Tram jam, ........ waiting for the shift to end at Trafford Park

The caption is not over helpful.  Just “Car 929, AEI Trafford Park.”  

But I guess we will be sometime in the late 1930s or ‘40s.

The photograph perfectly captures that moment just after the end of the shift at AEI.

The long line of trams waits for the workforce which is just appearing through the factory gates.

This was the period when Trafford Park was still a major industrial centre.  In 1945 75,000 people worked there and produced everything from bricks to electric cables, and food.

All of which is well documented, so instead I shall concentrate on the detail.  The first of the workforce is out of the factory and hurrying to catch the first tram.  It is a scene captured countless times in photographs and news reels from the period.

What is missing are the hundreds of of people who any minute will appear on their bikes, reminding us that this was still the time when the cycle was a cheap alternative to the tram or bus.  And of course what we won't see in any great numbers are workers driving home in cars.

I had hoped that the products in the shop might give a clue to a date.  But Robin cigarettes were being marketed at the beginning of the last century and were still being produced in the 1950s, long after our line of trams had gone to scrap heap.

But the shop front in its way is also a comment on the period.  Look closely and almost all of the products being advertised are cigarettes or tobacco.

A timely reminder that this was still a time when smoking was common place and when the upstairs of the bus or tram would be blue from the tobacco smoke.

Much of which would be from the roll up which like the tram is almost a thing of the past.



Picture; from the collection of Allan Brown

Lost images of our industrial past ........... no 5 the construction of the Petrograd Boot Company

Now I know there will be a story here and more over someone will come back with a full account of the history of the Petrograd Boot Company.

But for now all I have is this picture collected by my friend Sally from a book including many other pictures of Trafford Park from the first half of the last century.

The only other reference comes from the National Archive which took me to the Greater Manchester County Record Office, now with the Manchester Archives at Central Ref and lists  what I guess will be the same image, “Workers, or builders, or both, at the Petrograd Boot Company warehouse (Russian) in Trafford Park during World War I, reference 580/3, negative sheet number K1/29” with a date of 1914-18.

And I guess this may be the same image but of course this short description does not do justice to what will be a fascinating piece of history.

The starting point will have to be a directory for Trafford Park during the war and a visit to the Trafford Local History Centre.

But in the meantime I am full of questions, ranging from who owned the company, was it originally a Russian business and that obvious one did it survive the Revolution?

All of which will have to wait a tad bit longer.

Picture; the construction of the Petrograd Boot Company Trafford Park, during the Great War from the collection of Sally Dervan

Lost images of our industrial past ........... no 4 munitions workers at Westinghouse Works Trafford Park, during the Great Wa

Now this began as a one off showing pictures from a Derby foundry sometime in the 1930s but given my friend Sally’s wonderful collection of pictures from Trafford Park in the first half of the 20th century it has become a series.

This was featured recently by Sally on that excellent facebook site Greater Manchester History, Architecture, Faces and Place

More to follow.

Picture; munitions workers at Westinghouse Works Trafford Park, during the Great War from the collection of Sally Dervan

*Greater Manchester History, Architecture, Faces and Places, https://www.facebook.com/groups/646597565403712/

Lost images of our industrial past ........... no 3 engineers in Trafford Park in 1925

This is one of those pictures which I guess will never off up its full story.

I know that these were a group of men employed by Redpath and Brown Engineers in Trafford Park and the photograph was taken in 1925.

In time I will find out the exact location in Trafford Park and perhaps something of what the firm made here in Manchester.

But what I have found out so far is interesting enough and by one of those bits of historical coincidences links me to the company.

They started as ironmongers in Edinburgh in 1802, moved into structural ironwork and from 1896 having sold the ironmongery side of the business and later the firm's boiler business they became structural engineers.

A Glasgow office of the firm was opened in 1885 and in 1897 a new factory was built at Albion Road, with new bases established in London and Manchester during the 1900s.*

And that of course brings the link, with me because the London factory was built in East Greenwich not that far from where I grew up and where my father finished his working career.

Nor is that all for in 1911 “the Company had constructed, for a Manchester office building, a framework containing over 7,000 tons of steel, the first 2,000 tons of which was erected in 8 weeks! “**

And in time I think I might even be able to locate that building but for now I shall  just leave you with that photograph.

And one last thought which focuses on that man with the pipe and just what had caught his attention as the picture was snapped?



Picture; men employed by Redpath and Brown Engineers in Trafford Park, 1925, from the collection of Sally Dervan

*Source: Slaven, A and Checkland, S (eds.), Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography 1860-1960, vol 1, (1986, Aberdeen) quoted on the University of Glasgow Archives Hub, http://cheshire.cent.gla.ac.uk/ead/search?operation=search&fieldidx1=dc.subject&fieldrel1=exact&fieldcont1=construction%20engineering,

**Redpath Brown brochure text, taken from, Greenwich Peninsula History, https://greenwichpeninsulahistory.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/redpath-brown-brochure-text/