Southport to Leyland Great British Railway Journeys

'In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain. His name was George

'Bradshaw, and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to

'the tracks.

'Stop by stop, he told them where to go, what to see and where to stay.

'And now, 170 years later,

'I'm aboard for a series of rail adventures

'across the United Kingdom to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.'

With my Bradshaw's, I'm continuing my journey around the

industrial heartland of northern England, travelling on the very

tracks that helped to make the fortunes of entrepreneurs.

And I hope to discover that even in Victorian times,

some of them were men and others were women.

'On this leg of my journey, I put a vintage truck to the test...'

More than a century old and still going strong!

'..Learn how the railways transformed

'the North West's seaside...'

Without any doubt, they were fundamental

to the future success of the resort.

'And I bake a 19th century worker's lunchtime staple.'

You have to get a lot of air into it.

-It's already feeling lovely.

-You're quite good at this!

My journey began in Manchester, headed west to soapy Merseyside.

It will now traverse Lancashire to Preston and then Bradford,

and will dip down to steely South Yorkshire

and will end in Derbyshire,

the resting place of the father of the railway, George Stephenson.

This Lancastrian leg begins in sun-drenched Southport,

devours pies in Wigan, surges east to subversive Westhoughton,

weaves towards Bolton, and drives north to finish at Leyland.

From Birkenhead, I've crossed the Mersey

and I'm now heading to Southport.

Bradshaw's tells me it's a favourite and fashionable watering place.

From its situation and

salubrity, it's been christened the Montpellier of England.

Well, I've been to Montpellier on a blistering hot Mediterranean day,

and I'm assuming that the comparison is more

one of architecture than climate.

Lying on the coast, almost 20 miles north of Liverpool,

nowhere better epitomises the late 18th century fashion

for bathing in sea water than the once small fishing port,

which came to be known as Southport.

The future French emperor Napoleon III

took an apartment here for a season,

and it's said that he used the tree-lined

Lord Street as a template for his subsequent redesign of Paris.

My guidebook certainly liked the place.

Southport's buildings, says Bradshaw's, are

architecturally elegant, and the broad and beautiful streets,

particularly Lord Street, have made it universally admired.

In my mind, I can hear the jangle of bridles as the horses and carriages

pass by, and the clink of China as elegant ladies take their tea.

When the railways arrived in 1848, Southport's popularity

boomed as first Liverpudlians, and later, Mancunians, arrived,

looking for a refined break from their

industrial cities.

In 1860, Southport's elegant promenade was graced with

a pier, upon which I'm meeting former director of tourism,

Phil King.

-Hello, Phil.

-Michael, welcome to sunny Southport.

-Lovely to see you.

You've made me walk a long way! How long is this pier? It must be

-one of the longest in Britain.

-3,600-odd feet.

Second longest to our friends down at Southend.

This pier was built for what?

For leisure and pleasure. And people used to promenade up to be

seen, to talk, to bow their heads, to enjoy.

It used to cost you six pence. And if you had a

perambulator, one-and-six. And then, of course, as time went on, paddle

steamers arrived at the pierhead, which used to go to Blackpool,

Llandudno and other exotic places as well.

Tell me about the impact of the railways on Southport.

Without any doubt, they were fundamental to the future

success of the resort.

People came off, literally

in their thousands, to swim, use the bathing machines,

and then there was the development of the funfairs.

And they used to go for rides on the carousel,

a wonderful selling point for our resort.

The carousel is thought to date back to the Crusades

and to have its origins in a Turkish game.

By the 17th century, it had developed into a fixed structure

with legless wooden horses. It was revolutionised by an English

engineer called Frederick Savage who, during the late 19th century,

designed a machine whose horses moved up and down as they galloped.

I'm meeting Herbert Silcock,

who owns the fine exemplar at Southport Pier.

-Herbert.

-Pleased to meet you, Michael.

It's a lovely carousel. Is it Victorian?

-It is Victorian, built in 1900.

-How far back does your family

-go in the fairground business?

-We go back to the late 1800s.

This is the earliest picture we have of the family.

