Standing on the lost Prichard Street in the summer of 1971 ……… with no thoughts of the future

There will still be some people who remember the close network of streets and houses that stretched back from Oxford Road to the Medlock, and from Charles Street down to Great Street.

Pritchard Street on the cusp of change, 1971

In all there were fourteen streets and countless houses which were all swept away so that the BBC could have a new broadcasting centre here in Manchester.

The lost streets included Pritchard Street, Hesketh, Leigh and Saville Streets and along with the houses there had been a school and a pub.

Planning permission had been granted in 1968 and after a hiccup building began in 1971 was finished in 1975 and the place was home to the BBC until 2011.

And for those wanting to impress a companion, about 800 staff worked there and with the opening of the second studio in 1981 the BBC closed Broadcasting House in Piccadilly which had been there for 52 years.

And now Broadcasting House has gone replaced by Circle Square.

Pritchard Street, 1894

In the meantime, I wonder how many memories of those that lived in that small area can be shared.

After all the buildings only began to be cleared in 1968.

Broadcasting House, 2011

All of which has been prompted by that picture at the top of the page, which must have been taken in the summer of 1971.

We were on Prichard Street with Charles Street and the Lass O’Gowrie in the distance, surrounded by the remains of a warehouse to our right and what had once been a row of back-to-back house.

At the time I doubt we had any idea what the developers had planned, and more than likely we were on our way down to The Eighth Day or to meet up with friends at the Art College on All Saints.

The picture and the memories of that day have lain hidden for over half a century but offer up a little insight into the area off Oxford Road on the cusp of its development.

Lost and forgotten warehouses, 1971

I did wander down during the demolition of the old BBC Broadcasting House, and waited patiently for the site to be redeveloped.

But it seemed an age before the ground was broken and the development began to rise, pretty much eclipsing the surrounding buildings.

Now I don't pretend to be Methuselah, but in the space of that time from the summer of 1971 I have seen the rise of Broadcasting House, its demise and the subsequent rise of Circle Square. 

I guess it is presumptuous to suppose I will be around for the next development/

Well we shall see.

Location; Oxford Road, 1971-2022

Pictures; Prichard Street, 1971,  tall buildings and stairs, Circle Square, Manchester, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpsonand map of the area in 1894, from the OS of South Lancashire, 1894, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ BBC New Broadcasting House, Oxford Road, 2011, from the collection of Andy Robertson

One Circle Square, 2022

*Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ......... nu 56 the vanished fourteen and the story of the BBC, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2016/10/lost-and-forgotten-streets-of_5.html

Of letters, and postmasters in the Eltham of the 19th century

Eltham in the 1830s

I am back with the post office in Eltham and in particular two men who straddle the history of letters, parcels and other odd things sent by the postal service.

James Pike and James Lawrence were the postal service in Eltham for a big part of the 19th century and their stories have been unearthed by Jean Gammons and so I shall hand over to her.

“James Pike was Eltham’s postmaster for perhaps forty years.  He was a clockmaker and his house was in the High Street.  

Very little is known of him and the earliest reference is a record of the death of his first wife in the parish records in 1798.  I could find no record of his birth or his marriage to Elizabeth so he may not have been an Eltham man.

He remarried in 1809 when he was 49 to a young woman from Eltham called Ruth Patterson.*

She was some twenty years younger than him and the records show they ran the post office together.

This was on the High Street just up from the old Chequers inn.  They would have conducted the business of the postal service from a room in their house and people waited outside in the street to be served through a window.”

Burial entry of James Pike, June 1837

James died in the June of 1837, and was buried in the parish churchyard.  

His wife Ruth survived him by twenty years, but the business was taken over by James Lawrence whom the Pike’s had taken on as their apprentice in their clock making business.2

He had been born in Eltham in 1819 and we can follow him from the 1841 census when he was listed as watch maker through the next four decades.  By 1871 while he may still have had a connection with the clock business he lists himself simply as postmaster.

This was an important time in the development of the Post Office.

Looking towards the parish church

The year before “the post office had taken over the private telegraph companies and James Lawrence must have been very proud when his eldest son, then a lad of just 13 became one of the Post Office’s first Telegraph messengers.  

