by Paul Morley
One of the leading physicists of his time, an inventor best known for his influential research into electricity and thermodynamics and for giving his name to the international unit of energy, James Prescott Joule was born in New Bailey Street, Salford on 24 December 1818, in a house next door to the successful Joule Brewery owned by his father Benjamin. He was considered too sensitive as a child to attend school. In his early years, he was taught by his mother’s half sister, and then by tutors at his father’s house, Broomhill, in Pendlebury, becoming interested in scientific toys and flying kites. He started work in his father’s brewery at fifteen, a good place for him to study machinery and chemical processes. He became fascinated with electric motors, and set out to see if it was possible to convert the family brewery from steam power to electric power.
At sixteen, he was sent to study with ‘the father of modern chemistry’, John Dalton, at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, thriving in the academic surroundings. Dalton was a big influence on Joule, but most of his scientific understanding was self-taught, his scientific brilliance a combination of amateur enthusiasm and innovative thinking inspired by a brewer’s commitment to accurate measurement. His discoveries and writings improved the efficiency of numerous nineteenth-century industrial machines, and his theories led directly to the development of arc welding and refrigeration. His research was self-funded, and his funds finally ran out in 1875 with the decline of the family brewery – his attempts to improve the quality of beer proving a failure. His final few years saw him battle illness, and he died as a result of a form of degeneration of the brain on 11 October 1889 at home in Sale. Joule’s gravestone in Sale’s Brooklands Cemetery is inscribed with the number 772.55, his 1878 measurement of the mechanical equivalent of heat.
Samuel Laycock, one of the best-known writers of Lancashire dialect, who lived much of his life in Cheshire, was born on 17 January 1826 – ‘a year of great drought and scarceness’ – in an isolated farmhouse on a steep slope above Marsden, Yorkshire, a no-nonsense small town surrounded by moorland between Saddleworth and Huddersfield near the Roman trans-Pennine route connecting Chester and York. His father had been a weaver, his grandfather was a farmer.
Educated only at Sunday school, he started working at the local Robert Bowers Woollen Mill when he was nine, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m., for a weekly wage of two shillings. When Laycock was eleven, the family moved to Stalybridge, then at the centre of the cotton industry, an industry that experiencd periodic depressions – ‘when’t trade wur slack’. He earned his living as a power-loom weaver, eventually becoming a foreman, an occupation he continued in until 1862, when the blockade on Confederate cotton exports imposed by the Union during the American Civil War caused mass unemployment and much hardship among Lancashire cotton workers, a period that became known as the Cotton Famine or Cotton Panic.
Laycock was one of the thousands unemployed who tried to earn a living by writing verses which could be set to music and sung in the streets for pennies. His fortitude and striving, his belief in self-help and social reconciliation, were rooted in his own experience of poverty. Between 1855 and 1867 Laycock wrote most of his best-known poetry, including ‘Bowton’s Yard’, ‘Bonny Brid’, the collection Lancashire Lyrics and his first published work, ‘A Little Bit on Both Sides’ in 1855. Much of this work described in dialect verse the disastrous effects that widespread unemployment had on the districts of Stalybridge, Ashton and Dukinfield, which were almost totally dependent upon the textile trade for their livelihood. In March 1863 serious riots broke out in these towns, triggered by an attempt to reduce relief payments and impose harsher conditions on recipients. Panic spread among the local magistracy, who feared a return to the Chartist disturbances of the 1840s. ‘To riot or to rot’ appeared to be the future of Lancashire’s demoralised cotton workers.
His works were immensely popular among working people in northern villages, who readily identified with his sentiments – many poems were published as broadsheets and learned by heart or set to music and became popular songs. The melancholy but mischievous Laycock also produced a valuable record of working people’s experiences at the time, his poems containing a lively relish for fun despite tough circumstances.
