The lost woods of Chorlton …… and a mystery concerning Mrs Lydia Brown and John Holland

We are looking out on John Holland’s Wood which stretched west along Chorlton Brook towards the Bowling Green Inn.

John Holland's Wood, circa 1900, looking towards Brook Farm

Today the footpath to our left is Brookburn Road which once ran east to Barlow Moor Road and west into the village and then out again to eventually cross Turn Moss to Stretford.

John Holland's Wood, formerly the Cliffs, circa 1900

I can’t be sure exactly when it became known as John Holland’s Wood, but John Holland had taken over the family farm in 1865 on the death of his father. 

The Holland family were farming 54 acres around Chorlton from at least 1841 and their holdings were dotted about the township.

These included a strip of land on Row Acre which was the large field running along Beech Road, a stretch on the northern border beyond the Longford Brook and the delightfully named Back of the World which was located where Chorlton Brook joins the Mersey to the south of the stone bridge.

The Cliffs and Brookburn Farm, 1854

Back then, according to the 1854 OS map the stretch we can see in the picture was more heavily wooded, and was known as the Cliffs, which was rented by Lydia Brown who lived at Brook Farm, and farmed across the township, on land which she owned and land she rented from the Lloyd Estate.  

Added to which she owned the smithy on what is now Beech Road, the property used by the wheelwright, Mr. Brownhill on Sandy Lane and a portfolio of cottages.

We even have a snatch of a conversation she had with the journalist Alexander Somerville who came  to Chorlton-cum-Hardy in the summer of 1847 looking for potato blight, the disease which had ravaged Ireland, and was that summer causing concern in Derbyshire.

He stopped at Brook Farm, and reported his conversation with Mrs. Brown who complained about the ash trees which grew around the fields  “which are not only objectionable as all other kinds are in and around cultivated fields but positively poisonous to other vegetation, and ran through the ground causing much waste of land, waste of fertility, and doing no good whatever.  Squire Lloyd is the landlord.  

Brookburn Farm, circa 1900

Mrs. Brown a widow, is the tenant.  She keeps the farm in excellent order so far as the landlord’s restrictions will allow.  But neither herself nor her workmen must ‘crop or lop top’ a single branch from the deleterious ash trees."

And what is exciting is that we know just which fields she was referring to.  These were Rye Field and New Hey which were plots 317 and 318, and ran beside the woods and today form part of Chorltonville.

Despite not yet finding her on the census record I can track her and her husband across the Rate Books from the 1840s through to the mid 1870s.

The woods and Rye Field, 1845

And here is the mystery, because while Lydia Brown lived at Brook Farm which was roughly on the site of Brookburn School, the Holland family are also recorded at a Brook Farm which was according to the tithe record on the bit of Manchester Road which  for a century and a bit was the Conservative Club.

All of which is compounded by the census records which in 1861 place the Holland farm house  on Brookburn Road.

I will leave it to Eric, and who else cares to attempt an explanation, suggesting only that perhaps Lydia had given up farming by 1861, and was happy to live off the rents from her properties, leaving the Holland family to move closer to the woods which took their name.

Sadly, it is no longer possible to recreate the scene and reproduce an image from roughly the same spot.

The trees have vanished under what is part of Chorltonville and a new residential development which was built on the old dairy.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; John Holland’s Wood, and Brook farm from the Lloyd collection and the Cliffs in 1854 from the 1854 OS map of Lancashire showing a section of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and theTithe map of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1845

Chorlton Brook and the Cliffs at Holland Wood in 1847 ... part two

Holland Wood, by the Cliffs along Chorlton Brook, circa 1907

We are in Holland Wood, sometime at the beginning of the 20th century and according to the caption on the photograph, “on Chorlton Brook between Claude Road and Brook Road, looking from what is now Claude Road Bridge.”

This stretch of the brook was known as the Cliffs and had been well wooded, although by the time of our picture this seems to be less so.

Over the left is Brook Road and in the distance is Brook Farm.

Brookburn Road with Brookburn Farm in the distance, circa 1907

Back in 1847 the radical journalist Alexander Somerville* stopped at Brook Farm and reported his conversation with Lydia Brown the tenant farmer who complained about the ash trees which grew around the fields  “which are not only objectionable as all other kinds are in and around cultivated fields but positively poisonous to other vegetation, and ran through the ground causing much waste of land, waste of fertility, and doing no good whatever.  Squire Lloyd is the landlord.  

