CHESTER and the Northern Marches By Guy Williams

Printed By Ebenezer Baylis and Son, Ltd The Trinity Press , Worcester, and London .

Abridged Version

In spite of the virtual disappearance of its seaborne trade, Chester's importance as a social and cultural centre actually increased during the eighteenth century the fate of Chester. The opening of the wet dock at Liverpool in 1715 would certainly have led to the complete eclipse of the older port, even if the Dee had remained fully navigable. In less than a hundred years, the isolated little village by the Mersey increased in size until its population, in 1800, was 82,295 - a formidable figure for a provincial town . Chester's population, by 1800, had grown only to 15,000 , it was a place where the wealthy took or built town houses; where craftsmen lived who could supply the finest furniture and glass and the most splendid silverware; and where tradesmen were able to offer elegant clothes, choice cosmetics, and excellent food and wines. Some evidence of the extreme refinement of the eighteenth century inhabitants of Chester can be seen in the beautifully proportioned Georgian houses that replaced the medieval houses on the north side of the Cathedral, in the terrace houses that remain in Nicholas Street, and around Lower Bridge Street, and in the precious little shops and booths that were part of the Rows.

The farmers of Cheshire had always been fortunate, their land lay over thick seams of clay which retained moisture and provided plenty of lush grass, even in the hottest summers. So, Cheshire cheeses, and salt were principal exports. The big round cheeses were taken to London by the " long sea " route from Parkgate or Liverpool, or they were moved by horse-drawn cart to Burton-on-Trent, and from there by water to Gainsborough or Hull, and then down the east coast to London. There was a thriving trade, too, that took Cheshire cheeses by sea to Scotland and Ireland.

As Liverpool and Manchester increased in size, the inhabitants of those towns needed urgently to be supplied with butter, eggs, vegetables and table birds. (Geese were reared extensively in East Cheshire to satisfy the demand: but not many turkeys. These were regarded as a menace to the crops.)

The construction of a network of canals in the district during the eighteenth century allowed for the carriage of farm produce from Chester to Liverpool . The Bridgewater Canal, an arterial approach to Manchester, was opened in sections from 1761, the Chester to Norwich Canal was in full operation by 1778.

Throughout the century, the tables of the well to do in Chester were supplied with the salmon for which the Dee is famous. By the Charter of Henry VII, the Mayor and Sheriffs of the city were appointed protectors of the fishery, and they performed this function so efficiently that fish were being sold in Chester in the reign of George I for two pence half-penny a pound, the supply being so great that, after furnishing the market for the city and neighborhood, five or six one-horse carts were employed in conveying the surplus for sale in distant places

Joseph Hemingway

"All the elegant amusements and establishments that grace the most distinguished towns and cities in the kingdom may be found within the city, which are patronized by the higher classes with the utmost zeal,"

Under the management of Messrs. Ward and Bellamy, the Chester stage was second only to that of London, boasting a strong resident company, varied by frequent visits from such great national stars as Mrs.Siddons and the inimitable Mrs. Jordan. This is how one show was advertised in the Chester Journal:

On Monday evening will be acted, the historical tragedy of King Richard III at the Wool-hall in Chester, with the bloody murder of the two young princes in the Tower of London, the tragicall murder of the good and quiet King Henry by King Richard, after which he marries Lady Anne, whose heart he broke; to conclude with the bloody battle of Bosworth field, in which King Richard and the great Earl of Richmond fight a long while furiously with large swords till Richmond runs Richard through the body, and he dies as natural as life - N.B. Nobody will take it amiss that they cannot come behind the scenes, on account of the great hurry and bustle of the play.

There were less elegant amusements, too, provided for the people of Chester who were bloodthirsty enough to patronize them. We know from the pictures of Hogarth and other sources that London was a rough, crude place in the eighteenth century. Chester did not lag far behind.Cock-fighting was a favourite sport .An even rougher spectacle was the annual bull-bait, which was not finally suppressed until 1803.

