HAVING A HALF OF REAL ALE AT THE CRESCENT
My great great grandfather Walter Shorrocks lived for the latter part of his life at 3 The Crescent, Salford. This is a stone’s throw from the Crescent , the pub in Salford which, when it was known as the Red Dragon, hosted Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx. They used to meet to chat in a corner spot past the bar. I like to think that Walter said ‘Eh Up’ now and again to the two conspiratorial foreign gentlemen.
So I had to go and have a drink in the self-same spot and toast Fred at least.
As Roy Hattersley explains in his review of the book The Frock-Coated Communist by Tristram Hunt:
‘The word that best describes Engels's early manhood is "louche". But Hunt assures us that "the great Lothario, slave to Paris's finest grisettes and rough seducer... profoundly matured" by his early 60s. In the interim, he drank heavily. He also rode to hounds with the Cheshire Hunt.
'My hunting neighbours continually tell me that blood sports are a classless occupation. Yet I still find something ridiculous in the hero of Soviet intellectuals following a field led by the future Duke of Westminster - the unreadable chasing the uneatable’.
I have a big Seven O birthday coming up next year and Fred has given me something to emulate in terms of celebrating it. He reported that:
‘We kept it up till half past three in the morning and drank, besides claret, sixteen bottles of champagne — and that morning we had 12 dozen oysters.’
And it is reported that this was not an isolated act of indulgence. During the 1870s his Primrose Hill home had become a popular venue for socialist excess.
‘On Sundays, Engels would throw open his house,’ recalled the communist August Bebel. On those puritanical days when no merry men can bear life in London, Engels’s house was open to all, and no one left before 2 or 3 in the morning.’ Pilsner, claret, and vast bowls of Maitrank — a May wine flavoured with woodruff — were consumed while Engels sang German folk-songs or drunkenly recited ‘The Vicar of Bray’:
In good King Charles's golden days,
When Loyalty no harm meant;Zealous High-Church man I was,
And so I gain'd Preferment.
Unto my Flock I daily Preach'd,
Kings are by God appointed,
And Damn'd are those who dare resist,
Or touch the Lord's Anointed.
And this is law, I will maintain
Unto my Dying Day, Sir.
That whatsoever King may reign,
I will be the Vicar of Bray, Sir!
When Royal James possest the crown,
And popery grew in fashion;The Penal Law I shouted down,
And read the Declaration:
The Church of Rome I found would fit
Full well my Constitution,
And I had been a Jesuit,
But for the Revolution.
And this is Law .. etc.
When William our Deliverer came,
To heal the Nation's Grievance,I turn'd the Cat in Pan again,
And swore to him Allegiance:
Old Principles I did revoke,
Set conscience at a distance,
Passive Obedience is a Joke,
A Jest is non-resistance.
And this is Law ... etc.
When Royal Anne became our Queen,
Then Church of England's Glory,Another face of things was seen,
And I became a Tory:
Occasional Conformists base
I Damn'd, and Moderation,
And thought the Church in danger was,
From such Prevarication.
And this is Law ... etc.
When George in Pudding time came o'er,
And Moderate Men looked big, Sir,My Principles I chang'd once more,
And so became a Whig, Sir.
And thus Preferment I procur'd,
From our Faith's great Defender
And almost every day abjur'd
The Pope, and the Pretender.
And this is Law ... etc.
The Illustrious House of Hanover,
And Protestant succession,To these I lustily will swear,
Whilst they can keep possession:
For in my Faith, and Loyalty,
I never once will faulter,
But George, my lawful king shall be,
Except the Times shou'd alter.
And this is Law ... etc.
Fred clearly had a very realistic idea of how most people prosper in the politics of expediency!
And I think that Fred and I would have been able to share a joke or two. Perhaps I could have tempted him out to the Beer Garden if he had been in session this July and we could have talked about Cheshire Toffs and the place of the Middling Sort in industrial Lancashire.
As it was, I found a couple of companions in an architect and his friend who were renovating a property for student accommodation. And that warm evening, I was able to tell them the story about Fred’s flight from Germany, his drudgery as a manager relieved by autumn weekends boozing at the Swan Hotel, Tarporley after following the hounds - and his walks on the wild side in old Manchester with accommodating Irish girls.
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