Post by andrewteale on Jun 3, 2020 13:03:02 GMT
Between Bolton and Manchester, the ugliness is so complete that it is almost exhilarating. It challenges you to live there.
That was J B Priestley there, writing in his English Journey of the early 1930s, a work which laid the foundation for a genre of "it's grim up north" travel books that has been extensively mined ever since by a variety of authors. Priestley, of course, was from the wrong side of the Pennines - the industrial West Riding - and after eight decades of post-industrial regeneration his caricature no longer holds true in many instances. On the other hand, there is Farnworth to consider.
Farnworth and its associated towns lie on the eastern edge of the Lancashire coalfield, which is home to many towns that greatly expanded with the Industrial Revolution and are still looking for a future now that the Revolution has been and gone. Across the Irwell, the town of Little Lever still bears many of the scars of that history.
In the nineteenth century one of Little Lever's largest employers was the Ladyshore Colliery, occupying a canalside site which sloped steeply down to the Irwell. Its owners, the Fletcher family, were on the wrong side of one of the first landmark health and safety disputes. It was mining a coal seam which was known to have large amounts of gas in it; an 1885 explosion in a nearby mine working the same seam had killed 178 miners. Despite this, the following year HM Inspector of Mines turned up at Ladyshore, and found that it was still being dangerously illuminated with naked flames and open lights. The Inspector issued a notice to the mineowner Herbert Fletcher to remedy this by adopting safety lamps. Fletcher appealed this all the way to the House of Lords, which upheld the Inspector's notice; and Fletcher was subsequently fined by Bolton magistrates for endangering his workers. Ladyshore was the last colliery in England to use open lights.
Above ground was just as dangerous. A mile downstream from Ladyshore was Nob End, home to the Prestolee Alkali Works of Wilson and Company. Described in evidence before the House of Lords in the debates on the 1863 Alkali Act as "as bad as they well can be", Wilson's factory was in the business of making alkali, specifically soda ash, using the Leblanc process. The inputs to the Leblanc process were table salt, sulphuric acid and coal; the outputs were 2,000 tons per month of soda ash (which was what was wanted), hydrochloric acid (which was vented off into the atmosphere, the resulting acid rain killing every tree within a quarter of a mile), and 4,000 tons per month of "galligu" - solid calcium sulphide. There was no industrial use for calcium sulphide at the time, and it was simply dumped nearby.
Nob End is now the largest surviving Leblanc chemical waste dump in the world, and perhaps surprisingly it's a nature reserve. Most Leblanc alkali producers, including Wilson's, were put out of business before 1900 by the development of the superior Solvay process, and with Nob End being a rather remote site surrounded by two rivers and a canal it has escaped the attention of developers ever since. Over more than a century the calcium sulphide in the ground has weathered down to calcium carbonate, producing a limy soil unique in Greater Manchester. There is flora to match, including a very isolated orchid population which turns up every summer. Nature will reassert itself if you give it enough time, although the 10-metre high chemical waste cliff overlooking the River Croal is still no match for Malhan Cove in the beauty stakes.
There aren't all that many factories left along the Irwell and Croal now, and many of the cotton mills are gone too. Most recent to go was the Beehive Mills, two large structures which for decades greeted rail travellers arriving into Bolton from the south; they were demolished in 2019 in favour of new housing. Many more have fallen victim over the years to local resident, national treasure and steeplejack Fred Dibnah, who lived in this area.
Farnworth was a parliamentary constituency name from 1885, as part of the Radcliffe-cum-Farnworth constituency, before gaining independence from Radcliffe at the 1918 redistribution. That created a Farnworth constituency based on the small towns between Bolton and Salford, including Kearsley, Little Lever, Little Hulton and Walkden, as well as the coal-mining village of Outwood and the rather more affluent village of Ainsworth. Farnworth and Walkden are and to a large extent remain Lancashire as Coronation Street or Spring and Port Wine would have you believe it is, with Victorian terraces and a fair number of cobbled backstreets dotted around.
