Arthur Leonard

Ronnie Bray

Arthur Leonard was born in Daisy Street, one of the narrow cobbled ‘streets named after
common flowers and shrubs of the area of Huddersfield known as Turnbridge that ran from St
Andrew’s Road up towards the canal towpath on its last half-mile west to the Aspley Basin. The
old turn bridge from which the area is named, still sporting early Victorian cast iron gear and
chains in robust cast cylindrical housing to protect the innocent and the foolhardy, remains fully
operational and can yet be wound up and down by cranking the huge iron hand wheel that pulls
the clanking chains upwards, to lift the bridge some six feet, so that canal traffic on the once
busy canal could pass to and fro.

Daisy Street, like its half-dozen companions, held a row of back-to-back shoulder-to-shoulder
small stone built terrace houses to house workers at the mills along the canal run that had been
demolished when I was a toddler. It was a dead end street, running slightly upwards to the canal
towpath, from which it was separated by a dry stone wall. On Mondays, washing lines fastened
to wrought iron hooks, driven into the mortar of the stones, ran from house to house across the
streets making it impossible for any motor vehicle to enter the street. On Tuesdays, the street
was open to vehicular traffic, such as it was, again.

In between Turnbridge and the old Bradford Road at Southgate in Huddersfield was an area of
dockland known as Castlegate. This was the old part of Huddersfield and was almost entirely
slum properties. The low mean houses were little more than hovels where the poor and social
outcasts gravitated to live out their lives in simple poverty. Despised by the townspeople, who
used the name of their district as a synonym for slums and for worse when it was directed at
people. It was the area around the old canal docks and warehouses that served when canal
barges were the major form of transport before the coming of the steam railway changed the
landscape forever, taking interest, jobs, and hope away from the canals, leaving behind only
neglect, squalor, and despair.

Arthur Leonard’s father, Augustus, and his wife, had thirteen children and raised them in the
two-up and two-down house, with an outside water closet at the far end of the row. Turnbridge
Terriers, as the denizens were known, were destined to a hard life and obscurity, and Arthur
would have been no different had it not been for a choice he made.

Arthur was not a scholar and did not learn a trade. He worked at what he could but spent little
time out of work. In the mid to late fifties, he became a Latter-day Saint. This marked a new
departure for him as he took to his newly found faith with determination and stubborn resolution.
Not only did Arthur become conversant with the scriptures, but also enlarged his circle of friends
among whom he gained some influence. He entertained an intense hope of finding himself a
wife, but for all his longings, he was repeatedly and ultimately disappointed, finding no one
willing to be his bride.

Yet, despite his disappointment, he continued to be a faithful and useful member of his faith
community until his sudden and unexpected departure from mortality. A couple of years before
he died, Arthur brought a pencil-written manuscript to my home for me to type out for him. He
had written a children’s story that he maintained was going to make him a fortune. It was
written in a very simple and childish way. The characters were not developed, and the narrative
was written in a style that, in fairness, can only be described as continuous staccato. I gained his
approval to ‘tidy it up’ a bit before making it typescript and returning it to him sop that he could
send it off to a publisher and sit back and wait for the anticipated and enormous royalties to flow
into his bank account and make him rich beyond his dreams. His story hadn’t a ghost of a
chance of ever appealing to children, for although it was full of animal characters the story line
was weak, despite an, unusually dramatic and well-imagined finale in which the nice guys
triumphed over the big bad wolves.

I wrote and re-wrote to try and rid his work of the repetitious phrases that plagued it, and tried to
develop some of the main characters to put some flesh on their bones, but I was convicted of the
truth that the sooner he got it and sent it to a publisher, the sooner would his dreams of wealth be
dashed as his Turnbridge Legacy sneaked up behind him again to destroy his dreams, as it so
often had.

So, I determined to delay putting the finished manuscript into his eager hands. My plan worked
better than I had anticipated, for it was soon noised widely abroad that Ronnie Bray was standing
between Arthur Leonard and his fortune. This was a fiction that served Arthur well because he
had a solid reason for remaining poor – me! But one can only delay things for so long without
raising suspicions and, in time, I delivered the precious manuscript to the eager Arthur. Instead
of thanks, Arthur took me to task for the delay, for which I begged his pardon.

Whether he sent it off to a publisher, I never discovered, for Arthur was taken ill to everyone’s
surprise. For a year or more Arthur had been telling everyone about a special diet he was taking
that would ensure that he lived to be one hundred and thirty years of age. From his description
of the turgid liquid concoction that replaced normal food every other day, I decided that I would
rather die young than take it into my body. But Arthur was insistent that not only would it give
him an enviable and miraculous longevity, but it would also guard him against contracting any
form of cancer.

Arthur was admitted to Huddersfield Royal Infirmary for what must have been the first illness of
his life when he was a little more than sixty years old. Arthur was surprised and disappointed.
He died a few days later having fallen victim to his greatest fear, cancer.

Arthur was a man who had done the impossible and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps
with all the odds stacked against him. He was once walking past the market Square when a man
talking to Les Dufton saw Les wave to Arthur.

“Do you know that man?” he asked.

Les said that he did.

“I take my hat off to that man,” he continued, “because I know where he came from, and
I know how far he has come in life.”

Les agreed, for he too knew Arthur’s journey of life and the distance he had travelled against the
discouragements of the fates that ruled at his birth.
And to Arthur Leonard who provided mirth when he described Socrates as ‘Sew-crates’ and who
invariably said “Gold, Frankenstein, and myrrh” when reading the story of another who was
also born in poor circumstances whose heart, like Arthur’s, was given to service and who freely
shared what little he had without complaint, I raise my own hat and continue to love this
Turnbridge Terrier in his absence.

Copyright © Ronnie Bray

22 November 2002
All Rights reserved