At Burndon Park in the September of 1937 with the Wanderers 4 goals up.

I have been rediscovering the photographs of Humphrey Spender.

During 1937-38 he recorded the lives of working people in Bolton as part of the mass observation project.

It is something I wrote about recently when I featured BOLTON WORKTOWN, Photography and Archives from the Mass Observation*

I first came across Humphrey Spender in 1982 when someone bought me a book of his pictures.**

It is a book I never tired of looking at and it was one that I thought I had lost.  Well perhaps put away safely, so safe that I had no idea where.

This loss was not helped by colleagues at Bolton Library and Museum Service who said it was difficult now to obtain a copy.  An observation confirmed by a glance at Amazon where it was being offered  at anything between £30 and £60.  All of which made me even more gloomy given that mine was a first edition.

All however is now sunny because after an evening of hunting it turned up on a bookshelf.

And I have decided I shall feature another of the pictures from their online collection.

It is one I like.

According to the caption it was taken on September 25th 1937 when Bolton Wanderers reserves took on Wolverhampton reserves at Burndon Park in Bolton, and Bolton won 4-0.

I would like to know at what moment Mr Spender took the picture. Perhaps at the point that the home team were cruising to their final goal, and the smiles of the spectators say it all especially that of the man who has turned his back and shares the happiness of the moment.

Picture, courtesy of Bolton Library and Museum Service, who hold the copyright for this image, 1993.83.08.07

BOLTON WORKTOWN, Photography and Archives from the Mass Observation*, http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

***Worktown People, Photographs from Northern England, 1937-38, Humphrey Spender, Falling Wall Press

The slaughter house ..... the lost pond and heaps more ....... walking Beech Road's past

 Now I am back with those ever-popular history walks which wander down Chorlton’s past.

Mr. Higginbotham ploughing Row Acre, Beech Road, 1894

They have been a feature of Sunday afternoons for a more than a decade, take an hour and offer up a host of interesting people from the posh to the very un-posh, deliver heaps of little-known stories and along the way reveal the secrets of the buildings we inhabit.

So, on December 4^th it will be the turn of Beech Road, and in the company of a distinguished couple of authors and lots of interested residents we will walk the past from Barlow Moor Road, down to Chorlton Green.

The stroll will introduce you to the “slaughterhouse”, a lost fishpond, a handful of rebellious school students and the mysterious clay pipe.

Fans of the walks will instantly recognise that mix of silly stories, sound historical accounts of when we were a rural community and that bit of outrageous entrepreneurial flare which links the walks to the publication of yet another Simpson and Topping history book.

Mr. Gratrix's clay pipe, found on Beech Road,  2014

This one which is in the series of "nothing to do in chorlton" is entitled "Down Beech Road Looking for Chorlton Row".

All you need do is sign up .....pay your fiver and you get the book for free. 

Or if you have already bought the book, bring it along as your free pass for The Walk.

It couldn’t be simpler.

So if you enjoyed our Narnia tale on the Green, shuddered at the horrible murders of Mary More and Francis Deacon and were incensed at the Chorlton Burial Scandal then this walk follows the tradition.

Details of how to sign up for the walk are on our poster, along with how to contact us.*

I'm coming on the walk, the Rec, 2022

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; Ploughing Row Acre before it became the Recreation Ground, 1896  Mr Higginbotham's farmyard, circa 1880s, from the collection of William Higginbotham, Mr. Gratrix's clay pipe, 2014  When litter can be silly, Chorlton, 2022from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*“nothing to do in chorlton Down Beech Road Looking for Chorlton Row” by Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping, costs £4.99, and is available from www.pubbooks.co.uk and Chorlton Bookshop

Lost Images of Whalley Range number 6 ....... the Allied Library 1962

This was the Allied Library which was on the corner of Upper Chorlton Road and Wood Road North.

It had grown as a chain of rental libraries in the years after the last world war and at its peak in March 1962 it hired out 362, 000 books through 1,489 bookshops.

And it is a reminder that a long side the public libraries there were a shed load of small shops ranging from newsagent to bookshops which rented out books.*

Picture; Allied Libraries at No 202 Upper Chorlton Road taken in August 1960 Downes A H m40870 Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*Chorlton’s private lending libraries, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%27s%20private%20lending%20libraries

In Bolton in 1937, before the National Health Service

Before the NHS, The Working Man's Hair Specialist, Bolton, 1937

Now the National Health Service has always been  controversial.  

