When all eyes were on Chorlton, the local elections of 1928

Now I know that local elections do not fascinate everyone, but the 1928 election here in Chorlton had got the lot. 

It was fought out against a backdrop of worsening unemployment figures and an expectation that 1928 might be the year that the Labour Party became the largest group on the City Council.

Across the city the Manchester Guardian did not rate the chances of the Conservatives too highly and speculated that of the sixteen seats they were defending they might only hold eight.

The Liberals who were defending just five were reckoned to be safe in four of the five but it was Labour “with fewer seats to defend and a greater number of more vunerable positions [to] attack,” who were making an “audacious bid to secure a clear majority .... and although the attempt is hardly likely to succeed on the present occasion it is by no means a forlorn one.  The Labour representation has been steadily increasing and the at the moment only requires nine additional seats to give it the preponderance it desires”*

So attention focused here, where the Guardian told its readers the Conservatives were defending a slim majority and one that looked all the more under threat because the year before the Liberals had won the seat with a huge majority of nearly 2,500 votes, but as the Guardian went on to warn “it must be borne in mind that at the present occasion Mr Wicks, the Liberal candidate, is opposed by a serious Labour candidate in addition to the retiring Conservative.”

Sadly any campaign literature is unobtainable at present and we are forced back on the newspapers.  The Labour candidate was Alice McIlwrick who had stood the year before in Didsbury and gained  10% of the vote.

I wish I knew more about her.  She lived in various parts of south Manchester, had married at the age of 20 and was confident enough to issue a challenge to her Liberal candidate to “speak for a quarter of an hour in response to a challenge.”  

Moreover she was indeed seen by the Labour Party as a serious Labour candidate as they sent the Labour M.P., R J Davies and the Councillor Wright Robinson to speak on the same platform.

The result was not I suspect what many had expected.  The Conservatives retained the seat with 4, 788 votes to 3, 955 for the Liberals and a very creditable vote of 1,457 for Labour and 14% of the vote.  It was the first time the Labour Party had contested the seat and it would be another four years before they improved on that share of the vote.

What makes the election even more interesting was that it was rerun a month later.  The Tory councillor had died suddenly and the election was held just five days before Christmas.  Again the Manchester Guardian weighed in with the observation 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.”

And in an echo of a more recent Lib Dem assertion that the “Conservatives can’t win here” the Liberals pointed out that the Tory candidate‘s majority the month before was just 253 above what he had polled in 1925 while the Liberals had won the year before with a “record majority of 2,329 votes.”

None the less they were equally quick to point out that Labour “cannot possibly hope to win the seat and  suggest that a number of moderate Labour votes go to Mrs Pilling [the Liberal] who is a strong candidate.”

But in the event the Labour vote held with Alice McIlwrick obtaining 12% of the vote, the Liberals dropping three per cent and the Tories gaining an extra six per cent.

Now this may well have been simply because of the lower turn out by the electorate.  In the November election this had been 52% but a month later it had fallen to 28%.

And in part it may also have had something to do with the intervention of the Salford Diocesan Catholic Federation who had reported that “the questions addressed to the candidates on the education question have been answered satisfactorily by Mr Somervile the Conservative candidate; unsatisfactorily by Mrs Pilling the Liberal candidate, and that Mrs McIlwrick, the Labour candidate, has not replied to them.”**

The right of Roman Catholics to establish parochial day schools for children up to fourteen had become an important issue.  The Salford Diocesan Catholic Federation had held five meetings where candidates in the election were "invited to outline their attitude towards this educational problem.  In addition five test questions have been sent to each municipal candidate, and the answers to these will be published during the weekend. The views of each candidate will determine whether he shall have the support of local Catholics."***
The issue had arisen after a dispute in Levenshulme when the Education Committee had refused to approve plans for a parochial school.

Well I suspect the jury will be out until we can find some more first hand accounts of the election but like all these things I am confident they will turn up.

Picture; The Conservative Club and party headquarters, and the result of the election in November 1928.

* Manchester Guardian October 1st 1928
** Manchester Guardian December 18th 1928
***Manchester Guardian October 27th 1928

With Alice McIlwrick, fighting elections in the 1920s in Didsbury and Chorlton

Alice McIlwrick should be remembered.

