During the last days of peace Lancashire was taking on Surrey at Old Trafford and Hobbs and Hayward were striking for cover and slip. The crowd, enjoying this exemplary display of batting in the July sunshine, gave little thought to the conference of health professionals at Leeds University pondering the curse of consumption, which culled the poor and ill-housed; they were untroubled by the rancour that saw a staggering forty million days lost to industrial disputes in 1912; they were indifferent to the 500 engineers locked out in Accrington and the two hundred Ashton coal miners who were in court, charged with absenting themselves from work without leave after one of their colleagues was killed. They were only vaguely aware of the dock strike, which saw troops on the streets of Liverpool and gunboats in the Mersey and the years of industrial conflict that had raged since 1911 were a distant memory.

In the city’s parks 2,000 slum children were also untroubled. Though many were shoeless, they were enjoying their traditional summer outing, courtesy of the readers of a local newspaper.

Though page eight of the Manchester Evening News told of the removal of the bodies of the assassinated Archduke and his wife – whose murder would spark a chain of events leading to the outbreak of war – to Vienna, Manchester was concerned mainly with the cotton depression. Many mills were closed and trade prospects were grim. The news from Dublin, where British soldiers fired on civilians, killing three and wounding eighty, including many women and children, was more troubling: people feared civil war in Ireland. On Friday, 31 July the London and Manchester stock exchanges both closed. Something was afoot: the Special Reserve was called up, while Manchester’s suburban grocers experienced an unprecedented surge in demand. Saturday, 1 August was the busiest day many could remember: frantic housewives bought up flour, bacon and sugar for fear of imminent shortages and price hikes.

Monday, 3 August was a bank holiday and though the forecast was good a storm broke over the city and rain pounded down on those in the Cathedral, offering prayers for peace as the Dean, Edmund Know, told the congregation the continental conflict was not Britain’s concern. Across the city in St Francis’s monastery, Gorton, his Catholic counterpart, Bishop Casartelli, expressed his hope that ‘the nation would not proceed to extremities’. Local trade unions convened a protest meeting in Alexandra Park and asserted that Britain should not ‘be dragged into war’. But the feeling in the pubs and workshops was that it was high time Germany was taught a lesson, an opinion echoed in a letter to a local newspaper. The writer welcomed the war as an opportunity to ‘smash up the German fleet’, which ‘they should never have been allowed to build or own’.