but the stranger may doubt their ever being as dreary as the present
surroundings of the great black, squalid, and unbeautiful town. In
the very far-off days when those surrounding moors first saw this
settlement, it was “Bothelton,” from the word “Botl,” which means a
homestead. There are several “botl,” “bothal” and “bottle” prefixes
or terminations of place-names in these northern counties: notably
Walbottle, near Newcastle, situated on the Roman wall; and “Bothel”
occurs near Morpeth and in the neighbourhood of Keswick. “Bootle” has a
similar origin.
At last the name became worn down to Bolton: “Bolton-le-Moors,” to
distinguish it from Bolton-le-Sands, on Morecambe Bay; but it is many a
long year since this distinguishing mark was last used.
[Illustration: THE “OLD MAN AND SCYTHE.”]
[Sidenote: _END OF THE EARL OF DERBY_]
There was once a time when Bolton was a cleanly little town that
manufactured woollen cloths, fustian, and dimities, under idyllic
conditions. Those industries were in full progress when the quarrels
of King and Parliament broke rudely in upon the scene, in 1644: the
Parliamentary party having garrisoned the place, which, unfortunately
for itself, was a walled town. On came Lord Strange, afterwards Earl
of Derby, from Wigan, with a force to take it by assault, but he was
repulsed with heavy loss, and withdrew; the garrison being afterwards
reinforced from Manchester, and its strength brought up to 3,000. Again
the assault was pressed, and this time the Lord Strange was aided by
Prince Rupert with 10,000 men. Two hundred devoted Cavaliers crept up
under the walls, while treachery, it was said, admitted the cavalry.
The storming of Bolton that ensued was one of the bloodiest affairs of
the war, and few were spared from the fury of the Royalists. More than
seven years later, the then Earl of Derby suffered for the excesses
he, with Prince Rupert, permitted on this occasion; for, having
been captured at the Battle of Worcester, he was brought to Bolton
and beheaded on October 15th, 1651, at the Market Cross in Church
Gate, opposite the “Old Man and Scythe” inn: with a grim fitness on
the scene of the bloodshed himself had approved. An inscription on
the front of the house narrates how “In this ancient hostelry James
Stanley, seventh Earl of Derby, spent the last few hours of his life
previous to his execution.” The house, built in 1636, was indeed a
portion of his extensive Bolton property. Whatever the original sign
of the house, the present is doubtless an allusion to the famous
exploit of William Trafford of Swithamley, whose pretence of being an
idiot saved his property from being plundered by the Puritan soldiery.
They discovered him wielding a flail in his barn, and monotonously
repeating “Now thus,” and so, unable to make him comprehend anything,
they left. Beneath the threshing-floor where this supposed “natural”
was gibbering lay his chief valuables. His trick is alluded to in the
sign of the “Old Rock House” inn at Barton, near Manchester, where he
is represented in a counter-charged suit, alternately red and white,
and with his flail, inscribed “Now thus.” Here at Bolton, while the
chequered red and white dress, somewhat resembling that of a jester, or
fool, is retained, and while he wears a similar fool’s cap, his flail
has in the course of years become a scythe.
The “original” heading-axe that decapitated the bloody Earl, who richly
deserved his fate, is shown in the inn, which is merely a public-house,
together with the chair he sat upon. But a chair also purporting to be
the identical one is among the relics at the Earl of Derby’s seat at
Knowsley, where there is probably another heading-axe. The only way out
of this awkward _impasse_, to please every one, is to suggest that,
being an important personage, he was given two chairs to sit upon and
was executed twice, by two executioners! One can say no fairer than
that.
[Sidenote: _BOLTON_]
The “Old Man and Scythe,” it should be added, looks in the
illustration a highly picturesque half-timbered building: but it is
really commonplace brick, and the “timbering” is but a product of the
house-painter’s brush.
At “Bowton,” more than anywhere else along the road, you hear the
Lancashire talk, and the people of the town are as rough-and-ready
as any in the county, both in manners and in appearance. Even in
Lancashire they talk of a “rough Bolton chap,” and as less refined than
the people of Wigan, St. Helens, or Widnes; which is very like Walworth
reflecting upon the lack of culture in Whitechapel. A good deal of this
apparent brusqueness and rudeness is, however, more apparent than real.
