“See you at 2pm this afternoon” …. stories from postcards

Now long before test messages Face book, WhatsApp and Twitter, there was the picture postcard.

For a small price our great grandparents, could write home to family and friends reporting on a holiday, passing on birthday wishes or just arranging to meet up.

And because they included a picture on the front the cards have become the stock of local historians to illustrate “how we lived”

All of which brings me to the new book, “Urmston, Flixton and Davyhulme: A Postcard Heritage”, by Michael Billington.

The press release says“The Golden Age of postcard collecting, known as deltiology, was between the years 1902 and 1914, an era when collecting became hugely popular.

With regular and efficient collections and deliveries it was common to see messages such as “See you at 2pm this afternoon”; the text message of yesteryear? 

Also “Here's another for your collection” and “one more for your album”.

This book looks at the development of the publication of postcards in the Urmston, Flixton and Davyhulme area. E. Mather of Flixton Post Office and J. Wride, who had a stationer's in Urmston, photographed the streets of the area as well as landmarks such as the pubs, churches, grand houses, parks, hospitals, railways, cenotaphs, canals and bridges.

"A Byeway, Flixton", date unknown

All are here in this book contrasted with more recent photographs taken by the author.

Michael Billington is an Urmstonian and this is his third book about the area”.

The official launch will be on Thursday October 27th at  7.30pm in Urmston Library and will be il-lustrated by a powerpoint presentation by Mike featuring highlights of the book.

Mike adds, “the guest of honour, who will say a few words, will be Joanne Harding, Labour councillor with responsibility for culture, leisure and strategic partnerships in the Urmston Ward. She also has responsibility for Trafford Poverty Strategy and Domestic Abuse.”

"You may expect me tomorrow", 1910

Free glass of wine and admission free but booking required at the Eventbrite link below.

Urmston, Flixton and Davyhulme: A Postcard Heritage Tickets, Thu, Oct 27, 2022 at 7:30 PM | Eventbrite

And that is it.

Location; Urmston, Flixton, Davyhulme

Pictures; from the collection of Michael Billington

When you are never far from a bit of Salford water …….

Well, I know some will murmur “all I can see is a row of houses and a busy road” but there is a lot of water across Salford, and earlier this week Andy set out to explore it.

River Irwell from Cromwell Bridge, 2022

It was an adventure borne out of necessity as he says “on Tuesday I took my car to Higher Broughton for service and MOT. Whilst waiting I did an eleven-mile wander around Salford”.

And while keeping to the stretch around Cromwell Road he came up with some smashing pictures of Salford water.

So, for those who like me delight in all things Salford, here are some of Andy’s pictures from Cromwell Bridge and beyond.

Later I will go back and look at the history of these spots Andy walked along but for now it’s just the pictures.

River Irwell from other side of Cromwell Bridge, 2022

That said someone will respond with some historical observations.

River Irwell from path just off Cromwell Road, 2022

Location; Salford

Pictures; Salford water, 2022, from the collection of Andy Robertson

A key ring .......a war memorial ........ and memories of a father in law

Now I must have seen this key ring countless times and never given it much thought.

But then as it was constantly in use by Simone I dare say the details missed me by.

One side carries an image of an angel over a field of crosses with the dates 1915-1918, and the other the words “SACRARRIO DEI CADUTI DI REDIPUGLIA”.

My Wikipedia tell me that "The military shrine of Redipuglia is a monumental military cemetery located in Friuli-Venezia Giulia , in Redi Puglia , in the province of Gorizia . Built in the Fascist era and inaugurated in the presence of Benito Mussolini on 18 September 1938 , it contains the remains of over 100,000 Italian soldiers who died during the First World War . 

It is the centrepiece of a commemorative park of over 100 hectares which includes a part of the Gorizia - Monfalconese Karst (theatre during the Great War of the hard battles of the Isonzo ) with the enormous dimensions of the area involved which make it the largest military shrine in Italy and one of the largest in the world".*

Not that Simone was a supporter of Fascism or Mussolini, quite the reverse, but the link is that Simone did his military service in Redipuglia in the late 1950s and must have picked up the key ring around then.

Its worn and chipped state is testimony to the fact that it was in constant use for over 60 years.

Talking to Simone years ago, he reflected that Redi Puglia which is high up on the northeast of Italy was a shock for a young 18-year-old who had been born and grew up in Naples.

It was where he first encountered snow, an experience he never forgot.

Location; Redipuglia

Pictures, Simone’s key ring, circa 1956

*Military memorial of Redipuglia, https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacrario_militare_di_Redipuglia

Who remembers the ABC in Eltham?

Who remembers the ABC in Eltham?

I thought I did, and was more or less certain it was where Pamela and I went for our first and only date in 1966.

It was on the corner of Passey Place and the High Street or I thought it was.
Not that I have given it much thought over the years until recently when I began searching the High Street for it.

And as I drew a blank I slowly concluded that I had imagined the whole thing which is one of the down sides of having been born in the first half of the last century.

You just assume that as the evidence is not there it never happened.  Now that I know is silly because all too often in the course of tracking a story or crawling over my family history I have come across events and places which prove I was right.

And so it is with the ABC, for despite my sisters being unable to remember the cinema, there are a few pictures of the place.

It opened as the Palace Cinema on August 22nd 1922 and closed just fifty years later.  Looking at a photograph of the place from the 1950s it seems much larger than I remember it.

I would like to have more images but so far only a few have come to light and all are copyright.

And that rather highlights one of those real concerns about our more recent past that it is vanishing without trace.

In the later 19th and early 20th century the picture postcard made certain that there was a visual record of almost everywhere.

But as the postcard went into decline so did the visual record of places leaving only the images captured by the amateur photographer whose pictures are all too often confined to private collections and rarely see the light of day.

The result I fear will be that many buildings and events like the old Whit Walks will be lost to future historians.

Now that matters and I rather think we should all do our bit for posterity and snap away, passing on the results to local history libraries and history groups, which is pretty much how Manchester has come to have 80,000 digital images of the city going back two centuries which are freely available for anyone to consult.*

And so I shall now go off and email the Greenwich Heritage Centre to see what they have on the ABC. So far I know that just twelve years after it opened the interior was remodelled and that in 1936 it was taken over by the Union Cinema chain who in turn were absorbed by Associated British Cinemas the following year.

It would be another twenty-seven years before it was renamed the ABC Cinema which was about the time I started going there.

I don’t remember how frequently I walked through its doors, but the Gaumont on Eltham Hill was a bit out of the way and given that I lived just up from the roundabout the Well Hall Odeon was a tad too close.

After all if you are out to impress a new girlfriend you can hardly do it on your own door step.

So I rather think that my date with Pamela and the big screen at Passey Place would have been followed by others with Jennie and Ann all of whom I remember with fond memories if alas the ABC has faded.

Pictures of an older Eltham in the absence of the ABC courtesy of Jean Gammons

*Manchester Local Image Collection, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Making history of the future...

“No man can have in his mind a conception of the future for the future is not yet.  But of conceptions of the past, we make a future.”*

I often come back to what Thomas Hobbs said whenever I indulge my interest in science fiction because most of it is rooted in the present no matter how fantastical it might appear which makes the science fiction of the past a wonderful way of looking at the period it was produced.

It starts with the technology.  Look at any science fiction film from the 1950s and while the rockets are there the mechanisms to control them are more often than not switches and dials.

And even when the writer makes that leap of imagination like the hand held communicator it is less a bold flight of fancy and more just a logical next step.

So to with the futurestic transport networks which whizzed people above the streets in slim slender tubes of plastic and glass.

Leave out tubes of plastic and glass and substitute steel and iron viaducts and you have New York’s elevated railway which opened in 1868 using cable power and later steam locomotives transporting New Yorkers on tracks which ran almost three stories above the city streets.

In much the same way the stories often reflect the issues of the day.  In The Shape of Things to Come written in 1933 H.G. Wells projected the horror and destruction of the Great War into a future conflict between two unnamed countries which lasts a decade leading  to a major economic crisis,  global chaos, and the collapse of most governments and a devastating  plague which almost eliminates humanity.

The situation is saved by a benevolent dictatorship which in turn after a century of reconstruction is overthrown in a bloodless coup leading eventually to a withering away of the state and a society which has the material means to provide for all enabling the population  to concentrate on bettering itself.

It is a story that brings together so much of the political and social history of the 19th and 20th centuries as does another favourite of mine which is Star Trek.

The orginial  was a television series running in the late 60s it caught for me something of the excitement and optimism of the period.

Now I am the first to admit that  the period was not all good. The bright new decade full of promise has to be set against the Cold War, some pretty nasty conflicts around the world and that nagging thought that the millions spent on the “space race” could have been devoted to solving the issues of world hunger, drought and poverty.

But in its way the continuing story of Star Trek has done something to challenge the darker side of the mid 20th century.

It was set three hundred years into the future and like Well's future  all the material needs of humanity had been met and individuals were free to pursue their interests “in a quest to better themselves.”

So the Starship Enterprise was a vessel of exploration whose five year mission was about “exploring strange new worlds” meeting new races and contributing to the sum total of knowledge.

And in that respect the very fact that the space craft’s were referred to as ships and the crew took on a naval character underlined the theme of exploration.

But like all science fiction Star Trek was as much a comment on the 1960s as it was a vision of the future.

And so the themes of the television series featured racial intolerance, the conflicts between super powers and that still very relevant conundrum of non interference with other peoples and cultures.

All of which could lead to real controversy like the moment Captain Kirk kissed Lieutenant Uhura cited as the first interracial kiss on US television which also led to the episode being withdrawn by networks in the southern states.

But even so the programme never quite broke from the fact that it was a US production and when the Cold War was still very dangerous.

So depsite the Prime Directive of Non Interference there were plenty of times when the principle  was broken.

Often this happened with   the appearance of the other galactic super power in the form of the Klingons which resulted in a necessary battle to save a planet from being conquered by the totalitarian and militaristic Klingon Empire.