Even before its inception there were those who branded it as an opportunity for the workshy, and opportunist elements in society to take advantage of a service free at the point of need which would be funded through national taxation.

And in its first full year there was a huge demand seen in the number of free prescriptions issued for medicine and spectacles and in the rise in the cost of the NHS from £327.8 million in 1948-49 to £430.3 million by 1953-54.*

But that I suspect indicated just how much of a need there was from people who had not been able to afford even basic health care.

Moreover when the figures were adjusted for inflation the cost was less alarming and when judged as a % of GNP spending actually fell from 3.51% in 1948-49 to 3.24% in 1953-54

And set against this was the clear improvement in the nation’s health and a reduction in the levels of everyday pain as well as deaths from infectious diseases.  So deaths from TB were down from 25,649 in 1943 to 4,480 in 1958, diptheria from 1,371 to 8, whooping cough from 1,114 to 27 and measles from 773 to 49.

Only polio of these five diseases, was killing more in 1958 than it had done at the inception of the NHS but even here it was much lower than it had been.

Of course our standard of living had been steadily rising during the post war period while many of the worst slums had been demolished, but there is no doubting the impact on the population of the NHS.


More so because there are still those who can remember the time before it was created in 1948.  Theirs are stories of doctor’s fees which were beyond the reach of many working families, and of teeth being extracted in the market for a few pennies, and worst of all the do it yourself eye test where you tried different spectacles in the local store till you found one that suited.

The Pulsometer stall, Bolton OPen Market, 1937

And it is these pictures which bring that world back to us.

Like the Working Man’s Hair Specialist who operated in Bolton Open Market who claimed he could cure any ailment of the head.

Or the ‘stoutish woman dressed as a nurse’ who is selling coloured liquids in bottles to enthusiastic customers, and using a stethoscope and pulsometer to diagnose their ailments.”**

Such quack stalls were common and these were caught on camera in the September of 1937 in Bolton Open Market but could have been seen at markets and fairs as well as street corners throughout the century before.

The pictures are from WorkTown which were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."

Detail from The Working Man's Hair Specialist, Bolton, 1937

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s and can be seen online at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/ ***

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, working Man’s hair Specialist, 1993.83.01.24 & Pulsometer 1993.83.0139

*Source Report of the Guillebaud Committee Parliament. Report of the committee of enquiry into the cost of the national health service. (Chairman: CW Guillebaud.) Cmd 9663. London: HMSO,  1956, quoted from National Health Service History, Geoffrey Rivett, http://www.nhshistory.net/Chapter%201.htm#Reviewing_the_NHS

**Humphrey Spender

***BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION

http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

Reading the newspaper in Bolton in 1938

It is odd to think that in some ways the world I grew up in is far closer to that of my parents than the one I have shared with my children.

My parents and I belong to the wireless generation, remember ice on the inside of windows in the winter and accepted that public transport was the way you got around.

Now I could go on but there is always that danger that it becomes a bout of nostalgic tosh or becomes a political statement of the passage from a collectivist society to one where the overwhelming measure of success is wealth and fame.

So instead I shall reflect on these  pictures of the Reading Room from the Work Town collection.*

And before anyone accuses me of being either a tad reactionary or just dead old I am the first to enjoy visiting our local library. It is bright, light and unlike that blanket of serious silence you used to endure it is a place where children are encouraged to enjoy books, act out the stories they have read and want to come back to.

It’s also where the traditional book of reference sits beside a bank of computers offering a link to the world.

Now back in 1937 the Bolton Public Library did offer that all encompassing experience it is just not one that most people would feel comfortable in today.

It is all very spartan which may be because this was temporary reading room while the new one was being built in the Civic Centre.

This new library along with a museum and art gallery opened in 1939 and was designed by local architects, Bradshaw Gass & Hope.

But I remember something similar in our own Public Libray in New Cross in the 1950s.  The rows of newspapers and the big wooden tables and above all that powerful smell of disinfectant which I am convinced was also sprayed on the books.

It had a slightly sweet smell and so permeated the books that it still lingers on the odd copy sixty years after mother borrowed and forgot to return them. To open these volumes of the Deptford Public Library is to be transported back.

