Great British Railway Journeys (2010–…): Season 7, Episode 4 - St Helens to Knutsford - 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 industry,
society and leisure time.
As I crisscross the country
150 years later,
it helps me to discover
the Britain of today.
This week, I make tracks across the
North West, through areas which
bore Witness to Britain's rise
as the world's leading marketplace.
I explore the bright optimism,
but also the dark underside
of the Industrial Revolution.
My trip started close to
the Scottish border
and took me to the heart
of the beautiful Lake District,
before heading further south through
a classic northern mill town.
From there, I'm travelling onwards to
Merseyside's busy port
and then I'll reach my final
destination on the edge
of the Peak District National Park.
On today's leg, I venture to
a Lancashire town
built on coal and glass,
head westwards to the docks that
received the proceeds of empire
and end up in an affluent
town on the Cheshire Plain.
At my first stop, I feel the
heat of modern glass-making...
I've just walked past a furnace
and it's 1,600 degrees Celsius
and I can tell you,
it burns as you're going by.
Break into song with some
not too drunken sailors...
[SINGING]: "Strike the bell,
second mate, let us go below
"Look out to windward,
you can see it's going to blow..."
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.
Considerably more.
And discover a pioneering
literary voice.
She was the first female
social novelist.
I'm now more than halfway
through my journey
and enjoying my tour of manufacturing
towns in North West England.
My first stop today is St Helens,
which Bradshaw's tells me
"is celebrated for its manufacture
of plate and crown glass,
"got up to great perfection.
"An hour or two spent in
the inspection of these works
"would amply repay the stranger."
I'm hoping that an hour or
two will provide me
with a Window
on the Industrial Revolution.
I am on the Wigan-to-Liverpool
line travelling south.
Thank you. Bye.
St Helens Station features 400 square
metres of locally made glass.
I'm headed to the World Of Glass,
a museum built around the old
factory buildings of Pilkington,
the only glass
manufacturer in St Helens
surviving from the Victorian era.
Nowadays, the visitor enters the
glass plant through this
Wonderful recreation of
an old bottle kiln,
a superb piece of industrial
archeology
with, incidentally, an amazing echo.
- Hello, Matt.
- Good morning.
Welcome. Welcome to the
World of Glass.
Matt Buckley is from Pilkington's
architectural division.
So, why was it in the first place
that glass came to be made
here in St Helena?
Well, exactly here we had
everything we needed
that all came together
at the same time.
You'd got the coal for the power,
you'd got the sand,
which we then turned into glass,
and we have the canal here as well
that gave us the chance to
bring raw materials
and take the glass before
we also had the railways,
so everything came together here.
St Helens sits on the edge
of the plentiful
South Lancashire coalfields
and excellent transport links were
built to carry the coal to market.
That soon paved Way
for other businesses -
potteries, foundries and glassworks
that made crown glass by hand.
Crown was one of the earliest
types of mass-produced glass,
so there was a blob of glass
on a tube which was then spun
to produce,
with centrifugal force, a disc.
And eventually that disc could
be out into small panes,
but in the middle you were left with
a bull's-eye or a bullion,
and even today you'll see some
people using that in their windows,
but that was actually the poor bit
of the glass that people threw away.
A new technique for making much
larger panes of glass
was developed in the 1830s.
Large glass cylinders were sliced
open on a table,
heated, and pressed
flat with a roller.
It inspired an architectural
revolution -
the advent of grand glass roofs
on railway stations,
museums and public buildings.
The most breathtaking example was
the Crystal Palace,
housing the Great Exhibition
in London's Hyde Park in 1851.
The building employed 300,000
sheets of glass
of the largest size
ever manufactured -
a symbol of the United Kingdom's
technical ascendancy.
I have just walked past a furnace
at 1,600 degrees Celsius
and I can tell you,
it burns as you're going by.
By 1860, three quarters
of the country's Window glass
was produced in 24 furnaces,
nine of them at St Helens.
They operated around the clock.
This is the furnace, here.
The hot end, as it's called,
and this is Where we take in
the raw materials
and Within there We're actually
melting the glass.
So, Matt, we are facing here
extraordinary heat.
Which site is this?
This is Watson Street site.
This is the site Where we
made our first crown of glass,
14th February 1827, on this site.
Now, What is glass and
how do you make it?
This is What's in here.
This is the batch.
This is sand and soda ash
and dolomite and, really,
we heat that to 1,600 degrees C
and then form it through the process
eventually to produce
the glass as you know it.
And how are you actually
producing that level of heat?
OK, We've got...
Effectively, we were burning gas to
produce the heat.
