Friedrich Engels, the Cheshire Hunt, the Red Dragon & me

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!

Conquest of Chester in 616: Worth its Salt

THE FRONTIER IN ANGLO-SAXON PRE-HISTORY

Why did the Anglo-Saxons suddenly expand westwards around 600 AD to overrun the remaining ‘Welsh’ parts of England?

Well, the usual explanations involved dynastic skullduggery, megalomaniac thuggery by forceful leaders, clashes within the Catholic Church, and a more general sense among the Anglo-Saxons of their Manifest Destiny to rule England from shining sea to shining sea.

Indeed, the English still like to believe (as taught by Frederick Jackson Turner about the Taming of the American West) that ‘the forging of a unique and rugged identity occurred at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness.

This produced a new type of citizen - one with the power to tame the wild and one upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality’.

Alas the poor Welsh – who were literate and Christian long before the usurpers.

The blood-thirsty tribal thugs were Æthelfrith and Edwin, it being observed that the routine of kingship at this time involved regular - probably annual - wars with neighbours to obtain tribute, submission and slaves.

What seems to have been left out in all this is the economic dimension – issues that still concern us of comparative advantage and trade deficits.

FIRST OF ALL SOME DATES (I am not a date man so don’t take them too seriously)

593 Æthelfrith becomes king of Bernicia (in the northeastern 'Anglo-Saxon' part of England)

[Æthelfrith, son of Æthelric ruled two Northern English kingdoms in the 7th Century - Bernicia and Deira in the period 592 to 616. The 20th century historian Frank Stenton has written that "the continuous history of Northumbria, and indeed of England, begins with the reign of Æthelfrith".]

597 Battle of Catterick – weakening of Celtic Kingdoms of Rheged and Goddoddin

603 Battle of Degsastan – subjugation of Dal Riata

616 Battle of Chester – ‘Welsh’ of the Old North (Yr Hen Ogledd) cut off from Wales proper

616 Edwin become king

616 Collapse of North Reged

617 Subjugation of Elmet

626 Wessex defeated temporarily

624 Isle of Man taken

624 Isle of Anglesey taken – Anglo-Saxons start to dominate the Irish Sea

[From about 627 onwards, Edwin was the most powerful king among the Anglo-Saxons, ruling Bernicia, Deira and much of eastern Mercia, the Isle of Man and Anglesey. His alliance with Kent, the subjection of Wessex, and his string of successes added to his power and authority.

The imperium (as Bede calls it) that Edwin possessed was later equated with the idea of a Bretwalda or High King of Britain, a later concept invented by West Saxon kings in the 9th century.]

632 Penda of Mercia defeats and kills Edwin.

THE CAPTURE OF CHESTER

Æthelfrith attacked the Welsh Kingdom of Powys and defeated its army in a battle at Chester around 616. In this battle, the Powysian king Selyf Sarffgadau was killed.

Apparently:

'Æthelfrith king of Northumbria, at the instigation of Augustine, forthwith poured 50,000 men into the Vale Royal of Chester, the territory of Prince of Powys, under whose auspices the conference had been held.

Twelve hundred British priests of the Monastery of Bangor having come out to view the battle, Æthelfrith directed his forces against them as they stood clothed in their white vestments and totally unarmed, watching the progress of the battle - they were massacred to a man'.

According to the Raphael Hollinshead, the Tudor Chronicler:

"The Britains that dwelt about Chester, through their stoutnesse prouoked the aforesaid Edelferd king of the Northumbers vnto warre: wherevpon to tame their loftie stomachs, he assembled an armie & came forward to besiege the citie, then called of the Britains Chester.

The citizens coueting rather to suffer all things than a siege, and hauing a trust in their great multitude of people, came foorth to giue batell abroad in the fields, whome he compassing about with ambushes, got within his danger, and easilie discomfited."

So Æthelfrith put together an enormous army to subdue the city of Chester at the extreme southernmost corner of his growing ‘imperium’ of conquests – Why?

TRADE & TRADE RELATIONS

If you look at the map of England prior to Æthelfrith’s conquests, it is striking how far the Anglo-Saxon petty kings had succeeded in subduing the drier, eastern agrarian part of England before 600 AD. However, this left the western pastoral areas of England under the control of the ‘Welsh’.

