Farm machines at Hough End Hall and a vision of how it could have looked in 1937

At Redgate farm, date unknown

Now the deeper I dig the more of the story of Hough End Hall slowly slides from the shadows.

My old friend Oliver whose family took over the tenancy of the hall in 1940 and ran it alongside their farm at Park Brow, remembered a farm machine very like this one which comes from Redgates farm where the library now stands.

“I was looking at the photographs and it looks very like a mowing machine. 
Basically a reciprocating bar on which are mounted 20 or 30 triangular blades sliding to and frow over a cutter bar. 

The forward motion of the wheel works a crank.

There are pictures on youtube - try entering 'horse drawn mower' in google and there is even a video clip of one in Galway. 

I remember one at Hough End in the late 40s early 50s - probably Bonnie pulled it but I have no memory of that. 

They were the successors to the scythe.”

Detail of the mowing machine

And so just within the living memory of one person we are back to a time when the Hall was still a working farm.

True it had shrunk dramatically from its heyday when Mr Jackson and later the Lomax family farmed 200 acres during most of the 19th century.

Back then the Hall had become a farmhouse surrounded by the work a day buildings to be found on any farm.

By the middle of the 20th century much of the land had been taken for housing and even for a while the aerodrome.

The Lomax family had run the farm from 1847 and on the death of Mrs Lomax in 1940 the tenancy passed to Mr Bailey.

But even then the future of the Hall had been in doubt with the Corporation considering knocking it down when plans were laid for Mauldeth Road West.

"suggested lay-out  for the ground facing the southern front of Hough End Hall"

The more farsighted and historically minded pushed for an alternative whereby it might be taken into community use with some arguing that this along with landscaping the area around the Hall would be a fitting memorial to mark the coronation of the new King in 1937.

Alas this came to nothing and the history of the Hall took a different turn when just under 30 years later it was bought by a property developer and much of its elegance hidden by those two giant office blocks and its interior ripped away.

Still it may again have a new lease of life if it can be bought by an action group who want to turn it over to community use.*

Now that would be a fitting end, and one that is attracting growing interest.

Only last week the Advertiser featured the story which did the business if at the same time it got the date of the hall wrong by a full century.

I am too much of a historian to let that one go but that said given its long history and its promising future I suppose the Advertiser can be forgiven.

Pictures; working the land, date unknown from the collection of Carolyn Willitts,  the Hall in 1937 from the Manchester Guardian, January 6, 1937, found by Sally Dervan,

*Working the fields of Chorlton, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/07/working-fields-of-chorlton.html

**Hough End Hall: Let's make it ours! http://houghendhall.org/