Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 7, Episode 3 - Preston to Swinton - full transcript
For Victorian Britons,
George Bradshaw was a household name.
At a time when railways were new,
Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them
to take to the tracks.
I'm using a Bradshaw's guide
to understand how trains
transformed Britain,
its landscape, its industries,
society and leisure time.
As I crisscross the country
150 years later, it helps me
to discover the Britain of today.
I'm continuing my journey
through the verdant landscape
of Northwest England
towards its industrial heart,
Where the Victorian working class
lived and worked
in a new cityscape of factories,
railway stations and terraced houses.
On this journey, I Want to find out
What daily life was like
for the nation's first urban workers
and how they documented it
in art and poetry.
This week I'm travelling
through Northwest England
to the West Midlands.
I started in Cumbria,
winding south through the spectacular
countryside of the Lake District,
and I'm continuing on to Lancashire,
heart of the Industrial Revolution,
before I head further south
to Staffordshire.
On today's stretch
I begin in Preston,
travel south-east
to a market town, Darwen,
discover a dark tale in Entwistle,
and hear stories of
matchstick men in Salford.
I'll end this leg on Kersal Moor.
In this episode, I dabble
in 21 St-century technology...
Feels like some medical procedure.
Learn a thing or two about art...
I'm sure you're almost about to
say matchstick figures,
aren't you, Michael?
Well, matchsticks they are not.
They are much more observed,
much more acute.
And enjoy a good old
Lancashire sing-song.
"[SINGING] As they did
when he measur'd me finger"
"For t' little gowd ring
last neet."
Bravo I
My journey continues to
take me south,
today towards the heart
of Lancashire manufacturing.
Bradshaw's tells me
that Preston possessed,
before the passing of
the Great Reform Act of 1832,
"the only real democratic
electoral suffrage in the kingdom.
"All its inhabitants
above 21 years of age,
"if free from the taint of pauperism,
were entitled to a vote."
The 19th century brought
an industrial revolution but also
a vast extension of the suffrage and
improvements in conditions of work.
And in those battles, some of the
first shots were fired in Preston.
The city sits between coastal plain,
river valley and moorland.
By the time my guidebook was
published in the 1860s,
Preston had been transformed
from an unassuming market town
dotted with Weavers' cottages
into a densely populated centre
of 70,000 people
built around 60 or so cotton mills.
Today the factories are long gone,
but the memory
of their workers lives on.
I'm meeting local historian
and trade unionist Jim Leigh
at Preston Market.
According to Bradshaw's,
there was a lot of industrial unrest
in the first half of
the 19th century.
Was there something very
special about Preston?
There was. Preston had a
notoriety as a very militant town.
I think it was a combination
of extremely low wages
paid in the town together with
shockingly poor housing conditions.
80% of the town depended on the
mills for employment and housing.
Workers faced long hours
and dangerous conditions.
Their houses were filthy, cramped and
overcrowded, so disease spread fast.
Towards the end of the
19th century,
Preston had one of the highest rates
of infant mortality in the country.
I believe there was a
big event in 1842.
What was the background to that?
A severe recession was
gripping the country.
Unemployment was high,
and employers up and down the
land began cutting wages.
So there's a lot of anger
and frustration out there.
In response, a Working-class
movement, Chartism, tried to unite
workers across Britain in a strike
over pay and factory conditions.
In August 1842, Preston's mill
workers joined the protest.
And how did matters develop?
Groups of men and youths
began assembling about the town.
Soon these small groups converged
into one large group,
who then began visiting every mill
and Workshop across the town
and successfully
brought them to a standstill.
The mayor and magistrates,
accompanied by a detachment
of soldiers,
resolved to confront the protesters.
What had been a peaceful protest
escalated into a violent one.
Jim, it comes to be known
as the Lune Street Riot. How?
They Went about stopping the mills
Wherever they could find them
the following day.
The strikers then began
proceeding up Lune Street
and it was here that they were
confronted by the military.
And it was there that
the Riot Act was read out.
We quite often refer
to reading the Riot Act
Without, perhaps, thinking
What it means,
but I've got here What
is read out
by someone like the Mayor of Preston
on such an occasion.
"Our Sovereign Lady the Queen
chargeth and commandeth all persons
"being assembled immediately
to disperse themselves, and peaceably
"to depart to their habitations
or to their lawful businesses
"upon the pains contained
in the act
"made in the first year
of King George I
"for preventing tumults and riotous
assemblies. God save the Queen."
The cotton workers
refused to back down
and the military opened fire,
killing four of them.
The tragic event of 1842
has not been forgotten
and 150 years later, a monument
was erected
to commemorate this fateful day.
Jim, this is a very striking
monument. What was its inspiration?
I believe it's based on the
famous Goya painting
that depicted a scene
from the Napoleonic Wars.
And I see that flowers are laid.
Yes, these are from Workers'
Memorial Day, which commemorates
workers who died at work
each year.
Jim, you're a trade unionist,
I'm sure you've been
involved in a few disputes.
How do you assess
the significance of this event?
This is extremely important.
It's part of Preston's radical
history which continues to this day.
Little changed for the mill workers
in the aftermath of the riot,
but the event retains a symbolic
place in Britain's Working-class history.
