A family of seven in a two roomed cottage on the Row, ........ one up one downs part 1

It is hard today to imagine bringing up a family in just two rooms and yet many people here in the township during the 19th century and before did just that.

These were houses with just two rooms often with only a ladder to give access to the upstairs room, and they were common enough across the country both in our towns and cities but also in the countryside.

Only three still exist in Manchester and these are on Bradley Street backing on to far grander buildings on Lever Street.

We had our fair share but they have all been demolished and the evidence is scanty.

One survived on the edge of Chorlton on Maitland Road into the 1930s  but those which would have been here in the centre of the township along the Row and around the green vanished a long time ago.

 Most would have been wattle and daub cottages and while we still had something like fifty in the 1840s all went during the next half century with the last on the corner of Beech Road and Wilton being pulled down in 1892.

Now it is possible using old photographs, OS maps and census returns to locate them on what are now Beech Road and the green.

There were a group of them on the northern side of Beech Road almost opposite Reynard Road, a solitary example opposite the parish church close to what is now the car park for the meadows and more on Sandy Lane and there will be more in Martledge and Hardy.

These were all brick built and most survived into the 20th century and back in the 1830s and 40s were owned by local landowners, businessmen, traders and farmers.

At present we know most about those on Beech Road. They were owned by James Holt who had made his money in Manchester and retired to Chorlton to live in Beech House sometime around the mid 1830s. In the May of 1845 he was renting them out to John Hooley, John Whitehead and James Whitby and the rents ran from just under 4/- down to 3/4d. John Hooley was a joiner and Whitehead an agricultural labourer.

Trying to make sense of what proportion of their wages was paid in rent is difficult. But an agricultural labourer in Lancashire might earn between 11s and 18s. But these varied, and so in the most intense period in the summer months this could rise to 13s and fall later in the year to 12s or less.

Likewise women and children were better paid during the warm busy months. It is also worth noting that women’s wages in parts of Lancashire were the highest in the country. Added to this there was the money that could be earned at harvest time, and from task work and activities like drainage work.

Now overcrowding was a common feature of rural life and the Whitehead’s had five children ranging in age from 12 down to six months with the added complication that of the five one was a boy aged 12 and the rest were girls.

Families fell back on different strategies to cope, with some farming out some of the children to a grandparent or making arrangements with neighbours where by the girls of the two families slept under one roof, and the boys under another. In other cases they just relied on the blanket across the room. All of which allowed moralists and social observers a field day and was reported in great detail by Poor Law Commissioners on the Employment of Women & Children in Agriculture in 1843.

The cottages on Beech Road were demolished sometime around 1911, but those on Sandy Lane and the one opposite the parish church lasted much longer, but more about those later.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, circa 1895

A bus for every occasion .......

The Museum of Transport on Queens Road really does have a bus for every occasion as well as offering examples from all over Greater Manchester, along with "coaches, trams, objects and displays".

Here can be found the Corpi red of Manchester, the green livery of Salford, as well as blue buses, mauve, and of course that odd coloured offering from what was SENEC.

Nor is that all, because  there is a fire engine, a horse drawn vehicle and the opportunity to sit inside a number of those old rear entry buses which those of us of a certain generation remember with affection.

And while those old style buses allowed you to hop on and off and even to chase after them with a view to jumping aboard, they were not user friendly to the disabled and out of reach to anyone using a wheel chair.

Upstairs volunteers are working on the records of the old companies transferring the lists of employees from hard paper to digital which in time will be available to those wanting to study the history of Greater Manchester.

I had never been before and it was a revelation made all the more memorable by the premises which dates back to 1930s and was originally part of the bus garage, which was later used by the G.P.O to service their vans and lorries, before becoming a museum.

It is open on Wednesdays and weekends and attracts a wide range of visitors, from school parties to crinklies like me.

Location; The Museum of Transport on Queens Road

Pictures; wot I saw on my trip to the museum, 2024, from  collection of Andrew Simpson

*Museum of Transport Greater Manchester,  https://motgm.uk/ 

Passing Burton's on Well Hall Road to the sound of Betty Everitt and Judy Street

Now I have fond memories of the old Burton’s at the top of Well Hall Road.

It was here that I bought my first suit, more than a few shirts and the odd tie, although I do confess it ran a poor second to Harry Fenton's and even Payne's on the High Street.

Of course there will be those with equally happy stories to tell of the dances that were held upstairs.

Not that I ever went.

During the mid 60s I still commuted back to New Cross for school and so had yet to find friends in Eltham and by the time I started at Crown Woods in 1966 there were plenty of other places to go with the shed load of new people I had met.

That said on the long walks back from Grove Park after an evening with Ann I did sometime pass the dance hall after one of the more rowdy evenings.

And that is a shame because it will have been there that I guess I would have herd live versions of Betty Everitt’s  Getting Mighty Crowded* and Judy Street’s What.**

It would be years later in Manchester at the Twisted Wheel and later still at Placemate that I would fully come to appreciate these songs.

