A scene long gone, .......... Manchester Road at the beginning of the 20th century

There can’t be anyone left who remembers this scene and if it were not for the Temperance Hall in the picture I doubt it would be easy to locate it in Chorlton.

It dates from sometime between 1902 and 1910 and all of these houses on the west side of Barlow Moor Road have long gone. They were the homes of the new managerial class who were choosing to settle in a pleasant suburb still on the edge of the countryside yet within easy reach of the city centre. So here was a canal superintendant a manager, a journalist and a professor of music.

The houses were of a moderate size ranging from seven to nine rooms. Only one has survived which is the one on the corner of Barlow Moor Road and Wilbraham Road. Perhaps the fact that this one had become a bank by the early 1920s saved it from demolition in the 1960s.

I cannot be sure but I rather think this may be the one marked on the postcard which was the home of the Ferneley family in 1911. Thomas Moses and his son were professors of music while a second son was a buyer. It was the biggest of the five having nine rooms and looked out on both roads. Even now some of the grandeur of the place can be discerned from looking at the bank from Wilbraham Road. Ignore the stone frontage, the big ground floor windows and the entrance and concentrate instead on the upper levels. Now imagine those bays repeated down to the ground either side of a large front door.

None of the pictures do justice to what it must have looked like. Back in the 1880s it had the grand title of Sunwick and stood in its own grounds which included much of what is now the precinct.

During the next 40 years the surrounding area changed rapidly, with shops encroaching on the Wilbraham Road side and the development of the east side of Barlow Moor Road, leaving all three pictures a thing of the past.

Picture; Manchester Road circa 1902-10, Wilbraham Road circa 1895 from the Lloyd collection, & the junction of Barlow Moor Road and Wilbraham Road early 1920s from the collection of Rita Bishop

A nice doorway

A nice doorway
Wakefield Street in the summer of 2007. Not many of these doorways left. Sometime I will track the firm done and report back.
Picture; Wakefield Street, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The hunt for a photograph, .......... inside the Savoy cinema on Manchester Road

The old Savoy cinema on Manchester Road was my best hope. It had been opened sometime around the First World War and is still there today. True the impressive frontage has gone hidden behind a slab of brick and so too has the ground floor, but I thought there might be something of the upstairs left.

It would be the only intact interior of one of our picture houses. There had been four and now there are no more. The Pavilion down on Wilbraham Road had gone only thirty years or so years after it was opened, the Rivioli was pulled down for a fast food outlet and the Palais de Luxe Cinema on Barlow Moor Road is a supermarket.

Briefly I had high expectations that there might be something left at the Palais or Palace as it became known. The downstairs has undergone plenty of refurbishments in its time since it opened as a Tesco’s then Hanbury’s and now the Co-op but I reasoned there should be no reason to mess with the upstairs.

After all for most of its life as a supermarket it had been a pretty basic affair. The Tesco outlet had been very much dominated by the old retail maxim of “pile it high and sell it cheap.” Hard as it is now to think that the sleek Tesco stores of the 21st century could have been so. The one in Ashton may even have left the tinned stuff on pallets on the shop floor, but this was a long time ago and my memory can be faulty these days.

But then as a Hanbury store it remained pretty basic. Long after the big retail players had gone in for loyalty cards Hanbury’s customers at Christmas had a card which was stamped by the cashier.

So even given the brand new refurbishment rolled out this week by the Co-op there might have been something left on what would have been the circle and projection room. But sadly it is just a big empty space long since converted in to storage area.

So back to the Savoy and the Co-op Undertakers. The staff there said that there were remnants of what it had once been but there were health and safety issues and I was best writing in and making a formal request. Sadly despite my offer to wear a hard had only stand at the entrance and sign away any rights I had to a claim on the Co-op if anything happened I was still refused permission.

Which is all a bit sad really, particularly as memories of the inside of the Savoy are fading from living memory. I will try again.

But I cannot close without reflecting on the impact of Hanbury’s. I typed in the name on google just to see if there were any pictures of the old store. Instead I found a wealth of comments which makes me think I should write about that other institution on Barlow Moor Road that was Kingspot or “Kingy”, where the world of cheap often bizarre but fun products from plastic novelty toys to paintings of the San Franciso Bridge were all available for a small price.

Picture; one of the last times the old Palais de Luxe Cinema was photographed, taken by A H Downes in the May of 1959, m17516, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

A lost British Home Child

Anyone who has done any work on family history will know the highs and lows of such research. It starts with the discovery of a relative you never knew existed, unfolds with disarming simplicity and then the road block.

