The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

THE MANCHESTER AND
GLASGOW ROAD

CONTENTS

WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER

The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries: To-day and in Days of Old.

The Dover Road: Annals of an Ancient Turnpike.

The Bath Road: History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old Highway.

The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of England Highway.

The Great North Road: The Old Mail Road to Scotland. Two Vols.

The Norwich Road: An East Anglian Highway.

The Holyhead Road: The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Two Vols.

The Cambridge, Ely, and King’s Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway.

The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road: Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike.

The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven Road: The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols.

The Brighton Road: Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway.

The Hastings Road and the “Happy Springs of Tunbridge.” Cycle Rides Round London.

A Practical Handbook of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction.

Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols.

The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of “The Ingoldsby Legends.”

The Hardy Country: Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels.

The Dorset Coast.

The South Devon Coast.

The Old Inns of Old England. Two Vols.

Love in the Harbour: a Longshore Comedy.

Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey).

Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural.

The North Devon Coast.[In the Press.

WAITING TO CHANGE.

[By J. F. Herring.

THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD

THIS WAY TO GRETNA GREEN

By CHARLES G. HARPER

ILLUSTRATED BY THE AUTHOR, AND FROM OLD-TIME PRINTS AND PICTURES

Vol. II.—MANCHESTER TO GLASGOW

LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1907

PRINTED AND BOUND BY HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD., LONDON AND AYLESBURY.

THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD

I

London Road Railway Station nowadays marks the beginning of central Manchester. Hitherto the long, long approach, although busy and crowded, has been, if not a thought suburban, at least busy chiefly on the retail scale. Here, however, where the railway brings travellers in from London, you see Manchester as the great city of immense warehouses: the place that no longer manufactures but deals in bulk and by wholesale with the goods produced in a dependent circle of towns.

From London Road you come immediately into Piccadilly, which is not in the least like the Piccadilly in London; and there you find yourself at the very hub of Manchester’s hurly-burly. There is perhaps not much significance in all this to the commercial man who travels down by express from London, and merely rouses himself from his newspaper to alight and then to take a cab from this railway terminus to one of the others, or to his business appointments; but to trace the road down from London on a bicycle and thus enter Manchester is to understand the great metropolis of cotton as it really is in relation to the rest of the country. To such a traveller the noise, the crowds, the furious energy, and the great sooty piles of buildings are not a little terrible. There is much good modern architecture in Manchester’s streets, but a black cloak covers it all. And yet the sky, though generally overcast, for the climate of Manchester is tearful, is not scored with smoke-wreaths, and factory-chimneys are not a feature of Manchester itself. The sooty deposit comes insensibly in the air from the outer ring of towns, and although it is not evident in the sky, it very soon tones down brick and stone and terra-cotta to one dull monotone. For all the rain that washes the city, it does not suffice to cleanse away its coating of soot. The blackness of Manchester is the first characteristic that impresses itself upon the stranger. It greatly impressed the first Shah of Persia who visited England: Nasr-ed-din, who came in 1873, and afterwards wrote an account of his travels. “The City of Manchester,” he wrote, “by reason of its exceeding number of manufactures, has its houses, doors, and walls black as coal, and the complexions, visages, and the dress of people are all black. The whole of the ladies of that place at most times wear black clothing, because no sooner do they put on white or coloured garments, than they are suddenly black!”

BLACK MANCHESTER

This not without its picturesque exaggerations, and the citizens of Manchester will hardly recognise themselves in that inky complexion, but it will serve as a traveller’s tale, and puts a keener edge on the unsharpened blade of truth. The blackest blackness of all, however, is that of the great Infirmary building, in Piccadilly, whose sable hue is own brother to darkest night. Only long years have brought it to this richness of tint. Art could not produce such a black; dull, light-absorbing as it is, the building looks like an etching against the sky, and its Doric architecture in this coating would probably astonish any ancient Greek who might be privileged to revisit the earth and see what modern times had made of ancient models. But the Infirmary, ill-placed in these days amidst the roar of the streets, is presently to be removed, and this, the finest site in the city, is to be the home of an Art Gallery and Public Library.

There are statues on the broad pavement in front of the Infirmary, and very fine ones too. But the latest addition to their number, that of Queen Victoria, is not a success. Manchester people do not—and rightly they do not—like it. The bronze seated figure of the Queen is a poor copy by Onslow Ford of the well-known statue by Alfred Gilbert at Winchester, and is set in a great canopied chair-like throne that forms a ridiculous object, seen along the street, resembling a gigantic grandfather’s-chair. The figure is the very picture of senility. Was Onslow Ford, after all, a bitter satirist of the age and of the Empire? The horrible thing looks as though he had successfully striven to typify the decay that had set in during the last years of the Victorian Era: that glorious, world-moulding era of which the second Jubilee, in 1897, was really the monument and epitaph. Here you see the tired, aged face, the hands nervelessly holding orb and sceptre; and you cannot but think that this is really typical of that time. Given another ten years of Victorian recluse rule, with old-established abuses clustering around a long-occupied throne, cobwebbed methods hugged jealously, outrageous Prime Ministers, whether of the Old Man Eloquent type or the equally harmful man of the Blazing Indiscretions, and the slowly built Empire would swiftly have sped down the road to disintegration. A more fitting monument than this for modern Manchester, which lives in the present and for the future, would be a statue of the patriot King, under whose rule in the new century the nation and the Empire shall, please God, have a new birth.

THE PROGRESS OF A PEOPLE

Piccadilly gives place to Market Street, and then to Victoria Street, and Deansgate, which, although it forms one of the approaches to the Cathedral, is not named after any decanal dignitary but from a dene or dean—i.e. a hollow—once sloping to the confluence here of the rivers Irwell and Irk. Here, by those affronted rivers, once troutful streams but now of Stygian blackness, and running in tunnels and under innumerable bridges, is the very core of Manchester, whose long story contains little of the doings of kings and queens, or of the romantic ways of feudal lords; but is compact of a much more romantic and human interest: the story of the striving upwards of a people, through the disheartening chances of the centuries. It is not given to the casual wayfarer to perceive this romance, envisaged as it is in the grim and grimy outskirts, or in the everyday crowding and turmoiling of the central traffic; but it is there, nevertheless, and I, for one, refuse to treat of Manchester in particular, or of the road in general, in mere terms of topography; for the road, and the places to which it conducts, take in their compass the entire interests and sympathies of mankind: the blood and tears, the joys and sorrows of the ages.

II

Ancient Manchester centred about the parish church, afterwards collegiate, now the Cathedral, and about the manor-house that is now Chetham’s Hospital. It is still, although its pavements are crowded, and although it is neighboured by the great Exchange and Victoria railway stations, a place of narrow streets whose singular names would themselves be sufficient evidence of antiquity, even though every house in them were rebuilt. No modern authority would entitle a thoroughfare “Hanging Ditch” or “Smithy Door,” but such are the names here, together with Long Millgate, Hunt’s Bank, and Withy Grove. Rural names, most of them, and you would quest in vain for the olden watermill in Millgate, and withies grow no more in Withy Grove than hazels in the Hazel Grove of which you already know.

THE BUILDING OF MANCUNIUM.

[From the fresco by Ford Madox Brown.

This spot where Cathedral and Hospital stand, and where the narrow streets with odd names plunge up and down and twist round unexpected corners, is indeed of a very high antiquity. One thousand eight hundred and thirty years ago, according to generally received opinion—that is to say, in A.D. 78—the Romans, in the reign of Agricola, came to this site, where now the tide of modern Manchester flows most strongly. They found a red, rocky bluff where is now Hunt’s Bank, overlooking the confluent rivers, and all around were forests and swamps, and doubtless the hoary ancestors of those withies after which Withy Grove was in later mediæval times named. The sole representative nowadays near Manchester of those ancient abounding swamps is Chat Moss, now a very negligible bog indeed, but even so recently as early railway days a formidable phenomenon to be reckoned with. But the rocky ledge overlooking Irk and Irwell was not unoccupied. A tribe of Britons had established themselves there; very securely, no doubt, against foes of their own calibre, but when the Romans came and found the situation desirable, their day was done.

MANCUNIUM

No account survives of the taking of that palisaded camp of the Britons. We know nothing of what happened to the aborigines, and it is so remote a speculation that I am quite sure no one in modern Manchester has ever given the matter a moment’s thought. Nor did any Roman historian narrate how many of the Empire’s tall soldiers sank under the weight of their armour and perished in the morasses at the taking of what is said to have been styled by the British Maencenion. The Romans, in their usual way, Latinised the native name for the place, and thus, from what they called Mancunium, springs, after many intermediate changes, “Manchester.”

We know nothing of all these doings, but the building of Mancunium is strikingly pictured in the first of the series of beautiful and interesting frescoes by Ford Madox Brown in the Manchester Town Hall, and with as certain and matter-of-fact a touch as though it had been drawn from personal observation. It was the Pre-Raphaelite way. In the picture you see the toiling slaves, working on the massive walls enclosing the Roman city; a helmeted centurion on the topmost windy height directing their operations. I do not know which impress me most, the cast-iron folds of his wind-blown cloak or the gigantic muscles of his bare legs, standing out like penny rolls. They were a great people, the Romans, and their muscular calf-development was apparently astounding.

The early “historians” of Manchester were, however, not content with such history as this, and loved to tell a tale of the marvellous: how their city originated with a giant, Sir Tarquin, among whose peculiarities was that of having a little child every morning for breakfast, just as a modern might take anchovy, on toast. At last he was slain by Sir Lancelot de Lake, one of King Arthur’s knights, whereupon the population, relieved of this check upon it, began to increase, and here we have now, after the passing of sixteen or seventeen centuries, an assemblage, including Salford, of about three quarters of a million souls. An ancient carved wooden boss in the ceiling of the committee-room of Chetham’s Hospital alludes to this legend, and displays a giant head devouring an infant.

THE MANOR

And so we pass on to the Norman period, and to the time when the family of Greslet, or Gresley, acquired the manor of Manchester from that great personage, Roger of Poictou, to whom a manor more or less, in all the great tract of the country that was his between the Ribble and the Mersey, was a small matter. For centuries the Gresleys retained their holding, which passed from them at last by the marriage of Joan Gresley to one of the West family. Thenceforward, the Wests, ennobled as Barons de la Warre, owned the manorial rights of Manchester, until 1579, when they sold them for £3,000 to one John Lacy, who in his turn, in 1596, sold to Nicholas Mosley, alderman of London, at a mere £500 profit. After holding the manor for two hundred and forty-five years, the Mosley family, in the person of Sir Oswald Mosley, sold it to the newly created Corporation of Manchester for £200,000. It was a huge sum, but Sir Oswald was scarcely wise in his generation.

Strange though it may seem in a place to outward appearance so modern as Manchester, the old manor-house of the Gresleys and the De la Warres still survives in the very centre of the great city. It is, indeed, identical with none other than the range of buildings long past occupied as Chetham’s Hospital and Library adjoining the Cathedral, and here is the later story of it.

The last of the Manchester De la Warres was a man with an enthusiasm for the religious life. In 1373 he became rector of Manchester, and in 1422 refounded the parish church that is now the Cathedral, making it collegiate, and giving his baronial hall, hard by, for the purposes of his College of priests. That establishment was disestablished and disendowed in the time of Edward the Sixth, and the College buildings granted to the Earl of Derby, who used this ancient manorial residence as his town house. His successor, in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, re-endowed the College, which was again suppressed in the dawn of the Commonwealth era, when the church became a Presbyterian meeting-house.

