The Evolution of Trees ... one to listen to .... on the wireless ... today

I like trees and who wouldn't?

They look good, offer shade, have heaps of different things to eat and can be found in parks, along roads and in gardens as well as huge parts of our countryside.

So I am looking forward to The Evolution of Trees on BBC Radio 4.

It is part of the In Our Time series and today "Misha Glenny and guests discuss the earliest evidence we have of the existence of trees and how even plants we might have on windowsills or as vegetables in gardens can and do, in the right conditions, evolve into trees. 

Since their emergence around 400 million years ago after low lying plants started to develop stronger stems and grow taller and more upright, trees have transformed our planet, so creating ecosystems, altering the atmosphere and setting the stage for the world as we know it today.

With; Jenny McElwain, 1711 Chair of Botany at Trinity College Dublin and Director of Trinity Botanic Gardens, Christopher Berry, Senior Lecturer in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Cardiff University, and Bill Baker, Senior Researcher at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Produced by Conor Garrett"*

Location; BBC Radio 4

Pictures; trees wot i have liked, on the Meadows, 2020, Hough End, 2023, and Beech Road, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Evolution of Trees, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002x5jl  

“Wally of the Whalley” Says Goodbye ......... stories of the Whalley Hotel

“Wally of the Whalley” Says Goodbye

It is one of those headlines that you just can’t miss.

“Wally of the Whalley” Says Goodbye appeared in the Manchester City News for November 16th 1951 and featured Mr and Mrs Summer who had run the Whalley Hotel for four years.

Mr Wally Summer and his wife Ethel were leaving Manchester for Anglesey, where they were to take over the Anglesey Arms.

“It's going to be a wrench leaving” he told the City News, “we’ve made hundreds of friends since we came to Brooks’ Bar.  I’ve been amazed at the number of people who have come up to wish us luck.”*

The Anglesey Arms is still there just at the edge of the Menai Bridge.

Now in the fullness of time I would like to find out more about Mr and Mrs Summer.

Painting; The Whalley Hotel,  © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Facebook:  Paintings from Pictures
*Manchester City News November 16, 1951

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester nu 42 ......... Bunsen Street the one that changed its name and was stolen

Now even I have to admit that perhaps I have just gone off on one with the title, but it’s true, Bunsen Street was Bennet Street and sometime in the early 20th century the developers stole a big chunk of it.

The bit that is left runs from Little Lever Street to Lever Street and is flanked by a car park and the sides of three buildings.

Unless you use it as a cut through or a place to leave your car I doubt it will excite much interest, but there is a bit of a mystery, because once as Bennet Street it continued on over Lever Street into Spear Street.

But sometime between 1903 and 1911 it vanished under that huge red brick block that dominates the stretch of Lever Street down from Dale Street and along to Stevenson Square.

That said it doesn’t seem to have excited any interest from the compliers of the street directories who failed to include it in either the 1903 or 1850 lists of Manchester streets.

And I suspect if I go looking for it during the half century between these two dates it will be missing.

All of which just leaves a trawl of the census returns because back in the mid 19th century there were plenty of buildings along its course and five of those look to be small back to back properties.

So as they say, watch this space.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Bunsen Street Late Bennet Street, 2016 from the collection of Andrew Simpson 

When pop music was Saturday Club at home in Well Hall

Saturday Club on the Light Programme still has the power to invoke fond memories.

Now if you are my generation, born in the decade after the last World War who entered their teenage years to the sound of Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Cliff Richard and who can still remember listening to “She Loves You” for the first time, Saturday Club was essential listening.

It had begun in 1955 but I suppose I was not really aware of its existence for another five years.

Back then if you wanted to listen to pop music on the radio it was slim pickings.

There was of course Radio Luxembourg which I listened to on my small transistor radio but the adverts for Horace Batchelor* plus the way the signal would fade and wane irritated me.

