Off to Didsbury, in the summer of 1847

Now I can be as adventurous as the next chap and have been known to venture out of the township as far as Didsbury.

It was after all where our farmers went to get their cereal milled and it was where my old chum Alexander Somerville ended up in the June of 1847.

He had come over to Chorlton looking for potato blight, moved across the Mersey by the Greyhound pub at Jackson’s Boat and ended up in Didsbury.  A place he wrote
“of great beauty- not surpassed even by the beautiful fields, meadows, gardens, and the public pathways through them, lying around London.”*

And went on to revel in the place stating boldly

“Let the traveller, passing out of Cheshire into Lancashire by the Northern Ferry, who loves to loiter on the road, and see sights, come at the hour of summer sunset.  Let him approach Didsbury, and look back suddenly through the trees, the traveller will see the houses standing on the brow of eminence, and the gardens with them, and the people looking out of opened windows, the very houses gazing, as it were, with wonder; and the old church, with its graveyard, and the dead of a thousand years around it, standing in the very brink of the eminence.”

This I have to say is not an advert for the place nor a way of ingratiating myself with people of a neighbouring township who might just in the fullness of time buy a copy of The Story of Chorlton-Cum-Hardy** which like Didsbury was a small rural community.

Instead it is a way of introducing a new occasional series highlighting places close by.

And I now have a special interest in the Didsbury  because it is where Miss Leete of Poplar Grove lived, and she is someone I am very interested in because in a rural area dependant on farming she was on the Ladies Committee of the National Anti-Corn Law Bazaar.  The bazaar was held in London in the May of 1845 and was part of the campaign to abolish the Corn Laws.  These had been introduced in 1815 to protect British agriculture but amongst the working class and industrial interests were highly unpopular.

But more of her later, along with and some other interesting aspects of Didsbury in the early 19th century.  In the mean time I finish with my picture of the Didsbury Hotel.  The caption gives a date of 1860-70.

At that time there was a regular horse bus service operating from Manchester to Cheadle which went from "All Saints and from the Commercial Office on Brown Street via Rusholme, Fallowfield and Didsbury 40 minutes past nine, half past seven, and every hour at night; on Sundays at ten, eleven, one, two, half past two, three, half past three, seven, eight and nine.”***

And for those who wanted to travel a little down market there were the carriers of which two operated from Manchester.  These were “James Crompton from 2a Palace Street [off Market Street] and Alfred Midwinter from the Cock, Mark lane [Withy Grove] daily.”


*Alexander Somerville, A Pilgrimage in search of the Potato Blight, The Manchester Examiner, June 19th 1847
** http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
*** Slater’s Directory of Manchester & Salford 1863

Picture; from the Lloyd Collection

In Didsbury in search of Miss Leete of Poplar Grove

The year is 1845 and I am looking for Miss Leete of Poplar Grove.  

And apart from her address I know very little about her, except that she was a member of the Ladies Committee of the Anti Corn Law League Bazaar.

Now the Anti Corn Law League had been formed to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws which banned the import of cheap foreign cereal till the price of home grown corn rose to 80 shillings a quarter.

It was introduced in 1815 as a way of protecting British agriculture and was unpopular with the working class and sections of the manufacturing interests.

In the May of 1845 the Ladies Committee had organised an event at Covent Garden which raised £25,000 for an out lay of £5,713 and did much to publicise the Anti Corn Law League.

Some of both the success and impact of the event can be gauged from the sheer size of the event.   They shipped goods from all over England and these included fabrics and even machine tools.  There were twenty-seven stalls, a daily newspaper and between eight to nine thousand people had to be accommodated each day from noon to 10 p.m.

And my Miss Leete was one of the 1,150 committee members who acted as a link with their community asking for funds and articles and utilising the social network which owed much to their “district-visiting experience and leisure.”

No doubt as well as visiting her contacts she would have had them in her own home at Poplar Grove which looks to have been an impressive place set in extensive grounds east of the parish Church along what is now Wilmslow Road.

