Produced by Chris Curnow, Susan Skinner,Brian Wilcox and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)
Transcriber’s Notes:
Italic text is shown _thus_.
Bold text is shown =thus=.
The original spelling, hyphenation, accentuation and punctuation has
been retained except for apparent typographical errors.
Superscript single characters are shown as ^a.
Multiple superscript characters are shown as ^{aaa}.
A table of contents has been added by the transcriber.
The unique page headers have been retained and appear as sidenotes.
See further note at the end of the book.
THE MANCHESTER AND
GLASGOW ROAD
CONTENTS
WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
INDEX
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._
[Illustration: 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
[Illustration: Guard]
LONDON
CHAPMAN & HALL, LTD.
1907
PRINTED AND BOUND BY
HAZELL, WATSON AND VINEY, LD.,
LONDON AND AYLESBURY.
THE MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW ROAD
MANCHESTER AND GLASGOW
Manchester—
(Cross River Irwell.)
MILES
Salford 185-3/4
Pendleton 186-3/4
Irlam-o’-th’-Height 187-3/4
Pendlebury 188-1/2
Clifton 190
Kearsley Moor Church 192-1/4
Farnworth 193-1/4
Moses Gate 194
Bourndon 195
Bolton (Deansgate) 196-1/4
Dorfcocker 198-1/4
Boot Lane 198-3/4
Heaton 199-1/2
Horwich 201-1/2
Smithy Bridge 202-1/2
(Cross Lancaster Canal.)
Chorley 207-1/4
Clayton Green 211-1/4
Bamber Bridge 213-1/4
Walton-le-Dale 215
(Cross River Ribble.)
Preston 217
Cadley Moor 219-3/4
Broughton 221-1/4
Barton 222-3/4
Bilsborough 223-1/4
Brock’s Bridge 225-1/2
(Cross River Wyre.)
Claughton 226-1/2
Catterall 227-1/4
(Cross River Wyre.)
Garstang 228-3/4
Scorton 231
Bay Horse Station 233-1/2
Galgate 235-3/4
Scotforth 238-1/2
Lancaster 239-1/2
(Cross River Lune.)
Slyne 242-1/2
Bolton-le-Sands 243-1/2
Carnforth 245
Burton-in-Kendal 249-3/4
End Moor 255-1/4
(Cross River Kent.)
Kendal 261
Watchgate 265-3/4
Boroughbridge 271
Shap 276-3/4
Thrimby 280
Clifton 284-1/2
Lowther Bridge 285-1/2
(Cross River Lowther.)
Eamont Bridge 286
(Cross Eamont River.)
Penrith 287
Salkeld Gate 291-1/2
High Hesket 296-1/4
Low Hesket 297-3/4
Carleton 302-1/2
(Cross Petterill Brook.)
Carlisle (Clock Tower) 305-1/4
(Cross River Eden.)
Stanwix 306
Kingstown 308
Blackford 309-1/4
West Linton 311-1/4
(Cross River Line.)
Arthuret 313-1/4
Longtown 313-3/4
(Cross River Esk.)
The Border 317-1/4
(Cross River Sark)
Springfield 317-1/2
Gretna Green 318-1/2
Graham’s Hill 321
Kirkpatrick 322
Ecclefechan 328
Lockerbie 333-3/4
Dinwoodie Green 338-3/4
Johnstone Bridge 340-1/4
(Cross River Annan.)
Beattock 347-3/4
Moffat 349-3/4
Elvanfoot Bridge 362-1/2
(Cross River Clyde.)
Crawford 365
(Cross River Clyde.)
Abington 368
Denighton Bridge 370
(Cross a Branch of the Clyde.)
Douglas Mill 377-1/4
Lesmahagow 383-1/4
Larkhall 391-1/2
Hamilton 395-1/4
Bothwell Bridge 396-3/4
(Cross River Clyde.)
