Manchester weekend

I can't remember the last time I had such a perfect weekend.

I was in Manchester for their biennial International Festival.  I've been in Manchester several times before -- it is only 30 miles from where I am working -- but usually for specific things, such as the synagogue, the theatre, the art gallery.  This was the first time I just wandered aimlessly about, and I was really impressed. Britain's second largest city, with a population of just over 2.5 million, has seen several remarkable turns of fortune. 

Established as a Roman fort (the clue is in the name), Manchester foundered after the Romans left, was variously ruled by the Angles, the Celts, and the Vikings.  In 1301 it became a market town, and a community of Flemish weavers settled in the town to produce wool and linen, sparking a tradition of cloth manufacture. By the 16th century the wool trade had made Manchester a flourishing market town, but it wasn't until the end of the 18th century, when cotton met the industrial revolution, did Manchester make its mark.

Cotton is native to the Americas, Africa, and India. It is an ingenious little shrub with long fibers attached to its seeds, which help them catch the wind and thus disperse further.  The fiber can then be spun and woven into a light cloth, perfect for hot climates. Cotton clothing was widespread in India around 2,000 BCE, and it gradually spread throughout Europe as well because it was more comfortable than wool. By the 17th century, the East India Company--better known for spices and tea--was importing a quarter of a million pieces per year into Britain.  The Victorian middle class liked that cotton could be washed easier than wool, and the lower class liked the "calicoes," cheap cotton fabrics that were often brightly dyed  (The area that produced these Calicoes became known as Calicut, which then became Calcutta.)  To protect Britain's wool industry, Parliament banned the import of calicoes; however, this inadvertently encouraged India to export raw cotton to the UK, which finished the goods and sold them back to India. When the Calico Act was abolished 50 years later, India had lost the ability to compete internationally (a process now known as "de-industrialization").  As part of Ghandi's policy of "non-cooperation," he encouraged Indians to weave their own cotton cloth, called khadi, rather than buy from Britain.

On the other side of the world, when Christopher Columbus landed in the Americas he found the natives wearing cotton shirts, which only reinforced his belief that he had sailed to India.  However, Mexico had been using cotton cloth since 5,000 BCE, and in fact the American species were superior to India* because the fibers were longer.  Unfortunately, separating the cotton from its seeds was a laborious and time-consuming effort, taking almost 600 man-hours for a single bale of cotton.  Even with slave labour, cotton was not as profitable as tobacco, and slavery was in decline and may have well been abolished.  Then in 1793 Eli Whitney, a northerner who was purportedly trying to help slaves, invented the cotton gin ("gin" being short for "engine") which reduced the time to 12 man-hours.  Under the heading of "unintended consequences," this made cotton so profitable that it reinvigorated the slave trade and directly led to the Civil War.

As an English colony, America was treated the same as India--raw cotton was shipped to the UK, which finished the goods and sold them back. (This is why the American South never developed a manufacturing base.)  Liverpool became a major port for American goods, but a canal was built to ship the cotton to nearby Manchester, which already had a well-developed textile industry.  When the industrial revolution started, every stage of preparation -- cleaning, carding (combing), spinning, and weaving -- was mechanised.  From a description in 1823:

A very good Hand Weaver, a man twenty-five or thirty years of age, will weave two pieces of nine-eighths shirting per week, each twenty-four yards long, and containing one hundred and five shoots of weft in an inch, the reed of the cloth being a forty-four, Bolton count, and the warp and weft forty hanks to the pound. A Steam Loom Weaver, fifteen years of age, will in the same time weave seven similar pieces.

The hand weavers, threatened by the unskilled labor, started the "Luddite" movement and began sabotaging the machines.  However, the number of cotton mills in Manchester went from 2 in 1790 to 66 in 1821, and 108 by 1853.  Over the same time period, the cotton industry went from £600,000/year to £38 million/year.  At one point Manchester supplied 70% of the cloth in the world. Today that figure is less than 1%.

The boom resulted in many beautiful building throughout Manchester, many of which still stand.  (Manchester was targeted by the German Luftwaffe, but fortunately it was out of range of the V2 rockets.)  The population of Manchester also exploded, but for historical reasons it was not a city and had no representation in Parliament. In 1819 a crowd of 60,000-80,000 men, women, and children assembled in St Peter's Field to agitate for political reform.  Local magistrates ordered cavalry to charge the crowd; 15 people died and 700 were injured.  The massacre was termed "Peterloo" (after the battle of Waterloo in 1815) and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was inspired to write "The Masque of Anarchy" which ends with the lines:

And that slaughter to the Nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.

