The Earthquake Thieves
It's the early hours on 9 November 1852 and families across Manchester have the sensation that thieves are breaking into their homes
Mister Plant, the curator of Peel Park in Salford, was in fear for his life.
Awoken in the night by his bedroom door flying open, he seized his gun and began charging round his house hunting the burglars.
Failing to find them, he went back to bed but kept one eye open until the dawn.
It was a pattern being repeated all over Manchester that night.
In Blackley, the latch of another door was forced open — causing the everyone in the house to panic.
Others feared there were men under the bed when their matress suddenly bounced upwards.
It was 4.30am on 9 November 1852. But the strange door openings were not caused by burglars. It was an earthquake.
Today we are a well-used to the idea that we could be hit with a small earthquake once in a blue moon.
In 2002, Manchester was hit by a “swarm” of 116 quakes — many of them were tiny although the largest had a magnitude of 3.9.
But in 1852, many working people could not read or write and had no access to news and little knowledge of science.
The tremor that woke them from their beds, which had its epicentre off the coast of North Wales, had a magnitude of 5.3.
According to the Manchester Courier, people blamed the city’s criminals.
“One very general impression appears to have been that thieves were breaking into the house or rather into the room in which the parties were sleeping,” it said.
“We have heard of more than one person who got out of bed to look for the assailants.
“Their alarm was partly caused by the loud chattering of the windows, which rattled with great violence, and by the shaking of the room, as if some heavy person was walking rapidly about in it.”
It probably says something about the state of the houses in Manchester that they were so badly rattled by the earthquake that night.
The editor of the Courier said it was “wonderful” that the jerry-built homes in Hulme were not been shaken down.
By wonderful, he probably meant surprising.
The people living in them thought a heavily-laden waggon was speeding along the road and shaking the houses, he said.
One house in Devonshire Street was so badly shaken that the plates fell out of a rack and smashed on the kitchen floor.
Other people described feeling as though they were on a ship in a heavy sea.
“Bedstocks vibrated distinctly, dressing tables were shaken, bed hangings flapped backwards and forwards, and houses seemed to be in a general tremor,” the Courier said.
A Mr Gendall, who lived in Islington Street, Salford, was awoken by his wife as the bed began to shake and the windows started rattling.
In Cheetham Hill, a sanguine former Army officer who had served in the Caribbean, went back to bed.
“Now, if we’d have been in Jamaica,” he told his wife at breakfast in the morning, “they would have said that was an earthquake last night.”
But an attorney named Thomas Higson from Bowdon told another newspaper, the Manchester Times, he feared his wife had taken ill when their bed began to shake.
In the morning, their servant told him she thought there had been somebody under her own bed and got up to look.
As daylight broke, the telegraph at the exchange was buzzing as reports came in of tremors felt all across the north-west.
Amazing, in a city full of tall, thin cotton mill chimneys, not a brick was left out of place, according to the Courier.
“No domestic animals, such as house dogs, seem to have taken much notice of it,” the newspaper said.
“They were less alarmed than their owners.”
Angel Meadow ten years on
It’s been ten years since I published my debut book Angel Meadow.
Even after all this time, I still get a kick out of seeing the book on bookshelves, like here in Waterstones in Bury earlier this week.
When a book gets published, it takes on a life of its own.
Over the years, readers have sent me photos of the book having sailed all the way to Canada and Australia, and sitting on a bar next to a sangria in Spain.
Someone told me once that their mate had read it in Strangeways.
Others have found their ancestors’ names in the index. The biggest joy has been walking the streets with them and showing them where they once lived.
A couple of times, I’ve gone into a shop and seen someone reading the book.
I’ve wondered at times if I’d get in trouble for writing a little thank you note in the cover for someone to find.
There used to be a little cafe near Angel Meadow where the book was on display for people to read while having a coffee.
The book was stolen by a customer and then replaced — and that copy was stolen too.
I quite like that though — that someone liked the book enough to steal it. And it kind of feels appropriate for the history of the area too.
If you’ve read the book, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.
Take care and have a great weekend.
PS: If you’ve read the book and want to join me on a tour of the area, click the button below. It will be nice to say hello.
I suppose there have been earthquakes around Manchester since then. Hopefully less frightening, although an earthquake is always very disturbing. What especially intrigued me is that clip from the newspaper. The English, although a bit flowery, is still grammatically the same as today. You do a fine job of telling stories.