One old picture ….. a mystery location ….. and the Chorlton debate

Now I have Lee Hutchings to thank for this image.

He posted it today on a Chorlton Facebook site and it invites intriguing questions of just where we are, and the identity of the three individuals.

I doubt we will ever know their names but with a location we might be able to check on the occupants of the house and make a guess using the historical records.

Which of course just leaves the hunt for that location.  We are looking out on a well-established front garden with a lane and fields beyond, with just a suggestion of open water in the distance and a date of 1898.  There is furthermore a reflection of another house in the windows of the front door, which must have been opposite ours.

The lamp would perhaps indicate that the lane was well used or important enough to have public lighting at a time when this was not common in Chorlton.  

The first four street gas lights date from 1875 and a trawl of the records of the Withington Local Health Board and its successor the Withington Urban District Council might reveal the onward march of lighting provision and in turn reveal possible locations which match our picture and the date.

And I rather think our house might be one of a pair, which could narrow the hunt slightly.

So, with an address we could hit lucky and find occupants who resemble the people in the photograph.

The three look as if they are posing with that uncomfortable attempt to “look natural” which is rather negated by the artificial pose of the dog on the chap’s shoulder.

Already and rightly so there has been some speculation on where we are. The consensus so far is Beech Road with the Rec directly opposite.

It is plausible.  The Recreation Ground was opened in 1896, and our picture is dated two years later, but I think not.

This stretch of Beech Road facing what is now Beech Road Park down to Ivy Farm was undeveloped and remained so until Joe Scott built the row of terraced houses in 1915.

Wilton Road could be an alternative but there were no houses matching that reflected building nearby.

All of which leaves Cross Road, its houses are all in situ by the late 1880s and just maybe that reflected building has a mirror in the tall mid 1870s buildings on the corner of Cross Road and Beech Road.

But I am unconvinced, leaving me to think we still have a mystery.

And of mysteries I am fascinated by the thumb print on the picture. It is fruitless to wonder how we could identify it but it is one of those exciting but intangible bits of history which march alongside speculation on the identity of the last person to handle the grave goods of Tutankhamun or the strand of hair placed in a locket beside the ancient burial of a young bride.

But enough of such romantic tosh ….. bring on the debate on the location of our house.

But answers will only be judged worthy of consideration if like John Anthony Hewitt you make out a compelling case.

It maybe just be that we should be looking elsewhere and that open land in the distance is not the Rec but open fields yet to be built on.

We shall see.

Location; as yet unknown

Picture; the mystery house the unidentified people and a street gas lamp, courtesy of Lee Hutchings, 1896, restored and colourised 2026

A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester

It started with the find of a broken bottle in a garden on Wilton Road.

The lost and found bottle, 2023

My friend Declan wrote “Hi Andrew. Neighbours have builders in digging trenches for an extension. They unearthed an old glass bottle, possibly discarded when the houses were being built in the 1890’s?”

The shop on Beech Road, 1900s

It carries the name Mason and Burrows.

Now, I can date the house to between 1894 and 1903 when the property was occupied by a William Simpson.

And it may just be possible that he or a subsequent resident bought the bottle from a branch of Mason and Burrows “grocers & wine & spirit Merchants”.*

In 1895 they had shops on Moss Lane, Great Western Street and  Moss Lane East, and by 1911 had expanded further south to Stockport Road, 23 Wilbraham Road and 46 Beech Road.

The romantic un historian bit of me would like the bottle to have come from the Beech Road offi, which continued selling beer, wine, and tobacco into the 2000s before opening as "Espicerie Ludo, Wine Merchant and Fine Groceries”.

And as you do, I went looking for them.  So far, I have tracked them back to 1886 to Sun Entry, which was a small street off Cock Pit Hill and Bull’s Head Yard which was part of a warren of narrow streets and closed courts bounded by Corporation Street, Market Place and Market Street.

Sun Entry, 1886

They had a Dickensian feel, and non-more so that Sun Entry which snaked down from Cock Pitt Hill towards Market Street becoming progressively narrower till it ended as an enclosed passageway.

The area was already in existence by 1793 and elements show up on Tinker’s map a full 21 years earlier.

There will be a few people who remember the area before its demolition in the late 1960s which was replaced by that modernistic complex which included the Marks and Spencer store with its wavey canopy.

I wish I had known that older Manchester and walked the alleys’ and entrances.

In the 1880s Mason and Burrows occupied a large premises which fronted both Bulls’s Head Yard and Sun Entry and may have shared the “arched beer cellars” which extended down to the small and equally narrow Hopewood Avenue.

