Boxing Day 1959 with the Swift Annual Nu 4

This is the third of those comic annuals produced by the Hulton Press in the 1950s.

Swift like its companions, Eagle, Girl and Robin aimed to provide a mix of adventure stories, practical activities and a focus all things historical and scientific.

And like the others it issued an Annual at Christmas.
Swift Number 4 was published in 1957 and along with strip cartoons there were extended stories, and articles on Man 20,000 years ago, the Lighthouse, St Egwin, and a visit to Swift’s sweet factory.

Like the companion volumes there were plenty of line drawings and colour plates on Birds in the Garden, Wonderful Ants and The Story of Transport.

Now Hulton knew they were on to a winning formula and were not adverse to featuring commercial companies which appeared in the stories, so in Eagle there was Tommy Walls after the ice cream company and in Swift, Ladybird made an appearance in the Sign of The Scarlet Ladybird.

There were also DIY pages and what turned out to be my favourite Trains that run Underground.

Today, they seem a little quaint but at the time they were at the sharp end of what children wanted to know and what they wanted to read.

Looking again at my Swift Annual I have to say that the stories and pictures are pure 1950s.

I treasure the images of the trains and cars and enjoy just slipping back to what for a youngster was a carefree time.

At which point there is that danger of nostalgia creeping in so I might just sit down and make one of the many interesting things that Swift offered up.

In Number 4 these ranged from making animals from pipe cleaners to a Knight in Armour and a Cotton Reel Tank.

But Swift was aimed at both boys and girls and DIY acticities like the stories and featurs crossed what was thought at the time to be the gender divide, so for every tank there was advice on hos to make a  Raffia Girl from dusters, bamboo sticks and garden seeds.

And that is one of the charms of the book for the materials were what could be found in a 1950s house and that from memeory did include pipe cleaners, and discarded cotton bobbins.

I doubt that even then I could laugh at the jokes from page 117 of which these may be the best. Q."Why is a dog's tail like the inside of a tree? A. Because it is farthest from the bark, or Q. What is most like a horse shoe? A. His othershoes."

Now that said  I think this is the moment to close leaving me only to ponder on whether I shall explore the last of the Hulton four which was Robin, or strike off into one of the many rivals.
We shall see.

Pictures; from Swift Annual Number 4, 1959, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

One canal …… 18 pictures ……. 45 or so years ago …… walking the Rochdale in 1979

A short series bringing together for the first time pictures I took walking the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.

Most have appeared before but not together in the order in which I walked the Canal back in 1979.

But given my memory and my total failure to make notes of each shot at the time I took them some may well be out of sync.

Back then the canal was still in a shabby state and despite the work of restoration there was still an air of decay, which was added to by the state of the buildings which stood along its path.

Many had seen better days, a few were derelict waiting for something to happen, and since I walked the walk some have been demolished and some have been renovated.

But as rundown as the canal was, and perhaps because it was so messy, and out of sight,  it was from time to time part of the urban playground.

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal, 1979,  from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One canal …18 pictures ,walking the Rochdale Canal in 1979, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

The case of the missing Domestic Servants ……………..

Now it is one of those received pieces of historical truth, that the age of the domestic servant peeked in the early years of the 20th century.

South Drive, circa, 1900s

Before that date, even the most modest of homes might boast a servant.

After the Great War, the rising cost of living, the advance of labour saving devices, and the growing expectations of “the servant class” combined to shrink what had once been a source of employment for many young people.

All of which I knew from trawling the census returns for Chorlton and many other places.

But I had never gone looking for the hard evidence, and then yesterday rising out of a discussion on a blog story about Chorltonville, I decided to test the idea, and to test it through the records of the estate.

A number of people had questioned whether the residents would have employed servants, given the size of the houses and occupations of those who lived in the properties.

As a project it had much going for it, because there are a limited number of households and they are grouped in a compact and defined area.

Chorltonville from the air, circa 1930s

But and there is always a but, only  a proportion of the estate had been built and occupied by the time of the 1911 census, which is the last that can be accessed at present.

Not that I was daunted.

In the April of 1911 eighteen households on South Drive returned the census form.*

The occupations listed were pretty much what you would expect for the estate, consisting of a high proportion who described themselves as “Commercial Travellers”, a couple of clerical workers, two employers, along with an actor, one manager, and one on “private means”.

Of these eighteen households, six employed a domestic servant, who lived in the home.  Not surprisingly two worked for the two employers, another for the one householder on “private means”, but the remaining there were employed who commercial travelers and a clerk.

It is of course a very limited survey, but what is interesting is that when compared to the 1939 Register which required every householder to supply basic biographical details for all the occupants, none of the six households employed a servant.

In their place comes that familiar term “unpaid domestic duties” or “housekeeper” which in each case refers to a wife,  which of course raises an interesting debate about the role married women.

Other than that, of the full eighteen, only one household listed an individual who was described as a “housekeeper”.

Which just leaves me to report that none of the original six who employed a servant in 1911 were still living in their house by 1939.

So, that is it, other than to say in a quiet time I shall go back to the historical record to push forward our knowledge of servants in the Ville.

Location; Chorltonville

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection, circa 1900s-30s.

* 1911 census, Enu 11, Didsbury, South Manchester & 1939 Register

Christmas in Chorlton, circa 1989 and a quest for a special toy

Raphael

Anyone with children born in the 1980s will remember the desperate hunt to collect the four Ninja Turtle figures.

