THE COMPLEAT CITIZEN
_Question._ What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour?
_Answer._ My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as
myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto
me.
A Catechism. “Book of Common Prayer.”
Until each of us faithfully fulfils the first clause of his duty to
his neighbour it seems unlikely that we shall see in the flesh a
manifestation of the compleat citizen. I prefer the old-fashioned
phrase to the modern slang of super-citizen, but I take it the idea of
our seventeenth-century fathers was much the same as ours, only they
knew enough English to express it in their own tongue.
And one naturally goes back for a motto for citizenship to Dr. Nowel,
sometime dean of the cathedral church of St. Paul, who, “like an
honest Angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is
printed with our good old Service-book.” For, if anyone wished to
study the evolution of citizenship in this country, he would, I think,
for past history read the records of that ancient community of
citizens that dwelt in the old days east of Temple Bar, though for the
modern evidence of the continued existence of citizenship he would
have of necessity to journey towards the rugged north. For if there is
one thing that stands out as typical of the north countryman of
to-day, it is his pride of citizenship. Just as Paul boasted of Tarsus
when he was away from his native Cilicia, so the Manchester man, away
from Lancashire, the Leeds man far from Yorkshire, or the Newcastle
man dreaming of his beloved Northumberland, can always remember that
he too is a citizen of no mean city.
There is no widespread sense of citizenship in London. It exists
sporadically, no doubt. The germs of it must be there, but the thing
itself fell with the City walls, and passed away with the destruction
of the last gate. No doubt it will grow and flourish anew, and perhaps
the foundations even now are being laid on the south bank of the
Thames opposite Westminster. But even in Doctor Johnson’s day the
thing itself was not. Lover of London as he was――and not even Boswell
had a finer _gust_ for the great city――you find him claiming for his
beloved that she was pre-eminent in learning and science, and that she
possessed the best shops in the world, but he does not assert these
things with the pride of a citizen. No! London to the great man is a
“heaven upon earth,” and in those very words he negatives the idea of
citizenship, for to be a citizen is to be a part proprietor, having a
voice in the management of the concern and a responsibility for its
industry and good behaviour. Citizenship means freedom and the
exercise of a franchise and the privileges belonging to a peculiar
city. Pious visions of heaven give no hint of such things. And though
London was and is all that Doctor Johnson claims, it is as much the
property of the foreigner as of the denizen. Boswell had as great a
share in it as his friend, and in truth neither had more than an
equitable title to be called Londoner.
There is indeed no possibility of a citizen in London being in any
real sense a compleat citizen. The pictures in his galleries, the
trees and flowers in his parks, the statues in his streets, are not
really his at all. In London if a new road is cut across the grass of
the park a few murmurs may reach the ears of some remote official
through the pages of the Press, but they cause him no uneasiness. Did
such an affair awaken the indignation of the citizens of Manchester,
meetings would be held, debates raised, and in the City Council the
head of the official would be demanded by the malcontents, or at least
a resolution moved to disallow his salary on the estimates. People who
have not been citizens of any of the great towns of the North can have
but little idea of the keen interest taken in municipal matters. In
London day by day one scarcely reads a word in the Press of the great
problems of civic administration which are so important to health and
happiness. Gas and water are regarded with light-hearted contempt
unless the services break down, when the simple Londoner engages in
futile summer correspondence dear to the heart of editors in want of
copy. The gas and water and electricity, like the pictures and parks,
are not his to manage. But the citizen of no mean city sees the great
committees of his parliament fighting as to who shall serve him at
least cost and at the same time make the noblest contributions towards
the rates. When the New Zealander rediscovers this island and digs up
the engineering works of our time to read papers about them to his
historical society, he will find the great cities of the North
bringing their water from the mountains of Cumberland and Wales,
Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham linked to Thirlmere, Vyrnwy and
Rhayader; but he will have to peck about in the clay a long time
before he finds any vestiges of the little troughs in which they store
their water hereabouts. That Thirlmere scheme was, I think, typical of
Manchester and north-country citizenship. There you had up against you
the whole sentiment of the indolent holiday makers, the landed
