The Great British Story: A People's History (2012) s01e07 Episode Script

In the story of the British people we've reached the threshold of the modern age.
Through civil war and revolution, the nations of Britain emerged in the 18th century with their own identities, while part of a union that made them all Britons.
Their tale is one of creativity, resilience and invention.
And never more so than during the industrial revolution when Britain became the workshop of the world.
With their inherited skills and freedoms the British became the world's first industrial nation.
Pioneers in engineering, science and knowledge, they laid a path that others would follow.
In the next chapter of The Great British Story: The origins of empire and the industrial revolution.
Those who lived through the industrial revolution saw that it would reshape humanity.
For some that offered liberation.
The poet Wordsworth marvelled how "an inventive age had given birth, almost with the speed of magic, to a new and unforeseen creation, wielding her potent enginery to frame and to produce with rests not night or day.
" Others, though, saw enslavement to the machine.
"Cruel works of many wheels I view," said the poet William Blake.
"With cogs tyrannic, moving each other by compulsion, not in freedom.
" It was to be the issue of the age.
In 1700 Britain was a small island off the edge of Europe with less than six million people.
Nothing compared with the power houses of world history at that time: Ming Dynasty, China, Mogul India, the Ottomans.
But, in the course of the 18th century, Britain became the world's first industrial nation and acquired an empire which eventually became the greatest in world history.
And how it all happened is one of the greatest stories in history.
The industrial revolution didn't come out of the blue.
It was driven by deep social and economic forces working below the surface of society since the 13th century.
Local industries meeting basic needs - heat, tools, clothing - but now accelerated by invention.
William Clark came over from England in 1736 and started making linen right here at this very spot.
Beetling is where you hammer the cloth to make it into a continuous cloth, as opposed to warp and weft.
That's before it's beetled, only it's wet.
It's run through starch and it's wet.
As I keep putting it on and turning it every day it goes on till it comes to this stage.
Across Britain and Ireland traditional industries began to mechanise.
In the potteries, old manufacturers went into mass production for the growing middle and working classes who no longer wanted wood on their tables.
Almost everybody that you knew from this area worked in the pottery industry.
These specialised industries gave rise to new skills and new communities.
How long have you been doing this? - This particular job, about 22, 23 years.
- Wow! In the five towns of the potteries they used local coal seams for the kilns but the fine china clay came from Cornwall.
Some of the most famous names in world pottery set up here: Doulton, Wedgwood, Spode and Minton.
Founded in the 1780s, Dudson's are still thriving.
They also made high-end pottery, reflecting the growing international reach of British society, depicting the ideals as well as the tastes of the new age.
Tell us about this black ware here, Alison.
This was originally fashionable in the 1770s.
But it had a renaissance in the 1870s when Queen Victoria went into mourning on the death of Prince Albert.
So the potters obviously responded with a black range of pottery.
In the Black Country they had been makers of chains, nails, needles and blades since the 14th century.
And now domestic production was organised on a new level through a huge network of cottage workshops with child labour.
I'm just going to knock this into the shape of a U now.
Hopefully.
This work was still all done by hand.
How do you know if it's hot enough to get out the fire? By eye.
You just watch the flames.
And it's like sparkly little bits.
Then, when you bring it out, it's really fizzing.
That's why you need to be standing back that far, because when I hit it, the sparks will fly.
In the 18th century, chains had many different uses.
And children this age would have made them.
Did you see how hot it was? Yeah! One of the key factors in the industrial revolution was coal.
They'd mined it in Yorkshire and Durham since the Middle Ages.
And here in Gloucestershire you can see another factor that helped the rise of industry.
Freedom.
These are the Free Miners of the Forest of Dean.
Nobody's ever been able to find the physical charter but the story is that Edward I or II, depending on which book you read, gave us our rights right back in the 13th century or thereabouts.
And we obtained these rights by going to Berwick-upon-Tweed and driving a tunnel underneath the walls of Berwick-upon-Tweed and allowing the king to take the city.
