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NAPOLEON INVADES, THE LAKES, RARE TREES, AND THE PROBLEMS OF FARMERS' DAUGHTERS

6/2/2025

This is a draft post I made in 2021 which I hadn't published on my website although I had in other media. Seems a shame to waste it so here it is.

I travelled up to the Lakes last week and met up with my brother to pay homage to a five acre parcel of land in the South Lakes my late dad purchased in the seventies. It’s a piece of paradise.

But let’s begin with an entertaining conversation I overheard on the way back. I’m all for a bit of travel eavesdropping on trains, especially when it’s accidental and the people chatting coerce you, in a manner of speaking, to listen.

I got the train back to Manchester from Oxenholme. I wasn’t the only passenger boarding. Two young women in their early twenties, boarded as well and sat on the table across the aisle from mine. Their volume control was broken and stuck on ten.

Initially I was thinking why aren’t you both staring silently and raptly at your phones like everyone normal at your age. Yet the conversation started to drag me in, complete with the girls’ lovely Westmorland accents, that odd combination of north Lancashire, Yorkshire and Geordie.

Here’s part of the conversation.

K: Do you think people can tell we’re farmers?
D: Farmer’s daughters you mean?
K: (laughing): It’s not like we smell of barns.
D: (laughing): Not usually.
K: Well, why do meet so few interesting lads?
D: Interesting people, you mean?
K: It’s the friends’ group. It’s too small. We all end up going with each other. Then it’s embarrassing.
D: I know. I broke out once remember. For a bit. I had that thing with that lad in Skipton. Another farmer of course and dead good-looking but thick and ate awfully. Chomp, chomp. It was disgusting. Like a pig.
K: And can you remember that one I went with up at Kirkby Stephen for a couple of months.
D (laughing): Yeah, he really did smell like manure.

That made me laugh too, but I gave up, as the volume became too much, and put my headphones on and watched Morecambe Bay pass by to music. There were glimpses of the sands and over them the Lake District mountains appeared, Old Man Coniston prominent and then the last outlier, the dark humped bulk of Black Combe. It’s curious how the Lake District is so-called given it has so many mountains. Did ‘the Mountain District’ ever look likely to stick? Lakes are more distinctive I suppose. The Lake District is better, describes a characteristic.

Then we crossed the River Lune north of Lancaster. The tide was out and it occurred to me, as a non-sequitur, that rail travel is far more like floating than flight. Flight is a pointless bouncy castle of an experience compared to rail travel, usually conducted in a fog of cloud. The train, tied by gravity to the earth, flies smoothly through landscapes, with just enough fluctuations of movement, bumps for want of a better word, to show we still have the soil under our rails. It’s fast enough to get to places quickly, slow enough to watch the landscape change, yet close enough to almost feel it.

The next major river, the chatty girls and I crossed, was the Ribble. Ah lovely Ribble, a noble river, that starts in the Dales and flows into the Irish Sea fresh as daisy from its ramble through the north west of England.

I wondered at geography and geology lately on a walk up Pen-y-ghent mountain in the Dales where we'd found rare purple saxifrage flowering close to the summit almost artfully sited next to some residual snow. On one side of that very good-looking Pennine peak the waters all flow east into the North Sea and on the other side they flow west into the Irish Sea.

One of those ‘waters’ is the River Ribble. I don’t know why the watershed there creates wonder in me but it does. It seems significant in intuitive ways. Something to do with how the planet moves, how gravity falls, how nature behaves, how brief it makes our lives appear when compared to a geological timescale. I find nothing melancholy in that thought, on the contrary it’s reassuring.

Anyway, as stated, the purpose of the visit to the Lakes was to stroll a parcel of land the family call with great cunning ‘the Land’. We do this on the anniversary of my late mum’s birthday. There are three pasture meadows with extreme height differences in the terrain, turned into a sanctuary for flora and fauna by my dad’s monomania with trees. Much remains grassed of course, often sprinkled with cowslips, but the list of rare trees and shrubs impresses anybody interested in such matters.

The views are superb, north up the A6 to the dramatic ridge of Whinfell and south over Kendal, seven miles away, then into Lancashire. To the south east, at night and three miles distant, the west coast mainline trains and their lit compartments appear as snakes, bodies sparkling with bright light, winding over the shoulder of Benson Knott.

After ‘the Land’ we went to Bowness for a drink and a meal in the sunny April chill. My brother Robert likes to discover rare books in charity shops so we had to stop off in one of those. There was nothing for him but I found Napoleon Bonaparte.

Or to give him his full name and title: ‘Napoleon Bonaparte, by the Grace of God and the Constitutions of the Republic, Emperor of the French, King of Italy, Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine, Mediator of the Swiss Confederation’. Old Boney (as he was known over here) seemed a bit confused back then. Can you be an emperor through the constitution of a republic?

My Boney is about a foot high and ceramic. I knew he was small but not that small. He was priced £3 and is totally rubbish but it amused me to buy him and then we posed him all across Bowness, next to swans, on grassy mounds, on the lunch table.

The following day we went to Shap Abbey, which is perfectly hidden in a fold of the hills between the Lakes and the Pennines. It is a noble ruin with the principal feature the west tower. We posed old Bonaparte there too. Nobody was about, until as we left, over a footbridge, we passed a couple in their thirties with matching rambling poles. They did that tiresome Covid-shimmy to one side as though we had bubos popping out of our cheekbones, even though we were in miles of open country.

