Sometimes a photograph just defeats you. Of all the images in the collection this is one of only a handful that has no accompanying notes or date. Nor are there any reference points which could fix its location, time or purpose.
And so we are forced back on the picture. It is a wet day sometime in the summer and I think in the early years of the last century. There are a lot of children who have been brought by a convoy of “special” trams so we are dealing with a big event.
Now they are all girls and so it would be logical to think that it might be an event linked to the Girl Guides.
The obvious venues for what seems such a large group must be the big parks, but one where the tram terminates. This I think rules out Whitworth Park and Platt Fields. Chorlton wasn’t laid out till the 1920s which just leaves Philips Park and Heaton Park. Of course it could be somewhere in Salford but there my knowledge runs out. But I doubt it these are Manchester trams.
A a search of the Manchester Guardian for the first twenty years of the 20th century threw up large numbers of references.
My pal Allan Brown is working on the trams as a clue and I suppose there might be someone out there who can take the search further. But at present the trail has petered away.
Picture; from the Lloyd collection
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