Stepping back into Didsbury's past at the Old Cock in 1954

We are in Didsbury by the Old Cock Inn and the year is 1954.

Just twenty or so years later I would use it as a dinner time haunt, but by then it had changed almost beyond recognition.

The shop and the garage doors had gone and  that magnificent porch by the front door reduced in size.

Go back another fifty years and those garage doors didn’t exist instead the shop extended across to the end of the building.

All of which makes this photograph a nice period piece.

In the distance just popping above the tree line is what was once the chapel for the Methodist college but which had long since been converted into a library and lecture rooms first for the Methodist students and then for those young men and women training to be teachers.

The car parked outside clearly dates the picture as does the partially hidden sign for Emergency Water Supply.

The letters EWS could be found all over the city and date from the last war when extra water might be needed to fight fires during an air raid and when the water mains had been damaged.

Most have long since been painted over or have faded with age and when I went looking for this one it too had gone.

It might still have been there in 1974 but I can’t remember, that said I can date the picture to 1954 because it was one of a series produced by the Valentine Company in that year and while the photograph might be a tad earlier it won’t be much.

Location; Didsbury










Picture; the Old Cock in 1954 

Revisiting a favourite story from Didsbury’s past ......... Miss Bertha Geary

Now the thing about anniversaries is that they turn up all the time, from the big and momentous ones to the tiny private events.

And there are plenty of people who will follow the unfolding year ready to mark the exact moment in history when the calendar presents you with the same day a century after the event.

I am as guilty as the rest whether it be VE Day, the out break of the Great War on the tragic events in St Peter’s Field in the August of 1819.

So with all that in mind, here is the anniversary of the day Peter Topping and I decided to accept the invitation from Amberley Publishing and produce a book on the history of Didsbury.

The commission was familiar enough........ 90 old images of the township matched by 90 new making it one of those familiar then and now books.

What Made Didsbury Through Time different and mould breaking was that we decided to alter the tired formulae.  So some of the modern images were paintings by Peter and the text by me told the “stories behind the doors” of the people and buildings featured in the book.

After all there had already been two excellent histories written about Didsbury and no one wants to steal the thunder of other historians.  So instead I trawled the census returns and newspaper accounts used them to bring some of the residents of Didsbury back out of the shadows

My favourite was the young Bertha Geary who on a warm summer’s evening wrote to a friend “that she had heard the flying man.”

It is a story I written about on the blog and of course is also in the book we published six years ago.
Enough said.





Picture; Bertha’s postcard from the book Didsbury Through Time

Didsbury Through Time is available in Didsbury from Morten’s Bookshop on Warburton Road, Didsbury, and other bookshops.

* E.J. Morten Booksellers, 6 Warburton Street, Didsbury, Manchester M20 6WA,
Telephone: 0161 445 7629