A short series featuring objects which tell a story of Chorlton in just a paragraph and a challenge for people to suggest some that are personal to their stories.
Well I suppose I can be accused of cheating because here is
not one object but a row of objects on either side of Claude Road. But in a very real sense they form a whole,
because they are the houses which were rebuilt after a night of air raids which
also claimed the cinema on Barlow Moor Road.
Nor were they the only ones. On May 1st 1940 a direct hit on the corner of Chatsworth and Cavendish
Road destroyed two houses and killed seven people. There were also fatal hits
on Brantingham, Cheltenham, Scott, Torbay, and Dartmouth and on Cavendish Road on
the night of May 1st 1941.
Location; Chorlton
Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson
Did the same happen on what is now Chequers Road as there is a gap at the top end followed by different style houses?
ReplyDeleteIf you mean the two close to Etchells, I think they are just later land fil
DeleteI am next to the gap and I believe it was bomb damage. Both myself and 'next door' have half a plot extra on our houses. There is no number 51!
ReplyDeleteA story? Off to the bomb maps
ReplyDeleteThere were three hits on Egerton Road South plus one in the field just in the rail junction and one by the perimeter fence of the Ack Ack battery on Hough End fields where Waverley was built and recently demolished. They could have been after the guns or the rail mounted gun which used to run on the fallowfield Loop line.
ReplyDeleteCompare the end walls of 49 and 21 - the sticky-out chimney on 49 suggests that there used to be an adjoining house there to my mind.
ReplyDeleteYes of course a sight all too familair when I was growing up lumpie
ReplyDelete118 and 120 St Werburghs were also hit and a lady killed there.
ReplyDeleteThe cinema on Barlow Moor Road was mistaken for Metrovicks just like the Fallowfield cinema opposite Whalley Range School on Princess Road where a land mine was dropped. Both cinemas having a white frontage.
ReplyDeleteThere was also an Ack Ack battery on the YMCA playing fields. Years later a sink hole appeared whilst a football match was being played. The whole part of the foundations for the Ack Ack guns.
The house on Dartmouth Rd was my grandparents, my grandmother and aunt were both killed.
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