The two Withington vets …… a man called Hakim from Syria …… another from Poland…….. 567 Wilmslow Road

Now history comes in all shapes and sizes and can take you on a journey from high politics in Ancient Rome to the origins of fish and chips.

Both are valid, tell us something about the past and can be fun.

So here I am following the trail of the oldest small vets in Withington, which also may lay a claim to being the oldest veterinary surgery in the city.

I was alerted to the story by Ellie who with her husband Daniel, will be opening a new vet’s practice at 567 Wilmslow Road.*

She told me that she thought “it had been a vets since the 1930s. The whole property was previously the vet's house and he consulted out of his front room".

Now I know that it was a vets by 1953 and with a bit of digging Ellie was able to push the date back to 1948.

Since then, it has continued under different owners until it closed in 2020 and is now ready for its next story.

And as you do, I became interested in the property and curious as to who had lived there before Mr. Leask.

In the late 1920s it was occupied by a Horace Victor Hartley who was a builder, and at the start of that decade by David Wansker and his family.  

Mr. Wansker was born in Warsaw and had been a “natural born subject of the Russian Empire”, but in 1876 was a granted British Citizenship when he declared he was a Trimmings Manufacturer with four children the eldest of whom was six.  The certificate of naturalization was singed by Abel Heywood the then Lord Mayor of Manchester who many will know as a radical and Chartist in his early years and later as a Liberal.

I can track Mr. Wansker back to 1861 when he was living with his brother in Cheetham and the following decade when he described himself as a widower living with his daughter who was just 18 months old.  He later remarried and he and his second wife are buried in Phillips Park

I think there will be much more to uncover on the man and his family.

And I suspect also on the earlier occupants of the house which included Joseph Hakim, a Syrian who became a British citizen in 1898, and who was also connected to the textile trade, as was Arthur Beaty who lived in the property at the start of the 20th century.

Beyond Mr. Beaty the trail stops with a Walter Henry Law who took possession of the 11 roomed property in 1897 which I think will be when it was built.

He remains a shadowy figure, and the records offer up several Walter Henry Law’s of which the one I would like to choose was working as a calico warehouse apprentice in 1871 aged 17.  It might not be him, and historically I am out on a limb, but it would be nice to think our house had a connection with textiles for over 50 years as it has done for caring for animals for the following three quarters of a century.

Now that would be an interesting bit of continuity.

We shall see.

Location; Withington

Pictures, 567 Wilmslow Road, 2022, courtesy of Elli and Daniel Lee

*Manchester Cat Clinic, https://www.manchestercatclinic.co.uk/?fbclid=IwAR1lH2mYcECTpGaA7ClfLn0CcxPRaC-1s6eeF7GLMymUB8xCIrjSxrzefFo