Heritage. Manchester Fourteen Miles

Manchester Fourteen Miles was the inscription on the signpost outside 'Moss Ferry', the village where 'Hilda Winstanley' grew up before the First World War. The seemingly short distance from the capital of England's cotton industry was nonetheless the distance between one world and another. 'Moss Ferry' was a village which belonged to the old agricultural order, that is before cotton arrived. It had hardly changed, economically or socially for hundreds of years. Margaret Penn was Hilda Winstanley, taken into a farm laborer's family and brought up as one of them. She was an illegitimate child, her real father being a far richer man, and her sense of being different lent her powers of social observation a greater sharpness.