God Is an Englishman (4 page)

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eyes, as the other reeled in. Meanwhile the community thrived and prospered. Or one section of it did. But Oldham was only one among hundreds of villages that disappeared under the sulphurous pall that rolled down from the Pennines. The river of enterprise spared no single community within a thirty-mile radius of the city that some were already calling the new capital of the Empire. Like greased fingers running north, north-west, and west from a sooty palm the scabrous clutch of the new, post-rural society reached out to Rochdale, Bury, Bolton, and Wigan. Green spaces separating these country towns shrank to a minimum. The water in the streams about them turned grey and then black while the current, always sluggish, ceased almost to move at all. From the higher land to the north it was now possible to look down on that vast plain and see the city, not as a distant prospect, but as the site of a genie’s bottle stationed somewhere about the terminus of the twenty-eight-year-old Liverpool–Manchester Railway, first in the world to carry passengers at the astounding speed of 31 miles per hour. The genie was unsleeping. Day and night he toiled for his indefatigable masters, and the drifting grime he exhaled could be seen in the form of a gigantic mushroom, silvery grey and dun brown by day, jet black, shot with crimson, by night.

To the south, however, it was otherwise. Here the greater part of the Cheshire plain was green and gold, dotted with half-timbered farmhouses and neat rows of cottages linked by dust roads still bounded by hedges of hawthorn, elderberry, and nodding cow-parsley. Cattle grazed here and nearby flocks of white geese strutted in charge of strident, red-cheeked children. Huge, creaking haywains, riding the gentle slopes like overloaded barges, moved across the fields at harvest time, and sometimes the sound of church bells, carried on a south-easterly, reached the line of merchants’ houses marking the southern rim of the factory belt.

The line dividing these two worlds was a battle rampart broken by uneven gaps where the railway line crossed spongy open levels like the notorious Chat Moss. Its ramparts were the curving embankments thrown up by a hundred thousand Irish navvies and the little goose-minders would sometimes scream with excitement when one of the heavy trains moved snorting across the horizon. As yet the railway spurs had not probed south, and the Cheshire plain dreamed on of its companies of archers recruited for London kings centuries before and of royal progresses that had once brought tumult to tidy market towns. The threat of engulfment remained, however, for the border town of Warrington had been wholly absorbed when the railway ran through and now, besides textiles, it was churning out a cascade of hardware and soap. The racket originating from the hardware factory was continuous, but the soap factory GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 13

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advertised itself more subtly through the nostrils. When the wind swung to the north-westerly quarter the goose-children could smell it. It smelled like nothing within their experience.

Some of the Warrington merchants’ wives had developed sensitive noses, their sensitivity running ahead of their husbands’ bank balances. The menfolk, most of them less than a generation away from the midden, were indifferent to fumes of every variety, but, as busy men, they were susceptible to nagging and a few had already succumbed to their wives’ demands to better their living standards as well as their credit. So they packed up and moved, like a caravan of prosperous pioneers, across the county border and by the eighteen-fifties the northern rim of Cheshire was beginning to absorb the tide in a vastly different fashion from her sister county. It was getting a little of the gold whilst all the dross remained behind in Lancashire. Cheshiremen hoped it would stay that way but occasional visits to Warrington market did little to reassure them. There was always talk of new railways aimed at dreaming towns like Knutsford and Northwich, and the railway, taking in Chester, had already clawed its way as far as the Welsh coast.

When it was completed the Irish Sea would be at every Lancastrian’s disposal. At a statutory rate of one penny per mile.

In the meantime, however, Warrington, and its sister town Seddon Moss, boomed and grew, having even cheaper access to the Liverpool wharves than its overbearing neighbour Manchester. And its squalor kept just ahead of its prosper-ity, for Warrington and Seddon Moss elders were not afflicted by the evangelical zeal of certain leading Mancunians, being newer converts to the creed of muck and money and having their way to make in the world before they became the patrons of libraries, art galleries, and soup-kitchens.

Structurally Seddon Moss had been unable to adapt to rapid ex pansion. The houses of the older town still stood in the centre, crowd ing together like a company of beleaguered veterans assailed by naked savages. Beyond them, in an ever-widening circle, the new streets of back-to-back dwellings moved out like the ripples of a cesspit, a hundred or more to a block and sharing, perhaps, six communal privies that gave off a stench in summer capable of vanquishing that of the soap-factory and in winter overflowed and covered the stone setts with ordure. Cheshire farmers noticed something else on market days. The inhabitants themselves were changing. Whereas, not so long ago, they would have been indistinguishable from working folk in Northwich and Middlewich, they now had the manners and appear ance of an army of half-starved, semi-mutinous mercenaries living as best they could in the ruins of a pestilential citadel. Their GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 14

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faces had grown narrow and pinched, and their eyes were the eyes of men and women who, at any time, and given the least provocation, would erupt and find pleasure in outrage. A proportion of them were not even whole but walked on twisted limbs, clubbed feet, and with hum ped backs. Others lacked fingers and occasionally you would pass a man with an empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder, so that the coun try stallholders found them increasingly alien and quick to take offence, particularly if they thought they were being short-changed. Because of this, especially since the big strike and lockout at Rawlinson’s, largest of the mills, a Seddon Moss market-day that had once been regarded by farmfolk as a weekly jaunt became a sally into an embattled area. Recalling the Manchester erup-tion of eleven years ago, when regular troops had been rushed in by train from London, and Preston and several constables had been lynched, men wondered what might happen if Sam Rawlinson’s obstinacy held out against his greed into the autumn and winter months, when bales of Georgian cotton cluttered every offloading bay and his operatives needed warmth as well as food. Bands of them were already roving the Cheshire hedgerows in search of berries and herbs, and the kitchen gardens, hen-roosts, and orchards of northernmost farms had been the scene of raids and forays. Mercifully, for the present, a brassy July sun beat upon the countryside. Under cloudless skies men could still hope, and starving children were not obliged to stay indoors.

