From the chocolate factory to the gibbet in a West Yorkshire town

A huge After Eight sign the size of say 8,000 After-Eights towers the other side of the train tracks. Adjacent on another external wall of the sweet factory is an even larger illustration declaring "Quality Street: Proudly made in Halifax since 1936".

What time is the next train back to Leeds? These gags are too easy: it is scheduled for a little after eight. A metal electronic display box hangs from the platform rafters. Switched on, its showbiz lightbulb illumination conveys one word: “OFF”. Conceptually intriguing.

A 39-minute train trip from Leeds, Halifax does not exactly sit in the popular consciousness. Apart from its titular financial institution to which it has, as it were, "lent" its name. While The Halifax is indeed in Halifax and its final X does indeed mark the spot, a stroll around the West Yorkshire town does much to extricate it from that bankable brand.

And while there is indeed a Halifax branch there, along with the confectionery factory, visitors might suffer some semantic confusion about the town’s less-well-known identifier: the gibbet. This is conveniently found on Gibbet Street. But ask a random stranger the way: “You mean the device for lopping people’s heads off? Straight ahead.” Ask a second stranger: “You mean that gallows thing? Swing a right.”

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An innocuous square houses a 1974 reconstruction of this grisly execution device: the Halifax Gibbet. The bony-and-bleached-wood frame rises up from a tired concrete plinth. Its rusted metal plate fails to glint in the sun. For it is a mere dull substitute for the original blade, which is stored elsewhere for safety. This was a horrible place of execution for centuries of ill-fated petty criminals.

Home and dry

But hope springs eternal if you cling to a local legend: The Running Man. This held out the promise that if, as a condemned man or woman, you freed your head once the blade started to descend and then legged it sharply the 500 yards to the other side of the boundary marking the jurisdiction, you were home and dry. The legend even has it that one man, John Lacey, managed this feat in 1617.

A historical triumph for the underdog. Sadly – and in hindsight rather unwisely – some seven years later, poor Lacey crossed back into the clearly dangerous jurisdiction of Halifax. He was still a marked man. The long arm of the law got him again. The running man’s luck ran out and he was unable to escape a second decapitation.

This brutal reminder of the perils of petty crime stands close to the Calderdale Sports and Social Club, and King’s Cross Carpets. For life goes on.

The legendary Manchester band The Blue Orchids are even set to play in town tonight. (Eerily, they have a song called A Year With No Head. And another called The Hanging Man.) The venue is the Grayston Unity, a name conducive to the notion it might be some type of cult, a spiritual collective into which one might be absorbed and never be heard of again.

Di’s Pies

Halifax has other charms such as the Piece Hall – a vast colonnaded square once dedicated to the trading of the region’s wool and the best of its worsted products. A woman nearby sings a cover version of The Sound of Silence. Two cups of instant coffee (one with sugar) for two pounds are enjoyed in the Concorde Coffee House in the Victorian borough market. They wash down an award-winning pie from Di’s Pies.

Halifax is peaceful, unhurried. But it perturbed me with a dark puzzle: why call a guillotine a gibbet when I had always understood a gibbet to be a gallows? Mystery is worn well by many towns. One man’s guillotine is another man’s gallows. Both are ghastly.

At precisely a little after eight, the Grayston Unity door swings open. But there is no heaving crowd. No band tuning up. An ancient fear of arriving at the wrong venue resurfaces: “Where are The Blue Orchids playing? Is there an upstairs?” The barman apologises profusely. A sentence links a band member with the wretched Covid and explains the abrupt cancellation of the gig earlier that morning.

“But we came over from Dublin . . .”

He looks crestfallen. And so do we.

But an evening in that lovely bar unfolds. The Halifax Grayston Unity. By the miracle of Facebook, cult singer Martin Bramah sends a friendly personal text. The ale is good. A bar client confides he is off to see Spandau Ballet linchpin Tony Hadley the next night – also in Halifax. He suggests tickets might still be available. A cutting reply: "Of that I have no doubt."