And it had all been done before by Dan Dare Pilot of the Future in the Eagle Comic.**

He is someone I have written about already, and in the pages of the Eagle you can see much of Britain’s post war history reproduced.  Space Fleet’s Uniforms are those of the RAF, the United Nations is the sovereign global authority and aliens are by and large friendly.

A few of course pose problems.  The Treens from Venus with their belief in pure science and their ruthless dictator are committed to planetary domination, but they are defeated and beaten fairly and squarely with Dan and his pals always playing the straight bat and never resorting to under hand methods.

It is a world I can still recognise from my childhood and one I can still relate to. So in that respect I guess I continue to live my childhood and a bit of my past as I boldly go where many have gone before me.

Pictures; from the Eagle Comic collection of Andrew Simpson

*Hobbs, Thomas, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politics, 1650

**Dan Dare,
 http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Dan%20Dare

Chorlton shapes ………….. 2020

Down an alley

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Chorlton shapes, 2020, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A new park for Chorlton?

It’s not much of a story really but it does point to the changes that had been taking place in Chorlton over the last two decades of the 19th century.

Before the rapid development of housing in and around the railway station and along the Wilbraham and Barlow Moor Roads there had been plenty of open spaces with fields to walk around and woods to explore in and ponds and water courses to play beside.

This changed as more and more of Chorlton was given over to rows of houses which prompted one resident to write to the Manchester Guardian, “being so near town, there is a demand for houses and they rise like mushrooms.  

Rows, avenues, and semi detached in abundance, each with a small garden, where flowers can be grown if the smoke from the chimneys will allow; but very few have a grass plot large enough for the children to play on.”*

Apparently there had been hopes that a good site on Wilbraham Road might have been turned into a park but it was sold for building, “then the residue of an estate in Barlow Moor Road was for sale which is nicely wooded; that has now been sold to the Roman Catholics.”  All of which led the writer to fear that “Chorlton will soon be as crowded as Alexandra Park but without the park.”

But there was one field left which “in the general opinion of the residents is the right spot for the much talked of park.  The plot extends from Wilbraham Road to a new road about to be cut – Holland Road, I think it is to be called.  It is flanked on one side by Cavendish Road [Corkland] and on the other by the railway.”

It says much for the period that the writer expected the land and the maintenance of the park would be achieved by public subscription.

In the event it never happened and the plot was built on.  It would be a few more years before the Recreational Ground on Beech Road was laid out and well into the 1920s before Chorlton Park was established.

But next time I take the short cut down Zetland Road  [Holland] to Corkland Road [Cavendish] and onto Morrisons I’ll reflect on what might have been.

Pictures;, detail from the OS map of Lancashire, Manchester and South East, 1888-93, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk, and Holland Road from the Lloyd collection

* Manchester Guardian May 24 1892

Mrs. Ercolina Montabone … an Italian restaurant and unfinished story

Now this is 181 Oxford Road and is as close as I will ever get to Mrs. Ercolina Montabone who ran the Frascati Café Restaurant.

Frascati now a pub, 181, Oxford Road, 1956

I can trace the business back to at least 1901 when it was run by her husband, Vittorio Emmanuele Montabone.

It is one of those stories which came about because of a request from a friend interested in another Italian restauranter who 3 decades later was running his own restaurant also on Oxford Road.

But being Italian he was detained as an enemy alien in 1940 and died when the ship he was on was torpedoed in the same year by a German U Boat.

And in carrying out the preliminary search I came across Mr. and Mrs. Montabone and given we have an Italian side to the family I was hooked.

In all there are just ten documents which tell their story, ranging from one reference to the Masons, one court document, two census returns, a newspaper story along with their death certificates,  listings in two directories and their probate .

Not much I know for two lives lived out at the beginning of the last century, but there is enough to challenge those Brexiteers who are uncomfortable with anyone wanting to make a new start in this country.

And they were immigrants, with Vittorio Emmanuel coming from Italy and Ercolino from Switzerland.

I was hoping to find a reference to their naturalization as British citizens, but while this hasn’t come to light,  Ercolina did at some point gain that status which she duly recorded on the 1921 census.

The same census shows that the Montabone’s employed staff who were born in Italy and in Switzerland, a practice which stretched back over 20 years.

They lived above the business, and were still there when Ercolina died in 1923.  Her husband had preceded her fifteen years earlier and both were buried in Southern Cemetery.

An Italian thank you, 1918

Of the remaining documents, there are three that caught my interest.  The first was an entry in the book of Masons which shows that Vittorio joined the Manchester lodge in 1899, and a court document for 1908 showing that he was called as a witness and was paid 5s to cover his return rail fare from Manchester to Liverpool.

Both of which point to just how far he had integrated himself into British society.

But it is the last of the three that offers an insight into their origins, and it comes in the form of a newspaper article recording that Ercolina had been thanked by the “Royal Italian Consulate" for contributing £6 17s from collections she had raised which went towards the fund "for Refugees from the Invaded Provinces of Ventia”*

And that is it. 

There is a listing for the Frascati Hotel in 1961, but no indication of the owners or the manager.

