Sir Edward Abbott Parry

“ And if you have to move into a new house it is obviously not the right season to make the attempt, for at this season no money or entreaty will save your vans from being held up, and you may make up your mind to lay your carpets yourself. When you become a citizen of Manchester you recognise the sanity of the Whit-week festival. It comes at a time when days are long, weather favourable, the despair of winter behind you and the joy of summer at your feet. Some day all England will acquire the Whit-week habit, and it will cease to be the special luxury of Manchester. ”

“ The wind is tempered to the shorn lamb. The judge puts his legal telescope to his blind eye. He listens to 230 everything and everybody and both sides speaking at once. He takes a hand at the game himself with such worldly knowledge of the man in the street as he happens to possess, and in the end gropes his way through a mass of prejudice and hearsay and hatred, malice and all uncharitableness, and conveniently forgets that no one has complied with this section of a statute or that rule or that order, and business of a kind is done. ”

“ I was seeing visions, dreaming dreams, or more truly perhaps, I had impelled my spirit into the future and had left my body, umbrella-wise, hypothecated in the safe keeping of the library officials. For in this method I have many times visited Manchester several hundred years hence, and my difficulty has always been to find the Rylands Library, or even the Town Hall, so many noble buildings of even finer proportions stood among the lawns and gardens and fountains of the city. And I had rather see visions of a New Manchester than a New Jerusalem. ”

“ I have seen Grantham at his very best standing in an old Sussex wagon and judging a Bar point-to-point steeple-chase, and I have seen him presiding as judge in many different cases with varying success, but I have never seen him do anything but what he believed to be the only straight, honest thing to do. That is why he was so exasperating and lovable. He not only had strong, simple English ideals, but he acted up to them in open daylight. Any man of his ability and without his sincerity could have steered a safer and easier course. ”

“ And if there was one thing more than another that impressed me as having the real spirit of Manchester abiding within it, it was the lurry. I use the word lurry with the true Manchester spelling as though it were an English and not merely a Manchester word. The lurry is symbolic of the city and the dwellers within its walls. The lurry incarnate in wood and iron is a cart or wagon, what you will, a four-wheeled, oblong, flat tray, cumbersome yet capable of bearing great burdens. ”

“ Attachment to places is quite irrespective of their pleasances. The fields and orchards of Kent, white with blossom in the spring, purple and golden with the heavy fruits of autumn, can never be as acceptable to me as the mud building land of South Manchester. The Embankment and the Strand—​even in its debased modern form—​and the Temple Gardens and the fountain will always be home to one who started life as a Londoner, and was educated in the cellars of Somerset House. ”

“ And the lurry horses, like the Sunday School children, have their feast day also, which is the first of May, when, bedecked with ribbons and caparisoned in gleaming harness, they parade the streets. Who that has seen them will ever forget the splendid teams of Robert Clay, the bleacher, as they swing round into Albert Square on a sunny first of May and gladden the hearts of Manchester man, woman and child, with a vision of strength and wealth and beauty and business? ”

“ For if there is one thing that stands out as typical of the north countryman of to-day, it is his pride of citizenship. Just as Paul boasted of Tarsus when he was away from his native Cilicia, so the Manchester man, away from Lancashire, the Leeds man far from Yorkshire, or the Newcastle man dreaming of his beloved Northumberland, can always remember that he too is a citizen of no mean city. ”

“ One erects in one’s mind a standard of what ought to be, and applies that to the beloved place; and by constantly asserting to strangers that the place is in all particulars absolutely perfect, one begins by mere force of the repetition to believe in it oneself. In this way do myths become religions. There are many Manchester myths, all of which in my patriotism—​the more vehement because I cannot claim birthright in the great city—​I repeat, and shall continue to repeat, with the accuracy and fervour with which I still run over on occasion my “duty to my neighbour.” ”

“ It must have been within a year of my coming to Manchester that I was met by a glad surprise when I went down to the Assize Courts to my usual occupation of sitting in the back row and listening to others do cases in a manner that made me feel really sorry for them, their clients and myself. Wandering along the corridor in a weary and somewhat melancholy way, feeling that I had no real part in this hustling crowd of excited litigants and lawyers that the first day of assizes brings together, I was suddenly handed—​a brief. ”

