Westonby reveals its history

Something always turns up.

It is a phrase I use a lot and I guess very much sums up the optimistic side of me.

And I was reminded just how true this was when out of the blue I got a comment to a story I had posted back in May about Westonby, a lost house on Edge Lane.*  In the piece I had gone looking for the remains of a fine old early Edwardian house which had come on the market in 1905 just two years after it had been built.


I remember saying that I thought “there was a story here about the development of Chorlton,” and a little bit more of that story has come to light.

We now have a picture of the place, or at least we think we have. It was supplied by Averil who wrote to me that having come across the blog story,

"At last I have an answer as to where my late Mother was born in 1923. On her birth certificate it says Westorby, Edge Lane but I could find no trace. Then I saw on eBay a Guide for Chorlton that mentioned Edge Lane. 

In with my late Mother's aunt's photos was a photo of a very large old house. She didn't know where it was, and I am wondering if this could in fact be Westorby. Her Mother died shortly after my Mother was born.”

So together we are beginning to look for more clues as to the history of the house, its later occupants and its fate, for this grand pile has long since gone.

The first task will be to check out the street directories and electoral registers which will give us names and a date for when it was demolished.

And we know a little bit more about the place.  According to the 1911 census it had nine rooms as well as a bathroom and kitchen which pretty much fits the estates agents blurb from 1905.

At the back end of 1910 it was occupied by Mrs Fanny Cottam, but by the April of the following year she may have died because the house is occupied by her two married daughters. Florence had married Harry Richmond in 1907 and Ruby was married to Edward Ruby Stevens in 1911.  Both were young couples and the Richmond’s had two young children.

All of which does add to the story of the township’s development.  Harry Richmond was a sub manager in  the family business which he describes as “mail contractors,” but was also according to the firm's advert "Funeral Carriage Proprietors Mail Contractors and Job Masters,"  while Edward Stevens was an electrical engineer, which puts them in that new group of people who had steadily been moving into Chorlton since the 1880s. These were professional, managerial and clerical people who are best described as the middling people who worked in the city or the newly created Trafford industrial area but fancied living on the edge of the countryside.

And in 1911 Westonby was just that.  A little down the road was Stretford Railway Station while not more than 15 minutes away was Chorlton Railway station both offering a quick service into the heart of Manchester and yet our house looked out on fields stretching down to the Mersey.

Averil’s mother was born there in the April of 1923 so the gap in years is not much and I am confident that we will have more answers soon.

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/westonby-lost-house-on-edge-lane.html

Picture; from the collection of Averil Kovacs