Treasures from Southern Cemetery ……………..

Now there is a lot to say about Southern Cemetery and over the years I have done my fair share.*

Memorial to Satinik Kouyoumjian, 2013

It was opened in 1879, is still a municipally run cemetery which is the largest in Britain and the second largest in Europe.

Battered but still doing the biz, 2026

And like all those other Victorian public cemeteries, it is more than just a burial place.  

It is a place rich in history from the monuments of the great and good to the humbler gravestones, each with a story of which the inscriptions are clues to much more about the lives of those interred here.

Added to the reminders of those past lives there is an abundance of nature, from mature and not so mature trees to the abundance of wildlife.

For the Corporation who bought the 100-acre site in 1872 the grand plan was thwarted by drainage issues which put a hold on proceedings and involved the construction of a sewer to the river Mersey which was two miles away. **

It was indeed a very necessary project give than “water stood throughout the ground at about three below the surface and permeated the substratum of sand down to the clay about 15 feet deep”. *** 

Nor was this all because the in constructing the chapels workmen had to dig down to the clay levels and then build concrete piers and brick arches for the foundations to rest on.

Waiting for a paint job, 2026

All of which makes me ponder on the sagacity of the landowners who sold off the 100 acres, especially as a cursory glance of maps from the 1840s and 1850s show a fair a fair number of ponds and culverted water courses.

It's all in the detail, 2026

Outside the Jewish Cemetery, Southern Cemetery 2026

But enough of such doom and disappointment.

The civil engineering scheme was completed, the chapels built and the citizens of Manchester signed up for their little bit of eternal rest.

And now one hundred and forty-seven years later there is much to see, and on Monday after attending a funeral I took a walk and recorded some fine examples the railings that abut the wall of the cemetery running along Barlow Moor Road from the Crematorium all the way to Princess Parkway.

Like many I rarely even noticed them, but they are well worth looking at and remarkably despite layers of peeling paint they are in good condition.

Which is all I want to say.

Location; Southern Cemetery

Pictures; Memorial to Satinik Kouyoumjian, 2013, and those bits of iron, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Southern Cemetery, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Southern%20Cemetery & The Quirks of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Andrew Simpson, and Peter Topping, 2017

**The New Manchester Cemetery, The Manchester Guardian, May 23rd 1879

***ibid, The New Manchester Cemetery

The Isle of Wight August 1970 ......... a concert and a lesson in what to remember for Chris and Marisa

Now just for once I am not going to let the facts get in the way of the story which is another way of saying that I would rather keep my imperfect memories of the Isle of Wight Festival in the summer of 1970 pristine. 

The concert with the hill behind, 1970

The alternative would be to allow reality to spoil what I have remembered for 54 years.

It was a weekend and the four of us were all pretty bored.

The prospect of another night in the pub didn’t appeal and so there and then around seven in the evening we took off from London with sleeping bags, a change of underwear and headed south.

We arrived at Portsmouth, waited I guess till morning and then after the crossing joined shed loads of others on their way to the music.

I am not sure any of us knew what to expect, and had not even thought about the entrance fee.
As it turned out there was a hill overlooking the concert area and to my eternal shame we sat there and watched the music for free.

The line-up I am told included Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Jethro Tull, Ten Years After, Chicago, The Doors, Lighthouse, The Who Emerson, Lake & Palmer, The Moody Blues, Joan Baez, Free, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Kris Kristofferson, Donovan, John Sebastian, Terry Reid, Taste, and Shawn Phillips.

And of these I can remember but a few and if I am very honest only the Doors stand out.

In 1970 .......

The reasons for such a lapse of memory are unclear, but I fell a sleep listening to the Doors.

That said it was magical, because as dusk gave way to night hundreds of camp fires had been lit across the hill.  I would like to think that as the fires burned the Doors played “Light my fire” but I have no idea.

We left the following day missed Jimi Hendrix but felt relieved that we had avoided the mud and gunge which was the area around the lavatories.

So I have to say I came away with no revelations of spiritual awareness, and not even much of a memory of the music.

In the years afterwards I discovered four colleagues I worked with and another half dozen acquittances were also there but again to my shame I never shared the fact that we stayed for just one day and one night.

And all of this, because two of my Canadian cousins were impressed at my casual reference to the adventure, which in turn has made me come clean.

Location; the Isle of Wight Concert, 1970

Pictures; at the Festival, 1970, Roland Godefroy,who granted permission to use the image  under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 and me in 1970 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Pictures from a family album, Dartford 1928

I have to confess I am drawn to old family photographs.

Nor does it matter that they are not my family.

In fact very few of ours have survived.  Now this may be simply bad luck or a tendency that runs through the family to always be the person taking the pictures not the subject.

Added to that some of those that have not been lost or destroyed have no name, or date and so they remain a mystery.

