Anyone who has drunk in the Beech will have a story to tell. It is that sort of place. And as you would expect the story behind the pub is just as intriguing as any long tale told on the eve of closing time.
It is the youngest of the pubs around the green and was opened sometime around the beginning of the 20th century.
For most of the previous century the only drinking place on what is now Beech Road was the Travellers Rest, a small beer shop run by the Nixon family.
The building is still there at number 70. Despite the fact the interior has been drastically altered it is still possible to stand in the shop and get a sense of what it was like to drink in this small place.
And for a brief period around 1903 the Travellers Rest competed with the Beech, but within six years the old beer shop had gone leaving the Beech the winner. During that period it was run by Joseph Jordan still in 1911 in his 30s. In the five rooms of the pub lived Joseph, his wife Mary their three children and Nellie Shepherd their 23 year old domestic servant.*
It is easy today to assume that what you see today has always been there on the corner of Beech Road, but this is not the case and it maybe that the present building dates only from the beginning of the 20th century.
In the 1890s the OS map shows a very different set of buildings and these may be all that is left of the Methodist Sunday School which had been built sometime in the early 19th century.
The Methodists had raised the money for the school by public subscription but it seems they may not have secured the rights to the land and later in the century it was sold to Thomas Taylor who ran the Horse & Jockey.
For a while Mr Taylor charged the Methodists an annual rent but eventually in 1827 served notice on them to quit and the building was converted into cottages and it is these that show up in maps from the 1840s.
The intriguing question is exactly how these cottages became the Beech and when, which is a nice way of introducing another of Peter Topping’s pictures.
Peter paints the pictures and I tell some of the stories behind them. Looking at his painting of the Beech it is just possible to get a sense of what might have been an earlier building which ran out from Beech Road along Whitelow Road. But it is also possible that our pub is a new building using the site of the old cottages. But this as they say is another story.
Peter's paintings are currently on exhibition at a number of local venues and can be seen at
www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures
Picture;
Peter Topping 2011 www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
*Joseph Jordan 1911 South Manchester Didsbury Enu 13 Image 174
