by Paul Morley
1785
That year it was written of Mancunian manufacturers, ‘By much the major part, and even the most wealthy among them commenced their careers in business with but slender capitals . . . Patience, industry and perseverance was their principal stock.’
Thomas De Quincey was born Thomas Quincey in Greenheys, Chorlton on Medlock, in the midst of Hulme, Ardwick and Rusholme, on 15 August 1785. The family later adopted the name De Quincey, hypothesising that they were related to an old Anglo-French family named de Quincis which dated back to the time of the Norman Conquest. De Quincey’s father Thomas was a cloth merchant and haberdasher who settled in Manchester, and the family lived in a pleasant country home. De Quincey was the fourth of five children; he was close to his siblings and was deeply affected by the deaths of his sisters Jane and Elizabeth during his childhood, claiming the grief caused him to seek sanctuary in an intensely introspective imaginary world. With his brother William he created a fantasy life centred on the two imaginary warring kingdoms of Gombroon and Tigrosylvania. His youthful dreams were as much an influence on his writing as his later drug taking and psychological awareness. When Jorge Luis Borges said that ‘For many years, I thought that the almost infinite world of literature was in one man,’ he paradoxically named a number of candidates – Emerson, Flaubert, Conrad, Poe, Whitman – and De Quincey was one of them. He once referred to how De Quincey’s mode of truth ‘was not of truth coherent and central, but angular and splintered’.
On 21 July 1784, the same year that preacher and Methodist founder John Wesley found in Stockport ‘a lovely congregation much alive to God’, the Chorley-born, 28-year-old Samuel Oldknow, part of a textile family and a self-made calico and muslin maker from Anderton near Bolton, rode into Stockport to purchase a house and some land on Upper Hillgate. He used money borrowed from Richard Arkwright.
It was the time of a great cotton boom in Stockport, following the decline of the silk industry. Silk and the location in 1732 of one of England’s first mechanical silk mills had transformed Stockport. (A mill was essentially a factory, powered by a water, and referred to the milling of grain which had used water power for centuries. Because many processes in the early part of the Industrial Revolution like spinning and weaving were powered by water, the term mill survived even when steam replaced water power.) At the beginning of the eighteenth century Stockport was a picturesque market town with a population of just 2,000. By 1760, there were seven mills employing the same number alone, but silk was soon outmoded by cotton, the new miracle fibre, easy to spin, clean, dye, and comfortable to wear. People who had worn nothing under their coarse clothes could afford to wear cotton undergarments. Cotton changed people’s lives; it allowed the majority of Victorian England to be decently clad, and the public demanded the more practical and versatile cotton.
Cotton calico and muslin had previously only been made in India, and imported. Oldknow was one of the first entrepreneurs to exploit new spinning possibilities and compete with these imports. He had already opened a warehouse in Stockport, and had trawled for workers around the surrounding tenant farms and villages. Nearly 100 workers turned up, and were given the raw materials necessary for turning into cloth at their cottage farms. Oldknow’s Stockport warehouse was open four days a week for the return of goods – Tuesdays and Fridays were the ‘taking in’ days for spinners, Wednesdays and Saturdays the ‘taking in’ days for weavers, and Mondays and Thursdays being packing days for the cloth. Several days a week weavers would tramp the roads to Stockport with bundles of cloth or travel from further out in wagons.
Bramhall Hall
By the October of that first year Oldknow had 100 weavers in the Stockport district working for him and two years later he had become, with his Stockport and Anderton production, the foremost muslin manufacturer in Britain employing over 3,000 trained weavers who possessed among them at least 500 looms. Oldknow erected the first Boulton and Watt steam engine in Stockport for turning his winding machine – it became something of a tourist attraction, and stagecoach drivers would slow their vehicles as they passed along Hillgate to show their passengers. In time, such engines meant that mills and factories could be located away from the river, hastening the pace of industrial growth. In 1786, Oldknow established a bleach works for the bleaching, dyeing and printing of cotton on the north bank of the Mersey in what before the Industrial Revolution was simple farm country – Heaton Mersey, where he built his bleach works, means ‘the high farmstead beside the Mersey’.
