Waiting for the coal man

Enoch Royle the coal man circa 1930

There is something very reassuring about hearing the fire and the kitchen range being racked out in the morning.

More so if you are seven and it is one of those cold early December mornings.

Usually in our house dad did this around six just after he had got up and just before he made his breakfast.

It was the announcement that a new day had started and in its way was far better than any alarm clock because it was part of the routine of the house.

It was also combined with that knowledge that it was still early and you could drift back to sleep all warm despite the ice that had formed in the night on the inside of the windows.

Now it is a memory which I suspect will not be shared by many who were born after the 1950s.

The gas fire, 1938

Cleaning out and setting a new fire and maintaining the range were tiring, dirty and time consuming chores added to which bringing up a bucket of coal from the cellar was heavy work and so many opted for gas and electric fires and later still central heating all of which offered easy instant heat at the touch of a button.

That said of course many mining communities continued to rely on the delivery of coal from the NCB and even now once you leave the city and drive into the country there is still that distinctive smell of coal being burned and that lazy pall of smoke lifting from chimney tops.

At which point I must declare that this is no rosy nostalgic reflection on past times, but more a comment on what has been lost in just a few decades.

Along with that fire has gone the coal man and that distinctive sound of the coal thundering down the coal hole into the cellar.

It started with a loud rumble and finished with that after noise as the coal slid and settled, followed by the all pervading smell of the stuff which worked its way up despite both cellar doors being firmly closed.

Well Hall Road, 2014

All of which was something my mother could do without.

She was the first to demand gas fires throughout the house in Peckham and again when we moved to Well Hall.

Not for her the romance of coal and steam.

She would often remark on the end of the steam locomotive as progress pointing out that while they might have thrilled school boys of all ages they played havoc with your clean washing.

And in turn many of us will remember buildings darkened by decades of grime and soot and coming home covered in the stuff after a day climbing trees in the local park.

But each generation has a habit of reinventing the past and so  for the thirty years we have returned to open fires.

True often they were just an addition to the central heating and might be regarded as cosmetic, but now that most of the children have grown up and moved out there is less need to keep the whole house heated, and so we have retreated to the one room in the evening with a blazing fire and just a hint of the central heating across the rest.

The days of teenagers spread out on the three levels of the house all doing something different and doing it away from us have gone.

For many this will still be the fallout from modern living but not here.

From the six o’clock news till the weather forecast four and half hours later we will pretty much be in the one room, stocking that fire, and mildly disputing whose turn it is to venture into the coolness of the  kitchen.

And today with the fire cleaned out and set I just await the arrival of the coal man who comes once a week with two bags of mixed smokeless fuel and bags of kindling.

So somethings have just about come full circle.

Pictures; Enoch Royle and his father on Albany Road, circa 1930s from the Lloyd Collection, advert for gas fires, 1938, from from Your City, Manchester Municipal Officers’ Guild, 1938, a January open fire fire, 2024, Well Hall Road, 2014, Chrisse Rose

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 19 ........... the unremarkable

This is the continuing story of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

Now there is nothing over remarkable about these two pictures of our garden in Well Hall sometime in the 1970s.

The quality is a bit iffy but then they are over 47 years old and were taken with one of those old clunky instamatic cameras, which processed the film straight away and turned out the image in minutes.

The film was expensive and from memory you only got eight or so shots, but there was something magical about the instant nature of the process.

Today the mobile phone or the digital camera will do it equally fast with the added advantage that it can be sent on to family and friends across the planet.

But in 1970 this was pretty neat, and how better to use it than a snap of our back garden.

I doubt any of us will remember who took them but they show the garden just as I remember it.  My sisters, and in particular our Stella laid out the garden and Dad was on hand to do the actual work.

And like all back gardens, there in the corner was the shed, full of all sorts of treasures and a real necessity given we didn’t have a cellar.

Dad put it up around 1964 and a full thirty years later it still had that powerful smell of creosote.

Looking at out garden and across to our neighbours there is nothing remarkable about any of them, but that actually makes the fascinating and in their own way a real history lesson.

Here is how we decided to lay out our small gardens back in 1970.

They may not be much different from the same gardens today or those of the 1950s, but they do offer up a picture of life in 1970, added to which they are our garden, which is enough for me.

