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?

Recreating a a view of Hough End Hall in 1945

Now given that Hough End Hall is 418 years old and due a birthday soon sadly there are not that many pictures of the place.

It does feature in a range of postcards from the 19th century along with some privately made photographs and a few water colours but that is it.

More recently local artist Peter Topping has set about rectifying this by producing some paintings of what it might have looked like.

And before any one reaches for the lap top to express indignation that an artist in the 21st century should try to recreate a scene of the place from sixty odd years ago I would point out that Peter has used original photographs and called on the few colour prints we have to give a sense of the Hall.

Recreations are fraught with dangers and can lead to misinterpretations but are useful and  a way of beginning to understand a building and its context.

Now this scene I know well, not only because I have seen the original black and white photograph but because my old friend Oliver Bailey has described the scene to me.

His family held the tenancy of the hall and surrounding land from the outbreak of the last world war and later purchased them from the Egerton Estate.

The family kept horses and “along the side of the plot that borders Mauldeth Road there was a field and in front of that a line of what had been loose boxes where my father kept pigs and the ones nearest Nell Lane were used for horses for a while – as kids we kept ours there, Silver, Nils and Betty when they weren’t out in the fields.”*

All of which brings the hall a little closer which is fine by me.

Painting; Hough End Hall circa 1945, © 2014 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
Facebook:  Paintings from Pictures

*Oliver Bailey, 2014