‘The real ruler of Manchester’
Manchester supported Oliver Cromwell and Parliament against the Stuart king Charles I during the mid-seventeenth-century Civil Wars (the Wars of the Three Kingdoms). However, after the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, many of the citizens of Manchester and, more broadly, Lancashire (with its sizable Roman Catholic population) felt a loyalty to the deposed and exiled ‘legitimate’ Catholic Stuart monarch, James II (Charles I’s second son), and his male heirs. James’s successor or usurper, depending on your view, his nephew the Protestant William III, signed the Bill of Rights in 1689 which, among other things, enshrined the right of the people to petition the monarch (or his/her regent) as a keystone of the English constitution. The bill eventually ushered in, after the death of William’s heir Queen Anne in 1714, a tentative form of constitutional monarchy within the now united kingdoms of England and Scotland – since 1707, named Great Britain – under the Protestant Hanoverian Georges. But many of Manchester’s leading citizens still maintained a devotion to the Stuarts, if only of the sentimental variety. It was over the Old Bridge, via Salford, that the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart (James II’s grandson), and his Jacobite* or ‘rebel’ army entered Manchester in the late November of 1745, drawn to the town by its reputation as a Jacobite enclave and his desperate need for recruits to fight for this final attempt to restore the exiled House of Stuart.1
In reality Lancashire and Manchester were divided, like much of Great Britain, as Samuel Bamford recalled in his autobiography. His great-grandfather, Samuel Cheetham, during ‘the troubles in 1745… loaded his gun, and swore he would blow out the brains of any rebel who interfered with him’.2 His maternal grandfather, meanwhile, was ably assisting the Jacobite army in the collecting of local taxes. This ancestor just avoided execution for his part in the rebellion. As Samuel’s fond recollections suggest, such ancestral loyalties and family divisions were remembered long after the precise details of the events had been forgotten, although it is also true that the ’45 rising was still, just, within living memory and Charles Edward’s brother Henry Benedict Stuart (1725–1807), the Jacobite ‘King Henry IX’, continued the direct male Stuart line into the new century. As Bamford proudly concludes, ‘Such were the men and women from whom I derived my being. The rebel blood, it would seem, after all, was the more impulsive; it got the ascendency – and I was born a Radical.’3
The peaceful accession of a third Hanoverian King George in 1760 signalled that Jacobite hopes were effectively dead. At George III’s coronation in September 1761 the loyalist Manchester Mercury described a parade of all the principal trades through the town centre, organized by the local magistrates, and a ball at the old Exchange attended by seven hundred people.4 By this date a gradual acceptance of the Hanoverian monarchy had occurred across the political spectrum. Archibald Prentice was a partner in Thomas Grahame’s textile firm which had moved from Glasgow to Manchester, at Prentice’s instigation, in 1815.5 A proud radical, his thoughts on this acclimatization to the Hanoverian dynasty reflect his politics:
the doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance, which had made them continue Jacobites, reconciled them to the reigning family, which had, in its turn, become legitimate, and had shown no great disposition to extend popular rights or religious liberty, or to innovate upon the previously existing relations between Church and King. While the Church had a defender it mattered not much to them whether he was a James or a George; and, until the dawn of the French revolution, which awakened a hope that every governmental institution throughout Europe was about to receive beneficial renovations, Jacobites and Hanoverians, Churchmen, and Dissenters, lived together in tolerable harmony, smoking their pipes and drinking their ale in peace and quiet converse about the progress of their new machinery and the widening prospects of manufactures and trade.6
If local Whigs and Tories, in essence the ancestors of the later nineteenth-century Liberal and Conservative parties respectively, had indeed dispensed with party politics, and if religious differences between Anglican ‘Churchmen’ and ‘Dissenters’† had indeed been put aside, for the sake of domestic peace and the betterment of local trade and commerce, then the seismic tremors caused by the French Revolution of 1789, as Prentice goes on to observe, would have put paid to any such amity.
