The story about the mills of Colnebridge is usually overshadowed by the saddest chapter of all – the tragedy of 1818.

On Valentine’s Day morning while it was still dark 17 young Kirkheaton girls who had worked through the night perished in a raging inferno. The fire began in the ground floor storage room after a boy misplaced a candle and the flame caught hold of some loose cotton.

The appalling loss of life in such circumstances shocked not only those in Huddersfield and the surrounding district but the entire country. It also moved parliament to debate legislation that might prevent a repeat of the disaster.

In spite of the tragedy, however, life had to go on. Money meant survival and with the industrial revolution gathering pace large mills began to oversee the demise of the cottage industry.

Colnebridge became home to a large cotton spinning plant owned by Thomas Haigh & Sons The mills occupied both banks of the River Colne and were served by the John Ramsden Canal. The Haigh family lived at Colne Bridge House, a spacious mansion situated less than a quarter of a mile from the workplace. The home had previously been in the ownership of Thomas Atkinson who was resident there at the time when his mill was destroyed in the fire.

Unfortunately, historical accounts about the mills are few, but a number of interesting photographs depict an industrial complex along with houses that were occupied by a workforce dependent on the cotton trade for employment. The houses were cramped but the most notorious were the ‘landings,’ a large tenement block where deprivation was, by today’s standards, unimaginable.

With large mills right on the doorstep, the air vibrated to the incessant clatter of Haigh’s spinning machines.

Here generation after generation thrived and were generally happy. At the turn of the 20th century the village had three shops, two places of worship and a pub, the Spinners Arms, which was demolished and rebuilt in the 1930s.

The pub survived the closure of the industries and continued to be popular with locals. It was extended in the 1990s to house a restaurant and was renamed the Royal and Ancient.

Today the old community is just a memory. The remaining houses of Colnebridge are, by comparison, somewhat more genteel but the area that was once the vibrant core of a village was finally flattened in the 1960s.

Lamentably, it is now little more than a road junction.

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