Chapter 6 #2
Victoria called a few of her friends as soon as they arrived, eager to introduce Bert to them.
She was so happy, she wanted to share it with them, and she was proud to be his wife.
One of her friends said they were desperately busy with a house full of exhausting guests, another said the entire family was sick.
Two more promised to call her back to make plans and never did.
And the fifth one, an old widowed friend of Alfred’s who had always been like an aunt or grandmother to Victoria, told her quite bluntly that she had made a shocking marriage to a completely unacceptable man and she wouldn’t think of meeting him, or inviting them to visit her.
She told Victoria that she was welcome to come to tea anytime on her own, but not to bring her husband with her.
“What were you thinking? An industrialist from the north, from Manchester? My dear, have you lost your mind? No one will receive you married to a man like that.”
“He is a perfect gentleman,” Victoria assured her, shocked by what she’d said.
“Your father would have been heartbroken if he knew you were married to someone from the working class.”
“He’s not working-class, Aunt Margaret,” Victoria defended her husband hotly. “He owns the biggest textile mills in England.”
“My dear, how vulgar beyond belief.” Margaret was very dramatic and very grand, and her late husband was a duke. Victoria’s father had always called her The Grand Duchess, but they had grown up together and he was very fond of her, and was amused by the airs she put on.
“Papa knew him and liked him very much. In fact, before the ship went down, he entrusted me into Bertram’s care and begged him to marry me,” Victoria informed her, which didn’t change the duchess’s mind.
“Your father must have been drunk, or off his head with fear. How could he possibly have wanted you to marry a common man like that? No one will receive you, my dear. You made a terrible mistake.” Victoria knew that the only mistake she had made was calling Margaret.
She ended the call as politely as she could, and realized that all of them must have been gossiping about her.
Not a single one called her back during the week she and Bert were there, and she understood now that they never would.
Bert had been right about that. He had lived it for years.
Given his upper-middle-class origins, with enormous financial success, he was considered a pariah in Victoria’s world.
He no longer knocked on those doors and didn’t care for himself, but he felt sorry for Victoria, being cut off from everyone she’d ever known, the young women she had been presented with and even her father’s friends.
They were relentless and unforgiving. She had committed a cardinal sin, and a major social offense.
All doors were firmly closed to her. It made it easier for her to leave London and join Bert in Manchester.
She had nothing in London anymore except a very pretty house, and a lovely estate in Hampshire.
But she had lost everyone she had ever known there. She assured Bert that she didn’t care.
They had a restful week in Hampshire, and spent two nights in the city, where Bert had meetings.
They had dinner at home at night, and she packed everything she wanted to take to Manchester with her.
They were sending two trucks down when they went, with the clothes and all the belongings she was moving to his home.
She took mostly clothes since she didn’t know what Bertram needed, if anything.
She couldn’t wait to see his home, and get a sense of Manchester for herself.
Before they left London, Victoria held the memorial service for her father.
Notice of it was published in the paper, and despite its being summer, hundreds of people came to pay their respects.
She had invited a hundred of Alfred’s closest friends to a buffet reception at the house afterward.
They came to the service and the house. They were kind to Victoria and completely ignored Bert as though he simply didn’t exist. Victoria was grateful to get the painful event behind her before she left with Bert to begin their new life.
It was a fresh start. The past was behind her.
On the morning that Victoria and Bert left for Manchester, the two trucks with her clothes had already left early.
Parker, the butler, and Mrs. Babbitt, the housekeeper, were lined up with the other servants to say goodbye.
Bert shook hands with each of them and thanked them for their help.
Victoria had a kind word for each of them, and promised to come back soon.
Parker surveyed the scene with a dignified air, and Mrs. Babbitt kissed her goodbye.
Victoria felt a particular closeness to the housekeeper since she had been a witness at their wedding.
* * *
Victoria looked back at her home as they drove away and waved until they turned a corner to go to Marylebone Station.
The train would take four and a half hours to get to Manchester.
Bert had reserved a first-class compartment, and they would arrive at Manchester London Road Station, which was where the trains from London arrived.
Victoria had already read as much as she could about Manchester, and Bert had filled in the rest.
The population was close to eight hundred thousand, and it was the ninth most populated city in the world.
London was ten times its size with close to eight million inhabitants, but Manchester was nonetheless a sizeable city, not to be ignored, despite the disdain of the aristocrats Victoria knew in London, who looked down their noses at Manchester for being an industrial city, where everyone was involved in commerce and trade of some kind.
The main industry of the area was cotton, which made up the largest portion of commercial activity.
The cotton industry was powerful in Manchester, although the chemical and electrical industries had a foothold there as well.
In the last five years, Trafford Park had become the first industrial park, which had attracted American industry to Manchester as well.
The Ford Motor Company was established there, and Westinghouse Electric.
But cotton remained king in the area. Factories had sprung up since the end of the last century and were commonplace now, like Bert’s factories, most of which dealt with cotton.
He had his silk factory there as well. And he had expanded into wool, which was more commonly milled and sold two hours away in Leeds and Bradford in Yorkshire.
But Bert had expanded his factories to handle wool as well as cotton.
Manchester was decidedly the center of the cotton industry in England, with cotton mills right in the city and surrounding areas, and distribution centers for raw cotton and spun yarn.
Bert had highly efficient factories for every facet of the industry.
The city had been dependent on the port of Liverpool until Daniel Adamson, a fellow local industrialist, saw to it that the Manchester Ship Canal was built, which gave the city direct access to the sea, avoiding high dock fees, and allowed manufacturers to ship their goods directly, eliminating railways and Liverpool’s ports in order to keep prices down.
Oceangoing ships could now sail directly into the Port of Manchester at Salford.
Although Manchester was forty miles inland from the port, it was an easier route to the port directly from the city, and had made Manchester the third busiest port in England.
The city was teeming with activity at all times, and mill owners who dealt in cotton were the kings of the city, with Bert the most important among them with nearly four thousand employees, whom he paid fairly and treated well.
Travel around the city was made easier by electric trams. There were mills in the city and the outlying areas, with bleach works, textile print works, workshops, and foundries, all involved with the cotton industry, and enormous warehouses, visible everywhere between the factories.
Curiously, many of the mill owners preferred to live in the city near their factories, despite shocking poverty and appalling slums, while others preferred to live just outside the city proper, ten miles away in the county of Cheshire, in the smaller towns of Trafford, Stockport, Tameside, and Wilmslow, which was where the Greg family had established one of the first factories in the eighteenth century.
Bert’s home was in Wilmslow, while all of his factories and warehouses were in the city.
He preferred to live a little farther from his factories than many of his competitors who chose to be within walking distance of their offices.
Bert liked to get away from work at night.
Victoria couldn’t wait to see her new home.
All she knew from Bert was that he said it was fairly big and there would be room enough for her things, but how much room or what the surrounding area looked like, she had no idea, and he wasn’t expansive about it.
She knew he had lived in the same house for the past twenty years.
He was a widower already when he built it.
She had read that there was beautiful countryside surrounding the city, with picturesque villages in Cheshire, and she’d seen photographs of the main landmarks in the city, the Manchester Town Hall in Albert Square and the Manchester Cathedral.
She wanted to discover the John Rylands Library.
It didn’t look like a beautiful city, but it was alive and prosperous and filled with industrious people, which she thought would be exciting.
Bert’s factories were in the heart of the city, and she wanted to visit them as soon as she settled in and he would let her.