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00:00my walks take me to every corner of Britain as I seek out history embedded in the landscape in
00:10this country you're never very far from mysterious ruins of a shadow of unwelcome visitors so from
00:19romantic moors to majestic peaks I'm really enjoying some serious walking each of my walks
00:27leads me through a different time and a stunning location to find the stories you can only really
00:34appreciate on foot this time I'm walking through the West Yorkshire moors to discover how they
00:42inspired England's greatest literary family and two of the finest novels ever written this classic
00:51moorland became the backdrop both for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights why because it was the real
00:57life home of their creators the tragic but brilliant Bronte sisters this is the Worth Valley in West
01:15Yorkshire just 10 miles from Bradford and Halifax it's known to millions of people as Bronte country
01:21in the early 19th century the countryside here was home to three exceptionally talented novelists
01:29Charlotte Emily and Anne Bronte were born into a world of mills and moors where nearby Bradford was
01:38becoming the wool capital of the world today the city's wool exchange is a bookshop where the Victorian
01:46past lives on in print the Bronte's write about love and hardship in this really intense and passionate
02:05way that still feels raw 150 years later although I must admit there's a part of me that does find old chunks of
02:12the books really hard going I reckon I'm in the minority though because there are legions of Bronte fans
02:19who simply can't put them down and after all these years they still fly off the shelves the most famous
02:25Bronte novels are Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights they've been translated into almost every language on earth and
02:33turned into over a hundred films plays and dramas but the lives of the three sisters and their wayward
02:40brother Branwell read like one of their books so I've put together a four-day circular walk to uncover their
02:48story from their birthplace in Thornton I'll venture out into the countryside where they set so many of their
02:57stories ending my first day at the family home in Howarth a Victorian village with a killer secret on day
03:05two I'll step onto the moors and visit a crumbling ruin immortalized in Jane Eyre day three sees me explore
03:15the empty wilderness that inspired Wuthering Heights before moving down into the Calder Valley
03:21Luddendon is the first stop on my final day before it's over the moors once more to the tragic final
03:31chapter in the Bronte saga back at Howarth
03:41I'm starting my walk in Thornton which is four miles from Bradford city centre in 1815 this was a
03:50small country village where a new curate the Reverend Patrick Bronte had just arrived to set up home with
03:56his wife Mariah they already had two young daughters two-year-old Mariah and baby Elizabeth and they would
04:05have four more children over the next five years here we are this is where the Bronte story started 77
04:13market Street Thornton they don't shout about it do they there's no big ticket office or advertising
04:20hoardings it's just this little plaque in this house were born the following members of the Bronte
04:25family Charlotte 1816 Patrick Branwell 1817 Emily Jane 1818 and 1820 number 77 has now become a coffee
04:37shop the current owner Mark De Luca is more barista than Bronte he's created a literary cafe inside this
04:47simple terraced house Patrick Bronte complained that it was ill-constructed and inconvenient but
04:54it was a happy home for his growing family it's a bit kind of weird that you come up these little
05:01steps so close to the front yeah well this was extended in the 1900s when it was love it's the
05:08butchers so this is the authentic bit yeah this is the kitchen this is where the Brontes were born in
05:13front of the fireplace the real thing the real thing it's it's been retained for all these years so yeah
05:19it's a great piece Patrick Bronte wanted to give his children the best start in life he could he'd been
05:27born in a poor farm workers cottage in Ireland but he fought his way to Cambridge and believed that
05:33education was the key to escaping poverty in 1820 just four months after Anne was born Patrick started
05:41a new job in a larger parish so like the Brontes I'm making the journey to their new home in the
05:49village of Howarth it wasn't a long journey for them just seven miles along valley roads in their
05:58two flat wagons my route is more exposed my first taste of the moors and the path once used by pack
06:08horses you can see why they still call this place black moor the thick carpet of heather and rough grass
06:18means only hardy souls like north country cheviots are found up here but whether you take the high
