The Salford Scuttlers The Secret History of My Family

Victorian working-class Britain.

A labyrinth of destitution, street crime,

gang warfare,

drink addiction and welfare dependency.

Into this dark continent came an army of upper-class

do-gooders to study and help the problem families they found.

And on their expeditions into the slums, these missionaries

came face to face with Britain's outcast and unrecorded.

We knew very little about the history of our family.

She's sort of lower class, not worth anything.

The working class, yeah. "Get under there. They're only crap."

Now, using the explorers' written accounts of their meetings

with the underclass, we've traced their descendants

from Victorian times all the way down to the present day

to find out what happened to the families that history forgot.

To think about where our family's come in 200 years,

from just one girl, I think she'd be amazed.

We don't talk about it.

A story told by the descendants themselves.

We are all prisoners of our family histories.

Don't forget where you've come from. Don't forget.

Tonight, the story of two young gang leaders on opposite

sides of a postcode war that was terrorising the people of Salford.

Ooh, bedlam! Imagine it! Something out of a cowboy movie.

And the judge who wanted to clean up the streets

by giving the hooligans a dose of their own medicine.

'This is Ordsall. Two miles from Salford's town hall,

'ships lie at anchor on the greasy water.

'Even in the early hours of the morning, its nearby industrial

'chimneys go on belching, adding to an atmosphere already polluted.

'Coal fires adding their contribution to the carbonised air,

'while beneath a panorama of rooftops, the day begins.'

In Victorian times, Salford, near Manchester,

became one of the world's first industrial cities.

People flocked from all over, to graft in the mills

and the factories.

The conditions they lived and worked in were terrible.

I don't think they had cinemas and whatever.

You know, so social life, apart from the pub, was basically

fight each other to see who was the top dog in that area.

Gangs of youths, you know.

They had a distinctive dress style.

Basically bell-bottom trousers, clogs, jacket and a scarf.

And they had short back and sides.

They called these fights scuttles.

They wanted to fight and if anybody tried interfering,

like the police, they got a kicking or a good hiding.

Any bystander was automatically dragged in.

My name's Gary Farrar and in 1890

my ancestor, Peter Moffatt, was involved in a gang war

which shocked the people of Salford.

That's my dad, Alan.

His grandmother was Peter Moffatt's sister.

And she was a big member of his gang.

I'm Alan Farrar, Gary's dad.

Peter Moffatt, the scuttler, was my great-uncle.

I can understand why these lads were ready for a fight.

You was the lowest of the low, as far as higher ups was concerned.

You'd be lucky if you seen 40, weren't you?

They know they're getting exploited.

So you lose your rag and you just show it with violence, don't you?

It must have been just boredom or who wanted to be the top dog.

Cos they were making nothing out of it.

By 1890, the fighting reached its head,

as two rival gangs battled for control.

One notorious hard man was determined to be top dog,

my relative, Peter.

Peter Moffatt, a 20-year-old gang leader,

and he was a feared gang leader,

had got nine months' prison in Strangeways for stabbing

John Allmark, who was a leader of a rival gang.

Peter was under the impression his enemy grassed him.

I'm Ray Allmark. My grandad was a cousin of John Allmark,

Peter Moffatt's arch rival. His gang looked up to him.

He might've been the toughie in their gang, you know what I mean?

And then he's met his match in Moffatt.

You know, "I'm mean, I'll stand up to you," type of thing.

It didn't just go on for two or three months, it went on for years.

Moffatt blamed my great-great-uncle John for getting him

banged up for nine months in Strangeways.

During this nine months, it must have been festering in Peter.

He was hellbent on revenge.

Because on the day of his release

he went out looking for the Hope Street gang.

Bank Holiday Monday, Easter.

When they should have all been out celebrating,

having a few pints, he went scuttling.

I was told some men were looking for me, so I went up Ordsall Lane,

on to the Prince of Wales beer house in Hope Street.

A brick went through the window.

That was the calling note - we're here.

"Come out you bleeders. Cop for this."

The landlord went to the door and was struck with a stick.

-Then he sent all the lads out.

-Get your weapons.

They'd seen who it was

and started tearing the furniture apart to use as weapons.

They'd have gone out, faced them up and run at one another.

Obviously, using the weapons in their hand first.

Try and thin them out a bit with them. Buckle belts.

You only want one of them round your jaw or summat,

you wouldn't be getting up from that for a while.

According to an eyewitness, there was,

like, an 80-strong battle of young men.

