Preston to Swinton Great British Railway Journeys

For Victorian Britons, George Bradshaw was a household name.

At a time when railways were new,

Bradshaw's guidebook inspired them to take to the tracks.

I'm using a Bradshaw's guide

to understand how trains transformed Britain,

its landscape, its industries, society and leisure time.

As I crisscross the country 150 years later, it helps me

to discover the Britain of today.

I'm continuing my journey

through the verdant landscape of northwest England

towards its industrial heart,

where the Victorian working class lived and worked

in a new cityscape of factories, railway stations and terraced houses.

On this journey, I want to find out

what daily life was like for the nation's first urban workers

and how they documented it in art and poetry.

This week I'm travelling through northwest England

to the West Midlands.

I started in Cumbria,

winding south through the spectacular countryside of the Lake District,

and I'm continuing on to Lancashire,

heart of the Industrial Revolution,

before I head further south to Staffordshire.

On today's stretch I begin in Preston,

travel southeast to a market town, Darwen,

discover a dark tale in Entwistle

and hear stories of matchstick men in Salford.

I'll end this leg on Kersal Moor.

In this episode, I dabble in 21st-century technology...

Feels like some medical procedure.

..learn a thing or two about art...

I'm sure you're almost about to say matchstick figures,

aren't you, Michael? Well, matchsticks they are not.

They are much more observed, much more acute.

..and enjoy a good old Lancashire sing-song.

# As they did when he meazur't me finger

# For th' little gowd ring last neet. #

Bravo!

My journey continues to take me south,

today towards the heart of Lancashire manufacturing.

Bradshaw's tells me that Preston possessed,

before the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832,

"the only real democratic electoral suffrage in the kingdom.

"All its inhabitants above 21 years of age,

"if free from the taint of pauperism, were entitled to a vote."

The 19th century brought an industrial revolution but also

a vast extension of the suffrage and improvements in conditions of work.

And in those battles, some of the first shots were fired in Preston.

The city sits between coastal plain, river valley and moorland.

By the time my guidebook was published in the 1860s,

Preston had been transformed

from an unassuming market town dotted with weavers' cottages

into a densely-populated centre of 70,000 people

built around 60 or so cotton mills.

Today the factories are long gone,

but the memory of their workers lives on.

I'm meeting local historian and trade unionist Jim Leigh

at Preston Market.

According to Bradshaw's, there was a lot of industrial unrest

in the first half of the 19th century.

Was there something very special about Preston?

There was. Preston had a notoriety as a very militant town.

I think it was a combination of extremely low wages

paid in the town together with shockingly poor housing conditions.

80% of the town depended on the mills for employment and housing.

Workers faced long hours and dangerous conditions.

Their houses were filthy, cramped and overcrowded, so disease spread fast.

Towards the end of the 19th century,

Preston had one of the highest rates of infant mortality in the country.

I believe there was a big event in 1842.

What was the background to that?

A severe recession was gripping the country, unemployment was high

and employers up and down the land began cutting wages.

So there's a lot of anger and frustration out there.

In response, a working-class movement, Chartism, tried to unite

workers across Britain in a strike over pay and factory conditions.

In August 1842, Preston's mill workers joined the protest.

And how did matters develop?

Groups of men and youths began assembling about the town.

Soon these small groups converged into one large group,

who then began visiting every mill and workshop across the town

and successfully brought them to a standstill.

The Mayor and magistrates,

accompanied by a detachment of soldiers,

resolved to confront the protestors.

What had been a peaceful protest escalated into a violent one.

Jim, it comes to be known as the Lune Street Riot. How?

They went about stopping the mills wherever they could find them

the following day.

The strikers then began proceeding up Lune Street

and it was here that they were confronted by the military.

And it was there that the Riot Act was read out.

We quite often refer to reading the Riot Act

without perhaps thinking what it means,

but I've got here what is read out

by someone like the Mayor of Preston on such an occasion.

