Tramping from Preston's filthy lodgings to Chorley's squalid beds

If we turn the clock back 170 years to 1855, we had a stranger in our midst who eventually gave us a glimpse into life in Preston and Chorley at a time when the so called 'Cotton Lords Of Lancashire' ruled and Preston alone had 25,000 cotton operatives.

- writes Keith Johnson

The visitor was William Edwin Adams who kept the town waiting almost fifty years before his account of the visit was published in his 'Memoirs of a Social Atom' published in 1903. He had been apprenticed to the printing trade in Cheltenham, his birth place, and with radical leanings to Chartist philosophy he moved to Brentwood in 1854 as a compositor to William James Linton who was publishing the monthly 'English Republic' magazine, which unfortunately failed within the year.

What followed was recorded in his memoirs in the following manner in a section called 'On Tramp' - 'Our little company was dispersed in the spring of 1855 as the 'English Republic' expired, the public not wanting our wares, or our politics. I had a journey from Coniston to London of 274 miles ahead of me, with only seventeen shillings in hand-too small amount for a railway ticket. Wages had been of no consequence to us at Brentwood as long as we had enough to pay our way.

That dream was over, at least for the present, and having to take to the road did not alarm him. So he set off on his tramp from Coniston in high spirits with a bundle of tracts, outlining republican principles, that he would distribute to those he met on the way. He had little baggage to burden him save for a composing stick and an apron which were all a printer required to work anywhere.