Best thing was as they retreated we heard one of them say, “That’s odd. Do you think Napoleon had something to do with Shap Abbey?” It’s the sort of thing that creates a rumour that turns into a myth that becomes a fact. So, when you hear somebody say that Napoleon made a secret visit to England and stayed at Shap Abbey you’ll know it started with a daft man who bought a tacky ceramic statuette from a charity shop as a laugh.

When I got back to the flat my subscription of ‘History Today’ was in the letter box. One of my sons bought me this subscription as a Christmas present. The main story was called: ‘Napoleon, Life after Death’, and there was Boney with exactly the same coat as my statuette on the cover.

I love a good coincidence, which was compounded when on a walk across town to the excellent Ducie Street Warehouse for a meal I discovered there’s a new casino, bar and restaurant, opening on Portland Street called Napoleon’s - although by then I was beginning to worry something sinister was afoot.

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Favourite Mcr buildings. Part 1: The Former YMCA

31/1/2025

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Here's the former YMCA (1911), now St George's House, on Peter Street by Woodhouse, Corbett and Dean. The first UK building to be built of reinforced concrete on the Kahn system, named after a German-born American engineer).

The buff and brown terracotta-faced building mingles tremendous Art Nouveau motifs with an essentially Baroque form. That Art Nouveau though. Wow. Look at that stretched Manchester coat of arms, bees and ship and all? Magnificent.

There’s a cracking copy of Renaissance artist Donatello's St George too. St George seems to be staring at the queue for coffee-shop Ezra & Gil wondering whether a coffee is worth queuing outside in all weathers. The festoons are hung vertically not dropping from two higher fold points. Crazy stuff.

The massive arched entrance could be the entrance to a fancy road tunnel under a mountain. The YMCA was strong in Manchester with its own sports teams in local leagues. Keeping a body beautiful was part of having a clean spirit in the Young Men’s Christian Association. To this effect the building hosted a gym, a running track, two fives courts on the roof and a top floor with a swimming pool.

If co-working had been a thing when the building was converted twenty years or so back then maybe these would have been retained. It’s a building that whiffs of the changes taking place in architecture in the early 20th century. Catch it in the sun and that terracotta glows.

The building replaced a building of 1833 for the Natural History Museum of Manchester. The collection was transferred to Manchester Museum when that opened down Oxford Road, the building closed but in 1876 the YMCA moved in and then demolished it and gave the city this real Manchester gem: a gem presently hosting excellent food and drink Haunt and Exhibition.

You can read more about Manchester buildings in some of my Manchester books at or on Manchester Confidential

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Favourite Manchester Buildings: Part 2. St Wilfrid's, Church, Hulme

29/1/2025

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Here’s the former St Wilfrid’s RC Church in Hulme, converted to workspaces in the 1980s. It looks a little dowdy and plain but it’s important. It was designed by famed and controversial nineteenth century architect Pugin who like Pele has a somewhat more elaborate full name, in the architect’s case, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin.

The church was finished in 1842 when Pugin was a relatively young man of thirty two. In some respects this most talented of designers would remain young dying just ten years later. He’s perhaps best known for the interiors of the Palace of Westminster (Houses of Parliament) but if you want your eyes to pop out of your head in terms of rich decoration nip down to Cheadle, Staffordshire (not GM) and ogle St Giles’ Church - pictured below.

Pugin was a key player in the Gothic revival and a return to spirituality in church architecture. He was making a religious point over this as he’d converted to Catholicism and was very passionate about his new faith. As with St Giles, St Wilfrid’s was paid for by John Talbot, Lord Shrewsbury, Pugin’s patron, another Roman Catholic.

There was very little money though so St Wilfrid’s is simplicity itself with a bump on one side for a tower that was never built beyond eave level. The windows are mostly small, they’re called lancet windows, with a bigger rose window on the east. It’s all about the massing, the overall appearance, rising from a large brick and stone plinth. One authority describes it as a ‘seminal building in the history of 19th century church architecture’ because it led other architects to look more closely at genuine medieval churches and attempt to replicate that mood of spirituality.

Pugin’s son added the three gabbled confessionals on the south side. That was Edward who also designed the spectacular St Francis’s, now Gorton Monastery, and several other churches in the region.

St Wilfrid was a 7th century English saint known for being a truculent and difficult character. Speaking of which…

This is Johnny Rogan in his Morrissey & Marr biography: ‘While the Moors (murder) controversy raged, Steven (Morrissey) was taking his first communion at St Wilfrid’s Church. It was an eventful morning for the class of ’66 who turned out in the best clothes to receive the Host. Afterwards, they were treated to a post-Mass boiled egg breakfast.’

Very religious.

There’s now a tattoo studio in St Wilfrid’s called Sabbath Church. Times change.

The black & white picture by the way here is from 1964 and features a brick field wasteland.

This is Johnny Rogan in his Morrissey & Marr biography: ‘While the Moors (murder) controversy raged, Steven was taking his first communion at St Wilfrid’s Church. It was an eventful morning for the class of ’66 who turned out in the best clothes to receive the Host. Afterwards, they were treated to a post-Mass boiled egg breakfast.’ Mass boiled eggs, so to speak.

Very religious.

There’s now a tattoo studio in St Wilfrid’s called Sabbath Church. Times change.

The black & white picture by the way here is from 1964 and features a brick field wasteland.

