One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ....... part 13 the coalman comes

The continuing stories of the house that Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.

Now I miscalculated with the coal order this week and we are down to the bottom of the heap. Coal is pretty much all that we have delivered, although not so long ago it would have been the papers, the milk and even fruit and vegetables which Muriel would drop off if I was unable to call down for it. To me to have the papers and the milk delivered was the hall mark of a civilized life but then I grew up in the 1950s when such things were just how it was.

Go back another thirty years and all the tradesmen and shop keepers offered a delivery service which might arrive at the same time as the laundry van while somewhere not so faraway were the knife grinder and rag and bone man.

It is all there in those old pictures of Chorlton which have been cropping up on the blog. Look down some roads and there were two or even three vans plying their trade, and all pulled by horses, which of course begs the question where were the horses kept?

But back to coal. Now as you would expect in 1911 when Joe and Mary Ann were settling into married life there were lots of coal merchants and coal men. In that year Slater’s Directory listed something like 1200 business directly involved with delivering coal to the door. Some had multiple outlets across the railway yards of Manchester, others were operated by the co-op and the rest were small time businesses and most relied on the 8 collieries around and just outside the city for their coal. Here in Chorlton we had fifteen, some with their offices on Albany Road by the station and others listed from their homes.

I have no way of knowing who the Scott’s used. Amongst the Chorlton coal merchants in 1911 there was William Percival who lived on the green while a little later in the 1920s there was Norman Bailey whose brother ran Park Brow Farm and later still the Royle family. My old friend Alan tells me that William Percival was not the best of men with horses and had one die while hauling coal across the township.

Coal of course is messy stuff and after Joe and Mary Ann died our downstairs fireplaces were ripped out by John and gas became the way the house was heated, all of which I mentioned earlier when I told the story of our return to open fires. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/100-years-of-one-house-in-chorlton-part_20.html

All of which is how my miscalculation has caused a little hiccup on the domestic heating front. Still the weather has remained mild and our delivery is within sight. So not so bad then. It will arrive in the afternoon and just maybe will compete for delivery space with the supermarket vans, specialist food companies and those express parcel people. We shall see.

Picture; Enoch Royle and his father with their coal wagon on Albany Road circa 1930 from the Lloyd collection