Then it was that Humphrey Chetham, Manchester’s most famous benefactor, already planning the establishment of a free school, saw the College buildings, standing empty and forlorn, ready to his hand. He died in 1653, and so did not live to see the beginning of his school; but by his will of 1650 had appointed trustees for the purchase of the College, and at last, in 1658, his school of “Chetham’s Hospital” was opened. He directed that, “Ye boys shall be taught ye reading, ye writing, ye summes, and all kinds of ye ingenuitie,” and his will continues to be observed on the same spot, and in the identical buildings, to this day; the Chetham scholars even wearing the self-same picturesque but neat costume they wore when the institution was founded: dark-blue cloth jacket and knee-breeches, with silver buttons, and a queer little muffin-shaped cap.

THE HALL, CHETHAM’S SCHOOL.

CHETHAM’S SCHOOL

The Hospital and Library buildings suffer shockingly as to their exterior by the sooty atmosphere, but the various interiors are wonderfully interesting, intrinsically, and additionally from their situation amid such circumstances as those of a gigantic commercial city wherein cloistered buildings, reasonably to be expected at Oxford or Cambridge, are not looked for. The group of buildings has survived three uses: as manor-house of the baronial period; as the home of a religious fraternity; and for two hundred and fifty years as a school. The old hospitium, or guest-house, is the boys’ dormitory, where a hundred neat little cots are to be seen in long perspectives: the ancient kitchen that furnished curious, and often nasty, dinners to the ancient lords of the place and supplied the priests of the College with their not too cloistral meals—save for very shame their abstinent Friday fare of fish—is still in use, and sends forth the most appetising scents about midday; and the refectory is now partly the Governor’s quarters; while the Baronial Hall, where De la Warres held their very considerable state, is now the dining-hall. It is a noble apartment, this ancient hall, with its walls of thick masonry, its Gothic windows, and timbered roof. A bust of Chetham is placed on the wall over what was once a fireplace replacing the more ancient central hearth or brazier in the middle of the Hall. Electric lighting replaces older methods of illumination, and everywhere reveals with fine effect ancient panelling, painted devices and pictures. Over the cloister walks, in what was in the period of the collegiate establishment the priests’ dormitory, Chetham’s Library is housed in ancient presses greatly resembling those in the Bodleian at Oxford and the University Library at Cambridge. What was once the Warden’s room of the priestly establishment is now the Reading Room. To read scholarly books, to engage in the pursuit of curious knowledge in the Reading Room of Chetham’s Library is surely a wonderful privilege, for in this exquisite room, richly panelled in oak, with striped black-and-white plaster and timbered roof, and with gorgeously coloured and gilt wall paintings, the notorious Dr. Dee, Warden of the College in Elizabethan times, entertained among others Sir Walter Raleigh; and no doubt gazed into his mystic crystal globe here, on his guest’s behalf, to see what the future held in store for that courtier, warrior, explorer, and adventurer. Did it reveal nothing of that grim cell in the Tower where that unfortunate man was to spend years of captivity? Did no inimical shadows wax and wane in that crystal, to warn him that Tower Hill and the headman’s axe would cut his thread?

CHETHAM’S LIBRARY

If historic associations sufficed to bring eloquent writing into being, then what is now the Reading Room should be the parent of much literature; but the student resorting hither will have the place very much to himself, save for occasional parties of gaping visitors shown round by a Chetham’s schoolboy, for Chetham’s Library is rich rather in black-letter tomes, and in works that research feeds fat upon, than in current literature. One would not wish this cloistral seclusion amended. To find in Manchester, whose every byway seethes with life, a corner not already occupied, a spot where you can hear the ticking of a clock, is too delightful to be forgone. There is, indeed, only one other spot in Manchester where something the same conditions prevail, and that is the great palatial building of Ryland’s Library, where inestimably rare books, manuscripts, and bindings are to be found.

Manchester Cathedral adjoins Chetham’s Hospital. Cathedral though it be now, by virtue of the creation of the modern Bishopric of Manchester, the building is but a glorified parish church, and not any of the many additions made to it of recent years suffice to render it anything else. It remains, as it were, an incidental and not essential feature of the great city.

I suppose—the intense rivalry between Manchester and Liverpool being a thing to reckon with in so many directions—Manchester will not long remain content with this condition of affairs, especially since it has become known that the new Liverpool Cathedral, rising now from its foundations, is to outrange all others for size. The stranger to Manchester would certainly never imagine that the church he perceives, immediately outside the Exchange station, was of Cathedral rank; and indeed it is so only by reason of modern ecclesiastical arrangements, made expedient by the growth of great modern industrial communities.

MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM DEANSGATE.

MISERERE SEAT, MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL: THE PEDLAR AND THE MONKEYS.

MISERERES

Manchester was in the diocese of Lichfield until 1541, when it was transferred to Chester; but since 1847 it has been an independent see. Manchester people have had amply sufficient time to realise this added dignity, but the stranger fails altogether to assimilate the idea, and although he perceives the Bishop to be full-fledged—except that he is a “Lord” Bishop only by election—cannot help observing that his Cathedral is but a suffragan. It would be an imposing building in a smaller place, but here it is dwarfed by the neighbouring railway stations and the towering piles of warehouses. It looks, as already remarked, nothing more than a parish church, and a very black parish church, too. It is chiefly of Perpendicular Gothic, but little of the exterior is really old, the tower having been rebuilt in 1868, and many features added since. The beauty of the church is chiefly within. It is a dark interior, but the nave, with its tall slender columns of red sandstone, is particularly graceful. This is no place for an architectural history of the structure, but at least the ancient carved miserere seats may be mentioned, particularly as they are among the finest in the country, for craftsmanship and fertility of invention. Like—yet how unlike!—the pictorial advertisements of a patent medicine which here shall be nameless, “every picture tells a story,” and much entertainment may be derived from these quaintly humorous designs. The three legs of Man, shown upon one, allude to the connection of the Stanleys, Earls of Derby (who were Kings of Man), with the “old church,” as Manchester men still affectionately style the Cathedral. An elephant with a castle on his back is seen on another, but the elephant’s legs are jointed like those of a horse, and obviously the designer knew little of the structure of elephants. Another subject is that of the fox walking off with a goose. Two others display the twin sports of bull-and bear-baiting. A very humorous example displays a pedlar, fallen asleep by the way, robbed by monkeys, who are taking the trinkets and clothing out of his pack, and trying them on, while one other is busily searching in his hair for the usual game that monkeys in the Zoological Gardens may any day be observed seeking. Another very elaborate carving represents a sow playing the bagpipes, and a group of little pigs dancing to the music. A pilgrim engaged in drinking and accidentally letting fall the jug, is a scene unfortunately mutilated. A game of backgammon in an inn; the execution of the fox by owls and rooks; the hare’s revenge, where the hare is seen to be roasting the hunter on a spit; and a stag-hunting scene complete the set. In this last, the hunt is represented as at an end, or “done”; and probably is intended as a pun upon the name of the first Warden of the College, Huntingdon.

III

The history of Manchester is chiefly the history of the textile industries. There was a mill for the manufacture of woollen cloth in Manchester so early as the time of Edward the Second, and in the succeeding reign a settlement of Flemish weavers further increased the trade. In the reign of Henry the Eighth, Manchester was described as “the fayrest, best builded, quickliest, and most populous toune of all Lancastershire,” and “well-inhabited, distinguished for trade, both in linens and woollens”; but the cotton industry, introduced at the close of the sixteenth century, became no great thing until another two hundred years had passed.

WARS AND TUMULTS

In the meanwhile history was enacted. Early in the Cromwellian wars Manchester declared for the Parliament, and the Royalists besieged what was then the walled town twice, unsuccessfully. But these were only passing incidents. Everywhere in England at that time crop-headed men of sour visage and in subfusc garments warred with ringleted men of a cheerful countenance and ungodly conversation, wearing clothes of extravagant cut and colour. The one side fought for Parliament, the other for King, but the quarrel really was deeper than that. It was a conflict of ideals. But they fought it out elsewhere with greater fierceness and expenditure of blood, and Manchester went on as best it could with its fated function of providing linen for all the godly and ungodly, whether Royalists or Republicans, who had the wherewithal to buy.

Again Manchester was to know something of warfare, for Prince Charles and his Highlanders came in November, 1745. The sympathies of the town were largely with him, the bells of “t’owd church” were rung, and a great illumination lit the streets—as great illuminations were then understood: modern Market Street, with the shops lit of an evening, would probably reduce that illumination to a sorry flicker. Three hundred Manchester men marched south with Prince Charlie, under the command of Colonel Townley. Within a week they were marching back, and when they were come to Manchester again they found local sentiment sadly changed: the mob harrying their rear on the retreat to Preston. Colonel Townley and some of his ill-fated men were hanged on Kennington Common.

What the trade of Manchester was, and how goods were brought to and despatched from it in old times, may be seen from Aikin’s description in 1795:

“When the Manchester trade began to extend, the chapmen used to keep gangs of pack-horses and accompany them to the principal towns with goods in packs, which they opened and sold to shopkeepers, lodging what was unsold in small stores at the inns. The pack-horses brought back sheep’s wool, which was bought on the journey and sold to the makers of worsted yarn at Manchester, or to the clothiers of Rochdale, Saddleworth, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. On the improvement of turnpike roads, wagons were set up and the pack-horses discontinued; and the chapmen only rode out for orders, carrying with them patterns in their bags. It was during the forty years from 1730 to 1770 that trade was greatly pushed by the practice of sending these riders all over the kingdom.”

Such enterprise would not have been possible at an earlier period, for the turnpike roads surrounding Manchester date only from 1750: the earliest was the Preston to Lancaster turnpike, constructed under the Act of that year. Tolls were taken, on the Preston to Garstang section, until February 1st, 1875, and on the Garstang to Lancaster portion until November 1st, 1882. The way out of Manchester, on to Bolton, was turnpiked in 1752, and tolls ceased to be taken on November 1st, 1871.

NO ROADS: OLD ROADS

From the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century the roads of Lancashire were less roads than slushy lanes, very narrow and full of ruts, mud, and water. Even the main route through to Scotland was no better, and had then but little need to be, for wheeled conveyances were almost entirely unknown. Pack-horses, as we have seen, conveyed what goods were ever sent, but for all practical purposes most communities were self-contained. Their wants were few and simple, and were easily supplied from their own resources; while persons obliged to travel made their way on horseback; only those of robust physique and in good health being able to undertake such journeys, and glad enough, amid the difficulties of the way, to find here and there a stretch of lane roughly paved with rude slabs of local millstone grit.

But if the ways were incredibly foul, the inns at the end of each day’s journey went some way towards compensating the fatigued horseman for his labours. The Lancashire inns were then, according to Holinshead, writing in 1577, exceptionally good, each guest being “sure to lie in clean sheets wherein no man hath lodged.” Evidently the innkeepers looked to make their profit out of the “entertainment” they supplied for man and beast, for the horseman’s bed cost him nothing, but “if he go on foot, he hath a penny to pay.” Mere public-houses, of the complexion of drink-shops, were not tolerated in Manchester and Preston; for at Manchester it was forbidden to brew or sell ale unless the brewer or vendor could make “two honest beddis,” while Preston was even more strict: lodgings for four men and four horses being the irreducible minimum.

The old “Seven Stars” inn in Withy Grove is ancient enough to have come under this ordinance, which must have affected also the picturesque old house now styled the “Wellington,” in the Market Place, and the even more picturesque “Bull’s Head,” in Greengate, Salford.

With the growth of trade referred to by Aikin, between 1730 and 1770, Manchester’s interests comprehended the whole of the kingdom, and its trade was greatly helped by the demand that by this time was growing for good roads, not alone here, but generally throughout the country. Road improvements, made possible by Turnpike Acts, began to be frequent from about 1710, and were very numerous and important between 1730 and 1770, when 420 Acts were passed. In this period business grew so heavy that pack-horses did not suffice to carry the increasing bulk of goods, and wagons came more and more into use; while the press of affairs was such that principals found it necessary to visit London and other centres at more frequent intervals. It was thus that the Manchester and London Flying Coach was established, in 1754.