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MEETING HENRY V, BLUSHING TURKEYS, HODNET GARDENS, THE GUARDIAN AND DEAD GERMAN COMMUNISTS

5/5/2021

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A six or seven minute read or you can listen to the story in the audio file above.

I met a turkey last week and asked the silliest question. It was alive and well and was a 'rescue turkey'. Who knew there were rescue turkeys?

I was delivering three of my books to a reader in a pretty place called, appropriately, if spelt differently, Buxworth, just off the A6 in Derbyshire. The house was large and the garden huge. Gerri Ross, who’d bought the books, greeted us and explained how her family took in ducks, hens and even turkeys and looked after them if people couldn’t cope with their care anymore. The family used the eggs, of course, but as vegetarians they didn’t kill their feathery guests.

The turkey was a male and had been part of a pair but a year ago, just before Christmas, the female had been stolen.

“Why would somebody steal a turkey?” I said foolishly, thinking it’s a big job to kill, pluck, gut and clean such a huge bird.

Ask a silly question… The amused response was, “It was before Christmas, that’s why.”

The turkey was a chameleon in a manner of speaking. When we’d arrived into the car park of the house the turkey apparently became distressed. Gerri explained how its head is normally Manchester City sky blue in shade but, as we could see, was now Manchester United scarlet. Birds are related to reptiles, and lizards such as chameleons are part of the reptile family so it sort of makes sense, although I'd never known turkey's could do that.

My suggestion the turkey was protesting against the European Super League by displaying the colours of two of the ‘big six’ was pooh-poohed, but I was glad this complete change of head colour doesn’t happen to humans, well, aside from a little blushing. I wouldn’t like it if my whole head went, say, vivid green after a particularly difficult question on one of the guided tours I conduct.

Bright colour was on my mind back in the city too. I went for a meal at Salvi’s in Exchange Square, my favourite Italian restaurant. Walking there I passed the pawlonia tomentosas, aka Empress Trees, in St Peter’s Square. Every spring these trees go crazy with over-the-top horse chestnut sized blossoms on leafless branches, exploding like pinky mauve Roman candles. The flowers only last three weeks so I give them a few more days at most. The name comes from the origin of these trees in China. A tree would start to blossom after the same number of years it would take for a princess or empress to be ready to marry, hence the name.

Not far from Salvi’s restaurant is Manchester Cathedral. I was lucky last week to visit that venerable institution’s strong room, up winding stairs and through antique studded doors. The visit was courtesy of Anthony O’Connor, the director of fundraising and development at the Cathedral. I was there to photograph the Henry V charter that led to the building we have today. That’s from 22 May 1421, so it’s the 600th anniversary this year and I’m doing a Zoom tour as a fundraiser.

To get up close, so to speak, to one of the most famous kings in European history, Henry V (Agincourt, French princess wife, Shakespeare and so on), was stirring. The sense of history was thick in the air. Henry V’s seal, a smiting knight on horseback, could only have been wielded by his hand, because there was only one monarch’s seal created for each king or queen. This was to ensure the unique nature of the impression in the hot wax they made as they pressed. The seal was the monarch’s bond. If you copied the seal and were caught you would have had a very unpleasant death, forgery as High Treason.

There are other charters in the strong room, those of Elizabeth 1 and Charles 1. They carry their seals, of course. That’s a great hat-trick, all three monarchs are of primary importance in British history, mighty historical characters. Standing there gazing at them, knowing the seals were made by their hand, is as close to being in their presence as it’s possible to be, especially given the charters were not behind glass in some museum but right there, unguarded, in front of me.

Speaking of important figures, on 1 May I did an Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in Manchester tour as it’s Karl Marx’s 203rd birthday on 5 May. Engels lived for 22 years in the city and Karl Marx would visit him for months at a time. Authors of the Communist Manifesto, theirs was the most important bromance in political history and Manchester played a central role in the formation of their ideas. It’s a rich story whatever one’s politics.

The pair studied together at Manchester's most beautiful building, Chetham’s Library. I recall leading a tour around the building and to the famous ‘desk’ mentioned in a letter from Engels to Marx. A few days later a couple from the USA who'd attended, gushed on Tripadvisor how pleased they were to have seen the table where ‘Marks & Spencer’ had met. Inaccurate in so many ways but amusing. ‘Retailers of the world unite’.

00Busy week this one. 5 May is also the 200th anniversary of the foundation of The Manchester Guardian (now just The Guardian) by editor John Edward Taylor. In the prospectus he wrote: "No former period, in the history of our country, has been marked by the agitation of questions of a more important character than those which are now claiming the attention of the public." The new newspaper was to have a "spirited discussion of political questions" and “the accurate detail of facts”. This sounds somewhat familiar. I’ve written about the founding of what today is The Guardian here: https://confidentials.com/manchester/the-manchester-guardian-is-200-years-old?id=60922f5bdf6ae

The week finished with more beauty. Hodnet Hall Gardens is sixty miles south-south west of Manchester in lovely Shropshire countryside. The gardens were given their big boost by Brigadier Heber-Percy (don’t ya know) in the 1920s although the family have been there for centuries. It’s a sort of earthly paradise now, immaculately kept and with brilliant colours especially this azalea season. I was down there to write about it and the sense of peace was so overwhelming I wanted to lie down for a while and breathe it all in. If you’ve not been then go, it’s got to be in the top ten of British gardens.

And finally, strawberries.

