“Making do” …… rationing … cooking … and that lost world of 1946

I often return to L.P. Hartley’s novel The Go Between with its story of class, romance and redemption, made more memorable for me by that line from the book, “The past is a different place, they do things differently there”.

The universal and compulsory identity card, 1950

All of which is a lead into a series of reflections on those immediate post war years, when Britain was adjusting to peace but was still surrounded by the effects of those six years of conflict.

It was there in the ruined buildings and bombsites, to the vestiges of wartime control from identity cards, to rationing.

But walking hand in hand with that weariness and the prevailing “make do and mend” there was an optimism which was there in the creation of the Welfare State, The New Look and the Festival of Britain.

And it all seems to come together with a series of information leaflets from the Ministry of Food which were part informative, and part designed to promote heathy eating with the hard realities that food was still in short supply and many necessities as well as luxuries were still rationed.

The leaflets were issued each month during the late 1940s and were compiled into the “’ABC of Cookery’ [which gives] suggestions and methods of cooking and preparing food”.

What's left in the Larder, 1946

They covered every aspect of the sourcing preparing and cooking of meals advocating healthy and nutritious food.  Here could be found “a plan for meals for children”, “Cooking for one” foraging in the countryside and how best to use the fat ration.

At which point there will be those who mutter “nanny state” but it is as well to remember that for many families the war had interrupted family life and in particular the routine of cooking with many civilians eating in office and factory canteens or in subsidised public restaurants while evacuation had ripped many children out of the home.

Hedgerow Harvest, 1946

So, the Ministry of Food’s leaflets aimed to plug the gap of knowledge and in some cases promote what ever food was available.  

One of my favourites was the 1946 “Hedgerow Harvest” issued in the July of that year with the simple message that “there is a wealth of wild foods in our hedgerows and fields for those who are within reach of the countryside [and which] should not be wasted”.

It chimed in with advice from the The British Gas Council with approval of the Ministry of Agriculture focused on “Jam Making & Fruit Bottling”.  Over the years I have done my own experiments in these post war food suggestions including orange curd Pearl Barley Milk Pudding.

And today I have turned to their offer from December 1946 and “What’s left in the Larder” which explored using “Stale Bread” and using up left over fish which could be turned into a curry, using an onion, small carrot, curry powder, and flour to which you added a pint of stock, some vinegar, chutney, two tablespoons of sultanas and the flaked fish.

Using up stuff, 1946

Pearl Barley puddings, 1946

Now whether it was because rice was scare or just a culinary sign of the times, the curry was to be served with mashed potatoes.

But then just under twenty years later and mother regularly made a meat curry with sultanas and served it up with mash.

So looking through the leaflets there is indeed much that echoes that L.P. Hatley observation of the gulf between now then and now.

Of course, the canny cook has never forgotten that there is a place for yesterday’s leftovers in today’s meals, whether it be taking slices of old bread and rubbing them with a mix of garlic, tomatoes and olive oil, or my own teatime fall back which added some end of date salad, the last of the double cream with mushrooms and a newly cooked plate chickpeas, paprika, onions and tomato sauce.

And tonight I will finish off the chickpeas with what ever I can find in the fridge which needs using up.

Location; the kitchen and sometime in the 1940s

Pictures; selections from Ministry of Food leaflets, 1946 and my leftovers, 2026, and an identity card, 1950, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

My left overs, 2026

* "The past is a different place, they do things differently there", The Go Between, L.P. Hatley, 1953

A Chorlton secret ……. the demolished cinema …….. and Mr. Shaw’s superior garage

 Unless you were in the know I doubt you would ever have realized that behind the shops on Barlow Moor Road between the former Co-op and Coriander there is a large building which specialises in MOT’s and car repairs.

A garage revealed, 2024

But then you would either have to be a customer or wandered down the alley from the main road and found the place.

Shaw's Motor Garage, 1959

Today it is clearly visible from Barlow Moor Road but for a century and more the garage was obscured by that Co-op store, which was once our first purpose, built cinema which opened as The Palais de Luxe de Luxe in 1914.

That relic of the picture age, and the store which once traded as a Tesco, Hanbury’s and Co-op was recently demolished and the open space reveals the line of the garage.

Back in the second decade of the last century it was Shaw’s Motor Garage which had  the first kerb side petrol pump in Chorlton.

The garage was still there in 1959 when Mr. A H Downs took a picture of the building which pretty much matches an earlier one from 1912 which shows Mr. Shaw and a large crowd admiring the petrol pump for the photographer.

Mr. Shaw and his garage, 1912

And not to be out done some time in the 1980s I clocked the same spot when part of the original signage was briefly on show.

