by Paul Morley
With costs that had soared from £5.25 million to £15 million, an army of 16,000 builders ranging from labourers to craftsmen to engineers and surveyors, and numerous setbacks, the Manchester Ship Canal was finally officially opened some five months after its opening for general traffic. The ceremony took place on 21 May 1894, and Queen Victoria knighted the mayors of Salford and Manchester while she was there. She arrived by train at London Road station (later renamed Piccadilly), and from there progressed through the city, which was decked out with bunting and ornamental arches, to Stretford and then to the port, where she boarded the royal yacht for a ceremonial sail around the docks. Apparently she was heard to remark on the very noticeable smell. The canal, 36 miles long, 200-plus feet across and 30 feet deep, enabled ocean-going vessels to navigate from the Irish Sea into the industrial heart of Manchester.
Queen Victoria’s royal train passed through Miles Platting on its return journey after she had opened the Canal and an eye-witness account survives from one of the excited children who had gathered on Miles Platting station to wave to her as she passed. The lad said that although the Queen acknowledged them she did not smile and he thought her ‘a bit of a sauerkraut!’
The name Formby is said to have come to James Booth while sitting on a railway platform watching a goods train destined for Formby, a coastal town between Liverpool and Southport. He took the name George because of its royal connections, or perhaps because it was a common name at the time and went well with Formby, and he was George Formby until his death twenty-four years later in 1921, when his son took over and assiduously developed the franchise.
1893
Leeds became a city. It boasted an effective tramcar service, libraries, parks, schools and one of the finest shopping centres in the north, famed particularly for its arcades. By now the village by the Aire had spread itself across the hillsides of the valley, absorbing the local townships. It had become, as the Yorkshire Factory Times described it, ‘A vast business place . . . a miniature London.’
‘As a practical man,’ Robert Blatchford asked an Oldham weaver in his collection of socialist essays, Merrie England, ‘would you of your own choice convert a healthy and beautiful country like Surrey into an unhealthy and hideous country like Wigan or Cradley, just for the sake of being able to once a year go to Blackpool, and once a night listen to a cracked piano.’
1892
Band leader and impresario Jack Hylton was born on 2 July at 75 Boundary Street in the village of Great Lever, Bolton. He was christened John Greenhalgh Hilton by his cotton-yarn-twister father, George, originally from Stalybridge, and his mother, Mary, a schoolteacher. It was reported that his mother was knitting a pair of socks to earn a shilling the day he was born. George Hilton worked in a cotton mill, along with a great number of people in that area of Bolton in the late 1800s, but, unlike most, he was determined to make a better life for his wife and children. He was also an active trade unionist and helped establish a local socialist club.
Jack’s interest in music probably developed through his father’s talent as an amateur singer, mostly of Victorian ballads. By the time Jack reached the higher grade school in Bolton, his father had become the licensee of a public house called the Round Croft in James Street, Little Lever. George would sing to the customers as well as serve drinks. Here Jack gave his first public performances, accompanying his father on the piano as he sang popular songs of the day. Hylton then accumulated considerable experience as a stand-in pianist and singer, but it was in 1909 that he found his true vocation as a conductor, when he began to direct touring pantomime.
On a foggy night in November, 1892, the Mellor Mill at the foothills of the Pennines, on the bank of the River Goyt near New Mills and Marple, built by one of Stockport’s pioneering cotton traders, Samuel Oldknow, caught fire. Accidents were common at such mills, but there were rumours of it being the result of business rivalry. The blaze was not noticed until 2 o’clock in the morning, by which time it had gained a firm hold and there was no hope of checking it with the fire-fighting equipment then available. The following is an extract from the Cheshire County News report on the burning of the Mill:
. . . Immense tongues of fire were belching forth from the windows. Higher and higher they leaped and blazed, the building and its environs being encircled with a halo of crimson light. A message was despatched to Marple and Compstall fire brigade, but they arrived too late to be of any practical service. The spectacle when the fire was at its height was a splendid but awe-inspiring one. The entire mass of buildings, which covers half an acre in area, was in gigantic blaze, brilliantly illuminating the district. Huge columns of smoke ascended into the heavens and hung in the form of a dense canopy over the burning building. One by one the floors fell in with a deafening crash and the machinery clanged together like the roar of artillery. Then the roof with one gigantic swoop collapsed, falling through the practically demolished building with a thunderous smash, amidst the shrieks of the by-standers, for all the village was now awake. The mill girls with their shawls over their heads, the children clinging, terrified, to their mother’s dresses, and the men who had been striving to render what little assistance there was in their power, were all gazing at the burning pile . . .
