Unseen photographs of Hough End Hall and Mrs Annie Elizabeth Roberts

Now the story of Hough End Hall never quite leaves me and I have always been prepared for new pictures and new tales of the lives behind its doors.

Mrs Roberts in the garden, circa 1920s

About a year ago I was given an album of photographs of the last family to live in the hall and farm the surrounding land.

And then more reently I met Mr Stuart Bolton who kindly shared some pictures and newspaper clippings from his great grandmother who worked at the hall.

She was “Annie Elizabeth Roberts, nee Halfpenny; formerly Bateman. I believe she worked at Hough End Hall for about twenty years, from the 1910s to the 1930s.

I think the first one was taken in the 1920s and the second one was taken by the newspaper photographer in the early/mid 1960s.

I am also attaching the clipping from the newspaper which we think it was from the Manchester Evening News from the early/mid ‘60s, unfortunately it’s not dated.”

Mrs Roberts, by the Hall, in 1963

The pictures are just sheer magic and offer up more on the history of the Hall when it was still a working farmhouse.

Until recently there were few images of the building and the family from the early 20th century and these add to our knowledge.

There will be no one now who remembers the garden when it was in its pristine state and pretty soon the memories of the hall in its last sad stage during the 1960s will also fade.

And it is well to remember that from the early 1920s the fate of the Hall hung in the balance.

Newspaper story, possibly the MEN, 1963

There were plans to demolish it for the new road which was planned to run out of the city to and despite more than a few imaginative suggestions for its use during the inter war years it eventually became prey to vandals.

Nor were the developers kind to it.  In the words of one expert they “botched “the job of restoration and then proceeded to hide the hall behind those two ugly office complexes.

Its subsequent use as a restaurant, pub and offices met that all the internal features have long gone, leaving on the original Elizabethan staircase which now resides in Tatton Hall.

So Stuart’s pictures and the story that I know will emerge from them will advance our knowledge and in the process if he is happy I shall tell the story of his great-grandmother.

Location; Hough End Hall

Pictures; Annie Elizabeth Roberts and Hough End Hall from the collection of Stuart Bolton

What did you find in the cellar of Hough End Hall in the summer of 1965?

If you are of a certain age you will probably remember playing in Hough End Hall.

Of course we are talking about the 1960s when the place had long been abandoned as a family home and was yet to become a restaurant.

Back then it was an adventure playground for many of the children roundabout and bit by bit their memories are surfacing of what the Hall was like and what they did there.

Now everyone has their own stories and Ian who would have been about 11 remembered the cellar and what seemed “to be a gigantic set of leather and wooden bellows along with two stone fire places one of which was propped up against the wall and the other resting on the floor.

We tried to get the bellows to work and when that failed wrapped a rope around the tall fireplace and swung from side to side.

There were also big bags of what looked like salt.

And when we tired of the cellar we went on to play in the valleys of the roof.”

Ian is the first to admit that given that it was a long time ago, “my take on what I remember may be different to others, and perhaps the bellows could have been smaller or even larger.”

Either way it is a fascinating glimpse into a period in the Hall’s history which has sat in the shadows for too long.

But more of those memories are now coming to the surface and in time I hope for more.

Location, Hough End Hall, Chorlton, Manchester

Pictures; the Hall in the mid 1960s from the collection of Roger Shelley, https://www.flickr.com/photos/photoroger/

Hough End Hall still a working farm in the 1950s

This will be the last of the descriptions of the Hall from Oliver Bailey whose family rented and then owned Hough End and the surrounding land.

The Hall from Nell Lane, in 1952

It is a fascinating account not least because it is the only detailed description of the place during the 20th century.

There are a few anecdotes about the place from people who remember it as children and there is the 1938 survey commissioned by the Egerton Estate.

But most of these anecdotal accounts are vague and lack detail while the Egerton survey cannot be copied or photographed.

Back in the 19th century there is a short description of the Hall by the historian  John Booker which includes an engraving * and an inventory of the contents of the farm in 1849 published in the Manchester Guardian but this  sheds little light on the Hall itself.

So Oliver has cornered the market on descriptions of the Hall in the 20th century and at anytime come to that.

And in the process of sharing these memories he provided a plan of the buildings which to my knowledge apart from the Egerton survey is the only idea we have of what was there.

The Hall and surround buildings 1950s

It confirms that part of the hall was a smithy and right up to the end the place was a working farm with Mr Bailey’s pigs, horses and cattle and Jimmy Ryan’s rabbits.

“At one time my father had Highland cattle in the field where the school once was and there may be pictures in the Manchester Evening News archive. 

"My memory might be playing tricks there, he definitely had Highland cattle but they may have been in the field near Chorlton Station or perhaps even in both locations.

