Part 4

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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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 7-5/8_d._ in the £, to 2_s._ 2-1/2_d._ 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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _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.”

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.

[Sidenote: _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.

[Sidenote: _THE “BRIDGEWATER ARMS”_]