Mrs Brown a widow, is the tenant.  She keeps the farm in excellent order so far as the landlord’s restrictions will allow.  But neither herself nor her workmen must ‘crop or lop top’ a single branch from the deleterious ash trees."

He may even have wandered a little further along our stretch of the brook before up to the bridge over the Mersey and a conversation with Samuel Nixon also a farmer as well as the landlord of the Greyhound who was fairly disparaging about news papers and the news that came out of them.

The Brook, looking west

All of which has taken us away from Chorlton Brook which is the most southerly of our water courses It flows from the east into the township by Hough End.

By the time it arrives at this point it is already the product of many smaller streams of which the Gore and Red Lion Brooks are the last joining by Hough End.

For those prepared to leave the township the best glimpse of any of these streams is at Hough End Playing Fields where the Red Lion Brook comes out into the light and crosses the open before flowing underneath Hough End Crescent where it becomes Chorlton Brook.

Like so many of our journeys around the township back in 1847 we would have been surrounded by open fields.

But at the point where the Red Lion and Gore Brooks joined to become Chorlton Brook the landscape changed and the water course ran through an area bordered by trees known as Hough End Clough.

Sadly for the modern traveller the brook is lost again as it runs under Mauldeth Road West before reappearing and flowing past the high school and under Nell Lane.

The Brook with Hough End Hall, circa 1900

And just a little to the west of this point is one of those mystery watercourses, which might be another little stream flowing in an old brick tunnel or it may just have dried up.

But back in the 1840s it was clearly visible, coming in from the south across land farmed by Henry Jackson with field names like Old Marled Field and Great Thick Wood.

It fed into Chorlton Brook just below where the Brook now crosses Mauldeth Road West, through a wooded and wet area with the delightful name of Pitts and Bogs.  In its journey from the south it fed a number of ponds and as it flowed into the Brook it broadened out contributing to the swampy character of Pitts and Boggs.

Tracking it today is difficult and the Environment Agency has no record, but it may have followed a route which took it from the junction of Burton Road and Lapwing Lane, north towards the Brook, passing just east of Weller Avenue.  If so it may well be that the old disused railway line marks its course.

And yet another crossed Chorlton Park from two ponds just a little south and west of Brookfield House which is now owned by the Corporation and is divided between the warden’s office and an upstairs tenant.

The Brook as it flows through Chorlton Park, 2010

From now with just a small break we can walk alongside the Brook as it wanders through Chorlton Park and under Barlow Moor Road.  Back in 1847 the Nell Lane Bridge was a lower structure but still gave good views.
Looking east there was Hough End Hall standing in its own grounds which by then was the home of Henry Jackson and later Samuel Lomas who farmed 220 acres.  Directly south was Brookfield House, commanding fine views across what is now the park.

From here on the brook remains open to the air till it meets the Mersey.  Unfortunately as its route flows through private property there is no access to it till it crosses Brookburn Road.

There is a footpath which ran from Barlow Moor Road skirting Oak House Farm by the modern Oak House Drive and running down behind the gardens on the north side of South Drive and Claude and Brookburn Roads but this fell out of use and is now blocked off and it is very doubtful that it will be reinstated.

This is a great pity because it would allow our modern traveller to walk beside Brook along a steep wooded corridor known as the Cliffs which ran roughly along the route of the footpath.  Here the Brook skirts the edge of the village.  On the south side were Brook Cottage and Brook Farm.

Here to was the village pond which today was where the cark park of the Bowling Green Hotel stands. It stretched back from the lane to include all of the modern bowling green to the edge of Finney Drive and from the Brook to the hotel it contained fish and was rented out to gentlemen.

Once across Brookburn Road the course of the Brook twists and turns before flowing into the Mersey.

The land on either side would have mainly been meadows and running off from the water course would have been the ditches which allowed the farmers regularly water the land.  This as we know was a skilled task.

The Cliffs in 1841

Today while the area retains the popular name of the meadows the land does not resemble the former meadowland.

The scars from the tipping of rubbish are still visible and much of the land had been landscaped with trees artificial ponds and raised banks.

So today where young trees and bushes crowd in on the passer by back in 1847 it would have been more open with trees forming natural boundaries between fields. And not far from the bridge across the brook the land north was covered by an orchard which ran up to and over the old Road to the big pond on Turn Moss.

It was an one of the orchards that fascinated Alexander Somerville, but that is a story for another time.