The Mersey was an attraction for industrialists harnessing the power of its water, leading to numerous cotton mills such as Park, Logwood and the Dutch, with the result of the cotton production making the river one of the most polluted in Europe. In 1790, the manufacturer becoming a captain of industry, he started to acquire land around the River Goyt in Marple and Mellor – ‘the rounded hill’, a village that was in Derbyshire until 1936, and then Cheshire, until 1974, when it became part of Greater Manchester. On his new land, he established the largest water-powered cotton spinning mill ever built in England, six storeys high, 42 feet wide and 210 feet long with a further three-storey section on either side adding 190 feet. To power it, the River Goyt had to be diverted, requiring a reshaping of the landscape, and a series of three millponds constructed and a complicated system of tunnels, channels and wheelpits built.
The millponds became known in Victorian times as ‘Roman Lakes’ and were a huge tourist attraction. Mellor Mill was water powered for most of its life, steam engines and a boiler not installed until 1860. Although the building of Mellor Mill almost ruined him, leading to another loan from Arkwright, he became the driving force in the development and industrialisation of the area, responsible for the building of roads, bridges, coal mines, housing for his workers and canals including the Peak Forest canal. This created a short cut across Cheshire, Manchester and the surrounding rapidly growing industrial area, linking the Trent and the Mersey and therefore Lancashire and the Potteries. He knew roads were as important as the canals – the main road between Stockport and Marple up to then was little more than a pack-horse track, and to help his enterprises, he built bridges, and repaired and gravelled the road. It was this road that would have taken the Beatles, 140 years later, to and from their one Stockport gig.
After becoming the High Sheriff of Derby in 1824, Oldknow died in 1828, and was buried in Marple Church, respected enough for what was described as his open-hearted simplicity, disinterested benevolence and a genial and sympathetic disposition, that over 3,000 people came to watch his funeral procession.
1783
Attempts to perfect a rotary printing machine for cotton had started at the very beginning of the eighteenth century when a wooden printing roller was used in Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic). A three-colour roller was invented in 1743. However the real leap forward came only in 1783, when Thomas Bell (who worked at Livesey, Hargreaves Hall and Company in Preston) patented a method of printing from engraved cylinders. Two years later he was printing in six colours.
1781
Thomas Clifton and Sir Henry Houghton constructed a private road that made Blackpool more accessible to people. The same year was also the first time stagecoaches from Manchester would travel to Blackpool. By 1782, the stagecoaches would be travelling from Halifax as well.
George Stephenson, born in Wylam, eight miles outside Newcastle upon Tyne, on 7 June 1781, grew up with a keen interest in machines, and would take engines apart to see how they worked. By 1802 he was a colliery engineer, a year before the birth of his only son, Robert. By 1814, experimenting with steam power, he had built a locomotive he called the Blücher – after the Prussian general who had just defeated Napoleon – which could pull thirty tons up a hill at 4 mph. It was, he said, worth ‘fifty horses’. By 1820, now appreciating the importance of a smooth level track, he had built an eight-mile line from Hetton to the River Wear at Sunderland using locomotives, making it the first ever railway totally independent of anim
al power.
‘From a walled medieval town of monks and merchants, Newcastle has been converted into a busy centre of commerce and manufacturers inhabited by nearly 100,000 people. Newcastle is in many respects a town of singular and curious interest, especially in its older parts, which are full of crooked lanes and narrow streets. As you pass through the country at night, the earth looks as if it were bursting with fire at many points; the blaze of coke-ovens, iron-furnaces, and coal heaps reddening the sky to such a distance that the horizon seems to be a glowing belt of fire. From the necessity which existed for facilitating the transport of coals from the pits to the shipping places, it is easy to understand how the railway and the locomotive should have first found their home in such a district.’ Samuel Smiles, The Life of George Stephenson: Railway Engineer, 1875.
