One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ....... part 156 ..... the telly that makes you feel ancient

 The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.*

We all have those moments when you realize just how many years have passed you by.

For me it can be any one of a heap of things from the comics of my youth, the shocking revelation that I grew up eating sugar sandwiches, or that back in the 1950s our first phone was shared with another family, which meant we could only use it when they weren’t but we could listen into their conversations.

But today it is the telly, and not any telly but the one we rented which offered up just three channels.  It was colour and was a recent upgrade from a black and white one and yes to change channels you had to get up, cross the room and push the button.

No fancy remote gadget for which every family spawned a different name, which in our case was “the dit dit”.  

Of course, the absence of one meant we couldn’t lose it and end up arguing about who had lost it, only to find it down the side of the settee two hours later.

But it did have a wooden case which allowed you to polish it and think it was really a bit of furniture.

And that I suppose was a step forward from our first 1950s set which had double doors with a walnut finish which I I suppose was a statement about how tellies were not yet fully accepted and had to be hidden as a piece of something else.

This particular set dates from 1978 and is a reminder that the first colour transmissions by the BBC were only a decade earlier.

I remember going to the Welcome Inn one summer afternoon to watch Wimbledon, not that I am a tennis fan rather it was the novelty of watching one of the first colour transmission.

The observant will spot that we rented this set.  In those years we were customers of both Visionhire and Rediffusion, although I can’t quite remember which we finished up with.  Suffice to say I think Visionhire occupied a double fronted shop on Barlow Moor Road, and Rediffusion or maybe Granada were almost opposite on the corner of St Annes and Barlow Moor Roads.

As a story it’s not perhaps the most dramatic piece of history but is how we lived in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and looking at the set now I do feel old.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; Our telly, circa 1978, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Story of a House, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

A little bit of the old Assize Courts in a farm house garden in Chorlton

Now I have to confess that this picture of Manchester Assize Courts interests me more for the story behind one of the figures that adorned the roof.

And this is the stone figure which sat in the garden of Park Brow Farm at the bottom of Sandy Lane where it joins St Werburghs Road.

My friend Tony Walker maintained that it came from the old Manchester Assize Courts on Great Ducie Street in Strangeways and looking at pictures of the building the figures do look the same.

It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse and finished in 1864.

Sadly this magnificent building did not last a century and after being hit during the blitz of December 1940 and again in ’41 it was demolished in 1957.

Some of the exterior sculptures were designed by Thomas Woolner who was one of the founding members of the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, but I rather think our figure was the work of the Irish stonemason firm of O’Shea and Whelan.

Picture; The Assize Courts,   from the series Manchester United Kingdom, marketed by Tuck & Sons, 1903, courtesy of Tuck DB, http://tuckdb.org/ and stone figure from the collection of Tony Walker

The bridges of Salford and Manchester ....... nu 1 Blackfriars Bridge sometime in the 1850s

Now of course it does really depend on which way you cross the bridge.

But I am not a pedant.

And I am not inclined to add anything more, save to say it is another by the artist Mr C W Clennell who strolled into Salford from Manchester sometime in the 1850s and this was the result.

So far I have come across four of paintings featuring Salford.

And that is al I am going to say.

Location; Salford

Picture, Blackfriars Bridge, C W Clennell, , m77146 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Queenscroft, the one you can miss

Queenscroft, 2013 

Queenscroft is one of those places you can miss which is a pity because it has a rich history dating back to 1720 and maybe even earlier.

And not for the first time I am struck by one of the major differences between Eltham where I grew up and Chorlton cum Hardy where I have lived for the last 37 years.

Both were small rural communities on the edge of big cities, and both were seen by those with money as a good place to live.

But Chorlton had fewer of those big fine houses and all of them have now vanished save two modest properties unlike Eltham which had more and has been lucky enough to keep many of them.

During the last century most of them have changed their use but they are still there.

A once elegant home

Which brings me back to Queenscroft which stands at 150 Eltham Hill next to a larger neo Georgian block of yellow brick built in 1973.

Today the property is not seen at its best.

It is sandwiched between other properties and is close to the road, so that the only way to fully take in its splendour is to stand on the opposite side of Eltham Hill and gaze at it between passing traffic.

But just a century ago it was still set well back from the highway behind a stone wall and sixty years earlier commanded fine views at the rear across open land.

To the east and behind the house was an orchard and then just fields all the way down to the Palace.

