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Wednesday, 30th July 2003

Notoriety - the Nineteenth Century

Where the actual touch-paper of industrialisation was lit has been the subject of much debate, but its first urban product was Manchester. The growth of the city, in terms of those times, was astonishing. By 1801 the population had climbed to 90,000 and by 1861 it was 355,000. As usual this was a misleading figure. If the wider urban area outside Manchester's narrow boundaries was taken into account the city was half a million in population, packed into an area not much larger than today’s city centre. By 1901, there were more than two million people in the area of present day Greater Manchester.

The whole place was a bustling melting pot of people and businesses: for instance in 1849, along just 300 metres of Oxford Road there were 70 types of occupation from the nation’s biggest locomotive works to watchmakers, surgeons and tea dealers. In 1844, Benjamin Disraeli had called Manchester ‘the most wonderful city of modern times’. The wonder lay in the way the city had changed economically and socially and had become the model for the new capitalism and its positive and negative effects. Manchester had crashed into international consciousness, it was in historian Asa Briggs words, ‘the shock city of the age’.

Manchester Cathedral

The growth in the wealth, fame and prestige corresponded to a similar growth in pride and confidence. As the century progressed art galleries and museums were founded, new libraries opened, parks were laid, and theatres were established. The Collegiate Church was raised to Cathedral status in 1847. Soon after, in 1851, Manchester gained a new university: only the fifth in Britain. In 1853 Manchester gained the overdue Royal Charter which gave it formal city status. The new city played host to several important exhibitions, notably the Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857 - the first international exhibition of its kind.

Cotton might have made Manchester famous but it certainly wasn’t the only employer. Other fields of manufacture grew at the same time: iron founding, boiler making, heavy and precision engineering became key players in the local economy. Similarly, Manchester came second only to London in the number and variety of its banks and insurance houses which also employed large numbers of people. The city also became the centre for regional retailing. One of the first major stores was the Bazaar, which opened in 1839, concentrating on drapery and furniture. This is still going strong across the road from the old location, albeit with the name changed to Kendals.

An example of the Manchester Palazzo

The grandeur and the wealth of this epoch can best be gauged in the streets of the city where the Victorian architecture tells its own story. The dignified rows of Renaissance-inspired warehouses gave a street scene that was compared to Rome. Indeed, the typical warehouse became known as the Manchester Palazzo.

Manchester Town Hall

The Town Hall, completed in 1877 to the designs of Alfred Waterhouse, declares for all to see the extraordinary vigour of the age. At its opening, politician John Bright declared ‘’[We are] standing in a district more wonderful in some respects then can be traced out on a map in any other Kingdom of the world. The population is extraordinary in its number, extraordinary for its interests and industries, for the amount of its wealth, for the amount of its wages, and for the power which it exercises on other nations.’’

Often this energy was harnessed to political ends. Throughout the century the city was at the forefront of radical political thought. The Corn Laws provoked the most infamous act of Manchester’s political life with the Peterloo Massacre in 1819. In the years after Peterloo the Anti-Corn Law League was formed and was centred in Manchester.

Emmeline Pankhurst

Manchester inherited from such events a reputation for liberalism and radicalism that has existed to the present day. The Manchester Guardian, now simply The Guardian, embodied these principles when it first went to print in 1821. Also, mass Western vegetarianism began in Salford in 1809, the Co-operative Movement began in Rochdale in 1844 and the Trades Union Congress first met in the city in 1868. A year earlier, the Reform Bill of 1867 enfranchised most of the male population but excluded females. In response, Mancunian Lydia Becker formed the National Society for Woman’s Suffrage to fight, through constitutional means, for the vote. Later the Manchester family of the Pankhursts would turn the movement radical. In 1832, the Reform Act had, at last, given Manchester two MP’s but it wasn’t until 1838 that the town gained a modern administration. This blossomed to such an extent that by the end of the century Manchester was an expansionist city state running education, parks, water, gas, the police and much else. It even provided a large part of the money to build the Ship Canal.

Statue commemorating John Dalton in Manchester Town Hall

In science and engineering too, Manchester was prominent in many areas. Figures such as John Dalton, J.P Joule, William Fairbairn, Eaton Hodgkinson, Joseph Whitworth and James Nasmyth were globally famous.

Freidrich Engels

There was a price for all the dynamism. Visitors were amazed by the contradictions between the wealth in the centre and the suburbs where the rich lived, and the poor areas where the factories and the dwellings of the workers lay side by side. The French political philosopher, de Tocqueville remarked, ‘everything in the exterior appearance attests the individual powers of Man: nothing the directing powers of society.’ The most famous commentator was the German socialist Frederick Engels with his 1844 book describing Manchester, The Condition of the Working Class in England.

Generally though, the forces at work in this industrial maelstrom were not understood or were ignored. The drive for increased production and profit ensured that the city grew randomly with little regulation. As a consequence, the poor were largely at the mercy of their masters and any economic vagaries. People frequently led dreadful lives, overworked from an early age and living in insanitary and cramped conditions. The lack of regulation meant that pollution destroyed the quality of the air, the water and the earth. The unpredictable nature of the cotton industry, with its frequent period of booms and bust, simply exacerbated the problem.

The worst time of deprivation occurred during the American Civil War in the 1860’s when working days in factories fell from six to two or less. This was caused by the severing of the supply of raw cotton, as the Northern blockade of the Southern States became effective. People in the cotton areas of South East Lancashire found themselves penniless and starving. It took a massive national campaign of relief and the end of the war to ease the destitution.

Conditions were slow to improve. Real national regulation of industry and industrial practice came in 1833 with the first partially effective Factory Act and there were some local initiatives with the private development of factories and hospitals. Generally however, Manchester’s unregulated expansion provided a grim model for future urban development.

Indeed life could be so hard that some have wondered why people moved here at all. Money was the key. For many Manchester provided an opportunity to become rich, for others it offered the prospect of a more or less regular wage. ‘From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows’, de Tocqueville said. More lived in this sewer than got the gold but the potential was more attractive than an unpredictable rural life or an established small town hierarchy.

It was the opportunities here that made the city a magnet for national and international immigration. In Manchester: the Victorian Age, Gary Messinger summed this up. ‘Manchester was an extraordinarily open town… which became a kind of Eldorado. From the farms, villages and towns of neighbouring areas, successive waves of English labourers migrated towards it. From across the sea came the poor of Ireland. From the north came Scotsmen fleeing the harsh life of the Highlands and the slums of Edinburgh and Glasgow. And from the Continent more settlers arrived; some fleeing religious persecution, others fleeing civil strife, such as the Greeks during the revolution of 1821 and Italians during the wars leading up to national unification in the 1840s. Others, under clandestine conditions, came either offering to see or hoping to steal secrets of the new industrial techniques; still others, particularly the large number of Germans from Hanseatic cities,were attracted by the chance of high monetary returns for their business skills. In the northern part of the city, east European Jews arrived to join their Spanish and Portuguese brethren, Italians set up their own community in Ancoats.’

The development of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway caused people to speculate whether horses would be made redundant

Two other events need to be mentioned in the context of the nineteenth century, both involving transport. The first, of world significance, was the Liverpool to Manchester railway of 1830, the first successful goods and passenger railway.

The second transport landmark, towards the end of the century, was the construction of the Manchester Ship Canal, connecting the city directly to the world markets and sources of raw material. Both the railway and canal were important beyond just the needs of transport. The development of the railway provided the city with an alternative to its dependency on cotton, in the form of engineering. The Ship Canal reinforced the movement away from cotton and was to lead to the growth of Trafford Park Industrial Estate, at one time the largest concentration of industry in Europe.