Chorlton Precinct …….. spot the difference

Now I remember those competitions in newspapers where you were invited to spot the difference in two seemingly identical pictures.

1979/80

So here are two of Chorlton precinct separated by nearly 40 years.

The first was taken by me around 1979 and the second by Andy Robertson just yesterday.

The keen “spot the difference” competitor will immediately shout that they are not taken from the same spot, but where would the fun be in that?

So, for the those who remember the Precinct in 1979, the challenge is to talk about some of the shops back then without mentioning Safeway.

2019

While all of you who were born in the following decade the task will be to name a favorite shop and why.

The Precinct does not always get a good press, but I have always liked it and still enjoys a stroll through.

If pushed I must admit that the fruit and veg shop of Tony Adams is my favourite, not least because he has been providing us with Christmas trees since 1984, and I long ago trusted him to select them and bring us two fine ones at a very decent price.

Leaving me just to say, get in quick as there are those with grand plans for a new version.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; the Precinct in 1979/80 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and in 2019, courtesy of Andy Robertson

Didsbury College ............. eight months on and the strange tale of what was left

Revisiting an old story, four years old, ..... because I can.

I wonder if any of the staff and students have been back to Didsbury College since the move to Birley.

I was there in the summer at the farewell do on the lawn and wandered through the admin block, looked in at the old library and stood just inside the Assembly Hall where in 1972 I signed up to the NUT as I started a post grad course which set me off on a career in teaching which lasted 35 years.

So my memories of Didsbury College span a full 42 years and a bit and this week I was back again.

We were down visiting that archaeological dig in the car park and looked in at those now empty buildings.

I had expected to see nothing, but instead there was a whole range of abandoned stuff which no one had wanted or could see how it would fit in the new building down at Birley.

Amongst the discarded tables and chairs were piles of books and papers, the last big posters advertising the campus and a mix of smaller material from the campaign posters for student elections, to art work and what had once been a set of statues.

You had that over riding sense that the move had been interrupted and that the last of these things would be packed up moved out and found new homes in Hulme.

But I think not.  They will stay put slowly gathering dust and waiting to be shovelled off into skips and land fill.

Now I could of course slide into a flight of  historical fancy and bring forth images of Pompeii or the Mary Celeste but that would be to get silly, and yet I did feel that we were looking at a scene which remained unfinished.

And  one that seemed a tad sad, because these were the bits that no one wanted despite having once been cared for and each of which had a story to tell.

Like that piece of art work with its title "You can leave your hat on" or the piles of books and journals which once had so much significance to the teaching of students.

And finally that set of election posters seen through the window of the old library advertising the candidates in the elections for the Student Union.

I did wonder if I should go looking to see if Mr Palmer and Ms Adamson had been successful,  and briefly abandoned the idea as somehow spoiling what was a story of ghosts but in the end curiosity won out.

Mr Palrmer was elected as President with 62% of the total vote, and Jen Adamsom was reelected for a second term as VP-Education Officer.  "In total more than 4,200 students voted in the 2014 elections - a similar figure to 2013 but significantly higher than in previous years."

So a little of what we found down there goes on and makes me wonder if I should go looking for other bits of my academic career from the old Students Union in the Till Kennedy building to the Aytoun site which was the College of Commerce and where I spent three years in what was Manchester Polytechnic and is now the MMU, the very organisation which left Didsbury in the summer.  And sadly the Aytoun Building is now no more, and is in the process of being transformed into apartments.

But then perhaps some ghosts are best left alone.

Pictures; Didsbury College, 2015 eight months on, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Big turn out in student elections,Man Met Life,  http://www.staff.mmu.ac.uk/manmetlife/news/view/big-turn-out-in-student-elections

This item has now been taken down but it was there once, and has gone like the forgotten bits left behind in the move.

The Second Peterloo .............. in New Cross on the evening of August 16 1819

The events on the evening of August 16 at New Cross doesn’t even merit a footnote in books on Peterloo.

A comment on the events of Peterloo, 1819

Of course compared with what happened earlier in the day at St Peter’s Field, the deaths of William Bradshaw and Joshua Whitworth who were shot by the military at New Cross are small beer.

The big picture which became known as Peterloo was an awful event.

It had all begun on an August day in 1819 when anything between 50,000 and 80,000 men, women and children had assembled in St Peter’s Field to listen to the case for reforming the representation of Parliament.

Just before 2 in the afternoon a unit of Cavalry charged into the crowd with their sabres.  The deaths resulting from that charge have never been exactly established but sources claimed between 11 and 15 people were killed and up to 700 injured.

