young persons. Monday morning, commence work at six o’clock: at nine,
half an hour for breakfast; begin again at half-past nine, and work
till twelve. Dinner, one hour; work from one till half-past four.
Drinking (afternoon meal), half an hour; work from five till eight;
rest, half an hour; work from half-past eight till twelve, midnight;
an hour’s rest. One in the morning till five, work; half an hour’s
rest; work, half-past five till nine; breakfast, half an hour; work,
half-past nine till twelve. Dinner, one hour. Work, one till half-past
four. Drinking, half-past four till five. Work again from five till
nine on the Tuesday evening, when the gang of adult and infant slaves
were dismissed for the night, after having toiled thirty-nine hours,
with nine intervals for refreshment, but none for bed.
“Wednesday and Thursday were occupied with day work only. From Friday
morning till Saturday night, the same labour as that of Monday and
Tuesday was repeated.”
[Sidenote: _MANCHESTER, A CENTURY AGO_]
The mill-owners, of course, felt outraged when Parliament passed the
first Factory Act, and when the Ten Hours Act of 1847 and subsequent
legislation, designed to put an end to the scandal of women being sent
underground to work, and to rescue children from conditions hardly less
horrible than those of negro slavery, was under discussion, Bright and
Cobden characterised the proposals as “harassing the manufacturers,”
and as “a blow at liberty.”
V
Manchester was a place of especial unrelieved grimness in the early
years of the nineteenth century. It had ceased to be a picturesque
overgrown village, and was assuming the earlier and more forbidding
aspect of an industrial town. It was, of course, compared with the
widespreading city of to-day, a small place, and the surrounding
country came close up to its centre, and is said to have been not
unpleasing. But the toil and the striving were then unrelieved by any
urban graces. There was no “Society” at Manchester, but a great deal
of discontent existed and short commons were then the rule. Manchester
was regarded in those days of depression, after the close of the great
Continental wars, as a dangerous place; and here, indeed, Radicalism
was born, of injustice and hunger. “Manchester! your Royal Highness,”
exclaimed the fastidious Beau Brummell, in horror, to the Prince
Regent—“only think of Manchester!” when his regiment was ordered
there. He sped swiftly away and sold out of the Army, rather than be
banished to a benighted place where the correct set of a cravat was
unknown, and not considered especially worth knowing.
Manchester, as an industrial centre, has, in common with other great
cities similarly placed, always keenly felt the vicissitudes of
national prosperity, and, with the surrounding towns and districts of
Lancashire, has ever ridden on the crest of the waves of commercial
expansion, or wallowed in the depths of its depression. There is
perhaps no other great city, nor any other county than Lancashire, in
England which so surely feels the warming glow of good times, or the
chilling nip of bad; caused by influences almost wholly beyond control.
[Sidenote: _POLITICAL AGITATION_]
The years immediately following Waterloo and the close of the great
and long-continued wars with Napoleon were lean years in Lancashire in
particular, and in England in general, and discontent was rife. The
price of bread was high, employment was scarce and threatened by the
continual introduction of labour-saving machinery. The outlook of all
the wage-earning classes was very grim, and the position was further
inflamed by agitators, who very speedily put a political complexion
upon the economic crisis. It was the era before Reform, when all
political power was frankly held by the classes and the wealthy. The
people were not enfranchised, and were taught by mob orators to believe
that there lay the secret of the ills and disabilities they suffered.
To possess a vote was held up as an ideal which, when reached, would
be the solution of all grievances. It was probably not declared in
so many words that enfranchisement would bring more work and better
paid, nor that the voting-power would enable the working-men to vote
away the employment of the labour-saving machinery they dreaded;
but so much was implied. Riots, more or less serious, took place
sporadically, throughout the country, where the people were almost
starving; for, side by side with scarcity of employment, the price of
bread was extravagantly high, in consequence of a succession of bad
harvests bringing up the price of corn to an unprecedented figure.
The Government at length became seriously alarmed at the troubles.
There had been destructive riots in 1816, in Spitalfields, when a mob
of 30,000 had broken into shops and houses, and burned and pillaged.
Nottingham, Preston, Bury, and many other places were scenes of mob
rule. In 1818 the Manchester operatives had broken the factory-windows,
and had to be dispersed by Dragoons; and in the same year there were
riots at Barnsley. The year 1819 opened with the demagogue, “Orator
Hunt,” being thrashed by Hussars in the theatre at Manchester, where,
it was said, he had hissed the playing of “God Save the King”; and it
was declared that the turbulent Reformers of Glasgow proposed marching
upon London. At the same time a Reform meeting held at Birmingham was
dispersed, a constable being shot by workmen endeavouring to rescue one
of the arrested speakers.