In 1892 J. R. Clynes became an organiser for the Lancashire Gasworkers Union. This resulted in him leaving Oldham for the first time.
Millions of men and women died in their own towns and villages without ever having travelled five miles from the spot where they were born. How vividly I remember my first long journey away from Oldham. I had to attend a conference of the Gasworkers Union at Plymouth. To get there entailed a railway journey down the length of England. Men of my own class were driving the engine and acting as porters. I remember a sensation of power as I glimpsed a future in which all these men would be teamed up together with mill-hands, seamen, gasworkers – in fact, Labour everywhere – for the benefit of our own people. The least change of accent in speech, as we stopped at various towns, fascinated me, and I noted varieties of face, dress and manner. That was a wonderful journey for me, who had never before been out of the Lancashire murk. To look through the carriage windows and see grass and bushes that were really green instead of olive, trees that reached confidently up to the sun instead of our stunted things, houses that were mellow red and white and yellow, with warm red roofs, instead of the Lancashire soot and slates, and stretches of landscape in which the eye could not find a single factory chimney belching – this was sheer magic! I began to experience an inexhaustible wonder at the gracious beauties of the world outside factory-land, and this sensation has never wholly left me. That first long railway journey was as wonderful to me as if I had been riding upon the magic carpet in the Arabian Nights. And more and more strongly as I gazed, I felt a sense of indignation that the world should be so generous and so lovely, and yet that men, women and children should be cooped up in black and exhausted industrial areas like Oldham, merely so that richer men could own thousands of acres of sunlit countryside of whose experience many of the mill-workers hardly ever dreamed.
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I arrived in an Eccles largely settled into a typical post-industrial post-war rut, stuck to a declining darkening Salford that had slumped against its more prosperous Manchester neighbour for decades. Eccles was poignantly most famous for its deceptively simple round currant-packed flaky light-puff-pastry cake, first sold in the late eighteenth century at James Birch’s shop on the corner of Vicarage Grove by the station. An early rivalry with a former employer over who made the best, most authentic cake encouraged enough local interest for them to quickly become popular.
It is thought that the original Eccles cake recipe came from the remarkable and highly accomplished Doncaster-born Mrs Elizabeth Raffald’s (née Whitaker) influential The experienced English housekeeper – for the use and ease of ladies, housekeepers and cooks, one of the most successful cookery books of the eighteenth century, published in 1769. Written in robust direct language tha
t still seems clear and useful today, it included advice about how to spin sugar and thoughts about wine.
Elizabeth apparently served Eccles cakes regularly when she was housekeeper at Arley Hall in Cheshire for the eldest daughter of the Earl of Derby, Lady Elizabeth Warburton, to whom she dedicated her book. She made the rare move from domestic service to business, using the experience she had gained running an aristocratic household to reinvent herself as a visionary entrepreneurial career woman, quick to recognise and observe the rapid changes that were taking place socially and economically in Manchester. She was a shrewd and enterprising living metaphor for how Manchester and surrounding districts accelerated into the nineteenth century and beyond, anticipating how there would be demand for new sorts of trades, services and financial exchanges, and how people with new money would crave novel tastes, pleasures, opportunities and venues. Business – and people being busy – would require new forms of finding, inventing and enjoying leisure pursuits.