Now that should be a lesson to all of us, and even more so in the digital age where while the opportunities to take pictures are boundless the chances are that even less will stay the course.

We photograph what takes our fancy in an instant with a camera phone, may send it to friends but rarely save them for long.

Even if we are more mindful of the future the likelihood is that they will be stored on a computer with no hard copy made of the image.

All of which has been prompted by these delightful photographs of Harold Morris, who was born in Eltham in 1902, grew up in Welling and died in 1976.

His was a full and productive life.  He married Alma Minnie Shrove in 1928 and these are some of their photographs, courtesy of his niece who has written

“Young Harold's first love broke his heart, but when he was 26 he married a Bexleyheath girl, Alma Minnie Shove. 

The bridesmaid was his youngest sister, Dorothy who was Jean’s mother, a self-willed child. 

Her dress had too many frills in her view and so, on the bus journey to Bexleyheath she took scissors with her and cut off as many as she could before her parents noticed.”

Such are the stories from family weddings.

Pictures’ courtesy of Jean Gammons

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester nu 34 Mallard Street

It’s one of those little streets which run off Charles Street and which are cut short by the river and the railway viaduct.

For most people Charles Street will be the one that leads to the Lass a Gowrie pub and until its demolition was fronted by the side of the BBC Building which lasted just over 30 years.

Andy Roberston was there in 2012 just after the building which was the The Okasional Cafe had also been demolished.

The spot like so many is now a car park waiting redevelopment, leaving me also to wonder what will become of the old HSBC Bank on the corner of Charles Street and Oxford Road, which closed one day without me even knowing.

Location; Manchester

Picture, Mallard Street, 2012, from the collection of Andy Robertson

Painting Peckham ............. standing in a pub with no beer ....... the Carlton Tavern on Culmore Road

Now it’s just one of those things that “there's nothing so lonesome, morbid or drear than to stand in the bar of a pub with no beer.”*

The Carlton Tavern 2015 from a photograph, 2008

Which I guess might well be the closing words for the Carlton Tavern.

It did the business of pulling and serving pints on Culmore Road from 1867 till sometime around 2011.

But like so many pubs around the country that fateful mix of cheap supermarket beer, changing life styles and the onward march of the bar culture have done for so many traditional drinking places.

So as part of Peter’s ongoing project to paint the pubs of Peckham here is his painting of the Carlton Tavern taken from a 2008 photograph on London Pubology that excellent site for all things to do with London pubs and from where I discovered a little of his history.**

The Carlton tavern, 2015

And by sheer coincidence just a few days earlier Adam Burgess sent me another photograph of the place which he tells me “is now a block of flats but  has still got the advertising for the world cup on the blackboards” and if you look closely there also is the old  sign standing outside.

But for all that it is still a pub with no beer which brings me back to that song which I must have first heard sometime in the late 1950s.

It was adapted by Gordon Parsons from Dan Sheehan’s poem "A Pub with No Beer"  and was made popular by fellow Australian country singer Slim Dusty.

Since then it has been covered by a shedful of singers and has settled so deep into our culture that I assumed it was an old Victorian music hall song.

And along the way it has become the anthem for any one whose pub has temporarily run out of beer which is why it was such a hit in Ontario in 1958 when a strike at of Canadian brewery workers stopped the flow of beer for 48 days.

Slim Dusty

But that like the song is for another time leaving me only to reflect that having spent the last hour listening to the songs of Dusty Slim I have become a fan.***

Not that I suspect I will win many converts in our house for his brand of Australian country music which like all good country music mixes simplicity with a dash of truth and humour.

All of which is a long way from Culmore Road and that pub with no beer.

Location; Peckham, London

Painting; The Carlton Tavern, © 2015 Peter Topping from a photograph, 2008 in London Pubolgy 

Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk

Facebook: Paintings from Pictures https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Picture; The Carlton Tavern, 2015, courtesy of Adam Burgess and Slim Dusty reproduced from ABC News, 2003


*Slim Dusty sings a Pub with No Beer,  https://uk.video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?p=Slim+Dusty+sings+a+Pub+with+No+Beer&fr=mcafee&fr2=p%3As%2Cv%3Av%2Cm%3Asb%2Crgn%3Atop&ei=UTF-8

** Carlton Tavern, 45 Culmore Road, Peckham SE15
http://pubshistory.com/LondonPubs/Camberwell/CarltonTavern.shtml

***State funeral planned for Slim Dusty, ABC News  http://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-09-19/slim-dusty-hangs-up-his-spurs/1481156

Manchester Victoria … more than just a railway station

Manchester Victoria still retains that grandeur which allowed it once to boast it was the gateway to the north, Scotland and Ireland as well as the Continent.

