William Baines was born on Palm Sunday, 26 March, 1899, at 11 Shepstye Road Horbury.
Writing in 1972, on the 50th anniversary of William’s tragically early death, aged just 23, Stan Barstow, whose novel Joby describes a childhood in a town like Horbury, recalled:
I was born a few doors down along from William Baines in Shepstye Road, Horbury; but he had been dead for six years by the time I arrived on the scene. He was, in fact, exactly contemporary with my mother and its odd to think of her still alive and William dead all these years. But consumption and the like nipped off many a young life in those days: my mother’s talk of her youth is full of references to parents who “had eight and buried three”. And, of course, it’s tempting but futile to speculate upon how Baines’s talent might have developed had he survived and been with us, in his seventies, today.
‘I probably saw William’s father though I doubt that I ever heard him play the organ, for I went into the Primitive Methodist Chapel no more than a couple of times. The Highfield Methodist Chapel was where I spent the Sundays of my youth. There were four Methodist chapels within a couple of hundred yards along Horbury High Street in those days: the two I’ve mentioned and the Wesleyan and the Congregational. What their precise differences in belief and form of worship were I never knew, but it was only much later, after the Second World War, when their separate congregations began to fail, that three of them (the Congregational holding on to its independence) amalgamated for survival. A supermarket now stands on the site of the Primitive Methodist Chapel now [2022: currently Bistro 42 and the Lucky Flower Chinese takeway].
How quiet Horbury must have been in William’s day. I remember it as quiet enough in mine, for although I was born into the age of the internal combustion engine it was half a lifetime before bypass roads and six-lane super highways. An attractive little town at that time, compact, stone-built, sitting on the hill above the Calder, with green fields all round it. In the evening a one-armed lamplighter made his rounds; in the the early morning you would be stirred out of sleep by the clatter of colliers’ clogs passing under the window. Not much different, on imagines, from William’s time, for although his youth and mine were separated by a terrible war, change came much more slowly than in the years since 1945.
A puritanical town, of course. What other could it have been under that great weight of Methodism? Drink was a blatant evil, sex a vast unmentionable mystery. It’s perhaps fortunate that William was a composer, rather than a writer, for music carries few of the moral associations of literature. He’d have had a hard time putting the truth on paper in those days. His departure from his birthplace was not the kind of exile D. H. Lawrence had to seek from a not dissimilar environment, and his future, had he lived, would surely not have been plagued by the kind of persecution Lawrence suffered. But that is speculation again, and we should be grateful for what, in his short life, he left us to enjoy.’
Stan Barstow, ‘The Yorkshire of William Baines’, Harrogate Festival 1972
