Crossing the Ribble and looking backwards, the view along the dale to where Walton stands is charming; but with the extraordinary expansion of the Lancashire cotton-spinning industry, and the building here of many new mills, it seems like to be an expiring charm of scenery. Already the mills have come across from the north to the south bank of the river.

Preston has always been known as “proud.” The old rhyme ran:

But the rhyme long since went out of date. One would hesitate to declare that Preston is in any sense poor, while certainly the reproach of its church having a low steeple has been removed these many years past; for the spire of St. Werburgh is a particularly fine and lofty one, rising to a height of 303 feet. If it be necessary to find an origin for that supposed pride of Proud Preston, I should look for it in the fact that the town has always been the capital of the Duchy of Lancaster, and not in the story of its ladies once considering themselves too superior to mate with the commercial men of the neighbourhood.

“Proud Preston” occupies a proud position, on lofty ground overlooking the Ribble and its extensive flats. Its name, “Priest’s Town,” derives from the site having been the property of a Benedictine priory once situated here, but before the time of the priory, it was named “Amounderness,” from the ridge, or ness, then, even more than now, a striking object across the levels. Penwortham, on the opposite side of the river, was in that early period the chief place, for there stood the great castle of the Earls of Chester, giving security to peaceable folk against the incursions of the Scots; but when the county of Lancaster was made a Duchy, and the defence centred at Lancaster, Penwortham decayed and Preston grew populous. The unwisdom of this move across the river to a site without strong defences was immediately made apparent, for no sooner had Preston grown into an important town than the Scots, under Robert Bruce, came and burnt nearly the whole of it.

Charters to the number of fifteen, ranging from the time of Henry the First to that of Charles the Second, have been conferred upon Preston; mostly in recognition of its importance as capital of the Duchy of Lancaster; and desirable privileges, such as the right of gaol and gibbet, tumbril and pillory, were added, so that Preston might deal, quite independently of Lancaster, with cases arising here, that demanded those engines of justice.

Still, it was ever a prosperous and busy town, as the antiquity of its guilds proves; and suffered considerable loss in the Parliamentary war, when it was the scene of two struggles between Royalists and Roundheads. The first was in 1643, when the townsfolk were divided in opinion, and fighting took place in the streets: the second in 1649, when a Royalist army, commanded by Sir Marmaduke Langdale and the Duke of Hamilton, was driven from Clitheroe to Ribbleton Moor, on the outskirts of the town, by Cromwell, with a numerically inferior force.

The next taste of warlike times was in 1715, which was like to be a very serious time for Preston; for in the Jacobite rebellion that made this year memorable, the townsfolk figured more than a thought too prominently as well-wishers to the cause. English rebels, as well as Scotch, made this incursion from Scotland something new in the moving annals of such things. In olden times the Scots had come from the north as enemies; now the Old Pretender, “James the Seventh of Scotland and Third of England,” was proclaimed at the market-cross with every mark of approval, and the hospitality of the townsfolk and the smiles of the young ladies were extended to those who, it was thought, were presently to upset “the Elector” in London.

This kindly reception wrought disaster to the rebels. They had reached Preston on November 9th, but, instead of marching onward and fighting, idled away the precious days in feasting and flirting: and, as it proved, these hospitable burgesses and pretty girls formed what military strategists might call a “containing force” really helpful to the Royal armies hurrying up to meet the rebels, who were caught in Preston town, as neatly as possible. The invaders had numbered two thousand, but it is typical of the mismanagement of this ill-fated rebellion that ever since October 6th, when the Northumbrian Jacobites had assembled at Rothbury, their counsels had been divided. Later, when they had joined forces with a body of Scottish rebels, and had marched along the Borders, and so down into Lancashire, there was little authority and no discipline. The Scots wanted to fight in Scotland, and the English, for their part, declined to conduct the revolt there. So, grumbling and dissatisfied, they came south, under the leadership of Forster of Etherston, elected “General,” but a person of no native capacity or acquired military knowledge, and simply one of the famous, long-descended Northumbrian Forsters; famed less on account of their merits than that they had existed in Northumberland so long, and owned so many of its acres.

