More on Didsbury’s past ….. The Dawn of Didsbury Jewry 1861-1926

Now I have been waiting for The Dawn of Didsbury Jewry 1861-1926 to arrive in the bookshop.

I was alerted to Julia Maine’s contribution to the history of Didsbury last week and having bought a copy this morning I pretty much devoured the book in one sitting because it’s a fascinating account of the Jewish community here in Didsbury.

And while the author writes that “it is written for a broad readership” the scholarship is there in its content, glossary and extensive references, covering many aspects of Jewish life, the Jewish contribution to the community and a host of local Jewish men and women, culminating with the impact of the Great War.

Throughout Ms Main draws on the memories of residents as well as written records and the generosity of those who donated images and additional material.

So, having read it in an afternoon it will now sit on the bookshelf and become an invaluable reference to dip into.

The Dawn of Didsbury Jewry 1861-1926, Julia Main, 2026, £9.65 is available from most bookshops, including Chorlton Book Shop and online at Amazon and other retailers.

Hardy Farm ............ the picture I have never seen before

Now there are not that many pictures of Hardy Farm and that is a shame.

I included one of the most well known in the book on Chorlton but always cast around for more.*

During the writing of the book I became familiar with some of the farmers who lived there in the 19th century and collected stories from some who knew it from their child hood in the 1940’s and 50’s.

But the memories are fading and it will soon be a full half century since it was swept away for the ill fated UMIST sports scheme.

That said this picture brought back memories for  my friend Marion Jackson who remembers Hardy Farm.

“In my childhood the shed where the cows were milked was to the right. In front was a yard and further back to the right the orchard where the pigs were.

The track went down in front and then through the hawthorn hedges to Jacksons Boat.

I so loved my Sunday visits here with my father in the 40s. This was on his route to work in Sale from Withington by bike. Everything that my beloved father found interesting he showed to me.

This was a special favourite; I guess it reminded him of home in Cork. I used to look at the posh houses in South Drive as we cycled....guess where I lived for a happy 30 years? What a lovely life I have had.”

And that is all I have to say other than a thank you to Marion for sharing her recollections .

Picture; Hardy Farm, 1966, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, 2012, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/the-story-of-chorlton-cum-hardy.html

Sherard House and Church Row in Eltham in 1841 and Richard White census enumerator

Sherard House from the garden, 1909

This is Sherard House and once again I set out to describe the place and once again I have got side tracked.

But I shall start with a little of what I know.

 It stood on the High Street roughly on the site of the Nat West Bank, was built in 1634 and retained many of the original features including “the handsome mantelpieces of carved oak, oak panelling which surrounded the library and the quaint old open fire places.*

By the 1840s the front had been changed considerably but the rear remained unaltered although it would have been difficult to see the features given that it was covered in ivy.

And I would  have loved to walk through its 20 rooms and sat in the garden which extended north to the footpath known as the Slip.

Church Row numbered 316-320 and Sherard House 311 and garden 309, 1844

I can’t be sure at present but I think in the June of 1841 it was occupied by a Jane Edwards who was attended to by six servants but had moved on by 1843 when Sherard House was home to Samuel and his wife Frances and their children.

The Jeffreys were well off, farming 256 acres of land north of the High Street around Well Hall.

Not that they or any of our people of property can be said to have lived a life excluded from those of the less well off.

At the bottom of their garden were the five gardens of Church Row, in which lived the families of a shoemaker, carpenter, plumber and three agricultural labourers.

And these people fascinate me.  There was John and Dorothy Fiske, Anne Wakeman, John and Susanna Francis who shared with Joseph and Jane Arnold, while further down the row lived the Russell and Blundell families.

What is all the more remarkable is that these ordinary families show up in a range of official documents from the tithe schedule to the parish records.

The opening page of the census Enu 4 Eltham Kent , 1841 with Richard's signature

All would have been known to Richard White schoolmaster and the enumerator who in the June of 1841 was responsible for delivery the census forms to the 126 households on the north side of the High Street from the church down to South End.

His was the job of making sense of what had been written and in some cases of filling in the forms of those who were illiterate.

