This was to be the story of Mary Dean of Didsbury and her time as a housemaid in the very big house of Sir Ralph Pendlebury, who lived at Heaton Bank in Heaton Mersey.
Sir Ralph described himself as the employer of 75 hands, and his house was recognized as a grand one, with a large “spacious entrance hall, with stone staircase, and dome light, a dinning room, breakfast room and study, five bedrooms, water closet and bathroom fitted up with a bath and hot and cold water”.
Added to which there was a wash house and laundry, sundry outhouses “with an excellent coach house and good stabling for five horses harness room and hayloft …… and a large conservatory heated by hot water” and finally a large south facing garden, well stocked with fruit trees, [and] commands a delightful and picturesque view of a great part of the county of Chester”.*
All of which meant that Mary Dean who along with a cook was the only domestic servant, must have had her work cut out.
Sadly, we will never know what she thought of the job, as the only reference to her time there comes from the 1851 census, which had been taken in the April of that year.
Just when she started and indeed when she left is unclear, but I know she was back in Didsbury by 1860 for the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth Jane.
Back then “service in a big house” remained one of the prime means for a young woman to earn a living, and it was usual for employers to recruit from outside the district, which ensured that the secrets of the family were less likely to become common gossip.
I doubt we will ever get to know how she got the job, but there was an informal arrangement by which clergy would write to neighouring parish churches, alerting them of vacancies in the big houses.
And for Mary, Heaton Mersey was close enough to her family in Didsbury to mean that the occasional visits home were easy enough.
I suspect she would have walked, although there were always itinerant traders and even carriers plying the route from Manchester through Didsbury and the Heatons to Stockport who might have offered her a lift and perhaps even for free.
I would like to know more of her time as a housemaid, but as sometimes happens, there is no more.
Not that this is the end of the story of Mary, who I know was born in 1826, and spent her early life in Barlow Moor.
And at this point the story takes a surprising turn, because at her baptism in the parish church, her father gave his occupation as a weaver, a job he had been pursuing since at least 1821 when he married Mary Thompson.
Even using the rate Books and census returns it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where in Barlow Moor he lived, but I rather think it will have been one of the cottages which stretched north along Wilmslow Road from the junction with Barlow Moor Road.
I do know that he was paying three shillings a week, and his may be one the cottages which appear in a series of photographs, taken before 1880.
His name was Henry, and he is one of only a handful of Didsbury weavers that appear in the official records.
And his was a declining industry.
Handloom weaving was conducted in a wide arc both north and south of Manchester and in the areas bordering on northern Cheshire, Derbyshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire.
By the mid-18th century cotton had replaced wool as the main textile material and across the county areas specialized in such things as cambrics, muslins and ginghams. Just over 5 miles to the east near Gatley they had been growing flax and weaving linen from at least the mid-17th century.
But exactly what and how it was produced in the township is unclear. It may be that Henry and his family delivered each of the processes from carding and spinning to weaving but it is more likely with the mechanization of spinning and its concentration in the factories of Manchester that he may have been involved just in weaving.
At one stage our weavers may also have been involved in dyeing, because there are large numbers of crocuses that grow locally. In the past they were used for dyeing clothes alongside their culinary and medical uses.
In Stretford in 1826 there were 302 looms providing employment for 780 workers supporting 151 families,** and as late as the 1840s there were still seven, while in Withington there were nineteen cotton weavers, mostly concentrated in Lady Barn and Fallowfield where they specialized in “weaving checked handkerchiefs and ginghams.” ***
Nationally weavers had been the largest single group of industrial workers, and at any one time during 1820s, 30s and 40s, and they came third in the list of occupations after agricultural labourers and domestic servants.
The estimate of the Select Committee of 1834-5 reckoned that 800,000 to 840,000 were wholly dependent on one of the branches of weaving.****
But the onward march of mechanization and factory production in al three processes of making textile, meant that Henry and his fellow weavers were on borrowed time.
And so while we find him listing his occupation as a weaver during the 1820s through to 1841, in the following decade he described himself as a “Porter” and by 1861 as a “labourer”, while the numbers of weavers across Burnage and Didsbury fell between 1841 to 1851.
All of which points to the very personal tragedy of the collapse of weaving locally, and leaving me with just the observation that his granddaughter worked briefly in a Manchester cotton factory before returning to Didsbury and becoming a tailoress, which I suppose is the closest we get to her grandfather’s trade.
