Looking for history in Didsbury

Didsbury in the 1950s

You have to work at history.

It is there in all shapes and sizes from memories and photographs to buildings and the great accounts of State, but they rarely just fall into your lap.

So tomorrow I am off to Didsbury at the invitation of a friend to interview a long term resident.

I   have no idea what to expect other than that he has been kind enough to share his stories with me.

And that of course is a privilege, because we all take for granted that the past is available to be interrogated whether it is the sinking of the Lusitania to working conditions in a coal mine in county Durham in the 1850s.

But all those accounts are made up of countless bits of evidence and there is always something new to discover.

Now usually it just confirms what you already knew but sometimes it offers up a different interpretation and can even change what we know.

So recently rereading the war time letters of George Davison who was born in Manchester and died in June 1918 it became clear that his wife regularly visited him while he was stationed away from home.

She lived in “digs” in Woolwich in London and took rooms in a house in Ireland.

Now this was a revelation to me because I had always assumed the wives of serving soldiers stayed at home during the two world wars and was all the more surprising given that Mr and Mrs Davison had a very young son and travelling during the Great War was difficult.

Of course there is no way of knowing how typical Mrs Davison’s trips to meet her husband were but it is an interesting  avenue of research.



Picture; War Memorial and Library from the series, Didsbury, Lilywhite, issued by Tuck & Sons, 1959, http://tuckdb.org/history