Losing Fleming Hall in Chorlton

How easy it is to lose a building.  

1961

In this case it was Fleming Hall which in the 1950s and 1960s was used by various organizations but has long since all but passed out of living memory.

I say almost passed out of living memory but not quite, because my old friend Wendy emailed me yesterday with, “Fleming Hall was on Wilbraham Road and I thought it was where the Post Office now is but the Chorlton Townswomen's Guild held their last meeting in the Hall on the 15 October 1963 according to their Minutes,  but on page 159 of your book, "The Quirks of Chorlton-cum-Hardy" there  is a photograph of ‘The New Post Office 1961’.  

1961

It could have been where Sue Ryder's charity shop is, but it would have covered more land”.

And that set me going, because this spot was the home of the old Chorlton Post Office which was damaged when neighbouring houses were destroyed during the Manchester Blitz in the December of 1940.

Looking at photographs from the period it is possible that Fleming Hall was located in what had been that bit of the Post Office that survived the bombing.

I asked Oliver Bailey for help and it remembered “Fleming Hall on Wilbraham Road, on the left hand side heading towards Barlow Moor Road junction maybe forty metres past where Corkland Rd comes in, almost opposite where Stevensons the hairdressers were, and H T Burt/ Brown Brothers, right next to where the parade of shops started that continues to the traffic lights.

My recollection is that it was used a lot by the Conservatives for various get- togethers, dances, young conservatives, whist drives and so on. 

1959

It might even have been owned by them as I remember on several occasions moving stuff, including chairs and tables from there to one of the fields off Wilbraham Road in the stretch past St Werburghs, beyond Morville Road. 

On one occasion we even had to move an upright piano down the steps of the Fleming Hall and get it into the back of my father's land rover as there was going to be some dancing at one of the Fetes and offload it. All done by muscle power. But young conservatives generally responded well to the whip.

Internal layout; at the end away from Wilbraham road there was a stage for jollifications and speechifying, then the body of the hall and nearest Wilbraham Road a kitchen of sorts, but only for brewing tea and coffee and cutting up cakes. I think there might have been offices above the kitchen and loos, but memory is hazy on that”.

1907

All of which chimes in with the two images from 1959 and 1961, which clearly show the sign announcing the Conservative Party Committee Rooms and an election poster on the side of the building.

And for those with a keen eye for detail, the front of the building matches that of the old post office.
But, and there always is a but, Oliver added, “I don't remember it looking like the old Post Office though clearly someone kept the entrance structure for a while”.

So, there is still more to find out, including who actually took over the bomb-damaged Post Office, converted it into the Fleming Hall, and who was Fleming? Wendy remembers a prominent Chorlton individual named Fleming and I think we can rule out Sir Alexander Fleming.

Finally, I don’t yet have a date for its demolition, although I know it will be before 1969, because in that year the site is listed as the Maypole Grocers, which later became Lipton’s and is now Sue Ryder.

And after 1963 when the Chorlton Townswomen Guild met there.

So that is that, ………… I now just await someone with a story or a picture of the place.

And not long after the post went live, Lawrence commented that "Saw your post on Fleming Hall and in case you didn’t know……

Named after Edward Fleming 1891 - 1950. He was the Tory MP for Withington Constituency 1945 - 1950. He then stood for Moss Side when the boundaries were redrawn and Chorlton was put in that Constituency.

It’s the 1950 General Election and sadly Mr.Fleming died on the 17th February during the campaign. I have got somemore details I can dig out. I think he took a turn for the worse at his sister’s house on High Lane. Anyway polling was immediately suspended by all the local parties. The Tories went on to win the General with Winston Churchill.

Moss Side Constituency voted two weeks later and elected Florence Horsborough. She’d lost in Midlothian and Peebles but got another crack at obtaining a seat. Manchester’s first woman MP, first woman in a Conservative cabinet".

And this I didn't know.

And Anne, responded almost immediately with "Fleming Hall used to be where the Sue Rider shop is, I remember going there for Christmas and Birthday parties in the 1960s" with Margaret adding, "I remember going to a dance there when I was at Whalley Range High School. Probably a barn dance as we had a club after school of country dancing to which boys from Chorlton Grammar attended. That would be about 1955/6/7".

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Former Post Office, Wilbraham Road, 1959, A.E.Landers, m18242, and in 1961, m18511, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and the Post Office in 1907 from the Lloyd Collection

Miss. Mary Jane Weeks ……… domestic servant and shareholder in the Chorlton-cum-Hardy Conservative Club

Now history is messy and doesn’t always conform to rigid rules of historical development.

The Conservative Club and Public Hall, 1908

And nowhere is this more the case than in the individuals who came forward to buy shares in the new Conservative Club which opened for business, in 1892.

This was after all the party of class which represented the people of plenty.

But as we all know amongst their ranks no less than their loyal voters were people drawn from all classes.

And here it is easy to be dismissive and sniffy about those who consistently voted Tory despite coming from humble beginnings.

My father was a working class Tory.  He drove coaches all his life, and yet he voted for the party which on the surface was least likely to look after him.  That said mother was Labour and she always maintained that her vote cancelled out Dad’s which was a start on the way to a Labour Government.

