Part 21

The suburban road is here sufficiently broad, and approaching Stockport, where the fine modern church of St. George looks along the vista with its great bulk and graceful spire, it is even imposing, but the prevalent grey atmosphere dims and flattens everything; obscuring details, like an impressionist painter. The great church of St. George, in the newly formed parish of that name, was built in 1897, at the enormous cost of £90,000; borne entirely by one person. With a rather touching, but misplaced, confidence it is surrounded by trim lawns, and an almost rural-looking vicarage rises close by; but the stone-work of the church shows signs of turning black, the earth is growing dank and stale, and the lawns are by degrees going bald.

[Sidenote: _STOCKPORT_]

Stockport, in its local patriotism, would probably resent being lumped with “Manchester,” and Manchester itself might object, but to the passer-by, ignorant of local divisions, it is all one with the great city, although the town is not even in the same county with it; the river Mersey here dividing Stockport in Cheshire, from Manchester in Lancashire. Cheshire, in its most characteristic condition, is the Cheshire of the cheese-farms in the great fertile plain, where mild-eyed cows stand knee-deep in pastures; and a great manufacturing town is entirely out of sympathy with such idyllic scenes. I give you my word there are no idylls in Stockport: only a road where the granite setts are greasy; the pavements thronged with busy people and the girls of the cotton-mills; the sky smoky, and the air filled with distracting noise. But to see a less crowded and less noisy Stockport would be a sorry thing, for it is the wealth-producing commerce of the place that makes it what it is, and the times when the railway-lorries cease to crash and rumble along the streets, and when the waggons, laden with mountainous heights of grey shirtings, are no longer seen on their way from the cotton-mills to Manchester warehouses, will be troublous times for not only mill-hand and manufacturer, but for every one.

Commerce is typified in the statues that decorate public buildings by a woman of noble proportions, clothed in classic dress, and in her face a majestic calm; but that is an abstraction. Commerce as understood here—and indeed everywhere—is a matter of telegrams and telephones, of bales, packing-cases, and feverish hurry; and I suppose—if you must feminise—the nearest real human beings to that classic convention are the mill-girls and the typists. For the rest, commerce is what you perceive here; a polluted river, darkened by factories, bridges, and railway viaducts; and great goods yards, advertisement hoardings, banks, and the hundred-and-one kinds of buildings in which the business of the twentieth century is carried on.

The tall railway viaduct that spans the Mersey and goes high over the steep and grimy streets leading down to it, is impressive in its very bulk and in the smoky atmosphere that reveals it only in a broad flat effect; and, in the same way, the towering buildings that have no beauty of detail, gloom down upon you with an ogreish aspect that transcends their ugliness and elevates it into the region of horrific romance.

That such a place can ever have been the site of a castle wherein dwelt the glittering creatures of chivalry is scarce thinkable: and yet there was such a stronghold. But the very ruins of it were cleared away so long ago as 1775. They were very scanty, and no sort of use to Prince Charles, when he passed here, going and returning in the ’45. His Highlanders, we learn from one of the diarists of that time, “were very rough as they went through Stockport, and took Mr. Elcock and 2 or 3 more with ’em, with Halters about their necks.”

[Illustration: OLD TOWN HOUSE OF THE ARDERNES, STOCKPORT.]

Those good old times again, when England was Merry England. What fun!

But these good Stockport people were not strung up, after all, and returned later in the day to the bosom of their families.

A relic of an older Stockport that knew nothing of cotton-mills or other factories is to be found in the street called Great Underbank. This is the old timbered town house of the Ardernes of Harden and Tarporley. This ancient family resorted hither in the long ago from their various country seats, and called it “coming to town.” The Manchester and Liverpool District Bank now occupies the fine old place.

The “White Lion” was an interesting old inn, but it has gone down before Stockport’s growing commercial greatness. It was the house, according to usually received accounts, where the following tribute to the management was to be seen, inscribed on a window-pane by some dissatisfied guest of nearly a century and a half ago:

If traveller, good treatment be thy care, A comfortable bed, and wholesome fare, A Modest bill, and a diverting host, Neat maid, and ready waiter,--quit this coast. If dirty doings please, at Stockport lie; The girls, O frowzy frights, here with their mothers vie.

I think this is all the historian who is merely a gossip can say about Stockport. But stay! One very prominent feature has been passed over, and as I have no wish to incur the wrath of the burgesses, I hasten to repair the omission. Stockport is intensely proud of possessing the largest Sunday School in the world: proud, that is to say, of the large roll-call of its scholars, and possibly also of the mere bulk of the great building. Of its appearance, which is that of any large factory, there could not possibly be any pride. But in these days of secular advances and of a growing godless Socialism in great industrial centres, it is at once surprising and hopeful to see the like of Stockport’s great Sunday School: and in Manchester itself to witness the really wonderful Whitsuntide sight of the Sunday Schools’ processions through the chief streets of the great city.

FOOTNOTES.

[1] _Viâ_ Boroughbridge, Greta Bridge, and Catterick.

[2] Died April 27th, 1905. Will proved, October, 1905, for £1,562,500.

[3] Wesley is wrong in his measurement. The length is 550 feet.

END OF VOL. I

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