Pushing water up a hill …… looking for Mr. Mills in 1851

 Sometimes you know you are on a loser, but a mix of curiosity and a bit of stubbornness allied to the sheer fascination of digging deep into the past won’t allow you to stop.

John Broome and Jonathan Mills, 1828

And so it was with John Broome and Jonathan Mills who I first came across in a court case in 1828.

They were alleged to have taken part in a very nasty piece of vindictive bullying against a fellow apprentice in the Soho Iron Works in New Islington.

So far I haven’t been able to find out their fate at the Quarter Sessions only that they had both been ordered to find “sureties of £20 each to answer to any indictment at the sessions which having found, they were discharged”.*

Now £20 was a lot of money and there is no indication as to how they raised it.

But that was enough to set me off.

Not that I expected I would find out much.

After all we were dealing with two young men in 1828, who might not have lived long enough to make it into either the 1841 or 1851 census, and who any way could have moved away from Manchester or just slipped through the historical records.

Arthur Street, 1851

And it wasn’t a promising start because there wete plenty of John Broome’s in Manchester in the 1850s, but none quite fitted the profile.

Johnathan Miller was a tad different, because I found a Johnathan Miller on both the 1851 census in the Rate Books. This Mr. Mills gave his occupation as “Mechanic” and his age of 42 would have meant he was 19 in 1828, so just possibly still an apprentice.  

6 Arthur Street, 1901

He was living at 12 Arthur Street with his wife and three children in the heart of Ancoats, surrounded by textile mills engineering works and other industrial premises, all of which used machine power and in turn would have employed mechanics.

The family had been there from at least 1845 and were still there eight years later.  A decade later the family on Ashton New Road in Audenshaw and he described himself as a “labourer in a Chemical works”.  

I doubt we will ever now why he slipped down from a skilled job to being a labourer and while it is attractive to speculate it will not get us anywhere.

Of course this whole trail is based at present on two census returns and the assumption that this is our man, and that is a big assumption.

But the search did reveal a little bit about Arthur Street, which was bounded on two side by the River Medlock and on a third side by a railway viaduct and was located to the south of Fairfield Street closes to London Road Railway Station. 

It is now under the new development which is Mayfield. 

The family were paying a weekly rent of 3/8d and the maps of the period and a series of photographs taken around 1900 suggest that they were two up two down terraced properties.

Back of 6 Arthur Street, 1901

So a step up from the back to backs which many occupied but sufficiently close to the river and heavy industry to have offered little in the way of green verdant pastures.

And there the search for Jonathan Mills peters out,  reminding us that even if this is our man plenty of that water has flown back down the hill to make him and his family pretty obscure.

Location; Manchester in the mid 19th century

Pictures; extract from the Manchester Guardian, 1828, deatil of Adhead’s map of Manchester in 1851, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/, the site in 2023, courtesy of Goggle Maps, and 6 Arthur Street, m10771, Back of 6 Arthur Street, Bradburn A,m10771, Back of 6 Arthur Street, Bradburn A,m10772 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Arthur Street, now part of the Mayfield development, 2023

*Manchester Guardian, July 5th 1828