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

It started with a balcony and a picture.

In Didsbury they have balconies, Olive Shapley Aveune, 2026

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

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

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

10 Tresco Road, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rose Hill, Mill Gate, 2020

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Olive Shapley Avenue, 2020

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

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

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

*Lausanne Road, Evelina Road Linden Grove Tresco Road

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday in the Square ....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that today is that.

Location; Albert Square

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now there is a story to follow up.

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

 Location; Chorlton

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

 

 

I have seen the future and it works* …….. shopping in 1961

I like this picture because it offers up a range of shop fronts, from the traditional to the brand new.

And there is no doubting that when Shelia Montgomery and the Electricity Board opted for their bold and striking  fronts they were staking a claim to being modern and at the cutting age of the new Britain.

Back in the late 1950s and early 60s I was too young to appreciate  just how much of a break with tradition they were, and by the time I was in my teens they were so commonplace that I took them for granted.

But in 1961 they stood out as very different from the fashion shop of S. Pickles, which will noy have changed over much since the row of houses with their shops were built.

And walking back along the parade, Rushtons, Sprent and the supermarket had also chosen modernity over tradition.

A full sixty or so years later I rather think all five look dated in comparison to number 111, which modern shop fitters might seek to imitate.

I had thought we were on Princes Road and certainly some of the other pictures in the collection suggest so, but pinning down these shops has so far proved inconclusive.

And happily Michael Wood, came back with this, "Looking at the shop fronts I just got an inkling this was Alexandra Road, and sure enough in the Local Image Collection there is Sheila Montgomery on m30313, next door to Rushtons just before they too had gone for a makeover with the trendy brash new signboard seen in your photo!  

My mum used to occasionally go shopping along here in the 60s as it offered some cheaper alternatives to the Chorlton shops, and I used to pass along here whenever I got the bus into town.  

It was always bustling, with so much dense housing nearby.  There is also m30349 in 1972 both Sheila and Sprent beyond Rushtons have disappeared and the place looks a bit jaded!  Interesting series of photos".

And as ever Michael's correction shows how the blog is always a collaborative project.

To which Tony has added the entry from the Street Directory which I think will date from 1962 and offers up the full range and variety of shopping paradise.

Location; Manchester

 Picture; street directory, 1962, courtesy of Tony Petrie, shop fronts, 1961, 1961-3476.4, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*"I have seen the future, and it works", Lincoln Austin Steffens, 1919, after visiting the Soviet Union

What was lost ….. is found

“We have just found a box of old photos at 515-521 Barlow Moor Road; I haven’t had a good look at them yet .... but I immediately thought you would find them interesting”.*

It’s the stuff that makes for stories, and with some luck and a heap of research the photos may do just that

Or they may lead nowhere but the fun will be in the looking.

515-521 Barlow Moor Road is currently being redeveloped by Armistead Property who have a track record in renovating and restoring old properties and giving them a new lease of life.**

And with all old buildings you can never be sure what secrets have lain undisturbed for generations.

I still remember the story of the  parcel discovered under the floorboards of a house and the momentary excitement of the crew who found it, leading to wild speculation of buried treasure.  

So sure, were the team of builders that something valuable and perhaps historic was contained in the parcel wrapped in old newspaper that they took the find to the museum only to discover that the discovery was nothing more earth shattering than a cheese sandwich left by a carpenter under a newly laid floor in 1910.  

Just why it was left under the floor space will remain a mystery, but I suspect we are dealing with nothing more than one worker’s lunch left in the house, only to be lost when a fellow builder put down the timber floor.

All of which brings me to the Barlow Moor Road collection.

They consist of fourteen pictures found in a battered wooden box, and range from images of smart cars, and equally smart “young things” on holiday to a group of men in uniform and the Grand Hotel Oceanic.  

At first glance there is little detail which could lead to clues upon which to fasten some research, but I will persevere.

I had high hopes of the Grand Hotel Oceanic but I guess there will have been and indeed will be many hotels that claim the name.  The first I came across was in Paris and is one of those typical Parisian builds which are narrow, with a courtyard and stretch to seven floors with those elegant iron balconies. 

Alas it isn’t ours.  Ours is an ugly undistinguished modernist box.

But a further search may lead somewhere.

I can’t even be sure of a date or dates for the fourteen, but we will narrow that down and in time may come up with more.

We shall see.  

Location; 515-521 Barlow Moor Road

Pictures; Barlow Moor Road collection, undated

*Peter Armistead

**Armistead Property, http://www.armisteadproperty.co.uk/

On the green circa 1898

It’s a picture I have shown before, but is well worth a second look.

The caption suggests a date around 1898, arguing that this “Prince of Wales Horse bus at the Green.  Probably about 1898 before the Corporation took over the Carriage and Tramways Company, but maybe slightly later.”*

The Manchester Carriage and Tramways Company had been formed in 1865 from a merger of the two bus companies serving the city and neighbouring townships.

The larger was owned by the Greenwood Company and brought over 500 horses and 33 omnibuses to the merger, while what had been McEwen’s City Omnibus Company contributed the routes to Bell Vue, Rusholme, Longsight and Didsbury.

And at the end of the 19th was taken over by the City Council.

But what intrigues me is not so much the horse drawn bus but the surrounding buildings.
To the extreme right is the Travellers Rest which had been a beer shop since the 1830s and for most of that century had been run by the Nixon family and next to it the Beech Inn.

To the left is the Horse and Jockey which back then consists just of the middle building.  Beyond the outhouse jutting out towards the green was the tall cottage of Miss Wilton who had died the year before in 1897.

And it was her death which brought our village green back into common usage. From sometime earlier in the century till 1897 this had been the private garden of the Wilton family, surrounded and made secluded by tall hedges, but with her death the land reverted to the Egerton estate who in turn opened it to the public.

And tucked away in the corner was the  little cottage once the home of the Malloy family and later the sweet shop of Miss Gertrude Green.

Location; Chorlton



Picture; from the Lloyd collection