by Paul Morley
Part Eight
For all the boys of Stockport
Nothing is inevitable until it happens.
A. J. P. Taylor
86
At the Liverpool end the Mersey has been allowed to work its prodigious magic, allowed to have its say. At the Stockport end the river was removed from sight, as if it was ugly and poisonous, a squealing new-born mutt, an exuberance of threatening occult vitality, something wild and deviant that needed to be tamed – covered by consumer-framing concrete, grinding workaholic double-decker buses and a well-stocked C&A, by an ugly, squat shopping precinct that dropped something quasi-continental and pseudo-modern right between the colossal Victorian viaduct and the winding inbred twists and turns of a lacklustre market town painstakingly carved out of centuries of endeavour, struggle and commerce.
It’s peculiar that Stockport made the decision to tuck the Mersey away as if it was embarrassing, or dangerous, a liminal representation of supernatural energies, because without the river there would be no Stockport – this is where people met in the Middle Ages to cross the river, and in the late eighteenth century cotton mills were built using the powerful, hurrying and pent-up river for power, giving the town new purpose. It was partially covered first of all, in the 1930s, for the building of a dual carriageway which was part of an improvement scheme, because it was something of a sight, full of industrial waste, an eyesore. That was when the Merseyway was first named, a road on stilts, flat for the trams which had trouble with hilly twisty Stockport. In the 1960s the dirty deed, the complete dismissal of the river, was done, as if covering the Mersey meant covering up the disastrous past, which threatened to make Stockport, crawling noisily and indiscreetly away from the wreckage of the war, too ancient to survive in a world that urgently needed to rebuild and regroup.
As it gratefully emerged into view the other side of the A6, beginning its life, which would lead all the way to Liverpool and the rest of the world, the river was coated with a pockmarked chemical crust that resembled the inside of a Crunchie bar, fizzing and foaming in chunks the size of cannonballs, but the heady smell was more Maltesers, a thick aroma that didn’t seem beery to me as a kid, but which must have been, carrrying waste from Robinson’s Brewery perhaps, which by the 1960s had been situated in Stockport for over 150 years, dominating the south end of the town centre, regularly expelling a pungent aroma into the air, on its way to owning over 400 pubs in the north-west. This wasn’t a river you thought of as being filled with water, or even any type of recognisable liquid, where you used to be able to fish and one day you would be able to fish again.
This was the Mersey Square I grew to know, surrounded still by a dense, meandering, cobbled network of lanes, alleyways and steps laid out under the mighty arches of the viaduct as it soared over the hard-working bus terminal as if brick could cast a spell, a cluttered mosaic of hills, slopes, brows and stairs that you needed to climb in order to head out of the depressed town centre, which always seemed shiny with rain or drained by a stubborn mist that seemed reluctant to let anything as newfangled as electric lighting spoil its effect. For me the narrow lanes, the winding slopes, the steep little steps that took you from one level to another, the convoluted accumulation of cobbled inclines and abrupt ascents packed around the scrubbed backside of the shopping precinct, the Little and Great Underbank, the centre of Mersey Square around where the buses parked, known as the Bear Pit, were as natural as the hills and peaks in the distance, and I was completely ignorant about why they existed. I was oblivious to what history they brought with them, and why the A6, the Wellington Road, swept right over the town centre, above and next to the square where the buses ended their journeys, turning around ready to head out again, in all directions.
Mersey Square was relatively easy to get out of, from what at times could seem like the bottom of the world, because all roads and paths out rose quickly above it – north towards Manchester up heaving Wellington Road North, or up Wellington Road South, which soon evened out as the Buxton Road towards Hazel Grove, Poynton and Macclesfield (Old English maccel, cleared land, or (St) Michael’s open fields), which took you south. You could leave Stockport to the west and move into Cheshire through Bramhall, Heald Green and Wilmslow (William’s hill or mound), to the airport, or leave south-east, climbing Churchgate, Hall Street and Offerton Lane through Offerton before heading down the hill to Marple and High Lane, which issued an invitation to the northern edge of unaligned, toneless Derbyshire. Or you could rise from the hollow at the centre of Stockport, cross the Manchester Road, which would join the Wellington Road North a couple of miles towards Manchester at Heaton Chapel, and head plain east to my impassive Reddish, which sucked you into the shabby south-eastern edges of Lancashire, which in some ways resembled rubble that had slipped to the bottom of the pile.
An early-nineteenth-century description of the shape of Lancashire remarks how it can be likened to a miniature version of England and Scotland, with Manchester in the position that London is in a map of the kingdom, and Liverpool the equivalent of Land’s End. To the south-east, near the bottom, you could place Reddish, but more accurately Gorton and Denton, as the equivalent of the East End of London. The same description talks of Manchester’s reputation for rain, that it is deemed to be the wettest of places – always soaked and miry. It explains that the reputation is slightly exaggerated, but its evident wetness has much to do with its position between the Irish Sea, where the clouds glide over from the Atlantic Ocean, and the mountainous ridge called the ‘backbone of the nation’ which extends from Staffordshire through Derbyshire to Yorkshire – the Pennines. This backbone checks and breaks the invading clouds, which release their liquid load over Manchester and surrounding districts. It then suggests that this mountainous range is actually a sort of advantage, being the most elevated ground on the island. It produces allegedly constant rain but also screens the eastern parts of Lancashire from the blasts, frosts, blights and insects which infest the counties bordering the German Ocean – as the North Sea was also known, depending on your national point of view, until the end of the nineteenth century before hostilities with the Germans meant the name was entirely not acceptable. (At the beginning of the nineteenth century the British Isles were written about as something that merely ‘severed’ the Atlantic Ocean before it took over again in what is now the North Sea.)
