THE ESSENCE OF LANCASHIRE
By David J. Eveleigh
Every place – every British county – has its own particular characteristics, its own history, heritage and legacies which establishes its identity. Lancashire is certainly no exception. As a place of great change, the world’s first industrialised society, Lancashire’s identity is shaped at least as much by the stories of people as it is about industry itself and landscapes.
How is Lancashire seen today? And how we do we define Lancashire after the major changes made in 1974 to the county boundaries? Old county maps show three settlements which grew into important cities – Liverpool, Manchester and Salford but these now lie south of the present county boundary; only Preston which was granted city status in 2002 is located in present day Lancashire. Liverpool and Manchester – historically part of Lancashire – are now the centres of their own heavily populated metropolitan authorities but as part of Lancashire they were central to its development as a major industrial region which has several claims to being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. Lancashire has in effect shrunk in size and its southern edge pushed north. At the same time the county lost the detached Furness portion to the new county of Cumbria; so to understand Lancashire today, it is necessary to consider the historic country and, therefore, the wider region of the North West: this is reflected in the aims and purpose of Becconsall, Lancashire’s Living Museum.
Today, popular perceptions of Lancashire most likely include awareness of the iconic red rose of Lancaster which serves as the emblem of the county cricket club but for many people across Britain today, the overriding image of Lancashire is of an industrial working class society. Working class life in 1930s Wigan was described by George Orwell in ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, first published in 1937 and for the last sixty years has been portrayed in the TV soap opera, ‘Coronation Street’, first broadcasted in 1960. Over the years, characters from the soap – such as Ena Sharples, Elsie Tanner and Bet Lynch – brought the everyday life of the region including the Lancashire dialect to a wider audience. Another iconic Lancashire TV personality was the flat capped, steeplejack Fred Dibnah (1938-2004) from Bolton; with his enthusiasm for traditional mechanical engineering – and especially steam engines – he raised awareness of the region’s strong industrial heritage. Along with many of the cast from Coronation Street and Fred Dibnah, entertainers such as Gracie Fields – born in 1898 over a chip shop in Rochdale – and George Formby (1904-61) from Wigan have reinforced the idea that Lancashire people are never – or rarely – ‘posh’ but universally down to earth working class: blunt and direct in speech, irrepressibly cheerful and humorous. In 1936, Arthur Mee could write that Lancashire was only England’s sixth largest county but its most populousi. Depictions of Lancashire teem with ordinary working people – as in the hugely popular paintings of L. S. Lowry (1887-1976). Born near Salford, Lowry depicted everyday life taking place to a backdrop of textile mills with tall, smoking chimneys, streets of terraced houses and pubs populated by hordes of working class men, women and children – and dogs.
In recent times the special characteristics of Lancashire and the North West and its humour have been superbly captured by Nick Park (born in Preston) in the stories of Wallace and Gromit.
Like all regions, however, Lancashire and the greater North West contains considerable diversity of character, both natural and manmade. To take a journey from the small mill town of Bacup, situated high on the Pennines of East Lancashire westwards to the lush, green farmland of the West Lancashire Coastal Plain is to traverse two entirely different and contrasting worlds: the first, bleak and rugged with brief summers and long, cold winters; the second, mild and damp with fertile low lying land which has supported a thriving agrarian economy based on the cultivation of vegetable crops. The cultivation of root vegetables, brassicas and salads remains important in West Lancashire: Huntapac, established in 1942 and based at Holmes, near Preston, is now one of the largest suppliers in the British market. Then there is the west facing coast with the fishing port of Fleetwood and the seaside towns of Morecambe, Blackpool and Lytham St Annes in the Fylde and Southport. Preston had docks on the River Ribble until closure in 1981, but Lancashire’s overseas trade overwhelmingly passed through the port of Liverpool. Further north and east the wide expanses of the Ribble Valley and the Forest of Bowland provide a marked contrast with the densely populated urban districts further south.
Industrial development in Lancashire from the eighteenth century was largely based on cotton and coal although there were other important industries some of which brought international fame to the county. After 1750 coal mining grew more rapidly in Lancashire than anywhere else and by 1907 production peaked at 26 million tons per year. Coal was conveyed across the region by barges towed through canals such as the Leeds and Liverpool and the Rochdale Canal which were cut from the 1770s. Railways followed and the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, engineered by George Stephenson and opened in 1830 can lay claim to being Britain’s first main line railway. Others soon followed and by the 1860s, Lancashire was crossed by a dense network of railway lines, many of them owned and operated by the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway from 1847 to 1922. Much of the coal was consumed in domestic grates and in the steam engine boilers of the cotton mills but it also supported other industries such as chemical manufacture in Widnes and glass making at St Helens: Widnes – which was described in 1888 as ‘the dirtiest, ugliest and most depressing town in England’ – was one of the chief centres for chemical manufacture in England whilst Pilkington’s glass works in St Helens, founded in 1826 became renowned internationally.