Queens Croft in 1909 with garden wall and orginal spelling

It had fourteen rooms and a little of its former elegance can be seen from the well proportioned windows and front entrance.

At the turn of the last century it was occupied by a Colonel Tasker and then by Lieutenant Edward Beddington and his wife Elsie, their two young sons and five servants.

In 1911 Lieutenant Edward Beddington was 27 and an officer in the 16th Lancers and according to his military record was one of the “Old Contemptibles” who had fought in the opening months of the Great War in France.  Unlike so many of the British Expeditionary Force he survived the war and retired as a Lieutenant Colonel and died in 1926.

In time it should be possible track most of the families of Queenscroft over the last two centuries, and one has already come to light.

Looking east up the hill with the church in background

This was John and Elizabeth Garland who were there by 1841 and may have been living in the house on the hill by 1837.

In that year John who was a wine merchant is listed as paying land tax in Eltham and two years later is in the tithe schedule.

There after he appears in various directories, the 1851 census and the poll book for 1852 which also records that he voted Liberal in the General Election.

He died in Eltham in the January of 1854 and was buried in the parish church Elizabeth his wife survived him by another twelve years.

Queenscroft in 1874

I shall return to the people of Queenscroft because there will be other stories of the people who lived behind its front door.

And only today my friend Jean has gone off to check out more of its history including a memory of going there to arrange a visit from the sweep who lived in the place.

So that just leaves the map of the area with Queenscroft in 1870 with the house in red.

Pictures; Queenscroft,  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
Queenscroft today from the collection of Jean Gammons  and map of Eltham from the OS map of Kent, 1858-74

With Elizabeth Jane Hunt and three children in a two roomed house in Eltham in 1911

This is the White Hart on a summer’s day in 1909, and it was going to be the subject of the story.

Mrs Ann Nunn who ran the five roomed pub was 59 years old had been born in Suffolk and was a widow.

During the twenty or so years before 1909 she had run another pub on King Arthur Street a few minutes’ walk from New Cross Road.  Back then it was a densely packed part of south east London close to an iron works and in the shadow of the viaduct of the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.

Now I don’t yet know when her husband died but I think it may have been in 1897.  Either way she was still in King Arthur Street in 1901 and will have moved into the White Hart sometime aftter the January of 1908 and had gone by 1918.  Now I know this because she does not show up on either the street directories for 1908 and 1918 but is there on the sign above the door of the pub in 1909 and fills in her census return two years later.

But as things do I was drawn away from Mrs Nunn and instead wandered a little further up the street, stopping first at Harry Harvey’s fruit and greengrocer’s shop next door.

It is one of those remarkable examples of just how many people can be squeezed into a small property.

Here in the two rooms above the shop lived Mr and Mrs Harvey their two young children and the 18 years old assistant Frederick Walter Saunders.

Nor were the Harvey’s the only family to juggle overcrowded conditions, for around the corner in another two properties with just two rooms each lived the Chapman family of four and Mrs Hunt and her three children.

And it is Elizabeth Jane Hunt’s story that draws you in.  Her three children were aged, 10, 8 and 6, and for her the juggling began with having to have her daughter in her bedroom leaving the two boys to share the downstairs room beside the scullery.

She had been married for eleven years and worked a charwoman, which was not an easy job.

The date of her husband’s death has eluded me so far but I know he was called Charles and worked as a “Steel and Grass Borer in the Gas Works", and in the April of 1901 Elizabeth and Charles were living on the Broadway in Bexleyheath not far from Gravel Hill.  There is a record of a Charles Hunt who died in 1907 which puts their youngest child at just two years old.

His death may have occasioned the move to 4A the High Street and those two rooms hard by the White Hart.

I don’t have a picture of the properties but they look to have been built with one room above the other and a lean to scullery or kitchen attached.

Alternatively they may have been part of number 4 which was the shop run by the Harvey's/  If so this makes that property a much larger one with six rooms which will have been subdivided.

Either way neither Elizabeth Jane or Mr amd Mrs Chapman appear on those street directories which either means the rooms were vacant or that they were not deemed important enough to be listed at number 4.

I am hoping that someone will have a picture, but in the meantime I am forced back to that of the White Hart.

Pictures; the White Hart in 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

Looking for the story of Graeme House and that Chorlton Shopping Precinct

Graeme House and Safeway, 1971

We don’t do recent history very well.

I guess it is simply because we take it for granted and don’t even see it as history.

