Victoria County History Lecture

Victoria County History Lecture: ‘Stoke-on-Trent and the Sutherlands’

Earlier this year, the BBC joined together with leading universities to publish the Great British Class Survey. The ambition of this mass study into social class was to dismantle our traditional tri-partite understanding of working, middle and upper class. Instead, the academics decided on seven classes, encompassing such baffling bands as ‘emergent service workers.’ The lowest classing in this modern social hierarchy was the ‘precariat’ - whose members earn just £8,000 after tax and are unlikely to go on to higher education.

In part, this work built on the analysis pioneered by Professor Guy Standing of the University of London. And when asked to identify a geographical location which might serve as the home of the precariat, he chose Stoke-on-Trent.

In one sense, this is nothing new. The term ‘precariat’ instinctively builds on the notion of ‘proletariat’ – the term popularised by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the 1840s to describe the demoralised, brutalised, and exploited working class brought into being by the forces of the Industrial Revolution. As Engels himself described this class in his great work of 1845, The Condition of the Working Class in England: ‘The proletarian, who has nothing but his two hands, who consumes today what he earned yesterday, who is subject to every possible chance, and has not the slightest guarantee for being able to learn the barest necessities of life, whom every crisis, every whim of his employer may deprive of bread.’

And since its first development as an industrial city in the later eighteenth century, Stoke-on-Trent has been known as a working- class or proletarian city.

1 With its heavy industry, low wages, Non-conformity, associational culture, and sporting traditions, The Potteries has a reputation as a tough, industrious, but predominantly working-class community. And whether it is Bethesda Chapel, the Gladstone Pottery Museum, the old collieries, or the new football stadiums, the popular image and understanding of Stoke-on-Trent is often framed in terms of this vernacular, working-class culture.

Well, what I would like to do this afternoon is lay out a slightly different approach to the Potteries’ past and unearth an often over- looked history. It is one which challenges our idealised vision of the Industrial Revolution – but, arguably, has more in common with the familiar chronicle of proletarian Stoke-on-Trent than we might think.

VICTORIA COUNTY HISTORY

I do so, of course, to celebrate the publication of Volume XI of the Victoria County History of Staffordshire.

And I want to begin by paying tribute to the remarkable work which Dr Nigel Tringham has done in drawing together this brilliant work. The 1963 Volume VIII edition is a source of continual reference for me and I have little doubt that this latest edition will prove the same – not least if these perpetual boundary changes keep going on...

I also want to praise the work of Sue Gregory and Pam Sambrook, who contributed so much to the account of Trentham – a subject I shall return to. But it is also worth highlighting the vital financial assistance provided by Staffordshire County Council and the University of Keele in ensuring that this research and publication continues to take place.

2 In an era of ever greater fiscal austerity and challenges to the budgets of local authorities, it takes leadership and a long-sighted commitment to the County and its identity to ensure this work continues to take place.

I’m sure we would be pushing our luck with Eric Pickles if we sought to issue every new elected Staffordshire councillor with a copy, but it should certainly be a source of reference.

ARISTOCRACY AND INDUSTRY

It seems to me that at the heart of this volume on North Staffordshire is not our familiar story of the proletariat or precariat. Instead, it is a brilliant account of a family whose geographical and material back-story is often unfamiliar.

Not the Sneyds – amidst whose remarkable largesse we find ourselves today.

Rather, the history of the Leveson-Gower (LOOSEN-GORE) family – the Dukes of Sutherland and Marquis of Stafford – and their Potteries palace at Trentham which, I think, offers a richly rewarding, alternative history to the familiar narrative of the Industrial Revolution.

For the publication of Volume XI arrives bang on the fiftieth anniversary of one of the defining texts of how we have come to understand the social effects of the Industrial Revolution. ‘I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan ... from the enormous condescension of posterity,’ wrote EP Thompson in his preface to The Making of the English Working Class.

3 What that brilliant, engrossing history did was to chart the development of a working class identity out of the trauma of the Industrial Revolution, telling the story in terms of human relationships and lived experience.

