The secrets of the past are all around us, hidden in our streets,
buried under our feet, and in this series,
I'll be uncovering these secrets
as I explore Britain's Most Historic Towns.
I'll be deciphering physical clues...
It's like great early animation.
...and getting to know some extraordinary characters
who are often overlooked.
His nickname was The Uncrowned King of Scotland. Really?
With the help of Ben Robinson's eye in the sky,
I'll discover which towns across the UK reveal the most
about each period in British history and find out how those stories
still resonate today.
You could call it the world's first overdraft authorisation.
SHE GRUNTS It's quite overwhelming.
From the adventurous Elizabethans, to the elegant Georgian's,
from medieval knights, through to the height of empire,
I'll tell the story of an era through the story of a single town.
Today, I'm going to discover how a town's success during Britain's
Great Industrial Age created a workshop of radical ideas
that changed the world...
...where principled, working people endured great pain
to ensure the liberty of the enslaved.
Lincoln writes from the White House, saying how he was truly stunned
that people who were taking the bread out of their children's
mouths, that nonetheless, they supported what he had to say.
...where brilliant writers and relentless campaigners
embodied a never-say-die spirit that lives on.
We see injustice and we're prepared to do something about it
because we won't tolerate it.
If you really want to get a taste of the revolution that happened
during Britain's industrial heyday,
Manchester is the place to come.
Modern Manchester, with a population of over half a million,
has almost become a byword for successful regeneration.
World-class sport, science and education,
a national media hub,
an enviable public transport system
and rampant redevelopment
are leading the way.
The 20th century, when Britain's industrial base ebbed away,
wasn't kind to Manchester, but now it's back right where it belongs,
a northern powerhouse pumping the rich blood of economic vitality
and revolutionary identity around Britain,
a role it's been performing for centuries.
Originally a Roman fort, Manchester's position
on the crossroads of medieval trade routes,
and its proximity to the Atlantic,
established it as a key merchant town.
But its golden age arrived as it became the fulcrum of Britain's
first industrial revolution from the 1780s onwards.
The harnessing of steam power drove highly mechanised production
on a vast scale.
It brought great riches for a privileged few,
but for the factory workers, it was low wages, cramped housing
and continued disenfranchisement.
But out of these dark, satanic mills,
would emerge radical new ideas
and a spirit of activism that would ripple out across Britain
through the 19th, into the 20th century and beyond.
And so many of these revolutionary ripples started
right here in Manchester.
Back in 1844, a gifted novelist called Benjamin Disraeli
had one of his characters express a telling thought
when a friend proposed a visit to Athens.
"The age of ruins is passed", he said, "Have you seen Manchester?
"Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens."
By the time that Disraeli was prime minister, some 30 years later,
Manchester was an even more impressive metropolis,
heaving with factories, with great civic buildings
and with game-changing thinkers.
It was a city ripe with possibilities.
And all of this because of a century of breakneck change which made
Manchester world-famous.
And yet going back to 1775,
there wasn't a single mill in the city.
So how did Manchester change so fast?
To find out, I've come to what became known as Cottonopolis...
...to meet local historian Jonathan Schofield.
Great to see you. Hello.
Now, Manchester's almost synonymous with the Industrial Revolution.
So how did it play out here?
What happened in this city?
Well, you have to go before the Industrial Revolution
to the whole system, which was called the domestic system,
and that's individuals, individual families producing cotton cloth.
So this is people spinning and weaving at home.
Yeah, we've got the example here.
You got one of those many buildings - which you can still see scattered
across the city centre -
a three-storey building.
On the top story, you've got this row of windows.
These windows up there. The windows there.
One long row of windows, which is a workshop,
which allows the lights to come in so you can do all the fiddly work
to do with textiles.
So what you get is hand-powered production in vast quantities
of cotton cloth and cotton becomes the, well, to use a modern phrase,
cool fabric of the time.
So it becomes a fashion, it's adopted by everybody,
everyone wants to buy cotton,
Manchester becomes the epicentre of cotton production.
The lives of Manchester's handloom weavers and domestic producers
across the country were about to be revolutionised.
