On School Lane buying the fish and chips in 1911

We are on School Lane and the year is sometime around 1911 and I am drawn to the people in the picture. 

I doubt that we will ever be certain who the woman staring back at us is but I rather think it will be either Mrs Martha Meredith who ran “the Supper Bar (Fish and Chips)” at number 1 School Lane or Ellen Tennant who was the wife of George Tennant the butcher from number 3.

And if pushed I think it will be Martha who at 36 described herself as a widow with a 14 year old daughter and shared her home with her brother in law, Mary Ann who she employed as a servant and John Wilson the boarder.

Alas the children’s identities are lost to us but they will be local and must have been drawn from their homes by the presence of the photographer.

The properties are still recognizably the same and by one of those odd coincidences just one hundred and eight years after our picture was taken number 1 is still a fish and chip shop.

Despite the passage of just over a century it is still possible to recognise the scene today.

Not long after this picture was taken young Bertha Bertha Geary aged just 13 of School Lane has heard history. “We saw the flying man on Tuesday night fly over head.  Beaumont is his name.  

I wish you could have seen him.  It made such a noise.”

He was André Beaumont and he was one of 30 competitors in the Daily Mail Circuit of Britain Air race in 1911.

Flying in a Blériot XI he was the first to complete the course which was no mean achievement as many of the aircraft either failed to take off or crashed along the way.

But that is for another story.

The image comes from a collection  Didsbury through Time, by Peter Topping and Andrew Simpson.

Pictures; from Didsbury through Time.