From the early decades of the nineteenth century, excellent lines of communication in the region, principally by canal and rail – plus the availability of seemingly endless supplies of coal – and the availability of skilled labour stimulated the expansion of heavy engineering. In the 1830s Benjamin Hicks (1790-1842) consolidated Bolton’s reputation as a centre of mechanical engineering, establishing a foundry there in 1833 manufacturing steam locomotives, stationary engines, boilers and heavy machinery; then in 1836, a Scotsman, James Nasmyth (1808-90) came to Patricroft, at Eccles west of Manchester and out of a green field site created the Bridgewater Foundry. In 1842, he patented the steam hammer capable of shaping heavy forgings with immense power combined with great precision: within ten years the heavy thump of the steam hammer was heard in every major industrial region of Britainii. Locomotive building became a major industry for the export market from 1840 through Nasmyth Wilson, Sharp Stewart and Beyer Peacock in the Manchester area and Vulcan Foundry at Newton-le-Willows. Horwich, near Bolton was established as an important railway town when the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway opened extensive works there in 1886 and steam locomotives were made at the works until 1957. Lancashire also gave its name to a type of stationary horizontal steam engine boiler with two flues which became standard in Lancashire’s cotton mills from the 1840s and in factories the world over. At the turn of the 20th Century the region became a major centre for electrical engineering and more diversified heavy engineering through companies such as English Electric, Metropolitan Vickers, Ferranti and Mather & Platt. Lighter engineering was also present in many Lancashire towns: power looms and other textile machines were manufactured in several Lancashire towns including Bolton, Blackburn, Burnley, Manchester and Oldham. Mangles, wringers and washing machines were a speciality of Accrington along with hard red bricks whilst in southwest Lancashire, Ormskirk and Prescott were renowned centres of clock and watch making from the eighteenth century. From around 1900 century the automotive industry grew at Leyland and the buses of Leyland Motors Limited – which eventually became British Leyland – achieved international success. Vulcan cars and lorries were made in Southport in what was Britain’s first purpose-built motor vehicle factory dating from 1907. In the first part of the 20th Century, Southport was also home to several firms in the forefront in the first generation of electric vehicle manufacture. The County was the location of one of the first aircraft factories and this too became a major industry; one that has continued to have a presence in the area.
But Lancashire, above all, is associated with the textile industry which has been described as ‘the world’s pre-eminent textile manufacturing trade’iii The textile industry was one of the first and most important industries to undergo significant mechanisation and ushered in an entirely new way of working, the factory system which had wide ranging implications across society. Woollen fulling mills producing blankets and flannels were found in parts of Lancashire and one at Helmshore, dating to 1789 is now a museum; but as early as the 1720s, Daniel Defoe, travelling through the county, noted the growing importance of cotton spinning and weaving although all operations were then carried out by hand. By the end of the eighteenth century the industry had undergone extensive mechanisation and most of the principal innovations originated in Lancashire. In 1733, John Kay from Walmersley near Bury, patented his ‘flying shuttle’ which enabled the weft thread in the shuttle to ‘fly’ at great speed through the warp threads. The first of three major advances in mechanised spinning took place in c. 1765 when James Hargreaves from Oswaldtwistle devised the ‘spinning jenny’. In 1769, Richard Arkwright, born in Preston, patented his ‘water frame’ and after building a water powered mill at Cromford in Derbyshire patented an improved carding machine in 1775. The final breakthrough in the mechanisation of spinning came in the late 1770s when Samuel Crompton from Bolton devised his ‘spinning mule’ which combined the action of the jenny and the water frame. The result was a rapid and massive expansion of the industry. In 1811, Crompton visited about 650 cotton mills around Bolton and found that there were 4,600,000 spindles in use on his mules.iv Across Lancashire at this time roughly 80% of the cotton goods produced were woven from cotton that had been spun on mules and the employment of around 700,000 people depended directly or indirectly on Crompton’s invention for their livelihood. By the early 1800s most of the textile mills were powered by steam: thousands of tall mill chimneys were to become an integral part of the Lancashire landscape for the next two hundred years. Some chimneys were squat and square sectioned – some standing detached on nearby hillsides; others were tall and round and some mill owners poured money into building chimneys with magnificent ornate tops resembling a Florentine campanile, like the tall square chimney of India Mill dating to the 1860s which towers over the centre of Darwen.
