CHAPTERXITHE COMPLEAT CITIZENQuestion.What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour?Answer.My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto me.A Catechism. “Book of Common Prayer.”Until each of us faithfully fulfils the first clause of his duty to his neighbour it seems unlikely that we shall see in the flesh a manifestation of the compleat citizen. I prefer the old-fashioned phrase to the modern slang of super-citizen, but I take it the idea of our seventeenth-century fathers was much the same as ours, only they knew enough English to express it in their own tongue.And one naturally goes back for a motto for citizenship to Dr. Nowel, sometime dean of the cathedral church of St. Paul, who, “like an honest Angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is printed with our good old Service-book.” For, if anyone wished to study the evolution of citizenship in this country, he would, I think, for past history read the records of that ancient community of citizens that dwelt in the old days east of Temple Bar, though for the modern evidence of the continued existence of citizenship he wouldhave of necessity to journey towards the rugged north. For if there is one thing that stands out as typical of the north countryman of to-day, it is his pride of citizenship. Just as Paul boasted of Tarsus when he was away from his native Cilicia, so the Manchester man, away from Lancashire, the Leeds man far from Yorkshire, or the Newcastle man dreaming of his beloved Northumberland, can always remember that he too is a citizen of no mean city.There is no widespread sense of citizenship in London. It exists sporadically, no doubt. The germs of it must be there, but the thing itself fell with the City walls, and passed away with the destruction of the last gate. No doubt it will grow and flourish anew, and perhaps the foundations even now are being laid on the south bank of the Thames opposite Westminster. But even in Doctor Johnson’s day the thing itself was not. Lover of London as he was—and not even Boswell had a finergustfor the great city—you find him claiming for his beloved that she was pre-eminent in learning and science, and that she possessed the best shops in the world, but he does not assert these things with the pride of a citizen. No! London to the great man is a “heaven upon earth,” and in those very words he negatives the idea of citizenship, for to be a citizen is to be a part proprietor, having a voice in the management of the concern and a responsibility for its industry and good behaviour. Citizenship means freedom andthe exercise of a franchise and the privileges belonging to a peculiar city. Pious visions of heaven give no hint of such things. And though London was and is all that Doctor Johnson claims, it is as much the property of the foreigner as of the denizen. Boswell had as great a share in it as his friend, and in truth neither had more than an equitable title to be called Londoner.There is indeed no possibility of a citizen in London being in any real sense a compleat citizen. The pictures in his galleries, the trees and flowers in his parks, the statues in his streets, are not really his at all. In London if a new road is cut across the grass of the park a few murmurs may reach the ears of some remote official through the pages of the Press, but they cause him no uneasiness. Did such an affair awaken the indignation of the citizens of Manchester, meetings would be held, debates raised, and in the City Council the head of the official would be demanded by the malcontents, or at least a resolution moved to disallow his salary on the estimates. People who have not been citizens of any of the great towns of the North can have but little idea of the keen interest taken in municipal matters. In London day by day one scarcely reads a word in the Press of the great problems of civic administration which are so important to health and happiness. Gas and water are regarded with light-hearted contempt unless the services break down, when the simple Londoner engages in futile summer correspondencedear to the heart of editors in want of copy. The gas and water and electricity, like the pictures and parks, are not his to manage. But the citizen of no mean city sees the great committees of his parliament fighting as to who shall serve him at least cost and at the same time make the noblest contributions towards the rates. When the New Zealander rediscovers this island and digs up the engineering works of our time to read papers about them to his historical society, he will find the great cities of the North bringing their water from the mountains of Cumberland and Wales, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham linked to Thirlmere, Vyrnwy and Rhayader; but he will have to peck about in the clay a long time before he finds any vestiges of the little troughs in which they store their water hereabouts. That Thirlmere scheme was, I think, typical of Manchester and north-country citizenship. There you had up against you the whole sentiment of the indolent holiday makers, the landed proprietors and the average man in the street who is of no city, headed by that honest prophet and champion of lost causes, John Ruskin. But citizenship was there, and citizenship won. And it is always to me one of the crosses of life that John Ruskin never had a good word for Manchester, though Manchester returned good for evil by gathering together, after he had gone, the most beautiful and thoughtful collection to illustrate his works and days. No one asserts that Manchester is the Good and the Beautiful exemplified,but the author of “Fors Clavigera” ought to have seen a sense of beauty in a community manifesting itself in the perfection of outward and visible cleanliness, comfort and health, and a daily raising of the standard of living. The purity of life is higher in the great cities of the North than in many rural villages which look so peaceful and beautiful. Slum conditions are not unknown in the background of the garden of England, where life seems on the surface to be roses, roses, all the way. And the only antidote to all these evils that I can foresee is the growth of that spirit of citizenship which is of so little account in the South either in town or country, but which seems to be struck out of the very granite setts by the hoofs of the lurry horses when they haul the cotton bales along the Manchester streets.And although I can only lay claim to have been a citizen by adoption, yet on one or two occasions I got whirled into the midst of a local fight, and as Yuba Bill would say, “waded in with the best.” And it was one of the curious features of Manchester that, in the very shortest period, she finds a place for the foreigner and whistles him on to her deck, and there he is pulling the ropes and working the windlass like a native born. Yiddish, German, Greek, Albanian, Turk, Spaniard, Scot, Irish, and even the intractable Celt or Silurian from remote Wales may live in Manchester and even continue to speak their native tongues, but surely and by no means slowly, they are kneaded into the citizenmass of municipal dough, and may even be chosen as plums for the pudding or be selected as that decorative sprig of civic glory which we stick at the top of the affair and worship for twelve months as My Lord Mayor.And a merry