Location; Didsbury, Heaton Mersey
Pictures; Heaton Mersey and Barlow Moor, 1854, from the OS map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/
*Sale by Auction, The Manchester Guardian, December 16th, 1843
** Leach, Sir Bosdin, Old Stretford, Privately Printed, 1910, page 23
***Williamson, C, Sketches of Fallowfield, John Heywood, Manchester, 1888 page 34
**** Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class, Pelican Books edition 1968 page344
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| Mersey Bank House, Heaton Mersey, 1854 |
Added to which there was a wash house and laundry, sundry outhouses “with an excellent coach house and good stabling for five horses harness room and hayloft …… and a large conservatory heated by hot water” and finally a large south facing garden, well stocked with fruit trees, [and] commands a delightful and picturesque view of a great part of the county of Chester”.*
All of which meant that Mary Dean who along with a cook was the only domestic servant, must have had her work cut out.
Sadly, we will never know what she thought of the job, as the only reference to her time there comes from the 1851 census, which had been taken in the April of that year.
Just when she started and indeed when she left is unclear, but I know she was back in Didsbury by 1860 for the birth of her daughter, Elizabeth Jane.
 |
| The sale of Mersey Bank House, 1843 |
 |
| Barlow Moor, Didsbury, 1854, with the cottages stretching north |
I suspect she would have walked, although there were always itinerant traders and even carriers plying the route from Manchester through Didsbury and the Heatons to Stockport who might have offered her a lift and perhaps even for free.
I would like to know more of her time as a housemaid, but as sometimes happens, there is no more.
Not that this is the end of the story of Mary, who I know was born in 1826, and spent her early life in Barlow Moor.
And at this point the story takes a surprising turn, because at her baptism in the parish church, her father gave his occupation as a weaver, a job he had been pursuing since at least 1821 when he married Mary Thompson.
 |
| Barlow Moor, pre 1880 |
I do know that he was paying three shillings a week, and his may be one the cottages which appear in a series of photographs, taken before 1880.
His name was Henry, and he is one of only a handful of Didsbury weavers that appear in the official records.
And his was a declining industry.
Handloom weaving was conducted in a wide arc both north and south of Manchester and in the areas bordering on northern Cheshire, Derbyshire, and the West Riding of Yorkshire.
By the mid-18th century cotton had replaced wool as the main textile material and across the county areas specialized in such things as cambrics, muslins and ginghams. Just over 5 miles to the east near Gatley they had been growing flax and weaving linen from at least the mid-17th century.
 |
| Possible cottages lived in by the Dean family, pre 1880 |
At one stage our weavers may also have been involved in dyeing, because there are large numbers of crocuses that grow locally. In the past they were used for dyeing clothes alongside their culinary and medical uses.
In Stretford in 1826 there were 302 looms providing employment for 780 workers supporting 151 families,** and as late as the 1840s there were still seven, while in Withington there were nineteen cotton weavers, mostly concentrated in Lady Barn and Fallowfield where they specialized in “weaving checked handkerchiefs and ginghams.” ***
Nationally weavers had been the largest single group of industrial workers, and at any one time during 1820s, 30s and 40s, and they came third in the list of occupations after agricultural labourers and domestic servants.
 |
| Possible cottages lived in by the Dean family, pre 1880 |
But the onward march of mechanization and factory production in al three processes of making textile, meant that Henry and his fellow weavers were on borrowed time.
And so while we find him listing his occupation as a weaver during the 1820s through to 1841, in the following decade he described himself as a “Porter” and by 1861 as a “labourer”, while the numbers of weavers across Burnage and Didsbury fell between 1841 to 1851.
All of which points to the very personal tragedy of the collapse of weaving locally, and leaving me with just the observation that his granddaughter worked briefly in a Manchester cotton factory before returning to Didsbury and becoming a tailoress, which I suppose is the closest we get to her grandfather’s trade.
Location; Didsbury, Heaton Mersey
Pictures; Heaton Mersey and Barlow Moor, 1854, from the OS map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/
*Sale by Auction, The Manchester Guardian, December 16th, 1843
** Leach, Sir Bosdin, Old Stretford, Privately Printed, 1910, page 23
***Williamson, C, Sketches of Fallowfield, John Heywood, Manchester, 1888 page 34
**** Thompson, E.P., The Making of the English Working Class, Pelican Books edition 1968 page344
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