When a pint of Eltham Ale cost 4d and was brewed at our brewery.............. Eltham in 1874

Eltham Brewery, 1874

I often wonder just what a pint of Eltham Ale would have tasted like.

It was brewed buy our own Eltham Brewery and would have cost 4 pence back in 1874.*

According to their advert published in the October of that year they offered  twelve different ales stouts and porter and delivered across south east London and beyond which included Woolwich Charlton and out to Belvedere and Erith, and up to Peckham, New Cross and Brixton.

The old brewery had been up the High Street behind the Carpenters Arms and later moved to a spot just down from St John’s Church.

Eltham Brewery, 1920

Now I might be wrong but there seems to be little written about the brewery.

There is a reference to the old one in Mr Gregory’s book and another in Eltham in the Making and just two pictures which appear in other books.**

All of which is a bit odd given that it must have employed quite a few of our residents and supplied a decent number of pubs.

Of course Greenwich Heritage Centre is bound to to have something on it and in due course I shall go looking in their archives.

That said there will be someone who can put me right on the exact date it moved and more importantly when it ceased business.

It was still there in 1920 and six years earlier had been owned by the Kenward Brothers all of which promises a rich field of research.

Well we shall see.

Pictures, advert Eltham Brewery, 1874, from Grace’s Guide to British Industrial History, http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Eltham_Brewery, and the brewery in 1920, GRW 215, http://boroughphotos.org/greenwich/ courtesy of Greenwich Heritage Centre, http://www.greenwichheritage.org/site/index.php

*All of which is a bit confusing  given that some sources suggest a pint in 1872 was 2½d so perhaps I did the sums wrong when I calculated the numbers of pints in a frkin of Eltham Ale which sold for 15 shillings.

**The Story of Royal Eltham, RR C Gregory, 1909, Eltham in the Making, 1990, Eltham, A Pictoral History, John Kennet, Eltham Through Time, Kristian Bedford, 2013 

Looking for the Shambles …. behind Marks and Spencer ………….. 1969

Now, I don’t remember Old Shambles as it was before its move following the building of the Arndale.

Although I guess I must have fallen across, but by then the place had been much knocked about, first by the Victorians and then by Mr. Hitler’s bombs.

What was left, which wasn’t much but included the Wellington Inn were designated as Grade ll listed buildings in 1952, and that was a real bonus given that the Wellington is the only surviving Tudor building in the city centre.

There is a heap more about the history of the Old Shambles and what was done to it as part of the Arndale development and post IRA bomb rebuild, but that is covered very well for anyone who doesn’t know the story.*

Added to which there are plenty of pictures in Manchester’s Image Collection, of Old Shambles from the early 20th century and back into the century before.**

But these two photographs drew my attention, partly because I have never seen them before, but also because they date from 1969 when I washed up in Manchester.

Between them they perfectly anchor Old Shambles in a place I know.

And that is what pictures should do …. make the link with the past, which in the case of these two I admit is a full 51 years ago but to me remains only yesterday.

Location; Manchester

Pictures: Old Shambles, 1969

*Shambles Square, Manchester, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shambles_Square,_Manchester

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

A picture a day Chorlton Green circa 1883-96

A picture a day

During this week of September I have decided to feature a picture a day, drawn from the collections that span a century and more of Chorlton.

The green was enclosed by Samuel Wilton sometime in the early 19th century and stayed the Wilton garden until the death of his daughter in the 1890s whereupon the Egerton’s took it back and gifted it to the township. 

Sam Wilton ran the pub over the water called the Greyhound which is now Jacksons Boat and built the first bridge over the river around 1816.

The jutty out bit is an outhouse which might have been added when the the middle section of the property became a pub in the late 18th century.

I think the photograph may date from sometime between 1883 when the half timbered building called Zetland Terrace was erected and 1896 when the garden became the village green again.

It may have been taken by Arron Booth of Sedge Lynn who took pictures of Chorlton-cum-Hardy in the 1880s.

Location; Chorlton Green

 Picture; from the collection of Allan Brown circa early 1890s.

Four Didsbury balconies ….and a pioneering woman radio producer ….. Olive Shapley

It started with a balcony and a picture.

In Didsbury they have balconies, Olive Shapley Aveune, 2026

And turned into one of those moments of synchronicity where what appear to be random discoveries with no obvious connection all fall together.

