On this day … 14 July 1873

The Preston Guardian reported the death, at his home, 15, Winckley Square, Preston, of Peter Catterall, aged 77, a former mayor and one of the most ferocious critics of financial mismanagement by the corporation, particularly regarding its involvement in that bottomless pit, the Ribble Navigation project.

He brought to the task of calling councillors to account all the skills acquired as a practising attorney, what the Preston historian Nigel Morgan described as his ‘ruthless realism’. Nigel set out in detail Catterall’s criticisms in his work on political leadership in nineteenth-century Preston.

Another historian who spotted Catterall’s role in shining a light on the somewhat dodgy dealings of the corporation was a young Cambridge undergraduate who made Preston’s nineteenth-century politics the subject of her final-year dissertation.

This was Margaret Spillane (or Margaret Ainscough as she then was) who wrote her dissertation while a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, more than forty years ago. She was the first woman to graduate from the college.

In her preface, Margaret, whose family came from Preston, pays tribute to Nigel, who she met in the summer of 1980 in the Harris Library where she was carrying out research for her dissertation. She recalls, ‘He was a great help to me and, as a research novice, he pointed me in the right direction on many occasions. I was very sad to hear of his death. I remember him as a very amiable and helpful man.’

In her section on the Ribble Navigation Company (RNC), she makes it clear why Peter Catterall should have been suspicious of those councillors who were urging the corporation to take a larger stake in the company. Many of them had bought shares before 1837, when the corporation first took a stake in the company:

‘Twenty-six Council members had already taken shares in the company before the crucial meeting of December 1837, and of the subscribers to the original RNC one third were at one stage, town councillors. Peter Catterall, a lawyer, conservative and later mayor of the borough, exposed the extent of the Corporation’s involvement when advising them to take no more shares in 1850 in a company with £18,000 debts, “… it appeared that there were a number of gentlemen so bound up with the … company that they would not listen to contrary views”.’

Nigel Morgan, in his MPhil dissertation, Social and Political Leadership in Preston 1820-60, discovers Catterall objecting to the corporation’s involvement even earlier in 1839, when it was being called on to make further investment equal to more than half its annual revenues:

‘… as the leading opponent of the speculation, Peter Catterall, said [in] objecting to such a payment “Any private individual in such a situation would at once call a meeting of his creditors”. In November 1840 the wretched Treasurer, Philip Park, was obliged to report to the Council that he had presented a cheque for £2,140 “which the bankers had thought fit not to honour, stating that they did not wish the Corporation to stand indebted to them in a greater sum than £5000”.’

As Nigel commented:

‘From this inauspicious start the Corporation continued by the unwise but humanly and historically understandable policy of sending good money after bad, in the hope of finally recovering what was lost …’

The tragedy for Preston, was that the money desperately needed for the health and welfare of its townsfolk was syphoned off to fund the Ribble adventure, when the town had the worst record for mortality, especially of infants, of all the large towns in England.

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Sources
Margaret’s dissertation, section 5
Nigel’s dissertation, chapter, section 4