More than seventy years later, on a visit to the Tate Gallery, I was to see the same streets of terraced houses, the same school, the hospital which I had visited after a fall in St Anne’s school-yard, and the fairground I had visited at Easter time. It was the Lowry exhibition. I could feel and almost smell the mood and atmosphere and acrid smoke from the train engines going by Viaduct Street. In his painting of Ancoats Hospital Outpatients’ Hall, I could well have been sitting there clutching my knee. And in his depiction of the Silcock Brothers circus on a Good Friday at Daisy Nook, I could easily have been one of his stick figures wandering around the fairground…

Born in a working-class district of Manchester, cursed with TB, his mother dead when he was 11 and his father seeking solace in drink, Terry Maher became a successful businessman and, as he describes himself, ‘a frustrated politician’. From vivid descriptions of a bombed-out city, the hardships of post-war Britain, One of Lowry’s Children shifts to his early business career and the creation of the new Liberal Democrat party. Maher’s increasing disillusion with the path chosen by the Lib Dems is vividly described, with candid comments on what went wrong. The book’s ending suggests a way forward.