And in his gratitude he gave the foresters the right to mine coal, iron and stone in the Forest of Dean for evermore.
The first mine I went down they dropped me down a shaft 120ft deep in a 40 gallon drum with two hooks in the side on a hand winch.
I was 13.
The Forest of Dean actually was built on the minerals that are under the ground.
Because at one time there was nothing here.
It was a hunting place for royalty.
There was nothing here.
A tremendous amount of wealth had come out of the ground.
And that is how all the villages and towns and that sprang up, because of what is underground.
Another key to the industrial revolution was Britain's mineral riches: Copper, iron and tin from Cornwall.
Here at Levant mine these children have come to see where their ancestors toiled deep below the sea bed.
This shaft is about 2,000ft deep.
And under the sea there are 70 miles of tunnels.
You were saying that your nan worked in the mines.
Is that right? - Yeah.
- And how old is she now? - 94.
- She's 94! South Crofty mine was first dug in Tudor times.
Between the 18th century and the 20th, its vast caverns were expanded to 2.
5 miles across and 3,000ft deep.
Oh, that is just epic, isn't it? Look at that! So when was this dug out? Do you know, Chris? I guess it was started at the beginning of the century.
Would this have been all hacked out by hand, then? Yes, this was all done by hand.
We talk about the industrial revolution as if it's something that happened rather swiftly from the late 1700s onwards.
But these techniques existed for centuries here in Cornwall.
And what you see here is the product of a slow percolation of history, of the endeavour of ordinary people working at a local level.
It's just astounding.
So the industrial revolution came out of a perfect convergence of ideas and industry with a skilled and adaptable workforce.
Now, we're always taught that the industrial revolution was an English phenomenon, Coalbrookdale and Ironbridge and the Lancashire cotton mills, and they were important, but it all depends what you mean by origins.
As we've seen through this series, our industrialisation was really a long, slow progress over time.
They were working metals in the Black Country and Sheffield back in the 13th century.
So if you're going to look for a catalyst for these great events in the early 18th century how about not looking in England but here in Wales? This is Swansea Bay and they'd been smelting metals here, especially copper, since the 1600s.
It was out of these deeper roots that the great leap forward in history began.
From a long crystallisation new technologies would remake society, leading to the fateful transformation of humanity across the globe.
As Wordsworth had said, "At social industry's command, how quick and how vast an increase.
" And there was hope, too, to build Jerusalem in these dark satanic mills.
It's a new birthplace for the industrial revolution here in the world's first industrial nation, Wales.
Originally the copper works were importing their ore from Cornwall and in the late 18th century from North Wales as well, from the mines on Anglesey.
But when those reserves ran out they turned their sights to Cuba, to Chile, to South Australia, and shipped in huge cargos of copper.
Some of the big uses of copper that made the industry take off First of all, the Royal Navy used copper for sheathing the hulls of ships to protect them from degradation when they were at sea for long voyages.
And shortly after that came the development of coinage and the use of copper in coinage.
The Birmingham manufacturers Matthew Boulton were producing coins and needed good, reliable supplies of copper.
So, at its height the Swansea valley must have been an amazing sight.
It wouldn't have looked pretty, I think we can safely say.
The coal industry, of course, was what made smelting so profitable in this area, the availability of large volumes of coal near the surface that could be mined and used for smelting.
Copper smelting was closely followed by zinc works.
There was lead smelting, there were iron foundries.
So where there was muck, there literally was brass, as we say in Lancashire! There was a fair bit of muck, I think.
Or at least a fair bit of smoke.
As capitalism expanded, it co-opted the world for its workforce, and it didn't care how it got them.
The chains were both invisible and real.
And one link in the chain was the biggest unspoken in British history, slavery.
In the 18th century two-thirds of all British slaving ships were registered here in Liverpool.
It was Liverpool that opened my eyes to the horror of slavery.
It was the most horrific period in the history of this country.
You go down the list and Harry was 55.
Well, that turns your stomach a bit.
Or Mary was ten years old.
But when you get down to Grace who's just six months, you think It's important that we talk about Africans as Africans.