The political divisions within society existed on a local as well as national level, but took on a particular slant in Lancashire.7 In Manchester, Archibald Prentice wrote: ‘There are numbers of persons now alive who recollect hanging in Manchester taverns, boards stuck up with the inscription – “NO JACOBINS ADMITTED HERE.”’ He firmly believed that the ‘putting up of these articles-of-peace boards was part of a plan to prevent the discussion of reform principles in bar-parlours’, the tavern being, throughout the Georgian period, the forum for political debate and the spread of ideas.8
In nearby Middleton Samuel Bamford recalled his own father reading Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and Age of Reason, but at ‘the commencement of the French Revolution, a small band only, of readers and enquirers after Truth was to be found in Middleton. They were called “Jacobins,” and “Painites,” and were treated with much obloquy, by such of their bigotted [sic] neighbours, as could not, or would not, understand that other truths existed in the world.’9 This situation would only get worse as the events in Paris escalated. In 1793, in Archibald Prentice’s words,
[A] shriek of horror arose when Louis XVI was executed, not by the infuriate mob, but by deliberate judicial sentence; and another when Marie-Antoinette was led to the scaffold; and all England’s chivalry was roused to revenge the wrong to royalty and beauty. George the Third is recorded to have said, ‘If a stop be not put to French principles, there will not be a king left in Europe in a few years;’ and the nation joined in his fear of such a calamity.
As a result, the ‘war spirit was kindled, and it flamed up as fiercely as King, or Aristocracy, or Church could desire’.10 The effect, according to Prentice, in Manchester was extreme and pernicious: ‘Even in assemblies for music and dancing the “Jacobin” and his wife and daughters were liable to insult and vulgar abuse. The reformers were excluded from all society but that around their own firesides, and even there they had carefully to guard against the introduction of the insidious spy; and in business transactions, none who could help it would deal with them. Throughout Lancashire the same coarse manners and intolerant spirit prevailed.’11
Bamford also recalled such intimidation and partisanship. As a child, while sitting on the front steps of his home and watching the annual community rush-cart parade through Middleton (a subject we shall return to), young Samuel noted ‘a cart more richly decked than others’ on which ‘was placed the figure of a man, which I thought was a real living being’. A rabble, he recalled, was following the cart and throwing stones at the figure, clearly a type of Guy Fawkes effigy, while shouting (in the local dialect), ‘“Tum Pain a Jacobin” – “Tum Pain a thief” – “Deawn wi’ o’th Jacobins” – “Deawn wi’th’ Painites,” – whilst others with guns and pistols kept discharging them at the figure.’ ‘They took care,’ he continues, ‘to stop when they came to the residence of a reformer; the shouting and the firing renewed, and then they moved on. Poor Pain was thus shot in effigy on Saturday; repaired, re-embellished, and again set upright on Sunday; and “murdered out-and-out” on Monday – being again riddled with shot, and finally burned. I, of course,’ he concludes, ‘became a friend of Thomas Pain’s.’12
In 1816, on a day-to-day basis, Manchester was governed by a boroughreeve (or ‘reve’) and two constables chosen by a jury ‘impanneled’, as Joseph Aston describes it, by the steward of the manor. By tradition, the boroughreeve was selected from those who had already served as constables, but by the early nineteenth century it was largely an honorary position. As Aston observed in 1816: ‘He does not appear to have many duties to discharge, since the actual superintendence of the police is performed, under the direction of the two Constables, by their deputy, who has a salary of £350 per annum, and has under his command four beadles to assist him in the laborious duty of constable in so populous a township.’13 The boroughreeve, however, did preside at all public meetings, including those where politics and parliamentary reform were discussed, ‘which are convened by himself and the Constables, at the requisition of respectable inhabitants, who notify the nature of the business intended to be brought forward’. He therefore had the ability to permit or forbid a meeting, officially at least. To aid the constables, there were around two hundred special constables ‘who, residing in different quarters of the town, tend very much to the conservation of the peace’.14
Archibald Prentice, inevitably perhaps, offers a different impression of Manchester’s civil power, describing it as run by ‘the self-styled “friends of social order”, who swore by “Church and King”, and thought that they better served God and their country by punishing the discontented than by endeavouring to remove the causes of discontent’.15
