Correspondence
A MANCHESTER LETTER.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sin,—We are to have a new Bishop, a new Town Clerk, an aerodrome and a seventeen-story skyscraper. The aero- drome and the skyscraper will make a difference to the city ; whether. the Bishop and the Town Clerk do so rests with themselves. In the Bishop, who is Dr. Guy Warman, from Chelmsford, we count ourselves fortunate, for a diocese does not achieve a particular Bishop but has him thrust upon it, and Dr. Warman is a man of character and ideas. He has the harder task of the two, because he follows Dr. Temple, who is scholar and administrator, preacher and social worker, and who would be reported in the Press even if there were no Prayer Book controversy. The new Bishop will find one lively question awaiting him on which the Church in Manchester has taken a firm stand. That is the right of a community to say whether it shall or shall not have " the dogs," and the consequent gambling planted on it in, spite of its own wishes. A strong Manchester memorial has just been presented to the Government urging that time should be found for the necessary legislation.
The new Town Clerk is Mr. F. E. W. Howell, of Wolver- hampton, of whom all men speak well. He has a great opportunity. A city suffers, like a nation, from the need of a General Staff. Everybody is occupied with the efficient performance of administrative detail ; no one has the time or the power to plan broadly, to look far ahead, to work not only for the present but for the future. We suffer now for the lack of vision in our predecessors, as those who follow will suffer for the lack of it in us. A Town Clerk may have no more influence on the life of the community than an average solicitor's clerk (a valuable and necessary man in his own sphere), or he may be a Chief of Staff, planning and creating like an Oberbiirgermeister or a City Manager, even if he does not bear the title. Mr. E. D. Simon, one of the shrewdest modern critics .of our municipal system, has done right to raise the question whether a Town Clerk should necessarily be a lawyer. He should certainly have a lawyer's brains. at his disposal, but what, above all, a city needs to obtain somewhere, somehow, is the wider outlook, the strategic mind, of a first-rate Chief of Staff.
Well, they say, if you want " vision," here is an aero- drome. There is something in it, too. It shows initiative, confidence, a willingness to risk something ! The City Council has fixed upon a site on Chat Moss, which as a quaking bog so long defied the engineers of the first railway from Manchester to Liverpool. It is flat, unencumbered land, and is already owned by the Corporation. The expense will be small, but the outcome is speculative. After the War the Manchester-London air service died of inanition, the train service being both • quick and cheap. Now we talk of air-lines to Ireland and to Croydon and even, by direct route, to the Continent. In any ease, we are prepared to live, for the' present, by faith alone ; " it must come,' we say, or " people will get the habit," or at least " someone must make a start." We have not yet come down to the brass tacks of fares and time-tables.
There is " vision," too, about the projected skyscraper of Messrs. Tootal Broadhurst, Lee & Co., and some people do not like it. Manchester is, in general, a city of nondescript 'and undistinguished buildings. For many years there have been only one dignified commercial street and a number of good buildings scattered here and there. Now there is a growing crop of fine commercial structures, of which the Broadhurst building is- the latest, the loftiest and the most criticized. It is, no doubt, a la Americaine in a moderate degree, and its opponents threaten us,- but •immoderately, with. American consequences. Consider, they day, the additional congestion in the congested streets when a whole row of these monsters engulfs and then regurgitates its population ; consider the denial of light and air to the narrow, gloomy streets. Yet it should not "be beyond the power of a foreseeing–Council to lay down conditions which will avert these _dangers, and can anything arrest the natural process by which, when earth is dear and air is cheap, commerce aspires to the cheaper element ?
-We have fastened a commemorative tablet on the ten thousandth Corporation house, but everyone agrees that little or nothing has been done for the people who most urgently need cheap houses. New tram-sheds are opened, simultaneously the 'buses multiply, and the citizens com- plain that the increasing amenities of transport arc nerve- racking in their noise. Soon, on the tram routes, there will be a population of dwellers in back-rooms and a new justifica- tion will be found for back-to-back houses, since at least trams cannot be run between them. We are experimenting with the one-way system of traffic, and about to experiment with automatic signals. The discussion of the traffic problem proceeds interminably. Subways, bridges, tube railways, car parks, removal of the trams from the congested areas, abolition of the tram, abolition of the 'bus, abolition of the horse, abolition of the pedestrian--all are debated, but the problem grows. Yet the preservation of life is desirable. We have just had the lowest birth-rate on record for the city, while the death-rate stands where it did.
We have had Show Boat here, and the bold say that Drury Lane is not worth the extra money. The Rusholme Repertory Theatre has produced Strindberg's The Father, which has delighted the bourgeois without noticeably shaking their faith in women. Arthur Sinclair and Maire O'Neill have visited us with The Real McCoy, but alas ! that when we had admired their finished art we should have had to be glad that the play was finished, too. In music, while the Halle Concerts go on their triumphant way (with Elgar's " Falstaff " and the Brahms Piano Concerto in B flat played by Backhaus the other day), and Brand Lane's provide their customary " stars " (Paderewski followed by Chaliapine, and he by Cortot-Thibaud- Casals), the most interesting single event has been the visit of a choir of German students with their choral music from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. In painting, a newly- opened club for artists and their appreciators shows an exhibition of modem Swedish art.—I am, Sir, &c.,
YOUR MANCHESTER CORRESPONDENT.
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