Extract from THE STORY OF CHORLTON-CUM-HARDY, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton

Pictures; of Chorlton Brook passing through the Cliffs and by Hough End hall from the Lloyd Collection, as it passed through Chorlton Park from the collection of Andrew Simpson, detail of the Brook and the Cliffs from the OS map of Lancahire, 1841-53, courtesy of Digital Archives http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alexander%20Somerville

The day I lost a Chorlton Chartist

Well to be more accurate, it was more the day I invented one who never was. 

It all looked so good.  In the June of 1847 Alexander Somerville had walked the lanes of Chorlton looking for evidence of potato blight and discovered a potato called the “radical.”

His autobiography recalled how he had been flogged while in the army for distributing letters arguing that the military should not be used against those groups campaigning for the Reform Bill and there he was being quoted by Engels in The Conditions of the English Working Class.  So as you do I made an assumption and I was wrong.

He did “earnestly desire to see the enfranchisement of the working people” but disagreed with those Chartists who “think they can effect that great consummation by fighting for it.”* “In the first place, there is yet not a national desire for that enfranchisement; there is on the contrary, a general aversion to it among all persons of property.”  

This led him in turn to attack the Chartist leaders because “their practice has been to excite hatred between classes [and] until there is an alliance between classes there cannot be in Britain an act of universal enfranchisement.”

This correctly harps back to the convergence of interests between the reforming elements in the middle and working classes during the campaign for the reform bill in the 1830s but misses the point that by the late 1830s that shared interest did not exist anymore.  The middles class had the vote and could see no reason to share it.

So given the worsening economic situation, and the rejection of the first Charter it is easy to see how some Chartists might be drawn to physical force.

Now despite never being a pacifist Somerville was equally unhappy about the use of violence.  He had after all been flogged for trying to stop force being used against the supporters of reform in Birmingham in 1832, and maintained that the Chartists “avowed belief that they can do physical battle with a few wretched pikes, against the regularly armed military forces, are not likely to obtain sympathy of the people, interested in the preservation of property.”

It was this same opposition to civil insurrection which had led him in 1834 to inform on a plan  to assassinate members of the Cabinet and the Royal family and seize control of Parliament and the Bank of England.  In is autobiography Somerville justifies his actions on the grounds of the strife, loss of life and damage to property which would have ensued had the plot gone ahead.

But there is that other giveaway clue in his comments on the preservation of property, which mark him out as marching on a different path. He was convinced that those Chartists who were hostile “ to the existence of private capital , moneyed or landed” were wrong.  It was this that led him to oppose the Chartist Land Plan as unfeasible.

Equally he could see that “the capitalist, merchants, master manufacturers, and master shopkeepers” by continuing to block reform would not be able to escape the consequences of heightened class conflict.

So if the opposition to widening the franchise was because they believed “the mass of the people to be dangerously ignorant .... I would say educate liberally and universally. There is no middle course; either give schools and votes, or barrack yards and bullets.  I am for schools and votes.”

Now I may be airing a prejudice when I think that class interests might have been the hidden factor in the opposition to extending the vote, but as a principle I am right behind Alexander.

So not perhaps a Chartist who passed through Chorlton but a radical none the less.

*Somerville, Alexander, The Autobiography of a Working Man, 1848, page 509 Google edition page 521

Picture; The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10 1848, by William Kilburn

Voices from Chorlton ……… 175 years ago

In the summer of 1847 Alexander Somerville had come looking for potato blight, that disease which had ravaged the crops of Ireland and had been reported just a little further south in Derbyshire and what he found were a group of farmers and labourers all too happy to show him we were blight free.  

Mr Higginbotham ploughing Row Acre, 1893

Here were many of the people I had come to know, including James Higginbotham, farmer on the green, Lydia Brown whose farm was just a little to the east of the Bowling Green Hotel and old Samuel Nixon, market gardener and landlord of the Greyhound just over the river.

It is a remarkable piece because Somerville reported and in places quoted what they said.  Nothing quite fits you for hearing their voices, talking of farming issues, joking about what newspapers publish and complaining about their landlords.  These are the authentic voices of 175 years ago.

Nor is that quite it.  For when Somerville and Higginbotham inspect the potato field I know where it was. 

Row Acre, Chorlton Row, and the village 1854

It is the strip of land that ran from the Row along what is now the Rec beside Cross Road, and when they stood admiring the Rose of Sharon apple trees and the Newbridge pears we are just behind the Trevor Arms on what is now Beech Road.

It doesn’t take much imagination to recreate that orchard scene with the smell of William Davis’s smithy hard by and perhaps even the noise of the children in the nearby National school on the Green.