-What must it have looked like, that fight?

-Ooh, bedlam!

Imagine it!

Summat out of a cowboy movie.

I heard a row and shouting, but I did not go out.

I refused.

As the leader of them,

you'd expect him to, you know, lead from the front,

but I think John's a smarter fella that thinks a bit more than Moffatt.

Somewhere along the line, fighting like that, you're going

to say, "I've had enough of it now."

Other things on his mind.

Making money. Maybe he'd got a girlfriend.

While Allmark stayed inside the pub, outside,

his gang were getting the better of Peter's.

He was running away, Peter was. Cos they were getting beat.

He got caught, didn't he?

I felt the knives go in my back.

About...four cuts.

Wherever you get stabbed, five times is a bit tricky, isn't it?

Probably thinking - "I'm a goner here.

"I've had it. This is it. Goodbye, Mr Chips."

I got back home with some great difficulty.

I felt the blood running down my leg. I could hardly walk.

He must have gone through agony.

And that was his first day out.

Eh?

They'd be arrested, wouldn't they? Charged.

To appear in front of the magistrate.

He'd say, "You lot again?" That type of thing.

That's the way they'd look at it. Sick of you.

It might have even gone to crown court,

or the quarter sessions as they had then.

Cos it's not like just pinching a bottle of milk, was it?

It was causing carnage in the streets.

I'm John Crowther Makinson.

The Salford magistrate, Joseph Makinson, was my great-grandfather.

I do have a sense that he felt that the work

he did was, without being pompous about it, important

and particularly important at that time in that place.

He had been grappling with the scuttling problem for years.

This latest scuttle shocked him because Peter Moffatt had

attacked John Allmark on the very day he had been released from jail.

Prison no longer seemed to be working as a deterrent.

By 1890, there were more youths in Strangeways Prison

for scuttling than for any other offence.

So my great-grandfather came up with the controversial policy to

put a stop to it.

He wanted to introduce flogging, basically,

as a sharp-shock treatment and basically browbeat them.

I'd like to ask the magistrate how he'd feel

if he had to live in their conditions?

That's what I'd like to ask.

I've never seen a picture, but I can imagine a pot-bellied, pompous prat,

if I'm allowed to swear.

Looking down on them lads.

That's the way they've treated the working class.

"Yeah, get under there. They're only crap."

I do think that that probably wasn't a reflection of a sadistic or

even particularly a liberal streak in my great-grandfather

but probably the result of an intense feeling of frustration about

how to deal with a problem which didn't have an obvious solution.

Even in Victorian Britain, flogging was seen as brutal.

The Home Secretary thought it was too controversial

and turned Makinson's proposal down.

John Allmark ended up with four months' imprisonment and

Peter Moffatt, he ended up with 12 months' imprisonment, hard labour.

Peter vanished from the records for ten years.

Then he reappeared in the early 1900s.

He was in his 30s and things were just as bad.

He becomes a petty thief, stealing leggings, coats.

In total, he was convicted nine times.

It's no wonder Peter ended up in trouble with the law.

Through all his years, he never had what you'd call a stable home life.

Peter and his sister, Margaret, had brought themselves up alone.

Their parents were working all hours.

I think he had a lonely life. He was unmarried.

No family whatsoever, apart from his sister Margaret.

At the age of 51, he...

Presumably, he was diagnosed with a form of cancer of the lung and he

ended up in the Crumpsall Workhouse hospital, north Manchester.

When you sum him up, how do you see his life?

A complete uphill struggle.

From the day you're born to the day you go.

64967, December the 16th, Peter Moffatt.

Basically, he was one of our ancestors

and you reckon this is the grave he's in?

This is the grave here, yes.

In them days, they were referred to as pauper's graves.

-They would bury up to 17, 20 people.

-That many?

-Yeah.

They'd be just one buried on top of the other.

-So it'd have been rather deep, then?

-It would have been, yeah, 20ft plus.

-Right. So practically, lay... Just stacked up.

-Yeah.

-Just stacked up.

Yep.

There was two burials in that grave on the same day.

I don't suppose they'd have had a service for them either.

They were all treated the same, weren't they,

if you was working class?

If you had any money, you'd be over there in the middle.

They must have cost a fortune, whereas Peter's...

You wouldn't know it was there.

-You don't.

-That's it. His life's come and gone.

-There's not only Peter.

-No, I know.

There's hundreds and hundreds of people in this small plot here.

Peter never had kids, but his nephew, Joe, my grandad,

grew up in his shadow.