We are actually mixing the gas,
the gas and the air,
using a similar process than
we saw right back from the 1870s.
We fire gas from this side for 20
minutes, then from the other side,
and we effectively recycle
and re-use the heat.
- I wouldn't like to see your gas bill.
- It is very large, yes.
It's 20 million pounds a year.
St Helens glass-makers were
part of the plate-glass revolution
of the mid-19th century,
and they still led in glass
innovation 100 years later.
This here is a float glass plant.
It was the float glass process
invented by Sir Alistair Pilkington
in 1952.
And here we actually melt
the sand in exactly the same way,
but we float it on a bed
of molten tin
and that's What makes it perfectly
flat Without imperfections.
So, the type of glass you see in
today's buildings,
around the world, is float glass,
using the Pilkington technology.
And this stuff is just streaming
along these machines all the time?
Yes, the glass comes
down in a ribbon and is chopped
and then packed, and this line will
run for anything up to 20 years.
So, even in one week, we can
produce 5,000 tonnes of glass -
that's half a million
square metres.
Actually, in a year,
we can produce enough glass
probably to go halfway around the
world on this line.
So, massive amounts of glass,
almost unimaginable in terms of What
architects can now do
because of the developments in glass
and glazing technology.
I mean, just looking around,
it seems to me that
if there was a revolution
in architecture thanks to glass
in Bradshaw's time, we have had
another one in the last few decades.
Absolutely.
I'm back on the tracks that were the
artery of St Helens' economy,
linking it to the prosperous docks
of Liverpool, my next destination.
By the 19th century, Liverpool had
overtaken Bristol as Britain's
second most important port after
London,
thanks to its proximity to the
industrial powerhouse of Manchester.
And its railway station was perhaps
designed to emphasise
this new-found status.
Liverpool Lime Street station is
a perfect example
of how glass
transformed British cities.
The northern canopy
has a span of 200 feet
and, when it was built, around
the time of my Bradshaw's Guide,
it was the broadest that had ever
been built
and Victorian travellers
looked up at it in awe.
Modern-day Liverpool stands in stark
contrast
to the city of the mid-1800s.
The port was a gritty
and chaotic place, but its system of
interconnected docks was the most
sophisticated in the World.
It played a vital role
in the world's largest economy,
receiving materials
from the British colonies
and shipping out British
manufactured goods.
The docks in Liverpool,
says Bradshaw's,
are the grand lions of the town,
extending in one magnificent range
of five miles along the river.
Being a child of the 1960s,
I remember that the Beatles exported
the Liverpool beat to the globe.
But it turns out that decades
before that,
a Mersey sound was flowing
out to the World.
[SEA SHANTY]
The docks were swarming with
tradesmen, stevedores and sailors
from all over the world,
who used song to set the rhythms
for hauling ropes
and heaving cargoes.
They worked here at the Albert Docks,
Where I'm meeting a Liverpool girl,
Julia Batters,
a sea shanty enthusiast.
[SEA SHANTY]
Julia, What are sea shanties?
Where do they come from?
Sea shanties are work songs.
The were sung on British
merchant ships to enhance
the efficiency of the crew.
Those ships needed to travel fast,
have smaller crews than
were on the Royal Navy ships,
and so they were rhythmic tunes
sung to keep people making
a physical effort.
British sea shanties have
travelled around the world
and back again several times.
You can hear them translated
into Norwegian, into Dutch,
actually into Polish.
Some of them were adapted to
singing on the rivers and
the Great Lakes in the States.
It encapsulates so much
of the history
of What made the UK
great and of English working people.
And this is an important
heritage to preserve.
What are you doing to keep it up?
We've started a club.
Every month we sing sea shanties
in the Baltic Fleet pub,
which is one of the last
Sailor-town pubs left in Liverpool.
Liverpool is regarded
internationally as the
as the spiritual home
of the sea shanty,
so We're bringing the music back
here Where it should be sung.
[MAN SINGS, STRIKE THE BELL]
A quick wetting of the whistle
and I'm ready to join in.
[ALL SINGING] "Look out to windward,
you can see it's going to blow
"Look at the glass,
you can see that it is fell
"And we wish that he would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell..."
Julia's husband is shantyman
Derek Batters.
"There is the larboard Watch,
they're longing for their bunks
"They're looking out to windward,
they can see a great swell
"And they're Wishing that
the second mate
"Would strike, strike the bell..."
The shantyman had the important
task of keeping up morale on deck
and he would vary the song
to match the task at hand.
"Look at the glass,
you can see that it's fell
"And we wish that you would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell..."
