Famine, Slavery & Solidarity

Victorian white working class poor identifying their plight with that of the black African slaves …

Winter 1863. The starving thousands rioted in Stalybridge. Then in Ashton and then in Dukinfield. And the hussars on horseback arrived – charging the crowds in this Mancunian town – some 44 years after Peterloo.

But how many of you have ever heard of The Bread Riots of 1863?

For 3 years the Lancashire Cotton Famine devastated the lives of the poorest people in the north of England. President Lincoln had blockaded all cotton from the USA’s southern states in order to break the economic strength of the South slavery and to end the Civil War.
The cotton mills stood empty in Lancashire towns; with the worst towns affected being Ashton, Stalybridge and Dukinfield. In Stalybridge alone, just 5 of the 64 factories and operative shops were able to continue working part-time. 7,000 were unemployed in this small town and the situation became known as ‘The Great Panic’ as 750 homes stood empty when people left, to try and find employment.

One answer to prevent further contraction of the cotton industry was to replace American exports with Indian cotton – a far inferior crop and more difficult to weave – but this was deemed to be better than nothing and so, by the second winter, the situation seemed to be contained. In October 1862, a meeting was held in Stalybridge Town Hall which passed a resolution blaming the Confederacy and their actions in the Civil War for the cotton famine. Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens, champion of the working people, was horrified by the impact of the Cotton Famine and was soon making frequent appearances in public. At a meeting in Stalybridge Town Hall, he gave a three-hour speech where he emphasised the nobility of the working class, telling the people that the American Civil War was not to blame for the crisis; rather, it was the result of overproduction, the greed of the cotton masters and their desire to enslave the poor.

Most of the working class in Lancashire was outspoken in condemning a cotton industry that was built on the backs of African slaves – even though the boycott was effectively starving them. In recognition of this, Lincoln took the unprecedented step of addressing a collective letter to them, which was read out in Manchester and which sympathised with their plight, thanking them for their support in the fight against slavery. The burden of relief fell to the Poor Law guardians throughout 1861-62 and by January 1863 no fewer than 460,000 people across the country were dependent on such handouts.

But things were set to get worse again. On the Prince of Wales’s wedding day on 10^th March 1863, an act of sympathy towards the hungry poor of Lancashire was shown – with some 10,000 loaves made from American flour being shipped across to Manchester. As the crowd gathered to collect the food, a feeling of resentment grew as it seemed that there was, “something derogatory in being drawn after these bread-laden waggons, like donkeys after a bunch of carrots … a row ensued. Loaves were thrown about, were trodden upon … and the meeting [was] broken up.” Letters to both local and national press made it evident that the Poor Law guardians – noted as parsimonious hypocrites – were increasingly being made the target of anger and resentment. The Bee Hive, a moderate trade union publication, commented in December 1862 on the attitude of Poor Law guardians towards the recipients, who were, “treated as if they were standing in the dock of a criminal court, or rather worse; not only are they presumed prima facie to be rogues and imposters, but they are addressed in the coarsest and most insulting language…”

The huge numbers of unemployed in Stalybridge were already required by the Poor Law to attend ’emergency schools’ – to keep the poor off the streets and occupied – when, in March 1863, seven miles away in Manchester, the executive committee of the Poor Law declared a new directive for this town. They ordered that the 17,000 in the schools should have their relief cut from 3s 4d to 2s 5d in anticipation that the economic distress of the cotton industry might continue for some time. To add insult to injury, most of the remaining amount was now to be offered in vouchers, to be exchanged in local shops for food items. Clothes handed out via Poor Law relief also had to be marked out – or branded – so that the wearer was identified as wearing a donated item. The outrage at this was taken up by non-conformist ministers, with one of them waving a pair of ragged trousers from his Stalybridge pulpit, scorning the branding system. On 19th March 1863, those in receipt of relief held a meeting and decided to refuse both the reduction and the ticket system – and then the rioting began – both in Ashton and then in Stalybridge.

The newspapers and the ensuing government investigation stated that most of the protestors were men and women – described as boys and girls – in their teens and twenties, many of them were Irish immigrants and as such deemed to be ‘nowt but trouble.’ It is important to remember too, that during the 1860s the ethnic make up of these towns increased enormously; by 1869 nearly 50% of Stalybridge’s population were newly arrived Irish immigrants, following the ‘Great Hunger’ of Ireland and the failure of the potato crop.

The first act of civil disobedience involved breaking the windows of a cab which was transporting two members of the Stalybridge Relief Committee. The mob then moved down from the Castle Hall area and onto the main streets of Staybridge, smashing windows, vandalising the police station and targeting certain individuals unpopular with the working class. The first to receive such attention was Mr Bates (who was later a Whig mayor in the town). His mill was surrounded by the crowd, with every window being smashed. This led to the first charge by the police constabulary. The crowd retaliated with a shower of bricks and stones and moved onto Bates’s private residence at Cocker Hill, which received the same treatment. Mr Ashton, another member of the committee, had his shop looted, with the stocks of tea, coffee, sugar and spices being carried off. Dyson’s Eating House was similarly attacked and then the people broke into the Poor Law Relief Stores themselves – seizing clothing and throwing items out of the windows to those waiting below whilst attempting to set fire to the place. By now, a local magistrate was in attendance, along with troops on horseback (hussars) from Manchester, who galloped into the streets and protected the magistrate as he read the Riot Act out to the town. Some 44 years after Peterloo…

