In September 1890, Michael and Hannah and their young son Simon moved to Wigan. There were not many Jewish families in Wigan at this time, and there was no synagogue in the town for the Marks family to attend. Michael was attracted to Wigan by its potential for a successful market stall, with a large population of factory workers, and by its location. It was within half an hour’s journey by rail to Warrington and Birkenhead and other Lancashire towns like Bolton, which offered Michael a promising field for expansion.
Within weeks of Michael’s arrival, he had set up a new stall in Wigan’s Market Hall and rented a second property for use as a warehouse, for storing the goods that were sold on all his market stalls.
The family lived in rented rooms on Caroline Street in Wigan, then in 1891, Michael, Hannah, Simon and Rebecca (aged 3 and 1) moved to a two-up, two-down terraced house in Great George Street, which they rented for £9 a year.
As an adult, Simon wrote of this house:
“…my first memory is of a little house in Wigan at the age of four. The patter of clogs on the cobbled stone streets appealed to me enormously and I begged my father to buy me a pair, just like the other children. At night I would wrap them up in brown paper and put them under my pillow. I didn’t want to be different from the other children. We lived in modest but comfortable circumstances and conditions, and our happiest times seemed to be when father spent the Sunday with us. He was the most loveable of persons and seemed to be away a great deal. He was of course pre-occupied with the building up of his business to which he devoted all of his energies”.
When Michael and Hannah’s fourth child Miriam was born in 1892, Michael was still unable to sign his name – Miriam’s birth certificate bears his mark, and his occupation is listed as ‘Smallware dealer (Master)’. In the same year the family moved to a larger house at 57 Darlington Street, Wigan, at double their previous rent.
One of Michael’s stalls was in Birkenhead’s Open Casual Market, and he hired a local woman as sales assistant. Owing to the market’s exposed site and a spell of viciously cold weather, the young woman contracted pneumonia and died. Michael was devastated and, from then on, would never trade in open markets but only in covered market halls, arcades or high street sites. He was opening more sites between Liverpool and Manchester and the idea of having the latter as the centre of his expanding business was growing more attractive.