And I still have a fond spot for the opening lines of Getting Mighty Crowded, with its message of losing a lover ........................

“I'm packing up my memories
And I'm gonna move
On out of your heart

Turning in my keys
And I'm gonna move
On out of your heart

Cause there ain't
Room enough for two
And sharing your heart
With someone new
Will never do"

At which point I suppose I should launch into the story of Burton’s which replaced the Congregational Church and was itself supplanted by a Big Mac.

But I won’t instead I shall go off and listen to Betty Everitt who sadly is no longer with us and Judy Street who still is.

Picture; looking west down the High Street, 2014, from the collection of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick & Jean Gammons, 2013

* Getting Mighty Crowded, Betty Everitt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AmwoK6uw5Q


** What, Judy Street, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2NySUcbv3w

It’s coming home ….. after a thousand years … well almost

Yep, that famous tapestry which is in fact an embroidery not a tapestry is coming home.

"Keep your eye on that one Harold"

That said technically it won’t be on view till September but the booking site for tickets opened today.*

But be aware that when the British Museum opened its site for Friends to obtain tickets apparently it crashed due to demand. 

I remain ambivalent at the event.  

I know it will be a wonderful experience, not least because the entire story will be on view laid flat for people to see it.  

But it begs questions of whether it really is the right thing to do.  

The “tapestry” is fragile and while every precaution will be taken including transporting it over land via the Tunnel it is very, very old.

And while I too feel the thrill of getting up close to a piece of history I question the practice of shifting such items around the world, when with modern technology its is possible to view something from your own screen, and not have to queue or been rubbing us against strangers.

Back in 1972 when Tutankhamun came to the British Museum on his holidays, we took ourselves off to see the man.  

King Tut

The line of eager lovers of all things ancient Egyptian wound around the museum forecourt and out along the street, and despite having made the effort to travel across town from southeast London it was a wait too long.

We sat in China Town, had a lunch time meal and decided we would try again another day, which of course we never did.

Did I feel disappointed?  No and nor half a century later do I feel I missed something.  True today ways of displaying these priceless objects and visitor management have improved but so has the art of the virtual display.

Book your ticket

All of which means I think I will content myself with viewing those dastardly Normans and the hapless Harold and his housecarls from our house.

Leaving the countless thousands who will be there in the museum to get their 40 minutes of history, marvel at the beauty of the tapestry/embroidery and relive the epich story.

And happily come away without an arrow in the eye.

Now the historical pedants will sniff and challenge the asserion that its a thousnad years old with the counter comment  that it ain't a thousand years old.  According to my Wikipedia "it may have been commissioned at the same time as the  Bayeux cathedral's construction in the 1070s, possibly completed by 1077 in time for display on the cathedral's dedication".**

But then when did It’s coming home ….. after 949 years have the same ring?

Bishop Odo

Location; the British Museum and our house

Pictures; bits from the Bayeux Tapestry, Ticket site, British Museum site and King Tut in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Roland Unger, 2016. Licensing; I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses: GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

*Tickets from The British Museum, https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibitions/bayeux-tapestry

**The Bayeux Tapestry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayeux_Tapestry

Wattle and daub cottages in Chorlton

The story of how we lived here in the first half of the 19th century.


There may still have been upwards of fifty wattle and daub houses in the 1840s in our township.

They were constructed from a timber framework with walls made of branches woven together and covered with a mixture of clay, gravel, hay and even horse hair and topped with a thatched roof.

Samuel and Sarah Sutton brought up their 2 children in one of these cottages. Their home was one of two adjoining cottages situated on the Row and in every sense looked the rural part.

The white walls and wooden beams were partly obscured by ivy and the front door was approached through a small country garden. Behind the house and away from the view of strangers stood the privy and the back garden where the Sutton’s grew fruit, vegetables and flowers.

 There would be currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes, rhubarb and mix of vegetables which made an important contribution to the family income and were often home to chickens and even a pig.

Such houses were easy to build and equally easy to maintain, but there could be disadvantages to living in them. The porous nature of walls meant they were damp and crumbling clay meant endless repairs.

According to a later Parliamentary report “Many of them have not been lined with lath and plaster inside and so are fearfully cold in winter. The walls may not be an inch in thickness and where the lathes are decayed the fingers may be easily pushed through. The roof is of thatch, which if kept in good repair forms a good covering, warm in winter and cool in summer, though doubtless in many instances served as harbour for vermin, for dirt, for the condensed exhalations from the bodies of the occupants of the bedrooms....”


Floors made of brick or stone were laid directly on the ground and were almost invariably damp, and in the worst cases reeked with moisture. Once the brick was broken, the floor became uneven and the bare earth exposed. This might be compounded where the cottage floor was below the ground outside or the floor level was uneven which caused problems of drainage. Even the proudest wife and mother must have been reconciled to damp and dirt which were the result of such floors.