And on Saturday nights after the football results there was Juke Box Jury and later Thank Your Lucky Stars which showcased the latest singles and passed judgement on them.  But all too often these were shows watched by the whole family and as much as I loved my parents and young sisters there were times when you wanted to listen alone.

Now Saturday Club just fell into that requirement.

It went out after my sisters were at Saturday Morning Pictures and mum and dad were doing things.

It’s only real rival for me was Pick of the Pops the following afternoon, that rapid whizz through a week’s chart ups and downs.

This after all was the time when I was still too young to go to the dance hall above Burton's on Well Hall Road and those other live music venue like the Welcome Inn and the Yorkshire Grey were out of the question.

But then came Radio Caroline in 1964 followed by its rival radio London and things just were not the same again.

All of which is teetering on nostalgic tosh and so to the point.  Saturday Club was one of those programmes which didn’t just play records but offered up live performances with interviews which always appealed to me.

But the attention span of a teenager is fickle and with the arrival of Ready Steady Go with its visual and slightly edgy feel I was pulled in a totally new direction.

Top of the Pops might be required viewing to be shared with the whole house and discussed the following day at school but RSG had me hooked.

So bit by bit Saturday Club faded but has never quite left me, and as I head towards my 71st year I still have Tony Blackburn offering me something of the same on Radio 2 with “Sounds of the Sixties.”

Now that is perhaps the point to close but not before one last observation, which is that I know I am growing old when the music of my youth is now played on Radio 2.

Pictures; of Brian Matthew & Saturday Club, featured on Saturday Club** and Burtons in the mid 1960s


* Horace Cyril Batchelor was as an advertiser on Radio Luxembourg. He advertised a way to win money by predicting the results of football matches, sponsoring programmes on Radio Luxembourg.

**Saturday Club
This site is non profit making and solely for fans of Saturday Club to trade/swap off - air copies of the programme in whatever format eg reel to reel, cassette, cd etc, http://www.saturdayclub.info/

Porridge …. a bit of history …. and a riposte to a chum

Now I have to say over the decades porridge has never really shaken my tree.

Today I had porridge, 2026

Like our dad my go to breakfast was and is toast left to cool and eaten with lashings of butter and ginger marmalade*.

During the 1970s I flirted with muesli bought from The Eighth Day on Oxford Road and enlivened with various nuts and dried fruit.

But I am a child of the 1950s and this wonder dish was supplanted by a return to toast which has remained breakfast for the last five decades, opening me up to that accusation of being far too adventurous.

Lately I have broken out, eaten avocado on toast with salad and last month started on porridge which was less out of a preference and more because there was a heap of oats left over and I was always brought up not to waste food.

And so began the adventure.

Father always maintained you ate it with salt not sugar, a harp back to our Scottish past where they do things differently.

That was never going to happen; however much the spirits of our ancestors from the east Highlands might stir and rage.

 I cook it in water with the addition of sugar, bananas and blueberries with a dash of cream at the end, making it a tad fattening, outrageously indulgent and fully acceptable for a man heading towards his 77th birthday. 

Historically the oats version has been eaten for at least 5,000 years as evidenced from the bodies of long dead Neolithic bog bodies found in Central Europe and Scandinavia.  So, am I not arguing with them, although I doubt they put all the sweet stuff in.

Yesterday I had ginger marmalade, 2026

But Dad with his buttered toast flew in the face of this collective, cultural and gastronomic history and I must confess that porridge remains just one of the breakfasts I dip into, sitting beside the said toast, as well as croissants and those super healthy avocados.

Of course there are other breakfasts available.

Sugar Puffs, 1958

Over the years I have done a multitude of veggie breakfsts, but long ago went off eggs and have now moved away from pretend sausages, which makes the veggie breakfast limited.

Those of us born in the first half the last century might sill embrace those sugary cereals but alas they no longer come with the occasional free gift.

Surgar Puffs variously went for the detective set which vied with small coloured racing cars, and those divers which with the addition of a small quanity of baking powder could be dropped into a fish bowl and sent out bubbles replcating the oxygen bubbles of a real diver.

