E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
Moorhouse Hell's Foundations
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-28114-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
A Town, Its Myths and Gallipoli
E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-28114-5
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Geoffrey Moorhouse has been described as 'one of the best writers of our time' (Byron Rogers, The Times), 'a brilliant historian' (Dirk Bogarde, Daily Telegraph) and 'a writer whose gifts are beyond' category' (Jan Morris, Independent on Sunday). His numerous books -- travel narratives, histories, novels and sporting prints -- have won prizes and been translated into several languages: To the Frontier won the Thomas Cook Award for the best travel book of its year. In 1982 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and in 2006 he became Hon DLitt of the University of Warwick. He has recently concentrated on Tudor history, notably with The Pilgrimage of Grace and, in 2005, Great Harry's Navy, which has just been followed by The Last Office: 1539 and the Dissolution of a Monastery. Born in Lancashire, he has lived in a hill village in North Yorkshire for many years.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
The regimental home of the Lancashire Fusiliers was the town of Bury, which sprawls at the foot of Rossendale on the edge of the Pennine hills. These have sometimes been referred to as the back bone of England, and they do indeed run like a spine up the middle of the country, more or less half-way between the Irish Sea and the North Sea. Starting in Derbyshire they continue northwards for some 160 miles, until they merge with the Cheviots on the Scottish border. Just short of 3,000 feet at their highest point, the Pennines are about half that height as they traverse the eastern side of Lancashire, where they form a natural boundary which separates the county from Yorkshire; but this trifling altitude can be deceptive to the unwary traveller. Winter can be dangerously bleak on those hills, even at their lowest, even without snow, when rain is liable to sweep across them torrentially; and in any of the blizzards that frequently occur between December and March they can be lethal to those who, all too easily, become lost in the ensuing whiteout. At other times of the year they have a wild grandeur in spite of the fact that their carboniferous rocks are usually visible only in occasional outcrops and crags. The most characteristic view in the Pennines is one of sweeping moorland devoid of trees, broken by uncemented dry-stone walls which have marked out the sheep pastures since the proprietary enclosures of higher ground in the eighteenth century. The high pasture is fit for nothing but sheep, and parts of the Pennines will not even sustain any animal, where coarse tussocks grow amid expanses of barren peat. Cotton grass dapples the boggier tracts in spring and, when autumn comes, heather empurples the hills. Streams tipple out of these uplands to merge amid the bracken and the cow pastures lower down, and to become rivers which form along the bottom ground. The most memorable sounds of the high Pennines are those made by rushing water, and by the wind sweeping across the tops. These mingle with the plaintive bleat of sheep throughout the year, and with the bubbling trill of the curlew, which means that spring has come again.
Typical of the small rivers running out of these hills is the Irwell, which flows down the length of Rossendale, one of the valleys formed in the Ice Age between the main Pennine range and its numerous spurs. Some distance before the river joins the Mersey and goes into the sea at Liverpool, it reaches Bury, the biggest of several communities it has passed through since its source, and not much more than a dozen miles away in the hills to the north. Places like Bacup and Rawtenstall, Helmshore and Ramsbottom, clinging to the hillsides and spread along the river’s banks, all drew most of their sustenance from the textile trade at the time of the First World War. Bury, also lying in the lee of the hills, but a bit further away, had a much bigger share of industry than any of the townships further upstream.
It had no ancient history, though a couple of Roman roads ran not far from its boundaries. One of these, to the north-west, was an extension of Watling Street, which subsequent civil engineering had kept so up to date that none of the original roadworks were visible. But the other relic of those times, which crossed the Pennines into Yorkshire over Blackstone Edge, still revealed one of the finest Roman pavements in the country for several hundred yards before being subsumed in a wilderness of turf and bog. In Bury, however, there was nothing before the Middle Ages, when a licence to crenellate – effectively, to build a castle – was granted in 1465. The Wars of the Roses were at their height between the Houses of York and Lancaster, not to be settled (in distant Leicestershire) for another twenty years; the fortification was a sign of troubled times, but it had already fallen into ruin by Henry VIII’s day. Nothing of it survived into the twentieth century apart from the word, which appeared in Castle Street, Castlehill Road and one or two other thoroughfares.
