Fred wrote the Communist Manifesto with Karl Marx, and his words were used to inspire revolutions all over the world.
In the communist countries that perverted his theories, he was like a god and they used to parade his image everywhere – on stamps, coins, banners and statues…But the image was always of this dusty, beardy old git.
Yet when Fred came to Salford, age 22, he was on the ale every night, copping off with local girls and stirring up all sorts of trouble. He was the original angry young man, slagging off developers, the council, the capitalists and the conditions that working class people were living in…
…Hmmm, it seems Freddy Engels is so out, he’s in…
A Real Salford Heritage special made possible with the fantastic financial support of the Lipman-Miliband Trust.
Includes free exclusive limited edition poster by Matt Carroll of Salford’s top graphic artist team, Central Station... the poster was in issue 6 (see back copies for order details)
Real Salford Heritage
Are You Ready For Freddy ?
Everything you’ve ever needed to know about Frederick Engels…
HIS LIFE -
What do you want to be when you grow up sonny ?
`I wanna change the world – and I mean it, right!’
Born in Barmen, Germany, in 1820, young Fred was a major trouble maker after he discovered politics, so his dad – a rich mill owner – packed him off to Salford when he was 22 to work for the family’s joint owned Ermen and Engels’ Victoria Mill in Weaste, which made sewing threads.
By this time Fred already spoke 25 languages, was a top horseman, swordsman, swimmer, skater, artist, journalist, composer and philosopher – well, there was no telly in those days. And he’d published loads of political articles, stirring it up in his home town and prompting his dad to write “I have a son at home who is like a scabby sheep in a flock…”
En route to Salford, Fred stopped off in Cologne where he met his future best mate, Karl Marx.
When Fred arrived in Salford in 1842, by day he worked at Victoria Mill in Weaste and in the company’s office in Deansgate (now Kendals’ perfume counter), and was an outwardly respectable business type. But at night he slummed it, spending all his time going around the working class areas observing the shocking conditions that working people were living in.
Fred had copped off with a young Irish girl called Mary Burns, who probably worked at his dad’s mill, and she took him out at night in disguise so that he wouldn’t get his German bourgeois head kicked in.
After twenty months Fred went home and wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844 (published 1845). It was“dedicated to the working classes of Great Britain” but wasn’t available in English until 1892. The explosive book described in intimate detail, street after street, the total squalor that working people were living in, based on what he’d seen in Salford and Manchester.
But he didn’t just write about the conditions, and his hatred for the ruling class that allowed working people to live like that. Once back in Germany he got his sword out and took part in the revolutionary uprising against the Prussian army. It was after this, in 1848, that Fred and Karl Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto urging a worldwide socialist revolution.
With the authorities after him, Fred took refuge in Switzerland before arriving back at his dad’s factory in 1850, exiled in Salford. He stayed for 19 years. This time, Fred was under surveillance from the secret police, and had `official’ homes and `unofficial homes’ all over inner city Manchester where he lived with Mary under false names to confuse the cops.
While Fred was in Salford and Manchester, Karl Marx used to come and visit him at least once every year. They would sit for hours researching in Chetham’s Library – and then go drinking for hours in pubs all over town – possibly the Crescent and The Grapes in Salford, and the Gold Cup and Coach and Horses in Manchester.
The prime reason why Fred worked at his dad’s mill for 20 years was to get money to support Marx, so he could complete his masterwork, Das Kapital, which showed exactly how capitalism worked – basically the economic exploitation of the working class by the ruling class.
Fred `slaved’ in Weaste until 1869 but most of what he was up to during his stay is up for speculation as he destroyed over 1500 letters between himself and Marx after his mate died, so as not to expose their secret life in the north west. In 1870 Fred left Salford and Manchester for London, and world infamy. He died in 1895.
WHAT FRED SAID
“I once went into Manchester with a bourgeois and spoke to him of the bad, unwholesome method of building, the frightful conditions of the working people’s quarters…
The man listened quietly and said when we parted `And yet there is a great deal of money to be made here; good morning sir’…
All the conditions of life are measured by money, and what brings no money is nonsense, unpractical idealistic bosh !”
Engels
“Urban authorities…almost everywhere in England are recognised centres of corruption of all kinds, nepotism and jobbery – the exploitation of public office to the private advantage of the official or his family.”