Likewise I am pretty sure I can locate the large bank of earth with ash trees which Lydia Brown was so unhappy about and fully understand why she might contemptuously refer to George Lloyd the landlord as Squire Lloyd because of his refusal to allow her to cut the trees back.

Above all it is that calm and steady confidence of the farmer that shines through.

When Mr Somerville came to Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1847

Along with Higginbotham’s pleasure that the weather has won out there is the certainty of a life time of experience that allows George Whitelegg to assert that he didn’t believe in blight. Whitelegg ran the Bowling Green Hotel farmed 36 acres and later would go into speculative building.

Mr Higginbotham was 'only afraid that the blight might come.  When it does come it will be time enough to raise the alarm'.

Mr Whitelegg, of Chorlton, told me that 'he was a potato grower, had heard of the blight, had looked for it, could not find it, and did not believe in it'.

Crossing the green meadows I was told at Brook Farm to go down a path under some trees and examine a field; 'for' said the workman who bad me to go, 'it is best for those who want to find the potato disease to look for it themselves and find their own disappointment.'

I told him that I did not want to find it; that I should be well satisfied to find that the blight was not there, to which he replied briefly, 'then, sir you get satisfaction.  The best grown potatoes in this part of the country are in that field, and never since the day that you and were born did the plants look better.'

Looking out towards the green from Mr Higginbotham's farmyard, circa 1880

I found them after close examination to be all that he described them. 

A large bank of earth with ash trees growing upon it – trees which are not only objectionable as all other kinds are in and around cultivated fields but positively poisonous to other vegetation, ran through the ground causing much waste of land, waste of fertility, and doing no good whatever.

Squire Lloyd is the landlord.  Mrs Brown a widow is the tenant.  She keeps the farm in excellent order so far as the landlord’s restrictions will allow.  But neither herself nor her workmen must 'crop or lop top' a single branch from the deleterious ash trees.

Again I was in the green meadows, where the rain that had newly fallen, and the fresh wind that was blowing, and the luxuriant herbage on every side, and the wild flowers prodigal of bloom, all proclaimed that the insurgents now in rebellion against bountiful Providence must soon be defeated and humiliated.

The bridge Mr Somerville crossed to visit the Greyhound, 1865

At Jackson’s Boat where I crossed the Mersey into Cheshire by the bridge which has superseded the boat, the bridge keeper, Samuel Nixon also publican of the Greyhound,  said 'I have been a farmer all my days and never saw anything that can grow out of land look better.  It is only int paper; they must have something to say in paper.'**

Now that is what I call history.

Location; Chorlton


Pictures;  Ploughing Row Acre before it became the Recreation Ground, 1896  Mr Higginbotham's farmyard, circa 1880s, from the collection of William Higginbotham, detail from the 1854 OS map for Lancashire by kind permission of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and the old bridge across the Mersey, circa 1865

*Somerville, Alexander, A Pilgrimage in Search of the Potato Blight, Manchester Examiner, June 19th, 1847

**Chorlton Row, is now Beech Road

**The Greyhound is now Jackson's Boat

Off to Didsbury, in the summer of 1847

Now I can be as adventurous as the next chap and have been known to venture out of the township as far as Didsbury.

It was after all where our farmers went to get their cereal milled and it was where my old chum Alexander Somerville ended up in the June of 1847.

He had come over to Chorlton looking for potato blight, moved across the Mersey by the Greyhound pub at Jackson’s Boat and ended up in Didsbury.  A place he wrote
“of great beauty- not surpassed even by the beautiful fields, meadows, gardens, and the public pathways through them, lying around London.”*

And went on to revel in the place stating boldly

“Let the traveller, passing out of Cheshire into Lancashire by the Northern Ferry, who loves to loiter on the road, and see sights, come at the hour of summer sunset.  Let him approach Didsbury, and look back suddenly through the trees, the traveller will see the houses standing on the brow of eminence, and the gardens with them, and the people looking out of opened windows, the very houses gazing, as it were, with wonder; and the old church, with its graveyard, and the dead of a thousand years around it, standing in the very brink of the eminence.”

This I have to say is not an advert for the place nor a way of ingratiating myself with people of a neighbouring township who might just in the fullness of time buy a copy of The Story of Chorlton-Cum-Hardy** which like Didsbury was a small rural community.

Instead it is a way of introducing a new occasional series highlighting places close by.

