Friedrich Engels / Jeremy Deller

Industry, class war, Granby Row, Adrian Street...

A brick taken from the site of one of the mills co-owned by the father of Frederich Engels. The other, from the demolished Haçienda. Together they tell a story…  

The Engels brick (on the left) was gifted to me by the award-winning conceptual artist Jeremy Deller in 2009 when he was engaged in the ‘Procession’ project at Manchester International Festival. It was from a pile of old bricks at the site of one of the three mills co-owned by the father of Frederich Engels, all now demolished. I think, most likely, from Victoria Mill in Weaste, Salford.

Young Engels arrived in Manchester in 1842, aged twenty-one. Worried that he was coming under the influence of revolutionary ideas at home in Germany, his father sent him to England to work for the company, though - being the son of the boss - not on the factory floor itself, of course. He was mainly based at the company offices on Southgate, a small street parallel to Deansgate running down to Parsonage Gardens in central Manchester.

Engels lived in the city for extended periods up until 1870. While he was here, he investigated the miserable living conditions of the working poor; the brutal class divide in Manchester; attempts of the workers to bring about change; and the violent reaction of the authorities to strikes and riots. All this research he included in his book The Condition of the Working Class in England.

It’s an eye-opening read that will change how you navigate your away through Manchester. Reading the book, and doing any associated research, you become hyper-aware of the struggles and the stories of our forebears, and the history of conflict baked into our red brick buildings, and our familiar streets.

Navigating your way through Ancoats en route to one of Jay Rayner’s latest restaurant recommendations, you’re in a neighbourhood where several mills suffered arson attacks by desperate and rebellious workers in April 1826 (the trouble was sufficient for the Cabinet to meet in emergency session in London and order troops up to Manchester to quell the disturbances).

In August 1842, there were battles between workers and the military, including clashes between protesters and soldiers; a meeting of young factory workers near the old BBC and close to Yes was attacked by a platoon of soldiers with sabres. Granby Row where Shaun Ryder lived at the height of Happy Mondays fever, and the Vimto sculpture is situated, was the site of a huge Chartist demonstration; the crowd marched from there to Ancoats. There was also widespread looting on Oldham St, and the ransacking of a police station on Roger St, close to Red Bank.

Unbeknownst to Engels Senior, his son, far from being insulated from class conflict, was now living in a city where industrial unrest; revolutionary underground newspapers preaching sedition; food riots; direct action and violent attacks on the sites and symbols of capitalism; and major Chartist demonstrations were all part of the fabric of life in Manchester.

Engels also drew on his experiences of in the city in the shaping the Communist Manifesto. The desk and alcove on the first floor of the library at Chetham's Library where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels settled themselves in 1845 while working together on the Manifesto, features on the website of VisitManchester, the official tourism site of Greater Manchester.

In my recent short format book about Picasso in Paris, I discuss Sacre Coeur, a much-admired photogenic church on a hill, but completely drained of its problematic history as a symbol of repression. Similarly, we seem to have taken the painless route of including Marx and Engels in a tourist itinerary of Manchester rather than take a lead from the two men and ask awkward questions about the conditions we find ourselves in now; in an unequal society, where the hoarding of private wealth is increasing, and the powers to protest weakened.

There’s also a statue of Engels outside the arts complex Home, on a site where rusting, derelict gas holders once watched over post-punk types in a tiny queue at the Haçienda waiting to see bands like Einstürzende Neubauten.

Artist Phil Collins, who brought the statue to Manchester, says: “In the city centre we need more markers of these incredible radical histories. The statue underlines this and also Engels’ relationship with Manchester. I think it creates a dialogue for modern day tensions within the city. It could be a focus for discussion over the relationship between private and public space, about the growth across the central areas of luxury flats rather than social housing. The statue might make people question the way cities develop today”.