An entrepreneur called Richard Arkwright had shown
what could be achieved in a new type of workshop called a factory.
Richard Arkwright has a beautiful mill in the Peak District,
called Cromford Mill, and that's water-powered.
And he thinks, "Well, where's the big exchange for cotton?
"It's in Manchester.
"So I've got these steam engines now".
S0 in the 1780s, he opens the world's first
steam- powered factory.
The success of Arkwright's methods, encouraged investors to pour money
into Manchester, with huge new textile factories
sprouting up like mushrooms.
Of all the factors that came together,
how did the planets kind of come into alignment
to create the perfect situation for Manchester?
I think it's literally all those factors of an established
textile business, a raw material coming in, an established workforce
that sort of knew what it was doing, entrepreneurial spirit,
the raw...the raw materials of production, ie, coal beneath you.
And absolutely, that steam-power moment.
These new steam engines needed a constant supply
of coal delivered to the door.
Ben Robinson has sent his drone up to take a look at the transport
network that would do the job,
setting the mould for Manchester and industrial Britain.
The drone's perfectly positioned now.
I'm looking at the Bridgewater Canal.
And it gouges a great waterway through the landscape,
where none existed before.
Now, the whole idea of this was to get coal from
the Duke of Bridgewater's mines up in the in the Worsley area
to the north-west of Manchester, right into where it was needed,
to the steam-powered industry of the centre of Manchester.
And once it tied in with the Rochdale Canal,
you're suddenly linked into the whole of the north of England.
And what I'm looking for here is the next phase of the work.
I'm just looking at the junction here.
Yeah, a new branch heading right round to the south and I can see
it curving away here,
links up to the River Mersey, it links up to the sea.
This makes Manchester one of the most connected places
on the planet. And it's all down to water transport.
Oh, we've actually got canal boat on it as well.
Fantastic.
It would have been a whole lot busier
back in the Duke of Bridgewatefls time.
The Industrial Revolution was under way,
and as the 19th century began,
it was that famous defeat of the French and Spanish at sea,
in 1805, that really boosted Manchester's rise.
The Battle of Trafalgar had cemented the dominance of the Royal Navy
and the greatest threat to Britain's expansion and trade overseas
had been removed.
There was a huge global demand for cotton cloth
and there was plenty of work in the mills.
This stimulated massive economic migration.
From around 1790, thousands who'd struggled from harvest to harvest
in rural communities flocked here for a steady wage,
crowding into shoddy rows of basic houses.
These terraces are what replaced them around 1870.
But to find out what life here was like before that,
I'm meeting Dr Michaela Hume, an expert on the history
of this Ancoats area for.
Michaela. Hello.
This looks like a lovely place to live now,
but I presume it's completely different
to what it would have been back in the day.
Yeah. So now this area is very hip, it's very trendy.
It's the sort of place you want to live in Manchester.
But if you went back to 1850, this is hell on Earth.
This is the last place you'd want to live in the centre of Manchester.
And what was the density of occupation in houses like this?
Absolutely packed.
So you would have had maybe two families in the basement,
in a room, maybe ten-by-ten foot square, no beds.
So everybody would have slept on the floor, or on just straw.
And if there was a bed, you know, you would have got maybe six people
in that bed.
No provisions for human waste.
So that is literally in the streets.
There's also animal waste
cos a lot of people did keep animals, they kept pigs.
So there's dungs on the corner of the road.
So not only was your house contaminated with the stench
of everybody, disease was rife,
you also couldn't get away from it when you stepped outside.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because you couldn't see to the end of the road
from the smoke of the factories.
And what were the wages like?
Not great. If you wanted to earn a decent wage,
you needed to be a spinner or even an overseer.
But if you were, say, a throwster spinner,
which was the lower end of spinner,
you're earning about between seven and eight shillings.
Now, if you're trying to rent a terraced house,
you're looking upwards of six shillings.
That's all your money.
So for most people, just rent, you know, would have taken
the bulk of their wage.
And it must have been dangerous work as well in the mills.
