The history of Eltham in just 20 objects ........Nu 1 the Tram sheds

The challenge is to write a history of Eltham in just 20 objects which are in no particular order, and have been selected purely at random.

Anyone who wants to nominate their own is free to do so, just add a description in no more than 200 words and send it to me.

Today I have chosen those three buildings on Well Hall Road beside the parish church.  For over a century they consisted of a waiting room flanked by public lavatories.  They were originally built to serve tram passengers when the service began in 1910 and carried on in to the age of the motor bus.  In the 1970s the planners wondered if they should be demolished for a public place.  In their way they are a little bit of our history.

Picture; courtesy of Jean Gammons

Secrets from a Chorlton grave yard ……

I am looking at the remains of a clay pipe dating from around 1831.

King William lV pipe 1831-37

I can be fairly confident of that date because 1831 was the year of the coronation of William lV and our pipe carries a reference to that coronation.

The mystery is how it got to be in the graveyard.  Eric of Needham Avenue will be quick to advance outlandish explanations, but I suspect it was just lost or thrown away, but could of course belong to one of our gravediggers.

It was found along with a selection of coins, tokens, buttons  and a ring during a series of archaeological digs, not long before the graveyard was landscaped.

The dig in 1981

Now the trouble with archaeological digs is that for most of us they look just like a jumble of unconnected holes in the ground with a few bits of stone poking up out of the earth.

Which pretty much seems to be the case from this picture taken in 1981 of the old parish church during the dig conducted by Angus Bateman

He began “some exploratory and very amateurish digs, at weekends, intermittently between October 1970 and August 1972” * and concluded he needed to gain more experience in running a dig and to this end enrolled in a course in archaeology at Manchester University.  

The subsequent 1977 dig formed the project for that certificate and led on to further digs culminating in the 1980-81 season which was carried out with South Trafford Archaeological Group.

The graveyard, 2012

The excavations and the subsequent research undertaken by Angus have helped with an understanding of the two churches which stood on the site from about 1512 till 1949 and a possible dating sequence for the extension of the graveyard in the early nineteenth century.  

The fragments from the later church were carefully analysed and recorded and in some cases Angus was able to track the manufacturers, some of whom were still trading in the 1970s.  He also undertook a very detailed record of all the gravestones, including an analysis of the style and composition of the inscriptions and some work on the light they threw on life expectancy amongst the young in the township.

Location; Chorlton Graveyard

Pictures; the fragment of the King William lV pipe from the collection of Angus Bateman, the dig in 1981 from the Lloyd Collection and the graveyard in 2012 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

* Bateman, Angus J., Excavations and Other Investigations at Old St Clements Church Yard Chorlton Manchester 1977, Report of work done in part fulfilment of the Certificate Course in Methods of Archaeology, Extra-mural Department, University of Manchester, held by South Trafford Archaeological Group

Lost and forgotten streets of Manchester ................ nu 53 Silver Street, a bus station and some nasty history

Now this is Chorlton Street Bus Station in the 1960s and the image presents a bit of mystery, but more of that later.

Chorlton Street Bus Station, 1964

For now it is that gap between the office block and the ramp to the right of the picture and Chorlton Street which gave its name to the bus station which interests me.

That gap was the continuation of Silver Street.

You can still walk down Silver Street from Aytoun Street which ran on to David Street but my bit has vanished.

Back in the 1850s Silver Street and its neighbours were a warren of small closed courts leading off narrow alleys and filled with small back to back houses.

They were not perhaps the worst the city had to offer but they were neither the best.  In his case notes during the cholera outbreak of 1832, Dr Gaultier offers up a a vivid picture of the area. Chorlton Street he wrote “was tolerably clean and open but the vicinity crowded and populous.”*

Silver Street, 1849

But the home of the Bullock family was dire.

Mr and Mrs Bullock lived in one room with their two children and Mr Bullock’s mother.

The room was on the upper storey of a “filthy and crowded house” and was equally as “filthy.”

Even before they contracted cholera none were seen to be in good health and baby Martha aged eight months was “ricketty, and emaciated.”

In the course of just one week all of them died of cholera.

A month later our doctor was back in Silver Street attending Jane White who lived in a cellar and who died just days after contracting the disease.

Today Chorlton Street and Silver Street look far removed from the mass of courts, alleys and crowded houses of 1832 and that stretch of Silver Street occupied by Jane White is now underneath Chorlton Street Bus Station.

And here is the puzzle with that first picture, because read the histories of the bus station and they all agree that it was opened in 1950, redesigned in 1967 with the addition of the multi story car park and went through a major rebuild in 2002.

Major Street and the lost Silver Street, 1963

Now all of that is fine, but the caption on the picture offers up a date of 1964 which means that somebody is wrong.

