Walking the streets of Hightown .... a full century ago

I remain in awe of those writers who can sum up someone in a few simple sentences.

Outside lavatory, Back Percival Street, 1951

Dickens could do it, and today I came across a short description of a Mrs. Poyser which is up there with the best.

It comes from the novel, Magnolia Street by Louis Golding, which was based on the streets in Hightown in Manchester during the 1920s.

These were the streets he remembered from his youth, and in particular the uneasy relationship between Jew and Gentile.

He was born in the city in 1895 to a Ukrainian-Jewish family, described his politics as “strongly to the left” and in 1938 wrote The Jewish Problem which was published as a Penguin Special.*

The Jewish Problem, 1938

The book examines the history of antisemitism, and Zionism, against the backdrop of “The Nazi Horror” and concludes with a final chapter on  “The Future”

But he was also a prolific popular novelist, and I can see why, because his description of Mrs. Poyser  who ran a grocery shop on Magnolia Street perfectly recreates one of those people we have all come across.   “The Jewish women met socially in Mrs. Poyser’s grocery shop, facing the Lamb and Lion.  

There they forgathered in between the washing up after one meal and the preparation for the next; or they called in on their way from the market, to show what a fat chicken they had picked up or how fine a silver hake for chopping and frying.

On a certain Sunday morning in May in the year 1910, there was news and news of the Mrs. Poyser’s sort.  News was, in a sense, Mrs. Poyser’s prerogative.  She weighed it, she sorted it out into bags, she handed it over the counter, along with a pair of kippers or a pound of sultanas”.**

Back Percival Street, 1951

The book, which was written in 1932, had its roots in a series of short pieces he had sent into the Manchester Guardian a decade earlier, describing life from the Jewish side of Magnolia Street which the newspaper had rejected as “nonsense”.

His response was in his own words “to mobilise the Jews on one side of the Street and the Gentiles on the other side and make of them – and this is a thing which has been ignored in references to the book – a study not of Jew-Gentile problems but of the problems which assert themselves when two communities are found in close proximity to one another.  The sort of thing which happened in Magnolia Street to the dwellers on one side or the other are what happened exactly in a street in Belfast in which Orangemen lived one side and Catholics on the other and in Tunis where at the end of a certain area the French lived on side and the Italians on the other”.***

At present I am only on chapter two, with a full 500 pages a head of me, and not wanting to spoil the experience, I haven’t turned to the back, but my spoiler alert, with help from another Manchester Guardian article is that Didsbury features along the way.

Percival Street, Holt Town, 1953

Well, we shall see.

What did intrigue me, was that Mr. Golding was participating in “the formal opening of the new library set up by Messrs. Kendal, Milne and Co. in their Deansgate establishment [to a large audience] “on The workshop of the novelist’s brain”.****

Now that I would have liked to have been part of.

And in a sort of way I should also have liked to have walked those streets in Hightown that he knew so well.

Of course, they have mostly gone, cleared away in the clearance programmes of the second half of the last century.  But there are a few pictures, and in particular the two that appear here.  Both are of Back Percival Street, a small slip of a place which didn’t warrant a listing in the directories and doesn’t get recorded by name on the maps.

But my Facebook friend Bill Sumner, swiftly located the street where I thought it might be beside Percival Street, which was off Waterloo Road which in turn connected Bury New Road to Cheetham Hill Road.

Leaving me just to reflect on those two images of Back Percival Street, which are a powerful reminder of just how tough the area could be, whether you were Jew or Gentile.

Location; Hightown

Pictures; Outside lavatory, Back Percival Street, 1951, m08286 and m08291, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, cover from The Jewish Problem, 1938 and extract from the OS map showing Percival Street in Holt Town and surrounding streets

* The Jewish Problem, Louis Golding, November 1938, reprinted, November 1938, and January 1939

**Magnolia Street, Louis Golding, 1932

***The Making of a Novel - Mr. Louis Golding and “Magnolia Street”, Manchester Guardian, March 9th, 1935

****Ibid The Making of a Novel