From the 1780s, patents were taken out for the mechanisation of weaving and then by the early 1800s, the application of steam to drive a large number of looms remotely from a single source of power was established. Domestic handloom weaving persisted in some areas until later in the nineteenth century, but it was the steam powered mill with rows of cast-iron power looms connected by belts to an overhead drive that came to typify industrial Lancashire. The scale of the operations and regimes where mill owners imposed rigorous discipline on their workforce became known as the factory system: it confirmed Lancashire’s central role in the Industrial Revolution. At the centre was Manchester which owed its growth to cotton: by 1851 its population was 400,000. It has been described as the world’s first industrial city and it was also the undisputed commercial capital of the cotton industry with a trading exchange, numerous warehouses and banks. As one observer noted in 1868, ‘the county has , so to speak, taken a sudden leap out of one age into another’.v The textile industry remained important across much of Lancashire until the mid-twentieth century and whilst many tall chimneys have now disappeared from the landscape some mills have survived, converted to other uses.
The rise of large scale industry in the county was not without its negative consequences. First, there was the despoilation of the countryside: in 1859 the art critic, John Ruskin (1819-1900) saw an old house near Rochdale with mullioned windows and a low arched porch in ruins and uninhabited – its garden, ‘blighted into a field of ashes’ – whilst the nearby stream, ‘soaking slowly past’ was as, ‘black as ebony and thick with curdling scum’; in front of the house the furnaces of the city were ‘foaming forth a perpetual plague of sulphurous darkness’.vi From the 1820s, some 25 towns – including Manchester and Salford – grew rapidly in the south east of the county, some merging from one to the next with little countryside between. Between Bury and Bacup and Rochdale and Ashton-under-Lyne, wrote an observer in 1868, ’the line of the railway is almost everywhere fringed with factories and houses, thickest on the banks of the larger streams but also climbing the slopes of the great bleak moors that hang over the smoky valleys’.vii
Industrial workers endured considerable poverty and harsh living conditions in nineteenth century Lancashire. Cramped terraced housing – some of it back to back with no rear windows or yards – was typical and in large towns like Manchester thousands of families lived in damp, dark and ill ventilated cellar dwellings as vividly described by Friedrich Engels in 1844viii. In the late 1830s, William Howitt , ranging over the ‘wild, bleak hills’ of central Lancashire, encountered a swarming population of weavers and spinners living in ‘squalid and comfortless’ cottages with broken windows; in the streets of towns such as Padiham, he was met by stares of ‘mingled ignorance and insolence’ix Insanitary conditions were rife in the towns and death rates high. It was not until after the 1860s and 1870s that sanitary reforms began to take effect and high mortality rates dropped. Several towns such as Salford and Bury pioneered improved methods of human waste collection and in 1889, James Duckett, a drainpipe manufacturer in Burnley invented the ‘Tipper’ water closet which was widely adopted in the industrial towns of the midlands and north of England.
Improvements in sanitation went hand in hand with improved housing. The passing of the second Public Health Act in 1875 strengthened the legislative powers of towns to enforce higher standards of housing, outlawing the construction of back to backs in some districts and ensuring streets were wider with improved drainage and water supply; streets were increasingly lit by gas. From the 1870s many towns acquired tramways, first horse drawn then steam powered in some towns from the 1880s and after c. 1900 operators rapidly turned to electricity. Trams were great shifters of people. They enabled workers to live further afield from their place of work which in turn encouraged the building of new working class suburbs in the larger towns. None of this, of course, was unique to Lancashire but the scenery and geology of the North West set its own stamp on the urban landscape. Much of Lancashire was red brick country but a journey by road or rail from Bury into Rossendale crossed into the stone district. North of Ramsbottom the red brick mills, factories and terraced housing gave way to soot blackened millstone grit. This was the building material of all the upland towns of east and northeast Lancashire – from Haslingden to Bacup and Ramsbottom as far north as Nelson and Colne. A distinctive feature of the stone terraces in these and other Pennine towns such as Rawtenstall and Burnley is the way rows of houses are seen climbing steep slopes with a continuous inclined roof line running parallel to the ground and not with each house in the terrace stepped from its neighbour as generally found elsewhere. With the exception of the largest towns like Manchester, the countryside was never far away, and the combination of industrial streets and yards laid with granite sets and stone slabs and open countryside – of fields, moorland and fast flowing upland streams – was a particular feature of the county: towns in Rossendale like Haslingden and Bacup are frequently described as having being hewn out of the surrounding crags of rock. This is the Lancashire that has come down to us today in popular culture.
