Passing the parish church one Sunday in November and remembering Bradshaw's guide

Now I like Ryan’s picture of Eltham Church which got me thinking about how a modern guide book would describe it.

Back in 1861 Bradshaw’s Illustrated Handbook to London and its Environs reported that visitors should
“go and see Eltham Church; not that it is architecturally remarkable, but in the churchyard will be found a tomb to Doggett the comedian, who bequeathed the coat and badge still rowed for every 1st of August by the ‘jolly young watermen of the Thames.”*

Sadly for anyone using that edition and happening on the church a decade and a bit later they would have been disappointed because it no longer existed having been replaced by the one we know today.

Work on the present church began in 1871 and was finished eight years later  just  3 metres north of the old site and occupying a larger area.

At which point I do have to be careful because those with a much greater knowledge than I will point out that the unfinished building was consecrated in 1875.

The spire was added in 1879 when funds became available and s service of thanksgiving for the completion of the building was conducted by Rev. Walter J Sowerby on 24th June 1880 which is the  feast day of St John the Baptist.**

So there you have it ................ three possible dates for the historian with an eye for detail to go for.

In the meantime I will go looking for a later edition to Bradshaw’s guide book to see if they updated the entry and leave you with this earlier photograph of the parish church from the 1860s.

Back then the clock ticked the hours away and it is nice to know that after some time the clock in Ryan's photograph is again offering up the correct time.



Pictures;  Eltham Church, 2015 from the collection of Ryan Ginn and back in  1860,  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,

* Bradshaw’s Illustrated Handbook to London and its Environs, 1861, republished in 2012 by Conway

**Eltham Parish Church,  http://elthamchurch.org.uk/wp/?page_id=2

A history of Chorlton in just 20 objects number 13, the school photograph

Continuing the story of Chorlton in just a paragraph. They are in no particular order, and have been selected purely at random.

I have no idea of the date but would guess sometime in the early 20th century, if not a little earlier.  If that is the case the picture will have been taken in the yard of the old school on the green, which was built in 1878, replaced an earlier one from the 1840s which in turn had replaced an even earlier school.  In the way of things school photographs do not change over much.  They are drawn from a range of the social groupings, and the children stare back with that mix of seriousness, curiosity and in the case of the little girl on the second row a delightful smile.  In many ways their school experiences would be not so different from their parents but a world away from those of today.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, date unknown

Annot Robinson ........

Annot before her marriage to Sam Robinson

I have decided to revisit Annot Robinson.*

I first came across her in an excellent account of her contribution to Manchester politics in the early 20th century.**



I had already been reading some of her correspondence to the Daily Citizen in 1915.

“Women” she wrote “will most certainly have to take the place of men.  

There is already a shortage of men workers in Manchester  but so far as I am aware no women taking on a man’s work will be receiving a man’s wage.“***

She had been born in Scotland in 1874 married and moved to Ancoats in 1908 and returned to Scotland in 1923 where she died two years later.

She had become active in Scottish politics in the 1890s and by 1895 was working for the Independent Labour Party in Dundee.

Annot Robinson speaking at a Suffragette meeting circa 1910 with her daughter

“She entered a marriage based at first on love and shared political ideals but which was ultimately disastrous. 

Subsequently living as a single-parent in an unaccepting age, she struggled in support of her chosen and unpopular causes, a constant and active member of the ILP and at different times of the WSPU, the NUWSS and the Women’s Labour League (WLL), Women’s War Interests Committee, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, an ebullient speaker and tireless traveller and twice a candidate in local elections.”****

All of which was set against the backdrop of being “at first the family bread winner and then a single parent of two young children.”*****

And at this point rather than just lift Ms Rigby’sresearch I shall point you towards the article and in the fullness of time return to Annot Robinson when I found out more myself.

