A new book for Didsbury

There will be some and I know this to be true who will think that a story about a book with my name on it is just outrageous self promotion.

The cover of the new book

Nevertheless today across Manchester on the shelves of bookshops both large and small will be a new book on the history of Didsbury.

This is Didsbury Through Time, which is a joint venture between me and local artist Peter Topping, and I am quite pleased with the result.

It is a collection of old images of Didsbury juxtaposed with an equal number of new ones and a bit of text.

Peter sourced the old photographs and added the contemporary ones and I wrote a series of comments about them.

It is a well tried and trod formula and one that does appeal.  But we decided on something a tad different.

First because Peter is an artist we have included some of his painting instead of photographs and presented them in a slightly different way.

Some authors put the old black and white pictures  first followed by the same spot shot in colour, and all the images are grouped by a theme, so all the pubs are together, followed by the churches, then a collection of carts, trams and horse drawn wagons, and lastly the odd street scene.

The Italian dancers at the Coronation Festival in 1911 on Wilmslow Road.

In our book as you turn the pages the order of old and new is mixed up and because we both like walking we have taken the reader along a route from the east to the west of Didsbury, which allows people to come across buildings, street scenes and quite a few hidden gems just in the way you would if you walked through the township.

And we have tried also to do something different with the text.

All too often in such books the author just tells the reader what they can see for themselves, whether it be the lack of parked vehicles in 1900, the profusion of horse drawn wagons or the simple observation that a lot more men wore hats in the past.

Instead we decided to write about named individuals who lived behind the front doors, sold merchandise from the shop on the corner or left their mark in some other way.

Bertha on the "Flying Man"

And one such person was Bertha Geary aged thirteen of School Lane who in 1911 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 which was 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, for who the persistent buzzing of the aircraft’s engines above her head was something new and I guess louder than anything she had yet encountered.

Peter's painting of the Olde Cock

And what Bertha did on the postcard she sent her friend was to write her own address, and with this I was able to track her on a street directory, find out her surname and look her up on the census record.

All of which brought  Miss Geary and her family out of the shadows and led us to know a little bit more about the people who lived in Didsbury.

Pictures; from Didsbury Through Time. 

Didsbury Through Time is published this week and available in Didsbury from Morten’s Bookshop on Warburton Road, Didsbury, and of course from all other bookshops.  


Painting © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures, Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk Facebook: Paintings from Pictures