Rare pictures of the Horse and Jockey and a mysterious historian of Chorlton

This is one of three photographs that I doubt very few people have seen.

It is the Horse and Jockey in 1933 and appears in a Short History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy published privately in that year.

There are plenty of pictures of the pub from the very early years of the 20th century and lots from the 1950s onwards but so far I have only come across a couple which date to the 30s and 40s.

So this is an interesting one and shows the original before it expanded into the cottages on the left of the front door.

To our right beyond the fence had been the home of the Wilton family who lived there for most of the 19th century.  It was Samuel Wilton who around 1818 enclosed the green for his own personal garden with tall hedges and an allotment.  The space only returned to public use with the death of his daughter.

The remaining two photographs are of the parish church and Hough End Hall and all three were taken by F. Blyth who also printed the book at the College of Technology in Manchester while on his second year course.

But the text is by a J.D. Blythe and is as far as I know the first new account of Chorlton’s history since the twenty-six articles written by Thomas Ellwood during 1885-86.

Mr Blyth drew heavily on those articles and in places follows the earlier history word for word.  Not that this is to rubbish the book, particularly as I doubt it was meant as a serious rival to Ellwood’s work.  It may have just been a vehicle for F Blyth to complete a course at the college demonstrating his skill at photography and printing.

Now there is very little on either man.  J.D. Blythe was here on Claude Road between 1922 and 1929 and  is listed in the telephone directory but without trawling the street directories for the period we have no knowing when he went to live in Chorltonville and when he left.

There is a record of a J.D Blyth leaving for South Africa in 1919 with the stated purpose of settling in the Natal, but he returns just four months later in February 1920, and so far that is about it.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Picture; the Horse & Jockey in 1933, F Blyth from A Short History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, by J.D.Blyth, 1933

Mending the light bulb on Randolph Street in 1962 ..... when gas was king

 Now, there is so much going on in this picture that its hard to know where to start.

But I suppose it is the man with the ladder, mending the street lamp.

He appears in several different pictures in the collection and was clearly being followed around.

Just why is now lost, but I suspect as the collection was originally from the City Council it will be to do with maintenance of Corporation property and possibly the problem of vandalism.

Some of the images show a broken glass covering.

In another the man appears to repairing the bracket or gas pipe, and yes I think this might be a gas  street lamp .

And before Eric of Northenden takes me to task, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that gas street lamps were still in use in Ardwick in the 1960s.*

All of which is confirmed by a small story in the Manchester Guardian which reported on February 22nd, 1966 that the “City’s last gas lamp” was taken down.  In a ceremony, attended by “50 people , including civic chiefs, gas officials, residents and cameramen, who crowded the top of Aden Street, Ardwick, yesterday  to say farewell  to the last of Manchester’s one time 21,682 gas lamps.

The lantern of gas lamp No. 1635 was taken down and ceremoniously presented to Councilor Joe Ogden, chairman of the gas lighting committee who said he would offer it up to Manchester Museum as a souvenir”.**

That momentous event was still four years away when our man put his ladder up against the lamp post on the corner of Randolph Street, and drew the attention of children, who may have been more fascinated by the photographer than the lamp man.

Either way they broke off from playing in the street to watch, not that the two lads in the distance, the window cleaner or the woman on her way to the corner shop seemed at all bothered.

There were two Randolph Streets listed in the directories, one in Crumpsall and the other in Levenshulme, and I am minded to think this is Crumpsall.

Although I could be wrong, probably am, leaving me confident that someone will know.

Location; Manchester

Pictures,  Gas Street lamps, Manchester, 1962 -3691.4 and 1962 -3692.1, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Manchester Gas Lighting, https://www.rootschat.com/forum/index.php?topic=736794.0

**City’s last Gaslamp, Manchester Guardian, February 22nd, 1966

At the Kings Arms waiting for Fred Wisdom to pull a pint

Now this is one of those familiar pictures of the High Street, looking east towards the church and Court Yard some time in 1915.

It comes from an excellent collection from Greenwich Heritage Centre which I discovered recently.

On the surface it is interesting enough but it is the clues it offers up about some of the people who lived along this bit of the High street.

And because Mr Digby who took the picture focused on the Kings Arms I shall start with the pub and its landlord Fred Wisdom.

