MIDDLETON.—And now, before taking a glance at the woollens and hardware of Yorkshire, we suggest, by way of change from the perpetual hum of busy multitudes and the whizzing and roaring of machinery, that the traveller take a holiday, and spend it in wandering over an agricultural oasis encircled by hills, and so far uninvaded by the stalks of steam-engines, where the air is comparatively pure and the grass green, although forest trees do not flourish.
The visit requires no distant journey. It is a bare six miles from the heart of Manchester to Middleton. Nine times a-day omnibuses ply there. These original, if not primitive vehicles, are constructed to carry forty-five passengers, and on crowded market-days may sometimes be seen loaded with seventy specimens of a note-worthy class.
Middleton, lately a dirty straggling town, of 15,000 inhabitants, a number at which it has remained stationary for ten years, built without plan, without drains, without pavement, without arrangements for common decency, stands on the borders, and was the manorial village, of the Middleton and Thornham estates, which had been in the family of the late Lord Suffield for many hundred years. In the village, land was grudgingly leased for building, and no steam-engine manufactories were permitted. The agricultural portion of some 2500 acres of good land for pasturage and root crops, celebrated for its fine supplies of water and for its (unused) water-power, was divided into little farms of from twenty to seventy acres, very few exceeding fifty acres, inhabited by a race of Farmer-Weavers, who, from generation to generation, farmed badly and wove cleanly in the pure atmosphere of Middleton. They were, most of them, bound to keep a hound at walk for the Lord of the Manor.
Now the old Lords of the Manor and owners of the estate of Middleton (the Harbords, afterwards Barons Suffield), were proud men and wealthy, who despised manufactures and resisted any encroachment of trade on the green bounds within which their old Manor House had stood for ages. So when the inventions of Crompton, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Cartwright began to coin gold like any philosopher’s stone, for well-managing cotton manufacturers, speculators cast their eyes upon the pleasant waters of Middleton and Thornham, proposing to erect machinery and spin the yarn or thread, and otherwise to use the abundant water-power. But the Lords of Middleton would have none of such profits, (and if they could afford to reject them, we will not say that up to a certain point they were not wise), and so they gave short answers to the applicants, who went away and found, half-a-mile off, on the borders of Yorkshire, similar conveniences and more accessible ground-landlords in the Byrons, Lords of the Manor of Rochdale. And when, some time afterwards, a like application met with a like answer, other manufacturers went away to another corner, and built Oldham.
So the Middleton farms continued very pretty picturesque farms; Middleton village grew into a miserable town, and was passed over in 1830, when every population was putting forth its claims to a share in making the laws of the United Kingdom; while Oldham, with 30,000 inhabitants, was allotted two members, (an honour which cost the life of one of them, our best describer of English rural scenery, in racy Saxon English, William Cobbett); Rochdale, with 24,000, obtained one, and eventually made itself loudly heard in the House, in the person of John Bright, a gentleman of pluck not without eloquence, who has done a good deal, considering the disadvantages he has laboured under, in not having been brought to his level in a public school, and in having been brought up in the atmosphere of adulation, to which the wealthy and clever of a small sect are as much exposed as the scions of a “proud aristocracy.”
A few years ago, the late lord, who had occasionally lived on the estate, died. His successor pulled down the Manor House, became an absentee, always in want of ready money, and introduced the Irish system into the management of his estate. That is to say, good farming became a sure mode of inviting an increase of rent—for indispensable repairs no ready money was forthcoming, so tenants who had an indisputable claim to such allowances, received a reduction of rent instead; they generally accepted the reduction, and did no more of the repairs than would just make shift. The land in the town suitable for building was let at chief rents to the highest bidder, with no consideration for the mutual convenience of neighbours, or the welfare of future residents.
Thus mismanaged and dilapidated, the estates were brought into the market, and purchased for Messrs. Peto & Betts, by their land agent, Mr. Francis Fuller, for less than £200,000; and the lands of the aristocracy of blood passed into the possession of the aristocracy of trade. Here was a subject for a doleful ballad from “A Young Englander,” commencing—
“Ye tenants old of Middleton ye cannot need but sigh,
Departed are the traces of your own nobility,
The Locomotivocracy have gone and done the trick,
And England’s aristocracy’s obliged to cut its stick.”
A visit to Middleton, however, will show that on this occasion the tenantry have no reason either to sigh or weep, and the visit is worth making, independently of the pleasantness of a change from town to country, because it affords an opportunity of seeing what can be done with a neglected domain when it passes into the hands of men of large capital, liberal views, and a thorough determination that whatever they take in hand shall be done in the best possible manner.
Messrs. Peto & Betts are managing this estate on the same principles that they have conducted the undertaking by which, in a very few years, they have acquired a large fortune and an influential position. Not by avariciously grasping, and meritlessly grinding all the subordinates whose services they required; not by squeezing men like oranges, and throwing them away when squeezed; but by choosing suitable assistants for every task they undertook, and making those assistants, or advisers, feel that their interests were the same, that they were prepared to pay liberally for services strenuously rendered. By this system servants and sub-contractors worked for them with all the zeal of friends, and by this system the tenantry of Middleton will attain a degree of comfort and prosperity hitherto unknown, while the estate they occupy will be largely increased in value.