The protection of property was the most important element of law and order – property, among other things, being the basis for eligibility to vote and to sit in the House of Commons – which resulted in a judicial system with extreme penalties against, in modern terms, the most minor thefts by those who owned little or nothing. Transportation, hard labour, whippings and custodial sentences were commonplace punishments. The New Bailey Prison, where the Petty and Quarter Sessions magistrate courts sat, was located just across the River Irwell (at the western end of Bridge Street) on Stanley Street, Salford.16 Bamford described the prison as a ‘Golgotha’, a ‘building of sombre appearance; with flanking towers, and shot-holes, and iron spikes jutting above high walls; and ponderous black fetters, hung above the barred window, and grated portal’.17
The magistrates who presided at the Petty and Quarter Sessions included two Anglican churchmen, the Reverend William Robert Hay (b. 1761) and the Reverend Charles Wicksted Ethelston (b. 1767). William Hay lived in Yorkshire, where he was Rector of Ackworth, but he also held the important position of the chairman of the Salford Quarter Sessions. Unlike many of the magistrates, who tended to be either landowners or, as fewer such persons took up this onerous office, from the middling professional class, Hay had legal training, although he had given up the law in preference for the church. Charles Ethelston (sometimes spelt Ethelstone), a tall man of ‘large proportions’ who ‘spoke deliberately and with much pomp of manner’,18 had been a pupil at Manchester Grammar School, attended Trinity College Cambridge and, by 1804, was a published poet‡, the Rector of Worthenbury and a fellow of the Collegiate Church.19 In regard to his role as magistrate, William Hay ‘had formed a high opinion of Mr. Ethelstone’s firmness, decision, and temper, and considered him a valuable magistrate. Their views agreed on all important subjects connected with the administration of the law.’20
In 1814, Ethelston was actively supporting ‘The Book Repository’, wishing ‘to circulate on a large scale in Manchester and the neighbourhood, amongst the lower classes, at a reduced price, the publications of the Christian Knowledge and Prayer Book and Homily Societies’, no doubt an attempt to wean the working man off the radical literature which, as will become clear, was habitual reading material for some. He was also active in developing the concept of schools based on the principle that ‘the national religion should be made the foundation of national education’.21 In 1817 he attended the annual meeting of the Tory ‘Manchester Pitt Club’, ‘where 200 gentlemen dined in the Exchange Buildings, decorated for the occasion with banners, flags, busts, &c., under the presidency of William Hulton of Hulton Park, Esq.’22 William Hulton, of the wealthy coal-mining family and the chairman of the Lancashire and Cheshire magistrates, also sat on the Grand Jury at the Lancaster Assizes, which covered cases committed at Manchester, Liverpool, Royton and elsewhere.
Ethelston apparently ‘advocated the union of Church and State’ while lamenting ‘the bad effects on the popular mind of Sir Francis Burdett’s and Lord Cochrane’s political proceedings’. Burdett and Cochrane, the two Members of Parliament for the City of Westminster, were both advocates of reform, Burdett being one of the leading national figures.23
There is a description of the Reverend Charles Ethelston in court at the New Bailey, offered by its author F. R. Raines as an indication of his wit, which, Raines declares, ‘was generally fertile in coarse humour after the manner of Rabelais and Hogarth’:24
A servant girl was brought before the magistrates at the New Bailey for having robbed her mistress of wine, and for being found drunk and incapable in the cellar at midnight. Being asked what she was doing there at such an untimely hour, she replied she was frightened, for she had seen a spirit, and had gone there to hide herself. ‘No doubt, girl,’ said Mr. Ethelstone, with great gravity, ‘you met with the spirit of the cellar!’25
By tradition, most of the magistrates, like Ethelston and Colonel Ralph Fletcher of Bolton, provided their services without fee, considering it payment enough that they were performing their civic and moral duty. But by 1816 a magistrate who was a barrister, called a stipendiary magistrate, was appointed by government ‘and with a salary of £1,000 per year sits every day except Sunday in the courtroom of the New Bayley’. This position was first occupied by William David Evans and then, from 1818, by James Norris.26 In 1816 Aston commented that the Quarter Sessions ‘are so busy that they sometimes run for two weeks at a time’. The introduction of a paid magistrate indicates the issues around the appointment and retention of unpaid volunteers, as well as the dramatic increase in workload.