The loneliest thing I found this week was an abandoned strawberry plant on the tram. It was just sat there on its own seat in its own little plant pot minding its business. How it had got there, whether it had been abandoned or was just out for a ride it wasn’t saying. The tram’s destination was Rochdale. I put some pictures out on Twitter of my lonely strawberry plant. My favourite response was along the lines of: ‘Perhaps it’s changing at Victoria Station and then going off to meet friends in Berry.’ Very droll.

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The Manchester Music Zoom tour playlist

15/1/2021

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Suggested playlist for Manchester Music Tour at 6pm, 15 January 2021

The songs are not in chronological order because the Zoom tour follows my actual walking tour route. And yes, I know there are loads of bands and performers missing but I can’t cover everyone.

I will mention the performers in the list but not play their songs through Zoom as Zoom does not deliver good sound quality for music.

You can play them of course, while I'm conducting the tour, although you’ll have to have the dexterity of a DJ mixing snippets of songs because I’ll be working through the Manchester Music story at my usual pace.

It’s going to be great fun.

New Order - True faith
Dobie Gray - Out on the floor (Not a Manchester sound but representive of Northern Soul)
Buzzcocks - Ever fallen in love
Magazine - Songs from under the floorboards
The Hollies - The air that I breathe
10cc- I’m not in love
Bee Gees – Night fever
Sad Cafe - Every day hurts
Elkie Brooks – Pearl’s a singer
Joy Division – Love will tear us apart
New Order – Bizarre love triangle
Happy Mondays – Kinky afro
Simply Red – Money’s too tight to mention
A Guy Called Gerald - Voodoo Ray
808 State – Pacific State
Doves - Here comes the fear
James – Laid
Lamb – Gorecki
Durutti Column – Sketch for summer
Oasis – Morning glory
Rick Astley – Never gonna give you up
Lisa Stansfield – People hold on
Stone Roses – Made of Stone
Josephine Oniyama – What a day (very entertaining Youtube video featuring a walk around the city)
The Smiths – Nowhere fast
The Fall – British people in hot weather
Elbow – Leaders of the free world
I am Kloot – From your favourite sky
Blossoms - Charlemagne
Carnival Club – House of cards
Broke Casino – Wedding (My son’s band, got to be included of course)

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A river that isn't a river and the oldest fishing club

30/12/2020

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This is from The Manchester Guardian, 2 December 1893, writing about the construction of Manchester Ship Canal and the Rivers Irwell and Mersey at Irlam. ‘To advance four miles it was necessary to cross the course of the rivers fourteen times.’

It was brutal. The Manchester Ship Canal sliced like a knife through the former river courses leaving strange long lakes where the old rivers had flowed. The Canal stole their waters too. As it needed to maintain its own water levels.

This was Victorian Manchester’s domination of nature writ large. Here was the might of civil engineering bending river courses to its will.

As that 2 December 1893 report puts it, ‘Manchester took hold of the river…’ Even in its faded grandeur the Ship Canal remains magnificent. To see the lock gates and the mighty sluices at Irlam is stirring.

These are best appreciated from the east side of the canal on Irlam Road, Flixton. The Irlam High Level bridge is equally impressive here lifting the Manchester to Liverpool railway across the canal.

The lead engineer for the Ship Canal was Sir Edward Leader Williams.

As for the bossed about rivers, let’s quote The Manchester Guardian again, with its charming 1893 tone. ‘The pedestrian must often pause in astonishment at the sight of these great useless trenches scattered about in a promiscuous fashion. He comes upon them in the most unexpected places, abruptly starting at the bank of the canal and ending equally abruptly at another part of the bank’.

Most of these ‘promiscuous’ bits have disappeared. But one longish stretch of the redundant River Irwell remains in Irlam and makes for an entertaining short walk given the fact you are walking by a river that isn’t a river on a riverbank that isn’t a riverbank. It’s a curious sensation.

Yet, this rump river is definitely not a 'great useless trench'.

The ongoing story of the ‘Old River’ is heart-warming.

In the Kings Arms pub, just off Chapel Street there’s a room with big fish displayed where the Salford Friendly Anglers Society meets. This is the oldest surviving angling club in the world and it’s related to that lost stretch of the River Irwell.

The Salford Friendly Anglers Society wasn’t just about fishing when it began in 1817. It was about fishy friends with benefits. This is what the history says: ‘As a result of the passing of the Friendly Societies Act a group of like-minded anglers in Salford decided to institute a Friendly Society for the benefit of local anglers.

‘As well as offering fishing on the local River Irwell, society members as part of their subscriptions paid into monthly savings, sickness and death benefit policies. If an angler was unable to work through an accident or ill health they received an income of 5 shillings a month whilst unable to work. If a member died – then a levy of one shilling per member was paid out from club funds’. The Society had their own pub for many years at 10 Chapel Street. Unsurprisingly it was called the Fisherman’s Hut.

Recently the free to join Salford Friendly Anglers Society has done some remarkable things.

Let them blow their own trumpet.

‘In addition to securing fishing rights on 8 lakes, 13 miles of canal, and 6 miles of river… the committee has overseen the restocking of more than 50,000 fish into local venues in recent years to ensure that anglers can continue to enjoy great sport.’

This includes: ‘'7,000 tench, carp, roach, rudd and bream into The Old River in Irlam in partnership with the Hamilton Davies Trust.’

So, while the river might not be a river anymore it is certainly not that ‘useless trench’ described by The Manchester Guardian correspondent in 1893. This river, now a thin lake, lives on in active use both as a place of sport and recreation.

