In 1840, one man transformed travel in Britain.
His name was George Bradshaw,
and his railway guides inspired the Victorians to take to the tracks.
Stop by stop, he told them where to go, what to see and where to stay.
Now, 170 years later,
I'm aboard for a series of rail adventures across the United Kingdom
to see what of Bradshaw's Britain remains.
With my Bradshaw's, I'm continuing my journey
around the industrial heartland of northern England,
travelling on the very tracks
that helped make the fortunes of entrepreneurs,
and I hope to discover that even in Victorian times,
some of them were men and others were women.
On this leg of my journey, I put a vintage truck to the test,“...
More than a century old and still going strong.
...learn how the railways transformed the Northwest's seaside...
Without any doubt, they were fundamental to the future success of the resort.
...and I bake a 19th-century worker's lunchtime staple.
You have to get a lot of air into it.
- It's already feeling lovely. - You're quite good at this!
My journey began in Manchester, headed west to soapy Merseyside.
It will now traverse Lancashire to Preston and then Bradford
and will dip down to steely South Yorkshire
and will end in Derbyshire, the resting place of the father of the railway,
George Stephenson.
This Lancastrian leg begins in sun-drenched Southport,
devours pies in Wigan, surges east to subversive Westhoughton,
weaves towards Bolton
and drives north to finish at Leyland.
From Birkenhead, I've crossed the Mersey and I'm now heading to Southport.
Bradshaw's tells me it's a favourite and fashionable watering place.
"From its situation and salubrity,
it's been christened the Montpellier of England."
Well, I've been to Montpelier on a blistering-hot Mediterranean day
and I am assuming that the comparison is more one of architecture than climate.
Lying on the coast, almost 20 miles north of Liverpool,
nowhere better epitomises
the late-18th-century fashion for bathing in sea water
than the once small fishing port, which came to be known as Southport.
The future French Emperor, Napoleon Ill,
took an apartment here for a season,
and it's said that he used the tree-lined Lord Street
as a template for his subsequent redesign of Paris.
My guidebook certainly liked the place.
"Southport's buildings," says Bradshaw's,
"are architecturally elegant
and the broad and beautiful streets, particularly Lord Street,
have made it universally admired."
In my mind, I can hear the jangle of bridles
as the horses and carriages pass by
and the clink of china as elegant ladies take their tea.
When the railways arrived in 1848, Southport's popularity boomed
as first Liverpudlians and later Mancunians arrived
looking for a refined break from their industrial cities.
In 1860, Southport's elegant promenade was graced with a pier
upon which I'm meeting former director of tourism Phil King.
Hello, Phil.
Michael, welcome to sunny Southport.
Lovely to see you. You made me walk a long way.
How long is this pier? It must be one of the longest in Britain.
3,600-odd feet. Second longest to our friends' down in Southend.
This pier was built for what?
For leisure and pleasure, and people used to promenade up to be seen,
to talk, to bow their heads, to enjoy.
It used to cost you sixpence and if you had a perambulator, one and six,
and then of course as time went on, paddle steamers arrived at the pierhead,
which used to go to Blackpool, Llandudno and other exotic places as well.
Tell me about the impact of the railways on Southport.
Without any doubt, they were fundamental to the future success of the resort.
People came off literally in their thousands to swim
and use the bathing machines.
And then there was the development of the funfairs.
They used to go for rides on the carousel,
a wonderful selling point for our resort.
The carousel is thought to date back to the Crusades
and to have its origins in a Turkish game.
By the 17th century, it had developed into a fixed structure
with legless wooden horses.
It was revolutionised by an English engineer called Frederick Savage,
who, during the late 19th century,
designed a machine whose horses moved up and down as they galloped.
I'm meeting Herbert Silcock, who owns the fine exemplar at Southport Pier.
- Herbert. - Pleased to meet you, Michael.
It's a lovely carousel. ls it Victorian?
It is Victorian, built in 1900.
How far back does your family go in the fairground business?
