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"'.
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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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