And I now have a special interest in the Didsbury  because it is where Miss Leete of Poplar Grove lived, and she is someone I am very interested in because in a rural area dependant on farming she was on the Ladies Committee of the National Anti-Corn Law Bazaar.  The bazaar was held in London in the May of 1845 and was part of the campaign to abolish the Corn Laws.  These had been introduced in 1815 to protect British agriculture but amongst the working class and industrial interests were highly unpopular.

But more of her later, along with and some other interesting aspects of Didsbury in the early 19th century.  In the mean time I finish with my picture of the Didsbury Hotel.  The caption gives a date of 1860-70.

At that time there was a regular horse bus service operating from Manchester to Cheadle which went from "All Saints and from the Commercial Office on Brown Street via Rusholme, Fallowfield and Didsbury 40 minutes past nine, half past seven, and every hour at night; on Sundays at ten, eleven, one, two, half past two, three, half past three, seven, eight and nine.”***

And for those who wanted to travel a little down market there were the carriers of which two operated from Manchester.  These were “James Crompton from 2a Palace Street [off Market Street] and Alfred Midwinter from the Cock, Mark lane [Withy Grove] daily.”


*Alexander Somerville, A Pilgrimage in search of the Potato Blight, The Manchester Examiner, June 19th 1847
** http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton
*** Slater’s Directory of Manchester & Salford 1863

Picture; from the Lloyd Collection

When we made cider and perry here in Chorlton in 1847

Back in 1847, the journalist Alexander Somerville had walked the lanes of Chorlton looking for evidence of potato blight, that disease which had destroyed the crops in Ireland, and was already in parts of northern Derbyshire.

He didn’t find any but recorded his conversations with some of our local farmers, one of which was James Higginbotham whose land included a strip along what is now the Rec on the corner of Beech Road and Cross Road.

The conversation turned away from potatoes to fruit which made up a significant part of the crops we grew for the Manchester markets and included raspberries, rhubarb, currants and gooseberries and above all apples and pears and in particular the Newbridge pear, and Rose of Sharon apple.

Look at any old maps from the mid 19th century and you are struck by the number of orchards across the township.  Most would have gone to the markets, but some would have been turned into cider and perry and drunk at home.

So it was of particular concern to James Higginbotham that in the June of 1847 his apples and pears were doing well.  As he said to Somerville who dutifully reported the conversations,

“The insects had made great havoc among the fruit in the adjoining orchard during the hot sunny days of May and the first week of June but the cold of last week and the rain of this had come in time to save still a good quantity.  He pointed to his Rose of Sharon apple trees which had bloomed so profusely as to be wonderful; they had been invaded by a terrible army of insects, and had hardly been able to maintain the conflict; but the myriads of diseased invaders wrapped in their winding sheets of cobwebs and laying upon the ground, where the rain had carried them, showed how beneficial the cold and rain had been.  There was still a goodly show of apples left, and the Rose of Sharon branches were again fresh, beautiful and healthy.  The Newbridge pears clustered upon the trees as if the invaders of the orchard had never been.”*

It is a priceless piece of reporting and not just because here are the voices of the people who lived in Chorlton over 160 years ago but because it provides us with the actual names of what types of apples and pears were grown here.

And I am indebted to Mary Pennell of the National Fruit Collection** who kindly dug out some information about both crops. “Newbridge – is in fact a ‘perry pear’. It is also known as ‘White Moorcroft’. Rose of Sharon – an apple variety that was exhibited from Cheshire in 1934. Unfortunately this is the only record for this apple but at least we know that it did at least exist at some stage.”  All of which is very exciting, well to me anyway.

Our Newbridge pears are harvested from the first to the third week in October about the same time as the Rose of Sharon apples.  Now what for me is revealing is that here we have the first evidence that along with cider our farmers were growing perry pears and must have been making perry.  And for anyone unsure, perry is made in much the same way as cider.

So there you have it, and tomorrow I think I shall pursue the story but in the meantime you can look again at the Newbridge pear and pear tree.  And reflect that some of the fruit trees which are there in our gardens may be have links to those seen by Somerville and farmed by Higginbotham.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures; Newbridge pears and pear tree from the National Fruit Collection

*Manchester Examiner, Saturday June 19th 1847

**http://www.nationalfruitcollection.org.uk/

The lost orchards of Chorlton

Today I went looking for the Newbridge pear and the Rose of Sharon apple.

They had been grown here in the 1840’s and had caught the eye of the journalist Alexander Somerville who reported that both pear and apple were “fresh, beautiful and healthy.”