The Irlam 'old river' can be accessed from Fairhills Road, off the A57 in Irlam.

Many of these stories and hundreds and hundreds of others appear in my three books about Manchester.
Manchester: The Complete Guide - £11.99.
Lost & Imagined Manchester - £16.99.
Illusion & Change Manchester - £16.99.

The Salford Friendly Anglers' original pub on Chapel Street, The Fisherman's Hut

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Dr Alice Roberts, Manchester’s politics and genetic myths of the British Isles

29/9/2020

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There was a radioactive sunset burning Manchester into a ruddy glow on Sunday 20 September but that meant it had been a beautiful blue sky day.

TV production companies like blue skies, extra clarity and all that, although a late sun makes you have to pick your angles carefully.

I was filming with Dr Alice Roberts for Channel 4’s Britain’s Most Historic Cities. Dr A is well-known from so many TV shows, Digging for Britain, Time Team and Coast etc...but she is no ordinary presenter since she’s also a biological anthropologist, author and academic. Hardly Ant & Dec.

Walking around and chatting between the actual filming put me in mind of Michael Portillo, ex-Tory minister, political commentator and presenter of Great Railway Journeys. I am pretty sure Dr Alice Roberts has never been compared to Michael Portillo but what I mean was he was also more than just a TV personality when I'd taken him around several years ago. Aside from being a former Conservative Cabinet Minister, Portillo is an author and historian so he had a deeper knowledge which made the whole process of filming quicker, slicker and more enjoyable. Same with Dr Alice Roberts.

There have been a few Britain’s Most Historic Cities broadcast including those featuring Norwich, Chester, Cheltenham and York.

Manchester’s complex history meant the focus was on politics and radical thought in this city. My role with Dr Alice Roberts was to set the scene of the early industrial city and then cover Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s time in the city, and underline how Manchester helped shape the thought of these fathers of modern communism.

Getting ready to film on Kennedy Street

Getting to the filming day was an interesting process. First being contacted by Sonja Nicholls, the researcher, then by Lucy Hershon, the producer, then taking part in a preliminary visit by Tony McKee, the director. The production company working with Channel 4 was IWC Media and the whole process was smooth and professional.

Tony was fine company on that earlier visit and it would have been good to share a pint. But not with the Covid-19 alienation guillotine factored in. The measures to keep us all free of the virus were stringent. For instance, on the day of filming, nobody was allowed to arrive by public transport, easy for me as I cycled. Lunch had to be taken separately so while I could be in the same restaurant I had to be seated away from the crew. I also had to sign a health declaration some days before filming and then one on the day (I think) and I also had to have a temperature test. All this and remember there was no filming indoors – hence the weather was a blessing.

We talked Engels and Marx at Chetham’s under the guiding eye of Tony and the rigorous control of Lucy. Somebody said how small communists were in Manchester during the nineteenth century, meaning communism not communists, and the whole conversation spun off into laughter about how those titchy communists never had a chance. Someone deadpanned about Marx and Engels being so tiny it was hard for them to get their point over as nobody could see them. Or hear them. Another person said, it was a miniscule movement. Give them a yard they’d take an inch.

As usual, Fergus Wilde, the Chetham’s host and librarian was on hand offering wisdom and wit. As usual the old 1421 buildings were on hand offering ineffable charm and beauty.

Tony McKee snaps Fergus Wilde and Alice Roberts

The interior of the building because of horrid Covid had to filmed with just Alice. Somebody took a great picture of her at the table where Marx and Engels had studied in 1845.

I always remember a pair of guests once getting very excited about seeing that bay with the table and gushing about it on Tripadvisor. Unfortunately they'd put how much they had enjoyed seeing the table where Marks met Spencer. Retailers of the world unite.

Inside Chetham's Library at the famous table

Lunch was at Salvi’s Mozzarella Bar in the Corn Exchange. The group had been booked into Wagamama but I persuaded them to go for a local indie instead. Better food, spread the local love.

As we walked between the next filming locations, from The Vine pub with its weavers' windows, the canyon of textile warehouses along Princess Street and the Rochdale Canal, finishing at the old Birley and Mackintosh Mills, we talked about British DNA. As you do.

Alice said biological anthropology was showing that prior to the more recent immigrations in the second half of the twentieth century, the gene pool is remarkably similar across the British islands.

The main influence on our DNA came in the Bronze Age, the Romans, Normans and others scarcely affected it, nor did the Norse. We’ve long known that there is no such thing as a Celtic race by blood (read this by Stuart McHardy) despite a cultural attachment to the idea which is an entirely different thing. Nor it seems is there evidence to support the long held belief in major Anglo-Saxon invasions after the Romans left, despite a cultural attachment to the idea, which is again an entirely different thing.

It seems there may have been Germanic speaking tribes in the east of England before the Romans arrived. There would have been trade and mutual comprehension across the North Sea between what are now the Low Countries, Northern Germany, southern Denmark and England. In other words a form of English was spoken in England before England was ever a thing.

Large invasions never probably happened

Life, for many people, continued into the ‘Dark Ages’ in the way it had before the Romans arrived and during their almost 400 year occupation.

If this is true the English Language became the dominant one through interaction and adoption as the, so to speak, lingua franca. As this excellent article from Chris Catling says ‘Increasingly, linguists are characterising English as a contact language – emerging from the interaction of different languages – rather than the imposed language of a dominant class.’