The next leg of my journey
takes me south-east.
I have to change at Blackburn
before heading across
the West Pennine moors.
I'm on my Way to Darwen.
Bradshaw's tells me that
the paper mills of Messrs Potter
produced 400 miles of paper,
weighing 40 tonnes, per day.
Increasing quantities of paper
were needed to adorn
the walls of the middle classes,
bringing the colours of nature
into the Victorian drawing room.
The town sits in a valley amid
90 square miles of open moorland.
Following the arrival
of the railway in 1847,
Darwen, like many northern towns,
began to develop industrially.
The manufacture of paper
and textiles led it to become
one of the largest Victorian
mill towns in Lancashire.
The mills have long since shut
but a paint factory rich in
Victorian heritage is still
going strong in the town today.
It's here that I'm meeting customer
services director Geraldine Huxley.
Geraldine, the company mentioned
in my Bradshaw's guide is Potters,
which was making paper.
What is the connection between that
and today's company?
Well, John Potter was
a Manchester businessman
and he came to live in the area
and he married the
daughter of the gentleman
who invented the calico printing.
He actually came into the business
and took over, and turned it into
a mechanical operation
rather than a manual operation.
In 1839, the Potters developed a
steam-driven surface printing machine
which enabled them
to mass-produce Wallpaper.
With the repeal of
the Wallpaper tax in 1836,
Wallpaper became
a very important element
of Victorian interior decoration,
replacing panelling and tapestries.
William Morris's
Trellis pattern of 1864
influenced generations of designers
and remains popular today.
Which came first in Darwen,
Wallpaper or paint?
Wallpaper, definitely. Paint Wasn't
really experimented with until 1904,
some 100 years later.
In the Edwardian period,
brighter, paler colours were made
using synthetic dyes
produced by the rapidly-developing
chemical industry.
Potters paint also played
an important part beyond
the homes of the middle classes.
Something of special interest,
I think you will find, is the
palette of paints
that were specially designed
for the railway industry.
"British Railways Eastern Region
standard colour range for paint".
Now, some of these are What I would
expect, these kind of muted browns
and beiges, but actually,
some of them are quite bright.
Look at this vivid yellow and
look at that sort of scarlet colour.
Very nice indeed.
Today, the company produces
a staggering 385,000
litres of paint per day -
enough to fill 38 Olympic-sized
swimming pools every year.
I'm heading to the research
and development department
to meet David Booth.
There's a vast range of colours here
and a layman might think that
all possible colours are here.
But I've been thinking about whether
I could match this jacket here
and at first I thought
it was something like that...
No.
- Uh...
- No, it's far too orange.
Wait a minute,
What about this one?
That's the nearest,
but it's too weak.
So how will I match that up?
What we can do is take your jacket
and actually put it onto the machine
and we'll get a prediction
and make the paint up.
So I could buy a colour like that
and paint my wall,
just in case I Wanted to camouflage myself
- at home?
- You could, yes.
- Can we give it a go?
- Yeah, we can indeed.
Right, can you please put your arm
in there and push it up tight...
Whoops! ...against the machine?
Leave it there for a moment.
This is very Weird.
A spectrophotometer analyses
colour composition by measuring
the reflected light from a sample.
Feels like some medical procedure,
like having my blood pressure taken!
Now David selects a base paint
and the appropriate pigments
from a database.
Oh! I can see those streams
of colour going in there.
It's the moment of truth.
Whoa! Look at that!
Portillo pink. Stock up now,
it will be in fashion next year!
I'd love to stay
and paint the town pink,
but I have a short journey to make
before the day is out.
I'm heading five miles south
through East Lancashire
on the Ribble Valley line to
a rural station just north of Bolton.
- Entwistle. Request stop?
- That's correct.
- Could we stop at Entwistle, please?
- You certainly can.
- Make it easier to get off.
- Yes.
Thank you. Don't forget!
So We've emerged into the light after
passing through a very long tunnel,
the Sough Tunnel, which
I believe was quite an early
piece of railway engineering
about which I'd like to know more.
On the south side of the Sough
Tunnel sits Entwistle Station,
set in a small village overlooking
the rugged countryside
of the lower Pennine hills.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you. Nice to meet you.
I was afraid you
might have forgotten -
- to stop, I mean.
- Oh, no.
Thank you.
Thank you, bye-bye.
I'm meeting local historian Eileen
Cowen on the platform to find out
more about the construction of the
tunnel and the workforce behind it.
- Hello.
- Lovely to see you.
I've just come through Sough Tunnel.
Why did it have to be built?
It was to carry the Blackburn-Darwen
line through to Bolton
and on to Manchester, which was
very important for the industry
in Darwen and Blackburn.
And in the Way was Cranberry Moss,
which is 1,000 feet high, riddled
with coal mines, Water courses.
Very, very bleak in Winter,
it really is.
In 1848, the 1,850-meter
tunnel was completed
and the line through
to Bolton opened.
Who built it?
2,000 men worked there eventually.
Not mechanised - using wheelbarrows,
picks, shovels.
Some expert tunnellers, but a lot
of them just using their strength.