Manchester was transforming because of irrepressible self-made people like her, whose imaginative ability to create change led to more change, to equally motivated individuals who were inspired by the progress around them, and who in turn inspired others with their ideas and activities, expanding their minds and the city. New thoughts led to new discoveries led to new people with their own originality and pride arriving to make use of this new dynamic world. Women, with their own particular flair for creative and commercial thinking, with their own desires, were a vital part of this shift towards the future.
Fred Perry
Raffald’s restless, aspirational craving for progress, cooperation and social well-being is at the very start of the momentum that can still be felt in the north over 200 years later, wherever there is still belief in self-enlightenment, in making the best of whatever is around, in adapting to local conditions. She helped form the ‘shopocracy’ that was an essential part of Manchester’s rise to greatness, another layer of influence, energy and achievement to rival that of the mill owners, its members emerging often from the working class to claim positions within society without losing their appreciation of values other than merely the making of money and the creation of prestige. She was selling things; she was selling herself, and making her own way.
Presciently appreciating the connection between commerce and print, between an audience and exciting new products, anticipating the important role publicity would play in this new world, Elizabeth helped found Salford’s first newspaper, Prescott’s Journal, and published the first street and trade directory of Manchester in 1772. She kept a confectionery shop – more of a delicatessen stocking an exotic array of foodstuffs – ran old and famous local inns including the Bull’s Head in Manchester and King’s Head in Salford, was one of the first writers to use ‘barbecue’ as a cookery term, the first to record in writing the word icing for the topping of cakes, wrote the first published recipe for a wedding cake and for crumpets, wrote an unpublished book on midwifery, supplied basic and sophisticated cosmetics, rented genteel lodgings and storage space, opened perhaps the first office in Manchester for the supply of servants, and was buried at Stockport parish church after dying suddenly possibly from a stroke at the age of forty-eight in 1781.
Raffald had sixteen daughters during a troubled and sometimes torrid marriage to her less ingenious and fairly hapless florist husband John, formerly head gardener at Arley Hall and from a Stockport family of seedsmen and gardeners going back to the sixteenth century. Only three of her daughters – and it is possible their number was exaggerated, considering she would have had them in the space of eighteen years – were still alive when she died.
The first edition of her recipe book (priced at five shillings) comprised 800 copies, all of which she signed to prove that it was not pirated, and it was reprinted numerous times into the nineteenth century. Some of the recipes, including one for ‘hens nest in jelly’, turned up in Princess – later Queen – Victoria’s hand-copied book of recipes. In 1773 she sold the copyright to her book for £1,400, a considerable sum at the time. After the publisher Richard Baldwin had handed her the money, he asked that some of the terms in the book, being mainly of general use in the north, be changed for the south. Fiery, self-assured Mrs Raffald gently but firmly explained that what she had written was what she had meant to write, and she did not want any changes.
The book included ‘sweet patties’, based on an ancient recipe, with variations according to taste and family tradition, for a cake with enough exotic juicy richness to upset Puritans. Raffald’s ingredients were ‘the meat of a boiled calf’s foot, two large apples, and one ounce of candied orange, chop them very small, grate half a nutmeg, mix them with the yolk of an egg, a spoonful of French brandy, and a quarter of a pound of currants clean washed and dried; make a good puff pastry, roll it in different shapes to the fried ones, and fill them the same way; you may either bake or fry them – they are a pretty side dish for supper’. Elsewhere there was a recipe for ‘little currant cakes’ which hinted at the eventual Eccles cake – ‘bake them pretty crisp and a fine brown’. (A fresh well-made Eccles cake is beautiful. Try with Lancashire cheese. Never eat one that is stale, which leads to their reputation as a fly sandwich.)
Elizabeth Raffald had incredible willpower and the imagination and desire to inspire change. She was an early participant in and an inspiration to the spiritual, cultural and commercial transformation of northern life. It is fitting that something of her fortitude and vivacity has survived (a memorial plaque near Marks & Spencer in Manchester’s Shambles Square was destroyed in the IRA bomb attack of 1996) even if it is nothing more than a pastry that is often made so badly it might have been baked during her lifetime. A theatrical reverberation of her confidence, knowledge and power also lingers in the women of Coronation Street.