proprietors and the average man in the street who is of no city,
headed by that honest prophet and champion of lost causes, John
Ruskin. But citizenship was there, and citizenship won. And it is
always to me one of the crosses of life that John Ruskin never had a
good word for Manchester, though Manchester returned good for evil by
gathering together, after he had gone, the most beautiful and
thoughtful collection to illustrate his works and days. No one asserts
that Manchester is the Good and the Beautiful exemplified, but the
author of “Fors Clavigera” ought to have seen a sense of beauty in a
community manifesting itself in the perfection of outward and visible
cleanliness, comfort and health, and a daily raising of the standard
of living. The purity of life is higher in the great cities of the
North than in many rural villages which look so peaceful and
beautiful. Slum conditions are not unknown in the background of the
garden of England, where life seems on the surface to be roses, roses,
all the way. And the only antidote to all these evils that I can
foresee is the growth of that spirit of citizenship which is of so
little account in the South either in town or country, but which seems
to be struck out of the very granite setts by the hoofs of the lurry
horses when they haul the cotton bales along the Manchester streets.
And although I can only lay claim to have been a citizen by adoption,
yet on one or two occasions I got whirled into the midst of a local
fight, and as Yuba Bill would say, “waded in with the best.” And it
was one of the curious features of Manchester that, in the very
shortest period, she finds a place for the foreigner and whistles him
on to her deck, and there he is pulling the ropes and working the
windlass like a native born. Yiddish, German, Greek, Albanian, Turk,
Spaniard, Scot, Irish, and even the intractable Celt or Silurian from
remote Wales may live in Manchester and even continue to speak their
native tongues, but surely and by no means slowly, they are kneaded
into the citizen mass of municipal dough, and may even be chosen as
plums for the pudding or be selected as that decorative sprig of civic
glory which we stick at the top of the affair and worship for twelve
months as My Lord Mayor.
And a merry encounter I had with the powers that be――it is deemed an
honourable thing to set the shoulders of the Corporation on the ground
in a fair bout――and I recall it with greater pleasure because it was
the last time I appeared as an advocate. It was my last brief, as it
were, and Cerberus-like I was the solicitor, the counsel and the
client――three single gentlemen rolled into one――and what was more, I
won my case. And it was not, as you may be thinking, a mere
police-court affair, I had not been riding my bicycle on the footpath,
my dog had not strayed round the corner in undress and met a
policeman――why do dogs without collars meet policemen? a mad dog never
does――nor had I been watering the garden in the summer when the
Corporation annually arrange to be short of water. No; as a matter of
fact, I was not the defendant. I was the prosecutor, and I was
prosecuting the Corporation for conspiracy to annoy certain peaceful
residents of Withington, including myself. And as in this comic-opera
constitution of ours when a Corporation annoys you, you arraign them
before themselves, it is something to have achieved to have prosecuted
a Town Council successfully before themselves, and to have found a
Town Council brave and honest enough to convict themselves and promise
not to do it again.
It arose in this way. When I found that I really was a Manchester
citizen and was going to live there for ever and ever, as I hoped, I
made up my mind to buy a home of my own, and I settled on a corner
house at the back of Withington village, bounded on one side by a
narrow street called Brunswick Road, and on the other by another
narrow street called Burlington Road. They were paved by setts, as all
the Manchester streets are, but even the setts had a peaceful
old-world aspect, and so little traffic was there over them that the
grass sprang up between them, just as the history books tell us it
used to do all over England before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Beyond
the house were fields with potatoes in them and ponds to slide on in
the winter, and there was a little stream at the end of Heaton Road,
whose presiding naïad collected old domestic china in parts and left
them carelessly lying on her bed. Then there was that ideal school for
children at Ladybarn House, with a playground to which you could
stroll and watch really great cricket matches, and marvel at the
self-detachment of a young lady of eight who could field long-stop and
make a surreptitious daisy chain at the same time. Once a year,
indeed, there was a large but orderly crowd at the annual athletic
sports. One policeman kept it in excellent order. The sport was of a
high class, and you could watch a future “blue,” literally a
three-year-old, romping home in the kindergarten race, for which he
had been laboriously trained by his elder sisters on a neighbouring
lawn.