Grandad Joe's mum, Peter's sister Margaret,

was part of the Moffatt gang.

Joe grew up without a dad.

He had no-one to keep him on the straight and narrow.

His downfall was drink, gambling, smoking...

Not bad if you've got one habit, but he had the three.

Joe met this girl called Cressy Bailey in the early '30s.

And then they got married in 1935.

And then it was three years later when I was born, 1938.

She was good as gold to me.

If I was hungry, she'd give me the last crust. Oh, aye.

There was none of that - "You can't have this and you can't have this."

If she could get it, I'd have got it.

We had a nice house, it was clean.

We even had an electric wireless.

This might make you laugh, we had an electric wireless.

She was that... But we didn't have electric.

But she bought the electric wireless for when we got electric!

That made me laugh.

It was a bit rough in them days.

It's a case of dog eat dog, isn't it?

In the pubs, I know they was renowned for trouble...

Go in them to get a few pints and get drunk

and then the next minute, you've got an argument and that spills

outside and you've got a fight on your hands, haven't you?

You'd never see Joe scuffling. The pub and womanising.

He was never out of that Ritz.

What was your mum and dad's marriage like?

Oh, a bit turbulent!

Yeah.

The only time he come home early was when he was going out.

And that was to get spruced up.

If he weren't going out,

he didn't come home cos he'd be in the pub in his working clothes.

Being a kid, you don't realise,

but obviously she knew what was going on.

You could hear them rowing.

"You liar," and things like that.

It used to upset me.

"I'm leaving," and all that. You didn't want that.

I don't think any kid wants their family to split up, do they?

And that's what frightened me.

She'd been poorly all her life.

And one Friday night, she was sat there and she just says...

.."Oh, I do feel funny."

And she just started to fall off the chair,

so I jumped up and grabbed her.

And I laid her... She was that light.

I was only 17 and I grabbed her, picked her up,

and I laid her on the floor in front of the fire.

When I got back with the doctor, he said,

"She was dead when you grabbed her."

That's how quick it was.

So then it was just me and me dad left.

It'd be round about February or March, I'd been in the army

say four or five months.

And I came home one night...

..and the house was empty.

Gone. Everything.

Windows were whitewashed, actually.

You could just peep through the slits.

He sold all the furniture to neighbours.

And just let the house go and moved in with a woman.

So then, I was 18.

And homeless.

What happened to your dad?

Well, he lived with this woman. Over 20 years.

So when she died, he was homeless. So I took him in.

Why did you do that for him?

Just... Just something you'd do for your own.

He was still me own, wasn't he? He'd done me no favours,

but that doesn't say I haven't got to do him one.

-He hadn't done anything for you.

-Doesn't make any difference.

Doesn't say I've got to be like that, does it?

Looking back, I wouldn't say fighting's in my blood,

but at the same time, growing up round here,

you couldn't let yourself be pushed around.

So maybe I did inherit a little streak of Peter Moffatt's

fighting spirit.

If someone picked on you, if you didn't retaliate,

they kept picking on you.

So, that was it.

You're either prepared to take it all your life...or have a go back.

Someone hits you, you hit them back, don't you?

With a shovel if you've got one.

HE CHUCKLES

Just comes natural, doesn't it?

But I got through all that, grafted, got myself a job on a building site,

then ended up doing windows and all sorts.

Tell me about YOU becoming a dad. Did you want to have children?

I never gave it a thought, actually, to tell you the truth.

But I met a girl and we started courting and the next thing...

we got married.

Gary was born and once he was born, that was it.

I wouldn't bail out and leave my kid.

I'm Gary Farrar, Alan's son.

I'm the great-great-nephew of Peter Moffatt.

I was born in 1960 in Hulme. Did five years of school.

Left at the first opportunity and went working.

About '79, I acquired a job at a bakery, which is

on the industrial estate.

Six months into being made full-time, I thought,

"I'm going to get on my feet here."

I'd gone from earning £44 a week to earning over £100 a week in my hand.

It was fantastic, it was like winning the lottery.

Anyway, this particular morning, I finished work, I went home to bed.

My dad used to come home every lunchtime to let the dog out.

He had a Jack Russell at the time.

And he come up and woke me up.

Told me not to bother going to work in the evening

because the bakery had shut down.

And that was during the Thatcherite years.

-THATCHER:

-I must tell you that what we've got is an attempt to substitute

the rule of the mob for the rule of law.

The Thatcher years were hard times.