87
1761
Richard Arkwright began his working life as a barber, and it was only after the death of his first wife that he became an entrepreneur. His second marriage, to Margaret Biggins in 1761, brought a small income that enabled him to expand his barber’s business. He acquired a secret dyeing method and travelled around the country purchasing human hair for use in the manufacture of wigs. During this time he was often in contact with weavers and spinners, and when the fashion for wigs declined, he looked to mechanical inventions in the field of textiles to make his fortune.
1760
The first coach road between Huddersfield to the east and Manchester to the west was made in 1760. It was constructed by Blind Jack of Knaresborough, who, despite his blindness, was a musician, carrier and guide, as well as a planner and constructor of highways. The road was laid on bundles of heather over the boggy terrain. Much of this road is still in use today. To avoid the steepest gradient on the old road, a new section was constructed in 1791 and is also still in use. At the height of coach traffic six coaches each way between Huddersfield and Manchester would change horses at the Old New Inn in Marsden, and passengers were asked to dismount in consideration for the horses during the long pull up out of the village.
Around 1760 is generally accepted as the eve of the Industrial Revolution. In reality this eve began more than two centuries before. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries brought to fruition the ideas and discoveries of those who had long passed on, such as Galileo, Bacon and Descartes. The discovery of agriculture had made civilisation possible; the Industrial Revolution multiplied society’
s productive capacity many times over. Agricultural progress is limited by the ability of the land to produce (although biotechnology may be changing this) and by the limits of demand. Once food fills the belly, demand ceases. Demand is never infinite. But the demand for manufactured and technological products, arguably, is unlimited.
London to Manchester by coach takes three days.
1759
Francis Egerton, twenty-three-year-old third Duke of Bridgewater, was looking for a better way of carrying coal six miles from his Worsley mines to rapidly industrialising Manchester. Roads were primitive, still mostly a matter of medieval mud, and packhorses were the main method of transporting both raw materials and finished goods. Frustrated by how close he was to Manchester and yet how difficult it was to get his coal to where it was most wanted, Bridgewater needed a waterway that did not head towards the sea but went inland and was totally independent from a river route. Having travelled throughout Europe during his youth on the Grand Tour, the duke had been impressed by continental canal systems such as the Canal du Midi in southern France, running between Toulouse and the port town of Sète. He hired an ingenious self-taught engineer, James ‘Schemer’ Brindley, born north-east of Buxton in 1716, to build him a canal with a series of locks to get barges down to the River Irwell, about three miles from the mine, and then on into Manchester. Brindley had the bold idea of constructing a more level canal requiring fewer time-wasting locks; he would take the canal via an aqueduct over the River Irwell at Barton into the centre of Manchester. Some said this was an impossible scheme – no aqueduct this size had been built before in England – but the duke commissioned it. The canal was carried 840 feet across the river – 38 feet below – on three sandstone arches.
On 17 July 1761 the first barge load of coal is pulled by horses along the completed Bridgewater Canal; the price of coal in Manchester is immediately halved and within a year is down by two thirds. The impact on the cost of coal causes instant canal-building mania. The sight of a barge floating serenely in a gutter high up in the air becomes one of the first great tourist attractions of the Industrial Revolution – the castle or canal in the sky, which before it was built had been a term of abuse from those who thought Brindley was mad. The canal is among the beginnings of the nation’s inland waterway system, the catalyst that started fifty years of canal building.
1758
Cheshire was the most popular cheese in Britain by the late eighteenth century. In 1758 the Royal Navy ordered ships to be provisioned with Cheshire cheeses and by 1823 production was estimated at 10,000 tons per year.
1757
The census puts the Manchester population at 17,101.
1755
Some of the comments on the lifestyle of the lower orders which emerged from large employers and their allies in the eighteenth century suggest that a cultural divide had opened between sectors of Lancashire society. In Manchester in 1755 the Reverend John Clayton described the town’s poor as having ‘an abject mind, which entails their miseries upon them: a mean sordid spirit, which prevents all attempts at bettering their condition’.
1753
When a local entrepreneur put a handful of experimental models of John Kay’s flying shuttle into operation around Lancashire in 1753, word quickly got out that a sinister machine was threatening to rob hand weavers of their livelihood. Mobs marched across Lancashire smashing flying-shuttle looms, and weavers stormed Kay’s home in Bury, destroying everything they found, and might well have killed him if he hadn’t managed to flee to France.