Of course, it was not to be expected that this sylvan retreat could
remain for ever. The builder was bound to steal the fields from the
potatoes. The North-Western Railway had obtained powers to make its
way across to Parr’s Wood, and bought out the cuckoos that they might
not jeer at the engine-drivers and madden them to striking pitch with
their call of the summer. But you cannot expect a cuckoo to keep
faith, and only last year I heard them again from my bedroom
window――and if you will be hospitable to birds, as Manchester folk can
be, and make a feast of fat and cocoanut in the garden, I know no
place where birds are more ready to return your call without ceremony.
We had many generations of thrushes born in our little garden, and
starlings, blackbirds, robins and tomtits would build with us on
occasion, and would drop in promiscuous-like all through the day.
Some who know the place of which I write, may think that there is a
note of exaggeration in my description. I am ready to agree that at no
time was the hinterland of Withington a mere fairyland of milk and
honey and green pastures and still waters, but it had certain
attributes of homeliness and peace and quiet that make me remember it
with the gratitude due from one whose lines had fallen in pleasant
places.
It was this retreat of hard-working citizens that the Corporation
sought to destroy without warning or consultation, and if it had not
been that I found practically every resident of my own way of thinking
and spoiling for a fight, I think they would have successfully ruined
the district.
It was a summer morning, and a Sunday at that, when we woke up to the
fact that the motor ’buses were careering along our narrow roads back
and front of the house. They came hurtling over the setts at the rate
of about six an hour, and as you heard them chirruping in the distance
and screaming near to you and experienced the trail of stench they
left along their way, and saw the pavements and side-walks splattered
with mud, it was clear that if they had come to stay, those of us who
could afford would have to go.
But why had the motor ’bus invaded us in this way? The answer was
easily given. A company, the chairman of which was a powerful town
councillor, had obtained licences to run ’buses along these side roads
from Levenshulme to Stretford. They were to run by these back ways
because the Council had trams on the main route, and did not want the
company or competition of the ’buses. No doubt the end of August had
been chosen to start the ’buses, because in a residential district
like ours everyone was away for the holidays. I was just going off to
Grasmere, and telling my solicitor to threaten the company with an
action for nuisance, I fired a letter into the papers and went my way.
To my delight I found that the whole neighbourhood was up in arms, and
although I grudged the holiday time given up to it, I went into the
fight with considerable gusto. There was the usual newspaper
correspondence. We dilated on the amenities of Withington and pointed
out that the only traffic really catered for was the Sunday
_bonâ-fide_ traveller, and asked why one lucky councillor should have
these licences given him when the rest of such traffic was run by the
Corporation for the ratepayers. The reply was made that we were a lot
of selfish people――“carriage people” we were generally called――who
lived luxurious days in glorious country, which we wished to keep to
ourselves, and that this company of motor ’buses had been mainly
formed in the interest of the working man, who desired to ruralise
among us.
In the midst of all this clash of words we organised a petition, and
the other side did the same. It was clear that we had the residents,
who were nearly all of them workers in the city of various grades,
entirely with us. We had a very strong case on these two points alone.
First, that the type of ’bus used by the company was undesirable, and
secondly, that the roads over which it ran were unsuitable. The other
side had a strong case, in that temporary licences were already
granted, and the Corporation were not likely to go back on a matter
they had just decided. Further, the eminent councillor at the head of
the company had many supporters in the Town Council, including the
Lord Mayor, and Withington was a district recently added to
Manchester, and not much in touch as yet with Council affairs. Before
we carried our petition to the Council, in clubs and places where they
wager, the betting was three or four to one against us, but I am
conceited enough to chronicle that after the hearing it dropped to
evens.
