Discovering Turn Moss Road …… that one with a little history

Turn Moss Road is the one that runs off Edge Lane and down onto Turn Moss.

Turn Moss Road, 2023

It’s a road that you could easily miss or just give a nod to on your way from Chorlton into Stretford.

That said it has some nice-looking properties and is marked by that giant sign which welcomes you to Trafford, with a smaller one announcing that you are about to enter Stretford which regularly attracts spray can enthusiasts and the odd individual unloading a ranger of stickers.

I doubt I would ever taken the road further if Ruth hadn’t posted “Do you know anything about Turn Moss Road? 

I live in one of the black and white ones, built around 1992. I’d love to know more about what was there before. I think there was a large house and grounds on Edge Lane that was demolished”.

She was responding to a story I had written on walking into Stretford in 1847.

Turn Moss Road, 1892

And her question intrigued me, because with the sun cracking the paving stones and a possible high of 31° predicted for today, I am not going anywhere.

The road shows up on all the old maps going back into the early 19th century and for most of its existence it was just a a lane leading to Turn Moss Farm.

There are pictures of the farm, and it also appears on the OS maps for the 1840s and 1880s and in the census returns as well as various books on the history of Stretford.

John Bailey in his book Old Stretford published in 1878 wrote that “Turf moss or Turn Moss in the low lying meadows or ees, is mentioned in one of the Mosley Wills in 1612".

It was and is likely to have always been a lonely house and is yet surrounded by embankments to protect it from the floods. 

In 1771, when the estate was on sale it contained "93 Lancashire acres”,  but by the mid 20th century its size had shrunk so that when Samuel Massey in his book A History of Stretford, 1976 reported that

“Turn Moss Farm. Formerly Turfe Moss Farm. The fields, few in number, surrounded the far. The farm was approached from Edge Lane and from Hawthorn Road. The cellars of the farm house were subject to flooding. The occupiers were dependant for water on a shallow well and rainwater tank.” 

Turn Moss from the Briscat with Turn Moss in the distance, 1950

But what has really brought the old farm back is one of Allan Brown’s stories, who remembers working there as a boy in the 1940s. 

He was one of the many young people who were encouraged to help out working on farms during the Second World War.

This was the period of “Dig for Victory” with food in short supply parks gardens and even the tops of air raid shelters were used to cultivate crops.

So, Allan did his bit walking from his home near the green down the old road, now more commonly known as Hawthorn Lane to the farm and a stint of voluntary war work.

I never asked Allan if he ever used Turn Moss Road but I suppose he will have done, and back then it was just a lane with the current development dating from the 1990s.

Westonby, Edge Lane, 1914

Go back into the late 19th century and maps show that the only buildings along the Stretford side of the road was a green house and outhouse which may have the stables for the large house now long gone which stood on Edge Lane.  

That house promises to be an interesting research project and in time may match Westonby that place still remembered as the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth.*

It still stands to the east of our road and is somewhere I am minded to return to.

And that is about it for now..

Picture; Turn Moss Road, 2023, courtesy of Google Maps, Turn Moss Road, 1892, from the OS mapd of Lancashire, 1892-94, Turn Moss,1950 from what was known as the Briscat which was a three acre piece of pasture which back in the 1840s had been part of the land George Whitelegg rented from the Egerton’s, W. Jackson from the Lloyd collection, Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass.

*Westonby, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=westonby

The Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth, a chance conversation and a story revealed

Now it is another one of those stories I thought had come to an end, but the Twilight Sleep Home at Westonby on Edge Lane has popped up again.*

Westonby is a big Edwardian pile on the edge of Chorlton which was built in 1903 and was grand enough to have been “cellared throughout contains three well-lighted entertaining rooms; billiard-room spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom, and separate w.c, lavatory and w.c on ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden........ contains 3,074 square yards or thereabouts and has a frontage of about 200 feet on Edge Lane.”**

All of which made it an attractive place to live, but sometime around 1922 it had become the Old Trafford Twilight Sleep Home.  Not I grant you the zippiest of names and one with feint comic overtones  which opened a new field or research.  For on the same page of classified adverts was another Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.