We go back to the late 1800s.
This is the earliest picture we have of the family.
That's Great-Grandfather. Four sons. One, two, three, four.
Now, this is the showman's caravan that they lived in.
In those days, they were travelling from place to place?
Correct.
How did your family actually get going in the business?
This man here, Great-Grandfather Edward, he worked in a wire works in Warrington
and to supplement his income, he opened a little stall,
a coconut shy, in a railway viaduct,
and as the workers came out, he would offer them a game for a penny.
Eventually this took over
because he was earning more money than in the wire works.
My mother and father came here in 1959 and we've prospered since.
The elaborately carved animals and ornate panels
provided more than decoration.
They also hid the mechanism,
which in Herbert's great-grandfather's day, was powered by steam.
During the heyday of the golden galloper,
more than 250 carousels were built
and they were the most popular ride in the British fairground.
Nowadays people have computer games and I don't know what.
Why are they still attracted to carousels?
The carousel, in its heyday, was actually a white-knuckle ride.
It was quite fast, for the time.
It fell out of favour in the '50s and '60s as people wanted more speed,
but now it's as popular as ever, but it's now a children's and family ride.
Well, it may well be, but I hope that doesn't prevent me from having a go.
It certainly will not, Michael. Follow me.
Former politician backs wrong horse and is taken for a ride.
Feeling a little giddy, I'm going back to Southport Station.
Northern Rail is less ornate,
but its iron horse will carry me east at a canter.
This train will take me to Wigan. Bradshaw's tells me,
"lt's a great cotton town in Lancashire near the head of the River Douglas."
"It contains stone and coal in great abundance."
Wigan has found fame for its industry,
in literature and for the history of its food.
Coal was mined in and around Wigan from the Middle Ages
and when the canals and then the railway
linked it to its bigger manufacturing neighbours, the town prospered.
But the great depression of the 1930s hit Wigan hard
and the town, which has never since matched its Victorian prosperity,
presently strikes a chord because of a book named after
its most famous landmark.
When you think of famous piers, you'd think of Southend, Southport and Wigan.
I've never seen Wigan Pier, but given that the town isn't on the sea,
but on the Manchester-to-Liverpool canal,
I have a feeling that its pier can't be as spectacular as Southend or Southport.
Ahoy. Can you give me directions to Wigan Pier, please?
- The actual pier itself? - Yes, the pier.
This is it, really.
None the wiser, I'm hoping Wigan archives manager, Alex Miller,
will know the pier's precise location.
- Erm, I'm in search of Wigan Pier. - Right.
Can you direct me?
You're on it. You're standing on the very Wigan Pier,
such as it exists at the moment.
- Is this some kind of joke? - Well, actually, it is a bit of a joke.
It's an early 20th-century music hall joke.
This is Wigan Pier. It's essentially a coal tippler
that came to become the Wigan Pier of music-hall jokes.
And it was carried on by the Formbys,
in particular George Formby Snr and George Formby Jr.
♪ Now when we shunt The back's in front
♪ And the front part's in the rear
♪ If we survive then we'll arrive Alongside Wigan Pier
This construction here would been the end point of a railway line
stretching up into the network of railways that fed the coal industry.
The wagons would have come down the railway line to the tippler,
where they would have been tipped into the barges waiting beneath.
And the story goes that on a boat trip down the canal to Southport,
a group of people on the canal were lost in the fog.
They shouted out, "Where are we? We have no idea where we are."
A local wag shouts out from the banks of the canal,
"You're at Wigan Pier." They were on their way to Southport
expecting to see something a little bit grander.
- So, that's where it comes from. - That's now all lost in time, isn't it?
All of us just think of George Orwell and Wigan Pier,
but he then was picking up on an existing joke.
Absolutely. He was using it... It was a snappy title apart from anything else.
The Road to Wigan Pier, it gave him a very fixed point
in the end to his journey when he came to Wigan.