BEGINNINGS OF EXPORT

In 1760 the exportation of cotton goods began; for, with the first tentative application of machinery to weaving, production had increased beyond the possible consumption of the country. The first improvement upon the primitive form of handloom weaving was the invention of the fly-shuttle, in 1738. This contrivance doubled the weaver’s powers; but it was followed in 1768 by the invention of the “spinning-jenny,” by James Hargreaves, which increased production eight-fold.

THE “BULL’S HEAD,” SALFORD.

The population of Manchester and Salford had by this time grown to close upon 40,000, and the local needs had increased in like degree. But still, although much had been done to improve roads throughout the country, and in Lancashire, those immediately around Manchester itself were still so bad in 1760 that although coal was mined at Worsley, less than ten miles away, it could not be brought into the town by wheeled conveyance, but had to be carried by long lines of pack-horses, in loads of 280 lb. Coals were cheap at the pit mouth—usually 10d. the load—but the carriage cost, as a rule, a shilling more.

Inventions do not burst upon a world that has felt no need for them. The need may not have been more than blindly felt, but the necessities of the ages have, nevertheless, been supplied as they have arisen. In this, almost more than in anything else, the thinking man sees an ordered scheme of existence which, in other directions, the brutalities and injustices of an imperfect world would seem to deny.

THE BRIDGEWATER CANAL

At this time, the consumption of coal was growing so fast in Manchester, and the difficulties of marketing it were so great that the wealthy Duke of Bridgewater, owner of the pits at Worsley, conceived the idea of enriching himself still further, and at the same time helping the growth of Manchester, by means of constructing a canal from Worsley, by which coals could be carried cheaply and expeditiously. It was necessary to secure the support of the people of Manchester, before he could present a Bill to Parliament for this purpose, and he accordingly undertook, if the canal were made, to sell his coal at 4d. per hundred in the town—less than half the usual price—or to charge not more than half-a-crown a ton freight. The Bill was introduced and passed in 1759, without opposition, and by July 1761 the canal was opened. This first section of what eventually became the great Bridgewater Canal, extended to Runcorn in 1773, was the first step towards the making of modern Manchester, and was rendered possible only by the homely genius of James Brindley, the self-taught engineer, whose works were justly considered marvels in their day. He designed and originated all the novel and ingenious contrivances that were features of the undertaking, and did it all on wages not exceeding a guinea a week, a rate of pay he continued to receive for years of unremitting toil, until his death. The canals at length brought the Duke an income of £80,000 a year, but at Brindley’s untimely death in 1776 the stingy peer owed him some hundreds of pounds, on account of salary, which he was so incredibly mean as not to pay.

This enterprise was remarkable in more than the engineering difficulties overcome. Several canals had already been made in various parts of the country by deepening and straightening the channels of streams and rivers, and the first ship canal was that constructed in 1566, on the Exe, from Topsham to Exeter; but the Bridgewater Canal was the first to be dug in dry ground. Its extension across country, to the Mersey at Runcorn, was undertaken for the purpose of cheapening and expediting traffic in raw and manufactured cotton and other goods, between Manchester and Liverpool, and was thus the precursor, by a hundred and twenty years, of the Manchester Ship Canal, which aims to make Manchester a port entirely independent of its great seaboard neighbour.

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. In 1768 his cotton-spinning machine, which performed the work of sixteen or twenty men, was set up at Preston, and in 1707 was patented. His first spinning-mill was erected at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, and was entirely successful. In 1786 he was knighted, and in 1792 he died, leaving a fortune of close upon half a million sterling.

The fickleness and waywardness of fortune are proverbial, but nowhere else so marked as in the struggles of inventors. In 1779, eleven years after Arkwright had set up his spinning-jenny, Samuel Crompton, of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, near Bolton, invented the hybrid “Spinning Mule,” combining the useful features of Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s machines. He was an exceptionally poor man, and partly earned his living by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre.

THE FACTORY SYSTEM

A great step forward was Cartwright’s power-loom, invented in 1785, and the Government in 1809 granted him £10,000, in recognition of his usefulness to the advancement of commerce. With the same year that witnessed Cartwright’s invention, steam was first employed in weaving, by Boulton and Watt, and the history of the cotton industry has been, since that day, a long record of improvements, until nowadays factories are equipped with the most beautiful and complicated contrivances—the outcome of a hundred and seventy years of invention—that seem themselves almost sentient and understanding.

IV

This long succession of mechanical improvements brought immense wealth to the manufacturers and helped to tide England’s credit over the exhausting years of the American Rebellion and continual Continental wars; but it brought the original foul blight of the factory system, which replaced the spinning once done in cottage homes. Industry was stived up in overcrowded workshops, the slums came into existence, and under-paid, over-worked, and cruelly treated child-labour characterised the days before the passing of the Factory Acts.

A distinguished Spaniard, Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella, visiting England in 1807, and coming to Manchester, was truly horrified by what he saw here. It seemed to him that “a place more destitute of all interesting objects than Manchester it would not be easy to conceive. In size and population it is the second city in the kingdom, containing about fourscore thousand inhabitants. Imagine this multitude crowded together in narrow streets, the houses all built of brick and blackened with smoke; frequent buildings among them as large as convents, without their antiquity, without their beauty, without their holiness; where you hear from within the everlasting din of machinery; and where, when the bell rings, it is to call wretches to their work instead of their prayers.” Here you perceive the conflict of ideals between a priest-ridden country and a land of commerce: with the telling of beads pre-eminent in the one, and the counting of gold equally prominent in the other.

Espriella and his companions saw all the sights. They were taken to one of the great cotton manufactories and were shown a number of children at work there, the guide dwelling with satisfaction and delight on the infinite good resulting from employing infants at so early an age. “I listened,” says our horrified traveller, “without contradicting him, for who would lift up his voice against Diana at Ephesus!” and he left “with a feeling at heart which makes me thank God I am not an Englishman.”

“There is,” he continues, “a shrub in some of the East Indian islands which the French call veloutier; it exhales an odour that is agreeable at a distance, becomes less so as you draw nearer, and when you are quite close to it, is insupportably loathsome. Alciatus himself could not have imagined an emblem more appropriate to the commercial prosperity of England.”

CHILD LABOUR

“The guide remarked that nothing could be so beneficial to a country as manufactures. ‘You see these children, sir,’ said he. ‘In most parts of England poor children are a burden to their parents and to the parish; here the parish, which would else have to support them, is rid of all expense; they get their bread almost as soon as they can run about, and by the time they are seven or eight years old, bring in money. There is no idleness among us: they come at five in the morning; we allow them half an hour for breakfast, and an hour for dinner; they leave work at six, and another set relieves them for the night; the wheels never stand still.’

“I was looking, while he spoke, at the unnatural dexterity with which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion; and when he told me there was no rest in those walls, day or night, I thought that if Dante had peopled one of his hells with children, here was a scene worthy to have supplied him with new images of torment.

“‘These children, then,’ said I, ‘have no time to receive instruction.’

“‘That, sir,’ he replied, is the evil we have found. Girls are employed here from the age you see, till they marry, and then they know nothing about domestic work, not even how to mend a stocking or boil a potato. But we are remedying it now, and send the children to school for an hour after they have done work.’

“I asked if so much confinement did not injure their health.

“‘No,’ he replied, ‘they are as healthy as any children in the world. To be sure, many of them as they grow up go off in consumption, but consumption is the disease of the English.’”

This was not merely a temporary state of affairs, but an evil which came into being with the factory system, and grew steadily with its growth. Nor was it confined to any particular district. Not only in Lancashire, but everywhere that mills and factories were working, did the scandals of child-labour disgust Englishmen who did not happen to be mill-owners, and surprise and horrify foreigners, who at one and the same time saw England proposing to liberate the negro slaves, and permitting white slavery, almost as gross, in “the land of liberty.”

CRUEL PRACTICES

The things that Espriella saw in 1807 were the things, infinitely aggravated by the further extension of the factory system, that prevailed in 1832, when the scandal grew to such proportions that petitions were presented from all classes to Parliament, praying that legislation should be undertaken to end it. This movement resulted in a Factory Commission that revealed many unsuspected things. Not only were the factory owners guilty of working their miserable child-hands almost incredible hours, under the most dreadful conditions; but the parents, who practically sold their children into this slavery, were guilty equally with them.

The report of the Factory Commission is a voluminous affair of many hundreds of folio pages. Many of those pages of evidence taken on oath disclose curiously varying ideas of what constituted cruelty in punishment, or excessive hours of labour for children. For example, a child ten years of age employed at Wigan was punished for being late at the factory, as many others were, by being forced to work with a rope round her neck, to which a 20-lb. weight was attached. There were those who did not regard this as anything at all out of the way, and declared the children so punished did not mind it. We can only wonder they did not say more, and insist that the victims rather enjoyed this torture. Mary Hooton, the mother of the girl, acknowledged that she told the overlooker to beat her.

Humphrey Dyson, giving evidence as to the practice of a factory at Manchester, stated that the overlooker made a whip of a piece of leather about three inches wide and about half a yard long, and cut into fingers at the end. This was set into a wooden handle with a brass hook. With this instrument of torture the overlooker “punished” the children at his discretion. In many instances, mothers, superior to the Mary Hooton type, came and took these away and destroyed them, but the overlooker made others.

The wages of these child-workers, it seemed, ranged from one shilling and sixpence to four shillings a week, and these, according to a speech made in the House of Commons, were the conditions under which those scanty wages were earned:

“The following were the hours of labour imposed upon the children and young persons. Monday morning, commence work at six o’clock: at nine, half an hour for breakfast; begin again at half-past nine, and work till twelve. Dinner, one hour; work from one till half-past four. Drinking (afternoon meal), half an hour; work from five till eight; rest, half an hour; work from half-past eight till twelve, midnight; an hour’s rest. One in the morning till five, work; half an hour’s rest; work, half-past five till nine; breakfast, half an hour; work, half-past nine till twelve. Dinner, one hour. Work, one till half-past four. Drinking, half-past four till five. Work again from five till nine on the Tuesday evening, when the gang of adult and infant slaves were dismissed for the night, after having toiled thirty-nine hours, with nine intervals for refreshment, but none for bed.

“Wednesday and Thursday were occupied with day work only. From Friday morning till Saturday night, the same labour as that of Monday and Tuesday was repeated.”

MANCHESTER, A CENTURY AGO

The mill-owners, of course, felt outraged when Parliament passed the first Factory Act, and when the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and subsequent legislation, designed to put an end to the scandal of women being sent underground to work, and to rescue children from conditions hardly less horrible than those of negro slavery, was under discussion, Bright and Cobden characterised the proposals as “harassing the manufacturers,” and as “a blow at liberty.”

V

Manchester was a place of especial unrelieved grimness in the early years of the nineteenth century. It had ceased to be a picturesque overgrown village, and was assuming the earlier and more forbidding aspect of an industrial town. It was, of course, compared with the widespreading city of to-day, a small place, and the surrounding country came close up to its centre, and is said to have been not unpleasing. But the toil and the striving were then unrelieved by any urban graces. There was no “Society” at Manchester, but a great deal of discontent existed and short commons were then the rule. Manchester was regarded in those days of depression, after the close of the great Continental wars, as a dangerous place; and here, indeed, Radicalism was born, of injustice and hunger. “Manchester! your Royal Highness,” exclaimed the fastidious Beau Brummell, in horror, to the Prince Regent—“only think of Manchester!” when his regiment was ordered there. He sped swiftly away and sold out of the Army, rather than be banished to a benighted place where the correct set of a cravat was unknown, and not considered especially worth knowing.

Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the chilling nip of bad; caused by influences almost wholly beyond control.

POLITICAL AGITATION

The years immediately following Waterloo and the close of the great and long-continued wars with Napoleon were lean years in Lancashire in particular, and in England in general, and discontent was rife. The price of bread was high, employment was scarce and threatened by the continual introduction of labour-saving machinery. The outlook of all the wage-earning classes was very grim, and the position was further inflamed by agitators, who very speedily put a political complexion upon the economic crisis. It was the era before Reform, when all political power was frankly held by the classes and the wealthy. The people were not enfranchised, and were taught by mob orators to believe that there lay the secret of the ills and disabilities they suffered. To possess a vote was held up as an ideal which, when reached, would be the solution of all grievances. It was probably not declared in so many words that enfranchisement would bring more work and better paid, nor that the voting-power would enable the working-men to vote away the employment of the labour-saving machinery they dreaded; but so much was implied. Riots, more or less serious, took place sporadically, throughout the country, where the people were almost starving; for, side by side with scarcity of employment, the price of bread was extravagantly high, in consequence of a succession of bad harvests bringing up the price of corn to an unprecedented figure. The Government at length became seriously alarmed at the troubles. There had been destructive riots in 1816, in Spitalfields, when a mob of 30,000 had broken into shops and houses, and burned and pillaged. Nottingham, Preston, Bury, and many other places were scenes of mob rule. In 1818 the Manchester operatives had broken the factory-windows, and had to be dispersed by Dragoons; and in the same year there were riots at Barnsley. The year 1819 opened with the demagogue, “Orator Hunt,” being thrashed by Hussars in the theatre at Manchester, where, it was said, he had hissed the playing of “God Save the King”; and it was declared that the turbulent Reformers of Glasgow proposed marching upon London. At the same time a Reform meeting held at Birmingham was dispersed, a constable being shot by workmen endeavouring to rescue one of the arrested speakers.

It must be admitted that the classes were not conciliatory. Their representatives in high places scorned the masses as the “swinish multitude,” and did not propose any political changes.

MASS MEETING

Still, the methods of the mob-rulers were extremely provocative and alarming. Whatever else they were, or were not, Hunt and Bamford, leading spirits among the Reformers, were intelligent men, and should have been able to forecast the probable effect the drilling of the multitude would have upon the Government. It was very well to argue that the drilling that went on at night was merely intended to enable great bodies of men to march to and from mass-meetings in order. The leaders were philosophical Radicals, and did not for a moment contemplate force, and their followers were very generally of the same mind; but we may easily see into the mind of Governments, which themselves only employ drilling to one end: that of reducing brute force to a scientific form of defence and attack; and undoubtedly these exercises, even without arms, were alarming, for who was to tell whence weapons might not be procured at any given moment. In short, the Administration imagined the country to be on the brink of revolution: a thing not so wildly improbable when meetings were enlivened by banners bearing the inscriptions, “Annual Parliaments,” “Universal Suffrage,” and “No Corn Laws”; and when that offensive emblem, a Cap of Liberty, carried on a pole, was prominent. The authorities imagined themselves face to face with an organised attempt at a subversion of the Constitution, and, in that belief, it behoved them to be on their guard.

“Orator Hunt” and Samuel Bamford, who had already, in 1817, been arrested on suspicion of high treason in connection with the Reform movement, were active in the agitation of 1819. They had drilled thousands of men in readiness for a peaceful mass-meeting to be held in the small open space then called “St. Peter’s Field,” at the end of Mosley Street, Manchester, on August 16th, and the whole countryside was agog with excitement and the wildest rumours. Rustic folk, going home in the darkness, had heard the words of military command, “face right,” “face left,” “right wheel,” “left wheel,” and so forth, and extravagant notions of what was afoot very naturally spread. In readiness for the day, the magistrates enrolled a force of special constables, and a strong force of Yeomanry and military was kept near at call.

In from Middleton marched Bamford, at the head of 6,000 men, to “St. Peter’s Field,” and from other quarters came many columns; so that by the time appointed for the opening of the meeting in that narrow space of two or three acres, some 80,000 persons were assembled. The police held a warrant for the arrest of Hunt on a charge of seditious assembly, but, in the face of this huge crowd, declared themselves unable to execute it, and called upon the magistrates for military assistance. A more tactful method would have been to wait until the close of the meeting, when Hunt could probably have been easily secured; but tact is not a common possession.

PETERLOO

Close by was a force of one hundred and forty of the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, hidden away in Pickford’s yard, and to them was entrusted the task of driving a way through the crowd, to seize Hunt. It was an unfortunate choice, for the Yeomanry were, to a man, master manufacturers, whose interests had been assailed violently by the mob. The regular troops near at hand would have been less prejudiced, and would have acted more gently; but the Yeomanry charged into the midst of the masses of people laying about them with the edge and point of their swords. Many inoffensive persons, men, women, and children, were cut and slashed and trampled down; but the crowd was so tightly packed that it could not have given way if it would, and the Yeomanry were not only stopped, but began to be severely handled; which, after all, was no more than they deserved. Then Hulton, prominent among the magistrates, lost his head, and ordered up the Hussars to the aid of the Yeomanry. People were ridden down by the hundred, the platforms were stormed, the banners torn down, and the field cleared. Vast crowds of weeping and cursing fugitives, many of them wounded, fled from the scene and out of Manchester into the country: afraid of arrest. Eleven people lay dead, thirty dangerously wounded, and forty “much injured.” Hunt, Bamford, and others were arrested. Thus ended the great Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field. It was only four years from the time when Waterloo had been fought, and the people speedily found the name of “Peterloo” for this Yeomanry and Hussar victory. It was alternatively, with facile alliteration, known as the “Manchester massacre.” The site is now St. Peter’s Square, and on a portion of the ground stands the Free Trade Hall.

One cannot feel overmuch sympathy with the political agitation of that time. The history of all politics, in all ages, and still in progress, tells us that you succeed only in abolishing one tyranny to replace it with another: destroying the tyranny of aristocracy to replace it with that of wealth, which in its turn is overthrown by the worse tyranny of Socialism and the impossible doctrine of the essential equality of man. That which dominates will inevitably tyrannise, whether it be the strong over the weak, the aristocrat over the plebeian, or the wealthy over the poor; and sympathy with the downtrodden is a little blighted when it is realised that, when the poor grow rich and the humble powerful, they, too, begin to hector and to brow-beat. The cotton operative, rising by innate capacity from the position of a wage-earner to that of an employer, finds the centre of his interests shifted, and throws in his lot with the class to which he has won his way.

The necessity for Parliamentary and constitutional reform was acknowledged by Pitt, Earl of Chatham, so far back as 1782; and “radical reform”—i.e. reform going to the root of things—was demanded by the country in 1797-8; but it was left to agitators to bring the question of reform so greatly into disrepute that, in common speech, we hear always of a thing being “radically wrong”; never, by any chance, “radically right,” although the alliterative ease of either form is equal to the other.

The “Manchester School” of politics, founded in 1838 by Cobden and Bright, was a very virulent type of Radicalism, and, in some of its tenets, a singular creed for a commercial community of manufacturers and exporters to profess. It was nurtured on an agitation for the repeal of the Corn Law, and on a passion for Free Trade; it advocated peace-at-any-price, and regarded the Colonies with hatred. “It will be a happy day,” said Cobden, “when England has not an acre of territory in Continental Asia.” In these extraordinary aspirations John Bright shared to the full.

THE LITTLE ENGLANDERS

To reconcile the political creed of John Bright with his practice as a manufacturer is one of those tasks whose difficulties approach the impossible. He was an Apostle of Little Englandism: the passionate author of the phrase “Perish India!”; the ardent visionary of a day when “England” should cease to mean anything but this isle. What an ideal on which to dwell! Said he: “It may be a vision, yet I will cherish it.” He had what he termed the “noble vision” of Canada surrendered to the United States:

“From the frozen north to the glowing south, from the stormy waves of the Atlantic to the calmer waters of the Pacific main, I see one people, speaking one language, owning one law and holding one religion, and over all the flag of freedom, a refuge for the oppressed of every nation and of every clime.”

The “flag of freedom” was, if you please, the Stars and Stripes, and that “refuge for the oppressed” the land whose people are smarting under the tyrannies of the Trusts, and of the municipal disciples of the gospel of graft, as severely as any people ever suffered in the “oppressed” nations of Europe. At any rate, these are articles of belief to which few are now found to subscribe. That, with such aspirations as these, Bright could not endure the idea of Home Rule for Ireland, and so in 1886 broke with Gladstone and joined the Unionist party, is one of those extraordinary and illogical changes of front to which the careers of modern politicians of all shades of thought have so accustomed us that there are no surprises left.

A “MANCHESTER MAN”

Demagogues and silver-tongued orators have been the curse in modern times of this country. They and their audiences, grown drunken on their own wild words, have thrown over all consistency. In Bright you had a Radical politician opposed to the holding of an Empire, yet, as a manufacturer and exporter of cotton goods, having his interests largely bound up with the retention of our dependencies. It seemed honesty at the expense of sanity. But less honest was Bright’s bitter objection to any State interference with the factories. In 1836 he resented any attempt to control the hours of labour, and wrote a counter-blast to Fielden’s “Curse of the Factory System.” To the last, he opposed the reduction of factory hours. In 1861 he attributed the evils attendant upon over-production, in which he himself was engaged, to anything but their real cause; but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, although himself a heavy loser by the Cotton Famine, he nobly championed the cause of the North in its darkest hours. Looking back upon things accomplished since he entered the political scene, his Radicalism seems to have been singularly diluted with Whiggism: inevitable, no doubt, from his position as a large employer of labour. As a Quaker, he was for Disestablishment; being a landowner, he endeavoured to bring about the abolition of the Game Laws; he was, as we have already seen, bitterly opposed, throughout his life, to State regulation of factories. He denounced Chartism, of which most of the points of reform demanded have long since been conceded, and, in reply to the demands of the factory hands for better payment, invented the comprehensive generality that “with bad trade, wages cannot rise”; tracing all evils to the Corn Law, that effectual red-herring drawn across many trails. Always the Corn Law, until its abolition in 1849. It was responsible for almost everything ill, short of earthquakes.

Bright opposed compulsory education—for that would probably educate the factory hands into discontent with their station; and was eager to extend the cultivation of cotton in India. When that project did not meet with the support he expected, and when his protest against the Indian protective duties failed to open India to cotton goods free of duty, “Perish India” became more than ever a pious wish. Perhaps one of his greatest mistakes was his contempt for the bogey of Papal aggression; not such a mere illuminated turnip on a post as he and his contemporaries believed. Rome stalks through the land, aggressive, at this day.

VI

Many versions exist as to the origin of the expression, a “Manchester man,” but it is evident enough that the phrase, like that of a “Lancashire lad,” is a natural alliterative growth. The most widely accepted story, however, is that which tells of a coachman, who, asked “Who has ta gotten in t’ coach, lad?” replied, “Wha, then, ther’s a gentleman fra Liverpool, a man fra Manchester, a chap fra Bolton, an’ a felly fra Wigan.”

A Lancashire boy’s definition of a gentleman should not at this point be forgotten. It was given many years since, and was, “one what weers at watch, an’ ligs by hisself.” So now we know that gentility, in these days of cheap watches and a prejudice against sharing a bed, may be within the reach of all.

It is no small thing to be a “Manchester man.” The name has a self-reliant ring about it that fits the men of Manchester like a glove, whatever may be the fitness of the other descriptions, or of that other which tells of “Oldham roughs.”

