The Men of Lancashire
IN area Lancashire is still an agricultural county, though one might net think So, -travelling to Scotland, via Warrington, Wigan, and Preston.. But behind these Wens 'stretches a green country sprinkled with pleasant houT set deep in flowers and trees: . 'They are the houses' of thesuccessful; old-established Lancashire industrialists. These men—and they are the' men' I am Writing about—are no townsmen ; they never were.- Their grandfathers, or great-grandfathers, once set 'UP their .mills in valleys where' mountain-ash trees- berried and quick water flowed. Their descendants go instinctively back to the land. They seldom sleep in their smoky towns ; but, when their day's work is over, they still seek the running river and the berried tree.'
Independent and bold as he was in the beginning the Lancashire man remains to-day ; but out of his roughness has been sculptured something hard and strong as granite is hard and strong. Far from shouting loudly about his successes, he is, as a rule, curiously "-reserved on the subject of his own affairs. Always and everywhere, however, he makes himself felt. A South-Country man once told me that "the reason he couldn't abide North- Country people was because they were so critiCal." And this is true of them—they are as uncompromisingly critical as the Scotch. But the characteristic seems to spring from some underlying desire for excellence. . The old Puritan strain—he made a fine Ironside-L-is still quick within him; and he spends - his life With his eyes fixed on practical matters. His 'aesthetic impulses turn to the making of beautiful gardens and the assembling of ancient china, furniture, or prints—for he is a great collector. A fine old local Word describes him-best ; the Word " soil-socken." For sell-soaked, soil-soeken; 'is just what he is, rooted deep in his own traditions, saturated through and thrciugh With some mysterious essence which he seems to have drawn from the hills and stony valleys that gave him birth. He is utterly different from the Lancashire man of fiction—that curious, exotic image, like a kind of antiquated Aunt Sally, who figures as an "iron-master," a "cotton-lord," or a "wool-magnate."
• This travesty has been put together, piecemeal, from obsolete books ;• and th6se of us who live in the company of Lancashire business men Wender into what strange purlieus of their county these novelists. haxe wandered: Can it not be proclaimed from some house-top that the nabob " fra' Wiggin " is as extinct as the wild man from Borneo—if, indeed, like the wild man from Borneo, he ever really existed at all?
The man from Lancashire might, to-day, equally well be described as the man from Florida, or Rhodesia, or Ceylon ; he frequently lives in these places, and comes home from them on a visit. There may. be a touch of "nervous Northern Done" upon his lips, but he does not drop his h's, as well-regulated Lancashire men in fiction always do. Nor does he, at table, behave with manners almost as strange as those exhibited at the Mad Hatter's tea-party. Writers, however, find this uncommonly difficult to accept. I once came across a young London journalist (he certainly was very young) in an out-of-the- way village in France, and he told me that all Lancashire people had sausages for tea. (What if they had ? Why should it be respectable to consume sausages at one end -of the day and ribald to enjoy them at the other ?) He was mistaken, but when I told him so he obviously did not believe me. The novelists had him fast in their grip, and he could not accept my word for it that the pleasant custom of "high tea" (described so neatly by Charlotte Brontë as "taking your tea with your knees under the table ") has long ago disappeared. Lancashire business men and their families eat their sausages nowadays with the matutinal correctness of aristocrats.
The legend, I imagine, started with Camden. It is related of the learned, though somewhat timid, King-at- arms, that when he came Northwards he implored the protection of Heaven before visiting so wild a place as 'Lancashire. But then that was in Shakespeare's day, and a fairly long time ago. And, even in that remote age, the men of Lancashire could hardly have been, to the rest of the world, quite what the ancient Taurians were to the ancient Greeks—a savage people, living at the end Of the Friendless Sea, who killed all strangers that came their way, especially if they were Greek strangers. Certainly the men beyond the unsociable Irwell and the inhospitable Mersey were well known as terrific bowmen (their womenkind still carry off prizes at South-Country archery meetings), and perhaps that was why Camden was so frightened of them. But they had really stopped shooting people by the time that Camden came among them, and were busy rearing and shearing sheep, and sending the wool to Flanders. Nor had they at that time declared that "what Lancashire says to-day England will say to-morrow." When one comes to think of it, that arrogant pronouncement may have something to do with the attitude of the novelists, who may have formed a sort of conspiracy among themselves to prove that it isn't true. "Let us put these people in their places," they may advise each other, "and show the world that, far from England repeating to-day what Lancashire said yesterday, she is loudly, declaiming something entirely different, and will continue to do so, until at last even Lancashire herself believes 'it."
