Collinson, Marc

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   PRIFYSGOL BANGOR / BANGOR UNIVERSITY  J. Moher, Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades UnionCongress, (2021)Collinson, MarcHistoric Society of Lancashire and Cheshire NewsletterPublished: 17/05/2021Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordCyswllt i'r cyhoeddiad / Link to publicationDyfyniad o'r fersiwn a gyhoeddwyd / Citation for published version (APA):Collinson, M. (2021). J. Moher, Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades UnionCongress, (2021): Review. Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire Newsletter, (77), 3-4.Hawliau Cyffredinol / General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/orother copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legalrequirements associated with these rights.            • Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of privatestudy or research.            • You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain            • You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal ?Take down policyIf you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access tothe work immediately and investigate your claim. 01. Jun. 2021  Number 77 May 2021 																													In this issue ‘Counting the people in Lancashire and Chesh-ire: references to the Census in Transactions before 1911’ Update on Belmont Community Primary School’s evacuee project Forthcoming events  Book reviews Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain’s Most Sav-age Slum Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress  After a year of disruption, it is pleasing to see a jam-packed issue of the Newsletter. It is hope-fully a sign of things to come – there are plenty more short research pieces, reviews, and back-log of lecture reports still to appear.  Keep an eye out for updates about our events via email, social media (especially Facebook), and the website. – James Evans, Newsletter Editor Counting the people in Lancashire and Cheshire: references to the Census in Transactions before 1911 Record offices and archive search rooms are be-ginning to open up as we come out of lockdown, but while they’ve been closed I have been delv-ing into old (especially nineteenth-century) editions of Transactions. Most of us will have spent some time around Sunday 21st March completing our census form; some of us may even be looking forward to next January when the 1921 Census Household Returns will be made available. It was this that prompted me to see what use was made of the Census by contributors to Transac-tions at a time when the household schedules were not available for public inspection, but sta-tistics were very much in the air. As Edward Higgs has written: ‘The mid nineteenth century was certainly a period when almost indiscrimi-nate collection had become a mania, and the census can be seen as part of the movement to reveal the “state of the nation”’. The British So-ciety of the Advancement of Science had founded a Statistical Section in 1833 and had held its annual meeting in Liverpool in Septem-ber 1854. It is perhaps not surprising that several papers read to the Society made use of the 1851 Census. Not only did the 1851 Census gather more information than those held previ-ously but it was 50 years since the first census was taken in 1801. Transactions (Vol.7, 1853-1854) included a pa-per, ‘Science in Lancashire and Cheshire’, which John Towne Danson had previously printed and had sent to all those who were on the Society’s list of members. The Council had decided to include part of Danson’s paper in Transactions because it believed that too few papers had been included on science, ‘even in the extended sense of the term’. While touching on many different aspects of science, Danson also referred to the 1851 Census as supplying information on ‘the number, ages and civil con-ditions of the people’, pointing out that not   2  www.hslc.org.uk 																																					much use had been made of this, and its partic-ular relevance to the ‘densely populated’ Liverpool district. He urged the Society to in-vestigate the ‘ethnology’ of the North-Western division (Lancashire and Cheshire) and the im-pact of immigration, particularly from Ireland, on the ‘characteristics of the population’. Danson, a Vice President of the Society, fol-lowed this up in the following volume with two papers: ‘Liverpool: memoranda touching its area and population during the first half of the present century’ and ‘On the area and popula-tion of the Manchester district’. Here he pointed to various problems in defining the area of towns when comparing population figures be-tween censuses. But it was his ‘Science in Lancashire and Cheshire’ article which, by his own account, was noticed by Thomas A. Wel-ton in London; who was already developing his own statistical tables because, like Danson, he was interested in the ‘great lessons embodied in the census’. Their jointly-conceived ‘On the population of Lancashire and Cheshire and its local distribution during the fifty years 1801-1851’ was published in four parts in Transactions (vols. 9 – 12). The first paper was read to the Society on 23rd April 1857. Danson explained that ‘accounting for the actual pro-gress and distribution’ of the population in the North-Western division had been something of a task and that they would need four evenings