And not as slaves.
The people they kidnapped were Africans, and they kidnapped them.
In conservative figures, 12 million people.
12 million! That's Liverpool just by itself.
Conservative figures say that.
Liverpool merchants are responsible for 1.
5 million of the three million slaves that were taken on British ships that made it, that were able to be counted at the end of the voyages.
Liverpool is the classic 18th-century boom town.
I think it's about putting in perspective what our history is and telling the truth about it.
I think it was Martin Luther King who said the truth will set us free, I suppose for black and for white people.
So it's about putting the slave trade as one of the main events to help to shape the period when we become the first world super power.
Liverpool has to be the most splendid setting of any British city.
But unlike others, London for example, Glasgow, Newcastle, even Manchester, Liverpool owed nothing to its medieval past.
It's really a creation of the 18th century of commerce in sugar, tobacco, textiles and, of course, slaves.
"Liverpool is one of the wonders of Britain," wrote Daniel Dafoe in 1715.
"And what it may grow to in time I know not.
" So Britain was also transformed by the expansion of empire through the slave triangle between Britain, Africa and the Americas.
But above all, by India.
Here the Mogul empire was in decline Once a world power with a quarter of the world's GDP in 1759 they were defeated by a mercenary army of Britain's East India Company.
The story of how a trading company became the greatest empire the world had ever seen is long and full of strange twists and turns.
But the key thing to remember is this.
The British, although a small nation, were a sea power and through the 17th century established a series of bases around the shores of India.
The key was here in the rich and populous lands of Bengal.
The market they were after was textiles and their chief factory here by the banks of the Hooghly River, a tributary of the Ganges, in a little village which would become the great city of Calcutta.
"I was born in the year 1757 in Norwich in the county of Norfolk.
My father was a blacksmith but drawn by a desire to see the world, I enlisted with the honourable East India Company.
" "My whole stock on board was the jacket and the trousers I wore.
Plus half a guinea from the company.
" "India is a land of thousands and thousands of merchants and the abundance of very curious and valuable manufactures is sufficient for the use of the whole globe.
" So the British people began to spread across the globe, sons of Cornish miners, Scottish crofters and Norfolk blacksmiths, taking the risk, the profit and the loss.
"I am exceedingly sorry to acquaint you of my dear brother Patrick's death.
I cannot think of informing my dear father and mother.
" Good God, what distresses are accumulated on their heads.
" Survive two monsoons, they said, and you had a chance.
"Nothing can be more disagreeable than the weather here at present.
It is very hot with scarcely a breath of air.
" "But we cannot expect a good breeze until the monsoon changes.
" So the British people became part of a world system of commerce and industry, a system of their own devising.
At home their manufacturers invested in a transport network to meet the challenge.
This was the great age of canals, taking goods to and from the centres of manufacture.
The Leeds and Liverpool, the Grand Union, the Forth and Clyde.
4,000 miles of canal were created in the 18th century by private companies, going right into the hearts of the new industrial cities.
The canal-age engineers also led technological innovation especially the steam engine, invented in England in the early 18th century and perfected by James Watt.
This is the oldest working steam engine in the world.
It was put to work in May 1779.
It was designed by James Watt and ordered from James Watt by the Birmingham Canal Company and used for recirculating water on the canals.
It is, in engineering terms, maybe a little bit overdesigned.
But it will survive.
What steam did was allow you to have your factory convenient for your manufacture and convenient for your raw materials if there wasn't adequate water power available.
It was a flexible source of power.
One of the heartlands of the industrial revolution was Birmingham.
A city of small workshops, there were over 500 different specialised trades and crafts here with an incredible range of skills.
Nowhere in Europe or the Americas, it was said, lacked some product of the Birmingham manufacturer.
Here gathered some of the most brilliant people of the time, the Lunar Men, blending the inherited skills of local craftsmen with a new imagination.
Pioneers in chemistry, engineering and medicine, they were people with political and social ideals and scientific curiosity.
