It is a storyteller's tale told by Harry Hinchcliffe, my great grandfather, on a stormy October afternoon in 1913. Harry joins his friend George, the barkeeper of the Tudor Bar, in the George Hotel, Huddersfield, England, to while away several hours while waiting for his son to arrive on a train from Liverpool. A weather bound salesman joins the two men and in the course of conversation asks Harry where his ancestors were from and where his surname originated. The ensuing saga spans 2800 years from the steppes of Southern Russia to the valleys of Yorkshire and ultimately into Harry's own era. The symbolism of the names origin is illustrated in Harry's arrival in the Tudor Bar, and his final disappearance into the Huddersfield train station.

HEYNECHECLYFF

The Lame Man Who Lived Beneath The CliffBy Robert R. Hinchcliffe

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2009 Robert R. Hinchcliffe
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4490-5150-1

Chapter One

How all this got started.

I am the only son, of an only son, of an only son, and I have no son, and with me the male line of my particular branch of the Hinchscliff, Hinchliff, Hinchcliff, Hinchliffe or Hinchcliffe family tree ends. I do have a daughter who I hope will have children of her own at some future time. At least in this manner the family genes will continue, albeit defused, as a graft from the tree's trunk.

I'm sure that if I had stopped and really considered the implications ten years ago, when I decided to have a vasectomy, instead of reacting from an emotional instinct, I would have chosen a different course, and for a more compelling reason; the continuation of my family tree. At the time the vasectomy seemed like the right thing to do; the only thing to do. We, my wife and I , didn't want any more children as we were raising three teenagers; our daughter, and twins, a boy and a girl she'd conceived as a result of an affair while I was in the Army in the early 1950's. I liked sex, as did she, but she had reservations, and to be put off by: "I don't want to become pregnant again," and her intransigence against the pill, drove me in utter frustration to take the extreme course that I did. For a brief while the improvements, not only in our sex life, but also in our total relationship, were worth the twenty minutes under the knife and a week's discomfort. As it ultimately turned out my decision, made for the wrong reason, put a possible and premature end to my male branch of the family tree. Now I will never know if I could have produced a son to continue the extension of the tree branch.

Anyway, a marriage that had been rocky at best for years, which in hind sight should have been terminated in the 50's, and only continued for the children's sake, ended three years after I had the vasectomy. Oh yes, I considered vasectomy reversal, which at the time had only a 15 to 25 percent success rate. However, as I am in my early 50's I've had to question whether I really wanted to conceive a child even if I could be assure a son. Certain other factors entered my deliberations, such as having a wife and being in love. Yes, I know these ingredients aren't necessary these days, but to me they are. And, since I don't have a wife and obviously am not in love with any one, the question is academic. Anyway, the possibility of whether I could father a child, a son in particular, is at this point water over the proverbial dam, is neither here or there to my story. If my ancestors hadn't been a prolific and resourceful people down through the ages I wouldn't be here today, and there wouldn't be a story to tell.

To begin with who am I? I'm Robert R. Hinchcliffe, better known as Bob or Hinch. The R. stands for Roy, contraction of my father's given name, Leroy, which I've never liked nor used other than as an initial. I was born 53 years ago in Plattsburg, a small upstate New York city; on the shore of Lake Champlain, close to the Canadian border. My mother, Nellie Josephine Winch, a Vermonter of English yeomanry stock, was a schoolteacher two years older than my father, Leroy C., Charles. She was according to my father, who had met and courted Nellie while he was still in college, very pretty, robust and full of life. The two pictures that I have of her appear to bear him out. My mother and father's courtship, and all to brief marriage, only three years, was, I understand a true love match. Unfortunately, complications at the time of my birth resulted in the untimely death of my mother ten days after my appearance into the world. My father subsequently remarried and has a daughter by the union. At this point I have been married and divorced twice, have a daughter I mentioned earlier, and the twins I helped rear from their birth. During my life to date, I have been a soldier, student, university administrator, house painter, salesman and civil servant.

When did I first become interested in my family tree? I really don't recall for sure, but it certainly goes back to when I was a youngster. I think I first began to wonder: "where I came from", when I was about eleven, it might have been earlier. The, "where I come from," wasn't the birds and bees thing; I had learned that several years before. Most children growing up on a farm or in a farming community, as I did, tend to have an early understand of sex and the reproductive process, at least as it related to animals, and it wasn't that much of an stretch to human beings. And, of course I had a sister, so I was aware from an early age that there were differences between she and me, important differences. The, "where I came from," was at that stage in my life an incomplete and badly framed question in a still developing intellect. The question was more a question within a question. It was actually where did we as a family, a people originate? How did we get here? When? In my very early years I can recall being taken once to visit an elderly, tall, raw-boned, dour couple who I assumed were my grandparents, my mother's parents. They probably weren't that tall, elderly, raw-boned or dour for that matter, they just appeared that way to a young child. During that same period a tall woman was pointed out to me, on several occasions, in our small town, as an aunt. These, my mother's relatives, were like shooting stars, a brief view and then they passed from my life to never be seen again.