There were short drag shanties for
jobs needing quick bursts of energy
and long drag shanties, which gave
sailors a rest between hauls.
Derek is singing a pump shanty,
used when pumping the bilges of the
ship to prevent it from sinking.
"And he's Wishing that the second
mate would strike, strike the bell.
"Strike the bell, second mate,
let's go below..."
But pump shanties also work rather
well for swilling pints to -
an excellent Way to end my day.
"See that it's fell,
"And we wish that you would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell.
"Strike the bell,
second mate, let's go below
"Look out to windward,
you can see it going to blow
"Look at the glass,
you can see that it's fell
"And I wish that you would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell!"
Bravo I
[CHEERING]
Today, I'm continuing my journey,
travelling south-west on the Wirral
line towards Chester.
Chester was a Welcome break
for Victorians
from the grime and frantic pace
of the industrial cities.
But I'm not stopping. I'm changing to
the mid-Cheshire line.
I've travelled from salty Liverpool
to leafy Cheshire.
Bradshaw's tells me that,
over a distance of
two-and-three-quarter miles,
almost from Ashley to Knutsford,
stretches the fine park
belonging to Lord Egerton.
At onetime, it was 250,000 acres.
I shall get off the train at
Knutsford. It seems to me that
Tatton Hall could be a good place
to explore Victorian life,
both upstairs and downstairs.
- Have a good day.
- Thank you very much. You too.
A couple of miles from Knutsford
station lies an imposing
neoclassical country house.
The Egertons were highly regarded
members of the aristocracy.
This was the part of society least
touched by the upheavals
of the 19th century.
The aristocracy may have dabbled in
industrial investments, or banking,
but they exercised hereditary power
in Westminster,
the Army, and the Empire.
Their large country houses
relied on highly skilled servants
and Carolyn Latham,
from the Cheshire East Council,
knows all about life downstairs
working for the Egertons.
Carolyn, an enormous
establishment like Tatton Park,
how many staff did it take to run?
Over the years, somewhere between
perhaps 40 and 20 was quite typical.
How many best guest rooms
are there in Tatton Park?
This main block of the mansion has
eight guest bedrooms,
all with ensuite dressing rooms.
The middle section of the mansion
here is the family's more intimate,
personal, smaller apartments,
but about eight good guests could be
situated Within the household.
An invitation to an Egerton
house party was much sought-after.
On these hectic occasions,
the servants moved smartly up
and downstairs to attend to the
needs of master and mistress.
Well, the kitchens are very large,
although notably lacking in modern
conveniences and machinery.
Let's start with the people
who were here.
What were the butler's duties?
So, the butler is... his main duties
are around making sure that
household's running smoothly,
so he's looking after the
male servants,
the grooms, the footmen,
he's making sure that all the male
servants are all in the right
places at the right time.
That the dinnefis served on time,
the drinks are served on time.
You know, he waits on as well.
He's there when the master of
the household is around -
the butler wouldn't be
far away from him.
Domestic service was
Victorian Britain's
largest source of
employment for women.
At Tatton Hall, the butler,
the housekeeper and the chef
were at the top of the pecking order,
While a housemaid was at the bottom.
What was life like for the most
humble housemaid?
Well, quite long and hard
I would think.
They were up early,
they're the first up,
maybe half five, six o'clock
in the morning.
They're getting the fireplaces
ready for the other servants,
the higher-up servants as well
as for the household.
Serving breakfast trays,
cleaning bedrooms, emptying bedpans.
The housekeeper would have made
sure their time was really full
and accounted for.
They would have
their set break times,
but also those lowest housemaids
and scullery maids, you know,
there was a hierarchy Within even
the servants eating,
so they sat at the end.
They didn't really get to have
the conversations
that the others were having, so
their whole clay was very structured
and they'd have gone to bed
really quite late as well.
I'm travelling back in time,
to the heyday of Tatton Hall,
to put my skills to the
test as an under-butler,
eager to make a good impression
on my rather stern superiors.
Will there be much more to be
polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?
Considerably more, Mr Portillo.
Considerably more.
I think a little bit more
elbow grease is required.
Ah, I can see you set very
high standards, Mrs Cartwright,
here at Tatton Park. Indeed, we do.
What we require, Mr Portillo, is
20% polish and 80% elbow grease.
What time would her ladyship
be requiring her tea, Mr Douglas?
I think I'm correct in
saying, Mrs Cartwright,
- her ladyship requested tea at four?
- Four o'clock, yes, on the dot.
- Four o'clock, Mr Portillo.
- On the dot, Mr Douglas.
How's it going now?
A vast improvement, yes.
Can you see your face in them?
