Manchester in the September of 1969, memories from the new boy

Manchester sky line the old and new, 1970

Now had I been born just a decade earlier the chances were I would have done my time as a conscript in the army.

As it was at the tender age of 19 in the September of 1969 I arrived in Manchester with a suitcase and an address in Withington and the promise of an academic career at the newly formed Manchester Polytechnic.

There were those at the time and since who have bemoaned the end of National Service, but not I suspect many of the young men who for eighteen months marched and drilled.

Three years after the last world war the Government decided to retain conscription which meant that healthy young men aged between 17 and 21 years old were expected to serve in the Armed Forces for 18 months, and remain on the reserve list for four years.

They could be recalled to their units for up to 20 days for no more than three occasions during these four years. Men were exempt from National Service if they worked in one of the three "essential services": coal mining, farming and the merchant navy for a period of eight years. If they quit early, they were subject to being called up.

The future College of Commerce, 1965

But all that I missed and instead a year later than most of my friends I left home with all that brash confidence of youth to do three years with John Donne, William Shakespeare the odd romantic poet and lots of dead historians.

And fifty-four years later I am still here and hence this occasional series of reflections on the city that adopted me and in particular the places I remembered as a young Londoner in the September of 1969.

Not that this will be one of those sentimental journeys into a comfortable world which was better than now.

Just a few miles from where I read Wordsworth and explored the events of the Industrial Revolution and the complexities  of the French Fifth Republic, the Corporation was sweeping away a century of sub standard housing and coffee meant a lukewarm brown liquid with a hint of beans and a mass of frothy milk.

But there was a buzz about the place.  It was there in those bright new buildings of glass and steel which were going up around the city, the modern station concourses at Oxford Road and Piccadilly and the Mancunian Way.

For me it was the contrasts.  Sitting in the old Milk Maid facing the gardens, there was a panorama of the old Victorian city with its mix of elegant show warehouses, offices and shops while above us was the impressive Piccadilly Hotel.

And yet just a few minutes away were the tiny side roads dominated by shabby industrial buildings where somehow the light and warmth of the sun rarely penetrated.

The City Barge, Rochdale Canal, 1970

Now many of these places I discovered on long walks around the city when we should have been in the library.

I guess Canal Street pretty much sums up those walks.  I was drawn to it because it was close to the college and was bounded by the Rochdale Canal.

Back then both the canal and the street were drab, non descript and a little tired looking.  The attempt at something more exciting was summed up by the City Barge Restaurant in the stretch of the canal from Chorlton Street to Princess Street.

It was of course out of our price range but had the promise of something new and exciting and something to aspire to.

Still we had those wonderful three course meals offered at lunch time in the city centre Chinese and Asian restaurants for just three shillings a head.  Even now fifty six years on I smile at how sophisticated I thought I was when eating Banana Fritter and captivated by the Chinese version of custard.

Looking at the City barge from Princess Street, 1970

Which I suspect is just beginning to border on nostalgic tosh, so I shall close with that more serious reflection that in that drive to bring Manchester into the 1960s there was a serious attempt to sweep away all that Victorian heritage.

And so between new office developments, shopping precincts and traffic flow schemes some fascinating buildings and important bits of our history disappeared.

And more of that serious stuff another time.

Pictures; the new College of Commerce in construction, W Highham, 1965, m64167, and City-Barge-Restaurant Canal-Street, Dawson-A, 1970, m49402, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

On the parish, seeking benefits in the Stretford of 1807

Mary Crowther was just 18 in 1765 when she was removed from Stretford by the authorities and sent back to Chorlton.

They did this under a removal order which gave them the power to send anyone who had settled in the parish without permission back to the place of their birth.  It was a straightforward piece of economics which was designed to root out anyone who might make a claim on the parish for support in a time of need.

And Mary may well have been just such a person.  In 1765 after arriving back in Chorlton she gave birth to the first of three children all born out of wedlock.