By the height of railway mania
in the mid-19th century, a quarter of
a million navvies had laid
3,000 miles of track across Britain,
transforming the rural
landscape forever.
Where would they be living?
The majority of them
lived up on the hilltops
in shanties made
out of turf and stone.
What were conditions like
in the camps Where they lived?
They were living in
very exposed conditions.
The land now is wet and bleak.
In Winter it's covered in snow
a lot of the time,
sometimes six-foot high
on the roads round here.
And they worked through the Winters.
A navvy's life was harsh and
the work was notoriously dangerous.
Five lives were lost during
the building of the Sough Tunnel.
I count myself fortunate
to have a warm bed for the night.
Refreshed, I am ready to continue
my journey across Northwest England.
I decided to spend the night
in a delightful pub
with a great view over the moors,
and it's just by Entwistle Station.
My train is at 8:21.
Provided I leave here at 8:19
I should be in good time.
Following my guidebook,
I'm heading 15 miles south
across the Lancashire border
to Salford in Greater Manchester.
Bradshaw's paints
a marvellous picture
of an English manufacturing town
in the middle of the 19th century.
"Thronged streets and narrow lanes
stretch out on each side.
"Mills and factories rise
out of the dense mass of houses,
"and a forest of chimneys
towering upwards
"point out the local seats
of manufacturing."
It took only an artist of Salford to
add the matchstick men and women.
The Industrial Revolution
dramatically transformed Salford
from a small market town on the banks
of the River Irwell into a sprawling,
smoke-filled conurbation
housing a population of over 200,000.
With overcrowded slums,
at the time of my guidebook, areas of
Salford were deprived and squalid.
Lancashire artist
Laurence Stephen Lowry
famously captured the 20th-century
legacy of Victorian Salford,
of which just a hint
still stands today.
A fitting place to meet
art historian William Feaver.
What do you think
attracted Lowry to depicting
an industrial landscape
with all its smoke, and so on?
He always lived here,
it was utterly familiar to him.
It was useful to be surrounded
by your subject
rather than to have to
go out and find it too far away.
He recognised that in the tones of
grotty, smoky, dark, wet Manchester,
there were very beautiful
things to be seen.
Born in 1887, Lowry recorded
nearly a century of industrial life
in Salford and Manchester.
He was the first artist to engage
with industrial Working-class
culture, which until then
was viewed as unsavoury
and scarcely worthy
as a subject for art.
Do you think he felt an empathy
with the people he painted
in these streets?
Well, yes and no.
His father had been a rent collector
and he was a rent collector
for a living for many years.
He was obviously resented by some of
the people he called on regularly
and also he was familiar to them,
so it worked both ways.
Today, the largest public collection
of his works is housed
at The Lowry in Salford Quays.
The arts complex opened in 2000
as part of a 106-million pound
docklands-regeneration scheme.
Michael, I thought
you'd like to see this drawing
because it's an illustration almost
of What happened to Lowry once.
He was on Pendlebury Station,
missed his train,
looking around for something to do,
looked, and saw the industrial
landscape stretched around him -
smoking chimneys,
the people scurrying below him.
And I suppose in a Way this
commemorates that eureka,
bingo moment, when he suddenly found
himself a life's work ahead of him.
Lowry's contemporaries
often questioned
What he saw in such ordinariness.
ARCHIVE RECORDING:
People often tell me that,
"And why do you paint
such and such subjects?"
Well, I say,
why shouldn't I paint them?
I like to paint them, so why not?
So here we see a Salford street,
and, as ever, dominated by
the smoking chimney stack.
The houses and people
are rendered quite simply.
Would we be right
to think of this as naive?
You can say it's naive, but actually
I think it's much more
subtle than naive.
And I'm sure you're almost
about to say matchstick figures,
aren't you, Michael?
Well, matchsticks they are not.
They are much more observed,
much more acute.
Lowry painted the ordinary people
he saw at work and at leisure
on the streets of
his native Lancashire.
People call them matchsticks,
matchstick figures.
They may be. I don't mind.
I don't think it matters,
I paint the people as I see
the people in my mind's eye.
The people tend to be poor people.
Does he display also a sympathy
for people who are, I don't know,
outcasts or left aside?
He obviously saw that people
worse off than himself were somehow
rather like ants, always engaged
on business, scurrying to and fro.
All sorts of scenarios
take place in his pictures
and they are not as simple as they
look. They are much more subtle,
poetic and ultimately,
I think, rather lonely.
People often say that
but I suppose I reflect myself
in my figures - I'm bound to do.
I'm bound to reflect myself
in the figures
and I'm a very lonely
sort of a person.
As a Salford man himself,
with a concern for the plight
of the working class,
George Bradshaw might have empathised
with Lowry's depiction
of the city's people.
Lowry's popularity
is undeniable, isn't it?
I first became aware of him because
my grandfather managed to
buy one or two, but his popularity
has been enormous, hasn't it?
In England, Britain, probably
the most popular artist there is.
In the wider world, less known,
but he is a great artist,
and there's ho reason to
plump him more than that.
Lowry and Bradshaw,
one in painting and one in Words,
recorded Britain's
industrial landscape.
And today, having read Bradshaw's
vivid description of a manufacturing
town in the 19th century, I like to
hope that Lowry had read this book.
