Looking for the Didsbury street they stole ……

Well, a bit deceptive as the street in question is still there it’s just its name they stole.

Northgate Street, 2021

All of which will prompt the party poopers to exclaim “what an outrageous and silly bit of nonsense”.

And so it is, although that said there is a serious story here which revolves around the comprehensive city-wide policy of eliminating certain street names which I guess was to do away with duplications.  

I suppose it has always gone on, but I know that in the 1960s and 70s plenty of old names vanished.

Many of them were in Chorlton, but now I have come across the first in Didsbury and it was North Street which ran off Wilmslow Road close to the clock tower.

North Street, 1957

Today it is Northgate Street and for anyone still a tad puzzled as to where it is, just look for the Station pub which remains a delightful little place to pass the time.

The Station on North Street, 1959

I first came across it in 1978 on a night spent in the company of John Cordwell who lived in Wolseley Place, and always maintained that he was the man who shouted out “Judas” at the Bob Dylan concert in Manchester in 1966.  

John and I had worked together at a high school in Wythenshawe, and while I had stayed, he moved on to a post at Didsbury College of Education.  

We kept in touch, and more than once squeezed into the pub which at weekends was always heaving.

Just when John confided the Dylan story to me, I have long ago forgotten, and if I am honest I only half believed him, given that he did recount amusing and sometimes impossible tales, which were always  told with a slight smile and a twinkle in the eye, as if to say challenge me if you dare. 

That Dylan concert, 1966

Moreover, while I knew him as John, many of his older friends knew him as Nigel, and later still I rather think he reverted to Nigel.

It is a memory I long cherished and just when I began to think that I had dreamed it up, the confirmation came in an article in the Independent by Andy Kershaw, leaving me to tell friends that not only had I known the man that shouted out Judas to Bob Dylan, but it predated the national revelation by thirty years.

And that takes me back to Mr. James Edward Smallpage who was confident that his new beer shop on the corner of Wilmslow Road and North Street would be a success.

It started selling beer in 1879, and with an eye to the future, was directly opposite the new railway station which opened in the January of the following year.

And by 1881 it was trading as the Station Hotel, which rather cornered the market in railway names, given that his two nearest rivals were the Wellington and the Dog and Partridge.

He might even have adopted the name earlier, but sadly the rate books for the years 1880-81 for Wilmslow Road are missing.

North Street, and Wilmslow Road, undated

Before his entry into the world of beer, he was variously a cashier, and clerk and later reverted to this occupation, having given up the Station Hotel in 1885.

Thereafter the Station Hotel had a series of owners and managers and in 1911 the man pulling the pints was a William Wrightman who was 45 years old and a widow, who shared the pub with an Annie Elizabeth Robinson who described herself as “housekeeper”.

Cabs and people looking towards North Street, undated

Now this maybe the same William Wrightman who is listed as a cab driver at 40 Wilmlslow Road, which was just a few doors down the road in the row beside Saints and Scholars and is now the small open piece of land adjoining the library.

The romantic in me has often speculated on the relationship between Mr. Wrightman and Ms. Robinson.  

Both were from Lincolnshire and she was working as a cook in one of the big houses on Wolseley Place, a decade earlier, so their paths could have crossed many times.

She may even have encountered him in the cab office which stood directly opposite the railway station and the Station Hotel.

And after a few pints of Marstons in their old pub my imagination runs to the idea that he might be one of the figures caught in an old photograph of the railway station and the cab shelter.

And that is pretty much it except to own up that the search for North Street was not prompted by me, but by a request from someone who looking for what is now Northgate Street.

I wasn’t alone in offering up an answer, nor was I the first but I was the one with time on my hands to go looking for a story, and as you do found heaps of them.

In time I will trawl the rate books and find out when the houses fronting the street were built and maybe pick one to explore the histories of its occupants.

For now, I will leave you with the revelation that in 1921 the five properties on the southside were occupied by a mix of people including a clerk, salesman, engineer, florist, and “Crumpet Baker” along with the woman who described herself as “Domestic at the Poor Law Guardian Rhodes Memorial Homes”, which I suspect I will have to revisit.

As well as that outrageous plug for the book on Didsbury Pubs, available from www.pubbooks.co.uk

Location; Didsbury

Pictures; Northgate Street, 2021, courtesy of Google maps, North Street, 1957, from the OS map of Manchester and Salford, 1957, the Station 1959, m42646, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, and Wilmslow Road undated