The missing Oswald Road houses ……..a request ……. and an outrageous advert

There will be someone who remembers the terrace of houses on Oswald Road, which included number 94.

Oswald Road, 1907

I should do but I don’t.

Nor can I put to mind when they were demolished and eventually became the landscaped area beside the Field of OS.

I started pondering on when they vanished after someone contacted me asking what had happened to 94.

They appear on the OS map for 1894, and are still there on the OS for 1952, and I expect were knocked down in the late 1970s or early 1980s.

And here enters Peter Topping into the debate, because Peter did what I didn’t do and looked up the Chorlton Bomb maps.  These were compiled by the City Council and showed just where bombs fell in the city during the war.

Using the OS map of Manchester & Salford for 1933-34, direct hits were indicated by "red circles for fire bombs; blue circles for high explosives; pink shading for damaged buildings; red shading for demolished buildings; green marks: line mines, indicating bomb damage by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz”.

And our house had its own bomb circle, leading Peter to conclude this was one of the properties the Luftwaffe accidentally hit on its nightly trips out, which played out to his assertion that Hitler wanted to destroy Manchester City’s ground because he “was an ardent Manchester United fan”.

Now this might surprise some but the logic was explored in his book “Smile Dammit Smile !!! Chorlton”, which was published in 2020 and presented a lighted hearted version of the news.*

It was based on the publication Billy’s Weekly Liar, which was a spoof broadsheet sold in Blackpool before and just after the last world war.

So I rather think, we should be careful of Peter’s interpretation, not least because our house received not a high explosive bomb, but an incendiary device, which would explain why it was still there in 1952

That said I admire Peter’s determination to readjust history for the purpose of making us smile.

Location; Oswald Road

Picture; Oswald Road from the 1907 OS map of Manchester & Salford

*“Smile Dammit Smile !!! Chorlton”, Peter Topping, 2020, Hitler’s MUFC Takeover Bid, pages 104-105. The book  is available from http://www.pubbooks.co.uk/ or Chorlton Book shop