Nightingale’s, and an old 78 RPM ............. a little bit of our retail past on Wilbraham Road

Now I wonder if anyone remembers Nightingales the electrical shop which traded from 436 Wilbraham Road.

Like most of the strip of shops along the stretch from Keppel to Albany no 436  is now a fast food out let but back in the middle decades of the last century Nightingale’s sold all things electrical and by 1960 had an impressive range of televisions, transistor radios, fridges and washing machines in its window.

Now I know it was there by 1938 and still there in 1960 by a chance find and three photographs from the Manchester Digital collection.

The chance find was an old 78 RPM record of the Boston Promenade Orchestra performing the Ritual Fire Dance and the Conclusion to Bolero conducted by Arthur Fiedler.

And the catalogue number dated the record to 1938 while the perfectly preserved dust cover offered up the Nightingale name and the address of both the Chorlton shop and another at 58 Wilmslow Road in Withington.

At which point I can claim little credit for the find or much of the subsequent research.

It was Andy Robertson’s son who came across the record and Andy who went looking in Manchester's  digital collection, leaving me the easy job of hunting down the record in the HMV catalogue.

In time I am sure there will be people who offer up all sorts of memories of the shop, what they bought there and perhaps a beginning and end date to the business.

For now I shall just reflect that it wasn’t too long ago that high streets and more humble parades of shops could boast a full range of shopping experiences from the wool shop, electrical business along with DIY, hardware and the odd travel agents.

So there you have it a bit of our consumer past on Wilbraham Road, with just one last observation that it had gone by 1969.

Additional research by Andy Robertson

Pictures; record and dustcover, circa 1938 from the collection of Andy Robertson and Nightingale’s on Wilbraham Road, 1960, A E Landers, m18308 & m18307, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Going to school in Eltham in 1840

Now the National School  was opened in 1814 by the Reverend J.K. Shaw Brooke.

These were church schools and provided elementary education for the children of the poor.

They were the product of the National Society which had begun in 1811 and aimed to establish a national school in every parish delivering a curriculum based on the teaching of the church.

According to a report of the Charity Commissioners from 1819 the annual salary of the school master was to be £20 and by one of those wonderful chance survivals the first register was preserved which the historian R.R.C.Gregory published in his of Eltham.*

“Amongst the “batch of boys admitted were many bearing names that are still familiar in Eltham,
James Shearing, aged 7
John Scriven, aged 11
Thomas Foster, aged 6
Edward Hand, aged 10, 
William Stevens, aged 6
Charles Russell, aged 9
James Kingston, aged 7
I. Wakeman, aged 6
T.Wakeman, aged 8.”

And just like these names were familiar to Mr Gregory and his readers in 1909, some have stepped out of the shadows again today.

Thomas Foster was the son of the blacksmith who helped run the smithy on the High Street and the Wakeman boys were I think related to Peter Wakeman who had been invited to the Jubilee celebrations to mark the Reverend J.K. Shaw Brooke’s fifty years as vicar of Eltham.

This first school was at the end of Pound Place where it joined Back Lane and 1840 the infants’ school was added.

Now given that I have already mentioned Richard White who taught at the school in 1841, and lived on Pound Place I reckon there are a few more stories to come on the National School, its teachers and students.

Location; Eltham, London



Pictures; The National Infants School 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

It's the detail that draws you in, another Belleville picture from 1945

I keep coming back to this picture and like all good pictures it raises questions which as yet I do not have answers.

On the surface it is easy enough to see what is going on.

We are at Belleville railway station, Ontario in the autumn of 1945 and the Prince Edward Hastings Regiment have returned from the European war.

Of the two central figures, one is an officer who appears in many of the pictures while the other can be seen in a few of the photographs.  I would love to know what has made them laugh but that sadly is lost.

Beyond them there are other soldiers getting ready to disembark the train.  Some stare directly at the camera, while others seem more intent on getting on to the platform.

But what draws you in is the central figure of the railway employee.  He is one of two and the way they stand is out of kilter with the upbeat mood all around them.