It must be admitted that the classes were not conciliatory. Their
representatives in high places scorned the masses as the “swinish
multitude,” and did not propose any political changes.
[Sidenote: _MASS MEETING_]
Still, the methods of the mob-rulers were extremely provocative and
alarming. Whatever else they were, or were not, Hunt and Bamford,
leading spirits among the Reformers, were intelligent men, and should
have been able to forecast the probable effect the drilling of the
multitude would have upon the Government. It was very well to argue
that the drilling that went on at night was merely intended to enable
great bodies of men to march to and from mass-meetings in order.
The leaders were philosophical Radicals, and did not for a moment
contemplate force, and their followers were very generally of the
same mind; but we may easily see into the mind of Governments, which
themselves only employ drilling to one end: that of reducing brute
force to a scientific form of defence and attack; and undoubtedly
these exercises, even without arms, were alarming, for who was to tell
whence weapons might not be procured at any given moment. In short, the
Administration imagined the country to be on the brink of revolution:
a thing not so wildly improbable when meetings were enlivened by
banners bearing the inscriptions, “Annual Parliaments,” “Universal
Suffrage,” and “No Corn Laws”; and when that offensive emblem, a Cap
of Liberty, carried on a pole, was prominent. The authorities imagined
themselves face to face with an organised attempt at a subversion of
the Constitution, and, in that belief, it behoved them to be on their
guard.
“Orator Hunt” and Samuel Bamford, who had already, in 1817, been
arrested on suspicion of high treason in connection with the Reform
movement, were active in the agitation of 1819. They had drilled
thousands of men in readiness for a peaceful mass-meeting to be held
in the small open space then called “St. Peter’s Field,” at the end of
Mosley Street, Manchester, on August 16th, and the whole countryside
was agog with excitement and the wildest rumours. Rustic folk, going
home in the darkness, had heard the words of military command, “face
right,” “face left,” “right wheel,” “left wheel,” and so forth, and
extravagant notions of what was afoot very naturally spread. In
readiness for the day, the magistrates enrolled a force of special
constables, and a strong force of Yeomanry and military was kept near
at call.
In from Middleton marched Bamford, at the head of 6,000 men, to “St.
Peter’s Field,” and from other quarters came many columns; so that
by the time appointed for the opening of the meeting in that narrow
space of two or three acres, some 80,000 persons were assembled. The
police held a warrant for the arrest of Hunt on a charge of seditious
assembly, but, in the face of this huge crowd, declared themselves
unable to execute it, and called upon the magistrates for military
assistance. A more tactful method would have been to wait until the
close of the meeting, when Hunt could probably have been easily
secured; but tact is not a common possession.
[Sidenote: _PETERLOO_]
Close by was a force of one hundred and forty of the Manchester and
Salford Yeomanry Cavalry, hidden away in Pickford’s yard, and to them
was entrusted the task of driving a way through the crowd, to seize
Hunt. It was an unfortunate choice, for the Yeomanry were, to a man,
master manufacturers, whose interests had been assailed violently
by the mob. The regular troops near at hand would have been less
prejudiced, and would have acted more gently; but the Yeomanry charged
into the midst of the masses of people laying about them with the
edge and point of their swords. Many inoffensive persons, men, women,
and children, were cut and slashed and trampled down; but the crowd
was so tightly packed that it could not have given way if it would,
and the Yeomanry were not only stopped, but began to be severely
handled; which, after all, was no more than they deserved. Then Hulton,
prominent among the magistrates, lost his head, and ordered up the
Hussars to the aid of the Yeomanry. People were ridden down by the
hundred, the platforms were stormed, the banners torn down, and the
field cleared. Vast crowds of weeping and cursing fugitives, many
of them wounded, fled from the scene and out of Manchester into the
country: afraid of arrest. Eleven people lay dead, thirty dangerously
wounded, and forty “much injured.” Hunt, Bamford, and others were
arrested. Thus ended the great Reform meeting in St. Peter’s Field. It
was only four years from the time when Waterloo had been fought, and
the people speedily found the name of “Peterloo” for this Yeomanry and
Hussar victory. It was alternatively, with facile alliteration, known
as the “Manchester massacre.” The site is now St. Peter’s Square, and
on a portion of the ground stands the Free Trade Hall.
