On the turn of a sixpence, the continuing story of Manley Hall and Sam Mendel

The Hall in 1879

Yesterday I was pondering a visit to Manley Hall in the June of 1879.*

This had been the grand home of Samuel Mendel popularly known at the time as the “merchant prince”

It was a magnificent house of fifty rooms set in 80 acres of grounds which included a greenhouse, an orangery, deer park, fountains and ornamental lakes.**

The estate extended east from Upper Chorlton Road as far as the Independent College, and south to Clarendon Road.  Today Manley Park is all that is left of those extensive grounds and the rest is a mix of houses.

Manley Hall 1888-93

But back in the 1860s and 70s Sam Mendel’s home was reckoned to be everything a wealthy self made man could desire and the inside of the house was as impressive as the grounds.

Here were paintings by Constable, Gainsborough, Leighton, Millais and Turner along with fine furniture, silver plate and old Chelsea porcelain.

So much that when in the spring of 1875 the contents of the house were put up for sale, the auction lasted for five days.

Not that Mr Mendel stayed around to watch for after more than a decade at Manley Hall he moved south to London and on to Hastings coming to terms with his dramatic fall from prosperity.

He had made his wealth transporting textiles to India and Australia around the Cape of Good Hope faster than any of his rivals, and from his offices in Cooper Street and a succession of warehouses around the city he was recognised as a successful entrepreneur who was never out of the papers.


But a too ambitious desire to add to his vast collection of art  left him in serious debt to an art dealer. 

Samuel Mendel

For a while the general public were able for a charge to wander the gardens and enjoy both the floral displays as well as performances by a variety of brass bands.

There were also various schemes floated to turn the estate into a “great pleasure resort.  A winter palace was to be erected which should contain an art gallery, concert hall, promenade, library, assembly room, skating rinks, baths, and refreshment rooms.  Shareholders were to be allowed to use the park for promenade purposes on Sundays, and the hall was to be converted into a club, membership of which should be limited to holders of one hundred or more shares in the company.”***

But these and other plans came to nothing and it was pretty much death by a succession of small building plots as bits of the estate were sold off for development or turned into a golf course for the Manchester Golf Club.

The Hall still attracted the curious, and so it was in the June of 1904 that this couple wandered into the grounds and had their picture taken at the rear of the grand old house.  By then its years of neglect were only all too clear to see from the overgrown kitchen garden and bricked up rear windows and was demolished in 1905.

The rear of the Hall in June 1904

But like all such stories there is still more.  Back in 1875 the house had been bought by the coal merchant Ellis Lever for £120,000 and according to the historian Cliff Hayes Mr Ellis never paid up.****

This in itself is intriguing but made more so by a letter from Mr Ellis in the Times from June 1887 in which he deplored the abandonment of the plan to transform the estate into pleasure resort.

“There is not in the United Kingdom a town that has greater need than Manchester of healthy and refining influences, and there is not a more attractive and charming property than Manley-park.  

But while the people of Manchester and Salford are perishing for lack of pure and healthy surroundings this magnificent property is being allowed to go to decay or become absorbed  by the builder.

The Hall soon after the sale in 1875

Manley-park is thoroughly well wooded, and all the trees being vigorous and healthy.  That there should fall to the axe man to be replaced by rows of houses I look upon as a misfortune to the city.”*****

Which raises all sorts of questions about the involvement of Mr Ellis in the estate but those are for another time.

As for Samuel Mendel he died in 1884.

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection and map of Manley Hall from the OS map of South Lancashire, 1888-93, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and  picture of Sam Mendel, from a photograph by Franz Baum, 22 St Ann’s Square, Manchester Old & New, 1896, Manchester

*"the frown of fortune"...... the story of Sam Mendel and Manley Hall in Whalley Range,

** The land had cost £250,000 and the house another £50,000 to build.

*** City News on October 8, 1904, quoted in Manley Hall, http://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/gone/manleyhall.html

****Hayes. Cliff, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1999
.***** The Times, June 11 1887

"the frown of fortune"...... the story of Sam Mendel and Manley Hall in Whalley Range

Now I don’t usually do stately homes, but back in 1879 I might just have made the effort to visit Manley Hall which had once been the home of the 'merchant prince' Sam Mendel.