There was therefore both a natural trade synergy and a source of friction between the more densely settled farming communities of the east which led themselves to more conventional forms of authority and the wilder westerners who were happy to trade livestock but who were also happy to embark on mounted raids on settled territory.

The settled lands of the east had granaries, and access to the iron of Sussex and Kent to keep their tool and weapon-smiths employed. However, they lacked resources of non-ferrous metals like lead (from Yorkshire and North Wales), tin (from Cornwall), and gold (from Wales and Ireland).

And, as the economists would say, as they grew richer and consumption increased, they developed a balance of trade and payments problem.

Perhaps most importantly, they lacked their own sources of another limited supply / high value commodity that was in universal demand as a food additive and preservative – salt.

[In the South West of England, the Anglo-Saxon intruders had reached the western shores of England well before 600 AD, having seized a major source of salt at Droitwich and set up the petty kindom of the Hwicce - see lower map].

WORTH THEIR SALT

It has been observed that the Romans seem to have focused a good deal of the infrastructure of their Empire near salt sources or on salt routes between those sites and Rome [Via Salaria].

The Roman word salarium links employment, salt and soldiers, but the exact link is unclear. The least common theory is that the word soldier itself comes from the Latin sal dare (to give salt).

Alternatively, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder stated as an aside in his Natural History's discussion of sea water, that "[I]n Rome. . .the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it. . ." Plinius Naturalis Historia XXXI.

Others note that soldier more likely derives from the gold solidus, with which soldiers were known to have been paid, and maintain instead that the salarium was either an allowance for the purchase of salt or the price of having soldiers conquer salt supplies and guard the Salt Roads (Via Salarium) that led to Rome.

THE ANCIENT SALT TOWNS IN CHESHIRE

Salt extraction was one of the most profitable industries of the Cornovii tribe and was carried out at several sites in Cheshire, notably at Middlewich, known in Roman times as Salinae 'the Salt Pans'. In addition to these main works there is evidence of considerable Romano-British salt production here in Northwich and also at the recently-discovered salt-working settlement at Nantwich.

Condate (Northwich) was so important that is recorded in two separate itinera of the Antonine Itinerary, a the late-second century document which records all of the major road-routes within the Roman Empire.

The second itinerary in the British section of this document is entitled "the route from the Vallum to the port of Rutupiae" and details the road-stations between Hadrian's Wall in the far north of England and Richborough on the Kentish coast.

Towards the middle of this itinerary the station Condate is listed 18 miles from Mamucium (Manchester, Greater Manchester) and 20 miles from Deva (Chester, Cheshire).

Another classical geography which mentions the Northwich settlement is the 7th century Ravenna Cosmology, wherein the name is again listed as Condate, this time between the entries for Salinae (Middlewich, Cheshire) and the capital of the Coritani tribe at Ratae (Leicester, Leicestershire).

In Cheshire, recent archaeology at both Nantwich and Middlewich has confirmed that the Romans established new salt works on green field sites which were then abandoned and returned to agriculture. This was either with their departure in the 5th century or possibly even during the occupation.

One explanation is that these were Roman Army saltworks, providing salt for their own needs, while Romano-British salt makers occupied long established Celtic salt making sites nearby and continued to supply the traditional needs of the local population and the itinerant traders who travelled into Wales and to the North.

Salt making continued in post Roman Cheshire, at first through a period of Welsh control and then as part of the Anglo-Saxon Mercia. The same pattern of trade will have continued and later this attracted Viking influence from the North. The first documentary account of Anglo-Saxon salt making in Cheshire is found in the Doomsday Book of 1086.

[It is also noting that the Cheshire salt towns were detached from Northumbria in the 7th Century, as part of the Wreocansaete to become part of the thriving central English kingdom of Mercia.

As Mercia also acquired the salt facilities of the Hwicce at Droitwich, it then had a full salt monopoly - which led in turn to it becoming the paramount state before the Danish invasions and to the banishment of the 'Welsh' to west of Offa's Dyke, close to the existing boundary between England and Wales].

THE BATTLE FOR SALT & THE IRISH SEA TRADE

So I argue that Æthelfrith conquered Chester mainly because it was the centre of a lucrative trade in salt from Cheshire across the Irish Sea – one that brought Irish gold into England in payment.

And once Æthelfrith had subdued Rheged, the local fishermen and traders on the Fylde coast of Lancashire would have put forward a proposal to use their maritime resources to help wrest back the trade from the Welsh kings of Powys – to the mutual benefit of Rheged and Northumbria.

Remember, the forerunners of Rheged, the territory of the Brigantes (Brigantia) had a pre-Roman presence in both England and Ireland, with colonies around Wexford, Kilkenny and Waterford.

Not surprising then that only a few years after the fall of Chester, the Isle of Man and the Isle of Angesley were both conquered (the latter being a stepping stone to Ireland through Holyhead).

Nor should it be so amazing that, as discussed by Frank Kilfeather, Irish Times, Friday Feb 26 1999, an archaeological has uncovered a "strange" pre-Viking house built in the Anglo-Saxon style in West Temple Bar, Dublin.

The director of the dig, Ms Linzi Simpson, told The Irish Times the find was "very exciting". While working on a Viking dig they knew immediately the house was not Scandinavian, and a comb found in it could only have come from Roman-Britain.

The house was also found at the very lowest level, under Viking buildings. These three factors convinced them of habitation in the area before the Vikings arrived.

The Irish Times asks ‘If it is true that there was Anglo Saxon settlement in Dublin prior to the Viking arrival, it completely changes our understanding of the history of Dublin and Ireland. It also poses so many other questions - if they were Anglo-Saxons, where did they go?’

Well, they probably didn’t go anywhere – at least as long as they were able to exploit their newly established trade monopoly in salt across the Irish Sea.

The Thousand Mile Bike-Ride

Well, actually a whole lot more than 1,000 miles!

In 1960, when we were sixteen, I biked with six friends from Cheshire ‘around the North Sea’. The photo shows us just about to start the journey from the house of one of the party, Pat Cross, in Rowton near Chester. The members of the party are (from left) Tony Male, Chris Sumner, Roger Wilkinson, Bruce Colenso, Keith Johnson, and Pat Cross.

The trip took us about 4 weeks. Somewhere in Schleswig Holstein, I smeared my fingers in oil from my bike chain (or in Cheshire dialect 'bletch') and wrote '1,000 miles to Chester' on an otherwise immaculately clean German distance marker.

We travelled between 80 and 120 miles per day, staying in youth hostels that we had pre-booked. The journey took us through the Welsh Borders and then across to Dover. Landing in Ostend, we happily cycled unknowingly down the Ostend to Bruges motorway (such things were a mystery to us and we confused the horn-tooting for encouragement rather than irritation).

Then on through the Netherlands and Northern Germany and up into Denmark. Thence we took the ferry across from Fredrikshavn to Goteborg and on to Oslo. And back home from Newcastle through the Yorkshire Dales.

On my visit to England in October 2009, I caught up with Chris Sumner at a dinner hosted by Bruce Colenso, and Chris still retains his Youth Hostels Association card with all the various hostel stamps.

My overriding memories are of quiet, relatively flat roads, pine forests and occasional road houses serving fried potatoes and wurst. The hostels that still come to mind are those of Vught, Werden Aller and Aabenraa. At the first of these, the warden woke the dormitories in the early morning by playing his guitar and singing Dutch folk songs.

In Aabenraa, we were at first mistaken for Germans being much more noisy and self-involved than the locals but the Danes brought us apples and sweets when they found out that we were English – shades of WWII. Denmark was also the scene of an unfortunate reaction of my young stomach to a Danish pastry and a Carlsberg beer – wow, how about that for exotic back in 1960!

I owe the photo to Bruce Colenso who has made three successive summer visits to Wellington with his wife Shirley – and whom we hosted for a meal a week or so ago. The second photo shows me with Bruce in Island Bay in 2009 – we haven’t changed a bit!

'Love will tear us apart' - the Wellington link

While contemporary emotive links between Cheshire and New Zealand are a bit sparse, those that do exist are musical but melancholy.


THE WELLINGTON ‘IAN CURTIS’ WALL

A wall on Wallace Street in Wellington, New Zealand, had the words "Ian Curtis Lives" written on it shortly after the singer's death. The message is repainted whenever it is painted over. A nearby wall on the same street on the 4th January 2005 was originally emblazoned "Ian Curtis RIP", later modified to read "Ian Curtis R.I.P. Walk In Silence" along with the dates "1960 - 1981" (sic).

Both are referred to as "The Ian Curtis Wall". However on Thursday 10 September 2009, the wall was painted over by Wellington City Councils anti graffiti team. The wall was chalked back up on 16th September 2009, even if the dates had been muddled - Curtis was born in 1956 not 1966. The Council may now just turn a blind eye. The wall was repainted on the 17th September 2009 - this time with correct dates.

IAN CURTIS

Ian Kevin Curtis (15 July 1956 – 18 May 1980) was the vocalist and lyricist, as well as occasional guitarist and keyboardist, of the band Joy Division, which he joined in 1976 after meeting with Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook at a Sex Pistols gig. He was born in Old Trafford, Manchester but lived the greater part of his short life in Macclesfield, Cheshire.

He grew up in Hurdsfield, an area of Macclesfield, and from a young age he exhibited talent as a poet. Proof of his ability was his admission at the age of eleven to The King's School, Macclesfield with a scholarship. Despite this, he was not a devout student and did not further his education after receiving his O-levels.

From his high school days, his ambitions and hopes were focused on the pursuit of art, literature and, most importantly, music. Curtis was employed in a variety of jobs, including as a civil servant in Manchester and later in Macclesfield.

He was influenced by the writers William S. Burroughs, J. G. Ballard and Joseph Conrad (the song titles "Interzone", "Atrocity Exhibition", and "Colony" coming from the three authors, respectively), and by the musicians David Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop and Jim Morrison.

In 1976, Curtis met two young musicians, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook, at a Sex Pistols gig, who told him they were trying to form a band; he immediately put himself forward as a vocalist and lyricist. The three of them recruited, and sacked a number of drummers before settling on Stephen Morris as their final member. Initially, the band was called Warsaw before changing its name to Joy Division in 1978, due to conflicts with the name of another band, Warsaw Pakt.

The name "Joy Division" stemmed from the sexual slavery wing of a Nazi concentration camp in the 1955 novel The House of Dolls, and was thought to have been pitched by Curtis.

After starting Factory Records with Alan Erasmus, Tony Wilson "signed" the band to his label (although apparently no contracts were ever actually signed - despite the story of Wilson signing a contract in his own blood).

While performing for Joy Division, Curtis became known for his quiet and awkward demeanour, as well as a unique dancing style reminiscent of the epileptic seizures he experienced, sometimes even on stage. There were several incidents where he collapsed and had to be helped off stage.

Curtis's writing was filled with imagery of emotional isolation, death, alienation, and urban decay. He once commented in an interview that he wrote about "the different ways different people can cope with certain problems, how they might or might not adapt." He sang in a bass-baritone voice, in contrast to his speaking voice, which was higher pitched.

Earlier in their career, Curtis would sing in a loud snarling voice similar to shouting; it is best displayed on the band's debut EP, An Ideal for Living (1978). Joy Division had its sparse recording style developed by producer Martin Hannett, with some of their most innovative work being created in Strawberry Studios in Stockport (owned by Manchester act 10cc) and Cargo Recording Studios Rochdale in 1979, a studio which was developed from John Peel investing money into the music business in Rochdale.

As detailed in Debbie Curtis's Touching from a Distance, Curtis was staying at his parents' house in Macclesfield at this time and attempted to talk his wife into staying with him on 17 May 1980, to no avail. Debbie left him in her house overnight while she left to do some errands. Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle claimed in a 2006 interview that Curtis would sometimes phone him during the night and sing the Throbbing Gristle song "Weeping" — a song about suicide — to him.

In the early hours of 18 May 1980, Curtis hanged himself in the kitchen of the house that he and Debbie had occupied in Macclesfield. He had just viewed Werner Herzog's film Stroszek and listened to Iggy Pop's The Idiot.

At the time of his death, his health was failing as a result of the epilepsy and attempting to balance his musical ambitions with his marriage, which was foundering in the aftermath of his affair with journalist Annik Honoré. His wife found his body the next morning.

Curtis's memorial stone, which is inscribed with "Ian Curtis 18 - 5 - 80" and "Love Will Tear Us Apart", was stolen in July 2008 from the grounds of Macclesfield Cemetery. The missing memorial stone was later replaced by a new one.

The Old Darlingtons

The Darlingtons are widely known in Cheshire (and north Staffordshire) as a well established dairy farming family. They also have a swathe of relatives in the USA (who originate in the main from the settlement of Abraham and John Darlington in Chester County, Pennsylvania around 1704).

Horace shared a common ancestry with these US Darlingtons - the common ancestor farmed Brookhouses near Whitegate, Cheshire.

Tracing the exact links between gnerations is very taxing because the names 'Abraham' and 'John' cascade down the generations. The loose association of families with particular places, and changes in official boundaries and designations, do not help either.

For example: Whitegate, Darnhall and Over are very close (especially if you are walking across the fields as they probably did in the 16th and 17th centuries). Similarly, many of Horace's branch appear to have married in Acton Church (Acton by Nantwich) although they were living at Aston (Aston-juxta-Mondrum) - a place that hardly exists nowadays and is more often designated as Worleston.

The monograph 'Genealogy of the Darlington Family - A Record of the Descendants of Abraham Darlington of Birmingham, Chester Co, Pennsylvania' by Gilbert Cope (1900) is full of interesting material, including an overview of 'Our English Kith and Kin'.

Both Cope and I agree that all the Darlingtons from Cheshire are almost certainly ultimately related. Unfortunately, although Horace's ancestor Abraham of Poole Old Hall, Aston (i.e. Worleston) appears in the tree, I think that Cope had become fatigued and stubbed his toes on too many Abrahams and Johns when he came to establishing the links.

Taking Cope's information into account, this is my best effort so far:

DARLINGTON FAMILY TREE

1.Richard Darlington of Whitegate (born about 1530)

2.Richard Darlington of Whitegate (born 1564) – married Catherine Threlfall

3.Hugh Darlington of Darnhall (born 1599, Whitegate / Over)

4.John Darlington of Darnhall (born 1620, Whitegate) - married Elizabeth Barker

5.Richard Darlington of Darnhall (born 1674, Whitegate)
– married Mary Anderton of Whitegate, at Acton 1699
- remarried to Mary Cocksey (modern Cooksey) at Acton, 1718

6.Abraham Darlington of Aston (born 1721, son of Richard & Mary Cocksey) - married Sarah Hulse

7.John Darlington of Aston (born 1753, son of Abraham & Sarah) - married Mary Bullock, 1777

8.Abraham Darlington of Aston (born 1808 son of John & Mary) – married Mary Galley

9.Abraham Darlington of Poole Old Hall, Aston-juxta-Mondrum / Worleston (born 1841 Willaston, Nr Nantwich, died 1889) – married Esther Foster (formerly Scragg)

10.Herbert Darlington of Hoolgrave Manor, Church Minshull (b 1884, died 1954) - married Sarah Price Kinsey

11.Horace Darlington of Corner Farm, Wettenhall (b 1917, Church Minshull, died 1968) – married Mabel Kenyon Johnson (formerly Clarke)

Darlingtons - Cheshire Dairy Farmers

My Farming Connections

In the Spring of 1949, my mother Meg married Horace Darlington and we moved to Corner Farm, Wettenhall (located at the end of the short driveway that curves behind Wettenhall Church). Wettenhall is not an especially pretty village. It sits flat on very stiff clay, which makes cropping, and harvesting very difficult. The local opinions were: ‘Wettenhall – ah it is wet an all’ and ‘Wetna – where the crows fly backkards to keep the shit out of their eyes’.

In the June of 1949 I was five years old and I started school in the Autumn at the Calveley County Primary School. I was picked up at the end of the driveway by a very old-style round-ended bus that collected children from all over the lanes of that part of Cheshire. The bus was the entertainment centre for us kids, and it was here that I was exposed to my first pop song – sung by Alma Wilkinson – ‘Put another nickel in the old nickelodeon’.

Looking back, I am struck by the clash at that time between the very traditional character of village life and its very stratified class-system and the first inrush of US culture and values . WW2 had shaken things up and a common saying among the kids (repeated from their parents at homes) was ‘it’s a free country’. It was also an era of slowly widening consumerism and another of the rituals was the challenge ‘What’s the time?’ - Quickly followed by the riposte “Time you had a watch and paid for it’.

The farm and farming society became the complete centre of our family life. The farmhouse is a solid brick building (with the older parts of it perhaps brick veneer over Cheshire ‘black and white’) with eleven rooms. It was pretty scary and cold (though my bedroom became more user-friendly when Horace removed the bats from the eves above). The kitchen with its open Triplex grate fire was the kernel of our existence, particularly in the Winter . The largest bedroom was never occupied and was allocated for storing apples from the orchard on newspaper for the Winter – the source of Meg’s excellent apple pies.

In the early years, in response to national directives about food production, the farm was used to grow wheat (a highly unsuitable use of some of the densest blue clay in Cheshire) and I remember steam engines being used to winch multiple ploughs up and down the fields (at the ‘Townsfields’ part of the farm that was some 2 miles from the house). I also remember threshing from bays of sheaves, using a steam engine-driven stationary threshing machine. H.E. Bates captures some of the atmosphere of this period in his books about rural England in the post-war period (e.g. The Darling Buds of May).

As rural English people are used to, we effectively lived in two countries. The first was cold, grey and sparse. The trees and hedges were bare, the sun shone wanly, and dank drizzle permeated everything. However, even in this period (which it seemed could last for 9 months of the year) there could be sublime periods in January and February of crisp frost, clean snow and bright vast skies.

The other country is the one that expatriates remember so clearly – the glow of late summer evenings across some of the most beautiful and long-settled landscapes, with Beeston Crag in the distance. Sunday drives ‘tootling’ down lanes bordered with oaks and horse chestnut trees passing farms whose histories of ownership could be recounted, together with the triumphs and tragedies of the farming families that owned them. And quiet pints in country pubs near canal locks or village greens, with the midges playing above.

‘Grantchester – ah Grantchester …’ as Rupert Brooke wrote (it could be many an English village on a good day). For the sentimental, The Shropshire Lad is also a good read – and a reminder that it was the village lads who did a lot of the squadding throughout the Empire for King and Country. Old Mister Tickle up the road, who spent most of his life as a railway linesman at Cholmondeston, could tell sterling tales of chasing the Turks in Iraq in WW1.

When we settled on the farm I hopelessly devoted myself to helping Horace and the men on the farm with the work in the open air – with all the enthusiasm and lack of understanding that you could expect from a five-year old. I remember running along beside the tractor during harrowing until I was totally breathless, having been repeatedly warned off sitting on the mudguard of the large back wheels.

I also remember grabbing a piece of toast and being put up on the large cart that was being taken down fields to collect hay – when the back ‘thripper’ (a wooden bracket like a large gate) that held the load together gave way and crashed down on the cart top. Fortunately, as the thripper came down, the heavy wooden lattice found a space for me, leaving me unhurt but devastated by the chaff that had collected on my toast when it was knocked out of my hand.

Not surprisingly, I was warned off ‘helping’ after a few of these incidents and returned very unwillingly to being a ‘mummy’s boy’. However, I remained desperate to integrate into farm life – a quest that became increasingly hypothetical as I was unable to develop the necessary skills (partly due to lack of aptitude) and alternative opportunities arose in more academic fields.

Horace was a model of the sterling English yeoman – very upright and independent but his relationship with Meg was not without its storms as she sought to release the ‘tensions’ of living in, what was then, a remote area (with only weekly Thursday trips to Nantwich and very occasional forays to Chester). Nevertheless, the men in her family celebrated her as a brilliant cook who put a lot of love into her superb signature dishes (steak and kidney pie, apple pie, jam tarts, roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, sponge cakes, trifles etc.).

We ate very well in terms of the richness and quantity of the food but modern dieticians would quail at the amounts of suet, dripping, butter, cream and baked cheese that were consumed. Heart problems were endemic in South Cheshire – it was not just the Cheshire Cats that prospered for short lives on the dairy farms.

The farm was very hard work, with around 60 cows tethered in ‘tyings’ in the shippons (cowsheds) during the winter, requiring all the food to be brought in, all the refuse to be taken out, and milking twice per day.

When Horace had the opportunity to rent the farm (he had previously been the manager), he not surprisingly took the 65 acres near the house and rejected Townsfields to cut down on the work – though new labour-saving techniques like yarding during winter with cow kennels, bail milking and self-feed silage were already becoming well-established on neighbouring farms.

With Horace, I inherited another family – the Darlingtons. They were a very old Cheshire farming family, whose gravestones can be found at Broxton and Worleston churchyards

The family farm, Hoolgrave Manor, Church Minshull was a vast, decaying but rather grand place. The shippons were built in a large square enclosing a large round pond or ‘pit’ (the Cheshire dialect term) which had cobbled edges. In the old days, the shippons had been swilled out with water from the pit at the end of each milking. The house was vast and the large kitchen was the focus for most family get-togethers.

There was no electric light and oil lamps were still used. There was always a hunk of very fatty home-cured bacon hanging from the rafters in the kitchen and everyone clustered around the range to keep warm in the winter. Old Herbert Darlington , Horace’s father was a ‘character’ who was (I deduce in retrospect) suffering from a potential alcohol problem, as he could sometimes polish off a bottle of whisky per day. The lady of the house, Sarah (‘Sally’) Darlington [nee Price Kinsey] was a tough old boot who wasn’t I fear very partial to Horace marrying a widow with children, though we became quite fond of each other in spite of everything.

Looking at the Darlingtons in the 1901 Census, we find Herbert (17) farming with his widowed mother Esther Darlington, and 4 brothers John (29); Thomas (22); Fred (20) and Albert (14) at Poole Old Hall, Worleston. Esther (born Acton near Nantwich - she was already a widow when she married Abraham as Esther Foster) was 55 at this time and the household also included her 78 year old mother Ann Scragg and a 35 year old servant Mary Goosey. Herbert was one of at least 10 children and so we can surmise that all the girls had been married off.

By 1901, these Darlingtons had also colonised another nearby farm - Bryanes Hall (now Barons Hall), Aston-juxta-Mondrum , Worleston, where Abraham (33) was farming with his wife Alice D. (33). I assume this Abraham was the eldest of Esther's sons and that he was in the process of recreating the large family that he had known as a boy. This neighbouring family in 1901 comprised John (15), Beatrice D. (14), Edward (11), Abraham (10), Herbert (8), Mary D. (6), and William (3).

Horace also used to speak affectionately of his 'Great Uncle Abraham' who was an inveterate womaniser, and who died in his 80s after falling off his bike into the ditch in Bunbury back-lanes, still wenching after a bit-of-diggly. Asked his secret with women, Uncle Abraham is reputed to have said ‘Ah anna very good looking – but I’m very faskinatin!’

Going back to the 1881 Census, we can confirm that my Darlington great grandfather was yet another Abraham Darlington born c1841 at Willaston, near Nantwich. At the time of the 1881 Census, he was farming with Esther on '108 acres, employing 1 man' at Outlanes, Church Minshull. Herbert's brothers John and Thomas Darlington had already been born. One assumes that Abraham was yet to move up to take the tenancy of the larger farm Poole Old Hall. The 1881 Census records yet another Abraham Darlington, born 1847, Burwardsley, who must have been still living near or at the original family farm at Broxton.

Horace's great great grandfather was John Darlington - and the family is long-linked to this part of South Cheshire.

The Darlington household at Hoolgrave Manor came instantly to mind when I read two novels – ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ and ‘The Mill on the Floss’. [By the sound of it, Poole Old Hall would fit the bill even better!]. There was a kind of craziness about Hoolgrave Manor with its mixture of decaying gentility and physical hardship. In the depths of the cavernous kitchen, one would come across Italian ex-prisoners of war would had stayed on as farm labourers.

Horace’s elder brother George now reminds me of Seth in the novel Cold Comfort Farm. Apparently, both he and Horace were great ‘mollockers in the sukebine’ i.e. womanisers, in their day. George was married to my ‘Auntie Sheila’ (I was always very fond of her – she was a nurse with a wry sense of the ridiculous) – and their children were Christopher and Myra (George farmed at Roughwood Farm, Alsager, Cheshire and the farm is still farmed by his son Chris).

The younger brother Richard (Dick) was still at Hoolgrave when I used to visit – our side of the family fell out with him over the administration of Herbert’s will and so I can’t recall the names of his children. Like George Elliot’s own family (she was born Mary Evans into a Warwickshire farming family), as recounted in the novel Mill on the Floss, Sally made very sparing use of the ‘best’ rooms of the house (I can only recall one gathering in the main lounge) and she hid away most of her precious linens and silks.

Despite Herbert’s drink problem, the Darlingtons were very proud of their place in Cheshire farming society . Old Herbert must have been very stubborn and determined when he was young – when a landlord failed to meet his obligations on the improvements promised for a farm that he was tenanting – obligations to improve the house for Sally – he drove his pony and trap through the garden of the aristocrat’s big house, ruining all the flower displays and borders.

The Darlingtons were also known for their fox hunting prowess and their steeplechase racehorses (when I was young they were breeding from Catherine the Great, a brood mare that was half sister to the Grand National winner Russian Hero). I have very happy memories of walking down the fields in Church Minshull to check / ‘look-up’ the horses in late summer evenings.