encounter I had with the powers that be—it is deemed an honourable thing to set the shoulders of the Corporation on the ground in a fair bout—and I recall it with greater pleasure because it was the last time I appeared as an advocate. It was my last brief, as it were, and Cerberus-like I was the solicitor, the counsel and the client—three single gentlemen rolled into one—and what was more, I won my case. And it was not, as you may be thinking, a mere police-court affair, I had not been riding my bicycle on the footpath, my dog had not strayed round the corner in undress and met a policeman—why do dogs without collars meet policemen? a mad dog never does—nor had I been watering the garden in the summer when the Corporation annually arrange to be short of water. No; as a matter of fact, I was not the defendant. I was the prosecutor, and I was prosecuting the Corporation for conspiracy to annoy certain peaceful residents of Withington, including myself. And as in this comic-opera constitution of ours when a Corporation annoys you, you arraign them before themselves, it is something to have achieved to have prosecuted a Town Council successfully before themselves, and to have found a Town Council brave and honest enoughto convict themselves and promise not to do it again.It arose in this way. When I found that I really was a Manchester citizen and was going to live there for ever and ever, as I hoped, I made up my mind to buy a home of my own, and I settled on a corner house at the back of Withington village, bounded on one side by a narrow street called Brunswick Road, and on the other by another narrow street called Burlington Road. They were paved by setts, as all the Manchester streets are, but even the setts had a peaceful old-world aspect, and so little traffic was there over them that the grass sprang up between them, just as the history books tell us it used to do all over England before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Beyond the house were fields with potatoes in them and ponds to slide on in the winter, and there was a little stream at the end of Heaton Road, whose presiding naïad collected old domestic china in parts and left them carelessly lying on her bed. Then there was that ideal school for children at Ladybarn House, with a playground to which you could stroll and watch really great cricket matches, and marvel at the self-detachment of a young lady of eight who could field long-stop and make a surreptitious daisy chain at the same time. Once a year, indeed, there was a large but orderly crowd at the annual athletic sports. One policeman kept it in excellent order. The sport was of a high class, and you could watch a future “blue,” literally a three-year-old, rompinghome in the kindergarten race, for which he had been laboriously trained by his elder sisters on a neighbouring lawn.Of course, it was not to be expected that this sylvan retreat could remain for ever. The builder was bound to steal the fields from the potatoes. The North-Western Railway had obtained powers to make its way across to Parr’s Wood, and bought out the cuckoos that they might not jeer at the engine-drivers and madden them to striking pitch with their call of the summer. But you cannot expect a cuckoo to keep faith, and only last year I heard them again from my bedroom window—and if you will be hospitable to birds, as Manchester folk can be, and make a feast of fat and cocoanut in the garden, I know no place where birds are more ready to return your call without ceremony. We had many generations of thrushes born in our little garden, and starlings, blackbirds, robins and tomtits would build with us on occasion, and would drop in promiscuous-like all through the day.Some who know the place of which I write, may think that there is a note of exaggeration in my description. I am ready to agree that at no time was the hinterland of Withington a mere fairyland of milk and honey and green pastures and still waters, but it had certain attributes of homeliness and peace and quiet that make me remember it with the gratitude due from one whose lines had fallen in pleasant places.It was this retreat of hard-working citizens thatthe Corporation sought to destroy without warning or consultation, and if it had not been that I found practically every resident of my own way of thinking and spoiling for a fight, I think they would have successfully ruined the district.It was a summer morning, and a Sunday at that, when we woke up to the fact that the motor ’buses were careering along our narrow roads back and front of the house. They came hurtling over the setts at the rate of about six an hour, and as you heard them chirruping in the distance and screaming near to you and experienced the trail of stench they left along their way, and saw the pavements and side-walks splattered with mud, it was clear that if they had come to stay, those of us who could afford would have to go.But why had the motor ’bus invaded us in this way? The answer was easily given. A company, the chairman of which was a powerful town councillor, had obtained licences to run ’buses along these side roads from Levenshulme to Stretford. They were to run by these back ways because the Council had trams on the main route, and did not want the company or competition of the ’buses. No doubt the end of August had been chosen to start the ’buses, because in a residential district like ours everyone was away for the holidays. I was just going off to Grasmere, and telling my solicitor to threaten the company with an action for nuisance, I fired a letter into the papers and went my way. To my delight I found that the whole neighbourhoodwas up in arms, and although I grudged the holiday time given up to it, I went into the fight with considerable gusto. There was the usual newspaper correspondence. We dilated on the amenities of Withington and pointed out that the only traffic really catered for was the Sundaybonâ-fidetraveller, and asked why one lucky councillor should have these licences given him when the rest of such traffic was run by the Corporation for the ratepayers. The reply was made that we were a lot of selfish people—“carriage people” we were generally called—who lived luxurious days in glorious country, which we wished to keep to ourselves, and that this company of motor ’buses had been mainly formed in the interest of the working man, who desired to ruralise among us.In the midst of all this clash of words we organised a petition, and the other side did the same. It was clear that we had the residents, who were nearly all of them workers in the city of various grades, entirely with us. We had a very strong case on these two points alone. First, that the type of ’bus used by the company was undesirable, and secondly, that the roads over which it ran were unsuitable. The other side had a strong case, in that temporary licences were already granted, and the Corporation were not likely to go back on a matter they had just decided. Further, the eminent councillor at the head of the company had many supporters in the Town Council, including the Lord Mayor, and Withington was a district recently added toManchester, and not much in touch as yet with Council affairs. Before we carried our petition to the Council, in clubs and places where they wager, the betting was three or four to one against us, but