I mean, if you suffered an injury, presumably, that was it.
Absolutely.
As soon as you were injured, the guy who ran the factory
didn't want to know, you were out, you know, out.
There was no welfare. No.
Let's get somebody else able-bodied in.
Yeah, I think when you stand back and look at it,
you look at the Industrial Revolution
and do a couple of centuries later, it looks like progress.
But to the people going through it, it must have felt like anything but.
Yeah, especially for working-class people.
Some would have benefited probably more than others.
But for your labouring class and your lower working-class,
those that were handloom weavers before, they particularly struggled.
Hardship for the British working poor was about to get much worse.
As the efficiency of machinery increased,
less human labour was needed.
Workers were laid off and the gap between the haves
and the have-nots widened.
To add to the darkening, febrile mood in Britain,
revolution was sweeping through Europe like a contagion -
guillotines slicing down on aristocratic necks,
cutting down centuries of oppression,
emboldening previously unheard radical voices.
And here, in Britain, it was in Manchester that those voices
were heard the loudest.
I'm in Manchester to find out how the most successful
Industrial Revolution town
became a radical, potent force for political
and social change in 19th century Britain.
I've had a taste of how tough life was for the working poor here -
slum housing, brutally long hours and declining wages.
So with all that suffering, surely something has to be done.
I mean, Britain is a democracy.
There would be MPs in Parliament representing
these people's interests.
Well, not so much in the 1800s.
Incredibly, after the general election of 1818,
sparsely-populated Cornwall
sent 40 MPs to parliament, while densely-packed Manchester
sent precisely none.
To find out how this city led the drive
to overhaul Britain's political map,
I've come to meet historian Dr Janette Martin.
Janette, hello. Hello.
What was essentially wrong with British democracy
in the early 1800?
Well, the problem was it just wasn't very democratic
because places like Manchester, Bradford,
Leeds, Newcastle, Birmingham,
they were driving the prosperity of the country at that point in time.
And yet, they had no voice at Westminster.
Yeah. So how do they start fighting for that?
Most important of all, they used print,
so they used things like newspapers.
And a really important newspaper was The Manchester Observer.
So London had radical papers, but the Manchester Observer
was unique in that its focus was on the industrialising north.
So what kinds of things are bring covered in the newspaper?
The Observer was incredibly provocative and scurrilous,
so it used to poke fun at the government.
It was very direct in the kind of demands it wanted.
And as well as arguing for political reform,
were they going as far as to organise protests?
One of the sort of ways in which they built a mass movement
for parliamentary reform, was to hold meetings and invite gifted,
charismatic speakers to explain, you know,
what would it mean if you had universal suffrage.
So there's one particular meeting then that that goes down in history.
Yes. So the meeting happens on August 16th, 1819.
Henry Hunt had been invited to speak in Manchester
by the editor of The Manchester Observer, James Wroe.
And the ordinary people were really, really interested in this
celebrity speaker who, despite being a gentlemanly leader,
was really interested in helping ordinary people get the vote.
That meeting took place at a field called St Peter's,
the scene of the infamous crushing of a peaceful protest,
that came to be called Peterloo.
That wall, over there, is the last remaining structure of the area
that was St Peter's field.
And so Henry Hunt and the other speakers were on the hustings.
They were on a raised platform.
They were there to address...
Roughly 50-60,000 people were estimated
to have come to Manchester that day.
It's a huge number. It's a vast number.
And that's why the authorities were so scared.
It was the largest meeting that had ever really been held.
Yeah. So what happened that clay?
So just as Henry Hunt was starting to speak,
the magistrates, who were in a room overlooking the field,
sent word to the Manchester Yeomanry to go in and arrest the speakers.
The Manchester Yeomanry were on horseback.
They had sabres.
They cut their way through to the hustings
and they arrested the speakers.
But can you imagine, mounted soldiers going into a packed field,
the panic that ensued?
So at the end of that afternoon, 15 people were dead.
Three more would later die of their injuries,
and up to 700 people were injured.
And was this written about in the newspapers?
It certainly was.
