I love living in Manchester, but there’s something a little claustrophobic about any big city. It’s nice, from time to time, to get out of there, and I am spending the first few days of reading week in my Dad’s house in the comparitively rural satellite town of Stalybridge. Again, there’s a lot to be said for Rusholme and Fallowfield, where I’m spending my term time, but I’ve always felt there’s something quite special about the skies around Stalybridge. Here the plains of Greater Manchester segue into the foothills of the Dark Peak, and on anticyclone days there’s a wonderful depth of light colours in the sky offset by the darker tones of the hills that hold it up.
The hills are purplish black this evening, and the sky a purplish blue - these are the colours of Autumn - and as I was out walking I got to watch the sunset reflected off an aeroplane. That’s another treat we get here: the flightpath to Manchester airport. It’s times like these I wish that I was a better artist, that I could capture on paper the impression left by that spiky evening star the perfect shade of gold. Watching it recede I thought of the people on their way to a short and often fairly stressful escapes in the sun, and the greenhouse emissions on their way to a long and probably devastating stay in the atmosphere.
Immediate escape sealing eventual doom. It’s a poignant image, and it put me in mind of a half-written post comparing the aviation lobby with some of history’s greatest thefts; a luxury product for a few incurring unspeakably high costs on the many. It occured to me then that the history of Stalybridge was a rich tapestry of such monumental threads and, with more than its fair share of both clouded hills and dark Satanic mills, this could serve as a microcosm for a lot of England.
According to the wikipedia article on the town, mid 18th century Stalybridge had a population of only about 140 people. Daniel Defoe, writing at about that time, described Manchester itself as a wonderful “village”, and yet within a century the whole region was a densely populated and highly developed industrial centre. This demographic shift was so immense that we can consider it the beginning of Stalybridge as we know it. To start our history, then, we have to ask where these people all came from.
The answer lies in the first of our great thefts, the Enclosure movement. This was a process that slowly accelerated over a period of about 300 years, and we can identify more than a few contributory causes. Technological progress allowed landowners to dream of new, hyperproductive farms, while inflationary pressures caused by Royal mismanagement required them to be more ruthless in securing new wealth for themselves. The Protestant reaction to the stifling hegemony of the Catholic Church brought bloody conflict to much of Europe, but it also created a new religious hierarchy with an unprecedented taste for capitalism. This pre-liberal militant Neoliberalism put the capitalist class in control of religion, while the Civil War and the rise of Parliament gave immense political power to the landowners.
Stir in the demographic chaos caused by a century of intermittent plague, and you have the context for the British Naqba. In village after village, the small landholders were dispossessed, the common lands were fenced off. Large farms took spread from the newly-privatised villages into the hills, moors and forests that had once been the domain of nomads and tenant farmers. The population of England, Wales, and the Scots Lowlands went from being peasants to refugees to factory workers, from being able to live off their land to being forced to sell their labour. Oliver Goldsmith summed it up well:
They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;
But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
As the process intensified in the latter half of the 17th century, the victims of this theft flowed to the new industrial areas and became the inhabitants of Stalybridge.
The process occured later in other parts of the British Isles, as the influence of the ruling class was extended. The population of Edinburgh and Glasgow was greatly swelled by the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries; the difference was that the Scottish landlords were far away in London, and to clear their land required the British Army to smash and exile virtually all of Highland society. This brutal ethnic cleansing is commemorated in our national anthem.
Back in the Northwest of England, a population surge came from the Irish Potato Famine. Ireland’s population was devastated by the famine - still today, the population has not recovered to pre-famine levels - with millions dying or fleeing, especially to England and New England. While the scale of the catastrophe is widely appreciated, though, the causes are not. The failure of the potato crop was an unfortunate accident, but this alone cannot explain the crisis. In fact, not only did the United Kingdom (of which Ireland was a province) continue to prosper through its industries and its Empire (of which more later), but Ireland itself remained a net exporter of food throughout the famine. The Irish starved, in other words, while their food was being sold by wealthy - and usually absent - landowners. We must see the famine as a primarily economic phenomenom, and it’s one that is usually attributed to trends analogous to the enclosure movement.