06:26road or the low road you're still rewarded with a fantastic view of your destination howarth huh
06:35that's not bad is it actually it only took me about 40 minutes to cross black moore but you
06:41imagine the kids going are we nearly there yet papa are we nearly there howarth is every bit the
06:50classic Yorkshire village by 1820 this parish of scattered sheep farms had found a new source of
06:57wealth the water that drains off the moors in the 1800s brand new machines powered by water and steam
07:06were transforming the cloth making industry in places like how when the Brontes arrived howarth was no
07:15longer a small village it was an expanding township with 18 textile mills spread out across the valley
07:21employing four and a half thousand men women and children this population squeezed into narrow sandstone
07:30houses built into the hillside at the top was Patrick's parish church accompanied by its rather grand
07:37parsonage not a bad step up from a terrace in Thornton the new Bronte home overlooked the graveyard where
07:46I'm meeting the current vicar Peter Mayo Smith when Patrick got this job directly felt he'd landed on
07:53his feet it's so gorgeous here well it's gorgeous now I'm not sure it would have been when he arrived
07:58imagine this place without trees no buildings behind a church that was actually falling down when he arrived
08:04very cold and a working-class village very mill-oriented with children working in the mills and things
08:11like that the graveyard well I was gonna say it looks very beautiful it looks very packed it is
08:18packed estimates between 20 to 60 thousand bodies 20 to 60 thousand yes it's a tiny place yes and now
08:26Patrick's predecessor one of his predecessors William Grimshaw it's reputed did a thousand baptisms a year and
08:34never saw the population increase that gives you an idea of what's going on so that's indicative of a lot
08:40of disease that kills unfortunately yes Howarth was one of the unhealthiest places to live in Victorian
08:47England tuberculosis flourished and decaying matter from the graveyard seeped down into the stream which
08:53people used for drinking water 40 percent of children here didn't reach their fifth birthday
08:59the average life expectancy was just 25 years let's show you this Tony which I think illustrates the
09:07problem very well if we have a look at it we've got Elizabeth she dies in 1857 at the time Patrick
09:14Bronte she's only six years old and then we've got Mary another daughter who dies when she's two yes then
09:21Sarah another daughter 24 yeah Emma a daughter 21 and Joshua their son 24 that gives you a good picture of
09:33what's going on yeah it's really very sad a year after they moved into the parsonage Patrick's own
09:45wife Mariah died from uterine cancer aged 38 their two oldest daughters died next from tuberculosis which
09:55they caught at a nearby boarding school a devastated Patrick decided for the time being to bring up
10:02Charlotte Branwell Emily and Anne at home it created a bond between the four children which would last their
10:09entire lives Charlotte and Branwell was suddenly the eldest and they used their imaginations to escape
10:16the grim reality of life in Howarth one day all the kids are around and a dad comes in with this box of
10:25soldiers for his little boy Bramble but before Bramwell had even had a chance to lay them all out
10:31Charlotte who was by far the bossiest grabbed one of them and said that is the Duke of Wellington and then
10:38one of the other kids said that one of them was somebody else and another kid that's somebody else
10:43that's something else and that was the start of the fantasy worlds and adventures and landscapes that
10:51the four kids created together over the next few years Charlotte and Branwell decided that their new
10:59heroes ruled an imaginary kingdom called the glass town they chronicled it in obsessive detail
11:06I've been allowed to handle these tiny magazines which it suggested the Bronte children published for their
11:14little soldiers to read the stuff that I like best and actually completely blew me away when I first read this
11:24they've got tiny little adverts here which are quite bizarre
11:29to be sold a hundred horses by Gerald dreadful to be lent the unprecedented sum of sixpence by private
11:37candlestick who dwells between the gates of the wall of Jericho and the wall of China
11:42grand proposal by sergeant shuffle which if carried into effect will enable men to go to prison for nothing
11:50it's Monty Python it's the goon show the booklets imitated real life journals in their father's library
11:58like Blackwood's magazine but they also included poems which are so much more than just childish
12:04parodies listen to this poetry I think it's quite extraordinary it is pleasant on some evening fair after
