Slender Threads: A Saddleworth Shaw

From an ancient charter in the reign of King John, a slender thread leads through many generations, until it reaches modern men who worked for the Manchester Ship Canal Company and the Lancashire Cotton Corporation. As the book traces this unlikely journey, it captures history through the lives of an ordinary family.

For almost eight centuries, they lived in a corner of the north-west of England, on the borders of Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire, in Saddleworth, Ashton and Stalybridge. Shaw had not always been their surname (they changed it in the 14th century) and, as communities recovered from the Black Death, so Shaws ramified here. A great many families would share the surname and, wittingly or not, a common medieval ancestor.

Slender Threads follows one branch of these Shaws. On the wrong side of primogeniture, their fortunes declined in medieval times from a manorial lord to a tenant farmer, and they would aspire less to shape history than to survive it. But history would mould their lives, through civil wars and world wars, political protest and pandemics, revolution in industry and in religion; and through wool, cotton, coal and the opportunities afforded by education.

We meet their relatives and neighbours with names redolent of the north-west, such as Hulme, Hewitt and Hawkyard, Eastwood, Smethurst and Winterbottom, as well as other Shaws.

Slender Threads brings to life individuals and communities from across this span of time. We catch glimpses of their lives in manorial records, court disputes, fragmented church registers and the last wills and testaments that set their modest affairs in order. We sense the ambition and international awareness that sprang from the industrial revolution, and the extraordinary transformation of small settlements into bustling centres of economic activity. We witness how, in a world before antibiotics, the brightest promise and the best laid plans were so often snuffed out, as 'death crept from house to house'.