A lot of factory jobs just disappeared like that overnight.

There were more and more people on the dole, on the social.

It was hard for our Gary. He kept trying this and that.

-NEWS:

-The imminent closure of a textile machinery plant presents

a massive headache for the job finders.

But there was nothing solid for him to do.

People were just getting... Well, they decimated the mines...

It was a hard time.

After that, it was very, very difficult to get a job.

How did you feel at the time?

Quite bitter because I'd lost a job where I thought

I was going to get on my feet.

And all that was dragged from under my nose. It was stole from me.

You had to make money where you could.

Without obviously stating where I'd been making my money

and how I'd been making my money,

I don't want to incriminate myself, but you had to improvise.

I didn't go out thieving.

I could have got myself involved in some real trouble.

Violence like Peter Moffatt and his mob.

But I was determined not to mess my life up.

It made you more resilient because I used to think to myself,

"Right, I'm going to get on my feet here,"

and instead of blowing everything I'd got,

I'd govern myself for where I'd go out on a Friday night,

Saturday dinner, Saturday night and Sunday dinner and that'd be it.

I'd stay in the rest of the week and govern myself.

And I achieved things and started saving money.

There was another very important thing that helped me along too.

I had the odd relationship here and there and whatever

but nothing ever serious till Mandy came along.

-What was it like being a dad?

-I was made up.

Over the moon.

I told her, if we have a boy I wanted to call him Joe,

after me grandad.

A couple of years afterwards, she went in hospital to have Lois.

We didn't have the resources to go travelling abroad.

It was spent elsewhere, going out in local pubs

and basically survival.

And then I got a job at the airport.

I was loading planes up and they were coming back and unloading them.

I'd never flown and a guy I was working with, he said,

"Well, do you fancy it?"

CONTROL TOWER ON RADIO

All right, let's go.

-This is the most exciting bit.

-Yeah, taking off and landing.

Oh!

-So, when was your first flight, then?

-Spring '94.

Went up in a four-seater. Me and the kids, south side of Manchester.

-Yeah.

-And I'd never flown up till that day.

Gary never had the chance to go up in a plane.

We couldn't afford that kind of holiday, so I think he got

it into his head that it was something he'd never be able to do.

It was exciting. We flew over Goodison Park.

And Everton were playing Spurs that day.

And Lois was laughing,

"Look at those little people all running round the football pitch!"

It was a great buzz.

What did that one plane flight do for you?

It just gave me the kick up the backside,

saying that I should have done this years ago.

After that, it was Corfu, Gran Canaria, Cuba, Mexico

numerous times.

We've been to places other people dream of.

-Clear as a bell, isn't it?

-Oh, yeah.

-Fantastic.

It has opened our horizons.

Plastics, in number five, burnable, please, mate.

Currently, I work at a recycling depot.

I've never earned a lot of money, but a few years ago,

with some hard graft and a bit of help from my dad,

Mandy and me managed to buy our council house.

-Being able to buy my own house was fantastic.

-Are you proud?

Yeah, I am because I eventually got up there.

It's quite satisfying, actually, knowing that when I die,

I'll just put it in the kids' name.

The way it looks, I don't think they're going to leave home anyway.

Joe, he'll probably be here when I'm an old man.

Right, so what are we at?

I'm trying to watch this and you keep interrupting me.

I apologise.

-People wonder why I send you out.

-Well, let's eat then.

T-bone steak?

Ready meals.

When have you ever had a ready meal?

-I know.

-Everyone knows you don't get ready meals.

I tell you what, both of you, cooking your own tea tomorrow.

I cook it anyway.

When Joe left school, he went on from strength to strength.

He ended up enrolled at Leeds Uni.

I always knew I wanted to go to university,

especially from a young age, but it was a bit weird because you

didn't hear of people going, especially from, like, the area.

It was very rare.

To an extent that I remember a teacher in school told me

I'd never go. So...

Yeah, I proved her wrong.

How did you feel when he graduated?

Over the moon. I never thought I'd see a Farrar in an outfit like that.

You know. I was made-up.

Me and Lois, we've grown up, we've both gone to university, worked a

job at the same time, so I think as opposed to the violence in the blood,

I think it's more the hard work and the passion than anything.

My dad, he's never encouraged me to fight. He's never...

Actually, one of his old sayings when I was a kid was -

violence isn't the answer. So... You know.

Things have changed.

If Peter Moffatt would have had them opportunities,

what would he have been?

The violent rivalry between the Moffatts

and the Allmarks has petered out.