The Londoner, come from a place where a great deal of insincerity, and
even callousness, is hidden by the veneer of conventional behaviour,
is startled and shocked by the forthright manners and the very
frank speech of Bolton and other manufacturing towns, but there is
a heartiness about the people there is no mistaking. That typical
character, “John Blunt,” has certainly peopled Lancashire with his kin.
The clogs still clatter on the pavements of Bolton, and shawled girls
are yet to be seen going to and from the mills, but even in the last
fifteen years Bolton has grown enormously, not only in population
but towards a higher standard of life. Yet, to this writer at least,
the thought of Bolton will ever recall the odour of fried fish; for
it was on a winter’s evening, long ago, that he first came into the
grim town. Fried-fish shops filled the air with a revolting reek, and
everywhere along the pavements walked those who without ceremony ate
their suppers out of newspapers. High above, yellow in the dark sky,
like bilious eyes, glowered the illuminated dials of the Town Hall
clock, while ever and again the quarters chimed and the hours growled
out.
[Illustration: TOWN HALL, BOLTON.]
Bolton is especially proud of its Town Hall, which was opened in
1873, and was the first of those immense buildings, of a monumental
character, that of late years have been built in hundreds of towns,
less to fill a need than to please the vanity of mayors and aldermen.
No wonder, when municipalities build palaces for themselves, and house
every department royally and regardless of cost, the rates go mounting
ever higher.
[Sidenote: _BOLTON TOWN HALL_]
The Town Hall of Bolton, designed in a composite classic style, is,
in most of its circumstances, a good deal more imposing than useful.
A weary flight of steps leads lengthily up to the colonnaded portico,
and although it looks magnificent, is, practically, a sorrow to all who
have often to scale it.
A clock-tower, 220 feet in height, surmounts this elephantine building,
which cost £170,000, and has so imposing an appearance that it has
been the parent of many others; the design having been so admired
that it was closely copied in every detail by Leeds, Portsmouth, and
other towns; Paddington also proposing to build itself one upon the
same model. But the Bolton parent of them all has become very grim;
being, by reason of the smoke from the two hundred or so lofty factory
chimneys of the town, “as black as your hat.”
XI
[Illustration: FIRWOOD: BIRTHPLACE OF CROMPTON.]
The most interesting places in Bolton are—to speak in paradox—just
outside it. On the Bury road, where the electric tramcars race, you
may with some difficulty find the little turning at Firwood, where
the humble birthplace of Samuel Crompton still stands. Along the main
road the modern houses march prosaically on to Bury, but down this
little turning, which descends steeply and has the most extravagantly
uneven paving anywhere in the neighbourhood, you find a nook very much
in the condition of the whole countryside in Crompton’s day. Always
excepting, of course, the big cotton-mill that stands here. Looking
down towards Bolton there are still fragments of woods and tangled
brakes—fir-woods, or others—but on the skyline, as ever in Lancashire,
are factory chimneys, wreathing fantastic smoke-trails. Among the three
cottages here, Crompton’s early home is identified by a stone tablet
inscribed—
Birthplace of
SAMUEL CROMPTON.
Born Decr. 3rd, 1753.
I look at that humble, stone-built cot with something of reverence. It
did not, however, witness his bringing-up, for when he was but five
years of age, his parents removed to Hall-i’-th’-Wood, an ancient
mansion from which the owners had migrated to a more modern residence.
Here the Cromptons farmed in a small way, and here Samuel’s father
early died.
[Sidenote: _HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD_]
Hall-i’-th’-Wood (the Lancashire pronunciation may be written down
“Hauleythwood”) stands in a situation still romantic, in the parish
of Tonge, one mile from Bolton, on the Blackburn road. The great and
ancient woods of oak that once surrounded the old house are gone since
then, but the Eagley Brook yet comes foaming down in little cascades
amid the rocks of the picturesque gorge above whose crest the Hall is
situated; and there are patches of woodland remaining to inform the
scene with sylvan beauty. It is, frankly, a surprise, set as it is at
the very edge of the roaring traffic of a high road with shops where
housewives are bidden by leather-lunged butchers “Buy, buy, buy”: and
as delightful as surprising.