So The Manchester Observer was the first to come
up with the phrase Peterloo,
and it was coined by James Wroe, the editor.
And it was a very deliberate, satirical pun
on the Battle of Waterloo... Yeah.
...a heroic event that happened only four years earlier.
And ironically, one of the people killed on the fields
of St Peter's field was someone who'd fought at Waterloo.
Yeah, very, very much framing it as a battle. Absolutely.
While the authorities tried to cover up
the unprovoked brutality with fake news,
sympathetic Britons sought to help those suffering in the aftermath.
This is Manchester's John Ryland's Library, where I've been given
special access to an extraordinary record of the money granted
by the Peterloo Relief Fund, a nationwide subscription
set up to support the families of the injured and killed.
So here's John Rhodes.
We've got a very detailed record of the injuries that he sustained.
"John Rhodes, sabre cut on the head, by which he lost much blood
"A woman saw him wandering about, bloody, and took him into her house,
"shaved off the hair and put on a plaster.
"He was dreadfully bruised internally,
"so he's not since held up his head.
"And he died about the 18th of November."
And the reason he's recorded here, in this book,
which is about providing poor relief,
is that his father received some funds.
This is really important, because at the time,
there's this alternative version of events emerging,
where this is a violent riot that's being put down
and we know that that wasn't the case.
We know that this is a peaceful protest and that this is the brutal
repression of that peaceful protest.
13 years after the terror of Peterloo,
the Great Reform Act of 1832 was passed by Parliament.
67 new constituencies with MPs were created, including Manchester.
But the hand that giveth also taketh away.
More men now had the vote, but only the wealthy ones -
the factory workers certainly weren't going to the polls,
and although women had never had the vote,
now, they're specifically excluded in law
and it would take another 90 years
to overturn that piece of legislation.
Meanwhile, a lack of democratic representation wasn't the only
concern for Britain's impoverished workers.
This is Manchester's Free Trade Hall.
In 1976, The Sex Pistols played a legendary gig here,
which launched the punk rock scene in the UK.
But this building was originally designed
to honour the legacy of a man
with even more anti-establishment leanings.
His name was Richard Cobden,
and he didn't want anarchy in the UK, he wanted reform.
Already a successful manufacturer of printed textiles in Manchester,
in the late 1830s,
Cobden focused his energy on the hated Corn Laws.
For years, these laws had levied tariffs on imported cereals
so the great landowners could charge the Earth
for their domestic products, helping keep them rich
and the working poor half-starved and destitute.
To learn more about the Anti-Corn Law League
that Cobden spearheaded, I'm meeting historian Dr Simon Morgan.
Hi, Alice. Hi.
So, that's Cobden. It is, the man himself.
Why did he become so politically engaged?
Well, he's very much concerned that the economic ills
of the 1830s and '40s, there's a huge sort of downturn that begins
in the late 1830s.
The Corn Laws are making these worse, not just by increasing
food prices, but also by depriving people of employment
because he believes that other countries are retaliating
against Britain's tariffs on grain
by introducing tariffs on British goods.
So if you get rid of the Corn Laws, it's a virtuous circle.
Not only does bread become cheaper, you've also got more trade
with the likes of the United States and Russia and elsewhere
buying goods from Lancashire.
So people can afford to employ more hands in the factories.
And of course, eventually, we do have the repeal of the Corn Laws.
Peel repeals the Corn Laws.
Does he do that because of Cobden?
Is Cobden really instrumental in that?
There has been some controversy over this because Peel himself
was moving to a free trade position even before 1846.
But Cobden had kind of planted the seeds.
Yes, I think that's true.
He keeps it really high on the political agenda.
What does Cobden do then - hang up his boots?
Well, it doesn't bear fruit immediately.
But in 1860, he goes over to Paris
and he negotiates a commercial treaty with the French,
which becomes the basis of a network
of treaties across Europe over the next ten years.
And that has been seen as a forerunner
of the European Common Market.
Cobden is an idealist.
He believes that the more countries trade with one another,
the less likely they are to want to go to war with one another,
and that you can actually promote universal peace and harmony
by freeing up trade.