He also had a peacock with a couple of peahens and for a period Hough End was nicknamed Peacock farm because of the noise they made and because the peacock used to fly across Nell Lane into the park so lots of people saw it. 

There was a deep depression in the field near the rear left hand corner of the plot of the Hall itself and it was made a by a bomb which dropped there during the second world war, certainly it was known as bomb crater corner. 

According to family history the blast knocked my father over – he was an ARP Warden during the war so could have been out at night on fire watch.

During the war there was a riding school at Hough End, a Mc somebody – a search through a trade directory might find him - and my sisters learnt to ride horses at that time. The horses were kept in the loose boxes in the long building parallel to Mauldeth Road."

All that is left is for me to thank Oliver and his family for taking the trouble to recall the old hall and just hope it provokes more memories.

© Oliver Bailey, 2014

Picture; Hough End Hall from Nell Lane, T Baddeley, 1952, m47852, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Plan; © Oliver Bailey, 2014

*John Booker, A History of the Chapels of Didsbury & Chorlton, 1857, Cheetham Chetham Society Manchester

Hough End Hall in the 1950s

Now the thing about very old buildings is that usually we focus on that very old bit.

So it is with Hough End Hall built in 1596 and for a big chunk of its history the family home of the Mosley family.

Most of the accounts of the place concentrate on its Elizabethan design and the Mosley family and ignore the last two hundred years when it was a farm house and later still an office and restaurant.

But I am more interested in its time as the home of tenant farmers during the 19th century and then its uncertain time from the 1920s when it was under threat of demolition by road widening plans.

Today there is nothing much left and so I have decided to call on the memory of Oliver Bailey whose father took possession of the Hall and surrounding land at the beginning of the Second World War and worked it in conjunction with his farm at Park Brow.

Here and over the next few weeks are short accounts of what was once three and which I hope will set off more memories from other people.

"Looking at the front of the hall on the right hand side I remember a man called John Hallsworth had a blacksmith shop in the 1950s. 

He had been an iron worker with British Road Services and rented the smithy at Hough End from my father after he retired from BRS.

There was a wooden staircase up the wall of the hall inside the smithy itself. He he made a couple of gates for Park Brow Farm. 

Sam & Jack Priday, who were farriers with a smithy in Withington,  came round and used the forge to shoe my father’s Suffolk Punch horse. 

I remember walking beside him as he used a horse drawn single furrow plough in the field next to Mauldeth Roadd, probably late 1940s. 

At the rear right hand end there were various add-on outbuildings at the back, probably nineteenth century. 

One was a cottage and another a store of some sort that had fallen into disrepair .

The left wing of the Hall suffered severe structural damage which was perhaps caused by subsidence and had to be rebuilt in the 1950s by the Egerton Estate and I remember they used artificial stone lintels and cills for the mullioned windows. 

On the upper floor there was an old mangle that was basically a large box full of cobbles that rolled back and forth on rollers on the wooden base when it was worked by turning the handle.

 I think that ended up in Ordsall Hall, definitely went to Salford as Manchester had no interest."

© Oliver Bailey, June 2014

Pictures; Hough End Hall, 1952, m47850,the hall from the south east, 1952 m 47856 and the hall and duck pond, 1952, all by T Baddeley, m47859, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Next, a plan a riding school and the man who kept rabbits

Stories of Hough End Hall in the 1970s

Now I am intrigued by these three images of Hough End Hall.

They are some of the last from those in the digital collection and date from 1970.

It is a period in the hall’s long history that I know very little about.

From the 1920s it had been in danger of demolition when the new road to the south was being planned and later still there were suggestions to retain the facade while knocking down the rest.

During the next decade there were counter calls for its restoration along with proposals to give it a community use but nothing happened and it remained in agricultural use up to the mid 1960s when it was sold to a development company who after two unsuccessful attempts managed to get panning permission “for the restoration of the hall with two small office blocks.”*

 The original plan had included a filling station which the Corporation opposed as “damaging to the character of this old Historic Building.”

The final deal involved the developers “signing an agreement with the corporation which would ensure the restoration of the hall” and additional conditions  “about tree protection and landscaping.”

And “stipulating that restoration should retain the original character and that  all external material must be similar to or in keeping with those originally used” with the further proviso  that there “was to be no additions or alterations.”

It was a stipulation which failed to be kept for despite the Corporation’s denials there were accusations from the Ancient Monuments Society that the restoration had been “botched including reconstituted stone for the window mullions, sills and heads and that the inside had been gutted.”

Meanwhile the office development according to the letting agents, Dunlop Heywood changed hands “so many times that nobody knew what was happening,”

Finally International Colloids sold out to Burns Anderson in association with Norwich Union and at this point the hall structure was strengthed to allow the building of Mauldeth House  which might have threatened the foundations of the old building.

And it is here that our three pictures come into play, for the first two clearly show the extent to which the exterior was “restored.”