Location; Well Hall

Pictures; the back garden of our house on Well Hall Road, circa 1970, from the Simpson collection

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road,
https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall

Working a Salford Corporation Tram in 1917 ............ Salford women in uniform

I like the way that stories have a habit of reappearing and so it is with Miss Rebecca Chapman of Hodson Street who in 1918 began work with Salford Corporation as a “clippie” on the trams.

My old friend David Harrop acquired her contract, license and handbook and they featured on the blog.

And because it was such a good story she made her way into my  book on Manchester and the Great War.*

Now yes I know the title is Manchester and the Great War, but by the very nature of things people didn’t adhere to strict geographical boundaries.  

They moved from area to area, lived in Manchester but worked in Salford and Trafford and swapped homes and work places.

So a little bit of Salford has got into the book, and quite right too.

All of which is an introduction to a new short series featuring photographs of Salford women in uniform and given Miss Chapman’s contribution I have started with a picture of a clippie from 1917.

And I rather think she is holding her handbook which gave detailed instructions on how to work the tram, what to do in emergencies and the pay scales awarded to clippies.

There was even a few pages dedicated to making notes.

Miss Chapman had written soon after joining the Corporation that "she had fallen off the tram"

it was the only entry so I guess she never fell off again.

Location; Salford

Picture; Instructions to Female Conductors from the collection of David Harrop, and "uniformed woman worker with Salford Tramways," 1917, m08109,, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Manchester and the Great War, Andrew Simpson, the History Press, was published in February 2017, ISBN -33: 9780750 978965

That deadly smog …. a Clean Air Act…. and the story today …. on the wireless

I grew up with smog.

It was just the background to living in London in the 1940ss and 50s.

Of course, all our cities and towns were prone to the stuff if atmospheric and weather conditions trapped the smoke from countless domestic fireplaces and the tall chimneys of factories and power stations leaving it to settle around the streets and houses.

At the time we just called it fog and, in my case, I enjoyed the way it blotted out buildings and other urban features, deadened sound and got us out of school early.

But smog brought it with it a potential death sentence for some and doubtless didn’t do the health of any of us any favours.

Nor for that matter did a century and more of burning coal improve the state of buildings which were became caked in a layer of black soot which incidentally also settled on the trees and was visible on your clothes after climbing them.

All of this was to change in 1956 with the coming of the Clean Air Act which regulated what could be burnt, as witnessed by a cautionary note in 1964 from the survey of a house that we were about to buy which warned mum and dad that  “this house is likely to be included in a Smokless Zone under the Clean Air Act of 1956 and approved fireplaces must be fitted into the open fireplaces in the lower rooms by October next.”*

Now over the years there have been some fascinating accounts of those years and today I was drawn to another on BBC Radio 4’s “Every Breath You Take”, from the series “Rare Earth”which the sleeve notes remarked, “It was known as the Great Smog. In 1952, London was blanketed for five days in a thick toxic layer of soot and sulphur dioxide, leading to thousands of premature deaths. 

The outcome was the Clean Air Act of 1956. 

In this programme, Helen Czerski and Tom Heap ask what's changed in the seventy years which have passed since then. How clean is the air we now breathe?

Panel: Dr Gary Fuller, Honorary Senior Lecturer, Imperial College in London, Dr Kathy Davies, Environment Historian, Northumbria University, Beth Gardiner, Journalist and author,

Producer: Emma Campbell

Assistant Producers: Toby Field and Georgia Graham"*

Pictures; a foggy not smoggy day across the Rec, Beech Road, Chorlton, 2024

*Surveyors Report, February 1964

**Every Breath You Take, Rare Earth, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm

A golden childhood growing up in Well Hall in the 1960's

Lost in the woods, 1977

Now Eltham was a pretty good place to grow up in the 1960s especially when you had come from Peckham.

It was partly the opportunity to wander over large areas of open and wooded land where you could play, walk and just let your imagination out for the day.

That said I was 14 when we arrived in Well Hall which made some of the “play thing” a little old hat.

But that freedom to set off up into the woods on a warm summer’s morning with no real idea of where you would end up was magic.

Of course the first few times you took off up there it really was discovering new places, and then later it was equally special as you shared it with a girlfriend.

