Brenda, you joined the Library straight from school at the age of 18 in 1956. What interested you in a job at the Rylands?

BJS: I had always been interested in book history and all aspects of the arts. On seeking my first job, I wrote to the University Library and was interviewed by Moses Tyson, the Librarian at the time. I found it very off-putting because he had the most dreadful squint; you couldn’t tell where he was looking. But there was no vacancy at that time, so that was that. Then I was a pupil at Withington Girls School. Edward Robertson was a governor of the school, and he was also Librarian of the Rylands. And he inquired if anybody wanted to work at the Rylands. So, I was sent for an interview. At that time, I’m not sure that I’d even heard of the Rylands and had certainly never been inside. I duly presented myself for interview with the Librarian and, after a brief discussion, he said, ‘When can you start?’ An absolute dream interview!

JRH: Of course, in those days, it wasn’t unusual for people to come directly from school to work at the Library. For example, David Riley [later Keeper of Printed Books] came straight from Manchester Grammar School, and my research on former staff members has shown that quite a number were recruited from Manchester Grammar School and Manchester High School for Girls.

You were employed initially as a library assistant. What did that involve?

BJS: I was one of about four library assistants working on the counter, which served the requests of the readers, mainly retrieving the books that they requested and ultimately returning them back to the shelves. We also dealt with recording the receipt of periodicals, which you found out at the University Library [JRH worked in the Periodicals Office there in 1984]; we had a similar system.

We were also given simple instructions in cataloguing new items, and our work was checked by senior staff. All catalogue entries were handwritten, and you had to write carefully. Fortunately, I was one of the better hand writers, mainly, I think, because, like you, I’m left-handed. We had dipping pens, and I was often sent back to redo the work that we’d done, because I’d splashed ink all over, you know, jabbing the pen in. We wrote them out in rough and then they [the senior staff] checked them and we did it in our best handwriting. And then we had to file them in the slip catalogue, which in some cases was quite difficult because the scheme of cataloguing was based on the British Museum scheme, which perhaps served the Museum at the time it was instituted, but it was a bit of a minefield for a lot of people. When you’ve got things like London administrative areas, and so on and so on.

As a relatively junior member of staff, presumably there were parts of the collections that you couldn’t access or work on without approval from a senior member of staff.

BJS: Oh no, you couldn’t. But the only place I was restricted in going to retrieve material for readers was the manuscripts. I could go into the Early Printed Books Room, and I could go into the Bible Room. But the manuscript material was always retrieved by and put back again by the manuscripts staff.

You mentioned cataloguing, but what other processes were you involved with, because of course this was long before computers arrived at the Library and everything was done manually?

BJS: Periodicals were done on the counter. The accessions were mostly done by Audrey Barnes, and she had a separate room, and there was an accessions register, which I know is similar to the ones that the Main Library (on The University of Manchester campus) had, because in the course of later work, I’ve looked at the Main Library accessions registers for things and it was pretty similar. And, of course, new books were given a running R number.

Another of my duties, before a professional photographer was appointed [Edward Bathe, in 1961], was to produce requested photographs using the antique Watson & Sons mahogany plate camera. I hope it has been preserved. [See Elizabeth Gow and others, ‘“Fraught with Possibilities of World-Wide Benefit”: Towards a History of Photography at the John Rylands Library’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 101.2 (2025), 15–33. https://www.manchesterhive.com/view/journals/bjrl/101/2/article-p15.xml.]

What else? Oh, I think one of the things that always impinged on me was that the Library had no concern about health and safety. The lift was a hydraulic lift operated by a rope, and the hydraulic power came from a pumping station at the bottom of Bridge Street [now the People’s History Museum], which also serviced the Town Hall and other buildings. Can you imagine it? I mean, it’s antediluvian, isn’t it? With the hydraulic system, it wasn’t always easy to stop the lift level with the floors. And the trolleys were ancient wooden things, nothing like the ones at the Main Library. But of course, they were all flatbed because you had to put big books on. And there was never any question as to whether you were actually capable of picking up these books. I was quite capable, but perhaps others were not.

JRH: I remember David Riley once saying that he managed to tip a whole trolley load of books down the lift shaft in his first week at work.There were also issues around working at height, weren’t there? I mean, I remember some of the ladders were a bit rickety.

BJS: Yes. I was quite happy to climb up all the steps and reach the books at the top, quite happy. But I certainly pushed for ladders with a handle at the side, at one point. And some of them were very heavy. And the doors [of the glass-fronted bookcases] weren’t easy to open and close. I’m sure you must have found that.

But having said I thought that they had not much idea of health and safety, I didn’t think they had much more at the University when I moved there.

JRH: Yes, it was a different age, wasn’t it? And things that were taken for granted then seem impossibly risky now.

BJS: Something else, which has just come into my mind, We had regular meetings of the Governors. They met in a room downstairs, the Council Chamber. And we used to have to set out blotting paper, notepads, ink, and pen nibs. I don’t know whether they ever used any of them, but that was often my task.

JRH: Sounds Edwardian.

BJS: Absolutely Edwardian. I mean, a lot of the governors were actually Edwardians, weren’t they?

JRH: As a member of staff, were you ever invited to attend meetings, or was it behind closed doors, as it were?

BJS: Oh, it was behind closed doors. I don’t know what the committee discussed, but we used to have to put out in the adjacent room, the Book Committee Room, all the recent books that had been acquired since the previous meeting so that they could see what the Library was acquiring. That was quite a job. Of course, the basic architecture of the Library, the style, made some of the things difficult, particularly where you had to go from one lift to the other up the sloping floor. Pushing a trolley load of books up there was quite a task.

I believe you were also involved in the distribution of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library.

BJS: Yes, the other great thing that we did was posting off the Bulletin. I was the subscription manager to the Bulletin at the time. They were sent all over the world. They were divided into two sections: there were exchanges, where we got something back from other institutions, and there were subscribers. And I used to do the invoices and that sort of thing. But when the Bulletins arrived from the printers, everything stopped in the Library and we put them in padded bags, and I also produced the labels that were stuck on the bags. And it was principally my job to organise that, and then get the Post Office to come and collect them. And I used to go around to the Post Office in Bridge Street, long since gone, to pay for it. And I remember one time I went in and they said to me, ‘They’re not going. You’ve got the addresses wrong.’ I said, ‘I haven’t got the addresses wrong at all.’ ‘Oh no, they haven’t been organised into one country and another country.’ I said, ‘That’s not our job, it’s your job.’ And I bought the stamps, and we had to stick the stamps on, but the best thing of everything – I think this is amusing – was we had to stamp ‘Printed Paper Reduced Rate’ on the bags. So, at the end of everything, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, get rid of the frustration!

Can you tell me about your subsequent career development? I understand that you became an Associate of the Library Association in 1967.

BJS: That’s right. Now, I did a part-time postal course for one of the exams. The exams are all very different now. In fact, it’s graduate now, of course, and was shortly after I got the accolade.

Oh, another thing that was purely of the time. If you think of the 1950s, people like Keith Farmery [subsequently Deputy University Librarian] and his generation were doing National Service. And when we were studying for the library exams, the lectures were held at UMIST [University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology]. In order for some strange reason to equate the fact that we were not doing National Service, we got at least two hours a week study time in the Library. But when National Service finished, that finished for us, but I started off like that.

JRH: That’s interesting. I didn’t know that at all.

BJS: And I had a gap where I sort of did half the exams and then did nothing more.

JRH: And can you remember when you were promoted to assistant librarian, presumably after 1967?

BJS: Oh yes, but the very fact that I had no degree was always against me, because I was never able to be promoted beyond the lowest grade of the librarians. The only person who actually did anything for me in that respect was Chris Hunt [University Librarian, 1991-2002], because he gave me two merit rises, which put me up to the bottom level of the next stage, sort of thing.

I imagine that the staff cohort in the 1950s and ’60s was small compared with today, or even with the 1980s when I started.

BJS: Oh yes, but we were all quite friendly with each other. But you know there were two common rooms. Do you remember two common rooms?

JRH: Well, that was before my time, but I knew that there was a senior common room and a (smaller) junior one next door.

