“Ugly, smoky Manchester; dear, busy, earnest, noble-working Manchester” Elizabeth Gaskell 1847
Manchester has attitude.
There is no doubt about that. All cities will brag about their music scene and their football teams and certainly Manchester has those bragging rights but to quote Stuart Maconie:
“If it stopped banging on about its football teams and its bands and its shops and its attitude, Manchester has something that it can be genuinely, enormously proud of, something that its should shout from the rooftops….”
“Manchester changed the world’s politics: from vegetarianism to feminism to trade unionism to communism, every upstart notion that ever got ideas above its station, every snotty street-fighter of a radical philosophy, was fostered brawling in Manchester’s streets, mills, pubs, churches and debating halls.”
The history is evident as you walk the streets. The industrial past ever evident juxtaposed on a modern ever evolving city.
Some of the political history to which Maconie refers include the a key place in driving the Industrial Revolution, the first working canal, the first railway line.
The intellectual movements of reform and revolution were. Born in Manchester. Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes, the Peterloo Massacre and the reform of the Anti Corn Law league.
Where did that great revolutionary of our time, Bob Dylan, get called out as a Judas? Yep. Manchester. Ironically at the Free Trade Hall.
The greatness of Manchester cannot be separated from the history that is often not discussed.
I grew up with the view from my bedroom window of Cotton mills in every direction. Walking to school past the huge brick mills, now silently redundant but back in the late 1800s they were busy and noisily spinning most of the worlds cotton.
Celebrated as the epicentre of the industry eighty per cent of global cotton yarn and fabric production came out of Manchester and its surrounding towns.
The bee, ever present a symbol of Manchester was first incorporated into the Manchester coat of arms in 1843. Derived from the way the mills were seen – as hives of activity – and the workers the bees.
The mills were nicknamed ‘beehive mills’ and the bee became the symbol of the town.
This sounds somewhat derisory but the bee was also seen as a symbol of togetherness and cooperation. It is no surprise that the Co-operative was founded in the region at the same time and used the beehive as its emblem.
The city and its wealth almost exclusively built on the back of this. In school I learnt about cotton. We had pictures on the walls of the lifecycle of cotton, cotton pests, the carding process, spinning and the economics of the cotton trade.
Flying shuttles, bobbins and clogs displayed as a reminder of the industrial past which we had all benefitted from.
What was never taught was the connection with slavery.
Even to today the connection of Manchester to the slave trade and the southern states of the USA are only just coming to the fore.
The cities that are generally linked to the slave trade such as Bristol, London, Glasgow and Liverpool all being ports are more obvious. The direct link with sea transportation and the colonies.
However the convenient disconnected link between other cities is gradually becoming talked about more. The indirect links are obvious when looked for.
The great buildings and wealth of the country were built on trades that were dependent on slavery.
The Bank of England, Harewood house in Leeds, The gallery of Modern Art in Glasgow, the British Museum, Penrhyn Castle in Wales. The libraries of Oxford to the town houses of Bath, Britains history cannot escape the links to colonialism and slavery.
So where does this in with Manchester? The city that that Victorian Philanthropist Disraeli called “the most wonderful city of modern times …as greater a human exploit as Athens”
Manchester …. J ‘accuse
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Nick Inston 