The Peoples River

E H S ’ T E R L P V ELS O I NGE IRK E E R R E H P V C RI

D HE E I T R F &

RI

THE PEOPLE’S RIVER ACTIVITY BOOKLET

Join Manchester Histories in uncovering the hidden stories of people who live and work along the River Irk in North Manchester.

The People’s River project is inspired by and designed to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Friedrich Engels’ birth in 1820 and his connection to the industrial river. Engels, a German socialist philosopher and son of a wealthy textile manufacturer, wrote about the River Irk in his essay Condition of the Working Class in England, based on his experiences whilst living in Manchester.

Discover for yourself the impact the river had on people’s lives by exploring the life and writings of Friedrich Engels.

LET’S GET STARTED This activity booklet will introduce you to Engels and the River Irk. Each chapter has its own creative activity at the end. You can choose to respond however you would like to each activity.

You may wish to respond in the form of a poem, song, rap, a short story or perhaps you would prefer to sketch a drawing or take a photograph.

However, you want to express yourself.

Each activity in this booklet is designed to take only a few minutes at a time and can be done alone, with friends, members of your family, your neighbours or work colleagues over a brew.

There are six chapters in total.

Once you have completed all the activities we would love to see your responses. Send them in an email to us via the address below: thepeoplesriver@manchesterhistories.co.uk Or if you would prefer to write or draw directly on to the booklet you could post the completed sheets with your contact details to the below postal address: FAO Charlie Booth Manchester Histories, 3.17 Mansfield Cooper Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

INTRODUCTION FRIEDRICH ENGELS & THE RIVER IRK

Friedrich Engels was the son of a wealthy Victorian cotton manufacturer who lived the high life of a young gentleman, yet he was also a political revolutionary.

Engels wrote passionately about the lives of the poor in England and, with Karl Marx, created The Communist Manifesto. In 1842 he was sent to Manchester from his native Germany and there he was inspired to write The Condition of the Working Class on what he observed in poor areas around Manchester.

Victoria Mill, Weaste. Headquarters of the Engels’ family firm, Ermen & Engels.

Engels’ biographer, Tristram Hunt writes that “he was drawn to Manchester – ‘where the modern art of manufacture has reached its perfection’ – precisely because it promised to validate the communism he had taken from his earlier studies. Manchester’s role was to confirm, not create, the theory.”

Manchester Tour Guide and Editor, Jonathan Schofield, has gone even further in stressing how Lancashire transformed Engels’ thinking and, with it, the nature of socialism and later communism, “without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union,” he declares. “And the history of the 20th century would have been very different”.

Portrait of Friedrich Engels, Age 20–25 (c. 1840–45).

CHAPTER ONE WHO WAS FRIEDRICH ENGELS? Where was he born?

What was his family like?

Why did he come to Manchester?

Friedrich Engels was born an industrial heir in Barmen, Germany on Tuesday the 28th November 1820. His father was a wealthy businessmen who made his money from the production of linen yarn bleaching and later cotton–spinning.

Engels’ father invested in cotton manufacturing in the North of England. He owned Victoria Mill which was located next to Weaste Station, alongside the Manchester and Liverpool railway line. This was an ideal location both for receiving cotton imported through the Mersey docks and for supplying water from the River Irwell for the bleaching and dyeing processes (see photograph on previous page).

In 1842 the young Friedrich Engels was sent to Manchester to work in the headquarters of one of his family’s firms, Ermen and Engels. His father, who was a strict Protestant and conservative in his thinking sent him to Manchester to separate him from his radical views that were in conflict with the family business and their social standing.

It was hoped this change of location would prepare the twenty-something Engels for a life of business and would protect the family investment in cotton manufacturing in Salford. However, Engels had other ideas and so by day he worked as a mill clerk learning the cotton trade, but by night he walked the streets of Irish Town (now Angel Meadows) discovering stories of injustice and inequality.

Engels had learnt about the factory system from a young age. Every morning he walked through the polluted streets of his home-town Barmen, on his way to school. There he also observed the living conditions of the city’s working class, which he described as being worse than that of animals.

He was an extremely well-read young man and had a talent for language. He may have been sent to Manchester to learn the family business, but the young Engels also came to Manchester hoping to learn more about the social and political struggles that were taking place there.

Working for the family firm whilst living within an exploited community, Engels regularly felt the contradictions of his circumstances. In a letter to Marx he explained that he “forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men”.