"Our Sovereign Lady the Queen chargeth and commandeth all persons

"being assembled immediately to disperse themselves and peaceably

"to depart to their habitations or to their lawful businesses

"upon the pains contained in the act

"made in the first year of King George I

"for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the Queen."

The cotton workers refused to back down

and the military opened fire, killing four of them.

The tragic event of 1842 has not been forgotten

and 150 years later

a monument was erected to commemorate this fateful day.

Jim, this is a very striking monument. What was its inspiration?

I believe it's based on the famous Goya painting

that depicted a scene from the Napoleonic Wars.

And I see that flowers are laid.

Yes, these are from Workers Memorial Day, which commemorates

workers who died at work each year.

Jim, you're a trade unionist,

I'm sure you've been involved in a few disputes.

How do you assess the significance of this event?

This is extremely important.

It's part of Preston's radical history which continues to this day.

Little changed for the mill workers in the aftermath of the riot, but

the event retains a symbolic place in Britain's working-class history.

The next leg of my journey takes me southeast.

I have to change at Blackburn

before heading across the West Pennine moors.

I'm on my way to Darwen.

Bradshaw's tells me that the paper mills of Messrs Potter

produced 400 miles of paper, weighing 40 tonnes, per day.

Increasing quantities of paper were needed to adorn

the walls of the middle classes,

bringing the colours of nature into the Victorian drawing room.

The town sits in a valley amid 90 square miles of open moorland.

Following the arrival of the railway in 1847,

Darwen, like many northern towns, began to develop industrially.

The manufacture of paper and textiles led it to become

one of the largest Victorian mill towns in Lancashire.

The mills have long since shut

but a paint factory rich in Victorian heritage is still

going strong in the town today.

It's here that I'm meeting customer services director Geraldine Huxley.

Geraldine, the company mentioned in my Bradshaw's guide is Potters,

which was making paper.

What is the connection between that and today's company?

Well, John Potter was a Manchester businessman

and he came to live in the area and he married

the daughter of the gentleman who invented the calico printing.

He actually came into the business and took over and turned it into

a mechanical operation rather than a manual operation.

In 1839, the Potters developed a steam-driven surface printing machine

which enabled them to mass-produce wallpaper.

With the repeal of the wallpaper tax in 1836,

wallpaper became a very important element

of Victorian interior decoration, replacing panelling and tapestries.

William Morris's Trellis pattern of 1864

influenced generations of designers and remains popular today.

Which came first in Darwen, wallpaper or paint?

Wallpaper, definitely. Paint wasn't really experimented with until 1904,

some 100 years later.

In the Edwardian period,

brighter, paler colours were made using synthetic dyes

produced by the rapidly-developing chemical industry.

Potters paint also played an important part beyond

the homes of the middle classes.

Something of special interest, I think you will find,

is the palette of paints that were specially designed

for the railway industry.

"British Railways Eastern Region standard colour range for paint".

Now, some of these are what I would expect, these kind of muted browns

and beiges, but actually, some of them are quite bright.

Look at this vivid yellow and look at that sort of scarlet colour.

Very nice indeed.

Today, the company produces

a staggering 385,000 litres of paint per day -

enough to fill 38 Olympic-sized swimming pools every year.

I'm heading to the research and development department

to meet David Booth.

There's a vast range of colours here

and a layman might think that all possible colours are here.

But I've been thinking about whether I could match this jacket here

-and at first I thought it was something like that...

-No.

-Uh...

-No, it's far too orange.

Wait a minute, what about this one?

That's the nearest, but it's too weak.

So how will I match that up?

What we can do is take your jacket and actually put it onto the machine

and we'll get a prediction and make the paint up.

So I could buy a colour like that and paint my wall,

-just in case I wanted to camouflage myself at home.

-You could, yes.

-Can we give it a go?

-Yeah, we can indeed.

Right, can you please put your arm in there and push it up tight...

Whoops! ..against the machine?

Leave it there for a moment.

This is very weird.

A spectrophotometer analyses colour composition by measuring

the reflected light from a sample.