Engels: The Housing Question 1887
“If we cross the Irwell to Salford, we find…one large working men’s quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue…All Salford is built in courts or narrow lanes, so narrow, that they remind me of the narrowest I have ever seen, the little lanes of Genoa….The working men’s dwellings between Oldfield Road and Cross Lane…vie with the dwellings of the Old Town in filth and overcrowding.
In this district I found a man, apparently about 60 years old, living in a cow stable...which had neither windows, floor, nor ceiling…and lived there, though the rain dripped through his rotten roof. This man was too old and weak for regular work, and supported himself by removing manure with a hand-cart; the dung heaps lay next door to his palace.
The working people live, almost all of them, in wretched, damp, filthy cottages…the streets which surround them are usually in the most miserable and filthy condition, laid out without the slightest reference to ventilation, with reference soley to the profit secured by the contractor…”
Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844
“A class which bears all the disadvantages of the social order without enjoying its advantages…Who can demand that such a class respect this social order ?”
Engels: The Condition of the Working Class in England 1844
“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…”
Marx and Engels: Communist Manifesto
“Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletariat have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win…Working Men of All Countries, Unite!”
Marx and Engels: Communist Manifesto
“To get the most out of life you must be active, you must live and you must have the courage to taste the thrill of being young…”
Fred Engels 1840
FRED ENGELS – WAY AHEAD OF HIS TIME…
Literacy, Crime and Poverty - The Link
In Conditions of the Working Class In England, Engels used statistics from 1842 to prove the link between crime and poverty. He wrote that “taking the the average, out of 100 criminals, 32.35 could neither read nor write; 58.32 read and wrote imperfectly…”
Engels explained that “contempt for the existing order is most conspicuous in its extreme form – that of offences against the law. If the influences demoralising to the working man act more powerfully than usual he becomes an offender…”
He added:
“The offences are, in the great majority of cases, against property, and have, therefore, arisen from want in some form; for what a man has, he does not steal…”
In 2002, figures from a Social Exclusion Unit Report showed that 40% of convicted prisoners had “severe literacy problems” and 60% “had problems with literacy”.
The 2002 Report added that most prisoners come from “socially excluded backgrounds” - they are 13 times more likely to have been in care and 14 times more likely to have been unemployed than non-offenders. More than half of all male prisoners and over two thirds of female prisoners have no qualifications…
FRED ENGELS – WAY AHEAD OF HIS TIME
SOCIAL CLEANSING…
This is what Engels wrote about Salford, Manchester, London, Liverpool, Paris (etc) 120 years ago. He could have been writing it today…
“The growth of the big modern cities gives the land in certain areas, particularly in those which are centrally situated, an artificial and colossally increasing value; the buildings erected on these areas depress this value instead of increasing it, because they no longer correspond to the changed circumstances. They are pulled down and replaced by others. This takes place above all with the workers’ houses which are situated centrally and whose rents…can never increase above a certain maximum.
“…The result is that workers are forced out of the centre of towns towards the outskirts; that workers’ dwellings, and small dwellings in general, become rare and expensive and often altogether unobtainable. For under these circumstances the building industry, which is offered a much better field for speculation by more expensive houses, builds workers’ dwellings only by way of exception…They will provide new dwellings for hardly more than a quarter of the workers actually evicted by the building operations…”
Engels goes on to write about this being in `the spirit’ of a bloke called Haussmann, a corrupt government official in 19th Century Paris, who built “long, straight and broad streets through the closely built workers’ quarters, particularly those which are centrally situated…erecting big luxurious buildings on both sides of them…to turn the city into a pure luxury city.”
Engels added that these “evils” were usually done in the name of “beautifying the town”…
“World’s first industrial city to City beautiful!”
Central Salford URC slogan 2007
“Beautiful, Vibrant, Prosperous Central Salford is rapidly becoming one of the most desirable locations for investors and developers in the North…”
Central Salford advert
“The reason why capitalists do not invest still more than they do in workers’ dwellings is that more expensive dwellings bring in still greater profits for their owners”
Fred Engels 1887
“…luxury family homes…from £234,995 to £479,995…”
Press release Broughton Green 2007
“Live a Supurbia life from £161,950…”
Countryside Properties `New Broughton’ advert 2007
ENGELS TRIVIA...