So, my picture of four balconies prompted me to search the address which turned out to be named after a pioneering radio presenter who lived in Didsbury on Millgate Lane and was born close to where I grew up in Peckham in southeast London.

To this can be added a shared belief in socialism and the power of the wireless to document, inform and inspire the imagination.

10 Tresco Road, 2022

She was Olive Shapley and the more I pondered on her life and work the more I was drawn to her.

As a boy of ten out on endless adventures, I would have passed her birthplace on Tresco Road just a short walk from Lausanne Road where I grew up.*

And much later on wanders across Didsbury in the early 1970s I would have walked down Millgate Lane and passed Rose Hill, an impressive 19th century property which in 1965 she converted into accommodation for “unsupported mothers” a term she preferred over the description unmarried mothers.  

Later still she turned the house into a home for “Vietnamese boat people”.

But it was her work in radio that really interests me, and in particular her determination to produce programmes which explored the lives of working people in the North where she settled in the early 1930s.  

Perhaps one of the most important of these was the 1939 "The Classic Soil" made with Joan Littewood comparing the social conditions of the 30s with those observed a century earlier by Friedrich Engels.

Rose Hill, Mill Gate, 2020

She also broke new ground in how such documentaries were made giving them a real authenticity and vibrance by recording the conversations unscripted.

It was a method she continued to use while living and working in New York and making programmes about life in Harlem and Native Americans.

In 1941 she started to produce a "newsletter" programme which was sent back to Britain and broadcast fortnightly on the BBC's Children's Hour, and among her interviewees were Eleanor Roosevelt and Paul Robeson. 

They were according to Guardian the precursor of Alister Cooke’s Letter from America which began four years later. **  

And as a lifelong fan of his weekly fifteen-minute insights into all things American I wish I could find voice recordings of those earlier programmes.

That mould breaking approach continued when in 1949 she became the presenter of the Women’s Hour where “she brought formerly taboo subjects like menopause and women without men onto the air” **

There is much more about Olive Shapley and most of it is available from Guardian articles as well as a useful summary on Wikipedia. ***

They included a selection of BBc radio peogrammes on Olive Shepley, and her long listing for the Wo Manchester Statue which was finally awrded to Emmeline Pankhurst.*****

But I can’t leave without quoting a series of observations which chime in with my own feelings as a Londoner for my adopted city of Manchester.  

The first comes from a moment in the 1930s when she arrived back “cold and homesick at 10pm on a Sunday night and I can remember looking outside the station at a large advertisement asking, ‘Why wear a Truss?’ [and] Once recording in a shop I saw a women trying on a hat, and the sales assistant said, ‘Love, you look terrible’. I thought I want to stay here.  I was so excited by the people I met and felt I’d got to get them on radio.  I wanted to show Northern people as they were”. ****

Olive Shapley Avenue, 2020

And the last words should also be hers  showing as it does an emotional honesty. 

Writing to her children ten years after the death of their father from cancer she wrote that it had taught her that “the bad, unwelcome thing must be taken into the centre of your being and accepted; that it must be looked at and looked at again.  There is no other way to look”.

Picture; In Didsbury they have balconies, Olive Shapley Avenue, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Tresco Road, Peckham, southeast London, 2022, courtesy of Google Maps, and Rose Hill former home of Olive Shapley, 2020, and Olive Shapley Avenue, 2020, Cnbrb, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following license; the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

*Lausanne Road, Evelina Road Linden Grove Tresco Road

**Letting the People Speak, Annie Karpf, The Guardian, March 15th, 1999 

***Olive Shapley, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Shapley

**** Radical radio days, Annie Karpf, The Guardian, July 26th, 1989

*****Woman's Hour,BBC Radio, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p01ldcsc

BBC Archive shines light on Northern social documentary pioneer Olive Shapley, https://www.prolificnorth.co.uk/news/bbc-archive-shines-light-northern-social-documentary-pioneer-olive-shapley/

In Focus: Olive Shapley, https://www.bbc.co.uk/creativediversity/history/oliveshapley

Saturday in the Square ....

Now as our Town Hall continues along that path of restoration and renewal Albert Square with its statues and fountain is steadily being returned to public use.

It’s been going on for a while and on warm sunny days the place is packed.

Even yesterday when the showers were intense if infrequent the Square attracted the tourist, the curious, the passers through and more than a few wedding parties.