I like him. He does sound like a bit of a hero.
Men like Cobden sympathised with the working poor,
but away from the industrial heartlands,
the increasingly influential middle classes of the South
had no idea how harsh factory life still was.
But in an age of improving transport and literacy,
a quieter type of radical would bear witness and spread the word.
And so it, would be great writing that would keep
the Manchester revolution rolling.
I've come to Manchester, the original Northern Powerhouse,
to trace its role as the driving force
behind industrial and political change in 19th century Britain.
Protests against stark inequalities
had led to a somewhat fairer democracy.
But it was the democratisation of travel
that really got things moving.
By the 1840s, there were train tracks across Britain,
but one of the earliest and most important
was built right here in Manchester.
Ben is taking a look at the extraordinary feats of engineering
required to get the world's first
public intercity railway up and running.
I'm looking at the railway from Liverpool up there to Manchester.
It was the first to use just steam locomotives,
no horse drawn carriages like they were on earlier railways,
and the first used double track all the way through.
But as George Stephenson came towards Manchester,
he hit a problem.
And the problem was this,
the Sankey Valley running through the middle.
And there was also a canal, the Sankey Canal.
What to do?
This, the Sankey Viaduct, never been done before on this scale.
It's an amazingly impressive structure.
I can see one, two, three, four, five...
...nine arches here,
and it's called the Nine Arches locally.
Because the canal was still in use,
the masts of the barges had to be able to pass underneath.
So the canal company actually insisted that the arches
were a minimum of 60 feet high or so.
Now, there may have been bigger railway viaducts
built in the world after this,
but this was the one that proved the concept.
This was the one that said, "We can do it."
Transport links were opening up right across Europe,
and in 1842, a 22-year-old German arrived in Salford
to get some work experience at his father's cotton factory.
His name was Friedrich Engels.
I'm meeting up with Jonathan Schofield again
outside the oldest public library in the English speaking world
to find out why this young man's observations of Manchester
had such an impact.
This is amazing. This is the famous Chetham's Library.
It is very famous,
it's the oldest complete structure in Manchester,
filled with the atmosphere of a myriad
of very important people who came here.
The dismounts are just filled with Dickens, and Disraeli
and Benjamin Franklin, and of course, Marx and Engels.
So, how did Engels end up here?
Because, I mean, he comes from modern day Germany.
He does, he's a German. He ends up here because, basically,
his dad wants to get him out of Germany.
He's been called the scabby sheep of the family by his father.
Really? Yeah.
And his father doesn't like all these progressive radical ideas
he's taken on board in Germany. So he says,
"Hie thee hence to Manchester where I part-own a factory."
So his father sends him here to help manage his mill,
but, actually, Engels ends up being much more interested
in the condition of the people working there.
Well, Manchester is as big as Berlin.
There's no German city as big as Manchester, aside from Berlin.
And it's...oof! Absolutely heaving with people,
and heaving with people who had a fairly miserable life.
Well, yes and no.
I mean, of course, there was the middle class doing very well
in the periphery, but he immediately sees that,
that in the breezy heights of Cheetham Hill,
you've got the big mansions,
and then in the middle, you've got this foetid mess of humanity.
So, presumably, he's seeing the workers in the mill,
but does he actually go to where they live as well?
Well, this is the remarkable thing about Engels,
he's a young man in a hurry,
and he wants to really get to see the nitty gritty
of the life of the workers.
Now, we don't really know where he meets this young woman,
but he meets a young woman called Mary Burns,
who's from an Irish background,
living in a hellhole of a place called the 13th District.
And he would not be able to walk amongst
the very poor quarters of the city of Manchester
unless she was with him,
because otherwise he loved his clothes, Engels.
He was a smart looking gentleman.
He would've been robbed immediately.
So she really showed him the people.
So she's really important to the story.
Oh, key to it!
She is his passport.
Mary Burns had kept Engel's out of trouble in Manchester,
but it was his meeting in Paris with a fellow radical
that would change the course of political history.
That radical's name was Karl Marx.
And where does Marx come from? Well, he's German as well.