The ghost sign, 1984

Mr. Shaw was one of those enterprising men who seized the “motor car moment” at the start of the 20tth century and may even have rented out space to the company which built the Chorlton cars.

All of which I have written about.*

At some point the open space of the former Palais de Luxe de Luxe will be filled with new build, leaving me just to pin down just when the front part of the garage became shops and renew my search for Mr. Shaw.

Location; Barlow Moor Road

Pictures; the space wot was the cinema revealing the garage, 2024, row of shops and ghost sign, circa 1984, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Shaw’s garage in 1959, A.H. Downes, m17515, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and in 1912, from the Lloyd collection

**When Chorlton made cars ………..https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/01/when-chorlton-made-cars.html

Looking for our memorial to Manchester’s Cholera deaths

Now I may well have missed it, but I don’t think we have a memorial to those who perished in the great Cholera outbreak of 1832.

The Cholera Monument, Sheffield, 2006

And I say that because today I came across Sheffield’s monument to its Cholera victims, which stands just a bit west of the railway station, situated in grounds that were laid out in 1850, fifteen years after the monument was completed and seventeen years after the epidemic which killed 402 people.

402 victims of the disease were buried in grounds between Park Hill and Norfolk Park adjoining Clay Wood. Money from the treasurers of the Board of Health was set aside for a monument for the site.

Cholera was regarded by many as the worst of the killer diseases that swept through our towns and cities in the 19th century.

It was often referred to as “Deadly” or “King Cholera” and is an infection caused by contaminated food and water.

The main symptoms are diarrhea and vomiting, and if untreated will continue until the patient becomes severely dehydrated. In the final stages a cholera victim will bring up what was called rice water and is almost clear liquid with fishy smell and resemble living skeletons.

Its impact was always going to be worst in the overcrowded and unsanitary parts of the city where large numbers were crowded together in back to back housing and narrow enclosed courts.

New Wakefield Street, 2004

There are vivid descriptions of these places in the 1840s by writers like Frederick Engels, Leon Faucher and Dr Kay, as well as official reports.

The Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, drew attention to the fact that in the Market Street district of Manchester half the cases of Cholera were from the inhabitants of courts and cellar dwellings, which were in close proximity to open privies where the water supply was of a “poor quality” often served several cottages and was generally only “turned on for an hour day”.

More revealing is the case notes of Dr Henry Gaulter who experienced the first outbreak of Cholera during the May to December of 1832. He kept a detailed record of the first three hundred patients he attended describing their physical condition, the onset of the disease and their living conditions but was forced to abandon the exercise as the numbers increased.

Little Ireland, 1844

 Here is the fit, not so fit and in many cases undernourished residents of streets which were overcrowded and dirty, like Martha Chorlton aged 57 of 10 John Street Ancoats, who lived in a “locality, crowding, filth, &c. Street in a very populous and poor neighbourhood.” *

Or Thomas Cavanagh aged 5 and his mother Elizabeth who lived at 5 Wakefield-street Little Ireland which “fronted an open area but an impure stream whose channel does the function of a sewer, passes by the door to adjoining field where it collects and stagnates: house and inhabitants very filthy: three children and two adults on a straw bed.”

And so, it goes on but not all the streets were dirty and not all those who would contract the disease were poor.

The rich had servants who may have had relatives in the more depressed parts of the city and might walk the disease in by the servant’s entrance.

Span Court, 1965

Nor should we forget that the wealthy often lived near run down areas. So that very posh set of late 18th century houses on St John Street off Deansgate was just next door to Span Court and surrounded by roads where there was overcrowding and Cholera.

Perhaps also we should be careful not to overstate the impact of the disease on the city.

There were just over 142,000 people in the city of which according to Gaulter 1,325 died.  But then there is the danger of falling into that callous numbers game which judges deaths in terms of statistics while for the individual just one death is a tragedy.

And the chances were that for those who contracted it death was a pretty strong outcome. So, for those who caught Cholera in Manchester over 50% would die while in Chorlton on Medlock the figure was 38% and in Salford 30%. These are not odds that I would fancy.

Nor I think should we feel that it was just the cities and towns that suffered. Rural areas were equally unsanitary and diseases like typhus and typhoid were according to the Poor Law Commissioners real threats in the countryside.

So where are Manchester’s memorials.?  I can think of the inscription on the foot of the cross in St John’s Gardens, and the plaque in St Michael’s Fields in Angel Meadow, but I am stumped as to a specific Cholera one.

That said I bet there is, and someone will tell me.

I hope so.

