Children of the Industrial Revolution 2

Before they all ended up in Salford it seems lots of our family lived in Ancoats, Manchester.

What is truly amazing is how some of our ancestors lived so close to each other in the 1850s and 1860s yet it would take another 100 years before these families were joined together by the marriage of my mother and father who also met each other when they lived in adjoining streets although these streets were some miles and many decades distant from this district.

In 1851 Mary Callaghan, my great-great-great grandmother (she was Hannah Keogh, grandma Nally’s great-grandmother) was living in the area around New Islington, Pott Street, she was widowed by the age of 36 and left with five children to care for alone. She was Irish, born in 1815 , her eldest daughter Mary was born in Ireland in 1833 and the younger ones were born in Manchester. Her daughter Mary Callaghan married Laurence Nolan who was also born in Ireland. It seems they were born in Westmeath and must have emmigrated during the potato famine. They all lived in the same street ten years later. In the next decade they moved to Salford and their daughter Ellen Nolan married Matthew Keogh (whose father Daniel Keogh was born in Ireland) they brought Hannah Keogh into this world. Hannah Keogh (who married Arthur McNally) was the dearly beloved mother of my dearly beloved father who married his dearly beloved wife, my mother.

In 1851 my mother’s mother’s families were living not too many streets away in much the same conditions. George Clunie was living at 49 Portugal street, his son James Clunie’s future wife Martha Regan was living with her Irish born father, John Regan, a street sweeper and her capmaker mother, Sarah, not so far away on the other side of what was then St George’s road, now Rochdale Road.

By 1861 the Clunies had moved a few doors down Portugal Street to number 51. Martha’s father John and his family were nearby in Loom street. Martha and James would marry and give birth to Edward Clunie who married Laura Ann Ashman the parents of our beloved grandma Laura Armstrong (born Clunie).

Meanwhile, not too far away on the other side of the river Irk, Agnes Armstrong, born in Scotland and recently widowed was living at 64 Stocks Street with her two sons who had been born in Rochdale a few years earlier. Her younger son James Charles Armstrong would marrry Sarah Myers to produce Charles James Armstrong who married Annie Hodkinson to give birth to James Edward Armstrong, our grandad Jim, who married our dearly beloved grandmother Laura Clunie.

Sarah Myers was the daughter of Robert Myers and Jemima Baxter. Robert Myers marrried Jemima Baxter in 1853 but it seems they had already had a few children born before they married. Robert Myers was a pawnbroker at 294 Deansgate which is certainly in a pretty different category to the rest of the workers in this family.

Ancoats was the original ‘Cottonopolis’. The area described by Frederich Engels in his 1845 ‘The Condition of the Working Class in England’ the work of a 24-year-old German middle-class boy, who incredibly rejected all his bougeoise background to eventually team up with Karl Marx and start one of the most influential movements in history.

His impassioned descriptions of the slum living conditions of the workers in this area make for depressing reading. The exact areas he describes can be pinpointed on the map as dwelling places of our family. The most surprising thing about this work is the chapter on Irish immigration, which he begins by saying is an attempt to discover the causes and effects of this immigration. The analysis of causes is notable for its complete absence and the analysis of effects turns into a surprisingly rascist diatribe comparing the Irish to savages.Their southern facile character is used to living in filth, they only know potatoes and drunkeness. What does such a race need higher wages for he asks. They live with their pigs as Arabs live with their horses. They are specifically responsible for spreading the habit of going about with no shoes on their feet and generally responsible for bringing down the level of civilization of the English working class.

This is particularly upseting as Laurence Nolan is listed as an engine driver, which as I understand from other readings, was a job that was pretty much on a par with an airline pilot these days.

The most poignant irony is that much of these same living and working conditions can be seen today in 2010, in modern day China (and other cities of what we quaintly call the developing world). What we now call globalisation is pretty much the same as what one hundred and fifty years ago was called industrialisation and capitalism. Now it is carried out under the auspices of a system called communism which was sparked by this eager, young German boy, who, apalled at the conditons of the working class in Manchester, teamed up with a fellow German, Karl Marx, to create a movement that was meant to improve their condition.

In 1841 the life expectancy in Manchester was 26.6 years.