It is a feeling reinforced by the sharp lighting and above all by the fact that no one seems to take their hat or coat off.  They have wandered into a place which seems to be saying “by all means come in, do what you have to do but by golly don’t get comfortable.”

And under those stern notices to refrain from smoking and above all to be silent you can hear the pages turn and that resounding noise as a book is dropped onto a table or a chair is scraped across the wooden floor.

It is not a library that my children would recognise but it is familiar enough to me and no doubt to my parents.

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, 1993.83.19.22, 1993.83.12.21 & 1993.83.12.20

*The pictures are from Work Town which were part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s and can be seen online at http://boltonworktown.co.uk/

Walking along the High Street in the spring of 1851

Sherard House in 1909 from the garden

This is one of those walks I wish I could have made in the spring of 1851.

It would have started at the church and finished up just past the smithy by Eagle House and along the way we would have seen some fine old houses including Sherard House, Merewood House and Cliefden House, poked our noses into Sun Yard behind the pub of that name at the collection of wooden cottages and perhaps passed the time of day with some of the residents of Jubilee Cottages which were also tucked away behind the High Street.

Now Jubilee Cottages have quite caught my imagination.  They had five rooms with three up and two down looked east across the fields and had longish gardens at the rear.

The High Street, 1858-73

I often wonder how John Fry who owned them felt about the fact that despite being known on maps as Fry’s Buildings they were by common consent called Jubilee Cottages a name which had stuck from when they were built in 1833 and continued in usage on the census returns.

I have to confess that I am drawn to these along with the cottages of Sun Yard and those of Ram Alley, more perhaps because the big houses are well known as are their occupants.

And so starting tomorrow I rather think I will dig deep into their stories, while not ignoring those fine houses.  After all more than one of them while they may have looked to the casual passerby as an 18th century property were really much older.

Pictures; detail of Eltham High Street from the OS map of Kent, 1858-73 First Edition, and Sherard House from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers,http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

In one of the six Alms Houses on Eltham High Street in 1851

The Alms Houses in 1909

For many of us the Workhouse with its stigma and the horrors that went with being shut up behind its grim walls is just a few generations away.

In my case it was my great grandmother who in 1902 gave birth to her last child in the Derby Workhouse Infirmary, and there after it was the Guardians of that place who kept a watching eye on my grandfather and his siblings while they grew up in various homes.

And it was these self same Guardians who placed great uncle Jack with a blacksmith to learn a trade, great aunt Dolly in service in Northumberland, grandfather in a Naval reformatory school and gave great Uncle Roger the choice of the same boot camp or a new start in Canada as a British Home Child.

Now the Workhouse has always been a refuge of the poor, and long before the 1834 Poor Law and the creation of the Poor Law Bastilles, seeking help from the parish was  accepted as one of the strategies most working families fell back on when times got hard.

But after 1834 the price was high, with families being separated on admission and at the mercy of petty regulations which reinforced the shame of poverty.

And of course it was the old who more than most would come to rely on the institution, often warn out after a life time of struggle and hard work with the prospect of their last few years separated from loved ones and the prospect of a pauper’s grave at the end.

And if it wasn’t the Workhouse or some other form of parish relief then it might have been a charity.

The Alms Houses numbered 224, in 1853

Like as not in Eltham this might have been one of the six alms houses in the High Street which had been built by Thomas Philipot in 1694 at a cost of £302 on part of a field called Blunt’s Croft.

They consisted of two rooms, one above the other, a wash-house and a small garden.  The average age of those living there in 1851 was 86 with Sarah Glazebrook at 84 and Elizabeth Blackman aged 62.

I suppose I should also have included Mary Inson who was a mere babe at 53 but she described herself as a lodger and I rather think cannot strictly be included.

Now a lot more research needs to be done to track all eight back across the years in Eltham.  None had been born here but I suspect all had passed most of their lives in the place.

Some at least I know, like old Thomas Foster who had been one of the blacksmiths.   His smithy stood to the west of Sun Yard nearer to the lane and was one of the features of the High Street.*

He was originally from Carlisle but was in Eltham by 1819 when his son was attending the first National School.

And in time I will discover more about  his wife Ann, along with the widows, Jane Rivers, Sarah Glazenbrook, Elizabeth Dean, Mary Fulgar and her lodger the 53 year old Mary Inson and George and Elizabeth Blackman.