In 1876 Eltham’s little post office was upgraded to a Head Post Office and Lawrence was placed in charge of all the smaller post offices in the Eltham district with an overnight salary rise from £31 to £60 a year.

But his office was still at no 54 High Street in the old shop where it had been since the 18th century, roughly where the milkman’s cart is seen in the picture."

The Post Office is roughly where the milkman's cart stands

All of which takes us into a new and bold period in the history of Eltham and its postmasters.

Pictures, of the High Street in the 1830s, and in 1909 courtesy of Jean Gammons and Mr Pike’s burial entry from St John’s parish records, courtesy of ancestry.co.uk, and the City of London Corporation Libraries, Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery Department

*Another Eltham life brought out of the shadows, the story of Ruth Pike, nee Patterson, 1782-1857

Hough End Hall in the 1950s

Now the thing about very old buildings is that usually we focus on that very old bit.

So it is with Hough End Hall built in 1596 and for a big chunk of its history the family home of the Mosley family.

Most of the accounts of the place concentrate on its Elizabethan design and the Mosley family and ignore the last two hundred years when it was a farm house and later still an office and restaurant.

But I am more interested in its time as the home of tenant farmers during the 19th century and then its uncertain time from the 1920s when it was under threat of demolition by road widening plans.

Today there is nothing much left and so I have decided to call on the memory of Oliver Bailey whose father took possession of the Hall and surrounding land at the beginning of the Second World War and worked it in conjunction with his farm at Park Brow.

Here and over the next few weeks are short accounts of what was once three and which I hope will set off more memories from other people.

"Looking at the front of the hall on the right hand side I remember a man called John Hallsworth had a blacksmith shop in the 1950s. 

He had been an iron worker with British Road Services and rented the smithy at Hough End from my father after he retired from BRS.

There was a wooden staircase up the wall of the hall inside the smithy itself. He he made a couple of gates for Park Brow Farm. 

Sam & Jack Priday, who were farriers with a smithy in Withington,  came round and used the forge to shoe my father’s Suffolk Punch horse. 

I remember walking beside him as he used a horse drawn single furrow plough in the field next to Mauldeth Roadd, probably late 1940s. 

At the rear right hand end there were various add-on outbuildings at the back, probably nineteenth century. 

One was a cottage and another a store of some sort that had fallen into disrepair .

The left wing of the Hall suffered severe structural damage which was perhaps caused by subsidence and had to be rebuilt in the 1950s by the Egerton Estate and I remember they used artificial stone lintels and cills for the mullioned windows. 

On the upper floor there was an old mangle that was basically a large box full of cobbles that rolled back and forth on rollers on the wooden base when it was worked by turning the handle.

 I think that ended up in Ordsall Hall, definitely went to Salford as Manchester had no interest."

© Oliver Bailey, June 2014

Pictures; Hough End Hall, 1952, m47850,the hall from the south east, 1952 m 47856 and the hall and duck pond, 1952, all by T Baddeley, m47859, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Next, a plan a riding school and the man who kept rabbits

Dr. Catharine Corbett M.B. Ch.B. D.P.H...... another story from Tony Goulding

As promised, this is a follow up story featuring the woman who but for her surname being marginally higher alphabetically would have been the first to receive a medical degree at Manchester University.

Graduates of Manchester Medical School –July 1904

Catharine Louisa Corbett was born on 2nd December 1877 in Handforth, Cheshire. She was the second of the two children of Manchester-based architect (1) and surveyor Christopher George Bentham Corbett and his wife Sarah (née Woodhead). 

She had an older brother, John Rooke. (2) In the 1881 census, the family are recorded at 9, Silverwell Yard, Bolton, Lancashire where, very unusually for the time Catharine’s mother was, despite the fact she had two young children, recorded as a “school headmistress”

Both her parents were from established quaker families and as such Catharine benefited from that tradition’s valuing of the education of girls. Her mother, also being a beneficiary of this principle had the distinction of being one of the first three women to pass the Tripos at Cambridge University in 1873; being the very first to do so in Mathematics. These three ladies became known as the Girton Pioneers (3) with their names being celebrated in the that College’s song.

 The 1891 census records Catharine as a pupil of “The Hollies”, Epsom, Surrey, a High School for Girls run by her aunt Caroline Woodhead, who ten years earlier had been her family’s housekeeper.