There’s not much evidence that this has been the case. If anything, the current status of the statue - hemmed-in by a hotel, a Pizza Express, a Starbucks, and a multi-storey car park - appears to be an all-too-accurate representation of the way in which radical and disruptive forces in Manchester have been comprehensively outflanked by the forces of big business and corporatised blandness.

In my book Manchester, England: the Story of the Pop Cult City, which is twenty-five years old this year, I went back to the early nineteenth century to begin intertwining the social shifts and radical history of Manchester with a chronicle of the city’s popular culture. Back to when the city’s population exploded in the wake of the industrialisation of the cotton making process.

The replacement of small-scale, old-style cotton manufacture with huge mills, required large capital investment. In addition, those who set up the new mills and factories - the powerful capitalists of the nineteenth century - needed, and recruited workers to run the machines. Rural workers throughout Europe migrated in their millions like refugees from a worn-out world, seeking work in the new industries based in the burgeoning industrial towns and cities. Manchester attracted tens of thousands of poor Irish looking for work, for example. It was all part of a seismic shift; a new relationship became the dominant relationship on English society; that between owners and operatives; bosses and workers; capital and labour. 

Manchester was at the vanguard of wealth creation in the country; cotton had become hugely important to the national economy, accounting for nearly 50% of all export earnings. During the 1820s and 1830s something like eight hundred warehouses were built in the town in order to display and store raw cotton, spun yarn, and finished cloth. The city’s merchants had worldwide contacts, with no dependency on the largesse of London. I’ve read an hilarious account of a delegation of Greek businessmen coming to Manchester to view cotton and finished cloth and place a large order. They were wearing sandals, like they would at home. The local populace considered their footwear deeply inappropriate for our wet and dirty streets. The sandals were a scandal. Find them some sturdy boots!

The working people led bitterly life-destroying existences, many displaced from home, most working six days, some living in neighbourhoods in the city where average life expectancy was seventeen years old. These first generations living in industrial Manchester needed to feel something better than being ground down, needed escape, lived for the weekend. Beer and gin were the quickest ways out of the city.

Intoxication and weekend drink binges are nothing new. Engels, in the 1940s, reported thus; “On Saturday evenings, especially, when wages are paid and work stops somewhat earlier than usual, when the whole working class pours from its own poor quarters into the main throughfares, intemperance may be seen in all its brutality. I have rarely come of Manchester on such an evening without meeting numbers of people staggering and seeing others lying the gutter”.

I write a lot about Engels in Manchester, England. I became fascinated with him during the research. There’s some problematic stuff, including a very bigoted attitude to the Irish living in rundown areas of town, despite him living with a working class Irish woman, Mary Burns. He had an intriguing double-life, with two homes; one with Mary Burns, but also moving among rich merchants and well-to-do German businessmen. Looking on the positive side, this ability to move between two worlds could be said to have given him a unique a three-dimensional perspective.  

I’ve always thought that maybe one day I’d write a big book about his time in the city. There’s some very useful research in the short work Engels in Manchester by Roy Whitfield and several of Engels’s recent biographers - including Tristram Hunt and John Green – are interesting about his time in the city (although by no means definitive). It’s clear from all this, that his life in - and relationship to - Manchester was crucial to the development of his ideas.

As the Victorians sought to get a grasp of the huge changes which their society was undergoing, it was believed that the emerging and expanding industrial powerhouse of Manchester was the key to unlocking the new world. The Victorians believed definitions of their era, analysis and answers, were all-important. In the words of the writer and social commentator Thomas Carlyle, “This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new today?”.

Into this world of pubs, beershops, mills, warehouses, strikes and sedition, came the young Engels. During my researches, I dug deep in a huge book of letters by Engels to various correspondents (printed by an East German publishing house in the early 1980s); the letters revealed all kinds of shenanigans. In 1859, Engels was embroiled in a drunken argument in a pub near the Royal Exchange, and hit out with his umbrella after receiving an insult, injuring the other man’s eye. One of his regular drinking companions was the aptly named Ernst Dronke; he wandered into the road in a drunken state and got run over by a horse-drawn cab.

