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Manchester commemorates ‘great men’ like Engels. Why not Elizabeth Prout?
Why a Victorian-era nun who devoted her life to educating the poor deserves her own statue
By Robert Pegg
One September morning in 1849, Elizabeth Prout stood outside St Chad’s in Cheetham Hill, gazing down at Angel Meadow, Red Bank, Ancoats and beyond. The 29 year old was faced with a decision. She could accept a recent offer of marriage. Alternatively, she could lead a life of serene seclusion as a novitiate in a comfortable Belgian convent, or return to the green fields of Shropshire, where she was born. Finally, there was this: what lay before her. She could stay in Manchester to teach the children of the poor.
14 years earlier, Alexis De Tocqueville had described a similar view — one from what may have been the same vantage point: “From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilise the whole world. From this filthy sewer gold flows”. Friedrich Engels had called Manchester “hell on earth”. His seminal work, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, would not be published in English in Elizabeth’s lifetime. If each generation takes on the dreams of the one before, this one had woken up in a fever.
The few seconds it takes to recite the Lord’s Prayer is known as the ‘paternoster while’: just enough time to make an important decision. On that September morning, Elizabeth began: “Our Father, who art in heaven…” . By the time she had finished “…and deliver us from evil”, she had reached her decision. Manchester would be her home.
She wasn’t the only outsider living there. Already well acquainted with Manchester since 1842, Friedrich Engels decided to settle permanently in the city in November 1850. He would remain here for the next 20 years.
Born within a few months of each other in 1820, Elizabeth and Friedrich would find themselves sharing a time and space in history in the same city. But only one of them would be remembered. Sadly, Elizabeth — a shade under five feet tall, slight of build and frail from tuberculosis of the knee — has been largely forgotten. Hopefully that won’t be the case for too much longer, as a campaign to canonise her is inching its way through the labyrinthine Vatican bureaucracy.
The life of Engels is relatively easy to research, contrasted with the challenge of establishing Elizabeth Prout’s story. So I cannot claim to be writing the definitive account of her life — I am not sure such a thing is possible, given the scarcity of material available. Sometimes, details about her life conflict in different sources — when they do so, I’ve chosen the path that makes most sense to me, knowing what I know about her life and the material I’m drawing from. Sometimes I have used less conventional sources — a parish newsletter at St Mary’s (The Hidden Gem), a guide book to St Chad’s in Cheetham Hill, the information boards you can see when walking around the Church of St Anne’s and Blessed Dominic Barberi in Sutton, St Helen’s where Elizabeth’s remains lie. Another useful resource has been the online articles and films of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion.
Elizabeth’s mother was a staunch Anglican and her father a lapsed Catholic. She turned to Catholicism after hearing the teaching of Father Dominic Barberi, the priest who set her up with the teaching position at St Chad’s. This caused a major rift with her family, who to all intents and purposes disowned her. Anti-Catholic prejudice was still very much alive at the time and would enjoy one major outburst in the Stockport riots of 1852 while Elizabeth was in Manchester. These were sparked by, as one commentator at the time put it, “the perpetual feuds between the Irish Catholics and the lower class of English factory hands”.
Friedrich was the son of German Protestants and brought up in the Pietist tradition. He was sent to Manchester by his wealthy mercantile father, who thought that nice, steady work in one of his cotton mills in Salford would keep his son’s mind occupied on commerce rather than fomenting revolution. Both Engels and Prout would devote their work to the poor: one in theory, the other very much in practice. Neither would leave Manchester the way they found it.
Along with Conditions, Engels had also penned The Communist Manifesto — written with his ideological collaborator, Karl Marx, and published in 1848. After the failure of the German Revolutions of 1848, which Engels had fought in, both he and Marx were licking their wounds. Marx was starting work on Das Kapital, the monumental opus on the capitalist system that everyone has heard of but nobody you know has read. Engel’s revolutionary spirit was all but dead and a combination of free trade, entrepreneurship and education was beginning to lift the working poor of Manchester out of their previously deprived state.