Bothwell 397-1/2
Uddingston 399-3/4
Tolcross 403
Glasgow (Glasgow Cross) 405-3/4
CARLISLE TO GLASGOW (EXCHANGE) DIRECT, BY TELFORD’S NEW ROAD,
AVOIDING LONGTOWN, SPRINGFIELD, AND MOFFAT.
Carlisle 305-1/4
Glasgow Cross 399-1/4
Glasgow Exchange 400-1/4
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
SEPARATE PLATES
WAITING TO CHANGE (_After J. F. Herring_) _Frontispiece_
PAGE
THE BUILDING OF MANCUNIUM (_From the fresco by Ford
Madox Brown_) 7
MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM DEANSGATE 17
MANCHESTER TOWN HALL 61
HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD 79
PRESTON: TOWN HALL, HARRIS PUBLIC LIBRARY, AND
SESSIONS HOUSE 99
LANCASTER 109
LANCASTER SANDS (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 127
EAMONT BRIDGE 177
CARLISLE 207
SOLWAY MOSS (_After J. M. W. Turner, R.A._) 215
“A FALSE ALARM ON THE ROAD: ’TIS ONLY THE MAIL!”
(_After C. B. Newhouse_) 223
“ONE MILE FROM GRETNA: THE GOVERNOR IN SIGHT, WITH
A SCREW LOOSE” (_After C. B. Newhouse_) 231
THE DUMFRIES COACH (_After C. B. Newhouse_) 255
THE GLASGOW MAIL (_After James Pollard_) 275
ILLUSTRATIONS IN THE TEXT
The Hall, Chetham’s School 13
Miserere Seat, Manchester Cathedral: The Pedlar and
the Monkeys 19
The “Bull’s Head,” Salford 25
The “Sun” Inn, Poet’s Corner 65
The “Old Man and Scythe” 71
Town Hall, Bolton 74
Firwood: Birthplace of Crompton 76
Rivington Pike 85
Rivington Pike from the Road 87
Darwen Bridge and Walton-le-Dale 89
“Teetotal” 102
Garstang 105
“A fair mark, my Lord” 113
Javelin-Man 114
Lancaster Castle 115
Map of the “Over-Sands” Route 121
Carnforth 133
The Buckstone 135
The Market Cross and Pillory, Burton-in-Kendal 136
The “Duke of Cumberland” Inn, and Farleton Knott 137
Kendal Castle, and the Road into Kendal 138
Castle Dairy 145
Boroughbridge, Shap Fell 153
Sign of the “Greyhound,” Shap 155
Shap Abbey 156
Clifton 161
Sepulchral Slab of Udard de Broham 166
Brougham Castle 168
Countess Pillar 169
Yanwath Hall 170
Askham Hall 172
King Arthur’s Drinking Cup 174
The Giant’s Grave 184
Old Doorway, Penrith 186
Thiefside 188
East End, Carlisle Cathedral 195
St. Alban’s Row 203
Map of Old and New Roads from Carlisle to
Gretna Green 211
Arthuret Church 213
The Road past Solway Moss 217
Filial Affection (_After Rowlandson_) 221
Sark Bar 227
The Deaf Post-Boy (_After Cruikshank_) 233
Gretna Hall in the Old Days 241
The Old Smithy, Gretna Green 247
Gretna Green 251
Ecclefechan: Showing Birthplace of Thomas Carlyle 265
Old Tablet at Ecclefechan 267
Broken Bridge 285
“Brig o’ Clyde” 289
Hamilton Palace 292
Bothwell Bridge 295
Trongate 305
The Arms of Glasgow 309
Glasgow Cathedral and the Necropolis 311
The Oldest House in Glasgow 317
“Dixon’s Blazes” 321
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!”
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _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.
[Sidenote: _CHETHAM’S SCHOOL_]
[Illustration: THE HALL, 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.
[Illustration: MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL, FROM DEANSGATE.]
[Sidenote: _MISERERES_]
[Illustration: MISERERE SEAT, MANCHESTER CATHEDRAL: THE PEDLAR AND THE
MONKEYS.]
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.
[Illustration: 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 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.”
“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.”
[Sidenote: _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.”
[Sidenote: _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: