by Paul Morley
42
1929
The peak of British cotton cloth production came in 1913, when the combined output of the industry reached 7,075,000,000 (7 billion) square yards of cloth. But within a few short years the world would be a very different place, and the British cotton industry would begin its rapid decline. Those who in 1920 had pondered the question ‘Is Lancashire a modern El Dorado?’ were by 1929 left to wonder ‘is Lancashire finished?’
J. B. Priestley’s fortunes were transformed when he was given a sizeable amount of money by his great friend the novelist Hugh Walpole in 1929. Walpole’s gift enabled Priestley to write The Good Companions, a novel concerning a troupe of players touring Depression-hit middle England. The novel earned him the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction and made him a national figure.
To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touchline, a lightning shot, a clearance by back or goalkeeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced towards the opposite goalmouth, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turns at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half.
J. B. Priestley’s broadcasting career began in the 1920s and almost ended in 1929, when Hilda Matheson, the BBC director of talks, concluded that he had a ‘very unattractive voice on the microphone’. Matheson’s verdict would have surprised later admirers of his wartime broadcasting style, and perhaps reflected a 1920s view that northern accents, however ‘educated’, lacked the gravitas of the ‘received pronunciation’ in which the BBC preferred to discuss weighty issues.
1928
‘In spite of weariness I fell brooding over cotton men and their problems yet further, and as my thoughts turned more and more on the men I grew more and more depressed. I wondered despairingly whether they could appreciate any danger until it had overtaken them . . . By some Wellsian magic I was transported into the House of Commons . . . The President of the Board of Trade was winding up a critical debate on the Lancashire cotton industry. Just before he made an end my eyes wandered to the Speaker’s Chair. I started. Ghostily I seemed to see behind it the greatest of old timers who had brought the cotton industry to its hour of unparalleled fortune . . . Unseen by the assembled House the ghost of the great old pioneer, no longer able to restrain its fast-rising passion, was turning to depart. As it made ready to go its eerie way, I seemed to catch the words that fell between heartbeat and anger from its lips: “The men are spent. The machine is broken. The glory is for ever departed.”’ Ben Bowker, Lancashire Under the Hammer, 1928.
1927
Kenneth Arthur Dodd was born in November in the Knotty Ash area of Liverpool, which he later would make famous via the Diddymen. He began his career as a ventriloquist when his parents bought him a dummy. He performed on the club circuit under the guise of Professor Yaffle Chuckabutty, Operatic Tenor and Sausage-Knotter, but kept his day job as a door-to-door salesman. ‘People in Liverpool live their lives in a higher gear than most people. We are very enthusiastic people.’
Most of urban Lancashire was bypassed by the changes of the inter-war years, left in a time warp from which it was occasionally retrieved by music-hall jokes and horrified social reporting. The popular proverb about industrial success and failure ‘Clogs to clogs in three generations,’ with its wryly comforting message of the ultimate humbling of the upstart mighty – pride coming before a fall – had come to pass; but the real victims were the working class of industrial Lancashire not those who had pocketed the surplus value of their labour. The wheel had almost turned full circle, and Lancashire was fast reverting to the relative poverty and provincial backwardness of its provincial pre-industrial past.
In 1924, the Rochdale Canal Company made a statement warning that they felt there was no future for canals in this country unless the government provided them with some sort of aid. Their pleas were ignored by Parliament, and after many decades of decreased use, Narrowboat Alice, carrying 20 tons of wire from Sowerby Bridge to Manchester in 1927, was the last commercial cargo to travel the whole length of the Rochdale Canal. Over the next few decades canals were treated as though they were something of an embarrassment in a world of rail and road, and were increasingly ignored, built over, filled in, used as a local dump, stuck under motorways, treated as sewers, like they were channels of pollution, slow routes to nowhere special, not astonishing waterways that had opened up the nation.
43
To get to Houldsworth Square meant a walk along Gorton Road towards South Reddish, a walk lined with shops of which none have remained fixed in my mind apart from my barber, the occasional shop that sold fizzy pop and loose sweets, and an early version of a pound shop, which sold a lot of very cheap nothing in particular from plastic toys to cleaning sponges. I never went into pubs – I wasn’t even aware whether my dad ever did, and there was never any alcohol in our house – so I don’t remember any of the locals.
Map of the Nico Ditch from Reddish across South Manchester
Houldsworth Square, and until I was about eleven the toy shop on the other side with its transforming display of shiny multicoloured sweetly detailed Matchbox model cars, was about as far as I would venture. There were a couple of gigantic buildings near the square, totally out of scale with everything around them, mounds of brick, window and towering chimney that even to my young mind seemed to have run out of purpose, and I never wondered what their original purpose might have been. They were used now to manufacture and pack sweets – my mum worked in one for a while, eight hours a day filling bags with an assortment of misshapen toffees, boiled sweets and broken candy – and as the headquarters of a mail-order catalogue, but the buildings dwarfed this kind of mundane activity. These were buildings that must have once been important but were now stilled, giant reminders of when men made their minds up that they were going to make money, run businesses, hire people, organise communities, make decisions and fashion changes. Men who were going to show the world how important they were by building bulked-up structures clearly meant to stand at the centre of affairs representing their yearning to stand tall and proud among many. They intended to stamp their egos into the very ground they owned and throw grit in the eyes of the feeble minded. To me the buildings just seemed from the ancient past or weirdly fed back from a distant future. I never thought about why it was called Houldsworth Square and never considered that there in fact had been a Houldsworth, a William Houldsworth and eventually a Sir William Henry Houldsworth, Baronet. Without Sir William Houldsworth there would not only have been no Houldsworth Square, there would not have been a Reddish – at least, not as it turned out to be.
There would not have been this story, so this story of the north, with Houldsworth Square at its nondescript centre, the story in my mind of how the north was built, rebuilt, dreamed, scarred, lost, found, is the consequence of Conservative politician, committed Christian, dedicated philanthropist, social pioneer, paternalistic entrepreneur, cotton master and gifted organist William Henry Houldsworth being born in Ardwick, Manchester on 20 August 1834, the fourth son of Henry Houldsworth and Helen Hamilton. (At the time pre-industrialised Ardwick was an indistinct mile east of the Manchester city centre, located in open countryside, and Tiny Tim from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is said to be based on frail invalid Henry Augustus Burnett, known as Harry, Dickens’ nephew, son of his sister Fanny and Henry Burnett, both of them singing and music teachers living in Elm Terrace, Higher Ardwick. Harry died in Ardwick in 1849, aged nine, a year after his mother, who died of consumptio
n.)
Houldsworth was educated at the University of St Andrews in Scotland, and then joined the family business. His family were Liberals and shared some of the values and wider principles of Liberalism, but William was unsympathetic to the radical wing of the party and felt closer to the New Conservatism of Benjamin Disraeli. He was a prime example of the new type of Manchester businessman, succeeding through their own concentrated self-motivated energy and expecting others to be inspired to do the same and thus generate more of the same sort of achievement.
In a speech in 1827 at the Manchester Mechanics Institute in Cooper Street, founded two years before for the ‘improvement intellectually and socially of the working and middle classes’, the scientist, lecturer and Institute administrator John Davies told his audience, ‘Man must be the architect of his own fame,’ and this philosophy drove the likes of Houldsworth. As William was planning his local empire, he perhaps felt some guilt that earlier generations of Manchester men, those bigwig entrepreneurs who had made their money as the city went through an accelerated urbanisation, had ignored the neglect of town planning that had led to the shocking disparity between the ‘hovels and the palaces’. Houldsworth was more sensitive to how the increase in production leading to the increase in population had had such a terrible impact on the quality of life and health of ordinary working people. He built big to express his ego and ambition, but he also thought of his workers.
He first bought land in Reddish in 1864 alongside the Stockport Branch of the Ashton Canal, where he built Reddish Mill, adding North and Middle Mills over the next ten years. The gargantuan main factory contained a huge central clock with front and back faces to ensure late workers had no excuse, a fine 110-foot chimney at the back and forthright twin towers either side of the main entrance.
Abraham Henthorn Stott designed the Houldsworth Mills. Born in 1822 in Crompton, the son of a stonemason, he’d served his apprenticeship with Sir Charles Barry, architect of the Houses of Parliament and Manchester Art Gallery, and was the head of the Oldham-based Stott dynasty of mill-building structural engineers and architects, who designed and constructed scores of important, extremely conspicuous mills in the surrounding area. He spent ten years building not only the mills for Houldsworth but associated houses and community buildings. Houldsworth, inspired by the example of distinguished Nonconformist West Riding industrialist Sir Titus Salt and his progressive industrial community outside Bradford, was concerned to look after the spiritual and social welfare of his employees and their families, and spent time and money on where they could worship, socialise and be educated. In 1874 Practical Magazine described Salt’s industrial community, Saltaire, three miles from Bradford, which took twenty years to build, as ‘a nation in miniature, a little kingdom within a kingdom’.
In building and expanding his community, Houldsworth was a bold enterprising thinker, or at least was part of a committee of big thinkers, even though Reddish was a modest, peripheral space. He and the company he helped found commissioned the best practitioners in their fields. Stott was chosen for the mills because he was the best in the north, and to design his churches and schools he hired one of the most successful nineteenth-century architects, Alfred Waterhouse, born in Aigburth, Liverpool in 1830, the son of wealthy mill-owning Quaker parents. One of Alfred’s brothers, accountant Edwin, was co-founder of Price, Waterhouse and Co.
The prolific, versatile Waterhouse was an influential figure in the assertive high-Victorian architecture that was part of Manchester’s transformation into a major international city during the nineteenth century. Known as Slaughterhouse Waterhouse for his liking for red brick, his buildings were nostalgic for medieval flamboyance, which made them look particularly dated by the 1960s, and he was determined to produce complicated, stirring skylines. He built the intimidating Strangeways Prison, the massive, quintessentially Gothic Refugee Assurances Building on the corner of Oxford Street and Whitworth Street, as well as twenty-seven buildings around the county for the Prudential Assurance Company. He also designed the Natural History Museum in London, the National Liberal Club, Liverpool Infirmary, the Metropole Hotel on the seafront at Brighton, and various buildings for Oxford and Cambridge including the Union Buildings and work for Caius College.
By the end of his career, always determined to be much more than a provincial architect, he would be credited with over 650 buildings, and between 1865 and 1885 was known as Britain’s most widely employed architect. He was president of the Royal Institute of British Architects from 1888 to 1891. Most notably, in 1869 he solved the problem of locating a large building on a tricky triangular site in the city centre by building the dramatic, architecturally sonorous Manchester Town Hall with its front on Albert Square. This was finally completed in 1877, with a 280-foot clock tower, the three faces of the clock inscribed with ‘Teach us to number our days.’ The town hall would be described as a ‘High Victorian secular masterpiece’ and gave imposing spatial form to the then cresting Manchester self-belief. Waterhouse’s work for Houldsworth was relatively modest, especially compared to the ostentatious and ingenious Manchester Town Hall, but he would work on anything that caught his eye – as big as a town hall, a church, a museum, a prison, but with his love for practical but alluring detail he also designed the hot-water fountain in Chester Street, Manchester, a signboard on iron brackets for the Grosvenor Hotel in Chester, an extension to Knutsford Jail, various stables, semi-detached houses and sundry alterations to existing buildings. Commissioned in the 1870s and named after Houldsworth’s wife, St Elisabeth’s Church was built between 1881 and 1883 and paid for by Houldsworth, with the addition of a rectory, school and working men’s club, also designed by Waterhouse. The combined buildings were known as the Waterhouse Set. Houldsworth also planned several streets of cottages for his employees, but only a few terraced houses were actually built.
One hundred and five years after the birth of Alfred Waterhouse, in 1935, Norman Foster was born in Reddish and brought up in a gaslit terraced house in The Crescent near a railway viaduct on the gloomy outskirts of Levenshulme where it merges into Reddish. ‘The nearby railway bridge,’ he remembered, ‘bore huge steam trains that flew directly past my bedroom window. Under the arch of that bridge, though, down along a path, was a quite different proposition: a nice middle-class area of streets lined with trees and smart detached villas.’
Norman Foster’s father ran a pawnbroker’s and was later a security guard and a manual worker in a factory; his mother was a waitress. He went to grammar school and was bullied, leaving at sixteen. Foster was a determined bookish youth, a trainspotter, a fan of the Eagle comic and fascinated by Meccano. As a teenager he would cycle around south Manchester sketching parks, bridges, walkways and town squares before he even knew what an architect was. He became besotted with two books in his local library. One was about the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright, the other Le Corbusier’s modernist bible Towards a New Architecture. Lloyd Wright’s maxim was ‘Form and function are one.’
‘If it hadn’t been for Levenshulme Library,’ Foster once said, ‘and those books about architecture I found, I probably wouldn’t have gone to university.’ After school Norman Foster initially worked in the Manchester City Treasurer’s Office before National Service in the Royal Air Force. Once out of the RAF, he went to Manchester University School of Architecture and City Planning – working in a cold store, selling ice cream and furniture, in a factory and even as a bouncer at a cinema to pay his way through college – and developed an understanding of Manchester as a precursor of the modern global city. Perhaps too he found out about a local architect, an innovative designer who died the year he was born at the age of seventy-five, so that Foster joined the path trod by Edgar Wood, born in Middleton to a strict mill-owning father.
Wood initially had ambitions to be an artist, coming to a compromise with his disapproving father, who expected him to enter the family cotton business, by training as an architect. He transferred his artistic temperament
and belief in the beauty of creative power into buildings, mostly domestic but also several churches and commercial buildings, schools and hotels, and he was perfectionist enough to design the furniture and stained-glass windows that went with them, aiming for a completely integrated environment. He was influenced initially by the bold, lyrical Arts and Crafts Movement, and then in the early part of the twentieth century, as the Victorian Gothic tradition faded out, by the more abstract and modern: houses with flat roofs, dramatic curves and discreetly detailed elegance, almost prototypically space age. He built one of the first known concrete flat roofs in Britain – in 1906 – placing Mediterranean-inspired minimalism at the end of a row of everyday terraced houses in his red-brick hometown. In 1914 he built a semicircular two-storey house for himself clearly influenced by his travels to Persia and Tunisia – anticipating the geometric decorative detailing of Frank Lloyd Wright and the romantic industrial mind of Le Corbusier – in Hale, Altrincham, ten miles out of Manchester, where the managerial middle class moved for peace and family life. Florid Victorian architecture veered bizarrely towards Bauhaus sparseness in the village of Hale (Anglo-Saxon for nook or shelter) sixty years after its population was less than a thousand. Wood’s progressive and vivid approach to architecture, his sense of style and purpose, was right up Foster’s high street.
