The Little Book of Manchester E-Book

Stuart Hylton

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 257

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Did you know? - In 1824 a Pendleton tollkeeper set up Britain's first true public bus service, thought to be one of the first in the world. - Communism can claim to have been conceived, if not born, in Manchester as Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx used to meet in the city. - Manchester has the grim distinction of being the place where the first death of the English Civil War occurred. The Little Book of Manchester is an intriguing, fast-paced, fact-packed compendium of places, people and events in the city, from its Roman origins to the present day. Here you can read about the important contributions the city made to the history of the nation, learn about the individual communities and how they came together to form the modern city and meet some of the great men and women, the eccentrics and the scoundrels with which its history is littered. A reliable reference book and quirky guide, its bite-sized chunks of history can be dipped into time and again to reveal some new facts about the story of this amazing city. This is a remarkably engaging little book.

Leseprobe

Front cover photography: SAKhanPhotography via iStock.

First published 2013

Reprinted 2015

This edition published 2023

The History Press

97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Stuart Hylton, 2023

The right of Stuart Hylton to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 75249 401 2

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Limited, Padstow, Cornwall.

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Introduction

1.   Made in Manchester

2.   Fun, Fun, Fun!

3.   Ghosts and Ghouls

4.   Lawless and Disorderly

5.   On this Day

6.   Some Landmark Manchester Buildings

7.   Why is it Called That?

8.   Those Magnificent Men … Flying Out of Manchester

9.   The Things they Say about Manchester

10.   Dirty Old Town

11.   Charitable Manchester

12.   Grand Designs

13.   And Another Thing …

INTRODUCTION

Ever since I came to Manchester in the 1960s to study, and then stayed on to work, the city has held a special place in my affections. It was where my interest in local history really began (despite my having grown up in Windsor, which, one might have thought, had a fair amount of its own local history on offer). I later wrote a history of the city, now in its second edition, but I appreciate that not everyone wants, or has the time, to read a continuous narrative running to almost 300 pages.

This little book draws upon that longer work, but makes no pretence to be a comprehensive history of Manchester. Rather, it groups snippets from the city’s past by topic and tries to present them in a way that enables the reader to dip in and out of them, as their interest and opportunity dictates.

Manchester has a long and fascinating history. Its first recorded settlement was in the same year that the eruption of Vesuvius destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii, and for the past 260 years at least, it has been at the forefront of so much of our development as a nation. I have tried to highlight some of the contributions that Manchester has given to Britain and the world. It is a vibrant and constantly changing city but it has also retained many important reminders of its past glory. I have singled out some of these, but no doubt you will have your own views on which buildings best tell its story. There is also a darker side to Manchester’s development, and there can be few cities where the human cost of the Industrial Revolution has been better documented. I hope I have also given adequate recognition to this aspect of our history.

One important question is ‘what is Manchester?’ Its boundaries have been constantly spreading since it was first incorporated as a borough in 1838. Before that, the medieval parish boundaries stretched in many directions, far beyond even those of the present city. I must confess to having played fast and loose with those boundaries, referring to events in areas which took place before those areas became part of the modern city. I have even, on occasion, looked at events in areas which are not, and never have been, within the city’s limits, where these seemed important to life in Manchester. Let us say that I have been more interested in Manchester’s zone of influence, rather than its strict administrative boundaries.

Most of all, I hope this little book will stimulate your interest in the story of Manchester and encourage you to find out more. Manchester is fortunate in the many good books that have been published about its past. A visit to your local library or (better still!) bookseller is highly recommended, and there is always that internet thing!

Stuart Hylton, 2023

1

MADE IN MANCHESTER

Over the centuries, Manchester has often led the nation, and in some cases the world, in innovation. Here, we look at a few important examples. In addition, we will look at a few of the brand names that Manchester gave the nation. In particular, Manchester has led the way with innovations in transport, as the following examples show.

THE DUKE’S CUT

Before the canal age proper, a number of schemes were carried out to improve the natural corridors of transport provided by rivers. These included the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, which was approved by parliament in 1721 to make the Mersey and its tributary, the Irwell, navigable between Liverpool and Manchester. The works involved included the construction of eight locks along the route, but essentially followed the twists and turns of the rivers. The company had an effective monopoly, which allowed them to be over-priced and inefficient. They did not even use horses to pull the barges, but relied purely on manpower.

