When our history came as inexpensive and varied stories ……. a tribute to Neil & Sue Richardson

Now in an age when we can all access the past by surfing the net, which delivers television programmes, books, and countless photographs as well as a shedload of different original sources it is easy to forget that it was not always so.

Indeed, slide back to the early 1980s and anyone interested in history was pretty much limited to the works of professional historians, and a scatter of documents many of which were difficult to obtain.

And given the cost of books, most of us were still reading the events of the past courtesy of a lending library.

So full credit should be given to those small publishers who were producing books at affordable prices and equally important were willing to offer opportunities to local historians as well as “people with a story to tell” to write about their chosen interest.

Here in Manchester one of the foremost small publishers was Neil Richardson who lived in Radcliffe.

I never asked him how he got into the business, but I bet there will be someone who can provide his story.

Suffice to say that during the mid-1980s I started coming across soft back booklets on a range of subjects related to the history of Greater Manchester.  

Some were descriptions of growing up in places like Salford and Ancoats in the early decades of the last century, while others focused on the unwritten histories of the Pal’s Battalions which formed Kitchener’s Army during the Great War.

They were popular with the public because many told stories which were directly a part of ordinary life.

"Memories of Manchester" by Charles Naan described the streets and characters of Bradford and Beswick and later his time as a policeman on the beat across the City.

While Bob Potts wrote about the pubs of Hulme and Chorlton on Medlock at a time when they were vanishing as quickly as snow in the winter sun and in the process spent hours carefully researching each drinking place.

This I know because years later he kindly passed over his research to me, which was as comprehensive and historically detailed that I suspect it will never be repeated.

And that points to the simple fact that may of those who wrote for Neil Richardson did so with a wealth of knowledge supported by hours of interviewing people as well as wading through records held across the twin cities and beyond.

These included the Archive and Local History Library in Central Ref, as well as Salford Local History Library, Cheetham’s Library and the Greater Manchester County Office, and in the case of Eddie and Ruth Frow, their own vast collection of Labour history which is now the Working-Class History Library.

Much of that research broke new ground, like “Working Class Housing in 19th Century Manchester, The Example of John Street, Irk Town, 1826-1936” by Jacqueline Roberts published in 1999.  

It was an in-depth study of a few streets on the edge of Angel Meadow, and followed on from the collaborative work she had done recording buildings from the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth century. *

Few of the thousands which were thrown up in the decades of Manchester’s rapid expansion had survived and by the 1980s many of those were under threat of demolition.

As was the way of life of the many who lived in inner city areas Manchester which  were vanishing as their homes were cleared away and communities relocated in the new estates.

And one of my favourite accounts is still The Manchester Village by Frank Heaton who collected the memories of those who lived in the collection of streets running back from Deansgate towards the river and roughly bordered by Quay Street and the end of Castlefield, and subtitled “Deansgate Remembered”.

To which there is also  “Manchester’s Little Italy, Memories of the Italian Colony of Ancoats” by Anthony Rea.

To these Neil Richardson also added a selection of British and foreign descriptions of Manchester from the 1500s to 1865, several street directories, as well as plenty of other accounts drawn from across Greater Manchester.

By today's standards they may seem a little down market, with some images a little tired looking and  the print which reminds you of old computer printers.

But don't let that side track you, the history is fascinating is often written with passion, and thanks to Neil Richardson a whole lot of people got to tell their stories of places that have vanished.

And that I think is pretty neat.

Location; Greater Manchester

Pictures, covers of The Manchester Village by Frank Heaton, 1995, Radical Salford: Episodes in Labour History Edmund and Ruth Frow, 1984 and “Manchester’s Little Italy, Memories of the Italian Colony of Ancoats”, Anthony Rea, 1988

*The Early Manchester Dwellings Group

"Gossip with footnotes" ....a conversation with the historian Peter Hennesy

I have to admit to never reading any of the books of Peter Hennesy.