Led by Matthew Boulton, the group cut across class, a key factor in Britain's leap ahead of the rest of the world.
The Lunar Society who met here at Soho House they would take on subjects like philosophy, natural history, astronomy, physics, chemistry, medicine.
They were also designing things, inventing things.
And they took on philosophical questions as well round the dinner table.
So, an astounding bunch.
Hard to summarise them easily, really.
And coming up from the grass roots.
This is not given knowledge from the upper classes, is it? This is coming out of practical experience of manufacturing.
- I mean, Boulton had been on the shop floor.
- Yeah, absolutely.
The son of a manufacturer, not a baroness.
Joseph Priestley was the son of a Yorkshire wool dyer.
Josiah Wedgwood was the 12th child of a master potter.
James Watt was born on Clydeside, the son of a ship's chandler.
Erasmus Darwin was the son of a Nottinghamshire lawyer.
Matthew Boulton was the son of a Birmingham buckle-maker.
And as Matthew Boulton said, "I sell here what the whole world desires - power.
" And in the 18th-century enlightenment, power was knowledge.
Here in Armagh the public library was founded in 1771 by an English clergyman as part of a plan to found a university here.
Hello, Carol.
Just looking at your treasures here.
Absolutely incredible.
It's a beautiful edition of Voltaire.
I was keen for you to see this, one of Robinson's own books which he chose to donate to us.
And there you see his book plate.
Philosophical Dictionary of Voltaire in French.
And although he's a churchman, the works of the great sceptic.
Exactly.
Isn't that great? Many people think because he was a clergyman that this library must only have books on theology and I would always be very keen to explain, it's a breadth of subjects because, of course, it was to be a university library.
So Robinson was buying very, very widely in his choice.
And he wanted there to be a second university in the island of Ireland.
He chose Armagh.
It's astonishing to encounter a library from the 18th century, a school from the 18th century, an observatory from the 18th century.
It's as if there's another story to Armagh which isn't just St Patrick.
- This is the enlightenment city.
- Yes.
I love to think that he was looking at that and thinking, "Let's build on that.
" Yes, there have been centuries gone by where there wasn't that sort of success, but look what he was doing now in the 18th century, and looking at the age of enlightenment, all that was happening throughout Europe.
And I love the idea he didn't want Ireland to be left out of that and he didn't want Armagh to be left out of that.
So even though he was an Englishman, I think he was great! This is the Troughton equatorial telescope manufactured in 1795.
It's quite a small telescope by modern standards, of course.
It's the oldest telescope in the UK, still in its original housing.
You can still see through it.
That's the original lens at the other end, then? That's right.
Yes, it is.
The universe was literally opening up before their eyes, old certainties replaced by new questions.
Through newspapers, books and learned societies, these ideas passed into mainstream British society: Science, geology, evolution, and through them, reflections on the place of humanity itself in the cosmos and the very idea of universal human rights.
Josiah Wedgwood was in the anti-slavery movement alongside black Britons like Olaudah Equiano.
But once technology drives social change, there's no looking back.
If you had travelled across Britain in the last years of the 18th century, you would have seen the signs everywhere in every region of the accelerating transformation of societies and cultures, as a still predominantly agricultural population became an industrial, urbanised workforce, a wage-earning, landless proletariat.
Nowhere was untouched, from the booming, industrial cities to traditional, isolated, rural communities in the farthest reaches of the British Isles.
Out in the Scottish Highlands, after the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, The highland clearances.
Recently the Scottish Rural History Project has begun mapping villages depopulated in the 18th and 19th centuries.
The highland clearances were carried out by hereditary landowners.
People were driven out, their villages abandoned, and their sites forgotten.
Gavin and myself went on a two-day training course and were taught how to do surveys using a plane table, how to use a GPS and photography.
And after that two-day course, we just came back and started surveying.
Between 1700 and 1850 a way of life lived here since prehistory largely vanished.
I suddenly realised that the landscape was full of archaeology and we'd been walking here for years.
We walked past this and it just looked like a lump of hill.
But with that training we could see that it wasn't just a lump of hill.