Unfortunately, I can, Mrs Cartwright.
Tea, Lady Egerton.
- Shall I pour, Lady Egerton?
- No, I shall pour.
Yes, your ladyship.
Mr Portillo, a word, if I may.
Your shoes, your socks,
your trousers.
Something amiss, Mr Douglas?
One can only assume
that your previous employer
set a certain lower standard.
It's just as well that
I have other career options.
In the mid-1800s, a factory job might
have tempted a domestic servant
tired of responding to the
master's summoning bell.
A job in the city offered privacy and
freedom at the end
of the working day...
but urban and factory life
often shocked the new
worker from the countryside
and it appalled many in the middle
classes, who read about it
for the first time in the novels
of a pioneering female author.
I'm back in Knutsford to explore
the life of Elizabeth Gaskell
in conversation with Diana Stenson
from the local heritage centre.
Diana, What is this rather
extraordinary structure?
This is the Gaskell Tower
and it is the only commemoration
that we have officially
in the town to commemorate
our most famous daughter.
So, is she quite
highly regarded in Knutsford?
She was very highly regarded.
She was liked very much as
a child when she lived here
and, of course, when she Went on
to have this successful career
and all the things that she wrote,
some of them had
enormous social consequences.
She was very highly regarded and the
family were very regarded as well.
And What do you think was
Elizabeth Gaskell's legacy?
That she was the first female
social novelist of serious matters.
A sort of female Dickens?
Very much so,
and they were good friends.
Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford was
first published as a serial
in Charles Dickens' journal,
Household Words, in 1851.
It's her most famous book,
a collection of comic sketches
which affectionately portray
changing small-town customs.
Gaskell drew on her own
experience of a happy
childhood in Knutsford,
Where she was raised by her aunt.
Cranford is famously set in
and about Knutsford.
Is that very clear in the novel?
I think anybody that lived
around here would have recognised
Knutsford as this lovely little
cosy country market town
but quite a distance, as it would
seem in those days, to the
huge industrial belching chimneys
that we had in Manchester.
The railway comes to Knutsford
in 1862,
long after Cranford is published.
Do the railways get a look in
in the Gaskell novels?
They do. She wrote one particular
short story called Lady Ludlow
and it was heralding the arrival,
or the building,
of the railways in this area.
And the railway was all happening
and, blow me, Lady Ludlow decided,
virtually at the last minute,
when they're about to
build a bend,
"I'm not selling you the land after
all." So, it all fell apart.
And What was her attitude
to the railways?
She had a feeling of the mood
of the railways
because here We're sitting in an
agricultural area, railway's coming,
then the railways are arriving
and it speeded everything up.
People thought in a different Way
with the railway.
And so we would have our seasons
here,
which was What dictated What Went on
on the farms,
and then the railways
were speeding up
and it seemed to alter people's
perception of time.
Young Elizabeth moved
to Manchester
when she married William Gaskell
in 1832.
The city opened her eyes to the
plight of the urban working classes,
inspiring her to write her
first book - Mary Barton.
She was the first person to write
What you would call social novels.
She touched on and exposed a great
deal of the disgraceful things that
were going on towards the workers
in the Industrial Revolution.
There were hundreds of workers
coming in, nay, thousands,
from agricultural land,
from all over the North West,
coming in to work in these mills, having no idea
that they'd be living
in disgraceful cellars.
They had ho... There was ho sort of
sewage, there was nothing.
It was dreadful,
and she exposed all that.
She had a lot of trouble, socially,
because she was ostracised over
a lot of these things, but she stuck
to it and we owe her a huge debt
in telling us What was going on.
People who only lived
a mile or two away had no idea.
Elizabeth Gaskell's books were a
counterpoint to the optimism
that the Victorian public had
experienced at the Great Exhibition.
She reminds us that Britain's
prosperous position
as the Workshop
of the world carried a human cost.
Her work is a valuable Window
on the grimmer realities of
the Industrial Revolution.
The thing that most determined
Victorian architecture was glass
from St Helens, and no industry
made greater use of it
than the railways with their
stunning stations.
Elizabeth Gaskell perceived that the
trains were changing not only
the rural landscape
but also the country way of life.
Although, at Tatton Park,
rigid social structures endured.
As for my performance as an
under-butler, I think I would have
been given, in the Words of the sea
shanty, the heave-ho.
Next time, I'm blown away
by beauty...
We just soared over the valley,
absolutely beautiful.
I work up a sweat,
the Victorian way...
Stoking up the fire, giving the
locomotive a bit of oomph.
Builds good biceps, that.
And experience the
ride of my life.