Sun Entry from Cock Pitt Hill, 1910

There is more but I suspect the historic record is not up to revealing the secret of the number on the base of the bottle which was 1302. It may be a reference to a batch or to one of the products they sold.

Bottle bottom with a number, 2023

But unless we can have access to one of their catalogues, I fear that number 1302 will remain in the shadows.

Still, I like the way that on a sunny day in Chorlton the story took us back into the late 18th century in one of those lost and now largely forgotten bits of the city.

Location; Wilton Road, Sun Entry and Bulls Head Yard

Pictures; the lost Mason and Burrows bottle 2023, Mason Burrrows shop, Beech Road circa 1900s Sun Entry, 1886, from Goad’s Fire Insurance Maps, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Sun Entry, from Cock Pit Hill, City Engineers, 1902,and in 1944, City Planners 05914, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Sun Entry narrows towards, Market Street, 1944

* Mason and Burrows, Slater’s Manchester & Salford Directory, 1895

A little bit of history in the back garden ……. “Scrubbs Cloudy Ammonia”

Two bottles ..... with Scrubbs to the left, 2023

It is a given that if you have a garden at some point something will turn up, and if you are lucky it will have a story.

In ours we have unearthed heaps of animal bones, most of which belonged to Joe and Mary Ann Scott who lived in our house for 58 years and were so keen on their pets that they left bits of them in the garden and the property to the P.D.S.A.

That said in our 46 years of living here, we too have added two dead cats, and a a Superman toy which we bought in Greece and buried in the garden after his head parted from his body.

The reverse of the two bottles, 2023

These I have never gone looking for, but like many I have come across fragments of porcelain with those blue figures of Chinese pagodas and elegant bridges, to which there was the bowl of a clay pipe.

Not a great haul I must admit, and pale when compared to what a builder on Wilton Road has come across.

These include a bottle with the imprint of Mason and Burrows who sold beer, wine, and groceries and had a branch on Beech Road from 1892.*

To these according to Declan can be added, “an old ashtray, a broken wine glass & two more bottles. One is completely free of markings, but very thick glass coloured dark blue, so presumably medicine or poisonous!

The other has a raised glass ‘label’; “Scrubbs Cloudy Ammonia”, so I reckon that wouldn’t have been for drinking either!”

And Declan is right. A trawl of the internet threw up plenty of adverts for the product, all of which seem to have had a battery of uses.

In 1927 one advert suggested “After A Strenuous Game of [golf] a refreshing bath with SCRUBB’S CLOUDY AMONNIA  It also ALLAYS IRRITATION FROM MOSQUITO BITES", while the full range of its uses can be attested by another advert which promised it was 

Scrubb and Co, Southwark Street, London, 2009

“Refreshing as a Turkish bath, Invaluable for toilet purposes, Splendid Cleansing Preparation for the Hair, Removes Stains and Grease Spots from Clothing, Allays Irritation from Mosquito Bites, Invigorating in Hot Climates, Restores the Colour of Carpets, Cleans Plate and Jewellery”.

After which I guess you would be a fool not to slip down to your local grocery store where you could buy it in two sizes confident that one bottle would do for 10 baths.

And keep a stock in for that special time of the year when you would want to “CLEAN UP FOR CHRISTMAS [with] SCRUBB’S CLOUDY AMMONIA IN ONE BOTTLE All cleaning needs two sizes 10d and 1/4d”

John Williams & Son, Beech Road, 1932

Scrubb & Co were variously at 32 Southwark Street in Southwark in southeast London.  The building is still there, and id bounded by the main railway viaduct and stretched along Red Cross Way. 

Today it is a swish Portuguese restaurant but back in 2009 its origins are still very much there to see.

All of which just leaves me the thought of where our bottle would have been bought.

I guess it would be from a shop on Beech Road which might have been Mason and Burrows or perhaps John Williams and Son on the corner of Beech and Wilton, which was a chain of shops across the south of the city and were here by 1932.

John Williams & Co, 2015

For the curious their tiled name is till there in the present Launderette.

And that is it.

Location. Wilton Road

Pictures; the bottles from Wilton Road, 2023, courtesy of Declan McGuire,Scrubb & Co former works, Southwark Street, London, 2009,  John Williams and Son, Beech Road, 1932 from the Lloyd Collection, and Joth Williams & Co tiled sign, 2015 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*A lost Chorlton bottle ….. the Beech Road offi ……… and a trip back to a Dickensian Manchester, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-lost-chorlton-bottle-beech-road-offi.html