Lost in the attic .............. a new collection of photographs of Chorlton........ nu 1 Whitelow Road

This is Whitelow Road sometime in the early 20th century and with the picture comes one of those intriguing little stories.

It is one of a collection of images which were donated to St Clements Church and were found in the attic of a house.

And that is about all I know of the history of the twenty or so photographs of Chorlton.

All except one date from sometime after 1900 and measure 25.5 cms by 42 cms and have been reproduced from picture postcards.

I would love to know who went to all the trouble of first collecting and then enlarging the images and later storing them away.

Now there will be a story there but I doubt it will ever come to light.

So instead I shall concentrate on this one which shows a gang of labourers at work.

I don’t have a date but the company whose name plate appears on the steam engines was Davies Brothers, Asphalt Road Makers who were listed in the 1911 directory with an office on Princess Street and a depot on Green Lane.

Green Lane ran from Brook Street to the Garratt Bridge by the River Medlock in Chorlton on Medlock and long ago was swept away by new developments which included the old BBC Broadcasting building.

What makes the picture interesting is that it is one I have never seen before and comes with a companion photograph which also shows Whitelow Road with the same team of workmen.

Both contain a wealth of detail from the steam engines, barrels of tar to the wooden sets and the large number of labourers.

This was after all at a time when much of the work still relied on muscle power and so despite the steam engines it was still down to shovels, wheelbarrows and a lot of effort.

But the pictures also include that small band of spectators who have been drawn to the scene.

Like the workman they stare back at the camera with that mix of poses, some stopped in their tracks, a few looking curious and the rest those who just can’t miss the opportunity to be in the picture.

And of these the one I am drawn to is the chap in uniform pausing with his parcels to be caught on camera.

Now I am sure there will be someone who can help explains the use of the long wooden beam across the road and others who will want to speculate exactly where along Whitelow Road the pictures were taken from so I shall close by reflecting on how many more pictures of old Chorlton are sitting in attics across the township.

Pictures; Whitelow Road date unknown, from the Simpson Collection

Sitting in a backstreet in Florence ......... thinking of WLS radio station, Chicago

Florence, 2012

Now if you belong to that generation which was born just after the last world war, who grew up with the sound of Buddy Holly, and the Beatles, and trembled during the Missile Crisis of 1962 I expect Radio Luxemburg will stir memories.

In the absence of a dedicated British pop music radio station this was all there was till the “Pirates” arrived.

Of course it wasn’t perfect, it faded and returned and you had to put up with Horace Bachelor but it was still magic.*

And I was reminded of all that when my friend Susan from Canada told me of how “on clear nights throughout the 1960's, from my upstairs bedroom, close to the Manitoba/Ontario border, I could actually get WLS radio station in Chicago, almost a thousand miles away. They played songs I never heard anywhere else.”

Now my little transistor set bought for twenty-one shillings in Whitechapel hardly compared with Susan’s “purple and gold bakelite radio” but what they offered was something new, exciting and worlds away from our kitchen in Well Hall Road.

On the Highway Canada, 2011

All of which stirred the pot and made me begin to think of many things, but uppermost it was that idea of listening across the open lands of Canada to a radio station in Chicago and not for the first time I pondered on the vastness of Canada.

My cousins who live in Ontario will think nothing of a journey by car which will take them from their home to the small log cabin they built one summer.

It is a distance which if I replicated it here would pretty much take me from Manchester down across Europe to Vienna and would present me with a shed full of different European languages, histories and until recently even currencies.

The gas station, 2011

But for my cousin the journey would all be under a Canadian sun, with English spoken along the way and the sure knowledge that the petrol bought in Ingersol would come out of the same money as the payment for  the burger at the stop over half way and the groceries at the tiny supermarket close to their destination.

And if I push the idea, had my great uncle who was migrated to Canada by the Middlemore Homes acting for the Derby Union taken the Trans Canada Highway from St John’s in Newfoundland to Victoria in British Columbia he would have travelled 4,859 miles.

By comparison if I had continued on from Vienna to Istanbul I would only have clocked 2,108 miles from the suburbs of south Manchester to the Bosporus and the end of Europe.