I am conceited enough to chronicle that after the hearing it dropped to evens.I confess that it was so long since I had played the advocate that it was with some trepidation that I briefed myself to appear in my own interests at the hearing before the Hackney Coach Sub-Committee. A large number of residents went with me, and I stated my own case and theirs. I should like to report my speech at length. It was a beautiful speech. But the only phrase I remember was one in which I demolished the argument that we were a lot of selfish, stuck-up carriage people by confessing “that for my part the only carriage I had ever possessed was a double perambulator, and I thought most of my neighbours held the same record.”As a Manchester citizen I should have liked to have to chronicle a more speedy judgment, but historical accuracy compels me to say that Wilmslow, Levenshulme, Altrincham, and Urmston all took steps to protect the amenities of their roads before Manchester. It was not before October 8 that the committee refused to continue the licences. Still, we could boast that in six short weeks the residents of our little oasis had risen in rebellion against our rulers and governors and convinced them of the error of their ways.A friend of mine on the Town Council used totease me a good deal about the beauties of the Withington District. He lived in lovely far off country himself, and had only visited Withington as a member of the Highways Committee.“It seems an ordinary enough sort of place,” he said.“Let me remind you of what Wordsworth says,” I replied.Minds that have nothing to conferFind little to perceive.You can always obtain the just rude word to end a discussion from Wordsworth’s poems or David’s Psalms—David is perhaps a little heavy handed for these days.I suppose it is because my forefathers lived on the marches that I cannot help enjoying a downright good fight. I know it is wicked to enjoy the angry scenes of a contest, but even the saintly John Henry Newman confesses on occasions to have had “his monkey up”—not a very fierce and vicious monkey, but sufficient of a monkey as a precedent for a poor pagan to refer to—and when you get a wilderness of monkeys up, as we did in the Battle of the Sites, then is there a scene for Homer’s pen.As when a torrent from the hills, swoln with Saturnian showers,Falls on the fields, bears blasted oaks and withered rosin flowers… into the ocean’s force.So did every man, woman and child in the city get whirled into the contest and rush intothe flood, and get carried out of their depths and find themselves very much at sea. But itwasa fight.The Battle of the Sites was only a glorious incident in the thirty years’ war that in Manchester had been steadily raging round the affair of the Royal Infirmary. And I am far from suggesting that the good individuals who were members of the Board of the Infirmary were any worse citizens than the rest of us. But such is human nature that the action of a board or committee is not the action of the individuals. A sort of lowest common moral denominator is found by consent of all, and that becomes the ruling quantity in the resultant action. When a good man makes a mistake he apologises and makes amends. Had any individual member of the Infirmary Board done some of the things that were done by him collectively, I have never doubted that when the wrong was pointed out he would have hastened to straighten things out. But a board or committee never apologises, neither does it pay the costs when judgment goes against it. Those come out of the estate.And I wish I could believe the theory of Cardinal Newman, who solemnly tells us in his “Apologia”: “Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits, I considered there was a middle race, [Greek: daimonia]δαιμονια, neither in heaven nor in hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. These beings gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes ofmen. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is often so different from that of the individuals who compose them.” It is a charming conceit, but if taken literally might lead to committees throwing all responsibilities for their delinquencies upon the little demons at their elbows. But I like to imagine and picture the scene of a board meeting with [Greek: daimonia]δαιμονια in attendance, painted in the manner of the younger Teniers, whose goblins, teasing the unhappy Dives, have cheered me since early boyhood. Certainly if there were any smaller devils taking part in Infirmary affairs, which seems a practical solution of many difficult problems, they were not wise devils—indeed, they were silly devils—and we did well to cast them out.When the new Infirmary was building in the Oxford Road, I happened to meet Mr. Charles Hopkinson, who deserves so well of the citizens for his careful and devoted work on the Building Committee. He was admiring the rapidly rising building, and I told him that I did not see anything of those two pedestals in the front gardens.“What two pedestals?” asked Hopkinson; “I never heard of any pedestals in the design.”“Certainly,” I replied, “there were to be two pedestals for the two statues.”“I haven’t a notion what you mean,” answered Hopkinson, impatiently. “Whose statues?”“Joseph Bell’s and my own,” I called back over my shoulder.And although Hopkinson was quite right, andthese statues have not been placed there even yet, still it is only fitting that the great building on the Oxford Road should have had some memorial of Bell and myself, for without us there would have been no Royal Infirmary on the Oxford Road. A mediæval builder would have expressed in a series of sculptured capitals the whole history of the Battle of the Sites, and left satirical portraits of the old Board in gargoyles hanging over the guttering, whilst a statue of Joseph Bell would have adorned a spacious quadrangle, round the walls of which myself and the others of his committee were portrayed in brilliant mosaics. But your modern architect, who would be annoyed at being called a builder, never puts into his work any of the history of his building, but is quite content to erect adequate walls and roof and useful equipment and decorate the outside, much as a confectioner be-sugars a cake, to please the eye for the moment rather than with any intention of expressing ideas in his art. No doubt the Gothic days are over, and the Gothic spirit is dead, but Manchester has got what she wanted, an Infirmary building second to none in the kingdom.I always intended to have a return match with the old Infirmary Board, because, although I won the first of the rubber, the loss of the game did not to my mind fall on the shoulders of those who ought to have borne it.Early in 1893 a lady sought my advice through her solicitor. Her story was a very extraordinaryone. She had been a nurse at the Royal Infirmary since 1889. Her career was successful. She had been selected to attend on the late Oliver Heywood, and up to November of 1892 there had never been a word of complaint about her work or her conduct. A small-pox epidemic now broke out in Lymm, in Cheshire. Another nurse had been sent there and was ill—it was supposed, of small-pox. My client was sent there hurriedly to take her place. She found the so-called small-pox hospital to be two cottages converted into a temporary hospital, and