Workers kept dying of "la maladie de Bradford". It was anthrax.

Good morning, readers — we hope life is treating you well. Whatever your woes in the workplace, we’re pretty sure you are not going drop dead of anthrax on the job, and that’s the kind of cast-iron guarantee you can expect from The Exchange. That’s because Mia’s been deep in the archives, talking to scientists and historians about the bacteriological horrors that used to lurk in Bradford’s cloth mills — and the heroic local scientists who chased the truth, ultimately transforming the entire industry.

But first, here’s your news round-up:

The round-up

🏛️Killingbeck and Seacroft Councillor Paula-Jane Thackray publicly confirmed that she and Councillor David Dresser have stood down from the Reform Party, a couple of hours after we broke the story of their suspension. Yesterday, Brad reported that the pair had been suspended from the party, amid rumours that Dresser had compared senior Reform leaders to officials in the Soviet Union, calling them “Kommissar” over a request to go door-knocking. Thackray also confirmed that the pair would be known as “Leeds First independents”. According to an e-mail sent around councillors, Thackray will be in charge, while Dresser will be group whip, which frankly seems a bit unnecessary in a party of two. He's now onto his fourth party — having previously also been in Labour and the Liberal Democrats. We’ll be following up on this, if you know more, get in touch.

🎂 GetBaked, the controversial Leeds bakery, is closing its operation in Covent Garden, with a frank and raw statement from owner Rich Myers. “Covent Garden didn’t work — we got it wrong,” he wrote. “The location was wrong, the vision was wrong, it was commercially a bad move, and we’ve closed it.” He added that the need to appear successful has had a significant effect on his ability to even enjoy running the business. “I’m done with growth, I’m not even enjoying it,” he said. Godfrey’s will remain open and its products on sale via the GetBaked website.

🗣️ Remember the Garforth parish council feud? Leeds council has now recommended that the application to create a parish council be rejected. The move to trigger a Community Governance Review by the Garforth Neighbourhood Planning Forum on June 17 caused a real ruckus in the close-knit town. After considering their views, officers recommend, in draft at least, that “no parish or parish council be established for Garforth,” a senior council officer said at LCC”s General Purposes Committee Wednesday morning. 

The battle’s not over though. We can expect another round of consultation, with decisions in December — and, the officer added, another submission just came in on Tuesday from the Garforth Neighbourhood Planning Forum, the group that triggered the whole shebang, which the officer said is “premature in terms of the review process.”

⚖️ A former Leeds police officer is accused of possessing indecent images and engaging in sexual communication with a child. Zachary Haile, 27, has been charged with three counts of possessing indecent photographs and one count of engaging in sexual communication with a child. They relate to historic matters when Haile was off-duty. He is set to appear before Leeds Magistrates’ Court next Tuesday.

Death in the Woolpack

By Mia Jankowicz

It was 2pm on 26 February, 1878, and a sixteen-year-old girl was staggering home from the Adelphi Horsehair Factory in Glasgow, where she worked as a spinner. She clutched her stomach. “I am very bad, my head and my heart!” the girl, identified only as A.M.L., cried, according to the local medical examiner’s report. She “vomited everything, and constantly called for water.” After several restless nights covered in a cold sweat, she turned blue, and died on 1 March. “Red blood oozed from the nose and mouth soon after death.” 

A.M.L. was just one victim at the factory of an outbreak of a mysterious ailment known as “woolsorter’s disease”. 170 miles away, the Bradford Daily Telegraph quickly picked up the story: they knew it would play well locally. For decades, the mystery plague had stalked the city’s mills, picking off otherwise healthy workers overnight. Bradford was the wool capital of the world — on the continent, the disease was dubbed la maladie de Bradford. 

In the decades prior to A.M.L’s death, medical consensus held that the disease was caused by a buildup of dust and tiny fibres accumulating in the lungs over a long period. In an 1855 post mortem in Bradford, a deceased mohair-sorter’s lung remains were declared to contain “very fine fragmentary hairs.” The solution, a prominent doctor said, was to chlorinate the sorting room, smoke tobacco (to aid coughing), and for wool-sorters to “wear the hair on his upper lip naturally, not twisted up in a fashionable moustache” — presumably to act as a sort of primitive filter.

The steady stream of deaths over the next decades suggest that the fags-chlorine-and-moustache method — if it was ever adopted — was less than successful. And anyway, the lung build up theory couldn’t explain why someone who had been apparently perfectly healthy one day would keel over so dramatically the next. Why had woolsorting suddenly become so dangerous?