[THEY SCREAM]
[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 industry,
society and leisure time.
As I crisscross the country
150 years later,
it helps me to discover
the Britain of today.
This week, I make tracks across the
North West, through areas which
bore Witness to Britain's rise
as the world's leading marketplace.
I explore the bright optimism,
but also the dark underside
of the Industrial Revolution.
My trip started close to
the Scottish border
and took me to the heart
of the beautiful Lake District,
before heading further south through
a classic northern mill town.
From there, I'm travelling onwards to
Merseyside's busy port
and then I'll reach my final
destination on the edge
of the Peak District National Park.
On today's leg, I venture to
a Lancashire town
built on coal and glass,
head westwards to the docks that
received the proceeds of empire
and end up in an affluent
town on the Cheshire Plain.
At my first stop, I feel the
heat of modern glass-making...
I've just walked past a furnace
and it's 1,600 degrees Celsius
and I can tell you,
it burns as you're going by.
Break into song with some
not too drunken sailors...
[SINGING]: "Strike the bell,
second mate, let us go below
"Look out to windward,
you can see it's going to blow..."
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.
Considerably more.
And discover a pioneering
literary voice.
She was the first female
social novelist.
I'm now more than halfway
through my journey
and enjoying my tour of manufacturing
towns in North West England.
My first stop today is St Helens,
which Bradshaw's tells me
"is celebrated for its manufacture
of plate and crown glass,
"got up to great perfection.
"An hour or two spent in
the inspection of these works
"would amply repay the stranger."
I'm hoping that an hour or
two will provide me
with a Window
on the Industrial Revolution.
I am on the Wigan-to-Liverpool
line travelling south.
Thank you. Bye.
St Helens Station features 400 square
metres of locally made glass.
I'm headed to the World Of Glass,
a museum built around the old
factory buildings of Pilkington,
the only glass
manufacturer in St Helens
surviving from the Victorian era.
Nowadays, the visitor enters the
glass plant through this
Wonderful recreation of
an old bottle kiln,
a superb piece of industrial
archeology
with, incidentally, an amazing echo.
- Hello, Matt.
- Good morning.
Welcome. Welcome to the
World of Glass.
Matt Buckley is from Pilkington's
architectural division.
So, why was it in the first place
that glass came to be made
here in St Helena?
Well, exactly here we had
everything we needed
that all came together
at the same time.
You'd got the coal for the power,
you'd got the sand,
which we then turned into glass,
and we have the canal here as well
that gave us the chance to
bring raw materials
and take the glass before
we also had the railways,
so everything came together here.
St Helens sits on the edge
of the plentiful
South Lancashire coalfields
and excellent transport links were
built to carry the coal to market.
That soon paved Way
for other businesses -
potteries, foundries and glassworks
that made crown glass by hand.
Crown was one of the earliest
types of mass-produced glass,
so there was a blob of glass
on a tube which was then spun
to produce,
with centrifugal force, a disc.
And eventually that disc could
be out into small panes,
but in the middle you were left with
a bull's-eye or a bullion,
and even today you'll see some
people using that in their windows,
but that was actually the poor bit
of the glass that people threw away.
A new technique for making much
larger panes of glass
was developed in the 1830s.
Large glass cylinders were sliced
open on a table,
heated, and pressed
flat with a roller.
It inspired an architectural
revolution -
the advent of grand glass roofs
on railway stations,
museums and public buildings.
The most breathtaking example was
the Crystal Palace,
housing the Great Exhibition
in London's Hyde Park in 1851.
The building employed 300,000
sheets of glass
of the largest size
ever manufactured -
a symbol of the United Kingdom's
technical ascendancy.
I have just walked past a furnace
at 1,600 degrees Celsius
and I can tell you,
it burns as you're going by.
By 1860, three quarters
of the country's Window glass
was produced in 24 furnaces,
nine of them at St Helens.
They operated around the clock.
This is the furnace, here.
The hot end, as it's called,
and this is Where we take in
the raw materials
and Within there We're actually
melting the glass.
So, Matt, we are facing here
extraordinary heat.
Which site is this?
This is Watson Street site.
This is the site Where we
made our first crown of glass,
14th February 1827, on this site.
Now, What is glass and
how do you make it?
This is What's in here.
This is the batch.
This is sand and soda ash
and dolomite and, really,
we heat that to 1,600 degrees C
and then form it through the process
eventually to produce
the glass as you know it.
And how are you actually
producing that level of heat?
OK, We've got...
Effectively, we were burning gas to
produce the heat.
We are actually mixing the gas,
the gas and the air,
using a similar process than
we saw right back from the 1870s.