We can’t be certain, but it is likely he lived close-by to Victoria Mill. It is said that he regularly drank in the Crescent Pub, which has only recently closed but is still standing. Victoria Mill stood until the 1960s when it was pulled down to make way for the M602 from Salford to Manchester. What remains of Engels’ mark on the buildings in the area is a block of council flats called ‘Engels House’.

ACTIVITY

Have you ever embarked on a journey of discovery that changed the way you viewed or thought about the world?

PROMPTS: • Maybe you visited a different place, city or country and something you saw there changed how you thought or what you did?

• Maybe you have changed jobs and had to learn new skills?

• Maybe you have read a book, seen a film, or heard some music that changed your view on the world?

S H A R E YO U R STO RY W I T H U S H E R E

CHAPTER TWO WHAT WAS MANCHESTER LIKE 200 YEARS AGO? What was it like to live and work in Manchester then?

What did people who weren’t from there say about it?

Between 1800 and 1841 Manchester’s population (including Salford) grew from 95,000 to over 310,000 on the back of a booming textile industry producing cotton thread and fabric.

In the late 1770s the inventor Richard Arkwright had pioneered cotton production at his Cromford mills along the Derwent Valley. He was the first to use steam power for the purposes of cotton spinning in Manchester. By 1816 Arkwright’s Shudehill mill had been joined by a further eight-five steam powered factories employing almost 12,000 women and children as Lancashire and Cheshire expanded to account for some 90 percent of Britain’s cotton production.

But so much more contributed to making Manchester a great centre of industrialisation than the mills and factories. Manchester was a marketplace, a distribution hub, a centre of finance and radical thought; particularly around topics such as feminism, socialism and the abolition of the slave trade. The Cottonopolis image, with its smog-cloaked factories and stark contrasts of misery and riches was an attractive idea for writers wishing to document and work through the meaning of this new modern era.

HERE’S WHAT PEOPLE WROTE ABOUT MANCHESTER AT THE TIME Alexis de Tocqueville wrote:

John Georg May wrote:

“Thirty or forty factories rise on the top of hills” spewing out their foul waste. In fact, he heard Manchester before he entered it as no visitor could escape from the ‘crunching wheels of machinery’, ‘the noise of the furnaces’, ‘the shriek of steam from boilers’, or the incessant ‘regular beat of the looms’. Inside the sprawling, filthy city he found, ‘fetid, muddy waters, stained with a thousand colours by the factories they pass’/ And yet, ‘from this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world. From this filthy sewer pure gold flows.’

Thomas Carlyle wrote: “Hast thou heard, with sound ears, the awakening of a Manchester, on a Monday morning, at half-past five by the clock; the rushing-off of its thousand mills, like the boom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times ten-thousand spools and spindles all set humming there - it is perhaps if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagra, or more so.”

“Hundreds of factories in Manchester which tower up to five and six storeys in height. The huge chimneys at the side of these buildings belch forth black coal vapours and this tells us that powerful steam engines are used here... the houses are blackened by it. The river which runs through Manchester is so filled with waste dye matter that it looks like a dye-vat.

The whole scene is one of melancholy.”

Hippolyte Taine wrote: Manchester resembled nothing more than “a great jerry-built barracks, a “work-house” for hundreds of thousands of people, a hard-labour penal establishment.

The penning together of thousands of workmen, carrying out mindless, regimented tasks, ‘hands active, feet motionless, all day and every day’ was simply improper. ‘Could there be any kind of life more outraged, more opposed to man’s natural instincts.’

ACTIVITY

Starting from where you live, where you work, or in your imagination. Take a journey for about 20 minutes exploring your local area.

Whilst doing this make a list of everything you can hear, remember or smell as you take your journey.

Make a note of where your journey began and where you finished. Share with us some of the sounds, smells, sights, or memories you have experienced on your journey.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE

CHAPTER THREE ENGELS AND THE CONDITION OF THE WORKING CLASS IN ENGLAND What did it say? Why was it important? What impact did it have?

Manchester and Salford have become eternally associated with Friedrich Engels: it inspired him to write one of the greatest works on British industrial experience called The Condition of the Working Class in England. Engels was only 24 years old when he wrote this, it would see him rebel against his upbringing and distance himself from the thoughts and opinions of his colleagues and family.

