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Rival Authorities
One
source of difficulty for the Commissioners was the fact that, though
they had been given considerable powers to order the life of the
town, they were not the only authority within their own area. There
still existed the township of Bilton-with-Harrogate, that collected
and administered the Poor Rate in the greater part of this area.
This township included also the small villages of Bilton and
Starbeck,, which were not in the new town. As the affairs of the
township naturally came to be directed more and more in the
interests of the Harrogate part of it, the villages began to feel
neglected. In 1884, Bilton went so far as to get the Local
Government Board to constitute itself and the remainder of the
township not included in the town as a separate Highway Parish, with
control over its own roads.
The
Workhouse Committee, which had managed Harrogate affairs before the
Commissioners appeared, also continued to function until the
Workhouse was sold in 1858. Before this, the Knaresborough Poor Law
Union had been set up in 1854; and as this administered the Poor Law
in the whole township, a new outside authority entered the
Commissioners' territory. The township was represented, of course,
on the Knaresborough Union, through the Guardians it elected to that
body, but it did not welcome this new dependence on Knaresborough.
It insisted on making its own valuations of property for the Poor
Rate, and strictly investigated from time to time the way in which
Relief was being granted within the township. The Commissioners
themselves secured the partial independence of their part of the
township in 1862, by inducing the Local Government Board to make the
town a separate local board of health.
A
certain suspicion of Knaresborough felt by the whole township,
combined, possibly, with a lack of confidence in the Commissioners
on the part of Bilton and Starbeck, led Bilton-with-Harrogate in
1858 to create an extraordinary body called the Audit Committee.
This was clearly meant to replace the disbanded Workhouse Committee,
and more or less to continue its work. It consisted of the township
officers and some ten others, elected by the Annual Vestry Meeting.
It met, according to custom, in different hotels, and tried to
control township affairs. The minutes of its meetings strongly
suggest that only the Surveyors paid any attention to it, for what
it tried to do in the Harrogate part of the township was already
being done better by the Come missioners. As a co-ordinating 'body
it was obviously redundant, and when it quietly disappeared in.
March, 1863 the Commissioners can have felt no regret.
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