Lost and forgotten breweries of Manchester ......... nu 1 what a lot

It began as a discussion with Paul over the identity of this brewery on the corner of Ledger Street which was behind Miller Street. 

Ledger Street and that brewery. 1849

It shows up on both the 1849 OS map of Manchester and Salford and Mr Adshead’s  Twenty four Illustrated Maps of the Township of Manchester published two years later.

And as you do I went looking for it, staring with the 1850 street directory which along with listing most of the streets of Manchester & Salford, also includes the principal trades and householders.

Sadly the brewery on Ledger Street was not there but then nor was Ledger Street.

Some of our breweies, 1850

Instead I had to content myself with looking through the breweries which were in the directory, of which there were eight six.  Twenty two were in Salford and the rest were in Manchester.

To these could be added the very small enterprises which were no more than a family and a front room, who made their own beer and served it directly from their their home.

In time I am minded to go looking for all sixty four, finding out something about who they were and how long they survived.

I suspect some will have gone within a decade while others lasted into the following century and a few  will have survived until quite recently.

All of which brings me to  James Deakin’s brewery on Kenyon Street which was off Rochdale Road.

Now why I got Kenyon Street and Ledger Street mixed up I have no idea, but I did and for an hour roamed over the documents connected with Mr Deakin and there were a fair few.

He is there in the Rate Books in 1850 owning the “brewhouse” which had a rateable value of £33 which put his premises way above the neighbouring “workshops” but a minnow compared to the ironworks of John Rowcroft who paid £100.

Kenyon Street and Deakin's Brewey, 1850

That said Mr Deakin was doing well enough to live with his wife and son in Rusholme employing three servants.

A decade later they had moved to one of the posh bits of Ardwick living in a house which was big enough to accommodate their five children and three servants.

In time I will find out more about his business, but for now I uncovered a reference to the firm which “by the late 1880's the business was being run by James Henry Deakin, son of the brewer Henry Deakin. 

The title of the Manchester Brewery Company Limited was given to a newly-registered firm in 1888 when it was created to acquire the business of James Henry Deakin. The firm were based at the Britannia Brewery in Brodie Street, Ardwick, Manchester.”*

So that offers up a wealth of research opportunities and also opens up another line of enquiry because there was a George Deakin operating a brewery from 62 Butler Street just round the corner on Oldham Road.

None of which perhaps helps with finding our brewery on Ledger Street.

For that I suspect it will have to be a trawl of the Rates Books on a cold set day down at Central Ref.

Still someone has to do it.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; detail of Ledger Street 1849 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1844-49 and detail of Kenyon Street, 1851 from  Adshead’s map of 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Pubs and Breweries of the Midlands,  http://www.midlandspubs.co.uk/breweries/lancashire/manchester-brewery.htm

A lost Eltham Palace ........... nu 3 Eltham Palace from the north west

Now I have decided to run a few pictures of what Eltham Palace looked like in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It had long been abandoned as a home for royalty and its grand days were thing of the past.

The occasional tourist up from London called in along with an interested artist keen to capture its former splendour but that was about it.

All very different from now, and a prelude to more stories of the building and its history.*

But in the meantime here then over the next few days are the Palace as you might have seen it during the early 19th century, all taken from that wonderful book on the history of Eltham published in 1909.**

Picture; Eltham Palace from the north west from an old engraving, from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

*The Story of Eltham Palace, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-story-of-eltham-palace.html

** The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

Cycling to a beauty contest …….. “the pretty entrants” of 1937

I bet there will be someone who remembers Riding’s Stores Ltd.

They sold cycles and advertised themselves as “The largest Quality Cycle Specialists in the North of England”, with branches on Deansgate, Corporation Street, Market Street and Swan Street, with shops in Moss Side, Rusholme and Stretford as well as here at 362 Barlow Moor Road.

And in their drive to bring cycles to the world they boasted “No Risk - No Bother – No Fuss – It’s so easy, so simple Riding’s ‘Best of All’ Easy Ways”, which meant that from 1/6 a week you could have any Hercules model , with the added bonus of no deposit and a ”Seven Day Free Riding Trial”.

The advertisement appeared in the Chorlton and Wilbrahampton News for July  16th, 1937, but what caught my eye was an additional notice drawing attention to “More Pretty Entrants in Riding’s Great Northern Cycle Queen Contest”, which featured eleven young women, with one posing with a cycle, another in a swim suit and another talking on the telephone.

And in an act of overkill, the company posted yet another reference to the contest calling on women to “Send in your photographs now!  Adding, “Waste no time. This is a marvelous opportunity for some local girl to gain fame and popularity”.

