Mrs Jane Redford, Manchester's second woman councillor

I have been staring at this picture for some time.

It was taken on October 7th 1911 at the opening of Chorltonville, and somewhere amongst the worthies is Mrs Jane Redford.

She had been born in 1849 so we are looking for a woman aged 62 which narrows the search a little.

She is there because she was one of our elected city councillors having been elected the year before and in the way that these things work she was about to contest the seat again in the November.

So perhaps this was not so much civic duty as another one of the many public engagements that fall to a politician about to fight an election.

But this is perhaps to do Mrs Jane Redford a disservice. She had been active for over 30 years serving on various public bodies including the Board of Henshaw’s Blind Asylum and as a Poor Law Guardian for the Chorlton Union where she had campaigned for the provision of trained nurses for workhouse hospitals. All too often the workhouse authorities had relied on old and illiterate inmates to tend the sick.

Important as these contributions were it is her role as a city councillor which is more significant because her election in 1910 made her just the second woman to be elected to the council.

What is in some ways more remarkable is that she was not a member of the main political parties and seems to have had little in the way of an organisation behind her.

She described herself as a Progressive Candidate which had less to do with radical politics and more to do with all fashioned rate payer concerns.

Her predecessor Harry Kemp had campaigned as a progressive on the platform of advancing “good government” which involved “exercising a rigorous protest against extravagance” and “preserving as far as possible the residential character” of Chorlton.

But, and here is the interesting thing it came with a progressive take on the need for “adequate Schools, Libraries, Open Spaces, Public Baths and everything which counts for the better health and morality of the people”

And Mrs Redford echoed this in her own election address of 1911 which highlighted her record on the Education, Libraries and Sanitary Committees along with a degree of success in checking “the building of houses on the Chorlton side [of Longford Park] in order that Chorlton people may have easy access to this new park.”

It is also there in her concerns over the Carnegie grant to build a new library which she felt should have been delivered “through the ordinary means of municipal enterprise.”

Now the normal rate payer position and certainly that of her fellow Chorlton councillors along with Alderman Fletcher Moss was “for acceptance of the gift,” which perhaps marks her out as more than just a guardian of careful council spending.

And in turn points back to her wider concerns for the welfare of people.


She argued strongly that the Education Committee should experiment with vocational training and in particular training girls for domestic service which “was of all the occupations for girls that which was not overcrowded and so [they would be able to] enter service at once and claim a proper wage, instead of commencing work and gaining a precarious livelihood by cleaning steps.”


Of course it is easy to be cynical about the role of vocational education and I for one spent years arguing the need for a well balanced curriculum for young people which didn’t just push them into manual work without offering them the opportunity of a broad and challenging set of subjects.

And this seems to have been what motivated her, because while advocating the pilot scheme to train young girls she was keen that the Education Committee work with the Post Office to widen the career prospects of telegraph boys, who “were only engaged for a certain number of years as messenger carriers and when they had to find work other than that of a purely causal character the task was not a very easy one” 

The plan was provide “two or three hours instruction each day, so that when their career as telegraph boys ceased they might be better equipped to secure other and perhaps more lucrative appointments.”


Now I think it might be fair to argue that she did not embrace a clear political position which might mark off from say the vision of the new Labour Party but likewise this was no conventional rate payer politician. She had expressed her growing concern at the lack of school provision both here in Chorlton and across the city and was very active in the movement for women’s health.

There is more to find out about Mrs Redford and also stories to tell of other women who campaigned in their trade unions and local Labour Party branches for the vote, improved social conditions and a better deal for ordinary people but they are for later.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchetser

Pictures; The opening ceremony of Chorltonville, from the Lloyd collection, picture of Mrs Jane Redford from her election address by kind permission of Lawrence Beadle


References; Manchester Guardian, Harry Kemp and Jane Redford's election addresses.

So no more will I meet you at Kemps’ Corner

One of Chorlton best known landmarks .... rebuilt to form an extension to a bank

Kemp’s Corner is no more and lives only in the memories of  older residents.  

And yet for more than half a century it was one of the places in Chorlton which was a recognised meeting place.

It was located on the corner of Wilbraham and Barlow Moor Roads and was the site of Harry Kemp’s Chemist shop.

Now it is a story I have told before but is worth bringing out of the shadows again underling that simple observation that despite planners efforts to designate a place with an official name if it doesn’t catch the popular imagination it will not be used.

So it is with the junction of the two roads.  The official name which appeared just before the end of the last century is Chorlton Cross, but older people still think of it as Kemp’s Corner and most people today refer to it simply as the Four Banks.

Detail from the story in the Stretford and Urmston Journal, 1978

Both names arose out of popular usage, for not only was Kemp’s Chemist a prominent shop and he was a local politician but above the shop door was a big clock which I guess made meeting there that bit easy while today the presence of  a bank on each corner continues to make it a landmark.

All of which is a long way round to this newspaper report which captured the moment when Kemps’ Corner disappeared.

The Chemist had been run by the Coop for a while and then became a fast food out let but eventually the Midland Bank bought the building and set to converting it.

And the rest is almost history, for as someone said to me the idea that the place could have been known as Kentucky Fried Chicken Corner was just not going to happen.

Once the Midland had taken the corner we were on the way to the “Four Banks” which is itself an echo of an earlier name.  For back at the end of the 19th century someone had told a friend on a postcard to meet her at Bank Corner.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; the Chorlton edition of the Stretford and Urmston Journal, April 13, 1978

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

One hundred and ten years of elections in Chorlton

I am looking at the election address of the three Progressive candidates who stood for election here in Chorlton in 1904. 

This was the first local election after we had voted to join the city of Manchester and of the six candidates who put themselves forward, three were Progressives, two Conservatives and one an Independent.

The three Progressive candidates stood on the platform of advancing “good government” which involved “exercising a rigorous protest against extravagance” and “preserving as far as possible the residential character” of Chorlton coupled with the need for “adequate Schools, Libraries, Open Spaces, Public Baths and everything which counts for the better health and morality of the people”

The result was one of those odd outcomes with one Progressive, one Conservative and the Independent being elected.

And during the next two decades elections continued to be dominated by the Conservatives, the Progressives and Independents.

Although that is to simplify the scene, because there was a blurring of what it was to be an Independent and Progressive, so that at least two Progressive candidates slipped between the labels and one even later described himself as a "Ratepayer."

Not until 1922 would there be an election where Liberal faced Conservative and where over the next few years the electoral battle would be so finely drawn that

“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 from 1928 the Liberals were on the defensive increasingly being challenged by the Labour Party.

All of which is a story for another time, but as we have just had an election  I rather think I will close with the result.

Now there will be those who mutter that the outcome here in Chorlton was no surprise but that would be to misread elections.

The year after Labour won its first election victory in 1986 the Conservatives held onto their seat and it would not be until the following year that Labour won again.

And at the start of the new century the Lib Dems seemed to be a serious challenger to the dominant position of the Labour Party here in Chorlton wining two seats.

But in the last few years their share of the vote has fallen back and from a commanding 44% in 2010 has slid ever downwards, so that today they achieved 15%.

There will be plenty I guess with explanations but that also is for another time.

Picture; Progressive Party election material, 1904 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

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