We fire gas from this side for 20
minutes, then from the other side,
and we effectively recycle
and re-use the heat.
- I wouldn't like to see your gas bill.
- It is very large, yes.
It's 20 million pounds a year.
St Helens glass-makers were
part of the plate-glass revolution
of the mid-19th century,
and they still led in glass
innovation 100 years later.
This here is a float glass plant.
It was the float glass process
invented by Sir Alistair Pilkington
in 1952.
And here we actually melt
the sand in exactly the same way,
but we float it on a bed
of molten tin
and that's What makes it perfectly
flat Without imperfections.
So, the type of glass you see in
today's buildings,
around the world, is float glass,
using the Pilkington technology.
And this stuff is just streaming
along these machines all the time?
Yes, the glass comes
down in a ribbon and is chopped
and then packed, and this line will
run for anything up to 20 years.
So, even in one week, we can
produce 5,000 tonnes of glass -
that's half a million
square metres.
Actually, in a year,
we can produce enough glass
probably to go halfway around the
world on this line.
So, massive amounts of glass,
almost unimaginable in terms of What
architects can now do
because of the developments in glass
and glazing technology.
I mean, just looking around,
it seems to me that
if there was a revolution
in architecture thanks to glass
in Bradshaw's time, we have had
another one in the last few decades.
Absolutely.
I'm back on the tracks that were the
artery of St Helens' economy,
linking it to the prosperous docks
of Liverpool, my next destination.
By the 19th century, Liverpool had
overtaken Bristol as Britain's
second most important port after
London,
thanks to its proximity to the
industrial powerhouse of Manchester.
And its railway station was perhaps
designed to emphasise
this new-found status.
Liverpool Lime Street station is
a perfect example
of how glass
transformed British cities.
The northern canopy
has a span of 200 feet
and, when it was built, around
the time of my Bradshaw's Guide,
it was the broadest that had ever
been built
and Victorian travellers
looked up at it in awe.
Modern-day Liverpool stands in stark
contrast
to the city of the mid-1800s.
The port was a gritty
and chaotic place, but its system of
interconnected docks was the most
sophisticated in the World.
It played a vital role
in the world's largest economy,
receiving materials
from the British colonies
and shipping out British
manufactured goods.
The docks in Liverpool,
says Bradshaw's,
are the grand lions of the town,
extending in one magnificent range
of five miles along the river.
Being a child of the 1960s,
I remember that the Beatles exported
the Liverpool beat to the globe.
But it turns out that decades
before that,
a Mersey sound was flowing
out to the World.
[SEA SHANTY]
The docks were swarming with
tradesmen, stevedores and sailors
from all over the world,
who used song to set the rhythms
for hauling ropes
and heaving cargoes.
They worked here at the Albert Docks,
Where I'm meeting a Liverpool girl,
Julia Batters,
a sea shanty enthusiast.
[SEA SHANTY]
Julia, What are sea shanties?
Where do they come from?
Sea shanties are work songs.
The were sung on British
merchant ships to enhance
the efficiency of the crew.
Those ships needed to travel fast,
have smaller crews than
were on the Royal Navy ships,
and so they were rhythmic tunes
sung to keep people making
a physical effort.
British sea shanties have
travelled around the world
and back again several times.
You can hear them translated
into Norwegian, into Dutch,
actually into Polish.
Some of them were adapted to
singing on the rivers and
the Great Lakes in the States.
It encapsulates so much
of the history
of What made the UK
great and of English working people.
And this is an important
heritage to preserve.
What are you doing to keep it up?
We've started a club.
Every month we sing sea shanties
in the Baltic Fleet pub,
which is one of the last
Sailor-town pubs left in Liverpool.
Liverpool is regarded
internationally as the
as the spiritual home
of the sea shanty,
so We're bringing the music back
here Where it should be sung.
[MAN SINGS, STRIKE THE BELL]
A quick wetting of the whistle
and I'm ready to join in.
[ALL SINGING] "Look out to windward,
you can see it's going to blow
"Look at the glass,
you can see that it is fell
"And we wish that he would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell..."
Julia's husband is shantyman
Derek Batters.
"There is the larboard Watch,
they're longing for their bunks
"They're looking out to windward,
they can see a great swell
"And they're Wishing that
the second mate
"Would strike, strike the bell..."
The shantyman had the important
task of keeping up morale on deck
and he would vary the song
to match the task at hand.
"Look at the glass,
you can see that it's fell
"And we wish that you would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell..."
There were short drag shanties for
jobs needing quick bursts of energy
and long drag shanties, which gave
sailors a rest between hauls.
