Andrew Simpson

Red Gates Farm, .......... and one of the lost farm houses

2012-03-04T04:39:00.004Z

I know more about the farms here in the township during the first 60 years of the 19th century than I do about them in the second half of the last century. True there are far more photographs of the buildings but what really tells you the story of these places are the family documents, the census records and the countless bits of paper which never get kept.

And even photographs rarely capture the feel of a working farm, which is why I like this one of Red Gates Farm. It is another of the pictures kindly lent to me by Carolyn Willits and what makes it all more exciting is that one of the men staring back at us is her Uncle John who worked on the farm for the Wood family.

I guess we are looking at the farm on a Sunday in late summer. It is a quiet enough moment on a working farm. John and the other chap are out of their everyday working clothes into something smarter as befitting a day off. To the right of the picture are the farm’s chickens pecking away and even further to the right some farm equipment has been left propped up against the tree.

The picture is actually a postcard and reminds us that travelling photographers would record scenes like this to sell back to the residents as well to commercial postcard companies. In this case Uncle John used the past card to send to

And we can date the picture to sometime before 1906 when the postcard was sent to James and Florence Wood at 78 Manchester Road. James was the son of Thomas Wood who had been farming Red Gates since 1881.

Now it might seem bizarre that Uncle John would send a postcard from Red Gates which was just a few minutes walk from number 78 but that was how they did it then. With frequent collections and deliveries in a day people did really send a card in the morning to arrange to meet in the afternoon.

Ours was sent at 8.30 in the evening to arrive at breakfast time and the message was simple enough “ Another view for your collection taken while harvesting.” And it was to be one of the last.

Thomas Wood the farmer had died in 1902 and sometime in 1913 or ’14 the farm house was demolished to make way for the new library. It says much for the way that Chorlton had changed since Thomas Wood had taken over Red Gates. It had been one of the larger operations at this end of the township and had still employed three farm workers in 1901. But Thomas Wood was the last to farm Red Gates. Already two of his sons had chosen not to follow him. James had become a commercial clerk and John a music teacher.

Their farm house with its seven rooms went the way of many of our farm houses, so it is good that Carolyn’s picture has survived.

Picture; Red Gates Farm circa first decade of the 20th century from the collection of Carolyn Willits.

Who remembers this Beech Road?

2012-03-03T04:03:00.020Z

One of the things I like about collections of street photographs is how you can sometimes follow the photographer down the road. In the digital collection of Manchester Libraries there are some fine examples from the 1950s and 60s where the person behind the camera has meticulously recorded collections of houses and shops, property by property. They are today a wonderful snap shot of Chorlton fifty years ago.

So here is another of Beech Road from my old friend Tony Walker taken around 1980. One early Sunday morning Tony went out on to Beech Road and took a series of pictures. This is the second of the ones he took that day and judging from the angle of the picture was taken on the corner of Beech and Chequers.

It is a remarkable picture in that so much of what you can see has now gone. There has been an off license of sorts on the corner since the beginning of the last century and while the shop is now a deli it does still sell wines. Beyond was the grocery, a hairdresser and jutting out from the alley another grocers shop, Muriel and Richard’s green grocers and the piano shop. At the bottom was the Oven Door Bakery in what are now numbers 68 and 70 Beech Road while the old Coop building was yet to become the home of the gift shop, Thai restaurant and Whole Food shop and instead much of it was given over to Strippo who stripped doors for under a tenner

Now I remember Joy Seal who ran the chemist. Her husband told me how when they took the shop over in the 1950s they first had to demolish the huge ovens at the back which had been used to bake bread. It is still the chemists but the butcher to the right, and the Post Office to the left have gone as have the second hand furniture place and J. Johnny’s hard ware shop. J.Johnny's was a wonderful place where you could buy everything from a scredriver to a plank of wood. What I particularly liked was that with some items you never paid the same price. On three different occassions I paid three different prices for having some knives sharpened, but in the end I came out evens.

I suppose the only concession to the advance of the new Beech Road was the brief appearance of an amusement arcade next to the post office and the gift shop which had been the grocers beside Thresher’s off license. Neither lasted very long but was a hint of what was to come.

In some ways this period was an unhappy time. More and more of the old conventional retail out lets were closing and it was unclear what would take their place. These traditional shops could not compete with either the supermarket or the growing trend for home freezers. So while Safeway’s planned to move to bigger premises by Albany Road and the shop in the precinct selling frozen food prospered our shops went through a lean time and the parade began to take on the appearance of a ghost town.

So the arrival of the Lead Station and the restaurant Primavera heralded a change and a renaissance which at times might now be irksome if you want basic things but has at least returned Beech Road to a thriving and buzzing place.
Picture; from the collection of Tony Walker

A victory celebration 67 years ago and a view now lost forever

2012-03-02T04:36:00.018Z

Sometimes a picture reveals different stories which stretch back and encompass different people and different events.

This particular photograph is of the old school hall on the night we celebrated Victory in Europe which brought the European war to a close in May 1945.

During the spring of that year it was clear that the war was drawing to a close. In March the Western Allies had crossed the Rhine in to Germany and in April the Red Army was in Berlin. The death of Hitler on April 30th moved things on and on May 7th in the early hours of the morning the German army in the west surrendered. Despite no immediate official announcement the news spread that the war was over and later in the day the Government confirmed that Germany had surrendered and that May 8th would be a national holiday and designated it Victory in Europe Day.

The Manchester Guardian reported that here in the city,
“At ten o'clock Albert Square had become a great dancing floor, upon which partnerships were formed on a free and easy plan. Music came from the town hall and reached the crowd through loudspeakers. A popular prank was to climb on to the roofs of the air-raid shelters to dance - probably it was the men of the navy who began it. But whoever set the example found abundant followers, and presently the girls of the WAAF and the ATS showed a readiness to participate. Without ceremony dozens of them were hauled to the top amid a good deal of cheering. Fireworks were occasionally thrown into the air, and there was an unexpected supply of paper hats, streamers, confetti and other carnival accessories which, after years of a paper famine, would have been thought to be unobtainable.” *

I am not sure that our own celebrations happened on that night. These were spontaneous events and what was clearly a formal sit down affair needed planning. I have every confidence that someone will have recorded the evening in their diary and we will learn the date and perhaps something of the mood in the school hall.

The Government had already said that
“Bonfires will be allowed, but the government trusts that only material with no salvage value will be used.” And that “until the end of May you may buy cotton bunting without coupons, as long as it is red, white or blue, and does not cost more than one shilling and three pence a square yard.”

Strangely for such a momentous event the expressions on the faces of the group seem sombre. There are a few who are smiling and some who look slightly baffled but the rest just stare back at the camera. Perhaps the time lag between the victory news and the celebration party was enough for the euphoria to wear off, or maybe uppermost in many people’s minds was the sacrifice in treasure, lives and lost time.

I remember an old friend saying to me that her abiding memory of the war was how it had robbed her of a good six years of her life. “Instead of just growing up and having the sort of fun a teenager should have there was always anxiety. You were worried about your own safety and that of your family and the knowledge that any boy you grew fond of might be killed.”
In the same way I came across a diary entry for May 7th 1945, the day the fighting stopped in Europe. The entry was simple “Today” she wrote “I will go to bed knowing that everyone I love will be safe”

But the picture is also a wonderful record of what the old school on the green looked like. It had been built in 1876 by public subscription and replaced an earlier one dating from the 1840s.

There had been plans out forward in the summer of 1897 to build an additional level which would have almost doubled the capacity, because despite the fact that when built the school was “considerably in excess of the requirements of the Parish ................ the abnormal growth of the parish within the last five years has rendered a further enlargement imperative.”**

The inside was not unlike the Board School I attended which also had a huge fire place and tall windows. Now I never now look these late 19th century school buildings. They were built to last and were warm in winter and cool in summer. The tall windows allowed in plenty of natural light but made it difficult to stare out of.

All very different from the new all glass and steel constructions of the 1950s. The mass of windows made them hot in the summer and uncomfortable cold in winter and of course afford fine views to distract the bored student. So while the Board and National school buildings have survived for over 140 years many of their bright post war successors didn’t even make it into the 21st century.

There are still some in Chorlton who remember the inside of the old school and others who saved each Friday night with the Penny Savings Bank which used the building, but I suspect there are few photographs of what it was like, which makes this one so important. Even more so as the work to turn the school into modern private houses moves into its final stages.

Pictures; the old school hall from the Lloyd collection circa 1945 and the school and school house 209 from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*Manchester Gurdian May 9 1945
** St Clements Handbook 1897

Ghosts signs and a story

2012-03-02T04:02:00.022Z

It is just a name on the side of a gable end but the advert for Cooper family butcher has begun to intrigue me and of course there is a story.

It is what we call a ghost sign which are hand painted signs that have been preserved long after the shop keeper, product or business have vanished. In most cases it is just pure luck that they haven’t been painted over or covered with a modern advertising hoarding. There are a few around Chorlton but not many, and this one at 432 Barlow Moor Road is the best preserved.

Today it is an estate agent but not so long ago it was a fruit and veg shop where I occasionally bought things. But at some time around 1891 the Cooper family moved into the premises and started a butcher’s shop.

Alfred Cooper had been born in Derbyshire in 1846 and by 1871 he was selling meat in Manchester. His progress says something about the family fortunes, because in the next 20 years they moved from London Road in the heart of the city, out to Upper Brook Street and by 1891 they had settled here in Chorlton just as the area grew.

The shop On London Road was hard by the bend in the river and close to the Hanover Cotton Mill and the Ardwick Bridge Chemical Works.
And prosper they seem to have done. In 1911 they are listed as having a telephone and the business is there twenty eight years later in 1939 run by his son Alfred. The challenge is now to uncover how long they remained there.

Looking at the building to day it was a large house and in 1911 had eight rooms beside the retail area. Something of what it looked like is just possible from this picture of Barlow Moor Road. When it was taken the Cooper's were well established. It is the building on the left. And in 1911 there were seven of them there, but not young Alfred who must have taken over the business sometime in the next decade. But that is for another time.

Pictures; the Copper sign today from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Barlow Moor Road circa early 20th century from the Lloyd collection

Yesterdays adverts

2012-03-01T04:39:00.036Z

Yesterday I published some ghosts signs. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/02/ghost-signs.html These are those hand painted adverts which during the 19th and 20th centuries were on display on the sides of buildings.

Some by luck or neglect or good judgement have been preserved long after the shop owner, the company or the product have vanished and been forgotten. Most are now faded and difficult you see but a few are still around like the ones I posted.

Adverts have the power to take you back into the past. It is not just what they sell but often the assumptions that underlie them.

They take you back to a time when consumption delivered happiness, gender roles and expectations were clear and the future was always bright and confident. Of course certain periods seem to echo this more than others. If you grew up in the 50s you were part of that mounting belief that we had never had it so good, and that the grim years of depression war and hardships were things of the past.

Most of the time it isn’t obvious at first glance but at other times it can pull you up with a bump. Who could now believe the tobacco adverts which confidently asserted in 1939 that that “Craven A Will not affect your throat” of that “after every meal” a certain brand of chewing gum “keeps you fit”?

Adverts also have a way of fixing a moment in time and open up other clues as to how we lived and what was going when they were designed and put up. A.E. Landers captured these images in the spring and summer of 1960. The advertising hoardings ran along Wilbraham Road, in front of the railway. The smaller collection had stood close to the corner with Buckingham Road while the larger group were on the Chorlton side of the bridge.

The catalogue in the digital archives gives the date of both collections as 1960 but it is possible to be more specific. The smaller collection were posted just before Easter because one of the four advertises the Bell Vue Easter Parade, while the larger group lists thr forthcoming films at the Essoldo on Barlow Moor Road for the June of 1960.

So in the spring and early summer of 1960 people in Chorlton had a choice of entertainment. And there was also music at the Halle and a Festival of Magic at the Library Theatre. But my eye was caught by the Ice Palace on Derby Road off Cheetham Hill Road in Strangeways. Now I know the place but sadly not as a place of fun. Today it houses a collection of small businesses and is sprouting wild plants from its once elegant facade. But something of its former glory is still there.
“The Manchester Ice Palace was opened in 1910 and was once the finest ice skating rink in the world, the biggest in the UK and twice largest in Europe, and home to the Manchester Ice Hockey Club. 14000 square feet of ice was provided by an ice plant across the road and 2000 seats held Edwardian spectators at the National Ice Skating Championships and the 1922 World Championships.
The rink was later put to more prosaic use, holding munitions practice during the war before closing in the 1960s and becoming a bottling plant for Lancashire Dairies.”*
Older friends have vivid memories of the place, and back in the 1930s it was one of these places to go.

Now ice skating has never had much appeal for me so I guess I would have settled for the films at the Essoldo. Sign of the Gladiator was one of those “sword and sandal” films which came out of Italy in the late 1950s and early 60s. It was made with an international cast in 1959 and a fairly predictable plot which nevertheless made it slightly more appealing than Fabian The Hound Dog Man, also made in 1959. It was a vehicle for the American teen idol Fabian and looking at clips and listening to the lead song I would rather have watched paint dry.

But back to the adverts. There is something quite delightful about them. They are familiar enough but just manage to pull out you of today. It is there in the stylish clothes of the woman, the slightly dated dress of the ice skater and of course the iconic 60’s slogan “Drink a pinta milka day”. But for me it is the Express Freight poster which perfectly captures style of the period

Pictures; Wilbraham Road, A.E. Landers 1960, m18316 & Wilbraham Road, m18318, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

* Natalie Bradbury from her blog http://theshriekingviolets.blogspot.com/ and quoted from the post http://theshriekingviolets.blogspot.com/2009/10/manchesters-forgotten-palaces.html

Beech Road 1980

2012-03-01T04:38:00.007Z

Now I always think that some of the most fascinating pictures of Chorlton are not those of a hundred years ago but the more recent. Often these we remember because they are our past and yet in a strange way they can seem as remote as a photograph of Beech Road taken at the start of the last century.

So it is with this one taken by my old friend Tony Walker in 1980. Richardson’s still bears its name of the Beech Tree Bakery with its pine panelling. The Police Station is still an office for the City Council and away in the distance we still had a Post Office.

Looking more closely I am struck at how in 1980 Beech Road was still a conventional parade of shops. Next to Richardson’s was the fabric shop Marcele Materials and further down the Wool Shop as well as one of the two butcher’s while the boarded premises had been a grocery store. Completing the row was the Chinese takeaway of Mr Chan and the furniture place, where you could get anything from a three piece suite to a 1950 rotating ash tray.

And facing them was another butcher’s shop, a hardware place a grocers and further down Muriel and Richard’s veg shop. Within two decades many of them had gone.

Picture; Beech Road circa 1980 from the collection of Tony Walker

Reflections on the workhouse

2012-02-29T12:39:00.000Z

For any one born before my generation the workhouse held a particular dread and its one that features in many stories of British Home Children.

It is true the workhouse and the 1834 Act which introduced the new system of relief have many critics.

Much was written on the conditions in the workhouse, and these Poor Law Bastilles were both hated and feared particularly amongst those who had to rely on them. There were also many in the establishment who were hostile. These included Thomas Carlyle, and Charles Dickens, along with the Tory Richard Oastler who had long campaigned for factory reform and the radical William Cobbet. They were joined by the Times newspaper which from the late 1830s into the 40s carried letters highlighting some of the worst abuses.

Like all campaigning propaganda some of what was written was at best exaggeration and at worst falsehoods. The powerful scenes in Oliver Twist are in case in point. There was brutality and at times a callous disregard of the inmates which reaches its highpoint in Oliver’s diet “of three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week on Sundays.” But contemporary accounts and modern research suggest that this diet owed more to Dickens’s own hatred of the workhouses than reality.

But this should not blind us to what awaited any of those from our township who sought relief in the years after 1834. A precondition of admission was that families were segregated. It mattered little if the couple had been together for almost all their entire adult life or that they entered as a family unit.

The sad fact was that many working families could expect to seek relief at some point and the hated “bastilles” were one of the strategies to cope with unforeseen circumstances by all of those on the margin of poverty. This extended to those who were ill and might be admitted to the infirmary as well as those giving birth outside wedlock.
The Poor Law Commissioners reasoned that to provide medical care for a bread winner would in the long run be more economical than having to provide assistance to the whole family in the event that the illness proved long term. In the same way they were keen to promote schemes to resettle agricultural families from the depressed south to the growing industrial north and sponsor emigration to Canada and Australia.

It is always dangerous to make judgements about the past. The economic and political landscape as well as the prevailing philosophy of self help are, or at least were so different from our own that it can be misleading to criticise the system of poor relief. On the other hand Britain was the workshop of the world with vast riches flowing into the country from a growing empire.

But that wealth was held by a small section of the community who saw fit to devise a system of relief which regarded the sick, the unemployed and the old as feckless and grasping and whose poverty had to be punished.

Nor was the outcome of the 1834 Act a departure from existing thinking on caring for the poor. During the 18th century experiments had been undertaken to group parishes together with a central workhouse with the guiding principle that conditions inside should be so harsh that only the desperate would seek help. Nor should we forget that the policy of issuing settlement and removal orders had been in existence since the early 17th century. These made settling in a parish conditional on the family or individuals being able to prove they had the means to support themselves and in the event that they couldn’t provided for removal to their place or origin.

Extracts from Chorlton-cum-Hardy, by Andrew Simpson to be published in April 2012.

Friends of Chorlton Meadows

2012-02-29T10:45:00.000Z

It is a long time since I last referred to my old friend David Bishop’s excellent blog about Chorlton Meadows. http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.com/ David introduced me to Richard Buxton the working class botanist. I have been featuring his life in a series of instalments and would recommend his stories on Buxton and the other working class botanists at http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.com/2012/02/historical-background-to-study-of.html

Picture; Snow storm on the meadows from the collection of David Bishop

Ghost signs

2012-02-29T04:50:00.001Z

You don’t see many ghost signs around but a few can still be found here in Chorlton. They are the hand painted adverts which adorned the walls of buildings from the last decades of the 19th century right through in the middle years of the 20th.

To be accurate a ghost sign is one that for whatever reason has been preserved, often long after the product, company or shop has vanished.
I found three today, although one has already been painted over, but a faint out line is still visible. There may be more.

Of course in town there will be plenty and where I grew up in south east London there was also the faded signs for air raid shelters and emergency water supplies.

I must find out more about Cooper's and the garage where the last of my signs comes from. It has been a garage for over 50 years.
Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Working the fields

2012-02-29T04:40:00.038Z

We have very few working pictures of when we were still a rural community. And so it is always exciting when one turns up and I get permission to write about it.

This one is in the collection of Carolyn Willitts who has kindly allowed me to use it. There is no date but looking at the clothes of the chap on the left it might date from the early years of the last century. Now I am researching the machinery in the picture and this might fix the date. We shall see.

One of the men is a relative of Carolyn’s and he worked on Red Gate Farm which was close to the site of the library. There had been a farm here from the 1780s* and I guess much earlier. By the 1840s the tenant farmer was William Whitelegg who farmed 68 acres of land which stretched out on either side of Manchester Road. It was mix of meadow, arable and pasture with an orchard. He grew wheat and oats, along with potatoes, swedes, turnips, and mangle wurzuls, and raspberries and currants.**

But back to the picture. It is almost impossible to locate but it is just possible that it was between Ryebank Road and Longford Brook. Maps from the 1840s show a line of trees stretching out from Edge Lane. By the early years of the 20th century some of these beyond Ryebank Road were still standing and even today there are a few left roughly in the same place. So these may be the line which appear the photograph.

For me it is the detail that is fascinating. The man to the left holds one of those ceramic jars which might have been full of anything from water to beer and even cider. And there is no reason to suppose it wasn’t cider. Chorlton had plenty of orchards and there is anecdotal evidence of old cider presses turning up in the township. Most of the apples would have destined for the markets of Manchester but some at least would have been retained for home use.

It is one of only five pictures I have come across of men working the fields here in Chorlton and takes us back to a time now almost out of living memory. And it is all the more remarkable because we know one of the people in the picture.

Picture; working the land, date unknown from the collection of Carolyn Willitts
*Yates map of 1786 shows the farm
** From an advert for the sale of the farm contents of Red Gate Farm, Manchester Examiner & Times, November 3rd 1855, Issue 711, British Library of newspapers

Horse drawn delivery vans, gas lights, coal fires and net curtains, North Meade 1914

2012-02-28T04:09:00.014Z

Here is another of those occasional pictures celebrating just over one hundred years of Chorltonville. It was taken not long after the “ville” had been built and is looking out from Claude Road along North Meade towards the Meade.

In some ways it is a scene that has not changed much. The trees have now matured and the passage of time has made it necessary to replace the wooden fences, but essentially it is almost the same.

But what it reveals is a world remote from our own. The horse drawn delivery vans of which there are two in the picture hark back to a time when local shops however local made house calls. So on this quiet day as one plies his way onto North Meade, another has taken to stop on the island, which would sit badly with the generations of residents who have told children off for playing on the grass.

Nor does it stop there. Behind those front doors there was gas lighting, coal fires and the regulation style window nets. And a total absence of cars.

The roads in the “ville” are narrow but then when no one had a car it didn’t matter over much. It was perhaps fortunate that in planning the front gardens the design allowed for a drive and garage to be added later in mid century.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Richard Buxton, ............ part four

2012-02-27T04:32:00.014Z

The continuing story of working class botanist, Richard Buxton

By the middle of the nineteenth century when Buxton was writing his book most of the area had slid into slums through overcrowding and neglect.

And into this warren of dark, dank and dismal streets Richard grew up lived and worked. During most of his life he inhabited just a few streets separated by less than a half a mile.

“About sixty years ago ........I came to live in Bond-street Ancoats; and I now live near the same place, in Gun-street. Being a single man, I have never had a house of my own, but lodged with an elder sister of mine, of the name of Robinson.”

The house in Gun Street brimmed over with people. Not only was there his sister Mary and her husband but along with Richard six other people shared the house.

No records exist of what type of shop Richard Robinson ran so it is impossible to ascertain how well off he was, but a look at the occupations of the others in the house show that they existed at the bottom of the economic ladder. We know that Richard Buxton was a poor man
“who has had the greatest difficulty in procuring the necessaries of life in a worn-out trade, like that of a child’s leather shoe maker, and in delivering a few newspapers on a Saturday” and so were the others in the house. Jobs like charwoman and weaving were low paid occupations.

Overcrowding was quite common at that time and many of the neighbouring houses on Gun Street had similar numbers living in them. Often each family in the house lived in just one room and where there were cellars even these were occupied.

Not far away in John Street could be found the 14 back to back houses of John Street, Back Ashley Lane, Parker Street and Back Irk Street. They were built between 1780 and 1820. Here in 1851 lived 118 people in just these 14 houses. About 40% of the inhabitants had been born in Ireland and this is consistent with other parts of the area. They were one up one downs, with equally awful levels of overcrowding. At number 3 John Street for example, there were 18 people living in the one house. Six lived in the cellar but the remaining twelve lived in the two rooms. There was the Riley family consisting of Martin, Hannah and their son, along with four lodgers, and the Williamson family. While back at Bradley Street In 1851 at number 4 three generations of one family were crammed into this small dwelling place.

The house in Gun Street has long gone and so it very difficult to work out it would have been like. None of the maps of the period are much help. Richard Robinson described himself as a shop keeper and so it is logical to suppose the ground floor might have consisted of a shop and an adjoining room with two more above and two cellars, but this is just speculation at present.