The lists of offenders and their respective crimes and sentences from the most recent Quarter Sessions were immediately published in the Manchester Mercury. On 30 January 1816, for example, the newspaper reported that Mary Dalton, ‘for receiving cloth stolen from T. Brough’, would be imprisoned for two years at Lancaster Castle, while Betty Mitchell received a nine-month sentence for stealing butter from J. Newton of Manchester.27 On 14 May 1816 the paper listed nineteen people who had been sentenced to be transported for seven years, including William Hart and Michael Mar ‘for stealing a blanket, &c. from Mr. T. Proctor’, and one individual, William Major, found guilty of stealing treacle from a Mr. J. Chadwick, who was to be transported for fourteen years.28 The same hefty sentence was handed down to Edward Wild, as reported by the paper, ‘for stealing a watch from J. Arnold’.29 Transportation was usually to the new penal colony at Port Jackson, near Botany Bay, Australia (this term was now in general usage, officially replacing Terra Australis in the 1820s).
One case from the Quarter Sessions even warranted editorial comment, under the title ‘Modern Reformers’, as follows: ‘At the present Salford Session, James Mahon was convicted, on Tuesday, of feloniously stealing a coat, a shirt, and a pair of stockings, the property of his master.’ The report observes that Mahon ‘urged in his defence, that he was a Reformer, and that the prosecutor having two coats, both better than his own, he had a natural right to one of them.’ The editorial asks, ‘Could the principles of their system have been more clearly elucidated, by the longest harangue, from the ablest orator of the party, than by this simple avowal.’30 In all instances the likely chairman would have been the Reverend William Hay.
These ‘miserable rulers’, as Archibald Prentice describes the magistrates, ‘were in their turn ruled by one of their own servants, the noted Joseph Nadin, the deputy constable of Manchester’, the officer who, Aston records, was earning £350 per year. Prentice goes so far as to say that to ‘this man’s rule, strengthened, it is said, by seasonable loans to some of the magistracy, for he had contrived to make his office one of great profit, may be attributed much of the jealousy and hatred with which the working classes in this town and neighbourhood regarded their employers, the local authorities, and the general government of the country’.31 Nadin’s character and behaviour, as described by his less favourable critics, has the air of a corrupt and bullying lawman of America’s Wild West.32 Nadin had taken over the role of deputy constable in 1802, having previously been a mill manager in Stockport. At that time the annual salary of the deputy constable was a mere £150.33 The constables under his command, in imitation of Henry Fielding’s mid-eighteenth-century Bow Street Runners, were known as ‘Nadin’s Runners’.34
Joseph Nadin certainly made a powerful impression on anyone who had the misfortune to cross his path. Samuel Bamford described him as ‘I should suppose, about six feet one inch in height, with an uncommon breadth and solidity of frame. He was also as well, as he was strongly built; upright in gait, and active in motion. His head was full sized, his complexion sallow, his hair dark and slightly grey; his features were broad and non-intellectual, his voice loud, his language coarse and illiterate, and his manner rude and overbearing to equals or inferiors.’35 William Harrison, a cotton spinner from Oldham, when asked whether he knew Joseph Nadin, replied, ‘No, and I don’t wish to know him.’ When pressed further and asked whether Nadin was ‘much feared in this country?’ Harrison retorted, ‘I believe he is, and with good reason.’36 In turn Archibald Prentice declared Nadin ‘the real ruler of Manchester’, who was instrumental in repressing, ‘by every means of coercion, the rising demand for political and social rights’.37
