During the last few months of illness Robert Hedderwick had been assisted by William Fermie. They had apparently been friends from their youth, both being members of the Fife "clan" that supplied the Ducies with their agents. He had helped Hedderwick during the latter's early days in Manchester, and Hedderwick had been instrumental in obtaining for him a post in Lord Ducie's employ, as steward of a farm in Gloucestershire, Whitfield Example Farm, Lord Ducie being a noted agriculturist and famed breeder of shorthorns. Immediately after Robert Hedderwick's death William Fermie was sent again to Manchester and whilst staying at Robert Hedderwick's house in Park Place he received this letter from John Morton:

"Lord Ducie asked me if I thought you would like the situation. I said I believed there was a time when you would have been glad to have done so but I thought you now liked the country better than the town; but there was another thing, I said, and I had mentioned it to you, and that you said that your salary at Woodchester was much better than Mr Hedderwick's. (108)

It is in such revealing letters that one can recognise the human dilemmas, the personalities, and the subjective influences that helped to mould the future development, and in addition it shows how little material recognition was awarded to Robert Hedderwick for his labours and sacrifices. It was in response to this hint from John Morton that Fermie wrote the lengthy but informative letter to Lord Ducie detailing the terms upon which he was willing to accept the post, and substitute the bustle of industrial Manchester for the rural seclusion of Gloucestershire.

In Gloucestershire he valued his post as equal to £200 per annum, mainly in the form of perquisites which would have to be paid for in Manchester. These included a free house, and riding horse with keep, firewood or coal, candles, potatoes, and vegetables from the garden when there were more than sufficient to supply Lord Ducie's household, butter, cheese and milk. Against these Fermie compared the cost of living in Manchester.

"I do not take the riding horse into consideration as that is not necessary for your lordship's business there. But it is well known that £200 a year in a country situation is of far more value than the same in a large town when the additional expense of housekeeping, clothing etc. is taken into account, beside the additional cost of meat and various necessities of life. There are unavoidably a much larger number of visitors in towns and consequently a considerable increase in the consumption of bread, meat, tea, sugar, beer, wine and spirits, which will cost me at least beyond my expenditure here £20. Again there will be required for myself and Mrs Fermie additional in clothes and washing per annum £15. Also rent for a seat in church £5."

William Fermie gave also an illuminating account of the careful mode of living of his predecessor who had received perhaps £150 per annum.

"Having closely examined the late Mr Hedderwick's books I could easily see (and Mrs Hedderwick showed me their annual expenditure in housekeeping over several years) that I could not live on Mr Hedderwick's salary and assume that station in society which I consider your steward in Manchester ought to take. Mr Hedderwick's expenditure has been quite £200 a year ever since he came there and from observation I know they live very carefully. It has only been from having the surveyorship of the Bury and Ashton roads, in addition and latterly a few small agencies and a good deal of valuations of property taken up by railroad which taken altogether has produced him £150 annually besides. A stranger cannot expect any of these things to come all at once..." (110)

William Fermie was appointed to the post, and a salary of £250 was given to him by Lord Ducie, but his tenure of the stewardship lasted for but little more than six years, for he too succumbed to the miasmic atmosphere of nineteenth-century Manchester.

This period in Strangeways' history was of course also the heyday of the railway age, and it was the advent of the railway that was to profoundly alter the aspect of Strangeways, not only physically but also socially and economically. As early as January 1825, John Morton had written to Robert Hedderwick enquiring "How does the railroad come on? The folk are all railroad mad hereabouts but I believe you began first in Manchester." (111) Three months later he wrote, "I wish to know particularly your opinion of the rail road between Manchester and Liverpool, will it be an advantage to Manchester?" (112) The railway in question opened, of course, in 1330, but it was not long before sights were set on Strangeways for the route of a new railway, and this was immediately opposed by Lord Ducie once he realized that its effects might not all be beneficial to his estate and his pocket. In 1831 John Morton wrote to Hedderwick,

"I go tomorrow night to London; you must send me everything you can manufacture up in your Manchester way against the new rail road and against all rail roads." (113)

This was closely followed by a letter two days later

"I came here this morning [to London] and went immediately to work for you in arranging to oppose this rascally railroad and your letter which Lord Ducie received this morning I hope will have full weight in exposing anything but the gentlemanly conduct of those who want this bill to pass. Lord Ducie has been duped by them in promising not to oppose the bill, and they withdrew the clause through his property, but he now find if they carry the bill so far this year, next year they will be able to add this branch also." (114)

