One 1951 Festival ….a sliding Doors Moment …. and Mr. Feinstein of New York and New Haven

I have no recollection of the Festival of Britain.

Cover to the Guide Book, 1951

Somewhere beyond the Festival buildings was me, 1951

It was held in the summer of 1951 and looking at this picture postcard taken from across the River beyond the Festival buildings and out into southeast London there will be me.

I was just 20 months old, and we were living on Lausanne Road in Peckham

But given that it was summer, dad would have been working away and whether mum went on her own or with me I have no idea, and the passage of time has obliterated any chance of finding out.

My Wikipedia tells me that “The Festival of Britain was a national exhibition and fair held throughout the United Kingdom in the summer of 1951. 

Funded chiefly by the government at a cost of £12 million, it was intended to give the British public a sense of recovery and progress after the devastation of the Second World War, and to promote British science, technology, industrial design, architecture and the arts. 

It proved immensely popular, with more than ten million paid admissions to its six main exhibitions, and helped reshape British arts, crafts and design for a generation”. *

Within a decade of its opening, I was wandering the former site as a curious young kid with heaps of spare time, and later still as a teenager I would be drawn to the Royal Festival Hall and a host of concerts.

The Hall was opened in May 1951 and was part of the Festival of Britain.

Festival collection, 1951

The Skylon, 1951

At which point it would be easy to slide into telling the Festival’s story but there are very good accounts already in print as well as documentaries and that wonderful 1956 film The Long Arm which starred Jack Hawkins and featured the Festival Hall still shinny and new.

So, I shall be content with more images drawn from the back catalogue of Tuck and Sons picture
postcards of the Festival and instead wander off on a Sliding Doors moment which as every one knows who has seen the 1998 film of the same name, explores the idea that there can be mundane but pivotal moments which hold the possibility of a change in the course of a person's life.

Mr. Feinstien's offer, 1951

Now I don’t want to over exaggerate the Sliding Doors moment but contained in those Tuck cards was one addressed to a John Quinn of 271 New Litchfield Street, Torrington, Connecticut with an invite to visit “our store” to see “the distinguished collection of new woollen and gentleman’s accessories for 1951”.

The card was post marked London and dated August 29th, 1951.

And of course I was drawn in, but there began the problem, because the handwriting was bad and at first it was impossible to decipher Mr. Quinn’s address and I was forced back on a search of all streets in Torrington beginning with the word New, which proved to be a success, and gave me New Litchfield Street.

271 New Litchfield Street, Torrington, 2019

Armed with the address, Google Maps provided a street and a house.  

Now I can’t be sure that number 271 in 2019 is indeed the same property which Mr. Quinn occupied sixty-eight years earlier, but if it was, he was living in a three-storey timber clad house set in its own grounds, and surrounded by other houses of a similar design.

The curious in me is tempted to dig further into the story of Torrington, write to the town council and ask for assistance, and maybe I will strike lucky.

Torrington is a former mill town along the Naugatuck River Valley with a population of 35,000 which is just 6,000 more than when Mr. Quinn called it home.  

It has a Republican Mayor, can claim thirteen sites on the National Register of Historic Places and a water course called the Gulf Steam which rises in the Appalachian Mountain region of Torrington.  Added to which amongst its list of notable people is the abolitionist, John Brown.

All of which is worthy of more research and is not bad for a Sliding Doors Moment.

But I was puzzeled as to why Mr. Quinns’ picture postcard was over printed with the name Fenn Feinstein with offices at 9 E. 49th Street., New York and 264 York Street., New Haven on what was a bog-standard card printed in England. 

But the answer lies in the name of the man who sent the picture post card.  

He was Jack Feinstein and according to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum the “Frank Brothers was a prestigious New York City retailer and custom tailoring establishment that reached its peak influence in the mid-20th century. ”.**

264 York Street, New Haven, 2025

Of which there is more but for that you will have to follow the link.

Alas their New York store has gone but the New Haven one is still there and is an elegant building reflecting the firm’s stature as a business dealing in the “sophisticated and sometimes flamboyant Ivy League style, the brand was often associated with high-end menswear alongside names like Brooks Brothers and Dunhill. 

The firm was recognized for its custom-tailored suits and high-quality ready-to-wear items, including footwear and silk shirts.” **

Leaving me just to observe that while the postage stamp was removed, I can offer up one from another picture card posted the day before and bound for Belgium.