Manchester, like many industrial towns, was purposefully laid out in such a way that the rich and the poor were separated geographically. The buildings went up haphazardly on the crumbling side of river-banks and railways cut through old neighbourhoods. Engels wrote about “a peculiarly built town where a person may live in for years and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working person’s quarter or even with workers”.

READ SOME OF ENGELS’ WORDS: “The members of this money aristocracy can take the shortest road through the middle of all the labouring districts to their places of business, without ever seeing that they are in the midst of the grimy misery that lurks to the right and the left... For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange... they suffice to conceal from the eyes of the wealthy men and women of strong stomachs and weak nerves the misery and grime which form the complement of their wealth.”

Engels declared himself shocked by what he saw: “I have never seen so systematic a shutting out of the working class from the thoroughfares, so tender a concealment of everything which might affront the eye and the nerves of the bourgeois, as in Manchester.”

In the south of the city, just off Oxford Road, was where some of Manchester’s 40,000 strong Irish immigrants lived. They were the most exploited, lowly paid and abused of all the city’s residents; Engels wrote: “The cottages are old, dirty, and of the smallest sort, the streets uneven, fallen into ruts and in part without drains or pavement; masses of refuse, offal and sickening filth lie among standing pools in all directions…The race that lives in these ruinous cottages, behind broken windows, mended with oilskin, sprung doors, and rotten door-posts, or in dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, in this atmosphere penned in as if with a purpose, this race must really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.”

Engels explains in this fundamental text what would become a core Marxist principle, that class was economically determined: “The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to earn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread, this proletarian is placed in the most revolting, inhuman position conceivable for a human being.”

ACTIVITY

Think about Manchester today - how do you think it compares to what it was like when Engels lived there?

What has changed and what has stayed the same?

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE

CHAPTER FOUR ENGELS AND MARY BURNS Who was Mary? What did Mary do?

So how did Engels, the rich German son of a factory owner, gain all this first-hand knowledge of the working classes living in Manchester and Salford? How did he walk amongst the people, be invited to look at their private living quarters without being confronted? Who was to be his guide?

Her name was Mary Burns – a vital contact to Manchester’s undiscovered people and places and reportedly the first great love of Engels’ life. Eleanor Marx’s (Karl Marx’s daughter) childhood accounts of her are sketchy but she writes “she was a very pretty, witty, and altogether charming girl... of course, as she was a Manchester (Irish) factory girl, quite uneducated, though she could read, and write a little, but my parents... were very fond of her, and always spoke of her with the greatest affection.”

“She introduced him to the life of the immigrant Irish community in Manchester”, according to the Historian, Roy Whitfield, “she escorted him on excursions through districts which would otherwise have been unsafe for any stranger to enter; she was a source of information about factory and domestic conditions endured by working people.”

It is known she was born sometime between April 1822 and January 1823 and was the daughter of an Irish dyer and factory-hand Michael Burns, who came to Manchester in the 1820s.

We know that Engels met Mary Burns in the early months of 1843 but there is a lot of debate as to how they met. She might have been working in his father’s mill or a similar factory or she might have been noticed by Engels whilst working as a domestic servant.

The reason for this uncertainty is that she herself could not read or write much, and because Engels later burned much of his correspondence from this period of his life. Engels was also careful to not publicise his relationship with Mary, as he had to retain both his social position within Manchester and good relations with his wealthy, Protestant parents.

Historians have suggested that there could have been a sense of political embarrassment as to his own class status, for one of the many socialist criticisms against the factory and mill owners was their exploitation of female workers.

ACTIVITY

Think about someone who has inspired you like Mary Burns inspired Friedrich Engels and tell us about them.

Maybe they were a teacher or a relative that you knew well and who taught you something that has stuck with you? Or perhaps it is a well-known person who you have never met but they’ve had a great impact on your life because of their achievements.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE

CHAPTER FIVE ENGELS AND THE RIVER IRK What did Engels say about the River Irk? What was the River Irk like then?

The River Irk is a river in the North West of England that flows through the northern suburbs of Greater Manchester. It merges with the River Irwell in the city centre of Manchester close to the Victoria Train Station.

Manchester’s rivers, in particular the River Irk, stick out in the vivid descriptions that Engels produced.

The river has often been interpreted as a metaphor for the cost of human industrialisation in the natural world in Engels’ writing.