The political side, 1980s

Here in Chorlton throughout the late 19th century and into the first two decades of the next the Liberals and Conservatives fought it out, and at a local level this often resulted in the electorate returning candidates from both parties on alternative years  to the Town Hall.

But like elsewhere after the last world war, the Liberals were eclipsed and the Tories came out on top, dominating local elections until 1986 and continuing to return an MP until Keith Bradley’s victory in 1987.

And I have long been fascinated by what makes people from the working class vote Conservative.  There will be many explanations and the idea that they were all just class traitors is not good enough.

So that has led me to the big book of subscribers for the Chorlton-cum-Hardy Conservative Club.  The land had been handed over by the Egerton’s in 1891, and the subscription fund opened that year.

As you would expect here can be found the very wealthy, including Samuel Gratrix of West Point in Whalley Range who bought £200 worth of shares, and a collection of our farmers, merchants and businessmen.

The club up for sale, 2013

Here too was Charles Ireland who owned a string of photographic shops, as well as estate agents, civil engineers down to shop keepers and warehousemen.

Some may have been drawn by the politics, while others by the social attractions of the club

And along with all these was Miss. Mary Jane Weeks, who held shares amounting to £2.

What makes her interesting is that she was domestic servant, working for the Adams family from at least 1891 through to 1911 and possibly beyond.

She had been born in 1849, in the small market town of Hathereigh in Devon, and was working as a servant by 1871.

I would like to know more about Miss. Mary Jane, but so far there are only the census returns to go on, but something more will turn up.

 And in the same way in the fullness of time, all the subscribers will be plotted and their lives revealed.

All of which will help get a better understanding of who voted Conservative in Chorlton  in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as well as offering up an insight into Chorlton-cum-Hardy, just as the township was evolving from an agricultural community into a suburb of Manchester.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures; The Conservative Club, 1908, from the Lloyd Collection,  in 1980, from the collection of Tony Walker, and in 2013 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Register of Members Chorlton-cum-Hardy Conservative Club Limited 1892-96

When the tide turns......... politics in Chorlton in the 20th century

The Conservative Club circa 1910

I wonder just what an ardent Conservative or Liberal voter born in the late 19th century in Chorlton would make of the local political scene today.

Their first port of call might be those large political and social clubs which were established within a few years of each other on the edge of New Chorlton.

Both were set up by subscription and those who subscribed were drawn from a wide section of the community.

The Conservative Club opened in 1892 and with its public hall and impressive clock tower seemed to mark the Tories out as a force to contend with which seemed borne out by the fact that during a large part of the 20th century Chorlton returned Tory MPs and councillors. From 1918 to ‘23 and again from 1931 to ‘87 we had a Tory MP.

But the Liberals may well have taken heart that political fortunes can fall as well as rise and so their decision to convert Laurston House into a permanent home for the Liberal Association was a sound one.

It opened in 1897 admidst a fanfare of optimism.  But nationally the years around the opening of the club were not good for the Liberals.  They lost both the 1895 and 1900 general elections and would not be returned to office till 1906.

The ups and downs of Liberal fortunes in the 1920s and 30s

Locally they fared better both on the old Withington District Council and after our incorporation into the city on the Manchester City Council and by the 1920s were so evenly balanced with the Conservatives that the Manchester Guardian reported in 1928 that

“there are few wards in which Conservative and Liberal opinion is so nicely balanced.  

Of the eight elections that have been fought in Chorlton since 1920 four have been won by the Conservatives and four by the Liberals.”*

But by the early 1930s the Liberals were on the defensive increasingly being challenged by the Labour Party.

They won their last seat in 1932, saw their sitting councillor Lady Sheena Simon loose to the Conservatives the following year and after 1935 did not  contest another election until after the war by which time Labour were asserting themselves as the real alternative.

That said it would not be until 1986 that Labour won its first council seat defeating the Conservative candidate by a significant margin. And while they failed to win the following year from 1988 they consolidated their position winning all three seats.

Not that they had it all their own way, for there was a challenge from the Liberal Democrats who at one point won two of the Chorlton seats.

A decade in Chorlton elections

But in the last few years the Lib Dem share of the vote has been falling against that of Labour.

It is a reversal of political fortunes matched across south Manchester leaving a political landscape that our two visitors from the past would not recognise.

The Liberal Club quietly passed away and the building became the Laurston Club.

The Conservative Association lingered on but finally called it a day and their grand building with its Public Hall was sold to a developer.

By then its political fortunes had all but vanished. The last Conservative MP failed to be re-elected in  1987 and in the years since 2006 they have never achieved more than 7% of the total vote.

All of which would seem a grim scenario for both our Conservative and Liberal time traveller.

Pictures; from the Lloyd collection and election data from the Manchester Guardian and Manchester City Council.


*The Chorlton By-Election, Manchester Guardian December 18, 1928

100 years of political images

The story of the political history of Chorlton over the last 100 years has yet to be written. In the meantime here are three images from the last century of local political campaigns.

In 1904 Harry Kemp along with the other two Progressive candidates issued their election address for the first local election since Chorlton joined the city of Manchester.

Just over 70 years later Tony Walker photographed the sign outside the Conservative Party Offices when Chorlton returned three Tory councillors.












And in 1986 the Labour Party issued the first of a number of leaflets during their campaign which saw the election of the first Labour councillor.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; from the collection of Tony Walker and Andrew Simpson