Now New Cross is on the other side of town at the junction of Great Ancoats Street and Oldham Street which seems an odd spot for the incident.

But not so. To the east and south of New Cross there was a densely packed warren of small streets which were home to textile workers and those on the margins of subsistence.

The spot was known for food riots like the one that broke out in April 1812 in Oldham Road, when a food cart carrying food for sale at the markets in Shudehill was stopped and its load carried off.  Nearby shops were also attacked and looted.  The mob was eventually dispersed by soldiers but only as far as Middleton.

New Cross, 1794

There they met with an assembly of handloom weavers, miners and out of work factory operatives gathered to protest against the introduction of power loom machinery at Barton and Sons weaving mill.

The mob which had grown to 2000, was dispersed by “ a party of soldiers , horse and foot, from Manchester arriving, pursued those misguided people, some of whom made a feeble stand; but here again death was the consequence, five of them being shot and many severely wounded.”  

Revolution it was thought was in the air, and the Government responded with the Gag Acts, the suspension of Habeas Corpus   and the rounding up and imprisonment of political suspects.  Here in Manchester radicals were arrested and some like John Night were thrown into the New Bailey prison before being sent on to London, others like William Ogden were just “roughed up”.

And in the run up to Peterloo and in the days afterwards the area was seething with opposition to the authorities all of which are well documented in The Casualties of Peterloo which offers up some fascinating leads into the story of the area.*

In time I am minded to follow up those leads and delve deeper into the area which was the home of my old friend Richard Buxton** and accounted for 80 casualties from Peterloo.  It may even be possible to uncover something of the story of William Bradshaw and Joshua Whitworth.

Pictures; Peterloo, 1819, m77801,courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and New Cross 1794 from Green’s map of Manchester, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Bush, Michael, The Casualties of Peterloo, 2005

**Richard Buxton, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Richard%20Buxton

Making stories out of our histories ……….

The last decade and bit have seen an explosion in the number of people engaged in researching family history, and for that we have the internet to thank.

The christening, Greenwich, 1981

When my sisters began digging into our family history in the 1970s, it involved long journeys from London to the east Highlands to trawl over dusty parish records, and stand in ancient graveyards recording names, and dates on memorial headstones.

It took weeks of preparation, endless letters and great chunks of time on trains, and buses, which today can be telescoped into a few hours wandering across the net interrogating a range of online records and genealogical platforms.

Once done, many are faced with that simple question of what to do next?

For some it is enough to have stripped back the centuries and made links with places and people long forgotten, but for others that is not enough and for them there is the desire to writ it down to share with family or just to see the process through from start to finish.

The conversation, Manchester, 2018

In my case, it was also to place our family in the context of where they lived, and when they lived, which in turn helped offer up an explanation of how they lived their lives. 

And in that I am always guided by something Ian McMillan, the Yorkshire poet, journalist, playwright, and broadcaster, said about his mum and dad, that they had, “lived out little their lives in a great century”.

But those little lives are the stuff of history, because while the “great events” shape and influence all our lives, we too bring something to the great events, whether it be as a mill worker toiling in a cotton factory in 19th century Lancashire, storming the Normandy beaches in 1944, or suffering the awful conditions on a slave plantation, cutting the sugar cane under a fierce unrelenting sun, and bullied by a brutal overseer.

At the market, Ashton-under-Lyne, 1979

The trick becomes how you tell that story, and for some that isn’t easy. 

They may lack confidence in their writing skills, particularly if their last attempt at formal writing was at school decades ago.

And there is that other challenge of how to process and organise the story, which for a few becomes even more challenging when instead of a factual piece they opt to create a fictional account, where the names have been changed but the substance stays the same.

Waiting for something to happen, Paris, 1980

All of which is a lead in to an interesting project by my friend Lois, who runs writing groups and is now engaged in assisting those who want to turn grandad’s war or aunty Mabel’s youthful experiences into a story.*

The group differ in what they want to say, and in both their writing skills and their confidence, but by sharing their research and pooling ideas of how to approach the tasks, each is learning.

And that for me is a brilliant start.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson, 1979-2018

* FAMILY HISTORY WRITING GROUP… INSPIRING STUFF!   https://loiselsden.com/2019/02/26/family-history-writing-group-inspiring-stuff/?c=74084#comment-74084

Alan Johnson and the story of English education over the last 140 years ……. today and all this week on Radio 4

Now I belong to that generation that experienced the eleven plus, and didn’t come through with a place to a grammar school and a passport to the “glittering prizes”.