The house was set well back from the road and visitors would have travelled south along a path through the grounds with clear views in both directions to the rows of trees which boarded the estate and shut it off from the neighbouring fields.  At the end of this long path was the house surrounded by an orchard.

But she has proved elusive. I know she was living at Poplar Grove in 1845 but had gone by 1851 when the house was occupied by Thomas Phillips and his family.  Nor can I find here in Didsbury in 1841.

Not that I have given up.  There are still the directories which list householders and the Rate Books which record all the houses in Didsbury detailing the owner, the tenant, the rateable value and whether the property was rented. But, and there is always a but, the directories only list the householder and just possibly his occupation or status and the Rate Books only start at 1847, but I might strike lucky.  In the meantime she might just have been mentioned in a newspaper and in any documents linked to the Ladies Committee.

So I travel in hope.  

Pictures; Poplar Grove from the OS map of Lancashire, 1841-53, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/and front page of the Ladies Committee of the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar from the collection of June Pound

Campaigning with the Anti Corn Law League in Manchester in 1845

I am back with Alexander Somerville, radical, journalist and by his own admission at one time a police spy.

That earlier campaign in St Peter's Fields, 1819

All of which makes him a fascinating chap to write about and one who fully embodies my idea that history is messy.

Now I have written about his visit to Chorlton in 1847 and explored his stand against using the military to suprpress the popular agitation for the Reform Bill in 1832.*

And later I guess I will cruise along the Spanish coast relating his time fighting for the British Auxiliary Legion during the Spanish Civil War of 1835-38**

But today I want to go back to his time with the Anti Corn Law League which had been set up in 1836 to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws which had been introduced in 1815 as a means of protecting British agriculture, but which was judged by many as responsible for keeping bread prices high and preventing the unfettered reign of Free Trade.

So Alexander took on the job of taking the message into the countryside and arguing the case amongst the farming interests.  And it was while he was engaged in this task that he gave us a wonderful description of the headquarters of the Anti Corn Law League here in Manchester.  Match this with two pictures from digital collection of Manchester Libraries and we can almost be in the offices sometime at the height of the campaign.

We are on the corner of Market Street and Cross Street in Newell’s Buildings.  My picture dates from 1867 but judging from the directories was much the same building that Somerville knew.

In 1851 it was occupied by a couple of painters, two engravers, a Music school, share broker, the Manchester Library and the Financial and Parliamentary Reform Offices as well as the National Reform Association.

But just a few years earlier it was completely taken over by what Somerville descibed as “at that extraordinary body the Anti-Corn-Law League.”

And so “having a day in Manchester I determined to get a peep.  Accordingly at ten o'clock I was in Market Street, a principal thoroughfare in Manchester. A wide open stairway, with shops on each side of its entrance, rises from the level of the pavement, and lands on the first floor of a very extensive house called 'Newall's Buildings'. The house consists of four floors, all of which are occupied by the League, save the basement. We must, therefore, ascend the stair, which is wide enough to admit four or five persons walking abreast.

On reaching a spacious landing, or lobby, we turn to the left, and, entering by a door, see a counter somewhere between forty and fifty feet in length, behind which several men and boys are busily employed, some registering letters in books, some keeping accounts, some folding and addressing newspapers, others going out with messages and parcels. This is the general office, and the number of persons here employed is, at the present time, ten. Beyond this is the Council Room, which, for the present, we shall leave behind and go up stairs to the second floor.

Here we have a large room, probably forty feet by thirty, with a table in the centre running lengthwise, with seats around for a number of persons, who meet in the evenings, and who are called the 'Manchester Committee'.

During the day this room is occupied by those who keep the account of cards issued and returned to and from all parts of the kingdom. A professional accountant is retained for this department, and a committee of members of council give him directions and inspect his books. These books are said to be very ingeniously arranged, so as to shew at a glance the value of the cards sent out, their value being represented by certain alphabetical letters and numbers, the names and residences of the parties to whom sent, the amounts of deficiencies of those returned and so on.