She was the first Labour candidate to contest a local election here in Chorlton in the November of 1928 and she did very well gaining 14% of the vote.*

But beyond some brief details of her role in the election campaign there was little I could find out about her.

Not that I ever forgot Alice, and I always told myself that at some point something new would turn up and of course it did.  In this case from her grandson who posted a comment on my orginal story.

Tony McIlwrick lives in Scotland and he wrote

“Alice McIlwrick (1881-1964) was my grandmother. She married in 1919 and had two children. She was a graduate and a strong believer in the value of education - both her children went to Manchester University, her son becoming an electrical engineer and her daughter becoming a GP. 

As well as education she was also an ardent feminist and held strong left wing views. Her husband's parents had emigrated to Kansas from Manchester in the 1880's but following the premature death of his mother Frederick McIlwrick and his two young siblings were brought to Manchester and raised by a maternal aunt. Frederick, Alice and their two children lived in Parrs Wood Road in the early 1920's but in 1926 moved to Barlow Moor Road where they stayed until 1945 when they moved to Bowdon, Altrincham. 

In 1961 Frederick & Alice moved to Davenham, near Northwich to live with their daughter and it was there that she died.”

This was all I needed to reignite the search and sure enough in the course of the morning I came across a reference to their marriage and the celebration of their daughter’s coming of age in 1943 and some tantalizing hints of a concert career as a contralto in the early 1920s.

Along the way I uncovered Frederick’s 1911 census return.

And then I was drawn back to the politics.

She was the first and for many years the only Labour candidate to have fought the Didsbury ward in a municipal election which accordng to the Labour historian Rhys Davies was a real challenge “in that forsaken quarter, knowing what our fate must be.”  Neverthess “after much thought and doubt, Mrs McIlwrick, B.A., an ardent Labourite, a very forcible speaker, well versed in municipal affairs decided to don our colours, in a by-election there on May 17th 1927.”**

The result was not really in question, with the Conservative candidate gaining 55% of the vote, the Liberal 34% and Alice garnering 11%.

But this was a significant achievement for the Labour party given “that our cause was so weak that there was hardly any help forthcoming even on the day of the poll.”

And rereading the accounts of the two elections she fought here in Chorlton in the November and December of 1928 there is no doubting that she was a formidable politican.

The Manchester Guardian had reported that she was a serious candidate who would do well in the contest, a view endorsed by the Labour Party who sent its M.P., R J Davies and the Councillor Wright Robinson to speak on the same platform.

And the record shows that she gained 14% of the vote in the November election and despite a much lower turn out in the following month lost only 2% at the December by-election.

The years either side of that election saw the Labour Party strengthen it postion.  In 1923 it formed its first ever government and  became the largest party in the House of Commons six years later.

And these were the years when Alice was particularly active here in south Manchester.

The posters from the 1924 General Election at the beginning of the story would have been familiar enough to her and would have been the first Labour posters supporting a parliamentary candidate to be posted up in Chorlton.

The years after the Great War had seen unemployment increase particularly in the old traditional heavy industries and touched on that feeling that the country had not become a  place “fit for heroes.”

Nor had that basic problem of unemployment gone away.  Only once did the figure of those out of work drop below 8% during the decade and so Labour’s call for the country to turn out the Conservatives coupled with an appeal to woman to vote Labour “for the children’s sake did not go unheeded.

Nationally Labour gained 287 seats while in Withington which included Chorlton Labour took 16% of the vote which was an increase of 7% five years earlier.

I would love to know Alice’s part in all of this and I rather think it will not be long before it is revealed.

Pictures; Labour Party campaign posters from 1924 and 1929

*When all eyes were on Chorlton, the local elections of 1928, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Alice%20McIlwrick

** Socialism in Surburbia, Rhys Davies, 1930

See also Posters from the 20th century, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Posters%20from%20the%2020th%20century

Herstory, more for International Women's Day

National Union of Teachers Badge mid 1980s

It’s that week again and I think it’s worth recalling that while the Suffragettes quite rightly have been acknowledged for their part in campaigning for political equality they were not alone.

And so to Ada Chew, who chose not to chain herself to street railings, break the windows of politicians or end up in prison being forced fed.  She was not a suffragette, choosing instead to campaign within the labour movement for the vote.

Born in 1870, while working in a clothes factory in her 20s she was sacked for writing articles to the local newspaper criticising working conditions. From there she became active in the Independent Labour Party and in 1896 toured the north east of England in the Clarion Van arguing the case for socialism.

