Stories of the Great War from Eltham and Woolwich ............. nu 3 the ex soldiers

Now until recently I had never come across the story of those groups of ex servicemen who campaigned during and after the Great War. 

Three Woolwich men circa 1900

The first had been formed in Blackburn and was the National Association of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers and its main aims were a demand for employment training, better pensions, and greater government consideration for the problems of discharged men.*

This was followed later in the year by the formation of the National Federation of Discharged and Demobilised Sailors and Soldiers by various London-based veterans groups opposed to the Review of Exceptions Act, which made it possible for men invalided out of the armed forces to be re-conscripted.

It adopted the slogans "Every man once before any man twice" and "Justice before charity"

Lastly there were the Comrades of the Great War which had strong links with both the establishment and in particular the Conservative Party.  Its executive was dominated by MPs and ex officers in direct contrast to the other two.

Top five contests, 1918

At the General Election in 1918 the Federation mounted candidates in 30 constituencies across the country. In five they polled between 47 and 20% of the poll and in seven came 2nd.

Across London their fortunes varied with the Federation achieving 34% in Norwood, down to 6% in Southwark North.

They didn’t put up candidate in either of the two Woolwich seats, possibly because of the popularity of Will Coooks who was elected unopposed and in the new Woolwich West seat which have been deemed unpromising.

But in Woolwich the Federation had a very strong membership and like its other branches across the country organised to protect the rights of ex servicemen.  In Manchester the group were in dispute with several departments the Corporation over promises of reemployment to men who had enlisted while in Woolwich the focus was on the employment rights of disabled ex servicemen at the Arsenal whose jobs were threatened by the practice offering work to pre-war employees.

The Royal Herbert, 1915-1916

The protests included a petition to the King which was presented to Princess Mary when she visited the Victory Club for girls in Beresford Street and demonstration march to the House of Commons.

“With bands and banners, the 11,000 demonstrators made their way [from Beresford Square] to Westminster Bridge where they were stopped by the police and reminded of the Defence of the Realm Act regulation that processions within one mile of the Houses of Parliament were not permitted.  But the men were not to be put off; and thus began what the ‘Pioneer’ described as the ‘The Battle of Westminster Bridge.’

For a solid hour there was fighting as the darkness fell; police with truncheons and batons, vans full of disabled men trying to fight their way through, broken tramcar windows and ginger beer bottles, and pushing and kicking and pummelling – all the ingredients of a riot excepting only the reading of the Act with Lyons’ teashop at Belverdere Road corner a casualty station. Such was the confusion that when Mr Gilden, secretary of the ‘Demonstration Committee came over Westminster Bridge with the news that the notices had been withdrawn he was not allowed through the police cordon.”**

More Woolwich people, circa 1900

Despite angry headlines in the press the Government upheld the actions of the police refused a Labour Party’s call for an enquiry and saw several men charged and fined including Albert Mitchell an Arsenal worker who was fined 40s and £3 costs for breaking a tramcar window.

The Woolwich branch was also instrumental in organising a “comprehensive drumhead memorial service for the fallen on Woolwich Common .... where a crowd of some 50,000 was assembled... With thirty bands and several massed choirs, fifty-two local organizations and sixty-four trade union bands [it] provided what the Kentish Independent described as the most inspiring sight ever witnessed on the Common.”**

Pictures; Woolwich men and a market scene from Woolwich Through Time, Kristina Bedford, Amberley 2014, men in the Royal Herbert, 1915-1916 from the Royal Hebert collection, 1915-16 courtesy of David Harrop

*The Lion and the Poppy:  British Veterans, Politics and Society, 1921-1939, Nial Barr

** The Woolwich Story, 1970, E. F. E. Jefferson.

A heap of lights … a place called the Edge ….. and memories of Sunday worship

The Edge Theatre on Manchester Road is one of Chorlton’s real jewels, which has entertained, captivated and enthralled audiences with some of the best small scale touring theatre in the country, alongside  productions made by [their] own wonderful in-house creatives”* since it opened in 2011.

Heaps of lights, 2025

And if you are between productions there is the Dressing Room, which is a café/bar, and meeting place which also boasts a walled garden for those days when the sun is cracking the paving stones.

Looking in at the Edge, 2023

On those occasions when I am Billy No Mates, I like sitting in the Dressing Room trying to imagine what it was like when it once accommodated 100 young Sunday School scholars, along with more young people spread out in the rooms off the main corridor.

The Wesleyan Sunday School opened in 1885, having started 80 years earlier on Beech Road in what had been the first Methodist chapel.

The present café might also have been one of the rooms used by the Red Cross who occupied the entire building during the Great War after the Wesleyans had offered it up as a voluntary hospital for serviceman recovering from wounds and illnesses.

It was staffed by a mix of volunteer nurses, cleaners, cooks and those engaged in administrative activities.  