Location, London, 1951, Torrington, 2019 and New Haven, 2025

Postage stamps for the sending, 1951

Pictures; The Festival of Britain emblem, designed by Abram Games, from the cover of the South Bank Exhibition Guide, 1951, the collection of picture postcards of the Festival of Britain from Tuck and Sons, courtesy of DB Tuck, https://www.tuckdbpostcards.org/, and 271 New Litchfield Street Torrington, Connecticut, 2019, and 264 York Street., New Haven 2025, courtesy of Google Maps

*The Festival of Britain, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_of_Britain

** John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, https://jfk.artifacts.archives.gov/people/3552/frank-brothers--fenn-feinstein/objects

Revisiting County Street ...... Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester .......... nu 96

 This is County Street which is so unremarkable that it’s another of those narrow side streets not even worth a glance.

County Street, 2026

It is situated off Mount Street between Central Street and Lloyd Street, and goes nowhere.

It has none of the mysterious promise of other small side streets which might entice you in.

True it is narrow enough but it is also very short, ends in a dead end and has no twisty bits which make you wonder what is round the corner.

By 1900 it was just what you see now, although then it was called Chapel Street and ran into the back of the Memorial Hall and which is now a restaurant.

Go back just another fifty years and the street was indeed a more twisty stretch continuing all the way down to Coach Makers Entry which ran from Jackson’s Row to Lloyd Street.

And had you turned into it from Mount Street in 1851  it would have led to Brignall’s Dye Works and a Tannery before going off north and  east taking in any properties and passing the backs of another six buildings before exiting out on Coach Makers Entry, where for good measure there was the Coach Makers Arms.

The street in 1851

I can’t be sure when it was cut but it will date from after 1819, and indeed just fifteen years earlier this was just open land with a pond where the Albert Square Chop House now stands.

So it may not be much now but go back long enough and there was a lot more to that dead end, with plenty of stories just waiting to be uncovered.

Location, Manchester

Pictures; County Street, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the street in 1851 from Adshead’s map of Manchester, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

Uncovering a bit of the life of Lewis St J R Clutterbuck of Westmount Road in Eltham

Gertie's postcard 1915

Recently I was with Gertie about to send her postcard from Westmount Road in 1915.


She was keen to tell her friend E of how “I like the nursery work so much better so have taken a nurse’s place 2 children."

And it may be that her employers were the Clutterbuck’s who were in the house just four years earlier and at that time employed a child nurse for their daughter Jessie who was then just two.

I would really like to have found out more about Gertie but to date this is the only reference we have.

It is one of those frustrating things that sometimes people just fall through the cracks.  Not that I haven’t given up hope of tracing her, and the first long shot might be E whose surname we have and an address in Sudbury.

But as ever it is the people of property who leave more of a trail, and so it is with Lewis St J R Clutterbuck, his wife Isabella.

Royal Artillery Barracks, 1906

Lewis had been born in Dublin into an army family in 1885.    In 1891 Lewis and his parents were stationed in Chester Castle, and a decade later Lewis aged 16 was training to be an officer in Woolwich.

He married Isabella in 1907 in Dundalk and by 1911 they were in Eltham but I suspect only just because Jessie their daughter had been born in Henson in 1909.

And it is Lewis’s military record that allows us to trace him for the next fifty years.

In 1916 he was sent out to the Western Front, survived the war and was back in south east London after the Great War.

Now this I know this because in the October of 1919 when applying for his war medals his address was given as West Park Road in Eltham. Later for a short period he was in south West London before returning in the late 1920s to live on Westcombe Park Road in Blackheath.

Here he may have stayed until the late 1930s when he moved to Bishops Waltham in Hampshire where he died in a nursing home in 1965.

Church Parade, Royal Artillery Woolwich, 1939

He had steadily risen through the ranks, from a Lieutenant in the Royal Field Artillery in 1911, to a Major by 1916 and a Colonel by 1932 and along the way became an O.BE.

From 1932 he served on the Ordinance Committee of the Royal Arsenal and was still there five years later.

Now there is a lot still to find out about him and his wife Isabella and Jessie, not least what they were doing living in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 1941 which may have been a war posting.