Not for EP Thompson, the dry, econometric accounts of living standards and wage rates – instead, he gave voice to the men, women and children forced into a proletarian identity by the impact of industrialisation.

In terms of Staffordshire, Thompson charted the impact of the ceramics industry as well as the cultural force of Methodism – and how it provided the ideological underpinnings for Chartism in The Potteries. In many ways, Thompson followed the example set by my old friend, Friedrich Engels. When Engels wrote about North Staffordshire in The Condition of the Working Class in England, he explicitly recounted the horrors of the ceramics industry as a formative influence on the development of a working-class sensibility.

Among the children whose work is especially injurious are the mould-runners ... they must go to and fro the whole day, carrying burdens heavy in proportion to their age, while the high temperature in which they have to do this increases very considerably the exhausting effect of the work. These children, with scarcely a single exception, are lean, pale, feeble, stunted; nearly all suffer from stomach troubles, nausea, want of appetite, and many of them die of consumption ...

But by far the most injurious is the work of those who dip the finished article into a fluid containing great quantities of lead, and often of arsenic, or have to take the freshly-dipped article up with the hand. The hands and clothing of these workers, adults and children, are always wet with this fluid, the skin softens and falls off under the constant contact with rough objects, so that the fingers

4 often bleed, and are constantly in a state most favourable for the absorption of this dangerous substance. The consequence is violent pain, and serious disease of the stomach and intestines, obstinate constipation, colic, sometimes consumption, and, most common of all, epilepsy among children.

Which always makes one feel rather different about the gorgeous coloration of the Mintons, Spodes, Doulton and Wedgwoods...

This was the context – in industrial cities such as Manchester, Birmingham, and Stoke-on-Trent – for the emergence of the proletariat. But in recent decades, the historiography of the Industrial Revolution has also focused on the emergence of another social class, born of the wealth of industry. In the social aftermath of urbanisation and industrialisation, commentators began to talk of collective social groups such as ‘the poorer classes’ or ‘the middling classes.’

For middle-class identity was being forged just as actively as working- class. ‘In it are the heads that invent, and the hands that execute … the men in fact who think for the rest of the world, and who really do the business of the world,’ as philosopher James Mill self- congratulatory described them. Professional, property-owning, family-oriented, city-based and often Nonconformist in faith, a self- conscious middle class emerged into public life during the early Victorian period. Many would regard the 1832 Reform Act as a signal moment in the rise of the middle-class: a political reflection of their increasing economic and social power. BUT it was really in the years following reform which the language of the middle-class began to be more fulsomely employed.

5 And when we begin to look at the architecture and iconography of the Victorian city – be it the Wedgwood Institute in Burslem, Manchester Town Hall, the Bradford Wool Exchange, or Liverpool’s St George’s Hall – much of this was a self-conscious celebration of middle-class identity. Hence, the Industrial Revolution has also been taken as central to the making of the middle class. And one only has to read Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help to see how popular and influential an idea this was.

But what of our friends, the Sutherlands? It is my contention that we can also see the Industrial Revolution making the Upper Class – alongside the working and middle classes. And we can see it take place in the most working-class of all settings: Stoke-on-Trent.

THE SUTHERLANDS

So, step forward, George Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland (1758-1833) – and a truly remarkable product of concentrated dynastic wealth. In 1785, Earl Gower (formerly Viscount Trentham, as he was known), a man of very middling diplomatic and political abilities, with a posting as Ambassador to Paris (from which he had to be rescued) and the Parliamentary seat we find ourselves in today of Newcastle under Lyme, married the Duchess of Sutherland – bringing with her a million acres of land in Scotland.

He would not, in fact, be gifted the Dukedom until 1833 (it is said for supporting the Great Reform Act) but to avoid confusion I shall refer to him as the Duke.

6 In 1803, Leveson-Gower inherited the annual net income of the Bridgewater Canal and estates from his maternal uncle, the Duke of Bridgewater. Six months later, his father the marquess of Stafford died, so handing him the family estates at Trentham and Wolverhampton, as well as Lilleshall in Shropshire and Stittenham in Yorkshire. The Duke of Sutherland became, as he put it, ‘abominably rich’; ‘a leviathan of wealth’; with ‘a single estate certainly not in these days equalled in the British Empire.’

