A lost photograph and a clue to a vanished building

Sometimes you fall across a picture by chance which fills in a gap in your knowledge and at the same time is a joy to look at in its own right.


It is also unusual in that it is not one I have seen before and I doubt that at first glance many today would be able to place it.

 It is a postcard sent in the summer of 1905 and shows that section of Barlow Moor Road running north from the junction with Wilbraham Road towards what would now be the library.

There is little that is familiar. But perhaps the first clue is the building of John Bailey, joiner and cabinet maker. It is still there today but is now the solicitor on the corner of Barlow Moor and Warwick Road. 

Adjoining the building and further down Barlow Moor Road there are other buildings which are still there today albeit with some changes.

All of which leaves the two buildings beside Bailey’s the joiner behind the chap leaning on the fence. The white building set back is the old Royal Oak which had been selling beer from early in the 19th century.

It was here in the 1860s that drunken mobs from Manchester had to be chased off by locals and earlier still the scene of a pub theft which resulted in the convicted thief being transported.

But it is the building to the right of the Royal Oak which really caught my attention. This is Renshaws Buildings owned by a local farmer who lived on the Row.* It dates from the very early 1830s and maybe even older.

It was one of a number of properties built for rent by local businessmen like Renshaw the farmer, Brownhill the wheelwright and Grantham the tailor.

They may have been the first wave of new brick built cottages, replacing the old wattle and daub properties and aimed at the increase in population in the township.

These were for the local market and the census returns show that they were inhabited by farm labourers and tradesmen.

I cannot be sure of when Renshaws Buildings went up but we can be sure they were in place by 1832 because their ownership along with other properties guaranteed Renshaw a property vote after the 1832 Reform Act

Looking at the number of units in Renshaws Buildings and the number of families recorded in the census record they have been one up one down dwellings in a block running at right angles to the main road.

The picture may also be unique in that it could be the last time it was photographed like this.

Within perhaps ten years the front had been converted into a garage and by the late 1920s had been demolished to make way for the new Royal Oak.

Today the only evidence that it was ever there is the kerb running down the south side of the pub.

So there you have it, this postcard from 1905 remains one of the best images of Renshaws Buildings, a building which I have followed from its construction sometime before 1832.

*Chorlton Row is now Beech Road

Picture; Renshaws Buildings and the Royal Oak circa 1905, from the Lloyd Collection

A postcard and a memory of our declining rural past

This remains one of my favourite pictures of the old church.

 It was taken sometime before September 1904 but could have been at any time after 1837 when the two side aisles were added.

 The cottage to the right was there by the beginning of the 19th century if not before while the roof of Higginbotham’s farm house behind it was at least fifty years older.

And it was a view that would soon be lost forever. Within six years the old Bowling Green Hotel just out of sight on the right would be demolished and replaced by a new pub which would obscure our view of the church entirely.

 It is still a rural scene and bits of farm equipment are littered around the picture and reminds me that here we were on the edge of the village which were cultivated as meadowland.

But for me what adds to the picture and makes it unique is the message on the back. In an age when a postcard sent in the morning could arrive in the afternoon postal messages remained the quickest and cheapest easy of communicating with friends and relatives.

In this case the offer by Mrs Wood of Manchester Road to help at the harvest festival decorations at the old Church on Saturday was “gladly” accepted. It had been sent on the Wednesday afternoon of September the 21st and would have fallen through the door of Manchester Road for teatime or certainly by the following morning.

Harvest festivals were still a real part of the life of our community at the beginning of the 20th century and ones which celebrated the end of a successful year on the land.

 There may have been fewer people who relied on farming in the township but there were still enough for a bad harvest to spell hardship and perhaps even ruin.

Mrs Wood’s husband had been born into a farming family and his father had farmed at Red Gates till his early death in 1902 aged just 52. Red Gates did not long survive his death and in the next few decades more of the farms which dated back to before the 19th century closed.
I am indebted to Carolyn Willits who lent me the post card and gave me permission to use it.

Lcation; Chorlton

Picture; the old Church, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1904,  from the collection of Carolyn Willits

A day out on the meadows ..... circa 1910

The caption reads, “the footbridge over the stream at Brook Road entrance to the meadows. 

 From this bridge there was a diagonal path across Boat Meadow to Jackson’s footbridge which was part of the normal path from the green to the pub by the Mersey.” 

It is dated 1910.