12:11a summer's day when still the breeze and calm the air and sea waves gently play to view the bay or who's
12:19still breast white sails do softly glide it's so effortless so gentle she Charlotte was 12 or 13 when
12:28she wrote that just staggering the children had discovered a passion for storytelling and writing
12:35which perhaps helped fill the void left behind by the deaths of their mother and sisters
12:41but eventually the children's imaginations would take them beyond the confines of the parsonage
12:48you can imagine them can't you peering out of the windows at the wildness of the moors beyond
12:55and that is where i'm heading tomorrow
13:04i'm on a walk through west yorkshire and the countryside that inspired the brontes england's greatest literary family
13:16today i want to discover how their storytelling evolved from innocent childhood fantasies to charlotte's passionate
13:25breakthrough novel jane eyre my route this morning takes me over peniston hill and on to howarth moore
13:33where as children the brontes let their imaginations run wild then after lunch i'm following the bronte way as
13:41far as why call a ruin in lancashire which is said to have inspired jane eyre's final chapter
13:52the brontes were very close as children they'd all been deeply affected by the death of their mother
13:57and two elder sisters they found solace in writing but it would be wrong to imagine them as unhappy
14:05there's a wonderful description of their earliest adventures on the moor by their nursemaid sarah gars
14:16she says their afternoon walks as they sallied forth each neatly and comfortably clad were a joy
14:23their fun knew no bounds it never was expressed wildly bright and often dry but deep it occasioned many
14:31a merry burst of laughter they then enjoyed a game of romps and played with zest
14:45i can just imagine the bronte children filing out across peniston hill like a yorkshire version of the
14:50von traps the children became more obsessed by the imaginary world that they'd created
14:57with each passing year branwell drew maps of a land they now called angria while charlotte dreamt
15:04up romantic heroes like the imperious duke of zamorna but the language and atmosphere were pure yorkshire
15:13the fictional capital of angria was surrounded by dark moors it was a romanticized version of grimy
15:20the industrial howarth with its cloth working mills and these sandstone quarries
15:27pretty chunky this isn't it apparently a lot of this stuff was used to pave the streets of london
15:34which is quite an interesting fact well i think so anyway oh well we're only about a mile
15:41outside of howarth but already it's quite spectacular isn't it that's howarth there but then if you swing
15:51over to the north this is the pennine way going over in that direction so what with all the bronte fans
16:01and the long distance walkers these tracks are pretty well trodden
16:05the path from peniston leads into a well-hidden valley where local legend says the sisters used to
16:15stop and compose their stories
16:19this is the bronte chair there's no evidence whatsoever that the brontes ever sat on it but
16:34obviously a few hundred thousand people have over the years see how the erosion has made it all nice
16:41and smooth it is pretty plausible isn't it that the brontes would have sat on it i mean if you were a kid
16:45and you were coming this way and you saw this you'd sit on it but the other thing is it gives you a
16:50fantastic view of that these are the bronte falls although the name is just a bit of early 20th century
16:59marketing but we do know that charlotte came here at least once because she wrote about them in a letter
17:05she said that she came here in winter when they were in full raging flow and described them as white and
17:12beautiful which probably isn't the greatest bit of bronte descriptive writing ever but you can
17:17imagine after a bit of rain it would be fairly accurate
17:24the bronte sisters had an unusual upbringing their father patrick was unlike other victorian parents
17:31he treated his daughters as the intellectual equals of his son i want to find out how this made them
17:36different from other children their age so i'm meeting up with anne dinsdale what were they actually
17:42like well to people outside the family they seemed very quiet and subdued but in their own company
17:48they were quite lively and quite boisterous if you and i had seen them would we have thought that they
17:53were a little bit weird probably they didn't have a lot of contact with um children in the village they
18:00spent a lot of time together in their own company they were quite highly educated and i think it's true
18:05so they had quite an unusual education because um that the girls were allowed to sit in on branwell's
18:11lessons with their father so they had knowledge of the classics and latin and also patrick didn't
18:17censor their reading so they were allowed to read the works of lord byron which were considered quite
18:22it was quite hot wasn't it yeah yeah being out here you really get the feeling that their environment
18:29must have had an enormous impact on them yeah i think i think it did it's very harsh and powerful
18:35like their books um and i think it's that combination you know they they were themselves out here it offered
18:41liberty um this wild sweeping landscape but in 1824 branwell emily and anne discovered just how wild
18:51these moors could be they were out walking near a peat bog which had dried up after a long hot summer
18:59a sudden thunderstorm turned the peat into a rapidly expanding quagmire creating what's known as a bog
19:06burst patrick bronte described it as an earthquake but it was more like a landslide with torrents of mud
19:12boulders everything in its way was carried down the valley imagine it would be a bit scary
19:18if all of this started to move towards you yeah the bog burst made the local news and the children
19:25were lucky to escape with their lives all the accounts mentioned some children who were lost
19:32out of the moors and who took refuge in a local farmhouse and we think that was the brontes we think
19:37that was the brontes and we think this is where they took refuge pond and hall the children knew pond
19:44and hall farm well it's thought some of angrier's characters were modeled on the heat and family
19:49who lived here these formative years around howarth had a lasting impact on the bronte children and they
19:56never forgot their imaginary worlds but as i head towards the lancashire border i want to find out how
20:06leaving home helped turn them into the world famous novelists we know today
20:10patrick simply couldn't afford to keep on maintaining his children and in 1838 branwell
20:19went off to bradford to try his hand as a portrait painter while the three girls emily charlotte and anne
20:25were sent away to be governesses for a while it was a deeply unhappy time for them all
20:31a victorian governess led a lonely existence being neither domestic servant nor part of the family
20:39and charlotte considered herself intellectually equal to her employers
20:44but one job changed her life she journeyed to brussels to work as a teacher where she fell in love
20:51with constantine hedger the headmaster unfortunately he was married and made it clear that he could never
20:57share her feelings so charlotte came home where she poured out all her frustrations she picked up her pen
21:05and using the male sounding name curra bell she created her novel jane eyre one of the most
21:12passionate love stories of english literature with its brooding hero mr rochester
21:21there's a terrific description of mr rochester his horse has just slipped and jane goes out to help
21:26him and it says his figure was enveloped in a riding cloak fur collared and steel clasped
21:33its details weren't apparent but i traced the general points of middle height and considerable breadth of
21:39chest he had a dark face with stern features and a heavy brow his eyes and gathered eyebrows
21:48looked ire-full and thwarted just now
21:55jane eyre is a classic love story the tale of a lowly governess who falls for her aristocratic employer
22:01mr rochester whom she doesn't know is married charlotte dared to show that women could be as passionate as men
22:10she also drew on personal experience for her characters and locations rochester is an amalgam of
22:16her childhood creation the duke of zamorna and constantine hedger his very grand house thornfield hall
22:24was probably based on mansions charlotte knew but i'm visiting wycola hall the inspiration for
22:31ferndean manor where the two lovers finally come together at the end of the novel the manor house of
22:38ferndean was a building of considerable antiquity moderate size and no architectural pretensions
22:45deep buried in a wood even when within a very short distance of the manor house you could see
22:52nothing of it so thick and dark through the timber of the gloomy wood about it well that just about
22:58fits the bill doesn't it
22:59why collar hall was a two-story elizabethan manor house which in charlotte's day was already starting
23:08to crumble jane eyre is a good old-fashioned fantasy but it's also a very modern story of desire across
23:17the social divide theater director polly teal has adapted the book for the stage and she thinks that
23:25the novel's bittersweet ending was something charlotte could only dream about what i find so
23:31moving about the end of the story and about ferndean the place where we are now um is that she's
23:38attempting to imagine something that was almost impossible i think for her as a victorian woman