Derek is singing a pump shanty,
used when pumping the bilges of the
ship to prevent it from sinking.
"And he's Wishing that the second
mate would strike, strike the bell.
"Strike the bell, second mate,
let's go below..."
But pump shanties also work rather
well for swilling pints to -
an excellent Way to end my day.
"See that it's fell,
"And we wish that you would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell.
"Strike the bell,
second mate, let's go below
"Look out to windward,
you can see it going to blow
"Look at the glass,
you can see that it's fell
"And I wish that you would hurry up
and strike, strike the bell!"
Bravo I
[CHEERING]
Today, I'm continuing my journey,
travelling south-west on the Wirral
line towards Chester.
Chester was a Welcome break
for Victorians
from the grime and frantic pace
of the industrial cities.
But I'm not stopping. I'm changing to
the mid-Cheshire line.
I've travelled from salty Liverpool
to leafy Cheshire.
Bradshaw's tells me that,
over a distance of
two-and-three-quarter miles,
almost from Ashley to Knutsford,
stretches the fine park
belonging to Lord Egerton.
At onetime, it was 250,000 acres.
I shall get off the train at
Knutsford. It seems to me that
Tatton Hall could be a good place
to explore Victorian life,
both upstairs and downstairs.
- Have a good day.
- Thank you very much. You too.
A couple of miles from Knutsford
station lies an imposing
neoclassical country house.
The Egertons were highly regarded
members of the aristocracy.
This was the part of society least
touched by the upheavals
of the 19th century.
The aristocracy may have dabbled in
industrial investments, or banking,
but they exercised hereditary power
in Westminster,
the Army, and the Empire.
Their large country houses
relied on highly skilled servants
and Carolyn Latham,
from the Cheshire East Council,
knows all about life downstairs
working for the Egertons.
Carolyn, an enormous
establishment like Tatton Park,
how many staff did it take to run?
Over the years, somewhere between
perhaps 40 and 20 was quite typical.
How many best guest rooms
are there in Tatton Park?
This main block of the mansion has
eight guest bedrooms,
all with ensuite dressing rooms.
The middle section of the mansion
here is the family's more intimate,
personal, smaller apartments,
but about eight good guests could be
situated Within the household.
An invitation to an Egerton
house party was much sought-after.
On these hectic occasions,
the servants moved smartly up
and downstairs to attend to the
needs of master and mistress.
Well, the kitchens are very large,
although notably lacking in modern
conveniences and machinery.
Let's start with the people
who were here.
What were the butler's duties?
So, the butler is... his main duties
are around making sure that
household's running smoothly,
so he's looking after the
male servants,
the grooms, the footmen,
he's making sure that all the male
servants are all in the right
places at the right time.
That the dinnefis served on time,
the drinks are served on time.
You know, he waits on as well.
He's there when the master of
the household is around -
the butler wouldn't be
far away from him.
Domestic service was
Victorian Britain's
largest source of
employment for women.
At Tatton Hall, the butler,
the housekeeper and the chef
were at the top of the pecking order,
While a housemaid was at the bottom.
What was life like for the most
humble housemaid?
Well, quite long and hard
I would think.
They were up early,
they're the first up,
maybe half five, six o'clock
in the morning.
They're getting the fireplaces
ready for the other servants,
the higher-up servants as well
as for the household.
Serving breakfast trays,
cleaning bedrooms, emptying bedpans.
The housekeeper would have made
sure their time was really full
and accounted for.
They would have
their set break times,
but also those lowest housemaids
and scullery maids, you know,
there was a hierarchy Within even
the servants eating,
so they sat at the end.
They didn't really get to have
the conversations
that the others were having, so
their whole clay was very structured
and they'd have gone to bed
really quite late as well.
I'm travelling back in time,
to the heyday of Tatton Hall,
to put my skills to the
test as an under-butler,
eager to make a good impression
on my rather stern superiors.
Will there be much more to be
polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?
Considerably more, Mr Portillo.
Considerably more.
I think a little bit more
elbow grease is required.
Ah, I can see you set very
high standards, Mrs Cartwright,
here at Tatton Park. Indeed, we do.
What we require, Mr Portillo, is
20% polish and 80% elbow grease.
What time would her ladyship
be requiring her tea, Mr Douglas?
I think I'm correct in
saying, Mrs Cartwright,
- her ladyship requested tea at four?
- Four o'clock, yes, on the dot.
- Four o'clock, Mr Portillo.
- On the dot, Mr Douglas.
How's it going now?
A vast improvement, yes.
Can you see your face in them?
Unfortunately, I can, Mrs Cartwright.