I have no way of knowing how hard their lives had been or what struggles they endured in the alms houses or even what support and comfort their families were to them.

So I shall leave them on that spring day in 1851 in their cottages which looked out across the High Street to an empty field and wonder just what gardening Mr Foster did in his small garden behind the meadows.

Location, Eltham, London

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/heating-and-hammering-at-smithy-on.html

Picture; The Alms Houses from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, and detail of the High Street from detail of the land to the north of 1843 from the Tithe map for Eltham courtesy of Kent History and Library Centre, Maidstone, http://www.kent.gov.uk/leisure_and_culture/kent_history/kent_history__library_centre.aspx

In Queens Park Bolton in September 1937 during the National Apprentices’ Strike

You might be forgiven for passing over the picture of these policemen standing in Queens Park Bolton in the September of 1937.

And yet there is a story here and its one that connects my mother who had been working in Derby with the young men and women in Bolton.

The caption with the image provides part of the answer for this was the “Apprentices’ Strike meeting in Queen’s Park. 

The national strike by apprentices was to demand fair wages, the right to union representation and an end to victimisation. 

Apprentices’ wages were extremely low, despite them often been asked to do jobs for which adult workers were paid danger money.  

It was also standard practice for companies to sack them when they became fully qualified and replace them with new apprentices who were much cheaper. 

The apprentices’ slogan was `All out together, all back together’ and they were successful in gaining union representation and fairer wages.”

My mother always spoke with some bitterness at the practice in the silk mill in Derby where she worked which as in Bolton took on young people as apprentices, on low wages only to finish them when they qualified.

Apprentices were 'bound' to their employers for several years by indentures, which strictly forbade any indiscipline, including strike action.

By the mid-1930s, young workers in engineering and shipbuilding were complaining at the lack of adequate structured training and the low wages. Under the slogan 'all for one and one for all', a strike started on Clydeside, Scotland in spring 1937 and by April, there were 3700 apprentices out.

The strike was ended after national negotiations started between the unions and employers, only to break out again in Salford in September, when talks were seen to be non-productive. The strikes spread to Yorkshire, the Midlands and London and only ended in October, when the Amalgamated Engineering Union secured the right to negotiate on behalf of all apprentices. Many local agreements gave boys large increases, and their wage rates were tied into advances won by adult skilled men.”

The photograph was part of a Mass observation “project founded in the late 1930s by a group of young writers and intellectuals, led by Tom Harrisson. They believed that British society was deeply divided, with very little understanding or consideration given to the lives and opinions of ordinary people.

The first focused study carried out by Mass Observation began in 1937 in Bolton, which they called Worktown.

Bolton was chosen as a ‘typical’ northern working class town, and Harrisson recruited a team of men and women who tried to capture a vast range of information about the local population using observation techniques."*

They remain a wonderful and powerful record of life in the industrial north during the late 1930s.

*BOLTON WORKTOWN, PHOTOGRAPHY AND ARCHIVES FROM MASS OBSERVATION,
http://boltonworktown.co.uk/photo-collection/

Pictures; courtesy of Bolton Library Museum Services, from the collections, Apprentices’ Strike meeting in Queen’s Park, September 21st 1937, 1993.83.25.37

Merlewood House in the High Street and a hint of how the other half lived in the spring of 1851

Merlewood House in 1909

We are looking at Merlewood House which was one of those fine old houses Eltham did so well.

It stood just east of the present National Westminster Bank and was demolished when the road was widened and the bungalow shops were built.

It serves to remind us of the contrasts that Eltham threw up, for with Sherard House to its left it is the home of one of the well off in Eltham but stood close to Jubilee Cottages which had been built in 1833 and the interestingly named Ram Alley which in the 1850s and 60s housed some of our farm workers, labourers and tradesmen.

Merlewood had been home to Mr Richard Lewin from 1798 till 1853 and was ocuupied by a succesion of people who styled themselves "Gentry" including Caleb Mann Esq and Mr Howard Keeling who "left a benfaction to the National Schools."*

By contrast in Ram Alley lived Samuel and Mary Lambert and their three children.  He described himself as a labourer in 1851 and was one of the 21 men in Ram Alley who laboured on the land or the roads, and consitiuted 54% of those earning a living there.

Which is a nice introduction to a series of stories exploring the two sides of Eltham society.