It was part of the history of the landscape.
What do you prefer? - What are my options? - You hold a pole or you're at the table here.
This township above Camuscross had 50 families, 300 people, who went in a few years in the 19th century to work in the pits and factories of Glasgow and in Australia and Canada.
Only the foundations are left below the bracken.
What the team are discovering is the downside of the industrial revolution, one of the countless rural communities across the British Isles and Ireland that suffered a similar fate, people who had lived the subsistence life of our upland and island ancestors since prehistory.
The one thing there isn't here Quite often you'll find a midden out the front.
OK, so we can do the doorway now.
There's a wall creating an enclosure for vegetables and stacking the corn.
Over there there's a very small building that was either for storing hay or potatoes.
And then just over there there's what I reckon is a cattle fold.
They maybe had a boat.
You can see there's a good little bay just down there.
- That's the first doorway, just here.
- Oh, right.
So it's really far up the end? And the wall is a metre thick.
Right.
So, because it has two doors, they would have had the animals in one end.
So it's not a big area for so many people.
What's the size of it? How many metres long? - 12.
- 12 metres by? Four metres, and half of that would have been occupied by cattle.
We've found about 40 what would have been habitable buildings here in Berabhaigh and it's now empty.
This huge area that had 40 or 50 families living there, possibly - Depopulated.
completely empty.
So from the 18th century the story for the inhabitants of the highlands and islands was emigration to industrial Scotland, to Australia and to the Americas.
It's a song called Thoir mo Shoraidh thar Ghunaidh, one of the hundreds of songs that refer to emigration.
All these songs have got the same sort of feeling of deep sadness and separation from their people and from the land where they grew up.
But in this particular song we sing that hopefully the wheel has turned now and the landlords will not be tolerated if they don't play fairly with people.
And up here migration is in everybody's family story.
Cathy MacAskill from Govan in Glasgow has come back to Skye to pursue her own family journey.
Shipbuilders on the Clyde in more recent times, her ancestors were Gaelic speakers from Skye.
Cathy has come back here to trace the story.
- It's a very remote area, isn't it? - It's quite remote.
I'd imagine in the winter it would be a bleak place to live in.
And then if they lived off the land, they would be out in this all the time.
Looking at it from nowadays, however bleak it seems to us, this was where they were born and brought up so they'd have a more emotional pull to here.
They would have seen this in a different light, probably, to what I see it in.
To understand these vast social changes, the government undertook huge statistical enquiries into the state of the poor.
The great thing about Scotland is that they have something called the statistical account and the first one was produced in the 1790s.
Sir John Sinclair wrote to every single parish minister in Scotland and asked them to fill in a questionnaire.
160 questions.
So you can imagine what that would be like landing on your desk! But even so, he got over half the parish ministers replying, and this is the Bracadale Here Cathy is hoping to find her ancestors.
And he talks about the poverty of the people and how some had hardly any clothes and they couldn't do this and they couldn't do that because of their poverty.
"Regarding their comforts as to clothing, it may be sufficient to mention that there were 140 families found in the parish who had no change of night or day clothes.
From the above remarks as to food and clothing, it must appear evident that the people are far from enjoying the ordinary comforts of society.
And if their complaints are not more loudly heard, one great reason is that the system of farming pursued has placed them in such absolute dependence on the tacksman as to preclude any hope of amelioration.
" He's writing this in something that's going to be published and he's really saying it quite strongly.
- So he could lose his job? - He could perhaps, yes.
So who owned the land? - Who was the actual? - Well, MacLeod owned the land.
But it had been let out on a tack, which is a lease.
- And that was MacAskill's, was it? - Yes.
It's the tacksmen doing the clearing, as opposed to the landlord.
These tacksmen decided that you could get more money for renting a farm to a single sheep farmer rather than a group of crofters and so the area would be cleared.
Cathy's ancestor, it turned out, had worked as an agent of the landlord's.
"He cleared Carbostbeg for himself for the purpose of erecting a distillery in Carbost The same widow's daughter told me she saw her father's corn shovelled out into the river when seeking a place for the distillery.