The picture is a perfect reminder that the area was farmed as meadow land which involved regularly flooding the land from a series of irrigation ditches.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection

Working the fields of Chorlton

We have very few working pictures of when we were still a rural community.

And so it is always exciting when one turns up and I get permission to write about it.

This one is in the collection of Carolyn Willitts who has kindly allowed me to use it.

There is no date but looking at the clothes of the chap on the left it might date from the early years of the last century. Now I am researching the machinery in the picture and this might fix the date. We shall see.

One of the men is a relative of Carolyn’s and he worked on Red Gate Farm which was close to the site of the library. There had been a farm here from the 1780s* and I guess much earlier.

By the 1840s the tenant farmer was William Whitelegg who farmed 68 acres of land which stretched out on either side of Manchester Road.

 It was mix of meadow, arable and pasture with an orchard.

He grew wheat and oats, along with potatoes, swedes, turnips, and mangle wurzuls, and raspberries and currants.**

But back to the picture. It is almost impossible to locate but it is just possible that it was between Ryebank Road and Longford Brook. Maps from the 1840s show a line of trees stretching out from Edge Lane.

 By the early years of the 20th century some of these beyond Ryebank Road were still standing and even today there are a few left roughly in the same place. So these may be the line which appear the photograph.

For me it is the detail that is fascinating. The man to the left holds one of those ceramic jars which might have been full of anything from water to beer and even cider. 

And there is no reason to suppose it wasn’t cider. Chorlton had plenty of orchards and there is anecdotal evidence of old cider presses turning up in the township. Most of the apples would have destined for the markets of Manchester but some at least would have been retained for home use.

It is one of only five pictures I have come across of men working the fields here in Chorlton and takes us back to a time now almost out of living memory. And it is all the more remarkable because we know one of the people in the picture.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; working the land, date unknown from the collection of Carolyn Willitts


*Yates map of 1786 shows the farm

** From an advert for the sale of the farm contents of Red Gate Farm, Manchester Examiner & Times, November 3rd 1855, Issue 711, British Library of newspapers

A farm on the green

No matter how many times I look at this picture it always has the power to draw me back in.

The date is uncertain but my old friend Tony Walker suggested sometime in the 1860s but I cannot be sure.

The bowler hats worn by two of the men began appearing in the 1850s so a date just a little later might fix the photograph.

What I do know is that it cannot be any older than the mid 1880s because the familiar lychgate at the entrance to the parish church is missing.

 Now this was erected to celebrate  Queen Victoria's golden jubilee so we are dealing with a scene from sometime in the decades after the mid century.

It is Higginbotham’s farm yard. The family had lived on the green and farmed out towards the Mersey since the 1840s and were still there in the 1960s. It takes me directly back to the period of Chorlton’s history that I am most interested in and has featured in my book.

Here are those usual objects associated with a busy farm and like any working place not as tidy as perhaps it should have been.

To the left is the farm cottage with its distinctive rear porch. To the right the barn which in the early years of the 19th century was one of the sites where the Methodists held their services before building their chapel on the Row.*

Later still it became the work shop for the Walker Brothers who ran a building firm from the site.

There was for many years a stone inscription in the barn recording its part in the history of Methodism in the township but sadly it has been lost.

My second picture dates from the 1970s when the Walker’s still had the yard.

Pictures; Higginbotham’s farm circa 1860 from the collection of Marjorie Holmes, & the same spot circa 1979 from the collection of Tony Walker.


*The Row was later renamed Beech Road

A lost bridge across the Brook

Now I think it is time for a walk across the meadows in search of Mosley Bridge.

It was a small bridge over the Brook put up by Charles Walker and later washed away.  Charles Walker was the son of Thomas Walker, the radical, and lived at Longford Hall and the bridge connected his land on either side of the brook.

In the 1830s it was destroyed by a flood, and a new one was built where the brook joins the Mersey which makes it easy to find.  It’s there on the old tithe map of 1845 and looks to be roughly where the bridge is today.

But I am not sure that this is our bridge.  Over the last fifty years the banks and the land on either side of where the brook runs into the Mersey have been raised a number of times but from memory the masonry looks old.  And a bridge does show up on the right spot not only the tithe map of 1845 but on the earlier OS for 1841 and the later OS of 1888-93.

