Dewsbury
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Dewsbury is a town in the county of West Yorkshire, England, to the west of Wakefield, in the borough of Kirklees. It lies by the River Calder and the Calder and Hebble Navigation.
Dewsbury was one of the centres for the "shoddy" industry, the recycling of old woollen items by mixing them with new wool and making them into heavy blankets and uniforms.
The Reverend Patrick Brontė, the father of Anne Brontė, Charlotte Brontė and Emily Brontė, was rector of the parish church here.
Dewsbury was also the birth place of British Actress Rebecca Callard and former Speaker of the British House of Commons, Betty Boothroyd.
Patrick Stewart was also born in nearby Mirfield.
The town now has a large Asian community - taking up around 30% of the town's population. Savile Town is populated mainly by people of Indian origin and Ravensthorpe mainly by people of Pakistani origin. Other areas of the town are mainly White, such as Chickenley. Race relations have been volatile at time, but there have been no major disturbances. Local elections in 1999 sparked controversy, when it appeared that a section of the Asian community in Ravensthorpe had arranged so that several dead voters were down as having voted Labour, but the police abandoned the investigation. The BNP has often polled around 15-35% of the vote in the town's wards, but have yet to win a seat. The British centre of the Islamic missionary organisation Tablighi Jamaat is located in Dewsbury.
The town is listed as one of the most deprived areas of West Yorkshire by the government and the E.U. has made Dewsbury and its neighbour Batley into a "transformation zone". Some of the worst problems include housing, education and unemployment. Official government statistics estimate that almost a third of the houses in the town lack central heating.
There is a rugby league team in Division 1 - "Dewsbury Rams". They play on Owl Lane, towards Ossett, and the ground is on part of the site of the old Savile & Shawcross colliery, which was closed after the end of the miners' strike in 1985.sv:Dewsbury