Chased out of half of Europe, Engels was now working as a manager at his father’s cotton factory in Weaste, Salford for a capitalist system his life was devoted to overthrowing — mostly to bankroll Marx — and he was proving himself to be rather good at it. With Manchester earning the nickname of Cottonopolis, it seems likely the factory was turning a healthy profit. He had sacrificed his reputation and much of his bank account to be little more than a junior partner in both business and ideology.
Meanwhile, as Sister Barbara Sexton records in her biography of Elizabeth, A Job in Jeopardy, Elizabeth taught at St Chad’s Girl’s School, a badly ventilated warehouse in George Leigh St, Ancoats. Her lodgings were provided by Father Croskell of St Chad’s at 58 Stocks St. All her pupils were girls, children of factory workers and labourers aged 8-13. Schooling was not compulsory. There was no state provision for Catholic or Jewish schools and fees were tuppence to fourpence a week. Survival meant relying on charity and the work that Elizabeth and her four assistants earned themselves through factories and needlework, a skill they also taught to their charges.
As Sister Dominic Savio Hamer documents in With Christ in His Passion, despite her constant financial penury, Elizabeth actively sought out waifs and strays to take under her wing. She would frequently visit families from the poorest areas of Ancoats, Angel Meadow and Red Bank. There was some unwillingness or inability to pay for education – children were working in the mills and factories from as young as five and a child earning money was more useful than a child costing money. Despite this, she succeeded in providing hundreds of young girls with a safe and relaxed environment in which to learn, away from the grime of the factories and the violence of the streets.
According to church records at St Mary’s on Mulberry Street, within seven months of being in the city, Elizabeth had opened the first Catholic school in Manchester. It was one of the first four recipients of government building grants in the country.
As detailed in With Christ in his Passion, in 1851 Elizabeth founded the Sisters of the Holy Family. Her Order grew and many were called, but few were chosen. The hard work and long hours proved too much for many, but those who stayed with her were fiercely loyal. While some priests dismissed them as just a lot of factory girls, the Order was neat, disciplined and respectable.
Unable to accommodate all the girls who were now her charges, she opened a new St Chad’s at Dyche St – a large, airless room on the fourth floor of a candle factory. 140 children — Irish, English, Catholic and Protestant — were taught on weekdays, and 250 were taught on Sundays. Then, as now, education could be the only way out of such crippling poverty.
Things were changing in Manchester, and much of it for the better. The devastatingly poor area of Little Ireland off Oxford Rd was being cleared and readied for eventual demolition. Through a combination of free trade, entrepreneurship and education, conditions were improving to the extent that Engels’ seminal work was already looking out of date so soon after publication.
Things were changing for Elizabeth, too. The clergy who were initially dismissive of her Order were now asking her to take on further responsibility, and she took charge of St Mary’s in Royton St, off Deansgate, while also temporarily running a night school for children at St Chad’s. The demand and stress of work was beginning to take its toll.
Already frail from her childhood illness, she fell ill again, but still she managed to open another school, St Joseph's in Goulden St – an upstairs room in the temperance hall. Another 179 mixed girls and boys were educated by Elizabeth. Following an inspection in July 1853, Sister Barbara Sexton records that a government inspector wrote in his report, “The children seemed to attend with willingness and seem much attached to their two amiable teachers who cannot fail to exercise a moral influence of high value.” By this time Elizabeth’s working day involved getting up at 4:00am, prayer, walking to St Joseph’s, spending a full day teaching, home, cooking for her and her Sisters and night school before bed.
In 1853, aged 33, Elizabeth fell ill with a fever. It was at this time that Father Ignatius Spencer offered the nuns a short retreat in Newton Heath so Elizabeth could recuperate and in January 1854, Bishop Turner gave them a house in Levenshulme. In 1855, Elizabeth opened a convent and another two schools in Ashton. She moved to Sutton in St Helen’s to open another school for poor children and an Academy for Ladies there, temporarily leaving Levenshulme behind.
