Taming The Wild High Street West
Some early cotton towns were like the American frontier. People poured in looking for a better life but didn’t always find it, there was a beerhouse on every corner, and the ancient system of rural law enforcement, which depended (see pic) on volunteer constables policing their neighbours in their own little communities, was quickly overwhelmed.
Stalybridge was notorious. Glossop escaped the worst of it, perhaps because the Duke of Norfolk, through his agents the Ellisons, already had a grip on things; in his portrait Matthew, the patriarch, looks like somebody you wouldn’t have wanted to meet on a dark night. Nevertheless, the population quadrupled between 1801 and 1841, and when creating a new town which would draw in thousands more, a priority had to be courts, cells and a police station.
The Town Hall was built for this purpose, and was initially referred to as “the New Court House.” It housed the sessions of the County Magistrates, the County Court (for civil cases) the Duke’s own Court Leet, which dealt with issues concerning the Manor, and, after the Borough Council was established in 1866, the Borough Magistrates.
The traders having moved into the new Market Hall, a police station was built in the east side of the arcade, and in 1853 the town got a professional police force. There were only five of them – a superintendent and four constables – but they were probably more effective than what the local historian Robert Hamnett called “a small army of amateurs”. The superintendent would have lived at the back of the station, so when things kicked off in the town centre on a Friday night, he would have been right there.
In turn, courts and police needed cells. However, the architect, Matthew Ellison Hadfield, was better at cathedrals than lock-ups. He put them underground, at the south-west end of the arcade, linked to the police station by a tunnel. In 1867 the new Borough created its own police force, with a Chief Constable, Samuel Kershaw, recruited from Stalybridge. He was also made Sanitary Inspector, and wearing the latter hat (or helmet) he condemned the cells as insanitary. Arrangements were made to use those at the County station on Ellison Street, the old ones later being used to store ammunition for the Volunteer Corps. They may still be there, under what till recently was the record shop.
And after the cells came the journalists. In 1859 Glossop got its first newspapers, the short-lived but feisty Record and the good old Chron, still plodding on after 162 years. They were packed with local news, at a level of detail which seems quite incredible today, and – there being no Facebook and nothing on the telly – those who could afford them (and could read) would have lapped it all up.
And especially the court reports. Journalists in those days could write all kinds of things, especially about the character and appearance of defendants, which would nowadays get them into trouble, so their reports were often very colourful. In the next few posts, we will look at some of the cases which entertained their readership.
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