But to return to the Manchester of to-day; it has become rather the mercantile than the manufacturing centre of the cotton manufacture. There are firms in Manchester which hold an interest in woollen, silk, and linen manufactures in all parts of the kingdom and even of the continent.
From a pamphlet published last year by the Rev. Mr. Baker, it appears that there are five hundred and fifty cotton manufactories of one kind or other in the cotton district of Lancashire and Cheshire. Of these, in Ashton-under- Lyne, Dukinfield, and Mosley, there are fifty-three mills, Blackburn fifty- seven, Bolton forty-two, Burnley twenty-five spinning manufactories, at Heywood twenty-eight mills, Oldham one hundred and fifty-eight, Preston thirty-eight, Staley Bridge twenty, Stockport forty-seven mills, Warrington only four, Manchester seventy-eight.
The following is a brief outline of the stages of cotton manufacture which may be useful to those who consider the question for the first time.
When cotton has reached Manchester from the United States, which supplies 75 per cent. of the raw material; from Egypt, which supplies a good article in limited quant.i.ty; from India, which sends us an inferior, uncertain, but increasing, quant.i.ty, but which with railroads will send us an improved increasing quant.i.ty; or from any of the other miscellaneous countries which contribute a trifling quota--it is stowed in warehouses, arranged according to the countries from which it has come. It is then "pa.s.sed through the willow, the scuthing machine, and the spreading machine, in order to be opened, cleaned, and evenly spread. By the carding engine the fibres are combed out, and laid parallel to each other, and the fleece is compressed into sliver.
The sliver is repeatedly drawn and doubled in the drawing frame, more perfectly to strengthen the fibres and to equalize the grist. The roving frame, by rollers and spindles, produces a coa.r.s.e loose thread, which the mule or throstle spins into yarn. To make the warp, the twist is transferred from cops to bobbins by the winding machine, and from the bobbins at the warping machine to a cylindrical beam. This being taken to the dressing machine, the warp is sized, dressed, and wound upon the weaving beam. The weaving beam is then placed in the power loom, by which machine, the shuttle being provided with cops with weft, the cloth is woven."
Sometimes the yarn only is exported, in other cases the cloth is bleached, or dyed, or printed, all of which operations can be carried on in Manchester or the surrounding auxiliary towns.
The best mode of obtaining a general idea of the trade carried on in Manchester will be to visit two or three of the leading warehouses in which buyers from all parts of the world supply their respective wants. For instance, Messrs. J. N. Phillips and Co., of Church Street; Messrs.
Bannermans and Sons, York Street; Messrs. J. and J. Watts and Co., of Spring Gardens; and Messrs. Wood and Westhead, of Piccadilly. Next, to go over one of the leading Cotton Mills, say Briley"s or Houldsworth"s; then Messrs.
Lockett"s establishment for engraving the plates used in calico-printing, and Messrs. Thomas Hoyle and Son"s print works. This work completed, the traveller will have some idea of Manchester, not without.
SILK.--The silk trade of Manchester and of Macclesfield, which for that purpose is a suburb of Manchester, arose in the restrictions imposed upon Spitalfields, at the request of the weavers, by successive acts of Parliament, for the purpose of regulating employment in that district. In 1830 there were not 100 Jacquard looms in Manchester and its neighbourhood, whilst at the present time there are probably 12,000 employed either on silk or some branch of figure weaving. The most convenient silk manufactory for the visit of the stranger is that of Messrs. James Houldsworth of Portland Street, near the Royal Infirmary. This firm was established by a German gentleman, the late Mr. Louis Schwabe, an intelligent German, who introduced the higher cla.s.s of silk manufacture with such success as to enable him to compete with even the very first cla.s.s of Lyons silks for furniture damasks.
In addition to the extensive application of the Jacquard loom, Mr. Schwabe introduced, and Mr. Henry Houldsworth improved and perfected, the embroidering machines invented by Mr. Heilmann of Mulhausen. The improvements are so great that the original inventor cannot compete with them. Rows of needles elaborate the most tasteful designs with a degree of accuracy to which hand labour cannot approach.
Messrs. Winkworth and Proctor are also producers of high cla.s.s silks for ladies" dresses and gentlemen"s waistcoats.
Manchester is particularly celebrated for plain silk goods of a superior quality at a moderate price. There are also manufactories of small wares, which include parasols and umbrellas. A parasol begins at 4.5d. wholesale.
In Manchester the tastes and costumes of every country are consulted and suited. The brown cloak of the Spaniard, the poncho of the Chilean, the bright red or yellow robe of the Chinese, the green turban of the pilgrim from Mecca, the black blanket of the Caffre, and the red blanket of the American Indian may all be found in bales in one Manchester warehouse.
In pa.s.sing through the streets, the sign "Fents" is to be seen on shops in cellars. These are the odd pieces, of a yard or two in length, cut off the goods in the manufactories to make up a certain even quant.i.ty; and considerable trade is driven in them. Selections are sometimes bought up as small ventures by sea captains and emigrants.
Paper-making is carried on extensively in the neighbourhood of Manchester from cotton waste. This was formerly thrown away; scavengers were even paid to cart it away. After a time, as its value became quietly known among paper-makers, parties were found willing to take on themselves the expense of removing it. By degrees the waste became a regular article of sale; and now, wherever possible, a paper-mill in this part of the country is placed near, or worked in conjunction with, a cotton-mill. The introduction of cotton waste has materially reduced the price of paper. No doubt, when the excise is abolished, many other articles will be employed for the same purpose.
To describe the railroads, which are every hour departing for every point of the compa.s.s, would take up too much s.p.a.ce. But the railway stations, several of which have been united by works as costly, and almost as extensive, as the Pyramids of Egypt, are not among the least interesting sights. At these stations barrels of flour will be found, literally filling acres of warehouse room, and cuc.u.mbers arrive in season by the ton.
THE Ca.n.a.lS must be mentioned, and remind us that at Worsley, near Manchester, the Duke of Bridgwater, "the Father of Inland Navigation," aided by the genius of Brindley (another of the great men, who, like Arkwright and Stephenson, rose from the ranks of labour, and directly contributed to the rise of this city) commenced the first navigable ca.n.a.l constructed for commercial purposes in Great Britain.
At the present day the construction of a ca.n.a.l is a very commonplace affair, but it is impossible to doubt the high qualities of the mind of the Duke of Bridgwater, when we consider the education and prejudices of a man of his rank at that period, and observe the boldness with which he accepted, the tenacity with which he adhered to, the energy and self-sacrifice with which he prosecuted the plans of an obscure man like Brindley.
A disappointment in love is said to have first driven the Duke into retirement, and rendered him shy and eccentric, with an especial objection to the society of ladies, although he had once been a gay, if not dissipated, young gentleman, fond of the turf. He rode a race at Trentham Hall, the seat of his brother-in-law, the Marquis of Stafford.
When he retired from the pleasures of the fashionable world, his attention was directed to a rich bed of coal on his estate at Worsley, the value of which was almost nominal in consequence of the expense of carriage. He determined to have a ca.n.a.l, and, if possible, a perfect ca.n.a.l, and who to carry out this object he selected Brindley, who had been born in the station of an agricultural labourer, and was entirely self-educated. To the last he conducted those engineering calculations, which are usually worked out on paper and by rule, by a sort of mental arithmetic. Brindley must have been about forty years of age when he joined the Duke. He died at fifty-six, having laid the foundation of that admirable system of internal commerce which is better described in Baron Charles Dupin"s Force Commerciale de la Grande Bretagne than in any English work.
One often-told anecdote well ill.u.s.trates the characters of the n.o.bleman and his engineer, if we remember that no such works had ever been erected in England at that time. "When Brindley proposed to carry the ca.n.a.l over the Mersey and Irwell Navigation, by an aqueduct 39 feet above the surface of the water, he desired, for the satisfaction of his employer, to have another engineer consulted. That individual, on being taken to the place where the intended aqueduct was to be constructed, said, that "he had often heard of castles in the air, but never was shown before where any of them were to be erected."" But the Duke had faith in Brindley, persevered and triumphed, although, before the completion of all his undertakings, he was more than once reduced to great pecuniary difficulties.
