One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 27 ..... family stories

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.*

This began as the story of Joe and Mary Ann. I have lived in their house for nearly 40 years and know so little about them. And theirs is a story still to be told but not to day, because today almost without me knowing it I slipped back into the mid 19th century and ended up following the lives of Joe Scott’s parents.

All of which was not what I had planned but the more that was revealed the more I realized here was the link between our rural past and that short history which turned the township into a suburb of Manchester.

Henry Scott was Joes’ father. He was a plasterer from London who settled here sometime around 1876 and was part of that influx of new people who were responsible for the building boom which from the 1880s turned great chunks of Chorlton into rows of terraced and semi detached homes.

Little Atherton Street

This much I knew and I suppose just assumed his wife Lucy was also a Londoner, but not so, she had been born in 1855 here in Chorlton in the New Buildings on the site of the present Royal Oak pub.

Her father was Joseph Taylor and he described himself variously as an agricultural labourer and farmer.

It was just lazy thinking and on the turn of a correction the story opens up. Joseph and his wife Lucy’s family were agricultural labourers at a time when over 50% of the workforce derived a living from the land.

The Taylor’s lived in one of the new blocks of brick built houses which were less than 20 years old when they settled there after their marriage in 1848.

The occupational opportunities for Lucy as she entered working age were fairly limited. Some helped their mothers take in washing, some might work in the fields, but most like her sister Patience went into domestic service.

Not that many of these young women would be employed locally. Those Chorlton families who could afford servants tended to seek their employees from further away for few would want family secrets to become the gossip of the neighbourhood.

Lower Byron Street 1967 with Little Atherton Street off to the right

All of which perhaps explains why Lucy found work in Manchester and I rather think this was where she met Henry. In 1861 aged 17 and still in Chorlton she had described herself as a nurse, but by 1874 she was living at number 4 Little Atherton Street which was bounded by Quay Street to the north and Lower Byrom Street to the east in the Deansgate area of Manchester.

It’s gone now, and the closest you will get is to stand on Atherton Street with the Granada Studios to your right and Quay Street to your back, and stand at the entrance to the car park for here just off to the left under what is a grassed over lawn was Little Atherton Street.

Back then it was a densely packed area of small terraced houses, surrounded by warehouses, the Manchester and Salford Canal, and the goods depot of the London and North Western Railway. It was a world away from rural Chorlton.

Here during the working day and into the night would be the clunk of shutting engines working the goods wagons, and the smell from the smoke of countless locomotives and factory chimneys. I guess Henry might have felt a little more at home here than Lucy.

A few years earlier if I have got the right Henry Scott he was in Edmonton just six miles from Charing Cross in London. And sometime between 1871 and ’74 he came to Manchester and moved into 1 Little Atherton Street. No pictures have survived of either houses or the surrounding streets.

The best I can come up with is a detail from Goad’s Fire insurance map which shows the area including “Dwellings Yards and outbuildings” at the bottom of Atherton Street, and a 1965 photograph looking up Lower Byrom Street from Great John Street, by which our properties had long gone.

But I do know the houses had 4 rooms and I guess both Henry and Lucy were lodgers. I don’t know r how they met, but given the close proximity of numbers 1 and 4 I shall assume the oblivious and leave any temptation to speculate on how the romance developed.

Suffice to say that they married on December 27th 1874 and the ceremony was held in St John’s Church which was just a few minutes’ walk away, across Lower Byrom Street. The marriage was witnessed by Lucy’s sister Patience and her husband Thomas Whitelegg neither of whom could write and both left their mark.

Nothing quite prepares you for that simple insight into the level of literacy in this country in the last quarter of the 19th century. But in the years when Patience was growing up the authorities were still concerned at the level of illiteracy which begs the question of whether Patience ever saw the inside of our village school which had been built in the 1840s..

But that is for another story if only because it takes me a long way away from Henry and Lucy. So I shall finish by following them to Chorlton where they had settled by 1876 in one of a row of cottages off what is now Oswald Road close to Patience and Thomas Whitelegg, and over the next few years busied themselves with bringing up a family and helping transform the township.

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

Pictures; the home of Joe and Mary Ann in 1974, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Little Atherton Street, from Goad’s Fire Insurance map 1900, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ Lower Byrom Street, J.Ryder, 1965, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m02895, detail of the marriage document, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, and Ancestry.co.uk