Defeat

Abstract

Early one winter’s morning, a young sportsman trudged through heavy snow near Bingley to shoot wildfowl. He was William Busfeild, the 23-year-old heir to two squirearchical families. ‘On my road’, he recalled thirty years later,¹

… I found a little factory slave half-buried in a snowdrift, fast asleep. I dragged it from its winding sheet; the icy hand of death had congealed its blood and paralysed its limbs. … I aroused it from its stupor and saved its life. From that day I became a ‘Ten Hours Bill man’ and the unflinching advocate of ‘Protection to Native Industry’.