The ca.n.a.l property of the Duke of Bridgwater, with the Lancashire estates, are now vested in the Earl of Ellesmere, a n.o.bleman who well knows, and conscientiously works out, the axiom, "that property has its duties as well as its rights." A visit to Worsley will prove what an enlightened and benevolent landowner can do for a population of colliers and bargemen.
The educational and other arrangements of a far-sighted character show that there are advantages in even such large acc.u.mulations of property as have fallen to the share of the present representative of the Duke of Bridgwater.
Those who desire to pursue closely the state of the operative population in Manchester, will find ample materials in the annual reports of factory inspectors, and school inspectors, under the Committee of the Council of Education, and of the munic.i.p.al officers of health.
FIRES.--Dreadful fires occur occasionally in Manchester. If such a catastrophe should take place during the stay of a visitor, he should immediately pull on an overcoat, even although it be midnight, and join in the crowd. An excellent police of 300 officers and men renders the streets quite safe at all hours; and a fire of an old cotton factory, where the floors are saturated with oil and grease, is indeed a fearfully imposing sight. It also affords an opportunity of some familiar conversation with the factory hands.
In taking leave of Manchester, which is indeed the great heart of our manufacturing system, we may truly say that it is a city to be visited with the deepest interest, and quitted without the slightest regret. On our political railroad we are under deepest obligations to the Manchester stokers; but Heaven forbid that we should be compelled to make them our sole engineers.
THE ROAD TO YORKSHIRE.
MIDDLETON.--And now, before taking a glance at the woollens and hardware of Yorkshire, we suggest, by way of change from the perpetual hum of busy mult.i.tudes and the whizzing and roaring of machinery, that the traveller take a holiday, and spend it in wandering over an agricultural oasis encircled by hills, and so far uninvaded by the stalks of steam-engines, where the air is comparatively pure and the gra.s.s green, although forest trees do not flourish.
The visit requires no distant journey. It is a bare six miles from the heart of Manchester to Middleton. Nine times a-day omnibuses ply there. These original, if not primitive vehicles, are constructed to carry forty-five pa.s.sengers, and on crowded market-days may sometimes be seen loaded with seventy specimens of a note-worthy cla.s.s.
Middleton, lately a dirty straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on the borders, and was the manorial village, of the Middleton and Thornham estates, which had been in the family of the late Lord Suffield for many hundred years. In the village, land was grudgingly leased for building, and no steam-engine manufactories were permitted. The agricultural portion of some 2500 acres of good land for pasturage and root crops, celebrated for its fine supplies of water and for its (unused) water-power, was divided into little farms of from twenty to seventy acres, very few exceeding fifty acres, inhabited by a race of Farmer-Weavers, who, from generation to generation, farmed badly and wove cleanly in the pure atmosphere of Middleton. They were, most of them, bound to keep a hound at walk for the Lord of the Manor.
Now the old Lords of the Manor and owners of the estate of Middleton (the Harbords, afterwards Barons Suffield), were proud men and wealthy, who despised manufactures and resisted any encroachment of trade on the green bounds within which their old Manor House had stood for ages. So when the inventions of Crompton, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Cartwright began to coin gold like any philosopher"s stone, for well-managing cotton manufacturers, speculators cast their eyes upon the pleasant waters of Middleton and Thornham, proposing to erect machinery and spin the yarn or thread, and otherwise to use the abundant water-power. But the Lords of Middleton would have none of such profits, (and if they could afford to reject them, we will not say that up to a certain point they were not wise), and so they gave short answers to the applicants, who went away and found, half-a-mile off, on the borders of Yorkshire, similar conveniences and more accessible ground- landlords in the Byrons, Lords of the Manor of Rochdale. And when, some time afterwards, a like application met with a like answer, other manufacturers went away to another corner, and built Oldham.