I'm sure he did.
But of course, What he did,
he turned Bradshaw into a vision.
It's time to hit the tracks
and head for my final destination.
I'm taking a short train ride north
to Swinton,
from which it's a ten-minute drive
east to Kersal Moor.
By the time of my guidebook,
industrialisation had made its mark
on the Lancashire landscape
and the old pastoral ways
were disappearing fast.
The desire to preserve local identity
became stronger than ever.
Kersal Moor is a rural haven
in Greater Manchester.
It remains little changed
from Bradshaw's day, and I can see
now it captured the imagination
of 19th-century poet Edwin Waugh.
I'm meeting Sid Calderbank,
dialect enthusiast
and member of
the Edwin Waugh Society.
Why should we now remember
the Victorian poet Edwin Waugh?
He was known in his lifetime
as the Lancashire laureate.
He was the prince of
dialect poets.
His works, his songs, stories and
poems, spanned the whole of society.
What sort of things
was he writing about?
He wrote about life in the mills,
life in the factories,
life in the towns.
Born in 1817, Waugh penned poems
in his native Lancashire tongue.
He captured people's imagination
at a time when
urbanisation threatened
to dilute local traditions.
Lancashire's cotton industry had
boomed in the mid-19th century,
and its population doubled as workers
from all over Britain migrated here.
His best-known poem
was written in 1856 -
Come Whoam To Thi Childer An' Me -
and it's a poem about a young Wife
who's at home and she's got
all the housework done,
she's got the two children off to
bed, but she can't settle them
because they're crying.
And she's crying too
because he's down at the pub,
so against all the social
protocols of the time,
she gets his hat and coat
and she goes down to the pub
to appeal, it turns out
successfully, to his better nature.
But when she gets there she finds
he's hot all bad after all,
and that his pockets are filled
with gifts for her and the kids
that he's got from the market,
and he's merely stopped off
for a glass on his Way back.
So all ends happily.
Waugh's poems were often
set to music,
and Sid has devoted the last three
decades to restoring these works.
To give me a flavour, he's arranged
something rather special.
And here we have the Red Rose String
Quartet, and we can play for you...
- Hello! - ...if you wish.
Hello!
And if you'd like to join in, sir,
there's the Words.
- Very good! Good afternoon.
- Hello. Hello.
[SINGING]
"Our Dorothy's singin' i'th shippon
"Our Jonathan's leawngin' i'th fowd
"Our Tummy's at Th' fair,
Where he lippens
"O' swappin' his cowt for gowd
"Me gronny's asleep
wi' her knittin'
"An' Th' kittlins's
playin' wi' yarn
"Our Betty's gone out wi' a gallon
"For Th' lads
as in warkin' I'Th barn
[BOTH] "And it's oh,
yon Robin, yon Robin
"His e'en e'er twinkle't so breet
"As they did
when he measur't me finger
"For Th' little gowd ring
last neet."
Bravo I
In the 1870s,
Waugh's health deteriorated.
He moved to Kersal Moor
for its fresh air
and was buried here
after his death in 1890.
The moors were important
to Waugh.
Are they important to
Lancashire people generally?
Oh, they were important to
the whole population of the county.
They were the lungs of Lancashire.
If you can imagine
19th-century industrial Lancashire,
it was dirty, it was dark,
it was smelly and smoky,
but We've always been very proud
of the fact that you're never
so far from the old moorland.
You can be a quarter of an hour
from the factory gates
and you can be up here,
Where you can breathe.
Waugh clearly did much to preserve
the Lancashire dialect in his time.
Today the mantle has passed to
a handful of enthusiasts like Sid.
Can you greet me
in the local dialect?
How do?
How do?
That's simple enough!
- "How do?"
- It is. You don't need
any more than that, really.
It means, "How do you do?"
Which, when it arrived
in America, it became "howdy".
The Lancashire dialect is
full of terrific tongue-twisters,
from polite greetings -
"Aw'm gradely fain to Si thi" -
to, "Be sharp!
T'pig's fo'n i'th out!"
which means, "Hurry up, the pig's
fallen in the canal." Of course.
And What are you doing about
keeping the dialect alive?
I'm trying to make it available,
make it relevant to today's
audiences, not only to preserve it
but to bring it back to life.
Sid has certainly brought
back to life for me today
a piece of Victorian Lancashire.
With my lungs filled with
the finest air in the county,
I'm ready to return to the station.
Life was tough for working people
in industrial Lancashire.
Wage cuts caused
a bloody riot in Preston.
The region was the world's most
successful manufacturing hub,
but the cost in terms of
human suffering is visible
in the smoky streets
of Lowry's paintings.
At least mill workers could escape,
through the dialect of Edwin Waugh,
to the beautiful moors
of the Red Rose county.
Next time, I feel the heat
of modern glass-making...
I've just walked past
a furnace at 1,600 degrees Celsius
and I can tell you
it burns as you go by.
Break into song with
some not-too-drunken sailors...
[SINGING] Strike the bell, second
mate, let's go below
[SINGING] Look out to windward,
you can see it's going to blow..."
and experience life in service
to a lady of the manor.
Will there be much more to be
polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?
Considerably more, Mr Portillo.
