Sweet Thames Flow Softly*

The Thames Flows Down is another of those wonderful children's books written in the 1950s.

It was the companion to  A Valley Grows Up by Edward Osmond.*

The Thames Flows Down was  written by Laurie Osmond and  illustrated by Edmund and tells  the story of the River Thames from its small beginnings to the point when it flowed into the sea.

It is a  mix of history and geography, with the added bonus that it was written in the 1950s and perfectly captures the river and London at a point in time now long gone.

This is my river, that working waterway, when there were still warehouses on the south side facing the Tower of London, and when the docks still provided serious work for many families.

As a child I remember it all and even in the 1960s have memories of barges gently banging together on the tide beside the Cutty Sark pub on long summer evenings.

All of which may seem romantic tosh but it is about the Thames and its impact on those who lived along its banks and relied on it for work long before it became a mere backdrop for luxury flats and flash office blocks.

So I will close with the final words taken from Laurie’s book which pretty much sums up the flow of that river beside which I was born at Lambeth on the south side of the river  which was home for my  first 19 years.

“Back in the quiet reaches of the Upper Valley the Thames still pours steadily seaward through tranquil meadows, where owls are screeching and night jars churr in the trees.  Otters hunt and play, vixen steals for her cubs.

Over the pulsing heart of London an orange glow stains the sky.  The dark, running water is bright with reflections from the City’s embankments, yellow lamplight from bridges pierces the blackness of the tide-race round the piers.  

A police patrol boat slides silently upstream.  A light over Westminster tells that Parliament is still sitting, and along the wharves cranes still work for ships that must make the punctual tides.”

Back in the 1980s I wrote to Mrs Osmond seeking permission to use some of the illustrations from the books in history lessons and she kindly granted permission.

Sadly both books are out of print but maybe one day the O.U.P., will republish both books.  I hope so.

Pictures; from The Thames Flows Down, Laurie Osmond

The Thames Flows Down, Laurie Osmond, O.U.P., 1957

*Sweet Thames Flow Softly* by Ewan Mccoll, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmn5pOxb2iM

**A Valley Grows Up http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20Valley%20Grows%20Up

Pictures; from The Thames Flows Down, Laurie Osmond

Two elephants, a farmer’s son and a travelling circus Part One

Now the reason why Robert Bailey rode an elephant here in Chorlton in the summer of 1942 had a lot to do with the family farm. 

The Bailey farm was at the bottom of Sandy Lane and ran along St Werburgh’s Road and had a large enough supply of water to satisfy the thirst of the two elephants.

The Bailey’s also owned the land where the circus camped.

It was the strip of land which ran along the side of the railway track all the way from St Werburgh’s Road to Wilbraham Road.

And when the circus moved on the Bailey's left their cattle to graze there.

Photographs of the animals  on the land are in the local collection of Manchester Libraries and just to underline the point another photograph contains the sign “Beware of the Bull.”

Nor were these pictures from some distant past but were taken in 1959. Oliver Bailey remembers also driving pigs from the railway station along the roads to the farm.

Picture; Wilbraham Road m18513, Landers 1959, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Piccadilly Gardens ....... the early years nu 3 a plan for a new civic attraction .... 1920

Now if you are of a certain age the old Piccadilly Gardens will be a special place and even now generate a lot of heated debate about the present site.

A plan for the gardens, 1920

So here over the next few days are stories of the early years of those gardens.

In the Middle Ages it was nothing more than a site used to excavate clay for building and was simply known as “daub holes,” but in 1755 it became the home of the Manchester Royal Infirmary which continued to offer up medical care until 1910 when the hospital relocated to Oxford Road.

And then for the next twenty years the debate raged about what to do with this hole in the ground at the very centre of the city.

And it was indeed a hole in the ground which had been left over from the demolition of the old MRI leading one journalist to comment “the place has remained year after year a good imitation of a rubbish heap or the ruins of some volcanic upheaval.”*

And before the gardens ..... a hole in the ground 1917

The proposals ranged from an Art Gallery, to a tramway terminus and an underground railway centre and for a while part of the site was occupied by Manchester’s Reference Library.

But in 1920 the City Council decided to convert the site “into a pleasant garden. 

The existing hollow in the centre of the site is to be utilized for a sunken garden on the Dutch style and its banks will slope up to a border of flowering plants.”*

The gardens opened in the September of 1921 and in a revealing comment from one of the speakers the new civic attraction was planned only as a temporary measure until a new art gallery was constructed on the site.

Well that’s a twist in the story I didn’t know about.

Location; Manchester

Picture; the proposed gardens in 1920 from the Manchester Guardian, October 1920, and detail from a picture postcard of Piccadilly , 1917, from the collection of Rita Bishop

*After Sixteen Years : A Garden for Piccadilly; Manchester Guardian, October 23 1920, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

When the poem becomes the history ....... stories of Robert the Bruce ... today

This is one I shall listen to today. 

Penny of Robert the Bruce, circa 1320s

On BBC Radio 4 in the series In Our Time, Barbour's Brus': epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. 

In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. 

Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.

With Rhiannon Purdie, Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews, Steve Boardman, Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburh and Michael Brown, Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, Producer: Simon Tillotson"*

Location; BBC Radio 4

Pictures; Penny of Robert the Bruce, Museums Liverpool , Heather Beeton

*Barbour's 'Brus': epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dpm8

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ............. nu 52 underneath the Arndale

For anyone born after 1970 streets like Blue Boar Court, Bulls Head Yard, Watling Street and Spring Alley will be as remote as any of those little alleys that led away from the Coliseum in the Rome of the Emperors.

