Ramsbottom Grant Arms Hotel in Market Place was the home of William and Daniel Grant, 19th century industrialists closely associated with the rise of the town and reputed to be the inspiration for the Cheeryble brothers in "Nicholas Nickleby" by Charles Dickens. The Grants' employees were paid in tokens that had to be redeemed at a public house owned by the company. The landlord converted the tokens into cash, but only after deducting threepence per person, which had to be spent on beer, a variation on the truck system. A network of roads and railways routed through Ramsbottom allowed for a
The Hundred Brothers house are like. Within these confines, however, can be found "a remarkably complete catalog of the things that men do and feel among men":Football, fisticuffs, food fights, chess playing, bullying gambling, hunting, drinking, pornography, pranking, philanthropy, power tools, homosexual cruising, anxieties about incontinence, penis size and middle-age weight gain. "The book also, despite its brevity, contains a deftly telecoped genealogy of human knowledge and experience, reaching from pre-history up through a very belated present day in which civilization seems on the brink of collapse." The Hundred Brothers The Hundred Brothers is a 1997 novel by American author Donald Antrim. The