Looking at the profile of the volunteers, they were drawn from the local communities, and mostly served for the duration of the conflict.

Over the years I have come across some fascinating items, from a silver cup presented to the Wesleyan in 1917 by a group of soldiers and a letter of thank you to a group of children who embroidered a special pillow.

At the Dressing Room, The Edge, 2025

And of course there is much more …. which is for another time.

Location; Manchester Road

Pictures; the Dressing Room at the Edge, 2025, and the gardens, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson 

*The Edge, https://www.edgetheatre.co.uk/

Tram jam .............. Oxford Road

Now, somewhere I have a complete collection of press cuttings about Manchester's new road scheme, which resulted in huge rush hour congestion on Oxford Street and Road in 1938.

Tram Jam, 1938

It was a bold plan which was simply called Manchester's No 9 Traffic scheme. 

And it was a one way system that "included Oxford Street, a part of Oxford Road, and Princess Street"*

It had been in operation for eight days, including two Sundays before  "unprecedented congestion of trams in Oxford Street in the morning and the delays later in the day in Princess Street and Grovesnor Street showed showed the necessity  for alterations to the system".

Now the picture has no date, so it may have been taken during the road traffic scheme or was just  a tram jam in the rush hour at some other time in the 1930s.

Manchester's number 9 traffic scheme, 1938

Location Oxford Road

Picture; Oxford Road, circa 1939, from the collection of Allan Brown

*Manchester's One Way Traffic Scheme, The Manchester Guardian, June 13th, 1938

Two elephants, a farmer’s son and a travelling circus ......... Part two

Yesterday I re ran the story of my old friend Oliver Bailey’s association with two elephants. *

To be more accurate it was Oliver’s father who was connected with the two elephants, but that was yesterday’s posting.

Today I thought I would share the remarkable account which Oliver has dug out from the introduction by the publishers to the book about the two elephants* and provide a link to the author's excellent blog on the story, http://www.jamieclubb.blogspot.co.uk/

Here you can read not only about the elephants but much more about the history of the circus.

'Salt and Sauce were owned and presented by some of the most famous show business people of their era. Their owners included Carl Hagenbeck, George William Lockhart, Herbet "Captain Joe" Taylor, John "Broncho Bill" Swallow, Dudley Zoo, Tom Fossett, Dennis Fossett, Harry Coady and Billy Butlin. Their presenters included Ivor Rosaire and Emily Paulo. Formerly members and believed to be the longest suriviving members of George William Lockhart's "Cruet", they were featured in various books, newspapers and magazines in their day, and are the focus of a new book "The Legend of Salt and Sauce".

The elephants were famed for their vast array of tricks, but also feared for their temperamental moods. Sauce (known as "Saucy" most of the time) killed George William Lockhart (her owner and trainer) in an accident at Walthamstow Station and Salt killed William Aslett (an elephant groom) when she attacked him in 1957 on Rosaire's Circus.

Despite both Salt suffering dropsy symptoms that had already killed two other members of "The Cruet" she went on to live for five decades. Her death was well documented in the Cambridge local press (source: The Legend of Salt and Sauce) when she accidentally got stuck in Vauxhall lake whilst touring with Ringland's Circus in 1952. 

After seven hours and with the aid of a crane she was freed from the lake, but suffered from pneumonia and died after a week. According to the local press over one hundred wreathes were left for her at the circus. It was predicted that her lifelong companion, Sauce, would die soon afterwards (source: Salt and Sauce were Separated by John D. Swallow), but she lived until 1960, dying from "natural causes".

The book tells the true story of Salt and Sauce, two Indian elephants, who arrived in Britain in 1902 and became involved in the live entertainment industry from the Music Hall scene to circus and finally Butlin's Holiday camp. This is the story of how the elephants became both feared and loved by some of the most famous people of their era, and how their story became mythical among the circus community."

* The Legend of Salt & Sauce: The Amazing Story of Britain's Most Famous Elephants
by Jamie Clubb with Jim Clubb  ISBN Number: 187290436X Publisher: Aardvark Publishing

Pictures; from the covers of the book courtesy of Jamie Clubb

Sweet Thames Flow Softly*

The Thames Flows Down is another of those wonderful children's books written in the 1950s.

It was the companion to  A Valley Grows Up by Edward Osmond.*

The Thames Flows Down was  written by Laurie Osmond and  illustrated by Edmund and tells  the story of the River Thames from its small beginnings to the point when it flowed into the sea.

It is a  mix of history and geography, with the added bonus that it was written in the 1950s and perfectly captures the river and London at a point in time now long gone.

This is my river, that working waterway, when there were still warehouses on the south side facing the Tower of London, and when the docks still provided serious work for many families.

As a child I remember it all and even in the 1960s have memories of barges gently banging together on the tide beside the Cutty Sark pub on long summer evenings.