 Both “Catharine” and “Catherine” qualified as doctors on 28th July 1904 and as opportunities for newly qualified female doctors at the time were very limited the two often found themselves as colleagues and occasionally rivals for the same post. The “Westminster & Pimlico News” reported that on Wednesday 3rd January 1906, whilst both were employed at The Clapham Maternity Home, they attended an interview for a post at the Chelsea Infirmary. On this occasion Dr. Corbett was selected by the appointments board by a vote of eight to three.

 After eighteen months in Chelsea, Dr Corbett was appointed by the West Ham Board of Guardians on Thursday 27th June 1907 to a similar post at the Whipps Cross Infirmary.

The census of 1911 shows she had left London and was living at 35, Wilkinson Street, Sheffield again with her, by then retired aunt, Caroline Woodhead. She had also left hospital work and entered the field of public health, which would be the focus of the rest of her career: working as a school health inspector.

Manchester Babies Hospital, Burnage Lane, Burnage (28/4/1924)

Catharine had returned to Manchester to take on a similar rôle with Lancashire County Council Education Department and assist her friend Catherine Chisholm in the foundation of the Manchester Babies Hospital  when, in February 1915 she volunteered to join a medical unit formed by Scottish members of The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies which went to serve in a hospital at Kraguievatz on the Serbian front. At this time, her home address was 12, Birch Polygon, Rusholme, Manchester. In January 1916 she was reported as a prisoner of war. Released after a couple of months of captivity she returned to England and gave a series of lectures trying to raise much needed funds for the hospital. From 30th August 1916 until 24th November 1917, she again served on the Eastern Front treating sick and wounded in Russia and Rumania. Finally finishing the War, working as a surgeon at the County of Middlesex War Hospital. (The former County Asylum and now Napsbury Hospital, London Colney, Nr. St. Albans, Hertfordshire.)

 Following her war service, back in civilian life Dr. Corbett returned to her work for Lancashire County Council and Burnley, Lancashire (4) where she spent the remainder of her career before moving to Bristol, Gloucestershire in her retirement. In Bristol she once again resided with her brother at 1, Falcondale Road, Westbury-on-Trym. Dr. Corbett died there on 22nd June 1960.

   Outside of her medical career Catharine showed her adventurous spirit by being a keen climber and a liking for fast cars. On at least one occasion, she was convicted of speeding. Later while in Bristol she was involved in another traffic incident; that time only as a witness to an accident. She was also a Socialist and a Feminist being a member of both the Fabian Society and the National Society of Women.

In the immediate aftermath of World War 1 she privately published her diary of her time in Serbia and gave several lectures based on it 

Pictures: - Medical graduates Manchester University, 1904, Dr. Corbett is the left one of the two women on the front Row, with the kind permission of The Manchester High School for Girls Archives. Manchester Babies Hospital, Burnage Lane, Burnage Manchester City Council’s City Engineers Department m 52817 images courtesy of Manchester Libraries. Creative Commons Attribution International (CC BY 4.0) licence

Notes:-

1) One of Catharine’s father’s projects was the Barton Arcade between Deansgate and St. Ann’s Square, Manchester.

2) Her brother John Rooke was named after his uncle who had died aged 19 in a drowning accident in the River Irwell at Clifton, Nr. Salford, Lancashire on Monday19th April 1869. He was in a rowing boat with Catharine’s father when it capsized in rough water.

3) One of these “Girton Pioneers”, Rachel Susan Cook later married Mr. C.P. Scott the editor of the Manchester Guardian.

4) The 1921 census record shows Dr. Corbett at 395, Padiham Road, Burnley, Lancashire and again living with her aunt and two servants. By 1939 the family home had moved to 31, Ightenhill Park Lane, Burnley where Catharine’s brother John Rooke, who was a district valuer for the Inland Revenue, joined her and her aunt.

The lost grocery shop on London Road ........ 1960

Now, for me, these images perfectly capture  that time when I was growing up.

And I suspect it will be the same for many others who were also born n the late 1940s, and for whom these pictures  will chime in with their memories of a changing Britain.

There were the empty bombsites, the drab tired looking buildings, and plenty of horse drawn vehicles.

But many of those bombsites were car parks catering for the growth in car ownership, new and exciting consumer products were becoming available at affordable prices, and above all there was a sense of optimism about the future.