Picture; Gun Street looking from Blossom Street by A Bradman 1901, m11341,Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

References
Buxton R A, Botanical Guide to the Flowering Plants, Ferns Moses and Algae found Indigenous within Sixteen Miles of Manchester second edition of 1849 page iii
1841 census Enu 15 Page 3 Ancoats Manchester, Richard Robinson was also listed as a shopkeeper at 72 Gun Street in Slaters’ Directory of Manchester & Salford for 1841Page 212
Buxton R A, page v
In 1851 Angel Street “was regarded as the spine of the Irish quarter even though only 56.5%were Irish in 1851” Not far away just beyond Angel Meadow was New Town. Here in streets like “School Street and the small courts and alleys off it were over 75% Irish.” Busteed Mervyn, Hindle Paul, Angel Meadow: the Irish and Cholera in Manchester 1998
1851 census
1851 census Enu Page 28 Market Street Manchester Lancashire There were the parents in their late 60s, a son and his family, a grandchild and even a lodger.

Piccadilly Railway Station

2012-02-27T04:32:00.009Z

Waiting for a train
Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Stories of Empire, and a context for one British family

2012-02-26T12:03:00.001Z

Sometimes you can just lose perspective when researching a family relative. I always told myself that in telling their stories I wanted to put them into the bigger picture. As intriguing as the life of my great uncle might be it is nothing unless you place him in the context of where he lived, when he lived and what was going on around him.

He was a British Home Child, and understandably his life and the difficulties of tracking down a man born in 1898 who spent his early years in institutions and then left for Canada in the May of 1914 can become so absorbing that you don’t see the wood for the trees.

Now all of us who have researched BHC are aware of the social and economic background that led well meaning organisations and individuals to sweep up children in Britain and relocate them to Canada, Australia and the other colonies of the former British Empire.

And I guess we have all come across those back in the home country with an eye to empire. For them these children were also about putting down a population in a colony still being built, who in time with family, a farm and a flag would bind these new territories to the mother country. Barnado himself is reputedly to have talked about the children he sent as “bricks for empire.”

Of course the bigger picture helps place BHC in a context. We had been sending our criminals and unwanted children to North America, the West Indies and later Australia since the 17th century while in the 1840s the Poor Law Commissioners and local land owners connived a scheme to send the unemployed across the Atlantic.

So I suppose I should have not been surprised to read about the Free Passage Scheme which at the end of the First World War offered a “Free Passage Scheme for ex-servicemen, ex-servicewomen and their dependants to emigrate to the colonies and dominions of the Empire,”* and was followed by the larger, Empire Settlement Act of 1922 to emigrate large numbers of British women as domestic servants.

Now I knew vaguely about the Empire Settlement Act, but it was her article in this month’s BBC History Magazine “Our Excess Girls” which drew me into the story. It has been written by Lucy Noakes who lectures in history at the University of Brighton and is a curtain raiser to her book
From War Service to Domestic Service: Ex-Servicewomen and the Free Passage Scheme 1919–22, OUP, 2010. It is a fascinating story and fits well with the idea of the mother country populating the outposts of Empire. There were she writes a “complex network of interlinked beliefs and policies concerning both the relationship between the metropole and the Empire, and the perceived necessity for social stability in Britain and in the dominions and colonies.” But in the case of over 4, 000 young women who had been in the services it was the opportunity for a new life often in domestic service.

And like so much in history there is a direct echo with my own family. My great aunt who had been born in the Derby Workhouse in 1902 and like my great uncle had spent her early years intuitions before being sent into service at the age of nine went across to Canada in 1925. She was one of the beneficiaries of the many schemes for the settlement of people in Canada. I guess she was part of the the program providing transportation assistance and guaranteeing standard wages and transition support for more than 22,000 domestic workers between 1919 and 1930.

Hers is a story I have yet to tell and it is one that my cousin who is her granddaughter and I have often talked about. Great aunt Dolly had planned to stay in Canada just a short while, and took only a few clothes in a suitcase. She had been encouraged to go by her brother who was my BHC. The plan was for her to meet him in British Columbia but she got no further than Ontario where she stayed, married and raised a large family.

Put their two life stories together and I begin to have something more than just a family history. Add in another uncle who spent his entire working life in Africa and great uncles who plied the oceans as ships engineers and it is the start of my family and an Empire.

Picture; the reference for my great aunt for her new life in Canada & with her husband in later life, date unknown, from the collection Jac Pember Barnum
*Lucy Noakes

Cinemas I wish I had known

2012-02-26T04:39:00.028Z

A few days ago I featured this picture of the Grosvenor Picture Palace and pointed out its connections with our own Palais de Luxe on Barlow Moor Road, and I suppose I should have shown the two together.

And I was reminded of this other picture of the Palais. It is a detail from a postcard sent in 1943 but judging by the cars must be much older. I like it because it gives an idea of the cast iron glass canopy which most cinemas had when new. Try as I may I cannot make out the detail on the film notice which would I hoped give an exact date but I shall continue to work on it.

Pictures; The Grosvenor Picture Palace from the collection of Andrew Simpson, the Palais de Luxe, May 1959, A H Downes, m09248, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, detail of the Palais de Luxe, circa 1930-40s from the Lloyd collection

The story of a strike and of strikes yet to come, ............. part 4

2012-02-26T04:28:00.004Z

During the August of 1911 the labourers in the engineering workshops came out in a series of disputes over poor pay and conditions across the city.

They were “the mere muscular machines that do the donkey work” and were paid between 14s [62p] and 18s [90p] and “certainly very few, ever worked for fifty-two weeks of the year.”*

This was in part due to slack times and breakdowns and to annual sickness which might amount to fifteen days a year which meant that they might work just forty-four weeks which according to one estimate put their weekly take home pay at just 13s [65p]. Then there were the deductions like the two pence [1p] docked from their wages for the hot water to make their tea.

It began in Gorton in early August and quickly the strikes spread across the engineering workshops of the city and were a success with the employers conceding a wage rise. No adult general labourer would receive less than 20s [£1] a week for 53 hours labour, semi skilled labourers between 21s [£1.5p] and 25s [£1.25p] a week and foundry labourers a minimum of 21s [£1.5p]. Those on piecework were put on new rates, which extended to overtime work as well. Finally the employers consented to recognise the Trade Unions and negotiate with the men’s officials.

The same issues of low pay and Union recognition were at the heart of the dispute between railway workers at the Companies during the same month. The railway labourers, also wanted a minimum wage of 20s [£1] and at the start of the month 1,300 labourers employed in the Carriage Works at Newton Heath walked out on unofficial strike. They were soon joined by others from all grades and by the end of the first week 6,000 men had joined them. The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company which paid the lowest wages in the area, flatly refused to agree to the rise.**

In a growing spirit of “revolt, solidarity and self sacrifice”, the dispute continued to spread, with the strike widening to encompass support for the striking Liverpool railway workers. At a mass meeting held in Stevenson Square on the night of Friday August 4th railway workers agreed to link up with the workers in Liverpool and resolved there would be no return to work until all were satisfied.

The following day the staff at Central Station went on strike and at another mass meeting there was a decision to boycott all goods coming and going from Liverpool with decisions for an all out strike if the demands for a minimum wage were not met. The deadline for the strike was set for Monday August 7th and when there was no positive response from the Company the “railway transport workers of Manchester came out on strike.”

All the railway goods depots were closed, passenger services on the London and North Western Railway Station were affected, and by Tuesday the engine men at Longsight refused to take out their engines with those at Stockport moving to do the same. As a result train services south of Manchester from London Road station could not be maintained and at all Manchester and Salford Stations with one exception, the porters also struck.

The growing sense of confidence and militancy led the Manchester Trades and Labour Council held on the Wednesday night to accept a motion that “if ever the military are drafted into Manchester again during industrial disputes; the whole of the Trade Unions will cease work by way of protest.”

Nor were the events in Manchester and Liverpool isolated disputes, across the country railway workers were coming out on unofficial strike. Much of the grievance revolved around low pay and the refusal of the railway companies to recognise the unions. Five years earlier in an attempt to avert a national strike the Liberal Government had set up conciliation boards. But the companies still would not deal with the unions and the boards were not successful in improving pay and working conditions.
During the previous year the companies had been doing much better and were announcing improved railway dividends but had made no moves to share their growing prosperity with the workers in the form of pay rises.

Against this backdrop and with the wave of unofficial strike action continuing the four railway unions issued an ultimatum that if the companies did not either recognise the unions or start talks there would be an all out rail strike. The deadline was August 15th and when the companies remained defiant the strike began two days later. Consistent with his earlier actions Winston Churchill mobilized 58,000 troops which were deployed along the network at key points such as junctions, stations and signal boxes.

On the 16th he reported to the House that “at Manchester business is practically at a standstill, but there has been no disturbance. Two battalions and a Cavalry regiment are held in readiness to proceed on the request of the local authorities”

They were later deployed “to occupy the railway station, because there was an almost complete arrest of the deliveries of goods from the station, and that the traffic was being wantonly interfered with to a degree wholly different from any interference with the traffic in other parts of the railway system where the military had already given protection. I understood also yesterday evening that the Lord Mayor fully concurred in the steps which had been taken, and that the result had been extremely beneficial in permitting free movement of necessary supplies.”***

But already the strike had achieved its purpose with the Government bringing the unions and companies together face to face on the 17th. The companies conceded a small wage rise and a Royal Commission into the operation of the conciliation boards were promised.
How far the companies were genuine in their attempts at conciliation may be judged by how they treated those of their employees who had gone strike. Despite promises that there would be no victimization some workers in some companies found that their records highlighted the part they had played in the strike.

Moreover the Railway Gazette was convinced that the “principal lesson for the railway companies is the need of greater solidarity and greater firmness ... Having made up their minds to a certain course of action they should absolutely refuse to be turned from it by a mere public outcry. It dismissed claims of poor working conditions on the basis that from 1889 to 1911 there had been “only a very small number of labour disturbances” leading the paper to argue “that conditions of service in the British railway industry must be very much more satisfactory to the rank and file of the employees than would appear from the allegations of trade unionist officials, since an industry employing very nearly 600,000 men, in which strikes are, on the whole, very few, has hardly the look of 'seething with discontent’.” ****

I doubt that the railwaymen, engineering labourers or carters quite saw it that way. Strikes were costly, uncertain and fraught with the risk of dismissal. Working men and women had to think very carefully about withdrawing their labour. Just because at certain times they did not protest at their conditions does not mean they were happy or that they did not engage in other ways to further their condition. The unofficial strike of the Newton Heath carriage workers was coordinated from the Independent Labour Party Committee Rooms on Oldham Road in Newton Heath, and the ILP along with the Labour Party, other socialist groupings as well as the Co-operative Movement were places where working people could find a forum to articulate their wishes for a fair and just place.

Picture; Gorton Locomotive Works, 1960,m61101 & Victoria Station, 1910, m63286, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

* Richardson, H.M., The Manchester Strikes, The fight for a minimum wage, The Labour Leader , August 11, 1911, Working Class Movement Library, Salford
** This despite the fact that they were just about to declare a larger dividend than for the last eleven years, this amounted to 4½%, Richardson, H.M.,
*** Churchill, Winston, HC Deb August 16 1911 vol29
**** Churchill, Winston, HC Deb August 22 1911 vol29
***** The Railway Gazette, October 13 1911

Richard Buxton .......... part three

2012-02-25T15:57:00.000Z

The continuing story of Richard Buxton, working class botanist who record the plants of Chorlton

When the Buxton family arrived in the Ancoats it was just beginning to change from open fields with its own Hall to urban sprawl. The transformation was completed in just a few decades, and the casual visitor who might have once walked through fields in 1770 would have been met with a maze of narrow streets, dark courts, grim workshops and noisy cotton mills twenty years later.

The impetus for this development came with the building of the Rochdale Canal in 1804. It was built on the east side of the area and even before it was finished industrialists had begun erecting cotton mills along its route. In 1815 Ancoats had more cotton mills and the largest number of households than any of the other rating districts in the city. The population, swelled by large numbers of immigrants from Ireland as well as the surrounding area, rose from 11,039 in 1801 to 53,737 by 1861.
It was a crowded and teeming place, which visitors to Manchester either admired or like the Prussian, Johann Georg May thought was a “scene of melancholy.”

A view endorsed by another foreign visitor, who “saw the forest of chimneys pouring forth volumes of steam and smoke, forming an inky canopy which seemed to embrace and involve the whole place ......It is essentially a place of business, where pleasure is unknown as a pursuit, and scarcely rank as secondary considerations. Every person who passes you in the street has the look of thought and the step of haste”

Buxton who lived amongst the grime, smoke and melancholy was far more generous when he wrote “The operative who lives in a large manufacturing town, sees plenty of the handyworks of his fellow-men in the giant steam-engine, the ingenious mule, which rivals the gossamer in spinning threads, the never-tiring power loom, and the countless other contrivances of mechanical skill which have resulted from the fertile brain of man.”

But this paean to industrial Manchester only serves to act as a contrast to the wonders of flowering plants and open fields. The worker might see “the triumphs of science and art but little of the works of nature. This renders him an intelligent, but to a certain extent, an artificial man.”

It is no wonder I suppose that he should hold to the “many delightful walks, by pleasant streams through green woods.” All the more so when faced not only with the dirty industrial waterways, and satanic mills but awful hovels which were home to so many in Ancoats.

Speculators had followed the industrialist in laying out streets and building houses in the area and with no regulations much of the housing was of the worst type. It hadn’t always been so. Working class dwellings erected in the last two decades of the eighteenth century tended to be substantial and used good quality materials. Some of these like those on Lever Street were built in the 1790s and were constructed on three floors with cellars and were at first occupied by artisan families. The uppermost floor would have been used as workshops and some of these surviving on Liverpool Road still have the longer and wider windows designed to admit the maximum amount of daylight.

But under the impact of the growing population, builders responded with cheap poorly constructed buildings which used the cheapest materials. In an effort to maximise the number of houses that could be erected on a given plot speculators began building one up one down houses which were back to back. The outer wall would be one brick thick and internal walls just half a brick. Many would have been built in courts and access from the main road would have been by narrow alleys.

There are some one up one down houses on Bradley Street. The Bradley Street ‘three’ are the last remaining one up one down houses in Manchester. They were redeveloped in the late 90s and nothing is left of the original interior. Similar houses which have been excavated at Greengate in Salford opposite St Mary’s in Manchester reveal the small shoddy nature of this type of house. They had room sizes of less than 3.5 m square with foundations of one brick depth. Each ground floor room had a fireplace but there was no sign of floor covering nor a staircase and it is likely that access to the upper floor was by a wooden ladder.

Picture; One up one down houses, Bradley Street Manchester 1983, Courtsey of Manchester Early Dwellings Group

References
Hartwell Clare, Manchester2001 Penguin page273
May Johann Georg, quoted in Visitors to Manchester complied by L D Bradshw Neil Richardson Manchester 1987 page 25
Cooke Taylor William, Notes of a Tour in the Manufacturing Districts of Lancashire quoted in Visitors to Manchester page 36
Buxton R A page xii
Nevell Michael, Manchester the Hidden History The History Press page 149

Be careful what you wish for, .... snow on the green circa 1979

2012-02-25T04:51:00.002Z

Now I know the old saying, be careful what you wish for, but in this very mild February I couldn’t resist this picture of the green in the snow sometime at the end of the 1970s.
Picture; from the collection of Tony Walker

The power of the Mersey

2012-02-25T04:30:00.000Z

I posted this very tranquil scene of the Mersey at Red Bank Farm a few days ago and you would be forgiven for thinking that the river was a quiet and benign bit of water.
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/02/unfamiliar-picture-red-bank-circa-1910.html

But anyone who has walked the banks of the river after a few days of heavy rain will no differently.

Our village and the isolated farms near the Mersey were all built beyond the flood plain. Even so this was not always sufficient protection. The Mersey has on countless occasions risen and breached these towering banks sometimes even sweeping away the defences themselves.

It was for this reason that the weir was built. Just beyond the point where the Brook joins the Mersey and at a bend in the river the weir was built to divert flood water from the Mersey down channels harmlessly out to Stretford and the Kicketty Brook.

Not that it always worked. Soon after it had been built flood water swept it away and during the nineteenth century neither the weir nor the heighted river banks prevented the Mersey bursting out across the plain. In July 1828 the Mersey flood water transported hay ricks from the farm behind Barlow Hall down to Stretford only later to bring them back, while later floods proved to be even more destructive.

It was, wrote Thomas Ellwood the local historian
“no uncommon thing to see the great level of green fields completely covered with water presenting the appearance of a large lake , several miles in circuit.”

On a cold bleak and rain swept morning it was possible to sense the importance of the weir. Stretching out from the wall was a deep and placid pool of water home to ducks and broken by bunches of water plants. But with just a little imagination how different it might have been on a stormy night when the river swollen with rain water burst over the weir.

A friend has talked about his own scary moment earlier in the year when after what seemed to be weeks of rain the river rose and topped the protective banks, leaving him scrabbling for safety.

And indeed these historic floods were quite sudden. One such event left a farmer just enough time to release his horses from the cart and stamped them to higher ground, while on another occasion one man was forced to take refuge in a birch tree till the following morning.

Pictures; The Mersey at Red Bank & the wier 1915 from the Lloyd collection, Higginbotham’s flooded field 1946 from a painting by J Montgomery 1963, m80092, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Night clubs Variety evenings and live music

2012-02-24T05:04:00.001Z

I had many late nights in Valentines on Barlow Moor Road. It was later to have other names, from Ra Ra’s, to Adam & Eve’s, the Charlie Brown’s Fun Pub and Valentine’s Health Club, although don’t ask me in what order.

I remember it as Valentine’s , not that I can truly say any of the nights there were memorable. It was a place you went after the pubs closed and back in the 1970s and ‘80s that meant half past ten in the week with a 30 minute extension on Fridays and Saturdays. So if you wanted to party on after closing time Valentine’s was the place.
To be honest they were not that enjoyable, no more than the equally drunken evenings in the long room above the Pottery shop on Wilbraham Road.

Looking back I might have preferred it when it was the Princess Club. Then according to the historian Cliff Hayes it attracted many of the top entertainers in the 1960s, including the Drifters, Bob Monkhouse, Billy J Kramer, Lonnie Donegan and Tom Jones.

It is hard to think that somewhere like Chorlton could have been a venue for such performers. But back then there were plenty of clubs across Manchester which offered doing the same. Just a little further south and a bus ride from Princess Road was the Golden Garter in Wythenshawe which was still pulling them in during the early 1980s.
Now I never went to the Princess Club and I am not sure when it had changed its name from the Chorlton Palais de Dance, but there will be some who do.

Live acts as well as live music was more in evidence, and it could also be found in those big pubs built I guess in the 1930s. There were plenty of these just outside Chorlton. I would occassionly fall into the Mersey Hotel on Princess Road. It was a big barn of a place, with lots of different rooms and may even have still had waiter service. But like our cinemas the days of these barns were numbered. Despite changing its name to the Mersey Lights it eventually went. But in its time according to Cliff Hayes it hosted appearances by Little and Large, Les Dawson, Bernard Manning and Freddie and the Dreamers.

Still there is now the Edge which competes with the Irish Centre as a venue for live entertainment today.

Picture; The Mersey Hotel m 49963 1970 A Dawson, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Another Wool Shop and a different style of shopping

2012-02-23T04:40:00.010Z

On reflection I was unfair to wool shops. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Chorlton%20shops

I was remembering the one I seemed to spend my life in as a child in New Cross and painted a grim picture. The Beech Road Wool Shop was a friendly place and I suppose so was the one on Wilbraham Road. I had completely forgotten the Scotch Wool Shop at 452 Wilbraham Road although I must have passed it loads of times. And even after it had gone the cream tiles with their brown lettering announcing the Scotch Wool Shop remained in place in front of the entrance, a reminder of a slightly more elegant style of shop signage.

I must go back and look if it is still there at what has become a takeaway, but I fear that it would not sit well with the black, white and yellow sign which announces the Zam Zam Tandori.

In the same way, the neighbouring tobacconist shop of James Colbeck Ltd which also offered “Gents Hairdressing” seems equally out of time with its shop window full of tobacco products and the shiny cigarette dispenser.
Both are a reminder of just what has changed in the last fifty years, not only in what was sold but how .

Picture; Scotch Wool Shop by A E Landers 1960, m18299, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Chorltonville and a milkman

2012-02-23T04:21:00.001Z

Another picture of Chorltonville, South Drive and a milkman
Picture from the Lloyd collection

Thank you Canada ...... thoughts on researching the family and why cooperation is always better than self interest

2012-02-22T09:15:00.002Z

Now one of the great pleasures of researching family history is that it is not a solitary pursuit. True there are times when locked away in the cellar of an archive centre or trawling online records from the other side of the world it can seem so, but these are the exceptions.

More often the work is done in collaboration with others. In the archive and local history library in Manchester people engaged in their own work will stop to seek advice or just ask what you are doing and show a genuine interest. In much the same way I have to report how helpful my Canadian colleagues and friends have been in suggesting where to go to look for clues to the story of my own great uncle.

It started after I was deluged with responses from people living in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia who replied to my letters in their local newspapers. I knew my great uncle had been placed on three farms during 1915 and armed with the address of the farms and the names of the farmers I floated requests for anyone who might help.

I don’t think I was prepared for the interest and information that came back. People asked around, searched out relatives, neighbours and friends and in some cases went on their own journeys of discovery. Not only did I receive back stories and newspaper cuttings but some went out of the way to travel to the site of farms and photograph what was left. Now like so many of the places that my family has lived, the farms are gone. It is I suppose the fate of all of us born into working families that so much of our history is now car parks, motorways and open spaces.

Since then I have become part of a network of local historians tracking their BHC. We swop information, post links and above all try and search the archives on both sides of the Atlantic in an effort to find clues to our families. Along the way I have made some nice friends, learned a lot about Canada and just enjoyed myself.

It challenges all that nonsense that there is no such thing as society or that individuals will always put self interest above helping others. Self interest even enlightened self interest would not motivate two retired senior citizens to drive something like 100 miles to a site in NS to take pictures of the old farmhouse where my great uncle stayed or others in far away Ottawa to make contact with family and ask them to do dig around in the small towns in NB .

Just yesterday my friend Cindy went out of her way to trawl the marriage records in British Columbia following a hunch about who my great uncle married. And then there is Lori who has vetted my power point talks on BHC and has provided me with some wonderful material on young people who passed through Barnados.

Cooperation is how we progress; it was after all by working together that our ancestors maintained a precarious existence as hunter gathers for thousands of years before making that great step forward with farming and the development of settled communities and the first civilizations.

Now for me I think the trail has petered out. My great uncle may have married in the 1930s in BC having settled there sometime after 1920, but given that he changed his name once and that anonymity runs in the family I fear I have lost him. But “something always turns up” and usually when you least expect it and I have to say sometimes at the hand of someone else.

We shall see. In the meantime I owe my growing body of friends and colleagues in Canada a thank you, for the help and encouragement they have given me.

Pictures; site of the first farm my great uncle stayed on in Sheffield NB from the collection of Angela Faubert , and site of the second farm in Sidney, NS from the collection of Clive Hatton

Grosvenor Picture Palace

2012-02-22T04:46:00.008Z

It is an impressive building and one I have passed countless times over the years. It is on the corner of Oxford Road and I only knew it as a pub, but I would rather have fancied visiting when it was a cinema. It is the old Grosvenor Picture Palace which was designed by Percy Hothersall in 1913 and it opened in 1915. So it dates from same time as our own Palais de Luxe on Barlow Moor Road. It was in its time the biggest cinema in Manchester seating a 1,000 people.