Pictures; Annot  before she married Sam Robinson, and Suffragette meeting in Manchester, circa 1910, Annot Robinson standing.  The baby is her daughter, Cathy.  From ANNOT ROBINSON: A FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER SUFFRAGETTE

*Annot Robinson, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Annot%20Robinson

**ANNOT ROBINSON: A FORGOTTEN MANCHESTER SUFFRAGETTE, Kate Rigby, Manchester Regional History Review, Vol 1 Nu 1 Spring 1987,

***"no women taking on a man’s work will be receiving a man’s wage" ............stories from the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=stories+from+the+Great+War

****ibid Kate Rigby

***** ibid Kate Rigby

Letters to the Daily Citizen, courtesy of the Labour History Archives & Study Centre,  at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, http://www.phm.org.uk/

Mrs Sykes, the Diggle Hotel and more than a bit of complicated history

I am still looking for a photograph of Mrs Sykes of the Diggle Hotel, if only to identify a young man from a picture postcard dating to 1910.

The Diggle Hotel, 2015

But what started as a story about that picture postcard, has by degree turned into a quest to uncover the life of Lauretta Lilla Sykes, and in the process plunged me deep into the history of Diggle in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and by extension drawn me back the Diggle Hotel.*

And as they say this is one of those stories which will run and run.

Away from Diggle, 1910

The postcard is unique in that it shows a group of Volunteers from the 6th Manchester’s at a training camp in the spring of 1910 and amongst them is Gordon Radcliffe Sykes aged 21, son of Mrs Sykes and the nephew of Frederick Radcliffe.

And because it was addressed to Mrs Sykes at the Diggle Hotel that seemed a good place to start.

Mr and Mrs Sykes were there running the pub from 1891 and I rather think from a little before that.

They had been married in the November of 1887 and may have there well into the middle of the last century.

James Sykes died in 1939 and Lauretta in 1951 and with a bit more digging it should be possible to find out when they gave up running the pub.

The Diggle Hotel, date unknown

What I do know now is that her connection with the Hotel goes back to 1861 when aged just 9 months she was living there with her mother who was the sister of Frederick Radcliffe who the licensee.

And it becomes even more complicated because a decade later Lauretta was living with her parents close by in the home of James Broadbent whose sisters were working in the Hotel in 1861 and in 1881 she is listed as a householder sharing her home with her servant Amy Sykes aged 62.

With Janmes and Lauretta in 1900

At which point I shall pause and ponder on the connections between the Radcliffe, Platt, Broadbent and Sykes’ families and  just how much each of these families are embedded in the story of Diggle.

But that is for another time and while I am still no nearer knowing what Mrs Sykes looked like I am a bit closer to the business they ran because there on the walls of the pub are some posters from the 1900s.

They were sent to me by Lynn Shaw who along with her husband and family have been running the Diggle Hotel since September.**

Picture: the Diggle Hotel, 2014 and poster advertising the place in 1900 courtesy of Lynn Shaw and detail from the picture postcard, the 6th Manchester's 1910 at West South Downs Camp, from the collection of David Harrop

* Mrs Sykes, her son in the 6th Manchester's and the Diggle Hotel ....... part 1 a picture postcard,http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/mrs-sykes-of-diggle-her-son-in-6th.html

**The Diggle Hotel, Station Houses, Diggle, Oldham, Lancashire OL3 5JZ, 01457 872741
Local family takes over historic Saddleworth pub thanks to funding from RBS,  Aimee Howarth, Saddleworth Independent,  HTTP://SADDIND.CO.UK/LOCAL-FAMILY-TAKES-OVER-HISTORIC-SADDLEWORTH-PUB-THANKS-TO-FUNDING-FROM-RBS/

Charles Twemlow Rickards …… another story from Tony Goulding

Following a response to one of my stories from 2020 concerning the Rickards family, whose vault is a prominent feature of Chorlton-cum-Hardy's old churchyard, I must state in a paraphrase of a famous quote of Mark Twain “My report of his death was vastly exaggerated”.

I am indebted to one of this gentleman’s grandchildren for the opportunity to correct this error. In doing so I must admonish myself for falling into the fatal trap of accepting an absence of evidence as evidence to the contrary!     

St. Matthew’s Church, Stretford in 1901

Charles Twemlow Rickards was born in the December quarter of 1849 in Stretford, Lancashire; where he was baptised in St Matthew’s church on 5th October 1849.

He was the fourth child of William Henry Rickards and his first wife Ellen (née Royle). 

The death of his two elder brothers Gerald Broome (died aged 8 years and 8 months on 22nd July 1853) and William Royle (died aged just 15 months on 14th September 1847), both of whom are buried in the family vault in the old St. Clement’s churchyard in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester, resulted in him becoming his parents' oldest son.  His father William Henry had a total, I think now, of thirteen children, eight with his first wife Ellen and, after her death on 19th September 1860, five more with his second wife Sophie (née Munton).

Unfortunately, the family’s entry on the 1851 census appears to have been included on one of the pieces which suffered water damage and is not available. Charles Twemlow does not appear in the family household in either of the two following censuses, 1861 and 1871; resulting in my critical error. 

More records have become available online, one of which accounts for Charles’s absence from home at the 1861 census, he was a pupil at Sandbach Grammar School, Cheshire on a record dated 31st January 1861.

School_House_of_Sandbach Grammar_School_01/06/08 by ARBAY

Records of Charles Twemlow for the next three decades remain a little sketchy. He definitely sailed to Australia at some point in the early 1870s, likely arriving initially in Tasmania before being recorded as a passenger on the S.S Derwent out of the Tasmanian port of Launceston arriving at Melbourne, Victoria on 26th April 1873. 

There is also a possibility that he was the defendant in a court case at the North Melbourne Court of the Victoria Petty Sessions on 2nd May 1878 who was sued by his landlord Wilson for £1-19s. The court found in favour of the landlord and this Charles Rickards was ordered to pay this sum plus 5 shillings costs in weekly instalments of 4 shillings.

Charles Twemlow Rickards next appears in the official records with his marriage to Amelia White, the daughter of John White, in 1892. The remaining twenty years of his life are well documented as with Amelia, he had four daughters, Mabel Royle (born 1894), Marie Cicely (born 1896), Helena Lucy (born 1898), and Frances Sylvia (born 1901). Charles Twemlow’s death on 17th October 1913 was announced in the family notices column of The Manchester Courier of Friday 28th November 1913. He is interred in Cheltenham Pioneer Cemetery, Bayside City, Victoria, Australia. The record states he was a resident of Mentone, a seaside resort of Melbourne, and his occupation is recorded as “Gentleman”.

Amelia, his wife, died on 29th June 1932 and is buried in the Brighton General Cemetery, Caufield South, Nr. Melbourne, Australia.

Pictures: - St. Matthew’s Church, Stretford 1901 by unknown artist (m.71058) courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information, and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass School_House_of_Sandbach Grammar_School_01/06/08  By ARBAY - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4309194

A little bit of history in the back garden ……. “Scrubbs Cloudy Ammonia”

Two bottles ..... with Scrubbs to the left, 2023

It is a given that if you have a garden at some point something will turn up, and if you are lucky it will have a story.

In ours we have unearthed heaps of animal bones, most of which belonged to Joe and Mary Ann Scott who lived in our house for 58 years and were so keen on their pets that they left bits of them in the garden and the property to the P.D.S.A.

That said in our 46 years of living here, we too have added two dead cats, and a a Superman toy which we bought in Greece and buried in the garden after his head parted from his body.

The reverse of the two bottles, 2023

These I have never gone looking for, but like many I have come across fragments of porcelain with those blue figures of Chinese pagodas and elegant bridges, to which there was the bowl of a clay pipe.

Not a great haul I must admit, and pale when compared to what a builder on Wilton Road has come across.

These include a bottle with the imprint of Mason and Burrows who sold beer, wine, and groceries and had a branch on Beech Road from 1892.*

To these according to Declan can be added, “an old ashtray, a broken wine glass & two more bottles. One is completely free of markings, but very thick glass coloured dark blue, so presumably medicine or poisonous!

The other has a raised glass ‘label’; “Scrubbs Cloudy Ammonia”, so I reckon that wouldn’t have been for drinking either!”

And Declan is right. A trawl of the internet threw up plenty of adverts for the product, all of which seem to have had a battery of uses.

In 1927 one advert suggested “After A Strenuous Game of [golf] a refreshing bath with SCRUBB’S CLOUDY AMONNIA  It also ALLAYS IRRITATION FROM MOSQUITO BITES", while the full range of its uses can be attested by another advert which promised it was 

Scrubb and Co, Southwark Street, London, 2009

“Refreshing as a Turkish bath, Invaluable for toilet purposes, Splendid Cleansing Preparation for the Hair, Removes Stains and Grease Spots from Clothing, Allays Irritation from Mosquito Bites, Invigorating in Hot Climates, Restores the Colour of Carpets, Cleans Plate and Jewellery”.