[END THEME]
George Bradshaw was a household name.
At a time when railways were new,
Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them
to take to the tracks.
I'm using a Bradshaw's guide
to understand how trains
transformed Britain,
its landscape, its industries,
society and leisure time.
As I crisscross the country
150 years later, it helps me
to discover the Britain of today.
I'm continuing my journey
through the verdant landscape
of Northwest England
towards its industrial heart,
Where the Victorian working class
lived and worked
in a new cityscape of factories,
railway stations and terraced houses.
On this journey, I Want to find out
What daily life was like
for the nation's first urban workers
and how they documented it
in art and poetry.
This week I'm travelling
through Northwest England
to the West Midlands.
I started in Cumbria,
winding south through the spectacular
countryside of the Lake District,
and I'm continuing on to Lancashire,
heart of the Industrial Revolution,
before I head further south
to Staffordshire.
On today's stretch
I begin in Preston,
travel south-east
to a market town, Darwen,
discover a dark tale in Entwistle,
and hear stories of
matchstick men in Salford.
I'll end this leg on Kersal Moor.
In this episode, I dabble
in 21 St-century technology...
Feels like some medical procedure.
Learn a thing or two about art...
I'm sure you're almost about to
say matchstick figures,
aren't you, Michael?
Well, matchsticks they are not.
They are much more observed,
much more acute.
And enjoy a good old
Lancashire sing-song.
"[SINGING] As they did
when he measur'd me finger"
"For t' little gowd ring
last neet."
Bravo I
My journey continues to
take me south,
today towards the heart
of Lancashire manufacturing.
Bradshaw's tells me
that Preston possessed,
before the passing of
the Great Reform Act of 1832,
"the only real democratic
electoral suffrage in the kingdom.
"All its inhabitants
above 21 years of age,
"if free from the taint of pauperism,
were entitled to a vote."
The 19th century brought
an industrial revolution but also
a vast extension of the suffrage and
improvements in conditions of work.
And in those battles, some of the
first shots were fired in Preston.
The city sits between coastal plain,
river valley and moorland.
By the time my guidebook was
published in the 1860s,
Preston had been transformed
from an unassuming market town
dotted with Weavers' cottages
into a densely populated centre
of 70,000 people
built around 60 or so cotton mills.
Today the factories are long gone,
but the memory
of their workers lives on.
I'm meeting local historian
and trade unionist Jim Leigh
at Preston Market.
According to Bradshaw's,
there was a lot of industrial unrest
in the first half of
the 19th century.
Was there something very
special about Preston?
There was. Preston had a
notoriety as a very militant town.
I think it was a combination
of extremely low wages
paid in the town together with
shockingly poor housing conditions.
80% of the town depended on the
mills for employment and housing.
Workers faced long hours
and dangerous conditions.
Their houses were filthy, cramped and
overcrowded, so disease spread fast.
Towards the end of the
19th century,
Preston had one of the highest rates
of infant mortality in the country.
I believe there was a
big event in 1842.
What was the background to that?
A severe recession was
gripping the country.
Unemployment was high,
and employers up and down the
land began cutting wages.
So there's a lot of anger
and frustration out there.
In response, a Working-class
movement, Chartism, tried to unite
workers across Britain in a strike
over pay and factory conditions.
In August 1842, Preston's mill
workers joined the protest.
And how did matters develop?
Groups of men and youths
began assembling about the town.
Soon these small groups converged
into one large group,
who then began visiting every mill
and Workshop across the town
and successfully
brought them to a standstill.
The mayor and magistrates,
accompanied by a detachment
of soldiers,
resolved to confront the protesters.
What had been a peaceful protest
escalated into a violent one.
Jim, it comes to be known
as the Lune Street Riot. How?
They Went about stopping the mills
Wherever they could find them
the following day.
The strikers then began
proceeding up Lune Street
and it was here that they were
confronted by the military.
And it was there that
the Riot Act was read out.
We quite often refer
to reading the Riot Act
Without, perhaps, thinking
What it means,
but I've got here What
is read out
by someone like the Mayor of Preston
on such an occasion.
"Our Sovereign Lady the Queen
chargeth and commandeth all persons
"being assembled immediately
to disperse themselves, and peaceably
"to depart to their habitations
or to their lawful businesses
"upon the pains contained
in the act
"made in the first year
of King George I
"for preventing tumults and riotous
assemblies. God save the Queen."
The cotton workers
refused to back down
and the military opened fire,
killing four of them.
The tragic event of 1842
has not been forgotten
and 150 years later, a monument
was erected
to commemorate this fateful day.
Jim, this is a very striking
monument. What was its inspiration?
I believe it's based on the
famous Goya painting
that depicted a scene
from the Napoleonic Wars.
And I see that flowers are laid.
Yes, these are from Workers'
Memorial Day, which commemorates
workers who died at work
each year.
Jim, you're a trade unionist,
I'm sure you've been
involved in a few disputes.
How do you assess
the significance of this event?
This is extremely important.
It's part of Preston's radical
history which continues to this day.
Little changed for the mill workers
in the aftermath of the riot,
but the event retains a symbolic
place in Britain's Working-class history.
The next leg of my journey
takes me south-east.
