Justifiably incensed and led by star striker Billy Meredith, most of the Manchester United players refused to leave the union and were suspended. They started training independently as 'The Outcasts' while the 'proper' United struggled to find enough amateurs to play. The day before the season began, the FA gave in. Back pay was forthcoming, The Outcasts returned to the fold and unionism in football was recognised. Manchester Eleven, Pompous Mandarins Nil, I make that.
I'm walking through Manchester's Gay Village unfolding a page torn from last week's Guardian from my soft leather 'manbag'. Frankly, could I get any more metrosexual? Obviously I could or I wouldn't be chuckling schoolboy-fashion as I do every time I turn into Canal Street and see the judiciously altered road sign that now reads 'anal treet'.
At 11 a.m. the street, whatever you may call it, is just a genteel cobbled thoroughfare running alongside the sluggish Rochdale Canal. But at 11 p.m., it is a very different sexy beast, part Grand Guignol, part fashion parade, part Satyricon. Manchester's Gay Village is the biggest and maybe the most welcoming in Europe. In the bad, frightened days of the mid-1980s when some of the north's nightclubs might as well have offered 'Free Glassings With Every Third Pint Of Löwenbräu', the Gay Village had great bars, played great music and tolerated women and straights wanting a fun, lively alternative to the grim subterranean city-centre cellars with their half-price Midori and T'Pau and sweating sales managers with their hands up their secretaries' pencil skirts. When Manto, the first gay bar, opened, it did it with a flourish: huge display windows, balconies, open terraces. Come and have a go if you think you're hard enough, it seemed to say, on several levels.
As I stroll along, I ponder whether I could guess merely from the names of the bars whether I was in the gay quarter. AXM has a policy of 'no tracksuits or football shirts', which seems an unnecessary fashion edict for a gay bar. I mean, really. But what does AXM mean? Possibly something far too sinful and exotic for someone as 'vanilla' as me. Hey, here's one called Vanilla! (I later find out it's 'the Lesbian mecca of the north', although I imagine Mecca itself is fairly uninviting for lesbians.) Taurus? I like it. Masculine but not too obvious. And what's this one? Queers. Oh well.
In the demure hour before lunch, none are offering anything more sinful or exotic than tapas and latte and bruschetta, which all sound very nice. But I'm just passing through. Guided by the Guardian article I'm clutching, I'm in search of Manchester's blood-red, fiercely leftist past. The article describes a tour of Manchester in the company of local radical historian Jonathan Schofield. There's no doubt where Schofield's sympathies lie. For instance, he's reverential about a table in the cloistered Chetham's Library. 'Parts of the Communist Manifesto were written right here. . . Marx would sit on one side of the table and Engels on the other. Whenever I bring people from the Chinese consulate here and get out the old books that Marx and Engels touched, they weep.'
I suppose communism did cause a great deal of tears what with one thing or another. In the Gulags and the Killing Fields, in Berlin and Budapest and the rice fields of China. And if communism began in Manchester then maybe Morrissey was right. Manchester has so much to answer for. But is that fair? When Manchester and Mancunian citizens had those bold new ideas, they were the underdog not the tyrant. Maybe another Smiths line, from 'This Charming Man', makes more sense here, one Moz borrowed from Peter Schaffer's Sleuth: Manchester has always been 'a jumped-up pantry boy/who never knew his place'.
Historian Asa Briggs remarked, 'If Engels had lived not in Manchester but in Birmingham, his conception of "class" and his theories of the role of class in history might have been very different. The fact that Manchester was taken to be the symbol of the age in the 1840s . . . was of central political importance in modern world history.' Schofield is even more direct. 'Without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union. . . The history of the twentieth century would have been very different.'