Their heads are bowed and they stand apart from all that is going on.

Now I shall be careful and avoid any sweeping generalizations.

My knowledge of this period of Canadian history is almost nonexistent, which is an awful admission and one I want to address.

But I do have to ask why have they struck that pose?

There are of course many possible explanations, ranging from the shyness of the employees, to company policy about how to behave when passengers are disembarking from a company train, particularly when the press are present.  Or just maybe it is something less pleasant.

Either way my attention is drawn to this tiny little scene and I wonder at the social conventions of the period.

In much the same way as in the film of Doctor Zhivago where there is a scene where the young Zhivago is called to assist on a case of attempted suicide.  It is snowing hard and Zhivago and his professor go inside the house leaving the coachman to sit outside and wait.

Nothing you might think as odd.  But this is pre Revolutionary Russia, and Zhivago has just witnessed a brutal attack by the army on a peaceful street protest.  Added to that, the house call takes place against a backdrop of a social gathering of the wealthy.

The contrasts are all too obvious but I doubt that many pick up on the plight of the coachman who will sit for hours in the snow waiting for his employers.

There will be those I suppose who mutter “he’s going over the top and elevating a sixty second shot into something more than it is” which may be so.

And yet it is the tiny detail that often reveals a host of stories and puts the image into the bigger picture.  Well with this one we shall see.

In the meantime it is another of those unique records of the Prince Edward Hastings Regiment retuning home.

And there is no way that you can escape that sense of excietement on the faces of men who left for Europe in late 1939, saw action in France, Italy and Holland and were now back in Canada.

The collection is in the possession of Mike Dufresne who bought them in an auction and tells me they will be left to the regimental museum.

I can think of no fitting place for them to to end up and is a good reminder that all such images are part of oor collective history.

And it is worth mentioning also that Mike has already begun releasing them to the social network site,  Vintage Belleville, Trenton & Quinte Region.*

Now this I like not least because it means that people who live close by can see them, but total strangers from the other side of the world can also share this little bit of history.

All of which is fascinating, after all it is the stories of the "little people caught up in a big century" which bring the events of that period to life.

Picture; from the collection of Mike Dufresne

* https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vintage-Belleville-Trenton-Quinte-Region/395830067158776

In St Ann’s Square with the Rotary Photo Company …… sometime in the early 20th century

Now if you wanted proof that St Ann’s Square has always been a busy and fussy place, the evidence is here in this picture postcard.

I don’t have a date, but I am guessing we are sometime in the early 20th century, and a bit of detective work using the names of the shops and street directories will get close to when the picture was taken.

Everyone will pick up on some different bit of the picture, from the line of taxis and the cabby’s hut, to the throng of people parading through the square and that female cyclist.

And then there is another story around the company who published the picture postcard.

I had causally thought that Rotary Photo, EC were a Manchester firm, but not so.

According to that excellent site, Graces Guide to British Industrial History, they were a London business with offices at 23 Moorfields London, with works at West Drayton.

They were established in 1901, as The Rotary Photographic Co and “was a huge publisher of real photo postcards. 

One of their unique novelty postcards was a 1¾ inch x 5½ inch (4.4cm x 13.9cm) photo series of bookmark cards. Most seem to have been posted in the 1903-04 period".

Later in the century they amalgamated with other photographic companies and were still in business in 1947.

Location; St Ann’s Square

Picture; St Ann’s Square, date unknown, courtesy of Steve

*Graces Guide to British Industrial History, https://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Rotary_Photographic_Co

Sarah Sutton, a life lived out on the Row

There are no pictures of Sarah Sutton, nor to my knowledge has she left a diary, or anything which might tell me about her life.

She was born in 1821 in Withington and lived with her husband in a wattle and daub cottage on the Row*. She died in the same cottage 70 years later. Her husband Samuel was a farm labourer which was about what most people did here in Chorlton in the first five decades of the 19th century.

