One bedsit …. the lost tennis courts …… and those dream homes …..

Number One Malvern Grove is an unimposing house on the corner of Burton Road in West Didsbury.

1 Malvern Grove, house and garden 2022

And it was where I lived for six months in my student days in 1970.

I say unimposing but once it was the smart home of Mr and Mrs Simpson, their two children and Katherine Williams who was 23, from Everton and was employed as a “general servant”.

I know the property was there by 1896 and with a bit of digging should be able establish when it was built and perhaps date the rest of the homes on this small cul-de-sac.

And with a bit more diligence it will be possible to list most of the households from when it was built through to 1911 when the Simpson’s were there and on to when it became a series of bedsits.

It had ten rooms and two cellars, and I occupied one of the back down stairs rooms which might have once been the kitchen. It was a small room furnished as I remember with a bed, a table, two chairs an electric ring and one of those water heaters which held a pint and bit of water and ate electricity.

That ground floor rear room, 2022

Like all crummy bedsits I have lived in it was basic, cold, with walls covered in woodchip and painted in multiple coats of emulsion.   All very cheap and not very cheerful.

Added to which there was that lingering smell of 10 different evening meals permeating the place and the bone cold hall.

And here I stayed for just six months, at a time when I could have been very lonely were it not for some of the other residents who took me under their wing.  

They made sure that most nights I accompanied them across the road to the Old House at Home and took pity on a student ensuring that only occasionally was I allowed to buy a round.

At the time I never thought about the house or its history, instead I was captivated by the two 1960s “dream houses” just two doors away along the Grove.  They resembled exactly properties which had featured on the back of Kellog’s Corn Flakes boxes and had been part of an advertising competition which offered up the prospect of winning one of these “dream houses”.

On cold winter nights with all their house lights on they looked inviting and comfy with the promise of warm evenings in front of a television in the company of a happy noisy family.

Albemarle Lawn Tennis Court, 1958

Over the years I have gone back, and the ghosts are still there from the lad who lived in the cellar, his mate “Strain Chocker” and the policewoman who lived upstairs.  They  mix with the memory that most Saturday night’s the population of the house doubled.

What I didn’t know was that just a few yards down what had been an unmade road was the Albemarle Lawn Tennis Court. It shows up on the 1958 OS, had two courts, a club house and an adjacent building.  The courts were accessed from Abberton Road, and the path is still there although it has been incorporated into the side garden of one of the houses.

Student days, Chatham Grove, 1970, Mike, John, and Lois

They may still have been there in 1970 I just never went to look, but now are a bit of new build called Stow Gardens, and my dream houses have gone.

All of which could have burst my bubble.  But then it is over half a century since I called Malvern Grove my home and along with the tennis courts the pub is no more and as is the house on Chatham Grove where a friend spent a time and we celebrated his birthday, with cake and tuna and sweetcorn salad.

The afternoon was memorable if only because at the age of 19 I had never had either tuna or sweet corn.

And of course back then I had no idea that the family who I shared the house with me were also called Simpson.  Not that I see any significance in that .... long ago I realised just how many Simpson's I occupy the planet with.

So that is it.

Except to say there must be people who remember the tennis courts, like me spent happy nights in the Old House, and who knows may also have lived in 1 Malvern Grove and perhaps even knew "Strain Chocker"

We shall see.

Location; Burton Road

Pictures Malvern Grove, 2022, courtesy of Google Maps, Albemarle Lawn Tennis Court, 1958, OS map of Manchester & Salford, 1958, and Mike John & Lois, Student days, Chatham Grove, 1970 from the collection of Lois Elsden

Looking for the Didsbury street they stole ……

Well, a bit deceptive as the street in question is still there it’s just its name they stole.

Northgate Street, 2021

All of which will prompt the party poopers to exclaim “what an outrageous and silly bit of nonsense”.

And so it is, although that said there is a serious story here which revolves around the comprehensive city-wide policy of eliminating certain street names which I guess was to do away with duplications.  

I suppose it has always gone on, but I know that in the 1960s and 70s plenty of old names vanished.

Many of them were in Chorlton, but now I have come across the first in Didsbury and it was North Street which ran off Wilmslow Road close to the clock tower.