Passing from this room we come to another, from which all the correspondence is issued. From this office letters to the amount of several thousands a-day go forth to all parts of the kingdom. While here, I saw letters addressed to all the foreign ambassadors, and all the mayors and provosts of corporate towns of the United Kingdom, inviting them to the great banquet which is to be given in the last week of this month ... In this office copies of all the parliamentary registries of the kingdom are kept, so that any elector's name and residence is at once found, and, if necessary, such elector is communicated with by letter or parcel of tracts, irrespective of the committees in his own district.

Passing from this apartment, we see two or three small rooms, in which various committees of members of the council meet. Some of these committees are permanent, some temporary. Of those which are permanent I may name that for receiving all applications for lecturers and deputations to public meetings. ...

In another large room on this floor is the packing department. Here several men are at work making up bales of tracts, each weighing upwards of a hundred weight, and despatching them to all parts of the kingdom for distribution among the electors. From sixty to seventy of these bales are sent off in a week, that is, from three to three and a-half tons of arguments against the Corn Laws!

Leaving this and going to the floor above, we find a great number of printers, presses, folders, stitchers, and others connected with printing, at work. But in addition to the printing and issuing of tracts here, the League has several other printers at work in this and other towns of the Kingdom. Altogether they have twelve master-printers employed, one of whom, in Manchester, pays upwards of £100 a week in wages for League work alone.”***

So there you have it a vivid description of a campaign and its headquarters in the centre of our city.

Pictures; Peterloo, 1819, m01563, Newall’s Buildings, by James Mudd, 1867, m74665 and the interior, 1860, m56387 Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alexander%20Somerville
** Somerville, Alexander, History of the British Legion, and War in Spain,1839
*** Somerville, Alexander, The Whistler at the Plough, 1852, pp. 79-82

Manchester, the Anti Corn Law League and Cobden Bright Villiers Wright, who was born in Chislehurst and lived in Greenwich

I was lucky.  One of my middle names is Bux, which was my grandmother’s maiden name.  This makes me luckier than my uncles who were given the names, Honeymoon, Ferguson and Bradford respectively.  It is that tradition of ensuring that some family names endure.

Now I don’t have a problem with it and have become proud that I carry it.

But I wonder how Cobden Bright Villiers Wright thought about his given names.

This is his picture. He was born in 1848 to Thomas and Fanny Wright who lived in Chislehurst in Kent.

 His brothers and sister all had conventional enough names.  The eldest was Thomas, followed by Samuel, Sidney and Eliza.

But Cobden was named after politicians, three in fact.  Richard Cobden, John Bright and Charles Villiers.

All were leading proponents of free trade, the abolition of the Corn Laws and sat as Liberal MPs.

Added to this 1848 was the year of Revolutions when the ground under the monarchies of Europe shook in a way that it hadn’t since 1789.

Some disappeared, while others retained their thrones only after the application of brutal force and amidst the turmoil Marx and Engels wrote of “a spectre ... haunting Europe -- the spectre of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Pope and Tsar, Metternich and Guizot, French Radicals and German police-spies.”*

Here the establishment prepared for the presentation of the third and largest Chartist petition demanding an extension of the franchise to working men against a backdrop of continued industrial unrest.

All of which raises the intriguing question of why Thomas and Fanny bestowed such a collection of names on the young Cobden.  I doubt that Thomas was a revolutionary.  Within ten years he was describing himself as a “Carpenter, and Builder employing ten men” but he may well have been a fervent free trader celebrating the abolition of the Corn Laws just two years earlier.

In turn I wonder about Cobden and  how he voted.  He was also a carpenter and lived most of his life in Greenwich.

Now all of this came about because an old friend, one of the “class of 68” read the post on Campaigning with the Anti Corn Law League in Manchester which appeared here on the blog* and drew me to the link between the events here in the city, the trio of Liberal politicians and Cobden Bright Villiers Wright who was his great grandfather.

“I've just been reading the piece on your blog about the campaign against the Corn Laws, which rang something of a bell for me.