BJS: Yes, well, the one that was the senior common room became the general common room eventually. And if you kept fairly quiet with an open ear, you found out lots of things. That’s what I did. But initially I occupied the junior common room until it was taken over for other purposes.

Was it quite formal in terms of staff relations and the hierarchy?

BJS: Oh, yes, you didn’t have casual conversations with the senior staff, really, not even after we were all having lunch together in the same room, you know, at lunchtime. This is where I learned quite a lot, where they were talking to themselves. All the senior staff were always addressed by their titles, never their first names. Right to the very end, Glenise Matheson [Keeper of Manuscripts] was always ‘Miss Matheson’ to me, and she was very keen on that.

JRH: I remember it was only quite late on when I became more senior that I would ever address Mr Riley as ‘David’. It was always ‘Mr Riley’. Not that he insisted on that; it just seemed the right thing to do, to address him as ‘Mr Riley’.

Can you tell us about the culture of the Library sixty or seventy years ago? Was it rather stuffy?

BJS: I suppose it was really. But somehow or other it suited me. Perhaps I was stuffy at the time.

JRH: Was there a strict dress code?

BJS: I was surprised when you mentioned that. There wasn’t really, but I think at the time most people thought they ought to be smartly dressed in that sort of a place. I think the only person who ever complained to anybody was me complaining to a female member of staff who persistently came in boots. I don’t mean walking boots; I mean fashion boots. I thought they were inappropriate and she took it to heart, and never came in them again.

JRH: It may be an anecdote or a false memory, but I thought that somebody once said that male staff were only allowed to wear corduroy trousers on a Saturday, not during the week, but perhaps I’ve invented that.

BJS: Well, I think that’s what took place, yes, it was more casual on a Saturday.

Did the staff ever let their hair down? Was there socializing outside of work?

BJS: I don’t know about the senior staff. I’ve no idea about that. The junior staff did. And the very fact that I’m still in touch with two from that time shows. There was a gap when I wasn’t in touch with them. And then when the Friends [the Friends of the John Rylands] was established, they came and we got together again and I see them quite regularly. In fact, I was hoping to contact one of them this morning to tell her that we were doing this, but I shall be telling her at some point.

We haven’t said much about the readers or visitors. It was generally a much quieter place then, particularly in terms of visitors.

BJS: Oh, yes. Lots of readers would ring up and ask us in advance what they wanted and we’d get it out for them.

JRH: And were they mainly from the University or was it a mix?

BJS: Oh, it was a mix. And of course, many of the readers were international even then, mainly from the United States.

When groups from local societies came round, we took them round the exhibition on the library floor. There were general exhibitions; I mean, mostly it was one on the Rylands and then one on the Spencer collection and the family. And there were copious notes. We just had to read them upside down. But I was quite interested in that, and it was quite useful experience. You got some strange comments from people.

The merger with the University of Manchester Library in 1972 was arguably the most important event in the history of the Rylands. There had been discussions going on for at least a year or two before the formal merger. Presumably you were aware that it was being discussed, but were you, as a member of staff, involved or consulted as part of that process?

BJS: Well, we were aware, but we weren’t consulted at all. Neither did we have any information about what might happen at the merger, whether we would lose our jobs or whether we’d be moved, or quite what would happen. There seemed to be quite some euphoria on the day of the merger. But I don’t know, I think that soon dissipated really. To be honest, although it’s the major thing, I don’t remember that much about it, even though I feel I’ve got a good memory.

JRH: My impression is that the merger took a long time to take effect in practical terms. It didn’t feel like a single library, I think, for a very long time.

BJS: Oh no, it didn’t.

JRH: And in any case, there was no alternative. The Rylands could not carry on as an independent institution. It just wasn’t financially sustainable, was it?

BJS: No, it wasn’t. We weren’t well paid. This is another gripe about the merger. When I started work in 1956, I got £3 15s a week. Always paid in cash, in a little envelope, and it went up to £4 when I joined the staff pension scheme, run by Legal & General. At the merger, we had to join the USS scheme [Universities Superannuation Scheme]. And although I paid in from 1957 to 1972, it bought me only three years in the University pension scheme, which I thought was so mean, because it wouldn’t have cost much.

JRH: I guess most Rylands staff weren’t in a union, so I just wonder who was representing the interests of Rylands staff in the negotiations, if anyone, for example arguing for equivalence of the pension schemes?

BJS: No, there were no unions and no-one was arguing the case for the staff. We were just told a fait accompli.

JRH: Brenda, you have said that you didn’t transfer to the Main Library until 1979, seven years after the merger. Did it have any direct impact on you or your particular role immediately after ’72?

BJS: Not really. Things carried on more or less as before. I spent a few years working at Rylands with no intention of going to the Main Library, and it was Michael Pegg [University Librarian, 1981–1991] who decided I ought to be moved out of Rylands, which I found quite traumatic at the time, because I thought that was my entire life there, I was really keen on that. And I challenged the way in which my transfer was done, which was very underhand. They [the Library leadership] all knew, and they hadn’t told me that I was being transferred.

JRH: Really? So, you weren’t happy to be effectively moved?

BJS: Not at all, not at all, and I challenged it and lost.

JRH: Oh dear. In retrospect though, how do you regard the move? Did it benefit you?

BJS: It widened my experience considerably, because perhaps up till then I had had a fairly cloistered life. Eventually, they moved temporarily other people from Rylands to the Main Library, but I think I was the only one that actually fitted in when I got to the Main Library. I think I’m quite easy to get on with, I don’t know.

JRH: Yes, and adaptable. I think, as I say, it took a long, long time for the merger to be successfully implemented. I remember even in the 1980s there was still a bit of a ‘them and us’ attitude and mutual suspicion on both sides. And I would argue that the merger only really happened when the Rylands closed for the ‘Unlocking the Rylands’ project and we all moved up to the Main Library in 2003–4, which was over 30 years after the formal merger.

We’ve obviously covered a lot of ground and I think we should wrap up our conversation now. How do you look back on your 40-year career at the Rylands and the University of Manchester Library?

BJS: I enjoyed every moment of it, really.

JRH: Well, it’s been really interesting and enjoyable reminiscing like this, Brenda, and I’m most grateful to you.

Joanna Tilsley and Jessica Smith write:

We are delighted to announce the acquisition of the archive of writer, journalist and broadcaster Frank Tilsley (1904-1957).

Born, raised and educated in Levenshulme, Tilsley left school at the age of fourteen, and largely self-educated at the Carnegie Free Library which had opened at the bottom of his street in the year of his birth.  Before the prestige success of his first novel, The Plebeian’s Progress (Victor Gollancz, 1933), he worked in Manchester in an engineering shop; in a shipping warehouse; as a railway clerk; as an audit clerk at an accountancy firm; and as organising secretary at the Salon Arts Club.

His 26 published novels included I’d Do It Again (Martin Secker and Warburg, 1936), which established his reputation on a high level; and Champion Road (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1948), which was selected for publication by Graham Greene during his final year as director and literary editor at the publishing firm.  Champion Road achieved both critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic; and, in 1958, was adapted as a BBC Television series by the celebrated scriptwriter Constance Cox.

His final novel, Mutiny (Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958) which was completed posthumously by his son Vincent, became his most commercially successful work.  Set during the French Revolutionary War and telling the story of the 1797 Spithead Mutiny, an adaptation of the novel was released in 1962 by Columbia Pictures as the feature film H.M.S. Defiant.  Directed by Lewis Gilbert, this classic naval drama starring Alec Guinness and Dirk Bogarde can still be streamed on a number of digital platforms.

During the course of his career, Tilsley also provided numerous short stories and journalistic articles to a wide array of newspapers and magazines, including the Manchester Guardian; the Manchester Evening Chronicle; The Spectator; and the Daily Herald.

Tilsley also worked in broadcasting, for both BBC radio and television, over a twenty year period – as a writer of short stories, serials and plays; as a journalist, and also as a personality in his own right – becoming, during his own lifetime, a well known and popular household name.

During 1955, The Makepeace Saga – a cycle of four plays, co-written for BBC Television with his son Vincent Tilsley – was broadcast.  The Makepeace Saga, which told the story of the cotton industry through successive generations of a Lancashire family, achieved record viewing figures and was voted “Top TV Play” in a Gallup Poll.