The Hall in the Wood is not only interesting as the place where Samuel
Crompton invented the Spinning Mule: it is one of the finest examples
among the many ancient Halls of Lancashire, and is singularly varied
in its architecture; having been built in two separate and distinct
periods, and in each period of entirely different materials. It was
one Lawrence Brownelow who built the original half-timbered portion,
in 1591, as appears by the initials of himself and his wife Bridget,
and the date,
B
L B
1591
carved on a stone mantel. In 1637 the
property was sold to Christopher Norres, woollen-draper, of Bolton,
who was succeeded by his son, Alexander, a partisan of King Charles in
the Civil War. Norres escaped lightly from the victorious Parliament,
with a fine of £15 and the taking of the Covenant and other oaths; and
then settled down here, building the stone wing that bears the date
1648. With him, however, ended the Norres reign, for his daughter Alice
married a John Starkie, whose descendants resided here until near the
middle of the eighteenth century. Their punning heraldic cognisance,
six storks for Starkie, may still be seen, done in plaster.
[Illustration: HALL-I’-TH’-WOOD.]
[Sidenote: _SAMUEL CROMPTON_]
It was a neglected and dilapidated old house to which the Cromptons
came in 1758. For economical reasons—the window-tax then prevailed—all
the unnecessary windows, and some that really were necessary, had
been bricked up, rain came through the roof, and rats ran unchecked
from room to room. There, in a house a world too large for them, the
widowed Mrs. Crompton and her little lad lived upon the proceeds of a
small farm and the insignificant gains she made from spinning yarn,
by hand, as all yarn then was spun. Samuel helped in the spinning,
much, it may be supposed, against his will; and in the drudgery of it
his inventive powers were wakened, in the direction of labour-saving.
Hargreaves’ spinning-jenny of 1768 and Arkwright’s invention were new
when he began to plan, and his machine took the form of an improvement
combining the principles of both. He was twenty-one years of age
before he began the work, and not until five years were gone had
he completed it. The times were not propitious for inventors, bands
of infuriated weavers roaming the districts round about, destroying
everywhere the spinning-jennies that they imagined were depriving them
of work; and Crompton was obliged constantly to take his model to
pieces and hide it in the garret roofs of his wind-swept, rat-haunted
home. But at length the weavers’ fury spent itself, and then he could
experiment without fear of house and model being wrecked. Then,
however, arose a newer danger. Crompton, it became gradually known,
had a wonderful new machine in the old place, and many were those who
sought in some way to surprise the secret of it, among them the crafty
Arkwright, inventor and man of business too: an unusual combination of
talents that Crompton, unfortunately for himself, did not possess. In
the result, the secret was given away for a miserable pittance, and
not even patented. Factories were equipped with his invention, and
manufacturers combined to subscribe, as an act of grace, a hundred
guineas that should, multiplied a thousandfold, have been his by
right. In 1812, Crompton found that the number of spindles worked on
his principle totalled five millions. In that year a reward seemed
almost within his grasp, for a vote of £20,000, in recognition of his
services was proposed, and was to have been submitted to Parliament
by Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister; but that very day, in the
act of carrying a memorandum to that effect in his hand, Perceval
was assassinated by Bellingham in the lobby of the House of Commons,
and the proposal was not renewed. But by the intervention of some
friends a memorial to Parliament was prepared, which was signed by the
principal manufacturers of the kingdom, with the result that the sum
of £5,000 was granted to him. Let us here observe the exquisite humour
of the thing. The “principal manufacturers” had become such, and had
amassed great wealth by aid of Crompton’s mule, but they meanly went to
Government, and thus taxed the whole nation for a sum themselves should
have raised.
With this sum Crompton established his sons in the bleaching business;
but the establishment failed, and the inventor was again in straitened
circumstances. A second subscription was raised, and a life annuity
purchased for Crompton, producing about £63 per annum. He enjoyed it
only two years, for he died in 1827, aged seventy-three, and was buried
in Bolton parish churchyard.
The last stroke of cynic fortune was not dealt until 1862, when the
hapless inventor had been thirty-five years in his grave. Then the town
of Bolton, whose manufacturers had, living, denied him a livelihood,
set up a statue to the man who had made their town, and twenty other
towns, great and prosperous. Among those present at the unveiling, and
shrinking in his poverty from the robed and finely apparelled magnates,
was Crompton’s surviving son, then aged seventy-two, and in the poorest
circumstances. Palmerston eventually sent him a dole from the Royal
Bounty Fund.