What draws me to the building is that although much bigger than our own Palais de Luxe there is much here that we would recognise from the smaller cinema on Barlow Moor Road. Both had green and terracotta tiles and something of the same embellishments around the circular windows and blanks.

And there is one last connection. The Palais was part of the Moorhouse chain from 1939 while H.D. Moorhouse was a director of the Grosvenor.

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Stories behind a picture, ........... Chorlton Green circa 1904-12

2012-02-22T04:28:00.021Z

This is one of those pictures which you look at, think about how it has changed and pass on.

But that really doesn’t do it justice. The more I look at it the more I seem to see. It is a warm summer’s day in the afternoon and the green seems quiet enough. There are no children about so either school hasn’t finished or the holidays have yet to arrive.

Now I know it must date from sometime between 1904 and 1912. It can’t be any later than 1912 because this was the year the postcard was sent. Nor can it be any earlier than 1904 which was when the Pavilion theatre on the corner of Wilbraham and Buckingham Roads was opened. It would have been an extra bonus to be able to use the bill board beside the Horse and Jockey to fix the date even more accurately but it is impossible to decipher the print advertising the forthcoming acts.

So it is all down to when Mrs Gertude Green moved in to number 5 Chorlton Green and opened her sweet shop. She was definitely open for business by 1909 and it is her name that appears on the sign in front of the house which also carries the advert for Rowntrees chocolates.

The delivery cart for Camwal may have been unloading mineral water and soft drinks to her shop. The firm had begun in 1878 as the Chemists' Aerated and Mineral Waters Association Limited and by 1895 had factories in London, Bristol, Harrogate and Mitcham. It can’t be sure but it is likely that around 1901 they changed their name to Camwal or were taken over. Those wooden heavy crates would still be used well into the middle of the century for transporting various soft drinks and beers.

Now number 5 looks small and in 1911 it consisted of just three rooms. Fine for Mrs Green who was a widow and lived alone but two decades earlier it had been the home of the plumber James Moloy his wife and four children.

Today the house is bigger but looking again at our picture back then some of number 7 appears to run behind it but just how the internal geography of the two works has yet to be revealed.

Having said that our picture has not yet given up all there is to learn.

Until late in the 19th century the pub was just the space either side of the entrance at number 9 and as late as the 1891 census there were families in numbers 11, and 13. And you might think that when the picture was taken this was still the case. The fence extends along the rest of the row and separates these properties from the pub. But by 1901 all three were described as the Horse and Jockey which may have happened soon after the death of Miss Wilton who had lived at number 13 and died in 1896.

I would still like to know who owned the horse and cart in front of the Camel delivery vehicle, and whether the woman pushing the pram was the child’s mother or one of the many servants who were employed here in the years before the Great War.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, circa 1904-1912

Chorlton in 1818

2012-02-21T21:12:00.000Z

I like this map. It does not have the detail of the OS of 1841 but Greenwood’s map dated 1818 is a fine one and gives a good idea of what the small townships to the south of Manchester were like at the beginning of the 19th century. It is part of a collection of digital maps of the north produced by Digital Archives at reasonable prices http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Picture; Greenwood’s map, 1818, from Digital Archives

Another side of Chorltonville

2012-02-21T17:09:00.006Z

Another view of the Meade, what strikes me about this image from the 1920s is the degree of uniformity about the “Ville.”

Picture from the Lloyd collection

A 70 year old loaf and thoughts on recreating and representing the past

2012-02-21T09:06:00.001Z

I have been making our own bread recently. It is one of those things that I have been telling myself I should do for years. But in the past the results often resembled bullets that could have been thrown at the walls of a medieval castle with more effect than a cannon ball and even the more successful ones were likely to give you indigestion.

But it is something we do here in Chorlton and over the last few weeks with a special recipe, a new type of flour it has all come together.

So imagine my interest in the news that my old friend Lawrence has been experimenting with something called the National Loaf. “It was introduced in 1942 due to a shortage of shipping space for flour from Canada and the USA. It was sold unwrapped and unsliced to save packaging. There are references to it being sold a day old despite bread being best when fresh as possible. White bread was then no longer produced so if you wanted bread you bought the National Loaf” and you can follow the full story on his blog at http://hardylane.blogspot.com/search/label/National%20Loaf

Yesterday he recreated the National loaf in his own kitchen and now that my own bread is acceptable to the family I think it is time to branch out and have ago. It is all there the recipe, and the results.

All of which got me thinking about how we present the past. Today it is a growth industry ranging from the quest to uncover family history to the recreation of coal mines, period houses and whole communities. I have stood outside an early 20th century shop in the Midlands, peered into the downstairs room of a one up and one down cottage in Salford and stood beside the rebuilt Roman gate house facing out on to Castlefield.

And I have mixed feelings. It is something I have written about before now. As correct as the detail can be are we really able to fully understand what life was like 100, 200 or 2, 000 years ago from these reproductions? And is there not a danger that what people walk away with is a sanitized view of the past neatly packaged and somehow reinforcing what we were taught at school or confirming that warm comforting view of Edwardian Britain from the Hovis advert?

This is not to rubbish experimental archaeology. I am a great fan of Peter Connolly who tried to uncover some of the details of Classical warfare recreating the equipment. In the same way I don’t denigrate all those enactment groups. I know dressing up in period costume and pretending to do battle can seem strange but certainly in the case the Ermine Guard who are “a society dedicated to research into the Roman Army and the reconstruction of Roman armour and equipment” http://www.erminestreetguard.co.uk/ESG.htm their work is both very useful and does bring the subject to a wider audience.

Now there is a danger that what the public see is just not right, a point made by Chris Haines MBE of the Ermine Guard in a recent post http://www.erminestreetguard.co.uk/Centurions%20Corner.htm

Not only do they then walk away with a sanitized view of the past but it is one that is wrong. Does it matter I hear someone mumble? Well I think it does. I know some family historians who just hoover up people who have a tenuous link to their own family because the name and date are right without fully researching the background. This of course is bad history and helps no one.

But when done well I think the recreation of the past has value. We can never be sure that we always get it right, and what is put forward today as accurate may have to be modified in the light of future research, but I guess as long as we have that simple idea in our mind we can have some fun and learn something from that cottage in Salford.

Which brings me back to Lawrence’s National loaf which I shall try making this weekend. It will be a bit of fun and get me a little closer to what my parents and grandparent ate just seven years before I was born. On a more serious note Lawrence has highlighted an aspect of the last world war which does not always get much coverage. Setting aside the battles and the air raids what people ate and why is an important part of that history.

Picture; the real thing one up one down cottages in Bradley Street, 1983 the Early Manchester Dwellings Group. The three were built in the late 18th century and were converted into offices at the close of the 20th century

A painting, a row of shops and a hidden story

2012-02-21T04:05:00.020Z

I bet a lot of us will know these shops on Wilbraham Road. I have shopped in a few of them and drank coffee in another couple and once bought take away pizza in the boarded up one on the corner.

They are I suppose a typical cross section of retail outlets here in Chorlton. Along with the empty one and the charity shop there are the bars which seem the real growth industry of the last decade. And there are those that just seem to cling on like the Linen Room, the Barbecue and fishmongers. Each have loyal customers and always seem to be busy places.

My favourite is the Modern Army Store which like the old hardware shops offers a variety of things which you can’t seem to get anywhere else. A few months ago it was a plastic camping set and the previous year a pair of marching boots, and during a thunderstorm recently I found the perfect small umbrella.

My friend Peter painted the row recently. It is part of a new project to record street scenes around Chorlton. Like all of his paintings it is full of colour. But for me it also helps explain something of the history of where we live.

Like his other painting of the shops running from Albany Road down to Keppel Road, it helps explain how an impressive terrace of houses built in the early 1880s became a row of shops catering for the ever expanding population.

The shops were built in the gardens and extended into the ground floor of the houses. But these were a later conversion. All were still residential properties as late as 1911, and despite the location on what was to become an increasingly busy road, their back gardens abutted the much larger gardens of the houses on Manchester and Barlow Moor Roads.

So I am drawn back to Peter’s painting, which captures something of those houses and will be an important record of where Chorlton was at the beginning of the 21st century. There are plenty more many of which can be seen in venues across the township and at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Picture; ©Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk & the same site in the early 20th century from the Lloyd collection

My old Nokia

2012-02-20T04:11:00.043Z

It was so long ago that I can’t even remember which Nokia model this was, but it was my first mobile phone. I don’t count the brick I briefly rented around 1994, it was very heavy not easy to use and really at the time there were few people I wanted to contact using it.

Now I got thinking about phones, and smart phones after listening to a sketch on The Now Show on BBC Radio 4, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qgt7 It was a simple enough idea, the chap phones his mobile company and asks for a down grade, “to a phone which just allows you to call people, send texts and play snake with a battery which doesn’t run out by lunch time.”

All of which I suppose ranks me with the dinosaur or those people who welcomed the rule that a man with a red flag had to walk in front of motor cars.

I did try a smart phone. In fact I tried two. First I went with Nokia who I have always been with, but the screen was too small so following my partner’s advice I tried a different model only to realize that I wasn’t smart enough to use either of them.

Now one of my friends just thinks they are the bee’s knees, allowing him to send emails track where he is where, he was, and where he might want to go, along with accessing his emails, facebook and twitter. So this is the future, and my old Nokia which didn't even have a camera is as antiquated as the wireless and the telegram.

In the same way my friend Lawrence reflected on the demise of the postcard on his excellent blog, Hardy Lane Scrapbook*, http://hardylane.blogspot.com/2012/02/making-new-archives.html
“The long and short of it is they are no longer around. Eventually I did obtain an amusing one from a shop called Number 68 on Beech Road. They brought an old box of them from out of the back. Who needs postcards now - too slow to communicate, it takes days, too expensive to mail, 60p for the old card, plus 35p postage.”

Nevertheless I did downgrade back to an older Nokia which I now see has become obsolete. It is only the second I have got since that first Nokia and I still remember it with affection. It was not unlike the old Morris Minor car, simple and reliable. And unlike its smart successor could be dropped on the pavement and still work happily. The old one went on to to be used by two of my sons when their more sophisticated models gave up the ghost or were lost and is I think somewhere in the house much scratched and battered and held together with tape.

Picture; A cherished first Nokia

Looking in at Chorltonville

2012-02-20T04:06:00.006Z

Many of my friends have moved to the “ville” over the years, and you can see why. The houses are comfortable family homes and the grass and tree lined streets can be still be a peaceful place. Most of the early pictures reflect this quiet estate. So I decided to choose pictures which showed the delivery men and tradesmen. Here on the Meade there was a flurry activity.
Long before internet gorcery shopping brought to the door, the shops of Chorlton were sending out their produce.
Picture from the Lloyd collectionPicture from the Lloyd collection
Chorltonville
Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Waiting for a train

2012-02-20T04:02:00.005Z

Oxford Road Station May 2009
Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Chorltonville from the air

2012-02-19T04:40:00.005Z

Now I missed the birthday celebrations of Chorltonville which was a hundred years old last year. It is tucked away south of the Brook and was opened in 1911. This aerial picture dates from the 1920s when there were still fields close by. To the north are the farm buildings of Oak Bank Farm while at the bottom of the picture is the land stretching out to the Mersey.
Picture: from the Lloyd collection

A new painting and a discovery

2012-02-19T04:36:00.034Z

I have often wondered what the proud owners of numbers 2- 18 Wilbraham Road would have made of what happened to their homes sometime around 1906.

These nine impressive houses stretched between Albany Road down to Keppel Road were some of the finest new terraced properties built during our housing boom in the last quarter of the century. They were spread over three floors had cellars and quite decent front gardens which were hidden from the road by tall hedges and trees.

Today of course they are fronted by a row of shops ranging from the chemist’s, a fast food out let, a cafe and the inevitable charity shop. Here also until recently was the men’s clothes shop owned by the Burt family which had been established in 1895 and must have been one of the first businesses to locate into the newly added shops.

I doubt many people know that the shops have not always been there. Which is why Peter’s new painting is something of a revelation. It captures perfectly a moment in time on a not so busy Chorlton shopping day. But it also allows you to see the mismatch between the shops and the buildings. Look closely and it’s clear that something very odd has happened. The shops look like an afterthought tagged on and partly obscure the first floor of the dwellings behind.

The houses date from sometime around the early 1880s and were home to the middling sort of people who were fast settling in Chorlton. So in 1891 there were two yarn agents, a of Music,Professor and a mix of clerks. Most of the families employed at least one servant and some took in lodgers.

The houses were in a prime spot. The railway was just yards away and allowed the business types to get into the city in minutes. And maybe this was the problem. The site was just too busy. That short walk to the station involved passing the coal agent’s offices and behind these were the coal yards and the railway tracks and sidings. Noisy, smelly and unsightly.

Or perhaps someone with an eye to business could see that this was a prime location. Everyone needs shops and there were plenty of people in the surrounding roads who needed catering for. So sometime around 1906, the gardens went and the shop fronts arrived. It was not a perfect arrangement and the builders had to put in stairs at the back of the shops to allow access to what had once been the halls and front rooms of the old houses. It also involved taking out the impressive bay windows from the ground and first floors.

Look again at Peter’s painting and compare it with the old black and white image from about 1885. Nothing I think could better show the transformation from solid Victorian domestic life to the edgy Edwardian world of commerce.

Here were the typical collection of businesses. In 1911 these included not only a chemist and Burt’s, but also a confectioners, grocers, hairdresser, boot maker and milliner. And some of these clung on throughout the century. Stevenson’s the hairdressers were still there in the 1980s and Burt’s only closed in 2010.

Peter as you know paints the pictures and I add a story. His growing body of work can be seen at plenty of places in Chorlton including all the pubs and some of the bars. His work is also available to see at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Picture; ©Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk & numbers 2-18 Wilbraham Road circa 1885 from the Lloyd collection

The story of a strike and of strikes yet to come........... part three

2012-02-19T04:16:00.000Z

Over the last two days I have been writing about the impact of the industrial action during 1911 and 1912.

We were still a very unequal society. The life expectancy for working men was just 50 years of age and 54 for women, five per cent of children aged between 10 and 14 were already at work and the richest one percent held 70 percent of the wealth.
Between 1889 and 1910 the cost of food rose by 10 per cent and the cost of coal by 18 per cent. In stark terms this meant that the “purchasing power of 20s. in the hands of a working class housewife in 1895 went down to 18s. 5d. in 1900, to 17s. 11d. in 1905, to 16s. 11d. in 1910 and to 14s.7d. in 1914.”*

And as wages were decreasing in value the profits of companies were increasing which was not lost on working families. It is this realization that they were growing poorer as their employers were getting richer which accounts for the bitterness of the great strike struggles of the early 20th century. It is fair to say that “no such open class antagonism had been seen in Britain since the time of the Chartists.” **

So it was against this background that the Carters struck. We tend to forget just how much was shifted by horse and cart. Each railway company had their own stables and in all there were 157 carriers listed in the 1911 street directory. It was a hard job involving plenty of heavy lifting and a measure of horse knowledge. The absence of carters from the road not only meant shortages of food. Coal was not being moved to heat the boilers which powered the countless machines across the city, and finished manufactured goods were left in factories where they had been made.

The police in our picture were escorting one of the non striking carters travelling from Piccadilly Gardens along Newton Street. Their destination could have been the wholesale market.

There were concerns on the part of the authorities for the continuation of food supplies and at one point mounted officers of the Manchester City Police drew swords on a crowd. This was followed by the dispatch of troops to the city. Winston Churchill, answered questions in the House about the decision to send troops to Manchester on July 6th and Salford on the 13th. The troops, Churchill said were sent not only in accordance with the regulations "to send Military aid to the civil power .... but in this case they had also the express instructions from the War Office, sent after consultation with me."

The Times carried a story that the Stock Exchange felt “a certain amount of uneasiness aroused by the reports of riots among the carters on strike at Manchester,” and further reported a fall in shares. The events were also carried by the New York Times which reported that “crowds of women joined the men, stopping traffic and destroying or scattering the market produce in the streets” and it took the police till midnight to disperse the crowd making “frequent charges with their batons.”

Picture;Police officers beside a wagon travelling from Piccadilly Gardens along Newton Street, © Greater Manchester Police Archive, July 1911

*Morton, A. L., A People’s History of England, Lawrence & Wishart 1961 p 509
**Ibid Morton p510
House of Commons Debates, July 6, 1911, vol 27 c1341 & July 10, 1911 vol 28 cc13-4
The Times, July 3rd 1911
New York Times, July 5th 1911

The story of a strike and of strikes yet to come, part two .... and a Chorlton postcard

2012-02-18T05:03:00.000Z

The Carters came out on strike in Manchester at the beginning of July 1911.

It was the picture of police escorting a strike breaker which first caught my interest and led to the first story yesterday.

But they were not the first or the last during the next few years to withdraw their labour to advance a demand for better pay and conditions. Early in 1912 the miners had come out following a ballot “in favour of giving notice to establish the principle of a minimum wage for every man and boy working underground,”* and at the beginning of March Manchester Municipal workers voted to follow those of Stalybridge, Salford and Stockport and strike for higher pay.

You can get a sense of the mounting conflict from the newspapers of the period. The Manchester Guardian was quick to comment on the concerns over coal stocks in the Greater Manchester area just weeks after the miners had come out, and carried reports that in Nottingham the bakers and painters were about to go on strike while in Manchester there was serious disruption to the rail network.

And here in Chorlton on the day the Guardian reported that 60% of trains from one Manchester railway station had been “knocked off” Leonard wrote to a friend of his worries about his mother’s illness and that “all our staff intend to come out on strike this weekend.” Now it may never be possible to discover the business that he ran or what happened on Friday March 15th when the strike was due to start, but I shall endeavour to try.

He was “busy making arrangements to fill their places” and thought that “this Coal crisis ..... is a terrible affair.”

All of which rather eclipsed his pleasure that at the Parliamentary bye-election earlier in the year “our man got in (Good old Blue) turned a liberal majority from over 2,000 to a conservative one of 500, great excitement.”

It is a fascinating glimpse on how people here in Chorlton looked out on the mounting political and industrial unrest and sadly represents the only comment we have so far.

As it was the strikes rumbled on through the year, but more about them tomorrow.

Picture; detail of a postcard sent on March 12th 1912 from the Lloyd collection

*Balllot paper issued by the Miner’s Federation of Great Britain, January 1912

Claude Road and a clue to the vanished Beech House

2012-02-18T04:21:00.021Z

The date on this postcard of Claude Road is 1915 but the scene must be earlier. On the surface it seems an unremarkable image. It would look to be a morning perhaps in the holidays and the peace is disturbed only by the children playing close to Beech Road and the appearance of the delivery man who has attracted the woman on the right who I guess has come out of her house to catch him.

It is not unlike the same scene today with of course the absence of parked cars and passing traffic. But what does make it remarkable and dates the photograph to sometime in the first decade of the 20th century is the wall and gateway at the bottom of Claude Road where it joins Beech Road. They are part of Beech House which had stood in its own extensive grounds since at least the 1830s.

Three generations of the Holt family had lived there but the last had died in 1906, and by 1908 the house was empty and the estate was awaiting sale. By sheer chance a postcard showing the lodge has survived. The message records a pleasant afternoon spent in the grounds and the speculation that it was soon to disappear. “Edith and I had tea on the lawn of the big house which you see the lodge in the picture. It will soon be sold and then will probably be divided into small plots.”

By the following year part of the garden which ran the length of Barlow Moor Road as far as High Lane had been bought by Manchester Corporation who felled the trees demolished the wall and built the tram terminus on the land. The remaining land was developed with the cinema and a row of shops and the garage of Mr Shaw.

But we can be even more precise about the date of our photograph. Claude Road and its neighbouring Reynard had been built by 1907 and the estate wall demolished in 1909. So that little detail of wall anchors our photograph and provides a view of Beech Road that has gone forever.

Picture, from the Lloyd collection circa 1907-09

Rediscovering the story of a relative, one hundred years on, fragments of the life of a British Home Child

2012-02-17T11:30:00.005Z

Talk to most family historians and once you have got past the stories of great aunt Edna and the elephant they will admit to the frustrations of crawling over the past to find a relative. It is a bit like looking through a dirty window, the outlines are there but the detail cannot be seen.

How much more difficult than for those of us engaged in researching British Home Children. Not only do we have to contend with organisations that are not always helpful and will charge an arm and a leg, but the records can be deposited 3,000 miles away.

For my Canadian colleagues trying to track children born over here and navigate diverse sources of information which can be anywhere in the country must be daunting. In some cases the records of the workhouses where the children stayed have been destroyed, in my case just heaped on a skip to moulder 15 feet down on a landsite tip. Many of the personal files still held by the agencies which sent the children are locked by the 100 year rule of disclosure and are costly to access. Nor given the fact that most Canadian BHC are now dead and did not talk much about their early life it can be almost impossible to track down family members.

On the other hand for those of us wanting to follow the trail of a family member in Canada we stumble soon after they set foot in their adopted country. During the early years of the settlement of these young people records were not always kept and when they left their placements in their late teens not all were checked to see that they had prospered in the outside world.

Having said that the online resources of the Library and Archive of Canada are a wonderful first stop, and there are sites set up by the Canadian descendants of BHC, offering forums, help, news and databases.http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/lac-bac/search/arch

I have been luckier than most. Some of my great uncle's personal records have survived. This is the application form made out by a farmer in NB requesting a BHC and it was the first farm my relative was placed.
It reveals much of the expectation and relationship between the farmer, and the Middlemore agency and what was expected for the welfare of the child.

So it was agreed that the farmer would “provide proper food and clothing”, “medical attendance” and attendance at school for at least 5 months of each year as well as “Sunday School and Divine Worship.” The young person was to be paid $5 per month once he had reached 16 and would be retained until the age of 18.

And in the event that things turned out badly the child would be returned to the Middlemore Home “after not less than a month’s notice with a good supply of clothes as when I received him.”

Moreover to avoid the exploitation of the child he could not be “placed in another home.” Finally there was provision for regular reports back on the boy to the agency. In the case of my great uncle these have also survived but make for grim reading.

All this was fine and dandy but was less the case in the early years of settlement and there are both anecdotal and official reports from both children and inspectors that the reality did not live up to the intentions of the agreements.

Some children lived awful lives, badly treated and enduring the harsh winters of Canada and while a few were fully adopted by the families they worked for it was never the idea that they should become an integral part of the family. They were there as hands and as the document makes clear it was the manager of the Middlemore home who was to be regarded as “guardian”.

There will be those who dismiss such agreements as fiction arguing that the attitude of some farmers fell along way short of the spirit of the contract. Even so they are a priceless insight into a brief period in my great uncle’s life.

Not only do I have the names of the farmers he stayed with but I have tracked down the locations including one farmhouse which still stands and written to people who remember the families who took him in. Not much I know but still a powerful link to a relative I never met.

Picture; detail from the Middlemore agreement with Sayer Vernier Griffiths of Sheffield, Sunbury NB, February 10th 1914, in the collection of Andrew Simpson

Making sense of the unfamiliar

2012-02-17T08:34:00.000Z

Here is one of those pictures which the more you look at it the less familiar it is. Well I say that but some will recognise it as Wilbraham Road looking down towards the junction with Barlow Moor Road and away there in the distance is the slight rise in the road which marks out the railway bridge.

