One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 20, washing machines, televisions and much more

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

On any one day the number of electrical appliances running in our house would I think bemuse Joe and Mary Ann who moved into the house when it was brand new in 1920.  I have no way of knowing what electrical appliances they had but you can bet that back  then there weren’t many of them.

But Joe looked to the future and the house along with the other five in the terrace were built with electricity, unlike the ones he had built earlier and the select Chorltonville estate which had a mix of both electricity and gas for lighting.  In the late 1920s Joe was advertising that his new houses on Hackness and Highfield and Vicars had “every modern convenience” including. “electric lights.”

All of which I suspect would have meant that Joe and Mary Ann would have joined the consumer boom which began in the late 1930s and really took off during the 1950s.  And they may very well have looked at this 1952 advert and planned what they would buy both for easing Mary Ann’s domestic workload and their overall comfort.  Certainly by 1958 they had a television and a car and had been listed with a phone in during the 1920s.

Now it is all too easy to smile indulgently at this fixation with the new consumer revolution, and I have to confess to being a little critical in my early grown up years of the rush to outdo the neighbours with everything from hostess trolleys to bigger and better TVs, washing machines and teammates. Not that it stopped me enjoying the benefits that these objects offered up but in my priggish youth they all seemed part of that great conspiracy to draw us into a world we would then become dependent on and which made us forget some of the more horrible things that were going on around the world.

But then with maturity came the realisation that the generation who fell on these consumer products were people like my parents who had lived through a tough world war, experienced the hard times of the 1930s with its mix of mass unemployment and the Means Test and for those older there had been the Great War and the bitter peace that followed that conflict.

And of course there is that simple fact that all of these have made life so much easier.  Who now would want to wake up to a house where there was ice on the inside of windows, or where wash day meant a full day and a half of hard labour collecting and heating water in order to soak, wash, rub and squeeze dry the weeks washing?

They were sold as part of that bright new future and were central to the prosperity of post war Britain.  Of course there may be those who point to the fact that even given this prosperity it was relative and the rich remained very rich and the divide between them and the rest was still a gaping chasm.  Added to this some at least of the new products were bought on credit and as this 1950s Chorlton shop front shows were pushed with a real intensity. But they were nevertheless built to last our Cannon cooker marched proudly into its fourth decade before being scrapped, and many other appliances have equally stood the test of time.

Joe and Mary Ann may not have anticipated many of the machines we take for granted but they lived in a house which with just a little adjustment has accommodated them all.  Not bad for a property built just under a hundred years ago.

Pictures from the collection Graham Gill and the Xlent shop by A E Landers, 1959, M18455, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house