On the weekend of July 20–21, a very special event took place in the Yorkshire Dales. A gathering of leading local geologists, archaeologists, historians, naturalists and writers took over the town hall in in Grassington in Upper Wharfedale, in order to celebrate the life and work of one of the most remarkable Yorkshire scientists and historians of recent times: Dr Arthur Raistrick (1896–1991).
Older residents of Grassington and Linton still remember the familiar white-haired figure, inevitably dressed in a grey serge woollen suit and black boots, walking through the villages or waiting at the bus stop – he never owned a car. Many people also remember his remarkable public lectures on a variety of topics, but most memorably local industrial archaeology, typically explaining the history and technology of local lead mines and smelt mills, in a science he is widely credited to have pioneered in the UK.
Arthur Raistrick: a formidable scholar with socialist and pacifist principles
Arthur Rastrick’s achievements as a scholar and academic were formidable. In his long and active life, he published over 330 scholarly papers and books. Many of his books on the Yorkshire Dales and Pennines in particular have become classics of their kind, often based on lectures or classes he first gave in the Dales and elsewhere. He was a lifelong contributor to The Yorkshire Dalesman, which also published many of his popular books, for example on the ancient green lanes of the Dales, on stone walls, on Viking settlements, and on lead and zinc mines. Many are still sought after classics.
Yet, he had a difficult start in life. Born in Saltaire, near Bradford, in a small terraced house to working class parents, he won a scholarship to Bradford Grammar School but left at 16 to become an apprentice at a local electricity works. At the start of World War I, as an already committed socialist and pacifist, he refused to either serve in the armed forces or a reserved occupation and became a conscientious objector.
It is difficult for us to now imagine the personal hardship, insults, physical and mental violence conscientious objectors had to endure during and even well after World War I. Though still a teenager, he was court martialled and forced to spend the war years in Wormwood Scrubs and Durham Gaols, an experience that led him to become a lifelong Quaker. He was only finally released in 1919 after four years behind bars.
A budding career in geology interrupted by war
After the war he was finally able to take up a scholarship to Leeds University, which enabled him to take a first degree in civil engineering and a doctorate in geology. Still unable to get a full-time job, he sustained himself by research projects, mainly in mining geology in the Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire coalfields, and in teaching a variety of adult education classes. This included classes for the local Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) and extra mural university teaching for Leeds University. In 1929 he was finally appointed as a lecturer in geology at Armstrong College, Durham, later part of Newcastle University.
However, the Second World War was another personal catastrophe for Arthur and his wife Elizabeth, herself a noted local historian, when he was suspended without pay for refusing to do any work related to with the production of military weapons.
A new life of writing and teaching in the Yorkshire Dales
The Raistricks came to the Yorkshire Dales in 1939 and remained there for the rest of their lives in the village of Linton-in-Craven near Grassington. They converted a disused barn in the village to a modest cottage, from where they sustained themselves by writing and teaching. This included a whole series of articles by Arthur in the newly established Dalesman magazine, and in the immediate postwar years, a series of popular Dalesman books on various aspects of Dales history, geology and archaeology. He even produced a national guide to basic geology in the popular Teach Yourself series.
Travelling by train, bus and foot he also gave WEA classes in various villages in and around Skipton and the Yorkshire Dales. The Raistricks also grew much of their own food in a small allotment to the rear of the Fountaines Hospital almshouses in Linton.
A founding father of the National Park movement
In these dark and difficult years of World War II, Raistrick was already helping to build a better Britain. At this time, his friend and fellow Quaker, the architect John Dower, invalided out of the War, was living in Kirkby Malham. Dower was tasked by Government to write what became a hugely influential report on the future of Britain’s countryside. Raistrick worked closely with Dower on this report, regularly walking the nine miles between his home at Linton to Kirby Malham to discuss key issues which were to find their way into the Dower Report published in 1945 as the war ended. The document was to form the basis of the great National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 which in turn led to the setting up of Britain’s network of National Parks.
In 1954 Arthur Raistrick became an appointed member of the West Riding Committee of the new Yorkshire Dales National Park, so can truly be regarded as one of the Founding Fathers of the UK National Park movement and of the Yorkshire Dales National Park in particular. Known for his outspoken views on rights of way and public access – he was for many years President of the Ramblers Association – he was one of greatest campaigners for public access rights of his time.
Typically, however, and rebel to the end his days, in the 1960s Raistrick refused to accept an OBE offered to him by the then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, as it was a relic of an Empire he didn’t believe in.
Celebrating the extraordinary achievements of the “Dalesman of the Millennium”
Raistrick’s achievements as a scientist are also now recognised by scientists as being of major, national importance. His work on Dales glaciation in the 1930s was groundbreaking, and undertaken while he was also working on identifying productive seams in the Nottinghamshire coalfields as a world pioneer of the modern science of palynology, the study of fossilised pollens. Equally, his many books and lectures on landscape history, archaeology and industrial archaeology inspired and motivated later generations and continue to do so.
Little wonder, then, that in 2000 the Yorkshire Dales Society, now Friends of the Dales, honoured the memory of Arthur Raistrick by naming him Dalesman of the Millennium.
On 20 July, in celebration of the many different aspects of Arthur Raistrick’s extraordinary scientific and literary achievements, Grassington Town Hall was filled for a series of talks by local experts, organised by the Yorkshire Geological Society. On the following day, there was a series of field trips to various sites of historic or archaeological interest visited by Raistrick on his many teaching excursions, including the Grassington Moor mines, the ancient field systems of Upper Wharfedale, and several sites of geological interest around Malham and in Ribblesdale.
These events formed part of the 70th-anniversary celebrations of the Yorkshire Dales National Park and also the 75th-anniversary of the 1949 National Park Act, achievements to which Arthur Raistrick’s life and work made a significant contribution.
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