The Radcliffe-cum-Farnworth constituency had a Liberal tradition: the Conservatives won it only once, in 1895. Its MP from 1900 was Theodore Taylor, a textile millowner from Batley in Yorkshire who was one of the longest-lived MPs of all time. Taylor died in 1950 at the age of 102, a modern-era record which wasn't overtaken until 2018. (The current record-holder is Ronald Atkins, MP for Preston North in the Wilson and Callaghan administrations, who was born in June 1916 and will celebrate his 104th birthday this month.)
Taylor retired from the Commons when his seat was broken up in 1918. The Farnworth constituency was narrowly won by the Conservatives' Edward Bagley, who is described in the relevant Times Guide as having been "one of the most prominent Tariff Reform speakers and workers" before the Great War broke out. He had served in the war, and by polling day had the rank of Captain.
Bagley had a majority of just 497 votes over Labour candidate Thomas Greenall, who had worked down the coalmines for twenty years before becoming a full-time union rep: he rose to become president of the Lancashire and Cheshire Miners' Federation, and in January 1910 had been the first Labour candidate to contest the Liberal-dominated Leigh constituency. Greenall got his revenge on Bagley in 1922, gaining Farnworth by a majority of 3,354, and he enjoyed similar majorities in the 1923 and '24 elections against Conservative candidate Alexander Worsthorne. The father of the journalist Peregrine Worsthorne, Alexander was a Belgian who had been born with the surname Koch de Gooreynd and had reached the rank of General in the Belgian army. Goodness knows why he was thought to be a good fit for Farnworth.
Greenall retired in 1929 and passed the seat on to Guy Rowson, who like Greenall had gone down the pits as a child before ending up in the Lancashire and Cheshire Miners Federation. Rowson had been a Tyldesley urban istrict councillor from 1919 to 1925, and it his first election in Farnworth he had a majority of over 11,000.
It wasn't enough. The 1929 Labour government was a short and turbulent one, and Farnworth was one of the seats which fell in the following Tory landslide of 1931. The new MP was James Stones, a former railway clerk who had been chairman of Farnworth urban district council from 1915 to 1919. He pulled off a 17% swing to defeat Rowson by 2,907 votes.
To date, James Stones was the last Conservative MP for Farnworth. He died just before the 1935 election was called, leaving an open seat; and Guy Rowson returned to the Commons with a 10-point swing and a majority of 5,201. In his second term he became PPS to the party leader Clement Attlee, and introduced a bill to regulate holiday pay; but this proved to be his final term. Rowson died in November 1937, aged just 54.
The resulting Farnworth by-election of January 1938 is possibly the most extensively-studied by-election of the pre-war era. This is thanks to the efforts of Mass Observation, which was active up the road in Bolton at the time and embedded some of its observers in the two parties' campaigns. The photographic record of the campaign (now held by Bolton Council) is fantastic and I recommend a browse at boltonworktown.co.uk/themes/politics. I've previously put some highlights on this thread, and Bolton Council very kindly gave me permission to reproduce the above photo in Andrew's Previews 2018 in exchange for a free copy of the book.
The result of the election was probably less interesting than the study. New Tory candidate Herbert Ryan was defeated by Farnworth councillor and Lancashire county councillor George Tomlinson, who increased the Labour majority to 7,463. That set Tomlinson up for a long career on the Labour benches, which culminated in 1947 with his appointment to the Cabinet as Minister of Education, replacing Ellen Wilkinson after she died in office.
Tomlinson's government career ended with the defeat of the Attlee government in 1951, and within a year Tomlinson was dead at the age of 62. The resulting Farnworth by-election of November 1952 elected Labour's Ernest Thornton without fuss, and he served for 18 years in what was by now a safe Labour constituency. Thornton retired in 1970 and passed the seat on to John Roper, who was on the pro-European wing of the party. Roper was one of the Labour MPS who rallied to the SDP banner in 1981, becoming the SDP chief whip - a role he later carried out for the Liberal Democrats when he was elevated to the House of Lords in 2001.
