Manchester is the centre. It is at once the wealthiest and the poorest
district in England, where wealth has an increasing tendency to
accumulate in the hands of the few, and where, according to official
returns, there are, at the other extreme, more paupers than anywhere
else in the land, with the single exception of Middlesex, including
London. The inevitable reverse to the medal of great commercial
prosperity is wretched poverty existing side by side with it. It
is only in poor agricultural, non-manufacturing countries that
poverty is comparatively happy and endurable. If there is a remedy
for such a state of things in the industrial centres, no one has
yet found or applied it. There is always a large proportion here of
the classes it has become the fashion to style “submerged,” and in
times when prosperity wanes it increases so as to include most of the
wage-earners, and to bring the smaller shopkeepers to the verge of
ruin. Many of these periods of depression have been beyond human power
to foresee or to avert, but others have been induced by the action of
the manufacturers, in competition with one another. But in almost every
instance of hard times the nearest remedy has been sought, on one side,
or the other, in the strike or the lock-out. Lancashire is the home of
these crude remedies.
[Sidenote: _OVER-PRODUCTION_]
Next to the shortage, or the high price, of raw material, or the
slackness of trade, the greatest evil is that of the glutted market,
caused by over-production, hardly possible before the days of
machinery; an evil which is most often caused by the competition of
manufacturers, who continue to manufacture, each one in the hope that,
whoever else suffers, he at least will not. Over-production has in
the past been carried on to such an extent that goods have had to be
sold in bulk for very considerably lower than the cost of manufacture.
Selling at a heavy loss, the manufacturers have sought the nearest
means handy to reduce their deficit; and this has usually been found in
the reduction of wages, rather than in decreasing the output. A five
or ten per cent. reduction has generally brought about a strike, which
has, before now, been welcome to great firms, in affording an excuse
for ceasing to manufacture at a ruinous loss. To provoke a strike on
these terms has been the only way out of an impossible situation;
and the indignant workpeople have thus, instead of embarrassing the
masters, unwittingly saved them from bankruptcy. The middle course is
the expedient of “short time.”
These are large and serious questions, happily not of late years
pushed forward by circumstances so greatly as of yore; but once very
prominent indeed. The literature of cotton-spinning and strikes is a
very extensive one, and written upon largely by no less an authority
than Mr. John Morley, who is of opinion that “some of them (the
manufacturers) are idle, some are incompetent, and some of them
are blackguards.” This is severe criticism indeed to pass upon as
enterprising and as upright a body of commercial men as it is possible
to find in England: men, too, not so long since, generally of his own
brand of politics. They do not seem the words of a philosopher.
The greatest period of over-production was that culminating in the
gorged markets of 1861. The years 1859-60 had been times of “terrific
prosperity,” in which new mills had sprung up numerously, and had, in
common with the older, been working overtime. In the beginning of 1861
there were 2,270 factories in Lancashire, Derbyshire, and Cheshire,
working at high pressure. As a result of the supposition that those
good times would last, manufacturers strained every nerve to work
their plant and their hands to their utmost capacity, and in doing so
produced such a bulk of goods that by their own efforts they brought
prosperity to an end. India and China, the great markets for shirtings
and yarn, were full up, and ceased to be buyers; and all the while,
the warehouses of Manchester were bursting with an increasing stock of
unsaleable goods. The result was “short time” in October 1861. Even had
there been no war in America, bad times would have come; but with the
opening of the civil war between North and South, the Cotton Famine of
1862-3, brought about by the cessation of the supply of raw cotton from
the Southern States, brought wealthy cotton-spinners to the verge of
ruin, and misery and starvation to hundreds of thousands. Every one in
the manufacturing districts suffered, for the classes are dependent one
upon another. To manufacturers, workpeople, shopkeepers, professional
men, the Cotton Famine was a very grim reality. By December 1862, no
fewer than 247,000 hands were out of employment, and more than half
that number on “short time.” The huge number of 234,000 were in receipt
of poor-relief, and the average poor-rates for the manufacturing
districts rose from 7-5/8_d._ in the £, to 2_s._ 2-1/2_d._ The Relief
Funds subscribed amounted to over £2,000,000, and the trade losses due
to the Cotton Famine were calculated at £70,000,000.