“ And I envy Joseph Bell sniffing the battle from the upper windows of Portland Street, where the stricken field—​and it is a stricken field—​lies at his doorstep. At the right time he, as a good Manchester citizen, will off with his coat and rush into the fray whilst I shall be idling here, with no right to heave even half a brick in the good cause. But whoever is on the other side, the stable money is on Joseph Bell. ”

“ And though I believe that any sort of Court of Reconcilement or Conciliation must in time do away with much litigation, I do not necessarily think that a bad thing for the profession. How often to-day do lawyers try and keep their clients from litigation and promote compromise to their own cost, to satisfy their high ideals of right action. I am far from thinking it desirable that we should keep alive a system of litigation that we believe harmful to the community because it brings in fees to ourselves. ”

“ Mathew was an ideal judge in criminal cases, and I have never forgotten a maxim he was very fond of quoting and acting upon: “When the prisoner is undefended the judge must be his advocate.” In altered terms, it is a counsel of perfection for a County Court judge or any magisterial person who has the poor always before him. To see him double the part of prisoner’s advocate and judge was to witness a masterpiece of subtle wit and honesty. There has been much discussion of late about the bias of judges. To my thinking a judge without bias would be a monstrosity. ”

“ The Manchester audience is a great audience. Once captured and really entertained, the Manchester audience is a fearless and loyal friend. I have often been delighted to read in local critical columns the solemn excommunication of a play—​especially an amusing play—​and to note the pompous warning to the audience that if they are amused by this kind of thing they condemn their mental condition, and their moral purpose is ended; and then to go into the theatre and hear a Manchester audience in thorough enjoyment of what their guardian high priest has forbidden. ”

“ But if I seem to dwell too much on the deficiencies of Manchester as a great city, it is only because I am trying to recall as honestly as I can the first impression it made upon my little Cockney mind, for to-day when I return to its flags and setts I pace them with as much of the pride of a real citizen as my modesty will allow. ”

“ For we know that judges are only human, and we have seen many grow froward from age, their faculties become dim, their qualities rust, until at length they lose the one essential attribute of judicality, they are no longer able to suffer fools gladly, and the public and the Bar become uneasy of their continuance. And, on the other hand, what patience and loving-kindness are shown by the advocate towards the judge. No hours are too long, no time is misspent in preventing him from error, or leading him thereto, as the case may be. ”

“ For nearly twenty years he was a hard-working journalist, but he never lost his love of scholarship, and he was a scholar without pedantry. In his old-world house in Nelson Street, the site of which is now, I think, covered by the Infirmary buildings, he loved to greet newcomers and cheer them on their path with good-humoured, sane and helpful thoughts. He knew the best of Manchester, for he, too, loved to explore on foot or a wheel the moors and lanes and woodlands which lie within such tempting adjacence to the city. ”

“ And to my thinking, if you want to realise fully the wonderments that trade and commerce could produce if they would, turn into the real Manchester Cathedral—​not the parish church which belongs to the past—​but the Cathedral of to-day in Deansgate, the Rylands Library. Around you, seated in their stalls, are the great prophets and preachers of the world, clothed in glorious but perfectly legal vestments, not thrusting their messages uncivilly toward you, but waiting in dumb dignity until you feel worthy to approach and learn. ”

“ My grumble is that in Manchester there are too many Pharisees to the square yard. They capture and run organisations that were made for better things. They make it impossible for the average wicked citizen to take part in their good works, they bring disrepute upon the city by their vagaries on the house-tops, and they rouse up a great deal of hatred, malice, and uncharitableness in fighting with great ability and vehemence against the right of the harmless, necessary citizen to amuse himself in his harmless, necessary way. ”

“ Then when the sun shines—​as it has been known to on occasions even in Portland Street—​the lurry, with its two magnificent horses, strolls proudly away to station or steamer, no tarpaulin covering its snowy burden—​the harvest of Lancashire—​and when your stranger’s eyes follow it with admiration, you begin to learn something of the spirit and character of the city whose symbol it is. ”