North Street, 1957

Today it is Northgate Street and for anyone still a tad puzzled as to where it is, just look for the Station pub which remains a delightful little place to pass the time.

The Station on North Street, 1959

I first came across it in 1978 on a night spent in the company of John Cordwell who lived in Wolseley Place, and always maintained that he was the man who shouted out “Judas” at the Bob Dylan concert in Manchester in 1966.  

John and I had worked together at a high school in Wythenshawe, and while I had stayed, he moved on to a post at Didsbury College of Education.  

We kept in touch, and more than once squeezed into the pub which at weekends was always heaving.

Just when John confided the Dylan story to me, I have long ago forgotten, and if I am honest I only half believed him, given that he did recount amusing and sometimes impossible tales, which were always  told with a slight smile and a twinkle in the eye, as if to say challenge me if you dare. 

That Dylan concert, 1966

Moreover, while I knew him as John, many of his older friends knew him as Nigel, and later still I rather think he reverted to Nigel.

It is a memory I long cherished and just when I began to think that I had dreamed it up, the confirmation came in an article in the Independent by Andy Kershaw, leaving me to tell friends that not only had I known the man that shouted out Judas to Bob Dylan, but it predated the national revelation by thirty years.

And that takes me back to Mr. James Edward Smallpage who was confident that his new beer shop on the corner of Wilmslow Road and North Street would be a success.

It started selling beer in 1879, and with an eye to the future, was directly opposite the new railway station which opened in the January of the following year.

And by 1881 it was trading as the Station Hotel, which rather cornered the market in railway names, given that his two nearest rivals were the Wellington and the Dog and Partridge.

He might even have adopted the name earlier, but sadly the rate books for the years 1880-81 for Wilmslow Road are missing.

North Street, and Wilmslow Road, undated

Before his entry into the world of beer, he was variously a cashier, and clerk and later reverted to this occupation, having given up the Station Hotel in 1885.

Thereafter the Station Hotel had a series of owners and managers and in 1911 the man pulling the pints was a William Wrightman who was 45 years old and a widow, who shared the pub with an Annie Elizabeth Robinson who described herself as “housekeeper”.

Cabs and people looking towards North Street, undated

Now this maybe the same William Wrightman who is listed as a cab driver at 40 Wilmlslow Road, which was just a few doors down the road in the row beside Saints and Scholars and is now the small open piece of land adjoining the library.

The romantic in me has often speculated on the relationship between Mr. Wrightman and Ms. Robinson.  

Both were from Lincolnshire and she was working as a cook in one of the big houses on Wolseley Place, a decade earlier, so their paths could have crossed many times.

She may even have encountered him in the cab office which stood directly opposite the railway station and the Station Hotel.

And after a few pints of Marstons in their old pub my imagination runs to the idea that he might be one of the figures caught in an old photograph of the railway station and the cab shelter.

And that is pretty much it except to own up that the search for North Street was not prompted by me, but by a request from someone who looking for what is now Northgate Street.

I wasn’t alone in offering up an answer, nor was I the first but I was the one with time on my hands to go looking for a story, and as you do found heaps of them.

In time I will trawl the rate books and find out when the houses fronting the street were built and maybe pick one to explore the histories of its occupants.

For now, I will leave you with the revelation that in 1921 the five properties on the southside were occupied by a mix of people including a clerk, salesman, engineer, florist, and “Crumpet Baker” along with the woman who described herself as “Domestic at the Poor Law Guardian Rhodes Memorial Homes”, which I suspect I will have to revisit.

As well as that outrageous plug for the book on Didsbury Pubs, available from www.pubbooks.co.uk

Location; Didsbury

Pictures; Northgate Street, 2021, courtesy of Google maps, North Street, 1957, from the OS map of Manchester and Salford, 1957, the Station 1959, m42646, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass, and Wilmslow Road undated

In Northenden with the Ladies Dart team and Ken's sister Dorothy

One of the very nice things about writing the blog is the opportunity you get to meet people and share their family histories.

Even more so when they are kind enough to let me share their family photographs and tell the stories behind the pictures.

I have been featuring some of Ken’s photographs and they are not only a wonderful personal record but also capture perfectly the 1950s and 60s when I like Ken was growing up.