A few years later an elderly gentleman, my father's father, appeared on the scene. He would arrive, spend a few hours and then leave not to reappeared for a year or two. It wasn't until I was ten that he became a meaningful person to me. That year my family went on vacation to Haverhill, Massachusetts, my father and stepmother's hometown, and there in Groveland I saw my grandfather in his own environment; his house, gardens, greenhouse and even chickens, all the things that leave an impression on a youngster. More important, he took an interest in me.

Later, as a teenager growing up in Cambridge, New York, I would often spend an afternoon stretched out on a moss covered ledge, beneath the drooping boughs of a large pine tree, day dreaming. The tree sat on a hillside east of, Cambridge, a small farm community, where I spent the war years. The drooping boughs afforded me with a view of the town, while at the same time providing me with teenage privacy, and sanctuary from the cares of encroaching adult world. There my thoughts would frequently traverse from the present to the distant past and the question of what had my ancestors been like. What had they done? Had they been horse traders, pirates, generals, kings, highwaymen, churchmen, good, bad? And, of course where had they come from? I knew by then of my birthmother's supposed English ancestry, but only they had settled in Vermont, but not where they had come from, when, or under what circumstances. I also knew of my supposed English ancestry on my father's side, but little more. There also had been a mention of a grandmother, my father's mother, but only to the extent that grandfather and grandmother had been divorced while my father was still in high school. During this same period in my life I would often stretch out on the tin roof of the back shed, which I could reach by climbing out my bedroom window, on warm summer nights, to start gaze and wonder if we had come from up there, somewhere, sometime in the past. No much for an active and enquiring mind to go on, so my imagination began to take over.

Then of all the letters written by my father during World War II one letter sticks in my mind. While attending a meeting of some sort in Cairo, Egypt, in 1942, he was approached by, an English officer, who enquire if he was related to a Robert Hinchcliffe from some place in England. My father replied: "yes he was related to a Robert Hinchcliffe, his son, who lived in Cambridge, New York, in the United States, not the place in England." I was surprised that someone else had my name.

At the end of the war, my father now out of uniform, moved our family from Cambridge, New York, to Haverhill, Massachusetts, and there I began an all to brief acquaintance with that grand old man, my grandfather, Charles Henry Hinchcliffe, and later still with my father's mother, Henrietta Henry. Through them, particularly my grandfather, did my enquiry of "where we came from find direction and my English ancestry confirmed. My grandfather's father had come from Yorkshire, England, while my grandmother, Canadian by birth, had roots in Sussex, England. My only regret is that I didn't pay more attention to my grandfather's stories of his life, and those of his father. What I do recall is remarkably little, unfortunately. But, at that time I was in my late teens and more interested in girls, and in a hurry to experience life. One seemingly inconsequential event did more than any other single thing to set me on my quest to find out "where we came from." That was when I came across a small book.

In 1950, while working at Mitchell's Department Store, in Haverhill, I found a thin book stuck among others on a shelf in the advertising department. The book was titled, "Colne Valley Cloth." The finding of this short history of woolen cloth manufacturing in a Yorkshire Valley was to have a profound effect on my life. The trigger, a pictographic map of the Colne Valley Cloth District, on which there were a number of factory symbols, including one labeled Hinchliffe Mill. My grandfather's father had been in the woolen trade, and he had come from Yorkshire; was it possible there was a relationship? Twenty four years later, in 1974, shortly before my first visit to England I chanced to ask my next door neighbor, Gerry Painter, an Englishman, if he knew the Huddersfield area as I was planning to go there to visit a nearby Hinchliffe Mill. I was again surprised, and another step in my quest set, when Gerry replied; "Bob, I know the Huddersfield district very well as I used to sell shoes in that part of England. And, Hinchliffe Mill isn't a mill but a very small village in which there were and probably still is several woolen mills."

On Thursday, 4 July 1974, I arrived in Hinchliffe Mill aboard a red, double -deck, No.11, Huddersfield to Holmebridge bus. It couldn't have been a more inauspicious beginning; it was pouring rain. The wind driven rain, and the humidity inside the bus obscured any view along the way. What objects I could see after wiping condensation, from my window appeared, through exterior water droplets as distorted and spectral shapes. The stop buzzer sounded as the conductor gave me a sign that this is where I was to get off. The bus rattled, brakes squealed and shook to a stop. Another passenger already at the back of the bus got off; then it was my turn. The conductor admonished me, "mind the step and the puddle sir." I pulled up the collar of my raincoat and stepped down onto the sidewalk. As I fumbled to raise my umbrella, the bus pulled away from the curb and vanished in the direction of Holmebridge. Umbrella finally up, I slowly turned to view my surroundings ... Hinchliffe Mill. Although, I should have been prepared for some sort of transition, I was not, for in a matter of seconds I was transported from the late 20th century backwards in time to the mid-19th century or earlier. As I stood there getting my bearings the strangest feeling came over me. I felt that I had been there before, in another age; I had come home.

