Looking for the lost ...... one street over time in Ancoats ..... no 4 the school by Homer Street

The story of one street in Ancoats, and the people who lived and worked there.*

Homer Street was located just south of St Andrew’s Church and was bordered by the canal to the north, the river to the south and London Road Railway Station to the west.

The houses date from 1837 and just six years after the church was built.

Back in 1831 St Andrew's  Church was in “the midst of fields [when] the waters of the River Medlock which are  close by ran pure and sweet and were the home of beautiful trout.” **

At the time “the congregation of St Andrew’s was in its early years a fairly comfortable middle-class body, [with] most of the pews in the church being privately rented by people of substance. But by the middle of the century it was surrounded by rising Lancashire industry and black slums filled the parish.***

Five years later the church opened a Sunday school on the corner of Homer Street and Arundel Street which in 1846 became a day school.

The school records show that teaching there was to use that modern description “challenging.”

In 1850 there was an average attendance at the day school of about 200 and four of five hundred boys and girls attended irregularly at the Sunday school.

And in 1866 the authorities went looking for forty boys who were absent one morning  concluding  that “the parents are sadly to blame for keeping their children at home” and on another occasion observed that “130 present at a time and the teacher ill, make it rather hard work to keep things straight.”

Given all of that I can sympathise with the comment made in 1864 that the school master was “glad that the week has closed so that one might have a little rest.”

But even by the 1860s the population of St Andrew’s parish was in decline and in 1891 the school reported that "the number of children on the books was gradually diminishing owing to properties being condemned as uninhabitable", although the final clearances  only got  underway in the late 1930s.

So that by 1936 the population had fallen from 16,000 a century earlier about to 3,000 with many families having been moved out to Gorton and Clayton.

That said the school still had about 230 students on roll and their attendance was very good winning them the Entwistle Memorial Shield for the best school attendance in the city’s elementary schools which seems a nice positive point to close on.

The site is now part of the warehouse of Amato Food Products.****

Location; Ancoats

Pictures; St Andrew’s School, Homer Street, 1920, m48646, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Homer Street

**Commemorative Booklet, St Andrews Church Ancoats, 1831-1931

***A Centenary in Ancoats, St Andrew’s School, Manchester Guardian, June 13 1936

Painting Well Hall and Eltham ....... nu 3 Well Hall Cottages

An occasional series featuring buildings and places I like and painted by Peter Topping.

I have always been fascinated by Well Hall Cottages which were demolished in 1923 and  date from at least the mid 18th century.*

They consisted of six properties just north of Kidbrook Lane and  formed a rough L shape with three running west from Well Hall Lane, another two pointing north with a sixth at the rear on the western side.

By 1844 one of the six was occupied by John and Mary Evans. They were in their sixties, he had been born in Wiltshire and she was from Dublin.

Tracking down the other five has been less easy, but judging from the people listed on the census returns for 1841 and ’51 the cottages may have been home to agricultural labourers, a blacksmith and a carpenter.

There are plenty of photographs of the cottages but to my knowledge no paintings of the buildings so it was fitting that Peter should paint them using a coloured picture postcard dating from the early 20th century.

Now I am not a fan of taking a monochrome image and adding colour using a software process, but as Peter has used a postcard which had already been colourized, a very long time ago, my objections fly away.

Painting; Well Hall Cottages © 2015 Peter Topping from a photograph circa early 19th century.
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Facebook: Paintings from Pictures https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

*Well Hall Cottages, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Well%20Hall%20Cottages

The insurance clerk, the travelling salesmen and Mrs Buxton from the USA ....... a bit of Chorltonville in 1911

Now every bit of Chorlton has its own story and Chorltonville is no exception.

South Drive, 1913

Most people will know it began as a bold venture to supply decent homes at affordable rents on a plot of farm land at the beginning of the 20th century.

There had been a modest pilot scheme which had been built behind Upper Chorlton Road, but the ‘ville was the big one.

The houses were built in record time and by April 1911 the first residents were showing up on the census for that year.

They were tenants rather than owners but within a decade the association had been wound up and the properties began to be sold off.

The estate has remained a popular place to live and many of my friends have passed through or chosen to settle and bring up their families in this quiet secluded place.

Something of its history has featured in our  book the Quirks of Chorlton-cum-Hardy* .

And with that in mind I went back to the records to see just what the demographic of the estate was like back at the beginning of the last century.