[Sidenote: _THE COTTON FAMINE_]
The newspapers of that dreadful time were full of pen-pictures of the
Famine, and they are readily to be referred to, but no good purpose
would be served by recounting those sad tales. Yet, in spite of all
their sufferings, in spite of having everything to gain from the
success of the South, the essential sturdiness, independence, and
honesty of the Lancashire people’s character kept their original
opinions firm: that the North was right in fighting against slavery.
It was essentially the people’s opinion. Knowing something themselves
of slavery in the days before the Factory Acts, they were sympathetic,
and were solid for the North. Other classes were, at best, divided, and
England as a whole was for the South.
Manchester long ago ceased to be a cotton-manufacturing centre. The
growth of the industry, the growth of the city, and the increase of
rent, rates, and taxes within it, all led to Manchester becoming the
metropolis of cotton, in which it is no longer worked up from the raw
material, but where the finished product is warehoused. Warehouses,
and not factories, are the prominent buildings of “Cottonopolis”;
which is now a city of merchants and middlemen, and the metropolis of
the Lancashire industrial towns, where all professions and trades are
represented. To see the cotton mills, you need go to Stockport, Bolton,
Blackburn, Oldham, and Preston: but whenever they suffer, Manchester
will share in their trials.
The magnitude of the cotton-spinning trade is too great to be readily
grasped. In the comparatively early stages of its history, in the years
1793-1824, the value of the total exports was £365,000,000, or an
average of, say, twelve millions sterling a year, and that of the raw
material imported £128,000,000. In 1887, the total value of the annual
exports had risen to £70,957,000; or, in other words, it had grown
almost six-fold.
[Sidenote: _ENGLAND’S BRAIN-CENTRE_]
There were then 700,000 operatives, and a sum of £29,400,000 was paid
annually in wages. According to the returns for 1905, the exports of
cotton goods in that year were valued at £92,000,000, showing an annual
increase since 1887 of considerably over a million sterling a year. And
still the tide of commercial prosperity is rising; no fewer than eighty
new cotton mills having been built in Lancashire in the eighteen months
comprising 1906 and the first half of 1907: with the result that there
is more work to be done than hands to do it. When in due course the
usual over-production ensues, and the scarcity of labour is replaced by
lack of work, the bulk of misery and suffering will be proportionately
increased; and should there ever come another Cotton Famine, the
horrors of 1863 will fade into comparative insignificance.
VIII
[Sidenote: _THE MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL_]
“What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” That is
a political byword, not always supported by events; but if we enlarge
the scope into a plenary comprehension of affairs, the truth of it
becomes much more evident. Railways, in the opening of the Manchester
and Liverpool Railway, August 26th, 1830, the first in England,
originated in Lancashire, and spread from it; and canals, although the
first was made elsewhere, at Manchester first became of importance. The
opening of the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal in 1761, and that of the
Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, mark the beginnings of two different
eras: the second of the two freighted with no one yet knows what
tremendous possibilities. Manchester is a port, and has become so by
an exertion of local patriotism not equalled elsewhere. When shares in
the proposed Ship Canal were offered in the financial world and no one
would find the capital, the future of the project looked hopeless. The
powers for its construction, granted by Act of Parliament, were nearly
lapsing, and the promoters were reduced to stumping the surrounding
country and holding meetings to advertise the scheme. In that dark hour
many working-men of Manchester put their savings into the Company, and
the Corporation itself became very largely concerned in it. When the
success of the issue appeared assured, the giants of finance plucked
up a little courage, the situation was saved at the eleventh hour, and
the Canal became at last, after an expenditure of fifteen millions and
a quarter sterling, an accomplished fact. It has only recently yielded
any return upon that huge expenditure, but the direct access to the sea
it gives has enormously increased Manchester’s wealth and importance.