He was a name in the background but despite being aware of some of his 23 books, most are just titles I nearly bought in a bookshop.

So I was fascinated to hear him on Desert Island Discs, talk about his days as a journalist and later as an eminent historian.*

"He was born just two years before me, and much of what he said chimed in with own experiences of growing up in post war Britain and the debt all of us "baby boomers" owe to the creation of the Welfare State as much as to the endeavours of our parents and grandparents who strive to make for us a better world than the one they had known

Leaving me just to comment on that throw away comment about contemporary history which Mr. Hennessy described as "gossip with footnotes" and which he has used to masterly effect when matched with his use of archives and skill at writing about the past.

Professor Peter Hennessy is one of the UK’s leading contemporary historians. He has written acclaimed and important books about politics, the civil service, the intelligence agencies and the British constitution on which he is an expert.

Peter was born in London in 1947 and read history at St John’s College, Cambridge. He started writing for the Times in the mid-1970s, covering the inner workings of Whitehall whose activities at that time were shrouded in secrecy. Peter says he approached his journalism like an amateur anthropologist trying to discover more about an unknown culture. His reports were viewed with suspicion by some members of the civil service and Harold Wilson, the then prime minister, issued an edit banning them from talking to him.

In 1986 Peter co-founded the Institute of Contemporary British History, and in 1992 he moved from journalism to academia at Queen Mary, University of London where he is Attlee professor of contemporary British history. He is a fellow of the British Academy and was made a crossbench life peer in 2010. During the COVID-19 pandemic he started keeping a diary which he describes as an “aid to humility” with the aim of assessing post-world war history as BC (Before Covid) or AC (After Covid).

Peter lives in London with his wife Enid.

Presenter Lauren Laverne

Producer Paula McGinley"

*Professor Peter Hennessy, historian, Desert Island Discs, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001lr3k

Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past ..... today on the wireless

Now here is one of those Radio 4 programmes that anyone interested in history should listen to.

Writing and illuminating the book, 14th century

It is an adaption of the book, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past by Making History, by Richard Cohen.

"Richard Cohen examines the storytellers of the past, how they worked and how their writings still influence our ideas about history.

Who were the historians who changed the way history is written? How did their biases affect their accounts? Is there such a thing as objective history?

The series explores lives and works from the Greek historian Herodotus, through the great Roman historians Tacitus and Livy, with their great epic stories of war and plagues, all of them inventing stories to be more reader friendly, and then moving through Arab and Islamic writings, to the medieval historians like Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth – the latter famous for his economy with the truth, in other words, making it all up.

The great Italian Niccolo Machiavelli became a historian by accident, Voltaire and Edward Gibbon changed the way history was written, breaking away from a God centred universe. Then there's the Red historians from Marx (always in debt and crippled by boils on his skin) to Eric Hobsbawm, the emergence of female historians, and false accounts of history.

Episode 1

Detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, 1070s

The lives and works of the earliest historians, the Greek Herodotus in 450 BC , indulging his curiosity about the habits of his neighbours (for example, descriptions of the sexual habits of the Egyptians) and his successor Thucydides, who shaped his material to enthral his readers. The great Romans Tacitus and Livy, with their epics of plagues and wars, embellishing the truth whenever it took their fancy. Livy was the tabloid journalist of his day.

Author: Richard Cohen, Abridger: Libby Spurrier, Reader: Alex Jennings, Producer: Celia de Wolff, A Pier production for BBC Radio 4"

Picture; Roman de la Rose, The Roman de la Rose manuscript contains one of the most popular romantic French poems of its time, 14th century, Illumination on parchment, National Library of Wales  Blue pencil.svg wikidata:Q666063, References, MS NLW 5016D. This image is available from the National Library of Wales. You can view this image in its original context on the NLW Catalogue. This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.  And, detail from the Bayeux Tapestry, from the Bayeux Tapestry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry

*Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped The Past, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00159rh