Some at least of these fine Victorian buildings are still there but most have gone. To the left of the picture the shops were demolished to make way for the Precinct.

I am more interested in the other side. On the corner of Brundrett’s and Wilbraham Road a woman peers into the window of the outfitters of N East & Co, next door was a butcher’s shop and beside that a photographer. The site became Woolworths, while further on the tall houses were to suffer the fate of many along Wilbraham Road and were converted into shops.

And at the extreme right of the picture on the other corner of Brundrett’s Road were two fine houses demolished in 1959 as a part of the new shopping and residential block. All of which is a trailer for two more of Peter Toppings paintings.

Picture; from the collection of Rita Bishop, early 20th century

Looking beyond the obvious, a photograph and the story of a strike and of strikes yet to come ..... part one

2012-02-17T07:29:00.001Z

Photographs are not always what they seem. We can stare at an image and on the face of it draw all sorts of conclusions. Conclusions about when it was taken, who the people were and what purpose it served.

I had seen this photograph countless times and never really studied it. There was a suggestion that the date was 1880 and clearly the presence of the police hinted at trouble.

But study the picture and it tells its own story. A line of policeman are walking beside the horse and cart and alongside flanking them is a crowd, many of whom are keeping pace with the procession. Usually at least one person would be caught smiling at the camera perhaps even fooling around but not today. Look more closely and their faces suggest a collective sense of seriousness perhaps even anxiety. To our right a young woman is running and the purposeful expression on her face hints that all is not well.

There are questions that need to be asked of the image. Why are the police escorting a cart? Perhaps it was stolen but would this bring so many people out on to the streets? And why is the young woman running to get ahead of the police?

The caption in the police archives reveals that the cart is heading from Piccadilly Gardens along Newton Street. Now there was a police station on Newton Street, but it is also the direction you might take to get to the wholesale food market.

The clothes of the crowd are much later than the 1880s and put the photograph at the beginning of the twentieth century. This was a time of major industrial confrontation and the years around 1911 saw some of the bitterest clashes between employers and the Government on one side and organised labour on the other.

There were strikes in the south Wales coal fields, and trouble in Liverpool which began with a sailors strike and spread across the city involving other industries. And while the miners lost the workers in Liverpool were mostly successful and pointed the way forward for other workers in other industries around the country. There was a growing feeling that industrial action would deliver a better life for working people. And the agitation even spread to the schools. In over sixty cities and towns children came out as well. The number of working days lost because of strikes climbed as did the number of trade union members, and In Parliament Churchill, the Home Secretary was often preoccupied with questions on the industrial unrest.

All of this was against a backdrop of wage cuts, poor working conditions, and rapid inflation. Between 1889 and 1910 the cost of food rose by 10 per cent and the cost of coal by 18 per cent. The life expectancy for working men was just 50 years of age and 54 for women, five per cent of children aged between 10 and 14 were already at work and the richest one percent held 70 percent of the wealth.

Tensions mounted and the army was sent into the striking areas with fatal consequences. A miner was killed in south Wales and two workers in Liverpool.

Here in the city the same awful poverty, dreadful housing conditions and bleak prospects were evident to anyone who cared to walk just a few minutes from the tall impressive headquarters of commerce.
Just a little east of the scene in our photograph were the crowded streets and courts of Ancoats and Ardwick, while in the direction the procession was taking could be found New Cross , Redbank and Strangeways, all of which commentators agreed should be raised to the ground.

The photograph also provides a clue to the time of year. Our young woman is in shirt sleeves and the men in the crowd are dressed in suits. The summer of 1911 was particularly warm. June had been a mix of sun and showers but July was fine and hot and gave rise to fears of a prolonged drought and it is in early July that our picture was taken. It may have been Tuesday July 4th but certainly during that week.

I can be fairly certain because it was during this week that the carters went on strike here in the city. Twelve thousand men were on strike and in pursuance of their claim were picketing the docks to prevent the movement of food to the wholesale market.

Picture; Greater Manchester Police Archive, July 1911 by kind permission of Greater Manchester Police Archive, July 1911

An unfamiliar picture ............ Red Bank circa 1910

2012-02-16T04:30:00.001Z

It’s not a picture you see very often. It is just on the edge of the township. To the left is the barn of Red Bank Farm which was still farmed by the Alderley family who had been there since before the 1850s. In the centre distance is the tower of Christ Church.

The river looks peaceful enough but then as now could turn into a ranging torrent which sent flood water across the fields. It was in one such sudden outburst that the last cottages in Hardy not far from Jackson’s Bridge were so damaged that they were finally abandoned and demolished in the 1850s.

Picture; the Mersey circa 1910 from the Lloyd collection

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton, ......Part 12 the all electric home

2012-02-16T04:07:00.032Z

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over fifty years and the families that have lived here since.

We only took the old junction box off the cellar wall a few years ago. I cherish plans to clean it up and put it on display. It is a simple heavy metal box with a glass inspection window and has the letters M.C. E.W at the bottom just above the symbol of the sun.

It is a functional but I think beautiful piece of house furniture and it currently sits beside the old fuse box which still has three of the six ceramic fuses.

In 1935 Manchester Corporation boasted of its all electric houses, reporting that
The Housing Department recently completed 50 houses with all-electric equipment on the Brownlev Green Estate. These houses are provided with a coal fire in the living room, by means of which domestic hot water supply is also provided and a cooking oven heated. An electric griller for breakfast and lighter cooking and a kettle are provided, and inset electric fires are fitted in the two main bedrooms. An electric wash-boiler completes the equipment. Socket outlets for an iron or radio equipment are also provided, and the installations are supplied through prepayment meters. The results of the operation appear to be quite satisfactory. Similar installations are being provided in flats at Smedlev Point and Kirkmanshuhme lane and will undoubtedly indicate the suitability both as regards cost and convenience of electrical equipment for working-class dwellings.*

Just three years later in Your City written to celebrate the centenary of Manchester as a city the Corporation had proudly reported that the new Barton B power station “produces the power which you command by depressing a switch. Have you ever thought how much children benefit from electricity both physically and mentally” and accompanied this with illustrations of children reading by electric light, being warmed in their playpen by electric heating, helping their mother cook on an electric cooker as well as sitting in a steaming bath heated by the electric immersion heater and sitting under an electric ray lamp. **

Now Joe and Mary Ann never fully embraced electricity for their home but were forward enough not to have gone with the old gas lighting technology. As I wrote yesterday http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/02/one-hundred-years-of-one-house-in.html the garden estate of Chorltonville built in 1911 had gas lighting fitted as standard.

There is something quite quaint about using gas as a source of lighting. When it was introduced it was described as “illuminated air” and must have been a truly liberating innovation. Here was a source of light far more powerful than the old oil lamps or candles. And they had a long life. Manchester Corporation installed new improved gas lights in St Peter’s Square as late as 1935.

But on this the Scott’s were with electricity although I doubt they made use of the Corporation’s service of
"Assisted-Wiring and Prepayment-Wiring schemes, whereby consumers may have their houses wired at a small or without any initial payment. Hiring schemes for motors, cookers, wash-boilers, and water-heaters. Hire-purchase schemes for nearly all appliances (except lighting fittings) costing £2 and over."
He was after all a builder.

Sadly nothing else is left of the old electrical fittings, although there is one plastic power point still sitting forlornly on the skirting board in the front room. Where the others were is a mystery. There may even have not been any upstairs if the experiences of friends of mine are anything to go by. They bought a tall imposing terraced house facing the railway in Ashton Under Lyne back in the 1970s. All had looked fine when they went to see the house with a mind to buying it but when they moved in all the power points upstairs were missing, there were just neat screw holes on the skirting boards. There never had been any power to the bedrooms other than the lights.

Not that I can see Joe or Mary Ann having tolerated such an idea. By 1924 they had installed a telephone and must have been one of the first in Chorlton in the 1950s to have a TV. But for now the story of the all electric house here on Beech Road has yet to be discovered.

Pictures; advert from Manchester Electric Supply and picture of an all electric kitchen 1935, Manchester Corporation, and gas fitting in the collection of Lawrence Beedle

*Manchester Electric Supply 1935, Manchester Corporation
**Your City, Manchester 1838 1938, Manchester Corporation

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton, ........ Part 11 cooking on gas and electricity around the home

2012-02-15T07:33:00.002Z

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over fifty years and the families that have lived here since.

I have a confession. One hundred years of one house in Chorlton should read 93 years or there about. But more about that later.
The date is important and perhaps explains why there are no gas light fittings in our house. Just across the Brook the Chorltonville estate built a hundred years ago had gas lighting. It always seemed odd to me that if our house were the same age we too should have had gas lighting.

I had always thought that this was because Joe had seen the future and it was electricity but now I am not so sure and I have gone back to thinking the space in the kitchen with its chimney above must have been a range. It would have had one or more ovens and hot plates. After all until the mid 1970s the old brick and metal copper for heating water for washing the clothes was still in the cellar.

But I do think Joe and Marry Ann would have moved into gas cookers fairly early on. Gas cookers had become increasingly popular from the 1880s and Manchester Corporation through its Gas Committees had pioneered rental schemes from 1884. In 1935 they had showrooms at 140 Deansgate and 116 Wilmslow Road, and I guess Joe and Mary Ann would have had one as soon as they could and may even have installed one when the house was built. The design of the more basic models is little different from today, with an oven which could take 4 shelf settings, a top with the gas rings and a toaster above that.

In 1929 the Gas Committee had sold five and half thousand cookers and rented out another 1,798.* It may even be that the cooker which still stood in the kitchen in 1975 was the one the Scott’s had purchased.
But for many electricity was the coming thing. It was marketed as clean, new and the thing of the future. But few in the 1920s and 30s could have foreseen the number of things which would be run off electricity especially in the kitchen, all of which might need a power point.

I have to admit we are a little excessive; there are twenty power points around the kitchen. Some languish abandoned after a redesign but most are used and on a busy day with the kettle, toaster and microwave in use, plus the radio and a lap top the over abundant provision seems less so. Indeed with another taken up by the fridge freezer this leaves just nine to power the steamer, blender and food processor, along with other electronic kitchen gadgets which might come into play. So, no double adaptors here.

And that I suppose is the point, I doubt that Mary Ann used many tools which needed electricity. It was and I remember this from the 1950s possible to power some things including an electric iron with an adaptor run from a light fitting.

After the cooker the two household items which have made housework lighter are the Hoover and the electric iron. Beating rugs in the open air and sweeping carpets was hard manual labour and so the development of the carpet sweeper, and then a manual vacuum cleaner was important. The first manual models using bellows came in the 1860s.

Although they were lightweight and compact they were difficult to operate because of the need to turn a hand crank at the same time as pushing it across the floor. The first motorised vacuum cleaner was invented in 1901 but I guess it would have been well into the twentieth century before there was one here in 41.

Before the invention of the first electric iron in 1882, irons were either heated over an open fire or the range. This involved the use of several irons, and as one cooled down another would be taken from the heat source. There were also irons heated by various liquids, including paraffin, but what Mary Ann used is now lost.

I am sure that they had electricity from very early on if not from when the house was built. In the late 1920s Joe was advertising that his new houses on Hackness and Highfield and Vicars had “every modern convenience” including. “electric lights.”

So I reckon they must also have been quick to get both a telephone and televisions. As for the telephone this was in place by 1924 and the TV thirty years later.

Pictures; advert from the St Clements Bazaar Handbook 1928
References

*How Manchester is managed, Manchester Corporation, 1935

“No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat, At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street”

2012-02-14T08:30:00.000Z

I have always liked the idea of getting from Chorlton into town in a matter of minutes. It was what made where we live so attractive to the families of those who lived here in the years after the railway arrived.

For some it was the advantage of being able to travel home from the city centre for lunch and be back in time for the afternoon session. So the tram for me just ticked loads of boxes. Not only is it quick but it recreates a little bit of how we used to live. The new railway was so popular that during its first five years the number of season ticket holders rose from 200 to 600.

And the railway didn’t just mean passengers there was also the goods side. Today on the site of Morrison’s and stretching down along Albany Road down to Buckingham Road were three railway tracks and the businesses which relied on the railway to bring the goods. Of these coal was the most obvious. From here operated the coal merchants like Norman Bailey. More than one old friend remembers being sent down to pay for the order of coal.
And then there was also the livestock. The Bailey’s also had the farm at Park Bridge and brought their pigs from the station down to the farm well into the 1950s.

Now Peter’s painting of the tram brings back the excitement of travelling on the railway. Peter as you know paints the pictures and I add a story. His growing body of work can be seen at plenty of places in Chorlton including all the pubs and some of the bars. His work is also available to see at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

I always think it has a sleek look which is in contrast to the big powerful engines of steam. And it was while I was thinking about a train story that I came across this 1955 picture of Loco Number 73000 passing through the station. In the background is the station and the marshalling yards and beyond them Albany Road.

It is good that the tram has reawakened the old line and put to rest Slow Train that old Flanders and Swann song lamenting the loss of so many branch lines during the Beeching cuts. Written in 1963 it is as much a comment on the end of these railway lines as the passing of a way of life.
“No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat,
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street”

Chorlton survived the cuts in 1963 only to close 4 years later and 44 years later it’s possible ride the line again. Not a bad way to close the story on Peter's painting.

Pictures; ©Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk & Loco Number 73000 passing through Chorlton Station, 1955, the Lloyd collection
comment on the end of these railway lines as the passing of a way of life.

The Horse and Jockey, the painting and a story

2012-02-13T17:28:00.000Z

This Wednesday Peter and I are planning to be in the Horse and Jockey during early doors.

His painting of the pub has been mounted at the entrance and we shall be back there to add my story. Now if you have been following the blog you will know that Peter paints pictures and I tell stories. Not a bad combination. Peter’s work can be seen in many venues around Chorlton and also at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Pictures; the pub circa 1900 from the Lloyd collection and the pub as painted by Peter in 2011 ©Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

A British Home Child who had a choice?

2012-02-13T11:52:00.001Z

I think my great uncle may have been an exception to the rule. The decision to send British Home Children* to Canada and later Australia only played lip service to the idea of freedom of choice.

Exactly how it was explained to children in orphanages and workhouse institutions will always be a little in doubt. There are stories of some very young children being shown the shapes of countries as a way of making them choose a destination and there are anecdotal tales of children returning home to find their parents gone and the deal with the agencies done and dusted. To what extent pressure was put on some parents is hazy but Bernardo was reported as referring to “philanthropic abduction” as the motive and the means by which some children were offered up for shipment to Canada.

And recently I spoke to a fellow researcher who herself was nearly sent to Australia in the 1960s and was only saved by the intervention of her grandmother.

All of which marks my great uncle out as a little different. He had been born in Birmingham in 1898 to a couple who if I am kind were unpredictable and possibly not well suited to bringing up a family. On their separation my great grandfather stayed in Kent later to marry and father a family of five, while my great grandmother headed back north to have her last child in the workhouse in 1902.

During the next ten years the surviving four children grew up in various institutions and despite a brief period with their mother were taken back into care in 1913 after great grandmother was judged "unfit to have control.”
All of which took its toll on the children. Sixty years later my great aunt wrote that “I will say our lives were not too bad at the homes in Derby but I went to 6 different schools and I know that your grandfather went to some of them and according to the teachers they hoped I was not like him.”

Which I suspect explains why at the age of 14 he was sent to a naval boot camp in the form of the Training Ship Exmouth. These places were designed to offer basic training in seamanship in a highly disciplined environment.
My great uncle was also destined for the same place but appears to have jibbed at the idea which is why I think at the age of 15 he was offered the alternative of settlement in Canada as a British Home Child.

I have no idea how it was put to him or whether he was offered other alternatives. But I doubt it, after all the Guardians of the Derby Workhouse will not have had many options for a wilful young lad. So it was a choice then between naval boot camp and the wide open land of Canada with the added attraction of a sea journey.

I suppose the added irony is that he made a second free choice and that was to run away from his third placement and join the Canadian army just one year in the Great War.

Pictures; from the collection of Lori Oschefski

*British Home Children is the name given to thousands of young people from poor backgrounds who were settled in the former colonies of the British Empire during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Richard Buxton, ............ part two

2012-02-13T05:41:00.019Z

The continuing story of Richard Buxton
Richard Buxton was born in 1786 and died in 1865. He was one of those remarkable working men who were self taught. He became an expert on botany, wrote books and struggled against poverty before dying obscurely. “I am well aware” he wrote “that a narrative of the life of a poor man like myself .... is anything but interesting.” and yet it has proved to be so.

Buxton was a remarkable man living at a time when Manchester was fast becoming the “shock city of the industrial revolution.” During his lifetime the city became the centre of cotton manufacture and a huge sprawling place of overcrowded, mean and shoddy housing. He witnessed some of the great political events of the nineteenth century as the working class attempted to assert their share of the wealth that their labours had created and yet it appears he remained aloof from it. He was of a “quiet and retiring disposition” with a “humble opinion his own great powers.”

He was born at Sedgley Farm in Prestwich. In 1788 his father “became much reduced in circumstances and had to leave his farm”, moving the family to Ancoats . The Buxton’s were not alone. During the late eighteenth century and through the nineteenth century thousands left the countryside for the cities, exchanging open fields for narrow streets.

Buxton did not expand on the reasons for the family move. It may be that they overstretched themselves or were just unlucky. But rural life could be hard and unpredictable. The standard of living was if anything worse than conditions in the fast expanding industrial towns.

Many farm workers’ homes were little more than hovels with earthen floors, and thin walls. The traditional wattle and daub construction was easy to make and maintain, and if the walls were thick enough gave good insulation, but the porous nature of the material meant that damp was an ever present problem and the crumbling clay needed endless repairs. According to a 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....”

As in Chorlton brick would slowly replace wattle and daub and slate take over from thatch but this would not be until long after Buxton’s family had left Prestwich.

Their food could be monotonous and often scarce. Here in the north things were better, because wages were higher and the locally produced food was more nutritious. There was a greater reliance on an oatmeal diet made more palatable with the addition of milk which was more easily available as were meat and animals fats because of the predominance of pastoral farming. Potatoes too formed a greater part of the diet than in the south. Lastly the farm labourer here in the north benefited from the persistence of the practice of yearly hiring of labour. It was customary with this system to pay the labourer partly in grain or meal irrespective of the fluctuations in market prices. He might also be granted cow pasture, potato ground, or accommodation for pigs and poultry.

And while farm wages in the north were better than the south and east they were lower than some of those in the new industrial trades. In 1824 a survey of agricultural wages in the south and east showed levels of wages as low as 3s a week for a single man and 4s 6d for a married man, and in some parts of Kent they were as low as 6d a day to 1s 6d a day. In the north wages were generally higher because of the need to compete with the opportunities from industrial employment. A brick layer’s labourer in Manchester in 1830 might earn 18s a week and a street labourer 16s. Locally here in Chorlton farm wages a decade and half later were still much lower. Cow men working for James Higginbotham on the Green earned between 4s 6d and 5s. Similar wages were paid to carters and those of farm servants who lived with the farmer ranged from 4s. down to 1s.6d. The lower pay of farm servants reflected the fact that their board and food came as part of their living with the farmer’s family.

William Cobbet in his Rural Rides compiled between 1822-1830 calculated that a family of five needed £62 6s 8d a year merely for bread meat and beer, yet with wage of 9s a week supplemented by an allowance of 7s 6d he could as best afford only half the minimum necessary for basic food. Finally however awful these new towns seemed to be they did as they had since the Middle Ages offered a chance of upward social mobility.

All this paints a very grim picture which the Buxton’s might not have experienced. He was after all born on a farm and farmers would have commanded a better style of life than the farm labourer. But at this stage without more research it is difficult to know the status of the family.

Picture;gravestone of Richard Buxton photograph taken in 1916 by T Badderley, m72545,Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
References
Briggs Asa Victoria Cities Penguin Books 1963
‘Death of Mr Richard Buxton, the botanist’, Manchester Guardian January 5th 1865
Gauldie Enid Country Homes, page 531 The Victorian Countryside Vol 2 Rouledge & Kegan Paul 1981edited by Mingay G. E
British Parliamentary Papers 1893-4 XXXV V,1, page 103 qouted by Gauldie page532
Burnett John, Country Diet , The Victorian Countryside page 556
Burnett John, page 554 & Higginbotham’s Farm Accounts 1816-1849 Simpson A

The Wool Shop

2012-02-13T04:22:00.020Z

Now I belong to a generation that was dragged round wool shops as a child. My mum, her friend and later my sisters all knitted and so the trip to the shop was a regular part of my Saturdays.
It started with the knitting pattern, went on to an endless discussion about the colour of the wool and finished with walking home with loads of the stuff.

Then there was the smell. Wool shops had a distinctive smell, which was a sort of warm perfume smell which followed you home and stayed where ever mother was knitting. There was something else about the wool shop which for years I couldn’t quite work out what it was, and then recently it came to me, it was always so very quiet, as if there were secrets about knitting that could only be uttered in a low almost conspiratorial way.

Ours was a traditional wool shop. The wooden shelves which reached to the ceiling were made of a deep dark wood which shone in the sunlight and were heaped high with wool. And then there were the wooden and glass counters which today you only see in shops pretending to be old. Through the glass top you could see more wool and all sizes of knitting needles.

So the day Mrs Rogers announced that she was going to try out a knitting machine it was if she had admitted to multiple affairs over the preceding twenty years. I wouldn’t mind but it wasn’t even that she was going to buy one; all she wanted to do was try it out. But that marked her out as a flighty thing who would soon be buying a Christmas cake instead of making one and no doubt had already used custard powder and meat spread.

Nor did the torture of the wool shop stop there. Once home the wool had to be wound into balls, which could be only done using the back of a chair but usually involved me having to stand with my arms outstretched and the wool was pulled from me and went into balls.

So I suppose I chose to ignore the wool shop on Beech Road. But talking to people they remember it with affection as place where you could get what you wanted and be given helpful advice, which I reckon makes our wool shop a bit of an exception.

It had moved from the building that juts out from Daniel Sharp’s house beside the old Methodist chapel to a more central spot near the post office.
It’s demise says much about the way Beech Road has gone, but then it is too easy and cheap to complain that while you can buy novelty cards and interesting glassware it is no longer possible to buy a lamb chop or do all the veg shopping along the road. People have voted with their feet and prefer to buy everything under the same supermarket roof at the same time.

This really is a shame because between Muriel’s’ green grocery shop, the Italian deli, George’s wholefood shop and Etchells I could buy all the family wanted with just the odd visit to Hanbury’s. It became a proud boast that I never had to go off Beech Road. Still things are looking up with the new deli so perhaps we can have a mix. Well perhaps not yet a wool shop, the tide has yet to come back for that.
Picture; the Wool Shop Beech Road July 1978 from the Lloyd collection

Charabancs and an older corrected story

2012-02-12T13:36:00.001Z

Yesterday I had to admit I couldn’t unlock the story of a photograph. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/02/day-photographer-took-picture-of.html

Sometime on a warm summers day a crowd had gathered around a charabanc and were captured by a photographer. I thought it must have been a local scene but had no luck in discovering the location, the people or the date. So I am indebted to fellow blogger pluralized who identified the street in Blackpool, the butcher Mr Carver and a possible date. All in all a pretty neat piece of detective work. The full details are there in the comments on yesterdays posting.