With this talk of genocide in Ireland and ethnic cleansing in Scotland, though, we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The modern populace of post-industrial England tend to have roots in these catastrophes too - I know the Irish navvies are in my blood - but the economic cleansing of England alone was enough to get the ball rolling. Stalybridge was booming before they really got started, and the boom was far from pleasant. In mines and in factories, the working class got their baptism of sweat and dust, losing hands under great and terrible machines, and losing years off their lives from appalling living and working conditions. But theirs was only a part of the suffering inflicted by the textile industry; its story is that of the British Empire, and cotton spun and woven in Stalybridge was grown and sold across the world.
Let’s start with the Caribbean, where the cotton was grown in plantations manned by oppressed African slaves. Now, British Imperial nostalgia gets a lot of mileage out of the slave trade, and justifies the Empire with the following argument: slavery has existed for as long as civilisation has existed, while legislation against slavery began in Britain. This line of reasoning is a textbook example of cherry-picked facts, true in and of themselves but completely misrepresenting the truth as a whole.
It misrepresents abolition. First of all, the impetus for this came partly from revolutionary France, and mainly from popular anti-Imperial movements in Britain. Credit given to Parliamentarians like Wilberforce belongs equally to indignant workers, who rightly saw common cause with the slaves when they fought for their own rights.
We see a remarkable display of this solidarity in people’s reaction to the Cotton Famine kicked off by slaveowner blockades during the American Civil War. This greatly threatened the livelihoods of all the industrial revolutionaries, and the Confederates had indeed hoped that pressure from cotton workers afraid of recession would push the European powers into putting the anti-slavery North back in its place. In fact, the opposite happened: a meeting at Stalybridge Town Hall blamed the Confederates themselves for the famine, and a larger meeting in Manchester wrote a letter of support to Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln gratefully acknowledged what he saw as “an instance of sublime Christian heroism which has not been surpassed in any age or in any country”, “an energetic and re-inspiring assurance of the inherent truth and of the ultimate and universal triumph of justice, humanity and freedom.”
(I like to conjure up the romantic image of an ancestor of mine, looking uncannily like myself but presumably stunted and scarred by his appalling living conditions, marching on the Free Trade Hall with a banner reading “No Blood For Cotton!”)
As well as giving the ruling class of Empire undue credit for the abolition of slavery, nostalgia makes it seem more final than it finally was. A large and powerful constituency of former slaveowners prodded for business as usual, and they got it: slavery rebranded as indentured labour, outsourced from Africa to India. But far more disingenous is the misrepresentation of the Atlantic slave trade itself, portrayed as a mere continuation of what had gone on before. Slavery has indeed existed throughout history - so has murder - but not as an unbroken continuum. Just as we rightly distinguish the massive slaughter of the Holocaust from the background murders of human existence, so we should recognise the upheaval over a few decades of literally millions of Africans as an incident noteworthy - and, of course, deplorable - in and of itself.
We must also recognise the unprecedented racial justifications for the colonial slave trade. Slaves, historically, had always put up with poor conditions and few freedoms, but they had generally been recognised as human. A new ideology arose in Imperial Europe, a pseudoscientific theory of racial superiority that made colonisation a moral imperative - and demoted the ‘inferior races’ to a status barely above that of animals. In keeping with their subhumanity, the conditions of African slaves were often far worse than what had gone before - just think of the slave ships! The more we consider both the severity of the abuses and the scale of the forced displacements, the more we must consider the Atlantic slave trade in terms not of business as usual, but of a great historical crime - a crime which supplied Stalybridge with cotton.
But the story of cotton - like the story of Empire - doesn’t stop at the mill. Having created a labour force with Enclosure and Slavery, the Empire had to guarantee itself a market. It was in large part to this end that Britannia ruled the waves. In the very early days of the Royal Navy, Tudor Kings of England imposed trade treaties on Holland and Ireland, making it almost impossible for them to sell finished wool products. Instead, they were to sell raw materials to England where they were processed to a much greater profit. This was behind a wave of immigration of Flemish weavers to England, and it set Imperial policy for centuries.