So far I have not come across any old photographs of the bridge but there is a painting made by J Montgomery in 1963 looking east along the line of the Brook.  Stand on that exact spot today and to the south there is a dense collection of bushes and small trees which were entirely missing when Montgomery recorded the scene.

But neither his or the modern view are how it was.  Back in the 1840s, to the south of the Brook on what was Charles Walker’s land were water meadows, while away to our left just beyond the field was Walker’s orchard.

Now before I take a walk down to the spot I should really ask my old botanist pal David Bishop whose knowledge of the place goes back to the 1970s and whose blog at http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.co.uk/ is a wonderful collection of information about the land and the plant life along this stretch of the Mersey on the edge of our township.

Picture; Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Junction of Gore Brook [Chorlton Brook] and the River Mersey, J Montgomery 1963, m80140

Claude Road and a clue to the vanished Beech House

The date on this postcard of Claude Road is 1915 but the scene must be earlier.

On the surface it seems an unremarkable image.

It would look to be a morning perhaps in the holidays and the peace is disturbed only by the children playing close to Beech Road and the appearance of the delivery man who has attracted the woman on the right who I guess has come out of her house to catch him.

It is not unlike the same scene today with of course the absence of parked cars and passing traffic. But what does make it remarkable and dates the photograph to sometime in the first decade of the 20th century is the wall and gateway at the bottom of Claude Road where it joins Beech Road.

They are part of Beech House which had stood in its own extensive grounds since at least the 1830s.

Three generations of the Holt family had lived there but the last had died in 1906, and by 1908 the house was empty and the estate was awaiting sale. By sheer chance a postcard showing the lodge has survived. 

The message records a pleasant afternoon spent in the grounds and the speculation that it was soon to disappear. “Edith and I had tea on the lawn of the big house which you see the lodge in the picture. It will soon be sold and then will probably be divided into small plots.”

By the following year part of the garden which ran the length of Barlow Moor Road as far as High Lane had been bought by Manchester Corporation who felled the trees demolished the wall and built the tram terminus on the land. 

The remaining land was developed with the cinema and a row of shops and the garage of Mr Shaw.

But we can be even more precise about the date of our photograph. Claude Road and its neighbouring Reynard had been built by 1907 and the estate wall demolished in 1909.

So that little detail of wall anchors our photograph and provides a view of Beech Road that has gone forever.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester

Picture, from the Lloyd collection circa 1907-09

Beech Road 1980

Now I always think that some of the most fascinating pictures of Chorlton are not those of a hundred years ago but the more recent.

Often these we remember because they are our past and yet in a strange way they can seem as remote as a photograph of Beech Road taken at the start of the last century.

So it is with this one taken by my old friend Tony Walker in 1980. Richardson’s still bears its name of the Beech Tree Bakery with its pine panelling.

The Police Station is still an office for the City Council and away in the distance we still had a Post Office.

Looking more closely I am struck at how in 1980 Beech Road was still a conventional parade of shops. Next to Richardson’s was the fabric shop Marcele Materials and further down the Wool Shop as well as one of the two butcher’s while the boarded premises had been a grocery store.

 Completing the row was the Chinese takeaway of Mr Chan and the furniture place, where you could get anything from a three piece suite to a 1950 rotating ash tray.

And facing them was another butcher’s shop, a hardware place a grocers and further down Muriel and Richard’s veg shop. Within two decades many of them had gone.

Picture; Beech Road circa 1980 from the collection of Tony Walker

It started with a picture and became a story.......... Charles Ireland

The Palais de Luxe, circa 1928

It started with a picture and became a story.

The picture was of the Palais de Luxe Cinema on Barlow Moor Road and is not one I had seen before.

In that usual way of things it was in the possession of the archives and public records centre of East Dunbartonshire Council and got there because the fine iron and glass canopy which fronted the cinema had been made by the Lion Foundry in Kirkintilloch.

The story unfolded as the archivist and I sought to resolve the copyright issue of the photograph.

Ms Janice Miller was keen for me to see the picture but quite rightly was concerned that this might contravene the 70 year rule on copyright usage.

The photograph was by C Ireland and may have been taken around 1928 and that was all there was to go on. He might have been a local photographer or one especially commissioned by the Lion Foundry who came down from Scotland or just possibly one of those travelling photographers who captured local scenes to be converted into post cards.

Now both of us were fully prepared for a disappointment. After all we had just a name which is not much to go on.