I confess that it was so long since I had played the advocate that it
was with some trepidation that I briefed myself to appear in my own
interests at the hearing before the Hackney Coach Sub-Committee. A
large number of residents went with me, and I stated my own case and
theirs. I should like to report my speech at length. It was a
beautiful speech. But the only phrase I remember was one in which I
demolished the argument that we were a lot of selfish, stuck-up
carriage people by confessing “that for my part the only carriage I
had ever possessed was a double perambulator, and I thought most of my
neighbours held the same record.”
As a Manchester citizen I should have liked to have to chronicle a
more speedy judgment, but historical accuracy compels me to say that
Wilmslow, Levenshulme, Altrincham, and Urmston all took steps to
protect the amenities of their roads before Manchester. It was not
before October 8 that the committee refused to continue the licences.
Still, we could boast that in six short weeks the residents of our
little oasis had risen in rebellion against our rulers and governors
and convinced them of the error of their ways.
A friend of mine on the Town Council used to tease me a good deal
about the beauties of the Withington District. He lived in lovely far
off country himself, and had only visited Withington as a member of
the Highways Committee.
“It seems an ordinary enough sort of place,” he said.
“Let me remind you of what Wordsworth says,” I replied.
Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive.
You can always obtain the just rude word to end a discussion from
Wordsworth’s poems or David’s Psalms――David is perhaps a little heavy
handed for these days.
I suppose it is because my forefathers lived on the marches that I
cannot help enjoying a downright good fight. I know it is wicked to
enjoy the angry scenes of a contest, but even the saintly John Henry
Newman confesses on occasions to have had “his monkey up”――not a very
fierce and vicious monkey, but sufficient of a monkey as a precedent
for a poor pagan to refer to――and when you get a wilderness of monkeys
up, as we did in the Battle of the Sites, then is there a scene for
Homer’s pen.
As when a torrent from the hills, swoln with Saturnian showers,
Falls on the fields, bears blasted oaks and withered rosin flowers
… into the ocean’s force.
So did every man, woman and child in the city get whirled into the
contest and rush into the flood, and get carried out of their depths
and find themselves very much at sea. But it _was_ a fight.
The Battle of the Sites was only a glorious incident in the thirty
years’ war that in Manchester had been steadily raging round the
affair of the Royal Infirmary. And I am far from suggesting that the
good individuals who were members of the Board of the Infirmary were
any worse citizens than the rest of us. But such is human nature that
the action of a board or committee is not the action of the
individuals. A sort of lowest common moral denominator is found by
consent of all, and that becomes the ruling quantity in the resultant
action. When a good man makes a mistake he apologises and makes
amends. Had any individual member of the Infirmary Board done some of
the things that were done by him collectively, I have never doubted
that when the wrong was pointed out he would have hastened to
straighten things out. But a board or committee never apologises,
neither does it pay the costs when judgment goes against it. Those
come out of the estate.
And I wish I could believe the theory of Cardinal Newman, who solemnly
tells us in his “Apologia”: “Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits,
I considered there was a middle race, δαιμονια, neither in heaven nor
in hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty,
benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. These beings gave a
sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes of
men. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is
often so different from that of the individuals who compose them.” It
is a charming conceit, but if taken literally might lead to committees
throwing all responsibilities for their delinquencies upon the little
demons at their elbows. But I like to imagine and picture the scene of
a board meeting with δαιμονια in attendance, painted in the manner of
the younger Teniers, whose goblins, teasing the unhappy Dives, have
cheered me since early boyhood. Certainly if there were any smaller
devils taking part in Infirmary affairs, which seems a practical
solution of many difficult problems, they were not wise devils――indeed,
they were silly devils――and we did well to cast them out.