It's fascinating stuff. So, fundamentally, the white Britons whether in England, Scotland, Wales or the island of Ireland are closely related. Separate cultural identities may exist but there are few biological differences traceable in our DNA.

By the way, the Britains Most Historic Towns' episode about Manchester will be released late spring, early summer 2021.

By this time the UK will be definitely and sadly for many, out of the European Union, but what isn’t so definite is whether we’ll be out from under Coronavirus.

A radioactive sunset at Mackintosh Mills

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Manchester's huge Old Trafford art show

23/5/2020

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Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition 1857
Date: 1856-7
Architect: Edward Salomons
Demolished or lost: 1857/8

I had an email this week about an event in Old Trafford that is largely forgotten. This was the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857. The remains the largest temporary exhibition of artworks ever gathered.

The location is now crossed by Talbot Road in Old Trafford, and was bordered by the Botanical Gardens to the north. White City Retail park occupies the area of the Botanical Gardens. Manchester cricket club, now Lancashire had to move a couple of hundred metres or so down the road to accommodate the Art Treasures Exhibition.

The Art Treasures Palace covered an area of two football fields and had its own railway sidings, landscaping and catering arms. The building had the appearance of three large decorated arches. The central and largest arch allowed access to the Grand Central Hall, which was over 700ft long terminating in a stage for a 60 piece orchestra. Behind the orchestra sat a concert hall organ.

As prominent art historian and visitor, the German, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, wrote: ‘I have never seen a building containing such collected works of art so advantageously lighted as this, while the rooms are airy, and of felicitous proportions.’

Oddly, while visitors weren’t allowed to make notes or sketches, they were allowed to touch the paintings. Modern curators would curl up in a ball at the latter these days. Mills closed and people were brought by train to the exhibition from all across the country, some commentators sourly noting how some of the workers scarcely left the refreshment tents.

'THERE IS AN OLD TRAFFORD ZOOM TOUR ON THURSDAY 11 JUNE. You can book here. The session will be recorded so can be viewed at the guest's convenience.'

To add to the attraction of the occasion the Manchester Royal Botanical Gardens got involved too. As the official advertisement announced: ‘A communication is opened from the Palace to the Gardens, thus adding to the interest and variety of the Promenade’.

The delivery of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition from conception, through construction, to demolition was jaw-dropping. This was Victorian energy condensed and delivered in its purest form.

Following on from the success of the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and subsequent exhibitions in Dublin and Paris, all focusing largely on industry and science, Mancunians proposed an Art Treasures Exhibition. The idea was dreamt up in February 1856, money raised in March, royal approval granted in May, building at Old Trafford began in late summer and by February 1857 the building was completed. 16,000 artworks were in place by May 1857 and the exhibition opened.

During the next 142 days 1.3m people visited, including Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, the King of Belgium, the Queen of the Netherlands, Louis Napoleon, Benjamin Disraeli, William Gladstone, Lord Palmerston, Charles Dickens, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth Gaskell, John Ruskin, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Works by artists such as Titian, Raphael, Velasquez, Holbein, Rubens, van Dyck, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Reynolds, Turner, Constable were on show, as were works from the recent Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Indeed the exhibition did much to cement their reputation. Other ‘treasures’ included sculpture, china, furniture, even suits of armour.

An unfinished Michelangelo painting (shown above) was christened The Manchester Madonna after its first public display during the exhibition. It now resides at the National Gallery and depicts Madonna, Jesus, St John and angels.

For the first time photography was given prominence including a controversial tableaux piece by Oscar Gustav Rejlander called The Two Ways of Life (shown below). This depicted a pair of young men being offered advice from a patriarchal figure. On one side lie sinful pleasures including lots of topless women and on the other side are virtuous pleasures including reading a good book. It was scandalous at the time but when Queen Victoria bought a copy for Prince Albert the indecency tag faded.

By September the show was over. Within months nothing was left, the vast building had been demolished and dismantled, its 650 tons of cast iron, 600 tons of wrought iron, 65,000 square feet of glass and 1.5 million bricks recycled. The organisers and sponsors of the exhibition, all from Manchester postal addresses, made a small profit of £304 which was used for charitable purposes.

There are some permanent reminders of the event. German musician Charles Hallé had assembled a group of musicians to entertain the guests. The response encouraged him to set up the Hallé Orchestra in the city.

The London-based Art Journal praised the exhibition but couldn’t help a snobby dig at the city which had delivered the huge event. It wrote: ‘That Manchester should propose such an exhibition was surprising enough; but how much greater was the marvel that such an exhibition as was actually formed, should have established itself at Manchester!’

Fortunately another metropolitan magazine the Athenaeum was more accurate. ‘Before we can become creators we must educate a race of appreciators who will admire and buy. Nineteenth-century Art has broken from the patron’s drawing room, and appeals to the crowd. The Manchester Exhibition is a vast epitome of Art, ancient and modern – the best of its kind ever attempted.’

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The Crow, The Fish, Chronological Confusion and James Bond

18/12/2018

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I WAS followed by a crow today because I had a fish in my hand.

The fish was a fried fish from the chippy called the Hut on Liverpool Road into which my good friend, a Scot, by the name of Steven Lindsay, has in a spirit of civilising progressiveness encouraged the sale of the battered sausage. It’s ‘a belter, a Glasgow delicacy,’ as he describes.

