Westonby, possibly the last story

This I think will be the last story about Westonby* which has occupied me for the last few weeks.
It was a large Edwardian house built in 1903 on the edge of the Township.  

It boasted “three well lighted entertaining rooms, billiard-room, spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom and separate w c, lavatory and w con ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden” and “was cellared throughout.”  It was set back in its own grounds had views across the fields to the Mersey “and was convent to Stretford trams and trains.”**

It was perhaps the last of its type.  They were expensive to run and only worked well if there were servants on hand. They had names like Westonby, Sunwick and Ebor House.  The biggest, which were those along Edge Lane and High Lane have long since gone, some of the smaller ones suffered the indignity of being converted into bed sits and a few into offices or commercial properties.
You can sometimes come across the odd gate post with the name of the house carved into the stone and perhaps even a stretch of the wall. But as often as not the space where the grand building stood surrounded by it landscaped gardens are now filled with modern blocks of flats.

Most of these old elegant houses managed a century.  Not so Westonby.  It lasted just under twenty years.  By 1922 it was a private nursing home and perhaps by the late 40s it had gone.

Not you might think then a subject for a story.  But in its way I think there is something to tell.  It represented one of the last big houses to go up at a time when people were still moving to Chorlton looking for somewhere close to the city but on the edge of the country.  It is a theme I have often visited partly because it marks that change from rural community to suburb of Manchester.

And in their way Harry and Florence Richmond were typical of that professional, managerial and clerical wave of people who had been settling here from the 1880s.  He was a manager in the family business of George Richmond & Sons, Funeral Carriage Proprietors Mail Contractors and Job Masters.  Their works took up Gaskin Street which was a narrow dead end off Downing Street not far from Ardwick Green.  Here they made all sorts of carriages but seemed to have specialized in hearses.

Florence came from a similar background.  Her father was a mantle manufacturer with a show room on Oldham Street and the family had made a move out of Salford to Lytham St Ann’s sometime between 1891 and 1901.

They were in Westonby by 1907 and may have been there even earlier.  Florence’s father died in 1905 and her mother may have bought the house after his death. What is a little confusing is that while Harry is listed as the householder in 1907 in 1910 it his mother in law who appears on the directory even though she died in 1906. By April 1911 the house is occupied by Harold, Florence and Florence’s sister and husband.

What for me is more interesting is that there were no servants or at least none that appear to be living in.  It is just possible that the family employed someone to come in on a daily basis or they were modern enough to have dispensed with paid help all together.  This would have marked them off as unusual for the period.

I said this was the last story but in the course of today I have found pictures of Florence and her brother in law which may mean that the old Edwardian pile gets a chance to be looked at all over again.

Pictures; detail of Edge Lane showing Westonby 1907, advert for George Richmond & Sons, from Slater’s Directory of Manchester & Salford and Suburbs, 1911, and what maybe Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby.

**Manchester Guardian May 20 1905