It was in a Horton Bank Top back yard in early 1960s Bradford that I first met James Broadley. My Grandma had told me to go out and see my great-grandfather. A man was waiting outside the kitchen door, ready to go, where? But there he was, and here he is again, altered by memory no doubt, nonetheless wearing a black hat and coat. As I came out he smiled. It's true I was small, but I had never seen, nor will I ever see again, a taller man. He called me over and, from somewhere high up in the clouds, bent almost double to hand me a sweetie. Thinking of him I cannot help recalling the tall ageing porter played by Håkan Jahnberg in Ingmar Bergman's The Silence, much of which is filmed from a boy's perspective, or Carel Struycken's Giant Room Service Waiter in Twin Peaks, both of whom bend down in a similar manner. Memory and imagination seek the same underground channels, breaching in all the same places.
Born in 1874 James Broadley died shortly after our meeting. He had been a policeman, and before that, as a 1891 census records, a labourer and dyer. According to family lore he was employed dyeing leather upholstery for Bradford Corporation and had lost his job when the tram service gave way to motorbuses. But a glance at the history of Bradford city transport does not make it easy to locate when that point of transition was. His lifetime saw the introduction (1882) and passing (1902) of horse-drawn trams, steam-driven trams (1883-1903), then the full electrification of the tram service from 1903 (tramcar construction ending in 1931). Competing with trams and buses, Britain's first trolleybus service was introduced in Bradford in 1911 (a year in which a census recorded Broadley as a policeman). Later, from 1926, came the inexorable advance of the motorbus. This date is not without resonance in British history, and the advantages of more "flexible" privately run motorbuses were exploited by the City Fathers when tram drivers joined the General Strike that year. But with so much coming and going it is difficult to establish when James Broadley left dyeing to become a policeman.
My memory of my great-grandfather and his dyeing were revitalized recently by reading the Triestine writer Italo Svevo's 1913 essay 'A Short Walk to Woolwich' (translated by Carmine G. Di Biase), in which he remembers undertaking a business trip to London in 1901 as a representative of his father's company. Svevo's piece is a completely charming account of "men and things in South-east London" and more especially of the English eccentricities of the day as seen through a foreigner's eyes. But what initially surprised Svevo about London was that it seemed in one respect far behind the Continent: transport.