The Manchester manufacturer of about 1750, as described by contemporaries, was a humble person, of the greatest simplicity, working like a journeyman among his hands; beginning the day before six o’clock in the morning and ending it proportionably earlier, as the habits of the time and the primitive means of artificial lighting dictated. He both produced the goods and warehoused them, and his combined warehouse and factory was also his home. He not only worked with his weavers, but sat at meals with them, and all helped themselves out of a common bowl of water-porridge, and a dish of milk. No one among the manufacturers had such a thing as a “private residence,” and speech was indeed so simple that none of them probably would have understood the term unless put in more homely English.

So much for the mid-eighteenth century cotton-spinner. Let us see how his descendant of about 1866 appeared to his contemporaries. A writer in a popular magazine of that date, holding forth more or less eloquently on the characteristics of Manchester men and Liverpool gentlemen, described a “Liverpool gentleman” as a magnificent person who traded beyond his means and abused his credit, finally, when the inevitable crash came, compounding with his creditors on the basis of three shillings in the pound, and continuing his splendid life with almost undimmed splendour. But a “Manchester man,” according to this apologist, when he breaks, breaks utterly, and, surrendering his all, starts again from below. How these distinctions have borne the test of time I will not pretend to say. At that period, according to this same writer, the typical Manchester man was an imaginary person he chose to style “John Brown.” Putting aside the fact that there is no true or exclusive Lancashire ring about the name of Brown, we will pass on to the career of this typical person, as figured in that bygone writer’s keen imagination.

John Brown was originally a poor lad in a cotton mill. His father and mother were—the Lord alone knows whom, for his known career began with his being found as an infant one winter’s night on a doorstep, wrapped in a flannel petticoat marked “J. B.” The foundling was taken to the workhouse and was fed, clothed, and educated at the public charge, finally being sent, as a lad, to the nearest cotton factory, where, by his ability and industry, he speedily rose to be a foreman. He married, early, one Mary Smith, who was captured and enslaved by his noble whiskers, and (being probably well versed in penny novelettes, in which the infants of the aristocracy are not uncommonly abandoned on doorsteps) secretly thought him of gentle blood. John Brown, like the Industrious Apprentice in the moral tales, continually rose higher, and became a cotton-spinner on his own account, and a wealthy man, with a magnificent villa at Higher Broughton, or some other place at that time still semi-rural. He knew nothing of Art, but, as it seemed to be the conventional thing for a man in his position to do, he bought pictures, chiefly, it must be confessed, on the basis of so much per square foot. He rose at six, was at the mill by eight o’clock; and had dinner at midday in town. He was home to tea, which he took with his “owd wumman” in the back-kitchen, leaving the magnificent dining-room for uncomfortable state occasions. He was in bed by nine o’clock.

I do not know if any wealthy Manchester commercial men of the late ’sixties recognised themselves in this effort of the imagination; but at any rate it would not hold good nowadays. I do not perceive, at the present time, actually or imaginatively, any great cotton-spinner taking tea in the back-kitchen or retiring at 9 p.m., and, although the art patron idea vigorously survives, it is music that pre-eminently distinguishes Manchester in its higher recreations: Liverpool being really the greater art centre, devoted, above all things of culture, to the pleasing of the eye rather than of the ear.

MATTER-OF-FACT

To the typical Manchester man of that time, birth and gentility were nothing. He was, above all things, unsentimental and matter-of-fact, and provokingly literal. It was a Manchester man who, when a passage of poetry was read from Coleridge, declared that the reading, “The swallow was a-cold,” was incorrect, and should be “had a cold.”

“Day is breaking” remarked some one to a cotton-spinner. “Let it break,” he replied, “it owes me nothing.”

It was an inhabitant of some town jealous of Manchester—and there are plenty of them—who declared that a Manchester man, viewing Nelson’s bloodstained coat and waistcoat at Greenwich Hospital, would feel little patriotic emotion. He wonders first what cloth they were made of. It is a cruel saying, but it has at least this foundation: that Little Englandism and the old Manchester School of politics were one. Were one, for the Manchester School of Bright and Cobden is dead and its corpse dishonoured. It is true that what looked like a mental aberration overtook Manchester and the country in general at the election of 1906, but that was, here at any rate, not so much political conviction as your straightforward, forthright Lancashire man’s indignation at the want of honesty, the pitiful pettifogging, that characterised the Balfour Administration. There was, moreover, a feeling that the country had not been fairly treated in 1903, when Lord Salisbury resigned his office into the hands of his nephew. The policy of “keeping it in the family,” as though the governance of the country were a prerogative of the Cecil family, was very rightly resented, even to Manchester’s overwhelming rejection of the chief pettifogger himself.

VII

Ten millions of people inhabit the manufacturing districts of which Manchester is the centre. It is at once the wealthiest and the poorest district in England, where wealth has an increasing tendency to accumulate in the hands of the few, and where, according to official returns, there are, at the other extreme, more paupers than anywhere else in the land, with the single exception of Middlesex, including London. The inevitable reverse to the medal of great commercial prosperity is wretched poverty existing side by side with it. It is only in poor agricultural, non-manufacturing countries that poverty is comparatively happy and endurable. If there is a remedy for such a state of things in the industrial centres, no one has yet found or applied it. There is always a large proportion here of the classes it has become the fashion to style “submerged,” and in times when prosperity wanes it increases so as to include most of the wage-earners, and to bring the smaller shopkeepers to the verge of ruin. Many of these periods of depression have been beyond human power to foresee or to avert, but others have been induced by the action of the manufacturers, in competition with one another. But in almost every instance of hard times the nearest remedy has been sought, on one side, or the other, in the strike or the lock-out. Lancashire is the home of these crude remedies.

OVER-PRODUCTION

Next to the shortage, or the high price, of raw material, or the slackness of trade, the greatest evil is that of the glutted market, caused by over-production, hardly possible before the days of machinery; an evil which is most often caused by the competition of manufacturers, who continue to manufacture, each one in the hope that, whoever else suffers, he at least will not. Over-production has in the past been carried on to such an extent that goods have had to be sold in bulk for very considerably lower than the cost of manufacture. Selling at a heavy loss, the manufacturers have sought the nearest means handy to reduce their deficit; and this has usually been found in the reduction of wages, rather than in decreasing the output. A five or ten per cent. reduction has generally brought about a strike, which has, before now, been welcome to great firms, in affording an excuse for ceasing to manufacture at a ruinous loss. To provoke a strike on these terms has been the only way out of an impossible situation; and the indignant workpeople have thus, instead of embarrassing the masters, unwittingly saved them from bankruptcy. The middle course is the expedient of “short time.”

These are large and serious questions, happily not of late years pushed forward by circumstances so greatly as of yore; but once very prominent indeed. The literature of cotton-spinning and strikes is a very extensive one, and written upon largely by no less an authority than Mr. John Morley, who is of opinion that “some of them (the manufacturers) are idle, some are incompetent, and some of them are blackguards.” This is severe criticism indeed to pass upon as enterprising and as upright a body of commercial men as it is possible to find in England: men, too, not so long since, generally of his own brand of politics. They do not seem the words of a philosopher.

The greatest period of over-production was that culminating in the gorged markets of 1861. The years 1859-60 had been times of “terrific prosperity,” in which new mills had sprung up numerously, and had, in common with the older, been working overtime. In the beginning of 1861 there were 2,270 factories in Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire, working at high pressure. As a result of the supposition that those good times would last, manufacturers strained every nerve to work their plant and their hands to their utmost capacity, and in doing so produced such a bulk of goods that by their own efforts they brought prosperity to an end. India and China, the great markets for shirtings and yarn, were full up, and ceased to be buyers; and all the while, the warehouses of Manchester were bursting with an increasing stock of unsaleable goods. The result was “short time” in October 1861. Even had there been no war in America, bad times would have come; but with the opening of the civil war between North and South, the Cotton Famine of 1862-3, brought about by the cessation of the supply of raw cotton from the Southern States, brought wealthy cotton-spinners to the verge of ruin, and misery and starvation to hundreds of thousands. Every one in the manufacturing districts suffered, for the classes are dependent one upon another. To manufacturers, workpeople, shopkeepers, professional men, the Cotton Famine was a very grim reality. By December 1862, no fewer than 247,000 hands were out of employment, and more than half that number on “short time.” The huge number of 234,000 were in receipt of poor-relief, and the average poor-rates for the manufacturing districts rose from 7⁵⁄₈d. in the £, to 2s. 2½d. The Relief Funds subscribed amounted to over £2,000,000, and the trade losses due to the Cotton Famine were calculated at £70,000,000.

THE COTTON FAMINE

The newspapers of that dreadful time were full of pen-pictures of the Famine, and they are readily to be referred to, but no good purpose would be served by recounting those sad tales. Yet, in spite of all their sufferings, in spite of having everything to gain from the success of the South, the essential sturdiness, independence, and honesty of the Lancashire people’s character kept their original opinions firm: that the North was right in fighting against slavery. It was essentially the people’s opinion. Knowing something themselves of slavery in the days before the Factory Acts, they were sympathetic, and were solid for the North. Other classes were, at best, divided, and England as a whole was for the South.

Manchester long ago ceased to be a cotton-manufacturing centre. The growth of the industry, the growth of the city, and the increase of rent, rates, and taxes within it, all led to Manchester becoming the metropolis of cotton, in which it is no longer worked up from the raw material, but where the finished product is warehoused. Warehouses, and not factories, are the prominent buildings of “Cottonopolis”; which is now a city of merchants and middlemen, and the metropolis of the Lancashire industrial towns, where all professions and trades are represented. To see the cotton mills, you need go to Stockport, Bolton, Blackburn, Oldham, and Preston: but whenever they suffer, Manchester will share in their trials.

The magnitude of the cotton-spinning trade is too great to be readily grasped. In the comparatively early stages of its history, in the years 1793-1824, the value of the total exports was £365,000,000, or an average of, say, twelve millions sterling a year, and that of the raw material imported £128,000,000. In 1887, the total value of the annual exports had risen to £70,957,000; or, in other words, it had grown almost six-fold.

ENGLAND’S BRAIN-CENTRE

There were then 700,000 operatives, and a sum of £29,400,000 was paid annually in wages. According to the returns for 1905, the exports of cotton goods in that year were valued at £92,000,000, showing an annual increase since 1887 of considerably over a million sterling a year. And still the tide of commercial prosperity is rising; no fewer than eighty new cotton mills having been built in Lancashire in the eighteen months comprising 1906 and the first half of 1907: with the result that there is more work to be done than hands to do it. When in due course the usual over-production ensues, and the scarcity of labour is replaced by lack of work, the bulk of misery and suffering will be proportionately increased; and should there ever come another Cotton Famine, the horrors of 1863 will fade into comparative insignificance.

VIII

THE MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL

“What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” That is a political byword, not always supported by events; but if we enlarge the scope into a plenary comprehension of affairs, the truth of it becomes much more evident. Railways, in the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, August 26th, 1830, the first in England, originated in Lancashire, and spread from it; and canals, although the first was made elsewhere, at Manchester first became of importance. The opening of the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal in 1761, and that of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, mark the beginnings of two different eras: the second of the two freighted with no one yet knows what tremendous possibilities. Manchester is a port, and has become so by an exertion of local patriotism not equalled elsewhere. When shares in the proposed Ship Canal were offered in the financial world and no one would find the capital, the future of the project looked hopeless. The powers for its construction, granted by Act of Parliament, were nearly lapsing, and the promoters were reduced to stumping the surrounding country and holding meetings to advertise the scheme. In that dark hour many working-men of Manchester put their savings into the Company, and the Corporation itself became very largely concerned in it. When the success of the issue appeared assured, the giants of finance plucked up a little courage, the situation was saved at the eleventh hour, and the Canal became at last, after an expenditure of fifteen millions and a quarter sterling, an accomplished fact. It has only recently yielded any return upon that huge expenditure, but the direct access to the sea it gives has enormously increased Manchester’s wealth and importance. The useful and the beautiful, we are told, are one, but the Manchester Ship Canal is not a beautiful object. Its waters are black and smell to Heaven on hot days, and the great locks, swing-bridges, and the like, although wonderful engineering feats, are not improvements upon the landscape. But they have a majesty of their own, and if you voyage down the Ship Canal, duly holding your nose, you will be much impressed. You will be even more impressed if you don’t hold it. A succession of docks, lairages, grain elevators and coal-shoots lines this Acherontean tideway: everything equipped with machinery that performs marvels in a quiet, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. And the great ocean-going steamers come surging slowly up to Manchester, bellowing for the swing bridges to swing open, and crowds of interested idlers, and the impatient traffic, held up at the flung-up bridges, look upon the sight with never-satiated gaze. It is a perennial wonder, a sensation that never stales.