" That can't be my MacAskills! I hope not.
I hope not! So the transforming powers of industry and capitalism reached the farthest corners of Britain.
In the 19th century, in the last stages of their existence, the old ways of life were documented in reports and photographs in the same way that they recorded primitive tribes in the remotest parts of the world.
By then the British people and their way of life had changed for ever.
For several million people through the industrial revolution the only way out was emigration.
Take the real-life Downton in Wiltshire.
In the 1830s with rural employment collapsed the village hired a ship to cross the Atlantic so that the young and the poor could settle in Canada.
"Notice is hereby given that all fathers of families and all single persons who wish to emigrate to Canada are to attend a meeting tomorrow at three o'clock at the church for the purpose of securing their passage.
" In August 1836 the King William took 279 people from Downton and its neighbours to a new life on the Great Lakes with help from the impoverished community that they left behind.
"For the use of the poor about to emigrate from Downton parish, 25 pairs of men's shoes to lace, 25 pairs of women's shoes, 100 girls' and boys' shoes from three years old to 15.
The Downton migration came at a time of acute tension in the countryside.
The increasing mechanisation of agriculture had driven many of the traditional rural workforce out of work and off the land.
The enclosure of common fields everywhere was depriving the poor of work and of their traditional share in the land.
In the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire the resistance of the Free Miners to a tax on their rights is still remembered today.
It wasn't like agricultural enclosure, but actually these enclosures were put up for the growth of trees.
So it's a slightly different story in Forest of Dean but it was happening all over the country at that time.
Their leader was a miner called Warren James.
The bone of contention was that the Crown said that after so many years the enclosures would be thrown open because the trees would be above where the animals could damage them.
Despite various petitions to London and to parliament, they refused to reopen the enclosures, and that was really where the trouble started.
Warren encouraged people then to take things into their own hands and to throw the enclosures down and to fill in the ditches, and that's where the 1831 rising stemmed from.
Warren James was a miner.
He was a Free Miner and would have worked in a pit exactly the same as this very similar to the way we work today.
Actually, Warren ended up on the same trip as a lot of the Swing Rioters and Luddites that went out to Tasmania at the same time.
He was in the same boat, so to speak.
In the 1830s there were rural riots right across England, protesting against increased mechanisation and unemployment.
These were the last of the peasants'revolts.
In the south and the south-west they were led by the legendary and fictitious Captain Swing.
In Swing's name the protestors issued their letters and threats to the hated landowners.
"Revenge for thee is on the wing from thy determined Captain Swing.
" "Sir, your name is down amongst the black hearts in the black book.
This is to advise you and the like of you to make your wills.
You have not yet done as you ought.
" Faced with the threat of starvation or transportation, the rural workforce's only course was to organise into unions.
And the most famous union in our history was formed in Dorset in the 1830s.
The Tolpuddle Martyrs, still a landmark in British labour history.
During the Napoleonic Wars the conditions of the workforce in the countryside had declined gravely with growing mechanisation, surplus labour and so on.
But with the lifting of the laws against assembly in 1825 what we would call trade union movement was possible.
And in 1832, only two years after the great rising of Captain Swing, a group of six Dorset men formed the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers to protest against the decline in agricultural workers' wages.
Only six men, but nobody could have guessed where it would lead.
Convicted for forming a union, the martyrs were transported to Tasmania but public outcry saw them returned as heroes.
It's a reminder that the rights of the British people were not handed down from on high but won by the people themselves at a cost.
I lay this wreath on behalf of the TUC and the trade unionists of today who continue to be inspired by the courage that was shown by James Hammett and the other Tolpuddle Martyrs.
I lay this wreath on behalf of the rural and agricultural members of Unite at a time when rural and agricultural workers are under attack again.
I lay this wreath on behalf of the International Trade Union Confederation.
I lay this wreath on behalf of our youth and the future.
And for James Hammett's descendants, this history is also a family affair.
I'll never forget the night that I found out.