Tilsley’s varied output drew acclaim and acknowledgement for its depiction of contemporary social and working conditions in the early 20^th century during an era of economic depression.  He was a socialist and lifelong member of the Labour party, and could count the politician Aneurin “Nye” Bevan amongst his many high-ranking fans.  With wife Clarice Tilsley, he had two children, screenwriter and novelist Vincent Tilsley and actress and journalist Jill Tilsley.

The Frank Tilsley archive offers significant items of interest, with 10 draft manuscript notebooks, manuscripts and scripts for television and radio works, an excellent newspaper cuttings scrapbook collection, a selection of correspondence, photographs and legal and financial materials and a small amount of material relating to Tilsley’s work as a war reporter in the RAF during the Second World War.

I am honoured to have worked with poet Joanna Tilsley to bring her grandfather home to Manchester. The archive will help us to reflect and celebrate the creativity born in the city, to support our literature research corpus and also perhaps, to inspire new creative works.

The previous blogs have outlined slavery in the origins of the cotton bought by Blackburn merchants Richard Cardwell, Richard Birley and John Hornby, as evidenced by English Ms 1199 Messrs Cardwell, Birley And Hornby: Stock and Ledger Books – Wadsworth Manuscripts – Archives Hub. This blog highlights how the partners and their families also profited more directly from the trading in and exploitation of enslaved Africans, sets out how they used that money, and shows its local and international impact.

The 1797 section of the second ledger shows that the Blackburn cotton merchants owed ‘Tarleton and Backhouse’ £1707. This is John Tarleton junior, the son of another slave trader John Tarleton senior (who passed away in 1777), and Daniel Backhouse, whose company invested in more than 100 triangular voyages from Liverpool, and who both owned plantations in the West Indies. John Hornby married Alice Backhouse, the daughter of Daniel. When Daniel died in 1811, Hornby inherited some of his vast wealth in the form of cash, as well as a portion of: ‘…my plantations, estates, lands, tenements, hereditaments, slaves, negroes and their increase and progeny…’ John Hornby is listed on the Legacies of British Slavery website as later receiving almost £1,300 in post-abolition reparations for enslaved people on the Rabot Estate of St Lucia. In the third ledger (1813-1858), there are three entries which show that the Blackburn cotton merchants owed money to the ‘the executors of Daniel Backhouse’. The first has the company owing the then not insubstantial sum of just over £784. However, the second has the company indebted to the tune of £14,048 – which now equates to over £1 million. Precisely what this money is connected with is difficult to decipher at this remove, but it would have equated to an awful lot of cotton – if that’s what it was for.

Langton, Birley & Co. – a company which previously included John Shepherd, an earlier partner in the Blackburn cotton merchant business – appear throughout the ledgers. By 1780 it was based in Kirkham, Lancashire, with partners of Thomas Langton, his two sons John & William, alongside John (1747-1831) and William Birley (1750-1792), brothers of Richard Birley. Thomas Langton invested in Liverpool slave ships in the 1760s and 1770s and, although the About – Slave Voyages website contains no record of it, research elsewhere confirms that his son John Langton also invested in the triangular trade out of Liverpool. The father of Richard and John Birley – another John (1710-1767) – earlier owned the slave ship Hothersfall, the Birley family named as ‘West India Merchants’ and slavers in research, while John junior later invested in slave ships sailing from Poulton and Liverpool.

Legacies of British Slavery research lists a John Langton as owner of a Jamaican plantation and a William Langton with an estate on the island of Trinidad, both receiving post-abolition payments for enslaved people. Although researchers have not connected them with the partners of Langton, Birley & Co., it seems likely that they are one and the same. The fact that Margaret Hornby, cousin of John Hornby and wife of William Langton, is confirmed on the same website as receiving £125 in reparations for enslaved people in Jamaica, indicates that there is a connection.

John Birley married Margaret Backhouse, another daughter of Daniel, and received a share of his wealth derived from slavery and plantations with enslaved people. It is not clear from the ledgers what products or services Langton, Birley & Co. provided to the Blackburn merchants, but it is likely to have been shipping cotton – possibly from their own plantations and others in the Caribbean.

There are several payments in the first ledger to other individuals and companies involved in shipping. John Owen Parr & Co., Liverpool sailcloth suppliers, received money from the Blackburn merchants, as did William Jepson (1736-1816), a Lancaster Quaker and sailcloth manufacturer. Later a prominent abolitionist, Jepson recorded the details of slave trading voyages from the city, used by researchers into the triangular trade. Amongst several payments to ship captains are those to John Borrowdale of Whitehaven, Liverpool’s John Fisher, Robert Loxham and John Greenwood, a Captain Hippenstall of London and ‘Bruce of Bristol’, probably James Bruce, who captained slave trading vessels to and from the West Indies. So, why were Blackburn cotton merchants buying sailcloth and paying ship captains? The logical conclusion is that Cardwell, Hornby & Birley were more directly involved in the shipping of cotton than has previously been considered and, judging by the names of those they were paying, quite possibly the slave trade too.

Joseph Feilden, who invested in the Scorton mill of Cardwell, Hornby and Birley and who owned the warehouse used by the company, is listed on Legacies of British Slavery as being paid almost £3,500 in post-abolition reparations. The records show that Feilden claimed for his portion of a partnership which had 726 enslaved people on the Green Park and Spring Vale Pen plantations in Jamaica. Edward Cardwell (1^st Viscount Cardwell, 1813-1886), son of Richard, married into the Parker family, which received tens of thousands of pounds in reparations. So, members of the Hornby, Birley, Feilden, Cardwell and Shepherd families are all recorded as profiting from enslaved people, but what did they do with that money?

Shortly after receiving enormous wealth from the Backhouse estate, John Hornby constructed Brookhouse Mill in Blackburn, which would become one of the largest cotton manufacturing plants in Britain, further developed by his son William Henry Hornby (1805-1884). The sons of Richard, Hugh Hornby Birley (1778-1845) and Joseph (1827-1881), initially became partners in the Blackburn cotton merchant business before moving to Manchester, where they used their wealth to build a large mill in Chorlton. William (1772-1850), Henry (1818-1875) and John Feilden (1804-1861) – the sons of Joseph – used their wealth to construct George Street West Mill.

So, much of the money which was made through slavery was re-invested into the cotton manufacturing trade in Blackburn and Manchester, which boomed in the early part of the nineteenth century. According to Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), this drove the increase in the numbers of enslaved people needed in the southern US states, as plantation owners struggled to keep up with Britain’s demand for cotton. The money made from post-abolition reparations, combined with profits made from enslavement, was used to develop a British cotton manufacturing boom which then spurred an increase in US slavery.

The six ledgers include an annual stock take, each ending with an agreement signed by Cardwell, Hornby & Birley, outlining what should happen to the business in the event of one of them dying or the partnership being dissolved. In his notes, Wadsworth writes: ‘There is one astonishing sentence, which occurs 3 times, about the division of the work people at a death or end of partnership; they might be slaves on a cotton plantation’. Certainly, the number of ‘employees’ outlined in these agreements bears no relation to the amount of people working for the company in Lancashire, so Wadsworth seems valid to question to whom they referred. Perhaps some of the enslaved people, later claimed for by the cotton merchants and their families, were in fact part of the Blackburn business.

With the vast profits that they made, the Cardwell, Hornby, Birley and Feilden families built themselves huge mansions in the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside – away from the increasing pollution created by cotton industrialisation. Newspaper reports show that Hornby, Birley and Feilden invested in the infrastructure of Blackburn, building a canal, railways and roads to assist the movement of raw cotton into the town and the finished goods away, for sale in the UK and overseas. Joseph Feilden and his heirs used substantial amounts of this income to fund the construction of many of the town’s Church of England schools and chapels while his and the Hornby children used the wealth to buy up much of the land on which the town stood, again purchased from the C of E, and which they gradually sold off as Blackburn developed. The Feilden and Hornby families also financed the building of an ornate town hall, grammar school, cotton exchange, two large public parks, a hospital, technical college and a library (now museum) with business profits derived both directly and indirectly from exploiting the enslaved.