1752
In the sixteenth century ‘manufacture’ meant something made by hand. A manufacturer would therefore be a craftsman. However, as early as 1752 a manufacturer is ‘one who employs workmen for manufacturing’. Moreover, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in several industrial districts, especially in Lancashire and Yorkshire, it had a more restricted sense, denoting ‘an organiser of the domestic system’.
1750
There were probably no more than half a million men, women and children within Yorkshire’s four million acres. There were no towns of any size. Leeds with a population of 17,000 was a collection of mean streets clustering about an old bridge. Sheffield was a nest of squalid houses at the foot of a wild moorland. Bradford was no more than a village of three streets closely packed in a hollow of the hills. Hull sent out a few ships from the quays which lay behind its one street of any importance. Scarborough was a collection of fishermen’s cottages nestling together under the protection of a ruinous castle. Harrogate was a hamlet of nondescript buildings, half-inns, half-farmsteads, which stood about a mineral spring in the middle of a waste. The market towns, still semi-medieval in appearance, were little more than meeting places for husbandmen and hucksters. The countryside, on the other hand, was thickly populated; not only were strings of villages and hamlets as frequent as in the south-west, but sometimes the process of dispersion was carried a stage further, and several villages merging into one another became one vast and loose agglomeration. There was little noise of machinery, and little movement in the land: folk stayed, from birth to death, where fate had set them down. Of animation, evidence of energy, desire for progress, there was nothing save among a few ardent but unencouraged spirits. In York Minster silence and desolation brooded heavily in the deserted aisles and desecrated sanctuary; within York Castle they hanged men for the theft of a goat or a sheep. And on Micklegate Bar, plainly to be seen by all who entered the ancient city, still stood, firmly fixed on pikes, the rotting heads of the Jacobites of 1745.
Published in 1750, Tim Bobbin’s comic dialect masterpiece A View of the Lancashire Dialect; containing the Adventures and Misfortunes of a Lancashire Clown was a great success in the north of England. It was reprinted; further editions appeared and it was pirated. Some people thought the book reflected badly on people in the area, presumably feeling that Lancashire people were made to look like simpletons. Tim answered the criticism in his forthright manner: ‘I do not think our country exposed at all by my view of the Lancashire dialect: but think it commendable rather than a defect, that Lancashire in general and Rossendale in particular retain so much of the speech of their ancestors.’ He went on to ask why, if the Welsh could be proud of retaining their language, and the people of Saxony and Silesia were ‘commended’ for speaking in ‘Teutonic or old German’, should people in Lancashire be ‘laughed at for adhering to the speech of our ancestors?’
1747
The romantic imagery of the Lake District which is now the norm was in fact culturally constructed from the middle of the eighteenth century. Before 1750 or thereabouts the region was described by notable travellers as wild, barren and frightful. Defoe considered the landscape as ‘all barren and wild’, a wilderness far removed from civilisation. The transformation of this bleak wilderness into Arcadia was not a result of a change in the landscape, but came from a new way of viewing nature, as something to be savoured not feared.
1747
In The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy housewife Hannah Glasse upgraded and renamed a Middle Ages recipe for ‘dripping puddings’ first recorded in a book in 1737. What she called a Yorkshire pudding was used to fill up in hard times when there wasn’t enough meat to go around and even used as a main course on its own with onion gravy. When wheat flour came into common use for cakes and puddings, economically minded cooks in the north of England devised a means of utilising the fat that dropped into the dripping pan to make a batter pudding while the meat roasted. She said the sound of fat hitting batter was like the explosive personality of Yorkshire folk.
Take a quart of milk, four eggs, and a little salt, make it up into a thick batter with flour, like a pancake batter. You must have a good piece of meat at the fire, take a stew-pan and put some dripping in, set it on the fire, when it boils, pour in your pudding, let it bake on the fire till you think it is high enough, then turn a plate upside-down in the dripping-pan, that the dripping may not be blacked; set your ste
w-pan on it under your meat, and let the dripping drop on the pudding, and the heat of the fire come to it, to make it of a fine brown. When your meat is done and set to table, drain all the fat from your pudding, and set it on the fire again to dry a little; then slide it as dry as you can into a dish, melt some butter, and pour into a cup, and set in the middle of the pudding. It is an exceeding good pudding, the gravy of the meat eats well with it.
Glasse’s book became the prime reference for home cooks in much of the English-speaking world during its original publication run and spread word of the newly named Yorkshire pudding. Hannah wrote mostly for domestic servants (the ‘lower sort’, as she referred to them), using a conversational style familiar to anyone who has learned a recipe at the elbow of a parent or grandparent. The food is surprisingly recognisable, with staples such as gooseberry fool still known and eaten today, and there are even early traces of Indian dishes which eventually became naturalised in the UK. She disapproved of French cooking methods and in general avoided French culinary terminology.
For decades following its publication, there were widespread rumours that The Art of Cookery had been written by a man. For a woman to have authored such an eloquent and well-organised work seemed implausible to many. James Boswell’s diary records a party at the house of the publisher Charles Dilly, at which the issue was discussed. He quotes Samuel Johnson as saying, ‘Women can spin very well; but they cannot make a good book of cookery.’