All of which may seem romantic tosh but it is about the Thames and its impact on those who lived along its banks and relied on it for work long before it became a mere backdrop for luxury flats and flash office blocks.

So I will close with the final words taken from Laurie’s book which pretty much sums up the flow of that river beside which I was born at Lambeth on the south side of the river  which was home for my  first 19 years.

“Back in the quiet reaches of the Upper Valley the Thames still pours steadily seaward through tranquil meadows, where owls are screeching and night jars churr in the trees.  Otters hunt and play, vixen steals for her cubs.

Over the pulsing heart of London an orange glow stains the sky.  The dark, running water is bright with reflections from the City’s embankments, yellow lamplight from bridges pierces the blackness of the tide-race round the piers.  

A police patrol boat slides silently upstream.  A light over Westminster tells that Parliament is still sitting, and along the wharves cranes still work for ships that must make the punctual tides.”

Back in the 1980s I wrote to Mrs Osmond seeking permission to use some of the illustrations from the books in history lessons and she kindly granted permission.

Sadly both books are out of print but maybe one day the O.U.P., will republish both books.  I hope so.

Pictures; from The Thames Flows Down, Laurie Osmond

The Thames Flows Down, Laurie Osmond, O.U.P., 1957

*Sweet Thames Flow Softly* by Ewan Mccoll, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zmn5pOxb2iM

**A Valley Grows Up http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20Valley%20Grows%20Up

Pictures; from The Thames Flows Down, Laurie Osmond

Two elephants, a farmer’s son and a travelling circus Part One

Now the reason why Robert Bailey rode an elephant here in Chorlton in the summer of 1942 had a lot to do with the family farm. 

The Bailey farm was at the bottom of Sandy Lane and ran along St Werburgh’s Road and had a large enough supply of water to satisfy the thirst of the two elephants.

The Bailey’s also owned the land where the circus camped.

It was the strip of land which ran along the side of the railway track all the way from St Werburgh’s Road to Wilbraham Road.

And when the circus moved on the Bailey's left their cattle to graze there.

Photographs of the animals  on the land are in the local collection of Manchester Libraries and just to underline the point another photograph contains the sign “Beware of the Bull.”

Nor were these pictures from some distant past but were taken in 1959. Oliver Bailey remembers also driving pigs from the railway station along the roads to the farm.

Picture; Wilbraham Road m18513, Landers 1959, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Piccadilly Gardens ....... the early years nu 3 a plan for a new civic attraction .... 1920

Now if you are of a certain age the old Piccadilly Gardens will be a special place and even now generate a lot of heated debate about the present site.

A plan for the gardens, 1920

So here over the next few days are stories of the early years of those gardens.

In the Middle Ages it was nothing more than a site used to excavate clay for building and was simply known as “daub holes,” but in 1755 it became the home of the Manchester Royal Infirmary which continued to offer up medical care until 1910 when the hospital relocated to Oxford Road.

And then for the next twenty years the debate raged about what to do with this hole in the ground at the very centre of the city.

And it was indeed a hole in the ground which had been left over from the demolition of the old MRI leading one journalist to comment “the place has remained year after year a good imitation of a rubbish heap or the ruins of some volcanic upheaval.”*

And before the gardens ..... a hole in the ground 1917

The proposals ranged from an Art Gallery, to a tramway terminus and an underground railway centre and for a while part of the site was occupied by Manchester’s Reference Library.

But in 1920 the City Council decided to convert the site “into a pleasant garden. 

The existing hollow in the centre of the site is to be utilized for a sunken garden on the Dutch style and its banks will slope up to a border of flowering plants.”*

The gardens opened in the September of 1921 and in a revealing comment from one of the speakers the new civic attraction was planned only as a temporary measure until a new art gallery was constructed on the site.

Well that’s a twist in the story I didn’t know about.

Location; Manchester

Picture; the proposed gardens in 1920 from the Manchester Guardian, October 1920, and detail from a picture postcard of Piccadilly , 1917, from the collection of Rita Bishop

*After Sixteen Years : A Garden for Piccadilly; Manchester Guardian, October 23 1920, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

It just gets better in Chorlton's historic library

 Now l have been going to Chorlton Libray for half a century and it's good to see it just keeps getting better.

So after it's renovation and make over earlier this year it has now got it's own special story chair which is big stylish and orange.

Just the sort of chair to curl up in and read a story, or better still gather with a group of friends and listen to a heap of stories read aloud.

I called in today and was introduced to the chair by Kay who is one of the Library staff.

And is that.

Location; Chorlton Library 

Pictures; Kay and the chair along with the animals, 2025 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

When the poem becomes the history ....... stories of Robert the Bruce ... today

This is one I shall listen to today. 