The eighteenth century was a great time for building and town-planning in England, and it saw some very significant changes in the appearance of Chester. In 1768, the old East Gate was demolished to make way for increased traffic. When the ancient structure was taken down, two Roman arches that had been covered by the Norman masonry came into view. These were quickly swept away, and in their place was erected the present gate, built by the generosity of Lord Grosvenor. The shape of the Roman gate is known only from some sketches made soon after this entrance to the city was "improved ".

Later in the century, the activities of the famous and prolific architect Thomas Harrison did more to alter the appearance of the city. Between 1789 and 1813 the partly ruined castle suffered a radical change when all the medieval walls and towers, with the exception of the early thirteenth-century Agricola Tower and one or two lesser features, were removed to make room for Harrison's new buildings which still stand on the site today. The Grand Entrance to the Castle, in the Greek Doric style, is very imposing, but to many people it seems strangely formal and dignified in association with the warmer, more modest city of Chester. The Grosvenor Bridge, which carries the main road over the Dee near the castle, is a completely successful example of Harrison's work. Its single stone span of two hundred feet was, at the time of its construction, the largest in the world, and it still remains a remarkable feat of engineering skill.

Changes in the appearance of the Dee Estuary were also brought about during the eighteenth century. In 1730, or thereabouts, Nathaniel Kindersley, "supported by a number of spirited gentlemen", made a survey of the estuary, and offered to restore the navigation of the river in exchange for certain dues of tonnage, and the profits of the lands that would be recovered from the sea. An Act of Parliament was passed to sanction this in 1732, the first turf was cut in April 1733, and the water of the old channel was turned into that of the new just three years later.Vessels of 250 tons could come up to the city for a short time after that with no difficulty. In 1740, the River Dee Company was incorporated, to maintain the New Cut. Unfortunately for Chester, a clause in the Act, requiring that there should be sixteen feet of water in every part of the river at a moderate spring tide, was rather vaguely worded. ( Nobody seemed to know what was meant by a "moderate" spring tide, and the standard from which the depth was taken quickly disappeared.) As a result, the members of the Company had to be urged strenuously and often to fulfil their obligations.

The main source of trouble seems to have been that the new, artificial watercourse was much narrower than the old natural one, and the severe bends introduced as the river neared Chester caused the navigation to deteriorate rapidly. In a report on the river made for the Company in 1829 ,

Thomas Telford said :
The River appears to be in as perfect a state as to navigation as can be expected or required ....

The great engineer may have been satisfied, but there were many others who were not. Arguments and litigation in one form or another dragged on sporadically until 1938. Meanwhile, the Manchester Ship Canal had been constructed, taking into Lancashire yet more of the trade that might have passed though Chester.
There are many famous people who have left us their impressions ,One of these was George Borrow, author of Wild Wales, who pottered round the city noting the strange habits of the residents, and then, mounting to the walls near the Water Gate, looked out over the rich well-wooded countryside that had been for so long a disputed Tom Tiddler's Ground between the English and their proud neighbours.

As I stood gazing upon the hills from the wall a ragged man came up and asked for charity. "Can you tell me the name of that tall hill?" said I, pointing in the direction of the south-west. "That hill, sir," said the beggar, " is called Moel Vamagh ; I ought to know something about it as I was born at its foot." "Moel," said I, "a bald bill; Vamagh, maternal or motherly. Moel Vamagh, the Mother Moel." "Just so, sir", said the beggar; "I see you are a Welshman, like myself though I suppose you come from the South - Moel Vamagh is the Mother Moel, and is called so because it was the highest of all the Moels."
The profile of the Mother Mountain, so familiar to many Chester people, was changed shortly after that. To celebrate the fiftieth year of the reign of King George III, a group of prominent Cheshire men commissioned Thomas Harrison, the local architect, to build a tower on its summit. That tower, now partly ruined, distinguishes the mountain from all the other mountains in North Wales. It looks rather like a big pimple.