But the building has now vanished under what became part of a retail unit which also included the University Chaplancy.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Frascati now a pub, 181 Oxford Road, H.W. Beaumont, 1956, m03860,  courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

The picture that revealed a family story ..... the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax of Hough End Hall nu 2 ... what happened next

I like the way that stories have a habit of representing themselves and added to the original.

So a few years ago  I came across the family album of the Lomax family I featured the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax and Mr Kitching.

And yesterday their granddaughter wrote to me with some more pictures and the story of what happened to them

“You mused in the wedding piece about what might have become of the young couple.  Well, they had three children, Ronald (b 1916), Jeanne (b 1917) and Stuart (b 1920 or 1921).  

They migrated to Canada in 1926, to a town called Sooke, on Vancouver Island.  Even today, Sooke is a bit remote (at least by English standards), about 30 miles/50 km from Victoria.  At the time they migrated, it was just a small logging and commercial fishing village, accessible only by a long and winding dirt road from Victoria.  

It must have been quite a shock for my very proper English grandmother to find herself there!  The family stayed in Sooke for a few years, where my grandfather owned the local general store, then moved into Victoria in the 30s, to another general store.  

The depression hit hard, and around 1937 or 1938 my grandfather returned to England to try to re-establish, while the family stayed behind in Canada.  He was unable to get back to Canada before the war broke out, so there was a lengthy separation in the family.  

My uncle Ronnie had enlisted in the Canadian Army medical corps before the war as an ambulance driver, but ended up as an acting Major in an infantry regiment - the South Saskatchewan Rifles (never having been to Saskatchewan in his life) and saw quite a bit of action with his regiment in the liberation of Holland.  

My mother worked before the war as a clerk in the BC public service but also joined up, serving for several years in the RCAF.  Uncle Stuart joined the navy, but sadly died when his ship was torpedoed mid Atlantic.  


At war's end, Grandma and my mother headed to England.  They spent a year there, then returned to Canada with Grandpa in 1947.  My grandparents bought a little house in Victoria, and lived the rest of their lives there.  Grandpa passed away in 1974, Grandma in 1978.

My mother married my father in 1948 in Victoria, and had two children, my sister and myself.  Uncle Ronny married in England and returned to BC, to Vancouver.  

He and his wife also had two children, my cousins Ruth and David.  I've lost touch with Ruth, who moved to the US years ago, but David still lives in BC.  

My sister has recently moved from near Vancouver to the interior of BC, and by coincidence lives not far from David.  My mother now lives in a nursing home near my sister. 

And here am I, living in a lovely town outside Melbourne, in Australia.  So, to answer your musing, that's what became of them.

Although it has no relevance to your histories, I'm attaching a photo of my grandparents taken at a dinner for their 50th anniversary, in 1965.  I think that brings your story full circle.

Pictures; the wedding of Miss Lomax and Mr Kitching, 1915 and s from the family album of Evelyn nee Lomax Milburn donated by Mrs D Miller and the bride and groom, courtesy of Marlene Massey

*The picture that revealed a family story ................. the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax of Hough End Hall, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-picture-that-revealed-family-story.html

The short Chorlton History Walk that’s got the lot ……. this Sunday

So the challenge is simple ….. how much of Chorlton’s history can you pack into a short walk from Benito on Wilbraham Road to the Lloyds on the corner of Manchester Road?

Kemp's Corner opposite Sunwick, Wilbraham Road, circa 1900

Well, it has got to take in the transformation from small rural community to suburb of Manchester, along with a few murky crimes including the murder of Francis Deacon in 1847, a bit of entrapment and the gang of poachers down from Hulme.

And for those who mourn the loss of the Four Banks, there is that even older popular name of Kemp’s Corner which for a half a century was where people arranged to meet up.

Nor could we leave out the day that Wilbraham Road came to Chorlton, the dastardly theft of a chunk of Manchester Road and why in the event of a house fire you had to knock on the door of the Lloyd’s Hotel.

Woolworths, which became B&M before Benito, 2017

All these with a mix of other silly and serious stories will accompany me and all who turn up at 2.30.pm outside Benito during the great Chorlton Get Together this Sunday.*

Any one in doubt as to who they should approach outside Benito, I am the man with the expanding waistline, a south east London accent and tons of tales of how we used to live in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, before the bars arrived.

Location; Wilbraham Road at 2.30pm on Sunday September 25th

Doing the biz back in 2010

Pictures; Looking down Wilbraham Road, circa 1900 from the Lloyd Collection, and Woolworths, which became B&M before Benito, 2017, and Doing the biz back in 2010

*Chorlton Get Together; https://chorlton.coop/chorlton-get-together-sep-22

“OF ALL THE GIRLS 'TIS NICE TO MEET MANCHESTER GIRLS ARE HARD TO BEAT" in 1908

I rather think it must have been a slow day in the design room of Tuck and Sons when they came up with this picture postcard.

Here were six Manchester girls and just to underline that fact we have a picture of the Town Hall.

I may go off searching for the series from which it came to see what the other “Belles” were like.