[Sidenote: _RELICS OF CROMPTON_]
If the spirits of the departed can know what goes forward in the world
they have left, there must be bitter ironic laughter in the Beyond.
Plundered and neglected in life, Crompton is tardily honoured in death.
The darkling, mouldering old Hall has, through the munificence of Mr.
W. H. Lever, been purchased from the representatives of the Starkie
family, finely restored, stored with personal relics of Crompton, and
presented, as a lasting memorial, to the town of Bolton. It is open,
freely, every day. There you see Crompton’s old violin, his Bible,
and chair, and a model of his Spinning Mule. But there is much else
besides. Old portraits and old prints decorate the panelled walls, and
ancient furniture fills the room. Panelling has been brought from an
ancient house at Hare Street, near Buntingford, and a finely moulded
plaster ceiling copied from the “Old Woolpack” inn, Deansgate, Bolton,
pulled down in 1880. From the stone-flagged terrace of the garden you
look across to Bolton itself and the clustered chimneys whose murk
affronts the sky.
XII
There are two ways out of Bolton, to Chorley and Preston; known
severally as the Chorley Old and New Roads. The old road ascends
windy heights, and although still a practicable highway, is of such a
character that any traveller—not being a professional explorer of old
roads—who finds himself on it, and perceives the new road going flat,
below, is deeply sorry for himself. The way into this old road is by
the group of houses called Dorfcocker—where the “Tempest Arms” displays
the Tempest cognisance and their motto, “Loywf as thow Fynds”—and along
Boot Lane. Thence comes a steep steady ascent past the “Bob’s Smithy”
inn and the cottages of Scant Row—well-named in its meagre, hungry
look—to the “Horwich Moorgate” inn with the subsidiary title of the
“Blundell Arms.” Did any authority compensate these unfortunate inns
when the traffic was diverted into the “New” road? Let us hope so, for
the doing of it deprived them—not of a livelihood, else how could they
have continued to live?—but certainly of all save the merest means of
existence. There remains yet a look about the “Moorgate” inn which
tells you that not always did it rub meanly along on selling beer to
rustics or mill-hands. Alas!
[Sidenote: _THE RESERVOIRS_]
Henceforward, having reached the summit, and not wishing to remain on
this wind-swept height, it is necessary to descend: that is obvious
enough. But not easily is that descent made. To Avernus the transition
is reputed to be easy and comfortable: to Horwich, where the old and
new roads join, it is martyrdom, especially if it be undertaken on a
cycle. And so descending, cautiously and with alternate prayers and
curses, over the agonising pits and gullies in the neglected setts of
the Chorley Old Road, to the only less fearful surface of the Chorley
New Road at Horwich, we come at the two hundredth mile from London to
the great lake-like reservoirs of the Liverpool Waterworks, formed in
1848, stretching for a long way alongside the road, and occupying the
site of Anglezarke Moor. To a height of 1,545 feet rises the sullen
mass of Rivington Pike, in the background, crowned with its masonry
beacon. There are at least two dozen other reservoirs of different
sizes up there, in the vast gloomy moors where the Pike presides:
reservoirs in solitudes looking down upon the circle of busy towns
comprising Bolton, Bury, Wigan, Blackburn, and Preston, and supplying
their needs.
[Illustration: RIVINGTON PIKE.]
The great reservoirs beside the road, fenced from it by an ugly dwarf
wall and iron railing, are full of fish, and in most respects like
natural lakes; but the scenery, bold though it be, is scrubby and
hard-featured, and the scant trees look to those used to the softer
and more luxuriant vegetation of the south, starved. But if one has
courage sufficient to follow the waggonette-loads of beanfeasters from
Bolton, who favour these scenes, there will be found a quite charming
wooded glen and waterfall at Dean, beyond Rivington village.
[Illustration: RIVINGTON PIKE FROM THE ROAD.]
[Sidenote: _MILES STANDISH_]
That, however, is by no means the way to Chorley; but rather a side
dish: albeit a good deal more appetising than the main road itself.