I wrote about them recently and it occurred to me that I should go on an adventure with my old botanist chum and see if we could locate any last vestiges of them.  David reckoned that there were still orchards on the other side of the Mersey not far from Jackson’s Boat, but the weather was against us and never being one for getting wet the quest has been postponed.

But in the meantime I set out for find the ones that Alexander Somerville described.  Now these belonged to the farmer James Higginbotham and they took in the land either side of what is now Crossland Road up as far as Higson Avenue.

But there were others dotted across the township.  Now the productive life of an apple tree is about 30-40 years although some can go for 80 to a 100 years,* so with this in mind I doubt that any we find today will date from 1847, but you never know.

So I travel in hope, but even if we don’t find any Newbridge pears or Rose of Sharon apples what fascinates me is that they confirm the possibility that were making cider and perry here in the township.  Of course most of our apples were sent to the Manchester markets but some will have been retained for home use.  And because the Newbridge pear is a perry pear it follows that either we were making perry or we were sending it on to be turned into perry.

All of which also means there is now the hunt for an old press, and if that could be found I would really be very pleased.

*And there are examples which were planted at the beginning of the 19th century

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Picture; Higson’s orchard from a detail of the OS map of Lancashire, 1841, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Campaigning with the Anti Corn Law League in Manchester in 1845

I am back with Alexander Somerville, radical, journalist and by his own admission at one time a police spy.

That earlier campaign in St Peter's Fields, 1819

All of which makes him a fascinating chap to write about and one who fully embodies my idea that history is messy.

Now I have written about his visit to Chorlton in 1847 and explored his stand against using the military to suprpress the popular agitation for the Reform Bill in 1832.*

And later I guess I will cruise along the Spanish coast relating his time fighting for the British Auxiliary Legion during the Spanish Civil War of 1835-38**

But today I want to go back to his time with the Anti Corn Law League which had been set up in 1836 to campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws which had been introduced in 1815 as a means of protecting British agriculture, but which was judged by many as responsible for keeping bread prices high and preventing the unfettered reign of Free Trade.

So Alexander took on the job of taking the message into the countryside and arguing the case amongst the farming interests.  And it was while he was engaged in this task that he gave us a wonderful description of the headquarters of the Anti Corn Law League here in Manchester.  Match this with two pictures from digital collection of Manchester Libraries and we can almost be in the offices sometime at the height of the campaign.

We are on the corner of Market Street and Cross Street in Newell’s Buildings.  My picture dates from 1867 but judging from the directories was much the same building that Somerville knew.

In 1851 it was occupied by a couple of painters, two engravers, a Music school, share broker, the Manchester Library and the Financial and Parliamentary Reform Offices as well as the National Reform Association.

But just a few years earlier it was completely taken over by what Somerville descibed as “at that extraordinary body the Anti-Corn-Law League.”

And so “having a day in Manchester I determined to get a peep.  Accordingly at ten o'clock I was in Market Street, a principal thoroughfare in Manchester. A wide open stairway, with shops on each side of its entrance, rises from the level of the pavement, and lands on the first floor of a very extensive house called 'Newall's Buildings'. The house consists of four floors, all of which are occupied by the League, save the basement. We must, therefore, ascend the stair, which is wide enough to admit four or five persons walking abreast.

On reaching a spacious landing, or lobby, we turn to the left, and, entering by a door, see a counter somewhere between forty and fifty feet in length, behind which several men and boys are busily employed, some registering letters in books, some keeping accounts, some folding and addressing newspapers, others going out with messages and parcels. This is the general office, and the number of persons here employed is, at the present time, ten. Beyond this is the Council Room, which, for the present, we shall leave behind and go up stairs to the second floor.

Here we have a large room, probably forty feet by thirty, with a table in the centre running lengthwise, with seats around for a number of persons, who meet in the evenings, and who are called the 'Manchester Committee'.

During the day this room is occupied by those who keep the account of cards issued and returned to and from all parts of the kingdom. A professional accountant is retained for this department, and a committee of members of council give him directions and inspect his books. These books are said to be very ingeniously arranged, so as to shew at a glance the value of the cards sent out, their value being represented by certain alphabetical letters and numbers, the names and residences of the parties to whom sent, the amounts of deficiencies of those returned and so on.