No matter where you look, who you consult or however many times you try they stubbornly will not reveal anything more about their lives. After discovering I had a great uncle who had been born in Birmingham in 1898, lived briefly in Kent before moving to Derby aged four I lost him.

But following a lead in a letter from his sister written over thirty years ago and the discovery of his name on a passenger list the bits fell into place. He was one of those British Home Children, and through the records in Birmingham and the archives of Canada, and more than a little help from other researchers his life slid out of the shadows.

Here was a young man who at the age of four was placed in institutions, nearly got sent to a naval boot camp but instead went to Canada, where he worked on farms in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick before running away and joining the Canadian army, having lied about his age, changed his name and falsified the records of his relatives.

His years in the army were well documented and I can follow his movements around Europe, his health record, as well as his frequent clash with military discipline and his eventual sea journey home to Canada.

I have more documents about his life and know more about him from his birth to his early twenties than I do about his brother who was my grandfather.
But then it just stops. He had returned in 1918 and was keen for his sister who was four years younger to join him in Canada. In the November of 1925 she took the plunge and sailed planning only a short stay.”When I came to Canada I just took my clothes with me no belongings. I had planned to come back.”

By then he was in British Columbia but she didn’t like the idea of the open west which was still being settled, and instead stayed in the east.
And there as they say the road block stops progress. His sister my great Dolly is dead and any letters and records about him are not available. There is one reference to a James Rogers who died in the 1950s having served in the CEF but this is not him. Then there was the more promising land grant record for the mid 1920s awarded to a James Rogers in the west.
The Canadian Government had followed the policy of the United States in granting land to people who wanted to settle in British Columbia and Alberta.

Family historians well know the excitement of such a discovery. The name, the place and the time all fitted and this is where hope can trounce reason. You tell yourself you have found him, crawl over modern and historic maps of the area, eliminating locations before settling on the correct place by using the grid reference from the land settlement.

And now begins the fun. You write to local newspapers hoping that the name will ring bells. I did this for his time in NB and NS and was overwhelmed with help from residents. People went out of their way to talk to old friends, do their own research and even travel out to photograph the old farm sites. I owe all of them a big thank you.

But the west offers nothing and finally with the help of a researcher in Alberta we have to eliminate the land grant. It is just not him. My friend Lori suggests the street directories for the west which may offer something and there is a marriage record for a James Rogers who married Agnes Isabella M Davidson in Vancouver in 1931

So I have to tell myself that maybe he is just lost, having changed his name again, moved out of Canada or just disappeared.
Still if there is one thing I have learned it is that something will eventually turn up.

Picture; Langley Train Station, British Columbia 1925, located in Vancouver Public Library, and is in the public domain.

Another lost picture and a glimpse of what it was like

One of the most popular posts I have produced was one of a rarely seen postcard of Barlow Moor Road from the very early years of the 20th century. A lost photograph and a clue to a vanished building http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2012/01/lost-photograph-and-clue-to-vanished.html
I suppose its appeal is that it is of a time and place which has all but passed out of living memory.

Now this one which I also found by sheer chance is 52 years old but most of us would be hard pressed I think to recognise it at first glance. It comes from that wonderful collection of digital photographs held by our own library service and can be accessed at http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass



It was taken by AH Downes, who captured the scene in April 1959. Nothing over remarkable I hear someone muter. Yes there is an old lorry with bottles of milk an equally old fashioned car and of course the woman’s coat is very long.

But its location is unfamiliar. Well that is until you clock the building to the extreme right. It was then the Gaumont cinema and opened in 1937 as the Savoy. Today it is the Coop undertakers. All of which means that the buildings stretching back to our long coated lady are now the side of the shopping precinct. The house furthest away stands at the corner of Nicholas Road and beyond the gardens of the house to our left were more houses which fronted Manchester Road, which until the building of the precinct ran from Wilbraham to Nicholas Road.

So there you have it another lost picture and a glimpse of what it was once like. Well I say a lost photograph which it isn’t really, just I hadn’t gone looking for it.

Picture; west side of Barlow Moor Road, by AH Downes, April 1959, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council

Who will speak for the British Home Children of Canada?

I have mixed feelings about the need for Governments to apologise for acts done in their name or on their watch when those events have long since passed from living memory.

The opponents of such apologies tend to distort the argument by citing ancient acts of wrong doing from Herod’s massacre of the Innocents to the murder of the small Jewish community in York in 1190. Who after all could be held responsible? Not only is there no one who could in anyway be linked to such acts but the very systems of government around at the time have long since vanished.