her colleague was ill in bed, and was taken away. There was also a wife of a tramp dying of small-pox, and eight or ten patients. There was no water in the house. It is needless to repeat other unpleasant details of want of equipment. She stuck to her task for several days; she sat up with a delirious patient all night, and when the patient died she had to help the men bring in the coffin and screw down the lid, it being with much difficulty, and only after bribes of whisky that they would come inside the cottages at all. After writing letters to the authorities in Manchester and asking the local doctor for help that did not come, she at length broke down in health and fled. Arrived at Monsall, she was nursed there for a week, and at the end of that time received her dismissal without notice, and was refused permission, though at the end of her probation, to pass her examinations.Every effort was made to get the old Board to do justice to the lady and let her pass her examination,but as no redress was to be obtained without litigation a writ was issued. Under her agreement the Infirmary Board had no right to send her to Lymm at all. The lady desired no damages against the charity, and, therefore, an action was brought for an order to compel the Board to allow her to take her examinations. Shee led me in the case, and Gully and Sutton were for the defendants—and I have no doubt told them exactly what they thought of them. Certainly it was with an air of great relief that Gully, at Mr. Justice Day’s suggestion, threw up the defence and agreed that the lady should sit for her examination.The nurse agreed to compromise on the understanding that the matter was left in the hands of the Medical Board, whose examination she successfully passed. The lady got justice, but the Infirmary Board did not, and I made up my mind that if I ever got the chance of a return match with them, they should not be let off so lightly again.The Battle of the Sites had started years before I came to Manchester. The old Board had made up its mind to rebuild the Infirmary on the old site in the centre of the city; the majority of the citizens wished it to go to the present site at Stanley Grove, which was a gift of the Whitworth Trustees. Of the jealousies, squabbles, and troubles of all these years the less said the better.The old Board, with Fabian genius, continually prevented any agreement with the University authorities, and brought any other plan than thatof rebuilding on the old site to a dilatory end. The older generations of great citizens who had fought the Board in the past—Thomas Ashton, Reuben Spencer, Henry Simon, and Dr. Leech—were no longer with us, and in 1902 the old Board thought this was a most excellent time to carry through their pet scheme. They actually prepared plans for the rebuilding, and called a meeting, believing that the opposition had died down.The one man who defeated their plans was Joseph Bell. His interests in the commercial world have been too engrossing to allow him much time for political work, but from the way he handled the Infirmary question, I make sure he would be a big asset to any political party. At the first onslaught it did not appear that the old Board’s opponents were very strong, but the meeting stood adjourned. I had never met Bell, but I received a note from him, asking for an interview, a letter of mine having been read at the first meeting. It was when I was reading his note that I remembered that, from a dramatic point of view, I had left the case between the nurse and the Infirmary Board unfinished.Joseph Bell came to see me after Court with a bundle of papers, and, sitting down at my table, told me the whole story of the Infirmary Board and their doings on the site question from the earliest days. Two things were clear; one, that my visitor had a thorough and intimate knowledge of his subject, and, two, that he meant business. Whenhe had ended his statement he looked at me keenly and said: “Are you going to help?”“What are you going to do?” I asked.“We are going to clear out the old Board and build a new infirmary on the Stanley Grove site.”“You may put it there,” I said, holding out my hand.“Then the battle can proceed,” said Joseph Bell, laughing.And a very excellent fight it was. I should be sorry to have to read again all the letters that were written and speeches that were made. I remember I had to move the resolution against the old Board at the Memorial Hall and Lord Derby was in the chair. I certainly did not forget the nurse case when I told the members of the old Board that, “however great my temptations, I would not say anything worse of them than I knew they often said of themselves, namely, that they had left undone all they ought to have done, and had done all they ought not to have done, and there was no health in them.” A sentiment I was glad to hear heartily cheered.We won the resolution, we won the poll the friends of the old Board demanded, and then we had an election forced upon us. Joseph Bell’s policy had been to form a Board by consent, and on his “ticket” he ran several members of the old Board who more or less favoured his views. He was absolutely master of the situation, and could, had he wished, have nominated his own Board. There were twenty-two members to be elected, and Bell’scommittee put up twenty-one. The friends of the old Board did not understand Bell’s good sense in taking over so many members of the old Board, and did their best to thwart any settlement by consent. An election took place, and certainly created more interest and feeling than any municipal election that I can remember. It was with some excitement that, coming out of Court on the afternoon of the counting, I bought a paper from aChronicleboy, who was shouting out “Result of the Infirmary Poll.” One of Bell’s candidates had resigned at the last moment, and the other twenty were returned at the head of the poll.As I read the successful names I felt a sense of relief. Something had been attempted and something done. That nurse case that had begun before Mr. Justice Day ten years ago was really finished.But though the Battle of the Sites was over, the Battle of what to do with the old Site is not yet well begun, for having pulled down the old building, there is a very pretty quarrel going on as to what to put in its place. And I envy Joseph Bell sniffing the battle from the upper windows of Portland Street, where the stricken field—and it is a stricken field—lies at his doorstep. At the right time he, as a good Manchester citizen, will off with his coat and rush into the fray whilst I shall be idling here, with no right to heave even half a brick in the good cause. But whoever is on the other side, the stable money is on Joseph Bell.
Question.What is thy duty towards thy Neighbour?
Answer.My duty towards my Neighbour, is to love him as myself, and to do to all men, as I would they should do unto me.
A Catechism. “Book of Common Prayer.”
Until each of us faithfully fulfils the first clause of his duty to his neighbour it seems unlikely that we shall see in the flesh a manifestation of the compleat citizen. I prefer the old-fashioned phrase to the modern slang of super-citizen, but I take it the idea of our seventeenth-century fathers was much the same as ours, only they knew enough English to express it in their own tongue.