Born Eric Blair in 1903, George Orwell attended Eton College on a scholarship
and became a leading left-wing author.
He is best known for his anti-Soviet novel "Animal Farm"
and the dystopian "Nineteen Eighty-Four".
In "The Road to Wigan Pier“, he wrote graphically of the poverty
suffered by the northern working class during the 1930s great depression.
So, there had obviously been a decline in Wigan
because Bradshaw's talks about the place
being absolutely replete with stone and coal.
Yes, I mean it was. Wigan is very much a town built on coal,
but in the years after the Second World War,
Wigan has come to be known as a centre for food manufacturing.
You've got many multinational firms working in the area,
people like Heinz and Patak's,
and you've got one firm that has Victorian origins
that manufactures pies in the area, and that is Pooles Pies.
Heinz came to Wigan in the late 1950s,
attracted by the ready availability of crops,
grown on the fertile Lancashire plain.
Over a billion cans of food per year were produced in their Wigan factory.
But a century earlier, Margaret Poole started a business
that first put Wigan on the British culinary map.
I'm meeting baker Pauline Atherton at the Pooles Pie factory
in Pemberton, southwest of the town centre.
- Pauline? - Yes?
Hello, I'm Michael.
So, what happens in this kitchen?
This is where we do all the product development.
All the new recipes are formulated here.
Have you been making pies for long?
- Along time; about 50 years. - Really?
Were the Victorian recipes much different from what you do today?
pigeon, rabbits, oxtail, even blackbird.
Lots of things that you wouldn't use today,
but now there's more concentration on what is actually in it.
Pauline has offered to show me
how Margaret Poole might have baked a beef pie back in 1847.
You have to get a lot of air into it, so the pastry will be nice and light.
It's already feeling lovely.
You're quite good at this.
That looks pretty good to me.
- You roll it. Some pressure. - Quite vigorously.
A little thinner, a little thinner.
Lovely.
Then roll it over.
That's it. We'll start with the filling now.
- Shall I put that in there? - Spread it nice and evenly.
Margaret really knew how to make a pie.
- Pop it down over here. - Bring it towards you.
- Make it pretty. - With a few thumbprints?
Yes, and it's to seal it as well.
And I have something that looks like a pie.
Very nice.
How long shall we cook that for?
Roughly about 25 minutes, 200 degrees.
Nowadays, only prototype pies are handmade.
As mine bakes, Pauline wants to show me the 300,000-square-foot factory.
Here, 50 people on five production lines
make an astonishing 100,000 pies and pastries per hour.
Even though Margaret Poole had a factory,
she would have been amazed to see this.
She certainly would.
- What are the ingredients? - This is meat and potato.
And then, a bit like making a pie when you're doing it at home,
you spread the pastry on top and then cut off the surplus.
Yes, everything's all recycled all the way up again.
And here they are ready to go in the freezer.
And then anyone could cook those at home.
Yes.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating
and I'm afraid that the same applies to my pie.
- Am I Mother? - Please.
Just about.
Oh. Now that looks pretty good, but I want your opinion, Pauline.
I'm not going to touch it until you do.
- Superb. - Hmm.
It is pretty good.
Well clone, Margaret Poole. May her memory be blessed.
With a full tummy, Pm heading six miles east
toward today's final destination.
To end my day, I'm heading to Westhoughton.
Bradshaw's tells me that in 1812, a dreadful Luddite riot took place
at which a large quantity of machinery was destroyed by the mob.
If I remember, the Luddites were men driven to desperate violence
by the fear that mechanisation would cost them their livelihoods.
In 1812, England was mired in the worst trade depression for 50 years.
The invention of new machinery
threatened to consign home weaving to the annals of history.
Those conditions gave rise to machine breakers and rioters
dubbed the Luddites.
I'm hoping that local historian, Pamela Clarke,
can tell me what happened in Westhoughton.
- Hello, Pam. - Hello, Michael.
According to my Bradshaw's,
the violence here in 1812 was pretty bad. What happened?
In 1804, a new factory was built
across the road and it was full of 170 power looms with the big steam engine.
Luddites from Bolton decided to burn the factory
and destroy the equipment there.
So, is that exactly what happened? They marched up here and did it?
On 24th April, the mill was set ablaze.
All the machinery was made of wood
and there was lots of cloth around, so it was easy to get the fire going.
What were the consequences for the people who had perpetrated this attack?
Four of them were charged with breaking the machinery,
which was made a capital offence in 1812.
And they were sentenced to be hanged.
And were they?
They were, including a young lad
who was said to be anything from 12 to 16 years old.
Tomorrow, I'm hoping to find out more about one of the machines
that led to this dreadful incident in Westhoughton,
but now it's time for some quiet refreshment.
- Morning. - Alright?
- Nice sunny day. - Aye, it is.
Continuing east, my next destination is Bolton.
This is Bolton, what Bradshaw's calls Bolton le Moors.
"Cotton, velvets and muslins were first manufactured here about 1160-80
on a large scale by the new machinery of Richard Arkwright,
who resided here when a barber
and Samuel Crompton who lived at Hall i' th' Wood."
Much though I sympathise with the desperate Luddites
who broke the machines,
I have real admiration for the inventors who sought to perfect them.
In 1713, Bolton's population numbered less than 5,500.
By 1901, it had soared to 168,000.
The biggest reason for that increase
was the town's booming textile industry,
begun by a Bolton inventor who was born in 1753.
I'm meeting curator Erin Beeston
at Samuel Grumman's house in Hall i' th' Wood, north of Bolton.
- Erin, hello. - Hello. Welcome to Hall i' th' Wood.
It's a beautiful house and rather grand.
Was Samuel Crompton quite a rich man?
Well, actually at the time Samuel Crompton lived here,
the hall was in quite a bad state of repair.
Shortly after they moved to some rooms upstairs in the hall,
his father actually died and his father was only about 33 at the time,
so he was left with two sisters and his mother
and he was very quickly taught how to spin from an early age
to help the family produce the cotton that they needed to weave with.
In the middle of the 18th century,
people were producing fabrics in their homes?
Yes. Essentially, it was a cottage industry.
To produce the yarn required to make cloth,
Samuel and his family used a single-thread spinning wheel.
Volunteer Jacqui Elvin's demonstrating with raw wool.
To spin the yarn, you need to work the pedal
and that's a rocking motion.
And with that, it turns the spindle in a clockwise direction
you extend with the left-hand, and that causes the twist to go down the yarn.
And that creates your thread.
Not too straightforward, I must say.
It's like one of these things where you have to rub the top of your head
and stroke your nose at the same time. And I'm only producing one thread.
Exactly, and for weavers, you needed an awful lot of thread.
And that, I have a feeling, is where our Mr Crompton comes in.
Yes.
Thank you, Jacqui.
A number of 18th-century inventions transformed cloth production
from a cottage industry into steam-powered mass production
in factories during the Industrial Revolution.
Samuel Crompton's invention was called the spinning mule
and, borrowing elements of James Hargreaves 's spinning jenny
and Sir Richard Arkwright's water frame,
it revolutionised the production of yarn.
How did Crompton come to be so inventive?
Well, he was quite well educated.
He actually went to night school until he was 16.
He did things like mathematics. He did algebra and arithmetic.
He also was very musically talented and he used the money that he made
from playing the violin in one of the theatres locally
to get the parts together ready to make his invention.
And what is the significance of this room?
Well, this came to be known as his conjuring room.
There were reports of him staying up into the small hours
and passers-by travelling seeing flickering lights.
Toiling away by candlelight.
Legend has it that Crompton was so worried about local Luddites
hearing about his spinning mule and attempting to destroy it
that he kept it dismantled and hidden in his attic.
Today, there's a replica on display.
Did Samuel Crompton make his fortune from it?
Sadly he didn't.