Passing from this room we come to another, from which all the correspondence is issued. From this office letters to the amount of several thousands a-day go forth to all parts of the kingdom. While here, I saw letters addressed to all the foreign ambassadors, and all the mayors and provosts of corporate towns of the United Kingdom, inviting them to the great banquet which is to be given in the last week of this month ... In this office copies of all the parliamentary registries of the kingdom are kept, so that any elector's name and residence is at once found, and, if necessary, such elector is communicated with by letter or parcel of tracts, irrespective of the committees in his own district.

Passing from this apartment, we see two or three small rooms, in which various committees of members of the council meet. Some of these committees are permanent, some temporary. Of those which are permanent I may name that for receiving all applications for lecturers and deputations to public meetings. ...

In another large room on this floor is the packing department. Here several men are at work making up bales of tracts, each weighing upwards of a hundred weight, and despatching them to all parts of the kingdom for distribution among the electors. From sixty to seventy of these bales are sent off in a week, that is, from three to three and a-half tons of arguments against the Corn Laws!

Leaving this and going to the floor above, we find a great number of printers, presses, folders, stitchers, and others connected with printing, at work. But in addition to the printing and issuing of tracts here, the League has several other printers at work in this and other towns of the Kingdom. Altogether they have twelve master-printers employed, one of whom, in Manchester, pays upwards of £100 a week in wages for League work alone.”***

So there you have it a vivid description of a campaign and its headquarters in the centre of our city.

Pictures; Peterloo, 1819, m01563, Newall’s Buildings, by James Mudd, 1867, m74665 and the interior, 1860, m56387 Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alexander%20Somerville
** Somerville, Alexander, History of the British Legion, and War in Spain,1839
*** Somerville, Alexander, The Whistler at the Plough, 1852, pp. 79-82

A Chorlton Chartist, Alexander Somerville, well almost

I think I am close to finding my Chorlton Chartist.

Or in fact two, although having said that neither was born here or lived here, but one passed through in 1847 and the other one was born in Didsbury and lived just over the Mersey in Northenden.

Perhaps a little tenuous but a link and makes the point that we were not an isolated community but just four miles from the city and would have been alive to all that was going on. Our farmers and market gardeners visited Manchester to sell their farm produce, and in return we got the carriers who transported goods in and out of the township, the itinerant traders and plenty of Sunday visitors.

So all the news, the great debates and issues of the day that occupied the nation would work their way into the village and surrounding hamlets.

The fall of the Bastille, the cry of Liberty Fraternity and Equality, and the great surge of radical demands as well as the agitation for the protection of living standards as time got harder during the 19th century would have been heard here.  And it was a soldier from Manchester walking into the township with friends who brought the message of Methodism.  Added to there was the Duke’s Canal and the railway built in 1849 both of which made us even closer to all that was being done and said in Manchester.

The wealthy businessman Thomas Walker was just one such powerful voice.  He lived at Barlow Hall and later Longford House was buried in the parish church and embraced the ideas of the French Revolution and the abolition of the slave trade.  His life was threatened his home in Manchester attacked by a mob and he was put on trial for sedition*

All of which I have written about but today I want to introduce Alexander Somerville.  He had been persuaded by Richard Cobden to join the Anti Corn Law League in August 1842 and travelled through the countryside arguing the case for free trade and an end to the Corn Laws.

In the June of 1847 he was here in Chorlton and recorded his conversations with local farmers, James Higginbotham, Thomas Holland, and Lydia Brown. He even came across a potato which went by the name “Radical” because it had been introduced by Joseph Johnson who had been active in radical politics.

Alexander Somerville while in the army had been flogged for his support of the Reform Bill in the May of 1832, was quoted by Frederick Engels in the Condition of the Working Classes and his accounts of his travels through rural England were published in three volumes under the title Whistler at the Plough between 1852-53.

And there is much more.  His autobiography published in 1848 gives a detailed account of the passing of the Reform Bill and life in the British army during that period.  In one chilling passage set against the popular agitation against Parliament’s reluctance to pass the Bill he reported that

“It was rumoured that the Birmingham political union was to march to London that night; and that we were to stop it on the road.  We had been daily and nightly booted and saddled, with ball and cartridge in each man’s possession, for three days, ready to mount and turn out at a moment’s notice..  But until this day we had rough sharpened no swords.  The purpose of so roughening their edges was to make them inflict a ragged wound.  Not since before the battle of Waterloo had the swords of the Greys undergone the same process.”**

In this very charged atmosphere Alexander and some of his compatriots debated the possibility that like the Yeomanry at Peterloo in the August of 1819 they would be ordered to “draw swords or triggers on a deliberate public meeting.”

