Of Chorlton carnivals, Enoch Royle's decorated cart and a missing church on Albany Road

Now there is a lot in this picture.

The caption says “Decorated float in Albany Road, for Chorlton Carnival in the 1930s? Enoch Royle at the horses head, permission William Jackson.”

And I suppose that decorated float is where we will start.

According to the local historian John Lloyd, Chorlton staged a number of these carnivals during the mid 1930s which seemed usually to be centred on the Oswald Road part of new Chorlton and were part of the Rose Queen festivals which raised money for the Manchester and Salford Hospitals.

The Manchester Guardian in 1937 reported that carnival season had opened with “the gala held in St Margaret’s playing fields, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, on Saturday may be said to mark the opening of the charity carnival season.  

It has a history of five or six years only, but already it has become perhaps the most considerable effort of its kind undertaken in the city on behalf of the Manchester and Salford Medical Charities Fund.  

It has all the customary carnival, features a queen to be crowned with picturesque ceremony, morris dancers and processions of characters in comic and fancy dresss on horseback, cycle or on foot.”

The last recorded was the 1937 one although others like the Stretford one lasted much longer.
Now Enoch Royle crops up in a number of pictures in the collection always with his wagon and always at the bottom of Albany Road.

Now I had assumed he was a coal man and said so in earlier posts,  but in 1929 when he was living at 26 Fielden Avenue he gave his occupation as carter which is important because I had gone looking for his coal yard on the corner of Albany and Brantingham Roads and instead found a church and a hall.

Both appear to have had a short life.  They were there by 1909 but had vanished by the 1940s and tantalizingly there are those who remember a business run from the corner which went under the name of Mores which means that I will have to go into the Ref and trawl the directories.

So that just leaves the house behind the cart which is still, there today and has in its time been both a private residence and a retail outlet.

My earlier story on Mr Royle prompted Andy Robertson to send me a picture of the property from a few years ago but sadly neither of us has a memory of what was beside the property before the garage.

So while I go searching for that bit of the story I shall close with the observation that back them you could see across to Manchester Road.

Picture; of Mr Royle circa 1930s, from the Lloyd collection, Albany Road in September 20102 , with 
Flynn's Electricals, courtesy of Andy Robertson 

*Manchester Guardian, June 21 1937