But a Charles Ireland ran a photographic shop at 25 Lower Mosley Street in town during the first decade of the last century and continued in business there to at least 1927. The same set of telephone directories also revealed that by 1921 he was living at 76 High Lane here in Chorlton.

It is one of those amazing things about detective work that once the first secrets of a person’s life come to light others bubble up in front of you.

He had died in 1930 aged 63, left £5,330 to his widow and was buried in Southern Cemetery. He had been born in Newton in Manchester in 1867 and by 1891 the family were living here on St Clements Road.

This seems to have been a step up. The family home on Oldham Road in Newton was at the heart of an industrial area. Just to the north was the large carriage and wagon works of the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and to the south and east there were brick works cotton mills, bleach works as well a glass works.

25 Lower Mosley Street, 1964

Charles’s father Edward was in partnership as a pawnbroker although he also described himself as a photographer, and by 1891 this appears to have been his sole occupation.

There were as yet few photographers listed in the directories for Manchester in the 1880s and they are still described as artists.

By 1895 he had opened the shop on Lower Mosley Street which Charles still ran until the late 1920s.

The family continued to prosper and by 1911 they have moved to that large detached house on the corner of Edge Lane and Kingshill Road.

76 High Lane, date unknown

As ever the romantic in me fastened on the fact that in 1913 Charles married his photographic assistant. Edith May Hindley was 32 years old and like him had been born in Newton.

Sometime perhaps around 1918 they moved into 76 High Lane which had been the home of the artist Tom Mostyn the artist.

 It is still there having benefited from the addition of the large upstairs window and studio which I guess was the work of Tom Mostyn and which Charles in turn may have used.

I have yet to visit the grave in Southern Cemetery but it is on my list of things to do. Here he was buried along with his father and mother in law, his sister and finally in 1948 his wife

So far no other pictures accredited to Charles have turned up but they will. His working life stretched back over 40 years and the picture of 76 High Lane may even be his although sadly there is no date and the quality is pretty poor.

But I travel in hope that out there in a collection I will come across more of his pictures. Ms Janice Miller and the East Dunbartonshire archive can only be the first.

Location; Chorlton and Manchester

Pictures; the Palais de Luxe cinema, circa 1928 GD10-07-04-6-13-01 Courtesy of East Dunbartonshire Archives, 25 Lower Mosley Street by H W Beaumont 1964 m02915, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, & 76 High Lane, date unknown, from the Lloyd collection

A Beech Road that has now passed out of living memory

Now I have a soft spot for Beech Road, it is after all where I have lived since 1976. 

And for years I wondered why the pavement widens briefly almost opposite Reeves Road which was of course to accommodate the big tree.

What I also like about the photograph is that it is a view that has long since passed out of living memory and part at least had not changed in perhaps 80 years.

I can be fairly sure that it dates from 1907 when the houses on the left were built and no later than 1909 when the estate of Beech House on the right was sold and the big house demolished.

Beech House had been the home of the Holt family from the 1830s until the last of the family died in 1907. By 1909 the eastern side of the garden running along Barlow Moor Road had been acquired by the Corporation, its wall demolished and a stretch of it was about to become the tram terminus.

The remaining stretch would in time be developed to include Malton Avenue the Palais de Luxe cinema opened in 1915 and the parade of shops.

But now on that winter day it was still possible to see the outline of Beech House and beyond the row of terraced houses to the south were the Bowling Green Farm and the village.

Picture; Beech Road circa 1907-1909 from the Lloyd collection

Snaps of Chorlton No 6 the parish churchyard before the landscaping, 1976

An occasional series featuring private and personal photographs of Chorlton.

We are in the parish graveyard in 1976.  I have to say despite walking through the place many times I have no recollection of it looking like this.  And I pretend to be a historian.

Location; Chorlton







Picture; from the collection of Lois Elsden

A garden in Martledge on an August day in 1882

It looks like a fairly ordinary Chorlton garden and if pushed you might suggest a location bordering the meadows which pretty much means Meadow Bank or Ivygreen Road.  

But the title is the giveaway for we are in the garden of Sedge Lynn* and the open land beyond is not the meadows.  We are facing Oswald Road, and the long roads of Newport, Nicholas and Longford and the year is 1882.

In fact to be exact it is August 11th 1882 which was a Tuesday and judging by the light sometime around midday, but I could be wrong about the time.

It is the third of my pictures by Aaron Booth of Martledge where he with his family lived during the last two decades of the 19th century.

