One hundred years of one house in Chorlton ....... part 152 ….. birds …. Mr Gratrix …. and a pipe

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. *

In the garden, 2025

Yesterday we had the crows.

Well, I think they were crows.  They were black made that distinctive caa, caa sound which was both loud and repetitive and stayed with us all day.

But then apart from robins, pigeons and magpies I would be hard pressed to identify any bird.

Back in the 1950s growing up in southeast London there were heaps of house sparrows, those brown small birds which were the backdrop to urban living.

Not that they seem to like us in our house.  

I can’t remember the last time there was one in our garden, which my Wikipedia confirms with the brutal observation that since the 1970s house sparrows have “declined by 68% overall and about 90% in some regions … [with] the RSPB listing the house sparrow’s UK status as red”**

Not so in the 1840s when our bit of land was rented by Samuel Gratrix who lived just a little east of us on the other corner of Beech and Beaumont.

Mr Gratix's farmhouse and his field to the left which is our house, 1854

His farm was known as Bowling Green farm and in total he rented seven acres of land.

Some, like our field was turned over to arable, but he also had pasture and meadowland along with an acre and a bit of orchard.

And I doubt he would have welcomed the sight of sparrows in his fields. 

They were particularly thought of as troublesome and a danger to the crops in the township, and so there had been a tradition of paying a bounty on each dead sparrow presented to the constable who paid the prize from the local funds.  

A dead sparrow or its head duly taken to the constable was worth a halfpenny each, while an egg brought in the lesser sum of a farthing.  For the young eager for a little spending money this was a wonderful incentive, although some enterprising young lads were less than honest when they found a few dead sparrows on a manure heap at Oak House Farm in 1843.  

The sparrows were given to John Brundrett who was the constable for the year, which had a tinge of irony given that it was his farm. ***  

The clay pipe, 2014

But already by the time of this great sparrow crime, the practice was on the way out.  Farmers were realizing that the bids actually performed a valuable service in eating insects which were more of a pest, and it was down to Thomas Cookson another constable and farmer up by Dark Lane to abolish the custom. 

Where in all of this were crows is yet to be discovered.

But I have always associated them was cold winter weather, which has more to do with a book I read in Junior three at school sometime around 1959. 

The book featured a young boy much my age living in the countryside in the 1920s.  Given the other reading books available to us I suspect mine dated from that decade, and what has stuck with me is the image of a desolate and empty country lane in the middle of December save for a pair of crows making their melancholy call to each other across a crisp landscape.

Along Beech Road, 2024

Of course there is no evidence that back then they were here, and all I do have for that time when Mr Gratrix farmed our garden is a small broken clay pipe, which may have been discarded by someone walking past the field or perhaps even by the man himself.  

That said it is equally likely to have come from a consignment of night soil transported here from Manchester and spread over the fields.

Looking for the butterfly, 2025

His close neighbour Mr. Bailey regularly bought the stuff to spread on his bit of land on the opposite side of Beech Road and we have a receipt for a ton which he bought in 1853.

None of which gets me closer to the crows, which today have left us, making the garden a quieter place, save for the occasional butterfly which flits from one plant to another, reminding me again of the abundance of such insects which occupied my growing up.

But that is for another day.

Location; Beech Road

Pictures; Photographs, 2014-2025 of our garden from the collection of Andrew Simpson, Mr Gratrix's field, 1844, from the OS Lancashire, 1844, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*The Story of a House, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/11/one-hundred-years-of-one-house-in.html

**The House sparrow, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_sparrow

*** Ellwood, Chapter 8 Pace Egging & other customs, December 26th 1885