emigration.Liverpool Record Office
From Liverpool we headed east to Rainhill, just 20 minutes down the tracks. Steam trains expert Christian Wolmar waited on the station platform. Although noisy and not that pretty, Rainhill station seemed the most appropriate place for him to talk about what is perhaps the most significant stretch of railway line in the world. As trains thundered past, Christian explained that the first competition between steam locomotives had taken place here in 1829, before train and track were inextricably linked. Indeed, rails had been in existence for years, usually extending between mines or quarries and nearby industrial centres. Loaded wagons were usually pulled by horses. At the time of the contest the notion of an independently powered engine doing the donkey work was still new.
GEORGE STEPHENSON’S ROCKET WON HANDS DOWN, HAVING ACHIEVED A TOP SPEED OF 30 M.P.H.
It seems extraordinary now, but the 1829 Rainhill trials were organised to enable the directors of the Liverpool & Manchester Line to decide whether the trains should be powered by locomotives or by stationary steam engines. Five locomotives took part, one of which was powered by a horse walking on a drive belt, and were timed over the same course, with and without carriages. There was a £500 prize for the victor, whether or not a locomotive was eventually chosen. George Stephenson’s Rocket won hands down, having achieved a top speed of 30 m.p.h., and set a steam locomotive agenda for the Liverpool & Manchester Line, and ultimately the rest of the country. The display was enough to convince any remaining doubters that locomotives were the way forward as far as rail travel was concerned.
A year later the line was opened by the Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington. But Stephenson’s day of triumph was marred by the death, not far from where we stood, of Merseyside MP William Huskisson, who became one of the first victims of the modern railway.
Huskisson accidentally opened a carriage door in front of the oncoming Rocket, was knocked off balance and fell beneath its wheels. Although the Conservative MP was rushed by train to the town of Eccles by Stephenson himself, he died there within a few hours. His untimely death gave ammunition to a stalwart band of nay-sayers who opposed the railway on the grounds that it was new, that it threatened long-established ways of life and that there were unknown dangers associated with it that had yet to become apparent. Iron roads were not welcome everywhere they went. But despite Huskisson’s demise it was apparent that the age of rail, indeed rail mania, was here to stay.
Stephenson’s Rocket was the winner of a steam locomotive competition held in rainhill in 1829 that determined a bright future for this new technology.
Stapleton Historical Collection/Photolibrary
Eccles was the next destination for us too. Heading out towards Manchester through the sprawling housing estates, we wondered what Eccles had to offer the Victorian traveller and turned to Bradshaw to find: ‘The little village is prettily situated on the northern banks of the Irwell and environed by some of the most picturesque rambles.’
The railway changed all that. Within 30 years, Eccles had been swallowed up into the suburbs of Manchester. Even in Bradshaw’s day, though, Eccles’s claim to fame wasn’t so much about being a pretty village. It was about the cakes produced there.
Eccles cake making was big business.
Salford Local History Library
Nobody knows for certain when Eccles cakes were created, but they definitely predate the railway. In the seventeenth century Cromwell and his Puritans even banned them, on the grounds that they were too rich and sumptuous. Fortunately for Eccles and the rest of the Puritan-weary population, the ban was lifted during the Restoration. James Birch opened the first shop in the town to sell Eccles cakes on a commercial basis in 1796. There followed some rather ill-natured rivalry – and even today the townsfolk hold that a cake made outside of Eccles cannot truly be called an Eccles cake.
What the railways did was to make it quick and easy to ship the cakes all around the country. It has also been claimed that they were responsible for a change in ingredients. At the time the cakes were sold from station platforms and laced with brandy to help preserve them. But, the story goes, one driver enjoyed a generously laced Eccles cake too many and fell off his footplate, almost causing a crash. From then on, brandy was banned for the railway’s Eccles cakes, though it was still used to preserve cakes made for export to America and the West Indies.
Today the cake is as popular as ever. Ian Edmonds is the fourth generation of his family to produce Lancashire Eccles cakes. The secret of their success, he explained, lies in the ingredients. Ian uses only the very best currants money can buy. Called Vostizza A, they come from a Greek farmers’ co-op in a town near Corinth – from which we get the word currant. Ian’s team carefully wash 10 tonnes each week to quality-control the fruit. The plumped-up currants are then encased by hand in buttery pastry in a factory that produces 150,000 Eccles cakes a day for the domestic and export markets.
From Eccles the train brought us swiftly into Manchester, to discover more about cotton and the railway. It was clear from reading Bradshaw that the fortunes of the two were intertwined. By the 1830s Manchester was well established at the heart of the cotton industry, but the creation of the line to Liverpool and the subsequent lines that followed transformed its fortunes. At its peak in 1853, there were 108 mills in Manchester and it became known as Cottonopolis.
ECCLES’S CLAIM TO FAME WASN’T SO MUCH ABOUT BEING A PRETTY VILLAGE. IT WAS ABOUT THE CAKES
That history is still evident in the city’s buildings and streets. Local journalist-cum-tour guide Jonathan Schofield believes the only way to see the city so as to take it all in is to walk. From the Royal Exchange, where the cotton lords met each Tuesday almost 200 years ago, through the Godlee Observatory on Sackvillle Street, named after local mill owner Francis Godlee, to the iron street kerbs found around the city built to protect the pavements from the overloaded carts, cotton resonates on almost every route around Manchester. It was cotton that turned Manchester into the fastest-growing city of the nineteenth century.
The terrible congestion, squalid living conditions and harsh working conditions led to unrest, with strikes and food riots culminating in the Peterloo massacre, in which 11 people were killed and hundreds injured. Manchester was at the forefront of the movement towards reform that led to the Factory Acts.
Another of Manchester’s many claims to fame is that in 1801 George Bradshaw, author of our guide to Victorian Britain, was born here, in fact just outside the city in Pendleton, near Salford. Bradshaw was an engraver and cartographer who completed a detailed record of the canals of Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1830, known as Bradshaw’s Maps of Inland Navigation.
When the railways arrived he spotted a lucrative gap in the market and in 1839 started publishing one-off, then monthly timetables in a yellow wrapper which later graduated into a round-England and then a Continental guide. Within four years an eight-page pamphlet had grown to 32 pages, drawing together the times and services run by numerous rail companies. Without Bradshaw passengers were dependent on locally produced timetables that rarely extended beyond the often narrow boundaries of the rail company itself.
His name swiftly became a byword for timetables and featured in several Sherlock Holmes stories and in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, reflecting its hallowed place in society. Phineas Fogg began his adventure in Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days with a copy of Bradshaw under his arm.
An active Quaker, Bradshaw was also notable, if less well known, for his charitable works