The crow was noble in its devilish darkness, its head swivelling from side to side each time laying a black eye upon me and my haddock. It looked healthy as hell too, with a sheen on its feathers as rich as a polished jackboot. As Mark Garner of Manchester Confidential says, when birds look at you like that, they remind you of nothing less than their ancient relatives, dinosaurs, in this case a big predatory T-Rex.

The crow hopped from wall to wall on Longworth Street never taking its dead vision from me as though Hitchcock were directing it. A woman in her mid-thirties was walking the other way. “It’s following you,” she said with a strange smile, “is it your familiar?” She was dressed completely in black, like the crow. The only difference was she had platinum dyed hair and very black mascara.

The city was looking interesting in the late afternoon winter. It was half three, the light was failing and in the cold air every building seemed outlined in ink against the tarnished silver sky. Yet it was getting a bit scary down on Longworth Street. I swear that as soon as the woman spoke the crow gave her look, bobbed its head, and flapped away arrogantly. I was left alone with my fish and a slight chill down my spine.

Hey, stop staring at my haddock

Writing the time as half three, reminds me of something. I had a typical Northern European misunderstanding on the weekend. I was conducting tours of Chetham’s Library at 1.30pm and 3pm. There were a couple of Norwegians on the first tour who’d arrived a little early. They’d arrived at 12.30pm. This was because they’d rung me in the morning and asked me when the tour was starting. Half one I’d said. In many Northern European countries people think half one is half twelve, an hour earlier, in other words half the hour. In our island logic it clearly can only mean a half hour after the hour.

The Nordic guests were still delighted to come on the tour of these almost 600-year-old buildings: as were an American woman and her daughter who were looking up universities in the UK. The daughter wants to do a Masters in building conservation over here. When Michael Powell, the librarian, revealed letters from the Heywood collection signed by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, they shook their heads in astonishment.

The 3pm group loved the buildings too. As Michael, with his trademark sardonic delivery, was entertaining the guests while showing them remarkable materials such as a medieval bible in manuscript from the 1300s and the utterly lovely first edition of Saxtons’ Atlas of England and Wales from 1579, one woman noticed something about her friend. She thought he looked like the founder of Chetham’s School and Library, Humphrey Chetham, so she got him to pose behind Michael’s back and took the picture. “It’s the nose and the eyes,” she said later. David, as her friend was called, seemed happy to go along with the description. He was Humphrey for a day.

All David needs is a the right hat and he'd be a perfect seventeenth century benefactor

This reminded me of the time when I was taking a large group around Manchester Art Gallery and we stopped in the Pre-Raphaelite gallery. As I was talking I saw four people detach themselves and walk to a Holman Hunt picture. This was The Shadow of Death and features Christ with his arms raised in a Y-shape. It depicts him in his pre-Messiah days when he had a proper job and he’s stretching after sawing wood in his carpenter’s shop, ominously in the Hunt painting, his shadow on the wall behind is reminiscent of the crucifixion.

The wandering four from my group split. One took a picture, while, with Christ’s Y as the first letter, the other three made the MCA of the Village People’s disco blast. It was hilarious - if irreverent.

'Young man, there's no need to feel down/ I said, young man, pick yourself off the ground'

On that second Chetham’s tour were a father and daughter from Perth, Australia. They have relatives in Hartlepool and had seen Chetham’s Library on an Australian travel programme. Robert had called me in the morning to see if there were any spare tickets. There weren’t, but he seemed desperate to come along and when he said he wanted to drive from Hartlepool to Manchester and back for the tour in a day, I had to say yes.

The English (rather than perhaps the Scots’) sense of distance isn’t long. Two hours in each direction is perhaps the upper limit for most. When I grew up in Rochdale I never went out in Bury, all of six miles distant. Then again there wasn’t much there that Rochdale didn’t have aside from a better fish market and no teenager goes six miles for fish. Even when the crows leave you alone.

Robert’s daughter is studying at a Sydney university. Previously she’d stayed with friends on that side of the country but way outside Sydney and she said: “We’d drive six hours each way to get some city life.” I guided a journalist from Colorado once and he lived two hours from the nearest shop. I like to live two minutes from the nearest shop. And bar. With a national park and the Pennines within ten to fifteen miles. Convenience is so convenient.

Traffic grinds to a halt again in Manchester

Mind you, thinking of the Aussies, given the state of congestion on Manchester roads at present, it takes six hours to get two miles to The Quays, at rush hour. Something like that. Suffice to say that instead of the projected Sat-Nav time of two hours and forty minutes to get to Manchester from Hartlepool it had taken Robert and his daughter an hour longer.

The Chetham’s tours were the last of the year and so Sue McLoughlin, the heritage manager, and her granddaughter Imogen, provided mince pies and mulled wine. It was all very jolly.

By the way the best question of the week I couldn’t answer came in the Audit Room of Chetham’s. I was talking about John Dee, the enchanter, mathematician and the Warden of Manchester from 1595 to 1605, at the end of his long and slightly preposterous life. Dee was probably the inspiration for Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest. Before Manchester he had been in what is now Germany attempting alchemy, in other words making gold from base metals, the impossible dream of so many dreamers through the ages. He was spying for England too and, by sheer coincidence, through his obsession with symbols, gave himself the code number of 007.

I said something like this to the group, “Ian Fleming who created the James Bond’s MI6 character didn’t know Dee had done this. The inspiration for Fleming’s 007 seems to have come from the number assigned to a code breakthrough for naval intelligence in World War II.”