I just kept repeating it over and over.
I can't believe this, I can't.
Phil, look at this.
I can't believe this.
Did you know the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs before you knew about your connection? No, and it's quite shocking because I was brought up in Dorset.
I went to school in Shaftsbury.
If it wasn't for the unions at that time, he'd never have come home and we wouldn't be here.
So it really is that important, yeah.
- For you it is.
- Absolutely.
In the years after the Napoleonic Wars the British working class had also begun to mobilise in the industrial cities for fair wages, for franchise, and even women's rights.
The key turning point had come in 1819 with an attack by an armed militia on a crowd of 60,000 people demonstrating for workers'rights.
The Peterloo Massacre inspired new forms of social action.
"Shake off your chains," the poet Shelley said to the British people.
"You are many and they are few.
" And it happened in the shock city of the age, Manchester.
The city was the phenomenon of the age and famous writers and journalists and novelists came here to see the future, the world's first industrial city.
When the great French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville came here in 1835 he was just appalled by what he saw, the sheer anarchy of it.
"No sign of the directing hand of society," he said.
"Here modern civilisation works its miracles and modern man is turned back into a savage.
" Manchester just exploded as a centre of commerce.
People flooding in from the countryside, over from Ireland, particularly, when the potato famine hit Ireland in the 1830s, so they built the world's first industrial suburbs.
And the most famous slum of the industrial age, Angel Meadow, is now being uncovered by the archaeologists.
These little workers' houses, back-to-back rows so they could pack the housing in really tight.
These were dark, dingy places and, we can see clearly today, very damp.
No ventilation, no light.
Each floor was a separate family unit.
So one family had the cellar, a slightly better-off family had the ground floor and another family had the first floor.
How would they have the toilets? In those early stages, there'd probably be one privy in a yard shared between five to ten houses, each with three families in each house.
So you'd probably have one toilet for about 100 people.
The most famous account from the time was written by Friedrich Engels who shone a powerful light on the ravages of industrial capitalism which attracted the greatest philosopher of the age, Karl Marx.
Engels had already brought out The Condition Of The Working Class and Marx came up to work with Engels.
The idea was that Engels would support Marx.
He worked so that Marx didn't have to and that Marx could write.
Marx is really just He's an academic.
He gets his head down and that's all he does all day.
A driven intellectual, isn't he, really? Would Marx have actually seen things outside his window here? He would have had to, even just walking from here to the train station or walking to wherever he was staying.
This was at the time really one of the shock areas of Manchester.
Along with Little Ireland, Angel Meadow is a shocking area.
Together they ploughed through the great government statistical enquiries, trying to understand the effect of the capitalist system on humanity.
They look at society in detail and they amass data as well and statistics is perfect for them.
Engel's insights came from his own experience walking the streets of Manchester.
"The lowest, most filthy, most unhealthy and most wicked locality in Manchester is called Angel Meadow.
" "If one wants to see in how little space a human being can move how little air he can breathe, it is only necessary to travel here.
" This is where Engels came in 1844, led by his lover, Mary Burns, the Irish patriot who was his guide, the Virgil to his Dante, taking him on this journey into the inferno, the underworld of the Victorian age.
Here in 30 squalid acres lived 30,000 poor workers from Britain, Ireland and further afield.
Most people's ancestors were in this immediate area, were they? Absolutely.
Right round here.
- 1830.
- In 1830? They came across from Ireland They were living in a cellar dwelling and they were still there on the 1851 census.
1855 from Germany.
And he was a musician.
Which seems a bit out of step with the area.
Really, when they described it as the lowest of the low lived here.
That's what Friedrich Engels said.
The absolute poverty and the contrast between obviously, Britain thriving as an industrial power, on the backs and sweat of its people.
It's quite upsetting, really.
Engels was convinced revolution was inevitable and would happen soon, that the British working class as a whole would rise up and overthrow the system.
But, of course, it didn't happen.
And it didn't happen, as Engels himself later recognised, because the working class here were able to gain a share of the profits of their labours and of the empire.