I would like to think we are looking at a garden in transition and given that they may only have been in the house for a few months that seems plausible.  So here is a Victorian garden in the making with its Victorian wooden wheelbarrow, spade and packing case and perhaps at a moment when the labourers had gone off for lunch.  Of the three in the collection this casual and untidy scene for me is the most endearing and sets you down on an ordinary day when ordinary things are being done 143 years ago.

And then there is the view.  Back then it was open land popularly called the Isles because of the large number of ponds and small streams that crisscrossed the area.  The land here is clay and for centuries it had been dug up to make bricks or as marl to spread on the fields.  The pits then filled with water and gave the place its distinctive feature.  I counted 17 such ponds around Oswald Field in 1841, and they were a mix of the small and very large.

The Booth family would have had an interrupted view across the Isles towards Longford Hall only obscured by a row of trees.  It was a view which would have lasted into the late 1890s, but within another decade it would have been lost as the first rows of houses went up on the newly cut roads of Nicholas, Newport and Longford and behind them the sprawling brickworks.

All of which makes our picture a poignant image and one made a little more special because the photograph was donated to the collection by one of five daughters.

* Sedge Lynn stood on Manchester Road on the site of the old cinema and became the Coop Funeral Undertakers

Picture; courtesy of Miss Booth, 1882, from the Lloyd collection

Beech Road on Jubilee day May 6 1935

What I like about this picture of Beech Road in May 1935 is that it wasn’t taken by a professional but by someone I know.

 Marjorie Holmes captured the day of the old King’s Jubilee on what looks like a bright spring day.




Picture; from the collection of Marjorie Holmes, 1935

A harvest festival at Chorlton in 1904 .......... a rare photograph

There is something very powerful about this photograph. 

I know none of the people who are staring back at me and I can only hazard a guess at a date, but it is one of those few pictures where we can see a collection of the people who lived in our township.

It was passed to me by Carolyn Willitts whose family ran Red Gates Farm from the 1880s till the turn of the last century.

They were the Wood family and amongst Carolyn’s collection of postcards is one of John Wood with a plough somewhere out towards the meadows, another of him outside the farm and a third accepting the offer of help from Mrs Wood at the Harvest Festival in the old church.

This last card is dated September 1904 and our photograph cannot be any later than 1908, when the old Bowling Green Hotel was demolished and the new one opened. The roof and chimneys of the old pub are just visible to the left of the church.

The romantic in me would like to think that this was that harvest festival which begs the question is Mrs Wood there in that row of four women at the back? The trees still have their leaves so just maybe.

But on the other hand perhaps it is the third Sunday in July when the church here in Chorlton celebrated St Clements Day. This was the wakes day which had once been popular all over England and in the past was the time when the villagers would have brought fresh rushes to spread on the church floor after the old ones had been swept out. This gave the day its other name of rush bearing.

We may even be able to identify the clergyman sitting in the front. From 1892 the Reverend F.E. Thomas was here until 1911, or just possibly either the Reverend Floyd who was assistant from 1900-1904 or Reverend Thomas who was the assistant from 1904 till 1910.

Now I have learned that just because at this moment the picture still holds many unanswered questions there is every possibility that someone will identify one of the people in the churchyard that day or even be able to suggest a firm date.

We shall see. In the meantime it remains a rare picture of the church still in full use and the parish graveyard still a place where the bodies of generations of parishioners laid undisturbed.

 Although there will be readers who will raise the Great Burial scandal but that as they say is another story.

Picture; from the collection of Carolyn Willitts

An occasional series to mark the 500th anniversary of our parish church.

Postcards reveal all

When I was asked recently to suggest one of my favourite ways of finding out about the past I chose a post card. 

True, census information, wills, diaries and old maps are invaluable for tracking down an ancestor, but the postcard offers not only an image but can give context to where a family member lived. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries most cities and towns could boast a series of postcards illustrating places of interest. Along with the town hall a church and an old ruin, there might be popular street scenes and the odd empty field.

Some photographers made the effort to snap all the houses in a particular street with the hope that the inhabitants would buy a picture of where they lived. Now this is not so daft, given that few people owned a camera but might still want to show off their home to distant friends and relatives.

This was also a time of frequent letter collections and deliveries, so it was possible to post a card in the morning to arrange to meet somewhere in the afternoon. In the absence of mobile phones this remained a pretty neat way of keeping in touch.