Penny of Robert the Bruce, circa 1320s

On BBC Radio 4 in the series In Our Time, Barbour's Brus': epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss John Barbour's epic poem The Brus, or Bruce, which he wrote c1375. The Brus is the earliest surviving poem in Older Scots and the only source of many of the stories of King Robert I of Scotland (1274-1329), popularly known as Robert the Bruce, and his victory over the English at Bannockburn in 1314. 

In almost 14,000 lines of rhyming couplets, Barbour distilled the aspects of the Bruce’s history most relevant for his own time under Robert II (1316-1390), the Bruce's grandson and the first of the Stewart kings, when the mood was for a new war against England after decades of military disasters. 

Barbour’s battle scenes are meant to stir in the name of freedom, and the effect of the whole is to assert Scotland as the rightful equal of any power in Europe.

With Rhiannon Purdie, Professor of English and Older Scots at the University of St Andrews, Steve Boardman, Professor of Medieval Scottish History at the University of Edinburh and Michael Brown, Professor of Scottish History at the University of St Andrews, Producer: Simon Tillotson"*

Location; BBC Radio 4

Pictures; Penny of Robert the Bruce, Museums Liverpool , Heather Beeton

*Barbour's 'Brus': epic of Bannockburn, chivalry and freedom, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002dpm8

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ............. nu 52 underneath the Arndale

For anyone born after 1970 streets like Blue Boar Court, Bulls Head Yard, Watling Street and Spring Alley will be as remote as any of those little alleys that led away from the Coliseum in the Rome of the Emperors.

Watling Street from Shudehill, 1971

Of course there will be plenty who do remember Bulls Head Yard and in particular Watling Street which was once home to the old Hen and Poultry Market where the birds were displayed in cages and until recently the Mosley Arms which was serving pints by the middle of the 19th century.

Along with Watling Street, Spring Alley, Friday Street and Peel Street it vanished with the building of the Arndale.

But for the curious with a bit of imagination and an old map it is possible to recreate something of that warren of streets.

Watling Street ran off Shudehill almost opposite Thornely Brow and is today under the tall and twisty exit from the multi storey car park, which for even the most vivid of imaginations is a bit of a challenge.

So because Watling Street joined Friday Street which in turn joined High Street we will do the journey in reverse and begin with that entrance into the Arndale from High Street.

The Hen and Poultry Market, 1889

And by taking the main walk way east towards Exchange Court we will be walking roughly parallel with Friday Street which joined Watling Street passing a series of small entries including the one that gave access to Spring Alley.

All of which I suspect is very confusing so having included one picture of Watling Street from 1971 I will finish with an earlier one of the Hen and Poultry Market in 1889.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Watling Street from Shudehill, 1971, A P Morris, m05604 and the Hen and Poultry Market, 1889, S L Coulthurst, m80957, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Home thoughts from abroad nu 3 ................. lost in the woods in the summer of 1964

An occasional series on what I miss about the place where I grew up.*

Now I say lost but that would not be strictly true but thinking back to that summer of 1964 I might as well have been.

This was the first summer after we had moved to Well Hall from Peckham and it was magic.

After all how could it be other wise?

True there were parks in Peckham and neighbouring New Cross but the woods above Well Hall were something different.

For a start they were big, stretching all the way to that unknown place called Welling, offered great views down across Eltham and Woolwich but above all were just somewhere to wander.

And as the next few years rolled by and I was faced with yet another broken romance, walking alone in the woods got me out and pushed away that feeling of teenage melancholy.  
.
I was too old to see the woods as an adventure playground but they were still a place of fascination.

We went back recently took the old familiar routes up to the Castle looked down towards Eltham Park and then headed across to Shooters Hill Road and the Red Lion.

Of course back in 1964 the pub would not have featured over much on my journeys, but a little over three years later the Welcome Inn would be a fine finishing point to a long wander through the woods.

None of us were 18 but we looked it and that was enough.

And it was here sometime around then that I got to watch one of those first colour transmissions of a tennis game on TV.

It’s hard now to think all we watched was in black and white and I have to say that afternoon in the Welcome was a revelation.

Today of course we take it for granted, the welcome has gone and I seldom walk the woods.

Location; Oxleas Woods, Eltham

Pictures; the Woods, 1976 courtesy of Jean Gammons, and looking down, 2015 from the collection of Ryan Ginn

*Home thoughts from abroad, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Home%20thoughts%20from%20abroad

Stories behind a picture, ........... Chorlton Green circa 1904-12

This is one of those pictures which you look at, think about how things have changed and pass on.

But that really doesn’t do it justice. The more I look at it the more I seem to see. It is a warm summer’s day in the afternoon and the green seems quiet enough. There are no children about so either school hasn’t finished or the holidays have yet to arrive.

Now I know it must date from sometime between 1904 and 1912. It can’t be any later than 1912 because this was the year the postcard was sent. Nor can it be any earlier than 1904 which was when the Pavilion theatre on the corner of Wilbraham and Buckingham Roads was opened. It would have been an extra bonus to be able to use the bill board beside the Horse and Jockey to fix the date even more accurately but it is impossible to decipher the print advertising the forthcoming acts.

