Royal visits to Manchester and Salford during the reign of Queen Victoria

Social and political change

One of the great moral features of Manchester – of the manufacturing districts generally – is the extent to which the Sunday-School system is carried… educating thousands who would otherwise have grown up in utter and deplorable ignorance.[5]

The Queen responded with an address in which she expressed her "great pleasure ... seeing the attention that was paid to the education of the rising generation in Manchester and Salford".^[6] From Peel Park the royal procession continued into Manchester and the combined spectator figure recorded for both boroughs was 800,000, which The Times described as, "a population new on the soil, very mixed, very laborious, accustomed to hear all sides of political questions and to decide them on Utilitarian principles".^[7] This practical, down-to-earth stereotype of the people of Manchester was, by the 1850s visible as the warehouse, representative of the town's trading success, appeared and the advances of industry and technology, close to the heart of Prince Albert, were at the centre of its achievements.

1857

In May 1857 Prince Albert arrived in Manchester, one month before the Queen, to open the

Art Treasures Exhibition and also inaugurate one of the first portrait statues to be erected of Queen Victoria during her reign. The statue in Peel Park commemorated the Royal visit to Salford in 1851 and the aforementioned success of the 80, 000 strong, Sunday schools' performance of the National Anthem. Like 1851 the visit attracted large crowds and Manchester was awash with colour, as the Standard and Royal Arms flags decorating the majestic Watts Warehouse celebrated the city's civic pride and dedication to the crown; a scene which would be replicated on a much grander scale in 1894.

On 21 May the Queen visited to perform the official opening of the Manchester Ship Canal. The Ship Canal took seven years to build and stretched for 35 miles, creating the city's link to the open sea and independent shipping. The Queen knighted the mayor of Salford, William Henry Bailey and the lord mayor of Manchester, Anthony Marshall at the opening of the Canal.^[8]

In the run up to the visit, the city had experienced periods of both hardship and prosperity, with the depression of the 1870s and the continuing cycle of the cotton trade, thus the ship canal symbolised the future of not only cotton, but also trade in general for Manchester:

The strain of purely joyous sentiment suggestive of youth and high hope and bright anticipation, scarcely perhaps to be looked for in those more recent years.^[9]

The Manchester Guardian hailed the importance and success of the visit, in which the Queen saw a Manchester that "did not exist in 1851 or 1857"^[10] and quoted the Morning Post's claims that the ceremony was one of "exceptional interest and importance."^[11] Not only did the Queen officially open the canal, which represented technological and engineering advances, but she also viewed a city changed in appearance since her last visit. The Queen rode past the stately warehouses, like that of Messrs. Watt on Portland Street, the newly built Manchester Town Hall (1877), with the Albert Memorial, in Albert Square, Manchester's tribute to her late husband and finally the emerging commercial buildings epitomised in Lewis's Department store, all of which shaped the Manchester still visible to today's citizens and visitors. Moreover, as Sir Bosdin Leech commented, in the Leech Family Diaries, the crowd was vast and represented a city emerging out of the uncertainty of the third quarter of the century.^[12] The ship canal, the changing city and the cheering crowds signified a Manchester built on determination and innovation, both symbolic of the values of Queen Victoria and her late husband.

Historical significance

Although for its celebration of engineering achievement and vast attendance 1894 was arguably the most significant of royal visits to the region, the position of Manchester as a modern city and the plight of the working man during the nineteenth century reveals all three occasions to be of equal historical importance. As The Times's comments in 1851 emphasised, Manchester was new and built largely on industrious principles, which was in direct conflict with the traditions and ancient history of the Monarchy; therefore, the town's response and public support of the visits may be argued as surprising. However, it is clear from the social and political changes, which occurred between the Queen's accession to the throne and her first visit to the town that Chartism and forms of Republican politics had failed to provoke significant anti-royalist feelings. Moreover, the failure of Chartism to instigate change had forced the proletariat to reconsider his political stance, which ultimately led to his shift towards that of the Anglican Tory. This, when coupled with underlying tensions towards the Irish Catholics saw the emergence of a new working-class man, who, in the second half of the century, subconsciously reinstated the Head of the Church of England as the symbol of Englishness and displayed his national pride through a revived loyalty to the crown. A notion summed up by the Manchester Guardian, reporting on the visit of 1857 and hailing the, "proud spectacle for everyone rejoicing in the name and character of Englishmen".^[13]

See also

• History of Manchester

References