Historian Tristram Hunt records in The Frock-Coated Communist that Engels was taking up residences in Chorlton on Medlock, Gorton, Rusholme and Moss Side, living with his companion and paramour Mary Burns. They would not marry, both believing marriage to be a bourgeois institution. He would justify his hobby of spending the weekends in Cheshire hunting with hounds as good training for war, if it ever came, but nobody was seriously buying it. He just liked the lifestyle. He continued to live the bourgeois life, visiting art exhibitions in Trafford and regularly attending social events with Manchester’s great and good. Engels was a member of the Brazenose club, the Athenaeum, the Albert club – which reportedly had the best smoking room in Manchester – and the Royal Exchange, the height of bourgeois respectability.
Elizabeth returned to Levenshulme in 1858. When the American Civil War broke out, there was an embargo on imported cotton causing economic devastation across the region. When the cotton famine hit, soup kitchens were opened in Ashton (the 1800s equivalent to a food bank) and by June 1862 only around ten or so of the town’s 30 cotton mills were operating normally. Elizabeth sent more sisters to help out. Already suffering from the tuberculosis of the knee mentioned above, causing her constant pain, the physical demands of her work would further adversely affect her health, and she caught a heavy cold from which she would never truly recover. Father Ignatius remonstrated with her for putting her already fragile health at risk. Nevertheless she remained in Levenshulme.
A few months later, Elizabeth’s mother died — and her father followed a few months later. Reconciling with her family at the end, she was comforted that both of them had embraced the Catholic church — the thing that had caused so much division earlier in her life. Her own health continued to deteriorate and she moved back to St Helen’s.
Death preyed on those close to Engels, too. Mary Burns died in 1863 — a massive personal blow to Engels, who wrote to Marx, “I simply cannot convey what I feel. The poor girl loved me with all her heart.” The young Irish woman had been by Engels’ side since his arrival in Manchester, through his successes and failures as well as through his bouts of depression and philandering. Engels was a notorious lech and womaniser, and while he ostensibly disapproved of prostitution as exploitation, he was known to resort to it when his carnal urges got the better of him. His grief did not last too long. The following year he moved in with Mary’s sister, Lydia (Lizzie), who would remain his companion for life. You could say that one good Burns deserves another. He would marry Lizzie at the end of her life, a concession to her faith.
Elizabeth’s health rapidly deteriorated, making her too ill to return to Levenshulme. In December 1863 she took the last rites and on 11 January 1864, after giving her last confession to Father Ignatius, she passed away at 6:00pm as the Angelus bell struck the call to prayer. She was 43. Father Ignatius would follow a few months later. Today, we might remember Father Ignatius, the kindly looking Old Etonian renegade priest who sacrificed a privileged birth and upbringing to also work with the Manchester poor, through his more famous descendants. He was great, great, great uncle to: Charles, Earl Spencer; Lady Diana Spencer (and so great, great, great, great uncle to Princes William and Harry).
Friedrich moved out of Manchester in 1870. Both he and Marx had hoped that England, and Manchester, would be the seat of the revolution they both wanted. But when all was said and done, Manchester just could not be bothered with it. On his 70th birthday he boasted of consuming oysters and champagne — the original champagne socialist. He would outlive Elizabeth by three decades. Friedrich died at the age of 74 in London. His ashes were scattered at sea off Beachy Head at his request. Unlike Marx, he leaves no tomb to which adoring and sombre acolytes might make pilgrimage.
Friedrich Engels played no material part in the outcome of the story of Manchester. He made no material difference to the lives or the infrastructure of the places and people he wrote about. He changed nothing. He is remembered, and more often than not revered, because the Victorian era also gave us the great man theory of history — that history is shaped by the significant individuals of the time and the actions and decisions they make. Friedrich was such a man.