I remember my grandmother talking from time to time about someone called Cobden Bright Villiers, but had no idea who she was talking about. It was only some time after her death in 1986 that my mother mentioned that her (Grannie's) parents' grave in Cemetery Lane, Charlton was quite close to the Hatch family grave, so I went to take a look. There on the gravestone stood, 'Cobden Bright Villiers Wright', and his dates, 1848-1923. 

This was an eye-opener on several levels. Firstly, he was my grandmother's father, therefore my great-grandfather. Secondly, his given names were all surnames of the heroes of the fight against the Corn Laws. Thirdly, the year of his birth was significant not only in the UK but also throughout Europe for civil unrest, so I assumed that this meant that HIS father was left-leaning and enthused by the revolt against authority."

So there you have it another of those odd ways that history makes connections.  All that is left to do now is to delve deeper in to the lives of Thomas and Cobden and see if either of them have left speeches or letters which draw Manchester, the Anti Corn Law League and Chislehurst and Greenwich closer together.

*Marx, Karl & Engels, Frederick, The Communist Manefesto, 1848

*  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/campaigning-with-anti-corn-law-league.html

Pictures; Cobden and his wife from the collection of David Hatch,  The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Green, April 10 1848 by William Kilburn, and Interior of Newall’s Buildings, HQ of the Anti Corn Law League, 1860, m56387 Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Chorlton, Australia and an unpopular food tax

It was one of those serendipity moments which brought together my old friend Alexander Somerville, his contribution to the campaign against an unpopular food tax and our township and along the way brought a new pal from Australia.

Now I say my old friend Alexander Somerville but that is stretching a point as he died in 1885 but I have followed his life, read his books and got to feel he was someone I would like to have spent time with.*

And he was a remarkable man who campaigned on a wide range of social issues, was flogged by the British Army for refusing to attack peaceful protesters in 1832 and wrote extensively on Ireland and agricultural matters.

All of which would make him interesting enough but it was the fact that he came here in 1847, wrote about the place and recorded the conversations with some of our farmers that first drew him to me.

Then I discovered he was active in the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws and regularly took the case into rural communities. Now this must have seemed a tall order, given that the Corn Laws had been introduced to protect British farming by barring the import of foreign cereal into  the country until the price of corn reached 80 shillings a quarter thereby ensuring a market for home grown cereals.

But that is what he did and so it is entirely possible that he passed through here before the repeal in 1846.  All of which led me to ponder on the reception he would have got.  This may not have been so frosty, because although we did grow a fair amount of cereal many of our people were market gardeners and were more focused on the production of fruit and vegetables for the Manchester markets.

I have to admit that my knowledge of the degree of support for the Anti Corn Law Leagues in the countryside is limited and I have always promised myself it is something I must brush up on.  So I was intrigued when my new pal from Australia presented me with a list of the women on the Ladies Committee of the National Anti Corn Law Bazaar held in London in the May of 1845.

Given that the Anti Corn Law League had been founded in Manchester and was popular with the manufacturing interests it is no surprise to clock the number of Manchester addresses as well as the surrounding townships and out into Derbyshire and Yorkshire.

But there are also a few from rural areas, like Burnage and Didsbury which may mean something or may mean nothing at all.  There were plenty of business people who chose to settle away from the smoke and noise of their factories and both places were very pleasant and very much in the countryside.

So I suppose here is the new research project.  Single out, identify and track down these “ladies” and in the process see if there is evidence for their background and social standing in these rural communities.  All of which might lead on to how if they were linked to farming.

So far neither Miss Leete of Poplar Grove, Didsbury or Mrs Thomas Bright from Burnage have stepped out of the shadows but we shall see.

All of which just leaves my new pal.  This is June Pound who lives in Australia and who is related to the woman Alexander Somerville married and amongst her family treasures was the list which really goes to show how serendipity works.

Picture; Anti Corn Law Committee  from the collection of June Pound and cover page of Somerville's autobiography

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alexander%20Somerville