The major cities of Manchester and Liverpool have distinctive characters and dominate the region, but there are a host of other large towns, each having their own character and indeed which also have diversity in attributes such as dialect. A further characteristic of Lancashire is what might be termed the ‘industrial village’, often comprising of an early rural settlement with the appendage of a mine, a mill or works of some type along with a few streets of terraced housing.
If industrialisation brought hardship to many workers for others it brought opportunities. Lancashire’s population grew at a tremendous rate so that Lancashire was to become by far the most populous county outside London. Industrial expansion was driven by entrepreneurs, inventors and professional people, including mechanical and civil engineers, surveyors, architects, lawyers and financiers. They made profits, accumulated wealth, built large houses for themselves and their families, entered local politics and contributed to the development of the fabric of municipal life. From the 1840s and 1850s, Lancashire towns acquired imposing town halls such as those at Rochdale and Bolton, public parks and public baths, mechanics institutes, museums and galleries and many of these were founded on the wealth of prominent local figures: for example, the Haworth Art Gallery, Accrington, the former Lewis Textile Museum in Blackburn and Rawtenstall’s Whitaker Art Gallery were gifts of local industrialists. In some towns the well-to-do stimulated the development of streets of substantial houses and fashionable shops as in well-planned Southport which it is claimed had the highest per capita income in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century. Wealthy businesspeople settled in Southport, Blackpool and Lytham St Annes and commuted daily on exclusive ‘club’ trains to their places of work in Manchester; they are said to have had fixed places on the trains and struck business deals with fellow passengers as they travelled. In Southport, the main shopping street is Lord Street which was laid out from the early 1800s with residential, commercial and public buildings: it is even claimed that it was the inspiration for the wide, tree lined streets of Napoleon III’s Paris. So there was more than one face to Lancashire.
The benefits for an industrial society extended further down the social scale: unskilled workers were drawn to the region from other parts of the British Isles by the promise of higher wages and the opportunities that came with town life: towns offered change, excitement and new kinds of leisure. However, perhaps less well-known is the movement of skilled workers between the industrial areas of Britain. Foundry, engineering and shipyard workers moved between in the Central belt of Scotland and Lancashire as the volumes of work fluctuated and also encouraged by employers who sought people with experience in up-to-date ways of working. Such workers could rise to become partners and directors in firms. Even agricultural workers who were generally amongst the poorest paid were generally better off in Lancashire than in the south due to the strong demand for labour in the collieries and the mills; so wages were generally higher and the poor also benefitted from cheaper coal – the universal domestic fuel – than places further afield from supplies. Agriculture in the region itself changed dramatically to feed the burgeoning population. Agricultural work, and particularly on the extensive arable farms in West Lancashire, drew a large number of people from Ireland to the area; some at harvest time each year, but many to settle. Dairy farming thrived north of the Ribble and the meres and marshlands of south west Lancashire were reclaimed for highly productive arable farming.
Food has also played a part in shaping Lancashire’s identity. The county is well known for its cheese which, uniquely amongst British cheeses combined curds of varying maturity to give it its distinctive character. Today ‘Beacon Fell, Traditional Lancashire Cheese’ is a Protected Designation of Origin and can only be used for cheese made north of the River Ribble, including The Fylde, Preston and Blackpool. Other varieties include Tasty Lancashire and Creamy Lancashire and the well-known crumbly Lancashire cheese which, unlike the other types is made from a single day’s milk and is the only Lancashire cheese made outside the county.
Food and diet in the North West are also inextricably linked with the former way of life of the industrial working population. In 1844, Britain’s first co-operative store was opened in Toad Lane, Rochdale. About half of the founder members, known as the ‘Rochdale Pioneers’, were weavers and aimed to provide good quality, unadulterated food and other provisions at affordable prices for the poor. They began by selling butter, sugar, flour and oatmeal followed shortly by tea and tobacco. The experiment was a success and by 1860 there were more than 200 co-ops in the North West of England; by 1900 the movement had spread to most parts of Britain. The popularity of meat pies, black pudding and Lancashire hot pot – a simple stew of mutton or lamb, topped with onions left to simmer in a heavy pot in the oven of the kitchen range – reflected the reality that many working families were away from their homes during the day, so meals needed to be easy to prepare. Liverpool’s signature dish: scouse originates from Norway, brought by sailors and/or during the mass emigrations from Norway by those who stayed on in the city rather continuing their journey to America.