I really don't know what I had expected of Hinchliffe Mill prior to my actual arrival in place. What ever it might have been, my visit was off to a rather disappointing start, in a pouring rain, and the appearance that the place was disserted. Although it was just past mid-day the heavy scudding clouds and the streaming rain created an impression of grayness and gloom which in turn gave off a feeling of approaching night. Hinchliffe Mill turned out to be a hamlet of age begrimed millstone grit cottages and row-houses, several small shops, and a pub, The Bare Knuckle Boys Inn, stretched along both sides of Woodhead Road as it paralleled the north bank of the Holme River, on the lower slope of Austonely Moor. Nestled into the slope was the Yee Tree Mill, one of the two existing mills. The other mill, the Hinchliffe Mill of times past, now known as Whitely and Greens, straddled the river and rests, along with a cluster of buildings on the south bank of the river, on the lower slope of Cartworth Moor. The river bottom is narrow at this point, actually little more than a good size stream. All in all a settlement of some 500 souls, I would guess.

It was a deserted scene that I surveyed. No cars passed me on the road nor were there any parked within sight. I don't remember any sound other than the hissing rain at that point. The contrast between the rain-washed gray black stone flanks of the buildings seemed incongruous with the lush green pastures on the slopes of Cartworth Moor to the south across the river. I decided to walk down to the river and up onto the moor to get a better view of "my home". The person, a man, who had preceded me off the bus, although almost at the bottom of the street, at the bridge, turned back and asked me if he could be of any help. It was obvious that the minuet I had stepped onto the bus in Huddersfield I had been identified as an outsider and surreptitiously watched. I introduced myself, explaining where I had come from and the reason I was in Hinchliffe Mill. He shrugged as he replied that he was afraid he couldn't help me, as most people there about were Hinchcliffe's of one connection or another, wishing me well, turned pulling his umbrella more firmly down over his head and shoulders, and walking rapidly went down the hill, crossed the bridge and disappeared into the cluster of buildings on the other side of the river. I followed more slowly in his footsteps down Co-op Lane, as I wanted to imprint in my mind everything I saw. Across the bridge, Ford Gate, through the cluster of buildings and up onto the lower slope of Cartworth Moor, between files of stone walls I went. After about a fifteen-minute climb I stopped and looked back at the homogeneous and not unpleasant view, in spite of the rain and gloom, of Hinchliffe Mill. All of a sudden I began to hear sounds I had been too busy to hear before. The baaing of sheep and the lowing of cattle unseen in pastures behind the stone walls, the distant barking of a dog, the distinctive song of a meadow lark, the murmur of children's voice from a building I had passed, presumably a school of some sort, and of course the roar of the rain swollen river as it coursed its way down through the valley over rapids and dams, built in bygone days to divert the water's flow into mill races.

As I retraced my steps down the slope of the moor, across Ford Gate, up Co-op Lane to Woodhead Road, a sense of the place came to me. I noticed smoke coming from chimney pots and light discernable through curtained windows, a door banged and a woman with a sweater pulled tight about her and a scarf over her head scurried across the street and into what appeared to be a shop of some sort, and a car went by tires squishing on the rain swept street; Hinchliffe Mill was alive. Finally as I was starting to get wet, in spite of my rain gear, and as I still had one more place, Denby Dale, a small village south of Huddersfield, where there was still a functioning Hinchcliffe Mill to visit, before I returned to London, I reluctantly decided I'd best catch a bus back to Huddersfield. As I headed for the bus stop I noticed first one, then another, and further down Woodhead Road yet another person appear, all heading for the bus stop. Apparently my timing was right and a bus due. The ladies, who were very friendly, reiterated what the earlier gentleman had told me regarding the inhabitants of Hinchliffe Mill. Neither could they tell me when it had been established. One of the ladies did tell me of an elderly lady, who had just passed away at 91, who had lived her whole life in Hinchliffe Mill. They did mention a woman, a nurse, who lived just down Woodhead Road, who might help me, as she was interested in such things. I was also admonished: "but dearie she's been up all night on a case and shouldn't be disturbed." Of course not! Mrs. Emily Cottell, the nurse, has since become a good friend and a great help. She has been my bridge between California, where I live, and my ancestral home ... Hinchliffe Mill.

(Continues...)

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