The Chorlton History Wall is back

Yep, after just a short break that team of Simpson and Topping are back with a new installation telling the  story of Chorlton’s past which like the others is a history walk.*

This one tells the story of Chorlton’s Swimming baths and the surrounding area, which had once been the small hamlet of Martledge which was a mix  of cottages, a pub and open fields. 

And which in a just three decades was transformed in to what we know today.

So final was that change from rural to urban that the very name Martleldge was lost and pretty much forgotten.

And instead, it became New Chorlton or the New Village to distinguish it from the area around the village green and Beech Road which was Old Chorlton.

So, the Walk tells that story and because this is the site of the former swimming baths we include its story.

The wall includes stories by Andrew Simpson, original paintings by Peter Topping a selection of old photographs and was sponsored by msv in association with Chorlton Civic Society.

And joins the 80-meter installation which ran along Albany and Brantingham Roads, and that sponsored by Armistead Property which fronted Denbeigh Villas on High Lane during its renovation.

Leaving me just to say like its predecessors the most recent history wall will be become another Chorlton tourist site.

Location; Manchester Road

Pictures of the history wall by Peter Topping, 2024

*Chorlton History Wall, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=History+wall

At the factory gates in Bolton in 1937

Outside the Flash Mill Street compound in 1937

I am back with that wonderful collection of images from Worktown.

And today I have been drawn to these two pictures of Bolton at work in 1937.  It is a world that has all but gone, but one that says much about how we made our wealth from the early 19th century through to the 1960s.

They are of course iconic pictures which are what many people associate with the North and of course this was how it was.

When we first moved to east Manchester in the early 70s there was still much heavy industry most of which disappeared during the following decade.

Cycling home

For most of us looking at the picture, the first thing that you notice are the bikes, and in other pictures particularly of Trafford Park what amazes you is the number of people leaving work on a bicycle.

And then I suppose it is the preponderance of woman workers and lastly the tram lines.

The photographs were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

Unknown Bolton Mill, 1937

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."*

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s.

*BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION
http://boltonworktown.co.uk/photo-collection/

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, from the collections, Workers leaving the Flash Street Mills compound, 1937, image ref 1998.83.12.15 and a Bolton Mill, image ref, 1993.83.0120

South east London and the pictures that mean the most

Now I am wondering just which scene means most to those of us who were born and grew up in south east London.

I fully accept that is a bit of a tall order given the size of south east London and if like me you have moved around a bit.

Added to which bits will have changed almost out of recognition so having been born in the first half of the last century the landscape of Woolwich and Peckham baffle me when I return.

But if I had to choose it might well be the Pleasaunce or the woods in Well Hall where I was most happiest, the ferry with its connection to the Thames or when the train pulls over the river towards Waterloo Railway Station and I know I am home.

The idea of a personal picture was sparked off recently when our Jill took a series of photographs of Greenwich Park, and like many who looked at them I was instantly transported back to magical times long ago.

Mine include playing in the park, taking a new girlfriend for a walk down into Greenwich, and that time in the autumn of 1970 when I showed the place off to a group of friends from Manchester.

Nothing will quite top that day.  The sun was still warm and set off the leaves which were turning from gold to brown but there was that slight chill which you can get in early October.

And it is of early mornings that I shall finish, because Jill took the pictures soon after the sun had risen, when the light is sharp and enhances the features of landscape.

So that is it.

Location; Greenwich

Pictures; Greenwich Park, July 2107, from the collection of Jillian Goldsmith

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

Now I know the old saying, be careful what you wish for, but I couldn’t resist this picture of the green in the snow sometime at the end of the 1970s.

Location; Chorlton


Picture; from the collection of Tony Walker, 1970s

One to do today … local author …a story only half told

 

36 barrels of gunpowder ..... that horrendous act .... and a noisy night of fireworks

Now there is a pernicious and pervasive way of thinking which looks for conspiracy everywhere.

Mutterings and secret plans, 1604

As a way of looking at the world it isn’t new, and can be traced back to those who wile away the wasted hours seeking to disprove that there ever was a moon landing, to the sinister Protocols of the Elders of Zion which was a fabricated antisemitic text, and runs back into the mists of time.

All that is needed is an event which someone will seek to deny, or bend to their own political purposes.

And we are all familiar with the assertion that the Covid virus was not real, but when challenged with the evidence, advocates often switch tack and argue that it is in the interests of “them” to manufacture the scare, thereby to increase the powers of State surveillance, or manipulate the international markets.

Attempting to refute them is like counting the grains of sand in a bucket or pushing water up hill.

More recently I have followed the line of that radical 18th century writer Thomas Paine who wrote “To argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason, ….. is like administering medicine to the dead”.  

