Rain, Wind and the God of Fire: Why Manchester should be proud to be ‘The Rainy City’
Manchester Town Hall silhouettee during a heavy rain shower
Article by Phil Blinkhorn
We’d driven into Chicago, parked the car and had taken the sightseeing bus to the Shedd Aquarium. The weather was hot for April, 80 degrees F though rain was promised for the following night and we left our kagoules in the car.
Three hours later we emerged into 45 degrees F and a howling gale coming down the lake from Canada. With no taxis available, 30 minutes to the next bus, with the stop 200 yards from reasonable shelter and dressed only in T shirts and jeans, we retreated to the museum shop where we thankfully, if expensively, purchased the last two plastic kagoules available. Even then we were cold – oh for a Mac (the waterproof kind, rather than the computer or the burger!).
Chicago is known as the Windy City, though there is a dispute over the meaning of windy – is it due to the wind that comes either off the plains or down from Canada, or is it due to the reputation of local politicians in the19th century who had a penchant for, to say the least, going on a bit?
There is no doubt as to why Manchester is known as the rainy city – except, of course, statistics show it is far from being the wettest place (or even city) in Britain – but the tag sticks.
Whilst Chicagoans have made a humorous plus out of their weather nickname, Mancunians often squirm or try to persuade disbelieving listeners of the facts.
Instead of fighting prejudice Mancunians could take pride in how rain, and the need to protect against it, led Manchester to the forefront of a technology which not only revolutionised rainwear but provided the basic components without which much of today’s industry and transport could not function.
Everyone knows that Charles Macintosh had invented a waterproof garment which he tried to produce in Glasgow. Opposition from local tailors drove him to look for mass production elsewhere and he turned to the Birley brothers in Manchester who became partners and provided a new mill on their cotton mill site at Cambridge St.
Not a little experimentation was necessary before a workable waterproof cloth was produced. The naphtha process used was unstable and the waterproofing would melt in hot weather and, worse, the cloth had a distinct odour which meant that even those who could afford the expensive garments shunned them.
An economic slump added to the problems but at least the military saw the value of waterproofing and ordered large quantities of the material.
Industrial buildings Cambridge St Manchester
being converted into apartments
The Birleys took on another partner in the 1830s - one Thomas Hancock - who, after Macintosh’s death in 1843, developed a process of vulcanisation (named after the Roman God of Fire) which he patented. Months before an almost identical process had been perfected by Charles Goodyear in the USA but Goodyear was a tinkerer with no drive (the Goodyear company of today had nothing to do with him and was named for him because the founders admired his inventiveness) so the Manchester based patent, combined with Britain’s expanding Empire trade, made Cambridge St the world centre of an massive expansion in the use of rubber.
Vulcanisation, subjecting rubber to steam and sulphur, allows rubber to be stretched and return to its original shape, makes it resilient, resistant to weather, stops the transmission of electric current through the material and, with later additions of other chemicals, allows for moulding and forming.
As new uses were found for the product the mills on Cambridge St expanded and, during the cotton slump of the American Civil War period, some of the cotton mills on the site went over to rubber production.
By the end of the century vulcanised rubber was an essential component of thousands of products and remains so today – the list, of course, has both changed and expanded. The mills were eventually taken over by Dunlop - the original Macintosh mill was destroyed by German bombs – and production on the site finished in 2000.
The area used to be very seedy and run down – hardly the sort of place anyone would have expected to have been the point from which the process that allows much of today’s world to function was developed.
The site has passed into history and is now under the Southern Gateway development and, seemingly, the very vital part Cambridge St. has played in the development of modern technology is as forgotten as the 19th century rain – rain which at least contributed to modern life, unlike the wind in Chicago.
After an early career in industrial sales in 1976 he was appointed as Sales and Marketing Manager at Belle Vue. In 1978 he was appointed as Greater Manchester Conference Officer. He opened the Greater Manchester Conference Office which was successful in bringing major national and international conference and exhibition business to the region in his 6 year tenure. He was also involved in the planning of G-Mex.
He was a member of the Arrangements Committee for the 1982 Papal Visit being in charge of VIP reception and was also the person responsible for suggesting the Pope be served Black Pudding for breakfast – as the convent in which the Pope breakfasted was in Bury – a suggestion that was carried through.
In 1986 he left the Manchester area for East Sussex where, in 1989, he set up his own company which until his retirement in 1998 specialised in conferences on various aspects of aviation working closely with governments and the industry and operating events in the UK, Europe, Asia and the USA.
Retiring to County Kerry in 1998, he pursues his hobbies of aviation photography, aviation and transport history and has a keen interest in anything to do with Manchester.