And one naturally goes back for a motto for citizenship to Dr. Nowel, sometime dean of the cathedral church of St. Paul, who, “like an honest Angler, made that good, plain, unperplexed Catechism which is printed with our good old Service-book.” For, if anyone wished to study the evolution of citizenship in this country, he would, I think, for past history read the records of that ancient community of citizens that dwelt in the old days east of Temple Bar, though for the modern evidence of the continued existence of citizenship he wouldhave of necessity to journey towards the rugged north. For if there is one thing that stands out as typical of the north countryman of to-day, it is his pride of citizenship. Just as Paul boasted of Tarsus when he was away from his native Cilicia, so the Manchester man, away from Lancashire, the Leeds man far from Yorkshire, or the Newcastle man dreaming of his beloved Northumberland, can always remember that he too is a citizen of no mean city.
There is no widespread sense of citizenship in London. It exists sporadically, no doubt. The germs of it must be there, but the thing itself fell with the City walls, and passed away with the destruction of the last gate. No doubt it will grow and flourish anew, and perhaps the foundations even now are being laid on the south bank of the Thames opposite Westminster. But even in Doctor Johnson’s day the thing itself was not. Lover of London as he was—and not even Boswell had a finergustfor the great city—you find him claiming for his beloved that she was pre-eminent in learning and science, and that she possessed the best shops in the world, but he does not assert these things with the pride of a citizen. No! London to the great man is a “heaven upon earth,” and in those very words he negatives the idea of citizenship, for to be a citizen is to be a part proprietor, having a voice in the management of the concern and a responsibility for its industry and good behaviour. Citizenship means freedom andthe exercise of a franchise and the privileges belonging to a peculiar city. Pious visions of heaven give no hint of such things. And though London was and is all that Doctor Johnson claims, it is as much the property of the foreigner as of the denizen. Boswell had as great a share in it as his friend, and in truth neither had more than an equitable title to be called Londoner.
There is indeed no possibility of a citizen in London being in any real sense a compleat citizen. The pictures in his galleries, the trees and flowers in his parks, the statues in his streets, are not really his at all. In London if a new road is cut across the grass of the park a few murmurs may reach the ears of some remote official through the pages of the Press, but they cause him no uneasiness. Did such an affair awaken the indignation of the citizens of Manchester, meetings would be held, debates raised, and in the City Council the head of the official would be demanded by the malcontents, or at least a resolution moved to disallow his salary on the estimates. People who have not been citizens of any of the great towns of the North can have but little idea of the keen interest taken in municipal matters. In London day by day one scarcely reads a word in the Press of the great problems of civic administration which are so important to health and happiness. Gas and water are regarded with light-hearted contempt unless the services break down, when the simple Londoner engages in futile summer correspondencedear to the heart of editors in want of copy. The gas and water and electricity, like the pictures and parks, are not his to manage. But the citizen of no mean city sees the great committees of his parliament fighting as to who shall serve him at least cost and at the same time make the noblest contributions towards the rates. When the New Zealander rediscovers this island and digs up the engineering works of our time to read papers about them to his historical society, he will find the great cities of the North bringing their water from the mountains of Cumberland and Wales, Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham linked to Thirlmere, Vyrnwy and Rhayader; but he will have to peck about in the clay a long time before he finds any vestiges of the little troughs in which they store their water hereabouts. That Thirlmere scheme was, I think, typical of Manchester and north-country citizenship. There you had up against you the whole sentiment of the indolent holiday makers, the landed proprietors and the average man in the street who is of no city, headed by that honest prophet and champion of lost causes, John Ruskin. But citizenship was there, and citizenship won. And it is always to me one of the crosses of life that John Ruskin never had a good word for Manchester, though Manchester returned good for evil by gathering together, after he had gone, the most beautiful and thoughtful collection to illustrate his works and days. No one asserts that Manchester is the Good and the Beautiful exemplified,but the author of “Fors Clavigera” ought to have seen a sense of beauty in a community manifesting itself in the perfection of outward and visible cleanliness, comfort and health, and a daily raising of the standard of living. The purity of life is higher in the great cities of the North than in many rural villages which look so peaceful and beautiful. Slum conditions are not unknown in the background of the garden of England, where life seems on the surface to be roses, roses, all the way. And the only antidote to all these evils that I can foresee is the growth of that spirit of citizenship which is of so little account in the South either in town or country, but which seems to be struck out of the very granite setts by the hoofs of the lurry horses when they haul the cotton bales along the Manchester streets.
And although I can only lay claim to have been a citizen by adoption, yet on one or two occasions I got whirled into the midst of a local fight, and as Yuba Bill would say, “waded in with the best.” And it was one of the curious features of Manchester that, in the very shortest period, she finds a place for the foreigner and whistles him on to her deck, and there he is pulling the ropes and working the windlass like a native born. Yiddish, German, Greek, Albanian, Turk, Spaniard, Scot, Irish, and even the intractable Celt or Silurian from remote Wales may live in Manchester and even continue to speak their native tongues, but surely and by no means slowly, they are kneaded into the citizenmass of municipal dough, and may even be chosen as plums for the pudding or be selected as that decorative sprig of civic glory which we stick at the top of the affair and worship for twelve months as My Lord Mayor.