So the Middleton farms continued very pretty picturesque farms; Middleton village grew into a miserable town, and was pa.s.sed over in 1830, when every population was putting forth its claims to a share in making the laws of the United Kingdom; while Oldham, with 30,000 inhabitants, was allotted two members, (an honour which cost the life of one of them, our best describer of English rural scenery, in racy Saxon English, William Cobbett); Rochdale, with 24,000, obtained one, and eventually made itself loudly heard in the House, in the person of John Bright, a gentleman of pluck not without eloquence, who has done a good deal, considering the disadvantages he has laboured under, in not having been brought to his level in a public school, and in having been brought up in the atmosphere of adulation, to which the wealthy and clever of a small sect are as much exposed as the scions of a "proud aristocracy."
A few years ago, the late lord, who had occasionally lived on the estate, died. His successor pulled down the Manor House, became an absentee, always in want of ready money, and introduced the Irish system into the management of his estate. That is to say, good farming became a sure mode of inviting an increase of rent--for indispensable repairs no ready money was forthcoming, so tenants who had an indisputable claim to such allowances, received a reduction of rent instead; they generally accepted the reduction, and did no more of the repairs than would just make shift. The land in the town suitable for building was let at chief rents to the highest bidder, with no consideration for the mutual convenience of neighbours, or the welfare of future residents.
Thus mismanaged and dilapidated, the estates were brought into the market, and purchased for Messrs. Peto & Betts, by their land agent, Mr. Francis Fuller, for less than 200,000 pounds; and the lands of the aristocracy of blood pa.s.sed into the possession of the aristocracy of trade. Here was a subject for a doleful ballad from "A Young Englander," commencing--
"Ye tenants old of Middleton ye cannot need but sigh, Departed are the traces of your own n.o.bility, The Locomotivocracy have gone and done the trick, And England"s aristocracy"s obliged to cut its stick."
A visit to Middleton, however, will show that on this occasion the tenantry have no reason either to sigh or weep, and the visit is worth making, independently of the pleasantness of a change from town to country, because it affords an opportunity of seeing what can be done with a neglected domain when it pa.s.ses into the hands of men of large capital, liberal views, and a thorough determination that whatever they take in hand shall be done in the best possible manner.
Messrs. Peto & Betts are managing this estate on the same principles that they have conducted the undertaking by which, in a very few years, they have acquired a large fortune and an influential position. Not by avariciously grasping, and meritlessly grinding all the subordinates whose services they required; not by squeezing men like oranges, and throwing them away when squeezed; but by choosing suitable a.s.sistants for every task they undertook, and making those a.s.sistants, or advisers, feel that their interests were the same, that they were prepared to pay liberally for services strenuously rendered. By this system servants and sub-contractors worked for them with all the zeal of friends, and by this system the tenantry of Middleton will attain a degree of comfort and prosperity hitherto unknown, while the estate they occupy will be largely increased in value.
It is most fortunate that, at a time when so much landed property is pa.s.sing into the hands of men of the cla.s.s of which these gentlemen may be considered the intellectual leaders, an example has been set, by them, of liberal and judicious management.
For this reason we do not think these rough notes on Middleton will be considered a useless digression.
DRAINS AND REPAIRS.--Instead of the ordinary system of bit-by-bit repairs and instead of arrangements for the tenants to execute drains, as the first step after the change of proprietorship, a complete survey was made of the defects and of the value of all the holdings. On this survey the rents were fixed, with the understanding that while no increase of rent would be imposed on a good tenant, lazy slovenly farming would be forthwith taxed with an additional ten per cent.
The landlords have themselves undertaken to execute a complete deep drainage of the whole property at a cost of 20,000 pounds. For this they charge the tenants five per cent. on the outlay per acre occupied. Farm buildings and farm houses are being put in thorough repair, and tenants are expected so to keep them.
In the course of these repairs farm houses were found in which the windows were fixtures, not intended to open! While as to the farming, it is scarcely possible to imagine anything more barbarous. It is not a corn-growing district, and what corn is grown these weaver farmers, indifferent apparently to loss of time, first lash against a board to get part of the grain out, and then thrash the rest out of the straw!
Market garden cultivation, stall feeding, and root crops would answer well, but at the time of the survey only two gardens were cultivated for the sale of produce in the unlimited markets of Oldham, Rochdale, and Manchester; and little feeding except of pigs.