Next; living in Ram Alley and Eagle House.


Pictures; Merelwood House , from The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909 and published on The story of Royal Eltham, by Roy Ayers, http://www.gregory.elthamhistory.org.uk/bookpages/i001.htm

*The story of Royal Eltham, R.R.C. Gregory, 1909,page 278

Messages from Le Harve ..... a woman called Gertie ....... and an address on Oxford Road

 I like this picture postcard which was sent from Le Harve in the August of 1915.

And what I particularly like is the way the name has been adapted to include pictures of the town.

Now my Wikipedia tells me that Le Harve “is a port city in the Seine-Maritime department in the Normandy region of northern France. It is situated on the right bank of the estuary of the river Seine” *

So, it is not surprising that many of the individual photographs inside the letters are of ships, the port, and the sea.

And it reminds me of the images that were produced in the 1960s which are a bold mix of lettering with an imaginative way of showing off the images of the town.

In fact, when I first saw it, I assumed it was from that “swinging decade” and here lies an interesting observation in what attracts us to such a picture post card.  For me it was that 1960s connection but for David Harrop who recently acquired it I suspect it will be the Manchester address, which was 1 to 3a Oxford Road.

David has a fine collection of picture postcards, and many are linked to the city.

So having clocked that link I went looking for what I could about 1 to 3 Oxford Road, and the firm Parkinson’s where the card was sent.

Given that the sender omitted his surname I wondered if I could discover his identity by looking for clues to the firm.  

It followed that if Stanley was a serviceman, then he might well have enlisted at the start of the war and could just possibly get a mention in the Book of Honour which was a list of the men who volunteered for the Manchester Pal’s Regiments in 1914.

The book records the men, the companies, battalions and regiments they were assigned to and has a list of the businesses for which they had worked.

Alas Parkinson’s is not there and nor is it listed on Oxford Road in 1911.

All of which leaves me with Gertie Whitehead who was the recipient of the card.

There was a Gertie Whitehead on the 1921 census who was a "Children’s Costume Finisher" employed by Clarkson and Hurst Children’s Costume Manufacturer.

A decade before the firm were based at 43a Granby Row. and she was living on Rochdale Road, who ten years earlier had been a boarder in a house in Chorlton Medlock.

There are other Gertie’s but she seems closet to the fit.

Leaving me just to continue to look for Parkinson’s which if it was in anyway connected to the garment trade may fix our Miss Whitehead.

And that is about it.

In 1922 aged 28 she was living with her family on Rochdale Road, while ten years earlier she had been a boarder in a house in Chorlton Medlock.

As for Stanley he remains an enigma.  His message to Gertie spoke of fine weather and the expectation of a letter from her, and was signed “Love Stanley X”

But I doubt that we can read too much into that.

Location, Le Harve and Manchester

Pictures; from the Le Harve picture postcard, 1915 courtesy of David Harrop.

*Le Harve, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Havre

At the Aaben in Hulme .......... with heaps of interesting movies

 I have fond memories of the Aaben Cinema in Hulme.

Although I have to say my time there was pretty much limited to the late 1970s.

By the mid 1980s the kids were coming along and trips out were pretty much limited to the pub and the odd theatre trip.

But back in the day it was a grand place to go where you could see films you had missed first time around and a whole clutch of interesting movies which would never make it on to the main circuits as well as heaps of “arts” productions from around the world.

A full 45 years on and I am hard pressed to remember what I saw although I have memories of accompanying Jenn and Tricia to silly, bizarre, and earnest films.

The history of the place is equally interesting, and for its story I fell back on cinema TREASURES which is a cornucopia of accounts about our lost picture houses.

And the entry on the Aaben has the added authenticity that it was co written by John Wojowski who ran it in the 1980s until 1990.  He writes it was “opened in 1928 as the York Cinema, it was located on York Street, Hulme, an inner-city district of Manchester. 

Seating was provided for 1,414 and in 1937 the operators were given as Thomas and Norman Royle, who operated it into the late-1940’s. By 1954 it was operated by York Cinema (Manchester) Ltd. and the seating capacity was given as 1,300.

In 1967 it was closed and converted into a bingo club, but this was short lived as in 1969 it was taken over by the Unit Four Cinemas Ltd. of Burnley who made one of their first conversions of a former single screen cinema here, when they converted the building into four screens, re-opening as the Unit 4 Cinemas. 

