Stories of Salford Cinemas …………. Part 2 …….. L to V

This will be one of the easiest Salford stories, comes in two parts, and is nothing more than a list of all the Salford cinemas in 1928.*

The challenge should you accept it, is dredge up the pictures, with the memories.

And yes I know someone will have written the book, but where would the fun be in going there?

Instead the list is from the Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928, which lists all the cinema’s in the country, the film companies and much else.**

I have four Year books in the collection, spanning 1914, 1928, 1929 and 1947.

Location Salford

Picture; list of Salford cinemas, 1928

*Salford Cinemas, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2019/07/stories-of-salford-cinemas-part-1-to-k.html

** The Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928

Stories of Salford Cinemas …………. Part 1 …….. A to K

This will be one of the easiest Salford stories, comes in two parts, and is nothing more than a list of all the Salford cinemas in 1928.*

The challenge should you accept it, is dredge up the pictures, with the memories.

And yes I know someone will have written the book, but where would the fun be in going there?

Instead the list is from the Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928, which lists all the cinema’s in the country, the film companies and much else.*  I have four Year books in the collection, spanning 1914, 1928, 1929 and 1947.

Location Salford

Picture; list of Salford cinemas, 1928



* The Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928

Lost and forgotten streets of Salford ...................... nu 1 St Simon Street, a wireless and sixty earth rods

Now you can still walk along St Simon Street but it no longer follows the route that it did when it led from Blackfriars Street to the Anaconda Works of Frederick Smith and Co who were producing some pretty nifty things in brass at the beginning of the 20th century.

This I know because in Dad’s garden shed in Well Hall Road in south east London he had sixty brass Earth Roads still in their cardboard boxes.

The rods are 46 cms [18”] in length, are fluted and pointed at one end  with a screw and terminal cap at the other.

According to the description on the side of the box “A good Earth connection to a wireless receiver cannot be over emphasised.  It provides a definite relief from howling and mush.  It improves selectivity and volume.  

The Anaco S (registered) Earth Road is made by engineers who have specialised for over 50 years in the manufacture of electronic conductors....with the object of producing a connection giving the lowest possible earth resistance and to be entirely free from incipient corrosion of any type.  

The improvements produced by the use of this earth are permanent and no replacements are necessary.” 

So there you have it.  Our Dad at some point acquired sixty of these rods.  I have no idea why and we never got round to asking him.  I have no idea when he got them but there they were in 1994, having been manufactured I guess sometime in the early 1920s.

Of course some will have chapter and verse on both the date of the rods and the history of the Anaconda Works.

I know that they were Type W “would not crumple when driven into the ground” and the instructions  direct me to “ease the screw on terminal cap, insert the earth wire from set into bottom grove and tighten up screw to hold wire in good contact with rod.”

All I need now is the wireless .............. something dad didn’t have in the shed.

But like many of my generation I do on occasion refer to the “wireless” remember with fondness the Home Service and the Light Programme.

None of which of course helps with St Simon Street which at the beginning of the 20th century ran from Blackfriars hugging the south side of the river and ending at Springfield Lane.

Today it takes a different route and my bit of St Simon’s Street along with Frederick Smith & co’s Anaconda Works has gone.

Location; Salford

Pictures; box and earth rod circa 1920s, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

A Salford coal merchant and his two daughters who lived on Needham Avenue in Chorlton

This is Jacob Brimelow, coal merchant and I am guessing we will be somewhere in Salford. 

I don’t have a date but as Jacob was 25 in 1901 and a year later the family migrated to Australia where they stayed until the 1920s it is just possible that we are back in Salford just after they returned.

And there is a lot more to the picture because the wagon carried the name of William Perkins who was one of 11 coal merchants who had their offices at the coal depot on Ordsall Lane in 1911.

Jacob’s father had also been a coal merchant but appears to have changed occupations having described himself as a commercial clerk in 1881 but a decade later was selling coal.

And it may be that we can pin point that change to sometime after 1886 because in that year he is absent from the trade directories.

So with a bit more digging we should able to get an exact date for when he began trading and likewise when in the 1920s Jacob was also plying the Salford streets.

All of which brings me back to that picture and a date.

Look closely and at the rear of the wagon is a motor car while the hat and coat of the woman looking on suggest sometime in the 1920s or possibly early 1930s.

And I think we are dealing with something special for neither Jacob or the lad on the wagon are dirty or in their everyday work clothes.

Added to which the horse is decked out in gleaming brasses and head gear which may mean we are at the start of a special parade, but what that was is for now anyone’s guess.

But I have every confidence we shall.

Not that that is the end of the story, for two of Jacob's daughters who were born in Australia were later to settle in Chorlton and live beside each other in Needham Avenue.

Picture; Jacob Brimelow, date unknown, from the collection of Susan Barlow and familly.