Another great man who visited Chester during the eighteenth century was George Frederick Handel, the composer, to whom we owe the oratorio Messiah. At that time, a small boy named Burney was studying at the King's School. Later, he achieved fame as the celebrated Doctor Burney - organist, author of the General History of Music (1776 - 1789)
there was no comparable school for girls. It was not until the Dee House School (now, the Ursuline Convent School) was founded in the nineteenth century that girls received the same opportunities. To get an adequate artistic education in the eighteenth century, however, any talented boy from the Chester district had to go to London, or even abroad.

Life in Chester in the eighteenth century passed, for the most part, in a pleasant orderly way. But sudden tragedy could strike at the city unexpectedly, and one of the most dramatic events happened, by a strange coincidence, on Guy Fawkes' Day. On November 5th, 1772, at a little before nine o'clock in the evening, the inhabitants of the city were alarmed by a loud explosion, accompanied by a violent shaking of the ground, which everyone imagined had been caused by an earthquake.But the news soon spread that a large number of people, assembled to see a puppet show in the first floor of a building near the Water Gate, had been blown up by gunpowder stored in a warehouse beneath.

A scene of horror and confusion ensued. Directions were given that every person in the building who showed the least sign of life should be immediately carried to the Infirmary, where physicians and surgeons were gathering, ready to administer every possible means of relief Altogether, one hundred and six members of the puppet show audience suffered serious injury, of whom twenty-three died at once, or failed to recover. "Do not these facts evidently prove," asked Joseph Hemingway with a certain amount of hindsight, "that even the smallest quantity of gunpowder should always be kept in garrets?"

The first half of the nineteenth century saw the florid extravagances of the Prince Regent, later King George IV, the First Gentleman of Europe; and the disasters and triumphs of the Napoleonic Wars, which brought the threat of an invasion to Britain's shores, as well as the resounding victories of Trafalgar and Waterloo.

The Industrial Revolution was speeded in the north-west by Arkwright and Crompton and the other inventive geniuses of the textile trade. It brought radical changes to the way of living of a large part of the population, and turned vast areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands into squalid and unattractive slums.

Left out of the mainstream of industrial development as it was, Chester did not remain entirely stagnant. During this time, the size of the city increased enormously. Elegant houses for the well-to-do were built in the pleasant groves on the west of the river.
Fortunately for Chester, this rapid development took place while many of the local builders still cared about pleasant proportions and the suitable use of traditional materials. There were two principal reasons for the sudden swelling of Chester's population.

The first was an industrial one. In the early nineteenth century, the great mineral resources of Flintshire and Denbigshire were being fully exploited for the first time. The lead mines in Halkyn Mountain and at Holywell, the zinc deposits at Dyserth and the copper at Talargoch had probably been worked by the Romans, but it was only with the arrival of large numbers of Cornish miners at the end of the eighteenth century that they were made to yield vast quantities of ore. Once again, Chester was expected to serve as a kind of base from which "invaders" from England could advance into, and make money from, the territories that had once belonged wholly to the Welsh. The second reason was the improvement of transport to and from Chester by Rail .

Sixteen years after the Pentice vanished, the historic Dee Mills went up, literally, in smoke. The mills had been damaged by fire before, but on the present occasion they afforded "a magnificent but terrific spectacle", in which a man "considerably advanced in years, named Davies... was literally burnt to a cinder.. . when found about eleven o'clock next morning, merely the body, shoulders, and thighs remained, parched into an indistinguishable mass, not three feet in length

John Jackson, for stealing Joiners' Tools - Eve months imprisonment.
William Whitley, stealing flower pots - Fourteen years imprisonment.

Occasionally, the execution of justice produced some extraordinary results. In May, 1801 , three men named Thompson, Morgan and Clare were to be hung for burglary. When they were near the gallows, Clare made a spring from the cart, rushed through the crowd, which made way for him, rolled down a steep gutter towards the Dee, and plunged into the river. The weight of his chains carried him immediately to the bottom, and he was drowned, but his body was recovered, and hung up with those of the other two malefactors, who had been kept waiting in the cart in the interval. In 1820, the bodies of Thomas Brown and James Price, executed twenty-four years previously for robbing the Warrington Mail, were taken down from the poles on which they had been hanging on Trafford Green. In the skull of Price was found a robin's nest.

