78 Manchester Road, and a story ......... the Wood family

It is an ordinary looking house and past its best, sandwiched between the petrol station and supermarket on one side and a restaurant on the other, but 78 Manchester Road has caught my imagination.

I must have passed it lots of times and not even given it much of a thought. I remember one of the houses in the row was a photographer’s shop and for years there was a faded picture of a baby in the window.

But it holds a story. And it is one of those stories that has come together in bits and in its way says a lot about how we were, what Chorlton has become and offers that sense of continuity that comes from families staying in the same place for generations.

In 1911 number 78 was home to the Wood family but this was only fairly recent.

For a large part of his life James Wood had lived at Red Gates Farm which stood on the site of the present library. It had been there from at least the 18th century and I have followed its history through the first half of the 19th century when the tenants were the Whitelegg family.

Now I have to be honest and admit I wasn’t very interested in it after William Whitelegg ceased being the tenant in 1855. But like many of our farms it was still being worked into the 20th century. By then it was the home of Thomas and Mary Wood.

And like all of these things as soon as you delve into their lives so a whole new part of our farming past emerges. In 1881 Thomas described himself as “assistant farmer” living at Red Gates Farm, but if I have understood this correctly he was working for Elizabeth Kenyon who was a market gardener and at lived at Marsleach House which was demolished sometime in the 1890s or during the first decade of the following century and was on a large plot of land bordered by Selbourne, Manchester and Keppel Roads and so was almost directly opposite Red Gates. The Kenyon’s were an old Chorlton farming family and can be traced back to the early 19th century.

Red Gates had grown in size from 46 acres in 1841 to 62 by 1871 but in all probability was smaller by the turn of the 20th century. And I guess James had foreseen that the land was not his future and instead had become a clerk.

He had married Florence Cooke in 1905 and I guess this was when they moved to number 78. The farm was to disappear by 1914 and sometime between 1911 and 1921 the family moved to Romily and in the way of things that houses has also survived.

But what ties the family to Chorlton are a series of postcards they exchanged between 1904 and 1938. They are of the mundane and ordinary things of life which make them so valuable. Here are updates on family visits and of their health with Fred “being a prisoner with his face” which has “made him look quite pale,” along with descriptions of holiday weather and birthday greetings. And above all there are the references to farming, with John reporting that the farm was in the middle of harvesting and an acknowledgement of help at the forthcoming harvest festival in the old church.

There is something quite complete in these two messages which echo that way of life that had gone on for centuries in the township. First the frenetic activity of getting the crops in followed by the celebration that it had been achieved.

It is easy today with food available from around the world in the local supermarket to forget that on the success of the harvest hung not only the prosperity of the community but in a very real sense whether they ate well or not which is perhaps a fitting way to end the story of a family which had lived in Chorlton for half a century, and leaves me just to thank Carolyn Willits who has shared her family postcards with me and reflect that she also lives here in Chorlton.

Pictures; from the collection of Carolyn Willits