I have to change at Blackburn
before heading across
the West Pennine moors.
I'm on my Way to Darwen.
Bradshaw's tells me that
the paper mills of Messrs Potter
produced 400 miles of paper,
weighing 40 tonnes, per day.
Increasing quantities of paper
were needed to adorn
the walls of the middle classes,
bringing the colours of nature
into the Victorian drawing room.
The town sits in a valley amid
90 square miles of open moorland.
Following the arrival
of the railway in 1847,
Darwen, like many northern towns,
began to develop industrially.
The manufacture of paper
and textiles led it to become
one of the largest Victorian
mill towns in Lancashire.
The mills have long since shut
but a paint factory rich in
Victorian heritage is still
going strong in the town today.
It's here that I'm meeting customer
services director Geraldine Huxley.
Geraldine, the company mentioned
in my Bradshaw's guide is Potters,
which was making paper.
What is the connection between that
and today's company?
Well, John Potter was
a Manchester businessman
and he came to live in the area
and he married the
daughter of the gentleman
who invented the calico printing.
He actually came into the business
and took over, and turned it into
a mechanical operation
rather than a manual operation.
In 1839, the Potters developed a
steam-driven surface printing machine
which enabled them
to mass-produce Wallpaper.
With the repeal of
the Wallpaper tax in 1836,
Wallpaper became
a very important element
of Victorian interior decoration,
replacing panelling and tapestries.
William Morris's
Trellis pattern of 1864
influenced generations of designers
and remains popular today.
Which came first in Darwen,
Wallpaper or paint?
Wallpaper, definitely. Paint Wasn't
really experimented with until 1904,
some 100 years later.
In the Edwardian period,
brighter, paler colours were made
using synthetic dyes
produced by the rapidly-developing
chemical industry.
Potters paint also played
an important part beyond
the homes of the middle classes.
Something of special interest,
I think you will find, is the
palette of paints
that were specially designed
for the railway industry.
"British Railways Eastern Region
standard colour range for paint".
Now, some of these are What I would
expect, these kind of muted browns
and beiges, but actually,
some of them are quite bright.
Look at this vivid yellow and
look at that sort of scarlet colour.
Very nice indeed.
Today, the company produces
a staggering 385,000
litres of paint per day -
enough to fill 38 Olympic-sized
swimming pools every year.
I'm heading to the research
and development department
to meet David Booth.
There's a vast range of colours here
and a layman might think that
all possible colours are here.
But I've been thinking about whether
I could match this jacket here
and at first I thought
it was something like that...
No.
- Uh...
- No, it's far too orange.
Wait a minute,
What about this one?
That's the nearest,
but it's too weak.
So how will I match that up?
What we can do is take your jacket
and actually put it onto the machine
and we'll get a prediction
and make the paint up.
So I could buy a colour like that
and paint my wall,
just in case I Wanted to camouflage myself
- at home?
- You could, yes.
- Can we give it a go?
- Yeah, we can indeed.
Right, can you please put your arm
in there and push it up tight...
Whoops! ...against the machine?
Leave it there for a moment.
This is very Weird.
A spectrophotometer analyses
colour composition by measuring
the reflected light from a sample.
Feels like some medical procedure,
like having my blood pressure taken!
Now David selects a base paint
and the appropriate pigments
from a database.
Oh! I can see those streams
of colour going in there.
It's the moment of truth.
Whoa! Look at that!
Portillo pink. Stock up now,
it will be in fashion next year!
I'd love to stay
and paint the town pink,
but I have a short journey to make
before the day is out.
I'm heading five miles south
through East Lancashire
on the Ribble Valley line to
a rural station just north of Bolton.
- Entwistle. Request stop?
- That's correct.
- Could we stop at Entwistle, please?
- You certainly can.
- Make it easier to get off.
- Yes.
Thank you. Don't forget!
So We've emerged into the light after
passing through a very long tunnel,
the Sough Tunnel, which
I believe was quite an early
piece of railway engineering
about which I'd like to know more.
On the south side of the Sough
Tunnel sits Entwistle Station,
set in a small village overlooking
the rugged countryside
of the lower Pennine hills.
- Thank you very much.
- Thank you. Nice to meet you.
I was afraid you
might have forgotten -
- to stop, I mean.
- Oh, no.
Thank you.
Thank you, bye-bye.
I'm meeting local historian Eileen
Cowen on the platform to find out
more about the construction of the
tunnel and the workforce behind it.
- Hello.
- Lovely to see you.
I've just come through Sough Tunnel.
Why did it have to be built?
It was to carry the Blackburn-Darwen
line through to Bolton
and on to Manchester, which was
very important for the industry
in Darwen and Blackburn.
And in the Way was Cranberry Moss,
which is 1,000 feet high, riddled
with coal mines, Water courses.
Very, very bleak in Winter,
it really is.
In 1848, the 1,850-meter
tunnel was completed
and the line through
to Bolton opened.
Who built it?
2,000 men worked there eventually.
Not mechanised - using wheelbarrows,
picks, shovels.
Some expert tunnellers, but a lot
of them just using their strength.
By the height of railway mania
in the mid-19th century, a quarter of
a million navvies had laid
3,000 miles of track across Britain,
transforming the rural
landscape forever.