It is an odd name and takes you back to one of those fashionable medical practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and centred on the attempt to find a painless way for giving birth.

The standard approach had been to administer chloroform but in Germany experiements had been undertaken to see if women could give birth while asleep.  The mother was given a mix of morphine and scopolamine and early results were so promising that by the early 20th century the method had been adopted in the USA and Canada.

Our own Twilight Sleep Home opened in 1917 on Henrietta Street in Old Trafford and moved to Westonby sometime in 1921 or early 1922.  It advertised itself as offering “Painless Childbirth” and featured regularly in the classified section of the Manchester Guardian until 1927.  During those ten years it’s name varied slightly but always retained Twilight Sleep.

And last night in a chance conversation I discovered someone who had been there and given birth to a daughter.  The woman is now in her mid 90s and so this will place the birth sometime in the 1940s which was later than I had thought.

The Westonby home does not feature after 1927 but its competitor on Upper Chorlton Road was still advertsining in 1936 after which it too vanished.

The answer might lie in the loss of faith in the medical practice.  As early as 1915 there had been deaths associated with the method and much mainstream medical opinion was at best luke warm. There were also stories of poor quality care and an absence of trained doctors and nurses as well as horror stories of women having to be strapped to the birthing beds.

It may also be that Westonby was too small it had only eleven rooms.  Then there would have been the cost.  I don’t have any figures yet but such care would not have come cheap and even though some nursing homes catered for poorer clients it is hard to see that this was a first choice for all but the comfortably well off.

Add to this by 1948 the Nationa Health Service may have made such places redundant.

Of course the key will be a conversation with the mother and a trawl of the street directories. My friend also remembered another Twilight Sleep Home somewhere in Trafford.

I have a feeling that Westonby has still more to reveal.

Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, 1905 and April 6 1926, and what might be Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs

* Westonby, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby
**Sales advert Manchester Guardian, 1905

Back with Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home

As stories go it is more of a postscript but Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home just refuses to go away.

Westonby was a big Edwardian house on the edge of Chorlton and passed from private residence to become the Old Trafford Twilight Sleep Home.*

Now the Twilight Sleep Home is not the zippiest of names and has feint comic overtones, but it takes you back to one of those fashionable medical practises of the late 19th and early 20th centuries centring on the attempt to find a painless way for giving birth.

The standard approach had been to administer chloroform but in Germany experiments had been undertaken to see if women could give birth while asleep.  The mother was given a mix of morphine and scopolamine and early results were so promising that by the early 20th century the method had been adopted in the USA and Canada.

Our own Twilight Sleep Home opened in 1917 on Henrietta Street in Old Trafford and moved to Westonby sometime in 1921 or early 1922.

It advertised itself as offering “Painless Childbirth” and featured regularly in the classified section of the Manchester Guardian until 1927.  During those ten years its name varied slightly but always retained Twilight Sleep.

And I thought I had all but exhausted the story but then when you least expect it the Twilight Sleep Home bounced back, and not in a way I had expected.

I was talking to my new friend Ann who has lived in Chorlton all her life and was helping me out at a recent talk at the Post Box Cafe.

The conversation roamed across events in the township over the last 70 years during which I mentioned Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home, and of course you have guessed it was the type of birth Ann’s parents had opted for.

Now Ann had been born at the Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road, but she knew of Westonby and remembered it as the Chorlton Nursing Home.

All of which takes Westonby a little further in to the 20th century.

I had assumed that when the practice of giving birth asleep fell out of favour in the 1920s our house ceased to offer the service.

This was an assumption which seemed to be confirmed by the absence of adverts for Twilight Sleep Homes in the Manchester Guardian after the late 1920s and yet a full decade later Ann was born at the Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.

All of which goes to reinforce those simple observations that there is a lot more history out there and a pointer to me to go back to the Directories and search for Westonby from the 1920s.

Pictures; of Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 and the OS map of 1907.