These enumerators were not slow to amend and correct the entries, sometimes even altering the occupations listed by a householder.

Now Richard White is an interesting chap and I only wish I knew more about him.  He would have been paid for his work, and may have been selected from a number of people who applied for the job.

Baptismal record of Catherine White, 1838

He lived with his wife in Pound Yard close to the National School, and baptised his two children at the parish church, and then he falls out of history.

I can’t find him or his wife Mary, although there is one official reference to their son later in the century.  Neither of them was from Eltham so perhaps they moved on.

I suspect the rate books may give me a clue, and I have yet to pursue the school records, but in the meantime I shall leave them, but secure in the knowledge that I will return to both them and the occupants of Church Row.

*R.R.C Gregory, The Story of Royal Eltham, 1909

Pictures; Sherard House from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers,http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm detail of Eltham High Street,  1844 from the Tithe map for Eltham courtesy of Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, http://www.kent.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/kent_history/kent_history__library_centre.aspx

Baptismal records and census extracts from ancestry.co.uk courtesy of The National Archives

"I had forgotten how black the town hall was" .......... pictures from Linda

The thing about old picture postcards is that there is usually a story which goes with them.

Albert Square, circa 1960s

Often that story is the message on the back, or the recipient which if you are lucky will lead to more stories.

Most of the ones in the collection have been picked up over the years with no extra information about the person who chose it in preference to another, or anything about them.

So it is a rare treat to be handed two picture postcards, by someone I know and who offered up a bit of back story.

These two are instantly recognizable, and will bring back plenty of memories, with some looking closely at the detail to compare with the same scene today.

Usually I would throw in my own observations, but where would the fun be in that?  Far better that I leave that to you.

Piccadilly Gardens, circa 1960s

Instead I shall close with Linda’s own comments on the postcards.

“As I couldn’t make my monthly trip to Holmfirth yesterday I sorted out some paperwork and came across these two postcards.

The one of Albert square is a Bamforth card with a deckle edge.

Their building near the bus station was sadly derelict for years but has recently been converted into flats and looks so much better.

I had forgotten how black the town hall was. Used to park in the square twice a year when I took my children into town to buy their shoes”.

Location; Manchester

Pictures, Albert Square, and Piccadilly Gardens, circa 1960s/1970s, from the collection of Linda Rigby

Chorlton's brass band

There is something about old photographs and as much as I like the ones of the buildings, fields and roads of Chorlton it is those that contain people that I am drawn to.

This is our own brass band sometime in the 1920s and at least a few like William Mellor on the extreme right played in the 1893 band which I featured back in November of last year.*

Ours was one of the oldest brass bands in the country having been started in the 1820s.

 Of course the Stalybridge Band is older and can claim to have marched in to St Peter’s Fields on the day of Peterloo but ours had an almost continuous run until it agreed to wind up after the last world war.

 It performed in many of the great and not so great events here in the township and went on to win prizes in brass band competitions.

What makes this one that little more interesting is that none of them are in uniform. Perhaps it was an impromptu photograph with at least one chap still in what I think is the uniform of a Manchester Corporation tram driver. But I wait to be corrected. Nor can it be the full band.

But I am going to leave the band for another time and focus instead on the three young faces behind the bandsman.

In those early years of photography stretching into the 1920s when it was all still a novelty the camera attracted the curious and the vain. They appear on the edges of a picture always staring directly into the lens but never really part of what is going on.

I would love to know more about three children especially the girl in the middle. Were they related to the bandsman? Had they followed the camera man or was it just chance that they were staring over the wall when the bandsman pose?

I doubt that we will ever know who they were, or for that matter where it was taken. My guess is in the schoolyard of the old National School which could place our three interlopers in Number 1 Passage which runs behind the old playground wall from what was once called Crescent Road and is now Crossland. But there are some things I suppose we will never know.

Picture; from the collection of Allan Brown, some of the band circa 1920s and William Rogers in 1893

*The 1893 Brass Band ............ lives revealed, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/1893-brass-band-lives-revealed.html

A bit of the old Albert Square ….. in Manchester in 1969

One of the things I like about photographs is that quite often there are stories within stories.