And during the next two decades continued to be active in the labour movement as an organiser for the Women’s Trade Union League and then from 1911 to 1914 for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

This was the body which the WSPU had broken with over the issue of militant action and of course it is the WSPU which often features in the history books.  But the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies was no mild debating group.

In 1912 it established the Elections Fighting Fund Committee (EFF) headed by Catherine Marshall which intervened in four by-elections campaigning for the Labour Party against Government candidates.  Labour had committed itself to opposing any franchaise bill which did not include votes for women and while the Party failed to win any of the four elections the Liberals lost two.

Alice McIlwrick in 1936

Here in Chorlton, there was Jane Redford, our first women councillor on Manchester City Council, and Alice McIlwrick, socialist, teacher and campaigner for peace who stood as the first Labour candidate in the municipal elections of 1928.

Equally active was at the turn of the 20th century Catherine Garrett who was one of the three socialist Guardians elected to the Board of the Chorlton Union who administered the Poor Law in south Manchester and in particular the Withington Workhouse.

Time and time gain she argued for better conditions for the inmates and challenged many of the demeaning regulations that made applicants for relief feel like second class citizens.

Chorlton peace women

And closer to home there was our own Women’s Peace group active in the 1980s whose story has yet to be written but like Jane Redford, Alice McIlwrick and Catherine Garrett are here recorded in the blog.

But I shall finish with the suffragettes and their campaigning song http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCtGkCg7trY

Pictures; badges from the collection of Andrew Simpson, photograph of Alice McIlwrick , courtesy of Tony McIlwrick, and Chorlton peace women from the Lloyd collection

New people new ideas, Chorlton in 1895

“The influx of a new population of lower middle class city workers who have to find room to live in the new houses erected on open spaces where a few years ago there were green pastures and golden corn fields.  These people have brought with them a new political outlook consistent with the great advance of Labour in recent years.”*

It was of course one of the outcomes of the expansion of housing across south Manchester at the end of the 19th century  that new political ideas would follow the new people settling here.

Now I have no doubt that radical politics had long been discussed in the township.

For a while the radical politician Thomas Walker had lived at Barlow Hall at the end of the 18th century and there would have been plenty of people who travelled into Manchester who would have been aware of the torrent of ideas circulating during the years after the French Revolution and well into the middle of the 1800s and at the very least would have discussed them in their homes and the pubs and beer shops.

The radical journalist Alexander Somerville walked through the lanes of Chorlton in 1847 talking to our farmers and in the decade before had been charged by the Anti Corn Law League with the task of arguing for an end to trade protectionism and may have made other visits.

Thirty years before his visit there is evidence that people had walked from Urmston and Stretford to Peterloo in 1819** and I am sure they would have been joined by weavers and labourers from Chorlton, Withington and the other townships on the southern edge of the city.

But at present all that is conjecture, although we do know that in the 1835 General Election the Whigs got 27% of the vote against the Tories here in Chorlton.  Of course the total male population was only 26 men and neither of the Whig candidates were radicals, but on the other hand they were the “progressive party” and faced an onslaught of voter intimidation from the Tories during the campaign and on the day of the election.

Sixty years later and the Chorlton-cum-Hardy Socialist Society was active.  In 1895 they had complained bitterly to the Manchester Guardian that they had been prevented from holding a meeting in the Public Hall which was a “hall built for the public, consecrated to the common good, free from the trammels of faction, open for the use of all” and following this had met the same response from “every other room belonging to a public body.”***

And so were forced to meet “on certain nights around lamp posts”**** to spread their political message.

By 1906 they at least they were afforded the same rights as other political groups and had been given permission to hold two meetings on the village green.

But it was not till 1928 that the Labour Party contested its first local election here in Chorlton achieving 1,457 votes with 14% of the total vote, and still managed 12% a month later when a second election was run.

Now this is about it.  There will be election material, more reports and stories out there which will help throw a light on how the township developed politically in the early years of the last century.