Feels like some medical procedure, like having my blood pressure taken!

Now David selects a base paint

and the appropriate pigments from a database.

Oh! I can see those streams of colour going in there.

It's the moment of truth.

Whoa! Look at that!

Portillo pink. Stock up now, it will be in fashion next year!

I'd love to stay and paint the town pink,

but I have a short journey to make before the day is out.

I'm heading five miles south through East Lancashire

on the Ribble Valley line to a rural station just north of Bolton.

-Entwistle. Request stop?

-That's correct.

-Could we stop at Entwistle, please?

-You certainly can.

-Make it easier to get off.

-Yes.

-Thank you.

Don't forget!

So we've emerged into the light after passing through a very long tunnel,

the Sough Tunnel, which I believe was quite an early

piece of railway engineering about which I'd like to know more.

On the south side of the Sough Tunnel sits Entwistle Station,

set in a small village overlooking

the rugged countryside of the lower Pennine hills.

-Thank you very much.

-Thank you. Nice to meet you.

-I was afraid you might have forgotten - to stop, I mean.

-Oh, no.

Thank you. Thank you, bye-bye.

I'm meeting local historian Eileen Cowen on the platform to find out

more about the construction of the tunnel and the workforce behind it.

-Eileen.

-Hello.

-Lovely to see you.

-Welcome to Entwistle.

I've just come through Sough Tunnel. Why did it have to be built?

It was to carry the Blackburn-Darwen line through to Bolton

and on to Manchester, which was very important for the industry

in Darwen and Blackburn. And in the way was Cranberry Moss,

which is 1,000 feet high, riddled with coal mines, water courses.

Very, very bleak in winter, it really is.

In 1848, the 1,850-metre tunnel was completed

and the line through to Bolton opened.

Who built it?

2,000 men worked there eventually.

Not mechanised - using wheelbarrows, picks, shovels.

Some expert tunnellers, but a lot of them just using their strength.

By the height of railway mania in the mid-19th century a quarter of

a million navvies had laid 3,000 miles of track across Britain,

transforming the rural landscape forever.

Where would they be living?

The majority of them lived up on the hilltops

in shanties made out of turf and stone.

What were conditions like in the camps where they lived?

They were living in very exposed conditions.

The land now is wet and bleak.

In winter it's covered in snow a lot of the time,

sometimes six foot high on the roads round here.

And they worked through the winters.

A navvy's life was harsh and the work was notoriously dangerous.

Five lives were lost during the building of the Sough Tunnel.

I count myself fortunate to have a warm bed for the night.

Refreshed, I am ready to continue my journey across northwest England.

I decided to spend the night in a delightful pub

with a great view over the moors, and it's just by Entwistle Station.

My train is at 8:21.

Provided I leave here at 8:19 I should be in good time.

Following my guidebook, I'm heading 15 miles south

across the Lancashire border to Salford in Greater Manchester.

Bradshaw's paints a marvellous picture

of an English manufacturing town in the middle of the 19th century.

"Thronged streets and narrow lanes stretch out on each side.

"Mills and factories rise out of the dense mass of houses,

"and a forest of chimneys towering upwards

"point out the local seats of manufacturing."

It took only an artist of Salford to add the matchstick men and women.

The Industrial Revolution dramatically transformed Salford

from a small market town on the banks of the River Irwell into a sprawling,

smoke-filled conurbation housing a population of over 200,000.

With overcrowded slums,

at the time of my guidebook, areas of Salford were deprived and squalid.

Lancashire artist Laurence Stephen Lowry

famously captured the 20th-century legacy of Victorian Salford,

of which just a hint still stands today.

A fitting place to meet art historian William Feaver.

What do you think attracted Lowry to depicting

an industrial landscape with all its smoke and so on?

He always lived here, it was utterly familiar to him.

It was useful to be surrounded by your subject

rather than to have to go out and find it too far away.

He recognised that in the tones of grotty, smoky, dark, wet Manchester,

there were very beautiful things to be seen.