Karl Marx is German, of course,
and so they meet in Paris,
and they just sit down and talk for hours, and hours and hours.
And then that cements the closest, most important
political friendship in world history.
So they've met up, they're aware of each other's work,
they've had this meeting of minds in Paris,
and then they end up here in Manchester.
Well, Engels comes back to Britain,
and he brings Marx with him and says,
"See for yourself. Come along."
Marx is very willing to do that.
So they come here to Chetham's,
where they sit at this desk and chat and get books out.
Not the most interesting books, one has to say,
but if you're trying to base your theories on political economy,
they're fantastically interesting for them.
It's about fishery revenues,
and public revenues coming through the kingdom
and to do with the cotton trade and the cotton industry as well,
which is the prime example of this industrial growth.
Inside the library, I'm heading for the desk where Marx and Engels
actually sat and collaborated.
Three years of research and study
eventually led to the publication in 1848
of a slim but extremely heavyweight pamphlet.
It was this.
This is a copy of the original
Manifest cler Kommunistischen Partei.
It's the Communist Manifesto.
There it is in German.
My German's really poor, so I'm going to cheat...
...and read it in the English translation.
I'm not going to read all of it to you.
I'm going to give you a very neat precis.
Here's the beginning.
"A spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism."
And then if I skip to the very end,
which doesn't take long, it's only about 50 pages in total.
"Let the ruling classes tremble at a communistic revolution,
"the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.
"They have a world to win.
"Working men of all countries unite."
Isn't it amazing that such a small book
had such a huge impact in 20th century?
This vivid call to arms would become arguably the single most influential
political publication of all time,
its theories underpinning the Russian Revolution of 1979
and the creation of the Soviet Union.
At the time, however, its impact was limited.
Now, amongst the wealthy,
well-educated middle classes,
there may have been an abstract recognition
of a need for social change.
But at the same time, it was difficult to imagine
just how dire life could be for working class men and women.
And then it's impossible to empathise with them.
It would be a Manchester housewife with a talent for writing
great stories that would help change this.
I've come to the house of Elizabeth Gaskell, and it's in Victoria Park,
which was a very smart suburb just to the south of Manchester's
19th century industrial centre.
Dr Fariha Shaikh is going to help me understand
why it was the writing of Gaskell and not Friedrich Engels
that opened the eyes of the middle classes
to the plight of Britain's working poor.
Fariha, hi. Hi.
This is Elizabeth Gaskell's house, it's lovely. It is.
And this is a museum now? It is a museum now.
Why is Elizabeth Gaskell so important?
Because of the way in which she portrays working life in Manchester.
Her novels, Mary Barton, then North and South are the novels,
if you like, that depict the condition
of the working classes in England,
and specifically within Manchester as well.
It seems like quite a strange subject to be writing about.
I mean, she's a quite...l mean, obviously,
very comfortably well-off middle class woman.
I would almost have expected her to be writing romantic novels
rather than something as gritty as that.
Yeah, I can see where that's coming from.
Her novels do have a romantic plot,
so her female heroines do end up getting married.
But within that, she's also really, really interested
in using her fiction and using her novels
to bring the plight of the working classes
to her middle class readership.
So she sees her fiction as a means of opening windows
into what the life of a male factory worker would look like.
Was there quite a kind of moral impetus behind what she was doing,
or was she effectively just exploiting that kind of
gritty lifestyle?
I think there's a very, very keen social consciousness
at work in her novel.
So she's really interested in the idea that her fiction
can bring the plight of the working classes
to her middle class readership
for the express purposes of changing the way
in which they think about their factories,
the way in which they think about the conditions of their employees.
So, it really brings her readership to a new awareness
of what capitalism is doing, what industrialisation is doing.
The interior of Gaskell's house
records the domestic side of 19th century middle class life.
But I'm on the hunt for evidence of the powerful impression
Gaskell's first novel had on Britain's most popular ever author.
Oh, this is incredibly special.
I'm sitting in Elizabeth Gaskell house,
looking at the original letter that Charles Dickens sent her.
Isn't that wonderful?
31st of January, 1850.
Just imagine her, perhaps sitting right here, opening this letter.
"Dear Mrs Gaskell..." he says, "You might have seen that
"l'm starting a new weekly journal."
And he says to her that he doesn't know what she's up to.
"But I do honestly know
"that there is no living English writer whose aid
"l would desire to enlist
"in preference to the authoress of Mary Barton,
"a book that most profoundly affected and impressed me."
I mean, somebody the stature of Dickens writing to you,
it's like having just published something
and JK Rowling writes to you to say how much she appreciates your work.
And it's just, oh, it's amazing.
She must have been so excited to open this letter, right here.
The plight of Britain's industrial workers may have been so severe
that it compelled authors like Elizabeth Gaskell to write about it.
Across the Atlantic, enslaved people on the plantations
faced an even greater struggle.
And once again,
the people of Manchester would take up the fight.
I've been exploring Manchester, the best place to see
how the harshness of life during Britain's
early industrial era sparked a revolutionary spirit
that would change Britain and the world.
At the heart of Manchester in the industrial age
were the cotton mills,
employing thousands of workers and dominating the local economy.
But the mills were completely dependent on a supply of raw cotton
coming in from the Deep South of America.
Of course, that cotton was picked by vast armies
of enslaved African-Americans.
In 1861, civil war broke out in America,
with slavery the major flash point.
Abraham Lincoln's government supported abolition,
whilst the southern states, dependent on slave labour,
found such a policy abhorrent.
It may have all been happening thousands of miles away
from Manchester, but the ripples of war would be keenly felt here.
To learn more, I'm meeting Dr Natalie Zacek
from the University of Manchester.
Natalie, what was happening in the American Civil War
that had such an impact on Manchester?
Basically, an economic meltdown.
During the Civil War, the Union Navy blockaded
all the major southern ports, so the cotton wasn't getting
out of the south, it wasn't coming to the Manchester area.
So therefore, there was no work for the cotton workers
and they were mostly thrown out of work and had only
really private and religious charity to rely on to support themselves
and their families.
And what was the reaction to that amongst the workers
in terms of what they thought was going on in America?
They felt quite strongly that the struggle against slavery
was a noble one and that even though it was directly harming them
and their families, that it was something that they thought
was right and they greatly supported it.
And how did they express their support for the Union?
They held a big meeting of working people at the Free Trade Hall
on New Year's Eve, 1862, where they put together a letter,
which they sent to Abraham Lincoln,
in which they expressed their hatred of slavery and their support of his
and the Union Army's attempts to eradicate it.
And how did... Did Lincoln respond to them?
He did.
And not only did he respond, but very quickly,
considering that he was probably rather busy at the time. Yeah.
Lincoln writes them a letter from the White House,
saying how moved he was to receive their letter
and that he was truly stunned
that people who were losing everything, taking the bread
out of their children's mouths, that nonetheless they supported
what he had to say.
At this point, is it possible to say where Manchester was with,
I suppose, the anti-slavery movement,
as regards the rest of the UK?
Manchester was really the heart of the anti-slavery movement.
Many famous white and black abolitionists,
including people such as Frederick Douglass,
came through Manchester to raise funds and awareness.
Frederick Douglass himself was a freed slave.
Well, actually, when he came to Britain,
he was only a runaway slave, um,
and eventually a number of wealthy abolitionists contributed funds
to buy him out of slavery, so that he would not risk
being arrested and returned back to his master's plantation.
You know, he was really quite fascinated by Manchester,
not just that it was such a strong city for abolitionists,
but that it was full of radical political and social movements.
From the fight against slavery to campaigning for affordable food,
from marching and dying for a voice in parliament
to the call for class war...
...19th-century Manchester is like a greatest hits of radical
movements and iconic change makers.
And we haven't even yet mentioned the town's most famous daughter.
Time magazine included her in the list of the 20th century's most
influential people, she was someone that went toe to toe
with the establishment, who suffered enormous personal hardship,
fighting for a fairer society for equality.
She was the firebrand women's rights activist, Emmeline Pankhurst.