Where would they be living?
The majority of them
lived up on the hilltops
in shanties made
out of turf and stone.
What were conditions like
in the camps Where they lived?
They were living in
very exposed conditions.
The land now is wet and bleak.
In Winter it's covered in snow
a lot of the time,
sometimes six-foot high
on the roads round here.
And they worked through the Winters.
A navvy's life was harsh and
the work was notoriously dangerous.
Five lives were lost during
the building of the Sough Tunnel.
I count myself fortunate
to have a warm bed for the night.
Refreshed, I am ready to continue
my journey across Northwest England.
I decided to spend the night
in a delightful pub
with a great view over the moors,
and it's just by Entwistle Station.
My train is at 8:21.
Provided I leave here at 8:19
I should be in good time.
Following my guidebook,
I'm heading 15 miles south
across the Lancashire border
to Salford in Greater Manchester.
Bradshaw's paints
a marvellous picture
of an English manufacturing town
in the middle of the 19th century.
"Thronged streets and narrow lanes
stretch out on each side.
"Mills and factories rise
out of the dense mass of houses,
"and a forest of chimneys
towering upwards
"point out the local seats
of manufacturing."
It took only an artist of Salford to
add the matchstick men and women.
The Industrial Revolution
dramatically transformed Salford
from a small market town on the banks
of the River Irwell into a sprawling,
smoke-filled conurbation
housing a population of over 200,000.
With overcrowded slums,
at the time of my guidebook, areas of
Salford were deprived and squalid.
Lancashire artist
Laurence Stephen Lowry
famously captured the 20th-century
legacy of Victorian Salford,
of which just a hint
still stands today.
A fitting place to meet
art historian William Feaver.
What do you think
attracted Lowry to depicting
an industrial landscape
with all its smoke, and so on?
He always lived here,
it was utterly familiar to him.
It was useful to be surrounded
by your subject
rather than to have to
go out and find it too far away.
He recognised that in the tones of
grotty, smoky, dark, wet Manchester,
there were very beautiful
things to be seen.
Born in 1887, Lowry recorded
nearly a century of industrial life
in Salford and Manchester.
He was the first artist to engage
with industrial Working-class
culture, which until then
was viewed as unsavoury
and scarcely worthy
as a subject for art.
Do you think he felt an empathy
with the people he painted
in these streets?
Well, yes and no.
His father had been a rent collector
and he was a rent collector
for a living for many years.
He was obviously resented by some of
the people he called on regularly
and also he was familiar to them,
so it worked both ways.
Today, the largest public collection
of his works is housed
at The Lowry in Salford Quays.
The arts complex opened in 2000
as part of a 106-million pound
docklands-regeneration scheme.
Michael, I thought
you'd like to see this drawing
because it's an illustration almost
of What happened to Lowry once.
He was on Pendlebury Station,
missed his train,
looking around for something to do,
looked, and saw the industrial
landscape stretched around him -
smoking chimneys,
the people scurrying below him.
And I suppose in a Way this
commemorates that eureka,
bingo moment, when he suddenly found
himself a life's work ahead of him.
Lowry's contemporaries
often questioned
What he saw in such ordinariness.
ARCHIVE RECORDING:
People often tell me that,
"And why do you paint
such and such subjects?"
Well, I say,
why shouldn't I paint them?
I like to paint them, so why not?
So here we see a Salford street,
and, as ever, dominated by
the smoking chimney stack.
The houses and people
are rendered quite simply.
Would we be right
to think of this as naive?
You can say it's naive, but actually
I think it's much more
subtle than naive.
And I'm sure you're almost
about to say matchstick figures,
aren't you, Michael?
Well, matchsticks they are not.
They are much more observed,
much more acute.
Lowry painted the ordinary people
he saw at work and at leisure
on the streets of
his native Lancashire.
People call them matchsticks,
matchstick figures.
They may be. I don't mind.
I don't think it matters,
I paint the people as I see
the people in my mind's eye.
The people tend to be poor people.
Does he display also a sympathy
for people who are, I don't know,
outcasts or left aside?
He obviously saw that people
worse off than himself were somehow
rather like ants, always engaged
on business, scurrying to and fro.
All sorts of scenarios
take place in his pictures
and they are not as simple as they
look. They are much more subtle,
poetic and ultimately,
I think, rather lonely.
People often say that
but I suppose I reflect myself
in my figures - I'm bound to do.
I'm bound to reflect myself
in the figures
and I'm a very lonely
sort of a person.
As a Salford man himself,
with a concern for the plight
of the working class,
George Bradshaw might have empathised
with Lowry's depiction
of the city's people.
Lowry's popularity
is undeniable, isn't it?
I first became aware of him because
my grandfather managed to
buy one or two, but his popularity
has been enormous, hasn't it?
In England, Britain, probably
the most popular artist there is.
In the wider world, less known,
but he is a great artist,
and there's ho reason to
plump him more than that.
Lowry and Bradshaw,
one in painting and one in Words,
recorded Britain's
industrial landscape.
And today, having read Bradshaw's
vivid description of a manufacturing
town in the 19th century, I like to
hope that Lowry had read this book.