Born in 1887, Lowry recorded nearly a century of industrial life

in Salford and Manchester.

He was the first artist to engage with industrial working-class

culture, which until then was viewed as unsavoury

and scarcely worthy as a subject for art.

Do you think he felt an empathy

with the people he painted in these streets?

Well, yes and no. His father had been a rent collector

and he was a rent collector for a living for many years.

He was obviously resented by some of the people he called on regularly

and also he was familiar to them, so it worked both ways.

Today, the largest public collection of his works is housed

at The Lowry in Salford Quays.

The arts complex opened in 2000

as part of a £106 million docklands regeneration scheme.

Michael, I thought you'd like to see this drawing

because it's an illustration almost of what happened to Lowry once.

He was on Pendlebury Station, missed his train,

looking around for something to do,

looked and saw the industrial landscape stretched around him -

smoking chimneys, the people scurrying below him.

And I suppose in a way this commemorates that eureka,

bingo moment when he suddenly found himself a life's work ahead of him.

Lowry's contemporaries often questioned

what he saw in such ordinariness.

-ARCHIVE RECORDING:

-People often tell me that, "And why do you paint such and such subjects?"

Well, I say, why shouldn't I paint them?

I like to paint them, so why not?

So here we see a Salford street,

and, as ever, dominated by the smoking chimney stack.

The houses and people are rendered quite simply.

Would we be right to think of this as naive?

You can say it's naive

but actually I think it's much more subtle than naive.

And I'm sure you're almost about to say matchstick figures,

aren't you, Michael? Well, matchsticks they are not.

They are much more observed, much more acute.

Lowry painted the ordinary people he saw at work and at leisure

on the streets of his native Lancashire.

People call them matchsticks, matchstick figures.

They may be. I don't mind.

I don't think it matters,

I paint the people as I see the people in my mind's eye.

The people tend to be poor people.

Does he display also a sympathy for people who are, I don't know,

outcasts or left aside?

He obviously saw that people worse off than himself were somehow

rather like ants, always engaged on business, scurrying to and fro.

All sorts of scenarios take place in his pictures

and they are not as simple as they look. They are much more subtle,

poetic and ultimately, I think, rather lonely.

People often say that

but I suppose I reflect myself in my figures - I'm bound to do.

I'm bound to reflect myself in the figures

and I'm a very lonely sort of a person.

As a Salford man himself,

with a concern for the plight of the working class,

George Bradshaw might have empathised

with Lowry's depiction of the city's people.

Lowry's popularity is undeniable, isn't it?

I first became aware of him because my grandfather managed to buy

one or two, but his popularity has been enormous, hasn't it?

In England, Britain, probably the most popular artist there is.

In the wider world, less known, but he is a great artist,

and there's no reason to plump him more than that.

Lowry and Bradshaw, one in painting and one in words,

recorded Britain's industrial landscape.

And today, having read Bradshaw's vivid description of a manufacturing

town in the 19th century, I like to hope that Lowry had read this book.

I'm sure he did. But of course, what he did,

he turned Bradshaw into a vision.

It's time to hit the tracks and head for my final destination.

I'm taking a short train ride north to Swinton,

from which it's a ten-minute drive east to Kersal Moor.

By the time of my guidebook,

industrialisation had made its mark on the Lancashire landscape

and the old pastoral ways were disappearing fast.

The desire to preserve local identity became stronger than ever.

Kersal Moor is a rural haven in Greater Manchester.

It remains little changed from Bradshaw's day and I can see

how it captured the imagination of 19th-century poet Edwin Waugh.

I'm meeting Sid Calderbank, dialect enthusiast

and member of the Edwin Waugh Society.

Why should we now remember the Victorian poet Edwin Waugh?

He was known in his lifetime as the Lancashire laureate.

He was the prince of dialect poets.

His works, his songs, stories and poems, spanned the whole of society.

What sort of things was he writing about?

He wrote about life in the mills,

life in the factories, life in the towns.