So, here we are, on the corner of London Road and Buxton Street with the grocery store of P. Prole, where the promise of the future was edging out the past.

At first glance, the shop front could quite easily pass for one from the turn of the century.  

The tiles, the signage and the metal fitments look dated, but the poster in the window extolling the power of Stergene “To wash away the shadow of nylon” is accompanied with that elegant looking woman wearing the height of fashion.

While just a few doors down, the empty site has become a secondhand car business, where a 1956 Vauxhall Cresta is on offer for £475, making the Black Bentley look decidedly ancient.  

And for those who like period detail, the Cresta is advertised with a “heater” and the Bentley has been given new tyres, leaving just the odd shaped Morris van lurking in the background.

But despite the signs of modernity, the buildings and the area have seen their best.  

The upstairs floors of the shop have long been abandoned, the glass in some of the windows needs replacing, while the roof and gutters look in a sorry state.

Just when it and its neighbours were demolished I have yet to discover, but demolished they were.

The space it inhabited was replaced by what was one a telecom building and is now a hotel.

You can still walk along Buxton Street, but alas access to it is now via a car ramp which passes under the hotel, and the site of P. Prole’s grocery store is marked by a locked  hotel door.

Location; London Road, Manchester

Picture; The shop with a story, J Prole’s grocery store, corner of London Road and Buxton Street, 1960,Courtesy of Manchester Archives+ Town Hall Photographers' Collection,  

https://www.flickr.com/photos/manchesterarchiveplus/albums/72157684413651581?fbclid=IwAR35NR9v6lzJfkiSsHgHdQyL2CCuQUHuCuVr8xnd403q534MNgY5g1nAZfY

Living on our Meadows ...... stories from the Brownhill family

We are on the meadows, when people still worked and lived there.

Now everyone knows about the sewage works which were first established here in the 1870s, continued well into the last century.

Less well known perhaps is that two families of those who worked on the plant lived close by, and their houses stood by what is now the footbridge over the Brook.

The rest as they say belongs to Catherine Brownhill who sent over these pictures and the accompanying story.

“Hi Andrew, Malcolm (my husband) lived at No. 1 Cottage, Withington Sewage Works. Hughie  and Lily Edwards lived next door. Lily was 90 last October and Malcolm & his brother went to visit her. 

He has taken some pictures of photographs from her album. 

Over the next few days I’ll send them to you with as much info as I can. This picture is likely Lily and a friend at the Sewage Works. Ivygreen Road houses are in the background. The 2 cottages would be to the right of this picture. The tree is still there today.

This is the same tree with the ‘cottages’ in the picture. They were sturdy brick built semi-detached houses. 

Malcolm’s Dad, Jack Brownhill can be seen bowling in a game of cricket. 

The cottages were at the end of the cobbled road just where the bridge is. 

Below are the four Brownhill children. Jack and Irene were their parents. 

Over the years Irene worked in the laundry on Crossland Road and in three chip shops, on the Green and Beech Road. She attended the school on the Green. 

Pictured are Jeanette, Malcolm, Graham and Ray with the air gun.

The last one for today. 

These buildings were in front of the cottages and to the left and the buildings behind housed the engine room and various sheds. 

Back to the photo, where the car/van is this was a barn where straw was stored for the sheep in the fields and chickens were kept in one of the rooms to the right. Malc’s Dad had a Morris Minor and all the lads would take turns to drive it, Malc could only just see above the steering wheel. 

It was chopped up at the end of its life and was put over the bank of the brook. 

Bits of it may still be there, though we think that when the banks were reinforced in recent years the motor debris may have been cleared. This would have been to the left of where the bridge is now”.

Location; the Meadows

Pictures; living on the Meadows, circa 1950s-60s, from the Brownhill Collection

Wishing you were here ........... Eltham in the past nu 3 the old vicarage 1833

The caption says "The Old Vicarage as seen from what is now Sherrard Road.  In the distance the Church. 

On the right the old Chequers Inn. 

Date 1833.  The shops on the immediate right are still in existence.”

And that is pretty much all you will get today, except to say that “today” was 1909 and back in 1833 Sherrard Road where it joins Eltham Hill was the start of Well Hall Lane, but that is another story, for another time.

Picture; the old vicarage, from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm