The Knitting years .... number 1 balaclavas and other hats

Now I bet not everyone will claim that a collection of knitting patterns is a bit of a history book.

But if you have enough of them, then I rather think you have some of the story of the middle decades of the 20th century.

I say middle decades because our Jillian who collects the knitting patterns has them from the 1930’s through to the ‘70’s and she roams the charity shop chains with a mission not only to save these knitting patterns but press them back into use.

I should know I will soon be the proud owner of a jumper with a zip and collar and dancing reindeers in brown and red.  She made the original for me in 1970 and I am looking forward to the new one.

But back to the patterns, for here contained on the front covers are how we dressed during the age before online shopping and cheap supermarket clothes.

They include balaclava, and other hats, woollen toys and of course the cable jumper.

So over the next few days I shall be rummaging through our Jillian’s collection and wait for the gasps of “I had that”  “Mine was green” or “Oh God did I really wear that?”and when the series is over there is always my stories about wool shops.*

And there is just one more delight in these old knitting patterns, and that is the game of hunt the famous British actor when they were waiting for the big break and instead had their picture taken with a nice “cardy”.

Our Jillian has one of Roger Moore which is looking for as I type, and he might well find one of my old mate Joe when in between classes at Art school he too wore a selection of woollen jumpers.

Location; pretty much everywhere

Picture; knitting patterns, 1930-1970 from the collection of Jillian Goldsmith

*The Wool Shop, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=The+Wool+Shop

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

Elizabeth The Wool Shop at 510 Wilbraham Road ........... one of Chorlton's vanished shops by Jeremy Cameron

Jeremy Cameron is an author whose grandmother and aunts ran Elizabeth's the Wool Shop on Wilbraham Road and recently he agreed to provide an account of their shop. 

510 Wilbraham Road, 1959

My grandmother, Frances Hannah Marsh, was born in 1872.

At this distance her early history is a bit vague but as far as I know she was born in Belfast, emigrated with her family as a child to Canada where she crossed the country in a covered wagon and then returned.

She married Jack Cameron, whose first wife had died and who already had one child, Fred.  

My grandmother had a number of children of whom six survived into adulthood: Jim (originally called Duncan), Frances, Albert, Hilda, Ethel and Leslie (my father) who was born when she was 43.

The family grew up in Barrow in Furness, where Jack Cameron worked in the shipyards.  He died around 1923 and subsequently my grandmother moved to Buxton, Derbyshire, where she kept the fish and chip shop on the market place.

At some time during or more probably just after the Second World War she moved with her daughters Hilda and Ethel to 510 Wilbraham Rd, Chorlton-cum-Hardy, where she kept Elizabeth, the wool shop.  She died on 6th Feb 1958, the same day as the Munich air crash.

My grandmother was a much loved but stern lady.  She was alleged to maintain the posture of her children at the meal table by putting a walking stick down their backs.  Curious about the workings of the shop, I asked her one day how much money she had taken that day.   "One pound thirty-five and fourpence," was her reply.   It was her standard reply and it took me a while to work out that it meant nothing.  You didn't mess with her.   The family clubbed together to buy her a television in old age and we all watched the Coronation in 1953.

Incidentally the shop is more or less equidistant between Old Trafford and Maine Rd (the Etihad is of course much further).  My father took me to my first match at Maine Rd in 1954 (City 2 Arsenal 2) and later I would walk to Old Trafford.

My aunts kept the shop for another few decades until their very late retirement when they went into a care home across the street.  Their shop was, I believe, legendary.   People have told me that they would travel up to fifty miles to buy wool from my aunts or to ask their advice about knitting, needlework or embroidery.

The shop would sell a button or an inch of cotton or anything else that was needed.  Every evening they would knit in front of the television.   What were they knitting?   Garments for their customers.   What did they charge?   Nothing!  They charged for the wool but  their services came free.

Life became hard as supermarkets and department stores began selling their products and specialist shops grew scarce.   Fortunately they had the opportunity to buy their property early on for a very low price, otherwise they would have struggled much more.   Until they got their old age pensions money was at a premium; after that, they could manage.