From the 1850s Victorian England entered an incredible phase of social progress that really made us what we are today.
And the key to it was local government.
The mosaic on the floor, busy bees, the symbol of Manchester.
It's just fabulous, isn't it? Only 40 years after De Tocqueville's terrifying vision of the brutality and squalor of the streets of the town with no sign of the guiding power of society and now there's this.
Here was directing power writ large.
Manchester Town Hall is a cathedral of civic order.
The industrial revolution may have caused massive social problems but they were confident in their ability to solve them.
The City Fathers, the Corporation, commissioned these paintings from a famous painter of the day, Ford Madox Brown.
And they're a kind of semi-mythical history of Manchester.
The Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Vikings, and then all the way round through the Civil War to the industrial age.
As the Manchester Guardian said, "It's a visible reminder to all citizens of the labours and the responsibilities of the community to which they belong.
" In the last decades of the Victorian age the British people saw tremendous social progress through civic government.
And the machine did indeed become a source of liberation.
With trains even to take the workers on the great British summer holiday.
In a mere 50 years, Education and Health Acts raised the children of the poor of Angel Meadow out of their poverty.
The workers in the mills and factories, though not yet with a vote at the ballot box, enjoyed better housing and sanitation.
The establishment of police forces removed the anarchy De Tocqueville had seen in Manchester.
There was much to celebrate.
At the opening of this great town hall in 1877 the key speech was made by John Bright, a famous anti Corn Law agitator and free trader.
"The Victorians' achievements in local government," he said, "would be talked about in generations, indeed in centuries.
" But he added a note of caution.
He asked his audience here to imagine a time in the future when this great building was in ruins.
"We must be aware," he said.
And you can imagine it in his rich, rolling Rochdale Rs.
"Great cities have risen before in history, before Manchester and Liverpool" the symbols of his age.
"so we must not for a moment imagine that we stand upon a foundation which is absolutely sure and absolutely immoveable.
" As Bright spoke, there was a shadow on the horizon.
The world was already catching up, the new industrial powers of the USA and Germany.
And in the 1870s came the first great depression, the first crisis of capitalism.
And in Britain this triggered another wave of emigration.
With all their skills, the Cornish and the Irish, the Welsh and the Ulstermen, Scots and English, had each created their own empire of labour, mining and engineering.
And now they began to migrate once more, as if it was a condition of the British story.
I wanted to write about where I was from.
And there's nothing bigger than the emigration of hundreds of thousands of people.
You worked your passage because, in theory, there were always jobs for deep-rock miners and the Cornish were extremely good at digging very difficult mines.
It's true of Australia.
It's true of South America, North America.
Wherever there is mining you will find Cornish people.
This is the album of the Veale family, a mining engineer called Jarvis Veale.
This is the album that he kept when he journeyed all over the world.
He went to some extraordinary places.
Here he is in South Africa.
- That's Cecil Rhodes there.
- That is Cecil Rhodes, indeed it is.
We think this is Jarvis Veale here, so they moved, some of them, in high circles.
And then he goes off to Argentina.
This is in fact a little earlier.
This is 1888.
So he's a busy boy.
He goes around the planet.
So, David, have we got any sense of how many people migrated from Cornwall in the 19th century, say, up to the First World War? It's quite a difficult question to answer but you can say that several teens of thousands went.
The population of Cornwall in 1861 was bigger than in 1961.
Since the 1700s the British people had lived through an adventure unparalleled in history.
They'd made their country the workshop of the world and, for good or ill, created a great empire.
I love the way it starts because it says, "Out on the Ocean, Deep Sailing.
" And he spells "sailing" C-E-A-L-I-N-G.
"This morning me and a Welsh chap was up on deck walking about and forgot the breakfast until it was too late.
About ten we had preaching along with an English chap called Burroughs from Quenchwell.
" Which was another Cornish village.
Resilient, inventive, adaptable, they had made our modern world.
The doctor and the captain could force them to dance every night.
Force them! But little did they know what lay in store for them in the 20th century.
February 2017