Then and now that works stands out and hits you in the face.

But that said the Hall is now tucked away and dwarfed by the two office builds.

The first was completed in 1970 and was named Crown House and its four storeys accounted for 25,000 square feet of office space.

Three years later it was joined by the even bigger Mauldeth House with 50,000 square feet spread over seven floors.

I am not sure that it is one of those stories which has turned out well.

*Hall or nothing at all, Robert Waterhouse, Manchester Guardian, April 21 1973

Pictures; Hough End Hall in 1970 by H Milligan, m48587, m47856 and m47854, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Just what Sir Nicholas would have seen in 1596 ………

Now, since September I have been reflecting on what has been going on down at Hough End Hall that much knocked about Elizabethan home of the Mosley family for nearly 200 years and a succession of Withington farmers till 1940.*

During the 1920s it was in danger of being demolished for a new superhighway, and after failed attempts to turn into a cultural centre it was acquired by a series of property developers who created the two big glass and concrete slabs which pretty much hid the place.

And now one of those abominations of desolation has gone, cleared away to be replaced by a low-rise supermarket.

All of which I have written about over the last couple of months as I charted the demise of the unloved office block.

And today Peter Topping was back and recorded the site minus the said abomination of desolation, allowing us to get a glance of the hall as it might have looked to Sir Nicholas Mosley in 1596, and to generations of people from Chorlton and Withington until the 1960s.

At which point I won’t rehearse the supermarket story, but just leave it at that, leaving you to visit all the past stories by following the link.

Although Picky Edna of Peverel Crescent is bound to make the observation that I am being a tad economical with history, as Sir Nicholas would not have owned a car or van or ever agreed to a school being sited behind his magnificent hall. 

Location; Mauldeth Road West

Pictures; looking at Hough End Hall, 2023, from the collection of Peter Topping

*Hough End Hall, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search/label/Hough%20End%20Hall

Hough End Hall …… from the unseen collection of Chorlton pictures

It is easy to miss Hough End Hall.

It is partially hidden by two rather ugly office blocks, has a school and carpark to the rear and can only be glimpsed from the main road which nearly caused its destruction.

Many people will automatically assume it is part of Chorlton, and it does lookout on Chorlton Park, but it was once the home of the Lords of Withington, it’s inhabitants were listed in the census returns for Withington and it was built by an Elizabethan businessmen who had bought up into the connection with Withington.

The hall was built in 1596 by Sir Nicholas Mosley, passed into the estate of the Egerton family in the 18th century, and from then on was variously a farmhouse, restaurant, set of offices, and after an uncertain period when it was empty and waiting a buyer, it became an Islamic Centre.

All of which brings me to the picture postcard, which is one of six, dating from sometime in the 1930s, and were marketed by the Rapid Art Photography Company.

The Hall in the picture is in its last phase as a farmhouse, and by the time the photograph was taken, the land around the farmhouse had shrunk from 250 acres in the 1850s down to just three.

By 1940, the tenancy passed to the Bailey family who were just across the road and worked the three acres in conjunction with their own farm.

In the 1960s, the bailey’s sold the hall and plot to a developer. And later in the century it became a restaurant.

Since the beginning of the 20th century the hall, has seen off plans to demolish it for a road widening scheme, been the centre of a series of creative idea to transform it into an art gallery and community hub and is now an owned by an Islamic group.

What I like about the picture, is not only the image of the hall, but the surrounding detail, like the farm cart casually left in the garden, the outhouses and the glimpse of the fields in the distance.

Which just leaves me to close with the book on the hall, which I wrote with Peter Topping back in 2015.

It tells the story from when Sir Nicholas splashed out some of his money made in London to replace a much older family home, which was no longer to adequate to showcase the family's success.

The book covers the tops turvey history of the Mosley family, its time as a farmhouse, spanning 250 years and its time as a restaurant, containing many old black and white photographs, a series of original paintings by Peter, and contemporary accounts as well as my stories.

Location; Hough End Hall






Picture; Hough End Hall, circa 1930s, from a picture postcard, courtesy of Jennie Brooks

*Hough End Hall The Story Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping, 2015

Mrs Lomax's box mangle at Hough End Hall sometime in 1940

I can remember confiding in someone recently that I knew more about Hough End Hall in the 19th century than I did about the place in the last sixty years.

A box mangle

All of which is now being turned around as people come forward with their memories along with some photographs and a suggestion of where to go looking for the documents.

Chief amongst those with memories is my friend Oliver Bailey whose family rented the hall and the surrounding land from 1940 before buying it from the Egerton estate in the early 1960s and selling it on to a developer later in that decade.

Oliver not only has provided a set of vivid descriptions of the hall and farm buildings along with a plan and the names of some of the men who also worked there but has helped make sense of the place at the end of its time as a working farm.