In 1865 he became librarian and porter at the Stalybridge Mechanics’ Institute, a fine example of the Victorian quest for self-improvement and self-education as expressed by mill workers. (The mechanics’ institute movement was one of the most remarkable in British educational history, and thrived particularly in the mill towns of northern England. The institutes were a significant development in a period when educational provision for the working classes was practically non-existent: in 1833 only about 800,000 children were receiving some form of instruction, mostly in very elementary reading and writing. George Birkbeck, a Glasgow professor, founded the movement in 1800, with the creation of the first institute in Glasgow. Manchester UMIST – University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology – can trace its roots back to 1824 and the creation of the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute, established by local businessmen and industrialists to ensure workers could learn the basics of science.)
Laycock left this post six years later, after which he seems to have drifted for some time. Various unsuccessful enterprises – selling books on Oldham market, a photography business in Mossley, a short stretch as curator at the Whitworth Institute in Fleetwood – belong to this period. In 1868 he settled in Blackpool as it was thought the climate would be good for his health. He then worked as a photographer and his poems were published in book form, but his income remained precarious. He died in 1893 and was buried in Layton Cemetery, Blackpool.
In 1849, when John Ambrose Fleming was born the son of a Congregational minister, the Reverend James Fleming, in Lancaster, the telegraph was only five years old. By the time of his death nearly a hundred years later, Fleming’s invention, originally known as Fleming’s Valve, had ushered in the age of radio and television. In 1881, after studying at University College, London, and at Cambridge University under James Clerk Maxwell, Fleming was appointed electrician to the Edison Electric Light Company of London, a position he occupied for the following ten years. He then worked as a consulting electrical engineer, advising many corporations on their electric lighting plans and problems.
Fleming’s Valve, patented in 1904, was the first electronic rectifier of radio waves, converting alternating-current radio signals into weak direct currents detectable by a telephone receiver. Augmented by the amplifier grid invented in 1906 by the American Lee De Forest, Fleming’s invention was the ancestor of the triode and other multi-electrode vacuum tubes. With this advance, the age of modern wireless electronics was born. Fleming lived long enough to see the results of his work help save Britain during the Second World War. Radar sets using his diodes proved decisive in the Battle of Britain.
Samuel Ryder was born on 24 March 1858 at Walton-le-Dale near Preston in Lancashire. His father, also Samuel, had a gardening business, and his mother, Elizabeth, was a dressmaker. Throughout his childhood there was friction between father and son. Sam had a brother, James. When the time came they were both sent to Owen’s College in Manchester (now Manchester University), and although James completed his course, Sam did not: he left and got a job with a firm of shipping merchants in Manchester. The family later moved to Sale (at the sallow tree), on the south bank of the Mersey, two miles south of Stretford, and Samuel Senior’s business expanded considerably. Sam came up with the idea of selling penny seed packets to gardeners, a plan his father had little time for, so in 1895 he moved to St Albans in Hertfordshire, where he later established the successful Heath and Heather Seed Company. By 1905 Ryder was a very successful businessman and he was elected mayor of St Albans. When his health suffered due to overwork, his doctors prescribed fresh air and light exercise as part of the cure, and he took up golf. A cricket fan and initially not keen, he would become so enthusiastic that after watching a friendly transatlantic match at Wentworth in
1926 he agreed to sponsor what became known as the Ryder Cup, offering a solid gold trophy costing £200 for a biennial golf championship between the best professional golfers in the USA and the UK.
Emmeline Goulden was born in Sloan Street, Moss Side on 14 July 1858, the eldest daughter of a family of ten children. A prodigious intellect from the start, she attended school in Manchester and Paris at a time when it was still uncommon for girls, even those in the upper classes, to be properly educated. After studying in Paris between 1873 and 1877, Emmeline Goulden returned to England to her former hometown of Manchester and married Richard Marsden Pankhurst in 1879. Pankhurst, a radical lawyer, was the author of the first women’s suffrage bill in Great Britain and of the Married Women’s Property Act (1882). Together they strove to promote equality for women.
