"down an inviting green lane [that] leads to Eltham, a pleasant walk of hardly two miles" in the company of Bradshaw's guide of 1862

Now I never tire of guide books and so here we are with Bradshaw’s Illustrated Handbook to London and its Environs which was published in 1862 and includes a walk to Eltham.*

South of Woolwich from Bradshaw's Inland Navigation, 1830

Many people will be familiar with his railway timetables which he began issuing from 1839 just nine years after the first passenger railway began transporting people and goods from Liverpool to Manchester.

Few however know that he also produced three maps of The Inland Navigation of England and Wales which detailed the canal network and are still a wonderful source of information.

He was born in 1801 in Pendleton and was apprenticed to an engraver.  In 1821 he set up an engraving business in Manchester and produced a series of popular maps of Lancashire and Yorkshire.

But with the coming of the railways George Bradshaw saw an opportunity not to be missed.  The network had grown with a speed and the original 30 or so miles of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830 had become over 8,000 miles just 25 years later connecting most of our cities and towns.

Mr Bradshaw died in 1852 but the company continued and with an eye to the moment produced the Illustrated Handbook to London and its Environs to coincide with the second Great International Exhibition.

The book is divided into five parts, which are then further divided into a series of daily walking routes including detailed descriptions of what you might see along the way.

So for the curious 21st century reader here are descriptions on how to cross London by foot, train and boat as well as what the city and surrounding areas had to offer in 1862.

And I couldn’t resist following his adventure out from Blackheath to Shooter’s Hill and on “down an inviting green lane [that] leads to Eltham, a pleasant walk of hardly two miles.”

So here we are on his guided walk along the old Dover Road crossing the Heath, on Shooters Hill taking in ‘a rustic little hostelry on our left distinguished by the peculiar title of the ‘Sun-in-the-Sand’which was the haunt of quite a few 19th century writers who took advantage of an open balcony from which a pleasant view may be obtained of the surrounding country."

And from there we are directed up to Shooters Hill and told that it "commands an expansive prospect [from which] 'the mighty mass of brick smoke and shipping’ as Byron calls the view of London from this point, is well contrasted with the foliage of the wooded country extending towards the south beyond the vale of Eltham.”

Sevendroog Castle, 1909

And this is a fitting point to pause on the adventure which I will return to tomorrow and instead announce that the restored Sevendroog Castle’s opening day is scheduled to be on the Spring Bank Holiday at the end of May.

Illustrated Handbook to London and its Environs, is available on Kindle and in hard copy from Conway Publishers.  Now I should know, I downloaded my electronic copy yesterday and ordered up a hard copy today.

Now that shows interest in Mr Bradshaw











Pictures; south of Woolwich from Bradshaw’s  Inland Navigation of England and Wales, 1830, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Sevendroog Castle 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

* Bradshaw’s Illustrated Handbook to London and its Environs, 1861, republished in 2012 

**The City, the East, the West, the North, the South

King Cholera ......... stories of Public Health

I have been reflecting on those awful diseases that stalked our cities, towns and villages just over 170 years ago.

Of these Cholera was regarded by many as the worst and was often referred to as “Deadly” or “King Cholera” It is an infection caused by contaminated food and water. The main symptoms are diarrhoea and vomiting, and if untreated will continue until the patient becomes severely dehydrated. In the final stages a cholera victim will bring up what was called rice water and is almost clear liquid with fishy smell and resemble living skeletons.

Its impact was always going to be worst in the overcrowded and unsanitary parts of the city where large numbers were crowded together in back to back housing and narrow enclosed courts.

Span Court off Artillery Street is a fine example of a court and survived into the 1960s.

There are vivid descriptions of these places in the 1840s by writers like Frederick Engels, Leon Faucher and Dr Kay, as well as official reports.

The Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, drew attention to the fact that in the Market Street district of Manchester half the cases of Cholera were from the inhabitants of courts and cellar dwellings, which were in close proximity to open privies where the water supply was of a “poor quality” often served several cottages and was generally only “turned on for an hour day”

More revealing are 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.

 Here are the fit, not so fit and in many cases undernourished residents of streets which were overcrowded and dirty, like Martha Chorlton aged 57 of 10 John Street Ancoats, who lived in a “locality, crowding, filth, &c. Street in a very populous and poor neighbourhood.”*

Or Thomas Cavanagh aged 5 and his mother Elizabeth who lived at 5 Wakefield-street Little Ireland which “fronted an open area but an impure stream whose channel does the function of a sewer, passes by the door to adjoining field where it collects and stagnates: house and inhabitants very filthy: three children and two adults on a straw bed.” 

And so it goes on but not all the streets were dirty and not all those who would contract the disease were poor. The rich had servants who may have had relatives in the more depressed parts of the city and might walk the disease in by the servant’s entrance.

Nor should we forget that the wealthy often lived in close proximity to run down areas. So that very posh set of late 18th century houses on St John Street off Deansgate was just  next door to Spam Court and surrounded by roads where there was overcrowding and Cholera.

Perhaps also we should be careful not to over state the impact of the disease on the city. There were just over 142,000 people in the city of which according to Gaulter 1,325 died.  But then there is the danger of falling into that callous numbers game which judges deaths in terms of statistics while for the individual just one death is a tragedy.

And the chances were that for those who contracted it death was a pretty strong out come. So for those who caught Cholera in Manchester over 50% would die while in Chorlton on Medlock the figure was 38% and in Salford 30%. These are not odds that I would fancy.

Nor I think should we feel that it was just the cities and towns that suffered. Rural areas were equally unsanitary and diseases like typhus and typhoid were according to the Poor Law Commissioners real threats in the countryside.

Which of course brings us to Chorlton, and in the next few weeks I shall be reporting on child mortality, sickness and public health in our own township but in the meantime I am happy to say that the worst is over here on Beech Road.

Picture; Span Court, south side of Artillery Street, J.Ryder, 1965 m00211, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass & New Wakefield Street, Little Ireland today from the collection of Andrew Simpson

 Sources, Gaulter 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

* Gaulter

The forgotten Chorlton Bookshop ……..

Take a former front room in a house on Barlow Moor Road and in the late 1970s into the next decade you had a bookshop.

It was only open on a Saturday and specialized in books on the Labour Movement, Socialism and Green and Feminist issues, and was located in the old Labour Party offices.

From memory I doubt that they were queuing outside on the street but there was a steady trickle of customers most Saturdays.

Sometimes there was a run on posters or the latest book by a well-known politician and there was always regular trade for Tribune and Labour Weekly.

And in my case while doing a stint on the rota I was a sucker for odd pamphlet “topical badge”.

Most of the material came from Grass Roots on a sale and return basis, not that it ever rivalled Bryan the Book on Beech Road or Chorlton Book Shop, but for a few years it was a presence.

Location; Barlow Moor Road

Pictures, the alternative bookshop, circa 1979-1980, from the collection of Andrew Simpson 

When we had a piano shop on Beech Road

Sometimes a picture captures a moment which with hindsight allows you to see that things were just about to change.

 Here is another of those photographs taken by Tom McGrath in the middle 1980s.

I don’t suppose any of us could have realized that as we walked past the old closed up off license that within a couple of years two out of these three shops would be part of the transformation of Beech Road.

For as long as I can remember Muriel and Richard had run the green grocers in the centre of the parade.  On one side had been the off license which had sold bottled beer since the early years of the 20th century, while on the other the shop had been many things, including in the 50s a grocery store and by the time I washed up here was selling pianos.

But all of that was about to change and Tom’s pictures captures that point of change.

The off license which had struggled on into the 1980s became the Italian deli while the piano shop became a cafe before becoming a series of wine bars and growing its extension.

Only Richard and Muriel’s stayed the course, but were about to have a new and very impressive sign put above the door announcing that they were the Purveyors of fine fruit and vegetables, which they were.

But back in the mid 80s such things just didn’t seem to be done in the same way.  If you wanted fruit and veg, then that is where on Beech Road you went.  Just like if you needed paraffin or the odd nail or screw you went to the ironmongers next to Wilkinson’s the butchers.  Everyone knew them and knew what they sold.

Of course within a few years the old council offices had become the Lead Station, the grocers' beside the barbers' had become Primavera and the Wool Shop was to become Truth.

All of which makes Tom’s picture such a wonderful record of the old Beech Road some of us still remember.  And as if on cue as I was standing outside one of the new shops a couple went past telling their friend about “trendy Beech Road.”

What a lot has changed.

Picture, from the collection of Tom McGrath

The shock of the new ...........travelling the railway in 1830

Now I am not sure that some of the detail is completely accurate on this painting by A.B. Clayton of the “Inaugural journey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1830” but what I like is the way that it captures the shock of the new.

There rattling along at an impressive speed is the future while looking on are two oldish chaps who were no doubt born in the previous century when the canal was the cutting edge of transport technology and the horse the fastest you could travel.

One of the men leans on the sign warning the curious of the dangers presented by the innocent line of railway track.  And it was at the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway that William Huskinson the MP for Liverpool was killed when he was run over by Locomotive.

Now there are plenty of descriptions of the opening day and memories of people who travelled the trains from Liverpool to Manchester but my favorite is from J T Slugg’s wonderful book Reminiscences of Manchester published in 1881, and describing the city in the 1830s*.  Slugg lived here in Chorlton and knew Thomas Ellwood whose writings on the township are still required reading by anyone who wants to know what the village was like in the 19th century.

Likewise Slugg paints a detailed picture of “this system of travelling” which “it seemed impossible to jump from old practices and habits into a new order of things without passing a transition stage [so] as there had been two classes of passengers by coach – inside and outside- so there were at first only two classes of trains. The first class trains went at 7 and 10 a.m., and 2 and 5 p.m.; and the second class at 7-30 a.m., and 1 and 5-30 p.m."

And of course the accommodation varied with the cost of the fare.  For 7s you got to sit in a first class carriage holding four passengers and for a shilling less you shared with five others.  Second class cost 5s for “glass coaches and in open carriages, 3s.6d.”  Those who had not booked in advance were not permitted to travel.

But perhaps the most revealing insight into that age of transition was that “there were no wayside stations except at Newton, and [so] the train stayed anywhere on the line to suit the convience of passengers.”

Moreover the “directors announced that they were determined to prevent the practice of supplying liquor on the road, and requested that passengers not alight, [but] before this regulation as to liquor was issued I [Slugg] took a journey to Liverpool in the stand up boxes, and well recollect on the return stopping at Patricroft, opposite to an inn on the left-hand side and seeing a young woman, carrying a large tray of glasses containing liquors and cigars, which she supplied to many of the passengers.”

But that is enough for now.

Pictures; Inaugural journey of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway 1830, A.B.Clayton, in the public domain and the rest  from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Slugg, J.T.,Reminiscences of Manchester, 1881

On Shooters Hill in 1909

Looking down Shooters Hill in 1909

I am back on Shooters Hill in the June of 1841 thinking about the small community of 58 people who lived on this northern boundary of Eltham.

I had planned to write about them today but instead I couldn’t resist showing this picture of Shooters Hill looking west down the road.

It is taken from the book The Story of Royal Eltham which was written by R.R.C. Gregory in 1909 and although it has long been out of print it has been carefully digitalised by Roy Ayres and can be seen online at http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

And so back to our picture which was taken just 70 or so years after yesterday’s story.

Picture; 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

“Making do” …… rationing … cooking … and that lost world of 1946

I often return to L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go Between with its story of class, romance and redemption, made more memorable for me by that line from the book, “The past is a different place, they do things differently there”.

The universal and compulsory identity card, 1950

All of which is a lead into a series of reflections on those immediate post war years, when Britain was adjusting to peace but was still surrounded by the effects of those six years of conflict.

It was there in the ruined buildings and bombsites, to the vestiges of wartime control from identity cards, to rationing.

But walking hand in hand with that weariness and the prevailing “make do and mend” there was an optimism which was there in the creation of the Welfare State, The New Look and the Festival of Britain.

And it all seems to come together with a series of information leaflets from the Ministry of Food which were part informative, and part designed to promote heathy eating with the hard realities that food was still in short supply and many necessities as well as luxuries were still rationed.

The leaflets were issued each month during the late 1940s and were compiled into the “’ABC of Cookery’ [which gives] suggestions and methods of cooking and preparing food”.

What's left in the Larder, 1946

They covered every aspect of the sourcing preparing and cooking of meals advocating healthy and nutritious food.  Here could be found “a plan for meals for children”, “Cooking for one” foraging in the countryside and how best to use the fat ration.

At which point there will be those who mutter “nanny state” but it is as well to remember that for many families the war had interrupted family life and in particular the routine of cooking with many civilians eating in office and factory canteens or in subsidised public restaurants while evacuation had ripped many children out of the home.

Hedgerow Harvest, 1946

So, the Ministry of Food’s leaflets aimed to plug the gap of knowledge and in some cases promote what ever food was available.  

One of my favourites was the 1946 “Hedgerow Harvest” issued in the July of that year with the simple message that “there is a wealth of wild foods in our hedgerows and fields for those who are within reach of the countryside [and which] should not be wasted”.

It chimed in with advice from the The British Gas Council with approval of the Ministry of Agriculture focused on “Jam Making & Fruit Bottling”.  Over the years I have done my own experiments in these post war food suggestions including orange curd Pearl Barley Milk Pudding.

And today I have turned to their offer from December 1946 and “What’s left in the Larder” which explored using “Stale Bread” and using up left over fish which could be turned into a curry, using an onion, small carrot, curry powder, and flour to which you added a pint of stock, some vinegar, chutney, two tablespoons of sultanas and the flaked fish.

Using up stuff, 1946

Pearl Barley puddings, 1946

Now whether it was because rice was scare or just a culinary sign of the times, the curry was to be served with mashed potatoes.

But then just under twenty years later and mother regularly made a meat curry with sultanas and served it up with mash.

So looking through the leaflets there is indeed much that echoes that L.P. Hatley observation of the gulf between now then and now.

Of course, the canny cook has never forgotten that there is a place for yesterday’s leftovers in today’s meals, whether it be taking slices of old bread and rubbing them with a mix of garlic, tomatoes and olive oil, or my own teatime fall back which added some end of date salad, the last of the double cream with mushrooms and a newly cooked plate chickpeas, paprika, onions and tomato sauce.

And tonight I will finish off the chickpeas with what ever I can find in the fridge which needs using up.

Location; the kitchen and sometime in the 1940s

Pictures; selections from Ministry of Food leaflets, 1946 and my leftovers, 2026, and an identity card, 1950, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

My left overs, 2026

* "The past is a different place, they do things differently there", The Go Between, L.P. Hatley, 1953