A “MANCHESTER MAN”
Demagogues and silver-tongued orators have been the curse in modern times of this country. They and their audiences, grown drunken on their own wild words, have thrown over all consistency. In Bright you had a Radical politician opposed to the holding of an Empire, yet, as a manufacturer and exporter of cotton goods, having his interests largely bound up with the retention of our dependencies. It seemed honesty at the expense of sanity. But less honest was Bright’s bitter objection to any State interference with the factories. In 1836 he resented any attempt to control the hours of labour, and wrote a counter-blast to Fielden’s “Curse of the Factory System.” To the last, he opposed the reduction of factory hours. In 1861 he attributed the evils attendant upon over-production, in which he himself was engaged, to anything but their real cause; but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, although himself a heavy loser by the Cotton Famine, he nobly championed the cause of the North in its darkest hours. Looking back upon things accomplished since he entered the political scene, his Radicalism seems to have been singularly diluted with Whiggism: inevitable, no doubt, from his position as a large employer of labour. As a Quaker, he was for Disestablishment; being a landowner, he endeavoured to bring about the abolition of the Game Laws; he was, as we have already seen, bitterly opposed, throughout his life, to State regulation of factories. He denounced Chartism, of which most of the points of reform demanded have long since been conceded, and, in reply to the demands of the factory hands for better payment, invented the comprehensive generality that “with bad trade, wages cannot rise”; tracing all evils to the Corn Law, that effectual red-herring drawn across many trails. Always the Corn Law, until its abolition in 1849. It was responsible for almost everything ill, short of earthquakes.
Bright opposed compulsory education—for that would probably educate the factory hands into discontent with their station; and was eager to extend the cultivation of cotton in India. When that project did not meet with the support he expected, and when his protest against the Indian protective duties failed to open India to cotton goods free of duty, “Perish India” became more than ever a pious wish. Perhaps one of his greatest mistakes was his contempt for the bogey of Papal aggression; not such a mere illuminated turnip on a post as he and his contemporaries believed. Rome stalks through the land, aggressive, at this day.
VI
Many versions exist as to the origin of the expression, a “Manchester man,” but it is evident enough that the phrase, like that of a “Lancashire lad,” is a natural alliterative growth. The most widely accepted story, however, is that which tells of a coachman, who, asked “Who has ta gotten in t’ coach, lad?” replied, “Wha, then, ther’s a gentleman fra Liverpool, a man fra Manchester, a chap fra Bolton, an’ a felly fra Wigan.”
A Lancashire boy’s definition of a gentleman should not at this point be forgotten. It was given many years since, and was, “one what weers at watch, an’ ligs by hisself.” So now we know that gentility, in these days of cheap watches and a prejudice against sharing a bed, may be within the reach of all.
It is no small thing to be a “Manchester man.” The name has a self-reliant ring about it that fits the men of Manchester like a glove, whatever may be the fitness of the other descriptions, or of that other which tells of “Oldham roughs.”
The Manchester manufacturer of about 1750, as described by contemporaries, was a humble person, of the greatest simplicity, working like a journeyman among his hands; beginning the day before six o’clock in the morning and ending it proportionably earlier, as the habits of the time and the primitive means of artificial lighting dictated. He both produced the goods and warehoused them, and his combined warehouse and factory was also his home. He not only worked with his weavers, but sat at meals with them, and all helped themselves out of a common bowl of water-porridge, and a dish of milk. No one among the manufacturers had such a thing as a “private residence,” and speech was indeed so simple that none of them probably would have understood the term unless put in more homely English.
So much for the mid-eighteenth century cotton-spinner. Let us see how his descendant of about 1866 appeared to his contemporaries. A writer in a popular magazine of that date, holding forth more or less eloquently on the characteristics of Manchester men and Liverpool gentlemen, described a “Liverpool gentleman” as a magnificent person who traded beyond his means and abused his credit, finally, when the inevitable crash came, compounding with his creditors on the basis of three shillings in the pound, and continuing his splendid life with almost undimmed splendour. But a “Manchester man,” according to this apologist, when he breaks, breaks utterly, and, surrendering his all, starts again from below. How these distinctions have borne the test of time I will not pretend to say. At that period, according to this same writer, the typical Manchester man was an imaginary person he chose to style “John Brown.” Putting aside the fact that there is no true or exclusive Lancashire ring about the name of Brown, we will pass on to the career of this typical person, as figured in that bygone writer’s keen imagination.