The Flying man over Didsbury in 1911

Bertha's postcard

I am looking at a postcard of Didsbury sent in the summer of 1911.

But the scene is not as important as the message on the back, for Bertha Geary aged just 13 of School Lane has heard history.

“We saw the flying man on Tuesday night fly over head.  Beaumont is his name.  I wish you could have seen him.  It made such a noise.”

He was André Beaumont and he was one of 30 competitors in the Daily Mail Circuit of Britain Air Race in 1911. Flying in a Blériot XI he was the first to complete the course which was no mean achievement as many of the aircraft either failed to take off or crashed along the way.

So to him went the £10,000 prize awarded to a man whose real name was Lieutenant Jean Louis Conneau of the French Navy.

All of which today we take for granted but was pure magic and wonderment to young Bertha, after all the persistent buzzing of the aircraft’s engine above her head was something new and I guess louder than anything she had yet encountered.

Bertha's message

The streets were still dominated by the horse drawn vehicle, few had telephones, and radio as a form of mass entertainment was still in its infancy.

So hers was a generation which would embrace profound changes, and this drew me towards Bertha Geary.

She was born in Prestwich in 1898, and her father described himself variously as a school keeper and general labourer.  One of her elder sisters worked as “children’s milliner” and the other made “children’s costumes.”

There the trail goes quiet for Bertha, because if she married I can find no record, nor of when she died but she did leave one clue and that was her address on the postcard.

It is a simple but vital clue which allowed me to track her family on the street directory for 1911, establish a surname and search the census for that year.

It is one of those little rewarding pieces of research which has made writing the new book so much fun.

Didsbury Through Time aims to chronicle the changes in Didsbury over the last century and a bit mixing old images of the place with new photographs and paintings by local artist Peter Topping and concentrates also on the people who lived there.

Mikael Carlson owns and flies two of these Blériot XI

So along with Bertha there are stories of the great and good and the humble and industrious ranging from Fletcher Moss the historian and politician to William Wrightham cab driver and Mary Garside the cook at the Priory.

Many of the original pictures have been donated by local people and we would hope that there may be others who would like to become part of what we are doing by lending their photographs or even sharing their memories of what Didsbury was like.

For more information about how you can become part of this project contact Peter at peter@paintingsfrompictures.co.uk      

Picture; Bertha's postcard from the collection of Paul O'Sullivan and photograph of a Blériot XI, J.Klank, September 2007