Added to which it is sometimes quite difficult to track down the story.

So when I washed up in Chorlton in the mid 1970s the shopping precinct, Graeme House and that car park were a done deal, but only just.

They had replaced a set of houses and cut Manchester Road in two leaving just two properties as witness to what had once been.

Shops to let, 1971

You can find a few people who remember those houses and one of my friends attended a private school on that lost stretch of Manchester Road, but the memories are fading.

And to date I have found just a handful of photographs recording the demolished houses which ran along Wilbraham Road, Manchester Road, and Barlow Moor Road.

Part of the problem is that such developments don’t warrant being recorded in history books, so Mr Lloyd’s two books skip over the building of the precinct and the book written by Cliff Hayes has just a picture.*

From the Guardian, 1973

Of course the planning applications along with the deliberations of the Planning Committee should still be available but having crawled over the documents relating to the development of Hough End Hall a little earlier this can be long tedious and sometimes unrewarding.

All of which just leaves the local newspapers which will have recorded the events.

Graeme House and car park, 1973

And that has so far thrown up an advert for the remaining offices to still to be let in 1971 and a few photographs of Graeme House and the precinct.

Sadly I am no nearer to knowing why it was called Graeme House.

Intriguingly I did come across Graeme Shankand who was a planning consultant and architect who worked on projects in the North West.

It is a tenuous link but in the process did introduce me to a very interesting architect, who played an important part in founding the William Morris Society.

The precinct, 1973

But that as they say is for another time.

So for now I shall close with the memory of shopping in Safeway not long after it had opened in the precinct.

It was bright, busy and at the time the biggest supermarket in Chorlton, and for a while continued to operate after its bigger store had opened by the old railway station.

Now that should have been the end but to reaffirm that simple observation that history is messy, only hours after I posted the story Ste Passant suggested that the office block may have been named after Henry John Greame Lloyd who cropped up on a legal document.

Now I rather think that he was part of the Lloyd family that owned a large part of Chorlton coming from the same area and leaving £151,021 10s on his death in 1919.

All of which just leaves me to go off and search the records.

Pictures; the Shopping Precinct and Graeme House, H.Milligan, 1971, m17408, m19763, m17832, m17405 and Graeme House, The Guardian, October 22, 1973, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*The Township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1972,  Looking Back at Chorlton-cum-Hardy, John M Lloyd, 1985, CHORLTON-CUM-HARDY, Cliff Hayes, 1999

** Graeme Shankand, John Kay, http://www.morrissociety.org/publications/JWMS/W84-85.6.2.Kay.pdf

*** Buldoze and be damned, Terence Bendixson, the Guardian January 8 1969

A lost pub on Fairfield Street

This is the Bridge Inn on Fairfield Street as it was in 1970.

And it is a pub I will have passed countless times on the bus on the journey to Grey Mare Lane and Ashton.

But despite living for a chunk of time in east Manchester and beyond in the 1970s, I can’t say I ever noticed the pub and certainly never went in it, and that is a shame.

I can track a pub with that name to this spot back to 1840, when it was surrounded by a mix of industrial and residential properties.

According to the 1911 census, the landlord was a Fred Lord, who with his wife Elizabeth managed the pub, assisted by Arthur Dixon who was the waiter and Ethel Jackson who was described as a domestic servant.

And along with these were the Lord’s daughter, young Vera Patricia, aged 3, and Mr. Lord’s widowed mother.

The same census offers both a   glimpse into the pub, and into its occupants.

It had eight rooms, and may already have been familiar to Elizabeth who had been born in Ardwick and to Elizabeth’s mother in law who was born just up the road in Bradford.

What strikes you are the little details.  Ethel Jackson was just sixteen, Mrs. Lord senior was already a widow at 52, and the Lord’s had moved around the city, having been in Gorton in 1908.

And for an official document Fred Lord was less than conscientious about completing the form accurately having, failed to ascertain exactly where his 22 years old waiter had been born, so while I know it was WR, which may have been Whalley Range, the county is shown just as an ?.

Of course, it may also be that Arthur Dixon didn’t know his exact birth place.

Someone I know will be able to supply a date for when it closed, but for now, that is it, other than to say there remain some stories of the surrounding buildings which we will return to.

Location; Fairfield Street

Pictures; the Bridge Inn, 1970, A. Dawson, m49287, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and in 2020, from the collection of Andy Robertson