More recent crimes are no less easy to deal with. In most cases successor Governments had nothing to do with those past events and apologies do not allow those who suffered to escape from being seen as victims. How much better then to follow the South African policy of truth and reconciliation which has been a brave way of coming to terms with the years of oppression and apartheid.

But I think this is to miss the point. It is not so much about saying sorry as allowing those who suffered to feel that their lives and experiences were important and deserve more than a footnote in a history book.

That is why I was pleased that the British and Australian Governments apologised for the way that thousands of our children were taken from Britain and placed in Canada and Australia. Many may have had better lives as a result and made great contributions to their adopted countries, but few had much say in what happened to them. They paid the price for the fact that the biggest and richest world empire could not look after them, and chose instead to let a group of individuals and organisations solve the problem of child poverty by taking them elsewhere.

As Gordon Brown said in the House of Commons in 2010,

"To all those former child migrants and their families, to those here with us today and those across the world, to each and every one, I say we are truly sorry.
We are sorry that instead of caring for them, this country turned its back. And, we're sorry that the voices of these children were not always heard, their cries for help not always heeded. And we're sorry that it's taken so long for this important day to come and for the full and unconditional apology that is justly deserved. “

Now the same people who oppose such apologies will argue that it was a different time and under different rules, except there were plenty of people at the time from socialists and trade unionists to middle class reformers who criticised the way capitalism tolerated such poverty as an essential part of the system.

Sadly for my great uncle and most of the children shifted off to Canada it is all too late. The last that went across in the late 1920s will be very old. Most of them never talked about their lives as British Home Children and so the stories of who they were, how they got to Canada and their early childhood experiences are in danger of being lost.

Some of us have begun to do our own personal research and storytelling. In my case I have been helped by the growing network of others doing the same thing, and by the Library and Archive of Canada, as well people over here.

But even with online facilities it is not easy and costs which is why I applaud the campaign to get the Canadian Government to help with funding the research. http://www.change.org/petitions/minister-of-citizenship-immigration-and-multiculturalism-canada-government-help-and-justice-for-the-british-home-children

I am hopeful, after all it did designate 2010 as the Year of the British Home Child, and I am assured that there are study opportunities in Canadian schools for exploring the history of British Home Children.

All of which makes their decision not to offer an apology a little bizarre and all the more important that it honours the memory of the 100,000 or so children who were settled in Canada with help in telling their stories.

Chorlton in the snow, a postcard from Australia

Yesterday evening I heard the Snake Pass had reopened. It was closed from the Lady Bower Reservoir down to Glossop because of the snow. We often travel the route on the way home from Sheffield and I can well believe how it had become impassable

This is as good an introduction as you will get to this picture of Chorlton in the snow. It was taken where the Brook twists away from what is now Brookburn Road. Today the view across to the church and the barn of Hannah Cheshire at Ivy Farm is hidden by the modern Bowling Green Hotel and the row of houses that follow the line of the brook into Chorltonville.

The postcard was sent in the November of 1908 but the image is likely to be much older. To the right beyond the barn is the Queen and Pasley Laundry with is distinctive tall chimney which dates the photograph to after 1893 when the laundry was opened. But there is much in the picture which could take us back to the middle decades of the 19th century. The old Bowling Green Hotel which stood slightly to the side of the parish church was built in the 1780s, while the cottage on the left behind the hut had been built by 1818 and may be older.

So with a little imagination and a will to wipe out most of the buildings to the east of Hannah Cheshire’s barns we could be staring at the village from the meadows at anytime during the 19th century.

But that is not quite the end of the story. The postcard was sent from Australia to Matthias Hoyland Petts and his wife Laura at 16 Thorpe Street, Old Trafford. It is not a conventional postcard and was made by the sender who writes that she has “been out of postcards” and what we have is one of her own photographs. Now Matthias Hoyland Petts was easy to track. He was a cashier. He had married Laura in 1907 and was still living at Thorpe Street in 1911. By then they had a baby girl born the year before. 16 Thorpe Street is still there; it was part of a terrace, had six rooms and could only have been built in the decade before Louise sent her postcard from Australia.

It seems that Louise was married to Hoyland’s brother Charles who was a brass engraver and lithographer. It is his name on a stamp that appears on the postcard which places them at Warriston Street, in Brighton, Victoria.

Today it looks a pleasant enough little street of clapperboard bungalows and brick houses. Now the assumption is that she came from Chorlton and married Charles sometime between 1901 and 1908 but then there is just too much that we do not know. Perhaps Charles brought the picture out and maybe Louisa was already in Australia.

All of which is a long way from a photograph of Chorlton in the snow taken between 1893 when the laundry opened and 1908 when the new Bowling Green Hotel was built.

Picture; from the Lloyd collection