In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. Time was, and not so long since, when the park railings, along the Chester Road, at the outskirts of Manchester, disclosed broad stretches of wooded lawns, sloping to the Irwell, but it is now as though some magician’s wand had waved away the trees and the lawns and in one act had replaced them with a close imitation of the East India Docks, where skyscraping blocks of fireproof warehouses and mazes of railway sidings form amazing evidences of what the Canal has already done for Manchester. It has certainly “done for” any lingering rural fringe.

I well remember in the long ago being dumped down by the railway in Manchester, as a stranger, with no friends in the great city, and with that dim sense of locality only a railway journey can give. Coming by road into any such place, you bring topographical continuity with you, and know where the grim houses end and the smiling country begins; but to be set down solitary in midst of these miles of streets, and then on some leisure day to essay the enterprise of walking out to where the last house fronts upon the fields, and to walk on and on, and never seem to come any nearer the fringe of the frowning houses, is an experience whose horror only De Quincey could hope to portray. London is larger, but its streets have a more varied interest. Here, away from the midst of Manchester, whose central architecture is ornate, if black, the mean, featureless streets sear your very soul. It was before the days of electric tramways, and I walked on and on, and still on, without coming to the end of Manchester, and then at Old Trafford, obsessed with a dread of it all, walked back; thinking, rather wildly, did it ever come to an end.

Having since then come to it and left it by several roads, I am now fully informed as to its limits, and, with that knowledge, the houses look a little kindlier, the streets do not seem quite interminable. But I am still impressed with the extraordinary length to which the paved roads and lanes—paved with granite setts—run. There is a lane—a country lane, for it is bordered with hedges—which I found when exploring the neighbourhood on a bicycle, and that lane went on and onwards, ever winding, for miles, and always, although extraordinarily lonely, and with never a house nor a wayfarer, paved with granite setts which it must have cost a considerable fortune to lay there. It began in the neighbourhood of Warburton and ended at a misbegotten place called Broad Heath, and still it was more than six and a half miles to Manchester. I was never before so genuinely astonished in all my life.

At Old Trafford are the Botanical Gardens, once admirably placed, but now as incongruous as though, say, St. James’s Park were set beside the Commercial Road. Manchester amused itself in a genteel way there; but to see how Manchester can intensely enjoy itself after a spell of dogged work, the Belle Vue Gardens, Longsight, should be visited at holiday time. The place is the, superlatively the, popular resort, and is Hampstead Heath, Rosherville, and the Crystal Palace combined.

THE FENIANS

There is no end to describing Manchester: it is so vast and so varied, and its story presents so many chapters. One might say something of the Fenian outrage of September 18th, 1867, when Sergeant Brett, in charge of the prison-van conveying prisoners to Belle Vue Gaol, was shot in the Hyde Road by a desperate gang of forty armed men endeavouring to release the criminals, Kelly and Deasy. Of those arrested, Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien were sentenced to death, and hanged at the New Bailey Prison, Salford; figuring since in the perverted Irish Valhalla of heroes as “the Manchester Martyrs.”

MANCHESTER TOWN HALL.

In another glance at Manchester the great Town Hall, in Albert Square, demands notice, not merely because it cost considerably over a million pounds, but because it is one of the chief architectural embellishments of the city. Opened in 1877, it was, like many other modern public buildings here, the work of Alfred Waterhouse. The style is an enriched Early English and the exterior stately to a degree. But what shall we say of the beautiful but dark interior, with its maze of corridors, its unexpected steps up and steps down? The stranger to Manchester, however, must needs entrust himself to the perils of that wilderness, for in the very fine and striking series of twelve fresco paintings by Ford Madox Brown he will find not only a justification of pre-Raphaelite methods, allied with some fine colouring and some very quaint drawing, but an illuminating pictorial commentary upon the history of the city.

BACK STREETS

It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader for the statement that angels do not inhabit Angel Meadow, any more than they do Seven Dials in London. Culture does not linger here. There is oblique testimony to this in a recent resolution of the Watch Committee to supply a police-constable with a new “set of teeth, to take the place of those he has lost in the discharge of his duty.” They were the celestials of the Angel Meadow district who knocked the constable’s teeth out. Hallelujah! The place is not so far from the Cathedral and the Strangeways Gaol, but neither the promise of present punishment that the gaol holds forth for evil courses, nor the hope of Heaven for the repentant that the Cathedral typifies, suffices to blanch the scarlet sins of Redbank, or to win the inhabitants of Angel Meadow to a better life.

If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less, of one another.

IX

In despair at picturing Manchester in brief—for it is not to be done—I will devote some pages to a few words as to coaching times, and then conclude. Little can with advantage be said of those times, because the inns to and from which the coaches and waggons came and went are nearly all of the past, and because old inns of any kind are rare in Manchester nowadays. The ancient “Seven Stars” in Withy Grove is, however, not only much older than the oldest coach, but looks it too, in its timbered gables and stout walls, and is even of age remote enough for it to be claimed that the Collegiate Church itself is junior to it. Nay, it even pretends to be the “Oldest Licensed House in Great Britain.” Near it is the equally picturesque and ancient “Old Rover’s Return.” The “Bull’s Head,” in a neighbouring alley, with the finely moulded head of a bull by way of sign, has convivial memories and associations with early postal times, and there stands a grotesquely out-of-plumb timbered and lath-and-plastered old tenement in Long Millgate that was once the “Sun” inn, the place where Ben Brierley and his fellow dialect-poets found inspiration in the chimney-corner. The initials “W. A. F.” and the date 1647, are found upon the old building, but it is obviously at least a century older than that. No longer an inn, it is still known as “Poets’ Corner,” and in its rather vague celebrity the curio-dealer who now occupies the premises doubtless finds his account.

THE “SUN” INN, POET’S CORNER.

THE “BRIDGEWATER ARMS”

The foremost coaching inn at Manchester was the “Bridgewater Arms,” near the corner of High Street and Market Street. To it came the Royal Mail. In later years H. C. Lacy removed to grander premises, at the corner of Mosley Street and Market Street: a house that had in its day been a fine private mansion, and then still had the advantage of possessing a very large, well-stocked garden in the rear. He styled this house the “Royal Hotel and New Bridgewater Arms,” and to it came as well as the Mail, the “Defiance” and other smart coaches. It has long since disappeared, and the present “Royal Hotel” stands on the site; but the old original “Bridgewater Arms” still exists, although now, and for many a year past, occupied as warehouses. The initials B. I. M. and date 1736 are on a spout-head that looks down upon Bridgewater Place, the narrow alley upon which the warehouse fronts. It is a fustian warehouse in these days, but a poetic tribute by a former guest of the house, torn from the arms of his lady-love, remains, scratched on the glass of an upper window. He had his own ideas of where capital letters and punctuation should occur:

Adieu, ye streams that smoothly flow;

Ye vernal airs that gently blow;

Ye fields, by flowing spring arraid;

Ye birds, that warble in the shade.

Unhurt From you my soul could fly,

Nor drop one tear, nor heave one sigh;

But forced, from C(elia)’s charms, to part,

All joy, forsakes my drooping heart.

1797

This enriched pane is very carefully preserved from injury by being covered with wire, and thus the lover’s lament will probably remain so long as the house stands.

The “Peacock,” resorted to by the “Peveril of the Peak”; the “Swan,” where the “Independent” pulled up; the “Star,” rendezvous of the “Manchester Telegraph,” are now merely names; and the times they belonged to are perhaps more thoroughly forgotten at Manchester than in any other city. Looking upon the maze of branching tramlines and the hundreds of swiftly running electric cars that begin at five o’clock in the morning and do not cease until after midnight, and are driven more recklessly and at a greater speed than elsewhere, you clearly perceive that Manchester has no time for the past and not much leisure to expend upon the present.

X

THE HUNDRED OF SALFORD

Crossing the Irwell by Blackfriars Bridge, Salford is reached; a distinction, so far as the pilgrim is concerned, without a difference. Just as, to outward appearance, London and Southwark, and Brighton and Hove are one, so are Manchester and Salford. But in local politics they are all separate and independent, and if an observant eye is turned upon the very tramway cars here, it will be seen that there is not only a Corporation of Manchester but a Corporation also of Salford; and, if the comparative gorgeousness of the Salford tramcars were any criterion, Salford should be the more important place of the two. Their comparative rank is, however, to be judged by the fact that a Lord Mayor heads the Town Council of Manchester and a Mayor that of Salford; but the curious anomaly still exists that Manchester stands in the Hundred of Salford, and thus the larger is, in that respect at least, included within the smaller. This singular anachronism is a relic of those very ancient times when the Hundreds were formed. In that era Manchester itself was a place largely lying in ruin, the result of Norse fire and sword, and Salford, sprung up on the other side of the river, away from the scene of desolation, bid fair to be its successor in all the ages.

The thunder of railway trains overhead, and the crash and rumble of heavy-laden lorries along the road, accompany the explorer along his way through Salford. But there is an oasis in all this at the Crescent, where the Irwell, in one of its far-flung loops, approaches and the extensive Peel Park appears. Beyond this again comes unlovely Pendleton, and then the Bolton Road and Irlam-o’-th’-Height—that is to say, Irwellham-on-the-Hill—not so romantic in appearance as in name. Here the road rises to those always grim uplands extending to Bolton and giving that place its old name of Bolton-le-Moors: more grim now than ever, for here is the great coal-field that has made Manchester possible.

Passing through Pendlebury, with the old Duke of Bridgewater’s collieries of Worsley away to the left, we plunge into the district of coal-pits at Clifton, where the hoisting-gear of the Clifton Hall Colliery, the marshalled coal-waggons, the rails across the road, and the spoil-banks where starved vegetation takes a precarious hold, make a desolation beside the way. On the left are the sullen moors, with perhaps a solitary cow grazing in one of the few remaining fields, just to emphasise the change that has come over the scene; while on the right, far down, flows the Irwell, amid a curious medley of beautiful country, ancient halls and manor-houses, and innumerable collieries and mills whose chimney-stacks spout smoke and steam over all the valley. When a steady rain comes down, on windless days, and diffuses the mingled steam and smoke over the landscape in a grey, woolly mass of vapour, the scene is weird in the extreme; while a wet day at Kearsley or Farnworth, places of grey houses and drab shops, is a desolation in which even the public-houses that have superseded the inns fail to radiate a meretricious cheerfulness.

MOSES GATE

Moses Gate, now a kind of succursal to Bolton, and with a railway station of its own, was once a toll-gate on the turnpike road. Who was Moses, except perhaps the pikeman, I do not know, nor does any one locally evince the least curiosity. The name is accepted as a matter of course, together with the unlovely circumstances; but railway passengers passing to more favoured places are as a rule extremely amused by it.