I am confident someone will offer an explanation for the date of the rebuilt bus station and while I wait I suggest that those wishing to walk the past can just step back into the past can get a stab at it, because that vanished bit of Silver Street is now the entrance to a small car park between the back of Yates’ and the car park ramp, while the small road that runs along the bus station is the continuation of Major Street, but that is for another time.

Silver Street, 2016

But that is not quite all, because soon after I posted the story Andy Roberston sent me this picture of the corner of Silver Street where it joins Princess Street.

In may haste to complete the story I had failed to go looking for any more of Silver Street.  So the intrepid seeker after lost streets of Manchester can walk along another bit of my street, although it does end in a car park.

Location; Manchester

*The Origin and Progress of the Malignant Cholera in Manchester, Henry Gaulter M.D., 1833case notes no 5-8, page 162 and nu 71, page 178

Pictures; Chorlton Street Bus Station,  W. Higham, 1964, m56893, the ramp under construction 1963, W. Higham, m56982, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass  Silver Street from Andy Robertson  2016, and detail of Silver Street 1849 from the OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1849, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

The invitation from the Northern Quarter ....... and a mystery

There are still a few of those odd little passages and open doors in the Northern Quarter which beckon you in with the promise of something different and a bit edgy.

Tib Street, 2023

And so, it is with the passage which leads off from Tib Street, down a narrow way opening out onto a small court.

With a degree of imagination and with the light fading fast you could conjure up one of those places beloved of Dickens where few ventured who were not local.

Once there were plenty of them and anyone who was a stranger might well regret letting their curiosity get to them and walk through.

In the 1870s the Manchester Guardian reported on heaps of these places, many of which were off Deansgate and whose reputation for criminality and low life was such that the Police seldom ventured there alone.*

I doubt that our passageway is that dangerous flanked as it is by a florist and a café .

Today it it leads to  the rear of the Freemount pub which fronts Oldham Street.

But what is interesting is that it shows up on Adshead’s map of Manchester dated 1851.

Tib Street, and The King Inn, 1850

And then as now it led to a pub which back then was the King Inn whose landlord was George Todman.

Now I have become interested in Mr. Todman, because he like me was from Eltham in what was then Kent.  

He was 69, married to Mary who was 55 and  was born in Nottingham.  

They shared the property with eight others, three of whom were their children along with a grandchild, a servant, a lodger and on the night of the census a visitor and a “child”

The visitor was Rebecca Stevens from Derby who gave her age as 22, while the child, George Smith was just 8 years old and was from Manchester.

Just how young George got to be living with the Todman’s is unclear but intrigues me, and of course provides that bit of mystery which deserves more research.

As for the pub it commanded an annual estimated rental value of £120 which marks it off as a going concern and was owned by a “Hobson”.

Thomas Street, 2023

And that just leaves that other “invitation to the Norther Quarter which is on Thomas Street and amounts to an entrance to a gym in the cellar of the building.

Location; the Northern Quarter

Pictures; that mysterious passageway, 58 Tib Street, 2023 and total sports, Thomas Street, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and in 1851 from Adshead’s map of Manchester, Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ 

*Walking the streets of Manchester in 1870, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Walking%20Manchester%20in%201870

** 75 Oldham Street, 1851 census, Enu 1r 19 Market Street and 75, Oldham Street Manchester Rate Books, 1852

Arriving at Greenwich ……. long before now ….

It will be over 65 years ago that I first caught sight of the Queen’s House at Greenwich.

The Queens House, 1979

We had been on an adventure out of Peckham, walked all the way to Blackheath and then by degree through Greenwich Park to that point where General Wolf and the Royal Observatory stand facing down views of the River and beyond.

Nothing quite prepared me, John Cox or Jimmy O’Donnell for that view or for that matter the expanse of grass, bushes and trees which we had just encountered.

Arriving at Greenwich, 1979

Its nearest equivalent was Peckham Rye and the park and they paled into insignificance.

And once we had moved to Eltham in the spring of 1964 , both Blackheath and Greenwich Park along with that stretch of the River became my playground.

A decade and a bit later I took one of only two river trips from Westminster.  Both were made on a whim and an expensive and a long way of getting home from Central London via the River and Greenwich, which in turn wasted a return railway ticket.  But such are whims that make for memories.

Of course since then and since I took the pictures much has changed, and the view from the summit down to the River and beyond is dramatically different.

Location; Greenwich

Pictures; a lost Greenwich, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Of floods and weirs and peaceful places, on the edge of Turn Moss

The weir in 1915

I really don’t do enough pictures on the blog and rarely do those then and now sort of stories.  So here with the help of Nigel Anderson and Michael J Thompson of Hardy Productions UK* are some shots of the weir on the edge of Turn Moss just where the river takes one of its dramatic twists.

Now the Mersey is prone to flooding and after a particularly bad flood in 1799 the weir was built to channel storm water across the plain and into the Kickety Brook and so lessening the danger to the aqueduct which carried the Duke’s Canal.