All that was required was a  name and an address on the back of the picture which was to be sent in a “1½d. sealed envelope to Riding’s” main showrooms on Stockport Road. 

The company also embraced all the modern technology, promising that “Elimination contests will be filmed and the final selection will take place at the New Manchester Hippodrome”, which I suppose opened up the potential for a cinema news story.

But if that was not enticement enough there was the promise “handsome cash prizes” and the simply direct question “Will You Be Queen?”

So, there you have it and by one of those little quirky twists, the Riding’s shop on Barlow Moor Road was just four doors down from Ken Foster’s cycle shop.  Now that is a bit of historical continuity,

Location; Chorlton and Manchester

Pictures; addverts from the Chorlton and Wilbrahampton News, July 1937 from the collection of Maggie Watson

Lost stories in a forgotten street ……. the one behind Deansgate

Now it is easy to shudder and feel outrage at the accounts of housing conditions in the poor parts of Manchester in the first half of the 19th century.

New Gates, Manchester,  1908

Overcrowding, back-to-back houses, closed courts where the sun fought to penetrate, and of course a lack of sanitation matched only by parts of the developing world are the stuff of social history.

But the history books and rarely the social observers of the time burrowed deep to offer up the personal stories of those who lived in the cellar dwellings and the one up one down properties, often built in the shadow of textile mills, and iron foundries and bounded by the polluted rivers that ran through the city.  

Dr Kay, Frederick Engels and a few foreign visitors did paint a grim picture.

And more revealing is the case notes of Dr Henry Gaulter who experienced the first outbreak of Cholera during the May to December of 1832. 

He kept a detailed record of the first three hundred patients he attended describing their physical condition, the onset of the disease and their living conditions but was forced to abandon the exercise as the numbers increased.*

Royton Street, 1851

So, with that in mind I have plunged back into one street off Deansgate in 1851.  In that year it was home to 408 people who lived in 46 houses, nine of which were one roomed back-to-back properties, and the remainder, consisted of four rooms with weekly rents ranging from 1 shilling [5p] to 5s [25p].

The street was Royton Street, and history has not been kind to it.  It never featured in any of the street directories for the 19th century, and progressively lost its houses and half its length to industrial development and finally vanished under the Spinnyfields project at the start of this century.

There are only two photographs of it in the City’s digital collection, and one of those I think has either been misplaced from somewhere else or is much older than the published date.**

I came across the place by chance a few days ago, wrote about it and planned to move on but the detail is as they say in the detail and so I trawled the 20 pages of the 1851 census and then went back for some of the surrounding closed courts.***

One bit of detail was the presence of a Catholic day and Sunday school in the middle of the street, which made perfect sense given that 36% of the street’s residents were born in Ireland and a cursory look at the surrounding area suggest that this was typical.

Royton Street, circa 1880-1900

Nor would the Irish accent be the only one you could hear, for while 50% were from Manchester, there were significant numbers of residents from Scotland, Wales, Yorkshire, as well other parts of Lancashire, seven from London, nine from Cheshire, and even one from Prussia.

Their occupations were as varied as their origins, with a mix of textile workers, four policemen, an architect’s apprentice, and two teachers.

And there were the usual range of skilled trades from carpenters, painters, and glaziers to those engaged in the book and shoe trades, as well as tailors, dress makers, a blacksmith, oastler, and “brick setters.” 

But we are in one of the poorer areas of the city, and so here were labourers, house servants, and those on pensions, and poor relief.

To which we can add children, for over a third of the street were young people under the age of 15, and while plenty of these were attending school others by the age of 11, were employed as errand boys, apprentices, and servants.

Birth places of Royton Street residents, 1851

The census also records the degree of overcrowding, so our 408 inhabitants lived in just 46 houses made up of 89 households.  

Nor does this deliver the true degree of overcrowding.  So picking just three houses, which were numbers one, three, and four, together they were home to 38 people.  

At number one there were 18, divided into three households, at number three, eight divided into two households, and at number four there were 12 living in three households.

It is a picture replicated across the entire street, and while there were some big families, there were also many lodgers.  In total the figure was 72, most of whom were unmarried, were not related, and were occupied in a variety of skilled and non-skilled occupations.  

Of the 72, only 11% were from Manchester, with the rest drawn from all parts of the country, with 43% from Ireland.

Age Profile of Royton Street residents, 1851

Almost every household included some lodgers, and while there were a few “lodging houses” most families shared their home with people they were unrelated to.

All of which raises the question of how big the houses were.  

There were 14 back to back properties which might have had three rooms but equally might have had just two, and the census return is silent on the total number of rooms for these or the remaining houses.  

The surviving properties listed in 1901 indicate that they consisted of four rooms, but by then there were only 14 left which leaves the other 32 a mystery.