One cannot feel overmuch sympathy with the political agitation of that
time. The history of all politics, in all ages, and still in progress,
tells us that you succeed only in abolishing one tyranny to replace it
with another: destroying the tyranny of aristocracy to replace it with
that of wealth, which in its turn is overthrown by the worse tyranny
of Socialism and the impossible doctrine of the essential equality of
man. That which dominates will inevitably tyrannise, whether it be the
strong over the weak, the aristocrat over the plebeian, or the wealthy
over the poor; and sympathy with the downtrodden is a little blighted
when it is realised that, when the poor grow rich and the humble
powerful, they, too, begin to hector and to brow-beat. The cotton
operative, rising by innate capacity from the position of a wage-earner
to that of an employer, finds the centre of his interests shifted, and
throws in his lot with the class to which he has won his way.
The necessity for Parliamentary and constitutional reform was
acknowledged by Pitt, Earl of Chatham, so far back as 1782; and
“radical reform”—_i.e._ reform going to the root of things—was demanded
by the country in 1797-8; but it was left to agitators to bring the
question of reform so greatly into disrepute that, in common speech, we
hear always of a thing being “radically wrong”; never, by any chance,
“radically right,” although the alliterative ease of either form is
equal to the other.
The “Manchester School” of politics, founded in 1838 by Cobden and
Bright, was a very virulent type of Radicalism, and, in some of its
tenets, a singular creed for a commercial community of manufacturers
and exporters to profess. It was nurtured on an agitation for the
repeal of the Corn Law, and on a passion for Free Trade; it advocated
peace-at-any-price, and regarded the Colonies with hatred. “It will be
a happy day,” said Cobden, “when England has not an acre of territory
in Continental Asia.” In these extraordinary aspirations John Bright
shared to the full.
[Sidenote: _THE LITTLE ENGLANDERS_]
To reconcile the political creed of John Bright with his practice as
a manufacturer is one of those tasks whose difficulties approach the
impossible. He was an Apostle of Little Englandism: the passionate
author of the phrase “Perish India!”; the ardent visionary of a day
when “England” should cease to mean anything but this isle. What an
ideal on which to dwell! Said he: “It may be a vision, yet I will
cherish it.” He had what he termed the “noble vision” of Canada
surrendered to the United States:
“From the frozen north to the glowing south, from the stormy waves
of the Atlantic to the calmer waters of the Pacific main, I see one
people, speaking one language, owning one law and holding one religion,
and over all the flag of freedom, a refuge for the oppressed of every
nation and of every clime.”
The “flag of freedom” was, if you please, the Stars and Stripes, and
that “refuge for the oppressed” the land whose people are smarting
under the tyrannies of the Trusts, and of the municipal disciples
of the gospel of graft, as severely as any people ever suffered in
the “oppressed” nations of Europe. At any rate, these are articles
of belief to which few are now found to subscribe. That, with such
aspirations as these, Bright could not endure the idea of Home Rule for
Ireland, and so in 1886 broke with Gladstone and joined the Unionist
party, is one of those extraordinary and illogical changes of front to
which the careers of modern politicians of all shades of thought have
so accustomed us that there are no surprises left.
[Sidenote: _A “MANCHESTER MAN”_]
Demagogues and silver-tongued orators have been the curse in modern
times of this country. They and their audiences, grown drunken on their
own wild words, have thrown over all consistency. In Bright you had
a Radical politician opposed to the holding of an Empire, yet, as a
manufacturer and exporter of cotton goods, having his interests largely
bound up with the retention of our dependencies. It seemed honesty at
the expense of sanity. But less honest was Bright’s bitter objection
to any State interference with the factories. In 1836 he resented any
attempt to control the hours of labour, and wrote a counter-blast to
Fielden’s “Curse of the Factory System.” To the last, he opposed the
reduction of factory hours. In 1861 he attributed the evils attendant
upon over-production, in which he himself was engaged, to anything but
their real cause; but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten
that, although himself a heavy loser by the Cotton Famine, he nobly
championed the cause of the North in its darkest hours. Looking
back upon things accomplished since he entered the political scene,
his Radicalism seems to have been singularly diluted with Whiggism:
inevitable, no doubt, from his position as a large employer of labour.
As a Quaker, he was for Disestablishment; being a landowner, he
endeavoured to bring about the abolition of the Game Laws; he was, as
we have already seen, bitterly opposed, throughout his life, to State
regulation of factories. He denounced Chartism, of which most of the
points of reform demanded have long since been conceded, and, in reply
to the demands of the factory hands for better payment, invented the
comprehensive generality that “with bad trade, wages cannot rise”;
tracing all evils to the Corn Law, that effectual red-herring drawn
across many trails. Always the Corn Law, until its abolition in 1849.
It was responsible for almost everything ill, short of earthquakes.
