Mrs Cordingley at Jackson’s Boat up in front of the magistrates for “selling beer during prohibited hours” in June 1876

The old bridge and pub, 1881

Now I wonder how Mrs Cordingley felt after the magistrates threw out an alleged breach of the Licensing Act.

It was June 1876 and she had been called up in front of the bench for “selling beer during prohibited hours.”

For any publican this was a serious affair but I suspect a potentially devastating one for  Mrs Cordingley who had been running the pub across the river  with her husband Joseph since at least 1861 and maybe as early as 1857 and with his death would still be pulling pints until she died in 1902.

She had fallen victim to the Sunday Trade out from Manchester.

It was a popular enough event and involved a trip out from the city which on a pleasant summers day was just 3½ miles  out along country lanes with the reward of a pint or two  at the end.

The Manchester Courier, 1872

Some were families escaping for a few hours from those dismal narrow streets and closed courts hedged in by mills timber yards and iron works.

A few like Richard Buxton were out botanizing.**  These were self taught working class men who in the case of Richard Buxton were cataloguing the plant life and would in time produce the definitive book still referred to by many today.

But then there were those less interested in the pleasures of rural Chorlton and more simply for the opportunity to down as pints as possible.

They arrived in ones and twos and sometimes in gangs and could threaten our community with anti social behaviour, vandalism and petty crime.**

So I can understand Mrs Cordingley’s concerns, only a decade and a bit before she settled in the pub large gangs of men were known to assemble in the meadows up by Barlow Farm to watch illegal prize fighting.

The pub, 1881

The attractions were of course the remoteness of the site and this in itself put the Bridge Inn out on a limb which was made worse when Sam Wilton who ran the pub in 1818 built a bridge across the Mersey.

Mrs Cordingley had replaced it in the 1880s and like her predecessor charged a small fee to cross over.

Now the pub dates from the 18th century and for most its history went under the name of the Greyhound or the Bridge Inn.  In the 1840s it was run by Samuel Nixon who described himself as a farmer and whose son ran the Traveller’s Rest on Beech Road.

Old Sam Nixon died in 1857 and this may be when the Cordingley’s took over.

And the story has a happy ending for she was found not guilty and the two chaps who tried to falsely gain a drink were themselves fined 5shillings each.

Strictly speaking neither of them were part of the Sunday Trade, for one was from Chorlton and the other was from Stretford.

Of these James Harris of Chorlton is known to us.  He lived on Beech Road was a painter with a family and more on him later.

Pictures, newspaper account from The Manchester Courier, June 21 1876, courtesy of Brian Robertson, and picture of the pub and bridge  circa 1881 from the Lloyd Collection


*"over the Mersey at Jackson’s Boat and on to Baguley Moor and Hale Moss and after having botanized there ....returned to Manchester at dusk, all pleased with our day’s excursion” Richard Buxton in Chorlton, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/over-mersey-at-jacksons-boat-and-on-to.html


**A drunken jolly out from Manchester and stone throwing at Stretford........ petty crime in a rural community
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