I can’t remember which Christmas it was but the quest to find all four pretty much occupied the run up to the day.

The four and you had to try and collect all four were Leonardo, Michelangelo, Donatello, and Raphael and shops just couldn’t keep pace with the demand.

It was I suppose not unlike the stories my mum told about food rationing in the last war.

The rumour would circulate that one of the four was available from a certain toy shop and the race was on.

I remember there was an informal agreement that if you were out and you struck gold you bought as many as you could so that they could be shared out.

I am sure Quarmby's did their best but it was the big stores who offered the best chance of success.

Our eldest managed to get all four and in the way these things work all have now been lost.  But we do have a replica which came into the house a few Christmases ago for another of the lads.

It is Raphael who apparently was the bad boy of the team, being aggressive and sarcastic.

On a more pleasant note we still have mountains of Lego which once formed ships, castles, space rockets and pirate islands, now sadly reduced to their parts, kept in bin bags and waiting for something to happen.

But these were the toys of the 1980s and 90s when the boys were growing up.

Mud in 1974

Go back another decade and I could have picked space hoppers, scalextric, my little pony along with groups like the Bay City Rollers and Mud but I won’t.

Between them Mud and the Bay City Rollers divided the girls I taught and for a few years the school Christmas parties were dominated by alternating hit singles played out on an old record player  linked by a series of tired looking cables to the sound system which was already twenty years old and feeling its age.

These were the years when I had just become a responsible adult, had got married and was buying a house in Ashton Under-Lyne.

It would be a full ten years before I began pondering on wish lists and children’s toys.

That said I never quite lost my fascination for toys and in particular train sets, but that is for another time.

So given that I wandered into to that decade when my  sons were growing up I shall leave you with yet another image of Raphael and call a halt on all these Christmas postings.

Pictures; model of Raphael, Ninja Mutant Turtle from the collection of Josh Simpson, picture of Mud in 1974 from Wikipedia Commons, Beeld En Geluid Wiki - Gallerie: Toppop 1974, Author, AVRO

One canal …… 18 pictures ……. 45 or so years ago …… walking the Rochdale in 1979

 A short series bringing together for the first time pictures I took walking the Rochdale Canal from Princess Street to the Castlefield Basin.

Most have appeared before but not together in the order in which I walked the Canal back in 1979.

But given my memory and my total failure to make notes of each shot at the time I took them some may well be out of sync.

Back then the canal was still in a shabby state and despite the work of restoration there was still an air of decay, which was added to by the state of the buildings which stood along its path.

Many had seen better days, a few were derelict waiting for something to happen, and since I walked the walk some have been demolished and some have been renovated.

Location; The Rochdale Canal

Pictures; The Rochdale Canal, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*One canal …18 pictures ,walking the Rochdale Canal in 1979, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/One%20canal%2018%20pictures

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 18 ........... Christmas 1958

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

Actually it would be another six years before we celebrated Christmas in Well Hall, but why spoil a story?

The weather was less than promising with the Manchester Guardian on Christmas Eve, reporting that it would be “A Very Murky Christmas” with “Fog forecast for much of England and Wales [and] airports closed”.

Going on to comment “Fog to-day, fog to-morrow (though perhaps less) on Boxing Day are the possibilities for the Christmas Holidays in many parts of England and Wales.

Fog yesterday was a certainty,; it affected about thirty counties,  It covered nearly twenty thousand square miles stretching from Bournemouth to Durham.  It closed Manchester, Birmingham and Liverpool airports and last night was seriously upsetting flights into London Airport.”.

But we were not planning to travel far.

Which leaves me trying to remember how we spent our Christmas that year.  I would have been nine my twin sisters just two and a bit and our Jill still a baby.

As happened every year Uncle George would have travelled up from the west country a few days earlier and the day would have unfolded with the presents, breakfast and a walk to Peckham Rye and back, before Christmas dinner and followed by a mix of the telly and board games, of which Monopoly was dominated every Christmas evening.

Like many families we had bought into a television during the 1950s, and while I no longer know when our first one arrived, by 1958 it was an established item.

So that Christmas on BBC we had a series of films, along with variety shows and a ghost tale, which was pretty much replicated by London ITV and Granada.

Setting aside the television that Christmas drew heavily on the traditions experienced by my parents, both of whom were born in the first decades of the last century.

There were still  a mix of oranges and nuts in the Christmas stockings which for us were pillow covers, and 1958 might well have been the first year that coloured lights replaced real candles on the tree, although it would be many years before the paper chains and bright paper trees were done away with.

But as ever the bright but fragile glass baubles survived well into the 1980s and were brought out as they had been done every year, with a few additions to take the place of the broken ones.

As for presents, mine were as traditional as they had been each year, with an addition to the train set, an Eagle Annual and an assortment of sweets.

And while I can’t now remember exactly what those presents were I know that the Eagle Annual was number eight and that the lead story was Dan Dare in Operation Moss.

All of which I think is enough.

Location; Well Hall

Pictures; Christmas decorations; from the collection of Catherine Obi, bought at Oxfam, and the Eagle Annual Number 8, with an extract from Operation Moss

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

**“A Very Murky Christmas”, Manchester Guardian, December 24th, 1958

Christmas Eve with the Eagle

Christmas Eve with the Eagle

The Eagle always celebrated Christmas by decorating the main panel.



Location; Christmas



Picture, Eagle, Vol 6. No. 51 December 23, 1955, from the collection of Andrew Simpson