It was an impressive place built in the Italianate style with fifty rooms in 80 acres of grounds which included a greenhouse, an orangery, deer park fountains and ornamental lakes.

Added to this was a fine collection of paintings including works by Constable, Gainsborough, Leighton, Millais and Turner.

All of which reflected the vast wealth of Sam Mendel who had made that wealth by being able to ship textiles to India and Australia around the Cape of Good Hope  faster than his competitors.

“He was the son of a rope manufacturer who started business off Blackfriars Street, succeeding to the business of Mr. Robert Gardiner, a Levant merchant [and] built a warehouse in Dickenson Street, removing thrice to Booth Street, to Portland Street, and finally to his splendid warehouse in Chepstow Street.  

It is said of him he was never known to do a shabby act, but in the end he felt the frown as well as the smile of fortune.  

In 1875 his magnificent estate – Manley House- was the scene of a memorable sale, and it has ever since been but the ghost of its former self, in spite of effort after effort to galvanise it into life. The estate was cut up into building lots, and the tenantless hall survives only to witness the short-lived greatness of its builder.”*

And the frown of fortune was no less than a too ambitious desire to add to his vast collection of art which left him in serious debt to an art dealer. 

The house and its contents along with the 80 acres were put up for sale in the spring of 1875 and the auction of the contents stretched out over five days.

Not that I would have been wealthier enough to consider biding for the fine furniture, paintings, silver plate and old Chelsea porcelain.

Nope, for me it would have a walk around the gardens when they were opened to the public later in 1875.

And I rather suspect it would have been the piece in the Manchester Guardian of May 30 1879 which pushed me out of Chorlton and in to Whalley Range to walk the gardens, because the “announcement of yesterday with regard to the coming sale of this fine estate ... [means] that in all probability Manley Hall will not much longer remain open to inspection.”**

So despite the poor weather which had done little for “the great floral display which might very properly have been expected at the Whitsun Holiday” there was still “much to admire in the greenhouses and ferneries.”  

Along with “the Clown cricketers who were to play in the park on Monday, Thursday and Saturday and the Latelle ‘aerial bicyclists’ who have lately completed a successful engagement at the Westminster Aquarium [and] Mr. J.A. Whelan of Huddersfield who will make an ascent in his balloon ‘The Duke of Edinburgh’ on Thursday and Friday as well as a variety of amusements for visitors.”

But I rather think it would have been the “bands of music” which would have attracted me, one of which may well have been our own Chorlton Brass Band.  They had been formed in the 1820s and while I do not have a complete list of where they performed, there are records of them at Bell Vue, Lytham, Blackpool and Stalybridge as well as closer to home in Chorlton and up at Barlow Hall.

Now Samuel had sponsored the band during the 1860s and it would be nice to think that they were there at Manley Hall in the June of 1879.

And that perhaps is an appropriate point to close, for Samuel’s eclipse appears to have been a loss for Chorlton.

For not only did he sponsor the band but was a very active patron of the old parish church and in that great schism over the building of a new church and ist location on Edge Lane he remained with the group championing the existing building.

Next; the fate of the Hall and something more on Sam.

Location; Whalley Range, Manchester

Pictures; of Manley Hall circa 1878 from the Lloyd Collection, and picture of Sam Mendel, from a photograph by Franz Baum, 22 St Ann’s Square, Manchester Old & New, 1896, Manchester

* Shaw, William Arthur, Manchester Old & New, 1896, Manchester

** Manchester Guardian May 30 1879

Opps …….. when you get things wrong …..... apologise ....

So, after years of telling the story of Samuel Mendel who was the classic tale of fabulous wealth, and a  less than elegant descent into more straightened circumstance I have to confess I got a bit of it wrong.