*Westonby  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby

** The Post Box  http://www.thepostboxchorlton.co.uk/ and https://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Post-Box-Chorlton/565302550152568 0161 881 48

Getting things wrong ........... that house Westonby

Just when you thought you had nailed a story down up pops a disconcerting comment from a friend.

Now yesterday  I confidently wrote that “I think I may have found Westonby.*

It was a house on Edge Lane which has preoccupied me ever since I first came across it almost a year ago.
And the clue my well be this 1914 photograph of Edge Lane from the Stretford boundary.
Westonby was a large Edwardian house built in 1903 on the edge of the Township.

It boasted “three well lighted entertaining rooms, billiard-room, spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom and separate w c, lavatory and w con ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden” and “was cellared throughout.”  It was set back in its own grounds had views across the fields to the Mersey “and was convent to Stretford trams and trains.”

It was perhaps the last of its type.  They were expensive to run and only worked well if there were servants on hand. They had names like Westonby, Sunwick and Ebor House.”

All of which might have been a tad premature.

My old friend Michael of Hardy Productions UK did a bit more digging and overlaying my 1907 map with a current satellite image of Edge Lane along with a picture of a house looking more than a little like my Westonby in 1914 has made me reconsider my confident assertion about both the house and its final demolition.

Now a little bit more research needs to be done but I suspect that will just prolong the dispute.

I could of course be petulant but I am rather pleased at the outcome to date.

And long may the blog continue to spark both comments and suggestions.  Thanks again Michael and I all of you to wander down Edge Lane and confirm my mistake.

Pictures; of Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 and the OS map of 1907.

Westonby on Edge Lane reveals another secret

I think I may have found Westonby.*

It was a house on Edge Lane which has preoccupied me ever since I first came across it almost a year ago.

And the clue my well be this 1914 photograph of Edge Lane from the Stretford boundary.

Westonby was a large Edwardian house built in 1903 on the edge of the Township.

It boasted “three well lighted entertaining rooms, billiard-room, spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom and separate w c, lavatory and w con ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden” and “was cellared throughout.”  It was set back in its own grounds had views across the fields to the Mersey “and was convent to Stretford trams and trains.”**

It was perhaps the last of its type.  They were expensive to run and only worked well if there were servants on hand. They had names like Westonby, Sunwick and Ebor House.

The biggest, which were those along Edge Lane and High Lane have long since gone, some of the smaller ones suffered the indignity of being converted into bed sits and a few into offices or commercial properties.

You can sometimes come across the odd gate post with the name of the house carved into the stone and perhaps even a stretch of the wall.

But as often as not the space where the grand building stood surrounded by it landscaped gardens are now filled with modern blocks of flats.

Most of these old elegant houses managed a century.  Not so Westonby.  It lasted just under twenty years.

By 1922 it was a private nursing home advertising itself as the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth*** and perhaps by the late 40s it had gone.

Its story is a fascinating one which unfolded in a series of chance discoveries and now I have finally found a picture of the house which I am pretty certain is the right one and in the process has eliminated the only other image of the property.

And like all good detective stories there was an element of luck, because our picture had sat in the digital collection of Manchester Libraries without me noticing it despite regularly trawling the site for pictures of Edge Lane.

Westonby was the first house on the eastern side of Edge Lane as you crossed the Stretford Chorlton border, just past where the modern Turn Moss Lane joins the main road.

Opposite were two grand semi detached properties whose stone wall stretches away from the picture.

The sheer size of Westonby is clear from the photograph and matches the foot print from the OS maps for 1907 and 1932/35 as well as the Guardian advert and is why it would have been suitable as a nursing home.

Like all good stories I suspect there is still more, but that will involve searching more directories and later OS maps and is for another time.

Pictures; of Westonby and Edge Lane, 1914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, m17757 and the OS map of 1907.


*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby

**the Manchester Guardian, May 20th 1905

***http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/westonby-and-twilight-sleep-home-for.html

Westonby, possibly the last story

This I think will be the last story about Westonby* which has occupied me for the last few weeks.
It was a large Edwardian house built in 1903 on the edge of the Township.  