But in the meantime I shall just leave you with the card and the title which must have taxed someone’s imagination, “OF ALL THE GIRLS 'TIS NICE TO MEET MANCHESTER GIRLS ARE HARD TO BEAT”

Picture;  OF ALL THE GIRLS 'TIS NICE TO MEET MANCHESTER GIRLS ARE HARD TO BEAT MANCHESTER TOWN HALL  from the series Our Belles, marketed by Tuck & Sons, 1908, courtesy of Tuck DB, http://tuckdb.org/ 

What did you find in the cellar of Hough End Hall in the summer of 1965?

If you are of a certain age you will probably remember playing in Hough End Hall.

Of course we are talking about the 1960s when the place had long been abandoned as a family home and was yet to become a restaurant.

Back then it was an adventure playground for many of the children roundabout and bit by bit their memories are surfacing of what the Hall was like and what they did there.

Now everyone has their own stories and Ian who would have been about 11 remembered the cellar and what seemed “to be a gigantic set of leather and wooden bellows along with two stone fire places one of which was propped up against the wall and the other resting on the floor.

We tried to get the bellows to work and when that failed wrapped a rope around the tall fireplace and swung from side to side.

There were also big bags of what looked like salt.

And when we tired of the cellar we went on to play in the valleys of the roof.”

Ian is the first to admit that given that it was a long time ago, “my take on what I remember may be different to others, and perhaps the bellows could have been smaller or even larger.”

Either way it is a fascinating glimpse into a period in the Hall’s history which has sat in the shadows for too long.

But more of those memories are now coming to the surface and in time I hope for more.

Location, Hough End Hall, Chorlton, Manchester

Pictures; the Hall in the mid 1960s from the collection of Roger Shelley, https://www.flickr.com/photos/photoroger/

If it wasn’t for the houses in between you could see all the way across the fields to Ancoats Hall*

Smithfield Wholesale Fish Market, 1900,

We were in the Northern Quarter recently showing some of the family around this part of the city.

There will be many who remember it as a bustling area dominated by the whole sale markets and lots of little businesses.

But when I washed up in Manchester in the late 1960s it had taken on a more run down and seedy appearance, a place waiting for something to happen but not quite sure what that something might be.

Junk, 2 Dale Street

Today large parts of it seem to have a purpose and function again.  Here are those quirky little shops and businesses you won’t find elsewhere in the city.  It is to quote one review, “a centre of alternative and bohemian culture.”**

And as you would expect it’s also rich with history.

Walk these streets and more particularly the small narrow ones or the even smaller ones which sit behind them with names like Back Piccadilly and Back Thomas Street and it is still possible to get a sense of the city’s past.

More so because a fair number of the late 18th and early 19th century workers home and workshops have survived.

Detail from Green’s map of Manchester 1794

They were built just as Manchester was beginning to grow into something new and exciting on the back of commerce and cotton.

A place Asa Briggs described as “the shock city of the Industrial Revolution” and one that attracted visitors who came to gawp at the mills, the smoke, noise and great show warehouses, taking away vivid memories of the sheer frenetic activity of a new type of city.

Now there is no getting away from the fact that there was here also a lot of sorrow, blighted lives and a sense that for those working in the mills, living hard by the canals and factories and existing in awful housing conditions Manchester was no easy place to inhabit.

It was also a place of overcrowding, poor sanitation, and long hours of work which were recorded by Kay, Engels and others.

My old friend Richard Buxton’s family had moved to New Cross from rural Prestwich in the late 18th century and exchanged fields for those narrow mean streets and courts.

But during this period it was possible to walk just a few minutes from Piccadilly or New Cross and be in fields, with fresh streams and endless expanses of open countryside.

Richard Buxton is a case in point.  The family home may have been in a crowded little terrace off Great Ancoats Street but where he began work was just where the city met the country.

Port Street, 1960

In 1798 he was apprenticed at the age of twelve to James Heap in Port Street “to learn the trade of bat maker; that is a maker of children’s small leathern shoes.”

At that time Port Street was still on the edge of city.  On one side there were houses and workshops and open land on the other.

Standing with his back to the built up street Buxton could have looked out east on fields and the occasional houses with an almost uninterrupted view to Shooters Brook and the farms beyond.


Twenty years later you could still have followed the river Medlock or the Rochdale Canal out past Ancoats Hall and be open countryside by the time you reached Beswick.  Had you chosen to head west instead, once you had cleared Cornbrook with its dye works and chemical plants you were fair set for the field and farms which would eventually take you by degree to Chorlton and beyond.

Junk, 2 Dale Street

All of which would have been familiar to Buxton who was a botanist and often walked out of the city in the early to mid decades of the 19th century.

Now I know that is a long way from where we started in the Northern Quarter, so perhaps we should end where we started.

I think any one fascinated by the history of the city should just wander the area, and I suppose if you want a guide there is nothing better than Claire Hartwell’s book, Manchester, Penguin, 2001.

Our Jill and Jeff did.  The following day they were back there and in one of the shops on Dale Street Jill bought a very nice little red dress.  One of the memories and for showing off back in Eltham.