I can’t be sure when he took over the place but four years earlier he had been running the Railway Bell in Tonbridge.

He lived here with his wife Elizabeth, their two young children and his two nieces who worked behind the bar and described themselves as assistants.

And there is more because I know that Fred was born in 1878, Elizabeth two years earlier and they had been married in 1899.

I doubt we will ever know why they moved to Eltham but they were here by 1914 and were still pulling pints six years later.

All of which came from trawling the street directories and electoral registers which supply the names of the rest of the inhabitants on the block running up to Court Yard.

But for now my attention has been drawn to the big billboard on the gable end.

It is advertising the serialization of a story by Hall Cains who was one of the most popular novelists in the later Victorian and Edwardian period with many of his books being turned into films.

According to one source they were primarily romances, involving love triangles, but also addressed some of the more serious political and social issues of the day.

And as if on cue the book advertised as being serialized in the popular Reynolds’s News was Woman Thou Gavest Me. which I shall go looking for.

But I will just leave you back on the High Street in 1915.

Picture; the Old Kings Head, High Street Eltham, GRW 276, http://boroughphotos.org/greenwich/
courtesy of Greenwich Heritage Centre, http://www.greenwichheritage.org/site/index.php

The lost Hulme and Moss Side .....

Now I have been a great fan of Roger Shelley’s photographs for over a decade, ever since he shared a collection of pictures he took of a group of young lads playing in the near ruin of Hough End Hall nearly 60 years ago.

The attention to detail and his ability to capture the moment are skills I wish I had.

And so, I was very pleased when he posted another group of images he took during the house clearances in Hulme and Moss Side.

The pictures are a mix of street scenes, and the people he encountered, including kids at play, men and women at work and the ever present piles of rubble as the grand plan advanced and centuries old houses disappeared under the impact of the wrecking ball.

Like the work of Shirley Baker* his pictures don’t dwell on sentimentality and don’t make judgments of the wholesale clearances of communities.

They just record what he saw.

I don't have exact locations for the images, but some can be traced through the odd street name or feature.

And with his permission I will be working my way through the portfolio, fastening on images which tell their own stories.

Location; Hulme and Moss Side in the 1960s and 70s

Pictures;  from the collection of Roger Shelley, https://www.flickr.com/photos/photoroger/

*Baker, Shirley, Without a Trace, Manchester and Salford in the 1960s, 2018

William & Julia Relph of the Rising Sun a promise fulfilled

This is William Relph who ran the Rising Sun on the High Street from sometime in the 1880s till his death in 1909.

Now you can never be certain but it is more than likely that when a photographer turned up in the High Street in the summer of 1890 it will have been the landlord of the Rising Sun who came to the door to see what all the fuss was about.

And so this is William Relph and I have to own up to a mix of quiet satisfaction and fascination that I have tracked him down.

It was a promise I made in earlier stories and have now completed that promise.*

He was born in Greenwich in 1847 and came from a family that ran public houses.

What marks him out as a little special is that William saw his time out in both the old Rising Sun and the new one which still stands on the High Street.

The old pub according to our historian R.R.C Gregory was about 200 years old when it was demolished and replaced by the present pub in 1904.

Nor is that the only thing that intrigues me about William.

I had almost given up hope of finding him and then as you do I came across his widow Julia who was still in charge in 1911, and it was Julia who caught my imagination.

She was born in Cadiz, Spain and of course that raises all sorts of intriguing speculation.

But before I could go off on a flight of fancy I discovered her maiden name was West and like William her father was a publican.

That said her parents were in Spain between the birth of her brother in 1852 and when she was born two years later which may explain why they are missing from the census returns for the middle decades of the 19th century.

So there is more to find out but finding William and Julia of the Rising Sun is enough for now.

Pictures; from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers,  and Chrissie Rose February 2014

*Eltham’s Rising Sun, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Eltham%27s%20Rising%20Sun

Rediscovering our rural past, Thomas Ellwood and Mrs W C Williamson

We owe a great debt to the historians of the late 19th century who captured the memories of the people who lived in south Manchester when most of it was still countryside.

Thomas Ellwood and Mrs Williamson were working at a time when the rural communities of Chorlton, Burnage, Fallowfield and Rusholme were on the cusp of disappearing.