After which I guess you would be a fool not to slip down to your local grocery store where you could buy it in two sizes confident that one bottle would do for 10 baths.

And keep a stock in for that special time of the year when you would want to “CLEAN UP FOR CHRISTMAS [with] SCRUBB’S CLOUDY AMMONIA IN ONE BOTTLE All cleaning needs two sizes 10d and 1/4d”

John Williams & Son, Beech Road, 1932

Scrubb & Co were variously at 32 Southwark Street in Southwark in southeast London.  The building is still there, and id bounded by the main railway viaduct and stretched along Red Cross Way. 

Today it is a swish Portuguese restaurant but back in 2009 its origins are still very much there to see.

All of which just leaves me the thought of where our bottle would have been bought.

I guess it would be from a shop on Beech Road which might have been Mason and Burrows or perhaps John Williams and Son on the corner of Beech and Wilton, which was a chain of shops across the south of the city and were here by 1932.

John Williams & Co, 2015

For the curious their tiled name is till there in the present Launderette.

And that is it.

Location. Wilton Road

Pictures; the bottles from Wilton Road, 2023, courtesy of Declan McGuire,Scrubb & Co former works, Southwark Street, London, 2009,  John Williams and Son, Beech Road, 1932 from the Lloyd Collection, and Joth Williams & Co tiled sign, 2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-lost-chorlton-bottle-beech-road-offi.html

When Mrs. Jane Knapman of New Cross made the Manchester Guardian ……

Mrs Jane Knapman lived on Dennett’s Road, just off Queens Road at number 64.

Breaking news, 1885

I will have passed it most days during the 1950s and early 60s as I made my way from Lausanne Road down Mona Road, and on first to Edmund Waller School and then Samuel Pepys.

And it would have been on the route to call on John Cox who lived on the other side of Dennett’s Road.

All of which is an introduction to a story of a fire in 1885, which appeared in the Manchester Guardian later the same day.

I suppose some might murmur that it must have been a slow news day in Manchester for the paper to report the incident and even more so for people to read of a “Destructive Fire in London …. Narrow Escape”*

Equally there will be those in London who see the news story as confirmation that even a minor fire in a small road in southeast London proves the pre-eminence of the city.

The full story, 1885

But not so, this was still the first big period of mass news when papers across the country fell on stories and events from John O’Groats to Land End to feed the insatiable curiosity of the public.

Go back into the early decades of the 19^th century and murky stories of murders, sensational robberies and cases of infanticide were regularly picked up by all the regional press and passed on.

The Dennett’s Road fire was no different.  It had begun in the early hours of Tuesday was “an alarming and destructive character, by which two aged and infirm persons nearly lost their lives.”

And the story included great heroism as two policemen and a neighbour repeatedly went back into the blazing property to rescue two of the occupants.  “Constable Thursday rushed in through the suffocating smoke and found Mrs. Knapman in her bed almost unconscious … [and taking] her in his arms with some difficulty succeeded in carrying her safely into the street”

And while Constable Simpson tried to rescue Mrs. Mary Ann Saunders “who is almost bedridden” she was saved by a “neighbour James Jacobs of no.60 Dennett’s Road who twice ran into the burning building before successfully reaching Mrs. Saunders and carried the woman to the window where police constable Simpson received her”.

Dennett's Road, 1872

No sooner had Mr. Jacobs made his escape than the flames burst through the floor, and all seven rooms including the contents “were reduced to ashes”.

Along with the two elderly woman, Mr Knapman and a young woman Annie Cole escaped.

On the surface it is a pretty humdrum story despite the drama, but there is more.

I know that Mrs. Knapman who had been born in 1795 and her son were living in the house in 1881, and were still there a decade later, suggesting that despite the devastation to the house it was rebuilt.

In time I will go looking for the stories of all four, along with Albert Sanderson and his widowed mother who were lodgers in the house in 1881, and the five people who were squeezed into no. 64 a decade later.