Picture; Solidarity, Walter Crane, 1887, and Percentage  of the total vote in the Chorlton Local Election November 1928

.
*Davies, Rhys. J., Socialism in Surburbia, 1930
** On an August day in 1819, anything between 60,000 and 80,000 men, women and children had assembled in St Peter’s Field to listen to the case for reforming the representation of Parliament.  Just before 2 in the afternoon a unit of Cavalry charged into the crowd with their sabres.  The deaths resulting from that charge have never been exactly established but sources claimed between 11 and 15 people were killed and up to 700 injured.
*** C. Fletcher, Chorlton-cum- Hardy Socialist Society, Manchester Guardian, October 23 1895
****, Davies, p7

Another side to life on the Home Front in Manchester during the Great War

“This meeting views with grave concern the enormous rise in the price of foodstuffs and coal, which is equivalent to a considerable reduction of wages of those fully employed and the enormous profits that Shipping, Dealers and other gamblers in the means of life are at present reaping by their unholy profiteering.

We therefore call upon the Government to take immediate action to control supplies to regulate food prices and to put an end to this flagrant exploitation of the necessities of the poor.”*

Such was a resolution passed by a large audience in the Free Trade Hall on Sunday February 14 1915.

It was the culmination of a few days of factory and street corner meetings which focused on the swift rise in rents as well as food and coal prices since the beginning of the war.

And it is an aspect of life on the Home Front which does not always feature prominently in many accounts of the Great War.

The popular story of how we coped during the four years tends to fasten on the participation of women on the shop floor and in the fields; the impact of Zeppelin raids and the blackout but all too often skips over the huge hike in the cost of living.

As Henry Hyndman the leading socialist pointed out “since the war had begun prices had gone up 22%, so that now the purchasing power of a sovereign was from 13s. 6d to 13s.9d.”**

And this was the context behind the industrial conflicts which rumbled on and which some at the time and since have sought to characterise as greedy workers exploiting a country at war.

The reality was very different as Sam Hague who spoke at that Free Trade meeting was quick to point out, “there never had been a time in the nation’s history when the working classes had so solidly backed the Government.”***

Working hours increased, and under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 and The Munitions War Act 1915 workers were being prosecuted for absenteeism and striking over wages and conditions.

In Manchester the first prosecutions under the Munitions War Act were held at the Town Hall on Friday July 30 when thirty-two men employed at Craven Bros Ltd Reddish were brought before the Recorder charged with going on strike  over wages and working conditions without first submitting the matter to the Board of Trade.****

But this is to get ahead of ourselves.

Back in January the Manchester Guardian had reported “the all-round advance in the price of most household commodities since the outbreak of hostilities – an advance amounting in several instances to over 50% [was] causing concern to the average householder whose income is inelastic”*****

And amongst working class families this all-round advance was causing great hardship more so because it was accompanied by rises in rents and fuel prices.

But strikes to maintain living standards were not the only response to the jump in the cost of living.
On the day war broke out the Labour Movement had formed the War Emergency Workers National Committee tasked with defending the interests of organised working people.

During the next four years it received daily reports all on everything from rises in rents, the cost and quality of food to pensions and conditions in factories and on the land as well as the railways, war babies, air raids and women’s war service.

Much of the correspondence came from local Labour and Trades Councils across the country which set up their own local committees.

Here in the city the Manchester & District Workers (War Problems) Joint Committee consisted of Manchester & Salford Trades and Labour Council, Manchester & Salford Labour Party, Gorton Trades Council, the Engineering and Shipbuilding Trades Federation, Building Industries Federation, Women’s Trade Union Council, Manchester and Salford Women’s Trade & Labour Council, Manchester & Salford ILP, Manchester Salford  & District Co-operative Societies, Women’s Co-operative Guilds, Women’s Citizen’s Association, and the Women’s War Interest Committee.

This was a broad cross section of those organisation representing the working class.
In turn Food Vigilance Committees were set up across the country to monitor prices and ensure local councils were enforcing regulations on both prices and the quality of food.

They also called meetings, distributed leaflets and like the War Emergency Workers National Committee pushed hard for more Government intervention in regulating the abuses thrown up during the war.

Now that to me promises to be a fascinating story.

Pictures; courtesy of the Labour History Archives & Study Centre,  at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, http://www.phm.org.uk/

*Resolution passed at the Free Trade Hall on February 14 1915

**LABOUR AND FOOD PRICES. A FREE TRADE HALL PROTEST, Manchester Guardian Feb 15 1915

***ibid Manchester Guardian Feb 15 191

****O’Neil Joseph, Manchester in the Great War, 2014

*****FOOD PRICES AND THE WAR, Manchester Guardian January 31 1915

Looking for the Chorlton Socialist Society in 1908

Now I am always looking for those little bits of our history which have been lost but are now coming back out of the shadows.