The useful and the beautiful, we are told, are one, but the Manchester
Ship Canal is not a beautiful object. Its waters are black and smell
to Heaven on hot days, and the great locks, swing-bridges, and the
like, although wonderful engineering feats, are not improvements upon
the landscape. But they have a majesty of their own, and if you
voyage down the Ship Canal, duly holding your nose, you will be much
impressed. You will be even more impressed if you don’t hold it. A
succession of docks, lairages, grain elevators and coal-shoots lines
this Acherontean tideway: everything equipped with machinery that
performs marvels in a quiet, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. And
the great ocean-going steamers come surging slowly up to Manchester,
bellowing for the swing bridges to swing open, and crowds of interested
idlers, and the impatient traffic, held up at the flung-up bridges,
look upon the sight with never-satiated gaze. It is a perennial wonder,
a sensation that never stales.
In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken
Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. Time was, and not so long
since, when the park railings, along the Chester Road, at the outskirts
of Manchester, disclosed broad stretches of wooded lawns, sloping to
the Irwell, but it is now as though some magician’s wand had waved
away the trees and the lawns and in one act had replaced them with
a close imitation of the East India Docks, where skyscraping blocks
of fireproof warehouses and mazes of railway sidings form amazing
evidences of what the Canal has already done for Manchester. It has
certainly “done for” any lingering rural fringe.
I well remember in the long ago being dumped down by the railway in
Manchester, as a stranger, with no friends in the great city, and with
that dim sense of locality only a railway journey can give. Coming by
road into any such place, you bring topographical continuity with you,
and know where the grim houses end and the smiling country begins; but
to be set down solitary in midst of these miles of streets, and then
on some leisure day to essay the enterprise of walking out to where
the last house fronts upon the fields, and to walk on and on, and
never seem to come any nearer the fringe of the frowning houses, is an
experience whose horror only De Quincey could hope to portray. London
is larger, but its streets have a more varied interest. Here, away
from the midst of Manchester, whose central architecture is ornate,
if black, the mean, featureless streets sear your very soul. It was
before the days of electric tramways, and I walked on and on, and still
on, without coming to the end of Manchester, and then at Old Trafford,
obsessed with a dread of it all, walked back; thinking, rather wildly,
did it ever come to an end.
Having since then come to it and left it by several roads, I am now
fully informed as to its limits, and, with that knowledge, the houses
look a little kindlier, the streets do not seem quite interminable. But
I am still impressed with the extraordinary length to which the paved
roads and lanes—paved with granite setts—run. There is a lane—a country
lane, for it is bordered with hedges—which I found when exploring the
neighbourhood on a bicycle, and that lane went on and onwards, ever
winding, for miles, and always, although extraordinarily lonely, and
with never a house nor a wayfarer, paved with granite setts which it
must have cost a considerable fortune to lay there. It began in the
neighbourhood of Warburton and ended at a misbegotten place called
Broad Heath, and still it was more than six and a half miles to
Manchester. I was never before so genuinely astonished in all my life.
At Old Trafford are the Botanical Gardens, once admirably placed, but
now as incongruous as though, say, St. James’s Park were set beside
the Commercial Road. Manchester amused itself in a genteel way there;
but to see how Manchester can intensely enjoy itself after a spell of
dogged work, the Belle Vue Gardens, Longsight, should be visited at
holiday time. The place is the, superlatively _the_, popular resort,
and is Hampstead Heath, Rosherville, and the Crystal Palace combined.
[Sidenote: _THE FENIANS_]
There is no end to describing Manchester: it is so vast and so varied,
and its story presents so many chapters. One might say something of the
Fenian outrage of September 18th, 1867, when Sergeant Brett, in charge
of the prison-van conveying prisoners to Belle Vue Gaol, was shot in
the Hyde Road by a desperate gang of forty armed men endeavouring to
release the criminals, Kelly and Deasy. Of those arrested, Allen,
Larkin, and O’Brien were sentenced to death, and hanged at the New
Bailey Prison, Salford; figuring since in the perverted Irish Valhalla
of heroes as “the Manchester Martyrs.”
[Illustration: MANCHESTER TOWN HALL.]