That's Great-grandfather, four sons. One, two, three, four.

Now, this is the showman's caravan that they lived in.

Because in those days, they were travelling from place to place?

-Correct.

-How did your family actually get going in the business?

What was the first thing they did?

Well, well, this man here, Great-grandfather Edward,

he worked in a wire works in Warrington, and to

supplement his income, he opened a small little stall,

a coconut shy, in a railway viaduct.

And as the workers came out, he would offer them a game for a penny.

And eventually, this took over cos he was earning more money

than in the wire works. My mother and father

came here in 1959 and we've prospered since.

The elaborately-carved animals

and ornate panels provided more than decoration.

They also hid the mechanism which,

in Herbert's great-grandfather's day, was powered by steam.

During the heyday of the Golden Galloper,

more than 250 carousels were built

and they were the most popular ride in the British fairground.

Nowadays, people have computer games and I don't know what.

Why do you think they're still attracted to carousels?

The carousel, in its heyday, was actually a white-knuckle ride.

It was quite fast, for the time.

It fell out of favour in the '50s and the '60s as people wanted

more speed. But now, it's as popular as ever,

but it's now a children's and family ride.

Well, it may well be, but I hope that doesn't prevent me

-from having a go!

-It certainly will not, Michael. Follow me.

Former politician backs wrong horse and is taken for a ride!

'Feeling a little giddy, I'm going back to Southport Station.

'Northern Rail is less ornate, but its iron horse will carry me

'east at a canter.'

This train will take me to Wigan. Bradshaw's tells me it's a

great cotton town in Lancashire near the head of the River Douglas.

It contains stone and coal in great abundance.

Wigan has found fame for its industry, in literature

and for the history of its food.

'Coal was mined in and around Wigan from the Middle Ages,

'and when the canals and then the railway linked it

'to its bigger manufacturing neighbours, the town prospered.

'But the Great Depression of the 1930s hit Wigan hard,

'and the town, which has never

'since matched its Victorian prosperity, presently strikes

'a chord because of a book named after its most famous landmark.'

When you think of famous piers,

you think of Southend, Southport and Wigan.

I've never seen Wigan Pier, but given that the town isn't on the sea

but on the Manchester to Liverpool canal, I have a feeling

that its pier can't be as spectacular as Southend

or Southport.

Ahoy! Can you give me directions to Wigan Pier, please?

-The actual pier itself?

-Yes, the pier.

This is it, really!

'None the wiser, I'm hoping Wigan Archives manager Alex Miller

'will know the pier's precise location.'

-Um... I'm in search of Wigan Pier.

-Right.

-Can you direct me?

You're on it! You're standing on the very Wigan Pier, such as it

exists at the moment.

Is this some kind of joke? This isn't a pier!

Well, actually, it is a bit of a joke.

It's a 20th century, early 20th century music hall joke.

This is Wigan Pier. It's essentially a coal tippler

that came to become Wigan Pier of music hall jokes.

And it was carried on by the Formbys, in particular,

George Formby Senior and George Formby Junior.

# Now when we shunt

# The back's in front

# And the front part's in the rear

# If we survive

# Then we'll arrive

# Alongside Wigan Pier... #

This construction here would have

been the end point of a railway line stretching up into the network of

railways that fed all the coal industry. And essentially, the wagons

would have come down the railway line to the tippler,

where they would have been tipped into the barges waiting beneath.

And the story goes that on a boat trip down the canal to Southport,

a group of people on the canal, they were lost in the fog,

and they shout out, "Well, where are we? We have no idea where we are!"

And the local wag shouts out, from the banks of the canal,

"You're at Wigan Pier!"

Obviously, they're on their way to Southport, expecting to see

something a little bit grander, so that's where it comes from.

And that's now all lost in time, isn't it?

Cos all of us just think of George Orwell and Wigan Pier.

-But he then was picking up on an existing joke?

-Absolutely.

I mean, he was using it almost as a snappy title,

apart from anything else, saying The Road to Wigan Pier.

It gave him a very fixed point, in the end, to his journey

when he came to Wigan.