It boasted “three well lighted entertaining rooms, billiard-room, spacious hall, five bedrooms, box room, bathroom and separate w c, lavatory and w con ground floor, excellent kitchen, usual conveniences and large garden” and “was cellared throughout.”  It was set back in its own grounds had views across the fields to the Mersey “and was convent to Stretford trams and trains.”**

It was perhaps the last of its type.  They were expensive to run and only worked well if there were servants on hand. They had names like Westonby, Sunwick and Ebor House.  The biggest, which were those along Edge Lane and High Lane have long since gone, some of the smaller ones suffered the indignity of being converted into bed sits and a few into offices or commercial properties.
You can sometimes come across the odd gate post with the name of the house carved into the stone and perhaps even a stretch of the wall. But as often as not the space where the grand building stood surrounded by it landscaped gardens are now filled with modern blocks of flats.

Most of these old elegant houses managed a century.  Not so Westonby.  It lasted just under twenty years.  By 1922 it was a private nursing home and perhaps by the late 40s it had gone.

Not you might think then a subject for a story.  But in its way I think there is something to tell.  It represented one of the last big houses to go up at a time when people were still moving to Chorlton looking for somewhere close to the city but on the edge of the country.  It is a theme I have often visited partly because it marks that change from rural community to suburb of Manchester.

And in their way Harry and Florence Richmond were typical of that professional, managerial and clerical wave of people who had been settling here from the 1880s.  He was a manager in the family business of George Richmond & Sons, Funeral Carriage Proprietors Mail Contractors and Job Masters.  Their works took up Gaskin Street which was a narrow dead end off Downing Street not far from Ardwick Green.  Here they made all sorts of carriages but seemed to have specialized in hearses.

Florence came from a similar background.  Her father was a mantle manufacturer with a show room on Oldham Street and the family had made a move out of Salford to Lytham St Ann’s sometime between 1891 and 1901.

They were in Westonby by 1907 and may have been there even earlier.  Florence’s father died in 1905 and her mother may have bought the house after his death. What is a little confusing is that while Harry is listed as the householder in 1907 in 1910 it his mother in law who appears on the directory even though she died in 1906. By April 1911 the house is occupied by Harold, Florence and Florence’s sister and husband.

What for me is more interesting is that there were no servants or at least none that appear to be living in.  It is just possible that the family employed someone to come in on a daily basis or they were modern enough to have dispensed with paid help all together.  This would have marked them off as unusual for the period.

I said this was the last story but in the course of today I have found pictures of Florence and her brother in law which may mean that the old Edwardian pile gets a chance to be looked at all over again.

Pictures; detail of Edge Lane showing Westonby 1907, advert for George Richmond & Sons, from Slater’s Directory of Manchester & Salford and Suburbs, 1911, and what maybe Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs

*http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby.

**Manchester Guardian May 20 1905

Westonby and the Twilight Sleep Home for painless child birth

I said that there were two more stories about Westonby* that big Edwardian pile on the edge of Chorlton which was built in 1903 and demolished sometime in the 1940s or 1950s.

One was the family who lived there soon after it was built and the other was the mystery surrounding the birth of Sheila Healy who was born at “Westonby, Edge Lane” in 1923. I say mystery because Sheila’s parents lived in Old Trafford which begged the question of how she came to be in Westonby.

Now the obvious conclusion was that by 1923 our fine pile had become a nursing home.  All then that was left to do was crawl over the street directories for the period and track when it changed use.

Easy enough and there for 1922 was the answer, Westonby had become the Old Trafford Twilight Sleep Home.  Not I grant you the zippiest of names and one with feint comic overtones  which opened a new field or research.  For on the same page of classified adverts was another Twilight Sleep Home on Upper Chorlton Road.

It is an odd name and takes you back to one of those fashionable medical practices of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and centred on the attempt to find a painless way for giving birth.

The standard approach had been to administer chloroform but in Germany experiements had been undertaken to see if women could give birth while asleep.  The mother was given a mix of morphine and scopolamine and early results were so promising that by the early 20th century the method had been adopted in the USA and Canada.