When the new Infirmary was building in the Oxford Road, I happened to
meet Mr. Charles Hopkinson, who deserves so well of the citizens for
his careful and devoted work on the Building Committee. He was
admiring the rapidly rising building, and I told him that I did not
see anything of those two pedestals in the front gardens.
“What two pedestals?” asked Hopkinson; “I never heard of any pedestals
in the design.”
“Certainly,” I replied, “there were to be two pedestals for the two
statues.”
“I haven’t a notion what you mean,” answered Hopkinson, impatiently.
“Whose statues?”
“Joseph Bell’s and my own,” I called back over my shoulder.
And although Hopkinson was quite right, and these statues have not
been placed there even yet, still it is only fitting that the great
building on the Oxford Road should have had some memorial of Bell and
myself, for without us there would have been no Royal Infirmary on the
Oxford Road. A mediæval builder would have expressed in a series of
sculptured capitals the whole history of the Battle of the Sites, and
left satirical portraits of the old Board in gargoyles hanging over
the guttering, whilst a statue of Joseph Bell would have adorned a
spacious quadrangle, round the walls of which myself and the others of
his committee were portrayed in brilliant mosaics. But your modern
architect, who would be annoyed at being called a builder, never puts
into his work any of the history of his building, but is quite content
to erect adequate walls and roof and useful equipment and decorate the
outside, much as a confectioner be-sugars a cake, to please the eye
for the moment rather than with any intention of expressing ideas in
his art. No doubt the Gothic days are over, and the Gothic spirit is
dead, but Manchester has got what she wanted, an Infirmary building
second to none in the kingdom.
I always intended to have a return match with the old Infirmary Board,
because, although I won the first of the rubber, the loss of the game
did not to my mind fall on the shoulders of those who ought to have
borne it.
Early in 1893 a lady sought my advice through her solicitor. Her story
was a very extraordinary one. She had been a nurse at the Royal
Infirmary since 1889. Her career was successful. She had been selected
to attend on the late Oliver Heywood, and up to November of 1892 there
had never been a word of complaint about her work or her conduct. A
small-pox epidemic now broke out in Lymm, in Cheshire. Another nurse
had been sent there and was ill――it was supposed, of small-pox. My
client was sent there hurriedly to take her place. She found the
so-called small-pox hospital to be two cottages converted into a
temporary hospital, and her colleague was ill in bed, and was taken
away. There was also a wife of a tramp dying of small-pox, and eight
or ten patients. There was no water in the house. It is needless to
repeat other unpleasant details of want of equipment. She stuck to her
task for several days; she sat up with a delirious patient all night,
and when the patient died she had to help the men bring in the coffin
and screw down the lid, it being with much difficulty, and only after
bribes of whisky that they would come inside the cottages at all.
After writing letters to the authorities in Manchester and asking the
local doctor for help that did not come, she at length broke down in
health and fled. Arrived at Monsall, she was nursed there for a week,
and at the end of that time received her dismissal without notice, and
was refused permission, though at the end of her probation, to pass
her examinations.
Every effort was made to get the old Board to do justice to the lady
and let her pass her examination, but as no redress was to be obtained
without litigation a writ was issued. Under her agreement the
Infirmary Board had no right to send her to Lymm at all. The lady
desired no damages against the charity, and, therefore, an action was
brought for an order to compel the Board to allow her to take her
examinations. Shee led me in the case, and Gully and Sutton were for
the defendants――and I have no doubt told them exactly what they
thought of them. Certainly it was with an air of great relief that
Gully, at Mr. Justice Day’s suggestion, threw up the defence and
agreed that the lady should sit for her examination.
The nurse agreed to compromise on the understanding that the matter
was left in the hands of the Medical Board, whose examination she
successfully passed. The lady got justice, but the Infirmary Board did
not, and I made up my mind that if I ever got the chance of a return
match with them, they should not be let off so lightly again.