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About seventy yards south of the house Sam had instructed his Man chester architect to raise an artificial knoll and crown it with a summerhouse. The summerhouse did not face the woods, as one might expect, but the monstrosity that Sam Rawlinson had tortured from the hunting lodge that had stood there for the last century and a half, a two-storey building of red Cheshire brick, with a portico sup ported by two truncated Doric columns and a façade of tall windows, the lower section opening on to a verandahed terrace.

The original hunting lodge, local men recalled, had been an in offensive building, but Sam Rawlinson, after buying out the last defunct partner of Seddon Moss Mill, had set himself to amend that. The monster that resulted from a marriage of Sam’s notions of domestic grandeur and the fumblings of an inexperienced architect was possibly the most eye-catching structure in the world, not excluding some of the new municipal townhalls that were being run up with cheap, ready-made materials made available by the new railway net work.

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The renovated Stannard Lodge, as it was marked on eighteenth-century maps, just escaped being a folly but was the poorer for it. Seddon Moss operatives, who sometimes walked the eight miles sim ply to gape at it, knew it by another name. They called it “Scab’s Castle,” a name derived from a rumour that the new owner had ob tained his start in life by leading a counter-revolutionary work force at the Rochdale mill where he had begun his career as an eight-year-old coal-comber and had progressed, through bale-breaking and furnaceman, into the lower grades of management.

Nobody in the Warrington area knew the facts of Sam’s rise from the coal-comber to the mill owner, but it had been achieved in a mat ter of thirty-five years. There was nothing very spectacular about that. In the decades leading up to the late eighteen-fifties the same rate of progress had been accomplished by hundreds of men, most of them cottagers’ sons. The only thing singular about Sam Rawlinson was his willingness to leave production in the hands of a few, higher-than-average mechanics, and divide his tremendous vigour between administration and salesmanship. He had sold his first small mill at a handsome profit during a boom season and then ploughed every thing he possessed or could borrow into Seddon Moss, a business that had been steadily running down owing to the reluctance of its elderly owner to replace the outworn plant.

That was in 1850, and in less than two years the decline of Seddon Moss Mill was halted and reversed, and the town had had to adjust to the impact of Sam Rawlinson’s restless energy. He reorganised the mil from top to bottom, instal ed machinery that had not even been patented, signed on all the hands he could get, and went out after big oriental orders that called for quantity rather than quality.

The home market he ignored, preferring to deal through his Liverpool brokers with customers who were too far off to complain in person or press claims for refunds.

He worked, on an average, fourteen hours a day, having no inter ests outside the mill apart from the embellishment of his new home. The word “embellishment” played no part in his commercial life, where he was concerned exclusively with facts and figures, but it featured largely in his domestic background and even his pliant young architect had been astonished when Sam told him to add a third storey to the Lodge, then decorate the south-facing frontage with four Gothic turrets. After that he added a castellated balus trade to the top of the portico, and then a row of arrow-slits to the buttresses between the windows, so that when it was finished the building looked like a top-heavy mediaeval fort balanced, none too securely, on a squashed red box. He then knocked twenty-eight per cent off the architect’s fee and brought in a landscape gardener to cut back the encroaching GodIsAnEnglishman.indd 16

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timber, lay down an acre of lawn, excavate a large duckpond complete with an islet populated by roughcast herons, and raise the small hill so that he might have a convenient perch from which to survey his handiwork.

Nobody ever discovered whether it pleased him or not, but in his limited spare time he went on looking at it as though it did. He had no friends, other than old Goldthorpe, the ground landlord of the area in which Seddon Moss Mill was situated, and even Goldthorpe, a notorious miser and rentier, had been heard to say that Rawlinson would dry, process, and sell the skin of a grape if he could find a market for the end product. Men of business in the area came to respect him, however, as by far the biggest employer of unskilled labour hereabouts. His small team of executives, locally known as “The Strappers,” tolerated him, if only because he could be abso lutely relied upon to back them against the operatives on every occa sion. In the men, women, and boys who formed his labour force he inspired a compound of hate, derision, and naked fear, but also a certain awe that one man, and him a widower without sons or local background, could have acquired so much power so quickly, and exercise it with such damnable attention to detail.

For although Sam Rawlinson rarely appeared on the factory floor he gave ample evidence of knowing everything that happened down there, and every word spoken that was relevant to his concerns. He might, indeed, have been watching them individually from the mo ment they arrived at six-thirty a.m., until they trooped out twelve to fourteen hours later. He knew when one of them was a minute late in arriving, or ten seconds early in shutting down. He knew to a fibre how much wastage occurred every day, how many breaks were detected on a particular machine every hour, and often such irrelevant data as which unwed operative was pregnant and who was the likely father. They hated his powers of concentration, and they hated his unrelenting grasp of their personal lives, but almost all of them, deep down, regarded him as a reliable provider, particularly after Seddon Moss had ridden out the last slump without resorting to short time, as had a majority of mills in the area.

Perhaps it was this certitude of regular employment that kept them so long from mutiny, and helped them to resist the exhortations of men like Cromaty and McShane to bluff the Gaffer into increas ing the overtime rate by one penny an hour, and authorise a relief system for the ten-minute breakfast break, at present spent standing beside the chattering machines. In the end, however, the persuasions of a hard core of rebels prevailed and there was a ten-day walkout. Sam’s reply had been a nine-week lockout, that had now lasted from May into July.

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