Dating photographs can be tricky. If you are lucky a postcard will have the date it was sent stamped on the back, although this is still no guarantee that this was when the picture was taken. I have been caught out like this. Sometimes the post card is a reissue of a photograph which was taken much earlier, even though the scene may be the same.
But this picture of the green was fairly easy to date even given that there is something like a window of thirteen years. It must have been taken after 1883 because this was when Zetland Terrace was built.
Well that is if you go from the date on the wall of the first house. Ida however maintains that they were built in 1876 and that the stone mason got it wrong. It is one of those little debates which might run on and on. If they were built in ’76 none of the residents appear on the 1881 census, but that is another story for another time.
Number 1 Zetland is there directly behind the hedge and it is that hedge which provides a last possible date for the picture. Until 1897 the green had been the private garden of the Wilton family. It had been Samuel Wilton who enclosed it sometime in the early 19th century and then proceeded to rent some of it back to the villagers. Wilton was at one time the landlord of the Greyhound now known as Jackson’s Boat and it was Samuel Wilton who built the wooden bridge over the Mersey in 1816 for £200. He then charged people to use it which followed an older practice of ferrying them across the river by boat. This was still in place in 1832 when the pub and the surrounding land were put up for sale.
On his death the garden on the green passed to his daughters who lived at the last cottage beside the Horse and Jockey. It is the Wilton's outhouse jutting out past the pub sign that can be seen in the picture and behind it was their cottage.
Frederica Wilton died in 1897 aged 81. She had been born in the year after Waterloo, spent her childhood in a township which was still a rural community, and was still only 33 when the railway came to nearby Stretford. But as the picture testifies by the 1890s the village was changing. New tall brick built houses were replacing the old wattle and daub cottages and we had arrived at that point when those who earned their living from farming were in a minority.
So it was perhaps fitting that when she died and the garden on the green reverted to the Egerton family they should choose to end this enclosed private space and return it to the village as an open green.
I would like to know what James and Sarah Malloy thought of that change of use. Theirs were the children staring back at the camera underneath the sign advertising James as a plumber. They had eight children but only two were to survive. We cannot be sure but the four children were more than likely Josephine born in 1881, Christopher, in 1883, Albert 1888, and James 1891.
They may well have been some of the first children to take advantage of the new green in the village. But not for long by the spring of 1901 if not before the family had moved to 35 Barlow Moor Road.
Picture; from the collection of Alan Brown
But this picture of the green was fairly easy to date even given that there is something like a window of thirteen years. It must have been taken after 1883 because this was when Zetland Terrace was built.
Well that is if you go from the date on the wall of the first house. Ida however maintains that they were built in 1876 and that the stone mason got it wrong. It is one of those little debates which might run on and on. If they were built in ’76 none of the residents appear on the 1881 census, but that is another story for another time.
Number 1 Zetland is there directly behind the hedge and it is that hedge which provides a last possible date for the picture. Until 1897 the green had been the private garden of the Wilton family. It had been Samuel Wilton who enclosed it sometime in the early 19th century and then proceeded to rent some of it back to the villagers. Wilton was at one time the landlord of the Greyhound now known as Jackson’s Boat and it was Samuel Wilton who built the wooden bridge over the Mersey in 1816 for £200. He then charged people to use it which followed an older practice of ferrying them across the river by boat. This was still in place in 1832 when the pub and the surrounding land were put up for sale.
On his death the garden on the green passed to his daughters who lived at the last cottage beside the Horse and Jockey. It is the Wilton's outhouse jutting out past the pub sign that can be seen in the picture and behind it was their cottage.
Frederica Wilton died in 1897 aged 81. She had been born in the year after Waterloo, spent her childhood in a township which was still a rural community, and was still only 33 when the railway came to nearby Stretford. But as the picture testifies by the 1890s the village was changing. New tall brick built houses were replacing the old wattle and daub cottages and we had arrived at that point when those who earned their living from farming were in a minority.
So it was perhaps fitting that when she died and the garden on the green reverted to the Egerton family they should choose to end this enclosed private space and return it to the village as an open green.
I would like to know what James and Sarah Malloy thought of that change of use. Theirs were the children staring back at the camera underneath the sign advertising James as a plumber. They had eight children but only two were to survive. We cannot be sure but the four children were more than likely Josephine born in 1881, Christopher, in 1883, Albert 1888, and James 1891.
They may well have been some of the first children to take advantage of the new green in the village. But not for long by the spring of 1901 if not before the family had moved to 35 Barlow Moor Road.
Picture; from the collection of Alan Brown
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