One local reformer whose activity was rigorously monitored was John Knight, who had been a committed supporter of universal manhood suffrage and, more broadly, the rights of the labouring class since the 1790s.38 His family were from the area of Saddleworth, on the Lancashire–Yorkshire border; John’s uncle ran a woollen mill in Stonebreaks, but his father, Joseph, was a handloom weaver. John and his brother William were inspired by the French Revolution and the ensuing Napoleonic Wars to enter local politics. By 1812, at the height of the Luddite riots and the hardships brought on by the war, John Knight was living in Hanover Street, Shudehill, Manchester and was central to the formation of a local Reform Society in that year. The immediate purpose of the new society was to petition the House of Commons and submit an address to the Prince Regent, as set out in the Bill of Rights of 1689, calling for parliamentary reform. As Knight recalled, ‘The labouring classes of the community, especially those employed in the cotton manufacture, who are almost literally crushed to the earth by the increase of taxation, and the price of every necessary of life, with a concomitant reduction in their earnings, gladly hailed this meeting, as affording them an opportunity of expressing to the executive power, their real sentiments as to that ruinous and destructive system of policy.’39
A meeting was called on 11 June 1812 at the Elephant Tavern in Tib Street to discuss next steps. But before it had even begun, Knight was informed that Nadin was on his way with a military force to break up the gathering, upon which they moved to the Prince Regent’s Arms in Ancoats. The address and petition had been prepared and the meeting proceeded. The petition to the House of Commons highlighted the futility of the war and the burdens it placed on the populace, and stated that ‘the object of all political institutions ought to be the general good, the equal protection, and security of the person and property of each individual, and therefore labour (the poor man’s only property) ought to be held as sacred as any other’.40 It made a number of demands in order to avert ‘the annihilation either of the government or of the people… to restore cordiality and confidence between the government and the people; to diminish the national expenditure; to restore to the people their constitutional share in the disposal of their labours, their liberties and their lives; to give them that liberty, practically, which is now only enjoyed nominally, to conciliate and unite the will of the government and that of the people’. And it concluded:
we earnestly and zealously pray that your honourable House will adopt the most speedy and effectual means to restore to this afflicted nation the BLESSINGS OF PEACE! To diffuse the elective franchise as far as taxation; to divide the population of the United Kingdoms into equal parts, those parts to equal the number of representatives, each representative to be an inhabitant of the district which he represents, each man, not confined for crime nor insane, to be intitled to vote for a representative, and to cause Parliaments to be elected annually.41
As these eminently reasonable proposals were being discussed, Nadin suddenly burst into the room, armed with a blunderbuss and accompanied by a large number of soldiers with guns and bayonets. Knight and thirty-seven fellows were searched, bound and then taken to the New Bailey, where twenty-four men were put in a single cell ‘and crowded almost to suffocation, for sixteen or seventeen hours. We requested fresh air, water, and an immediate examination. The last, however, we could not obtain, nor were we permitted to see either our friends or solicitors.’42
They were charged, simply on Nadin’s oath, with ‘holding an unlawful meeting, combining for seditious purposes, tending to overthrow the government; which he could bring a witness to prove’.43 They were eventually sent to Lancaster Castle, fifty-five miles away, ‘ironed [shackled] together… without any other refreshment than a coffee breakfast, and a glass of beer each; and on our arrival we were put among persons accused of robbery, murder, and almost every species of crime.’44 At one point Knight was placed in solitary confinement ‘in a dungeon, in the tower, where I remained upwards of fifty hours’.45 During his confinement, Knight came to understand that the authorities were prejudiced against him and his fellow prisoners because they represented lower-class interference in politics. Yet, he later wrote, the ‘poor, I am persuaded, feel no wish to usurp the place of their superiors, in an expression of their political sentiments’. Rather ‘so acute, so long continued and severe have been their sufferings, that the apathy and indifference of the middle and higher classes, on subjects of the most vital importance to their welfare, and even existence, have rendered it imperiously necessary for them to come forwards.’46 The thirty-eight arrested and imprisoned were eventually acquitted when the testimony of a paid informer was exposed in court.
While in prison Knight was contacted by the veteran reformer Major John Cartwright (b. 1740), an early proponent of the reform fraternities initially called Hampden Clubs (after John Hampden, one of the five MPs whom Charles I attempted to arrest in the House of Commons in 1642, precipitating the Civil War) and later known as Political Unions. The first Hampden Club had been established in London by Thomas Northmore in 1811.47 Soon after Major Cartwright began to tour the North of England to encourage the creation of branches in the region, with the aim of bringing the working and middle classes together in a formidable alliance for the purpose of parliamentary reform. The first club in Lancashire was formed in 1816 at Royton by William Fitton, a local surgeon, and others were set up at Oldham, Rochdale, Stockport, Middleton and Manchester in the same year, with standard membership subscription set at a penny a week. Major Cartwright’s key innovation, to be rolled out through the expanding Hampden Club network, was the production of the mass petition, a document signed by thousands or even tens of thousands of men to signal the scale of support for reform.
Samuel Bamford was instrumental in the formation of the Middleton Hampden Club and was elected secretary as he was ‘a tolerable reader… and a rather expert writer’.48 In his autobiography he summarizes the extraordinary impact of the Hampden Clubs and the fraternity’s founding principles on the working class:
Instead of riots and destruction of property, Hampden clubs were now established in many of our large towns, and the villages and districts around them; Cobbett’s books were printed in a cheap form; the labourers read them, and thenceforward became deliberate and systematic in their proceedings… by such means, anxious listeners at first, and then zealous proselytes, were drawn from the cottages of quiet nooks and dingles, to the weekly readings and discussions of the Hampden clubs.49
As Bamford recalls, the key reading material was William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, printed by T. C. Hansard, which Cobbett established in 1801, initially as an anti-Jacobin journal but thereafter increasingly critical of the Pitt government. By the 1810s Cobbett and Sir Francis Burdett were the leaders of the reform movement and both venerated Major Cartwright. Burdett was now also the chairman of the London Hampden Club.
In 1816, in addition to the main journal, Cobbett began producing his Weekly Political Register in a cheaper format targeting the working man, selling it for two pence a copy. It became the most widely read paper among the working class, as Bamford testifies:
At this time the writings of William Cobbett suddenly became of great authority; they were read on nearly every cottage hearth in manufacturing districts of South Lancashire, in those of Leicester, Derby, and Nottingham; also in many of the Scottish manufacturing towns. Their influence was speedily visible; he directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings – misgovernment; and to its proper corrective – parliamentary reform.50
The power of print, as the Reverend Charles Ethelston understood, coupled with opportunities for basic education – in essence, reading and writing – was crucial to this transformation in working-class empowerment and identity. And just as crucial was who provided this education.