to present their data to the Society. While in 1851 Lancashire and Cheshire occupied one twenti-eth of the area of the UK, this division had one seventh of the population. Parts One and Two were written by Danson and Parts Three and Four by Welton, who was also responsible for all the tables. While much of Part One was taken up by differentiating be-tween town and countryside, the second paper was concerned with local variations in the ‘rapid’ increase in population across the divi-sion. The rapid growth of ‘Birkenhead (or South Liverpool)’ was cited – Danson argued that, in terms of growth, the two towns facing each other across the Mersey should be seen as one. He stressed that the authors’ interest went be-yond statistics, declaring that the movement of population in the North-West division had brought together ‘a very large number of peo-ple…under circumstances of which the history of the world affords no previous example’ with ‘momentous consequence’ not only for the country but for the world. In Part Three Welton focused on immigration and emigration in the ‘country’ districts, point-ing to problems with the Registrar’s definition of counties which made it appear that some peo-ple had moved out of their district. He concluded that, except in Liverpool and Man-chester, the increase in population by immigration in each district came from people in the immediate vicinity. In the final paper Welton presented a detailed overview of the dis-tribution of occupations as well as ‘a somewhat lengthened investigation’ into births, marriages, deaths, and fertility. The authors concluded that the diversity of death rates as they related to place and gender appeared ‘to be traceable in a great measure to occupations, and the modes of life they induce’. It has not been my intention here to comment on the authors’ methodology or even list their con-clusions, but rather to point towards ideas that were preoccupying at least some members of our Society in the 1850s. How would members PLR'TE IH.S.Or L & C.VOLX.1  3  www.hslc.org.uk 																																					have reacted to Danson’s paper, ‘on the uses of Learned Societies: and in particular of the His-toric Society’ read on 14th April 1859 (Vol 11, 1858-1859)? The time had come, he argued, for such societies to justify their existence. Philan-thropy was not enough to relieve misery when it was the causes of misery that needed to be re-moved. To do this they had to be understood, and he hoped that the Historic Society would contribute to the building of a ‘Social Science’. However, at the same time as Welton was de-veloping his idea of a social science, David Buxton, Principal of the Liverpool School for the Deaf and Dumb, was making use of infor-mation from the Census in a very different way and reporting his observations to the Society. I hope to say more about David Buxton in our next Newsletter.  – Dr Christine Verguson D. Kirby, Angel Meadow: Victorian Britain’s Most Savage Slum, (2020) A review of this book appeared in Transactions following its initial publication in 2016, but as it has now been reissued on three occasions, it was felt appropriate to include this brief re-minder of its value. Writing the book was clearly a personal journey for the author, who had learnt that in the 1860s his ancestor William Kirby settled in Angel Meadow. He had trav-elled from Ireland seeking work and it was here that four of his children would die prematurely. The book opens as the eighteenth century was drawing to a close, when Angel Meadow was a pleasant area, north of Manchester and home to many of the town’s better-off residents.  How-ever, the rapid growth of the cotton industry led to its decline. Cotton mills and other factories were built, and those who could afford to leave did so. Their large homes quickly became rat in-fested, disease-ridden lodging houses in which the desperate poor were forced to live. Others had to share squalid cellar dwellings or poor-quality houses, most of which were over-crowded and without adequate sanitation. Kirby is a journalist and he puts his skills to good use in describing the day-to-day lives of Manchester’s underclass in Angel Meadow. One particularly moving account tells of three men seen in the paupers’ graveyard of St Michael’s Church attempting to open a grave. Realising they had been seen, they fled, aban-doning the body of a newly born baby girl. It was discovered they were helping the mother give the baby a Christian burial rather than simply abandoning the corpse, which was then common practice. The impoverished mother, Eliza Leather, was found and a post-mortem re-vealed her daughter was stillborn two days before the failed burial attempt. She escaped se-rious criminal charges, but at the inquest, the coroner criticised her for not paying the six-pence, equivalent of £3 today, for a pauper’s burial, thereby displaying a lack of understand-ing of what true poverty was. Inevitably, Angel Meadow became home to criminals, many of them extremely violent, to-gether with other ne’er-do-wells. There was a great deal of alcohol-fuelled anti-social behav-iour. It was estimated that in the 1830s there were more than seventy-five taverns and gin shops in the area, all of them the haunts of bur-glars, thugs, confidence tricksters, beggars, and prostitutes. Kirby provides the reader with graphic accounts of their lives. The destruction of Angel Meadow began with the Housing