Watling Street from Shudehill, 1971

Of course there will be plenty who do remember Bulls Head Yard and in particular Watling Street which was once home to the old Hen and Poultry Market where the birds were displayed in cages and until recently the Mosley Arms which was serving pints by the middle of the 19th century.

Along with Watling Street, Spring Alley, Friday Street and Peel Street it vanished with the building of the Arndale.

But for the curious with a bit of imagination and an old map it is possible to recreate something of that warren of streets.

Watling Street ran off Shudehill almost opposite Thornely Brow and is today under the tall and twisty exit from the multi storey car park, which for even the most vivid of imaginations is a bit of a challenge.

So because Watling Street joined Friday Street which in turn joined High Street we will do the journey in reverse and begin with that entrance into the Arndale from High Street.

The Hen and Poultry Market, 1889

And by taking the main walk way east towards Exchange Court we will be walking roughly parallel with Friday Street which joined Watling Street passing a series of small entries including the one that gave access to Spring Alley.

All of which I suspect is very confusing so having included one picture of Watling Street from 1971 I will finish with an earlier one of the Hen and Poultry Market in 1889.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Watling Street from Shudehill, 1971, A P Morris, m05604 and the Hen and Poultry Market, 1889, S L Coulthurst, m80957, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Home thoughts from abroad nu 3 ................. lost in the woods in the summer of 1964

An occasional series on what I miss about the place where I grew up.*

Now I say lost but that would not be strictly true but thinking back to that summer of 1964 I might as well have been.

This was the first summer after we had moved to Well Hall from Peckham and it was magic.

After all how could it be other wise?

True there were parks in Peckham and neighbouring New Cross but the woods above Well Hall were something different.

For a start they were big, stretching all the way to that unknown place called Welling, offered great views down across Eltham and Woolwich but above all were just somewhere to wander.

And as the next few years rolled by and I was faced with yet another broken romance, walking alone in the woods got me out and pushed away that feeling of teenage melancholy.  
.
I was too old to see the woods as an adventure playground but they were still a place of fascination.

We went back recently took the old familiar routes up to the Castle looked down towards Eltham Park and then headed across to Shooters Hill Road and the Red Lion.

Of course back in 1964 the pub would not have featured over much on my journeys, but a little over three years later the Welcome Inn would be a fine finishing point to a long wander through the woods.

None of us were 18 but we looked it and that was enough.

And it was here sometime around then that I got to watch one of those first colour transmissions of a tennis game on TV.

It’s hard now to think all we watched was in black and white and I have to say that afternoon in the Welcome was a revelation.

Today of course we take it for granted, the welcome has gone and I seldom walk the woods.

Location; Oxleas Woods, Eltham

Pictures; the Woods, 1976 courtesy of Jean Gammons, and looking down, 2015 from the collection of Ryan Ginn

*Home thoughts from abroad, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Home%20thoughts%20from%20abroad

Stories behind a picture, ........... Chorlton Green circa 1904-12

This is one of those pictures which you look at, think about how things have changed and pass on.

But that really doesn’t do it justice. The more I look at it the more I seem to see. It is a warm summer’s day in the afternoon and the green seems quiet enough. There are no children about so either school hasn’t finished or the holidays have yet to arrive.

Now I know it must date from sometime between 1904 and 1912. It can’t be any later than 1912 because this was the year the postcard was sent. Nor can it be any earlier than 1904 which was when the Pavilion theatre on the corner of Wilbraham and Buckingham Roads was opened. It would have been an extra bonus to be able to use the bill board beside the Horse and Jockey to fix the date even more accurately but it is impossible to decipher the print advertising the forthcoming acts.

So it is all down to when Mrs Gertude Green moved in to number 5 Chorlton Green and opened her sweet shop. She was definitely open for business by 1909 and it is her name that appears on the sign in front of the house which also carries the advert for Rowntrees chocolates.

The delivery cart for Camwal may have been unloading mineral water and soft drinks to her shop. The firm had begun in 1878 as the Chemists' Aerated and Mineral Waters Association Limited and by 1895 had factories in London, Bristol, Harrogate and Mitcham. It can’t be sure but it is likely that around 1901 they changed their name to Camwal or were taken over. Those wooden heavy crates would still be used well into the middle of the century for transporting various soft drinks and beers.

Now number 5 looks small and in 1911 it consisted of just three rooms. Fine for Mrs Green who was a widow and lived alone but two decades earlier it had been the home of the plumber James Moloy his wife and four children.

Today the house is bigger but looking again at our picture back then some of number 7 appears to run behind it but just how the internal geography of the two works has yet to be revealed.

Having said that our picture has not yet given up all there is to learn.

Until late in the 19th century the pub was just the space either side of the entrance at number 9 and as late as the 1891 census there were families in numbers 11, and 13. And you might think that when the picture was taken this was still the case. The fence extends along the rest of the row and separates these properties from the pub.

But by 1901 all three were described as the Horse and Jockey which may have happened soon after the death of Miss Wilton who had lived at number 13 and died in 1896.

I would still like to know who owned the horse and cart in front of the Camel delivery vehicle, and whether the woman pushing the pram was the child’s mother or one of the many servants who were employed here in the years before the Great War.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, circa 1904-1912