Manchester Nostalgia
Manchester Made Them. By Katharine Chorley. (Faber. 125. 6d.)
MANY a Manchester man, as he reads this fragrant, wise and civilised book, will hardly know where he is and what is his relation by blood or social sanction to such a gracious scene. Alderley Edge was not thought to be part of the Manchester that nurtured the present writer ; the denizens of the hinterland would visit this pleasance in summer on " rambles " (we didn't " hike " then) • it was "in the country, amongst the 'nobs,'" as Charles Rowley called them during his Sunday afternoon improvisations at the Ancoats Brotherhood. Alderley Edge in those days had a very good cricket team ; invading Xls (from Manchester proper) were put on their best behaviour ; appeals for 1.b.w. were toned down for the occasion, and not made without some obvious justification. Tennis was associated with cricket at Alderley Edge, rendering the place suspect.
Lady Chorley glances back on a scene of English life in the upper middle classes ; the interest and truthfulness are general, not particular.
"Every morning in my childhood the business-men caught the 8.25 or the 8.50, or the 9.18 trains to Manchester.... They travelled first-class. But any wife or daughter who had to go to Manchester by one of those trains travelled third ; to share a compartment with the gentlemen' (we were taught never to call them just plainly ' men ') would have been unthinkable."
When the gentlemen had departed to the city the women were left to themselves. Servants abounded and, with their chores organised, there was nothing to do but attend to the social ritual. "Calls " were " paid " ; cards were "left," often a ticklish matter indeed.
"I remember mother's concern and bewilderment when one day she discovered the cards of a certain Mrs. Smith decorating our hall table. Now Mrs. Smith was relatively a newcomer, and it had been agreed that, warm-hearted as she might be, she was not exactly one of us.' In the first place then, as a newcomer, it had not been her business to begin the calling, and the fact that she had apparently done so was another black mark against her."
It would be crude to call this snobbishness A beautiful picture is drawn by Lady Chorley of her mother, centrepiece of a group of not ignoble dames. Noblesse oblige meant for her that the better the hand you have been dealt the greater your obligation to play it finely and with dignity. "Now I come to think of it I see that it was not really I and my contemporaries who liquidated noblesse oblige ; it was father's men, the technicians and the managers, the remote directors and the financiers who made the big impersonal firms. For better or worse, they tore the surviving roots of feudalism out of industry and with those roots went the sense of personal obligar on the part of a master to his men."
A Riickblick is seldom achieved without distorting sentimentalism. Manchester Made Thent is nostalgic, an evocation in prose that is sensitive and yet, at times, astringent. Values are insisted on in the light of a more humane ethic and economic. The book primarily enchants by its art, a lost world is presented "in the round," peopled by characters who are lovable because they were what they were, according to their environment. They lacked imagination—it is easy to say that now. But we can learn much from them as we see them in these pages, touched with an irony that comes from the artist's vision and affection
NEVILLE CARDUS.
Previous page