Seating capacities in the screens were 210, 101, 102 and 102. There was a bar and a snack bar for patrons. It was a 4-screen independent arts cinema from the mid-1970’s through to when it closed finally in 1991”.*

Now never one to steal other people’s research, I won’t quote anymore but instead direct you to Mr. Wojowski’s account by following the link.

In its way the cinema walks with the history of Hulme, having offered entertainment when Hulme was still a densely packed area of terraced housing and closing as the clearances swept away the original housing and its population.

Only to reopen as an “arts” cinema in the mid-1970s catering for a mix of students and young professionals who had begun to make Hulme their home.

The programme dates from 1988 and is a bit of a mystery given that by then I was no longer a patron, but maybe I picked it up somewhere with the vague intention of popping along, and as so often happens it went from the coffee table to a cupboard before being filed as a future bit of history, which of course it now is.

Location; Hulme

Pictures, Aaben Cinetheque, February/March ’88, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Aaben Cinema, Jackson Crescent, Manchester M15, John Wojowski, & Ken Roe,  cinema TREASURES, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/22901

Walking the Rochdale ........ 1979

Now I had pretty much decided that I had imagined the two sunken barges on the Rochdale Canal.

I knew I had taken pictures of them but long ago lost the prints and the negatives were old technology which, without smelly chemicals, a dark room and an enlarger was lost to me.

Various friends over the last few years confirmed my memories and even offered up their own pictures but I wanted my own.

And with Christmas came the present which scans the old negatives, and now I can once more walk along the canal at a point in its history, after it had been saved, but not before it had been gentrified.

So here are two of the lost photographs and looking at them again I am amazed I ever safely made it down the tow path.

Location; the Rochdale Canal




















Pictures; the Rochdale Canal, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The slaughter house ..... the lost pond and heaps more ....... walking Beech Road's past .... December 4th

Now I am back with those ever-popular history walks which wander down Chorlton’s past.

Mr. Higginbotham ploughing Row Acre, Beech Road, 1894

They have been a feature of Sunday afternoons for a more than a decade, take an hour and offer up a host of interesting people from the posh to the very un-posh, deliver heaps of little-known stories and along the way reveal the secrets of the buildings we inhabit.

So, on December 4^th it will be the turn of Beech Road, and in the company of a distinguished couple of authors and lots of interested residents we will walk the past from Barlow Moor Road, down to Chorlton Green.

The stroll will introduce you to the “slaughterhouse”, a lost fishpond, a handful of rebellious school students and the mysterious clay pipe.

Fans of the walks will instantly recognise that mix of silly stories, sound historical accounts of when we were a rural community and that bit of outrageous entrepreneurial flare which links the walks to the publication of yet another Simpson and Topping history book.

Mr. Gratrix's clay pipe, found on Beech Road,  2014

This one which is in the series of "nothing to do in chorlton" is entitled "Down Beech Road Looking for Chorlton Row".

All you need do is sign up .....pay your fiver and you get the book for free. 

Or if you have already bought the book, bring it along as your free pass for The Walk.

It couldn’t be simpler.

So if you enjoyed our Narnia tale on the Green, shuddered at the horrible murders of Mary More and Francis Deacon and were incensed at the Chorlton Burial Scandal then this walk follows the tradition.

Details of how to sign up for the walk are on our poster, along with how to contact us.*

I'm coming on the walk, the Rec, 2022

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; Ploughing Row Acre before it became the Recreation Ground, 1896  Mr Higginbotham's farmyard, circa 1880s, from the collection of William Higginbotham, Mr. Gratrix's clay pipe, 2014  When litter can be silly, Chorlton, 2022 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*“nothing to do in chorlton Down Beech Road Looking for Chorlton Row” by Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping, costs £4.99, and is available from www.pubbooks.co.uk and Chorlton Bookshop

Hough End Hall in the summer of 1925

An occasional series dedicated to looking down at Chorlton from the air. 

Here is Hough End Hall in the summer of 1925 taken from an Imperial Airways aircraft.

To the north of the hall is Chorlton Brook which meanders through open fields.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; aerial view of Hough End Hall 1925, m72046, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Bedford Falls on Beech Road …..

Now I am a great fan of window displays, which can brighten up a shop exterior and of course draw you in.