In a period of heightened debate about benefits and the drain on the public purse the actions of St Matthew’s Parish authorities might seem all too familiar.

Now Mary’s story has been well covered already*so instead I shall concentrate on some of the other decisions made by the overseer of Stretford.

The years just before and after Waterloo** were hard times and the parish of St Matthew’s responded to requests for help.  So in the year 1810-11, James Mee the overseer regularly paid out between £40 and £90 a month in relief, with the highest sums in the winter months when little work could be done on the land.

But it was always the bastardy payments which feature prominently.

For women like Mary Crowther who had done penance and had had three illegitimate children between 1765 and 1782 there was a greater recognition of the father’s responsibility. Mary could turn to the law for help and although we have no records for Mary there are other recorded cases.    

And it is those from Stretford which throw a light on how unmarried mothers were treated. These are the Orders for Maintenance of Bastard Children, and Bastardy Bonds which identified the adult male who would support the child as well as other miscellaneous Orders Relating to Bastardy. ***for , and across the country many of these records have survived in greater quantities.

They reveal a straightforward system designed to identify the father and bring him to court.  This might begin with an examination of the mother by a magistrate or if she was already in labour by a midwife.  These Bastardy Examinations were common in the early eighteenth century.    Having achieved the information a Bastardy Warrant was issued ordering a Constable to bring the father before the Magistrate.  If the case was successfully made then a Bastardy Order was issued which identified the man and stipulated the amount he was to pay.

The documents were pre-printed with spaces for the magistrates to write the names of the mother and father and the amount that had to be paid.  Some of the Stretford ones for the years 1702-1811 reveal the estimated costs which the father was expected to pay.  

Often the sum was decided on a yearly basis which would then be paid quarterly.  This amount varied and may have been based on circumstances.

The figure of 26 shillings [£1.30p] for the year payable until the child was fourteen appears in some of the Stretford documents but others set an initial payment to cover the birth ranging from £2 down to 10s. [50p] and specify that further payments should be made weekly.

These also varied from 30d [7p] to 7d [3p].   In some cases the mother was expected to contribute and this could be 18d [7p].

Attempting to make sense of these awards is fraught, but some idea of their monetary worth can be gauged by making a comparison with wage rates and some examples of the cost of living.  Just twenty years later in 1830 Mary Bailey and Higginbotham the farmer agreed an annual salary of £7.10s [£7.50] from which she bought  in January a pair of stays which cost 10s.6d, [52p], in May a new cap worth  1s.8d [7p] and in July repaired her shoes for 2s.8d [14p].  The cost of renting on the Row for a farm labourer varied from 10d [8p] to 5s [25p] a week.    Finally the day rate for women workers in the south west was between 7-10d [3p].

Against this backdrop of wages, and spending the magistrates determined that the cost of maintaining an illegitimate child was 7d [3p] a day and this was slightly more generous than the 26 shillings {£1.30p].

So in the year 1807 which seems typical, Catherine Ashcroft received 5/- on April 28th, the widow Pinnington 2/6d and Margaret Thompson 3/-

But the system was flawed and there were many in the early nineteenth century who said so.    The moralists argued that payments to a single mother only encouraged illegitimacy and they may even be evidence to suggest they were partly right.  Both here in the township and in the Parish of Ironville in Derbyshire and no doubt many other areas,  some woman gave birth to a number of children out of wedlock. Their story is also covered in my book.

The next task will be to trawl the records and see what happened to Catherine Ashcroft, the widow Pinnington, and Margaret Thompson.

I suspect that their stories will be like many of the women from Chorlton, who went on to get married, although in the case of Mary Crowther she did not, living out her days with one of her sons in a wattle an daub cottage on the site of the Trevor arms on Beech Road.