The industries in Britain’s colonies - including the U.S. - were kept, as far as possible, purely extractive, keeping the really profitable work for Britain itself. Taken to its natural conclusion, this policy was most effective against countries that were never even part of the British Empire. Unequal trading treaties were imposed not only on the colonies, but on China, Brazil, and at one point or another most of the world. This was of course another great theft, stealing the livelihoods of those in the affected countries, and the biggest such theft involved the Jewel in the Empire’s Crown.
The British went to India, in large part, to exploit its natural resources - its tea and its spices in particular - but it was also at least partly to take control of what was at the time the world’s most advanced cotton industry. Even with industrial mass-production, the cotton of Lancashire couldn’t always outcompete quality Indian calico; Imperial control of the latter guaranteed a market for the former. The British often claim to have “built India”, and can indeed take credit for the railway network that extracted the countries resources as well as various buildings completely unsuited to the Indian climate.
However, they also implemented a very deliberate strategy of retarding - even of reversing - Indian industrial development, in the aim of turning a potential rival into a subordinate. The cotton workers of Stalybridge were probably unaware of the Indian corollary to their jobs, but the Indians themselves were not. When Gandhi gathered support for independence, he frequently drew attention to British control of industry - and, when gathering international support, one of his most prominent trips was to Lancashire, where he met with cotton workers who quickly came to support his cause.
Stalybridge owes its very existence as an industrial town, then, not only to the theft of land from the British and Irish peasants, but also to the theft of freedom from the people of Africa, and the more abstract theft of jobs from the people of India. But we shouldn’t suppose that the people of Stalybridge were entirely willing accomplices to these crimes - although, to be fair, our ancestors were driven from the land not only into the factories, but onto the warships of the Royal Navy - nor that they were entirely willing victims. The popular pressures that threatened the very existence of the monarchic British empire-state were also very much a part of our town’s history.
Far from the disaffection we see today, the working class of the nineteenth century were highly politicised and militant. Their involvement in anti-capitalist activism went way beyond marches for better wages; the forerunners to trade unions set up both highly democratic spaces for decision making - where women were peaceably given the vote well over a century before the central government conceded them that right - and highly regimented structures for implementing industrial action. It is probable that the Stalybridge Old Band - the first civilian marching band in history - played a part in this infrastructure, judging from their presence at Peterloo. Though it still exists, the band doesn’t seem to have much of an online presence, but I did find this in an old council press release:
Stalybridge Old Band has a chequered history. The band was formed in 1809 from a house adjoining the Hope and Anchor Pub, now the Fleece Inn, in Market Street.
Among the band’s claim to fame is its presence at a pivotal moment in British history - it played at the Peterloo Massacre, in August 1819.
As a favourite of Henry Hunt (Orator Hunt), the band was booked to perform in support of him at a reform meeting at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester.
Following their appearance, the band returned to George Leigh Street in Ancoats for refreshments but were disturbed by a supporter rushing in to tell them of the massacre of Hunt’s radical supporters at St. Peter’s Fields.
The band members, fearing for their own safety, retreated out of the back door down a rickety ladder and through back streets, arriving hours later back at Ashton Moss.
After this, the band increased in popularity and its members were looked to as patriots who had suffered in defence of popular liberty.
(This brings me to another of my little fantasies: there’s a pub not far from Stalybridge that my family used to go to a lot - it had an ace play area - called The Heroes Of Waterloo. If I ever win the lottery - unlikely, given that I don’t play - I’m buying it and renaming it The Heroes of Peterloo)
That’s about as I can far as I can trace the history of Stalybridge, counting forwards from the start (although my Dad, reading over my shoulder, has just suggested a load of links where I can remedy this - it used to be famous for its noxious smog, he tells me), but before I pick it up again where my own memory starts there’s one little incident on which the town prides itself so much that I can’t really omit it. The song to which an astronomical number of workers marched to their death in the Great War, It’s A Long Way To Tipperary was actually written here - and for a bet at that. So what? Indeed, but there’s a blue plaque, a black plaque, and a statue commemorating it.
So, fast forward to my childhood, and to the era of post-industrial decline. I love coming back, every now and then, more for the hills than for anything else. These are a constant presence - notwithstanding some large grass and even peat fires over recent years - overlooking a town where nearly everything has changed. Now, I will concede that these changes, reflective of much broader, much deeper shifts in the towns of the West, started before the events I’m about to relate - the market in particular has been shut for about a decade - but the demise of Stalybridge was swift and sudden.