Disheartened by the feebleness of the invasion, five hundred of the insurgents left, and marched away home again. The remaining fifteen hundred were reinforced at Preston by the Roman Catholic gentry of Lancashire, their servants and tenantry, to the number of twelve hundred, but they appear to have been an embarrassment rather than of use.

Towards Preston, by way of Manchester and Wigan, came General Wills, on behalf of King George. His force numbered only a thousand men, and had the invaders been commanded by a soldier, or even by a civilian of ordinary courage and determination, it is possible the rebellion, of 1715 might have been successful. But Forster was a pitiful fellow. He did not even place Preston in a proper state of defence. It was not a walled town, and barricades were hastily run up on Wills’s approach being made known; but no advantage was taken of the excellent defensible position in advance of the town, where the road ran in a hollow way, and where the bridge across the river in itself could have been successfully held by few.

Forster, on hearing of Wills’s march, did certainly a more extraordinary thing than ever any other military commander is reported to have done on the approach of the enemy: he went to bed! I believe we could have respected him more had he run away. How it was that the other leaders, the Earls of Derwentwater and Kenmure, merely roused him from his couch, and did not take stronger measures, is a mystery. Better, perhaps, had they done so; for although the barricaded town repulsed the attack made by Wills on the 12th, and indeed inflicted severe loss upon him, Forster agreed to surrender unconditionally, and delivering Lord Derwentwater and Colonel Macintosh as hostages, did actually deliver up the town on the 15th. Meanwhile, the Lancashire Roman Catholics had run away, and none saw the going of them.

Fighting at Sheriffmuir and elsewhere in Scotland followed before the rebellion was crushed, but the surrender at Preston marked the end of this incursion upon English soil. Fourteen hundred prisoners were taken, many of considerable standing. Some among them being half-pay officers, were treated as deserters, and were summarily shot: hundreds were consigned to Chester Castle and afterwards sold into slavery overseas; but those who had been the moving spirits were taken to London. Among them were the egregious Forster, Lords Derwentwater, Kenmure, Nithsdale, Carnwath, Widdrington, Wintoun, and Nairn. They reached London on December 9th; riding horseback from Highgate with their arms tied behind their backs, to the sound of the drum: a mock “public entry,” to satirise the hopes they had expressed, in a happier hour, of a triumphal procession into London.

On the whole, the Government acted with leniency. Derwentwater and Kenmure were executed, twenty-two rebels were hanged in Lancashire, and four in London; but Lord Nithsdale, exchanging clothes with his wife, fled from the Tower, and others were permitted to escape, or were pardoned after an interval.

Forster escaped from Newgate by an ingenious ruse, only possible in days when prisons were conducted very much like hotels. He had inveigled Pitts, the Governor, into his room and the two sat drinking wine there while Forster’s servant locked the head-gaoler’s attendant in the cellar. Forster then left the room, ostensibly for a moment, but did not return, and the Governor, alarmed, arose to find himself locked in. Already, while he was vainly shouting and thumping upon the thick oak door, Forster and his trusty servant had enlarged themselves from gaol, and were making for Rochford on the Essex coast, whence they embarked for France.

Forster took no further part in public affairs, but travelled to Italy, and died at Rome in 1738. Had he shown generalship at Preston equal to this of his flight, all might have gone well with the Pretender.

The rebellion of 1745 came nearer success than this of thirty years earlier, but we do not find Preston harbouring and encouraging the rebels of that time, to anything like the same extent. The gaiety of Preston was not, this time, for them. But what, after all, did that gaiety amount to? A great deal, perhaps, judged by the standard of the wild Highlanders, come but lately from their solitary glens; but very little, it would seem, reckoned from an English standpoint, if the business then done by the sole wine-merchant of the town may serve for comparison. It would appear that the merchant who supplied Manchester lived at Preston, as the resort of the gentry, and was rarely asked to supply more than a gallon of wine at a time: and that a time which did not commonly stint itself in drink.

It was a very small place in those days, and numbered little more than 6,000 inhabitants; but when the factory system was introduced into the cotton manufacture, it grew rapidly, and is now a great town of more than 113,000 people. Nothing else so vividly shows us how far removed we are from those days, in circumstances and spirit, than the simple juxtaposition of those eloquent figures, which speak far more eloquently than the most impassioned descriptive writing.