I was fascinated by the mangle room which shows up on the 1938 Egerton survey.

It was on the first floor to the south of the main entrance and in the middle of the room was “an old mangle that was basically a large box full of cobbles that rolled back and forth on rollers on the wooden base when it was worked by turning the handle.”*

And recently Oliver was “at Mottisfont in Hampshire and they had a box mangle so I thought I would send you a photo.”

It is  one of those wonderful little bits of history that helps bring me closer to the time when the hall was a working farming inhabited by the Lomax family who were there from 1847 till Mrs Lomax died in 1940.

All of which now pushes me on to search for photographs of the Lomax family.

At present there is one picture which I think will be their children in the garden of the hall in the early 20th century but I am confident that in time someone will unearth an image.

After all until yesterday I had no idea what a box mangle looked like.

Picture; box mangle from Mottisfont in Hampshire courtesy of Oliver Bailey

*Oliver Bailey

Back at Hough End Hall, horses, bombs and a motel

There is nothing more exciting to anyone interested in the past than the memories of people who were there.

You can trawl through official documents, scan the maps and pictures of a period or place but the oral testimony of someone who experienced the event, touched the building or just passed through that moment in time is magic.

And if they are still alive it gives you the opportunity to quiz them, asking questions and revealing much that would otherwise never be revealed.

So I am always pleased when my old friend Oliver Bailey offers up more memories of Hough End Hall which he knew as a boy and young man.

Here are the priceless details which will never show up in the census returns rate book records or street directories, and I doubt will ever have been recorded elsewhere.

"The name of the Suffolk Punch plough horse was Bonnie and the crop that was grown in the field she used to plough was Kale. There were also to corrugated iron sheds in that field at the time.

Another horse in the field was in livery and belonged to the greengrocer at the corner of Wilmslow Roadd and Barlow Moor Rd in Didsbury

In the early to middle fifties there were several plans to develop the Hall itself, as my father was trying to dispose of it and the council didn’t want to take it over. 

One of them was to turn it into a sort of motel with the hall itself as a restaurant and some accommodation with a bedroom block in what used to be the orchard and so would be shielded from both Nell Lane and Mauldeth Rd. 

Included in that plan was a service station on Mauldeth Rd but a leap too far for the thinking of the time.

The old original entrance to the Hall was the main avenue through Chorlton Park from Barlow Moor Rd.

There used to be two Beech trees, one in each corner of the front garden as well as a Weeping Ash on the right lawn and a Yew on the left.

And then there was Bomb Crater Corner

This happened on the night of the Manchester blitz* and another bomb fell in the orchard. 

It is also rumoured that two or more fell in the bog at the side of the Chorlton Brook as there were craters but it is not known if they exploded. The target of course, was the railway line to London.”

©Oliver Bailey

*December 1940

Picture; the hall from the south east, 1945 T Baddeley, m47846, and in 1952, T Baddeley m47851, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?

The story behind that path in Chorlton Park ............ discovering Sir Nicholas Mosley's grand drive

Walking towards the Hall. 2015

I must have walked this route countless times and never made the connection with that 400 year old house which sits away in the distance.

The house is Hough End Hall and we are in Chorlton Park.

Old maps show what will once have been a grand drive up from Barlow Moor Road to the hall.

In its time it will have been wide enough to accommodate a carriage and horses and may also have been flanked by avenues of trees.

This after all was the first glimpse that visitors would have had of the home of Sir Nicholas Mosley who made a fortune trading in the city of London, was elected its mayor and walked with royalty.

The end of the path with the hall opposite, 2015

And long after the Mosley’s had left Hough End and it had become a more humble farm house this was still the main way to get to the hall.

It shows up on maps from the 18th and 19th centuries and so when in the 1920s the Corporation created Chorlton Park it made sense to incorporate it as a pathway.

Now I grant you that this discovery may not rank with the great tales of history but it is the sort that I like pointing as it does to that simple observation that quite often there is a story where you least expect it.

The grand drive in 1845

Pictures; Chorlton Park looking towards Hough End Hal, May 2015, from the collection of Costel Harnasz, and the route to Hough End Hall,from the 1845 OS for Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk

*Hough End Hall The Story, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/hough-end-hall-book-on-sale.html

A damned near thing .......... just how Hough End Hall only just survived

Now I rather think that Hough End Hall was in more danger during the last century than at any time since the Mosley family put the finishing touches to their fine Elizabethan home in 1596.

Of course at present much of the first two hundred and a bit years are shrouded in mystery.

Certain key moments stand out but the daily business of running an estate and managing the house are unavailable.

At the end of the 18th century the house and land was acquired by the Egerton family and the Hall settled down to being the centre of a farm.

At present I know who was there from 1841 through to the opening decades of the last century.  I have names and details of what they owned and the rent they paid to the Egerton’s along with who worked for them and the size of the farm.