Crompton has been criticised by historians
for not being a great businessman.
He listened to some of his peers who encouraged him
to take subscriptions to have his machine viewed,
rather than to take out a patent.
So they'd come along and give him small sums of money to see his machine
and then copy it.
So, his idea passed into the world virtually free of charge?
They said at one point there were four million spindles
spinning cotton yarn on his invention.
The manufacturers gained all this wealth and Samuel himself died in near poverty.
Decades after Samuel Crompton died a poor man,
a rather guilty Bolton erected a statue of him by public subscription.
But his real monument was that his invention enabled Bolton
and other Lancashire towns to establish factories
that were the most productive and competitive in the world.
Another invention benefited my next destination
at the turn of the 20th century.
I'm on my way to Leyland.
Bradshaw's tells me that it has an excellent free grammar school
and I am going there to study how a local boy, James Sumner,
started a business that made his town a household name.
Six miles south of Preston,
Leyland is synonymous with the largest car manufacturer
that Britain has ever had.
British Leyland had its roots in the commercial vehicle maker
the Lancashire Steam Motor Company, which was formed here in 1896.
Bob Howell is an engineer at Leyland's British Commercial Vehicle Museum.
What an amazing collection of vehicles.
Yes, we have vehicles from 1896 right up to 2006.
What are we standing amongst here?
This is the Leyland Lioness, bought by King George V
for conveying visitors to the Sandringham estate
from the railway station.
And what about this one here?
This is the Popemobile. The designer's brief for this was a high-sided vehicle,
so the Pope could see the people and they could see him.
And so that was used during the Pope's visit to Britain?
Yes, it was.
The Leyland marque might never have existed
had its young founder, James Sumner, the son of a blacksmith,
not attached a steam engine to a lawn mower.
As a teenager, James was allowed to experiment in his father's workshop.
He made his own two-cylinder compound steam engine,
which he fitted to a pedal tricycle.
Then a local head gardener gave James an old horse-drawn lawn mower.
This is the result.
Immediately the orders started flooding in,
not only from the owners of large estate houses,
but also from the cricket clubs.
In fact WG Grace bought one for his hallowed cricket pitch at the Oval.
James went into partnership with the wealthy Spurrier family
and, opting to use new petrol engines,
by 1914, the renamed Leyland Motors Ltd employed a workforce of 1,500.
In the 1960s, the company bought car manufacturers Triumph and Rover
and a merger in 1968, with British Motor Holdings,
brought Jaguar, Morris and Austin into the group.
Following the oil crisis of 1973,
this monolithic company was almost bankrupt
and was first nationalised and then broken up.
The now American-owned Leyland Trucks
still produces state-of-the-art vehicles,
as this museum example once was.
And we're away!
- How old is the vehicle, Bob? - 1908.
We believe it is oldest commercial vehicle running.
What was the history of the vehicle? What was it used for?
It was involved in the parcel collection and delivery in the London area.
It did a total of 390,000 miles before it was retired.
How many years have you been in the motor industry?
- 76. - 76!
I started October 1st, 1937.
Would you care to have a little drive?
- I would absolutely love to. - Why not?
Depress clutch, engage second gear.
Release brake.
Apply throttle.
Hooray, we're moving!
This is enormous fun, Bob.
This is a great tribute to Leyland.
More than a century old and still going strong.
I'm saddened that despite his inventive genius, Samuel Crompton of Bolton
failed to capitalise on his invention of the spinning mule.
In Wigan, Margaret Poole enjoyed greater material success
with her homely recipes.
She's reminded me that for the rail traveller,
a Bradshaw's guide and a sustaining pie.
On the next leg, I hear about unscrupulous Victorian grocers,...
Oatmeal was often mixed with gravel or sand.
This appears to be about 90 per cent gravel.
...I have to hail a train at a request stop...
Success!
...and I learn of King James's beefiest knighting.
He took his sword and dubbed this loin of beef, "Arise Sir Loin."
And everybody went...