Chorley was in Leland’s time, the matter of four hundred years ago,
down in doleful dumps. “Chorle,” he notes, painstaking traveller
that he was, “wonderful poor, having no market.” This is where your
modern Chorleian smiles the smile of conscious worth, for the place
is the antithesis of what it was then and is wonderfully rich and
populous. At the same time, I do not find anything at all to say about
it, except that continual tale of cotton-mills, supplemented here
by calico-printing. There is an ancient parish church, with relics
of St. Lawrence, its patron saint, brought from Normandy in 1442 by
Sir Rowland Standish, and enclosed doubly behind glass and an iron
grille; and with the elaborate canopied pew of the Standish family of
Duxbury Park, near by. The Standishes number among their ancestors such
diverse characters as that loyal squire, John Standish, who helped to
dispatch Wat Tyler; and the much more famous Miles Standish, “a blunt
old sea-captain, a man not of words, but of actions,” who, born in
1584, sailed with the Pilgrim Fathers to America in the _Mayflower_,
in 1620. The Chorley parish register of baptisms in 1584, in which his
name should occur, is defaced, lending some support to the theory that
his claim to be the rightful heir to the Duxbury estate was feared by
his contemporary relatives, who are in this manner suspected of seeking
to invalidate it. Whatever his prospects of success, he relinquished
them in sailing for New England, where he became the best-known of
those early colonists, and has found apotheosis in Longfellow’s
_Courtship of Miles Standish_. The poet represents him as the elderly
widowed Governor of Plymouth, in love with Priscilla, and, at once too
shy and too busy to do his own love-making, despatching his youthful
secretary, John Alden—himself in love with Priscilla—to woo her, “the
loveliest maiden in Plymouth,” by proxy. Poor John went on his mission,
as he was bid, and loyally fulfilled it. But without avail. Miles, in
John’s arguments, appeared to every advantage. He was a great man, the
greatest in the colony, and heir to vast estates; a gentleman, like
all the Standishes, with a silver cock, red-combed and wattled, for
arms, and all the rest of it. But these great gifts were nothing to
Priscilla, who no more than any other girl could endure love-making by
deputy, and, seeing the true condition of affairs, asked, “Why don’t
you speak for yourself, John?”
A monument, 120 feet in height, stands on Captain’s Hill, Duxbury, to
the memory of this stout but bashful sailor, and when the elements are
kindly forms a conspicuous landmark. But rain is your portion in these
latitudes, which perhaps is the reason why the present writer, not
alone in this disability, failed to find that “Sea View” of which the
sign of a wayside inn on the road from Chorley to Preston speaks. But
after all, rain or shine, that is no wonder, for measured on the map,
across the flattest of country, it is seven miles thence to the sea.
Hard by, on the right hand, is Whittle-le-Woods—there should
be elements of humour in the name to Americans, that nation of
whittlers—celebrated (a strictly local celebrity) for its alkaline
springs, sovereign, so they say, for rheumatic affections, but more
potent, it would appear, in brewing, for “Whittle Springs Ale”—a kind
of stingo—obtrudes upon you, on sign and hoarding, all the way into
Preston.
Clayton Green is an outlying settlement of Clayton-le-Woods, one of
the several unimportant villages in the neighbourhood with that
foreign conjunction. There is nothing whatever to be said of Clayton
Green, which has a place in my memory only as the spot where, in an
inclement summer, I stood sheltering under the dripping trees at the
entrance to a park, and saw, as I shivered there in the cold wet blast,
a hundred-legged insect happily crawl into his warm, snug crevice
between the stones of the dry walling, out of the miserable day. And
the cold wind blew, the rain, fell, and the motors swashed by in the
ankle-deep slush of the muddy road, and it was yet over five miles to
the outskirts of Preston.
[Illustration: DARWEN BRIDGE AND WALTON-LE-DALE.]
[Sidenote: _BAMBER BRIDGE_]
Bamber Bridge, where you see, not the rustic bridge across the
tributary of the Ribble that conferred the name upon the place, but
instead a very busy and dirty railway level-crossing, is now; a
something in the likeness of a busy town of cotton-spinning mills.
Beyond it, the road comes to the Ribble itself, and to Darwen Bridge,
rebuilt in 1901, the latest successor of the original bridge built in
1366 and rebuilt in 1752.
[Sidenote: _PARSON WOODS, OF CHOWBENT_]