The correspondence doe not mention the affair again, and it appears that on this occasion at least the railwaymaniacs' ambitions were thwarted. Any delay was only temporary, and at the end of 1838 John Morton wrote again:

"No less than three railway companies are soliciting a bill, each to go through Lord Ducie's property and that at the same place, or are they all to terminate at Mrs Clowes' old house. Lord Ducie has sent three sets of paper to you with his signature and seal and you are to fill up the word assent or dissent a you think right." (115)

Thus it was that one man's decision was to bring about a massive change to Strangeways, and to Manchester itself. It is also a reflection of the esteem by now granted to Robert Hedderwick by Lord Ducie that such an important decision could be left entirely to him.

The preformed image of Strangeways maintained by Lord Ducie was that of a genteel suburb in the Georgian style: "smart" façades complete with railings, behind which dwelt respectable merchants of Manchester and their families, and it is enlightening to examine the evidence of a quite different observer of Manchester, Frederick Engels. When he came to Manchester to work for the family firm, he lived at first at 70, Great Ducie Street, Strangeways, moving after two years to number 48, Great Ducie Street, which remained his home till 1858. (116) It was from Mrs Tatham's boarding house that Engels made his sorties into the seamier parts of Manchester, and he no doubt had Great Ducie Street in mind when he wrote:

"For the thoroughfares leading from the Exchange in all directions out of the city are lined, on both sides, with an almost unbroken series of shops, and are so kept in the hands of the middle and lower bourgeoisie, which, out of self-interest, cares for a decent and cleanly external appearance and can care for it" (117)

As for the pleasant, rural prospect of bygone Strangeways, and the attractive, fish-filled river Irk, Engels offers a disquieting contrast:

"At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul-smelling stream, full of debris and refuse, which it deposits on the shallower right bank." (118)

The right bank was of course the Strangeways side of the river, known as Walker's Croft, and the prospect here was scarcely appealing.

"On the lower right bank stands a long row of houses and mills; the second house being a ruin without a roof, piled with debris; the third stands so low that the lowest floor is uninhabitable and therefore without windows or doors. Here the background embraces the pauper burial ground, the station of the Liverpool and Leeds railway, and, in the rear of this, the Workhouse, the "Poor-Law Bastille" of Manchester which like a citadel looks threateningly down from behind its high walls and parapets on the hilltop, upon the working-people's quarter below." (119)

The pauper burial ground mentioned by Engels had existed since 1787, antedating even the Workhouse, and the utilitarian lines upon which it was run do not excite the same admiration today as was no doubt elicited from readers of 1816, when, because of the vast number of pauper deaths then occurring,

"an economical method of interring the bodies of the dead has been adopted. A very large grave, or more properly a pit, for the reception of mortality is digg'd and covered up, when not actually in use for depositing the remains of the dead, with planks, which are locked down in the night, until the hole is filled up with coffins piled besides and upon one another. The cavern of death is then closed, and covered up with earth, and another pit is prepared and filled in the same manner... many thousands of bodies have been interred in this singular depot, it might almost be said, magazine of mortality." (120)

Engels witnessed the arrival of the railway at Walker's Croft, and has left us a nauseous indictment of the manner in which it was treated.

"About two years ago a railroad was carried through [the pauper burial ground]. If it had been a respectable cemetery how the bourgeoisie and the clergy would have shrieked at the desecration! But it was a pauper burial ground, the resting place of the outcast and superfluous, so no one concerned himself about the matter. It was not even thought worth-while to convey the partially decayed bodies to the other side of the cemetery; they were heaped up just as it happened, and piles were driven into newly-made graves, so that the water oozed out of the swampy ground, pregnant with putrefying matter, and filled the neighbourhood with the most revolting and injurious gases. The disgusting brutality which accompanied this work I cannot describe in further detail." (121)

Victoria Station, Hunts Bank, 1844

The arrival of the railway precipitated the change in the character of Strangeways that had started many years previously, and which had been so far resisted by Lord Ducie, and this was the gradual metamorphosis from residential suburb to shopping centre. The 1840s were difficult years, for Strangeways as elsewhere. Many houses were vacant, for people were unable to afford the rents, like the unfortunate Mr Swain who wrote to William Fermie just after Christmas in 1843,

