Images of old Eltham and a warning for the future

Just sixty-two years separate these two images of Eltham. 

The first dates from 1915 not long after the southern end of Well Hall Road was cut and the tram service from Woolwich inaugurated.

It is a picture I have featured already but is well worth a second look as I ponder on the future of the photograph as a historical record of a place.*

But first to the pictures.

The first is one of those traditional picture postcards, sent in their thousands every year from the late 19th century well into the middle of the 20th century.  They are a wonderful record of the past and most contain something of interest in the message on the reverse.

And this one is just five years from when the passenger tram service began.

It started on Saturday July 23rd 1910 and according to The Kentish Independent was a great success linking the small communities on the route from Eltham to Woolwich.

During the week the service was every ten minutes with the first leaving Beresford Square for Eltham at 6.40 am and the last at 11.30 pm.

And it cost just two pence to complete the full trip from Beresford Square to Eltham High Street, whilst workmen's through tickets were issued until eight o'clock in the morning at half price.**

Just sixty-two years later Jean took this image of Eltham Hill at the corner of Sherard Road.

At first glance the buildings look familiar but many have changed hands and with that change have come new businesses.

All of which is fertile research for the local historian, but I wonder for how much longer images like these will act as a stimulus to unlocking the past.

For the simple reason is that fewer and fewer of us are now taking pictures which are printed off on card or paper.

The digital camera and phone camera are wonderful tools but I doubt that many of the pictures that are taken with them ever get printed.

Instead they sit on computers which with the advance of technology mean they will not always be accessible to the future.

I trained on the old BBC computer and friends on the Sinclair both are now as much a part of the past as the telegram is to the email.

So I doubt there will be many of these images for the next generation to crawl over.

And in the same way the advent of first the telephone and now the email has pretty much eliminated the old letter, often written by hand and sent by the post.  These too will be lost to the future researcher.

Now I am no luddite and I like my digital camera and emails but I will in the fullness of time deposit some at least of my pictures in the digital record banks.

And of course print a few off.

Picture; Eltham Church and Well Hall Road, 1915, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Eltham Hill 1977, courtesy of Jean Gammons

Princess Road …. Chorlton-cum-Hardy …. two mysteries .. only one solved

Princess Road was off Neale Road and is now Pinewood Road.

Princess Road, 1933

I came across it while searching for something else, and it was one of those niggling little mysterious which needed solving. 

It is there on the 1901 census and  in the Rate Books for the 1870s.

So far so good, it just became a matter of tracking exactly where it was in  Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

The 1911 street directory recorded that it was off Neal Road, which was confirmed by later maps.

But what makes it a little more interesting is that its name was changed in advance of the big cull on repetitive street names across the city which saw Regent Road become Reeves, Church Road turn in to Chequers, and the demise of countless other old Chorlton road names.  

Most appear to have happened in the late 1960s or early 70s, but not so Princess Road which had bucked the trend and become Pinewood sometime between 1933 and 1956.

All I suspect a little nerdy which I fully accept, but for another mystery which is its appearance in the Rate Books for 1870s.

It appears just the five times in the Chorlton Rate Books, with just the one property which is owned by the Lloyd Estate and home to a Mr. Charles Chambers who paid an annual rent of £12.

Before 1875, Mr. Chambers was residing at Pitts Brow which was the was the slightly raised bit of land on the north side of where High Lane joins Edge Lane.

Six years later the 1881 census has him at Ash Tree Cottage which the census records as Wilbraham Road, but I think was more properly on Manchester Road, opposite the Lloyds.

Ash Tree, 1853

Maps from the 1850s show a collection of cottages at this point, which Thomas Elwood, our own historian, described in some detail.

They appear in one of his newspaper articles from 1885, in which he singled out Ash Tree Cottage which took its name from “a fine old ash tree which stood at the centre of Manchester Road, at the foot of which a man used to engage in prayer at a certain time every day”.*

But the cottage looks to have gone even before it appeared in his article, for while it is there in the April of 1881, it had gone by the time the Withington Board of Health published its map later in the year.

All a tad confusing, more so because on that map Manchester Road named as the road running up from High Lane to Wilbraham Road, which was cut in the late 1860s.

So, one Princess Road mystery solved but a second left to be explored.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Princess Road 1933, from the OS map of Manchester and Salford, 1933-34, and Ash Tree Cottage, 1853, from the OS map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association,  http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Ancient Wood and Plaster Dwellings, Chapter IV, History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, South Manchester Gazette, November 28th 1885

Salford women in uniform nu 2 .......... the gas inspectors

During the Great War women began to replace men in a wide range of industries.