And to underline that boast the elegant and ornate iron and glass canopy announced the destinations that its trains served in 1909 with the equally impressive map which picked out the rail routes of the old Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Company.

 

I have often written about it’s past from the opening in 1844 to the station’s expansion over part of  Irk Town and the cemetery at Walker’s Croft and on to nibble way at the former Manchester Workhouse site, concluding with the uncertain period of the 1980s and the arrival of the tram.*

But despite its elegance it has always struck me as a messier railway station than Piccadilly with its busy concourse or the iconic timber entrance to Manchester Oxford Road.

You get the sense that the successive changes and developments have left it as a place where all the bits that make it work have been left on show.

Which echoes the mantra of my Maths teacher in the 1960s that “always show the working out that leads to your answer, even if you are wrong it’s the evidence of how you worked at it and tried to get there”.*

And that seems exactly what you get with that spaghetti like set of tracks leading in and out of the station.  

It isn’t pretty but it is how you get out and on to Shudehill.

In the same way the new bits that link the station with the AO Arena make no concessions to hiding anything away.  

The arena opened in 1995 and consigned those through railway platforms into a subterranean place made all the more claustrophobic by the sheer number of passengers destined for towns across Lancashire and Yorkshire and transported in a variety of work a day trains.

I might be wrong, but I have yet to see any of those sleek inter city trains which will whisk you from Manchester Piccadilly south or thunder north to Scotland.

All of that said Victoria still has lots to see from the war memorials to the wooden booking hall and former first class buffet.

And that will do for me.

Location; Victoria Railway Station

Pictures; Victoria, 2025-2026 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Mr. Gubby, Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern School, 1965

*Victoria Railway Station, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Victoria%20Railway%20Station

&

Market Street to Victoria, The History of Greater Manchester By Tram, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2025/03/victoria-railway-station-one-with-lot.html

Harold Morris of Eltham and Welling, a life lived out in service to the community.... part 2

In that great sweep of history marked by revolutions, wars and natural disasters most of us will not even get a footnote in some long and detailed history of the 20th century.

Ours are “little lives lived out in a great century.”  That said it is the stories of the little people who fascinate me most whether they be the woman who cleaned up after Alfred burnt the cakes, the lonely herdsman who watched the passing of a Roman legion as it made its way westward to Maiden Castle or the family who didn’t watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II on TV.

In an age all too ready to be impressed by celebrities and the autobiographies of people who have yet to reach their third decade I revel in the stories of men and women who quietly got on with life, providing for their families, looking to improve their communities, and leaving their mark in a far more positive way than a headline in a Sunday newspaper.

One such of these was Harold Morris, born in 1902, died in 1976 and a milkman for over 50 years.

Not perhaps the stuff of a Hollywood blockbuster but nevertheless a story which spans the last century and pretty much reflects how that hundred years rolled out and the changes that it brought to people’s lives.

When Harold was born virtually all the technologies we take for granted had yet to be developed or were in their infancy, but in that span of 74 years he was a party to the age of cheap air travel, the first landings on the moon, along with television, and much more.

At the age of 13 he could have followed his father and school friends  into the Woolwich Arsenal, instead he set up his own business as a milkman.

“There was no milk delivery service for the villagers around Welling where he lived. If they wanted milk they had to take a  jug or container of some kind up the hill to the dairy farm on Shooters Hill.”*

And being an enterprising young lad he walked “across the fields to Eltham to visit his grandparents, who lived in Courtyard.  Thomas Tillings, the omnibus company, had a yard full of horses, carriage and carts of all kinds just behind his grandparents' cottage.  

And he persuaded them let him have the use of a horse and cart so that he could set up a milk delivery service to serve the villagers of Welling.”

It was a job he would continue to do for the rest of his working life during which time the horse and cart was replaced by an electric float.

Holidays as for so many people of his generation were spent beside the seaside, and like his northern counterparts who were drawn to Blackpool and the resorts of the east coast and north Wales, the Morris family would have had their week by the sea in Kent in a  B&B made easier by the introduction of a week’s paid holiday.

Cheap rail travel added to the opportunities for that break by the sea, and by the early 20th century places like Blackpool and the resorts south and east of London boomed in the summer months.

His niece Jean remembers a generous man who was a "very special brother to his young sisters, Hilda and Dorothy.  

On pay day he used to tell them that he had dropped some coins on his bedroom floor and that if they found any they could keep them. 

They never found less than 6d apiece.

It was at his home that the family's wakes were held, when all the aunts gathered in the front parlour drinking tea.

But never ever taking off their hats because of  the bother of hat pins.  

Since his passing in 1976,  there have been no family wakes and his death took with it the heart of the Morris family.”

Now I can’t think of a better tribute to a man’s life.

*Jean his niece

Pictures; courtesy of Jean Gammons