In 1894 Emmeline Pankhurst became a Poor Law guardian. This involved regular visits to the Chorlton Workhouse, and she was deeply shocked by the misery and suffering of the inmates. She became particularly concerned about the way women were treated and this reinforced her belief that women’s suffrage was the only way such problems could be solved. By October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst had become frustrated at the lack of success of the Manchester branch of the National Union of Suffrage Societies, and with the help of her daughters Christabel and Sylvia she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union. The organisation’s motto was ‘Deeds not Words’ and its aim was to recruit working-class women into the fight for the right to vote. The group only really came to prominence when Emmeline moved its headquarters to London, where the WSPU was able to hold public meetings and protest marches around the capital, and in particular to the Houses of Parliament. It was an extremely efficient organisation and run much like a volunteer army. In 1906, the group was nicknamed ‘the suffragettes’ by the Daily Mail, and the name stuck.
Emmeline Pankhurst died on 14 June 1928, a month before her seventieth birthday and shortly before her life’s work came to fruition and British women were granted equal voting rights to those of men on 2 July 1928.
Lottie Dodd, ‘the greatest sportswoman of her day’, was born in Bebington, the Wirral, Cheshire on 24 September 1871, the youngest child of a wealthy cotton broker. The winner of the Wimbledon ladies’ singles title five times, the first at the age of fifteen in 1887, as part of her desire to test her versatility, she won the British ladies’ golf championship in 1894.
Frank Pick was born on 23 November 1878 in Lincolnshire, into a devout middle-class Quaker family, the son of Francis Pick, a draper, and his wife Fanny. He was educated at St Peter’s School in York and grew up there. After leaving school he worked for a York solicitor, George Crombie. He would always identify with the industrial and commercial values of the north, and was drawn to abstract art because of its iconoclastic free-thinking spirit. In several talks he gave to the local Salem Chapel Guild as a youth, Pick asserted that the rapidly changing urban world required radical new forms of corporate and spiritual identity. He longed to establish a ‘City of Dreams’, a heroic quest that would require its founders to assume the ‘armour of righteousness in moments of trial and step forth spiritual giants, the warriors of the kingdom’.
He moved to London in 1906 to work as a statistical analyst for the new London Underground Group, then a private group of transport companies setting up the London Tube network. Pick believed that the system needed a corporate identity uniting its disparate elements, both as an aid to confused customers and as an elegant model of civic unity. Rising through the ranks, Pick created a distinct and unifying look for the capital’s transport until 1940, when he resigned from what had then become London Transport. He commissioned artists to design what have become classic art deco advertising posters for the system, and the typographer Edward Johnston to design a special typeface to be used as a unifying symbol throughout the system alongside the famous Underground bull’s-eye logo, which Pick had helped to design. He established the Underground as an aesthetic corporate body devoted to life-enhancing social service as much if not more than profits. Pick was put in charge of the entire London Underground when it was nationalised in 1933, but declined both a knighthood and a peerage.
Novelist, audacious gay-rights pioneer and playwright Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, born in Disley, Stockport in 1904, was one of the first openly homosexual public figures. Best known for his Berlin Stories in the 1930s, he was described by Gore Vidal as ‘the best prose writer in English’. ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Someday, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’ ‘Goodbye to Berlin’, 1945.
Hylda Baker, born 4 February 1905 in Farnworth near Bolton, the eldest of seven, was educated at Plodder Lane Council School. Originally Hilda, she substituted the ‘y’ for show-business glamour. A feisty four-foot-ten-inch bundle of energy, the proto-feminist daughter of comedian Harold Baker made her stage debut at ten. A singer, dancer and comedienne, she wrote her own material, sketches and songs, often featuring her mute friend, Cynthia. She went on to manage her own revue show, design scenery and costumes, write scripts and music, organise the finance and tours, and star in them herself. During a brief break from show business in 1950, she owned a fish and chip shop in Farnworth.