In the May of 1915 Salford Corporation took on 15 women to work as guards on their trams.

It would be a few months later before Manchester followed suit and while they were undergoing their training the Manchester postal authorities decided to utilise the services of women in the “delivery of letters.”

And across the twin cities women were engaged as gas inspectors.

I hope that Salford Corporation was a little bit more generous in their recognition of the work undertaken by their woman gas inspectors than Manchester.

In 1918 Mr Frederick A Price the superintendant of the Manchester Gas Department reporting to the Gas Committee of Manchester Corporation on the work of the 31 women clerks and 85 women meter inspectors concluded that while they were good and careful workers and  industrious and painstaking.*

But they lacked initiative, were not capable of discharging the higher administrative duties and lacked the necessary imagination and concentration with the power of organisation adding they liked to indulge in a little gossip.**


Location; Salford

Picture; Salford women gas inspectors, 1917, m08110,, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

* Women at Mens’ Work, Manchester Guardian, January 5, 1918

**from Manchester and the Great War, Andrew Simpson, the History Press,  published in February 2017, ISBN -33: 9780750 978965

Waiting for the coal man

Enoch Royle the coal man circa 1930

There is something very reassuring about hearing the fire and the kitchen range being racked out in the morning.

More so if you are seven and it is one of those cold early December mornings.

Usually in our house dad did this around six just after he had got up and just before he made his breakfast.

It was the announcement that a new day had started and in its way was far better than any alarm clock because it was part of the routine of the house.

It was also combined with that knowledge that it was still early and you could drift back to sleep all warm despite the ice that had formed in the night on the inside of the windows.

Now it is a memory which I suspect will not be shared by many who were born after the 1950s.

The gas fire, 1938

Cleaning out and setting a new fire and maintaining the range were tiring, dirty and time consuming chores added to which bringing up a bucket of coal from the cellar was heavy work and so many opted for gas and electric fires and later still central heating all of which offered easy instant heat at the touch of a button.

That said of course many mining communities continued to rely on the delivery of coal from the NCB and even now once you leave the city and drive into the country there is still that distinctive smell of coal being burned and that lazy pall of smoke lifting from chimney tops.

At which point I must declare that this is no rosy nostalgic reflection on past times, but more a comment on what has been lost in just a few decades.

Along with that fire has gone the coal man and that distinctive sound of the coal thundering down the coal hole into the cellar.

It started with a loud rumble and finished with that after noise as the coal slid and settled, followed by the all pervading smell of the stuff which worked its way up despite both cellar doors being firmly closed.

Well Hall Road, 2014

All of which was something my mother could do without.

She was the first to demand gas fires throughout the house in Peckham and again when we moved to Well Hall.

Not for her the romance of coal and steam.

She would often remark on the end of the steam locomotive as progress pointing out that while they might have thrilled school boys of all ages they played havoc with your clean washing.

And in turn many of us will remember buildings darkened by decades of grime and soot and coming home covered in the stuff after a day climbing trees in the local park.

But each generation has a habit of reinventing the past and so  for the thirty years we have returned to open fires.

True often they were just an addition to the central heating and might be regarded as cosmetic, but now that most of the children have grown up and moved out there is less need to keep the whole house heated, and so we have retreated to the one room in the evening with a blazing fire and just a hint of the central heating across the rest.

The days of teenagers spread out on the three levels of the house all doing something different and doing it away from us have gone.

For many this will still be the fallout from modern living but not here.

From the six o’clock news till the weather forecast four and half hours later we will pretty much be in the one room, stocking that fire, and mildly disputing whose turn it is to venture into the coolness of the  kitchen.

And today with the fire cleaned out and set I just await the arrival of the coal man who comes once a week with two bags of mixed smokeless fuel and bags of kindling.

So somethings have just about come full circle.

Pictures; Enoch Royle and his father on Albany Road, circa 1930s from the Lloyd Collection, advert for gas fires, 1938, from from Your City, Manchester Municipal Officers’ Guild, 1938, a January open fire fire, 2024, Well Hall Road, 2014, Chrisse Rose

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 19 ........... the unremarkable

This is the continuing story of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

Now there is nothing over remarkable about these two pictures of our garden in Well Hall sometime in the 1970s.

The quality is a bit iffy but then they are over 47 years old and were taken with one of those old clunky instamatic cameras, which processed the film straight away and turned out the image in minutes.

The film was expensive and from memory you only got eight or so shots, but there was something magical about the instant nature of the process.

Today the mobile phone or the digital camera will do it equally fast with the added advantage that it can be sent on to family and friends across the planet.

But in 1970 this was pretty neat, and how better to use it than a snap of our back garden.

I doubt any of us will remember who took them but they show the garden just as I remember it.  My sisters, and in particular our Stella laid out the garden and Dad was on hand to do the actual work.

And like all back gardens, there in the corner was the shed, full of all sorts of treasures and a real necessity given we didn’t have a cellar.

Dad put it up around 1964 and a full thirty years later it still had that powerful smell of creosote.

Looking at out garden and across to our neighbours there is nothing remarkable about any of them, but that actually makes the fascinating and in their own way a real history lesson.

Here is how we decided to lay out our small gardens back in 1970.

They may not be much different from the same gardens today or those of the 1950s, but they do offer up a picture of life in 1970, added to which they are our garden, which is enough for me.

Location; Well Hall

Pictures; the back garden of our house on Well Hall Road, circa 1970, from the Simpson collection

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road,
https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall

Working a Salford Corporation Tram in 1917 ............ Salford women in uniform

I like the way that stories have a habit of reappearing and so it is with Miss Rebecca Chapman of Hodson Street who in 1918 began work with Salford Corporation as a “clippie” on the trams.

My old friend David Harrop acquired her contract, license and handbook and they featured on the blog.

And because it was such a good story she made her way into my  book on Manchester and the Great War.*

Now yes I know the title is Manchester and the Great War, but by the very nature of things people didn’t adhere to strict geographical boundaries.  

They moved from area to area, lived in Manchester but worked in Salford and Trafford and swapped homes and work places.

So a little bit of Salford has got into the book, and quite right too.

All of which is an introduction to a new short series featuring photographs of Salford women in uniform and given Miss Chapman’s contribution I have started with a picture of a clippie from 1917.

And I rather think she is holding her handbook which gave detailed instructions on how to work the tram, what to do in emergencies and the pay scales awarded to clippies.

There was even a few pages dedicated to making notes.

Miss Chapman had written soon after joining the Corporation that "she had fallen off the tram"

it was the only entry so I guess she never fell off again.

Location; Salford

Picture; Instructions to Female Conductors from the collection of David Harrop, and "uniformed woman worker with Salford Tramways," 1917, m08109,, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Manchester and the Great War, Andrew Simpson, the History Press, was published in February 2017, ISBN -33: 9780750 978965

That deadly smog …. a Clean Air Act…. and the story today …. on the wireless

I grew up with smog.

It was just the background to living in London in the 1940ss and 50s.

Of course, all our cities and towns were prone to the stuff if atmospheric and weather conditions trapped the smoke from countless domestic fireplaces and the tall chimneys of factories and power stations leaving it to settle around the streets and houses.

At the time we just called it fog and, in my case, I enjoyed the way it blotted out buildings and other urban features, deadened sound and got us out of school early.

But smog brought it with it a potential death sentence for some and doubtless didn’t do the health of any of us any favours.

Nor for that matter did a century and more of burning coal improve the state of buildings which were became caked in a layer of black soot which incidentally also settled on the trees and was visible on your clothes after climbing them.

All of this was to change in 1956 with the coming of the Clean Air Act which regulated what could be burnt, as witnessed by a cautionary note in 1964 from the survey of a house that we were about to buy which warned mum and dad that  “this house is likely to be included in a Smokless Zone under the Clean Air Act of 1956 and approved fireplaces must be fitted into the open fireplaces in the lower rooms by October next.”*

Now over the years there have been some fascinating accounts of those years and today I was drawn to another on BBC Radio 4’s “Every Breath You Take”, from the series “Rare Earth”which the sleeve notes remarked, “It was known as the Great Smog. In 1952, London was blanketed for five days in a thick toxic layer of soot and sulphur dioxide, leading to thousands of premature deaths. 

The outcome was the Clean Air Act of 1956. 

In this programme, Helen Czerski and Tom Heap ask what's changed in the seventy years which have passed since then. How clean is the air we now breathe?

Panel: Dr Gary Fuller, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Imperial College in London, Dr Kathy Davies, Environment Historian, Northumbria University, Beth Gardiner, Journalist and author,

Producer: Emma Campbell

Assistant Producers: Toby Field and Georgia Graham"*

Pictures; a foggy not smoggy day across the Rec, Beech Road, Chorlton, 2024

*Surveyors Report, February 1964

**Every Breath You Take, Rare Earth, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm