Will the real William Frank please step forward ……..

Now for a decade and more I have been hunting for Mr. William Frank who gave his name to two small streets off Great Marlborough Street in Chorlton on Medlock.

Great Marlborough Street, 2019

Once upon a time they consisted of 14 back to back houses but long ago were subsumed in to a finishing works leaving the streets as access points into the building, although at ground level it was still possible to make out the brick arches over the cellar windows and doors.

It was common practice and vanity that builders and property speculators would leave their name for ever in the names of the streets they built.

But for a long time, I couldn’t find William Frank, reposting a story about the area in which they were located.

This was the notorious Little Ireland, which Dr. Kay, Frederick Engels and a heap of other social commentators write about during the first half of the 19th century.

And in response to that story Geoff Ashworth left a comment that “Mr. William Frank, who owned these properties, lived in luxury in Plymouth Grove”, adding that “you also find how much was charged to live in these hovels, and how much they were valued at. Prior to 1860 they also had rented cellars. 1869 rents.”  

Geoff wrote that wonderful book on the rivers of Manchester which is still much sought after.*

Frank Street and William Street, 1844

So armed with this new bit of information and Geoff’s suggestion that I look at the Rate Books, I found Frank Street and William Street. 

In 1836 Mr. Frank owned ten properties, spread out across Frank Street, and William Street.  Those on Frank Street commanded rents of between 2s 5d and 3s 3d.  Now assuming the other properties brought in roughly the same sort of rents he was making well over £60 a year. 

The Rate Books indicate that there were other owners of houses on these streets, and the earliest entry appears to be 1834 which might give us a date for their construction.

As for William Frank his ten properties conferred on him the right to a vote in Parliamentary elections and his name crops up in three Poll Books, from 1836, 1837 and 1840.  

The same books give his address as Baxter Street in Hulme, but also suggest a relative who was a Thomas Frank.  He too had a vote by virtue of owning houses on the same two streets, as well as Spear Street and Oxford Road.  By 1840 Thomas disappears from the Poll Book and Frank appears yo have inherited his properties on Spear Street.

Poll Book for South Lancashire, 1836

Now in my defence a decade ago the Rate Books were not online and a trip to Central Ref to view them on microfilm was a full day’s work. 

So William Frank has come out of the shadows.

But only just.  I have yet to track down Baxter Street, and the one reference I can find lists him in 1851 living as a lodger at 99 Duke Street in Hulme.  He described himself as an “Estate Agent, and a widower who was born in Guisborough in Yorkshire.

Leaving me just to record that it may have been his son Samuel who occupied Plymouth Grove.

Pictures; Little Ireland, 1844, from the OS of Manchester & Salford, 1844, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ extract from the Poll Book for South Lancashire, 1836, and Great Marlborough Street, 2019, from the collection of Andy Robertson

*Ashworth, Geoffrey, The Lost River of Manchester, Willow Publishing, 1987