Picture; Cholera Monument, Sheffield, Gregory Deryckère, 2006,** New Wakefield Street, Little Ireland 2004, from the collection of Andrew Simpson,Little Ireland, 1844, from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1844, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/  and Span Court, south side of Artillery Street, J. Ryder, 1965 m00211, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

 *Gaulter Henry, The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera, 1833, London, & Appendix A, To the Report of the General Board of Health on the Epidemic Cholera of 1848 & 1849, 1850, London

**Gregory Deryckère, permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation

On Shooters Hill remembering the Great War at Christ Church

I am back on Shooters Hill in the company of Darrel Spurgeon's guide book.*

It is a book I keep returning to because it contains some fascinating history of Eltham and the surrounding areas and a set of first class walks.

So today I have lifted a little bit more of his walk along Shooters Hill and in particular Christ Church which is number two on the map and can be found by walking east up past the old police station as far as Red Lion Lane.

The church is opposte.

“Christ Church. A small Victorian Gothic church of 1856, the east end added in 1869.  

The exterior in unexceptional, but the interior is interesting with the atmosphere of a village church.  Note the fine east end and stained glass window of 1869 and a series of unusual roofshields.  

In 1900 Temple Moore added a coloured chancel screen, two large figures of winged angels in the chancel and decorated cornices.

In the churchyard is a graceful Great War Memorial cross of granite and in front of this the Ypres milestone, an 18th century milestone converted to a First World War memorial.  It reads: ‘130 miles to Ypres, in defending the salient our casualties were 90,000 killed, 70,500 missing, and 410,000 wounded.’ 

Note the modern milestone on the opposite side of the road, with replicas of 19th century iron plates reading ‘8 miles to London Bridge and 7 miles to Dartford’, which used to be on the Ypres milestone.

To the east is Christ Church School.  The small central building is the old village school of 1857; the extension on either side is post war.”

*Discover Eltham, Darrell Spurgeon, 2000

Pictures; map and photograph courtesy of Darrell Spurgeon

Walkng the streets of Manchester in 1830 in the company of J. T. Slugg and in search of Antonio Preduzzi.

St Ann's Church, 1793

I am on the streets of Manchester in the early 1830s in the company of J T Slugg* and in search of Antonio Preduzzi.

Over the last few days I have been exploring that Italian connection with the city and it has led back from Little Italy in Ancoats at the end of the 19th century  to the Preduzzi brothers who came from Lombardy and settled here in 1810 starting up a series of successful businesses.

They were living in what at the time was reckoned to be one of the most exciting places in Britain and which was talked about  as a model of the new age.

Here could be seem the raw enterprise and keen innovation of the new capitalism reflected in the ever increasing number of cotton mills, dye works and the acres of poorly constructed homes for a workforce which was increasing every day.

And because these men of industry wanted a quicker and cheaper way of transporting their products to and from Liverpool they built a railway which was not just a railway but the first passenger railway using technology which would define how locomotives were built and pretty much set the seal on how a railway would be run.

Of course we all know that behind those smoking power houses of cotton manufacture and great show warehouses there were the mean and narrow streets leading to even meaner and darker courts where little light or fresh air penetrated but which were home to all those who toiled for long hours and little remuneration.

This is that other side of the new way of doing things and was much commentated on by Dr Kay, Dr Gaultier, Frederic Engels and a possession of curious visitors.

And as revealing as these accounts are of the horrors of Manchester they are often paraded at the expense of the more benign descriptions of the city in the 1830s and 40s and for this I have turned to J.T. Slugg who arrived fresh faced and not long out of his teens from Bacup in the March of 1829.

The Infirmary, 1824

Fifty years later he set down his memories of the place which began with a walk up Market Street to Piccadilly and the Infirmary.

Less than a decade before he had arrived in the city this main thoroughfare had still been a narrow way flanked on either side by buildings which dated back a century or more.

These were home to taverns, sweet and bookshops the odd warehouse and a number of coaching offices. And in an age soon to be dominated by the railway it is a fitting reminder that for long distance travel the stage coach was still supreme.

And this was still at a time when “there was a very heavy duty on all kinds of glass, and as a consequence not a single shop-window contained any plate glass, but were composed of small squares of ordinary glass.”**

These would have been the sort of shop fronts that would have been familiar to Antonio and his brother.

He had opened a shop as a picture dealer in Spear Street around 1810, and later moved to Tib Street before settling at 31 Oldham Street. By this time, he was trading as a carver and gilder, and maker of looking glasses and picture frames. Oldham Street in the 1820s was a wide street containing ‘some very elegant shops and houses’.  Antonio's shop was above a confectioner's on the right-hand side from Swan Street.

The Infirmary, 1793

Here he framed and glazed needlework, drawings and pictures; re-gilded and silvered old frames and mirror plates; and made and repaired barometers, thermometers and hydrometers.

He also had premises at 44 Deansgate in the early 1820s and in 1831, to larger premises at 33 Piccadilly, opposite the Infirmary.

