Oswald Field, five cottages, a slice of rural Chorlton, and a bit of a mystery part 2

Oswald Road

 I  recently walked the field boundary of Oswald Field and today I want to think about the cottages.

There were five of them and they might have looked something like Grantham’s Buildings which stood on High Lane from the 1830s through to the late 1970’s.

I think we can date them from sometime after 1832 and maybe more exactly to around 1835 because in that year a John Hall qualified for a Parliamentary vote here in Chorlton on the strength of owning freehold houses on Oswald Croft.

Five years later the properties appear to have passed to Charles Bracegirdle who is listed in the electoral register for 1840 and with the changed ownership has come a slight change in the name from croft to field.

Red Gates farm, 1845

Now at this point I become a little pedantic.

It is possible that Oswald Croft and Oswald Field are not the same place, but there are no similar properties close by, and the boundary between Oswald Field and High Meadow was in the 1840s known as Oswald Lane, a name it retains till this day.

So I think we can be pretty sure they are one and the same.

But I am not sure of what these five cottages would have been like.

They might like Grantham’s Buildings on High Lane and Brownhill’s Buildings on what is now Sandy Lane have been two up two down properties, but it is equally likely that they consisted of just a single ground floor room with another on top.  There were plenty of one up one down cottages and rows of such across the township.

What I think we can be certain is that they were made of brick.  In the 1840s there were still upwards of fifty wattle and daub cottages but all the new build does seem to have been in brick.  Now I have written about our cottages  and perhaps it is enough to say that they would have been fairly basic, with a brick or slab floor resting directly on the bare earth, a privy and a communal well.

There was a wide disparity in the rents that were paid on the five, with one commanding an annual rent of £16, another £13 and two at £6 and the last at £4.

But I am not sure that this had anything to do with the houses themselves but more to do with the accompanying land.  The higher rented two were described as houses with land while the remaining three were with either “house and garden” or just “house”.

And this fits with the occupations of the tenants.  So Peter Langford who paid an annual rent of £13 in 1845 described himself as a gardener which may mean he derived some of his income from growing food for the Manchester markets.

Certainly he was perceived as a notch up from his neighbours because it is his name which appears as the lead tenant in the properties which allowed Charles Bracegirdle a Parliamentary vote in 1854.

And indeed three years earlier he had described himself as a market gardener on an acre of land.  While others living in the block described themselves as labourers.

Assuming then that the properties were all much the same it might be possible to get some idea of what they were like by comparing rents across the township.

At £6 a year a tenant would have paid 2s 3d or 11p a week while the lower rent of £4 would have worked out at 1s 6d or 7½p a week.  This put them broadly in the middle of the rented properties in 1845.

Rents as % of the total in 1845

Of course this still might hide enormous differences in the quality and repair of the houses but it is a start, and I guess means that our people on the edge of the township were living in homes which were much the same as their neighbours across the township.

And like all our people the length of tenancy seems mixed, some like Peter Langford stayed on Oswald Field for twenty years while others upped and move on in a fairly short space of time which I suspect is another area for some interesting research.

The rate books begin in 1845 and detail landlord and tenant throughout the rest of the century so it should be possible to plot tenancy times.

The last part of the story is still unclear.  Charles Bradshaw died in October 1864 his will was published in the following January and the houses did not them come to auction until the September of 1865.

I don’t know who bought them but I do know they were gone by 1871. I have yet to find out what happened to the tenants or an exact date for their demolition, but that is all possible.  The rate books for the 1860s will reveal when the date of their going and a trawl of the later census returns will show where the tenants settled.

But that is for another time.  Tomorrow I want to pursue the mystery of Charles Bracegirgdle.

Pictures; Grantham’s Buildings High Lane,  m17675, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass detail from the 1847 Tithe map of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, advert for the auction of the five cottages and land, Manchester Guardian 1865