But us Allmarks have stayed rooted in Salford.

We're a close, tightknit family.

I think that's what helped John the Scuttler turn his story around.

After the fight, Judge Makinson sent John to Strangeways for four months.

He was only 18 and unlike Peter Moffatt, I think it did him

some good.

It turned him.

After John's spell in prison, I think

it's the last straw for him, like, and he'd like to get away from it.

He joins the army, doesn't he? Went to Africa, Boer War.

And he turned himself round a bit in there. He was a good soldier.

He'd have been a bit used to coming under fire in one form or another.

Maybe hand-to-hand fighting.

You know, he'd done it before, so he knows a bit about it.

And how to handle himself in a situation like that,

with a knife or a bayonet.

He had a nice medal and mentioned in dispatches.

Goes back to Salford, restarted the coal round.

You had a coal business, you got a good round in,

you could probably make a few quid at it.

Made his business work for him. He's made himself a few bob.

From the photo, John looks as if he's done really well.

I'm really proud of him.

Everyone in Salford knew the Allmarks,

they were such a large extended family.

We've stayed living near the same streets as John the Scuttler.

# I found my love... #

Salford? Well, it was dark.

Everything seemed in black and white when I was a kid.

You know, it was just very dark and the streets, everywhere, was dirty.

# Dirty old town... #

You know, the walls and everything and... Grime, wasn't it?

I don't want to bum Salford up or anything

because it's a dirty old town, as the song goes, you know?

I grew up in it, I knew no different.

I knew no different.

There was some handy lads and some all right,

some villains that I don't want to know, you know.

As I got older, I got into trouble like John the Scuttler.

You're small and they think they can push you out of the way

and things like that.

I weren't having that.

They hit you and you don't go down, and you hit them,

they don't want it.

Weapons don't appeal to me.

That's not fighting. Fighting's stood up to one another.

Toe-to-toe, going at it, if that's what you want.

But nothing violent.

I wouldn't use buckles or anything like that, just my fist and my head.

And the boot, if they go down.

Had buckles hit me on the head and all sorts, hit with a pint pot.

Got all my eye bit there... He got hold of me and ripped it off.

As time went on, I met Mary and Mary got pregnant.

Me and Mary decided to get married.

She'd go mad if I'd had a fight or something. She used to go mad.

"What are you doing again? What are you doing all that for?"

In the end, Mary had her way.

I settled down and became a family man.

We had kids and then in time, grandkids.

Just like John the Scuttler.

I've gone down the same road as him.

Similar paths, you know.

He's took one to give up what he was doing in his scuttling days,

to settle down.

Mine was just learning a bit of sense.

But it just took me

to about 30 to think, "I'll change me direction a little bit."

You're responsible for each other.

You're responsible for your children.

And that's the be all and end all, really, isn't it,

looking after your family.

Aw!

I spent most of my working life as a joiner for the council.

When I finished that, I picked up a part-time job as a cleaner.

Keeps me out of trouble.

In a way, we haven't travelled very far at all.

We're ordinary working people, the same as we ever were.

No-one's become a judge or anything like that in my family.

We're builders, nurses, beauticians and one's an accountant,

so we're not millionaires.

But we've got the same family bonds that the Allmarks have always had.

The family have always been there, through whatever crisis you're going

through, you know you've always got a family member to fall back on.

It's just something that the Allmarks have done

and it's just the strength of them, really.

-You've been married into the Allmark family for...

-46...

Well, 48 years in July.

Is it 48?

Yes.

48 years.

It's definitely the case that we're all really close.

I think, growing up, everyone used to say

I was always with my dad, like, following my dad about, like.

I think it's the same with my dad.

My dad's always round at my grandad's house.

Realising where you've come from or where the family's come from,

to what they are now, it's special, really.

It is special.

So what about the man who dispensed justice on us back then?

Did his family stay in Salford?

Are they all still in powerful jobs?

The crimes and punishments of 100 years ago didn't just have

consequences for the families of the scuttlers.

In a different way, they have echoed down through my family.

My great-grandfather, Mr Joseph Crowther Makinson,

served as stipendiary magistrate in Salford for a great many years.

The scuttling problem with which he was being asked to deal,

was a relatively new kind of social problem.

My impression is that he was very seriously engaged in his work

and he felt that the work he did was important.

There is an idea of justice in the family.

That there are right ways to behave and there are wrong ways to behave

and we would like to behave in the right way.

'Oh, God. Grant us a vision of our city, fair as she might be.