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Manchester was on its way, at breakneck speed, to becoming the world's first major industrial city. Its wealth came from cotton and from the crushing labour and the desperate hardship endured by the city's workers. Lake poet Southey talked of the 'narrow streets and lanes, blocked up from light and air, crowded together because every inch of land is of such value that room for light and air cannot be afforded them. Here in Manchester, a great proportion of the poor lodge in cellars, damp and dark, where every kind of filth is suffered to accumulate because no exertions of domestic care can ever make such homes decent.' But it was rich, and de Tocqueville put it succinctly when he said, 'From this filthy sewer, pure gold flows.' It had booming factories, grand hotels and fine parks. It also had 300 brothels and 700 prostitutes. So much for the good old days.
They called it Cottonopolis; a behemoth of wealth and power and prestige built around city-centre slums like Little Ireland. An excellent road system meant that the liberal factory owners could get in and out of the city without seeing the degradation suffered by their workers and thus pronounced that they were 'doing famously' before sleeping easy at night on feather beds in Cheshire or in the rolling hills of the Pennines. Dickens knew this; in Hard Times, his factory owners live on the moor in the fictitious town of Stone Lodge where they can escape the smoke and soot and sewers of Coketown. Coketown was Manchester.
Manchester's factories throbbed and roared day and night and as a result the city itself became a giant turbine for radical ideas. The Chartists rioted regularly in the streets. And whatever James Anderton and the city's mandarins thought of the Sex Pistols playing the Free Trade Hall, it was actually quite in keeping with the building's history. For this is the only building in Britain named after a revolutionary principle. The restrictive Corn Laws of the eighteenth century guaranteed good prices for landowners while putting bread beyond the reach of the working class until they were repealed, thanks to an alliance between radical middle- and working-class activists like Richard Cobden and John Bright, the Rochdale orator who said, 'We were not born with saddles on our backs nor were the gentry born with spurs.' Ironically, today the hall is a five-star hotel with suites that can cost you a grand a night before you even think about having that Toblerone from the minibar. But maybe that's just free trade in excelsis.
Cottonopolis horrified and charmed Friedrich Engels when he came here in 1842 to work as a partner in a textile company. In the company of his girlfriend, a local lass called Mary Burns, he toured the worst areas, found a wretched people 'who must have reached the lowest stage of humanity' and used them as the basis for his book The Condition of The English Working Class, a landmark text and a passionate call to arms. He sounds like a top bloke, actually, old Fred, even if he did ride with the Cheshire Hunt. According to Eleanor Marx, his favourite virtue was 'jollity' and his favourite vice was 'excess'. She also said that his motto should have been 'Take It Easy'. Eleanor was married to Karl, of course, who by contrast was a bit of a lardarse with rubbish hair who nicked all Friedrich's ideas.
Most of the mills that stretch for half a mile along the Rochdale Canal down Redhill Street and Jersey Street are now derelict; 'buildings seven to eight storeys high, as high and as big as the Royal Palace in Berlin,' said German architect Karl Schinkel in 1825. There are plans to turn them into a World Heritage Site. The slums that appalled Engels, Southey and de Tocqueville are long gone in the vast clearances of the sixties, but the more handsome face of Cottonopolis can still be seen when you turn from the Gay Village into Sackville Street. There's something typically Mancunian and blustering, something very Elsie Tanner about how these commonplace industrial warehouses and offices have put on their glad rags and slap and turned their best features to the town; a Friday night array of come-hither windows, fabulous frontages and spectacular décolletages and cleavages of brick and masonry.
In case any younger readers are confused about this apparent reference to leather workers, we'll come back to Elsie Tanner in a moment. Manchester is a scarlet woman who hasn't forgotten its bl
ood-red past. Spinningfields is yet another 'landmark development' in the city centre, a giant Meccano riot of girders and cranes that according to the promotional literature will provide 'a natural expansion of Manchester's rapidly growing commercial domain . . . to help the city achieve its best economic and social potential, home to world-class financial services, professional services and corporate business'.
By the way, there are two 'services' in there, guys. Maybe you had a long lunch. But let it pass. 'Spinningfields,' concludes the blurb, 'offers a real sense of place.' If you're not convinced that world-class financial services or corporate business can ever give that, then tucked away behind the clamour of Spinningfields is the People's History Museum. Located in an old pump house behind another putative apartment block, it prides itself on being 'the only museum dedicated to the working people of Britain and the story of how they organised to change society, improving life for future generations'.
I liked the museum a lot. The chap on the door looked like he might have been a former bus driver struggling manfully with the new demands of customer service, bless him. Perhaps mindful that the class struggle and dialectical materialism are not as immediately attractive to an eight-year-old as, say, a stegosaurus or Saturn V rocket, every effort has been made to make the museum all singing and dancing. You can 'have fun making your own badge, or shop at a 1930s Co-Op'. I think they should take this a lot further. Some games, for instance, commemorating the Miners' Strike: 'Hey kids! Can you get your flying pickets down the M62 from Leigh Colliery to Orgreave without being stopped by the uniformed bully boys of the capitalist state?' Or maybe a coconut shy where you can win a goldfish for hitting Oswald Mosley or Norman Lamont.
I loved the sign that awaits you as you climb to the exhibitions on the first level. It's a period sign from an earlier, presumably 1930s, exhibition, featuring the classic rotund capitalist greeting you with, 'I don't approve of this exhibition at all. If I could stop you going in, I would. But I can't!' This really tickled Joyce, a large, genial lady who was here with a Trinidadian Trade Union delegation. 'Look at this little fellah!' she cried delightedly before going off to make a badge. Who says the proletarian struggle can't be fun!
A little way away in Salford Crescent, opposite the Peel Park campus of the university, a handsome former nurses' home houses the Working Class Movement Library, set up in the fifties by two voracious book collectors and activists called Eddie and Ruth Frown. There's nothing to push or press here, it's not a theme park, nothing lights up or rotates. But if you want to know how the industrial north and particularly Manchester and Salford shaped modern Britain, then pop in. A year's subs are only a fiver. There's always a cup of tea on offer and, as well as a staggering book collection including a first edition of Thomas Paine's Right of Man, you can see the flyer actually signed by Henry Hunt announcing the meeting which led to the Peterloo Massacre.
I'm on my way across town to the site of that very incident, the most significant and emotionally charged spot in Manchester's political history. To get there I leave Sackville Street, which the In spiral Carpets once wrote a song about, and wander through Chinatown. If you want Indian food in Manchester, head for Rusholme. But the best dim sum in the north is here, within a lobbed spring roll of the Chinese Arch. Here I once saw a man demolish a full set menu banquet and then, having smoked a postpaid fag, order and consume it all again. Having discussed this at length, my companion and I came to the conclusion that he had to be straight out of prison and this was the treat he had promised himself during the long nights in Strangeways.
I've written about the Britannia Hotel in another book (still some copies available, actually) so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say that for several years of my life I seemed to stay here at least once a week with a selection of bands and comedians and media people, usually getting back to my own room just as the chambermaid came to hoover in the morning. I never pass it now without a little shudder that's part horror and part wistfulness.
I take a meandering route by the rather nicer Palace Hotel and the Corner House – where in the eighties you couldn't get in unless you had a black zip-up top, a copy of Marxism Today and a packet of Giantess – past the afternoon Special Brew drinkers on Oxford Road and, avoiding the temptation to double back into the Lass O'Hare for a quick one, down towards Deans gate via Peter Street. Eventually I find the spot I'm looking for. In the warm afternoon sunshine it doesn't look particularly horrifying or grisly; a sunny piazza between the G-Mex Centre and the new Convention Centre. The steps are crowded with delegates in name tags, puffing on inter-session fags, sipping smoothies, picking up their messages, utterly oblivious to the bloody legacy of the site where they stand, Britain's Tirana Square: Peterloo.
What happened here on 16 August 1819 should perhaps remind we English, maybe next time we're bombing a television station in Belgrade or a hospital in Iraq, of how sordid and uncivilised our own past can be. Not millennia back either, not in the ages of Celts and Picts running around in pelts and woad, but a few short generations ago. On my mum's side, I come from a line of Lancastrian weavers so it's not unthinkable that my great-great-grandad or some of his mates might have been murdered here, by British soldiers, on a summer's afternoon in Manchester.
A crowd of around 80,000 from across Lancashire had come to hear rousing orator Henry Hunt and others speak. It was a time of desperate poverty and of growing radicalism and the meeting was called to espouse various popular causes: universal suffrage, secret ballots, an end to unfair legislation. Henry Hunt, fearing that the magistrates would look for an excuse to overreact, asked people to come 'armed with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience; determined not to be irritated or excited'. Everyone really expected a peaceful meeting, though, and many turned up wearing their Sunday clothes.
However, at 1:31 p.m. the magistrates decided to stop the meeting and gave orders for the arrest of the leaders. Captain Joseph Nadin, Deputy Constable of Manchester, sent for the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry. These were a volunteer force largely comprising businessmen and landowners unlikely to be sympathetic to the rally's ideals.
Sixty yeomanry cavalrymen, possibly drunk, entered the field brandishing their sabres and charged towards the cart that served as the speakers' stand. When some demonstrators tried to stop them by linking their hands, they set about them viciously with their sabres. The yeomanry then began to strike down the flags and banners of the crowd with their sabres, until the Hussars arrived, who cleared the field in minutes and pacified them.
Eleven people were killed then and there, including a woman and a child another woman was carrying. About 400 were injured, 100 of them women, many of whom were trampled by horses. One man had his nose severed; others were carried from the field bleeding from numerous sabre cuts. Five died later of their injuries.
Many participants on both sides had fought at Waterloo, including one of the dead. This led James Wroe of the Manchester Observer to describe the events with bitter humour as the 'Peterloo Massacre'. He was later arrested for having the temerity to report the events, another echo of Tiananmen. But there were many journalists present and the events immediately found their way into the press. Shelley wrote the impassioned and angry poem 'The Masque Of Anarchy' as a response. Though there was widespread outrage, the government of the day supported the action of the army and magistrates. The Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, even congratulated the murderers on their work. By the end of the year, he'd introduced legislation to suppress radical meetings and publications.
But Peterloo had awoken something in the nation as a whole and the north in particular. The widespread public anger at the massacre swelled the support of the reform movement from which the Chartists would eventually emerge. Red with blood that day, some say Manchester and the north has been red ever since. My theory is that the north has never really trusted Westminster, king or country since. Historian A. J. P. Taylor was right on the money when he said, 'Manchester cares no more for the roya
l family or the landed gentry than Venice did for the Pope or the Italian aristocracy... It is the only place in England which escapes our characteristic vice of snobbery.' Let's hear it for Manchester then, The Red Venice Of The North.
No bloodshed in St Peter's Fields this afternoon, no screaming, whinnying or clashing of sabres. Just the quiet hum of polyglot conversation from the delegates at the 10th Annual International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology's Genomes to Systems Conference. They start to file back in after their break and on a whim, I join them. Straight up the escalators and in. Security guy even nods at me. They seem a nice bunch and the free Danish pastries and coffee are great. I'm idly looking at a leaflet for the forthcoming 11th Human Genome Meeting in Helsinki when a very pleasant blonde lady with designer specs and a smart grey suit catches my eye. 'Ah, Helsinki. That's my city. Are you going to that one?' Fortunately, before I have to say, 'Well, probably not since I just came in off the street in search of free Danish pastries,' the bell goes for the next lecture. Lightheaded with my new devil-may-care attitude, I almost accompany Johanna (she had a badge on) into the auditorium for the talk but decide that it will probably be slightly too advanced for me, what with a disastrously poor showing in my biology mock 'O' levels of 1977 being my last recorded venture into the subject.
Pies and Prejudice Page 13