Pictures; Smithfield Wholesale Fish Market, 1900, now the Craft Centre, m59592,Port Street, 1960, H. Milligan, m04850, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Junk, 2 Dale Street, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, detail from Green’s map of Manchester 1794, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

*apologies to Gus Elen and his music hall song, If it wasn't for the houses in between
Oh it really is a wery pretty garden
And Chingford to the eastward could be seen;
Wiv a ladder and some glasses,
You could see to 'Ackney Marshes,
If it wasn't for the 'ouses in between.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1GmDA8FU9w

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Quarter_(Manchester)

The Lodge Family Grave …. another story from Tony Goulding

The inscription on this gravestone situated in the old St. Clement’s Churchyard, Chorlton-cum-Hardy is now very weather-worn and is becoming increasingly difficult to de-cypher. 

Indeed, I have been unable to make out the lowest portion and I issue a challenge to anyone to come up with the wording.

It marks the final resting place of two young daughters of Robert Lodge and his wife Mary (née Watkins). 7-years-old Grace Helen who was interred there on the 3rd January, 1856 having died the previous 30th December at her home on Dudley Road, Whalley Range and Winifred Beavan who was only 14 days old when she was buried on the 7th January, 1860. Grace Helen was baptised on the 15th January, 1849 in the parish church of Ashton-on-Mersey, Cheshire. 

In the baptismal register her father’s status is recorded as a “Gentleman” of Sale (Cheshire).  The census of 1851 records the family at School Lane, Sale, with the father’s occupation being given as “merchant (oil)”. (1) By this time a second daughter, Elizabeth, had been born in, 1850. Winifred Beavan was christened at St. Mary’s Church, Hulme on Christmas Eve, 1859, a sister, Isabella, had been christened in the same church on the 31st May of the year before.

St. Mary's Church, Hulme.

Robert Lodge, who was born in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in 1817, married Mary, the daughter of William Watkins (2) of Ardwick, Manchester, in Manchester’s Collegiate Church (now Manchester Cathedral) on the 5th August, 1847.

Following the tragic loss of his two daughters Robert and his remaining family relocated to North Meols on the West Lancashire coast. His still young, at just 38-years-old, wife died there soon after their arrival. Her body was returned to Manchester, and interred, on the 22nd November, 1860, in the same grave in Chorlton-cum-Hardy as her two children. The 1861 census shows that as well as Elizabeth and Isabella mentioned above Robert was left with three other children, all born in Whalley Range, Caroline Ann, 9, Alice, 7, and John William, 5. Completing the household at 166, Lord Street, North Meols were Robert’s unmarried sister, Alice and three servants.

In 1871, the Lodges were still in Lancashire at 11, Queens Road, Southport, however by then a further tragedy had hit the family as Caroline Ann, at only 14 years of age, had passed away in the June quarter of 1866. The household consisted of Robert Lodge, three of his children, Elizabeth, John William, and Isabella, and four servants. His daughter, Alice, was away from home at a boarding school for young ladies.

Upper Bishopdale

In retirement, Robert returned to his birth county becoming a “country gentleman” in Bishopdale, Yorkshire (North Riding). His house, “The Rookery” which he inherited in July, 1873 from his uncle Ralph, remained the family home for more than 30 years. (3)  He died there on the 12th September, 1888 leaving an estate of £12, 215-4s-7d. (£1.1 million at today’s value). 

Finally, the verse: -

 “He shall gather the lambs with his arm and carry them in his bosom” 

is from King James’s Bible, Old Testament -Isaiah 40:11

Pictures: - Lodge family grave, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, from the collection of Tony Goulding.

St. Mary's Church, Hulme by H. Milligan m70933 

Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Archives and Information, Manchester City Council http://manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

 Upper Bishopdale by Chris Heaton, CC BY-SA 2.0,

 https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3099436 

Alderman William Benjamin Watkins by George Patten (1801-1865) – (photo by Manchester Town Hall) Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (CC BY-NC-ND). From Art U K website https://artuk.org

Notes: -

1)   Subsequent records describe Robert Lodge as a “Drysalter”

2)   Alderman William Benjamin Watkins J.P.;

Alderman William Benjamin Watkins

Alderman William Benjamin Watkins

Served as the 5th Mayor of Manchester 1845-1846. He was born in 1789 in Hereford, Herefordshire and married (Mary Lodge’s mother) Caroline Beavan in Herefordshire before coming to Manchester and setting up in business as a drysalter. Alderman Watkins resigned from office on the grounds of ill-health in August, 1862 and died during the June quarter of 1864. His widow survived him for over three years dying at their home Legh House, Legh Place, Ardwick, Lancashire on the 30th June, 1867.

