In Our Time Read online

  LAWRENCE GOLDMAN: It was known as ‘Cottonopolis’; it was the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, but it was the Athens of the north as well.

  Roughly 75 per cent of all the raw cotton that was turned into cotton textiles in Lancashire came from America, and this was the very best cotton, the Sea Island cotton, as it was called, with plantations spreading out across the southern states as Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana were turned over to cotton. While the mills were using new industrial technology, the plantations used slave labour, and about 1.8 million slaves were engaged in the production of cotton in America, almost half the total number of slaves in the American south in 1860. At first, the slavery was not a significant concern in Lancashire, but, as it became better known, it became one.

  Since the majority of the population of the mill towns worked in or around the mills, a new way of life had grown up in Lancashire. This was skilled work for which mill workers were valued, and Emma Griffin said that this was particularly true for the women. In rural areas of Great Britain, there would be few ways for children to earn money, but, in and around Manchester, children could start working from age nine doing menial tasks, progressing in their teens to operating machinery, which made wage earners of the whole family. This incentive helped drive the move to mill towns from the rural communities in which often only the adults had a chance to earn.

  EMMA GRIFFIN: Instead of people dovetailing working at home with managing a cottage garden or something, now they are going into the factories. And it is the beginning of the modern working patterns that we are familiar with, where we are, effectively, paid for our time, rather than what we manage to get done.

  The newly independent work force was built on the import of cotton produced by slaves, a situation that was brought into sharp perspective once America was at war with itself. British campaigners had achieved great successes with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1807, if not slavery itself, though this was followed by emancipation in the West Indies from 1833. Now the focus was on slavery in the American south. David Brown pointed to the popularity of works by writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, which had a huge impact in Great Britain, and to African-American speakers such as Frederick Douglass, who regularly toured Britain in the 1840s and 1850s. There was even Henry ‘Box’ Brown, a slave who mailed himself to freedom in a parcel from Richmond to Philadelphia – he would arrive in the lecture halls in a box and emerge after about five minutes to present his account of his time as a slave.

  MELVYN BRAGG: What knowledge would you say there was in this country about the slave trade in the south of America, about the Confederates?

  DAVID BROWN: Most Britons got their knowledge from sources such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from reports in the press that emphasised the break-up of slave families, the long working hours, the terrible conditions that slaves endured.

  This knowledge of slavery might have been superficial in some respects, but it certainly emphasised the worst aspects of cotton slavery. When the Confederate south wanted to secede from the Union, it trusted that British reliance on cotton would win out over other considerations, and it calculated that, if they were to withhold cotton exports from Europe, their independence would be recognised.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Why was the Confederate south so confident that Britain would crumble, it would cry: ‘Oh, let’s support the Confederates so we can have the cotton back’?

  LAWRENCE GOLDMAN: There is a phrase that they used in the 1850s: ‘king cotton’ or ‘cotton is king’. It goes back to a number of speeches made by a South Carolinian, a senator, James Henry Hammond, who said that, cotton is king, and Britain could not, as a civilisation, continue if the cotton supply across the Atlantic stopped.

  The Confederates did not reckon on the diversity of the British economy, nor on the way in which workers in Lancashire responded to the embargo on cotton. They also lost some of the control of the embargo, which started with them withholding exports, but eventually the Union navy blockaded ports to prevent cotton crossing the Atlantic, so that it could not be exported even if the Confederates wanted it to be. Cotton bales were left to rot on the quaysides of the American south.

  Ahead of the war, Lancashire mill owners had stockpiled cotton so the problems were not very acute in 1861, but then the next year’s harvest failed to make it out of the south.

  EMMA GRIFFIN: That’s when the problems really start to emerge. All through 1862, well into 1863, not nearly enough cotton is entering the district and that’s when the factories start to go onto short-time work, and eventually many, many people are made unemployed.

  Relief funds were set up, and workers looked to the local help under the Poor Laws, but there was not enough room in the workhouses or enough of the usual menial work schemes such as rock-breaking.

  DAVID BROWN: It is a difficult time, there is a large literature in press, there are songs, there are poems written about the distress in Lancashire, one wonders what these people are going to do in such terrible circumstances, but there does seem to be an underlying moral commitment that, while negotiations with the Confederacy might be advantageous on one hand in bringing cotton back and reopening the mills, on the other hand, most mill workers, most working folk in Lancashire, are not going to align themselves with a slave power.

  Local authorities had to find new ways of helping with unemployment, borrowing money for work-creation schemes such as building sewers or setting out parks. This was a time of great suffering yet, at a meeting in the Free Trade Hall between Christmas and New Year 1862–3, it was resolved to send a message of support to President Lincoln from the citizens of Manchester, praising his stand on emancipation, saying, ‘The vast progress you have made … fills us with hope that every stain on your freedom will shortly be removed, and that the erasure of that foul blot on civilisation and Christianity – chattel slavery – will cause the name of Abraham Lincoln to be honoured and revered by posterity.’ This was the letter to which Lincoln replied on 19 January, mentioned in Melvyn’s introduction, in which the president added, ‘It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this government, which was built on the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one that should rest exclusively on the basis of slavery was likely to obtain the favour of Europe. Through the action of disloyal citizens, the working people of Europe have been subjected to a severe trial for the purpose of forcing their sanction to that event.’ These working people, though, were not giving in to the embargo.