At this time, the only way of getting coal from the Duke of Bridgewater’s mines at Worsley to Manchester was in 140lb bags carried by packhorses, which meant that the price of coal doubled between the pithead and Manchester. In 1736, a revolutionary proposal to construct the nation’s first completely artificial waterway was given parliamentary approval. Its sponsor was the Duke of Bridgewater himself, who had been inspired by seeing the French Canal du Midi while on the grand tour. As part of the scheme, he undertook to deliver coal into Manchester for no more than 4d a hundredweight.

Having obtained further parliamentary approval for revisions to the scheme in 1759, Bridgewater appointed as his chief engineer the son of a crofter, a man who was unqualified and virtually illiterate. He worked without the aid of technical drawings or written instructions and had never built a canal before; when asked to explain the principles of his Barton Aqueduct to a parliamentary committee, he carved a model of it out of cheese. In every other respect, James Brindley turned out to be an inspired choice. He worked closely on the project with Bridgewater’s agent John Gilbert, who is probably owed a good deal of credit for the success of the scheme, which opened for business in 1761. Soon, coal was being offloaded in Manchester at a rate of five tons an hour.

The Barton Aqueduct was the crowning glory of the scheme, though much of the public opinion thought such a feat of engineering insanely ambitious. At 200 yards long, it carried the waterway over the River Irwell at a height of 38ft, into Manchester. At the Worsley end, the canal went right into the mine itself and, by 1776, the Duke had secured a further western extension, via the Trent and Mersey Canal, to the Mersey itself, putting the Bridgewater in direct competition with the Mersey and Irwell Navigation.

The Canal even became an early tourist attraction. From 1766, people were making the trip from Manchester to explore the mines. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the King of Denmark were among the early tourists making the trip. Passenger services between Manchester and Liverpool were also introduced from 1776. A traveller in 1785 reported that these had two classes of accommodation and (curiously) that, in the event of ‘improper conduct’ by passengers, the master of the barge had the power to leave the miscreants on the bank.

But building the canal did not come cheap; the overall cost at the time was £220,000 and, by the time it was completed, the Duke was the modern-day equivalent of £2 million in debt. However, the canal was a commercial success from the start and became the inspiration for the period of canal mania that was to seize the country in the 1790s. Their golden age would cease from the 1830s onwards, as the railway network began to spread across the land.

THE BIG DITCH

If the Bridgewater was Britain’s first true canal, the Manchester Ship Canal (known to locals as the ‘Big Ditch’) was one of its last and most ambitious. The cost and delay involved in moving goods between Manchester and the port of Liverpool has been a bone of contention at various times in both cities’ histories. Ideas of linking Manchester directly to the sea go back as far as 1824, but it was not until 1882 that a detailed, thought-through and costed scheme was published. A three-year battle followed to get the scheme approved by parliament, and Manchester celebrated with parades and a public holiday when this was achieved in August 1885. Raising the necessary finance was the next headache and only two-thirds of the money needed had been assembled by the time the first ceremonial turf was cut at Eastham in November 1887.

Nonetheless, work proceeded, with as many as 16,000 people employed in the enterprise. By 1890 it became clear that the scheme was seriously under-capitalised. It was originally budgeted in 1882 at £4.5 million, but would eventually come in at around £15 million – £2 million of this would come from Manchester City Council, who became the majority interest on the board.

The project was a massive undertaking, digging a canal 35.5 miles long, 28ft deep by 170ft wide, and involved removing some 53.5 million cubic yards of material. Right up until the Second World War, there were only six ships in existence too big to use it. Five railway lines had to be lifted over it, at a height of 75ft, and the tidal River Gowy carried underneath it in a giant iron siphon. Brindley’s Barton Aqueduct, part of the Bridgewater Canal and, in its day, one of the engineering wonders of the world, had to be demolished and replaced by the Barton Swing Aqueduct. This was itself a wonder, involving a rotating trough of water 18ft wide, 6ft deep and 234ft long, able to carry barges across the Ship Canal.

The canal opened to traffic at the very start of 1894, prior to its formal opening by Queen Victoria the following May. After a slow start, the tonnage passing through it began to increase steadily, from 1.8 million in 1896 to 16.25 million in 1972. As early as 1914, the Ship Canal carried 5 per cent of Britain’s imports and 4 per cent of her exports. But after the Second World War, danger signs became increasingly apparent. Larger ships, too big to use the canal, were coming into wider use; more freight was being containerised, and Manchester had no suitable site for a container port; cheap and speedy road freight eroded the commercial advantage of direct access to Manchester, as did the extra day required to navigate the canal at a time when shipping companies looked for ever faster turnaround of their fleets. Air freight also emerged as a new form of competition. By the 1980s, the original raison d’etre for the canal had gone, and it is retained today primarily for leisure use and as part of the waterways network serving Manchester (without which, parts of the city would be more prone to flooding).

THE FIRST BUS SERVICE

In 1824 a Pendleton tollkeeper, John Greenwood, set up Britain’s first true public bus service and probably one of the first in the world. It ran from Market Street in the centre of Manchester and served some of the town’s new suburbs – Pendleton, Ardwick and Cheetham Hill. The fare was 6d inside and 4d outside and the first vehicles could carry just eleven people and ran three times a day. Passengers could be picked up or dropped off at any point along the route. Greenwood’s was the first of many similar initiatives – by 1850, sixty-four services were operating. A man named MacEwan further developed the service by introducing far larger vehicles, drawn by three horses and able to carry seventeen inside and twenty-five outside. With these, he was able to offer a service between Strangeways and All Saints for just 3d, half the price of his rivals.

By 1865, most of the main routes into Manchester were served by buses, operated by a variety of carriers. The first tramway in the area made its appearance in 1862, linking Manchester and Salford – the initiative of a Manchester councillor, John Howarth. This was before the General Tramways Act of 1870 gave local authorities powers to construct and own (but not run) tramways. Manchester Corporation resisted several piecemeal attempts by private operators to set up tramways, on the grounds that it should be a municipal undertaking. By 1875 they had obtained the necessary powers to do so and within two years were in a position to start letting leases to those who would operate them. Everyone did well out of them – the operators turned a healthy profit; the council saw its development costs recouped within seventeen years and the rates subsidised to the tune of £97,600, and the passengers got regulated fares, including cheap workmen’s cars during the rush hours.

It was Glasgow, not Manchester, that was the first to be a municipal operator of the tramcar service, but Manchester followed closely in their wake. By 1897 they had acquired the power not just to run the trams but also to convert them to electric traction. Gradually, the private operators’ leases fell in and, by 1903, all 56 miles of the city’s tramways were in municipal ownership. Municipal operation and electrification together had a dramatic effect on the operation. By 1909, fares were reduced by 40 per cent, the annual subsidy to the rates was increased ten-fold and even the working hours for the staff were reduced, from seventy to fifty-four, and their wages increased. The council diversified into petrol buses (in an effort to protect the trams from competition) and even introduced long-distance express services and a parcel delivery service. The latter turned out to be illegal and had to be largely discontinued.

At its peak, Manchester had the most extensive tramway network in the country, outside London, with (as at 1929) a fleet of 953 trams. One problem with the trams, as the city’s traffic grew, was that they were rather dangerous for passengers boarding and leaving them. They tended to stop in the middle of the road, leaving passengers to fight their way through the other traffic to or from the pavement as best they could. The City Coroner reported seventy deaths and 1,147 serious injuries from this in 1921 alone. After much debate, trams started to be phased out in favour of motorbuses from 1929. A timetable to phase out the last trams by February 1939 was put on ice, as people came to realise the difficulty of ensuring the necessary supplies of petrol for the buses in a possible future wartime, and it was not until January 1949 that the last tram ran on Manchester’s streets. Today, just one relic of Manchester’s old tramways exists – a short section operated by volunteer enthusiasts in Heaton Park but, since 1992, a new generation of trams have appeared on the city’s streets.

THE MODERN RAILWAY

While other railway lines (notably that from Stockton to Darlington) can lay claim to greater antiquity, the Liverpool to Manchester line was the first to be recognisably like its modern counterpart – twin-tracked, with recognisable stations (or stopping points), not allowing the chaos of universal access to the tracks, steam locomotive-hauled throughout and operating to a timetable (of sorts).