Pies and cakes were made to be taken to work as snacks. Chorley cakes consisting of currants sandwiched between two layers of unsweetened short crust pastry were sometimes spread with butter and eaten with a slice of Lancashire cheese. The Eccles cake is sweeter and made with flaky pastry and were being sold in the town by 1793. Sad cake which was once found widely over East Lancashire is similar to Chorley cake but larger and made by rolling out the pastry, dropping raisins or currants evenly over it and then rolling it to the required size. Sad cake was usually made round but could also be square. It was then sliced and added to a lunch box and eaten in the mills or coal mines with butter or margarine. Whilst never exclusive to Lancashire, black pudding was particularly associated with Bury and Ramsbotton and today the Real Lancashire Black Pudding Company, based in Haslingden, produces a range of traditional black puddings, and also sells tripe. Extracted from the stomach lining of cows, tripe was another staple of the traditional working class diet in Lancashire. Trotters, pig’s feet, a delicacy particularly associated with Bolton have given the town’s football club its nickname.
Fish and chips became a popular cheap and convenient meal for the working family in the later nineteenth century. John Lees is reputed to have established the first fish and chip shop in Britain at Mossley near Oldham in 1863, although one was opened in London around the same time and the sale of fried fish is documented earlier. However, in Lancashire meat pies with stand-up pastry walls and filled with meat and gravy are commonly sold in Lancashire chip shops. They are particularly associated with the firm of Holland’s, established in Haslingden in 1851. Now based in nearby Baxendale they claim to supply 85% of chip shops in the Northwest.
There are many other perspectives from which Lancashire and the wider North West can be viewed. Lancashire is known for some traditional handcrafts such as the making of trug or oak swill baskets in West Lancashire and for clogs which were worn by many factory workers and colliers: cloggers’ shops survived in several towns including Rawtenstall and Waterfoot until the late twentieth century. The region is well known for its professional football clubs – from the giants with huge international followings in Liverpool and Manchester and through other successful clubs such as Blackburn Rovers and Burnley, to the smaller clubs with smaller but no less dedicated supporters in towns such as Accrington, Oldham and Rochdale. There is also a flourishing tradition of Rugby League football in the North West and the County has always been strong in the game of cricket. Much of what we see and understand today by Lancashire was shaped during the Industrial Revolution and is little more than 250 years old, but like every part of Britain there are layers of earlier histories and stories which take us back to a more distant past. They are simply less visible but they, nevertheless, form part of the region’s heritage. The textile industry stretches back earlier than the momentous developments of the eighteenth century: Wigan was a major centre for the making of pewter in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Bolton and some other locations in Lancashire witnessed fierce fighting during the English Civil Wars of the 1640s. Manors and halls scattered across the county – Rufford Old Hall near Ormskirk, Hall i’ th’ Wood in Bolton and Clitheroe Castle to name just three – attest to an earlier feudal structure of society: there are parish churches built in the Middle Ages with a few containing fragments of Saxon architecture. Some of the place names in West Lancashire such as Birkdale, Formby, Burscough and Kirkby are the legacy of Viking settlements in the ninth centuryx. Like staring into outer space, the further back in time we look, the more blurred and obscured is the detail, but all these layers contribute to making the Lancashire and the wider North West that we recognise today.
i Arthur Mee’s Lancashire, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1936 and 1949, p 2
ii Samuel Smiles (ed), James Nasmyth Engineer, John Murray, London, 1883 and 1912, pp 195-200
iii Barrie Trinder, Britain’s Industrial Revolution, Carnegie Publishing, Lancaster, 2013
iv Roger Osborne, Iron Steam and Money, The Bodley Head, London, 2013. p 177
v James (Viscount) Bryce, quoted in Barrie Trinder op cit. p 422
vi John Ruskin, The Two Paths, Lecture III Modern manufacture & Design, George Allen, Orpington, Kent, 1878, p 103
vii Quoted in Chris Aspin, The First Industrial Society Lancashire 1750-1850’, 1969 and 1995 by Carnegie Publishing, pp 127-8
viii Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, 1845 and Penguin, 1987, p 102
ix William Howitt, The Rural Life of England’ Longman, London, 1838, pp 221-223
x Stephen Harding, Mark Jobling and Turi King, Viking DNA The Wirral and West Lancashire Project, CRC Press, 2010, p 22