Anniversaries are often thought-provoking affairs, even at the level of birthdays, let alone bicentenaries. They make us look afresh at our changing relation to our past; thinking again about who we are, and where we come from. Perhaps too about where we are heading?
For The University of Manchester, this year is an especially exciting, joyous and meaningful celebration. We look back over 200 years of almost unbelievable social and political change, and forward to a future full of optimism and opportunity, but shadowed by the stark threat of climate change. The role of the university institution now, as a stronghold of progressive thought in an open society, will be even more crucial in a world where the old foundations of learning are radically shifting like no other time in history.
Manchester Mechanics’ Institute
Reading the early accounts of Manchester, you’d never guess where it all began. When John Leland, Henry VIII’s antiquarian, came here in the 1540s, it was “the fairest, best builded, quickest and most populous town of Lancashire” with fine red sandstone houses and bridges, and “a fair market place.” But by any scale it was small. Daniel Defoe in the 1720s called it “the greatest mere village in England.” The town still had less than 20,000 people in the late 18th century, when Georgian families picnicked in green meadows by the River Irwell. But by 1844 it was an “industrial hell”, memorably described by Friedrich Engels. In a few fiery decades the city had expanded like a nebula, its population increasing 25 times to become a new thing in history, “the original modern” (as we Mancunians like to say!).
In those years Manchester was the dynamic epicentre of change, “properly considered, as great an exploit as ancient Athens”, the young Benjamin Disraeli wrote. Here was the first industrial society, which would change the whole world from Lancashire to today’s megacities like Shenzhen. So The University of Manchester’s founding story, as the first civic university in England, is directly and uniquely connected with great events in history, and the sense of being at the centre of things has always been part of the University’s outlook.
The founding of the University 200 years ago came at a point when a different idea of education had arisen for the first time in history. The impulse was essentially practical and democratic. In the old medieval universities – whether in Europe, the Arab world or in China – higher education was developed to support power. The universities trained scholars, scribes and theologians first and foremost to sustain the ideologies of the state. The modern idea of the university arose in the Industrial Revolution as the hold of the ruling class on our educational and cultural life began to loosen.
The time and place were no accident. In the early 19th century Manchester was the shock city of the age: a cauldron of radical ideas and social movements. Here in 1819 the government had brought in cavalry to brutally suppress a huge demonstration for political reform. Newspapers covered the so-called Peterloo Massacre in harrowing detail; pamphleteers pressed for wider suffrage; great poets of the day like Byron and Shelley turned their art to social justice. Change was in the air; the people were demanding representation and universal education.
Whitworth Hall
The University of Manchester began in the immediate aftermath. We were founded in 1824, first as the Mechanics’ Institute, later the Institute of Science and Technology, by the chemist and pioneer of atomic theory John Dalton, and a group of Manchester industrialists and businessmen who believed that workers’ education, especially in science, was crucial to the future fortunes of the nation. Among the early backers was Charles Beyer, the German-born railway engineer who helped found an Engineering Chair and endowed a professorship in applied mathematics. (Beyer was part of a strong German element in those early days; from the start Manchester was internationalist in outlook, as it still is today). In contributing to the cause these businessmen became our first philanthropists.
That same year of 1824, the Royal School of Medicine and Surgery was founded in the city, which became Owens College in 1872. By then the redbrick civic university movement was in full swing and Owens College became the Victoria University of Manchester by royal charter in 1880.
These two institutions, the Institute of Science and Technology and the Victoria University, we might say, represented the ‘Two Cultures’: science and the humanities, the two faces of education. They closely cooperated through the 20th century, finally coming together in 2004 to become today’s University of Manchester, which excels in both these huge areas of academic life.
Back in 1824 the founders, Dalton, Beyer and Owens, were far-sighted people who believed that we all have the right to a good education whatever path we take in life; that educated citizens make the best state; that democracy depends on the informed consent of the governed; and that is all the more true now amid the daily torrent of fake news and false truths on social media. A critical mind surely is our greatest resource, and universities above all teach us all to develop critical minds.
So here’s to a great Manchester anniversary, with the spirits looking down: Dalton and Rutherford, Nils Bohr, Wittgenstein and Alan Turing, Norman Foster, Peter Maxwell Davies and Anthony Burgess… and its great women, like alumna including Tilly Shilling, Catherine Chisholm, Christabel Pankhurst and Ellen Wilkinson, who famously led the Jarrow March in 1936.
And of course, today’s generation too, who are already making their own mark. We look forward to a rich, diverse and ever innovative future, in research, learning and teaching. And also in that core goal of social responsibility that we can trace back over the 200 years; as in 1824, we are still working for the common good.
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