Our own Twilight Sleep Home opened in 1917 on Henrietta Street in Old Trafford and moved to Westonby sometime in 1921 or early 1922.  It advertised itself as offering “Painless Childbirth” and featured regularly in the classified section of the Manchester Guardian until 1927.  During those ten years it’s name varied slightly but always retained  Twilight Sleep.

So far I haven’t uncovered a reference to the company or to its winding up.  Nor has a copy of the booklet which it offered come to light, but I travel in hope.  Along with the adverts there are a succession of birth announcements which refer to Westonby in the early 1920s so perhaps there must be more to uncover.

And again it will be the street directories which will help.  The Westonby home does not feature after 1927 but its competitor on Upper Chorlton Road was still advertsining in 1936 after which it too vanished.

The answer might lie in the loss of faith in the medical practice.  As early as 1915 there had been deaths associated with the method and much mainstream medical opinion was at best luke warm. There were also stories of poor quality care and an absence of trained doctors and nurses as well as horror stories of women having to be strapped to the birthing beds.

It may also be that Westonby was too small it had only eleven rooms.  Then there would have been the cost.  I don’t have any figures yet but such care would not have come cheap and even though some nursing homes catered for poorer clients it is hard to see that this was a first choice for all but the comfortably well off.

We shall see.  I have a feeling that Westonby has still more to reveal.

Pictures; advert from the Manchester Guardian, April 6 1926, and what might be Westonby from the collection of Averil Kovacs

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Westonby

Westonby on Edge Lane and a mystery

Yesterday I returned to the story of Westonby on Edge Lane, and in the way of things it has blossomed into two stories.

So I shall start in 1923 with the birth of Winifred Constance Sheila Healy born to Francis Joseph and Catherine Maud Healy, nee McDonnell which is really how I came again to visit this house on the edge of Chorlton.

 Her daughter had come across the Westonby story and wondered what more we might find out about the house and her mother’s early life and not for the first time it led off in all sorts of directions.

Sheila Healy as she was known was born at Westonby in April 1923 but therein lies the mystery because her parents came from Trafford Park, and it was in Trafford Park where her mother died just four months after the birth.

They had been married in 1920 at St Antony's Catholic Church on Fourth Street, Trafford Park and had lived on Eleventh Street.  Looking at a picture of Eleventh Street from 1910 it is a world away from the large Edwardian house which was Westonby set in its own grounds and overlooking fields.

Fourth Street and Eleventh Street were part of an industrial community built by the British Westinghouse Electric Company for its workers.  It was laid out “on the American style grid system of avenues and streets and had shops, eating rooms, a dance hall, schools, a church and a cinema.”*

Sheila’s mother was working for Westinghouse in 1911 and it may have been there in the electric works that she met Francis who gave his occupation as an “electrical and mechanical engineer” in 1920.

All of which begs the question of how Sheila came to be born in Westonby.  The answer will lie in the street directories which may reveal a changed use for the property.  Large buildings like Westonby were not as economic to run as they had been before the Great War and it may have become a small private hospital or nursing home.  It may even be that there is a link with Westinghouse who were regarded as “progressive employers”** and so could have funded a small hospital.

And that pretty much severs the link at present between Sheila and Westonby.  With the death of her mother Catherine more usually known as Kitty, Sheila was “raised by her grandparents Thomas & Margaret Healy in Chorley and Horwich. They came to England from Ballyfermoyle, Co. Roscommon, Ireland in the early 1880s and Thomas was one of the founders of St Mary's Catholic Church, Horwich,” which predated our own Catholic chapel by just eight years.

This was St Peter on Barlow Moor Road which was replaced by the now familiar church of St John on High Lane in 1927.

I doubt that there is any connection but there might be and so along with a search of the street directories for the early 1920s there may be something amongst the church records.

We shall see.