During this period there might have been a whole series of postcards of a place which were then repeated just a few years later, allowing the modern historian to follow the changes made to buildings and the landscape. And providing the card was posted there will be a date to fix the moment in time.

But above all what I enjoy are the comments on the back. Some are simple and terse while others hint at darker and more interesting lives. Often the author is keen to mark where they live and at other times give out clues to the neighbourhood. One postcard from the late 19th century suggests they meet at Bank Corner in Chorlton, echoing the modern usage of the Four Banks as a name for the junction of Barlow Moor and Wilbraham Roads. Another written in the summer of 1908 records a visit to the gardens of the late John Holt who lived in a fine house and grounds at the top of Beech Road.

“I had afternoon tea on the lawn of the big house of which you can see the lodge in the picture. It will soon be sold and then will be divided into small plots.”

Sadly this was what happened. The Corporation bought some of the land to build the tram terminus and the rest eventually became the houses on Beech Road and Malton Avenue and the parade of shops among Barlow Moor Road to High Lane.

In other pictures the photographer attracted an audience of children who followed him and appear in most of the pictures. My own favourite is of the churchyard where a mixture of young people including some from the Pasley Laundry have gathered in their lunch break to be captured by the image.

Picture from the collection of Philip Lloyd

Nostalgia ….. penny ago ….. memories of a past Chorlton-cum-Hardy

These are pictures of our Lych Gate on the green.

1979

They were taken in the winter of 1979, although I am well prepared to accept a date in the early 1980s.

And looking at them again after a passage of 45 years is to be struck by how dilapidated and neglected it had become.

1979

Once the proud gift of Mr. and Mrs. Brooks who lived at Barlow Hall and who buried their children in the parish graveyard just 90 odd years later it was in a poor state.

There were holes in the panels above the entrance, and boards had been placed over part of the elegant woodwork in the tower while the brickwork looked tired.

It would be another 14 years before the roof of the tower had some tender care and attention, and a full 45 years before the whole structure was restored using materials sympathetic to the original.

The finished project has received a lot of praise, but as ever with those comments came the inevitable ones which suggested Chorlton was no long what it once was.

And … yes on one level it is not what it was.  

It would be naïve to think after almost half a century almost anywhere is going to be the same.

1980

But for some the logical extension is that it is not so good.

And that got me thinking about the Lych Gate which certainly does look better than it did in 1979, and in turn the parish graveyard which had become neglected with some of its 360 head stones in a poor state, with some in danger of toppling over and others the subject to mindless vandalism.

The upshot was that in the 1980s it had had a make over which created a peaceful place with benches, bushes and trees, which in the years since have matured.

The downside, and there was a downside to the makeover was the loss of of most of the headstones, which recorded the names of those who had been buried here since at least the 18th century.

Those inscriptions were indeed a real set of historical records which have now been lost, and despite perhaps the good intentions of the planners their removal was an act of vandalism.

And while we do have a record of the inscriptions made by City Works in 1975, they can no way compensate for the disappearance of the originals.

2023

That said the graveyard had become a sorry place. The church which the headstones surrounded had been closed in 1940 and demolished nine years later bringing to an end a history of worship which stretched back to the early 16th century and perhaps even earlier.  

And in turn the graveyard had been locked off and pretty much neglected by most people, save for the odd trespassing kids and those interested in the inscriptions.

All of which makes it a tad easy and historically lazy to mumble things were better then.

They were different but I am not so sure they were better.  

At 75, I can remember a time when I lived in houses without central heating where in winter ice formed on the inside of windows, and when much of what we take as standard medical care was still in the realms of science fiction.

And when the much-vaunted local grocer’s shops had little variety and sold produce which was often close to its sell by date, and for a six year old telly on the one channel finished early, with programmes interrupted because the service broke down.

There will be few today who remember the BBC’s offering of the “Potter’s Wheel” or “London to Brighton in Four Minutes” which went on for ever while a clever technician fitted the fault.

2024

Of course I suppose on those day I could have climbed over the wall into the parish graveyard and read the inscriptions on the headstones and wondered who had had the job of ringing the bell in the Lych Gate tower on New Year’s Eve.

But that is perhaps another story for another time.

Location; Chorlton Green

Pictures; the Lych Gate, 1979- 2024, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

On being a dinosaur and remembering the horse drawn wagon

I am fast becoming a living dinosaur, and I suppose I have to ask how could it be any different?

