Manchester in Modern Times
20th Century History of Manchester

Manchester Before and after the Great War

Labour & Socialist Politics in Manchester

By the end of the 19th century, some conditions had improved in the workplace, thanks mainly to new notions of "collective bargaining" brought about by the new 'Model' Trades Unions. The Manchester & Salford Trades Union Council , later the Trades Union Congress had been founded in Manchester as early as the 1860s. In fact, Manchester had become one of the key centres in the early years of the British Labour Movement, and the establishment of the Labour Party.
The Manchester Labour Party had several MPs by 1914, and by 1895 over 300 local branches of the party had sprung up. In 1896 an estimated 40,000 people had gathered at Boggart Hole Clough to hear Kier Hardy, one of the founders of the modern labour party, speak. By 1906 there were 3 Manchester Labour MPs and the city council had 13 Labour members, with Salford having 6 further.

Women's Suffrage in Manchester

The movement to secure votes for women had begun in Manchester with the protests and petitions of two women in Manchester, Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel. She had helped found the Women's Suffrage League, and later the Women's Social & Political Union. Thanks largely to their efforts, by the general election of 1918, women (albeit over the age of thirty) were entitled to vote for the first time. By 1928, after a long struggle, women secured the vote at 21, in line with men. Manchester had been the home of the Suffragette Movement, and there is a museum dedicated to that movement in the Pankhurst's former home.

Manchester's Improved Amenities

Increased manufacturing production, and the wealth which that generated, though firmly in the hands of a few leading industrialists, did impact upon the city's standard of living. Schools, hospitals, libraries, swimming baths, public wash-houses - all these could now be afforded as a municipal duty, and paid for out of rates. And, by the early 20th century, Manchester had begun to take its civic responsibilities seriously. It was to install not only clean water and sewers (due to the laying of a pipeline to the Lake District), but gas, electricity and an electric tram system were added to the city's amenities.
In 1903 the city purchased Heaton Park, for the use of the people of Manchester, and set about the building of a Corporation housing estate at Blackley. Under the Unemployed Workmen Act of 1905, the city formed a local distress committee to seek to find ways in which the Corporation might create employment opportunities.
The Manchester Technical School was opened by the prime minister, A J Balfour, in 1902 - this was to become one of Britain's leading scientific and technical teaching and research institutions. Eventually it would combine with the Victoria University of Manchester to become the noted University of Manchester Institute of Science & Technology (UMIST). It was a city which believed in education, and several schools opened for the teaching of adults. New wealth also caused a blossoming of shops and major department stores where the people of Manchester could spend their new-found wealth. Lewis's Department Store in Piccadilly (still trading there), Paulden's Department Store (later to become Debenham's), and Woolworth's, which traded in Piccadilly until it was burnt out by fire in the late 1970s. Though the building was restored, Woolworth's never moved back.

Manchester Cotton, and its Decline

The year 1913 was a record year for the Lancashire cotton industry. Exports of woven cloth from the region topped 7,000,000,000 linear yards - more than 80% of the entire national textile output, and around 65% of world output. But the industry had failed to invest, and tended to be produced on Victorian machines. Also, exports, though high, were mainly to the continent of India, where British goods had a monopoly.
The First World War cut off supplies of British cloth to India, who turned to Japanese suppliers. Even when the war was over, this partially lost market was never fully regained. India had also realised that its total dependence on British goods was short-sighted and ultimately not in its own best interests. The Lancashire textile industries were to suffer the fate of many pioneers, when their supremacy was usurped by newcomers with cheaper labour and newer, better machinery.
By the outbreak of the Second World War, the British home market was still intact. But that would change within a decade. By the late 1940s, India had developed a powerful and popular movement to push the British out of India. Led by Mahatma Ghandi, one of their strategies was to persuade native Indians to refrain from buying British textiles, and to weave their own, by hand. In 1949, when the British withdrew from the subcontinent, and India achieved independence, the Indian market was virtually closed to British manufacturers.
The failure to introduce new technologies or to secure new markets meant that by the late 1950s most textiles manufacturing companies were in serious trouble, many were closing, and all were under threat. Inevitably, this was to have a drastic effect on the local economies of the Lancashire cotton towns, and most of the boroughs surrounding Manchester saw very hard times ahead, and increasing levels of unemployment. Many of the mills, the main source of employment, went onto short-time working, laid off many of their workforce, or went into liquidation and closed down. Even government intervention, in the form of the 1959 Cotton Industry Act, came too late, and its enforced modernisation and rationalisation was pointless, since by now synthetic fibres were already beginning to replace cotton in many woven goods. By the 1960s, Manchester's, and Lancashire's cotton industry was dead.

The Development of Trafford Park

With widespread laying-off of textile workers in the two decades after the war, Manchester came to depend more than ever on its distribution infrastructure. The port of Manchester still ranked as fourth most important in the UK, thanks largely to the Manchester Ship Canal and its direct access to the sea. It ran directly through the Trafford Park Industrial Estate, where other new industries had emerged. Trafford Park was the industrial home of the Co-operative Wholesale Society (the CWS), a Rochdale-born organisation, which had a major food packing factory and a flour mill there.
The Hovis company, had also opened a mill in Trafford by 1914; their brown loaf became synonymous with good quality and "natural" baking. Kemp's Biscuits were produced there from 1923. In 1938 the Kellogg company opened a major industrial complex at Barton Dock, and massively increased the importation of maize and grain products into the region - their factory still makes Corn Flakes at Trafford Park to this day.
After 1945, Brook Bond moved their tea packaging factory at the canal side in Ordsall. Many foreign businesses were attracted to Trafford, including British Westinghouse (later renamed Metropolitan Vickers). By 1933, over 300 American firms had bases in Trafford Park. The Ford Motor Company moved to the Park in 1910 and by 1913 was in production of the Model T Ford Car. Trafford Park has continued to grow throughout the years, and has offset many of the worst effects of depression on employment in Manchester.

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