Born Eric Blair in 1903, George Orwell attended Eton College on

a scholarship and became a leading left-wing author.

He's best known for his anti-Soviet novel

Animal Farm and the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four.

In The Road to Wigan Pier, he wrote graphically of the poverty suffered

by the northern working class during the 1930s Great Depression.

So there had obviously been a decline in Wigan,

because Bradshaw's talks about the place being

absolutely replete with stone and coal.

Yes. I mean, it was.

I mean, Wigan is very much a town built on coal, but then, in the years

after the Second World War, Wigan's come to be known as a centre for

food manufacturing.

You've got many multinational firms working in the area,

people like Heinz and Patak's, and you've got one firm that has

Victorian origins that manufactures pies in the area.

And that is Poole's Pies.

'Heinz came to Wigan in the late 1950s, attracted by the ready

'availability of crops grown on the fertile Lancashire plain.

'Over a billion cans of food per year

'were produced in their Wigan factory.

'But a century earlier,

'Margaret Poole started a business that first put Wigan on the

'British culinary map.

'I'm meeting baker Pauline Atherton at the Poole's Pie factory

'in Pemberton, south-west of the town centre.'

-Pauline?

-Yes?

-Hello, I'm Michael.

-Hello.

So what happens in this kitchen?

This is where all the product development

we do, all the new recipes are formulated here.

Have you been making pies for long?

-A long time. About 50 years.

-Really? Were the Victorian recipes much

different from what you're doing today?

You got whatever was available - pigeon, rabbits, oxtail,

even blackbird, you know.

Lots of things that you wouldn't use today, but now, it was more

-concentration on what is actually in it.

-Yes.

'Pauline has offered to show me

'how Margaret Poole might have baked a beef pie back in 1847.'

You have to get a lot of air into it so the pastry will be nice

-and light.

-Mm! It's already feeling lovely.

-You're quite good at this!

-That looks pretty good to me.

-Yup.

-You roll it quite... Some pressure.

-Quite vigorously.

-Yeah.

Little thinner. Little thinner.

-Lovely. And then roll it over.

-Ooh!

-That's it. We start with the filling now.

-Shall I put that in there?

-Yes.

Spread it nice and evenly.

-Margaret really knew how to make a pie, didn't she?

-Oh, yeah!

-Pop it down over here.

-Bring it towards you.

-Make it pretty.

-With a few thumbprints?

-Yes.

And it's to seal it as well.

And I have something that looks like a pie!

-Very nice.

-And how long shall we cook that for?

Roughly about 25 minutes, 200 degrees.

'Nowadays, only prototype pies are handmade, and as

'mine bakes, Pauline wants to show me the 300,000 square foot factory.

'Here, 50 people on five production lines make

'an astonishing 100,000 pies and pastries per hour.'

Even though Margaret Poole had a factory, I think

she would have been amazed

-to see this.

-She certainly would.

-What's the ingredients?

This is meat and potato.

And then, a bit like making a pie, when you're doing it at home,

you spread the pastry on top and then you just cut off the surplus?

Yes. Everything's all recycled, all the way up again.

And here they are, ready to go in the freezer.

-And then, anyone could cook those at home?

-Yes.

'The proof of the pudding is in the eating,

'and I'm afraid that the same applies to my pie.'

-Am I Mother?

-Please.

-Just about.

-Oh!

Now, that looks pretty good, but I want your opinion, Pauline.

I'm not going to touch it until you do.

Superb.

Mm!

It is pretty good!

Well done, Margaret Poole! May her memory be blessed.

With a full tummy, I'm heading six miles east

toward today's final destination.

To end my day, I'm heading to Westhoughton.

Bradshaw's tells me that "in 1812 a dreadful Luddite riot took place

"at which a large quantity of machinery was destroyed by the mob."

If I remember, the Luddites were men driven to desperate violence

by the fear that mechanisation would cost them their livelihoods.

In 1812, England was mired in the worst trade depression for 50 years.

The invention of new machinery threatened to consign home weaving

to the annals of history.

Those conditions gave rise to machine breakers and rioters

dubbed the Luddites.