  For David Brown, that was an extraordinary move by Lincoln at one of the busiest periods of his presidency, particularly as emancipation was extremely unpopular in the United States generally and, even in the northern states, there were many who did not support his policy.

  DAVID BROWN: I suspect that he was writing back to the folks in Manchester in order to galvanise that support. Certainly American newspaper editorials suggested that, if the workers of Lancashire and Manchester – particularly at a time of immense distress and suffering – can support emancipation for good moral reasons, then so should the rest of the United States.

  The skilled workers were supported by the mill owners, who tended to be independent-minded Unitarians or Congregationalists, Lawrence Goldman added. One of them, John Bright, put up a quarter of the costs of purchasing Frederick Douglass’s freedom from his legal owner when he was in Britain and feared recapture. The Confederates could clearly not count on the mill workers to lobby parliament to recognise them.

  In parliament, there was a lot of sympathy for the Confederate cause, particularly among the land owners, but even they knew they had to be careful not to intervene and risk supporting the losing side. The battles at Antietam (1862) and Gettysburg (1863) had not gone the Confederate way, which gave pause for thought. Pragmatically, it looked as though it was better to wait and see, at the very least. Even Lancashire was divided over the question of who to support. David Brown pointed to the Southern Independence Association, which was the main
pro-Confederate group and had a lot of support among the Liverpool importers, and the Union and Emancipation Society of Manchester. These battled it out, trying to sway public opinion.

  Mill operatives at the time of the Lancashire Cotton Famine.

  While the Union argument had found support in Manchester, the City of London also had reason to be wary of the Confederates. London was one of the largest investors in the industry and railroads in the north.

  LAWRENCE GOLDMAN: And their fear, their very considerable fear, is that if Britain were to come in on the side of the Confederacy, then the loans would be lost, there would be defaults on the loans, the federal government would instruct all its agencies to break with Britain, private businesses likewise, and millions would be lost.

  As if that were not enough, something like 30 or 40 per cent of the grain coming into Britain was from the wheat lands of the north, which weighed heavily against the value of the cotton from the south.

  EMMA GRIFFIN: Britain has other industries: we have ammunition, we have gun-making in Birmingham and the Black Country, we have shipbuilding in the north-west and we also have a very developed merchant marine. There are all sorts of other ways in which industries in other parts of Britain are benefiting from the civil war.

  With so much at stake, it was argued that the Confederates were misguided in thinking that their embargo and the Lancashire Cotton Famine would force Britain to recognise them. By the time their leaders realised that they needed the proceeds of cotton to buy ammunition and other supplies from Britain, it was too late. Lincoln’s blockade was beginning to bite. To David Brown, the embargo policy was naïve, if not foolish.

  Matters took a further turn for the worse for the Confederates. As the Union forces spread across the south, plantations fell into disarray, slaves fled and the southern economy fell apart. Meanwhile, with the embargo, it had been the survival of the fittest in Manchester. Emma Griffin suggested that several hundred mills closed during the Cotton Famine, never to reopen, and that the newer, streamlined ones tended to survive.

  There were other changes. As the Lancashire mill owners had been trying to find new sources of cotton to replace the bales coming from the south, their search led to large acreages being planted in Egypt, Brazil and, most notably, India. With so much production, the price of cotton went down and undermined the south even further.

  The public support offered by the citizens of Manchester to Lincoln had further repercussions. According to Emma Griffin, historians have suggested that the way the working people of Manchester conducted themselves, putting the interests of emancipation above their own well-being, was taken as a sign that they were mature enough to be allowed to vote.

  DAVID BROWN: William Gladstone in 1866 specifically mentions the stoic behaviour of Lancashire workers as strong evidence that they are reliable and should be given the vote.

  It may well be that the Cotton Famine was an important stepping stone to the Third Reform Act in 1884, which extended the franchise.

  After the programme, Melvyn and his guests discussed how the Poor Laws were hated by the proud, independent mill workers. There were collections in London for the people of Manchester, and there was some solidarity from the Union in America, beyond Lincoln’s letter, with ships crossing the Atlantic to bring flour, bacon and other food supplies for the unemployed in Lancashire. And his guests were concerned to check that they had conveyed the nuances of this period, particularly that not everyone in Lancashire supported Lincoln and that there was a strong Confederacy presence in the ports. Of that, Melvyn was in no doubt. ‘We avoid being relevant in this programme, but [there was] the trivial thing that began to emerge, the deep-seated rivalry between Liverpool and Manchester … ’