For acknowledgements and a list of resources, please see the end of Blog 1.

Dr Janette Martin curator of the Modern History Archives writes:

May 2026 marks the centenary of the General Strike, one of the most turbulent periods in British industrial history.  From 1 minute to midnight on 3 May 1926 until 12 May over 1.5 million key workers walked out in solidarity with striking coal miners who were facing longer hours and wage reductions. It was the first and only general strike Britain has seen and the country ground to a halt. Much to the strikers’ surprise, after 9 days of stoppages, the Trades Union Congress ended the strike. This was bitterly disappointing to those who had taken industrial action as there had been no concessions from the Government. Many felt betrayed. The miners were left to battle alone until the end of the year, when they returned to work on the employers’ terms.

Manchester’s printing presses fall silent

‘it would be dreadful if at the very moment when the saner parts of the press might do essential service it should be forcibly silenced’

This blog focuses on two stories told through collections held by The University of Manchester Library: how the news circulated during the strike, and the role played by students in strike breaking. Within the archives of the Manchester Guardian there is an intriguing telegram. Sent by the editor, C P Scott, on the eve of the dispute to the Leader of the Labour Party, Ramsay MacDonald, it urged him to do everything he could to keep the Guardian presses running during the strike. For “it would be dreadful if at the very moment when the saner parts of the press might do essential service it should be forcibly silenced.” While Ramsay MacDonald shared Scott’s misgivings, he was powerless to help.

A fascinating box of strike newspapers and bulletins within the Manchester Guardian Archive shows how both the authorities and strikers sought to control the news. The heavily unionised print workers stopped the presses entirely for the first two days of the strike and for the remaining days reduced the Manchester Guardian to a single sheet. This was significant disruption for a national daily newspaper which usually comprised 24 pages. Even when the strike ended, for several days the Manchester Guardian was a pitiful two sheets and four sides while Scott and the unions agreed terms around the return to work. Magnanimously, Scott said that there would be ‘no victimisation in respect to any action taken during the stoppage’ (Manchester Guardian, 16 May 1926).

During the disruption the newspaper proprietors had an old trick up their sleeves – the Gestetner.  The Gestetner company celebrated its role in keeping the news circulating during industrial disputes.  An advertisement in a 1920 strike bulletin noted, ‘during the dispute the news bulletins of the Manchester Guardian have been produced on Gestetner rotaries.’  Unlike the highly skilled work of typesetting and operating printing presses, this popular duplicator could be used by anyone, and during the 1926 General Strike newspapers across the country began to issue ‘no frills’ public bulletins at a penny a piece. A stamp on the reverse of the first bulletin issued by the Manchester Guardian on 6 May urged subscribers to display their copy in a window to help circulate the news further.

Other Manchester newspapers, including the Manchester Evening News and Manchester Chronicle, produced similar bulletins showing that there were managers or non-unionised staff willing to operate a skeleton news service during a strike.  Such behaviour was ridiculed by the printers’ union, the Typographical Association, who during the 1920 printer strike produced a cartoon lampooning the bosses for whom ‘running a newspaper was a great stunt’.  The cartoon depicts two men in conversation in front of a shop window papered with Gestetner bulletins: ‘publishing as usual’ says one, ‘Yes I don’t think’ says the other ‘I’ve bought one and there’s nowt in em’

Strikebreaking students

The General Strike caused a lot of headaches for the Victoria University of Manchester on several fronts. Correspondence in the Vice-Chancellor’s Archive documents a sharp demand for furnished rooms in Manchester as travel disruption created havoc for day students, with one poor chap describing long daily cycle rides from Bolton and back. There was also a lot of concern about impending examinations. Then as now the Vice-Chancellor’s office corresponded with other University leaders to see how they were responding to the crisis.

One of the most surprising things was just how many Manchester students and staff were willing to undermine the strike. The historian, Jonathan Schneer, notes that ‘the war spirit of 1914’ animated those that offered to help the country in 1926. Young men were loathe to miss the action and, compared to sitting examinations, aping the working classes was a bit of a lark.  In Manchester the engineering students were the first group to offer their services. Some worked on the railways, others drove trams or unloaded freight on the Manchester Ship Canal. Students from other disciplines followed and their names and degree subjects are recorded in the file. Staff were also supportive and made the case that those undertaking ‘national service’ should not be disadvantaged in examinations.

A letter from a trainee teacher in Bowdon is one of several requests for permission to pause studies for the duration of the strike. In his case to work the LNER signal box at Timperley Junction. Incidentally, strikers warned the public not to travel on any services operated by volunteer labour – wise words, as there were several fatal rail and tram accidents during the 9-day stoppage. 

The University knew that intervening in a labour dispute was a risky business and didn’t wish to be seen as taking sides. A report in the Manchester Guardian Bulletin, 8 May 1926, captured the delicacy of the situation.  In response to complaints of students driving Corporation buses the Pro Vice-Chancellor is quoted as saying ‘it was done individually without pledging the University.’ This was somewhat disingenuous as several senior academics were actively working with the Volunteer Services Committee to recruit men. Notably the Principal of the College of Technology who sent 100 engineering students to the Ship Canal on the 10 May 1926.  In a letter to the Vice-Chancellor, he justified his actions by stressing that he had been assured that they would only unload food.  He hoped this would protect the University from “the charge of strike breaking or taking sides”. 

Perhaps it was fortunate for the University that the strike ended before the participation of students and the University’s tacit support became known.

General Strike open day

On Saturday 9 May 2026, the People’s History Museum in Manchester will host an open day to mark the centenary of the 1926 General Strike. Join academics, activists, trade unionists, and heritage professionals in exploring the 1926 General Strike, its legacy and significance. The event is a collaboration between The University of Manchester, the National Co-operative Archive, People’s History Museum, and Working Class Movement Library, with support from the Society for the Study of Labour History.

Follow the link to get your tickets, which includes tea and coffee: https://bit.ly/4m0l5ZM

SOURCES

A selection of General Strike material will shortly be available in our digital viewer

Manchester Guardian Archive (Ref GDN 256/5)

University of Manchester Archives (Ref. VCA/7/185)

Papers of Frank Andrews, trade unionist and printer (uncatalogued)

Papers of David Arnold Wilson (1897-1981), railway clerk, trade unionist and socialist, includes a personal reminiscence of the General Strike in Bradford

Ramsay MacDonald Papers includes General Strike materials documenting the entire course of events, from the problems of 1925 to post-dispute commentary.

Books:

Keith Laybourn The General Strike of 1926, Manchester 1993

Jonathan Schneer, Nine Days in May: the General Strike of 1926, Oxford 2026

William and John Marriot appear in historical Lancashire directories as Liverpool cotton brokers, the ledgers confirming that they supplied Cardwell, Hornby & Birley with the imported material. Research on the Legacies of British Slavery website shows that William Marriot had a cotton plantation in Vere, Jamaica, from which he supplied clients. William must have passed away between the Blackburn merchants receiving the cotton and the point of payment, as the ledger states that: ‘The executors of the late William Marriot…debts owing by us: £252 16s’. According to the Historic England website Beechley, Non Civil Parish – 1262024 | Historic England, John Marriot had a mansion which he named Beechley, constructed using some of his profits – currently an empty Grade 2-listed building in Liverpool, with only the stables now in use.

The business name ‘Harper & Co. Liverpool’ is listed as supplying 44 bags of cotton valued at £707 to the Blackburn merchants (see Blog 2 for an image confirming this). Liverpool’s William Harper (1749-1815) was a slaver who, according to research on the About – Slave Voyages website, invested in over 50 triangular journeys from the city between 1784 and 1799. These ships first travelled to Africa, carrying items with which to barter for the enslaved, and then sailed across the Atlantic, to sell them on to plantation owners in the Caribbean, Guyana and Charleston in the US state of South Carolina. The vessels then returned to Liverpool, carrying goods which included cotton picked by the enslaved, on estates in the West Indies and the US. Research on the Legacies of British Slavery website shows that Harper owned a plantation in Montserrat, from which a business partner and father-in-law later received post-abolition reparations for the loss of enslaved people.