I was after all born in the first half of the last century, reached the age of four before the  last vestiges of wartime rationing came to an end, and grew up with the wireless as the only source of home entertainment.

Along the way I remember the street grinder, who went from house to house sharpening the family knives, the regular call of the rag and bone man and of course the horse drawn milk float.

By the 1950s these milk carts had rubber tyres but were still a link with that time when almost all carts, wagons and public as well as private transport was pulled by a horse.

We tend to forget just how much was shifted by horse and cart.

In Manchester as in every town and city each railway company had their own stables and in all there were 157 carriers listed in the 1911 street directory and all used horses, as did the local trades people and the bus companies.

Look at any old picture of Chorlton from before the last world war and there are bound to be some horse drawn vehicles.

And so it is time for another of those occasional series which will potter on through the summer looking at how horses pulled the way.

This one  according to the caption was the, “Prince of Wales Horse bus at the green, probably about 1898 before the Corporation took over the Carriage and Tramway Company, but may be slightly later.  Photograph origin unknown.”

Location; Chorlton

Picture; from the Lloyd collection circa 1900

Horses at Nell Lane

Here is another one of those occasional posts looking at how horses pulled the way across the township.

It's a picture I have posted before but I think is well worth looking at again.

It is of the pond by the Brook close to the entrance of Chorlton High School.

Now I can’t be certain but I would think the horses belonged to the farm at Hough End Hall which was just to our left beyond the bridge.

The year must be sometime around 1903 and reminds us that horses were still an integral way of work in the township.

Location; St Werburgh's Road

Picture; from the Lloyd collection, date unknown

Horses on Beech Road on a summers day sometime around 1900

It is a picture that regularly crops up in the collections and dates from around 1900.

Now this I know because the Travellers Rest on the left of the picture was still selling beer as it had been since the 1830s but its days were numbered and it would be gone by 1909.

We are on Beech Road and the man in the apron is Mr Neale the butcher, but the identity of the lad on the horse has been lost.

It would be fascinating to know who he was and what he was doing. I guess he might be the son of one of our farmers which is a good enough way to include the picture in the occasional series on the contribution of horses to the life of the township.

 There were still enough farms around the village to remind the casual visitor that were still a rural community, and as if he needed any further reminder, just a little further back up Beech Road he could have seen Mr Clarke the blacksmith going about his business of heating and hammering.

Location; Beech Road

 Picture; from the collection of Tony Walker, circa 1900

Chorlton Row

There are some pictures which I return to again and again and never tire of looking at.

This one appeared in a number of editions in the Wrench series including a tinted version brought out for Christmas.

Ignore for a minute the fashions of the people, the gas lamps and the telegraph pole which dates the picture to the late 19th century and concentrate instead on the old road which twists to accommodate the natural feature of the land, the field hedges and the old brick row of cottages and we could be looking at a moment in Chorlton’s history at anytime during the first half of that century.

This road was the main route out of the green to what was then called Barlow Moor Lane. And in the distance can just be made out Lime Bank, a fairly grand house which was the home of Charles Morton.

Now Charles would regularly walk down this road to attend the rate payers meetings held in the old school on the green. In the summer of 1848 with Europe convulsed with revolutions and our own establishment fearful of another Chartist petition calling for the vote, he walked down the Row to chair a meeting demanding the return of lost ratepayer’s money.

The cottages to the left were certainly there by the 1840s and hide views of the majestic home of the Holt family. They had made their money from making engraving blocks for calico printing.

The house and grounds stretched up what is now Beech Road, along Barlow Moor Road to High Lane and back to Beech Road.Looking out from their upstairs windows over our road they would have had fine views across the fields behind these hedges to Chorlton Brook and on to the Mersey.

The land to our right behind the hedge was mainly small market gardens In the 1840s much of it was farmed by the Gratrix family whose farmhouse stood roughly at the junction of Beech Road and Beaumont Road.
It would have been a timeless scene recognised by our farmers, the regular visitors as well as the Holt's and Morton’s.

But the clue to the date is the house on the left. This one and the other three which it stands beside were built in the early 1870s. In the next four decades, the Holt family home would be demolished along with the cottages and bit by bit the land farmed by Samuel Gratrix would succumb to houses. Only Lime Bank has survived, much knocked about and now hidden behind shops and MacDonald’s.

Picture; from the collection of Philip Lloyd