A Chorlton wedding in the April of 1913 and a tiny mystery

I doubt I would ever have got to know about Mr Hugget Billing and Miss Vivien Horsfall Attwood if it weren’t for Sally’s wedding photograph.

The couple were married at St Clements Church in Chorlton-cum-Hardy on April 16th 1913, and on that Wednesday the Manchester Courier was on hand to record the event which according to the paper was “crowded.”

And I think that may have been down to Vivien’s father who was a journalist and newspaper editor.

As such he will have been well known, added to which the family had lived in Chorlton on Cavendish Road from at least 1901 and so I guess there would have been plenty of local well wishers.

Mr Herbert Huggins Billing was a salesman who had been born in Rusholme, lived in Ancoats and in 1911 was residing in Longsight.

The couple settled in Chorlton and lived at 42 Claude Road.  Vivien died in 1930 and Herbert Huggins fourteen years later.

In time I will delve deeper into their stories.  I know they had two daughters and just before his death Vivien’s father was living opposite them at number 55 Claude Road.

Of course all such research runs the danger of becoming intrusive especially if there are direct living relatives and so I am minded to concentrate on what their lives might tell us about Chorlton and Manchester during the first half of the 20th century.

The records of how much all three left when they died reveal something of their financial background and a future hunt will tell us which paper Vivien’s father edited, and in time I might solve the little mystery of why her parents and her husband are all buried in Southern Cemetery but she is missing from the family plot.

That maybe because she died at Oakmore in Cheshire but I can’t be sure.

That said even I have to own up to a little curiosity and wonder why Miss Attwood gave her age as 28 in 1913 when she was in fact 31.



Picture; A Chorlton Wedding, the Manchester Courier, April 17 1913, from the collection of Sally Dervan