510 Wilbraham Road, 2016

Of all the people I have met who knew my aunts I doubt whether anyone called them by their first names.   "Good morning, Miss Cameron," said the customers in the shop  or their neighbours such as the excellent Chorlton bookshop or Mr Clayton next door.   "Elizabeth, Miss Cameron speaking," they said on answering the 'phone.

They disapproved of quite a few things, most notably bad manners, and did not hang back from correcting children who disrespected their parents in the shop; on the other hand they were quite likely to give the same child a small present on leaving.

Their politics were eccentric and best not examined too closely.   Despite the fact that they got on well with people of all races  and creeds their major fear was that on retirement their shop would go to "a Chinese take-over".  Which, I believe, happened.

Since they died that part of the family has lost all contact with each other.  They and their shop were the fulcrum.

I understand that on their retirement the shop fittings   -  glass cases for wool, intricate drawers for cottons   - were bought by television for period programmes.  I can imagine people today watching a Dickensian series and suddenly crying out:  "Oh!  I knew a shop just like that!   Elizabeth!   Miss Cameron and Miss Cameron!"

Location; Chorlton, Manchester

Text © Jeremy Cameron, 2016,  http://www.jeremycameron.co.uk/books/

Picture, Wilbraham Road north side, Shops 510-512, A E Landers, May 24 1959, m18272, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and 510,January 2016  courtesy of Tiny's Tipple, http://www.tinystipple.co.uk/

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 36 ............ the Wool shop on New Cross Road

The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

Now I belong to a generation that was dragged round wool shops as a child.

My mum, her friend and later my sisters all knitted and so the trip to the shop was a regular part of my Saturdays.

It started with the knitting pattern, went on to an endless discussion about the colour of the wool and finished with walking home with loads of the stuff.

Then there was the smell. Wool shops had a distinctive smell, which was a sort of warm perfume smell which followed you home and stayed where ever mother was knitting.

There was something else about the wool shop which for years I couldn’t quite work out what it was, and then recently it came to me, it was always so very quiet, as if there were secrets about knitting that could only be uttered in a low almost conspiratorial way.

Ours was a traditional wool shop. The wooden shelves which reached to the ceiling were made of a deep dark wood which shone in the sunlight and were heaped high with wool.

 And then there were the wooden and glass counters which today you only see in shops pretending to be old. Through the glass top you could see more wool and all sizes of knitting needles.

So the day Mrs Rogers announced that she was going to try out a knitting machine it was if she had admitted to multiple affairs over the preceding twenty years. I wouldn’t mind but it wasn’t even that she was going to buy one; all she wanted to do was try it out.

 But that marked her out as a flighty thing who would soon be buying a Christmas cake instead of making one and no doubt had already used custard powder and meat spread.

Nor did the torture of the wool shop stop there. Once home the wool had to be wound into balls, which could only be done using the back of a chair and usually involved me having to stand with my arms outstretched and the wool was pulled from me and went into balls.

Now I went looking for that wool shop on New Cross Road, but it has long gone as has my memory of exactly where it was located so I have fallen back on another wool shop here on Beech Road which survived in to the 1980s but has now also long vanished.


Picture; the Wool Shop Beech Road July 1978 from the Lloyd collection

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road,  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road  

Another Wool Shop and a different style of shopping

On reflection yesterday  I was unfair to wool shops.* 

I was remembering the one I seemed to spend my life in as a child in New Cross and painted a grim picture.

The Beech Road Wool Shop was a friendly place and I suppose so was the one on Wilbraham Road.

 I had completely forgotten the Scotch Wool Shop at 452 Wilbraham Road although I must have passed it loads of times.

And even after it had gone the cream tiles with their brown lettering announcing the Scotch Wool Shop remained in place in front of the entrance, a reminder of a slightly more elegant style of shop signage.

I must go back and look if it is still there at what has become a takeaway, but I fear that it would not sit well with the black, white and yellow sign which announces the Zam Zam Tandori.

In the same way, the neighbouring tobacconist shop of James Colbeck Ltd which also offered “Gents Hairdressing” seems equally out of time with its shop window full of tobacco products and the shiny cigarette dispenser.

Both are a reminder of just what has changed in the last fifty years, not only in what was sold but how .

Picture; Scotch Wool Shop by A E Landers 1960, m18299, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council


*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Chorlton%20shops