So it is all down to when Mrs Gertude Green moved in to number 5 Chorlton Green and opened her sweet shop. She was definitely open for business by 1909 and it is her name that appears on the sign in front of the house which also carries the advert for Rowntrees chocolates.

The delivery cart for Camwal may have been unloading mineral water and soft drinks to her shop. The firm had begun in 1878 as the Chemists' Aerated and Mineral Waters Association Limited and by 1895 had factories in London, Bristol, Harrogate and Mitcham. It can’t be sure but it is likely that around 1901 they changed their name to Camwal or were taken over. Those wooden heavy crates would still be used well into the middle of the century for transporting various soft drinks and beers.

Now number 5 looks small and in 1911 it consisted of just three rooms. Fine for Mrs Green who was a widow and lived alone but two decades earlier it had been the home of the plumber James Moloy his wife and four children.

Today the house is bigger but looking again at our picture back then some of number 7 appears to run behind it but just how the internal geography of the two works has yet to be revealed.

Having said that our picture has not yet given up all there is to learn.

Until late in the 19th century the pub was just the space either side of the entrance at number 9 and as late as the 1891 census there were families in numbers 11, and 13. And you might think that when the picture was taken this was still the case. The fence extends along the rest of the row and separates these properties from the pub.

But by 1901 all three were described as the Horse and Jockey which may have happened soon after the death of Miss Wilton who had lived at number 13 and died in 1896.

I would still like to know who owned the horse and cart in front of the Camel delivery vehicle, and whether the woman pushing the pram was the child’s mother or one of the many servants who were employed here in the years before the Great War.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, circa 1904-1912

Memoirs from Munuch .... 90 years ago ... one to listen to

This is one of those podcasts from BBC Radio 4 that I dipped into but kept missing the follow up episodes, so having tuned into episode 7 today*, I am now going back to listen to all 9.

The Pitter Hotel, Saltzburg, undated

It starts with the unpublished memoirs of the great grandfather of writer Joe Dunthorn.

"Drawn to a family legend about his German-Jewish family’s dramatic escape from Nazi Germany in 1936, the writer Joe Dunthorne accidentally discovers a far more unsettling history". 

There is the story of how this great-grandfather worked on a chemical weapons factory for the Nazis, and the inspirational account of the 17 year old sister of his great-grandfather who set up a Jewish kindagarten for children she encountered on the streets of Munich. 

From ssmall beginnings it grew into a "full Jewishsocial care organization".

"Episode 7. The City Forgets

In Munich, Joe traces a very different side to his family history, events that were left out of his great-grandfather’s memoir.

Written and presented by Joe Dunthorne, Produced by Eleanor McDowall, Music by Jeremy Warmsley, Mixing engineer, Mike Woolley, Story consultant, Sarah Geis, Executive producer, Alan Hall, A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4.*

And is avaialble from Penguin Books.**

Picture; picture post cards of the Pitter Hotel, Saltzburg, from the collection of the Simpson family

*7. The City Forgets, The History PodcastHalf-Life Episode 7 of 9, Half Life The History Podcast BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002cfqb 

**Children of Radium, A Buried Inheritance, Joe Dunthorne

Gasholders I have known and loved ........... no 3 inside the Rochdale Gas works

Now I am well aware this is a cheat ............. less a gasholder and more the inside of the Rochale Road Gas works.

But I have included it the series Gasholders.

The picture is entitled Gas Works Drawing Coke Rochdale Road and dates from 1894.

This was the time when “town gas” was manufactured on site and didn’t come down a pipe from the North Sea or in a container ship from somewhere on the other side of the world.

Back in 1894 Henry Tidmarsh recorded this one along with over 300 other  illustrations for the book Manchester Old and New which  was published in 1894 by Cassell with a text by William Arthur Shaw.

In three big volumes it told the history of the city but the real value of the book was in Tidmarsh's vivid depictions of Manchester, with streets and buildings animated with people.

Pictures; Gas Works Drawing Coke Rochdale Road, 1894, Henry Tidmarsh, from Manchester Old and New, William Arthur Shaw, 1894

*Gasholders,https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Gasholders

Will those responsible ……… return the drinking fountain to the Rec on Beech Road

It is one of those silly stories which started with a couple of pictures of the Rec in the early morning.

Early morning on the Rec, 2021

And progressed through to a newspaper report from September 1897 of an ordinary meeting of the Withington Urban District Council at which Mr. Burgess “intimated that a gentleman in Manchester, whose name he would not at present mention, had offered to give a drinking fountain to be placed in Chorlton-cum-Hardy”.*

I had been looking for information about the early years of the Recreation Ground on Beech Road.**

It had been opened in the May of 1896, and was gift form Lord Egerton of a strip of land which had for centuries been known as Row Acre.***

And here I went very  wrong, because so engrossed was I in the research that the fountain and the Rec came together and for a brief while I went searching for just where the drinking fountain might have been located on what is now called Beech Road Park.