"I have sent you the key of 37, Ducie Street and am sorry to be compelled to leave in the way I have. I have had one execution in the house which stripped me of many of my best things and I found it impossible to stay in the house... I would be honest if I could but I cannot see three children starve." (122)

This was, too, the time of the Chartist riots, past Strangeways on Kersal Moor, a traditional place of assembly for Manchester folk, and one resident of Strangeways recalled how

"One day a party of ruffians came running up the Cheetham Hill Road [formerly York Road] carrying with them sacks filled with stones which they had taken from the sides of the road, where they had been placed in heaps for repairing. These fellows rushed to the doors of the houses threatening to smash both doors and windows unless something was given to them." (123)

The change in policy came about largely as a result of the attempt by one Joseph Lodge to open a butcher's shop. In the January of 1843 William Fermie sought Lord Ducie's advice on how to deal with such a breach of one of the principal covenants, and received the reply that "as regards the Butcher's shop, if you proceed to give a notice, you must of course if that is ineffectual proceed to ejectment; as the former course would be ridiculous without the latter." (124)

Fermie wrote to Lodge a month later giving the warning, and notified him in August that proceedings were to be taken. (125) The reaction to this must have come as a considerable surprise to Lord Ducie and his agent, for in answer to all their efforts to maintain the good character of Strangeways, they received a petition from "Owners of land held under lease from your Lordship" asking for an extension in the leases to permit the trades of "Butcher and Plumber, besides other kinds of shops which are now open and which are not objected to as a nuisance." The reasons given were "the increasing population, and the railway terminus coming into the immediate neighbourhood; as such trades would not in any way deteriorate but rather enhance your Lordship's estate, and also be of interest to the owners of property." (126) The petition had seventy-nine signatures affixed, the first being "on behalf of the Trustees of the Strangeways Unitarian Congregation." The sequel to the petition was a terse memorandum to the Earl of Ducie from Fermie stating "Earl Ducie will not take any further steps against butchers' stalls or shops after so many of the tenants petitioning for liberty to open such shops." (127) The memorandum was approved, and the main thoroughfares were, in Engels' words, "lined... with an almost unbroken series of shops." (128)

One aspect of Strangeways' history of which so far we have seen little, is its population. Strangeways was neither a parish nor even a township, so that no figures are available for the population of Strangeways alone. The figures for the whole township of Cheetham do, nevertheless, give a good indication of the rapid increase in population occurring especially during the 1840s.

Year Males Females Total

1801 341 411 752

1811 531 639 1170

1821 894 1113 2027

1831 1820 2205 4025

1841 2681 3401 6082

1851 4956 6219 11175

The census returns for 1851 give us, naturally, a much clearer picture of the social composition of Strangeways at the time. As might be expected, most heads of households came from Manchester, or it would be more accurate to say they formed the largest single group, but the fact that they formed only a quarter of all heads of households in Strangeways is a striking indication of the importance of immigration to Manchester at that time. As for their occupations, there is a marked preponderance of the service and distributive trades - already by 1851 Strangeways was becoming dominated by shopkeepers and their employees.

1851 Census: Heads of Households

Birthplace

Manchester 156

Lancashire 101

Cheshire 49

Yorkshire 62

Other northern counties 53

Elsewhere in England 70

Wales 15

Ireland 23

Scotland 16

Foreign 15

Age

15-

20- 26

25- 76

30- 101

35- 72

40- 75

45- 57

50- 96

60- 43

70- 16

Occupation

Professional 46

Services 78

Clerical 44

Warehousemen 38

Building 26

Printing 28

Textiles 53

Distributive 131

Crafts 32

Engineering 36

Marital Status

Married Male 428

Single Male 22

Widowed Male 28

Married Female 11

Single Female 10

Widowed Female 62

Number of Children

1 81

2 77

3 53

4 44

5 29

6 10

7 8

8 5

9 2

As for their age distribution, as we might expect in a population largely composed of newcomers who had settled in Manchester in pursuit of work, most heads belonged to the 25-40 age group. There were also a great many single males living in Strangeways at the time as lodgers, just as there were a great many unmarried females who worked as domestic servants.