  SCIENCE

  Science is a particular pleasure because I know so little about it. I gave up physics and chemistry at fourteen, struggled with biology and failed it in what were then called O Levels, and enjoyed maths only to be barred from doing it in the sixth form. The excuse was that, being a very small school, they could not accommodate it in the timetable. The darker reason, I suspected later, was that Mr James, the history teacher, had already set his sights on my attempting to do history at university, in which case, in those days, I would need A Level Latin. I hated Latin. I am certain that the reason for this was that the teacher couldn’t abide me. She was a brilliant taunter of young boys and all it did for me was to make me learn lessons in resentment. Or maybe I had neither the knack nor the intelligence to assimilate that great dead language. I regret the terrible waste of time when I could have been enjoying maths but, yes, I needed it to get into university and, worse, through the three years at university, I also needed it! Some teachers can be destructive – probably without being aware of it. But that was long ago and in another country.

  So first Start the Week and then In Our Time were to make up for all that. It felt rather subversive at times. Using the good offices of the BBC to further an education and, along the way, being paid for it. Still, there were, it seemed, many people ‘out there’ who felt as I did, that science had been the neglected area in their youth, too, and, like me, they had arrived in adulthood faced with the unprecedented advances in science ill equipped to keep up. On certain programmes, I’m convinced that the key to making everything work is to follow your own instincts and hope there are enough others who also want to take it on.

  Some of those programmes – once again, Simon has picked ten out of more than 100 – were dazzling. They took us into new worlds, with new words and new ways of thinking. And there was a recklessness about it. What did I really know about Gauss, the greatest mathematician of his time or, arguably, of all time? Little. Like most of the listeners. My job was to use the documents supplied by Simon to be sufficiently prepared to enable the trio of contributors to unleash their best.

  It helped that Gauss’s own story was sensational – from poverty in late eighteenth-century Brunswick, through royal patronage, to predicting where to find asteroids, challenging Euclid and laying the foundations for Einstein’s theory of relativity. What was going on in that mind? How did that mind get to be that mind? As his achievements were meticulously tabulated by the outstanding mathematicians at the microphone, I held on for dear life.

  But, whenever I have discussed a subject about which, six days before take-off, I have known near zilch, I have confessed this to the attendant scholars and told them that I was relying on their generosity and knew just about enough to steer, but no more than that, they have extended a helping mind.

  The result is that, on Gauss, on P vs NP, on Pauli’s exclusion principle, on absolute zero and much else, audiences have been served information that, judging by the response, has satisfied and often whetted their appetites. And often, to my surprise, I find that I, too, especially during the discussion itself, feel a dawning of understanding, even a grasp of the subject.

  Some were easier. Dark matter, photosynthesis, Ada Lovelace – yet, on reviewing these programmes, the level of interest and excitement seemed much the same as the harder topics. It was excitement that swept me along. These scientists were masters of the new universe and their explanations not only replaced new news for old, often as they were uncovering previously unthought thoughts. I imagine that surfers feel as I felt when a particularly colossal wave comes their way and they can ride it.

  And simple mysteries were explored. The programme on Bird Migration was not only an explanation of a common phenomenon but a story of heroism, survival, mental brilliance, scarcely fathomable sensory perceptions. A world was revealed in many ways higher than our own – from the obvious to what is still unknowable to Homo sapiens.

  Moreover, in these programmes, as well as in all the others, the BBC has built a tremendous website of cross-references – in short, a broadcasting university course freely available, as are the podcasts.

  What I think I discovered early on about these programmes on science was that at least two languages were being spoken. One was that o
f general understanding in plain-enough English, which outlined the ideas and could even describe concepts. That was the level on which most of the discussions operated. The second language was the vocabulary of the initiates; to outsiders, a dense jargon of terms only a few of which could be grasped without several years of grind. These, too, were part of the programme but, early on, the scientists in a collective unconscious decision appear to have strengthened the presence of language number one (plain) and, by some alchemy, simplified (without dumbing down) the essential structure of language number two.

  And, as we can see from the cascade of erudite but readable books that have recently arrived from so many first-class scientists, they are effortlessly bilingual.

  BIRD MIGRATION

  For millennia, bird migration was a complete mystery to humans. Today, while what we know is remarkable, much of that mystery remains. There was an idea in ancient Greece that birds turned into fish when no one was around. In later folklore, some were thought to turn into barnacles, others to hibernate in cliffs or at the bottom of lakes. And perhaps those ideas are less extraordinary than what we now know: for example, that birds weighing less than a cup of water can fly across oceans non-stop from New Zealand to Alaska, breed and return. How birds know where they’re going is not yet fully understood, but may include some combination of internal clocks, some ways of detecting magnetic fields and a heightened sense of smell.

  With Melvyn to discuss bird migration were: Barbara Helm, professor for biological rhythms of natural organisms at the University of Groningen, and visiting professor at the University of Glasgow; Tim Guilford, professor of animal behaviour and tutorial fellow of zoology at Merton College, Oxford; and Richard Holland, senior lecturer in zoology (animal behaviour) at the University of Bangor.