Bright opposed compulsory education—for that would probably educate
the factory hands into discontent with their station; and was eager
to extend the cultivation of cotton in India. When that project did
not meet with the support he expected, and when his protest against
the Indian protective duties failed to open India to cotton goods free
of duty, “Perish India” became more than ever a pious wish. Perhaps
one of his greatest mistakes was his contempt for the bogey of Papal
aggression; not such a mere illuminated turnip on a post as he and his
contemporaries believed. Rome stalks through the land, aggressive, at
this day.
VI
Many versions exist as to the origin of the expression, a “Manchester
man,” but it is evident enough that the phrase, like that of a
“Lancashire lad,” is a natural alliterative growth. The most widely
accepted story, however, is that which tells of a coachman, who, asked
“Who has ta gotten in t’ coach, lad?” replied, “Wha, then, ther’s a
gentleman fra Liverpool, a man fra Manchester, a chap fra Bolton, an’ a
felly fra Wigan.”
A Lancashire boy’s definition of a gentleman should not at this point
be forgotten. It was given many years since, and was, “one what weers
at watch, an’ ligs by hisself.” So now we know that gentility, in these
days of cheap watches and a prejudice against sharing a bed, may be
within the reach of all.
It is no small thing to be a “Manchester man.” The name has a
self-reliant ring about it that fits the men of Manchester like a
glove, whatever may be the fitness of the other descriptions, or of
that other which tells of “Oldham roughs.”
The Manchester manufacturer of about 1750, as described by
contemporaries, was a humble person, of the greatest simplicity,
working like a journeyman among his hands; beginning the day before
six o’clock in the morning and ending it proportionably earlier, as
the habits of the time and the primitive means of artificial lighting
dictated. He both produced the goods and warehoused them, and his
combined warehouse and factory was also his home. He not only worked
with his weavers, but sat at meals with them, and all helped themselves
out of a common bowl of water-porridge, and a dish of milk. No one
among the manufacturers had such a thing as a “private residence,”
and speech was indeed so simple that none of them probably would have
understood the term unless put in more homely English.
So much for the mid-eighteenth century cotton-spinner. Let us see
how his descendant of about 1866 appeared to his contemporaries. A
writer in a popular magazine of that date, holding forth more or less
eloquently on the characteristics of Manchester men and Liverpool
gentlemen, described a “Liverpool gentleman” as a magnificent person
who traded beyond his means and abused his credit, finally, when the
inevitable crash came, compounding with his creditors on the basis of
three shillings in the pound, and continuing his splendid life with
almost undimmed splendour. But a “Manchester man,” according to this
apologist, when he breaks, breaks utterly, and, surrendering his all,
starts again from below. How these distinctions have borne the test of
time I will not pretend to say. At that period, according to this same
writer, the typical Manchester man was an imaginary person he chose to
style “John Brown.” Putting aside the fact that there is no true or
exclusive Lancashire ring about the name of Brown, we will pass on to
the career of this typical person, as figured in that bygone writer’s
keen imagination.
John Brown was originally a poor lad in a cotton mill. His father and
mother were—the Lord alone knows whom, for his known career began with
his being found as an infant one winter’s night on a doorstep, wrapped
in a flannel petticoat marked “J. B.” The foundling was taken to the
workhouse and was fed, clothed, and educated at the public charge,
finally being sent, as a lad, to the nearest cotton factory, where,
by his ability and industry, he speedily rose to be a foreman. He
married, early, one Mary Smith, who was captured and enslaved by his
noble whiskers, and (being probably well versed in penny novelettes,
in which the infants of the aristocracy are not uncommonly abandoned
on doorsteps) secretly thought him of gentle blood. John Brown, like
the Industrious Apprentice in the moral tales, continually rose higher,
and became a cotton-spinner on his own account, and a wealthy man, with
a magnificent villa at Higher Broughton, or some other place at that
time still semi-rural. He knew nothing of Art, but, as it seemed to
be the conventional thing for a man in his position to do, he bought
pictures, chiefly, it must be confessed, on the basis of so much per
square foot. He rose at six, was at the mill by eight o’clock; and had
dinner at midday in town. He was home to tea, which he took with his
“owd wumman” in the back-kitchen, leaving the magnificent dining-room
for uncomfortable state occasions. He was in bed by nine o’clock.
I do not know if any wealthy Manchester commercial men of the late
’sixties recognised themselves in this effort of the imagination; but
at any rate it would not hold good nowadays. I do not perceive, at
the present time, actually or imaginatively, any great cotton-spinner
taking tea in the back-kitchen or retiring at 9 p.m., and, although the
art patron idea vigorously survives, it is music that pre-eminently
distinguishes Manchester in its higher recreations: Liverpool being
really the greater art centre, devoted, above all things of culture, to
the pleasing of the eye rather than of the ear.
[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