As the reading material of Samuel Bamford and his father suggests, working people’s ability to read and write meant that they could not only judge for themselves the radical literature which was targeted at them, but also disseminate their own ideas and interpretation through writing, publishing and public speaking.51 As the author of two autobiographies, poetry and much more besides, Samuel Bamford is an interesting case in point. First taught by a Methodist tutor, then at the Middleton Free Grammar School and the Manchester Grammar School, Bamford recalled that in his youth ‘the Methodists of Middleton kept a Sunday School in their chapel at Bottom of Barrow-fields, and this school we young folks all attended. I was probably a far better speller and reader than any teacher in the place, and I had not gone there very long when I was set to writing.’52 He continues, ‘The church party’, in other words the Anglican Church, ‘never undertook to instruct in writing on Sundays; the old “Armenian Wesleyans” did undertake it, and succeeded wonderfully.’53 ‘For the real old Armenian Methodists’, the descendants of the reforming Anglican ministers John and Charles Wesley, ‘thought it no desecration of the Sabbath to enable the rising generation, on that day, to write the Word of God as well as to read it.’ Bamford describes the usual timetable:
Every Sunday morning at half-past eight o’clock was this old Methodists’ school opened for the instruction of whatever child crossed its threshold. A hymn was first led out and sung by the scholars and teachers. An extempore prayer followed, all the scholars and teachers kneeling at their places; the classes, ranging from those of the spelling-book to those of the bible, then commenced their lessons, girls in the gallery above, and boys below… Whilst the bible and testament classes were reading their first lesson, the desks were got ready, inkstands and copy-books… and when the lesson was concluded, the writers took their places… and so continued their instruction. When the copy was finished, the book was shut and left on the desk, a lesson of spelling was gone through, and at twelve o’clock singing and prayer again took place, and the scholars were dismissed. At one o’clock there was service in the chapel; and soon after two, the school reassembled, girls now occupying the writing desks, as boys had done in the forenoon; and at four, or half-past, the scholars were sent home for the week.54
This description sets out the melding of the basic schooling with Bible instruction and Christian worship. As Bamford recalls, the Middleton Sunday School ‘was well attended’, not just by local children and youths, ‘but by young men and women from distant localities. Big collier-lads and their sisters from Siddal Moor were regular in their attendance.’ From all around, places like Whittle-le-Woods, Bowlee, White Moss, Chadderton and Thornham, ‘came groups of boys and girls with their substantial dinners tied in clean napkins, and the little chapel was so crowded that when the teachers moved they had to wade, as it were, through the close-ranked youngsters.’55
Bamford confirms the confidence that such learning instilled, as working men became not only open to the reform movement, but enthusiastic advocates thereof:
Nor were there wanting men of their own class, to encourage and direct the new converts; the Sunday Schools of the preceding thirty years, had produced many working men of sufficient talent to become readers, writers, and speakers in the village meetings for parliamentary reform; some also were found to possess a rude poetic talent, which rendered their effusions popular, and bestowed an additional charm on their assemblages.56
The notion that the Methodist-led Sunday Schools were acting, whether by design or accident, as a hotbed for radical thought, as well as encouraging religious non-conformity, finally stirred the Church of England to reconsider their opposition to writing on the Sabbath. By 1816, according to Joseph Aston, fears expressed in Manchester of ‘an undue influence, on the part of the Methodists, over the minds of the children, in the formation of their religious opinions’ led to a split in the town’s Sunday Schools. The schools now fell ‘under the direction of two distinct Committees, and are supported by two separate subscriptions’, that is, the children of Church of England parents and the children of all the other denominations. Aston believed the two committees ‘are active in the cause of humanity, and have many rooms in different parts of the town appropriated to the benevolent purpose of pointing the infant thought to virtue, and teaching “the young idea how to shoot”. Near EIGHT THOUSAND children are attenders of the schools supported by the Establishment,’57 while, Aston calculated, those within Manchester taught by the other denominations numbered around five thousand.
Of the eight thousand educated by the Church of England, Aston describes ‘the most amiable… heart-gratifying sights’ of these children, ‘clean, and in many instances, neatly-dressed’, on Whit-Monday gathered in St Ann’s Square, ‘attended by the Clergy of the Established Church and the acting committee, in order to proceed to the Collegiate Church, to hear the annual sermon which is preached to them’. He concludes, ‘For the heart must be cold indeed, must be wanting in the most essential of human energies, which does not swell with pleasure at the sight of so many of the rising generation rescued from ignorance, and its, too often, consequent depravity, by the hand of Charity.’58 Bamford’s account suggests the Methodists’ approach was a less patronizing, authoritarian one, focused on equipping children for both the spiritual and practical aspects of life. The gift of learning, however, had already created a generation of well-read, confident and devoted advocates of parliamentary reform from the labouring class, who were now in the habit of gathering to agitate for change.
* From the Latin for James, Jacobus.
† Dissenters, or non-conformists, in Manchester were mainly Quakers, Baptists, Unitarians and Methodists.
‡ Notably his volume entitled The Suicide: with other poems, London, 1803.