The first is the “ladies dart team, possibly the Crown inn Northenden. 

The photo has the Stockport Express on the back so they might hav won the league! 
Second from the left is Monica Jarvis, then my sister Dot Smith, and the last on the right is Jackie Rees, I think the picture would have been taken around 1967.”

It just takes me directly back to that period.  I remember my mum with a twin set like that and can think of at least two girlfriends who had the same hair style as the young woman in the front row, fifth from the left.

Not to be out done Ken’s second picture of his sister Dorothy and Pamela McGill at the petrol station on Palatine Road in Northenden also conjures up vivid memories.

Pictures; from the collection of Ken Fish

Down on Barlow Moor Road with a bit of my past .............. Manchester Teachers Centre

2015

Now I still think the decision of the City Council to establish a Teachers Centre on Barlow Moor Road was a bold and progressive thing to do.

It was a place where teachers could meet, advance their knowledge and skills swap ideas and study in the  library.

Originally it had been a large private residence and in the fullness of time I will go its history.

I started going there in 1973 and used it fairly regularly throughout the rest of the decade and into the next.

1965

I have yet to track down a history of the Centre but rather think it was opened in the mid 1960s and lasted till budgetary cuts led to its closure and ultimately the sale of the buildings.

I lost touch with the place years ago and so Andy Robertson’s two pictures are a welcome reminder of one of those key moments in my life when getting married and starting work in Wythenshawe coincided with my visits to the Teacher’s Centre.

At the time I took the place for granted and gave no thought to how grand the building would have been when it was a family home.

A little of the style and detail was still there to see including the fireplaces and plaster mouldings above the picture rails and the glass windows.

1974

Thinking about it I wonder if the staircase up to what had become the library made the same creaking noise back at the beginning of the last century, which may border on questionable speculation  but makes a link with its past.

And by one of those wonderful twists of chance I rather think that one of the people in the 1965 picture is Joan Leighton who was my first head teacher which makes the link I was looking for.

She is sitting on the right of the picture beside the lady with the hat.

2015

Now I can't be sure what the meeting was about but around 1965 she was part of a team of Humanities teachers working towards a book on the city's recent past which drew on the interplay between geography and history.

It was a book I used less than a decade later.

And then there is one final link and it is the hall which stood beside what had been the rear of the house.

It was a functional bit of a building with no pretence to be anything other than what it was.

Beyond the glass fronted entrance was a large space which pretty much resembled any school hall built in the three decades after the last war and was the first casualty of the new development.


Pictures; Didsbury business centre.com, once Teachers Centre 2105 from the collection of Andy Robertson, and the Humanities room of Teacher’s Centre, 1965, m66479, and the hall, 1974, m21496, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Back with that ghost sign on Burton Road and memories of "sweet shops galore"

Now I like returning to stories, especially ones where people pick up on what I have written and take the tale just that bit further.

Today on Burton Road, 2014

So yesterday I posted about a ghost sign on Burton Road, and I half expected that my friend Sally would be able to tell me more.

She grew up just off Burton Road and more over went to school with the son of the chap who ran the shop which once proudly displayed the sign on the gable end.

"The newsagents as I remember it was called Gibsons.

There were so many sweet and cake buying opportunities in that area its a wonder all of the children were not morbidly obese, but we weren't, because we played lots of rounders and Rally Vo and we had Chopper bikes.

Back in 1962

On Burton road , just in the stretch between Nell Lane and Cavendish Road , there was Bancroft's, Lyngrays, Gibsons, Duwe's another shop (that was actually two shops) and sold greetings cards and stationary in one bit, while the other side was called 'The Chocolate Cabin' and sold the sort of boxes of chocolates you only really saw at Christmas .

If you dared to turn the corner onto Lapwing Lane, there was Smiths and Bennetts , both newsagents and sweet shops.

And a short walk up to ‘the terminus ‘ at the top of Lapwing Lane would bring you face to face with chocolate machines , where you could get those square bars of Cadburys Fruit and Nut..

And still in 1962

Under the veranda at the Terminus was also Inmans newsagents ... More opportunities to get rid of your 'spends.' "

And along with these priceless memories she dug up a series of pictures which complimented mine and showed Burton Road back in 1962, which is pretty much how I still remembered it a decade later just before it began to change into what we know now.