One has to admit that Lancashire men are pretty sure of themselves. How should they not be when they come of so stout a breed ? Dynamic men they are, with a taste for organization and inventions. During the Civil Wars, their cussedness even overcame their clannishness. No families were more bitterly divided against themselves in Cromwell's days than the families of Lancashire. One member of the house might be occupied in singing, "Happy art thou, 0 Lancashire, godliest among the peoples ! " at a midnight service of Roundheads on a stormy hill-top (those curious local psahns are still in existence, and rnay be found in old .libraries), while the rest of the family were busy hurrying -Cavaliers into strange hiding-places in the morasses. • When the Industrial Revolution changed the whole character of the county, more than half the Lancashire people turned industrialists. Here was a fine opportunity for their traditional conhunaciousness to blossom. If they were manufacturers they fought the operatives, and if they were operatives they fought the manufacturers. An old story is told of Turton Fair—and Turton Fair is just like other Lancashire fairs—about one merry. maker greeting another towards midnight. "Hey, Jack, hast thou fought yet ? " " Naw, not yet." "Then gel thy fightin' done, and coom home."
Fifty years ago that fine old dialect, racy, vital, and as difficult of comprehension to most people as the English of the Canterbury Tales, sprang easily to the lips of quite respectable Lancashire folk, just as Yorkshire idiom flowed from the tongue of Hiram Yorke. They do not speak it now, even among themselves, any more than Sir Robert Peel used it in debate a hundred years since in the House of Commons, or the Lord Chief Justice of England (if I mistake not, Lord Hewed is also a native of the town that the Peels came from) delivers it in this year of Grace from the Bench. A terse, crisp language it is, and one grieves for its decay. But, though the pith of the old dialect is dying, the pith of the men whose grandfathers spoke it remains vital and quick. Lancashire men do not change in essentials—there is many a business man, rich in those very qualities which produced Sir Robert Peel, hard at work in the county to-day.
The " bourgeois-aristocrat's " house was still standing, twenty years ago, characteristically four-square, ample, and solid, in a little hollow behind the parish church of a market town. The streets of the town, the " folds " encircling it, and the high whinberry-covered moors which rose up in the near distance, abounded in just such wild local stories as we read in Shirley. In the market street a house had been sacked by the mob in 1753 in their search for a man called John Kay. He had invented the flying-shuttle, and the hand-loom workers, weaving day after day in their small farms, or cottages, would have killed John Kay if they had caught him, for destroying, as they imagined, their means of livelihood. That old house must have been a familiar sight to Sir Robert Peel. His distrust of mass psychology—a distrust which has been shared by, and made such strong individualists of, so many Lancashire men—must have sprung from watching scenes much like that earlier man-hunt for the unlucky inventor.
A portrait of John Kay, in a delicious old oval gilt frame, gazes down upon these written words. He does not look like a greedy and arrogant bourgeois who would thrust his poorer neighbours into still deeper distress. Nor does he, to tell the truth, look like what Ford Madox Brown thought he did, when that fine artist made a fresco of him for the Manchester Town Hall. But, then, he was just about to be hustled into a wool-sack, for safety, and his expression, no doubt, suits the occasion. In my old picture he looks, to put it simply, exactly like a man who would love to grow sweet peas. And here lies the secret, hidden gentleness of these men of mettle. When they have "got their fightin' done" they like to go home to prune the roses, or—for many of them farm as a hobby—to look at the pigs.
BLANCHE WINDER.
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