So here we are in 1969, with what I take to be a procession from Manchester Town Hall to the law courts, but what interested me more are the buildings in the background.

I suspect you would have to be born before 1980, and possibly even further back to remember them.

I on the other hand do, and mainly because in the long endless hours between lectures at the Commerce of Commerce on Aytoun Street, the choice between going to the library and taking off into the city centre, was an easy one.

From the September of 1969 well into the next two years, I wandered up into Albert Square, down towards Shudehill and on plenty of occasions crossed the river to explore Greengate.

And I remember those tall soot blackened impressive buildings which faced the Town Hall Hall.

They were typical of the sort you could find across Manchester, with shops and restaurants at ground level, and offices above.

I have to confess I don’t know when they came down and were replaced with those modern red brick boxes.

Comparing the two, I have to say I think the new ones do look clean and busines like, and I suspect their predecessors were cold draughty paces which would have needed much tender care and attention.

That said I think if they had received that care and had an exterior clean up, they would have better complimented the Town Hall, Prince Albert and the buildings to the north and south of the square.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Albert Square, 1969, xxxx77 & xxxx79, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Heating and hammering at the smithy on Eltham High Street in the June of 1840

The smithy close to the present library, 1909

I like the way that Eltham is revealing more of its past.

Now I say Eltham as if it was a person which it isn’t but in the last few months I rediscovered my love of the place and in so doing have dug deep into its history.

As ever my starting point has been the book written by Richard Robert Castell Gregory in 1909. His The Story of Royal Eltham is a scholarly treasure trove of stories made all the more rich because he could draw on the memories of people born in the first few decades of the 19th century when Eltham was a rural community.

And of course at the heart of all such communities was the black smith.

When he was hammering and heating at his forge he acted as a magnate for people.  Some coming to collect a repaired tool or bringing a horse which was in need of a new shoe would stop and pass the time of day.

And there were always requests to personalise a farm tool. This might mean making a left handed scythe or widening or narrowing hoe blades used to chop out weeds.  Then there would be the endless procession of labourers needing tools sharpened from bill hooks and scythes to axes and all the other types of edged tools.

Mr Metcalf

In the process he  might well replace the broken or split staves.

And all the time, gangs of children attracted to the smithy by the red hot metal and frequent shower of sparks would stand and stare rooted to the spot.

“The farrier’s shop which stood to the west of Sun Yard nearer to the lane was one of the features of the High-street.  It was very old, and just before its destruction was in a dilapidated condition.  It was at one time worked by Mr Foster and his two sons Richard and William.

The last tenant was Mr Metcalfe.

An interesting adventure of old Mr. Foster is told in connection with this shoeing forge.  He had been shoeing a horse which was afterwards taken down to the Court.  

So he got astride the animal and proceeded to take it home himself.  On crossing the Moat bridge, however, the horse was frightened by a boy with a hoop, and bearing his rider with him jumped over the parapet.  Horse and man lighted upon s tack of bricks, and both of the miraculously escaped injury.  Fate however was not always kind to Mr. Foster.  Not long after he had escaped the perils of that terrible leap, he chanced to be getting over the stile at the end of the lane near to the smithy, slipped, and broke his leg.”

Now I thought I had identified the blacksmith who hammered and heated by the High Street.  In 1841 this was George Smith who was in Eltham by 1823 and still active at his forge in 1841.

All of which made Mr Foster a mystery and I assumed a later black smith.  But no he was there in 1840 working alongside George Smith and Thomas Doderell.  All three are listed in the tithe schedule as working the smithy, although by 1841 Thomas Foster was 70 years old and a decade later had retired and was in one of the Alms houses, leaving the business to his son Robert aged 35.

The smithy

George Smith snr was by then in hospital and his son appears with no trade, all of which makes a tad still confusing.

All of which leaves me to track down Thomas Doderell and Mr Foster’s other son.

But at least the Fosters have come out of the shadows and I pretty much know exactly where the stile was which Mr Foster fell off and broke his leg.

Picture; the Smithy 1909, from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm