This will be the last post on Richard Buxton, who I have been writing about since January, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Richard%20Buxton
His was a great achievement. From a humble background dogged by poverty and self taught he spent a life time identifying and collecting the “flowering plants, ferns, mosses and algae around Manchester” and publishing them in a book with contemporary poems. It was as he said intended “for working men, the cultivators of the soil, and young people of both sexes.” And in this he seems to have succeeded. Botanists still read his book and use it to identify plants which he first saw. In a spot where Chorlton (Gore) Brook runs into the Mersey David Bishop has seen the same plants first observed by Buxton one hundred and sixty years ago.
Nor should we underestimate what was involved in walking the fields around Manchester. It may always have been a joy but it must have tested a man who had spent a week of unremitting toil in that Port Street workshop. One such walk was to Chorlton which was still a small village four miles from Manchester. He was to set off with other botanists at seven in the morning from Hunts Bank. It had been he remembered “one of the hottest and driest summers that I can remember, and there had been no rain in the neighbourhood for two or three months; but on the day appointed for our meeting, very heavy rain came on about five in the morning.” With great honesty he continued, “I should not have thought of stirring out of doors; but, having made the appointment, I thought it just possible that my friends might come, and I would not on any account disappoint them. We all went in the rain, through Manchester to Chorlton-cum-Hardy. After staying at the last named place some time the weather changed and a fine day ensued ” encouraging them to push over the Mersey at Jackson’s Boat and on to Baguley Moor and Hale Moss “and after having botanized there ..... returned to Manchester at dusk, all pleased with our day’s excursion”
To the north of the city lies Kersal Moor. Buxton often visited the moor, a place which was rich in mosses, heathers, grasses and ferns as well oak rown and cherry trees. Here in June 1826 he “happened to see a person engaged in the same pursuits as myself ........... This was no other person than John Horsefield, hand-loom weaver of Whitefield the President of the Prestwich Society; and now president of the General Botanical Meeetings”. Three years later an amateur insect collector named Robert Cribb, collected a series of about fifty small yellow and brown moths which turned out to be a previously unknown species of moth. It was also the scene of the largest Chartist demonstration in the north. On September 24th 1838 anything between 30,000 and 300,000 met to listen to speakers from all over the country. Buxton does not record whether he was on the moor, nor what he felt about the Government stationing troops there ten years later in the face of further Chartist demonstrations. As ever his autobiography records only his interest in the plants of the Moor and the work of Horsefield.
And it was from the Moor that he must have gazed back at the city and contrasted the peace and tranquilly of the place with noise, dirt and bustle of Manchester. Just thirty-one years later, the artist William Wyld captured the scene in his painting A View of Manchester from Kersal Moor.
In a literate world where reading and writing are taken for granted, it is easy to gloss over the fact that at the age of sixteen he was illiterate, and had to set himself the task of learning to read. What is all the more remarkable is that having mastered the spelling book and the narrative of the New Testament he realized he needed to know not only how to pronounce the words but their exact meaning. And so “By this means I was enabled not only to read, but also to understand the meaning of what I read, and to speak it correctly.”
All the more remarkable given that his working day lasted from six in the morning till eight or nine at night.
He does represent that strand of the urban working class who battled against poverty and an unfair system to improve himself not by money but by learning. His goal was to better understand the world he lived in and share that understanding with others. In that sense he was very remarkable. In a few more generations compulsory state education would make his achievements of self learning a thing of the past.
And likewise the very method by which he made a living would soon also be consigned to the past. Having been apprenticed to a craft trade in a city increasingly dominated by machines and new ways of doing things his trade would soon be eclipsed. Shoes with leather tops would be replaced by cloth and later machines would replace the skilled worker altogether.
I suppose the other great achievement was Buxton’s acceptance by other naturalists and his invitation to join the Manchester Mechanics' Institution natural history class, where, he largely compiled the Flora Mancuniensis (1840).
In 1861 Richard and his sister Mary had moved just about a mile away to Martin Street which was off St Andrews Street behind Piccadilly Railway Station. Mary was by then aged 81 and a widow and he was 76.He died in January 1865 in Limekiln Lane, which seems a grim place. The 1884 OS map shows the lane bounded by the river and reservoir and surrounded by an iron forge, lime kiln, printworks, a dye works and a rubber works. Only a few houses existed in 1884 and today the area is empty. A dismal place for what by then must have been a lonely end.
But there is something powerfully uplifting about his life. He may have lived his life in what Engels described as a place which was “coal black and stinking” and have toiled for very little but he could write about “the cool shade of the woods, the bust insect world all alive and found an abundance of wild flowers.”
Pictures; our parish church circa 1860 from the collection of Tony Walker, Kersal Moor, By William Wyld 1859, Lime Kiln Lane, detail from 1880 OS for South Lancashire, courtsey of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/
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