Waiting for something to happen, 2021

All of which will allow Mr. Pedantic of Provis Road to mumble that the story is a nonsense, and artificially connects pictures of the Rec on a Tuesday morning with the real drinking fountain which was on Chorlton Green.

And he would be right, leaving me to reflect on that earlier bit of public open space which is surrounded by two pubs, the old parish burial ground, the village school along with two former farm houses.

Today most of us think of Chorlton green as an open space of grass ringed by trees but this was not how it has always been.

Before the turn of the 19th century it may have been much bigger and indeed for most of that century was not even open to the people of the village, having been enclosed by Samuel Wilton and not returned to public use until the 1890s.

And then for a great stretch of time remained without grass but did have a pretty neat water fountain.

The Green, circa 1900

The picture dates from 1906 when the Horse and Jockey was still just a set of beer rooms on either side of the main door, Miss Wilton’s outhouse still jutted out from the building and the space between the main entrance and the sweet shop was still a private residence.

I have always liked the lamp which stands on the green, with its hint of Narnia.

And back in the May of 1986 I can remember walking past it in the early evening and coming across a string quartet playing around its base.  Today people would just take it in their stride mutter something about it being typically Chorlton, but back then it struck me as the promise of things to come.

Which later that night with the defeat of the Conservative candidate and the election of the first Labour Councillor it  indeed seem to herald something new.

But being a historian I have to own up to the fact that the following year the Conservatives were back but they were on borrowed time, and 1987 marked the final year that a Conservative would be elected from Chorlton to the Town Hall.

The year before may have been the first string quartet on the green but it has not been the last.

The drinking fountain, circa 190o

I have to say I prefer the grass but lament the loss of the fountain.  

First it lost its cups and then vanished sometime in the 1920s or 30s.  To my mind that was a loss.  Public fountains are wonderful places to meet people, spend time chatting and just having a drink on a hot day.

Once it would have been the village pump which offered all three and which on hot summer days had the added bonus of a place the kids could play.

Now there is a lot more history to explore in the photograph of the fountain but I rather think I will leave that for another time.

To which Michael Wood has added, "My recollection is that the fountain on the rec was located centrally outside the shelter, as on the attached snip from the georeferenced maps website showing OS 25” 1892-1914 series.  

It was the same design as was used in Chorlton Park near the tennis courts, a perfunctory iron structure with domed hoods over the outlets, operated by a button on top -  nothing like the elaborate ornamental feature on the Green.  Can’t find an image at the moment, but I could draw one!  

The Rec, 1914

They must have been a common municipal feature in their time, but by the mid-sixties they were semi-functioning or defunct. "

And I hope he does, as it is I never knew about the bandstand.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; the Rec very early on a Tuesday morning from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the drinking fountain on the green, circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection

*District Councils, Manchester Guardian, September 10th, 1897

**Public Recreation Grounds at Withington, Manchester Guardian, May 18th, 1896

***Breaking News ……….. the Rec on Beech Road is officially opened, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2020/04/breaking-news-rec-on-beech-road-is.html

Passing Burton's on Well Hall Road to the sound of Betty Everitt and Judy Street

Now I have fond memories of the old Burton’s at the top of Well Hall Road.

It was here that I bought my first suit, more than a few shirts and the odd tie, although I do confess it ran a poor second to Harry Fenton's and even Payne's on the High Street.

Of course there will be those with equally happy stories to tell of the dances that were held upstairs.

Not that I ever went.

During the mid 60s I still commuted back to New Cross for school and so had yet to find friends in Eltham and by the time I started at Crown Woods in 1966 there were plenty of other places to go with the shed load of new people I had met.

That said on the long walks back from Grove Park after an evening with Ann I did sometime pass the dance hall after one of the more rowdy evenings.

And that is a shame because it will have been there that I guess I would have herd live versions of Betty Everitt’s  Getting Mighty Crowded* and Judy Street’s What.**

It would be years later in Manchester at the Twisted Wheel and later still at Placemate that I would fully come to appreciate these songs.

And I still have a fond spot for the opening lines of Getting Mighty Crowded, with its message of losing a lover ........................

“I'm packing up my memories
And I'm gonna move
On out of your heart

Turning in my keys
And I'm gonna move
On out of your heart

Cause there ain't
Room enough for two
And sharing your heart
With someone new
Will never do"

At which point I suppose I should launch into the story of Burton’s which replaced the Congregational Church and was itself supplanted by a Big Mac.

But I won’t instead I shall go off and listen to Betty Everitt who sadly is no longer with us and Judy Street who still is.