3)    Robert’s son, John William, died at “The Rookery” on the 23rd August, 1917. He was “called to the Bar” of the Inner Temple on the 26th January, 1883.  Three days later, the 29th, January, 1883, after having previously graduated with a B.A. from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, the same college conferred an M.A. degree on him. While still at Cambridge he joined the British Army, being gazetted into the 3rd (volunteer) battalion of The Princess of Wales Own Yorkshire Regiment on the24th June, 1874. He remained an officer with this regiment for almost 40 years, including service in South Africa during the 2nd Boer War, before retiring, in 1912, as the Colonel in command of its 3rd Battalion.  At the outbreak of the First World War, he volunteered for war service and when he died was commanding the 2nd (Garrison) Battalion of The Yorkshire Regiment. He was a county magistrate and served on both the North Riding and District councils and an enthusiastic follower of “country sports”.

The estate passed to his sister, Elizabeth, the widow of Matthew Liddon, and following her subsequent death, on the 20th July, 1920, to her son, Major Matthew Robert Liddon. Major Liddon sold up the property the following year and its long association with the Lodge family came to an end.

Acknowledgements: - Find my Past’s Newspaper Archive and Thoralby through time https://www.thoralbythroughtime.net  which was a good source of data on the Lodge family and the “Rookery”. 

From Hough End Hall to Shudehill and back to West Didsbury

Now I never quite know where any of these stories will go when I first start them.

A young Ethel

This one begins with a postcard sent to Hough End Hall sometime between 1910 and 1915 and ends with a mystery.

In between there was a wedding at Christ Church in Didsbury, a large hardware business on Shudehill and a death at the Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital Cheadle.

Now the starting point was that post card sent by Marjorie to Ethel Lomas who lived at Hough End Hall.

It contains the usual set of messages, including the reference to a night out in Buxton, the news that she had been on holiday all week and that on the day the card was sent she had been “by myself all day.”

Ethel had been born in 1891 in Chorlton on Sandy Lane and sometime around 1895 her parents took over the tenancy of the farm and they moved into the Hall which had been in the possession of the Lomas family since 1849.

I say possession but that is not entirely accurate because the hall like the land belonged to the Egerton’s who had bought it in the mid 18th century.

It was a working farm and the hall had long ago been divided up into family rooms and Ethel her brother and aunt all worked alongside Mr and Mrs Lomas to make the place work.

Kitching's Buildings, 1900

I don’t know how much leisure time she had, or what she did in her free time and the only image I have been able to discover shows what I think is Ethel in the garden of the hall sometime at the turn of the last century.

So she remains a shadowy character which is not helped by the confusion over her age.  So while she was born in 1891 she is down on the 1911 census as 22, and in 1915 when she got married age gave her age as 24.

She married a Harold Kitching whose father ran a hardware business on the corner of Shudehill and Mayes Street.  But it was more than just a hardware business.

Both Harold and his father Robert described themselves as merchants and the building from which they operated went under the name of Kitchings Buildings.

The property is still there today but there are those first ominous signs that its days may soon be numbered.

They were married at Christ Church in West Didsbury and the service was performed by Edward Lomax, vicar of St Mary’s in Liverpool.

Ethel and Howard's marriage, 1915

And that is where the trail ends for neither Ethel nor Harold can so far be tracked after that marriage.

I have every expectation that I will find them, but at present I have only been able unearth the death of Robert in 1924 in Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital Cheadle.

On his death he left effects worth £17987 and the business appears still to have been trading from 97 Shudehill.

Now I know there will be more, after all we have travelled from Hough End Hall and a farm to the busy enterprise of Shudehill and I have ever confidence that there is more still to come.

Pictures; Ethel circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection, the marriage of Ethel and Harold in 1915, courtesy of the National Archives and Ancestry.co.uk, and the map of Shudehill from Goad’s Fire Insurance Map, 1900, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Unpicking the clues of a postcard, .... Piccadilly sometime in the early 20th

This is one of those photographs I keep coming back to because there is so much going on.

We are in Piccadilly and Queen Victoria dominates the picture.  And according the Judge catalogue the image was added to the collection in 1913.
 

It was one of seven in a series on Manchester and included Albert Square, the Town Hall, Market Street, the Cathedral and the University and yes you guessed there is study group who may be able to date the series.*

But leaving aside the date it is the sheer amount of detail which makes the card such a treasure.  Sitting on the steps of the Queen’s statute are two boy scouts.  Now I can’t be certain but it looks like they may just have some cleaning implements at their feet which could link them to Good Turn Day which was introduced in 1914 and morphed into Bob a Job Week in 1949.

All of which takes me back to a date.

But there is so much more to see.  There is the man who is casually leaning against the lamp post and the pile of discarded rubbish in the litter bin.  Like others in the picture he is wearing one of the straw hats which seems to remain in fashion into the 1920s.

We must be sometime in the summer given the presence of women in blouses and our scouts without their coats.

The long line of trams reminds us that this was a busy part of the town with most of them destined to head down Market Street which  would also be thronged with pedestrians on route down to St Mary's Gate or visiting the many shops and offices which ran its length.

And judging by the number of passengers on the upper decks of the open trams plenty of people have chosen to take in the fine weather on this summers day.

My own favourite detail is the horse drawn cab, number 382.  As it waits for a fare the horse is feeding from its feed bag.

Now I doubt it will  be possible to check out the name of the cab driver which as they say would be a whole new story to tell.

