The bottle …… the stillman ..... and a mystery

Like all good stories this one began with the discovery of some treasure by Declan Maguire.

The bottle, 2021

The treasure was an old glass bottle which he told me  “is green tinted and very thick, and written in raised glass is the names ‘Thomas Edge Trade Mark T E Thomas Edge Registered Manchester’, and  on the back, ‘Redfern Bros. Bottle Makers Barnsley’. 

Strange what you can find just a few inches down. I wonder how long it’s been since that bottle last saw daylight, perhaps dropped into and during some long ago bit of building work”.

The bottle is undated, but I know that Redfern Brothers were engaged in the business of bottle manufacture from 1862, until they sold out to a Swedish company in 1967.  

And we can limit that near century down to sometime between when they started and when they moved out of Barnsley in 1946.*

Which still leaves a heap of time, but here Thomas Edge steps into the story, and reduces that chasm of time to just 25 years.  

In 1891 he described himself as a Stillman and Dye Worker, a decade later he had become a “Foreman in a Chemical works” and by 1903 was listed in the directories as a stillman, and that suggests by then he may have struck out on his own.

How he raised the capital to purchase the bottles and distilling equipment is an intriguing question, but I know he died in 1936, leaving just £127 to his niece.

All of which offers up a timeline for our bottle of something like 33 years.

Not much I know, but so far it’s the best we can do.

So instead, given that history is messy the story takes a few twists.  

Thomas was born in 1862, married Annie in 1885, and they settled in Blackburn Street in Hulme that year, and were still there in 1914.  Just how successful he was and what he put into that green bottle is as yet unknown to me.

8 Blackburn Street marked in red, 1894 home to Mr. and Mrs. Edge

But it does suggest we have a man who the Victorians would have approved of, and a man who had taken to heart the writings of Samuel Smiles in Self Help, and had raised himself “to social eminence and even wealth”.**

Of course, I might just have got this last bit wrong.  His business career may have been short, and carried out on the edge of impending disaster.

And so there is a lot more research to do, including why he left his money to his niece who in 1936 was 73 years old and not his married daughter.

I can think of answers but that would be unhistorical with out the research, so research I shall, leaving me just marvel at what can come out of the ground, long after they were discarded.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; the bottles, 2021, from the collection of Declan Maguire, and Blackburn Street, 1894, close to Chorlton Road, from the OS map of South Lancashire, 1894, courtesy of Digital Archives, Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

* Redfern Brothers https://sha.org/bottle/pdffiles/RedfearnBros.pdf

**Samuel Smiles