It all becomes a little bit unclear after that but by the 1940s the Bailey family were renting the hall and surrounding land and working it in conjunction with their farm at Park Brow.

Later they purchased the hall on the breakup of the Egerton estate and near the end of the 1960s sold it to a property developer.

And I am fairly confident that I shall be able to fill in the names of the missing tenants from the Lomax family till Mr Bailey took the hall over.

Today however has been about trying to understand how very nearly the hall ceased to be.  And that has involved reading through a large number of news stories and letters published in the Manchester Guardian from 1921 through to 1973.

The details will follow later but in short it is a tale of threatened demolition from the new road south out of the city to Wythenshawe and an onslaught from vandals and the natural elements.

During the 1920s some people recognised its unique value and campaigned first to save it from demolition, and then to suggest various uses including a folk museum and a community centre.

Four decades later the same depressing debate resurfaced ranging  from those who wanted it gone, to those who argued just for the preservation of its facade and a few who suggested that in the hands of a developer it could have a new life as a restaurant and club.

And it was that last option which won out.  By then the surrounding land had been taken for a new high school, two office blocks rose either side of the hall and what internal features had not been taken by the Egerton’s disappeared in a less than sympathetic restoration.

Now there is much more to come, including the decision by the ratepayers back in 1889 to refuse Lord Egerton’s offer of turning the land beside the hall into a recreation area, and plans in 1938 by both the Corporation and the National Trust to make the area around the hall into a park.

It is a sad story and one that so nearly ended with its demolition. Indeed as late as 1973 the Manchester Guardian reflecting on the “botched” restoration and those two office blocks which almost hid the building wondered “whether it might be better to put the old fellow out of its misery.”

Well that never happened and now as I have reported before there are fresh attempts to give the hall a new purpose and a community use.

Pictures; from the Lloyd Collection and Wesleyan Handbook, 1896

The picture that revealed a family story ................. the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax of Hough End Hall

The wedding of Miss Lomax and Mr Kitchin, May 1915

This is the wedding photograph of Ethel Mary Lomax of Hough End Hall and Harold Kitching and it is a picture I have long hoped would turn up.

For here are the faces of people I came to know during the four years of researching the story of the Hall and along with another thirty or so pictures began to help tell the story of the Lomax family who were tenant farmers at Hough End from the late 1840s through to 1940.

Until the family album turned up last week we had just one photograph dating from around 1900 which showed the children in the family garden.

There were of course the census returns, some birth, marriage and death certificates along with a few newspaper cuttings but nothing which put you face to face with any of them.

But the photograph album has changed all of that and now I can look upon Samuel and Ethel Lomax and begin to see how the children changed as they grew up.

That said there are many in the album who I cannot identify and I guess a few who will forever remain a mystery but others will come out of the shadows.

Of these there are some fine pictures of Evelyn Lomax in the grounds of the Hall in the 1930s.

She was the youngest of the children and was born in 1910, married Thomas Milburn in 1946 and died only in 2002.

Sadly she doesn’t appear on the wedding photograph because at the moment the photographer set up his camera she ran away hiding  somewhere deep inside the hall or maybe in one of the out houses.

Now that is a loss but before she died she did record the names of some of the wedding party all of which offers up rich pastures of research.

In time we may even discover how Harold and Ethel met.

I know that in 1915 he was living at number 14 Oak Avenue and gave his occupation as a merchant and that he grew up on Cheetham Hill Road.

Evelyn Lomax with Bobby the dog at the hall sometime in the 1930s

So had they come across each other at some social event or was it a chance meeting when Mr Kitchin was out walking past the hall?

Idle speculation maybe but it’s what makes looking into other people’s lives just that bit more fun and even if I don’t ever discover that little mystery I know in time I will find out where they set up home and a bit of what happened to them.

Already I know a some of the other wedding guests and a heap more about Evelyn so the rest is for the future, but it does underline that simple observation that you should never be surprised at the way something unexpected can turn up out of the blue.

And that means that the Lomax family and their time at the Hall has just got a lot more interesting.

Pictures; the wedding of Miss Lomax and Mr Kitching, 1915 and Evelyn at the Hall circa 1930s from the family album of Evelyn nee Lomax Milburn donated by Mrs D Miller

What should we make of Sir Nicholas Mosley who built Hough End Hall, made a fortune and was judged as “covetous and illiberal"?

Hough End Hall has one of those long and rich histories which pretty much has all you would want from a building dating back to 1596.*

The Hall from a print circa 1849

It was built by Sir Nicholas Mosley who made his fortune in London and was gambled away by one  of his descendants a century and bit later.

Its first owner had been at the heart of national politics during the reign of the first Elizabeth, another of the Mosley’s saw the hall and estates temporally confiscated by Parliament during the Civil War, after which the place settled down and fell out of the great events of State finally ending up as humble farm house for two centuries.

