MY CONNECTIONS WITH THE ORIGINS OF COMMUNISM
In my post of June 10, 2010 ‘Fox Hunting and the Point to Points’, I sketched the emergence of two of the modern mainstays of life in rural Cheshire and illustrated how new and synthetic this culture really is.
I mentioned that when the original Hunt Club was founded in 1762 in Tarporley, Cheshire it started off with hare coursing (i.e. using beagle hounds) and that it was only prosperity, farm consolidation and the widespread introduction and proper maintenance of hawthorn hedges that made fox hunting viable.
I also quoted from a poem or ballad called ‘Farmer Dobbin’ written by Rowland Eyles Egerton-Warburton and published in 1853. This was almost certainly first recited to the assembled members of the Cheshire Hunt at a banquet in the Hunt Room of the Swan Inn in Tarporley.
The poem celebrates the acceptance of a new stratum of prosperous local dairy farmers into the Hunt and it mocks the brash young men of Manchester and Liverpool for moving off too early before the fox started from its cover.
Well, you may be more than a little surprised to learn that one of the world’s most important revolutionary thinkers, Friedrich Engels, may well have been one of the offenders in taking up the chase prematurely.
In 1850, Engels returned to England to assist in the management of the sewing thread mill that was part-owned by his father. The Ermen and Engel’s mill was located at Weaste in Salford and Friedrich started by keeping the accounts, while later becoming a full partner.
Fox hunting with the Cheshire Hounds was one of his weekend hobbies in the autumn.
And in my post of August 11, 2010, ‘Who Do You Think You Are – and what were they worth?’ I mentioned that my great, great grandfather Walter Shorrocks, who was a Brush Manufacturer in Salford, lived near to the Crescent Pub in Salford (formerly the Red Dragon) where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels once drank and discussed revolution and the theory of Communism.
So, I couldn’t let these connections pass without further comment.
Quite possibly, Friedrich (born 1820) may have crossed urban alleyways then with my great great grandfather Walter (born 1824) in Salford, and country lanes with my Cheshire farming step family (Abraham Darlington the elder born 1805 and his son, another Abraham, who was my great grandfather, born 1841).
And the covert revolutionary may have shared drinks with the Shorrocks’ in the Red Dragon and the Darlingtons in the Swan Inn.
So I’ll take the opportunity to say more about Friedrich Engels and his life in North West England.
SALFORD PAYS TRIBUTE TO ITS FAMOUS ADOPTED SON
According to a colourful article in Salford Star (No 6: Winter 2007) on Friedrich Engels:
“Fred Engels is the most famous person who ever lived in Salford.
And when he settled in Salford, at the age of 22, he was on the ale every night, copping off with local girls and stirring up all sorts of trouble. He was the original angry young man, slagging off developers, the council, the capitalists and the conditions that working class people were living in.
Born in Barmen, Germany, in 1820, young Fred was a major trouble maker after he discovered politics, so his dad – a rich mill owner – packed him off to Salford when he was 22 to work for the family's joint owned Ermen and Engels' Victoria Mill in Weaste, which made sewing threads.
By this time Fred already spoke 25 languages, was a top horseman, swordsman, swimmer, skater, artist, journalist, composer and philosopher – well, there was no telly in those days. And he'd published loads of political articles, stirring it up in his home town and prompting his dad to write:
"I have a son at home who is like a scabby sheep in a flock…"
Fred copped off with a young Irish girl called Mary Burns, who probably worked at his dad's mill, and she took him out at night in disguise so that he wouldn't get his German bourgeois head kicked in.
After twenty months Fred went home and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844 (published 1845). It was"dedicated to the working classes of Great Britain" but wasn't available in English until 1892. The explosive book described in intimate detail, street after street, the total squalor that working people were living in, based on what he'd seen in Salford and Manchester.
But he didn't just write about the conditions, and his hatred for the ruling class that allowed working people to live like that. Once back in Germany he got his sword out and took part in the revolutionary uprising against the Prussian army.
It was after this, in 1848, that Fred and Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto urging a worldwide socialist revolution.
With the authorities after him, Fred took refuge in Switzerland before arriving back at his dad's factory in 1850, exiled in Salford. He stayed for 19 years. This time, Fred was under surveillance from the secret police, and had `official' homes and `unofficial homes' all over inner city Manchester where he lived with Mary under false names to confuse the cops.
While Fred was in Salford and Manchester, Karl Marx used to come and visit him at least once every year. They would sit for hours researching in Chetham's Library – and then go drinking for hours in pubs all over town – possibly the Crescent and The Grapes in Salford, and the Gold Cup and Coach and Horses in Manchester”.
THE STORY CONTINUES
During the 19 years that Friedrich spent in Manchester and Salford on the management team of Ermen and Engels, he enjoyed all the perks associated with his growing wealth (he became a partner in 1864) - and as I mentioned above, he rode with the Cheshire Hounds.