But we didn't have a fish bowl and when the diver was dropped into the sink he never consented to blow bubbles.

Back in the 1940s the Ministry of Food was keen on advocating a substantial breakfast.  

In 1946 in their leaflet number 33 on Suggestions for Breakfast along with porridge were ideas using "National or Wholemeal Bread for potato puffs, cheese and vegetable cutlets, fried cheese sandwiches, potato fadge with fried bacon, fried herrings and poached kippers". 

Everday breakfasts, 1946

Leaving me just to reflect its all a rather silly indulgent post prompted really by a Facebook chum who had also tried a bowl of porridge with bananas and blue berries.

Pilchards, grilled, pilchards fried ... but always pilchards, 1946

He wasn’t impressed but perhaps it was all in the mix.  

After painful failures I discovered the best combination was one-part oats to two parts water, slow cooking, heaps of stirring and that dash of cream.

And I rather think I will stick with it after the bag of oats is finished.

So, porridge …. a bit of history …. and a riposte to a chum.

And if the chum is online and has read the story maybe he will pass judgement on Fried Pilcards on Fried Bread.

We shall see.

Location; our kitchen

Pictures; a bowl of Andrew’s porridge, an empty jar of Ginger Preserve, 2026, and a box of Sugar Puffs, 1958, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Suggestions for Breakfast, Leaflet 33, the ABC of Cooking, issued by the Ministry of Food, 1946

*And yes it was never ginger maramalde but ginger preserve, but back then that was what we called it, oblivious to the fact that marmlade "is a sweet, tangy fruit preserve made from the juice and peel of citrus fruits boiled with sugar and water". Marmalade, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marmalade

On the turn of a sixpence, the continuing story of Manley Hall and Sam Mendel

The Hall in 1879

Yesterday I was pondering a visit to Manley Hall in the June of 1879.*

This had been the grand home of Samuel Mendel popularly known at the time as the “merchant prince”

It was a magnificent house of fifty rooms set in 80 acres of grounds which included a greenhouse, an orangery, deer park, fountains and ornamental lakes.**

The estate extended east from Upper Chorlton Road as far as the Independent College, and south to Clarendon Road.  Today Manley Park is all that is left of those extensive grounds and the rest is a mix of houses.

Manley Hall 1888-93

But back in the 1860s and 70s Sam Mendel’s home was reckoned to be everything a wealthy self made man could desire and the inside of the house was as impressive as the grounds.

Here were paintings by Constable, Gainsborough, Leighton, Millais and Turner along with fine furniture, silver plate and old Chelsea porcelain.

So much that when in the spring of 1875 the contents of the house were put up for sale, the auction lasted for five days.

Not that Mr Mendel stayed around to watch for after more than a decade at Manley Hall he moved south to London and on to Hastings coming to terms with his dramatic fall from prosperity.

He had made his wealth transporting textiles to India and Australia around the Cape of Good Hope faster than any of his rivals, and from his offices in Cooper Street and a succession of warehouses around the city he was recognised as a successful entrepreneur who was never out of the papers.


But a too ambitious desire to add to his vast collection of art  left him in serious debt to an art dealer. 

Samuel Mendel

For a while the general public were able for a charge to wander the gardens and enjoy both the floral displays as well as performances by a variety of brass bands.

There were also various schemes floated to turn the estate into a “great pleasure resort.  A winter palace was to be erected which should contain an art gallery, concert hall, promenade, library, assembly room, skating rinks, baths, and refreshment rooms.  Shareholders were to be allowed to use the park for promenade purposes on Sundays, and the hall was to be converted into a club, membership of which should be limited to holders of one hundred or more shares in the company.”***

But these and other plans came to nothing and it was pretty much death by a succession of small building plots as bits of the estate were sold off for development or turned into a golf course for the Manchester Golf Club.

