Off to Didsbury, in the summer of 1847

Now I can be as adventurous as the next chap and have been known to venture out of the township as far as Didsbury.

It was after all where our farmers went to get their cereal milled and it was where my old chum Alexander Somerville ended up in the June of 1847.

He had come over to Chorlton looking for potato blight, moved across the Mersey by the Greyhound pub at Jackson’s Boat and ended up in Didsbury.  A place he wrote
“of great beauty- not surpassed even by the beautiful fields, meadows, gardens, and the public pathways through them, lying around London.”*

And went on to revel in the place stating boldly

“Let the traveller, passing out of Cheshire into Lancashire by the Northern Ferry, who loves to loiter on the road, and see sights, come at the hour of summer sunset.  Let him approach Didsbury, and look back suddenly through the trees, the traveller will see the houses standing on the brow of eminence, and the gardens with them, and the people looking out of opened windows, the very houses gazing, as it were, with wonder; and the old church, with its graveyard, and the dead of a thousand years around it, standing in the very brink of the eminence.”

This I have to say is not an advert for the place nor a way of ingratiating myself with people of a neighbouring township who might just in the fullness of time buy a copy of The Story of Chorlton-Cum-Hardy** which like Didsbury was a small rural community.

Instead it is a way of introducing a new occasional series highlighting places close by.

And I now have a special interest in the Didsbury  because it is where Miss Leete of Poplar Grove lived, and she is someone I am very interested in because in a rural area dependant on farming she was on the Ladies Committee of the National Anti-Corn Law Bazaar.  The bazaar was held in London in the May of 1845 and was part of the campaign to abolish the Corn Laws.  These had been introduced in 1815 to protect British agriculture but amongst the working class and industrial interests were highly unpopular.

But more of her later, along with and some other interesting aspects of Didsbury in the early 19th century.  In the mean time I finish with my picture of the Didsbury Hotel.  The caption gives a date of 1860-70.

At that time there was a regular horse bus service operating from Manchester to Cheadle which went from "All Saints and from the Commercial Office on Brown Street via Rusholme, Fallowfield and Didsbury 40 minutes past nine, half past seven, and every hour at night; on Sundays at ten, eleven, one, two, half past two, three, half past three, seven, eight and nine.”***

And for those who wanted to travel a little down market there were the carriers of which two operated from Manchester.  These were “James Crompton from 2a Palace Street [off Market Street] and Alfred Midwinter from the Cock, Mark lane [Withy Grove] daily.”


*Alexander Somerville, A Pilgrimage in search of the Potato Blight, The Manchester Examiner, June 19th 1847
** http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
*** Slater’s Directory of Manchester & Salford 1863

Picture; from the Lloyd Collection