Mr. Mendel, undated

He had made his wealth transporting textiles to India and Australia around the Cape of Good Hope faster than any of his rivals, and from his offices in Cooper Street and a succession of warehouses around the city he was recognised as a successful entrepreneur who was never out of the papers.

Manley Park, 1894

The wealth that he made was poured into Manley Park a fine house in Whalley Range and a huge art collection.

But it all went wrong, and almost at the turn of a sixpence, the frown of fortune resulted him going bankrupt, and the sale of his fine mansion and his art collection.

All of which I have chronicled but the exact nature of his fall I got wrong. *

I followed the received knowledge and reported that his fall was the changing shipping routes which followed the opening of the Suez Canal, which his rivals adopted making his long routes around the Cape of Good Hope redundant.

And I was wrong, a mistake I have Brian Groom to thank who pointed out to that suggested I “amend the blog to remove one of the biggest lies in Manchester history IMHO. It drives me bloody mad! Sam Mendel did NOT go bankrupt at the time that he sold his Manchester business interests. 

Manley Park, undated

He remained a wealthy man for several years and, at one point, even bought the Manley Park estate back. In the end, his real financial downfall came from the fact he continued to invest unwisely in art and ended up owing Thomas Agnew, his art dealer of choice, a considerable amount of money. Mendel had helped make Agnew a very wealthy man, so it was with considerable reluctance that he did indeed commence bankruptcy proceedings against the ageing Mendel. 

However, the proceedings were paused as soon as Agnew discovered that Mendel was in very poor health. They were never resumed, because Mendel died. There were subsequent rumours spread that Agnew had tried to take the very bed that the dying Mendel lay in during the final weeks of his life. 

Agnew, justifiably enraged, sued the person making the accusations and won. Even on the very brink of financial ruin, Mendel was able to leave a reasonable sum to his widow. Gone were the days of what would today be a billionaire lifestyle, but she would have still been comfortably middle class”.

All of which was new to me and of course makes for a much more interesting story.

Leaving me just to thank Brian and record that his two books on the history of the North have rightly received much praise.

They are Northerners A History, From the Ice Age to the Present Day, and Made in Manchester A People’s History of the City that shaped the modern World.

I got the Northerners as a Christmas present and thoroughly enjoyed it and will be splashing the cash on his second one.

So my apologies to Mr. Mendel and always own up.

Pictures; from Manley Park, undated, from the  Lloyd Collection and map of Manley Hall from the OS map of South Lancashire, 1888-93, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and  picture of Sam Mendel, from a photograph by Franz Baum, 22 St Ann’s Square, Manchester Old & New, 1896, Manchester

*Samuel Mendel, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Samuel%20Mendel

Manley House, Whalley Hall and Upper Chorlton Road

This I think should be the last of the stories on the mystery of Whalley House on Upper Chorlton Road.

I began it all with a picture of a gatehouse which the caption described as the entrance to Whalley House.

Now this was the home of the banker Samuel Brooks who in 1836 bought Jackson’s Moss and set about developing it into a desirable housing estate for the seriously well off just a few miles south of Manchester.

It was on Upper Chorlton Road and out of sheer curiosity I set about looking it up on the 1911 census which was the first to detail the exact number of rooms in each property.  Samuel had lived there with his three children and five servants.

Maps of the 1840s show it as a grand place set in large gardens, but those self same maps suggest it was further north than our picture and I couldn’t find it on the census.

What I did find was Manley Hall, and today’s picture confirms that our gate house is that of Manley House, for which I have a whole set of people living in the house and the grounds.

The caption reads “Upper Chorlton Road looking from Manley Hall towards Brook’s Bar about 1911”

And in the fullness of time I think I will bring them out into the sunlight.  In the meantime I think  having ventured out of the township as I shall continue along Upper Chorlton Road and out towards the city taking in more of Whalley Range.

Pictures; from the Lloyd collection and detail of the OS map of Lancashire 1841-53 courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/