Royton Street, 1849

Nor it appears were there any cellars, recorded on the 1851 census.  Now cellar dwellings do show up for other parts of the city, and people are recorded as living in them, so it seems Royton Street was cellar free, or at least, from cellar occupants.

For the curious Royton Street was located between Hardman and Cumberland Streets and its course roughly follows the route of the Avenue in Spinneyfields

In the vicinity of Royton Street, Spinningfields, 2020

Occupations of Royton Street residents, 1851

Next, I have a fancy to explore some of the families and try to delve into what their lives were like.

Location; Off Deansgate, Manchester

Pictures; New Gates, 1908, m8316,  courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, Spinneyfields, 2020, from  the collection of Andrew Simpson and Royton Street in 1849, from the OS map of Manchester and Salford, 1844-49, and Royton Street circa 1880-1900 from Goad's Fire Insurance maps, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/and Royton Street 1951, from the OS map of Manchester and Salford

All that was left, 1951

*Gaultier Henry, The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera, 1833, London, & Appendix A, To the Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, 1850, London

**Royton Street, Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

***Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 95 Royton Street, 1951 https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2022/02/lost-and-forgotten-streets-of.html 

A little bit of history in the back garden ……. “Scrubbs Cloudy Ammonia”

Two bottles ..... with Scrubbs to the left, 2023

It is a given that if you have a garden at some point something will turn up, and if you are lucky it will have a story.

In ours we have unearthed heaps of animal bones, most of which belonged to Joe and Mary Ann Scott who lived in our house for 58 years and were so keen on their pets that they left bits of them in the garden and the property to the P.D.S.A.

That said in our 46 years of living here, we too have added two dead cats, and a a Superman toy which we bought in Greece and buried in the garden after his head parted from his body.

The reverse of the two bottles, 2023

These I have never gone looking for, but like many I have come across fragments of porcelain with those blue figures of Chinese pagodas and elegant bridges, to which there was the bowl of a clay pipe.

Not a great haul I must admit, and pale when compared to what a builder on Wilton Road has come across.

These include a bottle with the imprint of Mason and Burrows who sold beer, wine, and groceries and had a branch on Beech Road from 1892.*

To these according to Declan can be added, “an old ashtray, a broken wine glass & two more bottles. One is completely free of markings, but very thick glass coloured dark blue, so presumably medicine or poisonous!

The other has a raised glass ‘label’; “Scrubbs Cloudy Ammonia”, so I reckon that wouldn’t have been for drinking either!”

And Declan is right. A trawl of the internet threw up plenty of adverts for the product, all of which seem to have had a battery of uses.

In 1927 one advert suggested “After A Strenuous Game of [golf] a refreshing bath with SCRUBB’S CLOUDY AMONNIA  It also ALLAYS IRRITATION FROM MOSQUITO BITES", while the full range of its uses can be attested by another advert which promised it was 

Scrubb and Co, Southwark Street, London, 2009

“Refreshing as a Turkish bath, Invaluable for toilet purposes, Splendid Cleansing Preparation for the Hair, Removes Stains and Grease Spots from Clothing, Allays Irritation from Mosquito Bites, Invigorating in Hot Climates, Restores the Colour of Carpets, Cleans Plate and Jewellery”.

After which I guess you would be a fool not to slip down to your local grocery store where you could buy it in two sizes confident that one bottle would do for 10 baths.

And keep a stock in for that special time of the year when you would want to “CLEAN UP FOR CHRISTMAS [with] SCRUBB’S CLOUDY AMMONIA IN ONE BOTTLE All cleaning needs two sizes 10d and 1/4d”

John Williams & Son, Beech Road, 1932

Scrubb & Co were variously at 32 Southwark Street in Southwark in southeast London.  The building is still there, and id bounded by the main railway viaduct and stretched along Red Cross Way. 

Today it is a swish Portuguese restaurant but back in 2009 its origins are still very much there to see.

All of which just leaves me the thought of where our bottle would have been bought.

I guess it would be from a shop on Beech Road which might have been Mason and Burrows or perhaps John Williams and Son on the corner of Beech and Wilton, which was a chain of shops across the south of the city and were here by 1932.

John Williams & Co, 2015

For the curious their tiled name is till there in the present Launderette.

And that is it.

Location. Wilton Road

Pictures; the bottles from Wilton Road, 2023, courtesy of Declan McGuire,Scrubb & Co former works, Southwark Street, London, 2009,  John Williams and Son, Beech Road, 1932 from the Lloyd Collection, and Joth Williams & Co tiled sign, 2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-lost-chorlton-bottle-beech-road-offi.html

A lost Eltham Palace nu 2 .............. The Banqueting Hall in 1782

Now I have decided to run a few pictures of what Eltham Palace looked like in the 18th and 19th centuries.