And a merry encounter I had with the powers that be—it is deemed an honourable thing to set the shoulders of the Corporation on the ground in a fair bout—and I recall it with greater pleasure because it was the last time I appeared as an advocate. It was my last brief, as it were, and Cerberus-like I was the solicitor, the counsel and the client—three single gentlemen rolled into one—and what was more, I won my case. And it was not, as you may be thinking, a mere police-court affair, I had not been riding my bicycle on the footpath, my dog had not strayed round the corner in undress and met a policeman—why do dogs without collars meet policemen? a mad dog never does—nor had I been watering the garden in the summer when the Corporation annually arrange to be short of water. No; as a matter of fact, I was not the defendant. I was the prosecutor, and I was prosecuting the Corporation for conspiracy to annoy certain peaceful residents of Withington, including myself. And as in this comic-opera constitution of ours when a Corporation annoys you, you arraign them before themselves, it is something to have achieved to have prosecuted a Town Council successfully before themselves, and to have found a Town Council brave and honest enoughto convict themselves and promise not to do it again.
It arose in this way. When I found that I really was a Manchester citizen and was going to live there for ever and ever, as I hoped, I made up my mind to buy a home of my own, and I settled on a corner house at the back of Withington village, bounded on one side by a narrow street called Brunswick Road, and on the other by another narrow street called Burlington Road. They were paved by setts, as all the Manchester streets are, but even the setts had a peaceful old-world aspect, and so little traffic was there over them that the grass sprang up between them, just as the history books tell us it used to do all over England before the repeal of the Corn Laws. Beyond the house were fields with potatoes in them and ponds to slide on in the winter, and there was a little stream at the end of Heaton Road, whose presiding naïad collected old domestic china in parts and left them carelessly lying on her bed. Then there was that ideal school for children at Ladybarn House, with a playground to which you could stroll and watch really great cricket matches, and marvel at the self-detachment of a young lady of eight who could field long-stop and make a surreptitious daisy chain at the same time. Once a year, indeed, there was a large but orderly crowd at the annual athletic sports. One policeman kept it in excellent order. The sport was of a high class, and you could watch a future “blue,” literally a three-year-old, rompinghome in the kindergarten race, for which he had been laboriously trained by his elder sisters on a neighbouring lawn.
Of course, it was not to be expected that this sylvan retreat could remain for ever. The builder was bound to steal the fields from the potatoes. The North-Western Railway had obtained powers to make its way across to Parr’s Wood, and bought out the cuckoos that they might not jeer at the engine-drivers and madden them to striking pitch with their call of the summer. But you cannot expect a cuckoo to keep faith, and only last year I heard them again from my bedroom window—and if you will be hospitable to birds, as Manchester folk can be, and make a feast of fat and cocoanut in the garden, I know no place where birds are more ready to return your call without ceremony. We had many generations of thrushes born in our little garden, and starlings, blackbirds, robins and tomtits would build with us on occasion, and would drop in promiscuous-like all through the day.
Some who know the place of which I write, may think that there is a note of exaggeration in my description. I am ready to agree that at no time was the hinterland of Withington a mere fairyland of milk and honey and green pastures and still waters, but it had certain attributes of homeliness and peace and quiet that make me remember it with the gratitude due from one whose lines had fallen in pleasant places.
It was this retreat of hard-working citizens thatthe Corporation sought to destroy without warning or consultation, and if it had not been that I found practically every resident of my own way of thinking and spoiling for a fight, I think they would have successfully ruined the district.
It was a summer morning, and a Sunday at that, when we woke up to the fact that the motor ’buses were careering along our narrow roads back and front of the house. They came hurtling over the setts at the rate of about six an hour, and as you heard them chirruping in the distance and screaming near to you and experienced the trail of stench they left along their way, and saw the pavements and side-walks splattered with mud, it was clear that if they had come to stay, those of us who could afford would have to go.
But why had the motor ’bus invaded us in this way? The answer was easily given. A company, the chairman of which was a powerful town councillor, had obtained licences to run ’buses along these side roads from Levenshulme to Stretford. They were to run by these back ways because the Council had trams on the main route, and did not want the company or competition of the ’buses. No doubt the end of August had been chosen to start the ’buses, because in a residential district like ours everyone was away for the holidays. I was just going off to Grasmere, and telling my solicitor to threaten the company with an action for nuisance, I fired a letter into the papers and went my way. To my delight I found that the whole neighbourhoodwas up in arms, and although I grudged the holiday time given up to it, I went into the fight with considerable gusto. There was the usual newspaper correspondence. We dilated on the amenities of Withington and pointed out that the only traffic really catered for was the Sundaybonâ-fidetraveller, and asked why one lucky councillor should have these licences given him when the rest of such traffic was run by the Corporation for the ratepayers. The reply was made that we were a lot of selfish people—“carriage people” we were generally called—who lived luxurious days in glorious country, which we wished to keep to ourselves, and that this company of motor ’buses had been mainly formed in the interest of the working man, who desired to ruralise among us.
In the midst of all this clash of words we organised a petition, and the other side did the same. It was clear that we had the residents, who were nearly all of them workers in the city of various grades, entirely with us. We had a very strong case on these two points alone. First, that the type of ’bus used by the company was undesirable, and secondly, that the roads over which it ran were unsuitable. The other side had a strong case, in that temporary licences were already granted, and the Corporation were not likely to go back on a matter they had just decided. Further, the eminent councillor at the head of the company had many supporters in the Town Council, including the Lord Mayor, and Withington was a district recently added toManchester, and not much in touch as yet with Council affairs. Before we carried our petition to the Council, in clubs and places where they wager, the betting was three or four to one against us, but I am conceited enough to chronicle that after the hearing it dropped to evens.
I confess that it was so long since I had played the advocate that it was with some trepidation that I briefed myself to appear in my own interests at the hearing before the Hackney Coach Sub-Committee. A large number of residents went with me, and I stated my own case and theirs. I should like to report my speech at length. It was a beautiful speech. But the only phrase I remember was one in which I demolished the argument that we were a lot of selfish, stuck-up carriage people by confessing “that for my part the only carriage I had ever possessed was a double perambulator, and I thought most of my neighbours held the same record.”