But that is another story which of course I hope Sally will tell.

And in 1995

In the meantime having wandered down Burton Road it looks today and in 1962 I decided to visit just once more sometime in 1995.

By then the big hoardings on the gable end had gone and there was our sign which of course is still there today and where we started the story.

Sadly the newsagents is no more an in the course of the last two years has been a restaurant offering up different cuisine.

And that pretty much is that for now.

Picture; the ghost sign on Burton Road in 2014, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and in 1962, by J F Harris, m42962 & m42961  and in 1995 by M Luft m21519, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

At the wool shop on Burton Road ....... another story from Sally Dervan

I have my own "Wool Shop” memories of the one on Burton Road, West Didsbury. 

The buuton tin

I think it was owned by a brother and sister, but it was usually the lady who served us.

The shop door had a bell, and it would sometimes take quite a while for anyone to come out of the back of the shop. We would stand there very politely, and not speak or touch a thing until the proprietor appeared.

I loved the wool shop, both my mum and nana were very keen knitters and what they knitted (at the time these memories are from) was usually for me.

I wouldn't always be the wearer of what they knitted even if it was for me, because they also knitted for the whole army of dolls that I owned!

The wool shop did have a particular smell, and one that was familiar to me as the daughter of a carpet shop owner, because the smell was proper wool, not nylon stuff

On Burton Road

Before we bought the wool, we needed the pattern. The patterns were in a whole shelf full of binders at the side of the counter.

Each pattern was in a plastic sleeve and I used to like the slapping noise that the patterns made as we flicked through them.

I remember the glass counter in the shop that was full of buttons. I had a fascination for buttons that has always stayed with me.

Even now, if you put a tin of buttons in front of me I can sit for hours looking through them. Old buttons each have their own story and I remember my Mum and Nana would reuse buttons, so if clothes were being discarded.

Then the buttons would come off and be saved for putting onto something else. I could easily be wearing a cardigan as a child with buttons that had come from one of my mum’s cardigans when she was the same age.

A young Sally with buttons and Father Christmas

Actually buying new buttons was a rare treat, but if we were buying buttons as well as wool then we would select them through the glass counter as if they were jewels, and the wooden tray would then be slid out from the counter for the buttons to be more closely inspected.

I remember some really fancy little buttons, lambs, bunches of roses and even some that were shaped like little post boxes that went on one of my brothers cardigans in the 1970s.

To my shame I must report that, when I was very small, most if the buttons on my clothes were the size of saucers.

This was because of one attempt by me, witnessed by my nana, to shove a stray button up my nose. It took years for me to win back that trust! I have a very early photo of me, trying to escape from Santa's knee at Lewis' - the buttons tell their own tale!

© Sally Dervan

Pictures; from the collection of Sally Dervan and Nos 238-240 Burton Road, 1962, J F Harris, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m09736, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Pondering on the future of 9 Barlow Moor Road in Didsbury

9 Barlow Moor Road, 2013

Well here is one of those ongoing tales.  

This is number 9 Barlow Moor Road and for as long as I can remember it has been empty.

That said there will be some keen resident of this end of Didsbury who will know exactly when it was last in use.

Andy who took the photograph remembers that it was once a fish and chip shop and asks “what is to become of the chippy? 

This building has been derelict ten or twenty years. I used to get my chips there in the mid seventies when I couldn't be bothered to cross Wilmslow Road to go to Fongs on School Lane. 

It used to be run by three ladies.”

Now I know what it might become, because there has been a planning application to turn it into a cafe with a shop on the first floor.*

That was back in November 2013 but when I last passed recently it was still boarded up.

And back in 1973

But these things have a habit of taking a long time.

So I began instead to look for old images of the property but these are to find.

There are a few which give a glimpse of the place but that is about it.

And added to these there are references to it in the street directories but again they do not help me much.

So I shall for now leave number 9 awaiting its development and hope someone will come up with either a picture or some information.

Pictures; number 9 from the collection of Andy Robertson, February 2013, and in 1973 taken by 
J.F.Hughes, m21469, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

*Manchester City Council online planning
http://www.publicaccess.manchester.gov.uk/associateddocs/MCCList1.aspx?104341/FO/2013/S2