But it is enough to reflect on just where a simple postcard can take you.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and pictures of Royal Artillery Barracks, 1906, and Church Parade, 1939 issued by Tuck & Sons, from the series Woolwich, courtesy of TuckDB,  http://tuckdb.org/

Picking up the packet boat from Stretford and then post haste to Castlefield on the Duke’s Canal

Now I often write about living in the township in the mid 19th century and I reckon if I had wanted to travel into Manchester it would have been by water.

The price of a package ticket

So if I could have afforded it I would have chosen one of the twice daily package boats from Stretford along the canal which transported passengers in comfort and speed.

A ticket for the front room cost 6d [2½p] and the back room 4d [1½p].*

This was travelling in style.   These packet boats were fitted with large deck cabins surrounded by windows which allowed the passengers to sit “under cover and see the country” glide by at the rate of six miles an hour, made possible by  two or sometimes three horses which pulled the packet.  And if that was not style enough the lead horse was guided by a horseman in full company livery.**

Cornbrook south towards Stretford

It was a pleasant enough journey for most of the route was still across open farm land and it was not till Cornbrook that the landscape became more industrial.

From here on there was no mistaking that the final destination was that busy, smoky and energetic city.

The chemical and dye works of Cornbrook gave way to saw mills, a textile factory, paper mill and all manner of wharves and ware houses before the packet arrived in the heart of Castlefield.

But we all know that I wouldn’t have been in the money and so there would have been no fast packet boat for me and no walk out of the village along the old road to Stretford, instead it would have been a longer and slower tramp, north through Martledge.  But that is another story for another time.

Pictures; Packet boat charges from Pigot and Slater’s Directory of Manchester and Salford 1841, and detail of the Cornbrook stretch of the Duke’s canal from the OS map of Lancashire, 1841-53, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*This was beyond what most of our residents could afford.  A domestic servant might earn 2s 9d [13½] while that of a labourer was 13s.6d [57½p].

**Slugg, T.J., Reminiscences of Manchester, J.E.Cornish, Manchester 1881

Today I forget the history …. and celebrate the green bean

Well, I say forget the history but that’s not likely and anyway I bet there is a long and fascinating book on green beans through the ages.

And at 76 I have pretty much lived with the vegetable all my life.  Nana cooked them with cloves, but then she also added cloves to peas and apple sauce.  Fine until you bit into one.

As a student I would mix and match meals rotating tins of green beans with tins of peas and baked beans in the spirit of that now much advertised message of five a day.

Today with time on my hands, I have returned to that simple approach to cooking which favours fresh over tinned making food from scratch and avoiding the much-maligned processed word.

Not forgetting those two other twin requirements of using seasonal produce and avoiding waste.

All of which brings back to my green beans which are in season through July into September, and the leftover pile I cooked yesterday.

Our cookbooks groan with heaps of recipes for serving them up and my own favourite is simple and quick.

Having already cooked the beans they are added to a tomato sauce, which is then warmed through and then allowed to cool.

As with so many dishes they are best eaten the following day allowing all the flavours to mingle and develop.

And here I know there will be people who make point to what I have left out  with suggestions of what I should put in, but in the end, it is just down what’s available and what you fancy on the day.

That said a trawl of recipies threw up another favourite which mixes green beans with pesto, potatoes and pasta. 

And one that I think the jury is still out on which is Green bean casserole.  It’s popular in the US as a side dish served at the Thanksgiving meal and consists of  adding  green beans, mushroom soup, milk, soy sauce, ground black pepper, and crisp fried onions.

My Wikipedia tells me it was created by “Dorcas Reilly in 1955 while working in the home economics department at the Campbell's Soup Company in Camden, New Jersey.  

The recipe was created for a feature article for the Associated Press; the requirement was for a quick and easy dish using ingredients most US households kept on hand.”* 

I rather think I would prefer to go even simpler, and sauté the beans with some garlic. 

And that is it.

Pictures; my green beans, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Green bean casserole, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_bean_casserole

When Harold married Alma in the April of 1928 at Dartford

I am looking at two images which are now 90 years old.

This was the wedding celebrations of Harold Morris and Alma Minnie Shove in April 1928.

We all have pictures like this but many of them will be undated and long ago the identities of those staring back at us will have been forgotten as have the events surrounding the image.

Now even if I didn’t know some of the people and couldn’t place them in the first half of the last century they do have a fascination and an importance.

Part of this is because photographs like this so rarely see the light of day and if they do it is limited to a close set of family and friends.

