‘It was the very happiest day of my life.’
THE STULTIFYING HEAT of the July day was killing prize beasts at the Royal Agricultural Show where cattle fell dead in great stolid mounds. In Manchester the gritty haze that swathed the city simmered under the merciless sun. Then at 3.30 pm, with the suddenness of an eclipse, darkness fell. Nature seemed to hold its breath. Passengers on the upper deck of the 53 open top tram, jangling along Great Western Street, began to stir. A shaft of lightning cleft the sky and struck the car, showering the passengers with sparks and lighting up their terrified faces with a harsh glare that blinded many of them. Simultaneously, tramway switches burst into flames and the heavens opened, pouring forth rain that fell in great swirling torrents accompanied by resounding booms of thunder. The lightning destroyed four houses in Pendleton and threatened to smash the great glass dome of the Royal Exchange. ‘It seemed for a moment,’ said one passenger, ‘that we should all be killed.’
The tram was travelling towards Manchester, a city of 714,313 souls, the heart of the greatest textile industry the world had ever known and the centre of a conurbation thirty miles in radius, containing more human beings than any area of similar size anywhere in the world. Though no longer primarily an industrial town and now a market for a vast number of different goods manufactured in surrounding Lancashire, the city remained swathed in a perpetual thundercloud, a noxious vapour of industrial exhalations.
This poisonous breath was one of the reasons why life expectancy in the city was below the national average and Manchester men generally did not live beyond their late forties and women only a few years more. At least two in five of the population were unable to afford food, clothing and shelter sufficient to maintain good health and in many districts poverty was as unremarkable as the rain. Very few of the city’s workers’ homes had an independent water supply or sanitation. The people were obstinate and self-willed with a grim humour that delighted in jests about poverty, illness and death. Yet they had a great capacity to endure hardship, and a fundamental decency. They combined a fierce sense of independence and self-reliance with a combative cussedness that made them good comrades and bad enemies.
As one who grew up in Irk Town, Collyhurst in the years before the Great War described it, the city consisted of ‘viaducts cutting through the streets, factories, foundries, storage sheds, forges, workshops, gasometers, clusters of small terraced houses, railway yards, sidings, stables, water towers, and churches’, with every road slashed through by black rivers and canals. And noise – incessant, pervasive and ever-present, shaking the walls and making the pavements throb. The smoke of cotton mills and foundries had painted the ochre bricks black. Engineering, iron and steel employed over 55,000 men, the Manchester Docks over 6,000, while 10,000 produced chemicals and explosives. The success of all these was central to Britain’s entire war effort. As much as any British city, Manchester became the engine driving the machinery of war to ultimate victory.
Hard as life was, for the unskilled it was getting harder. The life of Tom Haddock, born in 1899 within the sound of the trains at London Road Station, was fairly typical. Tom was one of ten children – all born in different houses as his family regularly ‘did a moonlight’. He remembers Ancoats as a ‘dirty, lousy ’ole and very poor’. None of the houses he grew up in had gas, electricity or running water; the family washed at the pump in the yard and used communal toilets. Most of Tom’s neighbours were in unskilled jobs: working on the railways as porters or engine cleaners and goods yard labourers, existing on less than a pound a week. Like most Ancoats children, Tom was undernourished and went to school in a smock and bare feet. When he heard the call to arms, like so many others, ‘he felt that little shiver run up the back and you know you have got to do something’.
But the city also had a thriving middle class, grown affluent and confident on Manchester’s industry, commerce and trade. Among the lower middle class, commerce was the biggest employer, providing work for one in ten of the population, including 16,000 merchants and agents and 22,000 commercial clerks. The Manchester Docks, linked to Liverpool by the Manchester Ship Canal, made the land-locked city an international marine port and a centre of commerce and warehousing. It was this distinctive combination of trade and industry that gave the city its unique character.
Deansgate’s opulent shops catered for all the consumer whims of a flourishing middle class conscious of its status and physically separate from the working class. Bound by their common interest in lacrosse, hockey and cricket, many middle class men also shared a passion for the Territorial Army and devoted their Saturdays to drilling at Stretford Road barracks. The most ambitious of these aspired to an abode in Wilmslow or Alderley Edge, from which the 8.05 and the 8.32 carried the new aristocracy of wealth to their places of work. Engineering companies such as Mather and Platt and Whitworth were internationally respected enterprises of enormous prestige. Manchester Grammar School, Chetham’s, William Hulme and Victoria University prepared them for the professions and introduced many of them to the military ethos through their Officers Training Corps. Many of the first to go to war August 1914 were from this social milieu. Their patriotism was intense and their entitlement to form the officer elite of the new army was unquestioned. In peacetime they were leaders of the city’s economic, social and political life and in war they presumed that they would be at the forefront of the national cause.