The local government reorganisation of 1974 had left the Farnworth constituency evenly divided between Farnworth, Kearsley and Little Lever, which were part of the Metropolitan Borough of Bolton; and Walkden and Little Hulton, which had been annexed by the City of Salford. The 1983 redistribution divided the seat into two halves along this line, with the southern half forming the major part of the new Worsley constituency and the northern half forming the major part of the new seat of Bolton South East. Both new seats were notionally safe for Labour. John Roper decided to contest Worsley, finishing third in a close three-way result; that left Bolton South East as an open seat, and the Labour nomination went to David Young who had been the MP for Bolton East since February 1974. This was a much more Labour-inclined seat than the the marginal Bolton East, and Young won the new seat with a majority of 8,753 or 17.6% - still the lowest percentage majority in Bolton South East.
Young was deselected for the 1997 general election in favour of Brian Iddon, the only case in that Parliament when a Labour MP lost their nomination without boundary changes being involved. A long-serving Bolton councillor, Iddon came to Parliament from a career in academia as a chemistry lecturer.
Iddon retired in 2010 and passed the seat on to Yasmin Qureshi, who along with her fellow Labour MPs Rushanara Ali and Shabana Mahmood became one of the first female Muslim MPs. Originally from Pakistan, Qureshi's career before Parliament was in the law, including as head of the criminal legal section of the UN Mission in Kosovo.
Yasmin Qureshi's seat is centred on the Royal Bolton Hospital, which despite the name is in Farnworth; this is the busiest hospital in Greater Manchester and a major local employer. Much of the hospital site was previously railway land, occupied by Plodder Lane engine shed on a line which has long gone. The hospital is in Harper Green ward, which covers the western end of Farnworth and the Lever Edge area on the southern edge of Bolton proper.
To the vest of this is the starkly-divided Hulton ward, which combines the strongly Conservative area of Over Hulton with more downmarket parts of Bolton proper. From here we travel down Deane Road and St Helens Road into Rumworth ward, which is majority-Asian and majority-Muslim and has very high rates of people "looking after home or family". These lead to the sleek new buildings of the University of Bolton and to Bolton town centre, most of which is contained within the Great Lever ward that includes Burnden to the south. Also part of Bolton East until 1983 was the village of Darcy Lever, which is now part of a ward with Little Lever.
Qureshi's four elections have all been marked by large votes for the radical right. UKIP were second here in the 2015 general election with 24% of the vote, and saved their deposit in 2017; there were also saved deposits for the BNP in 2010 and for the Brexit Party in December 2019. This was not a flash in the pan. UKIP broke through on Bolton council in 2014 by winning Hulton and Little Lever wards; they also won Kearsley in 2016, and Little Lever has developed into a stronghold for the party.
The wheels started to come off the Bolton council Labour administration in January 2018 when they lost a by-election in Hulton ward to the Conservatives; but another by-election in Farnworth ward in March 2018 broke the mould. This was the first electoral success for Farnworth and Kearsley First, an anti-Labour anti-council localist independent group which now holds all three seats in Farnworth ward and two seats in Kearsley ward. (Given how insular Bolton and its surrounding towns area, it's surprising that nobody had tried playing the localist card before.) Following the 2019 local elections FKF and UKIP are two of the minor parties supporting a minority Conservative administration in Bolton - the only Conservative-run metropolitan borough in the north of England. Labour are utterly safe in the two inner Bolton wards of Great Lever and Rumworth, which almost certainly provide Qureshi's majority on their own, and are also safe in Harper Green where FKF have not been able to break through.
The travails of Bolton Labour shouldn't be enough to derail Yasmin Qureshi's 10-year-old parliamentary career, and unless and until the Boundary Commission decide to mess around with her seat Qureshi should be a good bet to complete a second decade on the green benches.
) - which was derelict for some time, long since demolished but the vast area of land is still there, up for grabs to become yet another high rise unaffordable housing. But what a disastrous design of a retail park that was, spreading out sideways instead of up in an area where space is at such a premium. I also remember the so-called ‘Electrical Clearance Store’ there (once a ‘proper’ Curry’s) that sold Curry’s goods that had fallen off the back of a lorry for barely reduced prices… that has now relocated to a dark grey monstrosity just up the road.