Animals as well as humans sometimes suffered at Chester from the severity of the law. One of the more unfortunate victims was a performing bear called Jenny. Jenny was taken on tour round the country with a monkey by her master, an Italian named Michael. This is how Henry Mayhew, writing in 1851 recorded an eye - witness' account of Michael's act:

Michael was not to say roughish to her, unless she was obstropelous . If she were, he showed her the large mop-stick, and beat her with it - hard sometimes - specially when she wouldn't let the monkey get a top on her head; for that was a part on the performance. The monkey was dressed the same as a soldier, but the bear had no dress but her muzzle and chain. The monkey (a clever fellow he was, and could jump over sticks like a Christian) was called Billy. He jumped up and down the bear, too, and on his master's shoulders, where he set as Michael walked up and down the streets. The bear had been taught to rough and tumble. She rolled right over her head, all round a stick, and then she danced round about it. She did it at the word of command. Michael said to her, "Round and round again."

Jenny proved a popular attraction wherever she was taken, especially with the gentlefolk in the balconies, both in town and country, who had a good (and presumably safe) view of her. But her career came to a sudden end at Chester:
It's more than thirty years ago -yes, a good bit more now; at Chester races, one year, we were all taken, and put into prison: bear, and dogs, and musicianer, and all - every one - because we played a day after the races; that was Saturday.
We were all in quod until Monday morning. I don't know how the authorities fed the bear. We were each in a separate cell, and I had bread and cheese, and gruel. On Monday morning we were discharged, and the bear was shot by the magistrate's orders. They wanted to hang poor Jenny at first, but she was shot and sold to the hairdressers. I couldn't stay to see her shot, and had to go into an alehouse on the road. I don't know what her carcase sold for. It wasn't very fat.

And, at that time, all dogs found running loose on the race course were liable to be instantly destroyed!

There was little hope of Chester advancing far on the road to enlightenment without more schools. The King's School had been joined, it is true, by the Blue Coat School. At this school, which was situated on the west side of Northgate Street, boarders were taken in and made to wear the distinctive blue uniform that became one of the familiar sights of Chester. (The building is there to this day, but it is used now for a Youth Club, and the Youth Employment Bureau). But these two schools, together, were only large enough to accommodate some of the bright boys of the city and the surrounding countryside, and the education of Chester girls and the younger children was still being sadly neglected.

At last, in 1825, a few " benevolent individuals " suggested the desirability of an Infant School in Chester to the Bishop, the Right Rev. Dr. Blomfield. The Bishop warmly concurred, the civil authorities lent their assistance, and at "a numerous and respectable meeting of the inhabitants, holden at the Exchange on the 22nd. Nov., a society was formed according to the plans and regulations proposed by the bishop who may indeed be regarded as its fostering father ".
The first Infant School was opened by the Society in the ( Dale Yards near the Cathedral in July 1826. A public subscription was raised to pay for the building. When this proved insufficient, another hundred pounds being needed, the ladies of Chester held a Grand Bazaar, which brought in £357.The surplus enabled the members of the Society to extend their activities to other parts of the city. The schools were largely supported by the weekly pence paid by the parents, one penny being demanded for each child.

Some idea of the character and aims of the first Infant Schools in Chester is given in this description, which was written shortly after they were opened:

In the Chester Infant Schools no endeavour is made to give to the children either such knowledge as is not adapted to their years or to their station in life. They are taught the simple elements of religion, and useful knowledge; they are exercised in the delightful occupation of singing the praises of their great Creator, and are trained up in habits of obedience, of gentleness and love towards each other. These schools thus become useful nurseries for the more advanced national schools. ...

In 1878 the Chester School for Girls was opened, on land given by the first Duke of Westminster (with that title, the worth of the Grosvenors had at last been suitably recognized). The school was intended as a counterpart to the ancient King's School, which was, and is, reserved exclusively for boys. When Queen Victoria consented to become the school's Patroness, its name was changed to The Queen's School, which is how it is known today. With the Ursuline Convent School for Girls, which developed from the old Dee House, Chester now has three Direct Grant Schools.

In all provincial cities, there must be a constant struggle on the part of those concerned with the Fine Arts to keep the local standards of intention and performance from lagging too far
behind those expected in the metropolis. Chester has been no exception. All though the nineteenth century concerts and dramatic entertainment's were held in Chester, but it seems fairly certain that many of these were lamentable. Typical of the fare thought good enough for a small provincial city was that provided at the Grand Evening Concert of Vocal and Instrumental Performers held in the Albion Hotel Assembly Room in April 1859. A critic said of this concert:

...... It was one of the worst we ever heard. All Round My Hat was very indifferently sung by Caldecotti ; it appeared to us that he had lost his voice entirely. Hoperini's Parody of Hope told a Flattering Tale was nothing equal to the Original; and when he dwelt on the notes E and G he seemed to lack that power which he previously possessed, and could scarcely give utterance to them; he was carried off the Stage almost insensible. ...

Chester was suffering, dearly, from the decline of its port. Both Liverpool and Manchester were attracting performing artistes of the very first rank when those words were written. They could afford the best.

At intervals, from 1772 onwards, attempts were made to hold special Music Festivals in Chester, but the organizers of these repeatedly ran into difficulties. At the 1821 Festival, an artist called Madame Camporese caused a great stir by her greed. "We are sorry that anything like dissatisfaction should have been expressed by this lady," observed the Chester Chronicle, "after the very liberal treatment she experienced from the Committee. We believe she only gave five songs in the Church for which she had £150, enough in all common conscience one would have thought. The air of Italy, however, as connected with pecuniary matters, has unquestionably a bracing tendency." The 1829 Festival was fairly successful, but it was fifty years before another was held in Chester.

Preparations were being made for a Festival to be held in 1842, but all arrangements had to be cancelled as.. . " the bishop [has] objected to sanction it on account of the concerts and ball which follow the oratorio, and the dean and chapter [have] refused to lend the nave of the cathedral for the morning performances". The citizens of Chester are said to have been highly incensed at the uncooperative attitude of the Cathedral authorities.

Culturally speaking, Chester may have gone into a steep decline during the nineteenth century, but from the sportsman's point of view the city could hardly have done better, since the race meetings held on the Roodee steadily increased in popularity and importance until they were only really surpassed by those held at Epsom, Ascot, and Newmarket.

As Queen Victoria's Sixty Glorious Years passed by, each in its turn adding some new brightness to the pages of Britain's history, the people of Chester were clearly inspired by a complete faith in their country's dignity and prosperity and, it has to be admitted, somewhat affected by the pomposity of the age. "The sun never sets on the British Empire" was the national slogan, and in that confident belief the local authorities embarked on their own small campaign of self - aggrandisement .

Left, by a disastrous fire, without a proper Town Hall, the civic authorities commissioned from an Irish architect the grandiose grey sandstone building, designed in the fashionable Gothic Revival style, that now sits so incongruously on the west side of Northgate Street. When it was finished, they invited Queen Victoria's son Edward, the Prince of Wales and Earl of Chester, to the city to open it. Champagne flowed like water. The central tower, which rises to a height of 160 feet .

By the Local Government Act of 1888, Chester became a County Borough. The civic authority was reconstituted, with a Mayor, fourteen Aldermen and forty-two Councillors. As the old Queen still retained, even towards the end of her life, almost all her former majesty and power, the municipal officials probably believed, as they sat in their new palatial headquarters, surrounded by neo-classical sculptured groups and formal portraits of the Grosvenor family, that nothing could ever again threaten the peace and comfort and security of their beloved city.

But if they did think that way, they were wrong. The newly developed internal combustion engine was to be just as much of a menace to Chester as the firebrands of the raiding Welsh or the siege guns and scaling ladders of the Cromwellian attackers. The Battle for Chester was only just beginning.