Rich orange flushed the pale horizon’s bar,
        Yet dark and unawakened lay the town
Without a breath of smoke, while Esk ran down
Beneath the glory of a single star;
The good wives slept, the fisher-boats were far:
You could not think that care was ever known
On yonder dreaming slope; no hint was shown
Of what laborious dawns and daylights are.
But still the planet wheeled to work and woe,
The orange faded fast to common light,
And that mysterious Abbey stood forlorn—
A hopeless ruin in the fuller morn;
An anxious boat went moving to and fro,
The smoke-wreaths rose, the sails were all in sight.

(Sonnets Round the Coast, p. 169)

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Sir,—I agree with the Dean that we ought to have some permanent war memorial of the brave men of the city and neighbourhood who have fallen in the great war, and though I could wish that side by side with this a fund should be raised for the scholarships to Secondary schools upon which the children of men who have died should have a first claim, and though I hope that other towns and villages might consider this stimulus to higher education a far-reaching and a helpful form of remembering the august dead, I cannot but wish that some such active body as the Citizens’ League could see their way to a house-to-house canvass for a fund to erect a really beautiful building which should serve the double purpose of enshrining the memory of the dead and being a great public benefit to the whole city.  Everybody to whom I speak admits the need of such a hall for public gatherings, for music, lectures, etc.  I understand that the Birmingham citizens have a scheme of this kind for a hall to be used chiefly for music.  The hall they contemplate is to seat 4,000 people; a hall to seat 2,000 would be ample for the needs of Carlisle.  At Birmingham, I gather the suggestion is to have an entrance hall, open at all times to the public, in which the names of the fallen would be inscribed, opening into a larger building which would be built entirely with a view to its beauty and acoustic properties.  Those who know the great use that is made of the fine organ in the Colston Hall at Bristol every Saturday might realise what an education to the whole city organ recitals for the people can be….  At some time or other there will surely be adequate municipal buildings in Carlisle.  Why should not this memorial hall be a nucleus of the scheme.  I cannot do much, but to prove my interest I shall be willing to contribute £100 towards such an effort.

(Carlisle Journal, 1 April 1919, p. 5)

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“Moses Gate,” cried the porter, and we alighted.  The heavens were black with smoke, and the smother of the mills, to one whose lungs were unaccustomed to breathing sulphurized air, made itself felt. (p. 512)….

Towards the water-lodge, and under the brow of a dark, sooty hill, crept beneath its old-fashioned stone-arched bridge a thing that only in Lancashire could be called a river.  Poisonous with the discharge into its frothy volume from the settling tanks of the Farnworth and Bolton sewage works; black with the refuse waters of mines and chemical works for miles, it almost seemed to taint the air at our distance. (p. 513)….

“Dirt ain’t cheap, though we do say dirt cheap,” piped in a wizened little old body with a market-basket on her knee.  “I tell yow the gentleman’s right.  It costs us poor folk a sight in soap and clean curtains, let alone clean brats and gowns.  When we used to get in our hay there out Darcy Lever way our gown pieces were solidly soiled black as soot in just going between the hay-mows.  Talk about hay-gettin’, it was dirt-gettin’, and that’s all about it now,” she spoke defiantly. (p. 523)

Her challenge was not taken up, for the train slid into the station.  But that frowsy, filthy, sulphur-smitten, soot-begrimed meadow of hay-grass haunted me all the way home; and I felt for the Englishmen and maidens of the mill robbed of their sunlight at the noon, cheated of the poor man’s heritage, the way-side flower, sickened by the filth of their black and torpid streams, with never so much as a meadow of hay-grass sweet for the smell or clean for the getting.  I thought of the pale faces and the dreary dawn, the dark noon hours and the lengthened gas-lit eventide, and wondered how long common sense and science would delay to make it possible for poor men’s eyes to behold the sun, and poor men’s souls to find more heavenly cheer than the gin-palace-lights at the corner.  Yes; and how long Lancashire lads would “sit in the dark and hear each other groan,” as one after another through sunless days they went through joyless work to the sunless tomb. (p. 524)

The train drew up at a ticket-collecting platform.  “Sunlight Soap” stared at me from the advertisement hoardings.  “That’s the only sunlight we chaps gets in Lancashire,” said the clerk. (p. 524)

“And it costs a deal more than the real article,” piped up the little wizened farm-woman.  The occupants of the carriage tittered; but there was a pathos about the thought of their make-believe sun at so much a pound, doing duty for the Daystar’s purging, and I did not wonder that momentarily an angry sun looked blood-red above a guilty city, as leaving the Victoria Station we stumbled out into the murky streets of smoke-stricken Manchester, and thought with sorrow of Bolton-le-Smoke. (p. 524)

Let the furnace-owners realize that smoke-prevention is their duty. (p. 524)

Let the workmen understand that smoke does not mean work, and how easy it is to prevent the smoke. (p. 524)  

Let electors feel that they have it in their power to insist on seeing the sweet sun, by enforcing the Public Health Act. (p. 524)

Let the people be taught that sunshine means health, joy, the sight of their eyes, and abundance of days; that it is their wealth—as much their wealth as their wages; then, the love of flowers, and clean gown-pieces and window-curtains will do the rest, and the answer to the question, Sunlight or Smoke? will be certain. (p. 524)

(Contemporary Review, 57 (April 1890), 512-24)

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Sir,—I will have the butchers against me and the farmers will not be well pleased, but men, and they are in the majority, who desire to win the war, to keep the price of meat reasonably low for poor folk, and at the end of the war wish their country to escape bankruptcy, will be with me in my appeal to this ancient city to try one meatless day each week.  I have calculated from such facts of our dead meat supply as are available, that if we all agreed to do this we should save in Carlisle the slaughter of 3,800 animals—oxen, sheep, calves and pigs in the year.  If all the cities of Great Britain followed suit we should not only prevent anything like a meat famine, but it would make the supply of imported carcasses, which, it is believed, amounts to one-quarter of the meat eaten, unnecessary.  It would have a good effect on the health of the whole population, for doctors are agreed that we all of us eat more meat than is wholesome for us.  But not the least good that would accrue is that we should, on that meatless day, turn our attention to a fish diet, and to the use of such vegetables as lentils and haricot beans as are now little used, while the good old days of “poddish” and “haver” bread might possibly return.  I know I shall be told that a man cannot do hard manual work without his bacon and beef-steak….  And if we go back only fifty years we shall find that the bulk of the workers of the land used meat quite sparingly, say once or twice a week.  I do not plead for any change in the meat diet of the mass of poor and rich alike, but we are at war—we may continue at war for longer than I like to prophesy—and I believe it a simple patriotic duty to go in for saving our stock of meat in this “right little, tight little island,” and know no better way than by having one meatless day in the week and urging all my friends and fellow-citizens to do the same.

(Carlisle Journal, 10 November 1916, p. 8)

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