Within a generation they had all but gone and with it was went a rich storehouse of stories and popular culture.

Today what was left is fast fading from living memory, so with in another decade I doubt that there will be any left who remember the blacksmith on Beech Road or being sent to one of the local farms to collect fresh milk and butter.

This makes it exciting when there comes along an opportunity to give a wider audience the chance to read about that rural past.

Thomas Ellwood lived here in Chorlton and during the winter of 1885 into the spring of ’86 he collected and wrote accounts of Chorlton dating back into the 17th century.

These were published in the South Manchester Gazette and are available in Central Library, but they are on microfilm which makes them a tad more difficult to read.  Some of the articles reappeared in various church magazines but I have yet to find a complete set outside the Gazette.

In the case of Mrs Williamson her work appeared in a slender edition in 1888 and I have only been able to put my hands on one copy again from Central Library.

However Bruce Anderson whose local history site I have mentioned from time to time has digitized his own copy along with a number of other histories of Burnage, Fallowfield and Rusholme and they appear on Rusholme and Victoria Park Archive at  http://rusholmearchive.org/

‘Sketches of Fallowfield and the surrounding Manors, Past & Present’ By Mrs Williamson, “gives a very interesting account of how Fallowfield developed from fields between Rusholme & Withington in the 14th century, gradually becoming a desirable neighbourhood with church, chapel & schools in the third quarter of the 19th century. 

There are three maps, 1818, 1843 and 1885 that illustrate the changes during these years.”

She lived in Fallowfield with her husband, Professor William Crawford Williamson FRS. He was an eminent Victorian scientist who was appointed as the first Professor of Natural History (Geology, Zoology and Botany) at Manchester in 1851. 

Williamson was one of the great Victorian naturalists who knew and actively corresponded with Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz, T.H. Huxley and other great scientists of the day. 

He also knew John Dalton and famously tended the great man during his final days, feeding him broth and other liquid sustenance. Williamson trained as a doctor and practised as an eye surgeon as well as pursuing his studies in the natural sciences.”

It is a wonderful book because it draws on the memories of those who experienced that rural life, and was a great help to me when writing my own account of Chorlton in the first half of the 19th century.*

And so for anyone wanting a vivid firsthand account of the handloom weavers of Burnage or the rush cart ceremony of Rusholme, Mrs Williamson and Bruce’s site have got to be worth a visit.

*THE STORY OF CHORLTON-CUM-HARDY, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-story-of-chorlton-cum-hardy-new.html

Pictures; Chorlton from the collection of Tony Walker, cover of Mrs Williamson's book from the collection of Bruce Anderson

An afternoon in Chorlton …… with a history of Withington

It was another of those well attended meetings at Chorlton Good Neighbours* and we were not disappointed by David Rydeheard’s talk on the history of Withington.

It started with maps which as everyone knows is a jolly good way of walking through the past, and we had four, covering the periods from 1820 through to 1934.

There at the start in 1820 was a very rural Withington which as David showed in subsequent maps was transformed by the march of urban development ranging from the grand properties of the people of plenty to the humble homes of the artisans.

And star of the presentation was the story of Withington swimming baths from its ambitious plans to the cut down version built by the City Council.

That said the finished product with its impressive, patterned windows and tiled walls is still a gem, and a gem which might have been demolished but for a community campaign which matched demonstrations with a carefully worked out business plan which did the trick.

The Baths were saved and today are the centre of a heap of community events as well as a place to enjoy a splash in the pools.

Nor was that al because David drew much social history from the provision of first- and second-class pools, and the limited access for women to the absence of a public laundry which were a feature of swimming baths in the poorer districts of the city.

Not content with the talk we had the opportunity to buy David’s book on the History of Withington Baths**, and the delightfully illustrated book A Bigger Splash, Withington Baths: Ten Years as a Community-Run Leisure Centre by the artist Len Grant***.

Pictures; An afternoon in Chorlton …… with a history of Withington, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Chorlton Good Neighbours, https://chorltongoodneighbours.org/

**Withington Baths, David Rydeheard, 2025, available from Withington Civic Society, www.withingtoncivicsociety.org.uk

***A Bigger Splash, Withington Baths: Ten Years as a Community-Run Leisure Centre, Len Grant, 2025 £15