ASK MANY people ‘What is the most notable thing to emerge from Mossley’s Hey Fram estate?’ and the most likely answer will be, ‘The 350 bus.’
But you can add one of Britain’s foremost economic historians to that list.
And Dr Victoria Bateman admits many of the things in her latest book ring true from her childhood.
Born at Tameside Hospital, the then Victoria Powell called that corner of the borough home in her early years.
A daughter of Frank, the academic was very quick to point out her connection to the area.
It may seem a world away from what Is detailed in her book Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power.
Described as the untold story of how women made the world wealthy, it has been named as one of the best books of 2025 by the Financial Times.
Female workers helped to build the Great Pyramid of Giza and to plumb the city of ancient Rome.
Women dominated London’s brewing trade during medieval times, along with countless other examples.
But ask Dr Bateman where she comes from and the response is instant.
She told The Correspondent: “I was actually born in Tameside Hospital.
“And Hey Farm Estate in Mossley was where my parents lived when I was first born.
“My dad’s not far from there and his family is all from Stalybridge.
“I you go back through the generations, they’re mill workers from Stalybridge.”
Despite moving over the border into Saddleworth, Dr Bateman’s fascination with economic history began with what was around her.
Many of the buildings standing in Mossley and Stalybridge, along with the rest of Tameside, once helped generate the wealth of the country.
And what was lying in front of her was too tempting to resist.
She added: “The reason I first got interested in economics and economic history in particular, was from growing up and the whole heritage of the Industrial Revolution.
“We know that Manchester once led the economy really in Britain in the 19th century, but this area provided the fuel for that.
“Spinning the cotton that went through Manchester, then out through the port of Liverpool and was clothing the world.
“The north-south divide was the opposite of what it is today. The economic fortunes of the nation depended on where we grew up in the north of England.”
Economica may tell tales from around the world in many different times, from ancient almost to the present.
But to Dr Bateman, many of them merely confiormed what she was told at the dinner table.
She said: “When I was growing up, my grandma, Joyce Chadwick, had this phrase she’d always say to me, ‘Victoria, working class women have always worked.’
“In other words, don’t expect to be a housewife. She’s tell me how she and the ladies that she worked with in the cotton mill developed a kind of sign language so they could communicate with each other during the working day because the machinery was so noisy and so clunky.
“I knew really from the local stories, from the family history, how instrumental women had been to the economic fortunes, not just of the north of England, but of the country.
“But what was interesting was when I went to Cambridge University to formally study economic history was how little women were mentioned in the textbooks.
“We have this idea that women have spent most of history as housewives and only really joined the workforce in the 20th century, as a result of the World Wars in which women started to do men’s jobs.
“But what I what I tried to show in this latest book is that from the very beginning of human history, women were hunting alongside men, they were building pyramids alongside men, they were plumbing in ancient Rome, they were brewing beer in medieval times.
“And they were not just making the cloth in the Industrial Revolution, they were also mining coal, for example.”
Dr Bateman, 45, will be back on home turf as she delivers the Hajnal Lecture at Manchester University in May after winning the Hajnal Prize for Economic History.
And on her wish list is being reunited with the man who put her on the path to where she is now, form tutor at Saddleworth School, Dr Bill Mitchinson.
He recalled: “Being in his form was really transformational.
“A lot of people spent their time in form sessions at the start of the school day, when registers were taken, throwing paper airplanes and that type of thing.
“But he read us Shakespeare and he read us the Iliad. He forced us to learn European country capitals and things like that.
“When I got my GCSE mock results – and I hadn’t revised – I got As and Bs. He said, ‘Victoria, this isn’t good enough. You can do better than this.’
“I blitzed my GCSEs and then went on to Oldham Sixth Form College, did well in my A-levels, and then went on to Cambridge.
“He’s such an amazing man and I’m sure he has had a transformational influence on so many students through his time.”