I'm sure he did.
But of course, What he did,
he turned Bradshaw into a vision.
It's time to hit the tracks
and head for my final destination.
I'm taking a short train ride north
to Swinton,
from which it's a ten-minute drive
east to Kersal Moor.
By the time of my guidebook,
industrialisation had made its mark
on the Lancashire landscape
and the old pastoral ways
were disappearing fast.
The desire to preserve local identity
became stronger than ever.
Kersal Moor is a rural haven
in Greater Manchester.
It remains little changed
from Bradshaw's day, and I can see
now it captured the imagination
of 19th-century poet Edwin Waugh.
I'm meeting Sid Calderbank,
dialect enthusiast
and member of
the Edwin Waugh Society.
Why should we now remember
the Victorian poet Edwin Waugh?
He was known in his lifetime
as the Lancashire laureate.
He was the prince of
dialect poets.
His works, his songs, stories and
poems, spanned the whole of society.
What sort of things
was he writing about?
He wrote about life in the mills,
life in the factories,
life in the towns.
Born in 1817, Waugh penned poems
in his native Lancashire tongue.
He captured people's imagination
at a time when
urbanisation threatened
to dilute local traditions.
Lancashire's cotton industry had
boomed in the mid-19th century,
and its population doubled as workers
from all over Britain migrated here.
His best-known poem
was written in 1856 -
Come Whoam To Thi Childer An' Me -
and it's a poem about a young Wife
who's at home and she's got
all the housework done,
she's got the two children off to
bed, but she can't settle them
because they're crying.
And she's crying too
because he's down at the pub,
so against all the social
protocols of the time,
she gets his hat and coat
and she goes down to the pub
to appeal, it turns out
successfully, to his better nature.
But when she gets there she finds
he's hot all bad after all,
and that his pockets are filled
with gifts for her and the kids
that he's got from the market,
and he's merely stopped off
for a glass on his Way back.
So all ends happily.
Waugh's poems were often
set to music,
and Sid has devoted the last three
decades to restoring these works.
To give me a flavour, he's arranged
something rather special.
And here we have the Red Rose String
Quartet, and we can play for you...
- Hello! - ...if you wish.
Hello!
And if you'd like to join in, sir,
there's the Words.
- Very good! Good afternoon.
- Hello. Hello.
[SINGING]
"Our Dorothy's singin' i'th shippon
"Our Jonathan's leawngin' i'th fowd
"Our Tummy's at Th' fair,
Where he lippens
"O' swappin' his cowt for gowd
"Me gronny's asleep
wi' her knittin'
"An' Th' kittlins's
playin' wi' yarn
"Our Betty's gone out wi' a gallon
"For Th' lads
as in warkin' I'Th barn
[BOTH] "And it's oh,
yon Robin, yon Robin
"His e'en e'er twinkle't so breet
"As they did
when he measur't me finger
"For Th' little gowd ring
last neet."
Bravo I
In the 1870s,
Waugh's health deteriorated.
He moved to Kersal Moor
for its fresh air
and was buried here
after his death in 1890.
The moors were important
to Waugh.
Are they important to
Lancashire people generally?
Oh, they were important to
the whole population of the county.
They were the lungs of Lancashire.
If you can imagine
19th-century industrial Lancashire,
it was dirty, it was dark,
it was smelly and smoky,
but We've always been very proud
of the fact that you're never
so far from the old moorland.
You can be a quarter of an hour
from the factory gates
and you can be up here,
Where you can breathe.
Waugh clearly did much to preserve
the Lancashire dialect in his time.
Today the mantle has passed to
a handful of enthusiasts like Sid.
Can you greet me
in the local dialect?
How do?
How do?
That's simple enough!
- "How do?"
- It is. You don't need
any more than that, really.
It means, "How do you do?"
Which, when it arrived
in America, it became "howdy".
The Lancashire dialect is
full of terrific tongue-twisters,
from polite greetings -
"Aw'm gradely fain to Si thi" -
to, "Be sharp!
T'pig's fo'n i'th out!"
which means, "Hurry up, the pig's
fallen in the canal." Of course.
And What are you doing about
keeping the dialect alive?
I'm trying to make it available,
make it relevant to today's
audiences, not only to preserve it
but to bring it back to life.
Sid has certainly brought
back to life for me today
a piece of Victorian Lancashire.
With my lungs filled with
the finest air in the county,
I'm ready to return to the station.
Life was tough for working people
in industrial Lancashire.
Wage cuts caused
a bloody riot in Preston.
The region was the world's most
successful manufacturing hub,
but the cost in terms of
human suffering is visible
in the smoky streets
of Lowry's paintings.
At least mill workers could escape,
through the dialect of Edwin Waugh,
to the beautiful moors
of the Red Rose county.
Next time, I feel the heat
of modern glass-making...
I've just walked past
a furnace at 1,600 degrees Celsius
and I can tell you
it burns as you go by.
Break into song with
some not-too-drunken sailors...
[SINGING] Strike the bell, second
mate, let's go below
[SINGING] Look out to windward,
you can see it's going to blow..."
and experience life in service
to a lady of the manor.
Will there be much more to be
polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?
Considerably more, Mr Portillo.
[END THEME]