LONDON: Jonathan Schofield is sitting at one of the most important tables in the history of the world. “Parts of the communist manifesto were written right here,” he says. Five hours into his tour of radical Manchester, Schofield lets his voice become reverentially hushed for the first time. “Marx would sit on one side of the table and Engels on the other. Whenever I bring people from the Chinese consulate here and get out the old books that Marx and Engels touched, they weep.”
We’re in the reading room of Chetham’s library, a venerable and cloistered building. The bay window in which the table has sat for centuries was a preternaturally quiet spot to hone ideas of socialist revolution while the first city of capitalism seethed unseen and unheard outside.
This, at least, is the historian’s contention about the city’s importance in catalysing communism. “Without Manchester there would have been no Soviet Union,” Schofield says with a challenging look. “And the history of the 20th century would have been very different.” Imagine — no Lenin, no gulags, no Mao, no Nazi-Soviet Pact, no Cultural Revolution, no cold war, no nuclear arms race, no Che, no Che T-shirts, and, without doubt, no faithful Chinese communists crying among the bookshelves. Oh, Manchester (as Morrissey sang in a very different context), so much to answer for.
Can it really have such a central role in history? “Yes it can — and does,” he says. Schofield directs me to a passage in Asa Briggs’ Victorian Cities. “If Engels had lived not in Manchester but in Birmingham,” wrote Briggs, “his conception of ‘class’ and his theories of the role of class in history might have been very different. The fact that Manchester was taken to be the symbol of the age in the 1840s ... was of central political importance in modern world history.”
Engels arrived in 1842. His father worried that little Friedrich was showing radical tendencies and sent him to work at a textile company in which he was a partner. “His father could not have thought of a worse place to send him,” says Schofield. Nor a worse time. Victorian Manchester was a hotbed of radical ideas, where the Anti-Corn-Law League was agitating, where Chartists regularly rioted. Two years after Engels hit town, Disraeli wrote in his novel Coningsby: “The Age of Ruins is past. Have you seen Manchester? Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.” To learn how the modern world was going, Engels might well have thought, better to immerse yourself in Manchester than classical Greece. “I would have loved to have lived in Manchester in the 1840s,” says Schofield, “and possibly to have met Engels, who sounds a lovely man, even though he rode with the Cheshire hunt. Marx sounds like a lazy fat man who took Engels’ money and his best ideas.”
Schofield has made many similarly grand claims for the radical credentials of his favourite city in the 300-odd minutes since he met me at Piccadilly Station. He has alleged that vegetarianism took off as a mass movement thanks to the sermons of an early-19th-century Manchester preacher called the Rev William Cowherd. He has charged that the Trades Union Congress is a Mancunian invention. He has contended that the Free Trade Hall is the only building in Britain named after a principle. He has noted that the Women’s Social and Political Union, stamping ground of the suffragette heroines Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney, was made in Manchester and that its militant civil disobedience bore all the bolshie hallmarks of Mancunian attitude.
All of this is declaimed in a ringing voice that stuns shoppers from their dogmatic slumbers as we walk. He forbears from moithering to me (as he has in print) about how the radical Manchester Guardian, forged in the wake of the city’s Peterloo massacre, ‘fled to London in the 1960s’, but he does recite me more verses by the Manchester punk poet John Cooper Clarke than anyone else can, with the possible exceptions of Mr Cooper Clarke and his mum. And, to return the favour, I don’t quote him the words of Mark Twain: “I would like to live in Manchester. The transition between Manchester and Death would be unnoticeable.”
It’s just as well I don’t, because Schofield seems guilty of an excess of civic pride, that rarest of English virtues. He has written books about Manchester and plans to write more, but you get the sense that this is where he gets most satisfaction as a historian — declaiming the city’s history on the streets.
Around the corner in Sackville Street, Schofield halts. “Typical Manchester,” he says, “all fur coat and no knickers.” He’s alluding to the grandeur of the frontages of the renaissance-style palaces that sprang up as Manchester became Cottonopolis.
At the TUC building in Major Street, he tells me that Francis Fukuyama once did a reading there about the end of history. “It was towards the end of his world book tour and he got intellectually torn apart by 200 hardcore lefties. He told me he’d never come across such committed Marxists.” True or just tall stories symptomatic of Manchester braggadocio? My money’s on the latter.
On we go, to the Free Trade Hall, where Schofield quotes with approval the words of his fellow townsman John Bright, the Rochdale orator and Anti-Corn-Law League stalwart, who said: “We were not born with saddles on our backs nor were the gentry born with spurs.” Wasn’t free trade just the rallying call of business? “No, the league was an alliance of middle classes and working classes. In years of bad harvest, the cost of bread went beyond the means of the poor because the Corn Laws guaranteed prices for British landowners.” Today the hall named after a principle is a five-star hotel with radical prices of up to £1,000 a night.
Then on to the statue to the utopian socialist Robert Owen, to Chetham’s library and its world-changing table, on to the beautiful choir of Manchester Cathedral, on to the Royal Exchange, centre of Mancunian capitalism. We’ve been walking for six hours and we still haven’t visited some of the most important radical shrines. Nor is there time to pay homage to the mass trespass of Kinder Scout in 1932 (organized by the Manchester Rambling Association). And doubtless more besides. But dusk is descending. Schofield leaves me to visit another very important historical table alone. Why it wound up in the People’s History Museum on Bridge Street isn’t immediately clear. On it, though, Thomas Paine wrote part of Rights of Man in 1792, a book that was immediately banned by an outraged government. In it, Paine argued that all men over 21 should have the vote and the House of Lords be abolished. It is clearly a very radical table indeed, and for that reason alone its proper place of rest is Manchester.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service