'A city of justice where none shall prey on others.'

It must have been a very uneasy, uncertain,

to some extent, unpleasant place to live.

But with economic opportunity as well.

I mean, there are a lot of people getting rich,

a lot of people getting poor. Felt like a sort of frontier town.

And Joseph Crowther Makinson was trying to establish,

as the magistrate, some pattern of order in the Wild West.

I mean, he was the local sheriff, to some extent.

He not only administered justice, but seemed responsible pretty

much for every part of the process of justice.

Traditional custodial remedies just weren't working,

so I think he was trying to figure out

whether there was a different way of addressing that.

I find it rather disturbing to think that an ancestor of mine

had been publicly advocating the flogging of young people.

It's not something that one would like to think

a Makinson would be doing today.

What about his home life? What was that like?

He had a number of kids from two marriages.

His first wife having died when he was quite young.

I think he was sort of back at home at the end of the day,

but I'm sure he was locked away in his study, reading papers

and forming a view on the cases that were coming before him.

It may be that he was a rather absent and perhaps quite

neglectful parent.

He was so focused on the work that he was doing

as a magistrate that the family life took a bit of a backseat.

Joseph Crowther Makinson had three sons.

Warwick, the eldest, John Russell, and the youngest, Joseph.

My grandfather seemed to be the most active, responsible,

directed of the three siblings.

He was sent away to a traditional boys' public school

and then went on to Cambridge, like his father.

And like his father, Joseph went on into the law,

but then he had a rather radical change of direction

and decided to join the Church, giving up some income,

probably giving up some social status.

My grandmother was bitterly disappointed.

She never really forgave him for that.

I don't think anybody could say that it was a successful marriage.

My own father, Kenneth Crowther Makinson,

was the only son of my grandparents.

Obviously had an unhappy childhood in some respects.

It made him a more anxious person than he would have been.

There was nothing terribly carefree about my father.

He went to war in 1939.

Met my mother in Italy, became engaged

when they'd known each other just a few days.

I mean, it wasn't an entirely happy marriage and, in the end,

my parents did separate.

I didn't have a confrontational relationship with my parents.

They were just very absent, honestly.

It was sort of a lonely life.

I went away to boarding school

when I was five - to a school called St Wystans.

It was near where I grew up in Derbyshire.

We had long since lost our Salford roots.

You can feel walking through the gates there, what it must have

felt like as a really young child,

knowing that you were waving goodbye to your parents.

I do have a memory in the back of my mind here...of the children

in the dormitory all sobbing themselves to sleep.

And it being a very sad place, particularly in the evenings.

That's me, right down in the corner in the front row.

Looking surprisingly cheerful.

HE CHUCKLES

SCHOOL BELL RINGS

Prep school and public school may not have been the happiest

of experiences, but they did at least prepare me for university.

I passed the necessary examinations and got myself a place at Cambridge.

I made a great many friends who have stayed with me through my life,

so I do look back with very happy memories on that time.

After that, I worked at the Financial Times,

first as a journalist and eventually as its managing director.

I am quite driven, I suppose.

I imagine that my grandfather

and my great-grandfather were both quite driven people.

So I suppose that's where it comes from,

from that Makinson line of the family.

I became the chairman of Penguin in 2002.

-What does the chairman do? What's your sort of...?

-Not much.

So this is the area in which we publish the Penguin Classics,

for which we are well-known, obviously.

These are our top-selling books from this area of the business.

The Makinsons left Salford generations ago

and we've lost Joseph the magistrate's ties to the area.

OK, I think we'll turn down er... Down here.

We are really a global family now.

I am based in New York, but I also work in London

and I regularly visit Calcutta in India,

where my wife hails from.

I don't feel I have particularly deep roots anywhere.

In some ways, I think it's liberating because you don't

get sort of imprisoned by a sense of identity and affiliation,

but I think there's a loss there as well.

I think we all like roots and anchors

and those aren't strong for me.

It's been for me...necessary to sort of learn, really, how to be

a more open person. It's not something that came naturally.

I'm not saying this is entirely my family background.

I think boarding school education does that to you as well, to some extent.

I think those defence mechanisms that you learn in childhood

make you quite resilient,

but they also make you a little bit closed up

when it comes to, not just relationships with a partner,

but with close friends, with one's parents, with one's children.

I have been divorced, my parents split up,

my grandfather's marriage was unhappy.

We spend a lot of time apart,

largely because I'm away from London a good deal.

And I do worry about keeping the closeness of this family.