Their occupations offer up a snapshot of the area in the 1890s.  So while John Knapman was a wheelwright working for the railways, two of the lodgers described themselves as “Railway Carriage cleaners”, Emily Hodge and her daughter were “needlewoman on shirts” and the youngest resident was a labourer.

And here there is the hint of tragedy, because Emily Hodge was a widow at 38, which replicated the story of Marian Sanderson who lived with the Knapman’s ten years earlier who was widowed by the age of 44.

Lausanne Road, 2007

Nor can I walk away without mentioning James Jacobs who was 30 years old, married to Sarah and worked as a “Leather Bag Maker”.

Together they had four children aged between 8 and just 6 months, and who had spent the early years of their marriage in the City of London and later in Surrey and had only recently settled in New Cross.

So it’s all a twisty turny story made more so because I had originally been trawling the Manchester Guardian for a piece on a Mrs. Wild who officiated at the introduction of street gas lamps in Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

What caught my eye was the breaking news that in 1885 the “Madras municipality in India had extended the suffrage to women”.  There was no more just the statement that the news had come from “Madras states by telegram”.

And below that was story of the destructive fire in Dennett’s Road.

Just shows what random history can throw up.  And yes in the absence of a picture of no.64 Dennett's Road which has vanished, I include our house on Lausanne Road .... because I can.

Location; New Cross & Manchester

Picture; the news story from the Manchester Guardian, 1885, Lausanne Road, 2007 from the collection of Liz and Colin Fitzpatrick, and Dennett’s Road in 1872, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, https://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*“Destructive Fire in London Narrow Escape”. Manchester Guardian, September 28^th, 1885 

A Royal Tudor bed and a Northern Rogue ……. the exhibition at the Cathedral ….. starting tomorrow

This is an event I am looking forward to.

It’s the story of George Shaw who Peter Lindfield writes “was the West Yorkshire architect-antiquary-forger, who created Tudor-revival homes in Victorian Britain and whose sizeable workforce churned out numerous pieces of fake Tudor furniture sold to Northern aristocrats as genuine family possessions”.

His co-curated exhibition is “at Manchester Cathedral from July 2nd will shine a spotlight on Shaw's ingenuity and highlight his broad, challenging output”. 

It is on until August 11th before transferring to Chetham’s until August 15th.

And along with pictures and information panels the exhibition includes  a selection of the original beds. 

One is by Mr. George Shaw, that delightful if less than entirely honest "Northern Rogue", the other is the Tudor original that served as the template for his deceptions. 

Leaving me just to conclude “For the first time, the work of George Shaw, a Tudor Revival architect from Uppermill, is reunited with his inspiration in a building that he Tudorised around 1848”. 

Location; Manchester Cathedral till August 11th and then Chetham’s until August 15th

Sunlight House a building “which has improved the appearance of the city and given it a dignity”

Sunlight House, © 2013 Peter Topping

Sunlight House is still a pretty impressive building and has been so since it was built in 1932 by the architect Joseph Sunlight.

It stands on Quay Street just down from Deansgate and a little before you get to the Opera House.

It was at the time according to the Manchester Guardian, “the tallest and largest building in Manchester, [standing] on a site of 3,000 square yards and rises 200 feet from the red rock foundations to its roof ridge. 

People who pass it are amazed at its massiveness.  It is a landmark which can be seen on a clear day from the Belmont Hills beyond Bolton, twenty miles distant.” 

Now I rather think I will go looking for what people thought about the building in 1931, and particularly on its impact as a landmark, if only to reflect on the response to that other tall building, which is the Beetham Tower.

The Beetham Tower is the tallest building in the Manchester dominating the sky line and can be seen from miles outside the city.

I do have mixed feelings about this modern giant alternating between that easy and lazy response that it is a blot on the landscape to marvelling at its sheer size and elegance.  But that I guess is how all new buildings are viewed.

Like Sunlight House the Tower sits on a comparatively small plot on Deansgate and is named after its developers.

But this is not about the Beetham Tower so I shall return to that article from the Guardian which writes

“It is shaped almost like a cube and is so proportioned as to be classic in form.  Modern conceptions of architecture are expressed in the sleekness and in the vertical lines.