Picture; from the collection of Alan Brown

* JUDGES POSTCARD STUDY GROUP  

So farewell Chorlton and thanks for the fish ……….

It may be more than a bit of vanity but this week I am reflecting on the decade that my Chorlton history stories fell on to door mats across Chorlton and later Didsbury as well.

From the summer of 2012 until last month along with a variety of other writers I was a regular contributor, to Open Up and before that when it was called Community Index.

But things change and its successor has an editorial policy of concentrating on offering up details of local businesses, and space could not be guaranteed for tales of how we lived in the past here in Chorlton.

I suppose the clue was that the publication is a directory which as everyone knows is predicated on lists of things.

So, for those who each month read that decade and a bit of stories, and often got in touch to provide comments or follow up material, a big thank you.

But fear not, there is always Chorlton History Blog which comes out every day and is posted across social media.*

Along with the twelve books I written, nine in collaboration with Peter Topping and three just by me, which range from the history of Chorlton-cum-Hardy in the first half of the 19th century, the book on Manchester and the Great War and the story of 150 years of a Manchester children’s charity.

Which means there is plenty out there to read about all sorts of different history, and here I couldn’t miss out Peter’s book Smile Dammit, Smile!!! Chorlton, which is an irreverent take on the place we live.

Together they are available from us or Chorlton Book shop.

Leaving me just to say that So farewell Chorlton and thanks for the fish ………. is of course a steal from the title of Douglas Adam’s book "So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish" which is one of his series of radio programmes and books dedicated to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

All of which are required reading.

Location; Chorlton, Didsbury and later great chunks of South Manchester

Pictures; cover of the August 2018 edition of Open Up

*Chorlton History Blog, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/

**Our books, www.pubbooks.co.uk

Sending our 10 year olds out to work in 1911

It used to be fashionable amongst some writers to lament the passing of the Edwardian Age, that short period between the death of the old Queen and almost the start of the Great War.

It can still be paraded as an elegant and almost innocent time which would soon be shattered by the horrors of a continental war which accounted for the deaths of ten million people.

And of course it all makes good telly from costume dramas to high budget films, from those images of sophisticated Edwardian men and women gliding past us to the protests of the suffragettes and a wave of industrial unrest which saw troops dispatched to many of our major cities.

Rarely do the dramas go out of the fine houses and even when they descend to those who lived downstairs we are rarely confronted with the full range of social inequality where in the words of Robert Roberts, “poverty busied itself.”*

The life expectancy of a manual worker was just 50 while for women it was only a little better.
 Life could be an uncertain struggle where illness, unemployment or the death of a wage earner could push a family into poverty and the workhouse.

And even while in gainful employment that family found it increasingly hard to manage as prices rose steadily from the 1890s but wages failed to keep pace.

Manual earnings amounted to sixteen or seventeen shillings a week compared to that of someone in the middle classes who might earn £340 a year.

So some at least surrendered to the option of allowing their children to start work at 10 and while this might not have surprised their grandparents it was shocking enough.

A full 9% of our young people between the ages of 10 and 14 were at work in the middle of 1911 which in the case of boys rose from just 1% of those aged 10-12 to 30% of those who had reached their fourteenth birthday.**

Against this we should perhaps pitch that simple statistic that the richest one percent held 70 percent of the wealth of the country.

Now in time I am going to explore in detail just what these young Mancunians did for a living and draw not only on the official records but the words of the young people themselves.

*Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum page 18

 **Occupations, Manchester 1911 Census Vol 10 page 230

Remembering those who crossed the Atlantic as British Home Children .... September 28th

Now for all of us who can count a British Home Child as part of our family, September 28th is a special day.

It is that moment in the year which has been recognised in Canada as British Home Child Day, and judging by the events recognising the thousands of young people sent from Britain to Canada, this year will be a very significant one. 

There will be illuminations, proclamations and exhibits as well as other “happenings” mounted by communities across the country.

As yet we lag along way behind, but I know there are people like Trish Leslie and others beavering away at increasing the awareness that it was British institutions which migrated children across the Atlantic from the 1870s into the early decades of the next century.

Our web site has been steadily growing, attracting interested people keen to know more, or prepared to share their knowledge and skills at tracking down British Home Children.*

Last year, one person persuaded a local authority to illuminate the Town Hall, while others were giving talks.

All of which leaves me to publicise the latest newsletter from Home Children Canada.*

Amongst a heap of interesting articles there is a full list of the events celebrating BHC Day.

And when you have read the newsletter I suggest you dig into the home site Home Children Canada which is a vast resource for those wanting to know about BHC.***

*British Home Children …. The story from Britain, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1624406061006317

**Home Children Canada, September 2022 Newsletter, https://www.britishhomechildren.com/_files/ugd/186d15_460bd16d3e374e12b6e4a6804ac22e40.pdf?utm_campaign=01a18020-3d51-483e-8bf8-2840d8183c5f&utm_source=so&utm_medium=mail&cid=5bcec5e8-1b55-40b1-8dc0-5dc5575b9217

***Home Children Canada, https://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/