I have two children in their 20s.

Emma, who is the elder daughter, and Lucy, who is the younger daughter.

They are two children that I had with my first wife.

Curiously enough, both of them ended up going to

study at Cambridge as well and they're bright, great, attractive...

Lovely, nice children.

I'm obviously totally objective on this issue, but they're fantastic.

This is a very nice Brunello di Montelcino.

My friends, when I was younger, always used to like coming round

-to my dad's house.

-Because there was nice wine?

Yeah, cos you were very generous with it.

-I am.

-Cheers.

-Cheers, my love.

-Is this a regular...?

-What? Cooking?

Yeah.

Fairly. Not as often as we'd like.

Since dad's moved primarily to New York,

we just see each other much less.

So, we both recognise that we have to make more of a kind of effort.

So, Dad and Luce and I can all easily go a month,

-maybe even two months, without speaking to each other, right?

-Yeah.

-It's certainly not very emotionally demanding.

-No.

We've grown up in a family that's sort of made work a bit of a

priority and always worked very hard and telling each other

how much we love each other the whole time, I mean, that's just not...

-That's not really an important thing to any of us, very much.

-No.

No, not very.

There's a sort of stability that comes with kind of, you know,

putting your family first and I'm quite envious, in many ways,

of my friends who have a nuclear family with whom

they still, in their 30s, go to dinner every Friday night and that's...

I think that's really nice.

Being a good parent is not really a learnt skill, is it?

It's an attitude and it's a consistency

and it's an availability and it's an openness.

I did spend some time some years ago...examining through quite

an intensive therapy process - my relationship with my parents

cos I really did want to come to understand it better

and to some extent come to terms with it.

I think as you recognise patterns of behaviour

and attitudes that migrate across generations,

you learn quite a lot about yourself.

The Makinsons have, I suppose,

been a consistently successful family,

in terms of their professional achievements,

but to succeed in environments like the courtroom

and boarding school,

perhaps we've had to keep some of our personal feelings buried,

so we have really had to work to keep talking about anything

and everything.

I mean, the sort of generational echoes are amazingly loud sometimes

and the more you look into them, the louder they become.

I mean, certainly in exploring my relationships with my own

parents and grandparents, the more you look into that

and dig around into that issue, the more echoes you find, so we are all

prisoners sometimes, in a positive way, of our family histories.

-Gingerbread man! Gingerbread man!

-Gingerbread man!

'There is another descendant of Joseph Makinson the magistrate.

'That's my family line.'

You want some? Bring it!

Do a handstand!

We're Makinsons too.

Yay!

But we've never met John Makinson. And he's never heard of us.

We're his cousins.

I like a noisy house.

I like some warmth to be within a house

and I think that comes from the people that live within it.

Turn them all over now!

Oh, hang on.

-Igloo!

-Taxi!

So how did we become so far removed from the world of our cousins?

Joseph Makinson had three boys.

There was Warwick, there was John and there was Joseph.

Warwick was my father's father.

Joseph was quite strict, both in his religious beliefs,

which was Wesleyan, but also strict within the family.

As children often do, they either want to emulate their father,

or be the complete opposite and I think Warwick wanted the opposite

to his father.

Warwick met and married a lady called Maude. Maude with an E.

As she always told me.

And she was the daughter of a local drapery clerk in a warehouse.

Now, I think you can see that's a totally different class.

There's nothing wrong with being in a warehouse,

it's better than being down a pit.

But it's not a magistrate, is it?

Warwick's father felt he had to be there, but I can't

see that he would have been overly pleased

at Warwick's choice of wife.

Warwick and Maude had three children.

First of all, they had Joseph.

Then they had Clifford and finally they had Josephine.

But after the death of their daughter,

Warwick and Maude's marriage fell apart.

Warwick had an affair with a woman called Mabel.

He left with her to Australia

and our family never heard from him again.

I think that's a disgrace. An absolute disgrace.

I think it shows a weak, almost worthless individual.

Within his will, he said he had, quote, "no issues",

which I believe means no dependents, he had completely written out

and written off my gran, my uncle and my father.

Warwick's adultery turned us

from a middle-class family into a working-class family.

From being very comfortably off,

the Makinsons were suddenly fighting for survival.

I don't think my dad had a very nice childhood at all.

My father went to a blue coat school, which was in Lancashire.

It was a very disciplined and strict school, for those who were poor.

When he was old enough,

he left and he went and joined the merchant navy.

Got on a merchant ship from Liverpool.