There are sixteen storeys in the building and about a thousand rooms.  The basement, lofty and with large top-lighted dome is to be used as a restaurant and the ground floor for shops or showrooms and restaurant-café.

The occupants of the top floors will be able to enjoy fresh breezes in a healthy environment, unfamiliar in narrow streets and dark offices.

Every modern aid to cleanliness and efficiency is embodied.  The floors are of polished oak throughout the building.  

An electric vacuum cleaning apparatus draws the dust down to a receptacle in the basement.  

Express lifts are installed to travel at 450 feet per minute.  In every room there is an electric synchronised clock.

The architect has taken particular care to arrange for the most adequate lighting and ventilation.  

By widening the adjoining street to twice its previous breadth he improved the lighting at the same time as he enhanced the building perspective.  

The result is that people in the offices in Sunlight House will work under hygienic conditions.  The heating system of radiators is, further, conducive to cleanliness in the atmosphere.”

And at this point in the article I have almost lost the will to live.

Now I know that the newspaper story is a valuable contemporary account and no doubt the people who worked there were impressed but the piece reads just like a promotional extract from Mr Sunlight’s own notes.

An observation which is confirmed by the claim that

“Before this new pile was erected the site contained some of Manchester’s worst slums, and it is satisfactory to note, in view of the difficulties which Manchester and other places are having in the matter of removing slum populations and providing them with alternative accommodation that private enterprise has helped to transfer successfully the tenants of a congested area and put up a building with a rateable value of “30,000 a year.”

Which is where I shall leave Sunlight House for today, but there is more and I shall return tomorrow with just a little bit more on the building, its architect and his frustrated plans.

*Sunlight House, the Manchester Guardian, May 12, 1931


Photograph; properties on Quay Street, 1910, m68184,courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council 


Painting; Sunlight House, © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
Facebook:  Paintings from Pictures

Crossing the river at Woolwich

There are only a few things that I miss about London of which my family is the biggest, but then there is also the river.

We never lived that far away from it and for me it marks many of my childhood memories.  Like the time Jimmy O’Donnell, John Cox and I went exploring along the beach below Greenwich Pier.

We could have chosen the stretch in front of the Naval College which was clean and from memory even had a little sand.

Instead we took the steps down to the river beside the brick dome which contains the stairs to the start of the foot tunnel and turned upriver and past a couple of beached Thames barges and promptly sank in the oily mud up to our ankles and had to be rescued by a bargee.

Now I suppose we should have been thankful, but we still had to face a two mile walk back to New Cross and the inevitable inquest into how shoes and socks were covered in Thames mud.  To this day I have to admit that under the stern questioning of my mother and to my continued shame I blamed the other two for my misfortune.

All of which is a roundabout way of reflecting on how the river back then in 1960 was still a working river.

My bit of the Thames from Woolwich up through Greenwich and Deptford was a busy noisy and dirty place full of cranes, barges and ships.

Not that of course it is anything like that today.

So last year  on our way back north from a holiday in Kent we missed the M25 and headed into London past the old family house in Eltham and made a river crossing at Woolwich on the ferry.

The first ferries were side-loading paddle steamers named Gordon, Duncan and Hutton,named after General Gordon of Khartoum, Colonel Francis Duncan MP and Professor Charles Hutton.

They were replaced, in the 1920s with The Squire, named after William Squires, a former mayor of Woolwich, and in 1930 with the Will Crooks the Labour MP for Woolwich from 1903-1921 and the John Benn who was a member of London County Council, Liberal MP for Wapping, and grandfather of Tony Benn.

The present  three vessels carry the names of John Burns, Ernest Bevin and James Newman who were also local politicians.

I had forgotten just how much I used to enjoy  the 7 or so minute crossing and just how much of the river you could see.

Locaton; Woolwich, London

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson 

Stories from Cornbrook …….

 Well, if I am being accurate it’s more some of the images from the first trip down the line to research the next of our books in the series,  The History of Greater Manchester By Tram The Stories at the Stops.