Tea, Lady Egerton.
- Shall I pour, Lady Egerton?
- No, I shall pour.
Yes, your ladyship.
Mr Portillo, a word, if I may.
Your shoes, your socks,
your trousers.
Something amiss, Mr Douglas?
One can only assume
that your previous employer
set a certain lower standard.
It's just as well that
I have other career options.
In the mid-1800s, a factory job might
have tempted a domestic servant
tired of responding to the
master's summoning bell.
A job in the city offered privacy and
freedom at the end
of the working day...
but urban and factory life
often shocked the new
worker from the countryside
and it appalled many in the middle
classes, who read about it
for the first time in the novels
of a pioneering female author.
I'm back in Knutsford to explore
the life of Elizabeth Gaskell
in conversation with Diana Stenson
from the local heritage centre.
Diana, What is this rather
extraordinary structure?
This is the Gaskell Tower
and it is the only commemoration
that we have officially
in the town to commemorate
our most famous daughter.
So, is she quite
highly regarded in Knutsford?
She was very highly regarded.
She was liked very much as
a child when she lived here
and, of course, when she Went on
to have this successful career
and all the things that she wrote,
some of them had
enormous social consequences.
She was very highly regarded and the
family were very regarded as well.
And What do you think was
Elizabeth Gaskell's legacy?
That she was the first female
social novelist of serious matters.
A sort of female Dickens?
Very much so,
and they were good friends.
Elizabeth Gaskell's Cranford was
first published as a serial
in Charles Dickens' journal,
Household Words, in 1851.
It's her most famous book,
a collection of comic sketches
which affectionately portray
changing small-town customs.
Gaskell drew on her own
experience of a happy
childhood in Knutsford,
Where she was raised by her aunt.
Cranford is famously set in
and about Knutsford.
Is that very clear in the novel?
I think anybody that lived
around here would have recognised
Knutsford as this lovely little
cosy country market town
but quite a distance, as it would
seem in those days, to the
huge industrial belching chimneys
that we had in Manchester.
The railway comes to Knutsford
in 1862,
long after Cranford is published.
Do the railways get a look in
in the Gaskell novels?
They do. She wrote one particular
short story called Lady Ludlow
and it was heralding the arrival,
or the building,
of the railways in this area.
And the railway was all happening
and, blow me, Lady Ludlow decided,
virtually at the last minute,
when they're about to
build a bend,
"I'm not selling you the land after
all." So, it all fell apart.
And What was her attitude
to the railways?
She had a feeling of the mood
of the railways
because here We're sitting in an
agricultural area, railway's coming,
then the railways are arriving
and it speeded everything up.
People thought in a different Way
with the railway.
And so we would have our seasons
here,
which was What dictated What Went on
on the farms,
and then the railways
were speeding up
and it seemed to alter people's
perception of time.
Young Elizabeth moved
to Manchester
when she married William Gaskell
in 1832.
The city opened her eyes to the
plight of the urban working classes,
inspiring her to write her
first book - Mary Barton.
She was the first person to write
What you would call social novels.
She touched on and exposed a great
deal of the disgraceful things that
were going on towards the workers
in the Industrial Revolution.
There were hundreds of workers
coming in, nay, thousands,
from agricultural land,
from all over the North West,
coming in to work in these mills, having no idea
that they'd be living
in disgraceful cellars.
They had ho... There was ho sort of
sewage, there was nothing.
It was dreadful,
and she exposed all that.
She had a lot of trouble, socially,
because she was ostracised over
a lot of these things, but she stuck
to it and we owe her a huge debt
in telling us What was going on.
People who only lived
a mile or two away had no idea.
Elizabeth Gaskell's books were a
counterpoint to the optimism
that the Victorian public had
experienced at the Great Exhibition.
She reminds us that Britain's
prosperous position
as the Workshop
of the world carried a human cost.
Her work is a valuable Window
on the grimmer realities of
the Industrial Revolution.
The thing that most determined
Victorian architecture was glass
from St Helens, and no industry
made greater use of it
than the railways with their
stunning stations.
Elizabeth Gaskell perceived that the
trains were changing not only
the rural landscape
but also the country way of life.
Although, at Tatton Park,
rigid social structures endured.
As for my performance as an
under-butler, I think I would have
been given, in the Words of the sea
shanty, the heave-ho.
Next time, I'm blown away
by beauty...
We just soared over the valley,
absolutely beautiful.
I work up a sweat,
the Victorian way...
Stoking up the fire, giving the
locomotive a bit of oomph.
Builds good biceps, that.
And experience the
ride of my life.
[THEY SCREAM]
[END THEME]