Picture; looking west down the High Street, 2014, from the collection of Elizabeth and Colin Fitzpatrick & Jean Gammons, 2013

* Getting Mighty Crowded, Betty Everitt, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AmwoK6uw5Q


** What, Judy Street, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2NySUcbv3w

What do we do with an Empire? ……. the answer from 1945

 I suppose I was the last generation which went through school being taught that the “sun never set on the British Empire”.

It was a grandiose boast which in my junior school was backed up with wall maps displaying a quarter of the world coloured red, and text books which were full of heroic figures of Empire.

And this was despite the fact that India “the Jewel in the Crown of Empire” had become two independent countries two years before I was born, followed during the 1950s and early 60s by a big chunk of that red.

Not that this had been arrived at entirely peacefully.  

The resistance of indigenous peoples through the 19th and early 20th centuries to British rule was matched by the colonial independence movements that followed the Second World War, with groups in Palestine wanting an independent Jewish state, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya and EOKA in Cyprus.

All of which was recognized by Harold Macmillan in his “winds of change” speech in February 1960 which was made against the backdrop of France’s defeat in Indo China and its continuing brutal colonial war in Algeria.

So while Britain may have divested itself of most of its empire with a degree of good grace, it wasn’t entirely done without a measure of resistance, which was overlooked by those teaching us the history of Empire.

Nor of course were we made privy to the degree of exploitation and savagery which marked the acquisition of that empire, all of which is now presented in scholarly and expensive books, some of which are more readable than others.

What they have in common of course is that the story is over, and while we still live with the legacy of empire, from the debates around Black Lives Matter, to the continued impoverishment of certain Commonwealth countries, the debate on what should happen to the Empire is over.

Not so in 1945, when Alexander Campbell published his book It’s Your Empire, which was a Left Book Club Edition.*

Britain had only just come out of the war, a war which had been prosecuted by units of the armed forces drawn from almost all of the Empire many of whom were volunteers.

So I was intrigued by Mr. Cambell’s book which has sat on a shelf for over 40 years, but which I have never read.

The Manchester Guardian described it as “a rapid and up-to-date survey of current Colonial problems in their current guise.  The reader is conducted from the West India to the Mediterranean, the Middle East & Africa; then to India & Ceylon, the Fra East & the Western Pacific.  Nor are the outlying islands such as Mauritious & St Helena overlooked.  It is a full your of the dependent Empire.  The result is a valuable and vivid conspectus …. By the author of Empire in Africa & Smuts and the Swastika”.**

And at the outset, Mr. Campbell dispels a serious of myths and misunderstandings about the Empire and its history, beginning with that much hawked myth that “the British are supposed to have acquired it in a fit of absentmindedness”, and that the public were well informed about all things Empire.

Going on to point out that “large parts of the Empire were ‘collected’ comparatively recently, with huge tracts of Africa and many Pacific islands becoming British possessions only in the last few decades”.

This he cites as one reason for the public’s ignorance about Empire, along with the events of two world wars and the Depression, which perforce had concentrated minds on more pressing things.

To which he adds that people had been very badly informed.  “In schools, children have been told that the Empire is a big happy , united  ‘loyal’ family and that the burning ambition of every little Indian, African and Malayan boy is to die  for the Union Jack”.

But the book is more than just a broad diatribe on the Empire, and instead looks at each of the British possessions, examining the present as well as the historical economic background, supported by a bank of Government statistics which point to to the unequal relationship of many of the indigenous peoples to the ruling elite and the way that those “home peoples” have and were being exploited.

My own interest in the Middle East drew me to his section on Palestine and the conflict between the Arab and Jewish populations, but those on the other parts of the Empire are equally instructive.

And as ever the book was at its best when quoting the figures which dispel some of the myths, like “One third of all registered deaths in the British Colonial Empire are caused by tuberculosis, pneumonia and bronchitis; pellagra and scurvy are widespread , worm infestations almost universal in many regions and in West Africa, venereal disease afflicts 50 to 90 per cent of the population.

In every colony many if not most children suffer from malnutrition, and in some some African and Eastern towns the infantile death-rate is between 40 and 50 percent. Conditions in India are no better.  These facts are culled from the official report  of the Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire”.

But the book looks to a positive and optimistic future, where the colonies become independent, but need to be supported arguing, “The colonies have ceased to be what they were in the past -treasure-houses of loot.  

The treasures have been removed; they went to to build Liverpool and Manchester. If the colonies are not to become the world’s waste lands, gigantic sums will have to be spent on combating soil erosion, rooting out disease, banishing malnutrition, and rehousing, reclothing and educating the people”.

And the book draws on the voices of those indigenous peoples like that from the manifesto of the Federation of Trade Unions of Nigeria which concluded, "The free peoples of the world look forward with intense eagerness to the fast approaching post-war years, when attention will be focused on the extermination of poverty, unemployment, excessive hours of work , and low wages, and Nigeria is not an exception …. [we shall] tenaciously explore all available constitutional  means with a view to achieving for the average worker such favourable conditions as ensure to a citizen under the British flag”.