The next day, the magistrates of Stalybridge charged 29 of the 80 prisoners who had been rounded up, but events were not over yet. Twenty-four hours later, the disturbances began again. Whilst several crowds began to roam the streets of Stalybridge, the mayor announced that he would try and get them food tickets, but cries for ‘money and bread’ began and the rioters began to target even more shops, beginning with Mr Ridgway’s who, in response to having his shutters forced, began to throw out his loaves and cheeses to the people below. Another 20 shops followed suit – amongst them Robert’s, which was only several doors down from the Poor Relief Stores. One of the more amusing stories told at the time by a journalist involved a young man in the crowd who seemed to be rather disgruntled with the jar of mustard that had been tossed out the window towards him. Swearing, he dashed it to the floor declaring that he wished, “He’d ha’ summat different to that.” By the evening, the police, foot soldiers, and hussars had once more managed to gain control of the town. Many of the perpetrators, however, made their way to Ashton and commenced with attacking shops in the same manner – leading to the Riot Act being read in Henry Square. Dukinfield also received a throng of looters and was met with the Riot Act. Hyde, too, was targeted, with prisoners being carted off from all three other towns to the Chester Assizes for trial. Back in Stalybridge, the following day experienced similar disturbances and the disorder was now giving way to a different sort of thirst: demands for beer and a scramble to ‘sup’, with pubs and beer shops being besieged.

My great x 3 grandfather and soon to be one of the first working class Mayors of England, Robert Stanley, would have witnessed the riots first-hand, as his shop was at the centre of the uprising on Princess (now) Melbourne Street and located between the shops mentioned by the press and the government inquiry. Indeed, the illustration at the top of this blog produced for the national press clearly shows the row of shops where Robert’s business and home were located. The picture shows a scene of chaos with soldiers lashing out at the mob with swords, and clothing and food raining down from the windows onto the crowd. Indeed, the first shop on the left being attacked by the crowd is the very one that Robert and his family had, until recently, been living in (they had moved from No. 27 Princess Street down to No. 5 next to the River Tame). And one of the very rare anecdotes that we have of Robert’s life, from David Stanley – my great uncle:

Well, your dad’s grandad, Dean Stanley, told us that when he were growing up, his grandad – ‘Unlucky Bob’ as he were known – used to tell him the tale of the Cotton Riots in Stalybridge. He said that the shops were under attack from some of the people and that so to stop them smashing up the place like they were all the others – his dad [Robert] decided to throw all the food and that out from the top windows – to keep the people at bay.

This tale certainly chimes with the written records of the time, highlighting the desperation and danger in the air.

It must have been a terrifying experience for the Robert and his family to witness the looters below – especially as some of the crowd had been attempting to set fire to adjacent buildings. No wonder that Robert and Emma decided to fling their stock out of the windows! It is interesting, however, that Robert is not named as one of the many business owners who were unpopular in the town and deliberately targeted. Perhaps Robert – similar in attitude, politics and outlook to Joseph Rayner Stephens – was a man with a good reputation already amongst the townspeople. Not long after the riots, the people of Stalybridge received a special visit from Mr and Mrs Gladstone, who were invited as guests of fellow wealthy Liberal, and soon-to-be sparring partner of Robert Stanley, Robert Platt. According to Bygone Stalybridge, Mrs Gladstone went to some of the sewing-classes, “and expressed surprise and delight at the excellent needlework and knitting done by the scholars. Mr Gladstone went through some of the schools where the male operatives were being taught.”

However, it seems that for these unemployed scholars, the novelty was wearing off, “knowing that the connection between the work done and the relief-wages to be procured was … a make-believe.”^[1]

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A few months after Robert’s shop had very nearly been torched by the rioters, the Stalybridge and Dukinfield Chronicle noted that a certain Robert Stanley, grocer, had been asked to chair a meeting of 500 men who had come together to discuss ‘The American War: its crimes and curses.” Certainly the working classes of South East Lancashire suffered terribly during these three years – prompting that famous letter of thanks from Lincoln to them (and later, a statue in his honour erected in Manchester.) And yet, in the main, the people felt great empathy for the plight of the slaves in the southern USA states; the general feeling was that their common enemy was that of the rich cotton landowners/ rich capitalists and that perhaps if they stood in solidarity with one another on the opposite sides of the ocean, perhaps one day ‘a change is gonna come’.

And Today?

Sadly, the ancestors of black slaves in the USA have still not received equality and dignity at the hands of that country’s formal institutions, some 157 years later. Reflecting on this ‘hidden history’ of the oppressed working classes of British history certainly causes me great sadness; not least because this is the kind of radical, wonderful stuff that every school child should be taught. But also because as we seek to fight for justice for non-white groups, we see the far right attempting to make mischief with the newfound interest in producing a new and more accurate narrative of the colonialised past; as they try and paint anyone who protests against the top-down approach to history as being statue-wrecking, intolerant, violent vandals.

I’m not sure what my great x 3 grandfather would have thought exactly, about the recent demonstrations in the UK and the USA but I feel fairly sure that he would have called for ALL oppressed people to reach out a helping hand to those who are downtrodden, weak and despised in society. (Although I feel fairly sure that he wouldn’t have objected TOO much to seeing a few of Gladstone’s statues being dragged off to a museum. He couldn’t stand the bloke…)

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(Taken from my research and from my books – ‘His Own Man’ and ‘Imagining Robert’ – see the book for references and www.robertreschidstanley.wordpress.com for more on the life and times of Robert Stanley and links to where you can buy the books from)

Note: The cutlasses used by the hussars and local police can still be seen on display at Stalybridge Civic Hall (the Victoria Market Hall) – it is thought that these are the actual weapons used during the 1863 Bread Riots.