Sutton's Cottage 1892

Unlike the wives of the well to do or even some of the farming families she had no servants to help her.

In the spring of 1851 she had two children under the age of eight, was married to a labourer and had the added responsibility of an infirm father in law.

So tracking her working day is a good start to understanding the daily routines of running a house.

Keeping a wattle and daub cottage clean was no easy task. Plaster walls tended to crumble, the roof of thatch could be home to vermin, and the stone or brick floors were damp and in need of constant sweeping.

The interior will have been similar to these pictures from a one up one down brck cottage which stood on Maitland avenue until the 1930s.

Her day would begin at six in the summer and not much later in the winter months. One of the first chores was the collection of water. This might come from a well or the pump in the Bailey farm yard opposite. She may also have used the fish pond on the Row, which was next to her cottage. In having a supply so close Sarah was lucky, for other people on the Row the regular daily journey back with a bucket of water would be a much longer journey. And this simple task would be mirrored across the township and beyond.

Downstairs room Maitland Cottage circa 1930

Water was needed for cooking drinking and washing and there would be a number of journeys to collect it. 

The next task of the day would have been laying and lighting the fire. This may have used wood or possibly coal. 

But traditional wattle and daub fire places were large and not suited for burning coal which needs a smaller fire place and an efficient flu to draw the flame. The compromise was to reduce the size of the fire place which would allow the use of coal now readily available from the Duke’s Canal.

The move from wood to coal may have been underway during the 1850s and while no one was selling the fuel in the township in 1851 there were a number of coal dealers recorded a decade later.

Once the fire had been made and breakfast served, there were beds to be aired, plates washed and the floor swept. Rugs and mats were taken out and banged against the wall, and even before the floor was swept and scrubbed in damp weather the stone flags had to be scrapped with a an old knife blade to loosen the trodden in mud.

But this simple task could only be done after Samuel had gone off to work and her son John who was seven to school. This left baby Ann who was just one and would have required frequent attention. It is likely that Sarah could have relied on one of her neighbours living in the same row. The midday meal needed preparing and if her husband was working too far away his meal would have either been prepared before he left or taken out to him which might have fallen to her son John.

Downstairs room Maitland Cottage showing boxed staircase circa 1930

Most rural families like the Suttons had a diet heavily based on vegetables. 

Some of these were available from the cottage garden, including the all important cabbages and potatoes as well as onions, carrots, parsnips and broad beans.

They were lucky enough to have an orchard behind their home and there may have been opportunities to collect some of the windfall.

 And like many cottage gardens there were also currant and gooseberry bushes, raspberry canes and rhubarb. Gooseberries were ready by June and were popular in the north where there were competitions and societies.

Sarah would also have grown some flowers and one that has survived and still grows on the site of her cottage is greater celandine. It has beautiful yellow flowers and like many that Sarah and others would have grown also had medical properties. Greater celandine is toxic but according to various sources in the right doses can be used for therapeutic uses. She may well have used it as a mild sedative to treat asthma, bronchitis and whooping cough along with other complaints including warts. But it is toxic nature and so not one to try at home.

It still grows on the site at the corner of Wilton and Beech Roads and may be one of the last survivors of our cottage gardens. My botanist fried David Bishop spotted it some time ago and wrote about on his blog.


In the back garden there may have been an area reserved for keeping chickens. Eggs could be expensive and keeping chickens not only avoided having to buy them but could be a small extra form of revenue. So in

1851 the price of a dozen eggs ranged from 4d [2p] in the summer to 8d [4p] later in the year. The family pig was another means of supplementing the family diet and might provide meat for up to seven months. It would be bought in the spring from a local farmer who might wait to the animal was killed and the meat sold before receiving payment in the autumn. This was the only way that some families could afford the cost of a pig which might be between 20s and 25s [£1-£2.25p].

Site of Sutton's Cottage, 2010

But it is unlikely that all their needs could be met from what they grew. Much research has shown that at best the garden supplemented the food they bought. But some might be gathered for free.