Now I have never been over bothered with looking into the story of Sir Nicholas Mosley.

Like most people I contented myself with the knowledge that he made that fortune In London, was rewarded by Queen Elizabeth I for his service to London and his country with a knighthood and  “a handsomely-carved oak bedstead, together with some other articles of furniture, for the new house which he had recently erected at Hough End, on the site of the old mansion which his ancestors had inhabited.”**

And in the fullness of time retired to his magnificent home where he died aged 85 in 1612.

But as I delved into the history of the Hall for the book* I became drawn to the man.

mural monument of Sir Nicholas, 1612

His own biographer wrote that his character “has been variously represented; his enemies reproaching him as covetous and illiberal, whilst his friends eulogised his skill, industry and hospitality.”

What is certain is that he left money in his will for a school in Chorlton and may have been involved in other “good works.”

That said I am intrigued by the view of him as “covetous and illiberal” which may have been more to do with a ruthless determination to do well.

After all he was nearly in his 50s when he left Manchester for London and within twelve years was elected an alderman for one of the City wards, became a sheriff in 1590 and Lord Mayor nine years later.

Likewise his business prospered and on the back of this growing wealth he acquired the manors of Manchester, Withington, Cheetham and Cheetwood and went on to maximise the income from these lands asserting old rights and increasing fines.

“In 1602 the burgesses of Manchester claimed that Mosley had worked ‘to alter, overthrowe and change all the auncient priviledges, usages and customs” such as common pasturage in 100 acres of Collyhurst, which had hitertoo benefited the burgesses and the town as a place of recreation, shooting, mustering troops and the placing of cabins for plague victims.”***

Hough End Hall 1853

Of course he was not alone  in maximising his income, plenty of Elizabethan landlords were doing the same and the practice of enclosures and taking away the rights to common land stretched back into the early 16th century.

Sir Thomas More in his book on Utopia published in 1516 had commented that because sheep farming was far more profitable than arable farming
“ the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men, the abbots not contented with the old rents which their farms yielded, nor thinking it enough that they, living at their ease, do no good to the public, resolve to do it hurt instead of good. They stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge their sheep in them.”****

All of which is a fine new slant on that magnificent hall at Hough End, which just leaves me with the charitable and optimistic words of his descendant Sir Oliver Mosley who in 1849 concluded that determining Si Nicholas’s character
“at this distant period very difficult to decide...... His abilities and success as a merchant have been universally admitted, and perhaps the great gains which accompanied his worldly pursuits might too much engross his attention; but we will charitably hope that many opportunities afforded him, during a long life, for repentance, were not neglected.”*****

I hope so but as yet I fear the jury is still out.

Pictures; Hough End Hall, 1849, and Sir Nichloas Mosley’s mural monument, 1612 in Didsbury parish church from Family Memoirs, Mosley, Sir Oswald, the Hall in 1853 from Booker, Rev John, A history of the ancient Chapels of Didsbury and Chorlton, 1857, Cheetham Society cover for the book Hough End Hall to be published in late 2014

* Hough End Hall the Story, Simpson Andrew, Topping, Peter Topping, 2012

** Mosley, Sir Oswald, Family Memoirs, 1849, Printed for Private Circulation, page 6

*** Bowd, Stephen, John Dee and Christopher Saxton’s Survey of Manchester,(1596), Northern History, XLII:2, September 2005

****More, Sir Thomas, Utopia, 1516
*****ibid Mosley, Sir Oswald

From Hough End Hall to Shudehill and back to West Didsbury

Now I never quite know where any of these stories will go when I first start them.

A young Ethel

This one begins with a postcard sent to Hough End Hall sometime between 1910 and 1915 and ends with a mystery.

In between there was a wedding at Christ Church in Didsbury, a large hardware business on Shudehill and a death at the Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital Cheadle.

Now the starting point was that post card sent by Marjorie to Ethel Lomas who lived at Hough End Hall.

It contains the usual set of messages, including the reference to a night out in Buxton, the news that she had been on holiday all week and that on the day the card was sent she had been “by myself all day.”

Ethel had been born in 1891 in Chorlton on Sandy Lane and sometime around 1895 her parents took over the tenancy of the farm and they moved into the Hall which had been in the possession of the Lomas family since 1849.

I say possession but that is not entirely accurate because the hall like the land belonged to the Egerton’s who had bought it in the mid 18th century.

It was a working farm and the hall had long ago been divided up into family rooms and Ethel her brother and aunt all worked alongside Mr and Mrs Lomas to make the place work.

Kitching's Buildings, 1900

I don’t know how much leisure time she had, or what she did in her free time and the only image I have been able to discover shows what I think is Ethel in the garden of the hall sometime at the turn of the last century.

So she remains a shadowy character which is not helped by the confusion over her age.  So while she was born in 1891 she is down on the 1911 census as 22, and in 1915 when she got married age gave her age as 24.

She married a Harold Kitching whose father ran a hardware business on the corner of Shudehill and Mayes Street.  But it was more than just a hardware business.

Both Harold and his father Robert described themselves as merchants and the building from which they operated went under the name of Kitchings Buildings.

The property is still there today but there are those first ominous signs that its days may soon be numbered.

They were married at Christ Church in West Didsbury and the service was performed by Edward Lomax, vicar of St Mary’s in Liverpool.

Ethel and Howard's marriage, 1915

And that is where the trail ends for neither Ethel nor Harold can so far be tracked after that marriage.

I have every expectation that I will find them, but at present I have only been able unearth the death of Robert in 1924 in Manchester Royal Lunatic Hospital Cheadle.

On his death he left effects worth £17987 and the business appears still to have been trading from 97 Shudehill.

Now I know there will be more, after all we have travelled from Hough End Hall and a farm to the busy enterprise of Shudehill and I have ever confidence that there is more still to come.

Pictures; Ethel circa 1900, from the Lloyd Collection, the marriage of Ethel and Harold in 1915, courtesy of the National Archives and Ancestry.co.uk, and the map of Shudehill from Goad’s Fire Insurance Map, 1900, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

A peacock, a plough and a very old picture ............. the photograph album from Hough End Hall

One of the peacocks, date unknown

Now I am back with a unique collection of photograpghs from a family picture album which I had thought lost.

It belonged to the Lomax family who had lived and farmed at Hough End Hall from the late 1840s till the death of Mrs Lomax in1940.

I say lost but to be strictly accurate I had no idea of its existence until recently and I wish I had come across it earlier when I was writing a book on the hall’s history.*

At the time I thought that there must be some family images of the Lomax family but all that had come down to us was one of the children dated at the turn of the last century and taken from some distance.

But now I have that album of pictures and as you would expect it is a mix of snaps, a few of the hall and gardens and a rare couple of the farm.

And what first caught my eye was the peacock which for a while at least was how the farm was known.

Ploughing on the farm, date unknown

There are still people who speak fondly of the peacocks but with the passage of time some have confused its location despite at least one painting carrying the name Peacock Farm.

I have to admit I never gave it much thought preferring instead to concentrate on the working side of the farm and the people who ran it.

And the album has offered up a wonderful image of the land being ploughed.  I don’t have a date but guess it will be from the early 20th century.

Mrs Lomax circa 1930s

By then the farm had shrunk from about 220 acres and by its end was just a little over three, but it was still a working business and in the 1930s Mrs Lomax was still advertising for farm hands.

She had been born in 1864 married Samuel Lomax in the March of 1888 and took up residence in the hall sometime in the early 20th century on the death of Mr Lomax’s uncle who had run the farm since the late 1840s.

And here is Mrs Lomax.

The picture dates from sometime after the late 1920s and was taken looking south.  Directly behind her is the recently cut Mauldeth Road West and the Corporation houses.

It is a picture I like very much for not only do we have a photograph of Mrs Lomax but also an indication of  just how much the farm has changed in a couple of decades.

As late as the 1890s looking south there were clear views across open land south to the Workhouse while a little to the west was Nell Farm, a nursery and the edge of the newly opened Southern Cemetery.

And that is what makes the family album so unique because the first pictures date from the last decade of the 19th century and span the years almost into the middle of the next century offering up a major contribution to the story of hall.**

The wonder is that they have survived and points up that simple observation that there is more out there than we ever suspect.







Pictures; the Lomax family album now in the collection of Andrew Simpson

*Hough End Hall The Story, Andrew Simpson & Peter Topping, 2015, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20Hough%20End%20Hall

**Hough End Hall, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Hough%20End%20Hall

The picture that revealed a family story ..... the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax of Hough End Hall nu 2 ... what happened next

I like the way that stories have a habit of representing themselves and added to the original.

So a few years ago  I came across the family album of the Lomax family I featured the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax and Mr Kitching.

And yesterday their granddaughter wrote to me with some more pictures and the story of what happened to them

“You mused in the wedding piece about what might have become of the young couple.  Well, they had three children, Ronald (b 1916), Jeanne (b 1917) and Stuart (b 1920 or 1921).  

They migrated to Canada in 1926, to a town called Sooke, on Vancouver Island.  Even today, Sooke is a bit remote (at least by English standards), about 30 miles/50 km from Victoria.  At the time they migrated, it was just a small logging and commercial fishing village, accessible only by a long and winding dirt road from Victoria.  

It must have been quite a shock for my very proper English grandmother to find herself there!  The family stayed in Sooke for a few years, where my grandfather owned the local general store, then moved into Victoria in the 30s, to another general store.  