It is a big task and involves trawling the census returns street by street.  So far I have been looking at South Drive, and have covered just 39 homes, from numbers 1 to 65, and 2 to 22.  There are gaps which suggest some homes were vacant and I am fully aware that this is but a small sample but it’s a start.

The Tradesmen calls, 1913

What strikes you is the number of residents who gave their occupation as a commercial r travelling salesmen.
In all there were 14 of the 39 engaged in the job, along with a number of clerks, two shop keepers, two teachers and a University lecturer.

And what is particularly interesting is that some at least of these occupations reflect the new industries.

One of our salesmen was selling telephones, another electrical cables, and a third heating, ventilation and lighting, while Ms Vera Harris of South Drive was a typist.

But amongst all this “new stuff” there were the more traditional ways of earning a living of which domestic service featured highly.  Of our 39 residents, six employed a servant and one family had two.

It will be interesting to see how this small sample compares with the rest of the ‘ville and with the whole of Chorlton.  But that is a very big undertaking.  An earlier study suggested that in total 29 households in Chorltonville employed a servant.

So, for now I will just close with the reflection that a walk down South Drive in the April of 1911 would have been punctuated by a hosts of accents including more than a few from London, as well as the North East, a few from Northern Ireland and two from the USA and two more from Sweden.

All of which makes the place as cosmopolitan as it is today.

Location; Chorltonville

Pictures South Drive, early 20th century from the Lloyd Collection 

*The Qurks of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping, 2017

Two novels … one author ….. and the continuing story of John and Enriqueta Rylands

We are now into day seven of our Arts Festival with another seven to go, and it just keeps giving, with a variety of different events spanning all the arts.*

I have to say it can be tricky to decide what to go and enjoy given that some evenings a shed load of exciting performances vie with each other.

So far, I have done a play, listened to a musical performance and have reserved several art exhibitions, two photographic exhibitions and a poetry to night to visit.

And last night it was a talk by an author on how she had come to write two novels on the lives of John and Enriqueta Rylands,** he of a vast trading empire and she as the woman who commissioned and saw through the building of the Rylands Library on Deansgate.

The author is Juliette Tomlinson who lives next to the site of Longford Hall where Mr. and Mrs. Rylands lived.

I like meeting authors because it affords the opportunity to explore with them how they came to write their books.

And I was not disappointed last night.  Juliette ranged over the inspiration for the novels, the fascination and at times the grind of researching the factual background, and the ups and downs of which there can be many.

In her case these included losing a section of her first book in the editing which was more than compensated by corresponding with a relative of Enriqueta and sharing a secret about the plight of the two grand Longford chandeliers, which I shall leave for Juliette to recount at a future talk.

Leaving me just to add that the first novel, Longford, came out in 2024, Sunnyside, the second instalment was published last month, and the third is in the process of being written.

Location; Chorlton Arts Festival

Pictures, Two novels … one author ….. and the continuing story of John and Enriqueta Rylands from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 2026

*Chorlton Arts Festival, https://chorltonartsfestival.org/

**Longford, A Manchester love story, 2024, and Sunnyside The Story Continues, 2026 Juliette Tomlinson, The Squeeze Press, are available from Chorlton Bookshop or from The Squeeze Press, www.woodenbooks.com

The Garamantes ... that ancient Sahara civilization .... on the wireless today

To my shame I had never come across The Garamantes.

Ruins of the ancient city of Garma02, 2010

All of which will be put right when I listen to The Garamantes which is the latest of broadcasts from on In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 today and beyond.

"Misha Glenny and guests discuss an ancient civilisation who lived over 2000 years ago in the southwest of modern-day Libya. During prehistoric times, the Sahara Desert was greener and even had large lakes, but for the last 5000 years it has been a hyperarid environment. 

Extreme swings of temperature and limited surface water might make the Sahara seem like an inhospitable place to live, but an ancient people in North Africa known to us as the Garamantes thrived there. 

Following descriptions of the Garamantes in Roman and Greek texts, the Garamantes have often been seen as pastoral nomads, or as tribal barbarians on the periphery of the Mediterranean world. But the work of archaeologists in recent decades has revealed something different. 

Evidence suggests a society with flourishing towns and cities, complex underground irrigation systems, a key role in trade routes across the Sahara – and may give us a broader view of ancient history.