What started out at Well Hall could by degree take you off to Welling via the castle and offer up some stunning views.

And when you tired of trees, solitude and aimless meanderings there was always the Palace and the pleasure of walking along King John’s Walk towards Mottingham.

King John's Walk, towards Mottingham, 1977

Looking back all that didn’t last long, partly I guess because the summers were all too short and soon there were widening horizons and counter attractions.

Never underestimate just how a sixteen your old starting out a fresh at Crown Woods with a whole new set of friends can be drawn away from the simple pleasures of a walk in the woods.

But they never quite went away, after all when you live on Well Hall Road the woods dominated the view from the back window and on those storming summer nights when the sky was lit up with the jagged flashes of lightening it was hard not to be drawn up there.

Not that anyone with any sense would venture there in such a storm.

A much better attraction was the Welcome from where you could sit out the storm with a pint although all too often I was less lucky.  Those storms seemed to pick me out as I was walking back from a Friday night in Woolwich, and later still falling out of the King’s Arms in the High Street.

And now the woods and Well Hall are a long way from where I live and separated by a gulf of time but they still exert a pull and bring back a pretty perfect childhood.

Pictures; the woods and King Jon's Walk, 1977 from the collection of Jean Gammons

Sunlight House “a modern building with the best of old standards maintained"

Sunlight House, © 2013 Peter Topping

Earlier this month I was on Quay Street with Sunlight House which when it was completed in 1932 was seen as a building which combined “modern conceptions of architecture in its sleekness and in the vertical lines, yet [retained] the best of the old standards of design.”*

It was designed and built by Joseph Sunlight as the headquarters for his business and was a lavish and modern building as befitted a man who claimed to have created more than one million pounds worth of property in the  first fourteen years as an independent architect.

Not that that he had it all his own way.

Just a few years after the building was opened his application for a license to serve alcohol was turned down.

And in 1949 he failed to get planning permission to “build a 35 storey extension to Sunlight House and a new 14-storey building between Peter Street and Jackson’s Row [because] the premises would dominate existing and proposed civic buildings, exceed the appropriate density of the area, injure the amenities of near-by buildings, and prejudice possible development plans.”**

So, even the mighty, wealthy and influential do not always get their way.

On Quay Street in 1911

Nor was his Parliamentary career a long one.  He was elected as the Liberal MP for Shrewsbury in the 1923 General Election only to lose the following year in the subsequent General Election.***

It is one of those interesting little asides of history that had he retained his seat he might well have seen his Brick Bill for the making of bigger bricks pass into law.

It was a private members bill which had survived its reading by one vote but fell by the wayside with the dissolution of Parliament in 1924.
All of which is a long way from Sunlight House and from the properties it replaced.

Now the Manchester Guardian had reported in 1931 that before Sunlight House “was erected the site contained some of Manchester’s worst slums.”

Twenty years earlier these had consisted of a mix of shops and lodging houses and judging from photographs may well have had their time.

*Sunlight House, the Manchester Guardian, May 12, 1931

And some of those who lived on Quay Street

**No extension to Sunlight House, the Manchester Guardian, July 2, 1949

***December 6 1923, October 29, 1924

Maps & pictures, detail of Quay Street from the 1888-93 OS map of South Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/,  and street directory from Slater’s Manchester, Salford and Suburban Directory, 1911

Painting; Sunlight House, © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
Facebook:  Paintings from Pictures

“I make no rash promises …. promises never fulfilled and perhaps never meant to be” ……

Yesterday I wrote about the election campaign of Frank Beverley who stood as the candidate for the Chorlton-cum-Hardy Labour Party in the local elections of 1937.

At the time I had yet to uncover his election address containing the outline of what he stood for.

Happily today I have that address in front of me and it makes interesting reading, partly because of its honesty but also because the points he made 85 years ago have a resonance with the problems faced by many during this “Crisis in the cost of living” and the response of some in National Government.

So here it is, along with the endorsement by the Chorlton-cum-Hardy Labour Party.

He lost, and the story of that election can be read by following the link.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures; Election leaflet, courtesy of Cllr Mathew Benham 

*Mr. Frank Beverley ……. Chorlton-cum-Hardy .... 1937, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/01/mr-frank-beverley-chorlton-cum-hardy.html