To these could be added the few who stopped outside No 10 North which for the those blissfully unaware is my Wikipedia tells me “a unit of the UK government's Office for the Prime Minister and Cabinet, based in Heron House in Manchester city centre. 

Its name refers to 10 Downing Street, the principal office and London residence of the prime minister of the United Kingdom”.*

But yesterday all that indicated the building’s new role were four Police officers.

So, dodging the rain I busied myself with renewing my acquittance with those statures which I have been photographing for nearly fifty years, and catching up on the rise of the new developments.

And that today is that.

Location; Albert Square

Pictures; yesterday in the Square, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Number 10 North, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_10_North

So what is the story behind the tram on Well Hall Road, one sunny spring day?

Now there is a fine line between nostalgia and remembering the past.

The first pretty much takes you nowhere and often distorts the past by making it seem somehow better than it was.

On the other hand remembering the past can trigger not only a series of memories but leads to wanting to find out more.

It often starts with that simplest of questions was this really how it was? And then takes you off into serious history which involves talking to others, cross checking their memories against research and beginning to record it for others to read.

And that often leads to community projects where memories and memorabilia come out of the cupboards, are dusted down and shared which not only adds to what we know but brings an area together, allowing the not so young to recreate the past for those too young to know what it had been like.

So here we are with one of those classic old pictures of Well Hall from a book on trams.*

There is no date on the picture, and the caption just says “early days on Well Hall Road [showing] that the local children had plenty of space to play.  All they had to do was get out of the way of the trams which plied the route every ten minutes. The ride from Woolwich to Eltham would have cost two pence.”

All of which draws you in and makes the picture worth investigating.

Judging by the trees and the children’s clothes I think we must be somewhere in the 1920s or 30s and taking into account the shadows it will be early afternoon.

Now it could be a Sunday which would explain the lack of traffic or we really are at a point in time when Well Hall Road was far less busy.

What I also find interesting is that the children by and large are ignoring the photographer.

Earlier in the century and certainly in the last decade of the 19th century the appearance of a man with a camera would have attracted the curious, the vain and those with nothing better to do.

You see them on the old pictures staring back at the camera, intrigued, mystified and just nosey.  But not here, which means we are either dealing with some very sophisticated young people or the world has moved on and street photographers were taken for granted.

And that just leaves me that little personal observation that however fascinating this picture is it just leaves off our house for the photographer has positioned himself just a tad further north, missing out 294 by a couple of blocks.

That said if I have got this right I have to satisfy myself with knowing that the corner house with its ever so fashionable lace curtains was the home of Mr and Mrs Burton in 1925.

The Burton’s were there by 1919 which means that Mr Christopher Dove Burton may have been an Arsenal worker, and just as an aside, I know that they were married in 1920 in Lambeth, and that Beatrice’s maiden name was Briant and it was as Miss Beatrice Briant that she shows up on the electoral roll in 1919 sharing the house with Mr Burton.

Now there is a story to follow up.

Pictures; Well Hall Road, date unknown, from the collection of G.L. Gundy, reproduced from Eltham and Woolwich Tramways

*Eltham and Woolwich Tramways, Robert J Harley, Middleton Press, 1996, https://www.middletonpress.co.uk/

Autumn on the Rec ……. and a memory of Mr. Higginbotham from 1894

 

Now, sometimes you just go with two pictures, separated by a century and a bit.

 This is Row Acre being ploughed for possibly the last time by Mr. Higginbotham who farmed the strip of this big field running alongside Cross Road, stretching from Beech Road down to what was the bowling green of the Masonic Hall.

 It is a favourite picture of mine, and one I often repost, and yesterday almost as an echo of Mr. Higginbotham’s ploughing, the Corporation was cutting the grass on the Rec, and in the process left a trail of leaves.

I think it may well have been the last time he ploughed his strip, because within a few years  Row Acre had become the Recreational Ground.

 By which time Row Acre had shrunk from a field which ran from Cross Road down to Acres Road to a parcel of land defined by Cross Road in the east and Wilton Road in the west.

And for the eagled eyed, yes the direction that the two pictures was taken is different.  I took mine from Beech Road, with the Irish Centre in the distance, and Mr. Higgibotham was photographed from somewhere on Cross Road looking towards Beech Road.

 Location; Chorlton

 Pictures; Mr. Higginbotham ploughing Row Acre, 1892, courtesy of Mr. Higginbotham, the Lloyd Collection, and the Rec in 2020, from the collection of Andrew Simpson