"We'll always have Manchester"

Peter van der Linden, June 2005

This is a brief note on the history of the city of Machester. They say it's the wettest city in England, but the first time I saw Manchester, the sun was shining brightly on the dirty stone buildings of the city center.

It was the tail end of the 1970's. Elvis had just expired on the toilet floor, punk rock was reshaping youthful hairstyles, and change was in the air. Back then, I was a freshman on my first day as an engineering student at the University of Manchester. It was a great time to go to college.

Birthplace of the Industrial Revolution

Manchester was a great place to study engineering, too. It's literally the birthplace of the industrial revolution - the massive social and technological upheaval in 18th century Great Britain. It started with coal-fired steam (hence the grimy buildings) that powered textile manufacturing machines. The Industrial Revolution spread from Manchester to the rest of Britain. In the 19th Century, with the introduction of steamships and railroad locomotives, the movement reached throughout Western Europe and North America, eventually affecting the entire globe.

Three ingredients of the industrial revolution: mills, railroads, and the Bridgewater canal.

But it all started in Manchester, England. The country's second city (after London) can boast an impressive number of "firsts". Britain's first free public library was founded in the Cheetham Hill district in 1653, and is still in use today. In 1825, Manchester mill owner Charles Mackintosh patented a practical waterproof fabric - and to this day raincoats are known as Mackintoshes or macs in Britain.

The first railroad station in the world opened in Manchester in 1830. Joe Whitworth designed his famous standard screw thread in his Manchester workshop (1841) and it was adopted throughout the English-speaking world. His name is cursed by owners of old English cars trying to find spare parts and wrenches. Ernie Rutherford split the atom in 1919 in his lab at Manchester University. The world's first stored program computer was developed at Manchester University in 1948 by professors Kilburn and Williams.

Slow Change

Physical change comes slowly to cities in the north of England; the money just isn't there to demolish buildings and start again. Much history therefore remains apparent in the streets and buildings. When I was a student, there were still many randomly-placed vacant lots in the city center. These were the last remaining signs of buildings that had been destroyed by German bombing in the Blitz thirty five years previously. The sites were levelled and used for car parks. The last such bombsite in England was only redeveloped a couple of years ago.

Firefighters in the Blitz had a ready supply of water from the half dozen canals and rivers in Manchester. One canal crosses through Manchester city center. It was built in 1761 (before there was a city center) by the Duke of Bridgewater, to transport coal from his mines at Worsely to the textile mills in Manchester.

The canal was a spectacular financial success, reducing the cost of coal in Manchester 75% within a year. Today, Britain no longer really has a coal industry (just 9 working pits) and the Bridgewater canal is used by leisure craft. Some of the old canalside mills lie in Manchester's lively gay village, and have been converted into nightclubs. Their worn brick walls now resonate to popular music where once the spinning and weaving machines clicked and whirred.

The Industrial Revolution led to a boom for Manchester which lasted well into the Victorian age. It was natural that Frederick Royce (later the "Royce" in "Rolls-Royce") would site his electrical and mechanical business in the Hulme district of Manchester, with easy access to skilled workers and a ready market for his products. After a few years, a larger factory was built at nearby Trafford Park, the first industrial park in the world.

The Royce factory in Cooke Street, Manchester

Sadly, for a place with so much history in the streets and buildings, the Royce Manchester factory, and Cooke Street itself no longer exist. It was all torn down in the 1960s, in an ambitious slum clearance program that replaced old row-house slums with brand new high-rise slums, which were themselves demolished in the 1990s.

Peterloo Massacre

Throughout the 1800s the city population grew as people left rural areas for better-paid work in factories. The changing demographics were expressed in politics, too. The first half of the 1800s was a time of great discontent over the "Corn Laws" - surcharges on imported grain that artifically maintained high domestic wheat prices, and hence landowner profits. Manchester was a center of opposition to the Corn Laws and support for Free Trade.

In 1819, a rally was held in a field outside St Peter's Church, in support of universal voting rights. A reactionary local magistrate falsely declared the meeting a riot, and ordered armed cavalry to break it up. Eleven civilians were killed and hundreds more injured. This event became known as the Peterloo Massacre - an allusion to the Battle of Waterloo four years earlier. The poet Shelley was inflamed by this murderous abuse of government power and wrote a searing poem which was too controversial to be published until after his death.

It was to be 100 more years before Britain got voting rights for all adults. Astonishingly it wasn't until 2002 that inherited seats in Parliament for landed gentry were largely abolished.

St Peter's church was demolished in 1907, and the field around is now a great city square, containing a tram station. On one side of St Peter's square is the imposing Midland Hotel where Royce had his landmark first meeting with Rolls in 1904. From that meeting between a man who could sell cars, and a man who knew how to build them, there flowed a natural partnership whose products have endured for over 100 years.

The sumptuous Edwardian Midland Hotel

The Free Trade Hall

A building called the Free Trade Hall now stands near the site of the Peterloo massacre. The Hall was built in 1840 by public subscription as a meeting place for Free Trade campaigners. After the political goals were achieved, the Free Trade Hall was used for concerts. Bob Dylan played there in 1965, and was loudly denounced by the audience for selling out his folk roots (the nasal-voiced entertainer used an electric guitar for the first time).

The Free Trade Hall near the site of the Peterloo Massacre

Other cities have buildings named for politicans and the well-connected. Manchester's once premier auditorium is named for the political and economic movement that brought so much wealth to the city. Against much public outcry, a city council apparently composed of historically-ignorant Philistines sold off the Free Trade Hall to a hotel developer in 2000.

Always

Manchester is steeped in history. Cobbled streets and gaunt abandoned mills still speak of a golden sunshine that once bathed the town in its radiance, but now shines elsewhere. During my student years in Manchester, I learned that it is today a rainy place, and cold, when the east winds come out of the Pennine moors. I learned something about life and history, engineering and mathematics, too.

My travels have rarely taken me back to Manchester over the last thirty years. And, anyway, as they say - you never can go back. But I know the truth that Humphrey Bogart shared with Ingrid Bergman in the film "Casablanca". In the role of nightclub owner Rick Blaine, Bogie leaned over to Bergman and confided a phrase that (on a rainy night with the wind coming off the moors) sounded a lot like "Manchester. We'll always have Manchester".

1. More Manchester buildings
2. Cotton spinning in Lancashire
3. Waterways in Manchester
4. Ancoats conservation area
5. Eyewitness in Manchester (photojournalist)