Act of 1930, the aim of which was to demolish the country’s slums. In December 1940, bombs dropped from German aeroplanes completed the task. This fascinating book is es-sential reading for those interested in the negative aspects of industrialisation and Man-chester’s emergence as a great city of in the nineteenth century. – Martin Baggoley, HSLC J. Moher, Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Con-gress, (2021) Understanding place and feelings of belonging are important to understand how historical fig-ures operated. In a 2012 chapter on ‘Historians and Labour parties’, Prof. Andrew Thorpe ar-gued that fellow labour and political historians should seek to understand how place and back-ground shapes a politician’s ‘mental map’ – the way a person orients and locates themselves in the world – and influences how a policymaker or activist sees the world, interprets its prob-lems, and acts. Similarly, the American   4  www.hslc.org.uk 	Forthcoming events ‘Discovering Coccium: an archaeological ac-count of Roman Wigan’, Ian Miller (University of Salford), 16th June 2021 ‘Blitzed: Liverpool Lives – stories from the ex-hibition’, Kay Jones (Museum of Liverpool), 15th September 2021 ‘History and development of municipal parks in Manchester and Salford’, Sam Hayes (Univer-sity of Salford), 20th October 2021 Each of these events will be held via Zoom at 14:00 on the date given. Tickets are to be booked via our Eventbrite page (available here: https://bit.ly/3djZ3zk). Further details are avail-able on the Society’s website. Recordings of the lectures will be uploaded to YouTube. Update on Belmont Community Pri-mary School’s evacuee project Members will recall the Society’s part-funding of a project on evacuees in Belmont, Lancashire (Newsletter No 73, January 2020). Its aim was to employ a ‘skills-based’ approach to the teaching the history of the Second World War, and involved a number of local history projects. Research revealed that the school hosted evac-uee children (a great many of whom came from Manchester’s Jewish community) during the war, as well as refugees from Czechoslovakia. The Society’s donation assisted with the pro-duction of a memories board, and its erection in an accessible part of the school. Progress continues to be made. The pupils have now designed a memorial garden and bench, which have been created with help from local firms. Information about the project can be found in the Historical Association’s Primary History (No 87, Spring 2021) and the school’s website, available here: https://bit.ly/3eAFFyO. biographer Robert Caro has long argued that ‘places’, and the experiences had in them, often explains a lot about later action. Any chronicler of one of Britain’s leading inter-war union fig-ures, Walter Citrine, would need, therefore, need a thorough understanding of the role of Merseyside in his political education. In this comprehensive and lively new biog-raphy, Dr Jim Moher carefully examines the formative influence of an early life and union career on Merseyside, together with the contin-ued residence there of his close family, on Citrine’s developing national career. It also dis-cusses his career as an electrician, his climb though Trade Union organisation in Liverpool and Manchester, taking in a failed 1918 parlia-mentary candidacy at Wallasey, before explaining his move to the TUC headquarters in London and his long residence in Wembley. While Citrine did not reside in the north-west again, Moher demonstrates how his experiences their shaped his actions as a senior trade union-ist. In many ways, it was the skills that the subject learned in the north-west that equipped him for national success. Moher both advocates for his subjects signifi-cance in his own right and succeeds demonstrate how his place in history was com-patible with the true force of nature that inhabits and often haunts the shadows of his story, Ern-est Bevin. For, if we accept that Citrine was the interwar union movement’s most significant administrator, Bevin was undoubtedly its great-est leader. This rivalry dominates the middle third of the book, before the final chapters fol-low the subject to a senior role at the National Coal Board, through his career pinnacle (for a former Merseyside electrician) as inaugural Chairman of the newly nationalised British Electricity Authority, through to his later years as a Peer of the Realm. As with many who are ennobled, Lord Citrine of Wembley’s title did not reflect his geographical origins. However, as Jim Moher has shown, these origins played a major role in shaping Walter Citrine’s mental map. The transformation of this radical Scouse syndicalist into a knight, a privy councillor, and peer or the realm is an excellent story, being well told, thoughtfully argued, and methodi-cally evidenced. It is both a timely labour of love and an important contribution to the sur-prisingly limited literature on its subject. For those interested in twentieth century political and labour history, especially as we approach the centenary of the 1926 General Strike, it is a worthwhile read. – Dr Marc Collinson, Bangor 

J. Moher, Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress, (2021):Review

https://research.bangor.ac.uk/portal/files/37874234/HSLC_Newsletter_77.pdf

J. Moher, Walter Citrine: Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress, (2021):Review

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