VIII

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THE MANCHESTER SHIP CANAL

What Lancashire thinks to-day, England will think to-morrow.” That is a political byword, not always supported by events; but if we enlarge the scope into a plenary comprehension of affairs, the truth of it becomes much more evident. Railways, in the opening of the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, August 26th, 1830, the first in England, originated in Lancashire, and spread from it; and canals, although the first was made elsewhere, at Manchester first became of importance. The opening of the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal in 1761, and that of the Manchester Ship Canal in 1894, mark the beginnings of two different eras: the second of the two freighted with no one yet knows what tremendous possibilities. Manchester is a port, and has become so by an exertion of local patriotism not equalled elsewhere. When shares in the proposed Ship Canal were offered in the financial world and no one would find the capital, the future of the project looked hopeless. The powers for its construction, granted by Act of Parliament, were nearly lapsing, and the promoters were reduced to stumping the surrounding country and holding meetings to advertise the scheme. In that dark hour many working-men of Manchester put their savings into the Company, and the Corporation itself became very largely concerned in it. When the success of the issue appeared assured, the giants of finance plucked up a little courage, the situation was saved at the eleventh hour, and the Canal became at last, after an expenditure of fifteen millions and a quarter sterling, an accomplished fact. It has only recently yielded any return upon that huge expenditure, but the direct access to the sea it gives has enormously increased Manchester’s wealth and importance. The useful and the beautiful, we are told, are one, but the Manchester Ship Canal is not a beautiful object. Its waters are black and smell to Heaven on hot days, and the great locks, swing-bridges, and the like, although wonderful engineering feats, are not improvements upon the landscape. But they have a majesty of their own, and if you voyage down the Ship Canal, duly holding your nose, you will be much impressed. You will be even more impressed if you don’t hold it. A succession of docks, lairages, grain elevators and coal-shoots lines this Acherontean tideway: everything equipped with machinery that performs marvels in a quiet, unostentatious, matter-of-fact manner. And the great ocean-going steamers come surging slowly up to Manchester, bellowing for the swing bridges to swing open, and crowds of interested idlers, and the impatient traffic, held up at the flung-up bridges, look upon the sight with never-satiated gaze. It is a perennial wonder, a sensation that never stales.

In some ways even more wonderful are the changes that have overtaken Trafford Park, at the head of the Canal. Time was, and not so long since, when the park railings, along the Chester Road, at the outskirts of Manchester, disclosed broad stretches of wooded lawns, sloping to the Irwell, but it is now as though some magician’s wand had waved away the trees and the lawns and in one act had replaced them with a close imitation of the East India Docks, where skyscraping blocks of fireproof warehouses and mazes of railway sidings form amazing evidences of what the Canal has already done for Manchester. It has certainly “done for” any lingering rural fringe.

I well remember in the long ago being dumped down by the railway in Manchester, as a stranger, with no friends in the great city, and with that dim sense of locality only a railway journey can give. Coming by road into any such place, you bring topographical continuity with you, and know where the grim houses end and the smiling country begins; but to be set down solitary in midst of these miles of streets, and then on some leisure day to essay the enterprise of walking out to where the last house fronts upon the fields, and to walk on and on, and never seem to come any nearer the fringe of the frowning houses, is an experience whose horror only De Quincey could hope to portray. London is larger, but its streets have a more varied interest. Here, away from the midst of Manchester, whose central architecture is ornate, if black, the mean, featureless streets sear your very soul. It was before the days of electric tramways, and I walked on and on, and still on, without coming to the end of Manchester, and then at Old Trafford, obsessed with a dread of it all, walked back; thinking, rather wildly, did it ever come to an end.

Having since then come to it and left it by several roads, I am now fully informed as to its limits, and, with that knowledge, the houses look a little kindlier, the streets do not seem quite interminable. But I am still impressed with the extraordinary length to which the paved roads and lanes—paved with granite setts—run. There is a lane—a country lane, for it is bordered with hedges—which I found when exploring the neighbourhood on a bicycle, and that lane went on and onwards, ever winding, for miles, and always, although extraordinarily lonely, and with never a house nor a wayfarer, paved with granite setts which it must have cost a considerable fortune to lay there. It began in the neighbourhood of Warburton and ended at a misbegotten place called Broad Heath, and still it was more than six and a half miles to Manchester. I was never before so genuinely astonished in all my life.

At Old Trafford are the Botanical Gardens, once admirably placed, but now as incongruous as though, say, St. James’s Park were set beside the Commercial Road. Manchester amused itself in a genteel way there; but to see how Manchester can intensely enjoy itself after a spell of dogged work, the Belle Vue Gardens, Longsight, should be visited at holiday time. The place is the, superlatively the, popular resort, and is Hampstead Heath, Rosherville, and the Crystal Palace combined.

THE FENIANS

There is no end to describing Manchester: it is so vast and so varied, and its story presents so many chapters. One might say something of the Fenian outrage of September 18th, 1867, when Sergeant Brett, in charge of the prison-van conveying prisoners to Belle Vue Gaol, was shot in the Hyde Road by a desperate gang of forty armed men endeavouring to release the criminals, Kelly and Deasy. Of those arrested, Allen, Larkin, and O’Brien were sentenced to death, and hanged at the New Bailey Prison, Salford; figuring since in the perverted Irish Valhalla of heroes as “the Manchester Martyrs.”

MANCHESTER TOWN HALL.

In another glance at Manchester the great Town Hall, in Albert Square, demands notice, not merely because it cost considerably over a million pounds, but because it is one of the chief architectural embellishments of the city. Opened in 1877, it was, like many other modern public buildings here, the work of Alfred Waterhouse. The style is an enriched Early English and the exterior stately to a degree. But what shall we say of the beautiful but dark interior, with its maze of corridors, its unexpected steps up and steps down? The stranger to Manchester, however, must needs entrust himself to the perils of that wilderness, for in the very fine and striking series of twelve fresco paintings by Ford Madox Brown he will find not only a justification of pre-Raphaelite methods, allied with some fine colouring and some very quaint drawing, but an illuminating pictorial commentary upon the history of the city.

BACK STREETS

It is not, however, all culture at Manchester: there are all sorts here, as in every great city. Some think the Cheetham Hill suburb the last word in dignity and ease: others extol Whalley Range, but all unite in reviling the Redbank district and Angel Meadow, or Angel Street as I believe it is now styled. Any intimate acquaintance with large towns and the flagrant purlieus in them, usually styled Providence Place, Pleasant View, and the like, will prepare the reader for the statement that angels do not inhabit Angel Meadow, any more than they do Seven Dials in London. Culture does not linger here. There is oblique testimony to this in a recent resolution of the Watch Committee to supply a police-constable with a new “set of teeth, to take the place of those he has lost in the discharge of his duty.” They were the celestials of the Angel Meadow district who knocked the constable’s teeth out. Hallelujah! The place is not so far from the Cathedral and the Strangeways Gaol, but neither the promise of present punishment that the gaol holds forth for evil courses, nor the hope of Heaven for the repentant that the Cathedral typifies, suffices to blanch the scarlet sins of Redbank, or to win the inhabitants of Angel Meadow to a better life.

If one thing is more certain than another in any great town, it is that the stranger should not explore back streets. Civic pride will see eye to eye with me there. For, indeed, the stranger in back streets sees strange sights, hears weird language, and smells still weirder odours that are not mentioned in conventional council chambers. The back streets converse in a speech of their own: they read a literature their own, and feed on food of which the front streets know nothing. In fact, in back streets and front you have two worlds that are entirely dissimilar, and know little, and would probably like to know even less, of one another.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

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