Mrs Jane Redford, Manchester's second woman councillor

I have been staring at this picture for some time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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

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


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

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

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchetser

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


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

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

It happened here in Chorlton and also in Didsbury .............. National Baby Week .... July 1917

Just a century ago a crowd assembled on the Rec opposite our house on Beech Road and listened to Mrs Jane Redford, Mr Peach and Miss Place of the Manchester & Salford Day Nurseries speak in support of National Baby Week.

The week long campaign aimed to rouse “a universal determination to prevent the unnecessary wastage of infant life, [focusing on] all the causes which make for the high rate of infant mortality. 

According to statistics 80,000 babies under a year old die every year in the United Kingdom of which 50,000 might have been saved.”*

Now this is all the more remarkable when you consider that we were by that summer in to year three of the Great War.

A war which had already caused thousands of causalities and although the organisers did not know it was about to deliver even more as the British army launched the Third Battle of Ypres, commonly known as Passchendaele which would in its three months result in the deaths of 244,897 British and Commonwealth  soldiers.

The celebration began with processions through Chorlton and Didsbury both led by “a band and numbers of green and white banners.”

The Didsbury procession which was "followed by a meeting addressed by Miss Margaret Ashton and Mr C T Needham M P and others included Red Cross nurses and munition workers."

By contrast the Chorlton march was made up entirely of  “small children with a few mothers and big sisters to look after the babies and large crowds turned out to watch.”

Sadly no photographs have come to light and I have no idea what Mrs Jane Redford or the others said in the Rec on that Saturday afternoon.

But Mrs Redford was an important figure both in Chorlton and the City and her personal papers may still be available.

She had been active for over 30 years serving on various public bodies including the Board of Henshaw’s Blind Asylum and as a Poor Law Guardian for the Chorlton Union where she had campaigned for the provision of trained nurses for workhouse hospitals.

And in 1910 after winning a municipal election here in Chorlton, she became not only our first woman councillor but also the second woman elected to Manchester City Council.

And she spoke on the Rec opposite our house which really was a bit of history which happened here.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Manchester

Pictures; the Rec circa 1910 from the Lloyd Collection and Mrs Redford, date unknown courtesy of Lawrence Beedle

*Baby Week Opening of the Campaign in Manchester, Manchester Guardian July 2 1917

Debates which never go away, ......... the story of our public library

Who could think that a gift of £5,000 in 1914 to help finance a library here in Chorlton could cause a stir and still have people debating the issue years later? Now the gift came from the steel magnate, Andrew Carnegie, and was only one of 660 which he funded in Britain, 1,689 in the United States, 125 in Canada and more elsewhere between 1883 and 1929.

From humble beginnings he had built up a huge steel business before selling out for an estimated $500 million in 1901 and devoting himself to philanthropist projects. Even before he retired he had been spending money on all sorts of projects of which the establishment of public libraries was just one.

But there are those who would argue the money was not his to give away having been made by the men who toiled in the steel plants and who were increasingly denied the right to organise collectively in his work places. But that is another story.

Here in Chorlton the charge against the Carnegie gift was led by Councillor Jane Redford, who “was not infatuated with the Carnegie gift” expressing “a feeling of disappointment that the Chorlton ratepayers were not to get a library through the ordinary means of municipal enterprise.”*

The issue of a free library for Chorlton had been bubbling below the surface since we had voted to be incorporated into the City of Manchester in 1904. In January 1908 the Ratepayers Association had written to the Town Clerk asking for the Corporation to honour the agreement which they did in November of the same year.

It was something of a temporary measure as the library was in a rented house on Oswald Road. But it began with the provision of a thousand books a reading room and a meetings room and was a runaway success. During the first two months the membership climbed to 1,100 and the number of books was doubled with a promise of another 1,000.

More than anything it proved the need for a library on a more permanent footing and by 1911 the negotiations with Carnegie were underway. These gifts from the steel magnate were hedged with conditions, and in our case that the site “should be made over free of cost to the Corporation” ** and the cost of the building shouldn’t exceed £5000.

There is a story that the original plans for the library crossed the Atlantic with the Titanic and were lost, but whether true or not the building was finished just a little later than scheduled and was opened on November 4th 1914. The Manchester Guardian reported “the style is Classical with Ionic columns in Portland stone and had 7,420 books, [which]if necessary can be increased to 10,500 volumes. There is a general reading room for adults and one for juveniles.”


In an age which has seen libraries add computers to the resources available to the user it is perhaps surprising that the Lord Mayor in opening the library nearly 100 years ago “hoped that someday there would be a kinematograph connected to our libraries for the special benefit of boys and girls, enabling them the better to understand the histories they were reading.”***


There was already a cinema of sorts just around the corner on Wilbraham Road, just over the bridge before the junction with Buckingham Road. It had been opened in the early years of the 20th century and would later be part of a chain of picture houses across the city. Alas no such venture was to enter the library.

And now the debate over the future of the library and the question of the degree to which the council should go into partnership with private enterprise is again a live issue. But like the story of the bioscope, and the Chorlton Pavilion on Wilbraham Road it is a topic for another day.

Picture; Chorlton Library from the collection of Andrew Simpson and picture of Mrs Jane Redford from her election address by kind permission of Lawrence Beadle 

* New Library for Chorlton, Manchester Guardian September 28 1911
**ibid Manchester Guardian September 28 1911
*** A New Library, Manchester Guardian November 5th 1914