The idea of telling the story of Greater Manchester by using the tram network has a lot going for it.*

You can catch a tram from the city centre and go south, east,  north, and west and along the way each of the 99 stops will have a story to tell, and being the tram you can just jump off, explore this little pocket of history and move on. Or skip to the end destinations and discover interesting historical things about Didsbury, Ashton-Under-Lyne, Rochdale, Oldham, Salford and bits of Trafford, Altrincham and Bury.

And this is the new project Peter and I have chosen for a series of new books.

Each book will wander along the network, taking in nine stops or so at a time, with original paintings by Peter, old photographs, and stories by me. 

The first book follows the line that takes you south to East Didsbury, taking in Trafford Bar, Firswood, Chorlton, St Werburghs, Withington, Burton Road, West Didsbury, Didsbury Village and ending at East Didsbury.

It is the novel and fun way to learn about the past.

The book along with the other thirteen we have written together are available from Chorlton Bookshop, and from us at www.pubbooks.co.uk

And as the new book will whisk you from Cornbrook into the city centre, today was the day to explore Cornbrook.

Location; Cornbrook

Pictures, Cornbrook 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*A new book on the History Greater Manchester by Tram, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20the%20History%20of%20Greater%20Manchester%20by%20Tram

A name and a clue to a family from Little Italy in Ancoats in 1881

Your name is a very important part of your identity and for some people in some parts of the world it is an immediate clue to where the family originated from.

So in the case of our Italian family the name suggests two hot spots, one in the north of Italy and the other in the south around Naples.

And that is pretty much spot on, for while they and some of the extended family live outside Milan they come from Naples.

But what if the name is difficult to read as it so often is on old official documents?  Well in my case I have some experts on hand to help out, but sadly the jury is still out on the verdict and so I have to go with my guess.

The name is Fuski and they lived at 43 Gun Street in the heart of Little Italy* in the spring of 1881.  This much I know, and while I cannot be certain of the spelling, there is much I do know about them.

Joseph and his wife Carolina were from Naples and they arrived in Manchester sometime around 1877, with their two daughters.

Now I can be fairly sure about the date because their third child Mary was born in Manchester in 1877.

He was a musician and seems to have attracted other musicians to him.  This may have had a lot to do with the fact that he rented number 43 Gun Street, and as things go found room for three of his cousins in the family home.

But he also found space for another ten people of which six were also musicians, one who worked as a General Servant and two were children.

All but two of this additional large group were also from Naples and both of these like Mary Fuski were children.

It makes for one of those insights into how people settled in a new country.  Here and in three other houses on the street could be found all the Italians, mostly from either Naples or Genova, choosing  to live with people they knew and could rely on to help them out.

In the case of young Joseph Fuski aged just two who was born in Scotland it is a hint that his parents may either have settled first across the border or were performing there when the boy was born and then travelled south to live with their cousin.

Now the Fuski family lived on that stretch of Gun Street which runs from Blossom Street to George Leigh Street and in 1881 it consisted of 20 houses and 125 people.  Of these just over 32% were born in Italy with 43% from Manchester and the rest from Ireland, and other parts of Britain.

This was a young community where over 37% were under the age of 16 and just 5% over 55.

And the degree of its youthfulness is even more marked when you single out those from Italy.

 For here there was no one over the age of 46 and all but 9 were between 20 and 40 years of age.

I guess those in the know would point to this group being the most likely to seek a new life and new challenges in a new country.  Few were married and even fewer had children.

And it follows that most of these young Italians were destined to live as sub tenants in what looks to be very overcrowded conditions.  Of the four Italian households, the numbers recorded in each were 23, 16, 14 and 7, in properties which contained just four rooms.

Not that the level of overcrowding in some of the houses was much better, but that as they say is another story for another time.

As for the Fuski family they disappear from the records but that may at present just be because I have the name wrong, and so I eagerly await help which may allow their story to grow.

*Little Italy is the area behind Great Ancoats Street, and was defined by, Jersey Street, Blossom Street, Georhe Leigh Street, running north and Gun Street, Henry Street and Cotton Street which crossed them on an east west line.  Here from 1865 there was a growing vibrant Italian community.


Pictures; Gun Street by A Bradburn, 1904, m11342, surviving houses on Gun Street, 1962 by T Brooks, m11344, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Councildata taken from 1881 Census, Enu 4 Ancoats, Manchester, Lancashire

William Eric Lunt ........ a Chorlton soldier from the Great War

I am looking at a picture of William Eric Lunt which I never expected to see.