So an interesting book, written a full two years before the independence of India, just months after the end of the war.

And a book still available.

Pictures; Ceylon, 1944 from the collection of Bob Ward

* It’s Your Empire, Alexander Campbell, 1945, Left Book Club Edition, Victor Gollancz

**It’s Your Empire, Manchester Guardian, October 14th, 1945

On the streets of Manchester, polishing shoes, selling food and offering up fun balloons

It is one of those things about city life that there is always someone who will sell you almost anything.

Just over a hundred years ago down by the Cathedral walls, the artist H.Tidmarsh recorded the old man selling newspapers, a woman selling potatoes and a boy polishing shoes, while up by the Infirmary at the top of Market Street he painted another street vendor selling food.

Not far away by Hunts Bank late at night young children plied the streets selling newspapers in the early hours of the morning.

And a century and a bit later, out on Market Street the crowd surged past the burger van, negotiated the balloon man, and stopped to buy a political paper.

Pictures; Manchester street sellers by H.E. Tidmarsh from Manchester Old and New, William Arthur Shaw, 1894 and from the collection of Andrew Simpson, June 2013

And over the next few weeks I shall focus on more of the street vendors who plied the streets of Manchester  in the late 19th century and their counterparts who still do the same business today.

Jack Beasley ……… his collection of Chorlton pictures ……. and a story … part 1

This is Chequers Road, sometime in the 1940s.

Chequers Road/Church Road circa 1940s

Of course, back then it was Church Road, and it is one of a remarkable collection of family snaps belonging to Kirsty.

Her family have lived in Chorlton for over 80 years and many of the photographs are of this one road

Her dad lived at number 41, and as they say the cross in the picture marks the spot.

Walk along the road today and the scene is pretty much the same, barring the inevitable number of cars and the lack of net curtains which were still a badge of respectability.

Outside 39 Church Road, with the "criss cross brown paper", circa 1939-45

Now if I wanted to hazard a guess, I think our picture will predate 1939, or certainly have been taken after 1945.

And the clue is in the absence of “the criss cross brown paper anti blast tape at the windows”, which Jack Beasley refers to on another of the pictures which was taken in the garden of 39 Church Road during the last world war.

The group consist of “Gerald Booth left, Jack Beasley, right, Gerald Vodon, [below] left, and Phyllis Vodon, [below] right”.

 Flo Beasley, date unknown

I know Kirsty has done some family research and the stories of the four will feature later, but for now I am intrigued by the unknown woman posing with a bunch of flowers.

I think she will be in the front garden of number 43, because comparing the image with others the front gate behind her is a match for number 41.*

And a trawl of the 1939 Register shows a Mrs Pauline Donbavand listed as living there along with her husband and Walter Meadows who was a Police Constable.

Pauline gave her occupation as a “Theatre Usherette”, had been born in 1909 and was two years younger than her husband.  

There is a slight confusion of the spelling of her surname which is a little unclear from the official record and Police Constable Meadows is listed as married but his wife is missing.

But like census returns, the 1939 Register was conducted on one night in early September and Mrs Meadows may have been elsewhere.

Added to which our unknown lady may not be Mrs Donbavand.  

According to Kirsty  she  could actually be  "my grandmother Flo Beasley", and certainly looking at family photographs there is a resemblance between the lady with the flowers and her grandmother.

So I rather think that is our mystery woman.

Outside 41/43 Church Road, date unknown

Equally intriguing is the way that some entries are redacted, so while Florence, Lilian and George Beasley appear, another two are hidden from view. 

That said I know that Florence was a “Bedding Machinist”, Lillian a “Shorthand typist” and George a "sapper" in the “Royal Engineers”, added to which an official returned to the list and changed Lillian’s status from single to married and including her new surname of Symonds.

There was nothing odd in the official alterations, as the 1939 Register was a working document and was used both for compiling the war time Identity cards, and for the new National Health Service which came into being in 1948.

Leaving me just to reflect that 83 years ago the occupations of those on Church Road, included two “house painters and paper hangers” a “retired Foreman lamp lighter”, an “Electrical engineer” along with a "chimney sweep", "a salesman", and a lorry driver.  With these were the familiar “unpaid domestic duties” and with a nod to the war, an “Auxiliary Fireman based at No.158 Manchester", and a number of servicemen.

I wonder what a contemporary tally of occupations would reveal.

Location; Chequers Road/Church Road, Chorlton

Pictures; Church Road circa 1939-45, from the collection of Kirsty

*There is however one hiccup and that is the modern street numbers for 41 and 43, do not correspond to what I think was the case in 1939 which may mean there was a change of numbers after 1939 ..... or I have just got it wrong.