Manchester student, circa 1910

Instead for me and most of my friends, we left Edmund Waller Junior School in the summer of 1961, and met up again in the playground of Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern School a month and a bit later.

On the surface not much had changed, and while we now had a uniform and there were no girls, it was little different from what had gone before, save that now we were joined by 120 other “also runs”.

The experience of my parents was little different, and in the case of my mother, she attended the same elementary school as her father and grandmother on Traffic Street in Derby which went under the imaginative name of Traffic Street School.

Edmund Waller School, opened in 1887

Together that amounts to 94 years of State education over two centuries, and encompasses some pretty basic provision, mixed with some fine examples of good teaching set against  comparatively poor resources.

All of which is a lead in to an excellent new series on Radio 4, presented by “Alan Johnson, the former Education Secretary, who tells the story of English education over the last 140 years through the prism of one school - St Michael and All Angels in Camberwell.

Over the decades, the school has undergone many transformations, including names, in response to changes in policy, but its purpose has remained constant - to provide decent and free education to local children.

The story is told through original documents – from headmasters’ logs and inspection reports – and the testimony of the children and teachers who went there. It is as much a social history of inner-city life down the ages as it is a study of our attempts to educate the children of poor families”.*

The school opened in 1884, three years before Edmund Waller which was just down the road in Peckham, and post dated Traffic Street by twelve years.

Traffic Street School, 1872-1990

Episode one, opened with "the Headmasters log book entry November 17, 1884 which documented the opening of the school: 'J Alfred Thomas Cox opened the above school and took charge. 74 boys were admitted.' 

Founded as a church school, St Michael and All Angels is set up under auspices of the The National Society for the Promotion of the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Established Church. The aim is clear: 'the proposed schools are for the poorest of the poor children, quite ragged and destitute. Many of whom are at present spending most of their time in the street.'"

Episode 2, began with a visit to “one of the few remaining hop gardens at the Museum of Kent Life to discover how, during September each year, generation after generation of St Michael and All Angels School pupils used to truant - or 'hop the wag' as they called it - to pick hops and earn money for their school uniform. 

Alan Johnson  talks to some of the last of those who went hop picking. He considers how, with changes in legislation and the end of child labour in mines and mills, schools became even more important – not just for education, but to meet society’s concerns about children 'running wild on the streets'.

The series goes on to look at the impact of The Great War, the awful poverty of the area, and moves into the 21st century.

Each episode lasts just 14 minutes, is repeated and is well worth a listen, as an informative and thoughtful look at our educational system before today.

Leaving me just to say that many of us "also runs" did achieve with the help of dedicated teachers who weren't prepared to allow the mark of the eleven plus to shunt us into a side street, bereft of what our grammar school contemporaries were privy to.


Pictures; one Manchester Child, happy child, m68208, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass
Edmund Waller School, Peckham, 2009, from the collection of Liz and Colin Fitzpatrick and Traffic School, Derby, 1990, courtesy of Cynthia Wigley


*The Secret History of a School, Presenter: Alan Johnson, Producer: Sara Parker, Executive Producer: Samir Shah, A Juniper Connect production for BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002r49

Denbigh Villas ...... saving that historic building

Now it is one of those sad observations, that we do not really care that much about buildings with a past, which have fallen on hard times.

The back of Denbigh Villas

So, while it is true there are charities, government agencies, and individuals committed to saving everything from a crofter’s hut, to castles, stately homes, and the odd shippon, there will never be enough money or groups to save everything.

All of which means that many places despite being unique and full of history will be bulldozed away and replaced by an unremarkable block of flats.

But during the last three decades there has been a move to retain buildings and convert them in to modern residential properties.

Inside

Not all these warehouse conversions or transformed old homes have been done well, but when they are, they achieve something special, providing homes, while at the same time saving a piece of our history.

And so, it is with the two on the corner of High Lane and Stockton Road which were built in 1877 and were called Denbigh Villas, and pretty much reflect the story of where we live.

They were once grand homes for the comfortably well off, one of whom wrote a fascinating account of Manchester in the 1830s.*

The communal garden under construction

Later the two properties became a school for the children of the “middling people”, who worked in the professions or owned businesses, and could afford to pay for their children to attend private schools.

By the mid-20th century they had been turned in to a series of flats, which were not particularly well designed, and by the end of that century the two properties were tired and in need of much tender care and attention.