With David Mattingly, Emeritus Professor of Roman Archaeology at the University of Leicester, Farès Moussa, Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton and Cultural Heritage Consultant, and Josephine Quinn, Professor of Ancient History and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge

Producer: Martha Owen"

Location; In Our Time, BBC Radio 4

Picture; Ruins of the ancient city of Garma02, November 2010, Franzfoto, I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publish it under the following licenses: GNU head Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU Free Documentation License.

Looking for the lost ...... one street over time in Ancoats ..... no 3 Homer Street when the developer came knocking

The story of one street in Ancoats, and the people who lived and worked there.

North of the river, 1819

Homer Street was located just south of St Andrew’s Church and was bordered by the canal to the north, the river to the south and London Road Railway Station to the west.

A short walk in pretty much any direction would offer a mix of cotton mills, dye works and timber yards all of which provided work for the residents of our street.

I can’t be exactly sure when it was built, but St Andrews which is just one street away was opened in 1831 and by 1837 the properties show up in the rate books owned by a Mr Price.

And just eighteen years earlier on Johnson’s map of 1819 the area up from the river to the canal was still open land although already it was edged with buildings.

The area, 1966

Homer Street seems a cut above some of the others.

The houses consisted of four rooms and they commanded a rent of 1 shilling and 9d a week.

This was at a time when the best wages paid in the cotton factories in 1833, for a man in his 30s might earn 22 shillings and 8d.

Sometime between 1934 and 1988 the properties were demolished and the site is given over to a sheet metal works which continued to occupy the site until the 1960s when for a while the land was vacant.

During the 1970s and until quite recently the area was a bus depot which ceased operating at the beginning of this century.

It is now a food warehouse owned by Amato Food Products.*

It would be intriguing to know if anything the Homer Street properties still exist just below the surface.

Not that I would ask Mr Amato to dig a hole in his warehouse floor.

Location; Ancoats

Pictures; a section of Ancoats whre Homer Street was to be built in 18i6, from the Johnson’s map of Manchester, 1819 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ and  St Andrew’s Square from St Andrews Street, facing west, 1966, T Brooks, m10604, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

From New York to Well Hall, the story of the Cooper family in the 1850s

Well Hall in the April of 1844

I am fascinated by the people who history has neglected.

The rich, the powerful and those of influence have had their lives inspected, their achievements judged and their homes open to the public gaze.

But the poor and the ordinary have not fared so well.  They have been consigned to walk on parts in the great events of the past, living out little lives in great centuries.

And this pretty much sums up all we know of George and Francis Cooper who lived in Well Hall with their five children in the April of 1851.

In total they have left just two official documents to mark their existence but they are enough to shed an interesting light into the couple.

In the spring of 1851 they appear on the census and may have lived in one of the six cottages just north of Kidbrook Lane.  Neither had been born in Eltham, George who was 42 came from Surrey while Francis who had been born in 1815 came from Hove in Sussex.

Well Hall Cottages in 1909

Now this was not unusual and gives the lie to that old school book myth that few travelled far.  Just under 30% of the people here in Well Hall in 1851 had been born elsewhere.  Had you walked the lanes around Well Hall in that spring you might well have heard the accents of the Home Counties mixing with those of Yorkshire, Ireland and the far south west.

And it might just have been possible to pick up a slight North American influence in the words spoken by George and Francis’s eldest two children who had been born in New York in 1839 and 1842.

I don’t suppose we will get to know why they went to America or why they returned.
Perhaps the clue is in the fact that George described himself as a servant so perhaps they crossed the Atlantic with an employer.  Either way they were back here in Greenwich by 1844 for the birth of their third child and there they still were in 1849.

And two years later they were in Well Hall but not for long, because by 1861 they are missing from the census record.

Well Hall Cottages in 1909

In fact the family disappear completely until 1891, when Francis shows up in the census return for that year living in two rooms of a six roomed house in Greenwich as a sub tenant of a Mr Read who was a Railway guard. She lived alone describing herself as a widow and “living on own means.”

I suspect there will be more, and there are tantalizing hints about the fate of the children.

But at present I shall leave Francis in her two roomed house near Ravensbourne Road determined to follow up the address on the OS Map of London for the period and to check out the Rate Books for Well Hall to pinpoint the time the family were in Eltham.

Location; Well Hall, Eltham, London

Pictures; Well Hall in 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 Well Hall Cottages 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,