The original reason for its existence was the slowness, cost and unreliability of the canals that bought raw cotton and other imports to Manchester from the Liverpool docks and carried finished textiles in the other direction. Passengers were very much an afterthought in the promoters’ plans. George Stephenson was appointed as engineer to the project in 1824, prior to the completion of his Stockton to Darlington line. He faced widespread opposition (and sometimes outright violence) from landowners and others when he tried to survey the route, some of which had to be done in secret by night. This, and his lack of education, may help to account for serious errors in his proposals, which were ruthlessly exploited by the opposition when it went before parliament.

When the scheme was thrown out, Stephenson was relieved of his duties and the more experienced (at least, in everything but railway building) team of George and John Rennie was bought in. Their skills (not least in negotiation) won over some key opponents to the scheme, in particular the Marquis of Stafford, heir to the Duke of Bridgewater and his canal. The scheme received parliamentary approval at the second attempt and Stephenson, his reputation somewhat restored by the successful opening of the Stockton to Darlington railway, was re-engaged to build it. Overcoming great difficulties on the way (not least, crossing the seemingly bottomless swamp of Chat Moss) the line was completed by 1830. One further problem had been securing a terminus anywhere near the centre of Manchester, again due to landowner opposition. Liverpool Road station was at that time virtually on the edge of open countryside.

Meanwhile, the promoters needed to make their minds up about how traffic would move along the line. Steam locomotives were far from being proven at this time, and there was significant support for the idea of wagons cable-hauled by stationary steam engines, at least on parts of the route. It was decided in 1829 to hold trials at Rainhill, offering a £500 prize for the ‘most improved’ locomotive. A shortlist of entrants was selected from a wide selection of more or less eccentric proposals, and the winner of the trials became just about the most famous locomotive in railway history – Stephenson’s Rocket.

The official opening of the line was set for 15 September 1830. Among the dignitaries attending was the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington (despite him disapproving of railways, on the grounds that ‘they encourage the lower classes to travel about’). Huge crowds gathered at either end of the line to witness the opening, which was marred by a fatal accident to local MP and former President of the Board of Trade William Huskisson. He dismounted from the train (against instructions) during a water stop to converse with the Prime Minister, and was run over by a locomotive.

The great surprise, once the line was opened, was a huge and unanticipated boom in passenger traffic, so great that there was no spare capacity for the railway to carry the freight for which it was originally built – more locomotives had to be ordered first. It fell to Liverpool and Manchester to work out from scratch the operating rules for a modern railway, the like of which the world had not previously seen.

THE SUBMARINE

If asked to name the person who invented the modern submarine, the curate of a church in Moss Side might not be the first person who springs to mind, but the Revd George Garrett (1852–1902) has a very good claim to that title. Strangely enough, the church seems to have a long-standing fascination with underwater travel – as long ago as 1634 two French priests drew up plans for a submarine, though their ideas were entirely innocent of the practical problems of making a working vessel.

Garrett was born in Lambeth, London, a member of an evangelical Christian family. His father, a clergyman, moved the family to Moss Side in 1861, at about the time when the area was being transformed from a semi-rural township into a suburb of Manchester. The family constantly lived in poverty and debt, due not least to some unwise litigation entered into by his father and his father’s considerable gift for making enemies. George himself was evidently a man of many talents, combining an interest in science (he carried out early experiments to develop a self-contained breathing apparatus) and great skill as a bare-knuckle boxer.

Despite winning a degree in science from Trinity College, Dublin, he was press-ganged by his father into becoming the curate in his church, mainly as a means of augmenting the family’s disastrous finances. George combined his scientific interests with his curacy, and even took on a third job as a schoolmaster. On 8 May 1878 he took out a patent on a ‘Submarine boat for placing torpedoes, etc.’ (A torpedo in those days was any explosive device designed to be detonated under water, and so included things like mines). He set up a company, the Garrett Sub-Marine Navigation and Pneumataphore Company, based at 56 Deansgate, to promote the scheme. Eventually he raised enough money to build a 4½-ton prototype, which he named Resurgam (Latin for ‘I shall rise again’). This was not practical as a warship, since the one-man crew had not only to operate the ballast tanks and hand-crank the propeller, but also to place or fire the torpedoes. However, the trials were sufficiently successful to encourage him to plan the full-sized (30-ton, 45ft long, steam-powered) Resurgam II. The press reported its trial as follows:

A new submarine vessel, the invention of the Revd. George W Garrett of Manchester, was exhibited on Tuesday in the Wallesey Dock, before a large number of scientific and other gentlemen. The object of the boat is to get near ships of war without being observed. The vessel is pointed at both ends. On the top there is a tower provided with windows, and there is a manhole by which the operator gets in or out of the vessel with ease.

Liverpool Weekly Mercury, 29 November 1879

Resurgam II was powered by a closed cycle steam engine, developed by American engineer Eugene Lamm. This superheated sufficient steam to power the craft for up to four hours, before the furnace was extinguished (so as not to consume the air supply) and it dived. However, the technology was not fully developed; the craft was stiflingly hot and the engine leaked fumes, leading to an illness christened ‘steam submariner’s lung’. Its other many design faults included difficulty in navigating, due to the lack of a periscope, and, most fatally, the fact that the hatch could not be properly sealed from the outside.

Nonetheless, Garrett decided to sail the craft from Merseyside to Portsmouth (since the Royal Navy refused to fund it without it undergoing trials there). They soon ran into trouble and put in at Rhyl for repairs. They left Rhyl in bad weather, with Resurgam now under tow by a steam yacht. This time, it was the steam yacht’s turn to run into engine problems, and Resurgam’s crew left the submarine to help the yacht. Inevitably, the unsealed hatch on the submarine led to it taking on water and Resurgam sank to the bottom, never to ‘resurg’. This led to Garrett’s bankruptcy and the winding up of his company.

Garrett’s perpetual absence from his clerical duties did not endear him to the parishioners of Moss Side, particularly when he got them to organise parish events that went to subsidise his submarine experiments. The rest of his life was no less colourful. He went on to design much larger submarines that saw service with the Greek, Swedish and Turkish navies (though these were called Nordenfeldt submarines, after their Swedish sponsor). He was also given a commission in the Ottoman Navy and died penniless and starving in New York (none of which need trouble a book about Manchester). A replica of his craft can be seen near the Woodside terminal of the Mersey ferry in Birkenhead.

MANCHESTER MOTORS

Manchester has two early claims to fame in relation to the car industry. Before the First World War, the city became European home to the world’s largest car maker and – all too briefly – the one that would become known as the world’s finest motor manufacturer.

In 1884, a small firm of electrical and mechanical engineers was established in Cook Street, Hulme. Despite having only two years’ formal education, the proprietor built up a business making dynamos, cranes, installing Liverpool’s first electric street lighting, and much else (for example, he invented the bayonet light bulb fitting). In 1903, he bought himself his first car, a French Decauville, and he could not resist the temptation to tinker with it and improve it. By April 1904 he had progressed from tinkering to designing his own two-cylinder car. He then started to manufacture them in a small way and one of his models came to the attention of a car salesman, racing motorist and general adventurer. He was sufficiently impressed to arrange a meeting with the manufacturer and this historic occasion took place in the Midland Hotel in May, 1904. The manufacturer was Henry Royce and the car salesman was the Honourable Charles Rolls. The first Rolls-Royce car (as Rolls insisted they be called) was exhibited at the Paris salon in December of that year.

From the start, the company set itself a target of absolute excellence. What people might today call their mission statement was ‘to turn out the best car in the world regardless of cost, and sell it to those people who could appreciate a good article and were willing and able to pay for it’. Their association with Manchester was brief – their Cook Street site did not have potential to expand and they started looking for another site in the Manchester area. Somewhere along the Stretford Road was being considered, but Derby Council lobbied them to relocate there and offered very favourable terms, and the company left Manchester in 1908. By that time they had developed from the two-cylinder prototype to the Silver Ghost, the 7-litre six-cylinder model which set the standard for luxury motoring until it ceased production in 1925. It is strange to think of the early models of this most luxurious marque of cars first seeing the light of day on the impoverished streets of Hulme.

Before the First World War, Manchester (or, more precisely, Trafford Park) was also home to Britain’s largest volume car manufacturer. Henry Ford launched what was to be his most famous car, the Model T, at the Olympia Motor Show in London in October 1908. Over its nineteen-year production run, more than 15 million of them would be sold worldwide. From 1911, English supplies of the car were assembled at Trafford Park from components imported from America, although the British arm of the company soon developed a sizeable local input to the product – in particular, the bodywork was sub-contracted to a local company, Scott Brothers. Ford put a Briton, Percival Perry, in charge of the operation and he rapidly built up a nationwide network of around 1,000 dealers. Within two years, Trafford Park was turning out 7,310 Model Ts a year, at a time when Britain’s largest home-grown car manufacturer, Wolseley, could barely manage 3,000.

The newspaper Ford Times gave this rationale for the selection of Trafford Park:

Manchester, England was chosen for the site of this assembling plant, as it was necessary to have the factory accessible to the coast to facilitate transportation. The locality selected for the plant is Trafford Park, the largest manufacturing centre in Manchester. This property is adjoining the Manchester Ship Canal, which will greatly aid in the handling of freight.

Ford set new standards for industrial wages. The English operation learnt from the company’s American experience that the dehumanising and dictatorial conditions of the production line that Ford pioneered led to huge levels of turnover and absenteeism. The company addressed this by paying unprecedentedly high wage rates (in England’s case, £3 a week). The Model T remained in production until 1927, by which time Trafford Park had turned out well over 250,000 of them. Ford’s association with Manchester did not long survive the demise of the Model T; they moved their operation (including many of their Manchester staff) to new headquarters at Dagenham in 1931.

THE TEXTILE REVOLUTION

The wider area of which Manchester forms the heart was the focus of Britain’s cotton industry. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a series of technological breakthroughs transformed it from a home-based craft industry to a factory-based giant that, by the early nineteenth century, supported around one in ten of the nation’s population. A number of these innovations originated from within the Manchester area and all of them were applied there.

The developments started in about 1733. Up until that time, the larger looms required two people to operate them, until James Kay from near Bury came up with the flying shuttle. This meant that a single weaver could now operate the loom and vastly increased the productivity of the weaving industry. Like many innovators after him, Kay’s invention made him neither rich nor popular. Manufacturers found ways of evading the royalties he was due on his invention, and irate weavers, who saw it threatening their livelihoods, attacked his house and forced him to flee abroad, where he died in poverty.

The increased productivity of the weavers now meant that it could take as many as sixteen cotton spinners to keep one weaver supplied with raw materials. In 1770, James Hargreaves, originally from Blackburn, patented the spinning jenny. This enabled one spinner to produce several threads at once, and would eventually increase their productivity by a hundredfold. Unfortunately, his invention coincided with a deep recession in the industry and hostility towards him from displaced workers again forced him to leave the area.

Samuel Crompton, a mill worker from Bolton, came up with a further improvement on the spinning machine, which became known as the mule. However, he was unable to patent it, and instead he hit upon the idea of raising a subscription for his efforts from the textile manufacturers, in return for which he would make his invention freely available to all. True to form, the manufacturers proved extremely ungenerous; despite the fact that, in Crompton’s lifetime, some 4.2 million of his inventions were in use in Britain’s mills, his subscription raised just £60. True also to form, his invention prompted riots among spinners in Manchester in March 1792. Crompton himself died in poverty in 1827.

Last and quite possibly least, in a brief reference to Manchester’s links with a specialist part of the textile industry, a third of the world’s waterproof garments were once made at the Mackintosh plant in Chorlton-on-Medlock.

THE COMMUNIST REVOLUTION

Communism, the political creed that was arguably the most important in shaping the history of the twentieth century, can claim to have been conceived, if not born, in Manchester. Friedrich Engels was born into a wealthy German textile manufacturing family and was sent by his parents to work in Manchester, in the hope of curing him of his radical tendencies (which was rather like sending someone to the Sahara to cure them of sun-burn). On the way, he was introduced to Karl Marx and the pair of them used to meet in Manchester. Engels was writing his Condition of the Working Class in England, based on what he had seen in the poorer parts of Manchester, and Marx was shaping his ideas for the Communist Manifesto