A harvest festival at Chorlton in 1904 .......... a rare photograph

There is something very powerful about this photograph. 

I know none of the people who are staring back at me and I can only hazard a guess at a date, but it is one of those few pictures where we can see a collection of the people who lived in our township.

It was passed to me by Carolyn Willitts whose family ran Red Gates Farm from the 1880s till the turn of the last century.

They were the Wood family and amongst Carolyn’s collection of postcards is one of John Wood with a plough somewhere out towards the meadows, another of him outside the farm and a third accepting the offer of help from Mrs Wood at the Harvest Festival in the old church.

This last card is dated September 1904 and our photograph cannot be any later than 1908, when the old Bowling Green Hotel was demolished and the new one opened. The roof and chimneys of the old pub are just visible to the left of the church.

The romantic in me would like to think that this was that harvest festival which begs the question is Mrs Wood there in that row of four women at the back? The trees still have their leaves so just maybe.

But on the other hand perhaps it is the third Sunday in July when the church here in Chorlton celebrated St Clements Day. This was the wakes day which had once been popular all over England and in the past was the time when the villagers would have brought fresh rushes to spread on the church floor after the old ones had been swept out. This gave the day its other name of rush bearing.

We may even be able to identify the clergyman sitting in the front. From 1892 the Reverend F.E. Thomas was here until 1911, or just possibly either the Reverend Floyd who was assistant from 1900-1904 or Reverend Thomas who was the assistant from 1904 till 1910.

Now I have learned that just because at this moment the picture still holds many unanswered questions there is every possibility that someone will identify one of the people in the churchyard that day or even be able to suggest a firm date.

We shall see. In the meantime it remains a rare picture of the church still in full use and the parish graveyard still a place where the bodies of generations of parishioners laid undisturbed.

 Although there will be readers who will raise the Great Burial scandal but that as they say is another story.

Picture; from the collection of Carolyn Willitts

An occasional series to mark the 500th anniversary of our parish church.