I'm hoping local historian Pamela Clarke can tell me what happened

in Westhoughton.

-Hello, Pam.

-Hello, Michael.

According to my Bradshaw's, the violence here in 1812

was pretty bad. What happened?

In 1804, a new factory was built across the road

and it was full of 170 power looms with the big steam engine.

Luddites from Bolton decided to burn the factory and destroy the equipment there.

And so is that exactly what happened there,

they marched up here and did it?

On the 24th of April, the mill was set ablaze.

All the machinery was made of wood and there was lots and lots of cloth

around so it was easy to get the fire going.

What were the consequences for the people who had perpetrated this attack?

Four of them were charged with breaking the machinery,

which was made a capital offence in 1812.

And they were sentenced to be hanged.

-And were they?

-They were,

including a young lad who was said to be anything from 12 to 16 years old.

Tomorrow, I'm hoping to find out more

about one of the machines that led to this dreadful incident

in Westhoughton, but now it's time for some quiet refreshment.

-Morning. Nice sunny day.

-Aye, it is.

Continuing east, my next destination is Bolton.

This is Bolton, what Bradshaw's calls Bolton Le Moors.

"Cotton velvets and muslins were first manufactured here

"about 1760-80 on a large scale by the new machinery

"of Richard Arkwright, who resided here when a barber,

"and Samuel Crompton who lived at Hall i'th' Wood."

Much though I sympathise with the desperate Luddites who broke

the machines, I have real admiration for the inventors

who sought to perfect them.

In 1773, Bolton's population

numbered less than 5,500.

By 1901, it had soared to 168,000.

The biggest reason for that increase

was the town's booming textile industry,

begun by a Bolton inventor who was born in 1753.

I'm meeting curator Erin Beeston at Samuel Crompton's house

in Hall i'th' Wood, north of Bolton.

-Erin, hello.

-Hello. Welcome to Hall i'th' Wood.

It's a beautiful house and rather grand.

Was Samuel Crompton quite a rich man?

Well, actually at the time Samuel Crompton lived here,

the hall was in a quite bad state of repair and shortly after they moved

to some rooms upstairs in the hall, his father actually died.

His father was only about 33 at the time so he was left

with two sisters and his mother and he was very quickly

taught how to spin from an early age

to help the family produce the cotton that they needed to weave with.

In the middle of the 18th century,

people were producing fabrics in their homes?

Yes, essentially it was a cottage industry.

To produce the yarn required to make cloth,

Samuel and his family used a single thread spinning wheel.

Volunteer Jacqui Elvin's demonstrating with raw wool.

To spin the yarn, you need to work the pedal,

and that's a rocking motion.

With that, it turns the spindle in a clockwise direction.

You extend with the left hand.

That causes the twist to go down the yarn,

and that creates your thread.

Not too straightforward, I must say.

It's a bit like one of these things where you have

to rub the top of your head and stroke your nose at the same time.

-And I'm only producing one thread.

-Exactly.

For weavers, you needed an awful lot of thread.

And that, I have a feeling, is where our Mr Crompton comes in.

Thank you, Jacqui.

A number of 18th-century inventions transformed cloth production

from a cottage industry into steam-powered mass production

in factories during the Industrial Revolution.

Samuel Crompton's invention was called the spinning mule,

and, borrowing elements from James Hargreaves's Spinning Jenny

and Sir Richard Arkwright's water frame, it revolutionised

the production of yarn.

How did Crompton come to be so inventive?

Well, he was quite well educated.

He actually went to night school until he was 16.

He did things like mathematics, he did algebra and arithmetic.

He also was very musically talented and he used the money that he made

from playing the violin at the theatre to get the parts together

-ready to make his invention.

-And what is the significance of this room?

Well, this came to be known as his conjuring room.

There were reports of him staying up into the small hours

and passers-by travelling seeing flickering lights.

Toiling away by candlelight.

Legend has it that Crompton was so worried

about local Luddites hearing about his spinning mule and attempting

to destroy it that he kept it dismantled and hidden in his attic.

Today, there's a replica on display.