In The Conditions of the Working Class Engels walks to the River Irk to record a view ‘characteristic for the whole district’. He wrote: “At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse which it deposits on the lower right bank. In dry weather, an extended series of the most revolting brackish green pools of slime remain standing on this bank, out of whose depth bubbles of miasmatic gases constantly rise and give forth a stench that is unbearable even on the bridge forty of fifty feet above the level of the water.”

Engels also commented on the homes and buildings surrounding the River Irk. He wrote: “In one of these courts there stands directly at the entrance, at the end of the covered passage, a privy without a door, so dirty that the inhabitants can pass into and out of the court only by passing through foul pools of stagnant urine and excrement. Surrounding it are hundreds more of these cattle-sheds for human beings, where men are reduced to the state of animals, pigs share sties with children, hundreds cramp into dank cellars, railways slash through neighbourhoods, and privies, rivers and water supplies all seem to merge into one deadly mix.”

“Such is the Old Town of Manchester, and on re-reading my description, I am forced to admit that instead of being exaggerated, it is far from black enough to convey a true impression of the filth, ruin, and uninhabitableness, the defiance of all considerations of cleanliness, ventilation, and health which characterise the construction of this single district, containing at least 20–30,000 inhabitants. And such a district exists in the heart of the second city of England, the first manufacturing city of the world.”

ACTIVITY

Take a walk to or look at some pictures of the River Irk online and make a note of what you see floating in the water and growing on the river banks.

• Are there buildings or train tracks close by?

• Is the water in a good condition?

• Does it look clean or polluted?

You can record what you see either in the form of a list or a short descriptive piece of writing such as a poem.

Or you could take some photographs or draw sketches of everything you see.

SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS WITH US HERE

CHAPTER SIX W H AT H A P P E N E D N E X T ?

What impact did the Condition of the Working Class have?

Who was Karl Marx and how did they begin working together?

The Condition of the Working Class was actually finished back at Engels’ parents house in Barmen in late 1844 and published originally in German. It was not translated into English until a year later (mainly for an American edition).

By the summer of 1844 Engels’ apprenticeship in Manchester had finished and the heir to Ermen and Engels returned home to Barmen. On his way back, he stopped off in Paris and met with a man called Karl Marx. From then on, Engels’ life would be forever connected with Marx. They would later go on to write the Communist Manifesto together and significantly change international politics and culture across the world.

The impact of Engels‘ text The Condition of the Working Class was immediately clear within German radical circles. It’s widely acknowledged to be the first to describe the social conditions created such a large-scale modern industry. Marx was particularly taken with the book and its helpful inclusion of data, reports and statistics. For the next forty years their friendship barely faltered. It is reported that Marx’s children called Engels their second father.

The duo would shortly return to Manchester for a study trip. When the two young communists were not exploring the destitute communities featured in the Condition of the Working Class, they conducted research by reading endless government publications and liberal economists’ works. Their favourite spot for this academic research was the bay window in Chetham’s Library, whose 100,000 volumes they used for political and social data.

Engels wrote to Marx 24 years later: “I like this place very much because of its coloured window the weather is always fine there.” The stained glass window and oak desk are still as Engels and Marx would have found them in the bay window of Chetham’s Library. Only now it is encircled by skyscrapers, hotels and the cranes of corporate Manchester. Today, the oak desk is a popular shrine for communist pilgrims seeking some kind of connection to the founders of Communism.

It could be said that Friedrich Engels would always appear secondary to Karl Marx, that he would work and exist in the shadow of his collaborator. However, Engels said of Marx: “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented. Without him the theory would not be by far what it is today. It therefore rightly bears his name.”

ACTIVITY

Do you have a special place you like to go to in Manchester?

Maybe it’s somewhere you go to read, meet friends, or spend your free time at.

TELL US ABOUT IT

PTO

NEXT STEPS THANK YOU FOR TAKING PART IN

T H E P E O P L E ’S R I V E R Once you have completed all the activities we would love to see your responses. Send them in an email to us via the address below:

thepeoplesriver@manchesterhistories.co.uk Or if you have written or drawn directly on to the booklet you could post your completed booklet to us with your contact details to: FAO Charlie Booth Manchester Histories, 3.17 Mansfield Cooper Building, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

Encourage others to get involved by sharing pictures of your activities on social media by using the hashtag:

#thepeoplesriver

THANK YOU