Like his previous shop, this one was on the first floor with a flight of steps leading up to it. The shop extended quite a long way back and had two long counters and a little sitting room beyond. There were also workshops on the premises.“***

This placed him in a prime position  which he shared with a few other shops, some rather fine houses and the offices of the Manchester and Salford Waterworks Company which supplied the town with its drinking water.

33 Piccadilly, the shop of Preduzzi & Co

Directly opposite was the Infirmary which “was a plain brick building  [and also] included the lunatic asylum.  Infrontwas the sheet of water known as the Infirmary Pond, separated from the footpath by palisading.  

At the Infirmary gates stood the public baths, the income arising from them being appropriated to the support of the Infirmary.  

The charge for the cold bath to non subscribers was 1s.; to subscribers of half-a-guinea, 10d.; and to those of a guinea, 9d.  

The price of a vapour bath was 5s; of a vapour and hot bath when used together, 6s.; and of the shampooing bath, 7s.”****


And while we are familiar with the huge show warehouses like S & J Watts on Portland Street which were built expressly to showcase the products of our textile mills, there was not a “single warehouse in either of these streets, Mosley Street, Portland Street, Peter Street, Oxford Road or Dickenson Street” but soon enough they would make their appearance at the cost of hundred of buildings in the neighbourhood which would be destroyed.

I don’t know what Antonio made of these changes which were transforming his adopted city.  When he had arrived in 1810 it was still possible to walk in to open fields just a short way along Oldham Road while to the south all of Hulme, Moss Side and Chorlton on Medlock were pleasant open space.

And yet by his death in the Chorlton Workhouse in 1846 great swathes of these spaces were the preserve of terraced houses, cotton mills and dye works.

Pictures;St Anne's Church and Manchester Infirmary from the Laurent map 1793, 33 Piccadilly and the Infirmary from the 1844 OS of Manchester & Salford, by permission of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ the buildings opposite the infirmary including the premise of Peduzzi & Co, 1824, m5291, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council  

*J.T. Slugg, Reminiscenes of Manchester, 1881
** Slugg, chapter 1
*** Collections Department, Museum of Science & Industry
**** Slugg, chapter 1

A chance photograph, some demolished houses, a lost Chorlton road and a lesson in always carrying a camera

It is one of those curious things that it is often the most recent history that goes unrecorded.

I must have walked down Ransfield Road loads of times in the late 70s and early 80s, but cannot remember these houses which were being demolished in Andrew’s photograph.

It was taken in the April of 1983 and like always there is a bit of story.

They date from the last decade of the 19th century and didn’t make their 100th birthday.  All of which is more puzzling given that they were six roomed properties and occupied by relatively well off working class people.  Here was a salesman a secretary, two clerks a plumber, tailor and a telegraphist.

And judging by Andrew's picture they were typical of what had been built at this end of Chorlton

Added to this the properties on the northern side of the road and those in the adjoining Claridge Road are still there. So there is a puzzle which a trawl of the clearance orders might throw up a reason or perhaps it was just a case of a developer buying the properties.

I had wandered down Ransfield Road just a few weeks earlier and couldn’t place when the new properties went up and for a while tracking the history of Ransfield was equally hazy.

Maps from 1907 showed them there but the street directories stubbornly refused to mention them.

All of which was because during the early part of 20th century Ransfield was called Richmond Road and may have been renamed because of the presence of another Richmond Road in Fallowfield, several Richmond Streets and two Richmond Groves one of which was here in Chorlton.

So in the process of exploring a line of demolished houses in the 1980s the quest turned up  another of our lost roads and in the process also points up that simple rule “never let an opportunity go by to record those moments of change."

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Robertson

On Shooters Hill with Mrs Craven and George Field in the June of 1841

I have decided to head north of Well Hall to Shooters Hill in search of a story. 

Back in the 1830s and 40s, it was a mixed bunch of those deriving an income from the land and the well off.

So of our forty two people in gainful employment in the June of 1841 the largest group were those who described themselves as agricultural labourers, farm servants or gardeners.

These were followed by those of “Independent means” along with one solicitor, a governess, a tea broker and a publican.

They lived fairly close together on the southern side of Shooters Hill on a stretch facing the Bull Inn.

And I guess quite a few of our band of workers would have spent time in the company of George Field who along with his wife Mary ran the Bull Inn.

Not that I would expect the Bull was ever frequented by Louisa Crewe who rented 21 acres  from the Crown and lived in Hazelwood House which was a big enough pile for it to be marked and named on the tithe map of 1844.

She had not long become a widow.

But of her, her employees and the others in Shooters Hill more next time.
Location, Shooters Hill , London

Picture; detail from the tithe map of Eltham, courtesy of Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, http://www.kent.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/kent_history/kent_history__library_centre.aspx