The charabanc was a horse drawn vehicle used for sightseeing and works outings usually to the countryside or seaside. They were usually open topped and were common in Britain in the early 20th century. In time the horse gave way to a motorised version which often had a detachable body so that when the summer season was over the vehicle could be used as a flat bed lorry.

They were not very comfortable and by the 1920s were being replaced by the coach. These might still have a canvas top but were far more comfortable.
I suppose the direct heirs of the charabanc are the works jollies or beanos and the touring coach holidays.

I have only been on one works outing which lived up to its reputation as a boozy affair with regular stops at pubs on the way to Brighton, followed by a fish and chip dinner, more pubs and the drive home. It had been organised by the chaps at my father’s garage and used one of the company coaches.

Dad worked for almost his entire career for a coach company called Glentons. Before and after the last war they specialised in inexpensive coach holidays across Britain and during the 1950s began tours of mainland Europe. He was one of the two drivers who did the “Continental runs," leaving on a Saturday morning and returning on a Friday night. I wrote about these in http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/swiss-and-italian-lakes-coach-tour-for.html

I cannot date the picture of Dad and the Glenton’s coach but it must be late 1930s or the immediate post-war years. With its open top it is a direct descendent of the old charabancs. I have a fond memory of this coach because years later when the new fleet of coaches were being introduced a model of the old one came out of the showroom window and became a toy for most of my childhood.

Pictures; a horse drawn charabanc from the Lloyd collection, and Alan Simpson and a Glenton’s coach from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The day the photographer took the picture of the charabanc

2012-02-12T04:56:00.002Z

Sometimes a photograph stubbornly refuses to give up its secrets. Now I know that to personalise the search for the identity of the people, the location and date is silly but that’s how it is.

It is a wonderful picture full of period detail. On what must have been a warmish day the community has turned out to be captured beside the vehicle. If I was better versed on early 20th century motor cars I might be able to be confident of the date, but I can’t. The clothes suggest the early years of that century but that is as far as it goes.
There is not even a guarantee that this is Chorlton, but given the collection it came from I think it might be. There was a Carver family living in Chorlton during the period and a Brierley who listed himself in the early 1900s as a tobacconist on Sandy Lane.

But this not Sandy Lane. Looking at the glass and iron canopy it should be Barlow Moor Road but I don’t even think that.

For a while I thought that the chap sitting next to the driver might be Charles Shaw whose garage dominated the stretch of shops from the tram terminus to High Lane, but this man looks too old.
So unless someone recognises the place, the people or makes out a good case for a date I reckon the picture hoards its secrets.

Well not entirely. It conveys that sense of public curiosity at what must still have been a bit of a novelty. Trips out in motorised charabancs like this were not a common occurrence and its appearance has drawn a crowd.
I have to say that those onboard seem a smug bunch, a few smile back at the camera but most are more than a little indifferent, and as for the man beside the driver, there is more than a little arrogance about him.

I don't think I am being unfair, especially when judged against the spectators. Here are a rich group of faces. At the back there is the woman beaming at the camera, matched by the dour face of the lady behind Mr Carver the Butcher. He on the other hand stares forthright at the photographer as does the chap next to him. And then there is the woman with the hat and what looks like an umbrella. Hers is an altogether different expression. She neither smiles nor scowls but just looks and there are many more just like her.

On a busy Saturday they have stopped to gaze back at the man behind the lens. For some it will be an opportunity to pose for others just a pause in whatever they were doing. Some haven’t even bothered to stop what they were doing. So behind the lady with the umbrella and the lady with the scarf, two of Mr Carver’s assistants carry on amongst the sides of meat hanging from the rail.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

"over the Mersey at Jackson’s Boat and on to Baguley Moor and Hale Moss and after having botanized there ....returned to Manchester at dusk, all pleased with our day’s excursion” Richard Buxton in Chorlton

2012-02-12T04:54:00.003Z

“one of the hottest and driest summers that I can remember, and there had been no rain in the neighbourhood for two or three months; but on the day appointed for our meeting, very heavy rain came on about five in the morning. I should not have thought of stirring out of doors; but, having made the appointment, I thought it just possible that my friends might come, and I would not on any account disappoint them. We all went in the rain, through Manchester to Chorlton-cum-Hardy. After staying at the last named place sometime the weather changed and a fine day ensued then over the Mersey at Jackson’s Boat and on to Baguley Moor and Hale Moss and after having botanized there ..... returned to Manchester at dusk, all pleased with our day’s excursion”

It is almost impossible to know when Richard Buxton walked the meadows of Chorlton and botanized the day away with his friends. But I guess it must have been sometime in the 1820s. We were still a very rural community and there would have been plenty to see and record. And record Buxton did, for he was one of those remarkable working men who were self taught, became an expert on botany, wrote books and struggled against poverty before dying obscurely. “I am well aware” he wrote “that a narrative of the life of a poor man like myself .... is anything but interesting.” and yet it has proved to be so.

Which is why over the next brace of weeks I want to tell his story. He was born in rural Prestwich grew up in Ancoats just as Manchester was becoming the “shock city of the Industrial Revolution” and died as he had lived in poverty.

I was introduced to Buxton by my old pal David Bishop who is a passionate botanist and has patiently explained nature to me over the years. It was David who lent me the book Buxton wrote in 1849. For a self taught man his Botanical Guide to the Flowering Plants, Ferns Moses and Algae found Indigenous within Sixteen Miles of Manchester is both a wonderful record of what there was to see but also a testament to his interest and tenacity.

In a world where reading and writing are taken for granted, it is easy to gloss over the fact that at the age of sixteen he was illiterate, and had to set himself the task of learning to read. What is all the more remarkable is that having mastered the spelling book and the narrative of the New Testament he realized he needed to know not only how to pronounce the words but their exact meaning. And so “By this means I was enabled not only to read, but also to understand the meaning of what I read, and to speak it correctly.” All the more remarkable given that his working day lasted from six in the morning till eight or nine at night.

The result is a book that has stood the test of time and one that botanists still use as a hand book.

Picture; Junction of Gore Brook and River Mersey J Montgomery 1963 based on an earlier picture, m8014, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Inside the Great Northern

2012-02-11T04:59:00.000Z

I have always liked the Great Northern Warehouse. It was begun in 1885, was completed in 1898 and renovated and opened as a leisure complex a hundred years later.
Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A scene long gone, .......... Manchester Road at the beginning of the 20th century

2012-02-11T04:18:00.015Z

There can’t be anyone left who remembers this scene and if it were not for the Temperance Hall in the picture I doubt it would be easy to locate it in Chorlton.

It dates from sometime between 1902 and 1910 and all of these houses on the west side of Barlow Moor Road have long gone. They were the homes of the new managerial class who were choosing to settle in a pleasant suburb still on the edge of the countryside yet within easy reach of the city centre. So here was a canal superintendant a manager, a journalist and a professor of music.

The houses were of a moderate size ranging from seven to nine rooms. Only one has survived which is the one on the corner of Barlow Moor Road and Wilbraham Road. Perhaps the fact that this one had become a bank by the early 1920s saved it from demolition in the 1960s.

I cannot be sure but I rather think this may be the one marked on the postcard which was the home of the Ferneley family in 1911. Thomas Moses and his son were professors of music while a second son was a buyer. It was the biggest of the five having nine rooms and looked out on both roads. Even now some of the grandeur of the place can be discerned from looking at the bank from Wilbraham Road. Ignore the stone frontage, the big ground floor windows and the entrance and concentrate instead on the upper levels. Now imagine those bays repeated down to the ground either side of a large front door.

None of the pictures do justice to what it must have looked like. Back in the 1880s it had the grand title of Sunwick and stood in its own grounds which included much of what is now the precinct.

During the next 40 years the surrounding area changed rapidly, with shops encroaching on the Wilbraham Road side and the development of the east side of Barlow Moor Road, leaving all three pictures a thing of the past.

Picture; Manchester Road circa 1902-10, Wilbraham Road circa 1895 from the Lloyd collection, & the junction of Barlow Moor Road and Wilbraham Road early 1920s from the collection of Rita Bishop

A nice doorway

2012-02-10T04:35:00.002Z

A nice doorway
Wakefield Street in the summer of 2007. Not many of these doorways left. Sometime I will track the firm done and report back.
Picture; Wakefield Street, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The hunt for a photograph, .......... inside the Savoy cinema on Manchester Road

2012-02-10T04:32:00.027Z

The old Savoy cinema on Manchester Road was my best hope. It had been opened sometime around the First World War and is still there today. True the impressive frontage has gone hidden behind a slab of brick and so too has the ground floor, but I thought there might be something of the upstairs left.

It would be the only intact interior of one of our picture houses. There had been four and now there are no more. The Pavilion down on Wilbraham Road had gone only thirty years or so years after it was opened, the Rivioli was pulled down for a fast food outlet and the Palais de Luxe Cinema on Barlow Moor Road is a supermarket.

Briefly I had high expectations that there might be something left at the Palais or Palace as it became known. The downstairs has undergone plenty of refurbishments in its time since it opened as a Tesco’s then Hanbury’s and now the Co-op but I reasoned there should be no reason to mess with the upstairs.

After all for most of its life as a supermarket it had been a pretty basic affair. The Tesco outlet had been very much dominated by the old retail maxim of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” Hard as it is now to think that the sleek Tesco stores of the 21st century could have been so. The one in Ashton may even have left the tinned stuff on pallets on the shop floor, but this was a long time ago and my memory can be faulty these days.

But then as a Hanbury store it remained pretty basic. Long after the big retail players had gone in for loyalty cards Hanbury’s customers at Christmas had a card which was stamped by the cashier.

So even given the brand new refurbishment rolled out this week by the Co-op there might have been something left on what would have been the circle and projection room. But sadly it is just a big empty space long since converted in to storage area.

So back to the Savoy and the Co-op Undertakers. The staff there said that there were remnants of what it had once been but there were health and safety issues and I was best writing in and making a formal request. Sadly despite my offer to wear a hard had only stand at the entrance and sign away any rights I had to a claim on the Co-op if anything happened I was still refused permission.

Which is all a bit sad really, particularly as memories of the inside of the Savoy are fading from living memory. I will try again.

But I cannot close without reflecting on the impact of Hanbury’s. I typed in the name on google just to see if there were any pictures of the old store. Instead I found a wealth of comments which makes me think I should write about that other institution on Barlow Moor Road that was Kingspot or “Kingy”, where the world of cheap often bizarre but fun products from plastic novelty toys to paintings of the San Franciso Bridge were all available for a small price.

Picture; one of the last times the old Palais de Luxe Cinema was photographed, taken by A H Downes in the May of 1959, m17516, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

A story behind the picture, ............ ploughing on Beech Road in 1890

2012-02-09T04:57:00.026Z

It’s a familiar enough picture and takes you back to that moment when Chorlton had almost lost its rural character. It was taken around 1890 on Beech Road and may have been one of the last times the land was ploughed before becoming the Recreation ground.

But like so many photographs there is much more. The picture belonged to William Higginbotham who may be the man behind the plough. His family had lived on the green since the 1840s and most of the land they farmed was on either side of the Brook stretching up towards the Mersey. But they also worked a small strip of land between the Row* and High Lane.

In the 1840s this was almost entirely Egerton land and was rented out in strips to a number of farmers. Along with James Higginbotham, there was William Bailey, George Whitelegg and Thomas White.

This pattern of land tenure was not so different from the old medieval strip farming where each peasant had a share of the land in different places. This was repeated across the township and so while the bigger farmers had most of their land concentrated near the farmhouse, the land of smaller farmers and market gardeners were distributed across the area.

The Higginbotham’s farmed a mix of meadow and pasture land close to the Mersey and arable along the Row.

This arable farming along the Row continued well into the 19th century so as late as 1893, there was open farm land and orchards running from Cross Road down to what was to become Wilton Road and stretching back to High Lane.

Pictures; ploughing on Beech Road, circa 1890 from the Lloyd collection, and detail from the 1841 OS map for Lancashire by kind permission of Digital Archives.

*The Row or Chorlton Row is now Beech Road

H.D. Mooorhouse and a chain of cinemas

2012-02-09T04:01:00.012Z

I don’t suppose many people in Chorlton today know of H.D. Moorhouse, and yet in the early decades of the 20th century he was responsible for setting up a chain of cinemas across the city and beyond.

And of course the point of the story is that his first cinema was here. It was the Pavilion opened in 1904 and acquired by Moorhouse in 1909 and featured in the post http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/stories-of-old-cinemas-chorlton-theatre.html

Like many early cinemas it hedged its bets and continued to offer variety acts and in the June of 1910 it offered a bill of variety including the Whips. By then it had become the Chorlton Theatre and Winter Gardens and stayed open through the inter war years.

By then Moorhouse had established a cinema circuit and had acquired the Palais de Luxe on Barlow Moor Road. It had opened in 1915 and was part of the circuit from 1939 until 1956, although it may have struggled on for another two years before closing and becoming a supermarket.*
Hubert Douglas Moorhouse was born in Kendal in 1879 but grew up along the Ashton Road in Openshaw. By 1911 he was living with his parents at 61 Wilbraham Road which was an eight bed roomed house along the stretch from York Road towards Brundretts Road.

So later this month I am off to the North West Film Unit to follow up on Moorhouse and the circuit. It was set up in 1977 and “preserves moving images made in or about Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire, Merseyside and Cumbria and offers a variety of access services to users in the public, academic and commercial sectors” and can be accessed at http://www.nwfa.mmu.ac.uk/
Picture; the Chorlton Theatre and Winter Gardens, from the Lloyd collection

*Hornsey, Brian, The Cinemas of H.D. Moorhouse and the H.D.M. circuit, Fuchsprint, 2001,

Sarah Sutton, a life lived out on the Row

2012-02-08T04:45:00.000Z

There are no pictures of Sarah Sutton, nor to my knowledge has she left a diary, or anything which might tell me about her life. She was born in 1821 in Withington and lived with her husband in a wattle and daub cottage on the Row*. She died in the same cottage 70 years later. Her husband Samuel was a farm labourer which was about what most people did here in Chorlton in the first five decades of the 19th century.

I have written about her life in my book and mentioned her yesterday in the post on wattle an daub cottages. Hers was a hard life. Unlike the wives of the well to do or even some of the farming families she had no servants to help her. In the spring of 1851 she had two children under the age of eight, was married to a labourer and had the added responsibility of an infirm father in law.

So tracking her working day is a good start to understanding the daily routines of running a house. As we have already seen keeping a wattle and daub cottage clean was no easy task. Plaster walls tended to crumble, the roof of thatch could be home to vermin, and the stone or brick floors were damp and in need of constant sweeping.

Her day would begin at six in the summer and not much later in the winter months. One of the first chores was the collection of water. This might come from a well or the pump in the Bailey farm yard opposite. She may also have used the fish pond on the Row, which was next to her cottage. In having a supply so close Sarah was lucky, for other people on the Row the regular daily journey back with a bucket of water would be a much longer journey. And this simple task would be mirrored across the township and beyond.

Water was needed for cooking drinking and washing and there would be a number of journeys to collect it. The next task of the day would have been laying and lighting the fire. This may have used wood or possibly coal. But traditional wattle and daub fire places were large and not suited for burning coal which needs a smaller fire place and an efficient flu to draw the flame. The compromise was to reduce the size of the fire place which would allow the use of coal now readily available from the Duke’s Canal.

The move from wood to coal may have been underway during the 1850s and while no one was selling the fuel in the township in 1851 there were a number of coal dealers recorded a decade later.

Once the fire had been made and breakfast served, there were beds to be aired, plates washed and the floor swept. Rugs and mats were taken out and banged against the wall, and even before the floor was swept and scrubbed in damp weather the stone flags had to be scrapped with a an old knife blade to loosen the trodden in mud. But this simple task could only be done after Samuel had gone off to work and her son John who was seven to school. This left baby Ann who was just one and would have required frequent attention. It is likely that Sarah could have relied on one of her neighbours living in the same row. The midday meal needed preparing and if her husband was working too far away his meal would have either been prepared before he left or taken out to him which might have fallen to her son John.

Most rural families like the Suttons had a diet heavily based on vegetables. Some of these were available from the cottage garden, including the all important cabbages and potatoes as well as onions, carrots, parsnips and broad beans. They were lucky enough to have an orchard behind their home and there may have been opportunities to collect some of the windfall. And like many cottage gardens there were also currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes and rhubarb. Gooseberries were ready by June and were popular in the north where there were competitions and societies.

Sarah would also have grown some flowers and one that has survived and still grows on the site of her cottage is greater celandine. It has beautiful yellow flowers and like many that Sarah and others would have grown also had medical properties. Greater celandine is toxic but according to various sources in the right doses can be used for therapeutic uses. She may well have used it as a mild sedative to treat asthma, bronchitis and whooping cough along with other complaints including warts. But it is toxic nature and so not one to try at home.

It still grows on the site at the corner of Wilton and Beech Roads and may be one of the last survivors of our cottage gardens. My botanist fried David Bishop spotted it some time ago and wrote about on his blog,
http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.com/2009/09/greater-celandine-chelidonium-majus-is.html

In the back garden there may have been an area reserved for keeping chickens. Eggs could be expensive and keeping chickens not only avoided having to buy them but could be a small extra form of revenue. So in 1851 the price of a dozen eggs ranged from 4d [2p] in the summer to 8d [4p] later in the year. The family pig was another means of supplementing the family diet and might provide meat for up to seven months. It would be bought in the spring from a local farmer who might wait to the animal was killed and the meat sold before receiving payment in the autumn. This was the only way that some families could afford the cost of a pig which might be between 20s and 25s [£1-£2.25p].

But it is unlikely that all their needs could be met from what they grew. Much research has shown that at best the garden supplemented the food they bought. But some might be gathered for free. There were many wild fruits and plants across the township for the collecting. Wine might be made from a variety of flowers as well as fruit and for those who knew where to look there were rich sources of plants which could enhance cooked dishes.

Pictures; Sutton’s Cottage circa 1892, photograph from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook of 1895 in the collection of Philip Lloyd, the site today of the cottage on the corner of Beech Road and Wilton Road, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
*The Row is now Beech Road

A lost British Home Child

2012-02-08T04:35:00.023Z

Anyone who has done any work on family history will know the highs and lows of such research. It starts with the discovery of a relative you never knew existed, unfolds with disarming simplicity and then the road block.

No matter where you look, who you consult or however many times you try they stubbornly will not reveal anything more about their lives. After discovering I had a great uncle who had been born in Birmingham in 1898, lived briefly in Kent before moving to Derby aged four I lost him.

But following a lead in a letter from his sister written over thirty years ago and the discovery of his name on a passenger list the bits fell into place. He was one of those British Home Children, and through the records in Birmingham and the archives of Canada, and more than a little help from other researchers his life slid out of the shadows.

Here was a young man who at the age of four was placed in institutions, nearly got sent to a naval boot camp but instead went to Canada, where he worked on farms in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before running away and joining the Canadian army, having lied about his age, changed his name and falsified the records of his relatives.

His years in the army were well documented and I can follow his movements around Europe, his health record, as well as his frequent clash with military discipline and his eventual sea journey home to Canada.

I have more documents about his life and know more about him from his birth to his early twenties than I do about his brother who was my grandfather.
But then it just stops. He had returned in 1918 and was keen for his sister who was four years younger to join him in Canada. In the November of 1925 she took the plunge and sailed planning only a short stay.”When I came to Canada I just took my clothes with me no belongings. I had planned to come back.”

By then he was in British Columbia but she didn’t like the idea of the open west which was still being settled, and instead stayed in the east.
And there as they say the road block stops progress. His sister my great Dolly is dead and any letters and records about him are not available. There is one reference to a James Rogers who died in the 1950s having served in the CEF but this is not him. Then there was the more promising land grant record for the mid 1920s awarded to a James Rogers in the west.
The Canadian Government had followed the policy of the United States in granting land to people who wanted to settle in British Columbia and Alberta.

Family historians well know the excitement of such a discovery. The name, the place and the time all fitted and this is where hope can trounce reason. You tell yourself you have found him, crawl over modern and historic maps of the area, eliminating locations before settling on the correct place by using the grid reference from the land settlement.

And now begins the fun. You write to local newspapers hoping that the name will ring bells. I did this for his time in NB and NS and was overwhelmed with help from residents. People went out of their way to talk to old friends, do their own research and even travel out to photograph the old farm sites. I owe all of them a big thank you.

But the west offers nothing and finally with the help of a researcher in Alberta we have to eliminate the land grant. It is just not him. My friend Lori suggests the street directories for the west which may offer something and there is a marriage record for a James Rogers who married Agnes Isabella M Davidson in Vancouver in 1931

So I have to tell myself that maybe he is just lost, having changed his name again, moved out of Canada or just disappeared.
Still if there is one thing I have learned it is that something will eventually turn up.

Picture; Langley Train Station, British Columbia 1925, located in Vancouver Public Library, and is in the public domain.

Another lost picture and a glimpse of what it was like

2012-02-07T05:27:00.024Z

One of the most popular posts I have produced was one of a rarely seen postcard of Barlow Moor Road from the very early years of the 20th century. A lost photograph and a clue to a vanished building http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/lost-photograph-and-clue-to-vanished.html
I suppose its appeal is that it is of a time and place which has all but passed out of living memory.

Now this one which I also found by sheer chance is 52 years old but most of us would be hard pressed I think to recognise it at first glance. It comes from that wonderful collection of digital photographs held by our own library service and can be accessed at http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

It was taken by AH Downes, who captured the scene in April 1959. Nothing over remarkable I hear someone muter. Yes there is an old lorry with bottles of milk an equally old fashioned car and of course the woman’s coat is very long.

But its location is unfamiliar. Well that is until you clock the building to the extreme right. It was then the Gaumont cinema and opened in 1937 as the Savoy. Today it is the Coop undertakers. All of which means that the buildings stretching back to our long coated lady are now the side of the shopping precinct. The house furthest away stands at the corner of Nicholas Road and beyond the gardens of the house to our left were more houses which fronted Manchester Road, which until the building of the precinct ran from Wilbraham to Nicholas Road.

So there you have it another lost picture and a glimpse of what it was once like. Well I say a lost photograph which it isn’t really, just I hadn’t gone looking for it.

Picture; west side of Barlow Moor Road, by AH Downes, April 1959, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Wattle and daub cottages in Chorlton

2012-02-07T05:04:00.001Z

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.

From my forthcomong book on the history of Chorlton http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Chorlton%20the%20Book

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

Putting the pieces together, the story of James and Sarah Molloy

2012-02-07T04:14:00.000Z

I do have to admit that one of the most exciting sides to researching and writing about history is when almost out of the blue stories come together.

It was while I was exploring that picture of Miss Wilton’s private garden on the green which was about to be made a public space in 1897, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/02/miss-wiltons-private-garden-story-of.html that I came across the Molloy family who lived just a few doors down from Miss Wilton.
There they were in the 1891 census in that house which stands beside the modern Horse and Jockey looking out on to the green. It is not as old as the block which houses the pub but it was there by the 1840s.

In the spring of 1891 they were living with their four children in that house. This much I had picked up from the census return for that year and I suppose that would have been that. I finished the post by wondering how their four children would have taken to the opening up Miss Frederica’s garden given that it would have been a playground and garden by their front door.

But then I remembered coming across a photograph of James Molloy’s business premises at 35 Barlow Moor Road along with his trade card. He was a plumber but given that Barlow Moor Road is very long and that there was no date on either the picture of the card just assumed that it was at the Didsbury end of that long road and was no concern of a Chorlton historian.

And there I was so wrong. In the 1891 census James described himself as a plumber and the sign above the door of the house by the green is advertising “James Molloy Plumber”. The following census a decade later has the family at 35 Barlow Moor Road which is on that stretch from the junction of Wilbraham Road heading south towards Needham Avenue. By this census one of the four children who posed in the picture a decade earlier had died. This would have been a tragedy for any family but for the Molloy’s it was only one of six such awful events. Sarah Molloy gave birth to eight children but only two were alive by 1911.

35 Barlow Moor Road was a seven bed roomed property and the photograph shows it had a yard at the back. Using the street directories for 1911 and counting back from Needham Avenue it was the 13th property next to Suffield the watch maker’s shop. All of which should make it easy to locate but hasn’t been so. Photographs of the period do not match exactly what is there today and so I gave up.

Instead I concentrated on the picture and the trade card. Standing and appearing to supervise must be James Malloy while amongst the pipes and felt are two of his employees. Seldom do we find people on pictures which we can identify but this is one. And his trade card is equally illuminating.

James Molloy was no jobbing plumber, he was not only a “registered sanitary plumber” but was also an “authorised gas and water fitter” and hired out gas cookers.

Gas cookers had become increasingly popular from the 1880s and Manchester Corporation through its Gas Committees had pioneered rental schemes from 1884. In 1935 they had showrooms at 140 Deansgate and 116 Wilmslow Road. The design of the more basic models is little different from today, with an oven which could take 4 shelf settings, a top with the gas rings and a toaster above that.
In 1929 the Gas Committee had sold five and half thousand cookers and rented out another 1,798. *

And somewhere within this trade fitted our James Molloy

Pictures, from the collection of Tony Walker

* How Manchester is managed, Manchester Corporation, 1935,

Who will speak for the British Home Children of Canada?

2012-02-06T18:52:00.001Z

I have mixed feelings about the need for Governments to apologise for acts done in their name or on their watch when those events have long since passed from living memory.

The opponents of such apologies tend to distort the argument by citing ancient acts of wrong doing from Herod’s massacre of the Innocents to the murder of the small Jewish community in York in 1190. Who after all could be held responsible? Not only is there no one who could in anyway be linked to such acts but the very systems of government around at the time have long since vanished.

More recent crimes are no less easy to deal with. In most cases successor Governments had nothing to do with those past events and apologies do not allow those who suffered to escape from being seen as victims. How much better then to follow the South African policy of truth and reconciliation which has been a brave way of coming to terms with the years of oppression and apartheid.

But I think this is to miss the point. It is not so much about saying sorry as allowing those who suffered to feel that their lives and experiences were important and deserve more than a footnote in a history book.

That is why I was pleased that the British and Australian Governments apologised for the way that thousands of our children were taken from Britain and placed in Canada and Australia. Many may have had better lives as a result and made great contributions to their adopted countries, but few had much say in what happened to them. They paid the price for the fact that the biggest and richest world empire could not look after them, and chose instead to let a group of individuals and organisations solve the problem of child poverty by taking them elsewhere.

As Gordon Brown said in the House of Commons in 2010,

"To all those former child migrants and their families, to those here with us today and those across the world, to each and every one, I say we are truly sorry.
We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back. And, we're sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we're sorry that it's taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved. “

Now the same people who oppose such apologies will argue that it was a different time and under different rules, except there were plenty of people at the time from socialists and trade unionists to middle class reformers who criticised the way capitalism tolerated such poverty as an essential part of the system.

Sadly for my great uncle and most of the children shifted off to Canada it is all too late. The last that went across in the late 1920s will be very old. Most of them never talked about their lives as British Home Children and so the stories of who they were, how they got to Canada and their early childhood experiences are in danger of being lost.

Some of us have begun to do our own personal research and storytelling. In my case I have been helped by the growing network of others doing the same thing, and by the Library and Archive of Canada, as well people over here.

But even with online facilities it is not easy and costs which is why I applaud the campaign to get the Canadian Government to help with funding the research. http://www.change.org/petitions/minister-of-citizenship-immigration-and-multiculturalism-canada-government-help-and-justice-for-the-british-home-children

I am hopeful, after all it did designate 2010 as the Year of the British Home Child, and I am assured that there are study opportunities in Canadian schools for exploring the history of British Home Children.

All of which makes their decision not to offer an apology a little bizarre and all the more important that it honours the memory of the 100,000 or so children who were settled in Canada with help in telling their stories.

Chorlton in the snow, a postcard from Australia

2012-02-06T04:58:00.025Z

Yesterday evening I heard the Snake Pass had reopened. It was closed from the Lady Bower Reservoir down to Glossop because of the snow. We often travel the route on the way home from Sheffield and I can well believe how it had become impassable

This is as good an introduction as you will get to this picture of Chorlton in the snow. It was taken where the Brook twists away from what is now Brookburn Road. Today the view across to the church and the barn of Hannah Cheshire at Ivy Farm is hidden by the modern Bowling Green Hotel and the row of houses that follow the line of the brook into Chorltonville.

The postcard was sent in the November of 1908 but the image is likely to be much older. To the right beyond the barn is the Queen and Pasley Laundry with is distinctive tall chimney which dates the photograph to after 1893 when the laundry was opened. But there is much in the picture which could take us back to the middle decades of the 19th century. The old Bowling Green Hotel which stood slightly to the side of the parish church was built in the 1780s, while the cottage on the left behind the hut had been built by 1818 and may be older.

So with a little imagination and a will to wipe out most of the buildings to the east of Hannah Cheshire’s barns we could be staring at the village from the meadows at anytime during the 19th century.

But that is not quite the end of the story. The postcard was sent from Australia to Matthias Hoyland Petts and his wife Laura at 16 Thorpe Street, Old Trafford. It is not a conventional postcard and was made by the sender who writes that she has “been out of postcards” and what we have is one of her own photographs. Now Matthias Hoyland Petts was easy to track. He was a cashier. He had married Laura in 1907 and was still living at Thorpe Street in 1911. By then they had a baby girl born the year before. 16 Thorpe Street is still there; it was part of a terrace, had six rooms and could only have been built in the decade before Louise sent her postcard from Australia.

It seems that Louise was married to Hoyland’s brother Charles who was a brass engraver and lithographer. It is his name on a stamp that appears on the postcard which places them at Warriston Street, in Brighton, Victoria.

Today it looks a pleasant enough little street of clapperboard bungalows and brick houses. Now the assumption is that she came from Chorlton and married Charles sometime between 1901 and 1908 but then there is just too much that we do not know. Perhaps Charles brought the picture out and maybe Louisa was already in Australia.

All of which is a long way from a photograph of Chorlton in the snow taken between 1893 when the laundry opened and 1908 when the new Bowling Green Hotel was built.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Miss Wilton’s private garden, ............. the story of the village green

2012-02-05T04:42:00.019Z

Dating photographs can be tricky. If you are lucky a postcard will have the date it was sent stamped on the back, although this is still no guarantee that this was when the picture was taken. I have been caught out like this. Sometimes the post card is a reissue of a photograph which was taken much earlier, even though the scene may be the same.

But this picture of the green was fairly easy to date even given that there is something like a window of thirteen years. It must have been taken after 1883 because this was when Zetland Terrace was built.

Well that is if you go from the date on the wall of the first house. Ida however maintains that they were built in 1876 and that the stone mason got it wrong. It is one of those little debates which might run on and on. If they were built in ’76 none of the residents appear on the 1881 census, but that is another story for another time.

Number 1 Zetland is there directly behind the hedge and it is that hedge which provides a last possible date for the picture. Until 1897 the green had been the private garden of the Wilton family. It had been Samuel Wilton who enclosed it sometime in the early 19th century and then proceeded to rent some of it back to the villagers. Wilton was at one time the landlord of the Greyhound now known as Jackson’s Boat and it was Samuel Wilton who built the wooden bridge over the Mersey in 1816 for £200. He then charged people to use it which followed an older practice of ferrying them across the river by boat. This was still in place in 1832 when the pub and the surrounding land were put up for sale.

On his death the garden on the green passed to his daughters who lived at the last cottage beside the Horse and Jockey. It is the Wilton's outhouse jutting out past the pub sign that can be seen in the picture and behind it was their cottage.

Frederica Wilton died in 1897 aged 81. She had been born in the year after Waterloo, spent her childhood in a township which was still a rural community, and was still only 33 when the railway came to nearby Stretford. But as the picture testifies by the 1890s the village was changing. New tall brick built houses were replacing the old wattle and daub cottages and we had arrived at that point when those who earned their living from farming were in a minority.

So it was perhaps fitting that when she died and the garden on the green reverted to the Egerton family they should choose to end this enclosed private space and return it to the village as an open green.

I would like to know what James and Sarah Malloy thought of that change of use. Theirs were the children staring back at the camera underneath the sign advertising James as a plumber. They had eight children but only two were to survive. We cannot be sure but the four children were more than likely Josephine born in 1881, Christopher, in 1883, Albert 1888, and James 1891.

They may well have been some of the first children to take advantage of the new green in the village. But not for long by the spring of 1901 if not before the family had moved to 35 Barlow Moor Road.

Picture; from the collection of Alan Brown

Where have the telephone boxes gone?

2012-02-04T04:51:00.009Z

Who now remembers the telephone box? My friend Lawrence and I spent a happy 20 minutes trying to think where they all still were in Chorlton.

They have been with us for nearly 100 years, came in all sort of sizes, colours and designs but like the snow in the winter sunshine they are fast disappearing.

In June 1885 the South Manchester Gazette reported that the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephonic Exchange Company was about to open “a number of Public Call Offices, on a s similar plan to those in operation in the city, where anyone may converse by Telephone, not only with Subscribers to the Company’s Exchange System, but also anybody who, by a previous appointment between the parties concerned, has gone to some other Call station to receive a message.”*

I have yet to find out when they began appearing on our streets in Manchester, but the iconic red kiosk designed by Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924 was rolled out nationally from 1929 onwards. And there were the emergency Police boxes and this delighful fire alarm which stood on Manchester Road opposite the Gaumont cinema.

My own favourite story says much about the early years of the telephone in Chorlton. In 1887 in the event of a fire residents in the area of New Chorlton could use the telephone at the Lloyd’s Hotel which would patch the emergency call via the Withington Board Office to the Manchester Exchange who would pass it on to the fire brigade at Jacksons Row.

It was however fraught with difficulties as the manager of the Lancashire and Cheshire Telephonic Exchange pointed out in the February of that year, because it only needed “the switch at the Local Board’s offices to be left out of its proper position” and the signal from the Lloyd’s Hotel would not get through to the operator in Manchester. His solution was for the Withington Board to pay the annual fee of £30-40 to secure a direct line to the exchange.

But I digress. There was a phone box on the green by the 1930s which was later moved to a position near the church yard, but it has now gone, along with so many. At one time we had boxes on the corner of Beech and Wilton Road, more on Beech Road by the post office and a bank of them by the bus station.

In the 1980s during the fierce competition between BT and Mercury everyday seemed to bring more out on to the streets. So why and where have they all gone?

I guess the mobile phone is the clue. Who now needs to go and stand in a box with its mix of spells and cards advertising all sorts of services when a small hand held device does the business? To be fair the telephone companies fought back... There were boxes where you could use a card instead of money and even an arrangement where toy could tap into your own telephone account to make calls.

But in the end it was just so much easier to use a mobile. The old days of pushing button A so that the coins could fall into the box and allow the call to proceed or pushing B to get your money back are as much a part of history as telegram.

I do occasionally see the old red boxes, usually in somebody’s garden or in a museum, but they are rare and it would seem their all glass replacement may soon be equally rare.

Picture; the fire alarm on Manchester Road, opposite the Gaumont cinema by A H Downes November 1 1958 m17988, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council and the telephone box on the green from the Lloyd collection

*South Manchester Gazette, June 12 1885
**Manchester Guardian February 1 1887

A view from Piccadilly Railway Station

2012-02-04T04:45:00.000Z

Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station sometime after the new concourse was opened. I had just said goodbye to someone and with time to spare explored the new station. It is still one of my favourite views of Manchester with the old law courts, the 1960s office block and the tram lines.
Sadly the cafe has gone and with it the view.
Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

In search of a book ............... clues to the story of Chorlton in the early 19th century

2012-02-03T05:46:00.000Z

An occasional series charting the research that led to Chorlton-cum-Hardy A Society Transformed

Crawling over other people’s lives is what we do as historians. You can wrap it up in all sorts of grand language but essentially it is about just that. And in the course of doing that we call on many different records, ranging from census returns to letters, legal documents and photographs. On the way there also wills, the registers of births, marriages and deaths and plenty of other things.

One of my favourites is the tithe document which records who owned the land, who rented it and where it was situated in a township. But more about tithe documents later.

Many of these documents are now online and this has become invaluable to the historian who might not be able to easily travel across the country from east to west or north to south. But there is still a thrill to that simple physical thing of actually touching the record and even more so if it was once held by a family member whose hand no less than their finger prints will be on the artefact.

For me the magic moment was when I held the minutes of the Vestry meetings held in the old school room on the green between 1839 and 1856. I doubt that few people had opened the book and read the contents since Edward Smith recorded the decisions of the meeting all those years ago.

So over the course of the next month I hope to share the clues that allowed me to tell the wonderful story of Chorlton in the first fifty or so years of the 19th century, a story full of everyday living along with the bizarre, the tragic and the comic.

Picture; detail of the tithe map of Chorlton showing the bottom of Chorlton Row where it joins the green

Kemp’s Corner, meeting place for three generations and a lesson in how places get their name

2012-02-03T05:06:00.004Z

I am fascinated by how places get their names, and often despite the attempts of landlords, planners and the well meaning, a name seems to come out of nowhere, fits the place and is adopted.

So it is with the junction of Balow Moor and Wilbraham Roads. In the late 1990s it was officially designated Chorlton Cross which I suppose sort of made sense, given that it was a crossroads in Chorlton.

But for perhaps three generations it was known as Kemp’s Corner, taking its name from Kemp’s the chemist. Harry Kemp was a Liberal politician, and his chemist’s shop stood from the beginning of the 20th century on the corner of Barlow Moor Road where it joins Wilbraham Road. The clock above the chemist made it a local landmark, and as such it was a recognised meeting point. Today the same spot is referred to as the Four Banks which given the fact that there is one on each corner makes sense which just repeats its even earlier title of Bank Square.

My old friends Tony and Ida remember arranging to meet people there. In an age before the mobile phone you had to fix a point and a time to meet up, and Kemp’s Corner with its clock and central position made.

In the same way I recently overheard a conversation in which one young woman was describing Chorlton and as she said, this is the “four banks and we tell people where we live in relation to the corner.”

So we are back to photographs as clues. Here is the junction looking south down Barlow Moor Road and there to the right is Kemp’s Corner. The roads are empty which could mean it was early in the morning or perhaps a Sunday.

I am sure there will be someone who can date the picture from the tram and maybe even suggest a time of year by looking keenly at the way the light falls across the pavement, sadly not being an expert I can only go on the information on the back of the postcard which says “sometime before 1914.” And maybe the chap on the bike is in shirt sleeves which as one of the shops has its awning down could suggest summer.

The shop front underwent rebuilding after a road accident in which five people were killed in 1959 and today the garden has vanished and been replaced by a car park.
Now I first visited this story back in November http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/kemps-corner.html and much of what I wrote then reappears in this post but given Bronwen's wonderful picture I hope I will be forgiven for returning to Kemp's Corner.

Picture; from the collection of Bronwen Bhabuta

Another of those lost Chorlton scenes

2012-02-03T04:37:00.005Z

This is another one of those pictures which just looks like you know where it is, or perhaps not. It was sent in the summer of 1906 but may have been taken a little earlier.

It is Barlow Moor Road and the road on the left is Cranbourne. Away in the distance is the parade of shops which start on the corner of Needham Avenue.

Now pictures can hold secrets and when I first looked at this one I wondered what was behind the wall and iron railings beside the two children. It turns out that in 1906 it was nothing more remarkable than the gardens of the houses which fronted Oak and Chestnut Avenue and which are still there today.

If there is a story to tell it is that parade of shops which were no more than 13 years old when the postcard was sent. They were built on the grounds belonging to a house called Oakley which earlier had been known as Oak Bank. In 1893 the grounds stretched along Barlow Moor Road, almost to Wilbraham Road and backed on to the gardens of what is now Corkland Road.
But this was a poor shadow of what they had once been. Fifty years earlier the grounds were bordered by the Rough Leech Gutter which runs under Wilbraham and Corkland Roads and extended to what is now Needham Avenue and beyond this all the way up to Sandy Lane were fields which belonged to the family.

Oak Bank House is a particular favourite of mine and was owned in the early 19th century by the Morton’s and later the Cope’s. But more about both of them later.
Picture; Barlow Moor Road circa 1906 from the Lloyd collection

Trams, a cinema and much more.

2012-02-02T04:44:00.019Z

There is enough in this picture for most of us to be able to place it easily. Even if it weren’t for the giveaway title at the bottom of the left hand corner most of us would recognise it as the bus terminus on Barlow Moor Road.

On the other hand we know it is well in the past. The most obvious clues are of course the cars and the trams. The last tram was withdrawn from service in 1949 and from the look of the cars I guess this must be a full decade before that event. We may even be able to take it back even further for the hat and coat of the woman sitting on the bench must date it to the late 1920s or early ‘30s.

Just beyond the terminus is the Palais de Luxe Cinema with its huge and distinctive circular windows looking like giant eyes and the equally striking white and green glazed tiles. Until I came across this picture I had no idea that it also had a glass and iron canopy, which was mirrored by a similar grand one opposite which fronted the shops that ran from St Ann’s Road down to Sandy Lane.

Now this shouldn’t have surprised me. It was opened in 1915 when such things were part of the design of both cinemas and theatres. Just down the road the Savoy had an even more impressive canopy.

So that pretty much seems to be it, but not quite. To the left where St Ann’s Road joins Barlow Moor you can still the old stone setts which have yet to covered with tarmac and finally there are the tram lines and cables all of which marks this out as from long ago.

But for many of the people captured on the photograph what we see was still very new. Had we stood on the same spot as the photographer just twenty years earlier almost everything I have described would have been missing.

The tram terminus, the cinema and all the buildings on to High Lane were built in the decade after 1910. Before that time this stretch back to Beech Road was the garden of the Holt family who also owned the land opposite.

They had been here since the 1830s and three generations of Holt’s had lived behind the tall wall that ran from Beech Road along Barlow Moor Road, down High Lane and then back to Beech Road close to the modern Cross Road. The entrance to their estate was at the top of Beech Road and their coachman lived in a small property beside it.

So sometimes a picture tells you even more than you first thought.

Picture; Barlow Moor Road from the Lloyd collection, date unclear
Trams, a cinema and much more.

Inspired landscaping or vandalism, ........... the parish church yard

2012-02-02T04:33:00.002Z

Now I know I said I would write about our own archaeological dig in the parish churchyard in the late 1970s and early ‘80s which is scheduled for spring but in the meantime I thought I would share this photograph.

Lois took it in the mid 1970s, before the excavation by Angus Batemen and his team and before the graveyard was landscaped. I still have very mixed feelings at the way the old gravestones were taken down and many destroyed. Those that were left have been made into part of the permanent way and already some are showing signs of wear and tear. Within another few decades the inscriptions which were so lovingly paid for will fade from sight.

Of course it is easy to be picky about what at the time many of us thought was a good idea, and some at least of the stones were already in place as part of the path from the gate down to the north entrance of the church.
But the whole sale loss of so much that told the story of the people who lived here was at best sad and at worse a sort of vandalism. True as Lois’s picture shows many were in need of a little attention but I fear we have lost a little of our history which will be very difficult to recover.

Picture; the old parish churchyard circa 1975 from the collection of Lois Sparshot

"Calgon take me away!", ..........adverts from our past

2012-02-01T11:10:00.007Z

Nothing dates so quickly as adverts. We take them for granted but within a few years they look odd and within a decade are a quiet source of amusement. But in their time many won awards, some imbedded themselves deep into our memory and a few became catch phrases often out living the product.

In their way they are a wonderful way to understand the period. One of my favourites is the advert for St Ivel Cheese which appeared in Woman’s Weekly in 1911 and drew on pseudo medical information to claim that it “contains lactic cultures which eliminate the poisons that other foods create” or the promise that grapefruit could act as a sliming food which I took to heart in the early 1970s, only to realise that tinned grapefruit contained sugar and rather defeated the object.

I was also fascinated by my Canadian friend Lori who used the catchphrase “Calgon, take me away!” Now always wanting to understand these things I tracked it down to a series of commercials for Calgon bath and beauty products which aired in North America. One of which had a woman wearing a fluffy pink robe who is seen in a chaotic home scenario. As tension rises, she utters the slogan "Calgon, take me away!" and in the next scene is relaxing in a bath in a quiet room. Like all successful catchphrases it has been referred to on songs television shows and films.

All of which is a way of introducing a site which my friend Lawrence put me on to last night “Have you seen this site - touch of nostalgia in photos? Best part I think are the adverts for food products. Who would have thought Twiglets were around in the 1950's I never saw one until the 1980’s?”
http://www.historyworld.co.uk/

My own favourite is the one for packamacs, but I have to say Lawrence is right about the food adverts. I spent a happy time remembering the things I ate in the 1950s and 60s many of which are now long gone.

Picture;an advert for Bird's Custard from Womens Weekly November 1911

Two pictures, a world a part

2012-02-01T08:04:00.000Z

I like those books which show you two photographs of the same place separated by time.

For me it is often the pictures which are not so far apart in time which prove to be the most interesting. We expect that there will be lots of differences in say a picture of Wilbraham Road taken in 1880 and one of the same spot today. But what about if the time lapse is just say fifty or so years? Can things be so different? Well of course the answer is yes they can.

The cars look odd, the clothes outlandish and adverts on walls and hoardings quaint and a little unreal. I smile at the 1960s call, “to go to work on an egg”, and remember with pleasure the jingle of “Murray Mints, the too- good- to- hurry mints.” But they are as unfamiliar now as the trolley bus.

Which brings me to another of Peter’s pictures. You know the line by now, he paints the pictures I tell the stories. There are now lots of them about in Chorlton and you can also see them on his facebook site https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Well he has just completed this one of the Bar on Wilbraham Road, commissioned by Robbie the new landlord. Like all Peter’s paintings it bounces with colour and activity.

So contrast it with this photograph from 1959 by A E Landers who a long with a couple of other photographers walked up and down the roads of Chorlton taking pictures of each block of houses and shops. It is a priceless image of the new Britain, which has emerged from the dull grey days of the early 1950s, with their hangover of wartime rationing and make and mend. By 1959 we were having it as good as it got and his picture captures that sense of consumer well being.

The double fronted shop is packed with washing machines and televisions and on the window is the urgent exhortation to Buy! Buy! Buy! for just £3 deposit, and 11/’ a week. And of course this has been written with that white wash which butchers, green grocers and hardware stores used to advertise their instant offers.

But of all those electrical goods it is the television which most strikes me as old and of another time. These small screens in their walnut or mahogany cabinets would have those huge valves inside, and when turned off left that white dot to slowly disappear. Our first TV came with doors which would be closed when the thing was not on and frequently needed a repair man to come and fix it.

Equally odd today was the washing machine which came with an electric mangle and was loaded from the top. It even had to be filled via a hose attached to the kitchen sink.

It was a different country and we did seem to do things very differently from today. So the next time Peter buys me a pint in the Bar I will be able to tell him more long tales of the Xlent shop on Wilbraham Road which is now the Bar.

Pictures; © Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk, and the Xlent shop by A E Landers, 1959, M18455, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Summer 1925, and the view from above of Oswald Road and surrounding area

2012-02-01T04:54:00.009Z

I have been featuring some of the photographs from the digital archive held by Manchester Libraries. The full collection can be seen at http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass which “contains over 80,000 images of Manchester and its suburbs. The original images are mainly photographs with some prints, drawings, watercolours and postcards, dating from the eighteenth century to the present day. The pictures of people, streets and buildings illustrate all aspects of the social, industrial, religious and transport history of the city. Between 1950 and 1972 the Manchester Amateur Photographic Society carried out an almost complete street by street survey of the city, showing the suburban streets before the major clearances and redevelopment during that period.”

This one is of the area around Oswald Road School is particularly interesting. It was taken in the summer of 1925 by Imperial Airways. It is easy to spot the school and the library and get a sense of how this part of the township had developed in the first decades of the 20th century. A closer look will reveal the cinema and beside it the Temperance hall as well as the row of shops just north of the library. But the photograph also reveals the bits that have gone. Directly opposite the library is a row of brick cottages which date back to before the 1840s. They may even at one time have been a single dwelling but are remembered by some people as in multi occupation by the 1930s.

Also now gone are the rows of houses on either side of Manchester Road which ran out beside the cinema. They were demolished to make way for the precinct car park and health centre. Today just two houses and a short stretch from Wilbraham Road are all that is left of Manchester Road.
Picture; Aerial view of Oswald Road School 1925, m72044, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council
Summer 1925, and the view from above of Oswald Road and surrounding area

The Rivoli, before it became the Essoldo, the Classic and the Shalimar and finished as our last cinema

2012-01-31T05:04:00.019Z

All our cinemas have gone. Two were demolished one is a supermarket and the last is an undertaker’s. It is hard to decide which has met the worst fate.

The last to go was the Rivoli which I suppose was fitting given that it was the last of the four to be built. It had opened in 1937 and closed sometime in the 1980s.

I remember seeing Gone with the Wind there in 1979, and it was the perfect film to see in such an old fashioned cinema house. The frontage was pretty much all glass, with tall windows reaching from the first floor to almost the top of the building.

The box office was in the centre of the auditorium and behind it there was the sweep of stairs which took you up the circle. Coming down from the stairs you could look out through the great windows with their faded drapes to the Feathers opposite. Not that we ever went there. A night at the “flicks" would still always end in the Trevor.

Now I guess it had been built to cater for the new Corporation estates which had been going up from the late 1920s. These were south of the Brook stretching out on either side of Barlow Moor Road and out beyond Mauldeth Road West and the Rivoli was situated perfectly to catch this audience.

It was damaged during the war and did not reopen until 1953. For those interested in these things it is still possible to trace the stick of bombs that fell that night, because along with the cinema they destroyed houses on Claude and Reynard which were also rebuilt after the war.

But the Rivoli suffered from the general decline of cinema goers and despite changes of name to the Essoldo, then the Classic and later still the Shalimar it was on the slide. When R. E. Stanley took his picture of the cinema it was showing an Italian movie called the Barbarian and the Goliath or as it was alternatively known the Goliath and the Barbarian. Starring Steve Reeves it was a sequel to the very successful Hercules made in 1958 and Hercules Unchained finished the following year. Unlike the earlier films this was set in the Dark Ages in Northern Italy when barbarian armies have overrun the country but are meeting with resistance from a local hero, and despite some plot twists and a romantic diversion is really a tale of tyranny versus good and could as one review has suggested been set at anytime in any place.

So just an action film with dubbed voices and as such good enough to fill the mid week slot and the Sunday matinee but not a crowd puller for a big Saturday night. In the same year there had been Ben Hur, North by North West, Some Like it Hot, Pillow Talk and Anatomy of a Murder, as well as On the Beach, Rio Bravo and Suddenly Last Summer.

Come to think of it, I can’t remember seeing a new release there either.
But then if we are honest suburban cinemas were not by the late ‘50s about the brand new film they were comfortable little places to fill the odd evening out between the big movies in town and the telly.

Picture; Essoldo Cinema m09200 March 1959 R E Stanley, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Debates which never go away, ......... the story of our public library

2012-01-31T04:42:00.017Z

Who could think that a gift of £5,000 in 1914 to help finance a library here in Chorlton could cause a stir and still have people debating the issue years later? Now the gift came from the steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, and was only one of 660 which he funded in Britain, 1,689 in the United States, 125 in Canada and more elsewhere between 1883 and 1929.

From humble beginnings he had built up a huge steel business before selling out for an estimated $500 million in 1901 and devoting himself to philanthropist projects. Even before he retired he had been spending money on all sorts of projects of which the establishment of public libraries was just one.

But there are those who would argue the money was not his to give away having been made by the men who toiled in the steel plants and who were increasingly denied the right to organise collectively in his work places. But that is another story.

Here in Chorlton the charge against the Carnegie gift was led by Councillor Jane Redford, who “was not infatuated with the Carnegie gift” expressing “a feeling of disappointment that the Chorlton ratepayers were not to get a library through the ordinary means of municipal enterprise.”*

The issue of a free library for Chorlton had been bubbling below the surface since we had voted to be incorporated into the City of Manchester in 1904. In January 1908 the Ratepayers Association had written to the Town Clerk asking for the Corporation to honour the agreement which they did in November of the same year. It was something of a temporary measure as the library was in a rented house on Oswald Road. But it began with the provision of a thousand books a reading room and a meetings room and was a runaway success. During the first two months the membership climbed to 1,100 and the number of books was doubled with a promise of another 1,000.

More than anything it proved the need for a library on a more permanent footing and by 1911 the negotiations with Carnegie were underway. These gifts from the steel magnate were hedged with conditions, and in our case that the site “should be made over free of cost to the Corporation” ** and the cost of the building shouldn’t exceed £5000.

There is a story that the original plans for the library crossed the Atlantic with the Titanic and were lost, but whether true or not the building was finished just a little later than scheduled and was opened on November 4th 1914. The Manchester Guardian reported “the style is Classical with Ionic columns in Portland stone and had 7,420 books, [which]if necessary can be increased to 10,500 volumes. There is a general reading room for adults and one for juveniles.”

In an age which has seen libraries add computers to the resources available to the user it is perhaps surprising that the Lord Mayor in opening the library nearly 100 years ago “hoped that someday there would be a kinematograph connected to our libraries for the special benefit of boys and girls, enabling them the better to understand the histories they were reading.”***

There was already a cinema of sorts just around the corner on Wilbraham Road, just over the bridge before the junction with Buckingham Road. It had been opened in the early years of the 20th century and would later be part of a chain of picture houses across the city. Alas no such venture was to enter the library.

And now the debate over the future of the library and the question of the degree to which the council should go into partnership with private enterprise is again a live issue. But like the story of the bioscope, and the Chorlton Pavilion on Wilbraham Road it is a topic for another day.

Picture; Chorlton Library from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* New Library for Chorlton, Manchester Guardian September 28 1911
**ibid Manchester Guardian September 28 1911
*** A New Library, Manchester Guardian November 5th 1914

A British Home Child at war

2012-01-30T13:18:00.002Z

I am proud of the contribution British Home Children made to the history of Canada. These young boys and girls crossed the Atlantic, facing daunting challenges in difficult circumstances and often on their own. Not for them the familiar streets in British towns or the comfort of close families.

Yet they made good, fulfilled their contracts, went on to productive lives, raising families and rarely talked about their past.
And I suppose the greatest contribution they made was to serve in the armed forces during the two world wars. Women as well as men “took part in Canada's war effort in large numbers, not only through direct participation in the armed forces and auxiliary services, but also in business, industry and agriculture while large numbers of Canadian men served overseas.” *

My great uncle was one of those who went. Aged just 17 and having been in Canada for just a year he enlisted in the August of 1915. Now I have written about his troubled first year in Canada on farms across New Brunswick and Nova Scotia and his equally colourful record of four court-martials but today I just want to explore the experiences of a young man who lied about his age, changed his name and spent three years fighting for his adopted country.

I am sure his was a common experience. After enlisting he was posted to Britain in the November of 1915 and was stationed at East Sandling in Kent in preparation for going to France.

A few of his letters have survived and they reflected the routines of army life.
“I was shooting on the ranges a day ago. We are in huts and it is fearful muddy all around, we have bayonet fighting, physical drill etc.”
The usual preoccupation of waiting for pay day followed by the comment that “the Canadian Government put half our pay in the bank so that of our $33 a month $16 go in the bank”

In some ways army life was suiting him, “I have” he wrote “put a bit of flesh on since you saw me last.” But his inability to get on with authority led him to the first of his court-martials for refusing to follow orders. And in all of this there was that ever present knowledge that at some point soon he would be shipped to France.

There are no letters from his time on active service but there are his military records which track him across the three years he served and the regimental war diaries. Both are an invaluable insight into the life of a young soldier. His records cover everything from his state of health, further infringements of army discipline and his eventual discharge and journey from France to Britain and back to Canada.

But it is the war diary which best I think opens up the life of my great uncle. Now these regimental diaries had been introduced after the South African war and were meant to help assess how successful army units were under fire and so draw valuable lessons about how to improve performance. They do not record individual soldiers but describe the daily routines, including the periods of rest and recuperation, time in the front line, unit strength and even the weather. Here in great detail are descriptions of attacks and the losses incurred. So armed with these it is possible to know something of his life during those years.

So on October 15th 1917, “weather fine. Battalion carried on with musketry and squad drill during the morning. Afternoon Recreation. Attack in the north continued, all objectives gained”

So here is the usual mundane and routine of army life, but mixed in are the reports of planned actions, real fighting and the casualties. On the morning of October 30th 1917 the diary recorded that
“Barrage opened at 5.50 am sharp. Enemy artillery opened up immediately. Our troops left trench at 5.54 am. At 6.00 am covering fire became intense. At 6.20 am supporting platoons of “A” and “C” Coys left the trench. On account of smoke it is very difficult to see any movement beyond Woodland Copse. At 6.25 am, “B” Coy, went over the top. A considerable amount of our shrapnel in bursting short at this time, some bursts occurring right over our trench.”

These were made in the heat of battle and only later typed up. This particular entry was timed at 6.30 and signed by Captain W.J. Atherton. Shortly after wards the diary continued with
“one of the runners bringing the report was wounded enroute and the other runner Pte, LeMarquand, stopped and bandaged his comrade’s wounds before delivering the report."
A little over an hour later “C” Coy had reached its objective and the men were “digging in”

Later after the fighting was over the diary attempted
an assessment of the attack which reported that the artillery barrage was “generally faulty and unsatisfactory. Many causalities being inflicted by our own artillery barrage on our men before they left their trenches for attack”
“The going was extremely heavy on account of the marshy nature of the ground over which the attacking troops had to pass. In many cases men could only advance by helping one and another long.” **
And concluded with the list of causalities which amounted to 400 men killed, missing or wounded out of a total of 590.

Now that the Great War has faded from living memory and the conflict becomes just a topic to be taught in schools and a source for books, films and television programmes, there may be a temptation to gloss over the sacrifice made by all those who fought. I hope not.

Most of us across Europe and in Canada, and all the countries of the old Empire as well as the USA will have relatives who took part. In my own family I can count two uncles, a great uncle, a grandfather and great grandfather as well as family who served in the forces of Imperial Germany. It didn’t turn out to be the war to end all wars but on their return those veterans tried to make the most of the peace that that followed. And I hope that my own British Home Child did the same.

Picture; detail of one of the letters written by my great uncle and George Bradford Simpson with friends, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Library and Archives Canada http://www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/military/025002-6070-e.html

**War Diary of the Canadian Mounted Rifles, courtesy of Library and Archives Canada

Penny Readings, a Reading Room, and two libraries, ....... tales to support a new painting by Peter

2012-01-30T05:13:00.004Z

In the age of the internet who would want to go to a library? For a start you have to go there, and mix with a lot of strangers who are always in front of you and seldom are in a hurry to get their book stamped. And you can bet there will be children laughing out loud as they read in the corner supposed to be the quiet room.

They are says one of my friends “a hangover from another age. Surely all that you could possibly want from pasta dishes to the date of the fall of Rome can be found somewhere on the net?”

Of course we all know that libraries have changed a lot. Our library can boast a range of computers with access to the world, an automatic book check out and a neat collection of DVDs. It is even possible to look up and reserve a book on line and have it delivered to the library.

Libraries have and still are a vital part of any community. In another age when books were not cheap and newspapers not so easily available the library and before it the “reading room” provided the only means by which many could further their knowledge or just read for pleasure.

Nor must we forget that for the generations born before the introduction of the 1870 Education Act, full time schooling was hit and miss and in agricultural communities school attendance vied with the needs of harvest time and plant sowing.

So the introduction of Penny Readings in 1867 in the village proved a great attraction and were supported by our own brass band and Vocal Society. The brass band I have already mentioned in the earlier post http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/1893-brass-band-lives-revealed.html

In 1874 a reading room was opened on Beech Road in a rented house and despite a shaky start by 1879 had “700 volumes of well selected books principally of an educational character, but comprising all the best works of the standard novelists.”* Later the library settled in Rowe House which was on the corner of Acres and Beech Road.

But these were essentially voluntary aided and depended on local fund raising. So in 1879 £120 was collected towards equipping the reading room with new books. And this tend towards self help had been here from the early 19th century when both the Methodists and the parish church raised subscriptions for building the Wesleyan chapels and Sunday School on Chorlton Row** and rebuilding the National school on the green and Rectory on Edge Lane.

Not till 1908 did we get our first municipal library which was opened in a rented house on Oswald Road and was part of the agreement by which Chorlton and other townships voted for incorporation into the city. It was “furnished with a thousand carefully selected volumes for use in the library and home reading,.............. a good selection of magazines is placed in a separate reading room [and] a special feature of the new library is the provision of a room for meetings of Home Reading Union circles and similar organisations.” ***
Which brings me to our library on Manchester Road and another of Peter’s painting’s which are on display at a number of places across Chorlton and can also be seen on his facebook site https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

I think he has captured perfectly the building and its customers on a busy library day. It opened in November 1914 with 7,420 books with capacity for another 3,000. On top of this there was a general reading room for adults and another for young people.

There had however been some opposition because it was in part funded by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie who provided £5,000 towards its building.

Now the whole story of Carnegie libraries Is enough for another post as is the debate on the future of present site in the light of Council plans for redeveloping the leisure facilities of Chorlton.

Picture; ©Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

*Thomas Ellwood, 1886
**Chorlton Row is now Beech Road
***Manchester Guardian November 23 1908

The Southern Hotel and the fields to the south of Mauldeth Road West from the air, 1933

2012-01-30T05:03:00.006Z

An occasional series dedicated to looking down at Chorlton from the air. Here is the Southern Hotel in 1933.

Despite the presence of fields and barns, the development of Corporation housing hints at the urban spread to come.

Picture; aerial view of the fields around the Southern Hotel on Mauldeth Road West, by N. S. Robert, m72051, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Sometime on a summers day in the early 1920s and a lost cinema

2012-01-29T20:02:00.000Z

I am looking at a picture of the Savoy on Manchester Road. Few in Chorlton will remember it as the Savoy and any one born after the 1960s may only know it as the Co-op Undertakers. But for most of the early 20th century it was the largest of our cinemas here in Chorlton.

It is one of those wonderful photographs which reveal much about an older Chorlton. It was taken sometime in the early 1920s on what must have been a warm summers day. The man painting out last week’s film is in shirt sleeves and the two by the entrance are wearing straw hats which were popular in the early decades of the 20th century. But what locates it to sometime after 1920 are the films which were being shown.

Sea Wolf was made in 1913, Should a husband Forgive was made in 1919 while Butterfly Man dates from 1920. I am not sure what the films say about cinema audience in the 1920s all three in their different ways were tales of morality .

In Sea Wolf the hero who has been rescued from a collision at sea is unable to break away from his rescuer who forces him to become a cabin boy, do menial work, and learn to fight to protect himself from a brutal crew, but eventually he is set free. In Should a Husband forgive, the heroine is at first misunderstood by the love of her life and rejected till she saves him, and finally in Butterfly Man a social gad fly does one good deed but this is not enough to wipe out his many misdoings and the end of the film sees him alone and forlorn.

Sea Wolf had been written by Jack London was an immediate success and in the first film version starred Jack London as a seaman.

Now I have already written about the size and grandeur of these early picture houses and the Savoy was no exception. First there is the stone frontage with its columns, and embellishments topped by the twin domes and then there is the wrought iron canopy. This was a big buildings possibly the biggest in the township. At night it would be lit up unlike any of our other buildings and even during the day must have attracted comment.
It was of course well sited given that this was the new Chorlton which had grown quickly in the last thirty years providing a ready audience. Next door was the snooker hall and within a few years there would be the rebuilt Royal Oak Hotel.

But it is also the little detail in the photograph that makes it special. Just in front of the cinema is the emergency telephone for summing the fire brigade, and a little to its left the ornate iron column carrying the tram cables.

So there you have it, a little slice of Chorlton in the summer of the early 20th century.

Picture; The Savoy cinema, Manchester Road early 1920s from the Lloyd Collection

A different Beech Road, sometime in the late ‘70s

2012-01-29T19:11:00.004Z

It is hard to remember that there was a time before there were any restaurants, bars, gift shops and art galleries on Beech Road. Not long before the Conservatives won the 1979 election; there were still grocery shops, two bakeries, three butchers and a green grocer. And a wonderful hardware store where you could buy a nail, a ball of string and a gallon of paraffin. There was also this shop specializing in anything and everything. I remember them well, we drank in the Trevor and more recently they have shared their memories of Beech Road.
Picture; Beech Road from the collection of Lawrence Beedle

A mother’s loss

2012-01-29T05:28:00.018Z

The continuing story of my family over 200 years

My grandmother’s war diary finishes in September 1943 which is rather an odd time to finish. But it may just be that the seven pages covering the period December 1940 to September 1943 are all that has survived. Or it might be this is all there ever was.

It would be another two years before Victory in Europe was celebrated in May 1945 and Victory over Japan in the August and it would be even longer before the troops including those in Japanese prisoner of war camps returned home.

I can only guess how Nana had got through the long years of waiting for news of my uncle. He had been captured in December 1942 and apart from one short letter and some official communication she had nothing to go on. The wait continued until the November of 1945 when the cruellest of news arrived in the form of a telegram from the Air Ministry.
“DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT YOUR SON 575348 AC= 2 ROGER JULIUS HALL IS REPORTED TO HAVE DIED WHILST PRISONER OFWAR IN JAPANESE HANDS ON 8TH JULY 1943 THE AIR COUNCIL EXPRESS THEIR PROFOUND SYMPATHY”

This was followed by a letter confirming his death from dysentery in Kanburi, Thailand and was buried in Paper Mill Cemetery, Kanburi. It is hard for any a parent to be faced with such news. He was just 21 with a full life ahead of him and in the words of the official letter dated December 2nd “the news will be particularly grievous at the present time, when you must have been hoping that you would soon see your son safe at home again.” What followed was the letter from the King and his medals.

Nana went onto write to anyone who may have been in the same camp. Some were there at the same time but in another part while others had just been passing through. The replies continued to arrive through into 1947, but none could shed any more information, “I fear I can tell you nothing in the way of news about your son’s death. I’m so sorry ........ he was in quite a different Unit from me, in the beginning and there were some 35,000 British personnel split up into 5 main Groups up and down the railway.”

The letter confirmed what I had long suspected that Uncle Roger was one of the allied prisoners who built the Burma-Siam railway which the Japanese began in October 1942 and finished the following December. 13,000 prisoners of war died during its construction and were buried along the railway. An estimated 80 to 100,000 conscripted civilians also perished.

His remains along with all those who died in the jungle camps were moved by the Imperial War Graves Commission to the Paper Mill Cemetery. Today it is possible to view the place online, Nana had to content herself with an official letter from the Imperial War Graves Commission dated May 1955 that along with permanent war memorial across all theatres of war the Kanchanburi War Cemetery in Siam was completed.

I would like to think that this letter closed the story. Nana could now look at a map and know where her son was buried; she had his medals and some if very few of the letters he wrote during his war service. But there had been a sting in the tail of how a grateful nation treated the mother of a serviceman killed fighting for his country.

In January 1946 she received a letter from the Air Ministry which pointed out that “as his Royal Air Force pay ceased on the day of his death, the voluntary allotment which you have been receiving has been substituted by a temporary allowance of equal amount, to which you are entitled under the regulations.”

But this to would cease on February 21st 1946, just ten days after what would have been his 24th birthday. I don’t suppose the money was ever the issue. The payments were no substitute for having her son home and watching him grow into maturity. Nor in a sense can you fault the logic which requested she return the payment book “to this Department as soon as you have cashed that order.”

But every time I read the letter I wonder how it must have torn at my grandmother’s heart.

Pictures; a message from the King, and the site of his war grave, in the collection of Andrew Simpson

Stories of old cinemas, ........Chorlton Theatre and Winter Gardens

2012-01-28T05:10:00.021Z

There is something about going to see a film at the cinema. I know you can watch it on the telly, download it to the computer, or buy the DVD cheap from Amazon, but for sheer all round experience you can’t beat the pictures.

In that dark big space the film just takes over. We try to go twice a month and now theatre tickets are zooming through the roof I rather think it will be more movies and less live drama.

Now I have written about the sheer excitement of going to the traditional picture houses which I guess were at their best in the 1930s. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/one-hundred-years-of-one-house-in_26.html Then it really was all enveloping from the thick carpets and wide auditorium to the plush seats bright colours and that warm clean smell.

By comparison the multiplex isn’t the same, even though you have more choice, better seats and a whole cornucopia of goodies to eat.

It was while I was thinking about the contrast between the two that I remembered John Lloyd referring to the Pavilion which “amongst a variety of entertainments, presented the bioscope (moving pictures) to a bewildered audience.”

It may have opened in 1904 and despite being described as the Pavilion on the 1907 OS map by 1910 it had become the Chorlton Theatre and Winter Gardens. It stood on Wilbraham Road, just past the bridge where it runs into Buckingham Road.

It was bought in 1909 by H. D. Moorhouse a Manchester solicitor who built up a circuit of cinemas around the city and beyond during the years between the two world wars. Some at least had been theatres before they became picture houses and may well have continued showing live acts alongside films.

Looking at this 1910 photograph of the theatre it is hard to think anyone would be impressed in going there. It has all the appearance of a big wooden shed, which I guess is what it was. Again according to Lloyd it had been built on land which the railway company still intended to use for extra track and so only permitted buildings which could be easily demolished.

But maybe I am being a tad unfair because the monochrome picture cannot convey what must have been a brightly painted building. Even before you went into the theatre you first had to buy a ticket from the pay box which with its wrought and cast iron additions must have brought back memories of seaside piers. And greeting the theatre goer were the picture of the stars they were about to see.