They could so easily have been demolished, but instead have been brought back, by Armistead Propertry, who have spent the last year gutting the two buildings, and making them structurally safe before starting work on creating twelve, two bedroomed apartments.**

Looking across Chorlton

And because of their history I have not only become attached to Denbigh Villas, but regularly visit them, to record the progress and written about them on the blog.***

Yesterday was one of those visits, and I spent an hour and half wandering through the two buildings, and the highlight was roof garden which will be a communal area for all the residents offering superb views across Chorlton.


Location; Chorlton

Looking towards the city

Pictures; inside Denbigh Villas ...... a work in progress, 2019, from the collection of Peter Topping


* Reminiscences of Manchester, J T Slugg, 1881

**Armistead Property, http://www.armisteadproperty.co.uk/



***Denbigh Villas, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Denbigh%20Villas

Pictures from an Eltham bus ........ no.29 ....... almost done

The top deck of a London bus has to be a pretty neat way of seeing the world below.

And when it is the same bus at about the same time every day, then you have got yourself a project.

All you need is a camera, and the patience each week to record the same spot, and the rest as they say is Larissa Hamment’s “Pictures from an Eltham bus”.*

In the case of our new cinema, Larissa has been recording the story from before the old Co-op building came down, and has covered its demolition, the clearing of the site and the slow rise of the new picture house, our first for decades.

And here is her picture, taken on Saturday, with, “Final adjustments to the cinema”.

Location; Eltham

Pictures; the new cinema, 2019, from the collection Larissa Hamment

*Pictures from an Eltham bus, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Pictures%20from%20an%20Eltham%20Bus

Sunday at the Whitworth

Now it’s years since we have taken to visiting an art gallery or museum on a Sunday.

Nor were we alone.

And I had forgotten just how pleasant it could be.

After a couple of hours in town, we took ourselves off down the Oxford Road corridor to the Whitworth.

There are exhibitions of the work by Hogarth and Goya, along with some very interesting contemporary work including a gallery devoted to wall paper.

And when all that was done, there was always the chance to sit and look out on the park from the comfort of inside.


Location; Manchester


Pictures; looking out of the Whitworth, 2019, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Challenging antisemitism ………. a darkly comic tale of one man's journey through the conspiracy underworld

Now at a time when antisemitism is again on the increase all efforts to challenge it are welcome.

The Community Security Trust’s publication, Antisemitic Incidents Report, records “a high total of 1,652 antisemitic incidents in the UK last year. 2018 was the third year in a row that CST has recorded a record high incident total and means the problem of rising antisemitism in our country continues to grow".*

And the show, A Lizard's Tale, performed by Marlon Solomon and hosted by Chorlton Labour Party last night was a comic, and thoughtful rebuttal of all things antisemitic. *

The show has been performed at Edinburgh and other fringe events and has received rave reviews.

Mr. Solomon is Jewish and set about creating the show after he realized that some people, he knew didn't believe the Holocaust. What followed was a production which ranges from 9/11 to shape-shifting lizards and Holocaust denial and is a darkly comic tale of one man's journey through the conspiracy underworld. He explores why conspiracy theories are more popular than ever and examines how fake news gives fresh currency to ancient slander.

The show was performed in Edinburgh and since then in venues across the country including Manchester.

Location; Chorlton



Pictures; in the night with A Lizard's Tale, by Marlon Solomon, courtesy of Laura Wright

*Antisemitic Incidents Report, 2018, Community Security Trust, https://cst.org.uk/public/data/file/c/7/IR_2018_Web.pdf

** A Lizard's Tale, https://medium.com/@marlonsolomon/for-this-british-jew-balfour-week-was-a-new-low-819809150a97

Revisiting a favourite story from Didsbury’s past ......... Miss Bertha Geary

Now the thing about anniversaries is that they turn up all the time, from the big and momentous ones to the tiny private events.

And there are plenty of people who will follow the unfolding year ready to mark the exact moment in history when the calendar presents you with the same day a century after the event.

I am as guilty as the rest whether it be VE Day, the out break of the Great War on the tragic events in St Peter’s Field in the August of 1819.

So with all that in mind, here is the anniversary of the day Peter Topping and I decided to accept the invitation from Amberley Publishing and produce a book on the history of Didsbury.

The commission was familiar enough........ 90 old images of the township matched by 90 new making it one of those familiar then and now books.

What Made Didsbury Through Time different and mould breaking was that we decided to alter the tired formulae.  So some of the modern images were paintings by Peter and the text by me told the “stories behind the doors” of the people and buildings featured in the book.