The Hall still attracted the curious, and so it was in the June of 1904 that this couple wandered into the grounds and had their picture taken at the rear of the grand old house.  By then its years of neglect were only all too clear to see from the overgrown kitchen garden and bricked up rear windows and was demolished in 1905.

The rear of the Hall in June 1904

But like all such stories there is still more.  Back in 1875 the house had been bought by the coal merchant Ellis Lever for £120,000 and according to the historian Cliff Hayes Mr Ellis never paid up.****

This in itself is intriguing but made more so by a letter from Mr Ellis in the Times from June 1887 in which he deplored the abandonment of the plan to transform the estate into pleasure resort.

“There is not in the United Kingdom a town that has greater need than Manchester of healthy and refining influences, and there is not a more attractive and charming property than Manley-park.  

But while the people of Manchester and Salford are perishing for lack of pure and healthy surroundings this magnificent property is being allowed to go to decay or become absorbed  by the builder.

The Hall soon after the sale in 1875

Manley-park is thoroughly well wooded, and all the trees being vigorous and healthy.  That there should fall to the axe man to be replaced by rows of houses I look upon as a misfortune to the city.”*****

Which raises all sorts of questions about the involvement of Mr Ellis in the estate but those are for another time.

As for Samuel Mendel he died in 1884.

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection and map of Manley Hall from the OS map of South Lancashire, 1888-93, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and  picture of Sam Mendel, from a photograph by Franz Baum, 22 St Ann’s Square, Manchester Old & New, 1896, Manchester

*"the frown of fortune"...... the story of Sam Mendel and Manley Hall in Whalley Range,

** The land had cost £250,000 and the house another £50,000 to build.

*** City News on October 8, 1904, quoted in Manley Hall, http://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/gone/manleyhall.html

****Hayes. Cliff, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1999
.***** The Times, June 11 1887

Scholes Square ….. fifty-one of its residents …. and a bit of Manchester’s past

 You won’t find Scholes Square today.

Scholes Square, 1908

I only came across it by accident when looking for pictures of London Road on Manchester’s digital archive.

It was a tiny court off Scholes Street which in turn was off Store Street.

The square survived into the last century, but only just and now the site is covered by a modern warehouse which itself is empty and looking for an occupant.

And added to the difficulty of locating it comes the name change which saw Scholes Street become Stand Street.

All a tad confusing.

To which I can add that as, yet I am unclear when it was built.

It doesn’t appear on Johnson’s map of Manchester for 1818 but is shown on the OS for 1844, and judging by the maps and the picture it didn’t have much going for it.

It backed on to a smithy and was totally enclosed on three sides.

You entered from Store Street by a flight of stairs and were confronted by eight one up one down properties, which just seven years later had been reduced to six.

Scholes Square, 1851

In 1851 the court was home to fifty-one people with most of the residents working for the railways or in the cotton factories. 

And the textile jobs ranged from piecers, to power loom weavers and interestingly one who gave her occupation as “Silk weaver by hand”.

This left a blacksmith, a joiner a servant and charwoman.

All of which made sense for this part of Manchester which was dominated by London Road Railway Station, accompanying railway warehouses and a series of cotton mills.

Nor am I surprised that in 1851 of the fifty-one inhabitants, 37% had been born in Ireland, 47 % from Manchester and the rest from Salford, Wigan and other parts of the northwest.

And there is evidence of serious over crowding with two families living at no. 2 and two at no.6.  

At no. 2 Mr. and Mrs Dowling shared with Hannah Wild who sublet her space to two lodgers, while Daniel and Sarah Finn and there two children shared with the Cass family which consisted of two adults and five children.

In time I will go looking for how the lives of some of these residents panned out, but for now it is enough to know that the picture I found by chance opens up a bit of Manchester’s story.

Location; Scholes Square

Pictures; Stand Street, off Store Street, 1908, m04569, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, and Scholes Square in 1851, 1851 from Adshead’s map of Manchester, Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/