Manchester: Part One

THIS PART OF OUR JOURNEY actually begins in 1972. Allow me to quote myself: I was a high-school junior in suburban Connecticut, freshly infatuated with the stage, so it was only natural that I would join my fellow theater-arts students on a week-long show-going excursion to London that February. A mere $300 bought airfare, hotel room, and tickets.

The first show we saw was a musical version of “The Canterbury Tales.” I didn’t like it very much. Next was “Never the Twain,” a quirky mash-up of works by Kipling and Brecht, which was far more appealing, but by then I realized that some of my favorite actors were performing on the West End, and I forsook the rest of the scheduled offerings in favor of such fare – beginning with Alec Guinness in John Mortimer’s “A Voyage Round My Father,” which I wrote about here in 2012.

Three years later, I received this email message:

I was crawling around, looking up a show I was once in, when I came across yr blog, where you write about a trip to London in Feb 1972, and a theatre-binge you went on. Hah - I'd been in Canterbury Tales in 1970, which you thought crap, and was in Never the Twain, a Brecht-Kipling conflation you thought more interesting.

It was from Maurice Walsh, who also noted that he’d found some of my internet traces and discovered that he and I enjoyed performing similar repertory – songs by Flanders and Swann, Noël Coward, and neglected music-hall numbers. Now based in Manchester, he’d spent many years teaching music in schools (he taught at a school where Auden taught). We became Facebook friends, which showed me that he had a wonderfully quirky sense of humor and an admirable social conscience. Here’s the rest of that piece.

Thus it was that the third stop on my UK journey was Manchester. It was about time that we met Moz, as Mr. Walsh has long since styled himself. Susan and I checked in at the Hotel Indigo, an elegant hostelry with modern design and appointments (but forget that tub!), and hurried to the sidewalk where Moz was waiting. Such a joy finally to effect this face-to-face! It’s one of those friendships, the intervening Atlantic notwithstanding, where we discovered commonality enough to reinforce the sense that we’d been amiable neighbors for years.

England and the U.S. have been neck-and-neck in the race to see who can treat immigrants more shabbily, but Moz has been very active in helping those who’ve been oppressed, particularly in the Calais Jungle, a horrific migrant camp that sprang up seven years ago. One of the people he helped was a Palestinian refugee named Mohammed who, thanks to Moz’s interventions, was able to settle in Manchester and eventually bring over his wife and children. He was working as a driver when we met, and volunteered his car and his services to shepherd us around the city and its environs. (We never would have fit in Moz’s tiny car, nor did he, now in his 80s, wish to do as much driving as he anticipated.)

Honoring our shared political leanings, our first stop was the People’s History Museum. Opened as the National Museum of Labour History  in 1975 in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets, with a collection that included Thomas Paine’s desk. It continued to collect significant material over the next dozen years, until (what else!) its funding was threatened. At which time the Manchester City Council and the Trades Union Congress laid the groundwork for a move north. The new museum opened in 1990 in a building on Princess Street – the same building where the TUC first met a century earlier. The ensuing years saw the name changed to its current moniker and the collections consolidated under one roof.

It’s a very interactive-style place, with various areas dedicated to particular people and incidents. The Peterloo Massacre of 1819 is an unfortunate highlight. Some 60,000 people gathered to demand representation in Parliament; instead, a calvary charge from the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry caused the death of eighteen people and the injury of hundreds of others. Prints and banners and other artefacts pay tribute to the event. Manchester was enough of an activists’ center that many more causes are represented as well. Give yourself plenty of time here.

But we were next escorted a couple of blocks, to the John Rylands Library. He was Manchester’s first multi-millionaire, a taciturn man who made his fortune in the textile business. He and his first wife, Dinah, had six children, none of whom survived him. Five years after Dinah died in 1843, John remarried, to a woman named Martha, and in 1860 took on Enriqueta Agustina Tennant as companion to her. By the time Martha died in 1875, John was as old as the century but waited a mere eight months to marry Enriqueta. And they had a dozen more years together before he died and left her the lion’s share of his fortune.

What to do with all that dough? Build a memorial library. Commission a neo-Gothic building from noted architect Basil Champneys, and stock with collections you never fully examined and for which you overpaid. Not by today’s standards, of course. Those core collections remain invaluable, and Enriqueta continued acquiring books for the library until her death in 1908. You enter and are struck dumb by its magnificence. As large as a cathedral, but for a much more productive religion: learning. Many of the study areas were occupied, making me wish I had a topic to pursue there and several hours during which to pursue it.

An important pursuit not available at the library was found at the Marble Arch Inn, a pub built in 1888 that retains enough historic significance to have merited a Grade II listing. Meaning you can’t mess with it without permission. It became home to Marble Brewery in 1997, which operated there for 12 years before outgrowing the location. But you’ll still find their excellent beers there, as proved by the pint of Marble Stout I sampled. Even Susan was inspired to try one of the brews, in this case a Lemon & Bergamot Witbier. Lots of citrus in the flavor, but it still didn’t win her over to beer.

Was it the beer? Was it the aroma of the many hookahs surrounding us at supper that kept her in bed the following morning? We dined with Moz and Mohammed at Zouk, an Indian-Pakistani restaurant so crowded and noisy inside that we elected to take advantage of the outdoor seating area. The meal was terrific. We went to bed with the triumphant feeling of having spent a very productive first day in this city. We awoke – or she awoke, as it happened – with a terrible headache. Our plans had to be altered. I’ll pick up this narrative in the second part of the Manchester part of this story.