I have so much more. Like I say, maybe one day…

The brick was a perfect gift; Deller knew from reading Manchester, England that I’d appreciate the artefact. But, in addition, more importantly, I know how Jeremy Deller understands the power of symbolic objects. His work concerns itself with buried history, important threads and connections.

In his book Art is Magic, published last May, Deller neatly summarises his status as a conceptual artist; we understand artists make things, he sees his role as making things happen. In Art is Magic, Deller describes many of his projects, including those very much engaged with addressing recent societal conflicts; The Battle of Orgreave - a recreation of the confrontation in the Miners' Strike - and Putin’s Happy, a film of people giving their opinion on Brexit, outside the Houses of Parliament, many of them pro-Brexit; their anger and paranoia and delusion is off-the-scale.

In Art is Magic a photograph of Adrian Street is given a double page spread. Born of generations of coal miners, and working down the pit at 15 years of age, he hated the mine; targeted because of his long hair, victimised by his father, Street escaped to London to become a professional wrestler. The photo features the wonderfully flamboyant Street with his European Middleweight Championship belt. The story of Adrian Street altogether fills ten pages in Art is Magic; in his explications of what fascinates him about the photo, Deller makes references to the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum in 1972 – which the young Deller visited - and to Glam Rock. Lovely, insightful, connections.

For Deller, the Adrian Street photo has historic significance as a representation of the death of the industrial Britain and a shift to a service economy and into an era of showbiz, entertainment, leisure, and pleasure. Another example of this post-industrial shift would be former warehouses becoming the site of illegal raves; Deller has explored this in various works, including the film Everybody in the Place.

Deller employs irony, satire, and imagination. There can’t have been many other shows with a such a mix of bizarre fun and righteous anger than the one he presented at the Venice Biennale in 2013, including a mural by Stuart Hughes of a giant William Morris throwing Roman Abramovich’s yacht into the Venetian lagoon. Deller’s contempt for oligarchs is immeasurable; one of his works centering on Rupert Murdoch triggered outraged messages from the Murdoch family.

Last month, the main funding body for arts and culture in this country, Arts Council England, told organisations that “overtly political or activist” statements made in personal capacities by artists they work with could lead to a withdrawal of funding. In the furore that followed, ACE scrambled to clarify its message and de-escalate the issue, but the episode remains confusing, regrettable, and, it’s hard to suspect, a botched attempt to censor pro-Palestinian voices. It revealed some fundamental misconceptions about art; an artist consciously and steadfastly avoiding any activism or engagement with the state of society won’t appear to be a rabble-rouser or activist, but is clearly taking a political stance - to resist change and to support the status quo.

The sidestepping of controversy in the way cities often present their history, and the ACE attempts to intimidate dissenting voices, are both part of the same conspiracy of silence about division and conflict.

Jeremy Deller, on the other hand, would be a prime suspect if the Arts Council England police went out looking for repeat offenders. He’s answering, for our modern era, the question our Victorian forebears posed; “This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new today?”.

Meanwhile; the other brick? You know the Haçienda, I assume? A live music venue and nightclub co-owned by Factory Records and New Order, which began operating in 1982, closed in June 1997, and was then subsequently demolished. In a month or so I’ll post part two of this article. More intoxication and falling into the gutter; but this time in the 1980s.

I’ll be examining and questioning the thirty-five year history of the notion that the music scene of the 1980s had, and still has, some role in Manchester’s urban regeneration. Plus trying to get a handle on our contemporary edifices of capitalism, forty storeys high, providing thousands of new apartments in the city; they cut off the horizon, cast shadows over the city and appear to be making no positive impact on the city’s lack of affordable housing, and the seemingly intractable homelessness crisis.

Haslam and Deller with the brick gift