It was a truly remarkable haul and, in many ways, reflective of the way in which the British aristocracy were revived by the riches of the Industrial Revolution. If many had done well out of the extraordinary bounty coming from the British Empire, they did even better out of industry. For where were the canals, coal mines, foundries, docks, railways, factories, and mills sunk, driven, built and bought? More often than not, on the property of the British aristocracy. The staggering profits which came out of the land went into the pockets of this island’s wealthiest. The Sneyds of Keele Hall grew wealthy on the coal mines and iron works of Silverdale; Lord Dudley revived his family fortunes selling the products of his dynastic coal seams into Birmingham. For all the talk of a growing working class and a confident middle class, the power structure of the aristocracy received an extraordinary boost from the advent of industry. And the Leveson-Gowers are a perfect case in point.

Throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Leveson-Gower family played an undeniably important role in the progress of industry in Staffordshire and beyond. From the late 1750s the family were instrumental in the development of the canal system, corresponding with Francis Egerton the third Duke of Bridgewater and employing the civil engineer James Brindley to survey a canal between the River Trent and the River Mersey which K. R. Fairclough describes as England’s ‘first arterial canal’.

7 In 1760 Brindley produced a plan for this canal entitled 'A Plan for a Navigation chiefly by canal from Longbridge near Burslem in the County of Stafford to Newcastle, Lichfield and Tamworth and to Wilden in the County of Derby'.

Then came the coal. As landowners the Leveson-Gowers exploited the mineral resources on their estates in Shropshire, Staffordshire and Scotland through extensive mining. The family owned numerous collieries on the North Staffordshire coalfield from the initial Knowles Colliery opened in late 1700s to the more modern Hem Heath, Stafford and Florence Collieries which opened in 1874 and was named after the 3rd Duke of Sutherland’s eldest daughter.

And, finally, the railways – with the first Duke of Sutherland particularly active on a national scale. His chief agent on the Sutherland estates James Loch was in regular contact with the leading engineers and politicians of the time, including Thomas Telford, George Stephenson and the ill-fated railway enthusiast and politician William Huskisson (infamously crushed by a train at the opening of the Liverpool-Manchester line), ensuring that the Leveson-Gower family benefited from and influenced any technological developments in transport during the nineteenth century.

Loch stated his intention in a letter written on 8th June 1824 to learn more about the Liverpool and Manchester Railway Company plans for a new railway, asking ‘who are the more active promoters of the measure’, and requesting information about ‘the proposed capital’. Having made up his mind to recommend the scheme, he wrote to the Duke on 1st January 1825 in favour of ‘the facilities and advantages’ of the railways, and their ‘great economy in the transport of goods’.

8 Loch saw the railways as benefiting the both the existing canals and trade and industry in the area writing that ‘as every encreased facility must add to the rapidly growing trade between Manchester with Liverpool and Ireland, that property must continue to flourish’ and later insisting in 1826 ‘that the Railway will create a Trade of its own’.

Soon after Christmas 1825 it was announced that the Duke had bought a thousand shares in the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, investing £100,000 in the project making him in the words of Professor Eric Richards ‘both the largest canal proprietor and the largest railway proprietor in the kingdom’ by 1826, ensuring that all major technological advancements in transport were routed through Staffordshire.

What he would have thought of Staffordshire’s opposition to High Speed 2 is perhaps a subject for another day... With the wealth came power, Professor David Cannadine once remarked that ‘the importance of landowners' influence on the timing, scale and type of development in many large nineteenth- century towns is a platitude of urban history...the power which it gave a large, aristocratic, urban landowner to influence local affairs – political, cultural, religious and philanthropic – has received much less attention.’

Well, it certainly deserves attention because, as Cannadine continues, ‘aristocrats used their estates as bases from which to exert leverage on the institutions -social, political, educational, religious and philanthropic - of the town within the boundaries of which they owned land.’ Whether it was the Dukes of Norfolk in Sheffield; the Earls of Derby in Liverpool; or the Calthorpes in Birmingham, the aristocracy embedded themselves in positions of political and civic power.

9 For all the history of progressive enfranchisement and rise of the middle class, it is also possible to chart here in North Staffordshire, a great deal of evidence of this ‘strategic influence’ at work. Most obviously, many members of the Sutherland family became involved formally in politics. From the first Duke of Sutherland who was the MP for both Newcastle-under-Lyme and Staffordshire, to his eldest son George Granville the 2nd Duke of Sutherland MP for St. Mawes, 1808-1812, for Newcastle-under-Lyme, 1812-1815, and for Staffordshire, 1815-1820, the Sutherlands would occupy the role of MP for generations.

But this being The Potteries, the question of selection and election – and the cultural propensity for independent candidates - was never easy. British politics pre-Reform Act had an even worse reputation than today – and the poor old Duke had to pour tens of thousands of pounds into Parliamentary battles. After a particularly expensive election, he asked his estates manager to look into the costs of these political tussles. ‘If, my Lord, this were a mere money Transaction and stood unconnected with every other Consideration I think I should be able so to settle the Account as to do Justice to all Parties’, began the beautifully crafted response.

‘But it is not a Case of that Sort on the Contrary from all I can learn it involves this great Consideration whether your Lordship in future is to have any Interest in the Borough or not Your friends one and all concur in saying that these Bills must be paid or your Interest is lost - I naturally asked, What! Are they to be paid in their full Extent. If you can detect Impositions and Overcharges are they to be paid? Are the Pockets of the Parties to be picked in open day? The Universal Answer is Yes. You must pay these Bills to their Extent, or you need never set Foot in the Town again – You may be more careful in future but this Money must be paid –...’

10 But not even money could secure the family’s position in the Staffordshire county election of 1820, when, against the back drop of increasing calls for political reform and universal suffrage, Sir John Boughey announced that he would stand against Lord Gower at the County Election. The atmosphere in the County Town of Stafford at this time was one of anger against the ‘undue influence’ and ‘private’ power of Lord Gower’s party as the people held up a banner at the hustings before the poll which read simply ‘Gold Cannot Buy Us Nor Peers Compel Us’. In the end Lord Gower was forced to withdraw from the contest signalling the start of the Leveson-Gower family’s withdrawal from formal Staffordshire politics.

Despite withdrawing from the elections, locally the Sutherland family retained a strong ‘strategic influence’ within the political system. As the major landowner in the parishes of Trentham, Longton and Blurton, the Leveson-Gower family remained influential figures in the urban politics of North Staffordshire at the turn of the twentieth century. From 1895 Cromartie Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, the fourth Duke of Sutherland, served as the Mayor of Longton and was instrumental throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in campaigns for improved provision of municipal and educational facilities in North Staffordshire.

The fourth Duke also played a prominent role in negotiations which resulted in the Federation of the six Potteries towns in 1910. He was a key figure in promoting the union of the towns, even offering Trentham Estate to the new county borough if the federation took place. After that, the family increasingly turned to somewhat subtler, ‘soft-power’ forms on influence peddling through donations, philanthropy, and institution-building. Whether it was the Sutherland Institute, Queen’s Park, the North Staffordshire Infirmary, or Longton Cottage Hospital, the financial and institutional generosity of the Sutherlands was evident through-out the fabric of Stoke-on-Trent and North Staffordshire.

11 TRENTHAM

But what the Sutherlands were really renown for here in North Staffordshire is Trentham Hall and Gardens. Since James Leveson acquired the Trentham priory site in 1540 followed the dissolution of the monasteries, a family property had existed on the site – undergoing progressive improvements, alterations and rebuildings down to the 1800s.

And the Victoria County History’s expert, insightful and beautifully recorded account of Trentham Hall provides the backbone of this new volume. If in Scotland, the Sutherlands would be notorious for throwing people out of their houses (with the barbaric clearances from their Highland estates), in Staffordshire they would be revered for creating a house and gardens of remarkable beauty – amidst an industrial landscape so often decried for its urban ugliness. On the edges of ‘Smoke-on-Stench’ there arose an Italianate arcadia which remains a jewel of Staffordshire to this day.

The first Duke was a renowned aesthete, who very wisely chose to spend his money on amassing one of the great art collections of England. He also brought his artistic temperament to bear on Trentham, by commissioning the architect Henry Holland and then his pupil Charles Heathcote Tatham to work on the house. We get little sense of that ambition today as we survey the ruins of Trentham, but in the ‘overpowering, cyclopean and ruthless’ Trentham Mausoleum (on the side of the A34 near the Longton Road roundabout) we can catch a glimpse of that past. Constructed with heavy stone blocks and topped by a weighty central tower, this gigantic sarcophagus fit for an Egyptian pharaoh offers a small hint of Stoke’s hidden aristocratic past.

12 But Trentham achieved its apogee under the second Duke who drafted in the great Charles Barry – architect of the Houses of Parliament (alongside North Staffordshire’s favourite Gothicist, AWN Pugin), but more importantly for us, the palazzo-style Reform Club in London’s Pall Mall as well as the Royal Institution in Manchester. It was Barry who popularised Italianate design across Britain’s Victorian cities – many of whom regarded themselves as modern city-states in the spirit of the Renaissance – and brought it here to The Potteries. The Trentham House which re-emerged in the 1830s is described in this volume as an ‘Italianate palace’ – and, as Pevsner put it, ‘in its own way architecturally as important as the Houses of Parliament.’

Alongside the House came the exceptionally ambitious gardens. Landscape architect William Sawrey Gilpin worked alongside Charles Barry in laying out an eleven acre formal garden complete with Italianate pavilion, laurel-tree walks, famous coloured planting schemes, lake and, of course, the wonderful array of classical statues – most notably, a bronze cast of the statue of Perseus with the head of Medusa, copied from the original by Benvenuto Cellini (recently loaned to the Royal Academy).

So, at the same time as Stoke-on-Trent established one of the oldest permanent football clubs in the League and serve as a hub of the Methodist and Labour movement, on the south of the city a radically different cultural experience was being forged. From the injection of Industrial Revolution riches came a remarkable aestheticism in the most unlikely of settings. It was endorsed by no less a figure than the Prince of Wales, future King Edward VII himself – who would occasionally stay at Trentham as the guest and fellow golfer of the third Duke of Sutherland. In 1873 Sutherland played host to the Shah of Persia who famously remarked to his fellow guest the Prince that their host and his estate were "too grand for a subject” advising “you'll have to have his head off when you come to the throne”.

13 But fifty years after the publication of EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, one of the great strengths of modern history and heritage is the fact that we are not just concerned with the story of the King of England and Shah of Persia. Instead, we are as much drawn to downstairs as upstairs.

This trend started with Merlin Waterson's restoration of the National Trust property, Erddig, which had stood for 250 years as the family seat of the Yorkes. Philip Yorke, the property's enlightened 18th- century owner, had taken an exceptional interest in the wellbeing of his servants, making detailed sociological studies of their lives. It gave the National Trust just the raw material it needed to return to Erddig a living sense of its domestic community, marketing it as "the most evocative 'upstairs-downstairs' house in Britain".

The Erddig innovation caught on and no country house exhibition is now complete without some insight into the working day of the scullery maid. Points of access are offered into the daily grind of "ordinary people" as ever-more detailed genealogical records help to establish our predecessors' drudging lives. This was the mindset which Kazuo Ishiguro caught so brilliantly in his novel, The Remains of the Day, while Julian Fellowes received a peerage last week for raking over the past in Gosford Park and Downton Abbey.

And what this new volume brings out with such intimate detail – and, it has to be said, in contrast to previous such volumes – is the downstairs life at Trentham. We begin to know the lives of those working in the farm, poultry yard and dairy – and then, fascinatingly, the inter-relationship between the fixed, permanent staff at Trentham and those who arrived with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland when the peal of bells rang in Newcastle parish church and they arrived in July for their summer sojourn.

