One hundred years of one house in Chorlton …. part 118 ......... olden days

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since. *

Electrical fittings, 1915

The thing about living in one place for a very long time is that you accumulate a lot of stuff, from furniture, and ornaments to memories and all those treasures from when your kids were growing up.

And if you are like me it’s hard to part with them, whether its that glow in the dark souvenir from Southport which long ago lost its glow in the dark, to the broken home made model of a rocket ship made for a school project.

This year I will clock my 48th year in our house and I am edging ever closer to matching Joe and Mary Ann’s tenure here.

They built and moved into to the house in 1915 and while Joe died in 1968, Mary Ann outlived him by another eight years which I suspect means I will never beat their record.

Still my 48 years is a big chunk of my life, and as you do, I have been reflecting on growing old in a house that long ago had its hundredth birthday.

They range from the countless different wallpapers, and paint schemes to the growing plethora of “handy" electrical household equipment to the size of the telly.

School projects, circa 1997

But as ever it’s the little things you come across which seem to shout out how far you have travelled across two centuries.

For me it started with an old electrical junction box in the cellar with the letters M.C.E.W., which remind me that there was a time when local authorities like Manchester Corporation delivered electricity and gas to people’s homes, along with water.

Or that there was a time when you could use the phone to hear Tim the “speaking clock” and later in the 1960s use the same phone at home or in a phone box to hear the song selected by the G.P.O. to listen to,

And along with the gadgets came a slightly different way of seeing things.

So back in the 1950s through into the next decade, it was common practice to go into a cinema half way through the film, watch it to the end, and then sit to see up to where you came in.  

Sugar Puffs, 1957

Which now seems a salutary lesson to all those great screen directors whose vision of a cinematic masterpiece involved the audience seeing it from the beginning to understand the plot, the message and of course the way the dramatic imagery served the story.

The choice of two TV channels, 1964

But it also rolls over into events that while I took for granted our kids find baffling, like an old property survey from 1964 on a house dad and mum bought in Eltham, which warned that the introduction of a “Smokeless Zone” would involve alterations to the house.

When I showed it to our Josh, a few years ago there was a pause while he worked out the significance of the document, and then came back with what now seems a reasonable question ......“So, dad back in 1964 they banned people from smoking”.

As the author wrote, “the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there.”**

At which point there is a danger that I will slide into that worst of all failings, …. a bout of nostalgia.

Instead I will just observe that one of the most powerful tell tale signs of old age, is not the fortnightly State pension payment, the concessionary deals on public transport and entering into events, it is filling in one of those age verification requests.

Empty tin of National Dried milk, circa 1949

You type in the day of your birth, followed by the month, and then are presented with that long line of years which you scroll through, leaving the 2000s and passing effortlessly down the decades, until reaching the first half of the last century which seals your status as having come from the olden times.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures;  house hold objects, 1964-1997 from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and the tin of National Dried milk by Oxfordian Kissuth, Photographer and columnist, Germany and England. And available at WIKIMEDIA Commons,http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Oxfordian_Kissuth

*The story of a house, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

**The Go Between, L.P.Hartley, 1953