The Battle of the Sites had started years before I came to Manchester.
The old Board had made up its mind to rebuild the Infirmary on the old
site in the centre of the city; the majority of the citizens wished it
to go to the present site at Stanley Grove, which was a gift of the
Whitworth Trustees. Of the jealousies, squabbles, and troubles of all
these years the less said the better.
The old Board, with Fabian genius, continually prevented any agreement
with the University authorities, and brought any other plan than that
of rebuilding on the old site to a dilatory end. The older generations
of great citizens who had fought the Board in the past――Thomas Ashton,
Reuben Spencer, Henry Simon, and Dr. Leech――were no longer with us,
and in 1902 the old Board thought this was a most excellent time to
carry through their pet scheme. They actually prepared plans for the
rebuilding, and called a meeting, believing that the opposition had
died down.
The one man who defeated their plans was Joseph Bell. His interests in
the commercial world have been too engrossing to allow him much time
for political work, but from the way he handled the Infirmary
question, I make sure he would be a big asset to any political party.
At the first onslaught it did not appear that the old Board’s
opponents were very strong, but the meeting stood adjourned. I had
never met Bell, but I received a note from him, asking for an
interview, a letter of mine having been read at the first meeting. It
was when I was reading his note that I remembered that, from a
dramatic point of view, I had left the case between the nurse and the
Infirmary Board unfinished.
Joseph Bell came to see me after Court with a bundle of papers, and,
sitting down at my table, told me the whole story of the Infirmary
Board and their doings on the site question from the earliest days.
Two things were clear; one, that my visitor had a thorough and
intimate knowledge of his subject, and, two, that he meant business.
When he had ended his statement he looked at me keenly and said: “Are
you going to help?”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“We are going to clear out the old Board and build a new infirmary on
the Stanley Grove site.”
“You may put it there,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Then the battle can proceed,” said Joseph Bell, laughing.
And a very excellent fight it was. I should be sorry to have to read
again all the letters that were written and speeches that were made. I
remember I had to move the resolution against the old Board at the
Memorial Hall and Lord Derby was in the chair. I certainly did not
forget the nurse case when I told the members of the old Board that,
“however great my temptations, I would not say anything worse of them
than I knew they often said of themselves, namely, that they had left
undone all they ought to have done, and had done all they ought not to
have done, and there was no health in them.” A sentiment I was glad to
hear heartily cheered.
We won the resolution, we won the poll the friends of the old Board
demanded, and then we had an election forced upon us. Joseph Bell’s
policy had been to form a Board by consent, and on his “ticket” he ran
several members of the old Board who more or less favoured his views.
He was absolutely master of the situation, and could, had he wished,
have nominated his own Board. There were twenty-two members to be
elected, and Bell’s committee put up twenty-one. The friends of the
old Board did not understand Bell’s good sense in taking over so many
members of the old Board, and did their best to thwart any settlement
by consent. An election took place, and certainly created more
interest and feeling than any municipal election that I can remember.
It was with some excitement that, coming out of Court on the afternoon
of the counting, I bought a paper from a _Chronicle_ boy, who was
shouting out “Result of the Infirmary Poll.” One of Bell’s candidates
had resigned at the last moment, and the other twenty were returned at
the head of the poll.
As I read the successful names I felt a sense of relief. Something had
been attempted and something done. That nurse case that had begun
before Mr. Justice Day ten years ago was really finished.
But though the Battle of the Sites was over, the Battle of what to do
with the old Site is not yet well begun, for having pulled down the
old building, there is a very pretty quarrel going on as to what to
put in its place. And I envy Joseph Bell sniffing the battle from the
upper windows of Portland Street, where the stricken field――and it is
a stricken field――lies at his doorstep. At the right time he, as a
good Manchester citizen, will off with his coat and rush into the fray
whilst I shall be idling here, with no right to heave even half a
brick in the good cause. But whoever is on the other side, the stable
money is on Joseph Bell.