14 Of the 21 servants living in Trentham Hall on census night in 1851, one housemaid was born in Trentham and seven other staff came from Staffordshire; the remainder were from Devon, Hampshire and across England – but the piper was Scottish. Meanwhile, in London, the Sutherlands kept 36 servants of whom 6 were from Staffordshire. However, my favourite piece of information is that in London the chef at Stafford House is listed in the census as ‘Pierre Crepie,’ a native of Paris; in the Trentham census, he is ‘Peter Cripin’ – a common-sense, Stoke translation. Interestingly, we know many of these servants would then settle in the area, adding a cosmopolitan touch to the sometimes interior-minded Six Towns.

And no doubt there might have been a little bit of mingling with some of the other less aristocratic visitors to Trentham. Because for all the wealth and pomp, the tradition of noblesse oblige lived on with the Sutherlands and, quite rightly, the beauty of the gardens was opened up for the people of The Potteries. From the 1840s the gardens became nationally renowned, and the grounds were thrown opened to the public on special occasions most notably Stoke Wakes Week during which it became a major leisure destination for the people of the Potteries and Newcastle-under-Lyme. While at the beginning people used to visit the gardens every day, by the end of the decade nearly all came on the final Thursday – ‘Trentham Thursday.’ In 1848 Trentham played host to an estimated crowd of 30,000 visitors many of whom arrived using the new railway station which had opened at Hem Heath earlier that year. In many ways this would foreshadow the modern function of the Estate, as Trentham Gardens today stands as one of the most successful visitor attractions and recreation facility in Staffordshire.

15 DECLINE AND FALL

But arriving here entailed a difficult history for the Sutherlands. For all his High Society entertaining, the 3rd Duke of Sutherland was a disaster: he fell out with his son; upset Queen Victoria by not attending the funeral of his own wife; and married an American bride in Florida – who then, on his death in 1892, disputed the will and ended up in prison for throwing one edition of it onto a fire.

The Sutherland fortune – still spectacular – was nonetheless under pressure and in 1905 the 4th Duke offered Trentham up to Staffordshire County Council as a women’s teacher training college. But it was offered without endowment and Staffordshire and then Stoke-on-Trent refused the bequest, as the Sutherlands themselves effectively vacated Staffordshire. In 1911 the Hall was demolished and today only fragments survive: the west entrance gallery, the orangery arcade, and the east end north ranges of the service yard.

Of course, the gardens lived on – with an entertainment hall, arcade, and open-air swimming pool all ensuring the popularity of the attraction. There were even plans for the great Soviet-emigre architect Berhold Lubetkin (the modernist genius behind the old London Zoo penguin pool) to redesign some of the site. After a period of disarray in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, the Gardens have since revived under the leadership of St Modwen Properties – and something of that 1840s wakes week popularity now attends the Gardens on any decent week-end.

But the history has gone. If we think of Trentham Gardens today, we often think of a landscape in opposition to Stoke-on-Trent: a formal, Italianate, oasis of beauty which exists unexpectedly, almost unnaturally against the quintessential urban backdrop of The Potteries. But what the new Victoria County History of Staffordshire has so brilliantly revealed is, in fact, the intimate relationship between the world of industry and the fabric of aristocracy.

16 The wealth which came to the Sutherlands came from the same canals, coal and railway which turned Stoke-on-Trent into one of the great industrial cities of England. And just as The Potteries produced one of the great working-class cultures of Britain – in its religion, politics, leisure and ethos – so it also endowed an aristocratic milieu which is as much part of the history of North Staffordshire as Thomas Spode, Reginald Mitchell and Stanley Matthews.

Usually, when we talk of hidden histories it is, as EP Thompson put it fifty years ago, those stockingers, croppers and weavers lost to the condescension of posterity. In Stoke-on-Trent, it is our vanished aristocratic past and all of those forgotten characters who played a part in it. Celebrating our county’s noble lineage is not, perhaps, an obvious message from a Labour Member of Parliament – but I think we should be hugely grateful to all the researchers, writers, funders and publishers who have made this possible and, in so doing, enriched our history even further.