So, I always like it when Framed Opticians on Beech Road changes theirs.*

In the past they have featured Super woman while the premise in St Ann’s Passage in town has sported equally happy and eye-catching displays.

And back on Beech Road the new one features Bedford Falls with its nod to that ever popular Christmas film, “It’s a Wonderful Life”

My Wikipedia tells me that “In 1945, Frank Capra visited Seneca Falls, New York to look for inspiration for the town of Bedford Falls. 

The real town and the fictional town are very similar as they are both mill towns, they both had a grassy median down the main street (Seneca Falls does not anymore), both communities boast Victorian architecture and a large Italian population, and they both have very similar toll bridges. The locations are both close to Buffalo, Elmira, and Rochester, New York.

In Seneca Falls, there was a local businessman named Norman J. Gould, who owned Gould Pumps, and was one of the richest men in town. Gould also had great control over politics and economics of the area, much as Henry F. Potter did in the film.

The name Bedford Falls derives from both Seneca Falls and a hamlet in Westchester County, New York, called Bedford Hills”.**

So that is it, other than to say the artwork on the window was by Lobster House Studios which have done heaps of shops.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures;  Bedford Falls on Beech Road, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Framed Opticians, https://www.framedopticians.co.uk/

**Bedford Falls, It's A Wonderful Life, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bedford_Falls_(It%27s_a_Wonderful_Life)

***Lobster House Studios, Commercial Artist, Window painting, Murals, Signs, Logos and Graphic Design,  https://www.facebook.com/lobsterhousestudios/

The Challenger Expedition 1872-1876 .... as important as the Moon landings ..... today on the wireles

Some have asserted that the The Challenger Expedition of 1872-1876 is as important as the Moon landings.  

HMS Challenger, 1874

I shall be listening at 9 this morning on Radio 4, part of In Our Time series, and if I miss it it will be available on line.*

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the voyage of HMS Challenger which set out from Portsmouth in 1872 with a mission a to explore the ocean depths around the world and search for new life. 

The scale of the enterprise was breath taking and, for its ambition, it has since been compared to the Apollo missions. 

The crew of HMS Challenger, 1874

The team onboard found thousands of new species, proved there was life on the deepest seabeds and plumbed the Mariana Trench five miles below the surface. 

Thanks to telegraphy and mailboats, its vast discoveries were shared around the world even while Challenger was at sea, and they are still being studied today, offering insights into the ever-changing oceans that cover so much of the globe and into the health of our planet.

With Erika Jones, Curator of Navigation and Oceanography at Royal Museums Greenwich, Sam Robinson, Southampton Marine and Maritime Institute Research Fellow at the University of Southampton, and Giles Miller, Principal Curator of Micropalaeontology at the Natural History Museum London

Producer: Simon Tillotson"

HMS Challenger, 1875

Pictures; HMS Challenger, 1874, Drawn by Royal Navy sub-lieutenant navigator Swire on the HMS Challenger during the scientific voyage of 1872-1876. His note - Monday February. 16th. 2.30 pm. Tacked & stood north. / Lat 66 - 40 - S / Long 78 -15 - E. Source, http://search.slv.vic.gov.au/permalink/f/1cl35st/SLV_VOYAGER3500826 State Library Victoria H2017.82/2 And The image above is from the journal of Pelham Aldrich R.N. who served on the Challenger Surveying Expedition from 1872-5, courtesy of Radio 4.

*The Challenger Expedition 1872-1876, In Our Time, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001fcvd

Shadows at the newsagents …….

Now I have been following the continuing changes to Etchells on Beech Road.

Work began earlier in the month when the tile cladding came off and revealed a bit of the story of the shop which dates to the start of the 20th century.

The removal of the tiles revealed clues to the original lay out of the shop including the front door and a window looking out onto Beech Road.*

Small history perhaps but fascinating none the less for a building which can lay claim to having always been a newsagent.

And one which in its earlier days was run by Lionel Nixon who was the grandson of the family who ran the beer shop which is now 70 Beech Road. 

They were Samuel and Sarah Ann Nixon, and they were in residence offering up beer and cheer from the 1840s, while Samuel’s father was landlord of that pub over the water once known as the Greyhound, but now Jackson’s Boat.

