Chapter I: Part 1: Tom

Pinder,...

Foundling.

(A Story of the Holmfirth Flood.)

by D.F.E. Sykes, LL.B.

Price one penny ______________

Slaithwaite: F. Walker, Commercial and Artistic printer, Britannia Works. 2,000-2-06

Later published under the title "Dorothy's Choice"

About the author

D F E Sykes was a gifted scholar, solicitor, local politician, and newspaper proprietor. He listed his own patrimony as 'Fred o' Ned's o' Ben o' Billy's o' the Knowle' a reference to Holme village above Slaithwaite in the Colne Valley. As the grandson of a clothier, his association with the woollen trade would be a valuable source of material for his novels, but also the cause of his downfall when, in 1883, he became involved in a bitter dispute between the weavers and the mill owners.

When he was declared bankrupt in 1885 and no longer able to practise as a solicitor he left the area and travelled abroad to Ireland and Canada. On his return to England he struggled with alcoholism and was prosecuted by the NSPCC for child neglect. Eventually he was drawn back to Huddersfield and became an active member of the Temperance Movement. He took to researching local history and writing, at first in a local newspaper, then books such as 'The History of Huddersfield and its Vicinity'. He also wrote four novels. It was not until the 1911 Census, after some 20 years as a writer, that he finally states his profession as 'author'.

In later life he lived with his wife, the daughter of a Lincolnshire vicar, at Ainsley House, Marsden. He died of a heart attack following an operation at Huddersfield Royal Infirmary on 5th June 1920 and was buried in the graveyard of St Bartholomew's in Marsden.

Introduction

Tom Pinder, Foundling is a romance and moral tale, set in the early part of the 19th Century, to the backdrop of the Greenfield and Holme Valleys when both were a part of West Yorkshire. It deals with the life of a foundling, Victorian values, the burgeoning of the cooperative movement and the Holmfirth flood. The book was first published c. 1902 and subsequently published under the title Dorothy's Choice (A Rushing of the Waters).

Sykes is one of few novelists who chose to portray the lives of common people in this period and for this reason alone it is a valuable resource as a social history. His use of the local dialect, ability to sketch interesting characters and their relationships adds greatly to its readability.