She worked for decades in variety and music hall until a memorable television debut on The Good Old Days in 1955. Her film appearances included a backstreet abortionist in both Saturday Night, Sunday Morning and Up the Junction, and as Mrs Sowerberry in Oliver!, and she became most famous for playing Nellie Pledge in the 1968 sitcom Nearest and Dearest. Nellie was an uptight northern spinster who happily bickered and traded insults – off screen as well, apparently, with little affection – with fellow seasoned music-hall veteran and panto star Jimmy Jewel’s debauched, grumpy Eli after they inherit their father’s Lancashire pickle factory and his liquid assets of nine pounds, seven shillings and sixpence. Eli called her a ‘knock-kneed knackered old nose bag; she called him a ‘big girl’s blouse’ and a ‘four-eyed barm pot’. (Jewel was born James Arthur Thomas Jewel Marsh in Sheffield on 4 December 1909, and left school at fourteen to work as a comic feed for his father, although his first stage appearance was at the age of ten in Huddersfield. Like George Formby Junior, he took his dad’s stage name.)
Nearest and Dearest was so popular it had a summer season at Blackpool in 1970. Hylda later revamped the role in a slightly disguised setting in the less successful 1974 Not on Your Nellie, now as lovable teetotal spinster Nellie Pickersgall, called down to London to run her sick father’s London pub, the Brown Cow. Her catchphrases as classic garrulous gossip included ‘She knows, you know,’ ‘Ooh, I must get a little hand on this watch’ and ‘Have you been, Walter?’ Walter was the ageing silent husband of her cousin Lily. Her malapropisms, presumably caused by the pickles, included ‘Don’t you contracept me,’ ‘You haven’t had the pleasure of me yet’ and ‘What are you incinerating?’
Sir Frederic ‘Freddie’ Calland Williams, born in Stockport on 26 June 1911, was the electrical engineer who invented the cathode-ray-tube memory system to store digital information which heralded the dawn of the computer age. By the end of 1948, the team he led had built a working computer – the Manchester Mark I. Enhanced by Ferranti, this became the Ferranti Mark I. Early in 1951 this became the world’s first commercially available computer.
Barbara Castle was born Barbara Anne Betts on 6 October 1911 in Chesterfield. Her father was a tax inspector, and his job required the family to move, first to Hull, then Pontefract and then Bradford. Barbara attended Bradford Girls Grammar School and became head girl. She wrote that ‘the girls’ parents were all rich, and the dainty frocks that the pupils wore did credit to the school’s reputation of beauty and culture throughout’. From there she won a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford. She then worked as housing correspondent of the Daily Mirror during the Second World War. In July
1944 she married the journalist Ted Castle, and in the 1945 general election was elected to represent Blackburn in the House of Commons. She served as the MP for Blackburn for over thirty years, and had a reputation for being tenacious, conscientious and hard-working. Soon after she was first elected, Stafford Cripps, the minister of trade, appointed Castle as one of his aides. Over the next few years she was associated with the left wing of the party led by Aneurin Bevan.
Castle was chair of the Labour Party 1958/9, and after the party won the 1964 general election the new prime minister, Harold Wilson, appointed her minister of overseas development (1964–5) and minister of transport (1965–8). In this post she introduced the 70 mph speed limit, breathalyser tests for suspected drunk drivers and compulsory seat belts. Wilson wrote in his autobiography Memoirs: 1916–1964, ‘Barbara proved an excellent minister. She was good at whatever she touched. I doubt if any member of the Cabinet worked longer hours or gave more productive thought to what they were doing.’
Barbara Castle should have been Labour’s and Britain’s first female prime minister. What a role model she would have been: passionate, fiery and absolutely committed to social justice . . . Barbara’s biggest achievement, of course, was the Equal Pay Act, introduced in 1970 following the strike by women workers at Ford’s Dagenham plant. Women MPs were few and far between – indeed, there were more MPs called John than there were women in the House of Commons. They were the butt of sexist jokes, from Tory and Labour men alike, and stereotyped as only being interested in ‘women’s issues’. But Barbara never flinched from taking on the cause of equal pay. Barbara Castle was a hero to millions of British women . . . Modern politics would have been very different if she had succeeded in reforming Britain’s outdated industrial relations laws in the late 1960s: her defeat at the hands of Jim Callaghan and the union barons paved the way for the ‘winter of discontent’ and Thatcher’s landslide a decade later . . . we need a heroine like Barbara Castle to remind us that being a moderniser is entirely compatible with a commitment to social justice. Patricia Hewitt, the first female MP for Leicester West from 1997.