I saw it from the inside. In the mid 1990s, having been made redundant by the latest batch of NHS reform, my Dad took over a local shop that had hit hard times, a health and specialty food shop of which, as the local vegetarians, we’d long been loyal customers. I was too young then to be aware of how good a chance we had of turning things round (I was a pessimistic smartarse, but then I was a pessimistic smartarse about most things) - maybe we were doomed from the start - but I can put my finger on the exact moment when it became impossible.
It was one of the “regeneration projects” that are springing up across post-industrial Europe that did it. These are by no means unique to Stalybridge - Manchester brands itself as “the most regenerated city on Earth, but the trend arguably started in Liverpool and is epitomised by the Gugenheim museum in Bilbao. Jonathan Meades describes these developments, among other memorable epithets, as “PFI gentrification”, that is, an exciting synergy between pricing the poor out of the housing market and turning taxpayers’ money into private profit. If we factor in its positive side - job creation - then this seems like a fairly accurate appraisal of regeneration in city centres. In a small town like Stalybridge, though, things are a bit different.
Our regeneration involved the Huddersfield Narrowboat Canal, a waterway that once ran through the town but fell into disrepair and, in the 1970s, was even paved over. The canal was to be restored, dredged and beautified, bringing tourist money in to turn the town’s fortunes around. Now, the restored canal is indeed lovely, but rather than being averted the town’s demise was hastened. The canal went through the biggest car park in town, which was demolished along with the bus stationed - scheduled for simultaneous redevelopment. Without easy access by car or by bus, the town centre was cut off from the outside, and trade dropped right down… until an old warehouse came down, and a new Tesco supermarket went up.
The customers came back, then, to within a tantalising few dozen feet of the local shops, but there was no way the latter could compete with Tesco. One by one, the shops and then many of the pubs began to close down. There is still - or was, last time I looked - a “Last Bookshop In Town (Use It Or You’ll Lose It!)”, but the local economy is now pretty much a Tescopoly - with a bit of Pottersville mixed in. For a new economy rose from the ashes of the old, an economy of increasingly untrendy winebars. Where once were shops - where once was a cinema - there are now nightclubs and a whole strip of kebab joints, and the originally ironical nickname of “Staly Vegas” has come to displace the town’s real name.
I’m put in mind of It’s A Wonderful Life, where local businessman George Bailey is shown the nightmarish mini-Vegas into which his town would have descended without his efforts to save it from the Great Depression. Despite its status as a perennial Christmas classic, I only saw the film post-Tesco, and ever since then I can’t go through town on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night without half-expecting to see a disoriented Bailey running through the town screaming. To be fair, Bailey’s Pottersville suffers from a serious prostitution problem, whereas I’m not aware of any money being passed around Staly Vegas - only diseases.
This is the last great theft of Stalybrugian (my neologism, but I like it) history, the theft of our local economy by an enormous supermarket. Once again, this theft is mirrored across the world, and it brings us back to that aeroplane I saw emitting its way across the sky this morning. The twentieth century saw an oil boom in the West, one that created the most inefficient economy in all of history: the economy of suburbs, cars, and aeroplanes, of Tesco, Wal-Mart and McDonald’s. The supply chains of these corporations snake around the world, burning insane amounts of oil to ship materials and products around the processing zones of the less developed countries, turning more insane amounts of oil into fertilisers and pesticides to intensively grow their food.
The Tescopolistic economy, then, is addicted to the oil boom, and hard times are coming as the oil runs out (something which is already happening) and the climate becomes less reliable. It is in these hard times that we will have the most need of our local distribution networks, our shops, communities, relationships with farmers, to keep us fed local when the oil-hungry networks of the supermarkets starve, wither and die - and it is precisely those supermarkets that have been destroying those communities.
Stalybridge’s demise, as with its growth, is a monstrous process of enclosure, taking our means of survival out of our hands and into those of capitalists disinterested in our welfare. Such thefts are writ large through the history of Stalybridge, but so is resistance to them. Now our very survival may depend on it, it’s up to us to rediscover our righteous indignation - and to rediscover resistance.
Latest Comments