And floods and the story of floods regularly pop up on the blog including the tale of the weir and Kickety Brook,.

Almost the same spot today © Nigel Anderson

So when Michael told me that he and Nigel had been down at the weir I just had to ask permission to use their photographs, along with two from 1915 which was the last time it served the purpose it was built for.


Their pictures show a benign spot, but it was not always so.

The river could flood with little warning and on one occasion a farmer just had time to release his horses from the cart as the water swept across the open land.

The weir from the flood plain, 1915

Another time in the July of 1828 flood water transported hay ricks from the farm behind Barlow Hall down to Stretford only later to take them back, while later floods proved to be even more destructive with one destroying the bridge across Chorlton Brook.

It was, wrote Thomas Ellwood the local historian
“no uncommon thing to see the great level of green fields completely covered with water presenting the appearance of a large lake , several miles in circuit,” and he recorded six major floods between  December 1880 and October  1881.

Looking towards Kickety Brook from the weir © Michael J Thompson

Not that it always worked.  Soon after it had been built flood water swept it away and during the nineteenth century neither the weir nor the river banks prevented the Mersey bursting out across the plain.

This happened in 1840 and in the following year it was rebuilt by the engineer William Cubitt.

After litigation the cost of repair was borne by the Bridgewater Trust who paid out £1,500, the Turnpike Commissioners £500, Thomas de Trafford £1,000 and Wilbraham Egerton £1,000.

*Hardy Productions UK https://sites.google.com/site/hardyprodsuk/

Pictures; of the weir in 1915 from the Lloyd collection and the weir today courtesy of Nigel Anderson and Michael J Thompson

“that plague has entered almost every house in the village which contains children.”

The April and May of 1886 were anxious times for any in the township with children for we were in the grip of a measles epidemic.

This according to one resident “has been ranging for many weeks now” with the result that “between two hundred and three hundred of our children have been attacked and five or six have died.”*

And the issue was bound up with bigger concerns of the general lack of sanitation and the tardiness of the public health authorities to act in the face of the epidemic

There had been growing disquiet about the high level of pollution in Chorlton Brook since at least 1875 with the local board a decade later commenting that it “is being constantly polluted with the sewage and other liquid refuse of several large manufacturing towns” and “emits most noxious odours and offensive gases which pollute the air.”**

And in 1881 a government inquiry called for the closing of the parish churchyard because the place was not only full but in an effort to accommodate more bodies, the authorities had resorted to removing some and burying others within 22 inches of the surface.  Added to this there was the assertion that there “were a great number of houses here which are jerry built... and one or two spots where hollow places have been filled up with stuff which is nothing more than night soil.”

Here then was a real threat to public health made worse by the unwillingness of the authorities to close the schools during the epidemic with the result “that the plague has entered almost every house in the village which contains children.”

Of course the authorities and medical opinion sought to argue an alternative picture.  It was said by Dr Rains that the epidemic was “now passing away” and “the death rate has been very small.”

And at the heart of the rebuttal was the plain fact that “The death rate varies, as we all know, in the different townships, but the rate per 1,000 in different townships of children under five years of age in 1885 was as follows, Withington 3.3, Didsbury, 4.3, Chorlton-cum-Hardy 3.2 Burnage 5.5 showing very much in favour of Chorlton.”

But then there are statistics and dammed statistics, and when the figures are viewed over a longer period there may well have been less room for complacency.  Taking the years from 1881-4 together and comparing the death rate across the townships Chorlton recorded the highest deaths of under fives per thousand of the population.

But measles is not caused by poor sanitation.  And in the absence of hard evidence about the state of housing conditons it is difficult to draw a conclusion about the general threat to public health.

By the 1880s there were only six houses left which were wattle and daub which one Parliamentary Committee had argued were often no better than hovels.  True there were plenty of brick built cottages which were just one up one down and many that predated 1840 and there was still overcrowding in some of them.  But Dr Rains maintained that “the main drainage of the place being very good, that all dwellings are connected therewith, under the superintendence if the surveyor to the Local Board.”

Nor if he can be believed was there any evidence of Typhoid during the period which along with Cholera is a bed fellow of unsanitary conditions.

So despite the concerns over the smelly brook and the odd set of bones on the highway perhaps he was right when he asserted that people wanting to settle here could be confident that Chorlton was “more healthy than most others round Manchester whatever their elevation may be.”  And he had come “here for the good of my health in June 1868.”

Of course I might yet be proved wrong.  But then that is the fun of history. You do the research, draw the conclusions, write what you think and then something new pops up.  Well we shall see.

Location; Chorlton, Manchester

Pictures; extracts from the Manchester Guardian, 1885

*Samuel Norbury Williams, letter to the Manchester Guardian May 17th 1886.

**Pollution of streams in the Withington District, Manchester Guardian September 12 1885