Born in Manchester in 1858,
Emmeline grew up in a family steeped
in radical politics, but it was in the first decade of the 1900s
that she really made her mark.
I've come to the People's History Museum to get a sneak preview
of a remarkable antique textile that was paraded
at the great suffragette march in London's Hyde Park in 1908.
Oh, my goodness, it's huge.
And beautiful.
That's so impressive. The colours are so vivid.
Look at that, Manchester, first in the fight.
This is where the suffragette movement started.
"Founded by Mrs Pankhurst, 1903."
That's when she found the women's social and political union.
This is the fight for votes for women, for equality.
It's an important moment in Manchester's history.
It's a massively important moment in British history.
This delicate banner is a rare survivor from the era
and was only recently brought to the museum
by curator Jenny Mabbott.
Hello. Hello.
Jenny, I'm so excited about this banner.
How did you come to acquire it at the museum?
Well, we saw an auction listing for the banner
and we went and saw the banner
and realised it was authentic.
Where had it been all these years, though?
It had been with a small charity
in a filing cabinet, would you believe?
And then they decided to put it up for auction.
We bid and were outbid by a dealer,
but then we made contact with the dealer,
had a crowdfunding campaign, got lots of public support,
and then we were able to acquire the banner and
bring it home to Manchester.
That's just perfect as well, that it was crowdfunding
that brought it back here.
Yeah. Yeah.
Emmeline Pankhurst's campaign achieved its aim just a few weeks
after her death, when all adult women were finally given
the vote in 1928.
But her cause is still very much alive and kicking.
I'm meeting Caroline Pankhurst.
She's no relation,
but chose to change her name in honour of her heroine.
Caroline, tell me about the legacy of Emmeline Pankhurst
and how she's influenced you.
I first came to hear about Emmeline Pankhurst at a play
at the National Theatre,
and it had a massive impact realising
what struggle women had gone through to get women the vote.
Yeah.
And then it was a real eye-opener for me personally
to have an opportunity to then look at,
where are we still today?
Do you think Emmeline Pankhurst would be pleasantly surprised
or slightly disappointed by
where we've got to now with equality?
I don't think that she would be surprised
and I think she would be quite horrified
at how social media has added another
way of silencing and oppressing women.
So I think there are a lot of things that have changed in society
now that she would probably recognise need addressing.
The things that she fought for,
while she was very single-minded at the time
in terms of wanting to get women the vote,
so that we were able to participate in decision making,
what that ultimately was about striving towards,
we're still nowhere near.
So her legacy has to live on,
which is why it's so important
that Manchester has this statue here now.
And is it unusual in Manchester to have a statue of a woman?
So, would you believe it if I told you she's the first,
apart from a royal statue?
And that's...that's not good enough, is it?
She...she exists here and she inspires
the future generations.
And we need to see more role models.
We need to see more of these amazing women in history
peppered around our cities in the same way
that we've got these remarkable men from history peppered around them.
So many of these radical movements
seem to have started right here in Manchester.
What is it about Manchester?
I don't know. I think it's the northern grit.
I think it's that we...we keep going and we see injustice
and we're prepared to do something about it because we won't tolerate
it and we want change.
We are a city of change makers, and I, for one, am
very proud of that.
It's great to see that tradition of protests thriving
in this century.
But Emmeline Pankhurst's achievements
would be a rare high point
for Manchester throughout much of the 20th century.
The textile industry was decimated,
the engineering jobs that were created to replace it
had also dried up,
the turbulent, buoyant years of the 19th century
were consigned to history,
but they left an indelible imprint underneath it all.
Typified by the spirit of renewal transforming the city today,
19th-century Manchester and its people had refused
to suffer in silence.
Instead, this town collectively rose up,
becoming a powerhouse of progression,
reshaping Britain and the world far beyond.
I can't think of a more fitting way to end my time in Manchester
than to pay tribute to Emmeline Pankhurst
and to all the Manchester radicals,
those brave men and women who called out inequality
and injustice wherever they saw it,
who fought for the greater good, for what was right.
And their work goes on.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media