So it is with the Chorlton Socialist Society which was active in the decades either side of the turn of the 20th century.

There isn’t much and what there is hints at much more.

In 1895 they had complained bitterly to the Manchester Guardian that they had been prevented from holding a meeting in the Public Hall which was a “hall built for the public, consecrated to the common good, free from the trammels of faction, open for the use of all” and following this had met the same response from
“every other room belonging to a public body.”*

The letter was signed by Charles Fletcher of 9 Chestnut Avenue who was the secretary, and in the course of the next five years there were three more secretaries who were recorded in the Labour Annual and its successor The Reformer’s Year Book**

In 1898 Mr Fred Hughes of 16 Manchester Road was secretary of a group which had 40 members and three years later he was followed by Mr J Crispin who lived at 32 Whalley Road and in 1901 by George Lee of 17 Albermarle Road.

So far little is known of these men, although a Charles Fletcher who later lived in Rusholme served during the Great War, and Mr Lee can be tracked across Chorlton from 1901 to 1911.

Charles Fletcher gave his occupation in 1915 on his Attestation papers as a lorry driver, while George Lee was a designer for a calico printing firm.

Now these were the sort of people who had been moving in to the township since the 1880s when much of New Chorlton was developed.

“The influx of a new population of lower middle class city workers who have to find room to live in the new houses erected on open spaces where a few years ago there were green pastures and golden corn fields.

These people have brought with them a new political outlook consistent with the great advance of Labour in recent years.”***

And with places like the Public hall barred to them they were forced to meet “on certain nights around lamp posts”**** to spread their political message. ****

That said by 1906 they at least were afforded the same rights as other political groups and had been given permission to hold two meetings on the village green.

Like all such groups their membership remained small but there was a steady core which took a dip in 1910 which at present is unclear.  In the previous few years it had affiliated to the Manchester & Salford Labour Representation Committee and its membership was on a parr with some of the bigger areas of the city.

In 1906 when the Labour Representation Committee changed its name to the Labour Party the Chorlton Socialist Society had debated its response to that name change.

Along with other such groups it was a branch of the Independent Labour Party which had been formed in 1893, and at the 1907 Annual ILP meeting which was to be held at Stockton-on-Tees, there were suggestions that the party should change its name.

The Pendlebury and Swinton branch along with Chorlton suggested a change to the Socialist Party while other branches came up with variations.*****

As it was the ILP retained its name and in turn affiliated to the Labour Party.

All of which may mean that after 1906 Chorlton had its own branch of the Labour Party which attracted members from the Socialist Society and that will introduce us to William Mellor who was also an active trade unionist and socilaist living in Chorlton.******

And that I guess means a return to the archives of the Peoples History Museum where no doubt I will be able to uncover a shed full more on both the society and at the start of the Labour Party here and perhaps a little more on Mr Fletcher, Mr Lee and those other secretaries.*******

We shall see.

Picture; Solidarity, Walter Crane, 1887

Additional research from Barry Clark and Morris, D 'Labour or Socialism'. Phd, University of Manchester 1982

* C. Fletcher, Chorlton-cum- Hardy Socialist Society, Manchester Guardian, October 23 1895

**Labour Annual, 1895-1900, The Reformer’s Year Book, 1900-1909

***Davies, Rhys. J., Socialism in Suburbia, 1930

****ibid Davies, page 9

*****New name for the ILP, The Manchester Guardian March 8 1906

******William Mellor, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/William%20Mellor

*******Archives & Study Centre, at the People’s History Museum, Manchester, http://www.phm.org.uk

William Mellor senior, a Chorlton Socialist

I am back with the mystery of William Mellor.*

Last week I pondered on the young William Mellor who lived in Chorlton from 1911, was a well respected book binder and calligrapher, exhibited with the Clarion Guild of Handicraft and was Secretary of the Northern Art Workers Guild.

He enlisted in 1915, was gassed and demobbed four years later and disappears from history.

All of which set me off on the search for this interesting man and on the way introduced me to his father.

He was also a bookbinder and back in 1911 lived next to his son on Clarence Road ** in Chorlton.