The Middle Ages also saw the start of textile manufacturing, at first on a modest scale and exclusively in wool. The sheep was the very basis of the national economy, bred chiefly for its fleece, from which English weavers produced the finest broadcloth in Europe. The small communities of East Lancashire obtained their wool from the Pennine flocks and for ages the weaving was done in the upper rooms of farmhouses and other dwellings by people operating handlooms. On these they produced varieties of cloth for the markets in London and even further afield, each fabric known by a distinctively evocative name; sackcloth and fustian, stammel and russet, yellow buffine and red durant – and perpetuana, which the Puritans liked, because it was close-woven and its colouring was chaste. The dampness of the Lancashire climate was a help in this manufacturing, because it reduced the risk of thread breaking while it was being spun: it would be even more beneficial when Lancashire turned from wool and established its cotton industry.
Cotton was first imported about 1600 from the eastern Mediterranean; from, among other places, the Smyrna that Mustafa Kemal would liberate from the Greeks in 1922. But this fibre was never more than an occasional additive in predominantly woollen or linen cloth until well into the eighteenth century. By then the handloom was beginning to be displaced by the power loom, driven by the rivers and streams running out of the Pennines. A number of Lancashire inventions were steadily advancing the technology of the industry. First came the flying-shuttle, devised in 1733 by John Kay, who was a Bury man. Some thirty-two years later James Hargreaves of Blackburn produced his spinning jenny, a hand-operated machine for domestic use, but an improvement on what had gone before. Four years after that, Richard Arkwright of Preston came up with his water frame, and in 1779 Samuel Crompton of Bolton at last made large-scale power spinning possible with his invention of the spinning mule. These appliances were not popular with the Lancashire workers. As each one appeared, mobs rioted in protest, because the operatives could perceive that such machinery would not only undercut anything a handloom weaver might produce, but would inevitably lead to mass production in the miserably overcrowded conditions of a mill. First Kay and then Hargreaves saw their inventions smashed by angry workers, and Arkwright was so apprehensive at the prospect of similar damage to his water frame that he encouraged a rumour which reckoned he was designing a machine to measure longitude.
The rioters were trying to beat back history and they were doomed before they even began. The port of Liverpool, which had sent its first ship across the Atlantic in 1667, was expanding annually on a trade in West Indian sugar and everything that the plantations of Virginia were willing to sell of their tobacco and cotton crops. That was where the raw material for Lancashire’s textiles would chiefly come from in the years ahead, until the supply was cut off during the American Civil War. But two other things in the last quarter of the eighteenth century were principally responsible for the industry being utterly transformed. One was the halving of the tax on pure cotton goods, which was ordered in 1774. The other was the perfecting of the steam engine the following year. Within a decade it had been adapted to drive machines that would spin and weave cotton, and these no longer needed running water to power them. They required only coal, which had been mined in Lancashire since Tudor times, though the deep shafts driven vertically underground didn’t come until the steam engine propelled winding gear at the pithead. Most of the collieries ran across a belt of south Lancashire to the west of Manchester; but one or two small pits were worked on the outskirts of Bury and round towns to the north. And with coal-fired power for cotton and other manufacturing, the Industrial Revolution began in this part of northern England. One measurement of its progress was a swift rise in the population of Bury itself. In 1773 no more than 2,090 people lived there: by 1801 there were 7,000 and sixty years later some 30,000 were in the town. When the Great War began, its population was 50,000 or so.
The textile towns developed their own specialities in cotton manufacturing, in much the same way that the handloom weavers had with fustian, perpetuana and their other cloths. Broadly speaking, spinning was the dominant process in Manchester, Bolton, Oldham and elsewhere in south-east Lancashire, weaving the major business in Blackburn, Nelson, Colne, Chorley and other towns to the north, including the communities up Rossendale. But there were several exceptions to this pattern. Proud Preston (as it liked to be known) had a leading role in both operations, while Bolton bleached and dyed cotton yarns as well as spinning them; and Rochdale, in the midst of the spinning area, preferred to weave. So did Bury, which also printed its cloth. One of the leading calico printers in this period was Robert Peel, whose business prospered enough for him to donate £10,000 for the defence of the realm when a Napoleonic invasion was expected. His grandson would be remembered as Bury’s most famous native when, as Sir Robert Peel, repealer of the Corn Laws and inventor of the Metropolitan Police, he became the first British Prime Minister to come from a commercial family rather than a landed one.
Many and great were the fortunes made in the Lancashire cotton industry, once it got into its...