The a voice came from across the room. “There’s MI5 and MI6, but what happened to MI1/2/3 and 4?”

I had no idea. I have no idea. Next time I see that crow I’ll ask it.

John Dee, 007, as he would have looked in Manchester. Give that man the Best Dressed Magician Award, 1595, right now.

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Wabbits, Scweamers And Bwutes

9/4/2018

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Haunted Underworld guests posing with me. Tina, the screamer, is on the right

THE DUCK, a female mallard, chased the male mistle thrush, stopped and then the thrush walked towards the duck. It looked very much like cross-species bird flirting. It also looked ridiculous given how much bigger the duck was than the thrush, three times bigger at least.

That this avian courtship was taking in place in front of group on an April Fool’s Day tour made it all the more delicious. The whole event was mad, with me delivering twenty five crazy Manchester stories and guests having to guess up to five false ones. We finished in the Town Hall Tavern where the group were tasked with singing Oasis’ Don’t Look Back in Anger to the tune of George Formby’s When I’m Cleaning Windows.

The false story, I only did one I included in the end, concerned a carving of rabbits in the Cathedral, called Rabbits Cooking The Hunter.

This is was the fib and what I said: ‘Elmer Fudd was right in his unceasing quest to kill Bigs Bunny. Rabbit should be pronounced 'wabbit'. We've just been talking about Samuel Johnson's 1750’s dictionary in Chetham’s Library. Well another of the books reveals something else. And it seems that for certain 'r' animal words the original pronunciation was 'w', this comes from a twist in the sounds handed down from the Germanic into Anglo-Saxon and which was continued in use by peasants. Thus in the 1300s it might not have been unusual for a peasant to have said: 'The wabbit and the wobin are worried by the wat.' This only applied to animal words. So, Elmer Fudd was right. Rabbit should be said 'wabbit'. Easter bunnies, Easter wabbits.’

I’m pleased only two of the teams on the tour guessed this was the false story.

The wabbits cooking the hunter

The group on the Salford tour

The day before the above tour I’d taken a full house of guests along Chapel Street in Salford,on a tour jointly organised with Salford City Council. This route is remarkably rich in colourful detail and national significance. In less than a mile it captures the essence of these central areas of the conurbation. We went inside Sacred Trinity church and St Philip’s church, both of whom supplied a splendid welcome, as is the way in these modern, progressive places of worship. A big, big thanks to Kolyn and Alice respectively in Sacred Trinity and St Philip's. (And for that matter, a big thanks to Shelagh McNerney, Head of Development, Salford City Council, and her team for facilitating the tour.)

In St Philip’s we went into the atmospheric crypt and saw the walled up grave of one of the most important military figures of the first half of the nineteenth century, Lieutenant Colonel Sir Thomas Arbuthnot, fought in the Napoleanic Wars from Spain to the West Indies. He was the North and Midlands of England military commander during the tumultuous 1840s, a time of great distress and Chartist unrest. He, apparently, carried out his role with great sensitivity.

His house was on the Crescent close to St Philips. He died without children, his wife having died many years before. Arbuthnot’s funeral in 1849 was a huge affair packed with military pomp and attracting thousands of bystanders. His simple wooden coffin can be glimpsed through ventilation holes in the crypt. We finished the tour by singing Ewan MacColl’s hymn to the gritty reality of Salford seventy year’s ago, Dirty Old Town. It was sung with relish by the guests.

The crypt under St Philip's church

Speaking of gritty, on one of the Mayfield tours recently a gentleman told me how his teacher during the 1960s had referred to Manchester’s three rivers, the Irwell, Irk and Medlock as the Inkwell, Mirk and Mudlark due to their extreme pollution at the time. Now there are brown trout back – as this video shows which I filmed with the Environmental Agency a few years back.

I loved another story on a recent Mayfield tour. Up on the platform level there’s a rusting piece of kit. Its official title is British Rail Universal Trolley Equipment. The acronym used by rail workers and managers was BRUTE. One guest on a snowy tour recalled how his mother was once taken aback in Victoria Station by a warning sign which used the acronym but failed to define what it meant. The sign read, ‘Please be careful of BRUTES on the platforms.’ Wise words.

An upended Brute

I mentioned an old department store on Stretford Road, called Paulden’s’, on a Principal Hotel tour recently. One lady remembered working at the Refuge Assurance, as the Principal Hotel was formerly, when a dramatic fire in 1957 destroyed the department store. Everybody was upset about the loss of this Manchester landmark apart from, “lots of people in Hulme, as all the records of their hire purchase payments had gone up in smoke with the fire.”

The Haunted Underworld tour on Sunday was great fun. Thanks must be extended to Tina Miller for her screams at the climax of a couple of stories in the dark. Screamers on ghost tours spread a fabulous mood of tension amongst guests, which is a fine quality in a spooky, dark, underground location. In fact, I might hire Tina to seed fear in the dark.

All the Haunted Underworld group line-up at the end of the tour

Finally, it was a great pleasure to chat with James Naughtie of BBC Radio 4 about Manchester at the time of the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester. We were in Chetham's Library looking at the Manchester Mercury newspaper from 17 August 1819, the day after Peterloo. The shows highlighting particular days in British history through the filter of front pages of newspapers will be broadcast in May and June. It seems from the picture below that Mr Naughtie was offering me lessons in how to play the invisible piano. Probably the best piano for me to play as long as its inaudible as well as invisible.

James Naughtie, the invisible piano and the Manchester Mercury

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