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Within a couple of years of the Merseyway shopping precinct emerging from the razed filthy ground around Mersey Square, there would be no more steam trains shuffling across the imperturbable viaduct over the other side of the Wellington Road. It was as though the shopping precinct itself had issued a warning from the future it so dynamically represented. Shops would be a refuge, gathered together in one place, protecting people from lack of choice. The world had changed. It was electric. Steam trains that had once symbolised a world of possibility boiling at the seams were laid to rest where they could be dirty in peace. Nor were cobbles of any use in this increasingly customised consumer world except as a neutralised form of heritage, as harmless souvenirs of the past pressed into the present as depthless decoration.
The new precinct put nationally branded shops on two levels around a pedestrian square you could wander through like it was a flat-packed concrete park left over from a science-fiction film set in an imaginary country lost between America and Russia. Incongruous open-air travelators glided from the ground floor to the first level connecting with various gangways as if the space was part of some gigantic machine. Thirty feet below this shiny lightness in a dark dripping tunnel flowed the ignored and apparently reviled river, as if the Mersey, all that wet messy possibly even shitty business, did not suit the new-generation modernist version of the market town. Apparently setting a big steel-framed concrete-clad shopping centre slap bang in the middle would update and repair the town’s creaky reputation. Meanwhile, the idea of the Mersey was relegated to a form of branding: a bus station and a parade of shops were the Mersey, not a river.
Stockport followed Manchester as the changes that had begun two centuries before, conclusively moving things from the rural to the urban, were forced to keep coming – industrial revolution, wars, industrial decline, uninspired social solutions – and Stockport tried hard to keep up. Merseyway was the latest in a series of rearrangements, renovations and building projects that had begun in the nineteenth century – when cathedrals, palaces and podiums were supplanted by hotels, railways stations, ports, markets, arcades, streets – as if this was to be the one that would bring the town into the middle of the forward-reaching twentieth century.
The Toast Rack, Hollings College, 1973
I never once thought about this at the time, but the darkened Mersey was now beginning in enforced hiding a pulpy journey that for hundreds of years had marked the line between Lancashire and Cheshire. ‘Mersey’ is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for boundary or border river, possibly because it originally formed the border between Mercia and Northumbria. Even when I was visiting Merseyway almost every day, because the seductive newness of the place and the shops filled with the now of the times suited me as a teenager more than it did Lowry and his beloved easel, I never seemed to wonder why on earth the Mersey didn’t actually flow through the town centre. I’d go as far as to say I never once thought about where the Mersey was.
It made its way to Liverpool, where it was in the clear centre of things, where it was better known, and more loved, because it was part of the city’s edgy, alluring worldwide reputation, because it had beat music and the Beatles, and a whole song celebrating the ferry that took you across it. In Stockport we walked across the Mersey without knowing it was there, and we headed into Boots, WHSmith, Marks & Spencer, and the record shop Nield and Hardies, where I bought my first single, which, funnily enough, was about a white swan.
The Mersey becomes itself a few hundred yards to the east of Mersey Square, the result of the foamy black-brown joining of the Goyt and the Tame, which themselves united several small dribbling streams that spring out of the craggy wilderness on the Pennine Hills, dashing out amidst boggy heather, moss, bracken, rocks, bent grass – the Tame rising in Saddleworth close to the border with west Yorkshire, flowing through Stalybridge – separating Lancs. and Yorks. – Ashton under Lyne, Dukinfield (open land of ducks), Denton and Hyde, half a mile to the east of Westbourne Grove, Reddish, close enough for me to bike to within minutes and follow for another few minutes to where it meets the Mersey.