After all there had already been two excellent histories written about Didsbury and no one wants to steal the thunder of other historians.  So instead I trawled the census returns and newspaper accounts used them to bring some of the residents of Didsbury back out of the shadows

My favourite was the young Bertha Geary who on a warm summer’s evening wrote to a friend “that she had heard the flying man.”

It is a story I written about on the blog and of course is also in the book we published six years ago.
Enough said.





Picture; Bertha’s postcard from the book Didsbury Through Time

Didsbury Through Time is available in Didsbury from Morten’s Bookshop on Warburton Road, Didsbury, and other bookshops.

* E.J. Morten Booksellers, 6 Warburton Street, Didsbury, Manchester M20 6WA,
Telephone: 0161 445 7629

A pint in the Racecourse Hotel at Kersal before blowing it on the 3.20

Now this is one of the stories I am going to pretty much leave at the pictures.

We are on Littleton Road, Lower Kersal and Andy Robertson had taken himself off down there yesterday.

And this is the Racecourse Hotel which “was built in 1930 to attract the race goers” and I bet there will be a fair few stories of afternoons in the place which effortlessly slid into a night time session.

It is not a pub I ever went in but I recognise the size and style which came to dominate that new wave of pub building in the 1920s and 30s.

They were big, often very impressive looking buildings and built with the motor car in mind.

So what a half century ago might have been a stables and yard now became a car park.

And often they were created in the new estates and out on the bigger roads on the edge of the countryside.

So all memories of the Racecourse Hotel would be most welcome.

Location Salford





Pictures; the Racecourse Hotel, 2016 from Andy Robertson’s Salford collection

Eltham in Pictures ......... one to do ..... today

Now its that time again when the Eltham Society presents its annual exhibition “Eltham in Pictures” which is on today at St Mary’s Community Centre, Eltham High Street.

This year the subject is "Eltham Connections" or "Where is my seat?" and explores the lives of a few more people with Eltham connections who might merit a presence on our high street furniture.

The exhibition will be opened by Tom Gregory at 11. am who is the  author of A Boy in the Water.*

It will be open from 10.30am to 4pm

Admission is free and Refreshments will be available.

Location; Eltham

Picture; looking up towards Eltham High Street, 2015, from the collection of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick

*A Boy in the Water by Tom Gregory, review – the youngest English Channel swimmer,
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Boy-Water-Tom-Gregory/dp/0241354129

Of bombs, and lost houses and the coming of a new post office

“Tonight I will go to sleep knowing that everyone I love will be safe.”

Even now that one line entry in a diary has a profound effect on me.  It was written in the late evening of May 8^th 1945, at the end of the first day of peace in Europe.*

For some it had been a riotous night of fun, dancing and abandonment, for others a time of quiet reflection on the cost of six years of a hard war.

I don’t know what my parents and grandparents did on that night.  Nana I expect spent some of it thinking of her son who was buried in a cemetery in Thailand and must also have wondered what her native Germany would be like.  She had been born in Cologne a city which like so many was now a desert of rubble, wrecked streets and shattered lives.

Granddad no doubt was in a pub while mum and dad would have been celebrating in their different ways.

All of course very different from the winter of 1940 when with the defeat at Dunkirk, and the still real threat of invasion my family went about their lives making do with growing the tightness of rationing and the almost nightly bombing raids.

In Manchester the attacks began in June building up to the horrendous two nights of bombing just before Christmas when late on December the 22nd through to the 23rd and again the following night the raids killed an estimated 644 people and injured over 2,000.

Here in Chorlton 30 people died in the second night of bombing, with 53% of the casualties concentrated on just two roads.

Mrs Reilly living on Oswald Road remembers that

“All the windows at the front of the house were broken and the front door blown open by the blast from a land mine that landed on the allotments at the top of Scott Avenue.  Father reckoned they were aiming for the huge water pipe that crossed Manchester Road.

Houses came down at the top of Scott Avenue and Cheltenham Road, two people were killed and a girl I knew had her face badly scarred by shrapnel as she was standing outside the air raid shelter in her back garden.”

And Geoff Williams recently revisited the spot of St Werburghs where the night before a bomb destroyed three houses and killed an air raid warden.

Now I had not been prepared for the extent of the bombing here in Chorlton, but the bomb maps which were compiled by the Corporation showing the extent of the fires started by incendiary devices and properties destroyed by high explosive bombs.