23:43which is a marriage of equals of course when she first meets rochester he's lord of the manor you
23:50know he's this rich rather imperious very charismatic fascinating man and jane's his servant
23:57and at the end of the novel she comes here and rochester's being scarred he's lost his sight his
24:03hand and she's inherited money and it allows them to come together as equals and to know each other in
24:11a different way it's only by him shedding a load of stuff and her acquiring a load of stuff that they
24:18can become equal something that's absolutely right i know that originally a lot of people said jane
24:22is charlotte bronte and then later people said no no no it's you know this it's much more objective
24:27she's a novelist but in a way they were kind of right first time round weren't they i mean i think
24:32that's one of the reasons the novel's so brilliant that she put all of herself into it the novel's full
24:38of this kind of um conflict between this wildness and a kind of constraint and i think that's very much
24:47charlotte herself you know that on the one hand she felt she had to be the dutiful daughter of the
24:53the vicar and on the other hand she was this passionate creature with a huge imagination
24:59intensely frustrated by her life and the fact that as a victorian woman
25:04there was so little available to her so she was full of rage and longing
25:10fans of jane eyre included queen victoria although i'm not sure her majesty would have
25:20approved if she'd known a woman had written such racy material
25:26despite all the odds charlotte had opened the door for her sisters to follow
25:32spurred on by charlotte's success emily and anne published their first novels a few months later
25:38also under male pen names ellis and acton bell i'm off to get my head down for the night because
25:45tomorrow i'm heading up onto the moors that were the setting for one of those books
25:50the most passionate and controversial bronte novel of all
25:54i'm walking through the south pennine moors in west yorkshire known as bronte country
26:12and today i want to explore the setting for emily bronte's classic novel wuthering heights
26:16so i've left wycola and i'm picking up the pennine way up to the moor top ruin at top withens i'll soak
26:26up the atmosphere at the nearby alcomden stones before dropping down to hard castle crags where i want to
26:33find out what the talented branwall bronte was up to before ending my day in gentrified hempton bridge
26:40it's a hearty 15 mile hike
26:51emily is the most enigmatic of the four bronte siblings wuthering heights is her only novel
26:59like jane eyre it's become a classic love story but it's a much darker tale and set almost entirely on
27:06the moors it's a savage supernatural saga of a doomed and tangled romance between a girl called
27:13kathy her foster brother heathcliff and kathy's husband edgar and it's not to everyone's taste
27:22for some people wuthering heights is the best book that's ever been written no question but i must admit
27:27i feel a bit more ambivalent than that sure there's some really good stuff in it there's lots of romance
27:33and revenge and all that kind of thing there's that great character heathcliff who's not really
27:40like the laurence olivia heathcliff at all he's more of a monster than a romantic anti-hero so all
27:46that's pretty good but the plot is really overwrought and complex and goes around their houses and there's
27:53this one character leading character who dies out of the blue halfway through which is really irritating
28:00actually i should have put in a spoiler alert there shouldn't i of course there are plenty of readers
28:07who'd say that's the best bit tony the book gets its name from an isolated farmhouse on the moors where
28:14heathcliff descends into madness the house wuthering heights is of course fictional but that hasn't
28:21stopped legions of fans from around the world trying to find it i love this look it doesn't just tell us
28:28where to go helps our friends from japan too ahead of me lies the bronte fans shangri-la a lonely ruin
28:38called top withens emily described wuthering heights house as a gentrified mansion whereas until 1920
28:47this was just a small working farm one of three on this part of the moor
28:51but to fans of the book the exposed setting of top withens is unmistakably familiar local historian
29:00steve wood is going to show me around that's a bit of a trek isn't it it is right yes do we know who
29:07the people were who would have owned this place when emily was around it was a family called sunderland
29:13who were here for most of the 19th century yeah in the year that wuthering heights was published 1847
29:19there was an old man jonas sunderland it would have been a bleak life up here wouldn't it terribly
29:25especially in winter dragging a living out of just 20 acres up here with what maybe four or
29:30half a dozen cows the sunderlands lived on an island of poor quality grass in the sea of heather
29:37selling milk to the locals and existing on a bland diet they lived off oats they had porridge for
29:46breakfast they made oat cakes hung to dry on a rack but the reason why so many people are convinced
29:53that emily had top withens in mind for her novel is because this picture illustrated the 1872 edition
30:02it shows the three farms and near withens and middle withens depicted much as they actually were
30:08but in this position they put a much bigger house than what is actually here to fit the description of
30:13the house in the novel that's quite plausible isn't it it's what any what writer would do you would
30:18choose an environment but then you could stick any house you wanted to in it yes of course thanks for
30:23your help see you i'm taking a step off the well-beaten path to the highest point on my walk
30:35it's crowned by a mysterious group of rocks made from millstone grit
30:40the alcomden stones they're only half a mile from top withens but few tourists ever come here
30:49oh wow isn't this something it never seems to amaze me that even in today's world
30:56you can find somewhere like this look just a few farms and a couple of tiny wind turbines
31:02apart from that no evidence of the modern world at all
31:05the moor in emily's novel isn't just untamed it's a mythical realm and local legend says that ancient
31:16druids use these stones as sacrificial altars i can really imagine an intense young emily locking
31:22somewhere like this away in her mind the stones remind me of heathcliff kathy and edgar's final
31:30resting place on the moor at the end of the novel i sought and soon discovered the three headstones on
31:39the slope next the moor i lingered around them under the benign sky watched the moths fluttering among
31:46the heath and harebells listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass and wondered how
31:53anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth
31:59by the end of 1847 all three bronte sisters were in print under the surname bell the youngest anne
32:13had her debut novel agnes gray published in december that year i now want to find out what had happened
32:19in the meantime to the missing bronte their brother branwell
32:23so the next section of my walk takes me four miles south off the moor and into the shade of hard
32:32castle crags branwell's an elusive character he was social and outgoing the complete opposite of his
32:41sisters he'd left home in 1838 to try his hand at being a painter but he lacked focus and wasn't quite
32:49the artist he hoped to be when he was just 17 he created this famous family portrait only to paint himself out
33:01by the start of the 1840s he was living here in the calder valley near halifax
33:07calderdale was up and coming gibson mill was one of the first built during the industrial revolution
33:13and in 1839 the valley also got a shiny new railway i'm meeting up with bronte biographer juliet barker
33:21who says that branwell was drawn by the opportunities here well it was expected that a man would
33:27provide for the rest of his family and everybody expected that branwell would provide for his sisters
33:32and he tried to be an artist and he failed at that he tried to be a tutor and he failed at that
33:37so he came here and charlotte was very sarcastic about it and said he was going to be a great
33:42knight errant on the leeds and manchester railways what job did he do here he worked as a clerk on the
33:48railway which was a boring job it has to be admitted um he sat there noting down which trains passed by
33:55what cargo they were carrying and which trains came back again and what they were carrying that way but it
34:00was very well paid and the thing was that he started off as an assistant clerk at sorby bridge station
34:06and then they built the line a bit further down so he got to london foot and he was made the clerk in
34:11charge there which was a promotion so he went up from 105 pounds a year to 130 pounds a year
34:17branwell's job allowed him to carry on writing poetry it also put him on the doorstep of halifax
34:23which in victorian england was renowned as a center of art and culture people like for instance list
34:30and mendelssohn and paganini all came and did concerts here in halifax but also there were a lot
34:38of poets and sculptors like jb leyland who exhibited regularly in london and so he was mixing in these
34:43artistic literary circles and they were all encouraging him because they recognized his genius and they
34:50thought too that he was going to be a great poet or a great writer so a big social life a huge social life
34:57and he's often written off as spending his entire life in the pub but the reason he spent so much
35:01time in the pubs was that these were the places where they read their work to each other and it