In another glance at Manchester the great Town Hall, in Albert
Square, demands notice, not merely because it cost considerably over
a million pounds, but because it is one of the chief architectural
embellishments of the city. Opened in 1877, it was, like many other
modern public buildings here, the work of Alfred Waterhouse. The style
is an enriched Early English and the exterior stately to a degree. But
what shall we say of the beautiful but dark interior, with its maze
of corridors, its unexpected steps up and steps down? The stranger to
Manchester, however, must needs entrust himself to the perils of that
wilderness, for in the very fine and striking series of twelve fresco
paintings by Ford Madox Brown he will find not only a justification
of pre-Raphaelite methods, allied with some fine colouring and some
very quaint drawing, but an illuminating pictorial commentary upon the
history of the city.
[Sidenote: _BACK STREETS_]
It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts
here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the
last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all
unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel
Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance
with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled
Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader
for the statement that angels do not inhabit Angel Meadow, any more
than they do Seven Dials in London. Culture does not linger here.
There is oblique testimony to this in a recent resolution of the Watch
Committee to supply a police-constable with a new “set of teeth, to
take the place of those he has lost in the discharge of his duty.”
They were the celestials of the Angel Meadow district who knocked the
constable’s teeth out. Hallelujah! The place is not so far from the
Cathedral and the Strangeways Gaol, but neither the promise of present
punishment that the gaol holds forth for evil courses, nor the hope
of Heaven for the repentant that the Cathedral typifies, suffices to
blanch the scarlet sins of Redbank, or to win the inhabitants of Angel
Meadow to a better life.
If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that
the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see
eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets
sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder
odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The
back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature
their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In
fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely
dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less,
of one another.
IX
In despair at picturing Manchester in brief—for it is not to be done—I
will devote some pages to a few words as to coaching times, and then
conclude. Little can with advantage be said of those times, because
the inns to and from which the coaches and waggons came and went are
nearly all of the past, and because old inns of any kind are rare in
Manchester nowadays. The ancient “Seven Stars” in Withy Grove is,
however, not only much older than the oldest coach, but looks it too,
in its timbered gables and stout walls, and is even of age remote
enough for it to be claimed that the Collegiate Church itself is junior
to it. Nay, it even pretends to be the “Oldest Licensed House in Great
Britain.” Near it is the equally picturesque and ancient “Old Rover’s
Return.” The “Bull’s Head,” in a neighbouring alley, with the finely
moulded head of a bull by way of sign, has convivial memories and
associations with early postal times, and there stands a grotesquely
out-of-plumb timbered and lath-and-plastered old tenement in Long
Millgate that was once the “Sun” inn, the place where Ben Brierley and
his fellow dialect-poets found inspiration in the chimney-corner. The
initials “W. A. F.” and the date 1647, are found upon the old building,
but it is obviously at least a century older than that. No longer an
inn, it is still known as “Poets’ Corner,” and in its rather vague
celebrity the curio-dealer who now occupies the premises doubtless
finds his account.
[Illustration: THE “SUN” INN, POET’S CORNER.]
[Sidenote: _THE “BRIDGEWATER ARMS”_]
The foremost coaching inn at Manchester was the “Bridgewater Arms,”
near the corner of High Street and Market Street. To it came the Royal
Mail. In later years H. C. Lacy removed to grander premises, at the
corner of Mosley Street and Market Street: a house that had in its
day been a fine private mansion, and then still had the advantage of
possessing a very large, well-stocked garden in the rear. He styled
this house the “Royal Hotel and New Bridgewater Arms,” and to it came
as well as the Mail, the “Defiance” and other smart coaches. It has
long since disappeared, and the present “Royal Hotel” stands on the
site; but the old original “Bridgewater Arms” still exists, although
now, and for many a year past, occupied as warehouses. The initials
B. I. M. and date 1736 are on a spout-head that looks down upon
Bridgewater Place, the narrow alley upon which the warehouse fronts. It
is a fustian warehouse in these days, but a poetic tribute by a former
guest of the house, torn from the arms of his lady-love, remains,
scratched on the glass of an upper window. He had his own ideas of
where capital letters and punctuation should occur:
Adieu, ye streams that smoothly flow;
Ye vernal airs that gently blow;
Ye fields, by flowing spring arraid;
Ye birds, that warble in the shade.