And at the same time, he maintained two homes in Manchester so he could continue to enjoy the beds and domesticity offered by two Irish working class sisters Mary and Lizzie Burns.
But he also supported Karl Marx. Drawing on his salary and profits, it is estimated that Engels provided at least £35,000 a year at today’s prices until Marx’s death, to enable Marx to keep up a middle class lifestyle, especially for his three daughters.
In 1870, Engels moved to London where he and Marx lived until Marx's death in 1883. He died in England in 1895.
Fellow politicians regarded Engels as a "ruthless party tactician", "brutal ideologue", and a "master tactician" when it came to purging rivals in political organizations.
However, he was also seen as a "gregarious", "bighearted", and "jovial man of outsize appetites", who was referred to by his son-in-law as "the great beheader of champagne bottles”. At his regular Sunday parties for London’s left-wing intelligentsia it seems that "no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning."
His stated personal motto was "take it easy", while "jollity" was listed as his favorite virtue.
When Engels died in 1895 he left more than £2m in stocks and shares in today’s money. In the cellar of his grand Primrose Hill four-story house he had £20,000 pounds worth of fine wines and more stored with his merchant.
Unconcerned that this wealth compromised his communist convictions, he apparently argued that:
“the stock exchange simply adjusts the distribution of surplus value already stolen from the workers” and that it was possible to both dabble on the stock market and be a socialist”.
And he promised a “fine reception” for anyone who came to him seeking an apology for being a boss of a manufacturing firm.
SOME FURTHER QUOTES:
"To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young”.
"I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful conditions of the working people's quarters…The man listened quietly and said when we parted `And yet there is a great deal of money to be made here; Good Morning Sir’.
"All the conditions of life are measured by money - and what brings no money is (judged) nonsense, unpractical idealistic bosh!"
"If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find…one large working men's quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue…All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of Genoa….The working men's dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane…vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding.
In this district I found a man, apparently about 60 years old, living in a cow stable...which had neither windows and floor, nor ceiling… and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung heaps lay next door to his palace.
The working people live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages…the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference solely to the profit secured by the contractor…"
"I forsook the company and the dinner-parties, the port-wine and champagne of the middle classes, and devoted my leisure-hours almost exclusively to the intercourse with plain working men; I am both glad and proud of having done so’
Glad, because thus I was induced to spend many a happy hour, which else would have been wasted in fashionable talk and tiresome etiquette ...."
"(I am) proud because I thus got an opportunity of doing justice to an oppressed and calumniated class of men who with all their faults and under all the disadvantages of their situation, yet command the respect of everyone but an English money-monger ..."
"A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages…Who can demand that such a class respect this social order?"
"Exploitation is the basic evil which the social revolution strives to abolish, by abolishing the capitalist mode of production."
"Urban authorities…almost everywhere in England are recognised centres of corruption of all kinds, nepotism and jobbery – the exploitation of public office to the private advantage of the official or his family."
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…”
"Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win - Working Men of All Countries, Unite!"
1861 CENSUS
Frederick Engels
Age 40
Estimated Year of Birth 1821
Relationship to Head of Household Lodger
Occupation Merchant
Address 6, Thorncliffe Grove
District Chorlton, Chorlton-Upon-Medlock
Parish Chorlton Upon Medlock
Administrative County Lancashire
Birth Place Prussia
[Lodger with Charles Lee, wife Ann (children Sarah 16, Charles 14, William 7, Emily 5 and Bertha 4)]
Walter Shorrocks (my great, great grandfather)
Age 37
Estimated Year of Birth 1824
Relationship to Head of Household Head
Occupation Brushmaker employing 3 men and 1 boy
Address 21 Islington Street
District Greengate
Parish Salford
Administrative County Lancashire
Birth Place
Birth County Lancashire
Abraham Darlington (my step great, great grandfather)
Age 56
Estimated Year of Birth 1805
Relationship to Head of Household Head
Occupation Farmer of...acres
Address Aston Green
District Nantwich, Nantwich
Parish Aston Juxta Mondrum
Administrative County Cheshire
Birth Place
Birth County Cheshire
[Son Abraham 20 years old born 1841 – good candidate for riding with the Cheshire Hounds c1860]
FOOTNOTE
I have also (once only) hunted with the Cheshire Hounds.
When I was about 10 years old, I badgered my mother and step father to be able to join the Meet of the Hounds at Calveley Hall Gates. I rode my overweight and normally ponderous pony Jonty (see photo below) - who however became a stampeding steed in the rush of horses.
Narrowly avoiding being maimed and crushed (parents were more stoic about risks and injuries in those days), I survived being dragged through a disintegrating post and rail fence in the fields between Calveley and Wettenhall.
This prematurely and permanently ended my enthusiasm for the sport!
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