The only heating would come from the open fire which might have been combined with a cooking range. On damp days when the coal or wood was wet the smell would permeate every room in the house. During the winter months the unheated bedrooms were particularly unpleasant places. On the coldest nights ice would form on the inside of windows.

Cottages of this design were often limited to four rooms, and some may have had only two, with the family living downstairs and sleeping on the upper floor. In some cases access to the bedroom was by ladder rather than stairs and in many cases bedrooms were left open. One surviving cottage in Chorlton from the eighteenth century did have a staircase which opened out to a big bedroom giving little in the way of privacy.

As for sanitation this would have been equally primitive. Nationally the rural picture was grim with privies often draining into open channels which themselves got blocked with refuse and so flowed too slowly to allow the waste to disperse.


Picture; Sutton’s Cottage circa 1892, photograph from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook of 1895 in the collection of Philip Lloyd

The Limited Stop ………….. the only way to travel

Now I remember the limited stop service that Manchester and SELNEC operated with a mix of fondness and frustration.

They were fine if you were at the start of the service and could sail happily through the city streets and on to your destination in half the time.

The 153 from the top of Penny Meadow in Ashton at 6 in the morning would get me into the heart of the city in a fraction of the time the 218 would take.

And if I was lucky, I might catch one of the limited stop buses onto Wythenshawe and work.

But of course, on a cold wet grey day, somewhere on the Ashton Old Road the sight of a limited stop bus was just a frustration as it zipped past without a second thought to those passengers waiting at the bus stop.

I seldom travel on the bus now, preferring the tram, so I am not even sure that the limited stop service still operates.  I could of course go and look, but where would the fun be in doing that?  Instead Reginald of Heald Green will offer up chapter and verse.

And in the meantime, I shall just reflect that Andy Robertson’s trip out to the Museum of Transport Greater Manchester on Sunday provided me with some excellent pictures of buses. *

Here be fine examples of Corpy blue buses from Ashton-Under-Lyne, the brash SELNEC livery and my own favourite, a red Manchester Corporation bus, from 1963.

And here for one moment I must confess I was confused, because I grew up in London with Routemaster buses, and travelled on the 161 from Eltham to Woolwich, and for one moment Andy’s picture took me back 40 years.

But this red Routemaster is a Manchester one, the livery is slightly different and those in the know will point out the technical differences.

All this I know because the Museum has a full list of its collection, and thus I know the details of all those Andy photographed. **

Location; Museum of Transport Greater Manchester

Pictures, from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Museum of Transport Greater Manchester, http://www.gmts.co.uk/index.html

** RM1414 - 414 CLT - AEC Routemaster 2R2RH - Double deck bus, from 1963, Manchester Corporation Transport,
 44 - PTE 944C - Leyland Titan PD2/37 - Double deck bus, from 1965, Ashton-under-Lyne Corporation Passenger Transport, 5871 - KJA 871F - Leyland Titan PD3/14 - Double deck bus, from 1968, Greater Manchester Transport

Well Hall on a wet day in 1964

Now just what do you do on a Saturday morning in early July when the rain is coming down like stair rods?

I rather think an adventure in the woods is pretty much out of the question and likewise the attractions of the market in Beresford Square or the ferry fall away as the rain just keeps falling.

After all even the upbeat market stall holders found their quick fire banter and optimistic sales pitch a bit harder when everything felt damp, while the sight of the Thames held little appeal when the rain clouds all but touched the water.

There were Saturday morning pictures but at 14 that all seemed a bit below me which just left the Library on the High Street and the bus ride down to Avery Hill.

In 1964 it would be a good two years before I started at Crown Woods and so this end of Eltham was still unexplored territory.

I am guessing I went into the hot house but I may have got that all wrong, although fast forward a few years and  I am convinced it was one of those places I visited on Sundays with new girl friends following the Saturday date at the ABC in the High Street.

There will be plenty who remember the scenario ........ the evening went well, you both wanted to see each other again but wanted a place more casual, and above all cheap.

So Avery Hill fitted the bill giving both of you that added advantage of being able to close down the romance and go your separate ways, allowing the rest of Sunday to be salvaged.

But all that was in the future, back in 1964 my options were more limited and ended up with a walk round the Pleasaunce, a trip up to Wilcox’s opposite the parish church and a trip up to London.

The train journey in itself was an adventure and the noise and bustle of London Bridge or Charing Cross could make up for what had been a dull morning in Well Hall.

At 14, pubs were still off bounds, but there were museums, art galleries and monuments to look at. All were free and most were out of the rain.

And of course by the time you got back the clouds had cleared, the pavements dry and the night held out all sorts of promise.

Location; Eltham

Pictures; Eltham, 2013 from the collection of Jean Gammons