Unhurt From you my soul could fly,
Nor drop one tear, nor heave one sigh;
But forced, from C(elia)’s charms, to part,
All joy, forsakes my drooping heart.
1797
This enriched pane is very carefully preserved from injury by being
covered with wire, and thus the lover’s lament will probably remain so
long as the house stands.
The “Peacock,” resorted to by the “Peveril of the Peak”; the “Swan,”
where the “Independent” pulled up; the “Star,” rendezvous of the
“Manchester Telegraph,” are now merely names; and the times they
belonged to are perhaps more thoroughly forgotten at Manchester than in
any other city. Looking upon the maze of branching tramlines and the
hundreds of swiftly running electric cars that begin at five o’clock in
the morning and do not cease until after midnight, and are driven more
recklessly and at a greater speed than elsewhere, you clearly perceive
that Manchester has no time for the past and not much leisure to expend
upon the present.
X
[Sidenote: _THE HUNDRED OF SALFORD_]
Crossing the Irwell by Blackfriars Bridge, Salford is reached; a
distinction, so far as the pilgrim is concerned, without a difference.
Just as, to outward appearance, London and Southwark, and Brighton and
Hove are one, so are Manchester and Salford. But in local politics they
are all separate and independent, and if an observant eye is turned
upon the very tramway cars here, it will be seen that there is not
only a Corporation of Manchester but a Corporation also of Salford;
and, if the comparative gorgeousness of the Salford tramcars were any
criterion, Salford should be the more important place of the two. Their
comparative rank is, however, to be judged by the fact that a Lord
Mayor heads the Town Council of Manchester and a Mayor that of Salford;
but the curious anomaly still exists that Manchester stands in the
Hundred of Salford, and thus the larger is, in that respect at least,
included within the smaller. This singular anachronism is a relic of
those very ancient times when the Hundreds were formed. In that era
Manchester itself was a place largely lying in ruin, the result of
Norse fire and sword, and Salford, sprung up on the other side of the
river, away from the scene of desolation, bid fair to be its successor
in all the ages.
The thunder of railway trains overhead, and the crash and rumble of
heavy-laden lorries along the road, accompany the explorer along
his way through Salford. But there is an oasis in all this at the
Crescent, where the Irwell, in one of its far-flung loops, approaches
and the extensive Peel Park appears. Beyond this again comes unlovely
Pendleton, and then the Bolton Road and Irlam-o’-th’-Height—that is to
say, Irwellham-on-the-Hill—not so romantic in appearance as in name.
Here the road rises to those always grim uplands extending to Bolton
and giving that place its old name of Bolton-le-Moors: more grim now
than ever, for here is the great coal-field that has made Manchester
possible.
Passing through Pendlebury, with the old Duke of Bridgewater’s
collieries of Worsley away to the left, we plunge into the district
of coal-pits at Clifton, where the hoisting-gear of the Clifton Hall
Colliery, the marshalled coal-waggons, the rails across the road, and
the spoil-banks where starved vegetation takes a precarious hold, make
a desolation beside the way. On the left are the sullen moors, with
perhaps a solitary cow grazing in one of the few remaining fields, just
to emphasise the change that has come over the scene; while on the
right, far down, flows the Irwell, amid a curious medley of beautiful
country, ancient halls and manor-houses, and innumerable collieries and
mills whose chimney-stacks spout smoke and steam over all the valley.
When a steady rain comes down, on windless days, and diffuses the
mingled steam and smoke over the landscape in a grey, woolly mass of
vapour, the scene is weird in the extreme; while a wet day at Kearsley
or Farnworth, places of grey houses and drab shops, is a desolation
in which even the public-houses that have superseded the inns fail to
radiate a meretricious cheerfulness.
[Sidenote: _MOSES GATE_]
Moses Gate, now a kind of succursal to Bolton, and with a railway
station of its own, was once a toll-gate on the turnpike road. Who was
Moses, except perhaps the pikeman, I do not know, nor does any one
locally evince the least curiosity. The name is accepted as a matter
of course, together with the unlovely circumstances; but railway
passengers passing to more favoured places are as a rule extremely
amused by it.