Ernest Broxap's The Great Civil War in Lancashire (1642-1651) (1910) doesn't exactly tell the story of the war from the perspective of the people, but it does make bring it down to a human scale, making it clear that war in Lancashire was largely fought out with makeshift armies that often lasted only as long as they could be paid. The depredations of the various armies impoverished the local population and in the end, the Royalist Earl of Derby, who is said to have enjoyed the popular support of the county Lancashire, was defeated because he failed to raise an army large enough to confront the Parliamentary forces. The map of Manchester above is reprinted in the book and puts the scale of the war in perspective. The siege of Manchester in 1642 was an important early battle in the war, but as the map shows it was fought over what was at the time little more than a pair of villages joined by a narrow bridge across the River Irwell.
Ernest Broxap's The Great Civil War in Lancashire (1642-1651) (1910) doesn't exactly tell the story of the war from the perspective of the people, but it does make bring it down to a human scale, making it clear that war in Lancashire was largely fought out with makeshift armies that often lasted only as long as they could be paid. The depredations of the various armies impoverished the local population and in the end, the Royalist Earl of Derby, who is said to have enjoyed the popular support of the county Lancashire, was defeated because he failed to raise an army large enough to confront the Parliamentary forces. The map of Manchester above is reprinted in the book and puts the scale of the war in perspective. The siege of Manchester in 1642 was an important early battle in the war, but as the map shows it was fought over what was at the time little more than a pair of villages joined by a narrow bridge across the River Irwell.
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I have just finished Silas Hocking's best seller, Her Benny (1879), and was struck by how the author represents the accents and dialects of the various Liverpool characters in the book. The book is tale of two street children, Benny and sister Nell, who along with the reprobate Perks, are given distinctive accents and the unusual, to me, forms of the verb to be 'I's', 'You's' and 'It are'. I also tried to read their dialogue in a modern Liverpool accent are failed miserably, but that could be more due to my ignorance than anything else. The speech of the adult characters on the other hand, is represented in what appears to have become the standard for Lancashire dialect writing, which suggests that Hocking was sensitive to generational differences in the Liverpool speech of the time. Anyone who knows their northern English accents will know that the modern Liverpool accent is distinctive and doesn't spread far beyond the suburbs. Hocking's representation of late 19th-century Liverpool speech makes me wonder when this came about.
'Arter aw, it does a mon no hurt to travel. I should na wonder if I mought see things as I nivver heard on if I getten as fur as the Contynent. Theer’s France now – foak say as they dunnot speak Lancashire i’France, an conna so much as understand it. Well, theer’s ignorance all o’er the world.'
Sammy Craddock in That Lass o' Lowries, Frances Hodgson Burnett, 1877. I have just finished reading Edwin Waugh's Sketches of Lancashire life and localities, of which I have written more on the 'eboowks' page. By the end of the book, I was skipping some of the more tedious pages in order concentrate on what Waugh does best - a good story told by a passing acquaintance in the dialect. Waugh's antiquarian passages are mostly dull and I have to admit that I often find his nature writing to be the same, although it won him praise in his day. Waugh was a Romantic and a lover of Wordsworth and he often quotes him at length. But his saving grace is that, unlike Wordsworth, he does not condemn the industrialization that was beginning to eat into his beloved south Lancashire countryside. Some of his most evocative passages, for me, document the impact of industry on the landscape and this view of Rochdale from the Pennines shows this side of his writing at its his best: "The parish of Rochdale partly consists of and is bounded by this tract of hills on the east and north; and what may be called the lowland part of the parish looks, when seen from some of the hills in the immediate neighbourhood something like a green sea of tempest-tost meadows and pasture lands, upon which fleets of cotton mills ride at anchor, their brick masts rising high into the air, and their streamers of smoke waving in the wind." A Librivox recording of Stanley Houghton's play, Hindle Wakes, in which I took the male parts and Michele Eaton the female parts with Kristingj narrating, is doing moderately well in terms of downloads on Internet Archive. As it turned out, the recording was catalogued on Sept 10, which was a day before the 100th anniversary run of the play opened in London. When I suggested the project, I thought of Hindle Wakes as an obscure and forgotten play that I had come across when searching for authors who had attended Manchester Grammar School (Stanley Houghton being one). More fool me... Here is a summary of what I have gleaned with the help of Mr. Google. I