William Eric Lunt, circa 1914

He was born here in 1895, and died of wounds in the 36th Casualty Clearing Station at the Somme on October 14th 1916.

The Lunt family lived in Chorlton and made their living from farming for all of the 19th century.

In 1845 they rented two acres of land off Moss Lane from the Egerton estate and were market gardeners growing a variety of food for the Manchester markets.

His smallholding was mostly orchard, stretching back from Moss Lane to Rough Leach Gutter and was a smallish amount of land, and like many of our market gardeners Mr Lunt may also have had other jobs as well.

And we know that he paid 4s. 7d a week in rent and in that cottage he and his wife brought up six children.

William and family circa 1905

Which brings me back William who was just 19 when he joined up on September 5th 1914; just one month after the war had broken out.

He was a fit young man weighing 129 lbs and was 5’ 11 inches.

His army records describe his complexion as sallow, his eyes brown and his hair dark, and that at present is all we know of his physical appearance.

In fact that is about all we have, for though there are eighteen military documents, as well his birth certificate and two census returns, none of them shed any light on who he really was, his likes and dislikes, or whether he was serious, humorous or like most of us a bit of both.

But up until yesterday I only had the one picture of him outside the family shop on Sandy Lane when he was about ten years old.

That in itself was one of those rare accidents where a photograph in the collection can contribute to a story of someone you have been researching.

The scroll, 1917

And now we have a second photograph which I think must be very close to the time he enlisted.

It was sent over by Julie Bryce who wrote, “I came across your blog post on William Eric Lunt. 

I'm one of his his great nieces and I have a few photos of him and some documentation commemorating his death which was sent to his parents home at 60 Sandy Lane. 

My daughter sent me a photo of the sign for the William Lunt Gardens in Chorlton and asked me if I thought it might be a relative. I was amazed to find the new estate was named in honour of Uncle Willie as representative of all those of Chorlton who lost their lives in the First World War. 

His sister Gladys May (my grandmother) would have been very proud.”

And it is fitting that the photograph has a place in my book Manchester Remembering 1914-18  because not only does William Eric Lunt feature in the book but so does the story of the naming of the road here in Chorlton.

I had been asked to suggest names to be considered for the honour and Mr Lunt’s seemed most appropriate.

An embroiderd silk postcard,  1914-18

But this isn’t quite the end of the story because just a month before the photograph arrived another relative made contact.

This was Margret Irvine who came across the story and commented

“Councillor Newman has kindly forwarded to me your information about William Lunt. 

Thank you so much for this. I knew some of it from family talk, my own research and recently from your own web pages, but the mystery remained as to why William should have been selected rather than any of the other WW1 casualties, so thank you for an explanation of that.”

I am pleased that William has come back out of the shadows and has gained wider recogntion.

The memorial, 2014

He was to become part of that new Kitchener’s army of young idealistic volunteers many of who were to die at the battle of the Somme.

I wish there was more.

I know he had joined up at Ardwick, was assigned to the 8th Battalion of the Manchester Regiment and remained in Britain until the summer of 1916 when he embarked at Folkestone landing on July 27 at Boulogne.

He is commemorated on the memorial in the gardens of the Methodist Church on Manchester Road.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures; William Eric Lunt, circa 1914 and the scroll, 1917 from  the collection of Julie Bryce, William circs 1905, from the Lloyd Collection, embroidered silk postcard, circa 1914-18 courtesy  of David Harrop, and the memorial in the Methodist Church, Manchester Road, 2014, from Tony Goulding

*A new book on Manchester and the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20Manchester%20and%20the%20Great%20War

Manchester Remembering 1914-18 by Andrew Simpson was published by the History Press on February 2 2017

This really is the last of Sidcup in 1961

Well just when I thought I wouldn’t post another Sidcup picture, here is the last in the series from Tuck and Sons.

They were marketing a collection of images of the High Street in 1961 and this one of the parish church was too good not to include.

Location; Sidcup, London


Picture; Parish Church, Sidcup, from the set Sidcup by Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://www.tuckdb.org/,