It a powerful guide to how to treat the outlandish arguments of those who have travelled beyond the borders of reason and reminds me of Deborah Lipstadt’s often referenced explanation for why she doesn’t debate with Holocaust Deniers because it is as pointless as discussing with “flat-Earthers or the Elvis-is-alive people”.*

All of that said there is a fine line between conspiracy theories and reinterpretations of past events. **

And as this is November 5th it neatly leads into the failed Gunpowder Plot, that awful act of planned terrorism which was so horrendous that its failure continues to be celebrated every year since Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes and the other conspirators were caught and executed.

In recent years the celebrations have been eclipsed by Halloween, so while the fireworks will burst on either side of November 5th and continue like a damp squib for perhaps a week few kids now take to the street asking for “a penny for the Guy” and heaps will not even know the historical significance of burning the guy and setting off fireworks.

Plotting the unthinkable 1604

Suffice to say the story goes that a group of “Catholic gentlemen” in the face of continued official hostility to Catholics chose to stage a coup by blowing up the House of Lords at the opening of Parliament on November 5th.  

If it had succeeded the entire political establishment would have been killed, the State left leaderless and in the vacuum the plotters would have placed the King’s daughter on the throne and manipulated her to run the country.

So far so good, but it failed. 

The ringleaders were captured, tried, and executed and things got a lot worse for Catholics.

But even at the time some questioned elements of the plot, citing the King’s chief advisor as implicated in a “set up”.

Conspiracies and disasters, 1970s

In the 1890s and since some historians have revisited the story, deconstructed the events and the evidence, discrediting the official version.

All of which offered some of us a fine set of history lessons where we presented the traditional account, offered up suspected flaws and led our year 8 history students to draw their own conclusions.

In 1996 the historian Antonia Fraser presented her interpretation which while it accepted that there was a plot challenged bits of the narrative. ***

And over the next few days I shall revisit her book, reading it as the last fireworks burst into the night and reflect that while there are and have always been real conspiracies, the default line of many is to see conspiracies where they don’t exist, and trade on assertions and half-truths.

Pictures; a contemporary drawing of the Gunpowder Plot Conspirators, Crispijn van de Passe the Elder, and a popular badge from the 1970s

Guy Fawkes, Catesby and Winter, 1604

*Thomas Paine US History, https://www.ushistory.org/paine/crisis/c-05.htm

**“administering medicine to the dead” ……. The American War of Independence ..... and Thomas Paine, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2021/11/administering-medicine-to-dead-american.html

*** The Gunpowder Plot, Terror & Faith in 1605, Antonia Fraser, 1996

Reading the newspaper in Bolton in 1938

It is odd to think that in some ways the world I grew up in is far closer to that of my parents than the one I have shared with my children.

My parents and I belong to the wireless generation, remember ice on the inside of windows in the winter and accepted that public transport was the way you got around.

Now I could go on but there is always that danger that it becomes a bout of nostalgic tosh or becomes a political statement of the passage from a collectivist society to one where the overwhelming measure of success is wealth and fame.

So instead I shall reflect on these  pictures of the Reading Room from the Work Town collection.*

And before anyone accuses me of being either a tad reactionary or just dead old I am the first to enjoy visiting our local library. It is bright, light and unlike that blanket of serious silence you used to endure it is a place where children are encouraged to enjoy books, act out the stories they have read and want to come back to.

It’s also where the traditional book of reference sits beside a bank of computers offering a link to the world.

Now back in 1937 the Bolton Public Library did offer that all encompassing experience it is just not one that most people would feel comfortable in today.

It is all very spartan which may be because this was temporary reading room while the new one was being built in the Civic Centre.

This new library along with a museum and art gallery opened in 1939 and was designed by local architects, Bradshaw Gass & Hope.

But I remember something similar in our own Public Libray in New Cross in the 1950s.  The rows of newspapers and the big wooden tables and above all that powerful smell of disinfectant which I am convinced was also sprayed on the books.

It had a slightly sweet smell and so permeated the books that it still lingers on the odd copy sixty years after mother borrowed and forgot to return them. To open these volumes of the Deptford Public Library is to be transported back.

It is a feeling reinforced by the sharp lighting and above all by the fact that no one seems to take their hat or coat off.  They have wandered into a place which seems to be saying “by all means come in, do what you have to do but by golly don’t get comfortable.”

And under those stern notices to refrain from smoking and above all to be silent you can hear the pages turn and that resounding noise as a book is dropped onto a table or a chair is scraped across the wooden floor.

It is not a library that my children would recognise but it is familiar enough to me and no doubt to my parents.

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, 1993.83.19.22, 1993.83.12.21 & 1993.83.12.20

*The pictures are from Work Town which were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s and can be seen online at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/