-Did Samuel Crompton make his fortune from it?

-Sadly, he didn't.

Crompton has been criticised by historians for not being

a great businessman.

He listened to some of his peers who encouraged him to take subscriptions

to have his machine viewed rather than to take out a patent.

So they would come along and give him small sums of money

to see his machine and then copy it.

So his idea passed into the world virtually free of charge?

They said at one point there was four million spindles

spinning cotton yarn on his invention.

The manufacturers gained all this wealth and Samuel himself

died in near poverty.

Decades after Samuel Crompton died a poor man,

a rather guilty Bolton erected a statue of him by public subscription.

But his real monument was that his invention enabled Bolton

and other Lancashire towns to establish factories that were

the most productive and competitive in the world.

Another invention benefitted my next destination at the turn of the 20th century.

I'm on my way to Leyland.

Bradshaw's tells me that it has an excellent free grammar school

and I am going there to study how a local boy, James Sumner,

started a business that made his town a household name.

Six miles south of Preston, Leyland is synonymous

with the largest car manufacturer that Britain has ever had.

British Leyland had its roots in the commercial vehicle maker

The Lancashire Steam Motor Company,

which was formed here in 1896.

Bob Howell is an engineer at Leyland's British Commercial Vehicle Museum.

What an amazing collection of vehicles.

Yes, we have vehicles from 1896 right up to 2006.

And what are we standing amongst here, for example?

This is the Leyland Lioness, bought by King George V

for conveying visitors to the Sandringham estate from the railway station.

-And what about this one here?

-This is the Popemobile.

The designer's brief for this was a high-sided vehicle

so the Pope could see the people and they could see him.

And so that was used during the Pope's visit to Britain?

Yes, it was.

The Leyland marque might never have existed

had its young founder, James Sumner, the son of a blacksmith,

not attached a steam engine to a lawn mower.

As a teenager James was allowed to experiment in his father's workshop.

He made his own two-cylinder compound steam engine,

which he fitted to a pedal tricycle.

Then a local head gardener gave James an old horse-drawn lawn mower.

This is the result. Immediately, the orders started flooding in.

Not only from the owners of large estate houses

but also from the cricket clubs.

In fact, WG Grace bought one for his hallowed cricket pitch at the Oval.

James went into partnership with the wealthy Spurrier family

and, opting to use new petrol engines,

by 1914 the re-named Leyland Motors Ltd

employed a workforce of 1,500.

In the 1960s, the company bought car manufacturers Triumph and Rover

and a merger in 1968 with British Motor Holdings

brought Jaguar, Morris and Austin into the group.

Following the oil crisis of 1973,

this monolithic company was almost bankrupt,

and was first nationalised, then broken up.

The now American-owned Leyland Trucks still produces

state of the art vehicles as this museum example once was.

And we're away!

-How old is the vehicle, Bob?

-1908.

We believe it is the oldest commercial vehicle running.

Do you know what the history of the vehicle is? What was it used for?

It was involved in parcel collection and delivery in the London area.

It did a total of 390,000 miles before being retired.

How many years were you in the motor industry?

-76.

-76!

I started on October 1, 1937.

Would you care to have a little drive?

-I would absolutely love to, please.

-Why not?

Depress clutch, engage second gear...

Release brake...

Apply throttle...

Hooray, we're moving!

This is enormous fun, Bob.

This is a great tribute to Leyland.

More than a century old and still going strong.

I'm saddened that despite his inventive genius,

Samuel Crompton of Bolton failed to capitalise

on his invention of the spinning mule.

In Wigan, Margaret Poole enjoyed greater material success

with her homely recipes.

She has reminded me that for the rail traveller,

there are two essential artefacts -

a Bradshaw's guide and a sustaining pie.

On the next leg, I hear about unscrupulous Victorian grocers.

Oatmeal was often mixed with gravel or sand.

This appears to be about 90% gravel.

I have to hail a train at a request stop.

Success!

And I learn of King James's beefiest knighting.

He took his sword and dubbed this loin of beef,

"Arise, Sir Loin."

And everybody went, whoa!