What of course strikes you first off are the clothes including those above the knee dresses, soon to fall a few inches as the 1930s came along.

And then there is the half hidden garden and house a reminder that most weddings for people like Harold and Alma ended back at the house.

But even here there are questions that we might never know or have an answer to, like the name and age of the elderly woman in the corner of the second picture. I rather think she will be in her 70s or perhaps older, and so her presence takes us back to the late 1850s.

A time almost as remote from Harold and Alma’s experiences as 1928 is to us.

It is just possible that this lady may have walked to her wedding, that amongst the guests would have been those who could remember reading the stories of the old Queen’s wedding in 1840, and more than a few whose parents had talked of the rejoicing of the news of the allied victory at Waterloo and the shock they felt at hearing of the death of Lord Nelson.

And in the same way looking back at that April of 1928 is to see a totally different landscape. Alma might have been 23 years old but it would be another four months before Parliament voted to extend the franchise to her and a full year before she vote in a general election.

That general election in the May of 1929  was dubbed the flapper election marking as it did the first time that women of Alma’s age and class could help determine the next government of this country.

Nor is that all for if the newlyweds had wanted to dance to record music it would have been via a wind up gramophone, many of the films they might have watched would still have been silent ones and many such couples could only hope to aspire to one of those new and clean electric cooker.

So bring on these old family photographs.

Location; Eltham, London

Picture’s from the collection of Jean Gammons

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ................ nu 53 Silver Street, a bus station and some nasty history

Now this is Chorlton Street Bus Station in the 1960s and the image presents a bit of mystery, but more of that later.

Chorlton Street Bus Station, 1964

For now it is that gap between the office block and the ramp to the right of the picture and Chorlton Street which gave its name to the bus station which interests me.

That gap was the continuation of Silver Street.

You can still walk down Silver Street from Aytoun Street which ran on to David Street but my bit has vanished.

Back in the 1850s Silver Street and its neighbours were a warren of small closed courts leading off narrow alleys and filled with small back to back houses.

They were not perhaps the worst the city had to offer but they were neither the best.  In his case notes during the cholera outbreak of 1832, Dr Gaultier offers up a a vivid picture of the area. Chorlton Street he wrote “was tolerably clean and open but the vicinity crowded and populous.”*

Silver Street, 1849

But the home of the Bullock family was dire.

Mr and Mrs Bullock lived in one room with their two children and Mr Bullock’s mother.

The room was on the upper storey of a “filthy and crowded house” and was equally as “filthy.”

Even before they contracted cholera none were seen to be in good health and baby Martha aged eight months was “ricketty, and emaciated.”

In the course of just one week all of them died of cholera.

A month later our doctor was back in Silver Street attending Jane White who lived in a cellar and who died just days after contracting the disease.

Today Chorlton Street and Silver Street look far removed from the mass of courts, alleys and crowded houses of 1832 and that stretch of Silver Street occupied by Jane White is now underneath Chorlton Street Bus Station.

And here is the puzzle with that first picture, because read the histories of the bus station and they all agree that it was opened in 1950, redesigned in 1967 with the addition of the multi story car park and went through a major rebuild in 2002.

Major Street and the lost Silver Street, 1963

Now all of that is fine, but the caption on the picture offers up a date of 1964 which means that somebody is wrong.

I am confident someone will offer an explanation for the date of the rebuilt bus station and while I wait I suggest that those wishing to walk the past can just step back into the past can get a stab at it, because that vanished bit of Silver Street is now the entrance to a small car park between the back of Yates’ and the car park ramp, while the small road that runs along the bus station is the continuation of Major Street, but that is for another time.

Silver Street, 2016

But that is not quite all, because soon after I posted the story Andy Roberston sent me this picture of the corner of Silver Street where it joins Princess Street.

In may haste to complete the story I had failed to go looking for any more of Silver Street.  So the intrepid seeker after lost streets of Manchester can walk along another bit of my street, although it does end in a car park.

Location; Manchester

*The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera in Manchester, Henry Gaulter M.D., 1833case notes no 5-8, page 162 and nu 71, page 178

Pictures; Chorlton Street Bus Station,  W. Higham, 1964, m56893, the ramp under construction 1963, W. Higham, m56982, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  Silver Street from Andy Robertson  2016, and detail of Silver Street 1849 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1849, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/