That for me brings home the sheer size of Canada and of course also its southern neighbour but it also reinforces my fascination for my own Continent which offers tremendous diversity but also a sense of unity.

Rome, 2009

We may speak different languages, and some at least of us still carry our own national currency in our pockets instead of the Euro but there is much we have in common.

Sitting in a backstreet restaurant in Florence or in down town Naples with heaps of history and culture everywhere I am reminded that 2000 years ago my journey would have been one made across one empire with a single currency, and just two official languages and bits of the small town of Manchester would have been replicated in the grand cities of Rome and Byzantium.

Added to which much that followed the fall of the Roman Empire from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance and the Age Enlightenment owed much to the Romans.

That said while sitting at that tiny restaurant in Florence the background music on the small portable CD player veered from a selection by the Three Tenors to that Harry Chapin song with the refrain “I am the morning D.J at W.O.L.D. .......... playing all the hits for you where ever you maybe...”

On the farm, 2011

And that is pretty much  where we came in, leaving me only to share the contrasting images from three of my favourite Italian cities with the stunning photographs of rural Canada by my friend Lori Oschefski and perhaps giving a plug to that endearing radio series on Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor "where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average."

Now Lake Wobegon may have been an imaginary town set in the USA but it pretty much sums up what I think a small Canadian town out somewhere in the west of Alberta might be like and as such is miles away from those small Italian cities I know.

Alghero, 2013

The huge open landscape which just seems to go on forever runs counter to the close confines of those towns and cities where at the end of every street there is a piazza and  around every corner an ancient ruin.

That said there are plenty of ugly places where poor planning, low investment and shoddy development have created sink suburbs, dispiriting to live in and unremarkable to the eye.

Not so bits of Alghero which has it all, and may even have its own radio station dedicated to the music of the 60s.

Pictures; Florence 2012, Rome, 2009, and Alghero, Sardinia, 2013 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the Canadian heartlands, 2011, Lori Oschefski

* Horace Cyril Bachelor was as an advertiser on Radio Luxembourg. He advertised a way to win money by predicting the results of football matches, sponsoring programmes on Radio Luxembourg.

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 3 Tasle Alley

Now Tasle Alley is one of those places most people will pass without a second glance.

It is the gap almost on the corner of John Dalton Street and Albert Square which with its double yellow lines which often looks dark and gloomy can’t be much of an attraction.

On the other hand for the curious that little ginnel beside New Church House on John Dalton Street suggests an adventure and if you plunge in the tunnel leads on to Tasle Alley and through a second tunnel to Mulberry Street and St Mary’s Chapel which is more popularly known as the Hidden Gem.

As late as 1849 Tasle Alley lay open on its northern side but within two years that open land had been built on and it became the narrow alley we know today and as these things go it didn’t even warrant a listing in the street directory.

I had thought that just perhaps because the buildings seem to date from 1851 they had missed being incorporated in the street directory for 1850, but no, Mr Slater's fine Directory for 1863 stubbornly refused to list  anything for the alley.

Tasel Alley, 1849

By 1900 the alley had a set of warehouses which were mainly furniture and printing with a wine merchants and a set of offices.

So that is about it.




Location; Manchester





Picture; Tasle Alley, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and in 1849 from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1842-49, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

Who stole Alton Towers?

Today I was reminded by my old Facebook chum Bill Summers of that house on Edge Lane called Alton Towers.

Alton Towers, 1907

Like him I have often come across it on maps and set to the challenge he laid down today, when he posted the 1911 OS map showing the property adding, “We all know roughly where Alton Towers is or have heard of its pleasure grounds but might be surprised to discover there was another- in Chorlton cum Hardy back in the day. 

Just wondering if Andrew Simpson can tell us anything of it. 

It stood for a while at the side of St Clements Church on High Lane, so maybe there is a photo out there somewhere". 

It was a challenge I couldn’t turn down.

Today the site is open land and was gifted to St Clement's for the use of young people and is now part of the school, and that is pretty much how I remember it from when I washed up in Chorlton in 1976.

The site of Alton Towers, 1933

The last recorded reference to the house is on the 1911 census  but interestingly it is not listed in the street directory for that year and the OS map for 1933 shows it as open land with a tennis court in one corner.

So sometime between 1911 and 1933 it disappears.

I can track it back from 1911 to 1879, and I am fairly sure that 1879 marks the date when it was built.  

It was owned throughout by John Richardson who rented it out to just five tenants over those thirty years.

It had been a grand house with ten rooms, set back from the main road in a large garden and commanded an annual rent of £100 and a rateable value of £68.

And not to be short changed had a series of green houses arranged amongst the trees in the garden.

In 1911 it was occupied by an Edward and Christina Wright, their four children and two servants.  Mr. Wright described himself as a “Paper merchant" with his offices at 62A Fountain Street. 

The site in 2023

What happened after 1911 is yet to be discovered but I do know that one of his son’s was living at 22 Whitelow Road in 1917, because his Attestation papers say so.

It may be that the family moved from Edge Lane to Whitelow Road.

There is no reference to Alton Towers in the 1921 census, and sadly so far the only images we have are of a gate post on pictures dated in 1930 and 1959.

Sad looking gate post, Alton Towers, Edge Lane, 1930

Not that I am finished.

I shall explore the life of John Richardson, and talk to St Clement's Church about their acquisition of the land and follow up the story of a fire.

so heaps to find out.

We shall see.

Location; Edge Lane

Picture, Alton Towers, 1909, OS map for Manchester and Salford, 1909, site of Alton Towers, 2023, courtesy of Google Maps and Only a sad looking gate post, Alton Towers, Edge Lane, 1930, m17809, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

The Tale at Eltham …….

Now I really wish I knew just what the “Tale at Eltham" was, but alas it is lost.

Nor I suspect did anyone know just what had gone on in Eltham in the October of 1917 when this picture postcard was sent to Miss Goddard of Sussex.

I can tell you that it was sent at 2.30 in the afternoon, but can’t make out from where it was posted.

Nor can I really be sure that the sender or Miss Goddard had any connection with Eltham, which leave me wondering if it had been the two “young things” that caught the attention of Eliza who sent it.

But then these picture postcards were standard fare, with the company merely over printing different destinations to attract local audiences.

Some where in the collection I have another with a different place name.

The message on the back is difficult to read but hints a at a boat trip and an admonishment that Miss Goddard hadn’t written recently.

So that is it, a little bit of 1917 which might or might not have a connection with Eltham.

Location; Suffolk and maybe Eltham

Picture; The Tale at Eltham, 1917, from the collection of David Harrop

“Longing to tell you ‘the Tale’ at Eltham” ……. October 12th, 1917

Now sadly I doubt that the “The Tale” in the picture postcard refers to the short story written in 1916 by Joseph Conrad and published the following year.

Nor did the recipient live in Eltham.

She was a Miss Nell Goddard who lived in Wenhaston, which is a small village of 818 people in north west Suffolk.

The Domesday Book records that the village had a mill, a church and woodland sufficient to feed sixteen hogs.

Wenhaston, briefly had a railway station which was part of the Southwold Railway which opened in 1879 and closed in 1929 and today has a “thriving pig farm industry.” *

But it does have a pre-Reformation panel painting depicting the Last Day of Judgement, which Miss Nell would have known, because the panel was discovered during restoration work to the church in 1892.

All of which is a long way from Eltham and leaves me to think that this was one of those picture postcards produced in their thousands which were over printed with the names of different places.

That said I like it.

And given that we have the name of the manufacturer, who was a W & K Lonson along with a serial number, we might in the fullness of time find out more.

I hope so.

Location; 1917

Picture; postcard, courtesy of David Harrop

* Wenhaston, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenhaston

The Eltham we have lost, part 2........ The old lane by the National Schools, 1908

Another of those pictures of Eltham’s past which need no comment

This is the old lane by the National Schools as it was in 1908.  The lane is now Archery Road and 'One acre Allotments' was on the right.









Picture; the old lane,  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