The mystery of the Sowerby Bridge ticket office

The Telegraph and Argus reports forthcoming events at the Brontë Parsonage Museum. They're tempting as usual:

The handwriting of the Bronte family has been analysed to give new insights into their personalities and behaviours.
The study by a graphologist forms part of the new contemporary arts programme at the Bronte Parsonage Museum.
Visitors to the Haworth museum will be able to use the findings to "read" the Brontes' writings in new ways.
The findings of graphologist Diane Simpson will be revealed alongside the Victor Buta's exhibition Alter Ego, Running February 6-March 31.
Victor has produced a series of abstract paintings based on Bronte handwriting and signatures.
Diane Simpson will visit the museum on February 14 to talk about graphology and analyze visitors' own handwriting.
The next event is on November 12 at the Old Schoolroom, Haworth, when novelist Maggie Farrell will talk with writer and poet James Nash.
They will discuss Maggie's latest novel The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox, which has been compared with Jane Eyre.
The book portrays a woman edited out of her family history and explores the themes of sanity and madness.
Award-winning Maggie has acknowledged the influence of the Brontes on her work. (David Knights)

Not far from Haworth, the Halifax Evening Courier reports a scheme for the old station ticket office to become a pub. That's all very well, but this puzzles us:

The ticket office, built in 1876 and famous as the workplace of Branwell Bronte, is being turned into a licensed cafe called The Jubilee Refreshment Rooms, named after the last class of steam locomotive to operate in Calderdale. (Joe Shute)

It puzzles us mainly because by 1876 poor Branwell had been dead and buried for 28 years. It is true, though, that Branwell worked as assistant and clerk at the Sowerby Bridge train station between September 1840 and April 1841. We have been unable to find specific mentions of the ticket office, but the information regarding the train station is confusing as well. According to the Brontë Encyclopedia,

It was during [Branwell's] time there that the present station was under construction.

Which would be all very well, if the Wikipedia entry for Sowerby Bridge railway station didn't point out that:

The original station was opened on the 5 October 1840 by the Manchester and Leeds Railway Company. It was severely damaged by fire in October 1978 and demolished by British Rail in 1980. The current station, which is not on the original site, was built in 1981.

So it is true that Branwell started work there just before the new station opened, but the current station is not the one Branwell knew. Where the ticket office enters into all this we don't really know.

At any rate, if you find yourself nearby when the new pub opens, Branwell would be just glad to have someone toasting him (there or anywhere else for that matter).

The Ottawa Citizen talks about Rachel Manley's Horses In Her Hair. Apparently,

Manley's grandmother could be a character out of Brontë. With her passionate, somewhat untamed nature, she could even be a Brontë. She was born Edna Swithenbank in Dorset in 1900 and raised in Cornwall on the rocky shores of St. Ives Bay in a community that clung to its Celtic traditions.
Her father was a Methodist minister who had met her mulatto mother in Jamaica where he served for a while as a missionary. Edna adored him. Claustrophobic indoors with her eight brothers and sisters, she often joined him for long walks on the moors while he contemplated his sermons.
After the war Edna attended art school and fell in love with her Jamaican first cousin, Norman Washington Manley, the prize-winning athlete and Rhodes Scholar. The couple married and resettled in Jamaica where he became a political leader and she became a mentor to a group of young artists. She encouraged them to discard irrelevant British traditions and express their island experience. (Donna Bailey Nurse)

The Times reviews the latest British Library release:

two new three-CD sets, one of British and one of American writers, talking about life, literature and their work.

Like us, Christopher Hart misses some never-to-be-heard-again voices, such as the Brontës':

Unfortunately, only a few female writers are represented, since the best of them — Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot — lived before the advent of voice recording.

It is always amusing to recall that according to Mary Taylor, when she and Charlotte first met, Charlotte 'spoke with a strong Irish accent'. And Ellen Nussey said of Anne Brontë's singing voice that it was 'weak, but very sweet in tone'.

So that is about all we know about the Brontës' voices but still the article makes an excellent read for any fan of literature and books in general and links to some actual recordings of writers like Virginia Woolf and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Obviously not read by Emily Brontë herself, but the Sunday Sun offers the chance of receiving 'Wuthering Heights as an audiobook download - all free of charge' just for registering to receive their free email newsletter.

As for blogs, Peter Murphy's Blog of Revelations says of the 1965 opera The Mines Of Sulphur by Richard Rodney Bennett that it is:

a gothic romp pitched somewhere between The Masque of the Red Death, The Seventh Seal and Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, with a bit of Bronte and Burton thrown in for grand guignol.

Also, Evolution of a White Hair reviews Wuthering Heights.

Categories: Books, Branwell Brontë, Brontë Parsonage Museum, Opera, Wuthering Heights