(as told to Karl Marx’s daughter Eleanor in 1869)
Favourite virtue: jollity
Favourite virtue in a man: to mind his own business
Idea of happiness: a bottle of wine
Aversion: affected stuck up women
Hero: none
Favourite flower: bluebell
Motto: take it easy
From Salford With Love - how Salford gave revolution to the world…
Without Salford there would have been no Russian revolution, no Che Guevara, no Fidel Castro…and no John Lennon singing `We all wanna change the w-u-u-r-r-r-ld’…
- Fred Engels came to work at his dad’s mill in Weaste because he knew that the area was right at the cutting edge of everything. Salford and Manchester were the world’s first industrial cities, with all the associated social problems and political reactions – mass Chartist rallies, the Peterloo Massacre, the centre of trade unionism and in the year he arrived, mass strikes in the mills repressed by troops and the police. It was kicking off all over the place. If anywhere was ripe for revolution it was here…
- Karl Marx was sat in London absolutely skint. He wouldn’t have been able to write the Communist Manifesto or Das Kapital without Engels subbing him all the time. Marx would have had to get a job stacking shelves in Netto or something. But the money that Engels sent him came from the profits at his dad’s Victoria Mill – the sweat of Salford’s workers paid for these history changing books to be written.
- Engels wouldn’t have been able to write the groundbreaking Conditions of the Working Class In England without being taken around those areas by Mary Burns. They say that if you can’t change your doorstep you can’t change the world. Mary Burns showed Fred the social horror on her doorstep which led to him igniting the flame that inspired over fifty workers’ revolutions across the globe…
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ON ENGELS
“It was the workers in Ermen and Engels mill in Weaste who made the profits which enabled Frederick Engels to support Karl Marx while he researched in the British Library. The result, which became known as Scientific Socialism, had, and still has, world wide influence…”
Ruth Frow, Founder Working Class Movement Library, Salford.
"Marx could never have gained the mass circulation he did had it not been for Engels. It is, of course, one of the ironies of history that it was the success of the family business that enabled Engels to fund Marx. Perhaps the first example of a partnership with the private sector!"
John Merry, Leader Salford City Council
YOUR GUIDE TO FRED ENGELS IN SALFORD…
- Ermen and Engels Victoria Mill – the mill where Engels worked was at the bottom of Weaste Lane, and the M602 now smashes straight through the former site. It’s chimney still stood until about 25 years ago when that too was demolished. There’s not a trace left of the world’s most famous mill which Engels part owned until 1869.
- Engels Pubs - Salford social historian, Tony Flynn writes…
If one is to believe all the stories about Engels, most of his time was spent in the pub. The most widely published story is that he would call in The Crescent pub, on the Crescent, for a swift 'un before returning home to his house in Chorlton on Medlock. However I doubt this story because his father’s mill was in Weaste, and surely that’s a long way to go for a pint? His most sensible route home would have been along Eccles New Road and Regent Road, a distance from The Crescent Pub. However, several books on Eccles history tell the story of The Grapes pub on Church Street which was licensed from 1770. It is reported several times that Engels visited this pub, and allegedly attempted to form a communist cell there. Eccles at this time was a hotbed of social unrest.
- Kersal Moor – Fred was a keen horseman, riding with the Cheshire Hunt at times, but he apparently also used to go riding on Kersal Moor, which is commemorated in a mosaic on Prestwich Precinct.
- Working Class Movement Library – the Library, on the Crescent, has a collection of rare photos and slides of places of Engels interest. It also has copies of his books plus an incredible Engels scrapbook based on Roy Whitfield’s research for his Frederick Engels in Manchester book. Whitfield painstakingly tried to piece together the maze of pseudonyms and secret lodgings that Engels had in order to foil the secret police during his stay in Manchester. He also tried to unmask the mystery behind Mary Burns.
- Local History Library at Salford Museum and Art Gallery – has copies of Engels books and communist propaganda pamphlets featuring photos and portraits. It also has a typewritten letter in Russian, dated 1951, from the Soviet Central Committee of the Institute of Marx Engels Lenin to a Mr Butterworth in Eccles discussing the idea of putting a memorial plaque to Fred in a local factory.
- Salford Council Planning Department – Engels’ descriptions of Greengate found in The Condition Of The Working Class in England 1844 are now being used in official council planning documents for the area’s multi-billion pound makeover…
“A town of eighty thousand inhabitants which, properly speaking, is one large working-mans’ quarter, penetrated by a single wide avenue (Chapel Street)…it is an old and unwholesome, dirty and ruinous locality… The narrower side lanes of Chapel Street, Greengate and Gravel Lane have certainly never been cleaned since they were built…”
Engels House –
Welcome to the only formal monument to Fred Engels in the whole of Salford – a ten storey towerblock in Eccles…
They’ve got massive statues of Fred Engels all over the world – from Germany to China, to Russia to Cuba…They’ve got libraries named after him…children named after him, even…Fred’s featured on postage stamps, coins and bank notes…And what do we do to commemorate probably the most famous person ever to breathe in Salford ? We name a towerblock in Eccles after him…
Not that Engels would have minded – he wasn’t into monuments and stuff. But given this is as good as an Engels monument gets in Salford, we thought we’d have a chat with the residents who live there to gauge their views…
Engels House, off Trafford Road in Eccles, has no plaques on the wall commemorating the infamous revolutionary. In fact the block has only got half the letters of its title on the wall…just `Engels’ because the `House’ bit of the white lettered sign has fallen off at some point and never been replaced. In 2004, 100% of homes here didn’t meet the Decent Housing Standard and now there’s a huge sign outside declaring a Hazard Reduction Scheme.
The block itself is a style-junkie’s dream – minimalist to the extreme with spotless, Mondrian inspired floor and wall tiles, shining metal lift doors and awesome symmetrical staircases. It’s a classic of `modernist design’, as they used to called it. And similar to hundreds of high rise flats in what was the Eastern Bloc which perverted Engels’ theories and then worshipped him. Here, though, in his spiritual home a few miles from his former mill, few have ever heard of the man who literally changed the world.
Outside Engels House we meet Steven Greenhall, who’s lived here for two years and says he’s always wondered who the flats were named after…`You should be proud, man’ we say `It’s Frederick Engels!’…blank looks…`Engels?...Karl Marx’s mate?...He changed the world?...And this is the only monument to him in the whole of Salford!’…”Poor man” Steven laughs, but adds “Now I’ve got a bit of information I do feel proud to live here, and it makes you want to know a bit more about him.”
We venture inside and on the middle floor find Anne Manley in her very cosy flat. She’s lived here for seven years, has never heard of Fred Engels and has never really wondered where the name of the block came from. When we tell her that it’s the only monument to the man, she just shakes her head…”A bit of a shame really, isn’t it?”.
Gordon Langlands has lived here for 12 years. He’s only too keen to invite us into his immaculately decorated flat…`Proud to live here?’ we ask…”I don’t know about that but I’m having problems with this” he says, pointing to the ceiling. Oh my god! It looks like it’s about to cave in at any minute. It’s all damp and there’s huge bubbles underneath the peeling paint.
“It’s getting worse and worse now, and every time it rains, it comes through again, it’s been like this for over a year” he adds “I’ve reported it, had them out five times and I can get nothing done about it. The Council just seem to be deafing me on it, they’re just a bunch of comedians. But it’s getting beyond a joke now. Someone told me to move out but I’ve built this place up. This Engels, he would have sorted it!”
Hopefully, in Engels’ absence, the Council might decide to sort it. It’s shocking. Next we meet Jean who’s lived here a year and has never heard of Marx’s mate either…”It’s not a very good monument to him though is it?” she decides.
“No-one’s ever mentioned him” says David Atkinson, who’s lived here for two years “There’s no plaque, nothing at all…and if he’s that famous it’s a bit disappointing and he should be recognised. They could at least have some information here that explains a bit more about him…”
David says that he’s going to go on the net to find out more…Meanwhile, Mike Barton echoes the view…”they should have one of those blue plaques” he says “Get the tourists here from Cuba!”
It would be good to get the Council here first to fix Gordon’s rotting ceiling… but yeah, why not?
The towerblock named in Fred’s honour is off Trafford Road near Eccles town centre.