As a Manchester citizen I should have liked to have to chronicle a more speedy judgment, but historical accuracy compels me to say that Wilmslow, Levenshulme, Altrincham, and Urmston all took steps to protect the amenities of their roads before Manchester. It was not before October 8 that the committee refused to continue the licences. Still, we could boast that in six short weeks the residents of our little oasis had risen in rebellion against our rulers and governors and convinced them of the error of their ways.
A friend of mine on the Town Council used totease me a good deal about the beauties of the Withington District. He lived in lovely far off country himself, and had only visited Withington as a member of the Highways Committee.
“It seems an ordinary enough sort of place,” he said.
“Let me remind you of what Wordsworth says,” I replied.
Minds that have nothing to conferFind little to perceive.
Minds that have nothing to conferFind little to perceive.
Minds that have nothing to confer
Find little to perceive.
You can always obtain the just rude word to end a discussion from Wordsworth’s poems or David’s Psalms—David is perhaps a little heavy handed for these days.
I suppose it is because my forefathers lived on the marches that I cannot help enjoying a downright good fight. I know it is wicked to enjoy the angry scenes of a contest, but even the saintly John Henry Newman confesses on occasions to have had “his monkey up”—not a very fierce and vicious monkey, but sufficient of a monkey as a precedent for a poor pagan to refer to—and when you get a wilderness of monkeys up, as we did in the Battle of the Sites, then is there a scene for Homer’s pen.
As when a torrent from the hills, swoln with Saturnian showers,Falls on the fields, bears blasted oaks and withered rosin flowers… into the ocean’s force.
As when a torrent from the hills, swoln with Saturnian showers,Falls on the fields, bears blasted oaks and withered rosin flowers… into the ocean’s force.
As when a torrent from the hills, swoln with Saturnian showers,
Falls on the fields, bears blasted oaks and withered rosin flowers
… into the ocean’s force.
So did every man, woman and child in the city get whirled into the contest and rush intothe flood, and get carried out of their depths and find themselves very much at sea. But itwasa fight.
The Battle of the Sites was only a glorious incident in the thirty years’ war that in Manchester had been steadily raging round the affair of the Royal Infirmary. And I am far from suggesting that the good individuals who were members of the Board of the Infirmary were any worse citizens than the rest of us. But such is human nature that the action of a board or committee is not the action of the individuals. A sort of lowest common moral denominator is found by consent of all, and that becomes the ruling quantity in the resultant action. When a good man makes a mistake he apologises and makes amends. Had any individual member of the Infirmary Board done some of the things that were done by him collectively, I have never doubted that when the wrong was pointed out he would have hastened to straighten things out. But a board or committee never apologises, neither does it pay the costs when judgment goes against it. Those come out of the estate.
And I wish I could believe the theory of Cardinal Newman, who solemnly tells us in his “Apologia”: “Also, besides the hosts of evil spirits, I considered there was a middle race, [Greek: daimonia]δαιμονια, neither in heaven nor in hell; partially fallen, capricious, wayward; noble or crafty, benevolent or malicious, as the case might be. These beings gave a sort of inspiration or intelligence to races, nations, and classes ofmen. Hence the action of bodies politic and associations, which is often so different from that of the individuals who compose them.” It is a charming conceit, but if taken literally might lead to committees throwing all responsibilities for their delinquencies upon the little demons at their elbows. But I like to imagine and picture the scene of a board meeting with [Greek: daimonia]δαιμονια in attendance, painted in the manner of the younger Teniers, whose goblins, teasing the unhappy Dives, have cheered me since early boyhood. Certainly if there were any smaller devils taking part in Infirmary affairs, which seems a practical solution of many difficult problems, they were not wise devils—indeed, they were silly devils—and we did well to cast them out.
When the new Infirmary was building in the Oxford Road, I happened to meet Mr. Charles Hopkinson, who deserves so well of the citizens for his careful and devoted work on the Building Committee. He was admiring the rapidly rising building, and I told him that I did not see anything of those two pedestals in the front gardens.
“What two pedestals?” asked Hopkinson; “I never heard of any pedestals in the design.”
“Certainly,” I replied, “there were to be two pedestals for the two statues.”
“I haven’t a notion what you mean,” answered Hopkinson, impatiently. “Whose statues?”
“Joseph Bell’s and my own,” I called back over my shoulder.
And although Hopkinson was quite right, andthese statues have not been placed there even yet, still it is only fitting that the great building on the Oxford Road should have had some memorial of Bell and myself, for without us there would have been no Royal Infirmary on the Oxford Road. A mediæval builder would have expressed in a series of sculptured capitals the whole history of the Battle of the Sites, and left satirical portraits of the old Board in gargoyles hanging over the guttering, whilst a statue of Joseph Bell would have adorned a spacious quadrangle, round the walls of which myself and the others of his committee were portrayed in brilliant mosaics. But your modern architect, who would be annoyed at being called a builder, never puts into his work any of the history of his building, but is quite content to erect adequate walls and roof and useful equipment and decorate the outside, much as a confectioner be-sugars a cake, to please the eye for the moment rather than with any intention of expressing ideas in his art. No doubt the Gothic days are over, and the Gothic spirit is dead, but Manchester has got what she wanted, an Infirmary building second to none in the kingdom.
I always intended to have a return match with the old Infirmary Board, because, although I won the first of the rubber, the loss of the game did not to my mind fall on the shoulders of those who ought to have borne it.