The depression hit hard, and around 1937 or 1938 my grandfather returned to England to try to re-establish, while the family stayed behind in Canada.  He was unable to get back to Canada before the war broke out, so there was a lengthy separation in the family.  

My uncle Ronnie had enlisted in the Canadian Army medical corps before the war as an ambulance driver, but ended up as an acting Major in an infantry regiment - the South Saskatchewan Rifles (never having been to Saskatchewan in his life) and saw quite a bit of action with his regiment in the liberation of Holland.  

My mother worked before the war as a clerk in the BC public service but also joined up, serving for several years in the RCAF.  Uncle Stuart joined the navy, but sadly died when his ship was torpedoed mid Atlantic.  


At war's end, Grandma and my mother headed to England.  They spent a year there, then returned to Canada with Grandpa in 1947.  My grandparents bought a little house in Victoria, and lived the rest of their lives there.  Grandpa passed away in 1974, Grandma in 1978.

My mother married my father in 1948 in Victoria, and had two children, my sister and myself.  Uncle Ronny married in England and returned to BC, to Vancouver.  

He and his wife also had two children, my cousins Ruth and David.  I've lost touch with Ruth, who moved to the US years ago, but David still lives in BC.  

My sister has recently moved from near Vancouver to the interior of BC, and by coincidence lives not far from David.  My mother now lives in a nursing home near my sister. 

And here am I, living in a lovely town outside Melbourne, in Australia.  So, to answer your musing, that's what became of them.

Although it has no relevance to your histories, I'm attaching a photo of my grandparents taken at a dinner for their 50th anniversary, in 1965.  I think that brings your story full circle.

Pictures; the wedding of Miss Lomax and Mr Kitching, 1915 and s from the family album of Evelyn nee Lomax Milburn donated by Mrs D Miller and the bride and groom, courtesy of Marlene Massey

*The picture that revealed a family story ................. the wedding photograph of Miss Lomax of Hough End Hall, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2015/10/the-picture-that-revealed-family-story.html

Selling the contents of Hough End Hall in the January of 1849

The Hall in 1910

Now I am back at Hough End Hall, that Elizabethan manor house.*

Strictly speaking it was in Withington but is so close to the border with our township that every historian since John Booker in 1853 has included it in their accounts of Chorlton.

It served as a fine home to the grand Mosley family until it was sold to the Egerton’s in the mid 18th century who rented it out to tenant farmers.

Some of these we know more about than others, and today it is the turn of Henry Jackson who was there during the 1840s and perhaps earlier.

He crops up in the census return the tithe records and the rate books and will still have been remembered by many when Thomas Ellwood wrote his series of articles about Chorlton in the winter and spring of 1885-6.

His was one of the bigger farms in the area, covering 220 acres and employing five labourers some of whom lived in the Hall.

And by one of those wonderful strokes of luck we have an inventory of the farm equipment which came up for sale on his death in 1849.

Executors of the late Mr Henry Jackson, of Hough End Hall, in Chorlton-cum-Hardy, in the county of Lancaster, to Sell BY AUCTION, on Tuesday, February 6th 1849, and following days, until the whole is disposed of the truly Valuable STOCK OF DAIRY COWS, HORSES, HUSBANDRY IMPLEMENTS, PRODUCE, &c. 

The Hall in 1895

Consisting of 17 high bred calved and in calf cos, eight draught horses, gears, for fourteen horses, sets of ploughing tackle, sundry odd gears, hackney saddles and bridles, six carts with six inch wheels and iron arm, one cart with narrow wheels, timber dobbin, two milk carts on springs, with harness complete.

One excellent gig and harness, several ploughs, double ploughs, cultivators, scarifies, seed and other harrows, winnowing machine, sieves and riddles, stack sheets, and poles, pair of smiths’ bellows, vices, anvils, a great variety of smiths’ and joiners’ tools, a large quantity of old iron, ladders dung, wash and wheelbarrows, thrashing machine, an variety of husbandry implements necessary for carrying on an extensive farm; one fat pig, poultry, ducks, boilers and fixtures, tankards &c.  

The produce comprises about 300 thraves of wheat, 600 thraves of oats, 80 thraves of horse beans, 100 tons of hay, 100 loads of potatoes of various sorts, 30 tons of Swede turnips. &c.  

The sale to begin each day at eleven o’clock, and the whole to be sold without reserve.  The cows, hay and part of the hay on the first day.  The horses, corn, and remainder of the produce the second day.  The reminder of the implements, &c on the following days.**

*Hough End Hall, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Hough%20End%20Hall

**Manchester Guardian January 20 1849

Pictures; the Hall looking west courtesy of Nora Templar 1910 and in 1895 from the Wesleyan Handbook, from the Lloyd Collection