Now I have to admit that I passed William Mellor senior over in the hunt for the younger William and that was a mistake.

He was an equally intriguing man and also presented a puzzle.  In 1911 he described himself as a secretary which I took to be a reference to his work for the National Union of Bookbinders and Machine Rulers, which in turn led me to link him with W.R. Mellor who was a City Councillor and magistrate.

And here not for the first time the research got complicated because a William Mellor of Stanley Grove in Chorlton  died in 1925 and this seemed to rule out W.R. Mellor who died nine years later.

It was an easy enough mistake to make particularly as both had wives with the same name.

But now I think we are back with W.R. Mellor who in 1911 was secretary of the Manchester & Salford Trades & Labour Council and gave his address as 3 Clarence Road.

And here I have to thank my friend Lawrence who fired by the mystery dug deep and discovered that, “William Mellor snr, is I think the William Mellor (W.R.Mellor) who was the secretary of the Manchester Trades Council. He retired from that post in September 1929, and was also a Councillor. 

He was very active in the strikes of 1911 and the General Strike and is mentioned many times in the book 
To Make That Future Now, by the Frow's.

He lived in Clock Alley, a street absorbed by the CWS buildings on Corporation Street, left school at 10, becoming a bookbinder, and was active in the National Union of Bookbinders and Machine Rulers before WW1.

The Manchester Guardian has his death notice, on March 2, 1934 when he was living at 115 Birch Hall Lane, wife of Mary. Manchester Crematorium, funeral arrangements M&S Co-Op Funerals.”

So there you have it, in the course of exploring the life of young William Mellor we now know more about his father.

And I rather think I want to know more.  He was according to a colleague, "a man of kind disposition, humane feeling with a strong sense of justice.  Always he gave offenders the benefit of any doubt there might be in their cases, and whenever possible extended to them a helping hand.""****

He "represented the Moston Ward in the Manchester City Council, was a member of the Labour Group in the council and sat on the Baths, Housing and Public Health Committees and was the founder member of the Tenants' Defence League. He was originally in the bookbinding trade but later became connected with trade union work, and was at one time secreatry of the Manchester and Salford Trades Council."*****

Picture; Manchester & Salford Trades & Labour Council, agenda 1911, courtesy of Lawrence Beedle.

Research thanks to Lawrence Beedle

* What happened to William Mellor?
 http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/what-happened-to-william-mellor.html

**William Mellor and his wife Eliza lived at 1 Clarence Road in 1911 and his father and mother at 3 Clarence Road, now renamed Claridge Road, both have now been demolished.

***Frow, Eddie & Ruth, To Make That Future Now, 1976

****Manchester Guardian, March 3, 1934
*****Manchester Guardian, March 2, 1934

What happened to William Mellor?

It is a simple enough question but one for which I have no answer.

And it is all the more frustrating given that his early life up to the point when he moved to Chorlton  is well documented.

Now I have to confess William Mellor was unknown to me until a few days ago when my friend Barry Clark told me about him.

He was born in 1886 and moved to Clarence Road in Chorlton around 1911.*  At the age of 30 in 1915 he had volunteered for the army, served in France and was twice gassed before being demobbed in 1919.

And that is pretty much it.  Despite a heap of digging neither of us has been able to track him after the Great War, which is a puzzle given that he was a well respected book binder and calligrapher having won prizes for both.

He exhibited with the Clarion Guild of Handicraft  was Secretary of the Northern Art Workers Guild before it folded in 1911 and his work appeared  in various national art journals of the time.

Now there are plenty of clues still to follow up.

His father, William Mellor was also a book binder and was editor of the Book Binders Trades Journal and may have held a position in his union given that he gives his occupation as “secretary” on the 1911 census.

It is just possible that something of the young William will be revealed in a further search through his father’s life and from his links with the Northern Art Workers Guild.

Added to which there might just be some records from his time as a student at the Manchester School of Art.

All of which leads me at present to pursue the Clarion Guild of Handicraft which is a fascinating area of study and may still throw some light on William Mellor.

Picture; poster advertising an exhibition of the Clarion Guild of Handicraft, at the Athenaeum in 1904, from the collection of Barry Clark.

Additional research by Barry Clark

*William Mellor and his wife Eliza lived at 1 Clarence Road in 1911 and his father and mother at 3 Clarence Road, now renamed Claridge Road, both have now been demolished.