Ever since work started, I have been going down and photographing the progress, and this Sunday with the new rendering on and the sun shining the wall was a backdrop for these shadows.

And that pretty much is that.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures, Shadows at the newsagents ……. 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*When archaeology came to Beech Road ……, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Beech%20Road

Remembering east Manchester

Now I was there when they demolished the winding gear at Bradford Colliery in 1973.  

Well that is not strictly accurate.  It was there when we went out in the morning and gone when we got back.  It may even have been a few days before I noticed.  It was one of those places you took for granted.

In the same way we woke one Sunday to the dull persistent sound of some big engines being tested off towards Pottery Lane and again in the way of these things we only realized that it had been going all day when it stopped around tea time.

But then the area was still full of industry.  Just up the New Road was Clayton Aniline, with its tall chimney which belched out different coloured gasses at different times and turned the sky different shades.  There were the wireless works up by Philips Park, the canal, railway lines and countless small workshops.

It is all very different now.  The Aniline went in 2007, most of the smaller industrial units vanished during the Thatcher years and that great sprawling block of deck access flats which was almost brand new when we arrived has gone without a trace.

They say you should never go back to places where you lived and were happy, and as I tried to get my bearings on what was the corner of the Old Road and where Grey Mare Lane stood I did have to agree.

Not that I hasten to add that this is some sort of nostalgic bit of tosh for a lost golden age.  True there was a real sense of community but few would want to return to houses which were past their best with damp walls sagging roofs and the occasional infestation.  Nor I think would there be any appeal in living next to shunting yards and watching clean washing get streaked with soot or live in the shadow of some great grimy factory.
Most who hanker for this never had to live it and never would.

Now I know a little of what I am talking about because although we may only have lived there a year I spent a chunk of my early life in a similar industrial area.  The long rows of terraced houses hard by factories, mills and marshalling yards had been built in the 1780s and time had not been kind to them.  I fell asleep to the clunk of railway wagons in the nearby shunting yards, woke to the sound of steel shod boots of  men passing the door on the way to the local mill and knew it was dinner time by the siren from the same mill announcing the mid day break.

All of which is a belated introduction to David Hall’s book Working Lives: The Forgotten Voices of Britain’s Post Working Class.  It is according to the review “an oral history of post war industrial Britain,” covering “the lives of working people in the 1950s and 1960s.”**

Here are stories of awful industrial accidents of Saturday night outs and mean streets dwarfed by mills, forges and collieries.

It is an industrial landscape and way of life that has in the main vanished and one that those of us who knew east Manchester will share with David Hall who came from Bradford. His was a world bounded by canals, railway line, gas and chemical works and  of factories and lived out under grey smoke filled skies to the incessant sound of noisy forges and engineering plants.

Now as I said nostalgia does nothing for me, but his book goes someway to recreating both my own childhood and that part of east Manchester I got to know just as it was being lost.  And is a real reminder of the transformation of industrial Britain.

Pictures; Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Bradford Colliery during demolition, 1973, m60850, Grey Mare Lane and Ashton Old Road, 1962, Hotchin,F, W., Ralph, m15433, Grey Mare Lane west side, Hotchin, F. W., Ralph, m15435, Grey Mare Lane Flats, Milligan, H, 1971, m12519, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass


*Hall David, Working Lives: The Forgotten Voices of Britain’s Post Working Class. Bantam £25
** Stephen Armstrong, The Sunday Times, August 19 2012

Horses on Beech Road …….

I wonder just when this building was converted into residential use.

In the late 19th century, it turns up on the Rate Books as two stables and remained so in 1900 when numbers 56 and 60 Beech Road are listed as “House, shop and stables”.

Nor does it appear that anyone was living there when the 1921 census was taken.

After which there is one of those historical hiccups which are as fascinating as they are challenging, because in 1939 the numbering of Acres Road includes a number 69, which is not there in 1921, when the previous final two houses are numbered 63 and 65.

My friend Tony checked his street directories and confirm that the stables had not begun their residential change of use in 1962.

I do have vague memories of work being done on the property in the late 1970s, but someone will have a better memory than me.

In the meantime, I will go and ask my friend  Andy who holds a copy of the last directory to be published which was in 1969. 

So, watch this space.

And yes it's the same picture ......... so good I took it twice.

Location; Chorlton

Location; Chorlton shapes, 2022, from the collection of Andrew Simpson