So ……… who pinched the tennis courts by the Lloyd’s Hotel?

Now, everyone knows that the Lloyds has a bowling green, which will date from soon after the hotel was built in 1870.

The Lloyds, 1970

Thomas Ellwood, our own historian writing in 1886 said that along with the bowling green there “is a bowling club which meets every Wednesday during the season”.

Adding “recently a lawn tennis club has also been started”.

This I suspect had something to do with Mrs. Crabtree who ran the pub in the 1880s and by all accounts “improved the place considerably in various particulars” and it may have been her who encouraged the bowling green members to build their own club house and as an enterprising woman with an eye for business also laid out a lawn tennis court on the open land along side Whitelow Road.

The growing population brought in by the housing boom centred along the Edge Lane/Wilbraham Road corridor and around what until recently was the “Four Banks” stimulated a growth in both cultural and sporting groups, and Mrs. Crabtree’s tennis courts may have played to that interest.

The Lloyds in 1894

But none of the maps dating from the 1880s onwards show the presence of those tennis courts, and while the same maps do not indicate other courts which were in place by the late 19th century and survived into the1900s, it suggests that ours did not last long.

Certainly, by the mid 20th century the site had become a car park, and so the mystery remains.

And a mystery not helped by the lack of any reference to the tennis courts in the rate books.

Mrs. Ada Crabtree is there as the tenant of the pub from 1884to1887, followed by Richard Crawshaw, but no tennis green which as an asset should have turned up in the Rate Books.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; The Lloyd Hotel with that public lavatory, 1970, A Dawson, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass the Lloyds in 1894 from the OS map of South Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, https://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Ellwood, Thomas, Inns, Chapter 23, History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, South Manchester Gazette, April 17 1886