I cannot begin to appreciate the difficulty they were in or the momentums choices that were before them, and in a shining example of courage they stood out against a repeat of the massacre in St Peter’s Field, choosing to write letters “to various parties in Birmingham and London... Some were addressed to the Duke of Wellington, some to the King, some to the War Office, and some were dropped in the streets ... [saying] that while the Greys would do their duty if riots and outrages upon property were committed, they would not draw swords or triggers upon a deliberate public meeting or kill the people of Birmingham for attempting to leave their town with a petition to London.”

It is a powerful insight into a period which many history books pass over as  “popular unrest during the passing of the Reform Bill.” and leads on to Chartism

I rather think Alexander deserves more.  He was after all flogged for his brave stand and went on to record much that was going on during the period, including a firsthand account of a British mercenary army unit that fought in the Spanish Civil War of 1839, and conditions in rural Ireland.

His is a story I knew so little about.  I had read his History of the British Legion, and War in Spain but until Lawrence sent me a copy of the Manchester Examiner for June 1847 I did not know he had been in Chorlton or that he recorded so much of  the story of radical politics.

So he was here, passing through I grant you, but if we have found him I travel in the full expectation that there will indeed be a home grown Chorlton Chartist just waiting to be discovered.

Tomorrow, Joseph Johnson who had been active in radical politics. was on the platform in St Peter’s Field, during the Peterloo Massacre was imprisoned for “assembling with unlawful banners at an unlawful meeting for the purpose of inciting discontent”  and ended his days just across the Mersey.

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/longford-hall-and-our-own-chorlton.html and http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alternative%20histories
** Somerville Alexander, The Autobiography of a Working Man, 1850  page244 Google ed page 253

Pictures; The Autobiography of a Working Man, Peterloo, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m01563, The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10 1848, by William Kilburn

See also The Day I lost a Chorlton Chartist http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-day-i-lost-chorlton-chartist.html

Chorlton, Australia and an unpopular food tax

It was one of those serendipity moments which brought together my old friend Alexander Somerville, his contribution to the campaign against an unpopular food tax and our township and along the way brought a new pal from Australia.

Now I say my old friend Alexander Somerville but that is stretching a point as he died in 1885 but I have followed his life, read his books and got to feel he was someone I would like to have spent time with.*

And he was a remarkable man who campaigned on a wide range of social issues, was flogged by the British Army for refusing to attack peaceful protesters in 1832 and wrote extensively on Ireland and agricultural matters.

All of which would make him interesting enough but it was the fact that he came here in 1847, wrote about the place and recorded the conversations with some of our farmers that first drew him to me.

Then I discovered he was active in the campaign to repeal the Corn Laws and regularly took the case into rural communities. Now this must have seemed a tall order, given that the Corn Laws had been introduced to protect British farming by barring the import of foreign cereal into  the country until the price of corn reached 80 shillings a quarter thereby ensuring a market for home grown cereals.

But that is what he did and so it is entirely possible that he passed through here before the repeal in 1846.  All of which led me to ponder on the reception he would have got.  This may not have been so frosty, because although we did grow a fair amount of cereal many of our people were market gardeners and were more focused on the production of fruit and vegetables for the Manchester markets.

I have to admit that my knowledge of the degree of support for the Anti Corn Law Leagues in the countryside is limited and I have always promised myself it is something I must brush up on.  So I was intrigued when my new pal from Australia presented me with a list of the women on the Ladies Committee of the National Anti Corn Law Bazaar held in London in the May of 1845.

Given that the Anti Corn Law League had been founded in Manchester and was popular with the manufacturing interests it is no surprise to clock the number of Manchester addresses as well as the surrounding townships and out into Derbyshire and Yorkshire.

But there are also a few from rural areas, like Burnage and Didsbury which may mean something or may mean nothing at all.  There were plenty of business people who chose to settle away from the smoke and noise of their factories and both places were very pleasant and very much in the countryside.

So I suppose here is the new research project.  Single out, identify and track down these “ladies” and in the process see if there is evidence for their background and social standing in these rural communities.  All of which might lead on to how if they were linked to farming.

So far neither Miss Leete of Poplar Grove, Didsbury or Mrs Thomas Bright from Burnage have stepped out of the shadows but we shall see.

All of which just leaves my new pal.  This is June Pound who lives in Australia and who is related to the woman Alexander Somerville married and amongst her family treasures was the list which really goes to show how serendipity works.

Picture; Anti Corn Law Committee  from the collection of June Pound and cover page of Somerville's autobiography

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alexander%20Somerville