Born in 1817, Waugh penned poems in his native Lancashire tongue.

He captured people's imagination at a time when

urbanisation threatened to dilute local traditions.

Lancashire's cotton industry had boomed in the mid-19th century,

and its population doubled as workers from all over Britain migrated here.

His best-known poem was written in 1856 -

Come Whoam To Thi Childer An' Me -

and it's a poem about a young wife

who's at home and she's got all the housework done,

she's got the two children off to bed but she can't settle them

because they're crying. And she's crying too

because he's down at the pub,

so against all the social protocols of the time,

she gets his hat and coat and she goes down to the pub

to appeal, it turns out successfully, to his better nature.

But when she gets there she finds he's not all bad after all,

and that his pockets are filled with gifts for her and the kids

that he's got from the market,

and he's merely stopped off for a glass on his way back.

So all ends happily.

Waugh's poems were often set to music,

and Sid has devoted the last three decades to restoring these works.

To give me a flavour, he's arranged something rather special.

And here we have the Red Rose String Quartet, and we can play for you...

-Hello!

-..if you wish.

-Hello!

And if you'd like to join in, sir, there's the words.

-Very good! Good afternoon.

-Hello.

-Hello.

# Our Dorothy's singin' i'th shippon

# Our Jonathan's leawngin' i'th fowd

# Our Tummy's at th' fair, where he lippens

# O' swappin' his cowt for gowd

# Me gronny's asleep wi' her knittin'

# An' th' kittlins's playin' wi' yarn

# Our Betty's gone out wi' a gallon

# For th' lads as in warkin' i'th barn

BOTH: # And it's oh, yon Robin, yon Robin

# His e'en e'er twinkle't so breet

# As they did when he meazur't me finger

# For th' little gowd ring last neet. #

Bravo!

In the 1870s, Waugh's health deteriorated.

He moved to Kersal Moor for its fresh air

and was buried here after his death in 1890.

The moors were important to Waugh.

Are they important to Lancashire people generally?

Oh, they were important to the whole population of the county.

They were the lungs of Lancashire.

If you can imagine 19th-century industrial Lancashire,

it was dirty, it was dark, it was smelly and smoky,

but we've always been very proud of the fact that you're never

so far from the old moorland.

You can be a quarter of an hour from the factory gates

and you can be up here, where you can breathe.

Waugh clearly did much to preserve the Lancashire dialect in his time.

Today the mantle has passed to a handful of enthusiasts like Sid.

Can you greet me in the local dialect?

How do?

How do? That's simple enough!

-"How do?"

-It is. You don't need any more than that, really.

It means, "How do you do?"

-"How do?"

-Which, when it arrived in America, it became "howdy".

The Lancashire dialect is full of terrific tongue-twisters,

from polite greetings - "Aw'm gradely fain to si thi" -

to, "Be sharp! T'pig's fo'n i'th cut!"

which means, "Hurry up, the pig's fallen in the canal." Of course.

And what are you doing about keeping the dialect alive?

I'm trying to make it available,

make it relevant to today's audiences, not only to preserve it

but to bring it back to life.

Sid has certainly brought back to life for me today

a piece of Victorian Lancashire.

With my lungs filled with the finest air in the county,

I'm ready to return to the station.

Life was tough for working people in industrial Lancashire.

Wage cuts caused a bloody riot in Preston.

The region was the world's most successful manufacturing hub,

but the cost in terms of human suffering is visible

in the smoky streets of Lowry's paintings.

At least mill workers could escape, through the dialect of Edwin Waugh,

to the beautiful moors of the Red Rose county.

Next time, I feel the heat of modern glass-making...

I've just walked past a furnace at 1,600 degrees Celsius

and I can tell you it burns as you go by.

..break into song with some not-too-drunken sailors...

# Strike the bell, second mate, let's go below

# Look out to windward, you can see it's going to blow... #

..and experience life in service to a lady of the manor.

Will there be much more to be polished this afternoon, Mr Douglas?

Considerably more, Mr Portillo.