Aunty Minnie: Jemima Myers Armstrong

Aunty Minnie is another of the aunties my sisters and I have had great fun speculating about. Who was she? What was her real name? We grew up with the names of these aunties floating around us but apart from being amused by their funny names we never gave much thought or interest to who they were. My southern brother-in-law thinks it’s just a typical northern name, basing his knowledge on Minnie Caldwell from Coronation Street.

Jemima Armstrong was granddad Armstrong’s aunt. Charles James Armstrong’s younger sister. She was born in 1870 in Hulme, Manchester. Her father James Charles Armstrong died when she was about nine years old. Her widowed mother Sarah Myers Baxter was living at 125 West Park Street, Salford in 1881 with 5 children ranging in age from 16 to 4 years old. Sarah had taken in a lodger, Henry Hinds Beanland, who she would later marry. He was a mechanic from Bradford who seems to have passed himself off as a widower but I’ve since found out that his first wife was still alive. In 1891 Jemima was still living with her mother and two younger siblings, Thomas and Annie. Henry Beanland is still lodging with them although they have moved to 99 West Park Street. Jemima is now 21 years old and working as a dressmaker.

She married Joseph Washington Naylor in 1893. He was a widower with one daughter, Amy Elindor Naylor. She had two sons, Joseph Armstrong Naylor, born in 1896 and Clarence Arthur Naylor, born in 1907.

She died in 1965 aged 95.

Children of the Industrial Revolution

Our family members really were the children of the industrial revolution. They all ended up in Salford, Manchester, which at one time was the richest and fastest growing town in the UK in terms of manufacturing and trade. It was also home to one of the biggest slum areas in the country with families owning little more than their weekly wage. This weekly wage was barely enough to pay the rent and put food in the mouths of their large and constantly growing families

They ended up in Salford at different times. Some families migrated from Ireland during the years of the potato famine. Laurence Nolan and Margaret Callaghan moved from Westmeath sometime in the 1840s or 1850s. The Keoghs went from Ireland at about the same time. John Regan, born in Cork, at the beginning of the C19th was in Manchester in 1851 working as a street sweeper. They joined the hordes of other Irish immingrants who settled in the slum streets where they doubtless suffered prejudice and marginalization as they formed the lowest socio-economic stratum. Arthur McNally left rural Ireland sometime after 1911 to work on the docks.

Other families had migrated from the surrounding countryside. Annie Hodkinson's family the Cravens had been in Cheshire for generations. The Armstrongs went from Rochdale to Hulme, Manchester before moving to Salford but they may originally have been from Scotland. The Almonds and the Rushbys were from Yorkshire. James Richard Ashman went from Uppingham, Rutland to Morley, Yorkshire and worked in the woollen mills there before moving his young family to Salford in the early C20th. The Clunies were living in Ancoats, a slum area of central Manchester before moving over to Salford.

They lived in streets overshadowed by cotton mills and gasworks, brick works, the railway lines, the cattle market and factories belching smoke, the original dark satanic mills. Street upon street of tiny terraced houses, not a blade of grass to be seen. Little brick built houses with doors and windows opening directly onto the streets, intersected with back alleys, entries and ginnels as they were sometimes called. Streets going down to the docks, up to the railway, along to the factories where everyone including the women and children spent their lives. Matthew Keogh worked as a cord machine minder at 13 years of age, he could be the little boy in the video. Here they worked, married, bred numerous children and mostly died young as a result of exhausting work and poor nutrition.
'The tragedy was that in the most opulent country in the world so many possessed so little'

Children of the Industrial Revolution

This is Aunty Cissy

This is a photo of Aunty Cissy and Uncle Jess with grandma and granddad Armstrong and Matthew James McNally. Matthew was born in 1972 so it must be year or two after this. They lived in a house with garden and a well in Holywell, North Wales.
My sisters remember visitng them and we had lots of speculation about what their real names were. I have now found out that Cissy was grandma Armstrong's aunt, the youngest sister of her mother, Laura Ann Ashman. Cissy's real name was Rachel Ashman, she was born in 1897 in Manchester. The family had moved from Morley, Yorkshire just a short time earlier. She married Jasper Craigie in 1918. Her sister Mary married Jasper's brother William in 1920.