Chorlton's brass band

There is something about old photographs and as much as I like the ones of the buildings, fields and roads of Chorlton it is those that contain people that I am drawn to.

This is our own brass band sometime in the 1920s and at least a few like William Mellor on the extreme right played in the 1893 band which I featured back in November of last year.*

Ours was one of the oldest brass bands in the country having been started in the 1820s.

 Of course the Stalybridge Band is older and can claim to have marched in to St Peter’s Fields on the day of Peterloo but ours had an almost continuous run until it agreed to wind up after the last world war.

 It performed in many of the great and not so great events here in the township and went on to win prizes in brass band competitions.

What makes this one that little more interesting is that none of them are in uniform. Perhaps it was an impromptu photograph with at least one chap still in what I think is the uniform of a Manchester Corporation tram driver. But I wait to be corrected. Nor can it be the full band.

But I am going to leave the band for another time and focus instead on the three young faces behind the bandsman.

In those early years of photography stretching into the 1920s when it was all still a novelty the camera attracted the curious and the vain. They appear on the edges of a picture always staring directly into the lens but never really part of what is going on.

I would love to know more about three children especially the girl in the middle. Were they related to the bandsman? Had they followed the camera man or was it just chance that they were staring over the wall when the bandsman pose?

I doubt that we will ever know who they were, or for that matter where it was taken. My guess is in the schoolyard of the old National School which could place our three interlopers in Number 1 Passage which runs behind the old playground wall from what was once called Crescent Road and is now Crossland. But there are some things I suppose we will never know.

Picture; from the collection of Allan Brown, some of the band circa 1920s and William Rogers in 1893


*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/11/1893-brass-band-lives-revealed.html