Pictures; Eleventh Street, 1910 from Wikipedia Commons, and Westonby and newspaper extract from the collection of Averil Kovacs

*Trafford Park Village, http://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/outside/village.html

**As early as 1869 the American parent company had introduced a 9 hour day provided adequate housing for its workforce, as well as educational and cultural facilities and insurance schemes, Working Conditions in the Westinghouse Works,  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/papr/west/westcond.html

*** Averil Kovacs, Sheila’s daughter

Westonby reveals its history

Something always turns up.

It is a phrase I use a lot and I guess very much sums up the optimistic side of me.

And I was reminded just how true this was when out of the blue I got a comment to a story I had posted back in May about Westonby, a lost house on Edge Lane.*  In the piece I had gone looking for the remains of a fine old early Edwardian house which had come on the market in 1905 just two years after it had been built.


I remember saying that I thought “there was a story here about the development of Chorlton,” and a little bit more of that story has come to light.

We now have a picture of the place, or at least we think we have. It was supplied by Averil who wrote to me that having come across the blog story,

"At last I have an answer as to where my late Mother was born in 1923. On her birth certificate it says Westorby, Edge Lane but I could find no trace. Then I saw on eBay a Guide for Chorlton that mentioned Edge Lane. 

In with my late Mother's aunt's photos was a photo of a very large old house. She didn't know where it was, and I am wondering if this could in fact be Westorby. Her Mother died shortly after my Mother was born.”

So together we are beginning to look for more clues as to the history of the house, its later occupants and its fate, for this grand pile has long since gone.

The first task will be to check out the street directories and electoral registers which will give us names and a date for when it was demolished.

And we know a little bit more about the place.  According to the 1911 census it had nine rooms as well as a bathroom and kitchen which pretty much fits the estates agents blurb from 1905.

At the back end of 1910 it was occupied by Mrs Fanny Cottam, but by the April of the following year she may have died because the house is occupied by her two married daughters. Florence had married Harry Richmond in 1907 and Ruby was married to Edward Ruby Stevens in 1911.  Both were young couples and the Richmond’s had two young children.

All of which does add to the story of the township’s development.  Harry Richmond was a sub manager in  the family business which he describes as “mail contractors,” but was also according to the firm's advert "Funeral Carriage Proprietors Mail Contractors and Job Masters,"  while Edward Stevens was an electrical engineer, which puts them in that new group of people who had steadily been moving into Chorlton since the 1880s. These were professional, managerial and clerical people who are best described as the middling people who worked in the city or the newly created Trafford industrial area but fancied living on the edge of the countryside.

And in 1911 Westonby was just that.  A little down the road was Stretford Railway Station while not more than 15 minutes away was Chorlton Railway station both offering a quick service into the heart of Manchester and yet our house looked out on fields stretching down to the Mersey.

Averil’s mother was born there in the April of 1923 so the gap in years is not much and I am confident that we will have more answers soon.

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/westonby-lost-house-on-edge-lane.html

Picture; from the collection of Averil Kovacs

Westonby, a lost house on Edge Lane

I went looking for Westonby yesterday.  It stood on Edge Lane in an extensive set of grounds which extended south to Turn Moss Road and back along Edge Lane almost opposite Alderfield Road.

It was built some distance from the main road and from the north and east there were fine views of open land which took in Turn Moss all the way down to the farm and the old road.

Some its grandeur can be got from the advert which appeared in 1905 announcing its auction, just two years after it had been built.

Now I can track the residents during the early years and with a bit of research could find out when it was demolished, for demolished it was, and judging by the style of the houses I would guess sometime in the 1940s or 50s.  It was just too big for that period and just like some of the other fine houses along Edge Lane fell to the developers who replaced these old rambling places with smaller town houses and blocks of flats.

I rather think there is a story here which says much about the development of Chorlton and fits with what I wrote recently http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/one-hundred-years-of-one-house-in.html

Sadly I can find no pictures of Westonby and I doubt that there is anyone who remembers the old pile.  But I am a persistent sort of chap.  In time I shall trawl the directories for the years after 1911 looking for the moment the place disappears from the lists, have a go at looking at the story of the people who lived there and maybe just maybe come up another advert for the pace or even a description.  We shall see.
Picture; advert from the Manchester Guardian, May 20th 1905