Early in 1893 a lady sought my advice through her solicitor. Her story was a very extraordinaryone. She had been a nurse at the Royal Infirmary since 1889. Her career was successful. She had been selected to attend on the late Oliver Heywood, and up to November of 1892 there had never been a word of complaint about her work or her conduct. A small-pox epidemic now broke out in Lymm, in Cheshire. Another nurse had been sent there and was ill—it was supposed, of small-pox. My client was sent there hurriedly to take her place. She found the so-called small-pox hospital to be two cottages converted into a temporary hospital, and her colleague was ill in bed, and was taken away. There was also a wife of a tramp dying of small-pox, and eight or ten patients. There was no water in the house. It is needless to repeat other unpleasant details of want of equipment. She stuck to her task for several days; she sat up with a delirious patient all night, and when the patient died she had to help the men bring in the coffin and screw down the lid, it being with much difficulty, and only after bribes of whisky that they would come inside the cottages at all. After writing letters to the authorities in Manchester and asking the local doctor for help that did not come, she at length broke down in health and fled. Arrived at Monsall, she was nursed there for a week, and at the end of that time received her dismissal without notice, and was refused permission, though at the end of her probation, to pass her examinations.
Every effort was made to get the old Board to do justice to the lady and let her pass her examination,but as no redress was to be obtained without litigation a writ was issued. Under her agreement the Infirmary Board had no right to send her to Lymm at all. The lady desired no damages against the charity, and, therefore, an action was brought for an order to compel the Board to allow her to take her examinations. Shee led me in the case, and Gully and Sutton were for the defendants—and I have no doubt told them exactly what they thought of them. Certainly it was with an air of great relief that Gully, at Mr. Justice Day’s suggestion, threw up the defence and agreed that the lady should sit for her examination.
The nurse agreed to compromise on the understanding that the matter was left in the hands of the Medical Board, whose examination she successfully passed. The lady got justice, but the Infirmary Board did not, and I made up my mind that if I ever got the chance of a return match with them, they should not be let off so lightly again.
The Battle of the Sites had started years before I came to Manchester. The old Board had made up its mind to rebuild the Infirmary on the old site in the centre of the city; the majority of the citizens wished it to go to the present site at Stanley Grove, which was a gift of the Whitworth Trustees. Of the jealousies, squabbles, and troubles of all these years the less said the better.
The old Board, with Fabian genius, continually prevented any agreement with the University authorities, and brought any other plan than thatof rebuilding on the old site to a dilatory end. The older generations of great citizens who had fought the Board in the past—Thomas Ashton, Reuben Spencer, Henry Simon, and Dr. Leech—were no longer with us, and in 1902 the old Board thought this was a most excellent time to carry through their pet scheme. They actually prepared plans for the rebuilding, and called a meeting, believing that the opposition had died down.
The one man who defeated their plans was Joseph Bell. His interests in the commercial world have been too engrossing to allow him much time for political work, but from the way he handled the Infirmary question, I make sure he would be a big asset to any political party. At the first onslaught it did not appear that the old Board’s opponents were very strong, but the meeting stood adjourned. I had never met Bell, but I received a note from him, asking for an interview, a letter of mine having been read at the first meeting. It was when I was reading his note that I remembered that, from a dramatic point of view, I had left the case between the nurse and the Infirmary Board unfinished.
Joseph Bell came to see me after Court with a bundle of papers, and, sitting down at my table, told me the whole story of the Infirmary Board and their doings on the site question from the earliest days. Two things were clear; one, that my visitor had a thorough and intimate knowledge of his subject, and, two, that he meant business. Whenhe had ended his statement he looked at me keenly and said: “Are you going to help?”
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“We are going to clear out the old Board and build a new infirmary on the Stanley Grove site.”
“You may put it there,” I said, holding out my hand.
“Then the battle can proceed,” said Joseph Bell, laughing.
And a very excellent fight it was. I should be sorry to have to read again all the letters that were written and speeches that were made. I remember I had to move the resolution against the old Board at the Memorial Hall and Lord Derby was in the chair. I certainly did not forget the nurse case when I told the members of the old Board that, “however great my temptations, I would not say anything worse of them than I knew they often said of themselves, namely, that they had left undone all they ought to have done, and had done all they ought not to have done, and there was no health in them.” A sentiment I was glad to hear heartily cheered.
We won the resolution, we won the poll the friends of the old Board demanded, and then we had an election forced upon us. Joseph Bell’s policy had been to form a Board by consent, and on his “ticket” he ran several members of the old Board who more or less favoured his views. He was absolutely master of the situation, and could, had he wished, have nominated his own Board. There were twenty-two members to be elected, and Bell’scommittee put up twenty-one. The friends of the old Board did not understand Bell’s good sense in taking over so many members of the old Board, and did their best to thwart any settlement by consent. An election took place, and certainly created more interest and feeling than any municipal election that I can remember. It was with some excitement that, coming out of Court on the afternoon of the counting, I bought a paper from aChronicleboy, who was shouting out “Result of the Infirmary Poll.” One of Bell’s candidates had resigned at the last moment, and the other twenty were returned at the head of the poll.
As I read the successful names I felt a sense of relief. Something had been attempted and something done. That nurse case that had begun before Mr. Justice Day ten years ago was really finished.
But though the Battle of the Sites was over, the Battle of what to do with the old Site is not yet well begun, for having pulled down the old building, there is a very pretty quarrel going on as to what to put in its place. And I envy Joseph Bell sniffing the battle from the upper windows of Portland Street, where the stricken field—and it is a stricken field—lies at his doorstep. At the right time he, as a good Manchester citizen, will off with his coat and rush into the fray whilst I shall be idling here, with no right to heave even half a brick in the good cause. But whoever is on the other side, the stable money is on Joseph Bell.