Robert Brade (1747-1815) partnered Harper in a company which traded in enslaved Africans from Liverpool and another base in Dominica. Brade is listed on Slave Voyages as investor (in some cases alongside Harper) in ships visiting the Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominica and Grenada, which returned with cotton and other goods to Liverpool. The ledger shows that Cardwell, Hornby & Birley owed Harper & Brade £5,318 (over £388,000 in modern terms), quite probably for Dominica cotton, which was considered of very high quality and so fetched top prices in Lancashire mills.

Trade with companies named Allanson & Barton and Barton, Higginson & Francis appear in the accounts, the partners being John Allanson, Thomas (1753-1799) and William Barton (1755-1826), and John Higginson (1776-1834); I have been unable to identify ‘Francis’. Slave Voyages confirms Higginson, Allanson and the Barton brothers as investing in ships which carried enslaved Africans to ports in St Lucia, Barbados, St Kitts, Jamaica, St Vincent and Savannah in the US state of Georgia during this period. In fact, between 1768 and 1815, companies run by the Barton family were the largest importers of cotton through Liverpool, shipping more than twice the amount of their nearest rivals, Barbados being one of their companies’ key calling points.

William Barton is confirmed on the Legacies of British Slavery website as the owner of the Waterford and Joes River plantations on the island of Barbados. Barton and his heirs claimed £8,500 (now around £620,000) for 379 enslaved people in post-abolition reparations. John Higginson also owned several plantations on the island of Barbados, claiming compensation for the loss of many enslaved Africans. Cardwell, Hornby & Birley’s ledger shows £1,358 as owing to the Liverpool merchants, presumably for the cotton grown on their Barbados plantations, picked by the enslaved and then shipped back on the return journeys by vessels almost certainly part-owned by the same people.

Cotton provided by William Aspinall (1744-1783), valued at just over £214, appears in the second stock and ledger book of Cardwell, Hornby & Birley, which dates from 1793-1798. According to Slave Voyages research, Aspinall invested in ships sailing from Liverpool in the 1790s, selling enslaved Africans to plantation owners on the islands of Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua and Grenada. James (1729-1788), John Bridge (1759-1830) and William, traded as J. & J. Aspinall, and between 1766 and 1807 the Aspinall family was involved in more than 190 triangular journeys. This includes one of the most infamous episodes of that time, when hundreds of enslaved Africans were thrown into the Atlantic from Aspinall’s ship Zong as drinking water ran short, the owners then claiming on the ship’s insurance for ‘loss of cargo’. Legacies of British Slavery confirms that the later mayor of Liverpool, John Bridge Aspinall and Thomas Aspinall, the sons of James, claimed post-abolition compensation from the UK government for the loss of enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica. It is therefore likely that William, John and James both traded in enslaved Africans and used them to pick cotton on Caribbean plantations, which William then supplied to the Blackburn company.

The Slave Voyages website shows John Kennion as a Liverpool slave ship investor from the 1750s, visiting Barbados, St Kitts, Jamaica, Guadeloupe, Brazil, Tortola, Nevis, South Carolina, Antigua and Cuba. Newspaper reports confirm that Kennion was in Jamaica in 1768 and was importing goods (including cotton) through Liverpool in the 1770s. Legacies of British Slavery research has him as a plantation owner with enslaved people in Jamaica, with Hall Head and Holland Estates. The ledgers refer to: ‘Kennion’s 20 bags Tobago cotton now on Shipboard for Liverpool’ and below that to Kennion’s ‘9 bags Tobago cotton…’ Kennion has (so far) not been connected to trading with plantations on that Caribbean island, so as an importer through Liverpool, he perhaps supplied Tobago cotton shipped by another company to Blackburn. Kennion ran much of his business in partnership with William Atherton (1742-1803). Originally from Preston, Atherton’s family, which included Richard (1738-1804) and John, were also involved in slavery. Although neither William, Richard nor John appear by name in the ledgers, ‘Athertons & Co. Preston’ is listed as doing business with Cardwell, Hornby & Birley. The Legacies of British Slavery website confirms that William Atherton owned one Jamaica plantation and had a stake in another, from which multiple post-abolition claims for the loss of the enslaved were made.

John Knight (1708-1784) was reported in newspapers as being a merchant based in Water St, Liverpool, importing goods including cotton through the port in the 1760s. According to Slave Voyages and other sources, between 1750 and 1775 Knight invested in at least 114 slave ship journeys to Jamaica, Dominica, St Kitts, Grenada, Barbados, St Vincent, Antigua, Martinique, Montserrat and to Charleston in the US state of South Carolina. Knight supplied enslaved Africans to, and formed a friendship with, Henry Laurens (1724-1792), a US ‘Founding Father’ based in Charleston, who was a politician, slave trader and a plantation owner using enslaved labour. As a partner in Austin & Laurens, the largest slave-trading business in North America, Laurens generated vast wealth.

Letters between Knight and Laurens, in the Henry Laurens Papers held within the archives of the South Carolina Historical Society (Laurens-Henry-papers-037.pdf) discuss the business of slavery and include correspondence from Knight persuading Laurens to return to the trade after he had turned his back on it. The Austin & Laurens Account Book, preserved at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Account book, 1750 April-1758 December. – Yale University Library) also details the finances of the trade in enslaved people between Knight and Laurens. Knight is listed as supplying 16 and a half bags of cotton to the Blackburn company at a cost of £198. A ‘Mr Knight’ also appears in the accounts, and is quite possibly one and the same person, although I am yet to confirm the connection.

See the fourth and final blog in the series, which looks at more direct slavery connections in the partnership of Cardwell, Hornby & Birley, investor Joseph Feilden and their families.

For a list of resources and acknowledgements, see the end of Blog 1.

‘There is a light that never goes out’ was a unique exhibition of photographic prints documenting Manchester as a city inextricably linked to its musical heritage. The exhibition was purchased by the John Rylands Research Institute and Library in early 2020, just weeks prior to the national lockdown due to the Covid pandemic; it is a celebration of Manchester’s musical giants, which complements our growing photographic collections and our British Pop Archive.

The idea for ‘There is a light’ was developed by photographer Jill Furmanovsky and the Rock Archive Collective, after her successful ‘Oasis DNA’ exhibition in 2017. Jill collaborated with writer Jon Savage to develop the exhibition and with help from the Manchester Digital Music Archive they curated this superb collection of photographs. In addition to Jill’s works there are iconic images created by Kevin Cummins, Pennie Smith, Paul Slattery, Steve Double, Peter Walsh and Howard Barlow.

Cataloguing this collection has been really fascinating – I thought I knew most of the bands featured and their histories, but I’ve researched less prominent bands, the less known musicians and discovered where and when some of these bands toured.  I particularly enjoyed being able to link these images to others held in our Visual Collections and seeing how the artists had developed, changed, and often ‘aged’ throughout our collections, particularly through their haircuts and fashion choices.

For more details: Special Collections A to Z (The University of Manchester Library) and to search for the details The University of Manchester Library (The University of Manchester Library)

The port is situated a few miles down the coast from Lancaster at Glasson Dock. This area was developed for that purpose by money donated by the same Quaker families who were involved in slavery. The cotton imports through Lancaster probably explain why the Blackburn merchants built their first spinning mill in Scorton, just south of the city, rather than in East Lancashire, as transporting the raw material from the coast would have been time consuming and expensive before the construction of the canal network. There are payments in the accounts to people involved in the building of the Leeds–Liverpool Canal (1770-1816) and the Lancaster Canal (1792-1826), which connected Blackburn with both ports and enabled the movement of cotton directly to the town. It is almost certainly not a coincidence that Blackburn’s enormous cotton manufacturing boom took place on the completion of these two great navigational achievements, largely built by Irish labourers.

The Rawlinson family of Lancaster were prominent Quaker slave traders and the owners of Caribbean plantations on which enslaved people picked cotton. ‘Rawlinson of Lancaster’ is listed in the ledgers as providing cotton to the Blackburn merchants, as are later companies featuring family members which include Rawlinsons & Chorley and Rawlinson & Lindow. Abraham Rawlinson (1709-1780) and his brother Thomas (1712-1769) initiated the business, the family later rising to such prominence that Abraham (1738-1803), son of Thomas, became the city’s MP, which enabled him to oppose the abolition of slavery in parliament. The Slave Voyages website confirms that Thomas Rawlinson, Abraham, Abraham junior and his brother Henry (1743-1786) all invested in slave ships visiting Barbados, Brazil, Jamaica and Suriname – often in partnership with other Lancaster Quakers.

Abraham is listed in research on the Legacies of British Slavery website as claiming British government post-abolition reparations for enslaved people on the Gouyave and Maran Estates in Grenada. His son Henry Rawlinson, of the company Rawlinsons & Chorley, listed in Lancaster directories as ‘West India merchants’, is also mentioned in Legacies of British Slavery research, as a Grenada plantation owner with enslaved people. It is possible that the Rawlinsons were providing cotton picked from their own plantations to the Blackburn company, as Grenada was one of the key suppliers at this time. More likely, looking at where the company’s ships visited in the Caribbean, the cotton they supplied came from other plantations in the West Indies or South/Central America. William Lindow (1724-1786) began as an apprentice with the Rawlinson company, working his way up to become a partner, the business renamed Rawlinson & Lindow, and in 1771 he married Abigail Rawlinson, daughter of Abraham. Alongside investing in slave ships, Lindow also owned a share of three plantations in Grenada and St Vincent, and he transported and sold the enslaved between Caribbean islands while later living and working there.

Thomas Satterthwaite (1720-1790) was a Lancaster Quaker involved with his brother Benjamin (1718-1792) in slavery and the importation of goods produced by enslaved people in the Caribbean. Slave Voyages confirms that the Satterthwaites invested in slave trading vessels initially registered in Lancaster and then Liverpool, which visited Barbados; Charleston, South Carolina; St Lucia; Dominica; and Jamaica. Benjamin acted for the company (and others) in the Caribbean, the business dealings of the brothers outlined in the Satterthwaite Letter Books 1737-1782, fully digitised by Lancaster University Special Collections. The annual inventories in the ledgers of Cardwell, Hornby and Birley, confirm that their warehouse held cotton provided by the Satterthwaite company and show related debts owing to the family; the brothers sometimes co-invested in slavery with the Rawlinsons.

Most of the slavers who initially operated from Lancaster, moved their businesses to Liverpool later in the eighteenth century, as the port’s much larger docks offered the opportunity to increase the size of ships, and consequently the scale of trade. Slave Voyages confirms that between 1771 and 1796 a company run by John Hodgson (1736-1813), and his brother Thomas (1738-1817), who originated from Lancaster, invested in over 50 triangular journeys from Liverpool, visiting several Caribbean islands as well as US ports in South Carolina and Georgia.

According to the Historic England website in 1784 John and Thomas Hodgson built Low Mill at Caton near Lancaster. The ledgers confirm that Cardwell, Hornby and Birley paid John Hodgson several thousand pounds without confirming for what goods or services. Although there is one transaction after 1784, the others are from well before it, so these payments will almost certainly be for providing cotton to the Blackburn merchants. By 1792 the company name was Hodgson, Capstick & Co, which advertised a bounty for the return of Low Mill runaway apprentices. The ad confirmed that they had ‘procured’ the children from Liverpool Workhouse. Newspaper adverts indicate that this was not unusual at that time; mill owners effectively ‘bought’ child labour from workhouses, who often (and perhaps unsurprisingly) then went on the run. There are unconfirmed reports that in this period hundreds of such escaped children lived in woods between Blackburn and Preston. The Legacies of British Slavery website has a ‘John Hodgson of Jamaica’ listed as owning Halifax Estate, St Ann, Jamaica. Legacies of British Slavery researchers were unable to connect this John Hodgson to the Lancastrian slaver and so far, neither have I – despite it likely being one and the same person.

The Lancaster based Samuel Bradford & Co (also listed as Bradford & Co), appears in the ledgers, the Blackburn merchants owing them over £300 for unspecified goods or services. Newspaper reports from the 1770s confirm that Bradford was importing cotton through Lancaster, while the records of Gillows, the furniture makers, show that he purchased 24 Windsor Chairs for his ship Minerva. Although Bradford does not appear in Slave Voyages research, the website confirms that the Minerva made multiple triangular journeys from Liverpool. Elsewhere in the ledgers, the company is named as Bradford & Coupland, as he was also in business with John Coupland – a Liverpool cotton merchant who does appear on Slave Voyages as investor in slave ships travelling from the Cumbrian port of Whitehaven to Jamaica. Although John is not listed in Legacies of British Slavery, his wife, Mary Ann Coupland, is confirmed to have received post-abolition reparations for enslaved people in Kingston, Jamaica. Caroline, Eliza and Margaret Coupland, also made claims in Kingston – although it has not yet been possible to connect them with John. Samuel Bradford was effectively ex-communicated by the Lancaster Quakers, not for his exploitation of enslaved Africans, but for theft from a fellow church member.

In The Emergence and Establishment of the Slave Trade in 18^th Century Lancaster (1992), Melinda Elder sets out how many of the city’s tradespeople became dependent on slavery. Not only were several families involved in the triangular trade but, according to Elder, slave ships were also constructed in the port, employing hundreds on the building, fitting out and supplying of the vessels. The nefarious trade was also carried out from Maryport and Whitehaven, north of Lancaster, and from Kirkham in West Lancashire to the south. In the second half of the eighteenth century, triangular journeys through these ports gradually died away and, in the next blog, we will look at the Blackburn merchants’ growing trade with businesses in Liverpool.

For acknowledgements and a list of resources, see the end of Blog 1.

While the ledgers begin in 1767, the company existed in a different form before that date, and partnerships change throughout the six volumes. However, Richard Cardwell (1706-1785), John Hornby (1763-1841) and Richard Birley (1743-1812) owned the company during the key period of the latter half of the eighteenth century. Acting initially as cotton merchants and putters-out to Blackburn handloom weavers, with investment from Joseph Feilden (1736-1792), they constructed a water powered spinning mill in the village of Scorton and a cotton treatment plant at Walton near Preston. Later the Hornby family built Brookhouse Mill in Blackburn while the Birleys had a factory in Chorlton.

Wadsworth’s notes contain a hand-drawn graph showing from where the cotton originated during this period, broken down by date and country. Initially from ‘Smyrna’ (now Turkey), and then the Caribbean islands of Barbados, Tortola (British Virgin Islands), Jamaica and Dominica. Cotton also came from Brazil and India but largely it originated from the West Indies until 1798, the final year of Wadsworth’s graph, when it began to be imported from plantations in the US state of Georgia. In 1774 a group of Blackburn cotton manufacturers (including Cardwell, Hornby, Birley and Feilden) took out a newspaper ad stating that they would now use only better-quality West Indian cotton, which provides us with a definitive date by which the town’s mill owners had changed supplies.

When I began this project, I presumed that the different elements of the cotton process – its picking, shipping, sale and resale – would make tracing the material’s journey extremely difficult, if not impossible. The ledgers certainly show that the Blackburn business traded with numerous other cotton merchants and brokers in Lancaster, Liverpool, Manchester and London and this diffusion does make following the route of the raw material more difficult. However, Cardwell, Hornby and Birley also dealt more directly with plantation owners who used enslaved workers and the shipping companies involved in the triangular trade and import/exporters. In the ledgers are also payments to captains of those vessels and even to businesses which supplied ships with sails. So, although the research available on websites such as Slave Voyages does not show that the partners invested in the slave trade, it seems quite possible that they were involved, and the fourth and final blog in this series explores this in more depth.

Within the first ledger (1767-1792) is business the Blackburn merchants conducted with Thomas Hinde (1720-1798). Originally based in Lancaster, and sometimes described as the city’s leading slaver, Hinde moved his growing operations to Liverpool, later joined by his sons Thomas junior (1757-1829) and Samuel (1778-1840). According to Slave Voyages, their ships made around 70 triangular journeys, picking up enslaved people in Africa, transporting them to sell on islands in the Caribbean and then returning with goods including sugar, rum and cotton to Liverpool. There are two references to the company in the ledger. One stock take confirms that the warehouse held 19 bags of cotton valued at £283 supplied by Thomas Hinde but does not say from where the material originated or when it arrived. However, the 1786 accounts state: “monies paid…for St Domingo cotton to Thomas Hind & Son which yet remains in their hands and which we put no profit upon” – for which the stock book confirms that the Blackburn company paid £2,629. St Domingo is a port of the Dominican Republic, and triangulating this with information on Slave Voyages, confirms that the journey took place in 1786, and that the major investor was Thomas Hind[e] junior. There are no other sailings by vessels invested in by the Hinde family which visited Dominica listed in that year.

Slave Voyages records that The Golden Age captained by William Jackson, set off from Liverpool on the 25^th of June 1786 and visited Bonny, an island off what is now Nigeria, where it picked up 731 enslaved people, landing with 670 survivors at St Domingo. However, a newspaper report of January 1787 contradicts that, stating that the ship arrived in Dominica with just 573 survivors which, if correct, would equate to the loss of 158 Africans on the voyage. The vessel arrived back at Liverpool on the 27^th of February 1787 – which explains why the Blackburn merchants were still awaiting delivery of the cotton in the 1786 ledger. The Manchester Mercury newspaper of 6^th March 1787 confirms that The Golden Age returned to Liverpool from Dominica carrying: “66 bales and packets of cotton, 23 tons of fustic, ten elephants’ teeth and Madeira Wine for Thomas Hinde & Co”. This is a particularly clear example of what some, even at the time, described as: ‘the nefarious trade’.

The second blog will focus on trade through the port of Lancaster.

A more local history focused article about English Ms 1199 can be found on the Cotton Town website.

With thanks to:
Dr Grant Collier (Curator, University Heritage, The John Rylands Library)
Dr Elizabeth Gow (Curator, English and European manuscripts, The John Rylands Library)
Mary Painter (Local History Librarian, Blackburn Library)

Sources:
University of Manchester Library Special Collections – English Ms 1199
University College London Centre for the Legacies of British Slavery website
Slave Voyages website: Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database
Cotton Town website
Liverpool as a Trading Port Project website
Ancestry – Former British Colonial Dependences, Slave Registers, 1813-1834
Historical directories of Blackburn, Lancaster, Liverpool and London
William Abram – A History of Blackburn, Town and Parish (1877)
William Abram – Blackburn Characters of a Past Generation (1894)
John Baynes – The Cotton Trade Lectures (1857)
Sven Beckert – Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014)
Cumbria Archives – BDHJ/340/1/1 The will of Daniel Backhouse
BDHJ/388/27/3 The probate of Daniel Backhouse
Melinda Elder – Slave Trade and the Economic Development of 18^th Century Lancaster (1992)
A Phelps, R Gregory, I Miller & C Wild (Eds) – The Textile Mills of Lancashire: The Legacy – Published by Historic England undated
D Richardson, S Schwarz & A Tibbles (Eds) – Liverpool & Transatlantic Slavery (2007)
Steven Toms – Financing Cotton: British Industrial Growth and Decline 1780-2000 (2020) – in particular the chapter Industrialization and Capital Formation
AP Wadsworth & Julia de Lacy Mann – The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780 (1931)
Gomer Williams – History of the Liverpool Privateers and Letters of Marque with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, 1744-1812 (2004)
Gordon Clark – ‘Lancaster and the Slave Trade’ (2021) Lancaster Civic Society Leaflet
Lancashire Archives – DDX 2261/23 Scorton Mill: An interim historical and archaeological record – Nigel Morgan
Lancaster University Special Collections – The Satterthwaite Letter Books
The Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire website holds several useful articles
‘The Captains of the British Slave Trade 1785-1807’ – Stephen D Behrendt
‘The Letter Book of Benjamin Satterthwaite’ – MM Schofield
‘The Slave Trade from Lancashire and Cheshire Ports 1750-1790’ – MM Schofield
‘The Flax Merchants of Kirkham’ – FJ Singleton (which holds details about the Birley family involvement in slavery and the interconnected businesses of the Birley, Hornby and Cardwell families)
‘Liverpool and the Slave Trade: A Guide to Resources’ – F E Sanderson
C KNick Harley: ‘Prices and Profits in Cotton Textiles During the Industrial Revolution’ – University of Oxford Discussion Paper (2010)
FE Hyde, BB Parkinson & S Marriner – ‘The Cotton Broker and the Rise of Liverpool Cotton Market’ – The Economic History Review Vol 8 No 1 1955
Digitised newspapers: The Barbadian, Blackburn Times, Blackburn Standard, Jamaica Royal Gazette, Manchester Courier, Manchester Guardian, The Pilot, Saunder’s Newsletter & Daily Advertiser

First experiences with the archive offer no immediate instruction on a research method, forcing the researcher to invent one in real time. Inventing it becomes a creative process itself. My aim is to reflect on this experience through the journey of researching The Eiffel Tower made by John Furnival (1933-2020), and held in the dom sylvester houédard (dsh) archive, which I came across whilst exploring The John Rylands Library Special Collections – and to share the outcomes of this research (Fig.1).

What attracted me to the dsh archive was the complexity of his persona, which I found paradoxical. How could Catholicism, Buddhism and avant-garde art exist together? As I found out later through conversations with Jessica, the collection’s curator, the Catholic Church did not fully approve of dsh’s avant-garde practice. His archive was transferred to The Rylands from Prinknash Abbey in the early 1990s, shortly following dsh’s death. The library was a centre for research in both counterculture art and theology – both of which feature heavily in the collection. Some of the materials were requested back by the Abbey and never returned. dsh was famed for cultivating an enormous counterculture network. There are a large number of posters, programmes, invitations and advertisements for events, exhibitions and happenings in the archive.

The first step of research involved reviewing the collections, which are available to view by request. Among the listed works, The Eiffel Tower (Acc 2, Box 125B, Item 13) instantly captured my attention. The piece, constructed from a seemingly chaotic arrangement of words and letters, forms the distinctive Eiffel Tower. Typestract, a term coined by Edwin Morgan, blending ‘typewriter’ and ‘abstract’, precisely characterises The Eiffel Tower. It was created by John Furnival in 1996 for The Opening Press, a small press initiated by dsh and Furnival in 1964. It was dedicated to publishing concrete poetry, and their statement of intent was: ‘We aim to produce a series that is a complete integration of graphics and texts, ie. not an illustrated poem or a captioned drawing.’

This combination of typography and the visual arrangement made me question the hierarchy between content and form. In the archive this large item is stored horizontally, lying in a folder (Fig.2). But was it meant for a wall display like a painting or vocal performance as a poem? According to R. P. Draper, concrete poetry is ‘the creation of verbal artefacts which exploit the possibilities, not only of sound, sense and rhythm – the traditional fields of poetry – but also of space.’¹ A very avant-garde idea of the rejection of medium frames and hierarchies, meaning that content and form become equally important.

The size and overlaying of the letters makes the work difficult to read without a magnifying glass. Online, johnfurnival.com revealed a photo of the original poem made in 1966 and titled The Eiffel (Eyeful) Tower. Reading the poem from top to bottom, as if ascending its structure, started to uncover the meaning. The first line reads ‘EYE FALL… EYE FULL? THEN JUMP! PAD-AYE-OO’ onomatopoeically twisting Eiffel into ‘I fell’ (English), I am falling (Russian transliteration, ‘padayu’) (Fig. 3). As dsh stated in Between Poetry and Painting, ‘dictionary (convention) as language-coffin – this word/poem means the WAY we use it – we (not them) convene its meaning’.²

This word play escalates downward, weaving etymology, historical context and critique. The Eiffel Tower itself, a symbol of modernity and the Industrial Revolution, was a project that sparked public controversy including protests in 1887. The scale of the tower was quite literally making the eye full. dsh, however, subverts this context of modernity as the next lines mention the ‘ghost of Delauney’, referring to Sonia Delaunay, Ukrainian-born Parisian artist and goes on into discussion of eyes and their spiritual meaning (Fig.3).