My dad, Cliff, was in the merchant navy for five years.

In 1935, he came back to England and got a job as a labourer.

My mum met my father in Hastings.

And my dad was digging a hole in the road, was just a labourer.

And she liked the look of his back.

It can't have been a very gentle aroma...

but it wasn't enough to put my mum off my dad's back.

Apparently so!

Although my dad, Cliff,

didn't have the wealth that there had been in the past,

he had the wealth of having a loving family and I can honestly say

I can't remember an unhappy day within my childhood.

Learning about your past,

how has that helped you understand more about yourself?

There's been similarities with divorces and separations.

Maude being abandoned and deserted and left to bring up two small boys.

I was left without a penny in my purse, with three young girls,

and had to make do.

Maude kept things going for her boys.

I mean, how my father turned out to be such a lovely,

lovely man is either down to his inner goodness or

because of the education that Maude gave him, or both.

If she brought up my dad and my dad was so lovely,

thank you very much, Maude.

It was a crimewave 125 years ago which first brought together

the Moffatts, Allmarks and the Makinsons.

Back then, Makinson believed harsher punishment was a solution.

I don't agree. Two wrongs don't make a right.

The person who freed us from the past

and changed our fortunes - was my dad.

It was him sticking by us that helped our family get on its feet.

But what about the Makinsons and the Allmarks?

I'm about to see how it all turned out for them.

Um... Bit like myself, I suppose. You know, working class people.

I'm apprehensive and a bit nervous, yeah. Yeah.

How's it going to go? You know, I hope we don't all start scuttling.

HE CHUCKLES

Joseph Crowther Makinson was the

stipendiary magistrate in Salford at that time.

So relationships between him

and the other families, at that time, were not very harmonious.

We hope we'll get on a bit better later today.

Is he a judge now?

They usually stay in that profession, don't they?

I hope it's nobody I've ever met!

THEY LAUGH

I'm John Makinson and I'm the great...

-So, we are the great-grandsons of Joseph Crowther Makinson.

-Hello.

You're a Makinson, aren't you?

-Hello, John.

-Nice to meet you.

-This is my daughter, Kristal.

-Hi, Kristal. I'm John.

-How did you know that we were Makinsons?

-It's the Makinson nose.

-Is it?

The Makinson nose.

-Who are you?

-Allmark, Raymond.

-Hello.

-Pleased to meet you, John.

-Hello.

-How are you doing?

-Hi, I'm Gary Farrar.

-John Allmark. How are you doing?

We're just trying to keep peace here.

LAUGHTER

Oh, wow!

I knew straight away who you was. You were the Moffatt.

They are some wonderful people. The Allmarks are great.

They're just like us, working-class folk. And it's been good.

I feel privileged.

LAUGHTER

-Get in! That's it, isn't it?

-Good game!

She's a stirrer. She's just trying to provoke a reaction.

-We're OK, aren't we?

-All right.

-Thank you very much, Emily.

-We're perfectly all right.

-I'm waiting for it to go dark.

LAUGHTER

I've been very struck by how close, as families, the other two families are.

They're quite large families and ours is quite a small family, really.

But they are large and very interconnected families.

-We're not that bad, are we?

-You're not, no.

Perhaps because they have stayed close to here, the scene of

the action, for generations, and live close to each other to this day,

and that's not true of my family.

We're a diaspora.

Good or bad.

Beautiful.

So how are you related, then?

-How are we related? Cousins?

-I guess we're cousins. Yeah, so...

-Second cousins?

-I don't know.

That way a little bit more?

Our history is the tale of two fathers...

-GIGGLING

-What?

..one who did a disappearing act and the one who was always there.

One more of those.

I think my story has shown strong families triumphing over

misfortunes and not rich at all -

money-wise. But family-wise, very, very rich.

Yeah, I think the family is at the heart of our story.

The Allmarks have always looked out for one another.

That's what helped us get out of the slums.

The marriages have stuck together.

-That's made them stronger still.

-Yeah.

They've stayed together,

the families have all been... All tightknit.

-Everyone's an Allmark or a descendant of an Allmark.

-Mm.

Along the lines, we are learning. We're not stuck in rock bottom.

Peter Moffatt was on his backside, basically. Destitute.

Joe's been to university, Lois is at university.

So I feel privileged, on that score, and I'm proud of that.

What do you think Peter Moffatt would have made of today's meeting?

He'd have probably pinched our coats.

-And three, two, one.

-ALL: Salford!