up on a hill. I have previously attended events about Sylvia Plath, the village ran a festival about her life in 2022, and the fight against fascism in Manchester. I think the trade union movement locally must support the efforts to keep history alive and relevant and I’ll be doing my best to make sure that is so.”

Address: Heptonstall Museum, The Old Grammar School, Heptonstall, Hebden Bridge HX7 7PG 01422 843738

https://heptonstall.org/heptonstall-museum/