And as ever I stand by a correction from Bill Sumner who wrote "The Stretford records you allude to were not in the Parish of St Matthew as that church was not then built, they are the records of Stretford Old Chapel and much more can be read of similar cases in The History of the Old Chapel of Stretford by Sir Bosdin Leech. Charles Walker of Barlow Hall settled later in Longford House Stretford and became Poor Law Guardian for Sretford, he ruthlessly cut down on the number of persons receiving benefit from the town excluding all who were originally from elsewhere".

Pictures, Mary Crowther's gravestone from the collection of Andrew Simpson,  map of Stretford from Greenwoods map, courtesy of Digital Archives, 1818, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/  Bastardy Orders, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

*The Story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson 2012, the History Press, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
**The Battle of Waterloo 1815
***  St Matthew Overseers of the Poor,  Manchester Archives L89/9/14

Looking out on the High Street with memories of past girlfriends

Even on a Sunday in late October our High Street can be a busy place.

And looking out from the parish church I am reminded of the countless times I stood in the shelter of that entrance waiting for a friend.

More often than not it will have been a girl friend although thinking about it there were only three steady ones.

That said the corner of Well Hall Road and the High Street was a favoured place for me and Jenny to meet up.  In term time she lived in the lodge at Crown Woods and if we were going out to the cinema this was a sensible place to meet.

And this was in that pre mobile age when once the choice of where to meet was made you had to stick to it or suffer the consequences of missing each other and trying to second guess an alternative which otherwise meant mutual recriminations on the Monday morning.

So along with the entrance to Avery Hill and the Wimpy bar this place will always have a special place in my memory.

Picture; the parish churchyard, October 2015 from the collection of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick

Looking into the future of Eltham High Street in 1975

The High Street in 1910

Now I don’t normally go in for then and now pictures but I have made an exception with these two images from a 1975 document issued by the Council.*

The book was part of a planning consultation and fell through the letter box after I had long left Well Hall for Manchester.

I am not sure what my dad and sister Stella thought of the process, or the ideas but now both the planning exercise and their suggestions  are as much a piece of history as any of the stories I usually write.

The High Street in 1971

So along with the 1970s pictures there is also an insight into how the planners were thinking back then and just how far the bold new world they suggested has come about.

And for me the images have a special connection. Our Stella worked at the library and from 1964 till I left Well Hall in '69 it was a regular venue, along I remember with Marks & Spencer's where I bought my first ever fruit yogurt.

Now that is not only revealing a secret but says so much on the new horizons which were opening up for a lad from south East London.

Pictures; from A Future for Eltham Town Centre, Greenwich Borough Council, Planning Department, 1975

*Of town plans and visions of a future that never quite happened, Eltham in the 1970s and Manchester in 1945.http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/of-town-plans-and-visions-of-future.html

Travels through a lost bit of railway history ........ sixty-one years ago

 I won’t be alone in having a long love affair with the former Liverpool Road Railway Station.

The 1830 Warehouse, 1965

It opened in 1830 along with a warehouse and was the first passenger railway in the world connecting Manchester to Liverpool.

Not that passenger traffic was the reason for its construction, that decision rested with the economic priorities of providing a cheap form of transport to shift goods between the two destinations.

So successful was the venture that within a few years extra warehouses were constructed, a second passenger platform was built and just 14 years after it all began, a new station was opened at Hunts Bank and our site was given over entirely to goods.

The story is one I often return to and for two decades was a place from where I ran conducted talks and walks.

The platform with former passengerwaiting room beyound, 1965

It had been abandoned by British Rail in 1975 and bits sold off to Granada TV and later still the rest became the new home of the Greater Manchester Museum of Science and Technology. 

My first encounter with the place was in 1980 during the “Steam Expo” event, when I took a series of good and not so good pictures.

But others had come with their camera before me, including Ron Stubley and as yet unknown photographer in 1965.

The unknown photographer took four colour slides which are part of a collection which cover Manchester, Stretford and out to Chorlton and Wythenshawe and are a mix of industrial scenes, some old historic buildings and more than a few of well-known city centre sites.