Other places of Engels interest:
You can still sit in the alcove at Chetham’s Library in Manchester where Marx and Engels would research their work, and read the very same books that they poured over in the summer of 1845. There is also a blue plaque to Engels at the `Toblerones’ student halls off Oxford Road in Manchester, commemorating one of his official houses at Thorncliffe Grove. But anywhere that Engels lived has now been demolished. There’s not a brick left. It’s like he was never here…You can’t even buy a new copy of The Condition of the Working Class In England 1844 anywhere in Salford.
MARY BURNS – International people’s superstar and woman of mystery…
There was Karl Marx…There was Frederick Engels…And there was Mary Burns…Mary Burns ? You don’t see her portrait being paraded around Cuba or revered on stamps and coins. But when it comes to Salford’s heritage she’s the number one woman…And she was proper working class…
Yet no-one’s ever heard of Mary Burns. And no-one can ever see her. She’s a total mystery. There’s no record of her birth, nor any surviving photos, and those who are into this stuff have spent years trying to find out more about her. Without a great deal of success.
What we do know is that she copped off with Fred Engels, lived with him for around twenty years, and without Mary Burns no-one would have found out about The Condition of the Working Class 1844 because she took him round and showed him the worst districts of Salford and Manchester for his research.
They say that if you can’t change your doorstep you can’t change the world. Basically, Mary showed Engels her doorstep and inspired him to change the world.
The only biographical reference to her was in two book about Engels, one by Max Beer in 1935 who wrote that Engels “lived in free union with an Irish girl of the people, Mary Burns, who had worked in his father’s factory” and one by Edmund Wilson in 1941 who wrote…
“He was having a love affair with an Irish girl named Mary Burns who worked in the factory of Ermen and Engels and had been promoted to run a new machine called a `self actor’. She seems to have been a woman of some independence of character as she is said to have refused his offer to relieve her of the necessity of working.
“She had, however, allowed him to set up her and her sister in a little house in the suburb of Salford where the coal barges and chimneys of Manchester gave way to the woods and fields.
“Mary Burns was a fierce Irish patriot and she fed Engels’ revolutionary enthusiasm at the same time that she served him as a guide to the infernal abysses of the city.”
Wilson gives no proof for all this, and Roy Whitfield in his book Frederick Engels in Manchester, written in 1988, argued that Mary was actually from the Deansgate area on the Manchester side of the border with Salford, but accepted that his work was well researched speculation. Whitfield did, however, prove where she was born from the 1861 Census return when she gave her age as 38 and her birthplace as Manchester. Given that no-one knows where she actually lived, if Mary had pulled Fred while working in his Weaste factory, she was most likely to have been from Salford.
The only direct reference to Mary Burns that survives is a letter from Marx to Engels on learning of her death saying she was “very good natured” and “witty”, and a letter from Marx’s daughter, Eleanor, saying that she was “very pretty, witty and an altogether charming girl…but in later years drank to excess.” Sounds like she was, indeed, from Salford…
Mary Burns died on January 7 1863. No-one has ever found her grave.
After Mary died, Fred lived with her sister, Lizzie, and married her on her deathbed.
Credits: Many of the Engels related images are from the collection at the Working Class Movement Library; The Russian letter to Eccles is from the Local History Library at Salford Museum and Art Gallery. We would like to thank both libraries for their time and help. Thanks also to Lawrence Cassidy, Tony Flynn, Ruth Frow and, of course, the Lipman-Miliband Trust. Photos of Engels House are by Kate Furnell. Graphics on this page are by Matt Carroll. Supplement layout by Steven Speed. Words by Stephen Kingston.
MORE QUOTES FROM FRED
“I have never seen so demoralised a class as the English middle classes. Their sole happiness is derived from gaining a quick profit. They feel pain only if they suffer a financial loss. Every single human quality with which they are endowed is grossly debased by selfish greed and love of gain…”
Fred Engels 1845
“Exploitation is the basic evil which the social revolution strives to abolish, by abolishing the capitalist mode of production…”
Fred Engels 1887
On Manchester and Salford…
The town itself is peculiarly built, so that a person may live in it for years, and go in and out daily without coming into contact with a working people’s quarter or even with workers, so long as he confides himself to his business or pleasure walks…With conscious determination, the working people’s quarters are sharply separated from the sections of the city reserved for the middle class; or if this does not succeed, they are concealed with the cloak of charity…”
Fred Engels: The Condition of the Working Class In England |