won't go into Stanley Houghton's life and untimely death - referring instead to the introduction to a three volume edition of his works written by fellow member of the 'Manchester School' of playwrights, Harold Brighouse. Let's go straight on to Hindle Wakes, the highlight of his short but brilliant career. A brief summary of the plot: Fanny Hawthorn takes a holiday trip to Blackpool with her friend Mary. She meets Alan Jeffcote, son of the local factory owner, and the two go off together for a weekend in Llandudno. Unbeknown to her, Mary dies in a pleasure boat accident, and when Fanny returns home, she is forced to tell all. The Hawthorns visit the Jeffcotes (the two fathers are both employer and employee and old friends) and agree that Alan should renounce his fiance, Beatrice, and marry Fanny instead. Alan reluctantly agrees, and only because Beatrice tells him to. In the final act of the play, Fanny unexpectedly speaks up for herself and asks whether anyone has thought to ask what she thinks. She then tells Alan that they have had a good time together but she has not intention to marry him. Rejected by her mother, who had been hoping to turn Fanny's indiscretion into an advantageous match, she then declares that she will live alone and as she likes. Hindle Wakes was written in 1911 for Miss Annie Horniman's Gaiety Theatre in Manchester, but was staged first in London in 1912, where the play was a hit and Fanny's morality a talking point in the newspapers of the day. In 1913, the play was staged in New York, where it was less popular, but attracted attention from Willa Cather and Emma Goldman. (Catherine Edman's reading of Goldman's essay is bundled with the Librivox recording). Houghton's income from the Hindle Wakes meant that he could move to Paris and concentrate on his writing, but after a series of unexplained illnesses he died of meningitis at the end of the year. Hindle Wakes was filmed four times. Maurice Elvey directed a silent version of the play in 1918 and a remake in 1927. A talking version, directed by Victor Saville, appeared in 1931 - with Sybil Thorndike (above) taking the role of Fanny's mother - and in 1952 a fourth version appeared, directed by Arthur Crabtree. The 1927 and 1931 versions are generally acknowledged to be the best of these adaptions and the 1952 version the worst, in part because the cast made little attempt at northern accents. A 1976 television version was produced in the ITV Lawrence Olivier Presents series, with an all-star cast including Rosalind Ayres, Trevor Eve, Donald Pleasance and Roy Dotrice. Hindle Wakes has been performed on the stage many times over the years, notably in a 1996 performance in Manchester that was cut short by an IRA bomb explosion. It was put on again to reopen the refurbished Royal Exchange Theatre in 1998. Hindle Wakes was staged most recently at the Finborough Theatre, London, in September 2012, directed by Bethan Dear. The film versions are also shown in public from time to time and Hindle Wakes is the title of a 2000 recording by Sheffield musicians In The Nursery to accompany the 1927 film. Reviews of the play have tended to focus more on Fanny's morality than on the merits of the play. The recent London production was advertised as 'Banned, Burned, Revived', but there is little evidence that the first two actually happened, or that Hindle Wakes has ever been away. It is clear enough, though, that in its day Fanny's proto-feminism set tongues wagging in the theatre and the press. Emma Goldman saw her as a role model for female sexuality, while Willa Cather objected to Houghton's ambivalence on the issue (see below). Fanny's choice has, of course, become less and less shocking as the years have gone by, which led one reviewer of Bethan Dear's production to conclude that Stanley Houghton is 'not a playwright for all time'. Stanley Houghton, I suspect, would have been more than a little surprised that, 100 years on, Hindle Wakes had been remembered at all. From a review by Willa Cather in McClure's Magazine, March 1913 THE only play given in New York this season that touched upon the feminist movement or the industrial position of women at all vitally was Stanley Houghton's new play, "Hindle Wakes." The play did not meet here with a shadow of the success it had in London. It is written in the quiet tone popular among the younger English dramatists, who are so determined not to be artificially conclusive that they are sometimes more inconclusive than they need be. But they are certainly bringing to the stage fresh material; and, cutting into new cloth, they have the right to cut it to a new pattern. The plot is slight, but the characters are very real people, with clearly defined individuality, and the dialogue is living human speech, colored by strong human feelings.... It would have been comforting to the conventional-minded if Mr. Houghton could have added another act showing us where we would find Fanny in, say, five years—whether she was really able to live up to her liberty, whether she recovered from her indiscretion as a young workman would, kept her head, and made the most of her life and her skill. Probably Mr. Houghton would say: "Here is the situation; I don't know where it's leading any more than any one else does." A nice podcast here from Jack Thurston's Resonance FM Bike