Former passenger platform, 1965

The collection was donated to me by the daughter of the photographer, but somewhere along the line their identity was lost, although I am still looking for the letter, email or Facebook message which alerted me to the names of the woman who donated them and the photographer.

Those for the Liverpool Road site are a window into what was still a working area and show just how far the buildings had been knocked about over the 135 years since the  complex had opened.

The 1830 warehouse still retained the loops holes through which goods would be taken in from the rail side and the arches through which wagons would have been pulled into the building.

The plaque, 1965

But at some point, one of the arches had been lost and a much larger entrance constructed.

As late as the 1990s it was still possible to find the turntables used to turn wagons 90 degrees and transfer them inside.

Likewise, bits of the old passenger railway station had survived but all were in a vey sad state.

Along with these relics there was the commemorative plaque above the doorway on Liverpool Road, recording the site’s history and set against that washed out red paint which was part of the old British Rail livery and indeed may been remanent from the former LMS colour scheme.

On that last note I await to be corrected.

Location’ Liverpool Road

Pictures; walking the old Liverpool Railway site in 1965, from the 1965 collection

Neglected stories ........ handloom weaving in Chorlton

Now if you have been on one of those history walks around town chances are that at some point the guide will enthusiastically point to a building with long windows on the upper floor which were “to give the maximum amount of natural light for a handloom weaver.”

And then there might follow an impassioned lecture on the noble life of the handloom weavers who were to be squeezed by the coming of the factory system.  

All of which is true up to a point.  Some weaving families could command a very good standard of living into the 19th century and there is something quite attractive about a life where all the family were collectively engaged in all the processes of carding, spinning and weaving, working at their own pace and free to pursue other interests.  As Marx said “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner.”

But there is also a lot of romantic tosh written about handloom weaving.  It was by the 19th century an increasingly unprofitable way of earning where the majority of weavers were competing against the industrialization of the different processes, were at the mercy of the middlemen and had to foot the cost of maintaining a workshop.

I doubt that many have seriously researched the extent to which the townships around the south of the city had their own weavers.  But there is evidence for them in Stretford, Urmston, Withington and Burnage and here in our own village.

In some places the records are fairly slim but in others the stories are rich and detailed.  Now I want you to read the book so I shall be outrageously selfish and limit myself to stating that the evidence is there in the census records in newspapers and in the oral testimony recorded just thirty years after the last remaining weavers were plying their trade in some of our townships.

In the June of 1832 20 cottages with their loom houses  at Barlow Moor, came up for auction, while just 25 years earlier here in Chorlton, George Jones who had described his occupation as weaver baptised his two children at the Methodist chapel on the Row*.  

Nor was he alone, because during the same period he was joined by another two weavers who had walked over from Stretford and another from Withington to baptise their children in the same chapel.

*The Row is today Beech Road

Pictures; Liverpool Road, circa late 18th century from the collection of Andrew Simpson, advert from the Manchester Guardian June 9th 1832

The shop that ..... sold stories

It’s not an original tale but today l visited the shop that sold stories.

Ah my young friend you will instantly tell me l am referring to a book shop that purveyor of the imaginations of novelists, poets and scholars with countless volumes offering a window on the world.

But not so because here in a ramshackle property down an uninviting alley purpoting to be a newsagents was indeed the shop which sold stories. 

Stories to fit the demands of any customer provided by the owner who was the custodian of a thousand and one fantasies.

For a small down payment and a sinister promise our visitors could order a story of romance, light entertainment or dark horror just by supplying a title. 

And then for an hour and more as day slid into dusk the shop keeper would weave an entrancing voyage of love, laughter or unnerving terror. 

And at the end my young friend our customer would fulfil their sinister promise and depart into the night.

And the promise you ask? That is only vouched safe by the owner of the shop that sold stories.

Picture; the shop, 2016, from the collection of Andrew Simpson