There were many wild fruits and plants across the township for the collecting. Wine might be made from a variety of flowers as well as fruit and for those who knew where to look there were rich sources of plants which could enhance cooked dishes.

Pictures; Sutton’s Cottage circa 1892, photograph from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook of 1895  and interior of the cottage on Maitland Avenue in the collection of Philip Lloyd, the site today of the cottage on the corner of Beech Road and Wilton Road, from the collection of Andrew Simpson


*The Row is now Beech Road

With The Hastings and Prince Edward Regiment in Belleville, Ontario in 1945

Arriving Home, 1945 

Here are three of those images that pretty much speak for themselves.  

We are in Belleville in Ontario in the autumn of 1945 watching the home coming of The Hastings and Prince Edward  Regiment.

They had shipped out for Europe in the December of 1939, saw action in France in June 1940 and were part of the allied landings in Sicily and mainland Italy in 1943.  In the final months of the war they moved to North West Europe

Marching through familiar streets, 1945

Meanwhile back in Canada in June 1945, a second Battalion of the regiment was mobilized for service in the Pacific but with Japan’s surrender in the August the battalion was disbanded in the November.

Each photograph is a rich source of detail, from the informality of the disembarkation at the railway station to the formal march past.

So often the identities of the people in the pictures are lost but the second soldier in the parade was the Inetelligence Officer Farley Mowatt.

Pictures; by Mike Dufresne, posted on the facebook site, Vintage Belleville, Trenton & Quinte Region

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Vintage-Belleville-Trenton-Quinte-Region/395830067158776

A name …… some reports ...... a heap of friends ...... and the memories …… Crown Woods ..... 1966-68

Just what survives from our school days is a lottery.

It’s usually a mix of luck, self-interest, and our parent’s determination to save something of our childhood.

Me …….. I have just five school photos from my days at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern, nothing from my Junior School and little from my time at Crown Woods.

 And I guess it’s the absence of much from Crown Woods that irks me the most given that they were the happiest of my school days.

Just why they were lost is still a puzzle, but I have rediscovered the reports from our Stella.

All five of us went through its doors, from September 1966 when I was 16 and new to the Sixth Form to my four sisters who attended in the late 60s into the next decade.

The reports span the winter and summer of 1970/1971 and are fascinating on many levels.

First of course they remind me of our sister and that in itself is a bonus.

But then there is the school badge and the names of the teachers including Mrs. Husain who was my first tutor and head of History but who had become a deputy head by 1971.

And there is the style of reporting which I recognise so well from my 35 years of teaching.

Some of the comments are spot on, others very subject specific and some vague and generalized.

All of which I can vouch for over the decades in what I struggled to write about my students, running from the supportive, constructive to the diplomatically critical.

“Always remember” I told myself that “this is a person, not a number on a register who should always be treated with respect”, unlike one poor soul who a colleague of mine in the 1970s summed up as “feeble”, no more no less.

But reports are not all of what lingers with most of us.  For me it is the friends I made, and who I still talk to today fifty-eight years after I met them along witha heap of memories which range from the good to the indifferent and the bad.

In there I include some girlfriends, some impressive teachers and the drama and musical evenings which still live with me.

And now I read that the successor to the Crown Woods I knew is discussing changing the school’s name.

Am I sad? Well, a little, but then the building I knew has already been demolished and it is over half a century ago that I went there.

Added to which of the seven educational institutions I studied at and taught in, only one has survived, and that was Edmund Waller in New Cross. The rest from my secondary school to Crown Woods, the places I did a degree and obtained a Cert Ed along with the schools I taught at ... all have gone. Some are now apartments, or housing estates while one changed its name, was then demolished and is now an academy with a new name.

So, not much to show for the biggest part of my life as a student and teacher.  Still to misquote Rick Baine from the film Casablanca we will always have the memories.*

Location; Eltham

Pictures; report for Stella Simpson, 1971 in the Simpson collection

*“We will always have Paris” Rick Baine, Casablanca, 1942