But for me the real value of the picture is the billboard, which not only dates the photograph to the week beginning June 20th 1910 but announces the programme. I have tried tracking down the Whips but have so far been unsuccessful but they will turn up.

There are no pictures of the inside but it would have been a fairly simple affair with wooden seating, the stage at the far end, and wooden floor boards.

But despite still showing films in the years after the First World War, it had been eclipsed by the far more impressive Palais de Luxe Cinema which had been opened in 1915 on Barlow Moor Road close to the tram terminus. Now this really was a cinema, with its glazed white and green tiles on the front and the huge circular windows. But this along with the Rivoli is a story for another time.

Picture; the Chorlton Theatre and Winter Gardens, June 1910from the Lloyd collection and the Palais de Luxe Cinema, A H Downes May 1959, mo9248, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Barlow Hall and its occupants, ............ from the Barlow family to the Radical Thomas Walker, on to the Whig Shakepeare Phillips and finally William Cunliffe Brooks friend of Chorlton and a banker

2012-01-28T05:03:00.004Z

Barlow Hall is old and while there may have been a building on the site dating from the Middle Ages, the present half timbered structure dates probably from the reign of Henry VIII. Little of the original structure was visible by the 1840s.

Most of the timber work had been covered in plaster or hidden under ivy. The old great hall which occupied most of the building and open to the roof had been divided off to create two stories, with the lower floor given over to three entertaining rooms.

The Barlow’s had settled here by the fourteenth century, appear to have lived a quiet existence until like many they were caught up in the conflicts over religion in the sixteenth century. They had adhered to the old faith and been persecuted during the reign of the first Elizabeth.

The family continued to live at the Hall until the last died in 1773 and the estate was sold to the Egerton’s twelve years later.

During the later part of the eighteenth century and into the next it had been home of the radical Thomas Walker, and later to the leading Whig businessman Shakepeare Phillips and in June 1848 to William Cunliffe Brooks.

According to various observers Cunliffe Brooks was keen not only to preserve the building but to share his love of the hall. This interest never appeared to have left him and led Mrs C Williamson to write in her Recollections of Fallowfield, that his “love for old things is so great that every relic is sacred to him, and even mindful alterations are made in such close imitation of old, they look the real thing.”

This was a passion which was to lead him to display a piece of the original timber which had been exposed after a fire in 1879,and own Chorlton historian may well have been speaking from firsthand experience when he advised that “Mrs Brook’s morning room is worthy of a visit, with its quaint old china, and the vestibule containing some fine old Furniture and an engraving of Wellington with his autograph.”

Each of the families will feature of the next few weeks.

Picture; Barlow Hall from the collection of Rita Bishop

Looking for answers,............ the story of a British Home Child

2012-01-27T10:19:00.000Z

What makes a young man on the edge of a long life full of promise and opportunity go off the rails and seemingly mess up everything in front of him? It is a question which has exercised social workers, teachers and judges as well politicians and journalists.

For some of course it can be explained away by bad parenting, or the influence of peers, or perhaps a combination of things including low social esteem, poverty or maybe just that they were born bad.

Now I don’t have the answers other than saying the idea that you are born bad is just tosh. But it is a topic that is close to me. My own great uncle went off the rails and despite a number of chances to set out a fresh he seems to have stubbornly ignored them.

At the age of 14 he was destined for a placement on the Training Ship Exmouth which was a sort of naval boot camp designed to sort out troublesome youths with a mix of military style discipline away from the old haunts and temptations. Later he was sent to Canada as a British Home Child, a scheme which transported 100,000 young people to new lives in a new country on the other side of the Atlantic. Not that he could settle here either.

In the space of one year he was placed on three different farms across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before running away, and joining the army in 1915. Even here he showed a blatant disregard for truth and honesty. He lied about his age, and falsified the record of his next of kin. Nor did the army prove to be his life line. Despite being in the front line and seeing active service, he kicked against authority and underwent four court-martials.

The reports from the placement farms speak of a troubled young man, who on one occasion was suspected of trying to burn down the farmer’s barn. This was disputed by the Middlemore organization which was responsible for him, but other reports reveal that he was not happy. In the June of 1915, the farmer Mrs Moffat reported that he was “fairly good for three weeks since then it seems impossible to get him to do anything. He is heart and soul lazy.” She couldn’t “depend on him for when he is left alone to work he sleeps under the trees.”*

But Mrs Moffatt was a fair woman and so despite asking for him to removed she did report that he was “even tempered, good to the children, kind to animals, a great reader, does not run around and is quiet and usually good which is a great item.”

His army record shows a similar pattern of someone who would rather be somewhere else and while one of the court-martials involved him being absent while the unit was in the front line, the other three show him kicking against authority and refusing to do as he was told.
Now there are plenty of young people who would fit that description.

In the case of my great uncle maybe there was more. Certainly the early years of his life were chaotic, uncertain and eventful. He was born in Birmingham, grew up in Kent and at the age of four his parents separated and his pregnant mother and two brothers moved back north to Derby where his sister was born in the Derby Workhouse. During the next twelve years he was in care. His mother was briefly recorded as working away in service. For a short period he was reunited with his siblings and his mother during 1913 she was deemed unfit to care for them and one by one they were all placed back in care.

So this was not the most auspicious start to a life and one that didn’t get any better. At the age of 15 in the December of 1913 it was decided he should be sent to the Training Ship Exmouth. Training ships existed to give young boys a fresh start.

“Training ships were used to train poor boys in all aspects of seamanship, preparing them for a career at sea. Boys were able to join the ship from the age of 12. Their first task was to learn how to mend and patch their own clothes, they also had to learn how to wash their clothes and keep their lockers and contents in good order. Each boy had his own hammock, which was stowed during the day, leaving the decks clear of bedding. As well as learning the skills of sailing, rowing, sail and rope making, gunnery and signalling, they continued ordinary school work and such physical activities such as swimming and gymnastics. The ship had its own band and bugle band.

The Exmouth was run on strict military grounds and with up to 700 boys on board discipline was strict, with misdemeanours punished by forfeiting shore leave and spending the afternoon marching and drilling instead, or scrubbing the deck. Caning, in front of the entire ships company, was also used as a warning to others. Sunday morning was Captain’s inspection with the Captain making his rounds below decks to inspect all the messes. He would wear white gloves for this inspection, rubbing his fingers under the edges of tables, forms and lockers to find hidden dirt. The mess that was considered to be the best was rewarded with extra rations,” from http://www.workhouses.org.uk/trainingships/

My grandfather had already been sent to Exmouth, and stuck it out, spending a year on board before being sent to sea in 1914. Not so my great uncle. Perhaps that rebellious side asserted itself, but the records show he ever attended and instead was placed with the Middlemore organisation and sent to Canada. Middlemore was one of the charitable groups which organised sending young people from poor and disadvantaged back grounds Canada.

And I suppose that is part of the answer to the way his life went. His early years had not been very stable. He last saw his father when he was four and he was separated from his brothers and sister. When he came up against any form of authority it tended to be impersonal or draconian. I doubt that there was much loving care in the institutions he found himself in, nor could he expect any in the Training Ship. Likewise his period with Middlemore would have been Spartan and fairly impersonal.

So is it any wonder that he felt uncomfortable in Canada in a life chosen for him which bore no relation to what he was used to? After all he was an urban boy pitched into rural Canada with only a few months training in how to work on a farm.

Nor can I be surprised that when he decided to run away and join the army in the August of 1915 he falsified the records of his age and next of kin and changed his name.. He was after all under age and there seemed little point in recording the name of his father who he could barely remember or his mother whose own bouts of stability seem limited. And he had run away so need a new name.

But he did seem to cling to some family links and after inventing a factious brother as next of kin settled on his aunt who had recently married. And he retained elements of his given name. He was born Roger James Hall which he shortened to James Rogers. Not you might think the most original name change but perhaps another link with his past.

I remain saddened when I think of what might have been, and how his early life had such a false start, even more so because parts of that early life seem forever closed to him. When asked his place of birth on joining up he gave Derby not Birmingham, but then I doubt that he even knew that simple fact about his early life.

Picture; detail from his Attestation Papers August 1915 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*letter from Mrs Lottie Moffatt, June 24th 1915

Beech Road not so long ago, on a warm spring day

2012-01-27T05:54:00.007Z

An unremarkable picture, but remarkable in that all but one of the businesses has gone during the last five years. So counting from Aces Road, The Nose, Muriel’s, Buonissimo, Diamond Dogs and Jack & Lilly’s which had been the barbers. And beyond the vision of the camera, so has Mosaic and what had been Rowe House as well as Chorlton Wholefoods.
Picture; Beech Road from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Saturday April 17th 1943 ........ Missing ............. a war time story

2012-01-27T05:07:00.000Z

The occasional story of my family, over 200 years.

The main story on the front page of the Derby Evening Telegraph for Saturday April 17th was the news that the largest RAF bomber raid of the year had been successful. “Over 600 Bombers In Greatest Raids This Year: 55 Lost: Czechoslovak and Rhine Armaments Works Pounded.”

Elsewhere the war news from North Africa centred on the Allied advance against German and Italian forces which was going to be “slow, laborious and costly.”

Most of the cinemas were showing comedy or light musicals and across the town there were dances including one for the Derby Home Guard. Lew Stone and His Band were at the Grand Theatre, and the paper was full of Easter attractions.

A fairly usual days reporting in the middle of what was already a long war, except tucked away on and I guess the reason for the survival of the newspaper in the other war documents of my grandparents was the news that “Mrs Hall of 12 Hope street, Derby, has been informed that her son, Aircraftman R.J. Hall (21) is now listed as missing in Java.”
Uncle Roger had arrived in the Far East in February 1942, just three days after the surrender of Singapore to the Japanese. Mother maintained that the Government had known they were sending these men into the hands of the Japanese. Perhaps, but I am no student of the Far East campaigns and it might just be that it was a combination of poor communication and bad luck. But it was a powerful belief which she never lost.

Of course Nana had no idea where he was in that February of 1942. It had been his birthday on the 15th, just three days before he arrived in the Far East and she had sent a telegram and then wrote reflecting on his first twenty years. The letter also contained much domestic news, including the slow recovery of my mother from “what the doctor says is nerves” and messages from the family.

Trusting that missing meant captured and not worse, Nana wrote on April 23rd “575348 R J Hall JAVA PRIS O WAR C/O Red Cross Tokyo Japan hope it gets there.” At the same time she turned to the Red Cross, but in the September of ’42 as they explained they could do little until they had some idea where he might have been.

But Uncle Roger had been a prisoner since the December of 1942. The official news did not reach her until July and another month later came the last personal communication. It had been sent on December 25th 1942, and arrived on August 20th 1943. “Java, My health is excellent. The Nippons treat us well, so don’t worry about me and never feel uneasy. There are plenty of entertainments on the camp so the time passes fairly quickly. All love.”

It was little enough and had been damaged by fire.

Sometime perhaps around the same time came some of the air grams she had sent to him. The covering envelope told its own story of the confusion of war, and the plight of one individual. In total there were 6 date stamps from February 1942 through to March 1943. It must have followed him from the different theatres of war, at one point shuffling around India before receiving the simple message, “Not in India Command” and at some stage “Last seen in Java February 18” before being stamped “Return to Sender.”

Undeterred she continued to write, noting in her diary “Wrote several letters of 2 pages. New rule is 25 words on Postcard every 14 days wrote 1 PC today”

It was September 1943; Italy had surrendered to the allies. A month earlier the Germans had been defeated by the Red Army at Kursk, and in the Far East the Japanese were on the defensive.
Nana might well have pondered on how long the war could now continue and how long it might be before her son returned.

Pictures; front page of the Derby Evening Telegraph, Saturday April 17th 1943 and missing report from the same paper on the same day, in the collection of Andrew Simpson

Our history through the post,........ the British Postal Museum & Archive

2012-01-26T13:43:00.000Z

Now I have been a fan of the British Postal Museum and Archive since they helped me out with some research into the type of early telegraph system which operated in the township on the Row in the mid 19th century.

They can be accessed at http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/ and they produce a wonderful news letter. Mine arrived today and contains a review of the BBC Radio 4 The People’s Post which I featured last year, in a story about the Postal workers Strike, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/12/postal-workers-strike-of-1890-and.html and articles on The Great Train Robbery, the Culture of Letters, the history of Christmas cards, and the History of the GPO Film Unit.

And now they have a blog at http://postalheritage.wordpress.com/ My favourite so far is the story posted on Janaury 23 2012 on the GPO film Night Mail

Picture; Night Mail from the blog of the British Postal Museum & Archive

One Hundred years of one house in Chorlton ...... Part Ten, going to the cinema

2012-01-26T04:59:00.042Z

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lved in for over sixty years and the families that have lived here since.

The Scott’s had a phone by 1924 and a television by 1958 and in between many of those other items which landmark the growing prosperity of ordinary people.

Theirs was a generation born before the first motor cars, aeroplanes and radios. During their early adult life they would have mastered first the radio, and then the telephone and no doubt one of the still rare motor cars.

And at some stage in their newly married life they may have sat in a darkened hall and been mesmerized by the moving images on the giant screen and still later by the mix of sound and pictures. I have no way of knowing if they went to the Pictures but I guess so. There were enough of them here in Chorlton. Some like the Palais de Luxe Cinema on Barlow Moor Road had opened by 1915, while the Rivoli which was the last opened its doors in 1937.

It is difficult today in the age of the multiplex to fully appreciate the novelty, magic and sense of luxury of “going to the flicks.” The very first picture houses may have been in small assembly rooms or converted music halls, but by the 1930s they were sumptuous almost decadent places. Everything about them was designed to lift the cinema goer into a different world.

Here was a sort of comfort few could enjoy at home, which ranged from the rich carpeted floors and plush seating to the bright lights of the foyer and the clean crisp lines of the kiosks. The interiors were bright with reds, blues and gold and the large curtain in front of the screen was always of a thick rich material which would have looked so wonderful in your front room.

And it started at the door, with the uniformed attendants who marshalled and welcomed the queues of cinema goers. Remember few buildings remained lit up at night and the cinema was a beacon of coloured electric lights and many retained their wrought iron canopies which sheltered you from the rain, advertised the show and was the first contact with the picture experience to come.

They were also warm and smelt clean, all of which made you feel special. And there was the class thing, like theatres you got what you paid for. The cheapest seats were downstairs the most expensive upstairs in the balcony. Even in the 60s there was a choice to be made. If you were out with your mates, it was the cheap seats and if it was a Saturday and a special date then you splashed out for the balcony. Forget all that stuff aboutthe back row which I cannot deny I did but a special date meant a special seat.

I doubt that Joe or Mary Ann would have bothered with the back seats; by the time the Savoy on Manchester Road and the Rivoli up by the bridge over the Brook on Barlow Moor Road were opened I think their main preoccupation would have been watching the picture.

And of course there was so much to see, from the “feature” and the B movie to the short news reel. We forget that before the television these short news slots were the only visual way most experienced the events of the day. And my generation still had that odd practice that because shows were continuous you could go in at any time, picking up the film from that moment and watch round to the point where you had come in, which today I find a bizarre way to see a film but then was quite normal.
Ida has told me of the restaurant at the old Rivoli which was opened to coincide with its restoration after it had been bombed. The first day the owners issued special vouchers and there after it remained a wonderful place to eat.

Of all our cinemas I have to say the Palais de Luxe Cinema remains one of my favourites. Smaller and less grand than the others its designer had managed to add something quirky with the large circular windows which I guess reminded you of eyes and its green and white glazed tiles.

But for me the saddest image is the transformation of the Savoy on Manchester Road which in a way sums up the decline of the old cinema houses. Looking at the 1930 picture by Harold Clarke all the wonderful elements are there, from the twin dooms and the ornate stone frontage to its wrought iron canopy. And compare it with its appearance in 1958. In keeping with the 50’s look the ornate fiddly bits have either been taken down or hidden by the wooden panelling, and the entrance canopy banished to some scrap yard.

I suppose it was all part of the picture houses adapting to new times, and there was plenty of life left in them, after all some of the great spectacular movies ranging from Cleopatra, Spartacus and Lawrence of Arabia had yet to me made, not to mention James Bond, but the telly had arrived.

The Scott’s had theirs by 1958 and the idea of going out on a cold winter’s night to seek entertainment may not have been as attractive. And cinemas were not as inviting as they had been. Some were looking shabby while others suffered from that craze to slash the cinema seat with a flick knife which created that whoosh of air as you sat down in the chair.

In 1972 John Lloyd the historian lamented the passing of the cinema and much that had been the cultural life of Chorlton. It was he wrote ”painfully obvious that Chorlton in the evening is dead,” concluding that at “about eleven o’clock those who have been out shuffle back and a few more ghostly blue shadows flick across the curtains to join the many more that have been flickering all night.”*

But things have a habit of going full circle and the wide range of cultural and educational activities which Lloyd so missed are returning. I mentioned these in an earlier posting http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/chorlton-history-group.html

In 1910 there were 36 such organisations including seven tennis clubs, three lacrosse clubs, nine football clubs as well as cricket, drama groups and political parties.

I have no way of knowing if Joe and Mary Ann got involved in them but I will be returning to these later in the year.

Pictures; Palais de Luxe Cinema, H. A. Downes May 1959, m09248, Savoy Picture House, A.H. Clarke 1930, m09290, and Gaumont Cinema, A.H. Downes November 1958, m09220, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

*Lloyd, John M, The Township of Chorlton cum Hardy, E.J.Morten, 1972, pp 108-109

Hough End Hall in the summer of 1925

2012-01-26T04:55:00.002Z

An occasional series dedicated to looking down at Chorlton from the air. Here is Hough End Hall in the summer of 1925 taken from an Imperial Airways aircraft.

I guess this shot was taken on the same day as the one of the green I posted earlier this month. To the north of the hall is Chorlton Brook which meanders through open fields.

Picture; aerial view of Hough End Hall 1925, m72046, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Millie the Mole, Boy Boy Jones and a garden shed, ............ London in the 1950s

2012-01-25T05:55:00.022Z

Millie the Mole lived in our house in the 1950s and she lived with Boy Boy Jones who drove the getaway car for a smash and grab gang.

I was too young to remember them but they were just some of the people who rented rooms in my parent’s house on Lausanne Road.

Now this was the period just after the last world war and housing was still in short supply, and most people lived in rented accommodation. It was the age of the private landlord and “living in rooms” was commonplace. We were I think unique in owning our own house and most of my friends lived in grand old Victorian houses which long ago had been sub divided in to flats. One family lived in the basement of a row of terraced houses near the old fire station, and another in one of those prefabs which had been put up to meet post war housing needs and which over 60 years later are still going strong.

Ours was a tall terraced house built sometime in the last quarter of the 19th century. It had nine rooms spread out over three floors, with cellars and a long garden. The land must have once been an orchard because our garden and the surrounding ones were full of fruit trees. In our case we had collard the corner on pear trees, of which there were at least five, along with a worn out apple tree and a tired vine which clung to the back of the house but to my knowledge never produced any grapes.

I don’t know how many lodgers we had at any one time, but until the arrival of my twin sisters in 1955, there was just mum dad and me. So after accounting for the three downstairs rooms and the bath room, this still left enough for a collection of paying customers.

True to the period each upstairs room had a coin operated gas fire and father had fitted radio outlets around the house. I remember them well. By turning the switch you could tune into the Home Service or the Light Programme. My early years were radio years and listening to the wireless remains one of the joys of my life.

But back dear reader to Millie the Mole and Boy Boy Jones. Now smash and grab raids were at the cutting age of big time crime. The gang would choose a suitable jewellers and using a brick and pick axe handle smash the window, grab the loot and escape in the waiting car. Boy Boy Jones was the driver. A career which came to an abrupt end when he drove off during a raid, leaving the gang to struggle along a crowded Peckham High Street, with assorted diamond rings, a necklace and several watches. Needless to say their progress was somewhat hampered by the loot and the Saturday shoppers and they were caught.

Boy Boy Jones remained free which was not necessarily a good thing for Millie, whose relationship with him was tempestuous at the best of times and led on one occasion to Boy Boy arousing the street as he dangled her out of one of the upstairs windows by her wrists.

Then there was Flo and Les who ran an antique shop which wasn’t making enough so they had to work three days in the timber yards. I say an antique shop but I suspect it was really a second had shop with pretentions. This was Peckham in the early 1950s and however genteel Lausanne Road had once been I don’t recall there being much call for posh stuff when I was growing up.

Many of the houses still had a faded glow about them but six years of war; bombing and neglect had rather taken the shine off the area. A trend best reflected by some of the other lodgers we had staying with us.

In particular I remember a young outgoing chap who worked delivering sweets but turned out to be a bigamist which was still a serious offence if you were caught. This was after all a time when divorce was not an easy thing to do, especially amongst the working class. Nor was just living with someone easily tolerated and so in his case he just moved across London and married again. Mother trusted him enough to allow me to accompany him to the swimming baths and on one occasion to drive us to see my grandparents in Derby.

The last of our lodgers were a couple who met in Lausanne Road. She was single and German and he was Polish. Their romance began with midnight trysts and ended with the two getting married. To me they were something different. Occasionally I would be invited to share a cup of real coffee and some Polish biscuits which arrived from the “homeland”.

Like so many of the stories I have posted their experiences reflect the awful events of the century they lived in. Theirs were “little lives lived out in a big century.” Both had been victims of the displacement of millions of ordinary people who had been in the wrong place when the war broke out and found themselves part of that tide of homeless refugees in 1945.

I don’t know their stories and like many of their generation they didn’t talk about the past. But he was Polish and may have spent time as a Soviet prisoner, which begs the question had he been on the wrong side in the conflict, or just a causality of the Cold War?

Either way there is a lasting testimony to their stay in the house, because the garden shed he built in the late 1950s is still there. I had almost completely forgotten about it. And then on an impulse while on a visit to London for a family wedding we visited the old house.

It is almost 50 years since we left but there is much about the place that I remember. I am grateful to Rachel and David the new owners who did not mind that we had invaded their Sunday and were happy to show us around.

The garden seemed smaller and more alive with plants than I remember it. The trees had gone but the shed remained.

I rather liked the fact that something from all those people who had passed through had survived.

Picture; Lausanne Road today, & the long back garden with the shed, Lausanne Road circa 1957 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Echoes of the past ............ Higginbotham’s farmhouse and yard from the air, in the summer of 1975

2012-01-25T05:42:00.002Z

Now that I seem to be in posting pictures of Chorlton from the air I thought I would go back to my old friend Tony Walker’s collection of pictures he took around 1975.

I featured one of my favourites back in November which showed the farmhouse of James Higginbotham who farmed on the green in the 1840s, the remains of his barns and part of the parish church. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2011/11/tony-walker.html

This one is of the same general area but looking at the old farm complex from the south and what I like about it is both what it tells us about the past and something about what has changed since Tony took it.
Higginbotham’s 18th century farm house stand in its own gardens. Tony told me that the last Mr Higginbotham who was still living there in the 1960s filled in the well which stood in the smaller back garden. Something of the odd shape of the cottage can be seen from the air and the only obscured building is the diary between the tree and the extension. It faces north which means it is colder than the rest of the house and so perfect for making butter and cheese.

I like also the detail of the farm buildings which at the time were part of Walker Brother’s building and timber yard. The site including the barns, have been converted into dwellings as have the area further north which were once Sparks garages.

It always surprises me how the township has and continues to undergo so much change. Later pictures of the Bowling Green from the air.

Picture; from the collection of Tony Walker.