Looking for stories ………. from one house in Chorlton

Now, it has become popular to take a pretty ordinary house and trace its story back in time.

The house, 1959

I have to confess it is something I have done with three of the houses I have lived in over the last seventy years, and more recently the idea has become a successful television series.*

All of which is an introduction to Bamburh House on High Lane.

It featured yesterday on the blog when I began to explore its history.

And I have returned today with part two.  It was to be the story of some of the domestic servants who toiled away in the background rarely recognized, but essential to the well being of the family who employed them.

The idea was partly prompted by my own interest in those “who toiled”, and also from a comment by Sarah, the present owner that “When we bought the house we opened up the attics and there was a bedroom for a maid up there. 

I will dig out the pictures just for your interest because although the staircase carried up to her room she would’ve had to bend  double to get under the roof to enter”.

But as so often happens their stories are harder to piece together, and despite an afternoon wandering the records the four I chose led almost nowhere.

I had started in 1871 when the house was built, with a Miss Taylor aged 23, and young Agnes who was just 14 and employed as a “nurse”, but the enumerator’s handwriting was almost undecipherable, and my best shots led nowhere.

And while a decade later I could at least identify a Sarah A Edwards and John Strawbridge, they too remain in the shadows.

High Lane, 1881, the house marked with an X

Still there are plenty more to look for, and in time I will go looking.

All of which leaves me falling back on the house and exploring a little bit more of its past, which begins with an interesting mystery concerning John Strawbridge who in 1881 is described as a groom, suggesting the then owners had a horse and carriage.  Maps of the period show outbuildings behind the house on the west side, but later census returns make no reference to a groom.

The last census records that in 1911 Mr. Robert Newberry West, who was a surgeon, employed Elizabeth Parker as “cook-domestic” who was charged with maintaining the elven rooms and cooking for Mr. West, his mother and his two siblings.

The house, 1881, marked with an X

I have to say I have been drawn to Robert West, partly because he was born  in Camberwell,  close to where I was born and grew up in south east London and because we can track his progress from London to Chorlton-on Medlock where his father was the vicar at St Stephens and on to Southport where he lived with his widowed mother.  

He married in 1920 at the grand old age of 47, living on Upper Chorlton Road and finally Barlow Moor Road where he died in 1924.

Nor is that quite the end of the story, because like many bigger properties in south Manchester,  Bamburh House finally succumbed to multi occupancy.

Just when this happened is unclear.  

In 1929 the directories show that it was occupied by the Morris family, but a decade later the house was divided in to five flats of which two were unoccupied.  The remaining three were occupied by a sales manager and sales assistant, neither of whom were married, and Mr. and Mrs. Bond and their young daughter. Mr. John Bond was a sales manager for a tobacco and drugs company, his wife Doris was “an assistant hospital nurse” and Rita, their daughter was just 2 years old.

After which the house continued its long association with multi occupancy.  In 1954 it was home to three tenants, and in 1962 to four, and it remained so until Sarah bought the property and returned it to family use, which of course has been a trend across Chorlton.

With thanks to Sarah for allowing me to profile her house and Tony Petrie who supplied the street directories for 1929, 1959, and 1962.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

The house, 1956

Pictures; the house in 1959, A. E. Landers, m17886, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass High Lane in 1881, from the 1881 Withinton Board of Health map, courtesy Trafford Local Studies Centre, https://www.artuk.org/visit/venues/trafford-local-studies-centre-6551 and in 1956 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1956

*The story of a house, 

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall 

The story of one house in Lausanne Road, 

The house on Harrow Road in Leicester,