And these words shall then become
Like Oppression's thundered doom
Ringing through each heart and brain,
Heard again - again - again -

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

Of course I know this only because one of the performances was an absolutely brilliant reading of the poem, in a long-disused concert hall filled with candles, mere yards from where the even occurred 200 years ago.  There were probably 500 people in the auditorium, it was absolutely sweltering, and you could have heard a pin drop during the entire 30 minutes.  It was mesmerising.  (You can read the full text here. It is quite interesting, if a bit gory, when you know the history.)

In 1900, Manchester was the 9th largest city in the world.  It was also the third largest port in the UK, despite being 40 miles inland!  (The canal had been dredged deep enough to allow shipping vessels to bypass Liverpool and come straight to Manchester.)  However, cotton processing was in decline, and the cotton exchange closed in 1968.  The canal was unable to handle the increasingly large container ships, and the port closed in 1982. Heavy industry declined in the 1960s and was dealt a death blow by Margaret Thatcher in 1979. Manchester lost 150,000 jobs in manufacturing between 1961 and 1983.  Ironically, what saved Manchester was a bomb.

In 1996, the IRA detonated a bomb in the city centre, the largest to be detonated on British soil. Fortunately warnings an hour earlier had allowed the area to be evacuated, so there were no casualties, but property damage was estimated at £400 million.  The reconstruction spurred a massive regeneration of the city centre, with many of the historic buildings preserved, and the old mills converted into apartments. Last year the BBC moved its entire London television production studios to Manchester. Today it has a broad economic base, thriving tourism, and is a melting pot of immigrants. (15% of Mancunians -- as they call themselves -- were born outside the UK.  The UK average is 8.3%.  The US average is 12.3%.) 

Walking around, I could feel the heft of a city proud of its history. (And the Museum of Science and Industry really slams it in your face, focused exclusively on innovation that has occurred in Manchester, although surprisingly I didn't see anything related to graphene, which was discovered at the University of Manchester using such sophisticated tools as a pencil and some Scotch tape.)

However, I was there for the International Festival, and the crown jewel (pardon the pun) of the festival was Kenneth Branagh's return as Macbeth.  Tickets had sold out even before they went on sale!  (At least, on sale to the general public.)  However, on Saturday I saw they had some day tickets, and so on Sunday I was at the box office at 10am for tickets that went on sale at noon -- and I was #3 in line. I loved reading Macbeth as a child, and this was without a doubt one of the most amazing performances I've ever seen.  It was in a deconsecrated church, with stadium seating built on either side of an aisle that was--I kid you not--filled with dirt, which quickly turned to mud during the opening battle scene in the rain. Everything got coated in mud and, given the subject matter, it was absolutely appropriate. The church held maybe 300 people, with only six rows (and those in the first row were warned they might get pelted with mud).  Fantastic.

To top it off, the weather in the UK has been absolutely gorgeous for the past two weeks -- they call it a heat wave, but apparently the technical definition of that is 5 days at 5 degrees above average, and so in England a heat wave is a welcome thing indeed.  To be fair, it's been quite warm in southern England (29C / 84F) but in northern England it was a perfect 25C / 77F.  I even spent a couple of hours sunbathing in the park.

So everything was perfect--I even found two vegetarian cafes--but you know I couldn't have a weekend without a hitch, and in this case it was the "national transgender pride festival" also being held in Manchester that weekend, and my hotel was ground zero!  I swear I was the only guest who wasn't a crossdresser!  And these weren't the Ladyboys of Bangkok -- these were guys in their 70s; guys who were 6' 5" before putting on stilletos; guys who looked like rugby players squeezed into a dress three times too small.  And worse, even though they dressed like women, they still behaved like guys -- by Sunday the entire area was trashed, full of beer cans and takeaway containers.  It was...disappointing.  For some reason, I expected them to be better than that.

* The American South believed that Britain and France, starved of its cotton supply, would intervene in the Civil War.  However, Egypt--seeing an opportunity--planted American cotton along the Nile, and saw its profits boom from $7 million to $77 million in just four years. However, after the war, Europe returned to cheap American exports, sending Egypt into a deficit spiral that led to the country declaring bankruptcy in 1876, a key factor behind Egypt's annexation by the British Empire in 1882.  Today, Egypt is not even in the top ten of cotton-producing countries, and most "Egyptian cotton" is produced in Pakistan and China. (And it's just the same as American cotton.)