35:06was at this point in his life that branwell started to get published long before his sisters got a thing
35:11in print branwell bronte got his poems published in the halifax guardian the leeds mercury and in the
35:18bradford observer as well branwell's literary efforts might not rival jane eyre or wuthering heights
35:26but the local papers here had a very high reputation for the poems they printed
35:34i'm following the stream down to hebden bridge which today is filled with the sort of artistic
35:39types branwell might have got on well with this former mill town was once voted the fourth funkiest
35:46place to live in the uk in the 1970s and 80s musicians artists and new ages helped revive a town hit by
35:54industrial decline it's also the ideal spot for a weary walker to spend the night
36:04tomorrow i'm making my way back to howarth to find out how the fortunes
36:08of the bronte family changed this part of the world forever
36:25i'm setting out from hebden bridge in west yorkshire on the final leg of my walk through bronte country
36:30today i want to visit the pretty village of luddenden before heading north across my final stretch of
36:37moorland near the end of my journey i can take a short train ride from oxenhope back to the bronte's
36:43home and the end of their story in howarth
36:49but first i want to finish the tale of branwell bronte who was living here in the 1840s
36:55i must admit i didn't know much about branwell before i started out on my journey but the more
37:03i find out about him the more intriguing he becomes the traditional view of branwell one that he liked
37:10to encourage is that he was a drunken hell raiser who neglected his job as a railway clerk friend said
37:17that he used to leave his station porter in charge and certainly he enjoyed a few drinks in pubs like the
37:23lord nelson in london but his bravado covered up a distressing episode in 1842 he found himself in
37:31hot water when auditors checked his station's books the story goes the eleven pounds one shilling and
37:39sixpence which was a heck of a lot of money in those days had gone missing so did the porter steal it
37:44who knows but branwell got the sack branwell was devastated by his dismissal his sister anne got
37:51him another post as a tutor working alongside her for a family at thorpe green but from here things
37:58went really wrong for him branwell fell in love with his employer's wife an older woman appropriately
38:05named mrs robinson and she let him on and then she dumped him and he got the sack and all this set
38:14him off on the road to self-destruction a broken branwell returned to howarth to live with his elderly
38:24father patrick and his three sisters he spiraled into a pit of self-despair suffering from shaking
38:31fits brought on by excessive drinking some say he was an opium addict my own journey back to howarth
38:39takes me past some of the modern moorland sites wind turbines the golf course
38:46and several huge reservoirs the moors round here are littered with reservoirs
38:53but in the late 1840s none of them existed
38:59and before a supply of constant clean water arrived the local towns were filthy overcrowded and disease
39:06ridden in these conditions branwell's alcoholism soon masked the killer symptoms of tuberculosis
39:16in 1848 he died aged just 31 in the arms of his father who'd had such high hopes for his only son
39:27victorian england didn't really understand why so many young people were dying here
39:31patrick bronte thought that the stink from open sewers was to blame so in 1849 he kick-started a
39:39campaign to clean up his parish that would eventually lead to today's reservoirs being built which reservoir
39:45is that that's leaming reservoir alice just hidden from view i'm meeting up with engineer simon firth from
39:51yorkshire water so what kind of diseases had an impact down there well the main waterborne diseases would have
39:58been cholera and typhoid but um of course tuberculosis was a big killer in the time and
40:03patrick's energy was very central in transforming this place into somewhere where people could actually
40:09live yes it was his letter writing to the general board of health that got the whole thing off the
40:14ground he had to write three times before they finally sent an inspector out to look at the conditions
40:19in howard and what did the inspector say well the babbage report indicated that the the possibly worst
40:24aspect of the town's conditions was the lack of clean water and he put together a lot of recommendations
40:30for collecting water off the hills and piping it down to the town so did did that do the magic trick
40:35eventually but it did take a lot more effort from patrick bronte to finally get it off the ground he had
40:40to prod the general board of health and remind them it's funny isn't it most people know about the
