Part 2

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.

[Sidenote: _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?

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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 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 10_d._ 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.

[Sidenote: _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 4_d._ 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.

[Sidenote: _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.”