The body of Hannah Beswick was displayed as an exhibit in the museum from its opening in 1835, alongside other ‘Mammalia’ (including ancient mummies and taxidermied animals). Among Hannah’s companions at this time were the Egyptian mummy now known as Asru (presented to the Natural History Society by Robert and William Garrett in 1825 and still in the collection of the Manchester Museum), a number of ‘tattooed heads of New Zealand chiefs’, and Old Billy, a barge horse who worked for the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Company. In 1838, the society removed its members-only policy, allowing members of the public to view this mixture of local curiosities and exhibits of antiquarian and academic interest for a shilling (sixpence for the working classes). This chapter offers analysis of ‘The Manchester Mummy’ as a museum exhibit in Victorian Manchester. As no complete catalogue was ever produced for the museum, the chapter uses testimonies from contemporaneous visitors to examines the way in which Hannah Beswick’s body was displayed and contextualized within the museum setting, highlighting the vagueness of description and interpretation offered by the museum, as well as the ways in which the museum both shaped and reflected popular mores, including fears of body-snatching and premature burial.
The growing commercial leisure industry was big business in twentieth century Britain. Charting the fortunes of large leisure providers including Mecca Leisure Ltd and The Rank Organisation, this chapter demonstrates the power of youth commerce in the post-war period. Leisure organisations fought to attract this growing market of young consumers, and in doing so played a significant role in shaping the landscape of leisure across Britain.
On 18 May 1835, the museum of the Manchester Natural History Society opened in purpose-built premises just off Peter Street (on the corner of what is now known as Museum Street). This opening chapter looks at what it meant to open (and visit) a museum that was, unusually for the time, not in London. Using archival material, it examines the reasons for opening the museum, the original intended audience for the collections, and the methods used to develop the museum’s collections. It traces the evolution of the museum from an exclusive institution affordable only for the wealthy, to a civic institution bringing science and history to the people. It examines an issue that remains current in museums to this day: the contradiction between the drive towards scholarly preservation and the museum’s purpose in providing public edification/entertainment that would play out in the display and reception of ‘The Manchester Mummy’.
The conclusion highlights the book’s study of the transformation of youth and, in particular, of young people’s changing relationship with the built environment. For young people growing up and going out in the second half of the twentieth century, increased access to the products of an growing global consumer market intersected in powerful ways with the emergence of new spaces in which to consume them. It suggests areas of further study for historians writing about youth in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The book’s epilogue offers a personal reflection on graves and burials, beginning with an anecdotal account of a local supermarket built on the site of a former cemetery. This reflection goes on to consider the numerous bodies in the book that have been kept out of the grave or disinterred after burial to unsettle a notion of the grave as a permanent or final resting place. The epilogue ends by returning to the idea of the unburied corpse as the source of entertainment, particularly around the time of Halloween, concluding that anxieties around the unburied corpse still sit alongside entertaining tales of post-mortem reappearance, just as they did when Hannah Beswick’s body was a museum exhibit.
This chapter explores the significance of the bequest made by Hannah Beswick to cover her funeral expenses. It examines the changes in funeral practices between the death of Hannah’s mother, Hannah’s own death, and the time of her delayed burial, and the ‘professionalisation of death’ that occurred during this time with the rise of undertaking as a commercial profession. Alongside this, consideration of the average costs of funerals during this period is used to argue that Hannah’s bequest is far too high (and too specific) a sum for an ordinary funeral. The chapter goes on to explore the history of embalming as a funereal practice, including explanations for the purpose and techniques employed. The chapter ultimately argues that, while the ‘mummification’ and display of Hannah’s body has been described as a ‘ungenteel fate’, a standard funeral is not a guarantee of a ‘genteel fate’. Through further consideration of the detail of Hannah’s will, alongside the recorded discovery of human remains at Cheetwood discussed in a previous chapter, this chapter concludes by positing that Hannah Beswick actively chose post-mortem preservation of her corpse at the hands of a surgeon, likely for religious reasons or other sensibilities, and that her viscera were ceremonially interred at Cheetwood Hall with the full knowledge of her friends and family.
In the decades following the Second World War, youthful sociability was remade as young people across Britain flocked to newly-opened coffee bars, beat clubs, and discos, drawn to their dark corners, crowded dance floors, and loud music. These spaces, increasingly unknown and unfamiliar to the adults who passed by them, played a remarkable role in reshaping town and city centres after dark as sites of leisure and recreation. Growing Up and Going Out is a book about sociability, leisure, and youth culture in post-war Britain, and demonstrates how young people’s experience of commercial youth leisure was increasingly characterised by its spatial and temporal separation from the wider urban leisurescape. Telling the history of youth in post-war Britain from the ground up, first through the story of Sheffield and then through towns and cities across the country, this book traces how the new spaces of post-war youth leisure transformed both young people’s relationship with their local environment and adults’ perceptions of the possibilities and dangers of modern leisure Using an extensive range of sources, from oral histories, to licensing documents, government records, and newspapers, this book demonstrates the importance of taking popular youth cultures seriously. Exploring the making and meaning of youth leisure, Growing up and going out offers a timely reassessment of young lives in the second half of the twentieth century that will be essential reading to scholars of youth, modern Britain, and popular culture.
The rise of late-night leisure paved the way for a new culture of youth drinking that had a significant impact on young people’s leisured landscapes. However, the perceived shift in young people’s relationship with alcohol led to numerous attempts to manage their consumption of alcohol and the spaces in which they consumed it. The ‘problem’ of underage drinking was highlighted as a threat to both young people’s morality and their health. However, this chapter demonstrates that while young people’s relationship to alcohol was undoubtedly shifting in this period, the pursuit of intoxication did not supersede sociability as the primary draw of youthful leisure.
This chapter introduces and narrates Hannah Beswick’s life and family history, using a variety of archival and genealogical records to narrate the facts. In addition, contemporaneous primary sources, including diaries, commonplace books and property deeds, are used to give this history some context. The story that emerges differs from those recounted in the first part of the book, and it is one that draws on the reality of eighteenth-century Manchester to allow Hannah Beswick’s life to be better understood. The chapter concludes by asserting that Hannah Beswick was a fairly normal, though very wealthy, member of a gentry family, whose daily life likely included socializing with friends and family, music, dancing, and the management of property and the estate. This assertion serves as a precursor to subsequent chapters, which will explore how this ‘normal’ woman came to be embalmed and displayed in a museum.
Charting the growth of youth culture as a topic of historical enquiry, the introduction outlines the importance of commercial youth cultures. It outlines recent developments in the historiography of youth in modern Britain, and situates the book’s spatial approach within a broader consideration of the lived and everyday. It argues that there is a clear need for further consideration of commercial spaces of youth leisure and their relationship to the changing urban environment in the second half of the twentieth century.