There remains a certain stateliness in the streets and houses of Preston: an aristocratic “county town” environment that not all the expansion of industrialism has been able to engulf: an eighteenth-century appearance that calmly declines to be hustled out of existence. The refinements of life, in so far as they are reflected by many dainty tea-shops and restaurants, are not lacking at Preston; but let the stranger come into the town on a Saturday night, and he will see another phase of existence, for then the place is typical of all Lancashire towns on that supreme marketing occasion. The streets are thronged with the people of Preston and all the villages round about: it is a marketing and pleasuring saturnalia, wherein the brilliantly lighted shops, the barrows, and the shows compete for the custom of thousands of good-humoured mill-hands whose weekly wages are burning holes in their pockets.

Preston Town Hall was long pre-eminent among the town halls of Lancashire, and a source of peculiar pride to the townsfolk, but others have since eclipsed it. Designed by Sir Gilbert Scott, it looks like an instalment of St. Pancras station, in London, also designed by him, unaccountably mislaid in the provinces. Manchester, the biggest town, holding, bien entendu, all the tricks, has rightly gone Nap on town halls, and has won the game. Even in Preston its pre-eminence has since been challenged, for in the self-same square there stands the immense building of the Harris Institute and Public Library, designed in the Ionic order of architecture: a very severe Greek contrast with the gay Early English of the Town Hall. But there are even later competitors, the Sessions House and the Post Office, to challenge attention. Of these two, the first is in the present fashionable Eclectic Renaissance, while the Post Office is the product of the Office of Works, and of no style at all. The great square in which these various buildings stand is, therefore, nowadays very much an exhibition of architectural methods, incongruous and mutually destructive.

Outside Preston, probably not one person in a thousand knows how the word “teetotal” sprang into popular use. It is said to have been, to all intents and purposes, deliberately invented by “Dicky Turner,” a reformed drunkard, who, speaking at a meeting held in September, 1833, at the Old Cockpit, declaimed vehemently against the arguments of the moderate drinkers, and insisted upon total abstinence. “I’ll have nowt to dee wi’ this moderation botheration pledge,” he said: “I’ll be reet down out—an’—out tee—tee—total for ever and ever.”

“Well done,” shouted the meeting, and the word was adopted, with enthusiasm.

It bore no reference to tea, as often supposed, nor was it the result of a stuttering attempt at the word “total”; for Turner was not a stutterer, but was well known as a coiner of words, at any emergency; to say nothing of being a perpetrator of what in an Irishman would be called “bulls”: of which the following is a supreme example. Speaking in furtherance of the temperance movement, he said, “We will go with our axes on our shoulders and plough up the great deep, and then the ship of temperance shall sail gallantly over the land.”

A stone in St. Peter’s churchyard, to his memory and to that of fellow-workers in their cause, is inscribed

Beneath
this stone are
deposited the Remains of
RICHARD TURNER,
author of the word Teetotal,
as applied to abstinence from
all intoxicating Liquors,
who departed this life on the
27th day of October, 1846,
Aged 56 years.

Here—where did you get that hat?—you see the fearsome spectacle (according to modern ideas) that Dicky Turner presented.

It will be observed that in this claim to the origin of “teetotal” there is a qualification not generally admitted. This reservation is generally overlooked, but is important. He was indeed only author of the word in its application to total abstinence, for it was at that time well known in Ireland, and is to be found in the writings of De Quincey and Maginn. But every tale is good until the next is told, and in another version “teetotal” is said to have originated in a general signing of a pledge of moderate drinking: those who signed and were prepared for total abstention adding a T, for “total,” to their signatures.

To conclude with Preston, it was here that the inspiration was given to Focardi, then an unknown and needy sculptor, for his group, long since famous, “You Dirty Boy!”

Lodging in a humble purlieu of the town, he witnessed the scene of the old woman scrubbing the writhing urchin and rubbing the soap into him, and realising the humorous possibilities of such a group, secured the two as models and at once set to work. He could not have foreseen the price of £500 at which the statuary was purchased, nor the world-wide advertising celebrity it was given, in pictures and in replica terra-cotta statuettes, by the proprietors of Pears’ soap.