Show on the Lancashire cycletourer-writer Albert Winstanley, who died earlier this year at the age of 95. Three of his books are featured on Tim Dawson's voluminous Cycling Books website. Two are compilations of articles published in cycling magazines, describing his cycling adventures around the north west of England - The Golden Wheels of Albert Winstanley and Golden Days Awheel. A flavour of Winstanley's writing from The Golden Wheels, courtesy of Tim Dawson: "I chose a convenient rock to sit my wet seat on and peeled off my socks, then my shorts and underpants. Over my sandwiches and a flask of tea I sat in the October sunshine, musing and laughing at my adventures. Draped around me were my wet clothes, and I had my cape handy to throw over my state of undress should anyone choose to come this way." Winstanley's third book, Owd Tom, was a celebration of the life of the Lancashire miner and cyclist Tom Hughes, who clocked up 400,000 miles on his penny farthing 'ordinary', which he continued to ride into the 1920s and beyond. I have been making CD covers for my last few Librivox recordings and, when searching for a picture to go with Wordsworth's River Duddon sonnets, I came across this from James Thorne's Rambles by rivers. The chapters of the book cover rivers across the country, with the Duddon being Lancashire's contribution. There are six illustrations of the Duddon in all, which I have uploaded as a slideshow. I have just posted a link on the Audiobooks page to Andy Minter's wonderful Librivox recording of The Lancashire Witches by Harrison Ainsworth, which brings me to my third Old Mancunian, as former pupils of Manchester Grammar School (or some of them at least) like to call themselves. Although Harrison Ainsworth made a name for himself in London, he was a Lancashire and he dedicated Mervyn Clitheroe to his 'contemporaries at the Manchester school'. The book is set mainly in rural Cheshire, but also in smoky, industrial 'Cottonborough', where Mervyn spends his schooldays at the 'Cottonborough Free Grammar School'. 'I cannot say much in praise of the architectural beauty of the school', he writes, 'for, if truth must be spoken, it was exceedingly ugly'. 'It was a large, dingy, smoke-begrimed brick building, with copings of stone, and had so many windows that it looked like a lantern. In front, between the angles of the pointed roof, was placed a stone effigy of the bird of wisdom, which seemed to gaze down at us with its great goggle eyes as we passed by, as if muttering, "Enter this academic abode over which I preside, and welcome, but you'll never come out as clever as I"'.
Thomas De Quincey, author of Confessions of an English opium-eater, is the second of my Manchester Grammar School old boys. De Quincey was born in Manchester, but left after the death of his father and then returned at the age of 15 to attend the school. His studies there lasted less than 2 years, ending when he fled the city in a fit of pique because his guardians would not release his inheritance so that he could immediately enroll at Oxford University. De Quincey's recollections of the school are somewhat jaundiced and were no doubt influenced by his precocious talent for ancient languages. He is at pains to point that his knowledge of Greek was superior to that of the headmaster, Charles Lawson, from the day he arrived, and in his later reminiscences he points out that he generously disguised him as a 'doctor', when in fact he was not. In his additional texts to the Confessions, he has this to say of the school: "It was (1.) ancient, having in fact been founded by a bishop of Exeter in an early part of the sixteenth century, so as to be now, in 1856, more than 330 years old; (2.) it was rich, and was annually growing richer; and (3.) it was dignified by a beneficial relation to the magnificent University of Oxford".
Just added to the eBoowks page is a short 17th century history of the city of Manchester by Richard Hollingworth, Mancuniensis. This is the first of three that I will add that were written by former pupils of my own school, the Manchester Grammar School, which was founded in 1515 and located in the city centre between what is now the cathedral and Chetham's School of Music. His entry for Anno 1519 reads:
"Hugh Oldham, D. D. and Bishop of Exeter, died, who out of the good mind hee have to the county of Lancaster, being, I believe, his native county, perceiving that the children thereof having pregnant wits, were for the most part brought up rudely and idllely; that Knowle ledge might be advanced, (the art of grammer being the ground and fountaine of all the liberall arts and sciences) and that children might bee occupyed in good learning, and better taught to love, honour, and dread God and his lawes, founded the free schoole in Manchester." As this is the oldest online book on Manchester that I have found, I expect this is one of the earliest published references to the school. In my day, in the 1960s, we were often reminded of Hugh Oldham, as his name, pronounced 'Owldham', was the origin of the owl badge that we wore on our school blazers. |
Phil Benson
Born in Manchester when it was still part of Lancashire, which it still is really. Exiled in sunny Sydney, I love to read Lancashire books Archives
March 2013
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