| Billy Holt by Roy Stockdill |
| I imagine few of you will have heard of the Todmorden author William Holt -
Billy, as he was always known - but when I was a boy 40 years ago in the
Calder Valley he was a famous local character. For Billy Holt wrote books and then travelled widely throughout Britain and Europe selling them himself - from the back of a horse! Wherever he went he always rode a white/grey horse called Trigger that he bought in the 1950s for £5 when he saw it pulling a rag and bone man's cart through the streets of Todmorden. The horse carried him thousands of miles and became as famous as Holt himself. One of his books, Trigger in Europe, chronicled the pair's remarkable journey through France, Italy, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands. Please don't ask me how he managed to get the horse across so many borders that presumably even in those days had laws about the movement of animals, because it is many, many years since I saw the book - and if anyone has a copy that I could beg, steal or borrow I would be hugely grateful! I can recall Billy Holt tying Trigger up in the stable of my parents' pub at Mytholmroyd, near Hebden Bridge, as he was a friend of my folks and always called on us whenever he passed through the village on one of his journeys, Todmorden being only about 6 miles away. He travelled the length and breadth of Britain on the horse, selling his books as he went. My parents always bought his latest book but, as is the way of these things, they have long since disappeared and I expect are long out of print. He may even have published them himself, as well as selling them on horseback, I cannot recall. Later when I joined the local newspaper in Halifax, he often figured in its pages. Billy Holt was born during the 1890s and was working in the mills at the age of 12. He was largely self educated and the product of a typical northern working class, non-conformist background, his father being an itinerant fiddle player who played folk music and also for a Wesleyan chapel choir. Holt fought in the First World War and was one of the few ordinary soldiers from a working class background to be chosen for officer training. However, despite being brought up in a temperance background, he celebrated the end of hostilities rather too well, fell out of a window and broke his leg and was invalided back to Todmorden. He sold coal door to door, became a Communist (having visited Russia soon after the Revolution), got thrown into jail for political activities and fought an election for the local council from his prison cell, narrowly failing to unseat the deputy mayor who was one of the magistrates who had sent him there! He married a Barnsley girl who had moved to Todmorden to work in the mills, but their marriage was very much an "absent" one, for Billy Holt spent most of his life travelling. He became a war correspondent and covered the Spanish Civil War for a British newspaper, went to Russian again and also lived with a holy man in a cave in India. During World War II he was enlisted by the BBC as a broadcaster and made many broadcasts - including to America and other countries - in his Yorkshire accent (a rarity in the heavily upper-class accented BBC in those days). In the 1950s, already near or around 60, he took up his new career as an itinerant author. He saw Trigger pulling a rag and bone coat through Todmorden one day and, thinking it looked deeply unhappy in its blinkers and pulling the cart, he decided that both he and the horse needed a new adventure, so he bought it for £5. Trigger, like Billy Holt, must have lived to a ripe old age, for I can recall him visiting my folks' pub with it in the mid-1950s and it was still alive in the mid-70s when the book from which I am gleaning some of this information was first published. Holt lived for a while with an artistic, Bohemian set in London, among them Aleister Crowley, the infamous devil worshipper. His perapetic lifestyle did not lend itself to a successful marriage and his first wife divorced him quite late in life. He returned to Todmorden and married in old age for a second time to a brewery heiress who had written to him, admiring "Trigger in Europe." The marriage lasted about six months and when he divorced again at the age of 80 he let his wife have the house and moved into the barn with Trigger!!! Holt wrote 10 books, both autobiographical works and novels, including I Haven't Unpacked, I Still Haven't Unpacked, Trigger in Europe and The Weaver's Knot. I would be glad to hear from anyone else who remembers William Holt or who has copies of his works. |