Elizabeth Prout materially and beneficially changed every life she touched for the better and was directly responsible for the education of thousands of children of the poor and helped lift them out of poverty. She is largely forgotten because she is not one of the ‘great men’ of the era, but rather a lesser woman.
Elizabeth kept no journal or diary and published no writings. There are just a handful of letters that dealt with mainly administrative matters between her and her priests. One letter from the archives of the Sisters of the Cross and Passion may give us some clue as to the nature of her character. When she was asked by Father Croskell, formerly of St Chad’s, to be “doubly kind” to another priest and his flock, despite the fact that some of them may speak ill of her, she replied: “I hate deceit. I cannot say one thing and believe another. I cannot be so easily turned.” Shortly before her death, Father Ignatius described her as a “little woman, brimful of energy and will.” In 1875 the Sisters of the Cross and Passion was founded in her memory at 29-31 Byrom St, a premises which now stands shamefully neglected.
Today, a statue of Engels dominates the public space outside HOME in the city centre, evidence that in some respects Manchester is yet to move on from the great man Victorian patriarchy of old. It was dragged here from the Poltava region of Ukraine for the dubious benefit of the 2017 Manchester International Festival (MIF) against the better instincts of Manchester’s Ukrainian community who, not unreasonably, don’t care to be reminded of their relationship with Russia, from Peter the Great to Vladimir Putin.
So why is Engels such a prominent part of the city’s landscape and Elizabeth Prout isn’t? We remember Engels in Manchester because he gives us nothing to aspire to beyond wishful thinking. He makes no demands of us. Engel’s legacy at best is that he taught his contemporaries to read and think about politics, society and ideology differently. Elizabeth's legacy is that she taught them to read.
There is no public monument to Elizabeth Prout, but her spirit is still in the poor areas of Manchester and everywhere beyond. She is in every food bank, children’s home and every women’s refuge. She still lives in the classrooms of the poor.
Engels was obsessed with his legacy. Elizabeth was concerned with the here and now. Where his ideology saw the human as an economic unit, Elizabeth saw the immediate human need. When Alexis De Tocqueville spoke about gold flowing from the filthy sewer, he could have been talking about Elizabeth herself. Engels only saw the sewer.
We don’t remember Elizabeth because she was ordinary, and history swallows the ordinary. Nobody in this city has anything to thank Engels for, but many people can trace their ancestry back to the Victorian slums and the predominantly Irish and Italian Catholic immigrant population. If you’re one of those people, then there’s a fair chance that Sister Elizabeth taught your forebears the importance of education and gave them the means to lift themselves out of unspeakable poverty. For that alone, she deserves her place amongst the greats. She deserves her own statue.
Tell people in Manchester you’re a great admirer of Engels and you will get the approving nods of the soi-disant writers, artists and pseudo intellectuals. Tell people you are an admirer of a contemporary of Engels — a diminutive nun, crippled by poverty and physical infirmity, with an infectious laugh and an inability to lie or deceive, who devoted her entire life here to those less fortunate than herself — and who knows: they might, just might, start thinking about who really did shape the radical history of this city. What could be more revolutionary than that?
St Augustine said the dead are not absent, they are invisible. Elizabeth Prout deserves to be visible.
If you have a spare moment and you happen to be in the area, drop into St Chad’s on Cheetham Hill Rd. Down the left hand side of the church to the Lady Chapel where she attended Mass, there is a plaque and a photograph of Sister Elizabeth commemorating her time in the area. It’s almost hidden from view and you would miss it if you didn’t know it was there. If you’re of a mind you can pause, pray, light a candle or meditate on the mysteries of the rosary. Your faith or absence thereof doesn’t matter. Go outside and walk to the end of St Chad’s St, where the road bends and you can stand where she once stood on that day in 1849, and look out over Angel Meadow and Red Bank, where today the unstoppable rise of the skyscrapers continues apace. Progress, like revolutions, devours its children.