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1890
Bram Stoker did a considerable amount of work on his novel during three summer weeks in Whitby (white settlement) – seaside town by Scarborough, east Yorkshire, facing the epic North Sea at the mouth of the Esk, surrounded by the bracken-laden 550-square-mile North York Moors. Of the 124 pages that comprise his working notes, thirty were written in Whitby. They include descriptions of weather conditions, words and expressions in local dialect, a coastguard’s report of shipwrecks, inscriptions copied from tombstones and sketches of the landscape. The name Dracula came from what Stoker learned in the Whitby library while researching the history of vampirism. His original intention had been to call the character Wampyr, but he came across references to a Transylvanian prince called Vlad Tepes (also known as Dracula and Vlad the Impaler), who fought the Turks in the fifteenth century and was renowned for his brutality. A hand-written footnote in the notebook records that Dracul meant devil in Hungarian.
The roads of Lancashire towns were paved with rectangular blocks of hard sandstone called setts, and the footpaths were made of larger oblongs of sandstone called flags. At rush hour, as the mill sirens sounded to summon the workers to their posts, or at the end of a long day the cacophony of a thousand iron-shod clogs on stone paving was tremendous and likened to artillery fire. Children enjoyed making their clog irons spark against the paving stones. Wherever it was wet underfoot, clogs were the preferred footwear, due to their cheapness (to buy and to repair), their durability and their comfort.
1889
English writer Edward Carpenter publishes Civilisation: Its Cause and Cure, which later has a great influence on Mahatma Gandhi. Carpenter looks down on the town of Sheffield and sees ‘Only a vast dense cloud, so thick that I wondered how any human beings could support life in it, that went up to heaven like the smoke from a great altar. An altar, indeed, it seemed to me, wherein thousands of lives were being yearly sacrificed. Beside me on the hills the sun was shining, the larks were singing; but down there a hundred thousand grown people, let alone children, were struggling for a little sun and air, toiling, moiling, living a life of suffocation, dying (as the sanitary reports only too clearly sho
w) of diseases caused by foul air and want of light – all for what? To make a few people rich!’
1888
‘I bought a copy of John Mitchell’s Jail Journal in an Oldham junk-shop in 1888, and the author’s patriotism, courage and loyalty to his country affected my feelings in a way I have not yet forgotten. But books of my own were rare luxuries. Most of my reading was done in the Oldham Equitable Co-operative Society’s Library. I remember sitting there night after night, watching men and boys reading the employment advertisements, reading them till the type stupefied the eye and then sighing and shuffling down the steps into the grimy streets outside. I sat at a table reading Shakespeare, Ruskin and Dickens, or whatever else I could get hold of. I remember my discovery of Julius Caesar and how the realisation came suddenly to me that it was a mighty political drama, not just an entertainment . . . The old librarian of the Society’s library took a kindly interest in me. Often he would hobble across to where I sat and murmur in satisfaction, “Stick to Shakespeare and the Bible. They’re the roots of civilisation.”’ J. R. Clynes, Memoirs, 1937.
The world’s first professional football league was set up in 1888 in the Royal Hotel, Piccadilly. None of the twelve original members were from Manchester. Blackburn, Burnley, Preston, Bolton and Accrington joined the Football League at its inception in 1888 and Preston North End emerged as the dominant football team in the early years of the League’s history.
James Haslam, secretary of the Piecers Union in Oldham, describes a meeting that took place in 1888: ‘The turn of Clynes came about nine o’clock. He was nothing to look at – a frail lad, pale and serious in ungainly clothes. For three-quarters of an hour the piecer-orator spoke with well-measured sentences of sincerity and grammatical precision. The audience, which had not been easy to control, laughed with him, and was sad with him. Afterwards the chairman of the committee said to me: “Where did you get that lad from? This country will know summat about him – if he lives!”’