It had long been abandoned as a home for royalty and its grand days were thing of the past.

The occasional tourist up from London called in along with an interested artist keen to capture its former splendour but that was about it.

All very different from now, and a prelude to more stories of the building and its history.*

But in the meantime here then over the next few days are the Palace as you might have seen it during the early 19th century, all taken from that wonderful book on the history of Eltham published in 1909.**

Picture; the Banqueting Hall West end, from an engraving in Archeologica 1772, , from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

*The Story of Eltham Palace, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-story-of-eltham-palace.html
** The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

D Day ...... AD 43 .......Portrait Of An Age ..... and the death of General Gordan

Pan Edition 1961

I have begun re-reading The Great Invasion by Leonard Cottrell.

It was first published in 1958 and describes the Roman invasion and conquest of Britain.*

Now Mr Cottrell had himself been a war correspondent and this book was written only 13 years after the end of the last world war and must have had a real resonance.

“Among the readers of this book may be some who have known what it is like to wade on to an enemy beach under heavy fire. 

Others may have commanded troops in such actions, and experienced that nerve racking moment when all hangs in the balance, when the defenders have the advantage of protected positions, and the attackers have not had time to establish their fighting formations.” 

And in quoting Julius Caesar’s account of the military expedition to Britain in 55 BC Mr Cottrell observed that it “could almost describe an attack on the Normandy beaches or a Japanese island in the Pacific.”

So  there is a directness and a sense of authenticity about the account which other such later books on the subject do not give me.

Michael and Susan Henchard artist Robert Barnes, 1886

Now we all have our favourite books, the ones we return to time and time again to the point that we can  quote back at the author the opening lines or know just what awaits the leading characters just around the next page.

I never tire of those first few lines from A Tale of Two Cities and the sinister and chilling warning at the start of The War of The Worlds

In the same way I am still moved to indignation when the drunken  Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter at the beginning of Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge.

But history books are different, and mainly because the scholarship moves on and what was fresh and new is at best old and tired and all too often has been proved wrong by new discoveries.

Some of course survive because of the style, wit and elegance of the writing.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, Thomas Babbington Macaulay’s social history and Young’s Portrait of An Age are still a joy to read.

I do not think you can better the opening of Young’s Portrait of An Age, **

O.U.P., edition, 1960

“A BOY born in 1810, in time to have seen the rejoicings after Waterloo and the canal boats carrying the wounded to hospital, to remember the crowds cheering for Queen Caroline, and to have felt that the light had gone out of the world when Byron died, entered manhood with the ground rocking under his feet as it had done in 1789.  

Paris had risen against the Bourbons; Bologna against the Pope, Poland against Russia, the Belgians against the Dutch.  

Even in well drilled Germany little dynasts were shaking on their thrones and Niebuhr,*** who had seen one world revolution, sickened and died from fear of another.  

At home, forty years of Tory domination were ending in panic and dismay; Ireland, unappeased by Catholic Emancipation was smouldering with rebellion; from Kent to Dorset the skies were a light with burning ricks.”

And I still enjoy  the closing lines of the essay on the Death of General Gordan by
Lytton Strachey in his Eminent Victorians which having surveyed Gordan’s life and the campaign to avenge his death concludes that “General Gordan had always been a contradictious person – even a little off his head, perhaps, though a hero; and besides he was no longer there to contradict .... At any rate it all ended very happily – in a slaughter of twenty thousand Arabs, a vast addition to  the British Empire, and a step in the Peerage for Sir Evelyn Baring.”****

Penguin Classics, 1989

Set against the measured, and dry writings of so many here is a sweeping comment on British imperialism and a cynical examination of the later Victorian period.

All of which is a long way I know from D-Day AD 43 and the great Roman Invasion.

On the other hand these are the sorts of history books which capture the imagination and want you to read more leading you on to even greater study, if only to know whether Lytton Strachey was fair or Mr Cotteril accurate.

And of course are as entertaining as the those first few lines from A tale of Two Cities and the sinister and chilling warning at the start of The War of The Worlds*****

Pictures covers from Pan Books, The Mayor of Casterbridge, the O.U.P. and Penguin Classics

*The Great Invasion, Leonard Cottrell, 1958

**Portrait of an Age, G.M. Young, 1936

***Barthold George Niebuhr, August 27 1776 – January 2  1831, was a Danish-German statesman and historian who became Germany's leading historian of Ancient Rome and a founding father of modern scholarly historiography.

****Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey, 1918

*****“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”

“No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”