Bolton was formerly surrounded by “dreary and inhospitable” moors, but the stranger may doubt their ever being as dreary as the present surroundings of the great black, squalid, and unbeautiful town. In the very far-off days when those surrounding moors first saw this settlement, it was “Bothelton,” from the word “Botl,” which means a homestead. There are several “botl,” “bothal” and “bottle” prefixes or terminations of place-names in these northern counties: notably Walbottle, near Newcastle, situated on the Roman wall; and “Bothel” occurs near Morpeth and in the neighbourhood of Keswick. “Bootle” has a similar origin.

At last the name became worn down to Bolton: “Bolton-le-Moors,” to distinguish it from Bolton-le-Sands, on Morecambe Bay; but it is many a long year since this distinguishing mark was last used.

THE “OLD MAN AND SCYTHE.”

END OF THE EARL OF DERBY

There was once a time when Bolton was a cleanly little town that manufactured woollen cloths, fustian, and dimities, under idyllic conditions. Those industries were in full progress when the quarrels of King and Parliament broke rudely in upon the scene, in 1644: the Parliamentary party having garrisoned the place, which, unfortunately for itself, was a walled town. On came Lord Strange, afterwards Earl of Derby, from Wigan, with a force to take it by assault, but he was repulsed with heavy loss, and withdrew; the garrison being afterwards reinforced from Manchester, and its strength brought up to 3,000. Again the assault was pressed, and this time the Lord Strange was aided by Prince Rupert with 10,000 men. Two hundred devoted Cavaliers crept up under the walls, while treachery, it was said, admitted the cavalry. The storming of Bolton that ensued was one of the bloodiest affairs of the war, and few were spared from the fury of the Royalists. More than seven years later, the then Earl of Derby suffered for the excesses he, with Prince Rupert, permitted on this occasion; for, having been captured at the Battle of Worcester, he was brought to Bolton and beheaded on October 15th, 1651, at the Market Cross in Church Gate, opposite the “Old Man and Scythe” inn: with a grim fitness on the scene of the bloodshed himself had approved. An inscription on the front of the house narrates how “In this ancient hostelry James Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby, spent the last few hours of his life previous to his execution.” The house, built in 1636, was indeed a portion of his extensive Bolton property. Whatever the original sign of the house, the present is doubtless an allusion to the famous exploit of William Trafford of Swithamley, whose pretence of being an idiot saved his property from being plundered by the Puritan soldiery. They discovered him wielding a flail in his barn, and monotonously repeating “Now thus,” and so, unable to make him comprehend anything, they left. Beneath the threshing-floor where this supposed “natural” was gibbering lay his chief valuables. His trick is alluded to in the sign of the “Old Rock House” inn at Barton, near Manchester, where he is represented in a counter-charged suit, alternately red and white, and with his flail, inscribed “Now thus.” Here at Bolton, while the chequered red and white dress, somewhat resembling that of a jester, or fool, is retained, and while he wears a similar fool’s cap, his flail has in the course of years become a scythe.

The “original” heading-axe that decapitated the bloody Earl, who richly deserved his fate, is shown in the inn, which is merely a public-house, together with the chair he sat upon. But a chair also purporting to be the identical one is among the relics at the Earl of Derby’s seat at Knowsley, where there is probably another heading-axe. The only way out of this awkward impasse, to please every one, is to suggest that, being an important personage, he was given two chairs to sit upon and was executed twice, by two executioners! One can say no fairer than that.

BOLTON

The “Old Man and Scythe,” it should be added, looks in the illustration a highly picturesque half-timbered building: but it is really commonplace brick, and the “timbering” is but a product of the house-painter’s brush.

At “Bowton,” more than anywhere else along the road, you hear the Lancashire talk, and the people of the town are as rough-and-ready as any in the county, both in manners and in appearance. Even in Lancashire they talk of a “rough Bolton chap,” and as less refined than the people of Wigan, St. Helens, or Widnes; which is very like Walworth reflecting upon the lack of culture in Whitechapel. A good deal of this apparent brusqueness and rudeness is, however, more apparent than real. The Londoner, come from a place where a great deal of insincerity, and even callousness, is hidden by the veneer of conventional behaviour, is startled and shocked by the forthright manners and the very frank speech of Bolton and other manufacturing towns, but there is a heartiness about the people there is no mistaking. That typical character, “John Blunt,” has certainly peopled Lancashire with his kin.

The clogs still clatter on the pavements of Bolton, and shawled girls are yet to be seen going to and from the mills, but even in the last fifteen years Bolton has grown enormously, not only in population but towards a higher standard of life. Yet, to this writer at least, the thought of Bolton will ever recall the odour of fried fish; for it was on a winter’s evening, long ago, that he first came into the grim town. Fried-fish shops filled the air with a revolting reek, and everywhere along the pavements walked those who without ceremony ate their suppers out of newspapers. High above, yellow in the dark sky, like bilious eyes, glowered the illuminated dials of the Town Hall clock, while ever and again the quarters chimed and the hours growled out.

TOWN HALL, BOLTON.

Bolton is especially proud of its Town Hall, which was opened in 1873, and was the first of those immense buildings, of a monumental character, that of late years have been built in hundreds of towns, less to fill a need than to please the vanity of mayors and aldermen. No wonder, when municipalities build palaces for themselves, and house every department royally and regardless of cost, the rates go mounting ever higher.

BOLTON TOWN HALL

The Town Hall of Bolton, designed in a composite classic style, is, in most of its circumstances, a good deal more imposing than useful. A weary flight of steps leads lengthily up to the colonnaded portico, and although it looks magnificent, is, practically, a sorrow to all who have often to scale it.

A clock-tower, 220 feet in height, surmounts this elephantine building, which cost £170,000, and has so imposing an appearance that it has been the parent of many others; the design having been so admired that it was closely copied in every detail by Leeds, Portsmouth, and other towns; Paddington also proposing to build itself one upon the same model. But the Bolton parent of them all has become very grim; being, by reason of the smoke from the two hundred or so lofty factory chimneys of the town, “as black as your hat.”

XI

FIRWOOD: BIRTHPLACE OF CROMPTON.

The most interesting places in Bolton are—to speak in paradox—just outside it. On the Bury road, where the electric tramcars race, you may with some difficulty find the little turning at Firwood, where the humble birthplace of Samuel Crompton still stands. Along the main road the modern houses march prosaically on to Bury, but down this little turning, which descends steeply and has the most extravagantly uneven paving anywhere in the neighbourhood, you find a nook very much in the condition of the whole countryside in Crompton’s day. Always excepting, of course, the big cotton-mill that stands here. Looking down towards Bolton there are still fragments of woods and tangled brakes—fir-woods, or others—but on the skyline, as ever in Lancashire, are factory chimneys, wreathing fantastic smoke-trails. Among the three cottages here, Crompton’s early home is identified by a stone tablet inscribed—

Birthplace of
SAMUEL CROMPTON.
Born Decr. 3rd, 1753.

I look at that humble, stone-built cot with something of reverence. It did not, however, witness his bringing-up, for when he was but five years of age, his parents removed to Hall-i’-th’-Wood, an ancient mansion from which the owners had migrated to a more modern residence. Here the Cromptons farmed in a small way, and here Samuel’s father early died.

HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD

Hall-i’-th’-Wood (the Lancashire pronunciation may be written down “Hauleythwood”) stands in a situation still romantic, in the parish of Tonge, one mile from Bolton, on the Blackburn road. The great and ancient woods of oak that once surrounded the old house are gone since then, but the Eagley Brook yet comes foaming down in little cascades amid the rocks of the picturesque gorge above whose crest the Hall is situated; and there are patches of woodland remaining to inform the scene with sylvan beauty. It is, frankly, a surprise, set as it is at the very edge of the roaring traffic of a high road with shops where housewives are bidden by leather-lunged butchers “Buy, buy, buy”: and as delightful as surprising.

The Hall in the Wood is not only interesting as the place where Samuel Crompton invented the Spinning Mule: it is one of the finest examples among the many ancient Halls of Lancashire, and is singularly varied in its architecture; having been built in two separate and distinct periods, and in each period of entirely different materials. It was one Lawrence Brownelow who built the original half-timbered portion, in 1591, as appears by the initials of himself and his wife Bridget, and the date,

B
L B
1591

carved on a stone mantel. In 1637 the property was sold to Christopher Norres, woollen-draper, of Bolton, who was succeeded by his son, Alexander, a partisan of King Charles in the Civil War. Norres escaped lightly from the victorious Parliament, with a fine of £15 and the taking of the Covenant and other oaths; and then settled down here, building the stone wing that bears the date 1648. With him, however, ended the Norres reign, for his daughter Alice married a John Starkie, whose descendants resided here until near the middle of the eighteenth century. Their punning heraldic cognisance, six storks for Starkie, may still be seen, done in plaster.

HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD.

SAMUEL CROMPTON

It was a neglected and dilapidated old house to which the Cromptons came in 1758. For economical reasons—the window-tax then prevailed—all the unnecessary windows, and some that really were necessary, had been bricked up, rain came through the roof, and rats ran unchecked from room to room. There, in a house a world too large for them, the widowed Mrs. Crompton and her little lad lived upon the proceeds of a small farm and the insignificant gains she made from spinning yarn, by hand, as all yarn then was spun. Samuel helped in the spinning, much, it may be supposed, against his will; and in the drudgery of it his inventive powers were wakened, in the direction of labour-saving. Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny of 1768 and Arkwright’s invention were new when he began to plan, and his machine took the form of an improvement combining the principles of both. He was twenty-one years of age before he began the work, and not until five years were gone had he completed it. The times were not propitious for inventors, bands of infuriated weavers roaming the districts round about, destroying everywhere the spinning-jennies that they imagined were depriving them of work; and Crompton was obliged constantly to take his model to pieces and hide it in the garret roofs of his wind-swept, rat-haunted home. But at length the weavers’ fury spent itself, and then he could experiment without fear of house and model being wrecked. Then, however, arose a newer danger. Crompton, it became gradually known, had a wonderful new machine in the old place, and many were those who sought in some way to surprise the secret of it, among them the crafty Arkwright, inventor and man of business too: an unusual combination of talents that Crompton, unfortunately for himself, did not possess. In the result, the secret was given away for a miserable pittance, and not even patented. Factories were equipped with his invention, and manufacturers combined to subscribe, as an act of grace, a hundred guineas that should, multiplied a thousandfold, have been his by right. In 1812, Crompton found that the number of spindles worked on his principle totalled five millions. In that year a reward seemed almost within his grasp, for a vote of £20,000, in recognition of his services was proposed, and was to have been submitted to Parliament by Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister; but that very day, in the act of carrying a memorandum to that effect in his hand, Perceval was assassinated by Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons, and the proposal was not renewed. But by the intervention of some friends a memorial to Parliament was prepared, which was signed by the principal manufacturers of the kingdom, with the result that the sum of £5,000 was granted to him. Let us here observe the exquisite humour of the thing. The “principal manufacturers” had become such, and had amassed great wealth by aid of Crompton’s mule, but they meanly went to Government, and thus taxed the whole nation for a sum themselves should have raised.

With this sum Crompton established his sons in the bleaching business; but the establishment failed, and the inventor was again in straitened circumstances. A second subscription was raised, and a life annuity purchased for Crompton, producing about £63 per annum. He enjoyed it only two years, for he died in 1827, aged seventy-three, and was buried in Bolton parish churchyard.

The last stroke of cynic fortune was not dealt until 1862, when the hapless inventor had been thirty-five years in his grave. Then the town of Bolton, whose manufacturers had, living, denied him a livelihood, set up a statue to the man who had made their town, and twenty other towns, great and prosperous. Among those present at the unveiling, and shrinking in his poverty from the robed and finely apparelled magnates, was Crompton’s surviving son, then aged seventy-two, and in the poorest circumstances. Palmerston eventually sent him a dole from the Royal Bounty Fund.