Also ‘BISTRO!’ and ‘БЫСТРО!’ which is a nod to folk etymology, tying the term to Russian troops saying ‘quick!’ after the 1814 Battle of Paris (Fig. 4). It’s interesting to note that when Furnival did his national service, his linguistic skills took him to the War Office, translating Russian documents. It explains some Russian transliterations in the poem. Furnival also uses the word ‘SUNRAY’, which is a British military radio voice procedure term (call sign) which refers to the formation or unit commander and serves as a synonym of ‘leader’ (Fig.5).

Near the base, political message sharpens: ‘The Vietnam Question? Well if I knew the answer to that one, I’d be along at the White House right now with it’ (Fig. 6).

Humour and the playful spirit of the poem become critique, making the viewer rethink not just the first impression but also the act of looking. The Eiffel (Eyefull) Tower forces you to slow down and go through each line and letter. It challenges the viewer to find connections between words, languages, contexts and to embody the spirit which unites it all together. After my research, I see this piece as a symbol of modernity, which did not lose spirituality and adopted the courage of the French Revolution to speak out about societal problems. I encourage anyone interested in concrete poetry, avant-garde art, Buddhism or Catholicism to explore dsh’s archive; his works held at The John Rylands Library are available to view by request.

1. R.P. Draper, Concrete Poetry, 1971, 329 ︎
2. I.C.A catalogue, Between Poetry and Painting, 55 ︎

Bibliography:

Draper, R. P. “Concrete Poetry.” New Literary History 2, no. 2 (Winter 1971): 329–342.

Gold, David L. (2009). The Alleged Russian Origin of French Bistro – Bistrot. In David L. Gold; Antonio Lillo Buades; Félix Rodríquez González (eds.). Studies in Etymology and Etiology. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante

Houédard, Dom Sylvester. Between Poetry and Painting. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, n.d., 55.

Perloff, Nancy, ed. Concrete Poetry: A 21st-Century Anthology. London: Reaktion Books, 2021

Practical Promotion

The invention of tobacco rolling machines in the 1880s enabled the mass production of pre-rolled cigarettes, offering an alternative to traditional tobacco pipes and cigars. Sold in paper packets, cigarettes were susceptible to damage, hence the introduction of a stiffener – a small piece of card inserted into the packet to stop the contents from being crushed or bent. Measuring approximately 2⅝ inches (67 mm) by 1⅜ inches (35 mm), these cards provided a ready-made promotional opportunity. 

Originating in the United States, cigarette cards were soon popularised in the United Kingdom by firms such as W. D. & H. O. Wills of Bristol, John Player & Sons of Nottingham, and Gallaher Ltd of Belfast. Printed with pictures, and later, with accompanying text on the reverse, the cards were produced in numbered sets, usually of 25 or 50, covering a wide variety of subjects. Popular themes such as sports, transport and the armed forces were designed to appeal to young men, attracting them to a lifetime of consumption. Nicotine addiction apart, the collectable nature of cigarette cards encouraged repeat purchases and brand loyalty.

A Family Affair

Following the First World War, the tobacco industry extended its advertising to women, as female smoking in public became more socially acceptable. Likewise, cigarette cards continued to broaden their appeal by celebrating diverse aspects of British culture and history. With thousands of cards being produced by hundreds of companies, consumers could customise their collecting according to their individual interests:

‘Many interesting things have been illustrated (in series) on cigarette cards. Indeed, nearly all important events and people have had their own series of such cards’.

(Harmer, E. W., ‘What are Cigarette Cards?’ in The Boy’s Own Annual, Vol. 59, 1936-7, p. 472.)

The interest generated by cigarette cards extended from men and women to their offspring. ‘Fag’ cards were regularly collected and traded by children, who sought them from family members, from strangers, or even from empty packets discarded in the street. Spares could be swapped or gambled in various ‘flicking’ games. This popular pastime gave players the opportunity to win additional cards, commonly by landing their own card on that of an opponent, or closest to an agreed target.

Cartophily: The Hobby of Collecting Cigarette Cards

In an era before television and the internet, with limited access to illustrated books and periodicals, cigarette cards offered collectors a colourful window onto the world. In a competitive market rival manufacturers used novelty to stand out from the crowd. ‘Bird Painting’ (Godfrey Phillips, 1938) introduced an interactive element, inviting patrons to create their own miniature paintings using the template provided.

As the hobby of cartophily developed, some cigarette manufacturers issued albums to store and display specific sets. ‘Birds & Their Young’ (John Player, 1937) had adhesive backs to facilitate mounting. However, this approach had one main disadvantage:

‘In many albums the letterpress on the back of the cards is hidden, which is a pity, as there are interesting and instructive details in these small paragraphs, without which the pictures lose a lot of their value.’

(Robinson, H. A., ‘Improving Your Cigarette-Card Album’ in The Boy’s Own Annual, Vol. 61, 1938-9, p. 108.)

Readers of The Boy’s Own Annual were encouraged to overcome this drawback by creating their own albums which allowed both card ‘faces’ and backs to be displayed simultaneously.

Educational Value

The ‘interesting and instructive details’ crammed onto the backs of cigarette cards were valued as a cheap way for the working-classes to access knowledge. Ranging from historical facts and figures to biographies of contemporary celebrities, and up-to-date sporting records, the letterpress contributions were well-researched and achieved a reputation for accuracy. Mistakes and misprints were very rare. Errors, if discovered, were swiftly corrected.

One of the best-known inaccuracies occurred not in the letterpress, but in the picture itself. In this portrait of Benjamin Disraeli (1804-81), described as ‘a young man of twenty-two’, the artist Christopher Clark (1875-1942) has placed the dashing young author and future Prime Minister in front of the iconic Big Ben clock tower. Unfortunately, the clock tower (renamed Elizabeth Tower in 2012) was not completed until 1859.

Cigarette Cards and Imperialism

Issued during a period when the British Empire was at its height, cigarette cards provide a rich source of imperial and colonial imagery and information. Sets such as ‘Military Uniforms of the British Empire Overseas’ (John Player, 1938) and ‘Warriors of All Nations’ (Churchman’s Cigarettes, 1929) provide a glimpse into the breadth and structure of Britain’s armed forces, including soldiers recruited in Africa, India and Central America.

The heroic exploits of individuals during military campaigns were also popular. ‘Victoria Cross’ (John Player, 1914) tells the stories of recipients of Britain’s highest reward for gallantry. Conflicts covered include the Crimean War (1853-56), the Indian Rebellion (1857-58) and the Boer War (1899-1902).

Reflecting the dominant ideas of this expansionist age, military and colonial cigarette cards formed part of a wider network of popular culture, including imperial adventure stories, which would have appealed to young men and boys, while subtly promoting the benefits of Empire.

Rise and Fall

Cigarette cards enjoyed a golden age in the 1920s and 1930s. Some companies employed their own writers, artists and editors, and there was even a fan magazine, Cigarette Card News (London Cigarette Card Company, 1933). The magazine survives today as Card Collectors News. However, the outbreak of the Second World War heralded the beginning of the end for cigarette cards, as paper shortages halted production by 1940. 

Although other trade cards, for example those issued by tea and confectionery companies, enjoyed success in the following decades, cigarette cards never regained their popularity. The Royal College of Physicians’ ‘Smoking and Health’ report (1962), which highlighted the harmful effects of smoking, led to restrictions on tobacco advertising and underpinned a change in societal attitudes towards smoking. Cigarette cards continued to be used sporadically until 2003, when they were banned under the 2002 Tobacco Advertising and Promotion Act. Ironically, the UK government is currently considering the use of cigarette pack inserts to provide health warnings and information on the benefits of quitting.

The Leslie Clarence Cigarette and Trade Card Collection

The Leslie Clarence Cigarette and Trade Card Collection was assembled by Leslie Clarence (1938-2021) of Salford, Lancashire, and was donated to the Library by his brother-in-law Alan James McHugh. The focus of the collection is 3,640 British cigarette cards, issued by 19 different companies from 1904-39, including 73 complete sets. There are also examples of cigar cards (1976-97), and non-tobacco cards issued by companies such as Cadbury’s and Brooke Bond PG Tips.

Although the number of smokers in Britain has steadily declined, the hobby of cartophily continues to be popular today, with cards being appreciated for their beautiful images, textual information and insight into historical popular culture.