40:44three bronte sisters and some people know about the brother but very few people know about patrick and yet
40:51he transformed things around here he certainly did yeah but patrick's campaign to clean up howarth came
41:05too late for his own family within 10 months of branwell's death tuberculosis had killed emily aged 30
41:14and then anne at just 29. by 1849 charlotte was the only one of his children still alive
41:28so i've arrived in oxenhope where there's the chance to journey in style back to howarth
41:45on the keithley and worth valley railway
41:48uh singled house charlotte could never have realized at the time but her presence was laying
41:54the foundations for the valley's tourist industry i'm meeting dr lucaster miller to find out how
42:02charlotte helped create the bronte legend after her sisters died
42:13charlotte must have been devastated that so soon after the whole business with branwell emily and anne
42:18died i know it's almost impossible to try and imagine what it must have felt like emily's death
42:24was far more disturbing and devastating for charlotte she wouldn't admit she was ill she wouldn't
42:30try any of the medicines that charlotte tried to get for her she wouldn't see a doctor and charlotte was
42:35utterly frustrated that she couldn't get through to her she finally agrees to see the doctor but it's
42:41far too late and she dies that day um um and as charlotte describes it she was torn panting out of a happy
42:47life whereas anne's death was less traumatic and was very committed christian and very sort of
42:53brave and a much quieter personality the three sisters had always sworn to keep their true
42:58identities secret from the public but now she was sole survivor charlotte was persuaded to break her
43:05promise in 1848 her publishers invited her to london to mix among the capital's literary elite
43:12what is a massive shock when it was revealed that these three male authors were actually three
43:20young sisters it was frightfully exciting to all the people down in london in the sort of
43:25literary coteries the first reviews of jane eyre were pretty positive by the time reviewers started
43:31to suspect that in fact it was by a woman there was a complete sort of turnaround i mean we now think of
43:36jane eyre as a classic but it was a sort of scandalous book a naughty book as the critic g h lewis
43:42put it to charlotte completely embarrassing her at the dinner table by sort of nudging her and saying
43:48oh you and i've both written naughty books um especially when you find out that his naughty
43:54book has a character in it who's a woman writer who ends up as a prostitute on piccadilly circus
43:59charlotte had let the genie out of the bottle and feared that life would never be the same again
44:06so she decided to create a modest persona for her sisters to protect their memory in 1850 she wrote
44:13a brief biographical notice of her sisters that was published with a reissue of of wuthering heights
44:19it's sort of a pr exercise these women have got the reputation for writing immoral scandalous even
44:25anti-christian books um and charlotte thinks that one way to get the public sympathy is to say oh
44:32they were these sort of uneducated country girls who just didn't know what they were doing when they
44:36wrote their shocking novels unlike her late sisters charlotte had found fame while still alive
44:46and she didn't like it
44:47in the 1850s the first two bronte tourists arrived in howarth and were sent away from the parsonage
44:56with a flea in their ear today they're welcomed with open arms and they come from all over the world
45:04to visit the home where the sisters lived most of their lives
45:07i've really enjoyed my walk through bronte country but as for the family saga there's still one chapter left
45:25in 1854 charlotte aged 38 married her father's assistant curate and became pregnant
45:32but this happiness wasn't to last
45:41she soon fell ill with extreme morning sickness and died at home from dehydration and exhaustion
45:51this is the place where charlotte was buried along with emily and the rest of her family
45:56and it's a point of pilgrimage for bronte fans today
46:02the pretty tourist village we see today is far removed from grim victorian howarth
46:11it's the legacy of four talented children who never really left charlotte emily anne and branwell bronte
46:20if you want to follow in my footsteps you can download a guide to my walk by going to www.channel4.com
46:32pushing himself to the limit tomorrow night back for a brand new series we're trying to break records
46:37with speed with guy martin that's at eight film time next tonight though tom hardy chris pine and
46:43reese without a spoon all-star in our network premiere this means war
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