Today if you look carefully you can match that bomb damage across Chorlton.  In some streets the natural line of late Victorian and Edwardian houses is broken by newer properties some of which only went up in the 1960s.

In other cases they were never replaced.

So it was with numbers 3, 5 and 7 Wilbraham Road.  You won’t find them today.

They went on the night and early morning of December 24^th and 25^th and in the process eliminated our post office.

It was a direct hit from a high explosive bomb, and the site was left empty till the present post office was opened on the site in 1961.

They look to have been fine houses set back from the road with long gardens stretching down over what is now the sorting office.  Numbers 3 and 5 had eight room and number 7 nine, which made them  attractive family homes.

But sometime not so long after they had been built they were redesigned to include shop fronts leaving only number 1 on the corner of Cavendish Road [now Corkland] as a family home.  

But even here the business potential was not lost on Mr Alfred Mumford M.D., M.R.C.S.A., L.S.A, Surgeon, who in time turned part of his 12 roomed property of Gablenook  in to  a doctor’s surgery.  After all the house which was known as Gable nook, commanded a prominent position on the corner of what was a busy road, facing as did the railway station.

These were developments mirrored opposite where an equally fine row of late Victorian houses running from Albany down to Keppel Road lost their elegant front gardens and became shops. 

And round about the time that Mr Mumford was converting Gable nook into a surgery, Dovedale or number 5 had become a hosiery shop and number 7 the post office, leaving only number 3 with its equally fine name of Mayfield as a private residence.  But not even Mayfield could buck the trend, and a year later two shops had been added to its front which in turn was replicated at number 5.

All of which was fine until the night of December 24^th 1940, but that along with a bit of a detective story is for tomorrow.

*Of course it would be another four months before Japan surrendered and the fighting was truly over.

Pictures; Victory street party, Halstead Avenue, courtesy of Tom Turner from the Lloyd collection, Blitz bomb damage, 1941,  courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m8608,8609, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass extract from the 1911 directory for numbers 1-5 Wilbraham Road, corner of Cavendish and Wilbraham Roads circa 1890 from the Lloyd collection

The power of the Union ............ half forgotten stories from the Great War

“This meeting views with grave concern the enormous rise in the price of foodstuffs and coal, which is equivalent to a considerable reduction of wages of those fully employed and the enormous profits that Shipping, Dealers and other gamblers in the means of life are at present reaping by their unholy profiteering.

We therefore call upon the Government to take immediate action to control supplies to regulate food prices and to put an end to this flagrant exploitation of the necessities of the poor.”*

Such was a resolution passed by a large audience in the Free Trade Hall on Sunday February 14 1915.

It was the culmination of a few days of factory and street corner meetings which focused on the swift rise in rents as well as food and coal prices since the beginning of the war.

And it is an aspect of life on the Home Front which does not always feature prominently in many accounts of the Great War.

The popular story of how we coped during the four years tends to fasten on the participation of women on the shop floor and in the fields; the impact of Zeppelin raids and the blackout but all too often skips over the huge hike in the cost of living.

As Henry Hyndman the leading socialist pointed out “since the war had begun prices had gone up 22%, so that now the purchasing power of a sovereign was from 13s. 6d to 13s.9d.”**

And this was the context behind the industrial conflicts which rumbled on and which some at the time and since have sought to characterise as greedy workers exploiting a country at war.

The reality was very different as Sam Hague who spoke at that Free Trade meeting was quick to point out, “there never had been a time in the nation’s history when the working classes had so solidly backed the Government.”***

Working hours increased, and under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and The Munitions War Act 1915 workers were being prosecuted for absenteeism and striking over wages and conditions.

In Manchester the first prosecutions under the Munitions War Act were held at the Town Hall on Friday July 30 when thirty-two men employed at Craven Bros Ltd Reddish were brought before the Recorder charged with going on strike  over wages and working conditions without first submitting the matter to the Board of Trade.****

But this is to get ahead of ourselves.

Back in January the Manchester Guardian had reported “the all-round advance in the price of most household commodities since the outbreak of hostilities – an advance amounting in several instances to over 50% [was] causing concern to the average householder whose income is inelastic”*****

And amongst working class families this all-round advance was causing great hardship more so because it was accompanied by rises in rents and fuel prices.

But strikes to maintain living standards were not the only response to the jump in the cost of living.
On the day war broke out the Labour Movement had formed the War Emergency Workers National Committee tasked with defending the interests of organised working people.

During the next four years it received daily reports all on everything from rises in rents, the cost and quality of food to pensions and conditions in factories and on the land as well as the railways, war babies, air raids and women’s war service.

Much of the correspondence came from local Labour and Trades Councils across the country which set up their own local committees.

Here in the city the Manchester & District Workers (War Problems) Joint Committee consisted of Manchester & Salford Trades and Labour Council, Manchester & Salford Labour Party, Gorton Trades Council, the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation, Building Industries Federation, Women’s Trade Union Council, Manchester and Salford Women’s Trade & Labour Council, Manchester & Salford ILP, Manchester Salford  & District Co-operative Societies, Women’s Co-operative Guilds, Women’s Citizen’s Association, and the Women’s War Interest Committee.

This was a broad cross section of those organisation representing the working class.
In turn Food Vigilance Committees were set up across the country to monitor prices and ensure local councils were enforcing regulations on both prices and the quality of food.

They also called meetings, distributed leaflets and like the War Emergency Workers National Committee pushed hard for more Government intervention in regulating the abuses thrown up during the war.

Now that to me promises to be a fascinating story.

Pictures; courtesy of the Labour History Archives & Study Centre,  at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, http://www.phm.org.uk/

*Resolution passed at the Free Trade Hall on February 14 1915

**LABOUR AND FOOD PRICES. A FREE TRADE HALL PROTEST, Manchester Guardian Feb 15 1915

***ibid Manchester Guardian Feb 15 191

****O’Neil Joseph, Manchester in the Great War, 2014

*****FOOD PRICES AND THE WAR, Manchester Guardian January 31 1915

With the Labour Party Conference at Lambeth Baths in 1913 supporting the right of women to vote

I am looking at a photograph of the Labour Party Conference in 1913.

It was held at the Lambeth Baths at the end of January and it seems an odd choice of subject for a picture post card.

But the Labour Party was beginning to shake a few trees.

It had been formed as the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 as "a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour."*

Its role was to coordinate attempts to support MPs sponsored by trade unions and represent the working-class.

In 1906 the LRC won 29 seats and at the first meeting after the election the group’s MPs adopted the name “the Labour Party.”

So here we are in the Lambeth Baths at what was their eighth conference since the adoption of the new name.

Now I have yet to find out the details of that three day conference but I do know that it was here that the Labour Party decided to oppose any legislation which merely extended the vote to more men.  They were instead fully committed to votes for women and would only support moves to that end.

In response the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, sent a telegram on the second day of the conference expressing “Heartfelt congratulations on fine policy adopted by conference.”

In time I guess I will be able to unearth who all the delegates were and the rest of their decisions, but in the meantime I am drawn to the details in the photograph and in particular the reference to the Daily Citizen.

This was a short lived newspaper which hit the streets in October 1913, just months after the launch of the Daily Herald.

Delegates and spectators might well have whiled away some of the more tedious moments with the paper or gazed at the poster with its stirring slogan of “Forward! The day is breaking.”

And amongst those earnest people looking back at us would have been the delegates from the Woolwich Labour Party which still in the 1960s had the largest membership of any constituency Labour Party, but that is for another time.

Pictures; the Labour Party Conference 1913, courtesy of Mark Flynn Postcards, http://www.markfynn.com/london-postcards.htm and the poster, Forward! The day is breaking” the Labour Party

The lost photograph ..... the mystery of Chorlton’s Ice Rink ... and the walk through our past on Sunday

Now here is a story which has been a long time in the making.

It concerns our own Chorlton Ice Rink which stood on the corner of Longford and Oswald roads.

On Jan 17 1907, “H” wrote to Albert, that “This is a photo of Chorlton’s Skating Rink.  I had a dust on it on New Year’s Day and it is OK”.

I first came discovered, it when I came across a painting by J Montgomery who painted the place in 1946 from a photograph dated 1906

He referred to it as “Chorlton Skating Rink (later the “Picturedrome”).

But until this week the original photograph was lost, but I rather think this may be the one Mr Montgomery used.

The building belonged to the Chorlton Skating Rink which was wound up as a company in 1916, but its time as a cinema was limited to just Montgomery’s reference to the Picturedrome.

In 1914 it is listed as the Longford Picturedrome seating 600 and its proprietor was a James Morland.

Sadly that is all we have and the listing did manage to substitute Street for road in the address.

There was a Mr Moreland living in Old Trafford just a few years earlier but that is it.

It may be the competition with its close rivals proved too much.
The Chorlton Theatre and Winter Garden had opened in the early years of the 20th century as a variety hall and doubled up as a cinema, while in 1915 a purpose built picture house had opened on Barlow Moor Road.

The combined competition may just have proved too much or it might have been the  war that finished it off.

Either way you can find out lots more on Sunday when we walk our past and call in at the site of the Chorlton’s Ice Rink.

The walk which is part of Chorlton Book Festival, will start from the the Library on Sunday November 18 at 2 pm and take about an hour, after which we will relax in The Edge Theatre, Manchester Road.

Beverley from the library service informs me that “tickets are £7.50 including soup and a roll at the Dressing Room café, The Edge Theatre, Manchester Road, M21 9JG after the walk. 

Booking is essential for this popular event. 

Please visit Chorlton Library or call 0161 227 3700.

Walking Chorlton's Past, Sunday 18 November 2 - 4pm"

Location; Chorlton

Picture: The Chorlton Ice Rink, 1907 from the collection of Chris Griffiths and cover from The Kinematograph Year Book Program Diary and Directory 1914

*Chorlton Book Festival, November 16-24, https://www.chorltonbookfestival.co.uk/

A little bit of how elections used to be fought, out with Dr. I. Richmond in the November of 1946

It is 73 years since Dr I Richmond, JP stood for election in the Kirkdale Ward.

I have no idea whether he was elected and without a lot of research I guess I never will.
But it is one of those fascinating little documents which shed light on how we organised elections for most of the 20th century.

Dr Richmond’s party workers would have been engaged for the month running up to the election knocking on doors, combing the records of previous elections, and then delivering this card to remind the elector to vote Labour.

It contained information on where to vote, and when to vote and of course that all important picture and name of the candidate.

And all the political parties did the same with varying degrees of activity circumscribed only by money, the number of activists and the likelihood of success.

There would have been public meetings some of which would have been in the open air, along with processions part carnival and part political.

An in each ward and each constituency across the country thousands of these reminders would fall through letter boxes in the days before the election, but I doubt many have survived.

Some will have made their way into local history archives, some into museums and a few will still be in a corner of a draw or in an old keepsake box.

This one had rested in a book for fifty years until I discovered it.

Today the successor to this card will still fall through the door, but much else has changed in how the parties go about the task of winning votes.

True they still knock on doors, will collect your polling card from the voting stations and will have pushed endless leaflets through letter boxes.

But the message is more often delivered in broadcasts on the television, through phone calls and the carefully rehearsed sound bite delivered during an interview.

There are still the occasional public meetings but they are much rarer than they were and while politicians will still turn up at local events they will also have offered up their opinions on a web site or a blog.

Now I am not one of those that lament the passing of the old ways, they in their time were a direct advance on how electioneering had worked in the late 19th century.
Instead I just enjoy coming across the election material of that past like this one from the Labour candidate

Dr I Richmond in the November of 1946.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Perhaps the least exciting story ……. iron covers and petrol cans

Now I am the first to admit that Friday afternoons in February can be slow, and not everyone will see the point in a story about iron covers and old petrol cans, but I can.

More so, because some may soon be lost to us and others just have a history.

I have long been fascinated by those iron coal hole covers, most of which disappeared a long time ago, either to be recycled or just cemented over.*

Like ghost signs, they carry the names of iron foundries, which no longer trade and come in all sorts of designs.

There are still a few here in Chorlton but they will not last another decade.

This one is different, and is relatively new, and gives access not to a coal cellar but a drain.

It can be found outside Morrisons, just past the entrance on the way to the tram stop and I am guessing doesn’t even get a glance from most of those that pass it by.

Nor I suspect will many people think much of this petrol can.**

After all plastic petrol cans can be bought in plenty of shops and warrant little interest unless of course your car has run out of petrol.

But once, along time ago any serious motorist would not have contemplated setting off without a tank of petrol secured in the boot or the side of their car.

In the early years of motoring there were few petrol stations and it was as will to have secured a supply before driving away.

All the big oil and petrol companies supplied their own cans, with the company name or logo emblazoned on the side, and supplies could be obtained from a variety of different places, ranging  from iron mongers to blacksmiths.

What makes this one a little different is that it belonged to the GPO and was collected by my old friend David Harrop.

Location; everywhere

Pictures; metal drain cover, 2019, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and GPO petrol can, circa 1920, courtesy of David Harrop

*Coal Holes, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=coal+holes


**Petrol Pumps, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=petrol+pumps

The view from the Bridge

A Salford Bridge looking out across a Manchester scene.

The two in one picture

Location; the river and the bridge




Picture; 2018 from the collection of Andy Robertson