The Goyt starts in the moors of Axe Edge near the main road between Buxton and Macclesfield, travels alongside old lanes and packhorse tracks through Whalley Bridge, New Mills, Disley, Marple Bridge and Offerton, having been joined by the Etherow, which once marked the historical border between Cheshire and Derbyshire. The Etherow rises 1,700 feet above sea level in eerie, boggy Featherbed Moss, Bleaklow near Sheffield, trickles, rushes, winds and spills, trying to find its level, for nineteen miles, flowing through a chain of reservoirs in the valley of Longdendale constructed by the Manchester and Salford Waterworks between 1848 and 1877. Emerging at the village of Tintwistle, once of Cheshire, from 1974 of Derbyshire, with its cricket team logo featuring the wheatsheaf of Derbyshire, the red rose of Lancashire and yet also the white rose of Yorkshire, it enters Tameside and Greater Manchester at Hollingworth before it passes into Stockport and joins the Goyt. Where the Etherow meets the Goyt at Brabyns Park in Marple was once considered the place where the Mersey actually begins; some say it was a mistake in a Victorian map that moved the beginning of the Mersey closer to the town centre. This is where the Goyt tumbles underneath a stone bridge down below a busy, indifferent road and the Tame swirls by a large patch of waste ground, where little remains of the once busy Stockport Tiviot Dale railway station. They meet in Portwood as the Mersey, and almost immediately disappear.
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1778
In 1778 William Wordsworth was sent to a school founded by Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, in the year 1585 at Hawkshead in Lancashire. Hawkshead is a small market town in the vale of Esthwaite, about a third of a mile north-west of the lake.
Football matches were originally almost battles in the streets of towns like Rochdale fought by unruly crowds, and there were inter town and village ‘games’. On 3 February 1778 the Manchester Mercury noted a fixture between towns: ‘A match of football between Ashton Lever Esq. and the township of Middleton, Blackley, Prestwich against Captain Aytoun and the townships of Rochdale, Royton & Oldham to begin at 12 o’clock on February 11th 1778.’
1770
William Wordsworth was born in the town of Cockermouth in 1770, and his first home was in the Lake District, one of many he would have there. His boyhood was full of adventure among the hills, but he said of himself that he showed ‘a stiff, moody, and violent temper’. He lost his mother when he was eight, and his father, John, a legal representative of the first Earl of Lonsdale, in 1783, when he was thirteen. Nature was important to Wordsworth from his earliest years, as it fired his vivid imagination. Some of the most striking memories he would describe in The Prelude are of experiences he had as a child, when his impressionable mind was sometimes even afraid of his surroundings. He tells of a night-time boat trip he took which left him shaken, thinking ‘grave and serious thoughts . . . for many days’:
I dipp’d my oars into the silent Lake
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan
When from behind the craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a hu
ge Cliff
As if with voluntary power instinct
Uprear’d its head.
That cliff seemed to follow him ‘like a living thing’. He rowed away with ‘trembling hands’, and was haunted afterwards day and night by forms moving slowly through his mind. Wordsworth was intellectually inspired by his surroundings: ‘O Nature! Thou hast fed / My lofty speculations!’ In his everyday life among the vales and mountains he would observe, consider and commit his reflections to verse – often doing so aloud as he walked.
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The Mersey bursts from its temporary captivity at the other side of the square and the A6, thrashing underneath the hundred-foot-high viaduct past long-extinct mills and settling between the craggy red sandstone and the canopies of trees, and without wondering where it comes from, you could look down on it from the Wellington Bridge, as it heads out to the north-west, south of Heaton Norris and Heaton Mersey past traces of the old bleach works, refuse tips, railway sidings through woods towards Didsbury, Sale and Northenden, meandering around the western edge of Manchester, set back from the massed houses behind protective parkland, the crammed-together Withington, Chorlton-cum-Hardy and Sale golf courses and fields.
As it snakes through the golf courses the Mersey passes near the Southern Cemetery, where notable local personalities are buried: Sir Matt Busby, manager of Manchester United between the finish of the Second World War and the end of the 1960s, including the 1958 Munich air disaster, charismatic Granada Television presenter, northern historian, United fan and Factory Records impresario Anthony H. Wilson, and L. S. Lowry, who often stood near the Mersey, thinking fluid thoughts about the lonely depths, closed-in poetry and mournful resonance of northern colour, character and shadow.