RELICS OF CROMPTON

If the spirits of the departed can know what goes forward in the world they have left, there must be bitter ironic laughter in the Beyond. Plundered and neglected in life, Crompton is tardily honoured in death. The darkling, mouldering old Hall has, through the munificence of Mr. W. H. Lever, been purchased from the representatives of the Starkie family, finely restored, stored with personal relics of Crompton, and presented, as a lasting memorial, to the town of Bolton. It is open, freely, every day. There you see Crompton’s old violin, his Bible, and chair, and a model of his Spinning Mule. But there is much else besides. Old portraits and old prints decorate the panelled walls, and ancient furniture fills the room. Panelling has been brought from an ancient house at Hare Street, near Buntingford, and a finely moulded plaster ceiling copied from the “Old Woolpack” inn, Deansgate, Bolton, pulled down in 1880. From the stone-flagged terrace of the garden you look across to Bolton itself and the clustered chimneys whose murk affronts the sky.

XII

There are two ways out of Bolton, to Chorley and Preston; known severally as the Chorley Old and New Roads. The old road ascends windy heights, and although still a practicable highway, is of such a character that any traveller—not being a professional explorer of old roads—who finds himself on it, and perceives the new road going flat, below, is deeply sorry for himself. The way into this old road is by the group of houses called Dorfcocker—where the “Tempest Arms” displays the Tempest cognisance and their motto, “Loywf as thow Fynds”—and along Boot Lane. Thence comes a steep steady ascent past the “Bob’s Smithy” inn and the cottages of Scant Row—well-named in its meagre, hungry look—to the “Horwich Moorgate” inn with the subsidiary title of the “Blundell Arms.” Did any authority compensate these unfortunate inns when the traffic was diverted into the “New” road? Let us hope so, for the doing of it deprived them—not of a livelihood, else how could they have continued to live?—but certainly of all save the merest means of existence. There remains yet a look about the “Moorgate” inn which tells you that not always did it rub meanly along on selling beer to rustics or mill-hands. Alas!

THE RESERVOIRS

Henceforward, having reached the summit, and not wishing to remain on this wind-swept height, it is necessary to descend: that is obvious enough. But not easily is that descent made. To Avernus the transition is reputed to be easy and comfortable: to Horwich, where the old and new roads join, it is martyrdom, especially if it be undertaken on a cycle. And so descending, cautiously and with alternate prayers and curses, over the agonising pits and gullies in the neglected setts of the Chorley Old Road, to the only less fearful surface of the Chorley New Road at Horwich, we come at the two hundredth mile from London to the great lake-like reservoirs of the Liverpool Waterworks, formed in 1848, stretching for a long way alongside the road, and occupying the site of Anglezarke Moor. To a height of 1,545 feet rises the sullen mass of Rivington Pike, in the background, crowned with its masonry beacon. There are at least two dozen other reservoirs of different sizes up there, in the vast gloomy moors where the Pike presides: reservoirs in solitudes looking down upon the circle of busy towns comprising Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Blackburn, and Preston, and supplying their needs.

RIVINGTON PIKE.

The great reservoirs beside the road, fenced from it by an ugly dwarf wall and iron railing, are full of fish, and in most respects like natural lakes; but the scenery, bold though it be, is scrubby and hard-featured, and the scant trees look to those used to the softer and more luxuriant vegetation of the south, starved. But if one has courage sufficient to follow the waggonette-loads of beanfeasters from Bolton, who favour these scenes, there will be found a quite charming wooded glen and waterfall at Dean, beyond Rivington village.

RIVINGTON PIKE FROM THE ROAD.

MILES STANDISH

That, however, is by no means the way to Chorley; but rather a side dish: albeit a good deal more appetising than the main road itself. Chorley was in Leland’s time, the matter of four hundred years ago, down in doleful dumps. “Chorle,” he notes, painstaking traveller that he was, “wonderful poor, having no market.” This is where your modern Chorleian smiles the smile of conscious worth, for the place is the antithesis of what it was then and is wonderfully rich and populous. At the same time, I do not find anything at all to say about it, except that continual tale of cotton-mills, supplemented here by calico-printing. There is an ancient parish church, with relics of St. Lawrence, its patron saint, brought from Normandy in 1442 by Sir Rowland Standish, and enclosed doubly behind glass and an iron grille; and with the elaborate canopied pew of the Standish family of Duxbury Park, near by. The Standishes number among their ancestors such diverse characters as that loyal squire, John Standish, who helped to dispatch Wat Tyler; and the much more famous Miles Standish, “a blunt old sea-captain, a man not of words, but of actions,” who, born in 1584, sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the Mayflower, in 1620. The Chorley parish register of baptisms in 1584, in which his name should occur, is defaced, lending some support to the theory that his claim to be the rightful heir to the Duxbury estate was feared by his contemporary relatives, who are in this manner suspected of seeking to invalidate it. Whatever his prospects of success, he relinquished them in sailing for New England, where he became the best-known of those early colonists, and has found apotheosis in Longfellow’s Courtship of Miles Standish. The poet represents him as the elderly widowed Governor of Plymouth, in love with Priscilla, and, at once too shy and too busy to do his own love-making, despatching his youthful secretary, John Alden—himself in love with Priscilla—to woo her, “the loveliest maiden in Plymouth,” by proxy. Poor John went on his mission, as he was bid, and loyally fulfilled it. But without avail. Miles, in John’s arguments, appeared to every advantage. He was a great man, the greatest in the colony, and heir to vast estates; a gentleman, like all the Standishes, with a silver cock, red-combed and wattled, for arms, and all the rest of it. But these great gifts were nothing to Priscilla, who no more than any other girl could endure love-making by deputy, and, seeing the true condition of affairs, asked, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?”

A monument, 120 feet in height, stands on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, to the memory of this stout but bashful sailor, and when the elements are kindly forms a conspicuous landmark. But rain is your portion in these latitudes, which perhaps is the reason why the present writer, not alone in this disability, failed to find that “Sea View” of which the sign of a wayside inn on the road from Chorley to Preston speaks. But after all, rain or shine, that is no wonder, for measured on the map, across the flattest of country, it is seven miles thence to the sea.

Hard by, on the right hand, is Whittle-le-Woods—there should be elements of humour in the name to Americans, that nation of whittlers—celebrated (a strictly local celebrity) for its alkaline springs, sovereign, so they say, for rheumatic affections, but more potent, it would appear, in brewing, for “Whittle Springs Ale”—a kind of stingo—obtrudes upon you, on sign and hoarding, all the way into Preston.

Clayton Green is an outlying settlement of Clayton-le-Woods, one of the several unimportant villages in the neighbourhood with that foreign conjunction. There is nothing whatever to be said of Clayton Green, which has a place in my memory only as the spot where, in an inclement summer, I stood sheltering under the dripping trees at the entrance to a park, and saw, as I shivered there in the cold wet blast, a hundred-legged insect happily crawl into his warm, snug crevice between the stones of the dry walling, out of the miserable day. And the cold wind blew, the rain, fell, and the motors swashed by in the ankle-deep slush of the muddy road, and it was yet over five miles to the outskirts of Preston.

DARWEN BRIDGE AND WALTON-LE-DALE.

BAMBER BRIDGE

Bamber Bridge, where you see, not the rustic bridge across the tributary of the Ribble that conferred the name upon the place, but instead a very busy and dirty railway level-crossing, is now; a something in the likeness of a busy town of cotton-spinning mills. Beyond it, the road comes to the Ribble itself, and to Darwen Bridge, rebuilt in 1901, the latest successor of the original bridge built in 1366 and rebuilt in 1752.

PARSON WOODS, OF CHOWBENT

Walton-le-Dale, the village on the right, looks a peaceable place enough, and it has little history, but it came very near being the scene of a bloodstained struggle between Catholics and Presbyterians in the Old Pretender’s rising of 1715. Nearly the whole of the Catholic gentry of Lancashire had turned out to aid the Pretender’s forces, and the rebellion was almost on the point of changing from a dynastic conflict and a clash between Whig and Tory ideals into the very much more serious matter of a religious war. The rising of the Tories and the Catholics stirred to furious antagonism the Whigs and the Low Churchmen, but most of them blew off their rage in violent language. Not so the valiant Boanerges of the dissenting chapel of Chowbent, near Bolton, who not only breathed fire and slaughter, but took the lead of eighty among his congregation, whom he marched off to the front; the front being the passage of the Ribble, over against Preston. There the embattled minister—this valiant Parson Woods, “General Woods” as they called him—posted his men to withstand the crossing of the river, and was said to have drawn his sword and sworn he would run through the body the first man who showed signs of timidity. Having arrived there, armed only with what Baines, the Lancashire historian, calls “implements of husbandry”—what a beautiful phrase, covering the ungainliness of the poor crooked scythe and spade!—in front of a strong force of rebels, armed with implements of war, they doubtless were timid; but the bold advance of General Wills saved the situation, and Parson Woods had no excuse to embrue his hands in gore. But King George the First, recognising his earnestness, sent a gratuity of £100, which Woods promptly divided among his men; they in their turn handing it over towards rebuilding their chapel.

For the rest, there remains but to remark upon this singular epitaph, dated 1685, in Walton-le-Dale church, before we have over the bridge into Preston:

“Here lyeth the body of a pure virgin, espoused to the man Xt Jesus, Mrs. Cordelia Hoghton, whose honorable descent you know. Know now her ascent.”

XIII

Crossing the Ribble and looking backwards, the view along the dale to where Walton stands is charming; but with the extraordinary expansion of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, and the building here of many new mills, it seems like to be an expiring charm of scenery. Already the mills have come across from the north to the south bank of the river.

Preston has always been known as “proud.” The old rhyme ran:

Proud Preston,

Poor people,

High church,

Low steeple.

But the rhyme long since went out of date. One would hesitate to declare that Preston is in any sense poor, while certainly the reproach of its church having a low steeple has been removed these many years past; for the spire of St. Werburgh is a particularly fine and lofty one, rising to a height of 303 feet. If it be necessary to find an origin for that supposed pride of Proud Preston, I should look for it in the fact that the town has always been the capital of the Duchy of Lancaster, and not in the story of its ladies once considering themselves too superior to mate with the commercial men of the neighbourhood.

“Proud Preston” occupies a proud position, on lofty ground overlooking the Ribble and its extensive flats. Its name, “Priest’s Town,” derives from the site having been the property of a Benedictine priory once situated here, but before the time of the priory, it was named “Amounderness,” from the ridge, or ness, then, even more than now, a striking object across the levels. Penwortham, on the opposite side of the river, was in that early period the chief place, for there stood the great castle of the Earls of Chester, giving security to peaceable folk against the incursions of the Scots; but when the county of Lancaster was made a Duchy, and the defence centred at Lancaster, Penwortham decayed and Preston grew populous. The unwisdom of this move across the river to a site without strong defences was immediately made apparent, for no sooner had Preston grown into an important town than the Scots, under Robert Bruce, came and burnt nearly the whole of it.

PROUD PRESTON

Charters to the number of fifteen, ranging from the time of Henry the First to that of Charles the Second, have been conferred upon Preston; mostly in recognition of its importance as capital of the Duchy of Lancaster; and desirable privileges, such as the right of gaol and gibbet, tumbril and pillory, were added, so that Preston might deal, quite independently of Lancaster, with cases arising here, that demanded those engines of justice.

Still, it was ever a prosperous and busy town, as the antiquity of its guilds proves; and suffered considerable loss in the Parliamentary war, when it was the scene of two struggles between Royalists and Roundheads. The first was in 1643, when the townsfolk were divided in opinion, and fighting took place in the streets: the second in 1649, when a Royalist army, commanded by Sir Marmaduke Langdale and the Duke of Hamilton, was driven from Clitheroe to Ribbleton Moor, on the outskirts of the town, by Cromwell, with a numerically inferior force.