The price of worship in 1857

The receipt for the pew rent paid by William Bailey. Midsummer 1857, and over written with other figures.
Picture; from the Bailey collection

Chorlton's workhouse ...... part 1

The Stretford Road workhouse was in the heart of Hulme just over three miles away. For any of our people from the township this must have seemed a forbidding place. On all sides and stretching out in all directions the area was a collection of closed packed terraced houses punctuated by timber yards and cotton mills.

All of which was a long way from the fields and woodland of the township. Here the prevailing sound would be that of the many machines engaged in ceaseless noisy activity and the ever present pall of smoke from countless domestic chimneys and boiler houses.

The isolation from all that was familiar was reinforced by the harshness of the immediate surroundings. The workhouse was not meant to be a comfortable resort. For both sick and healthy inmates the regime inside the institution was bleak and austere. The segregation of the sexes extended from the young to the old and from the sick to those judged to be lunatics. In all there were twelve exercise yards for the 300 inmates each dedicated to a particular group where behind tall walls no man or boy could gaze on the opposite sex. This was not a new policy and was followed by the Manchester workhouse before the new poor law.

The policy of segregation was particularly hard on elderly married couples who may have spent their entire adult life together but were now forced apart. Of the 17 couples in the work house in the summer of 1841 most were in their sixties. But it was no less hard on those with young families seeking help. They too were split up. Boys were accommodated next to the old men and girls beside the old woman while the younger men and women were housed beyond the infirmary at the back of the workhouse bordering Devonshire Street.

Twenty-four children in our workhouse had been admitted with their mothers. These mothers were mostly in their thirties or forties were there without their husband or partner and most had entered with two or more children and as we shall see they would be separated from the children they had brought into this world.

What constituted a child had been set down in the original classification back in 1834. This specified that females under 16 were girls, while males below the age of 13 were treated as boys, and those under seven were regarded as a separate class. In certain circumstances a child under seven could be left with their mother and even share her bed. Other than that mothers were supposed to have access to the child. This was easier if the child were in the same workhouse and only a possibility if it were in a different institution. As to the length of the interview this depended on the Guardians.

In all there were 66 under the age of 16 of which a full 42 were there on their own. Their ages ranged from just a few days through to 15. Some were there with siblings but most had no one except the friends they could make.

They would have arrived in many different ways. Some would be orphans, or deserted children, while others might be illegitimate and yet others abandoned due to a range of disabilities. Once inside the Guardians might decide to retain an orphan under the age of sixteen if they determined that on release the child was in danger.

Well might they have abandoned all hope for in a real sense they were lost to all but the officials of the institution and even those charged with their welfare may not always have been diligent in promoting their needs.

So it was with young Mary “Penny” in November 1841, who had been abducted from a nurse girl in Hulme, left with another child a few streets away for a penny and ended in the workhouse on Stretford New Road as an orphan where she languished for eleven months. The admission book showed no record of the baby’s entry into the workhouse and the official position was that such events were improbable. This may well have sealed her fate, but the persistence of her parents combined with the testimony of an inmate resulted in the baby’s release. It is a bizarre and unusual story but one which points up more than a hint of what could happen to those with no voice or influence.

Extract from Chorlton-cum-Hardy, A Community Transformed

Picture; The Workhouse in Hulme from the OS 1842-44

The day we went to Florence

Now I have featured this picture before but as I am reflecting on little out of the way places in Italian cities I thought I would come back to it. We had been on holiday in Viareggio and decided to visit Florence. And in between the sightseeing bus and the battle for a camera pitch I stumbled across a side street at lunch time.
Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Following the family history trail

This is one of those family photographs I am drawn back to. We all have them and this is my grandmother and Uncle Roger in the back yard of 12 Hope Street in 1929. It is one of a collection that I inherited and set me off researching my family history.
At the time I was very much at “sea” and would have welcomed anyone who had a similar interest but a little more knowledge and experience of following the family trail.

I ended doing it the hard way, but on the way had tremendous help and encouragement from the staff at the Archives and Local Studies Centre of Manchester Public Libraries which are currently in two sites at Central Library, Elliot House on Deansgate, and the Manchester Room and Greater Manchester County Record Office on Marshall Street, http://www.manchester.gov.uk/libraries/a

It was there that I came across the Manchester & Lancashire Family History Society http://www.mlfhs.org.uk/ who hold sessions for beginners at Elliot House.

And now I have news of the ManchesterandSalford Familyhistoryforum at http://manchesterfamilyhist.proboards.com/index.cgi?action=pmview&view=1&id=3854#ixzz1qVYeq74S which “is a new family history web site and forum, dedicated to helping people find their ancestral roots in Manchester and Salford. We are looking for new members who are researching their family trees or who can help researchers with requests for information. We are also looking for copyright-free old photographs of people and the area, which could be used on our website.”

So the quest goes on. I still turn up pictures like this one which at present are a mystery, but I travel in hope and know that at some point someone will help me unlock the secrets of who these men were and where the photograph was taken.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Reflections on an exhibition .... Glad to be in Chorlton Past and Present

I said I wondered how we would feel at the end of the day, and tired and pleased pretty well sums it. The Big Green Festival attracted 4,000 people last year and I think this year was even better.

Certainly enough of them came through the exhibition to make Peter, Linda, Rachael* and I feel that the exhibition had been a success. It opened with a series of six tall panels taken from a post card of Beech Road in 1910, interspersed with story boards and photographs describing the road and shops in 1850, 1900 and 1980. These were key moments in the history of the road, covering the last time we were truly a rural community, moving on to the point when the shops and buildings pretty much took the form we can see today and ending at the point when the traditional character of the place was undergoing the change which eventually led to what we have now.

All of which led neatly into Peter’s paintings which capture the road today in six street scenes. Now I am a historian who Peter calls a story teller and I provided the text and original photographs. But it was Peter who put this mix of words and images together and turned them into a real visual experience.

So thank you to all our friends, including those who regularly read the blog, those who came to see Peter’s wonderful pictures and all the others who wandered in for a coffee and stayed to be part of the exhibition.

We will be staging the exhibition at a number of events over the rest of the year and so if you missed it rest assured that it will be coming to a venue near you.

* Peter and Linda Topping, https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures
Rachael McGowan, https://www.facebook.com/#!/media/set/?set=oa.388939324459139&type=1
and me http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com

Stories of beer shops, a druggist called Lightly Simpson and William Davis the blackmith all on the Row in the June of 1841

Well, depending on when you are reading this, Peter and I will be at the Glad to be In Chorlton Past and Present Exhibition at the Big Green Festival in St Clements Church on Edge Lane, or wondering just exactly where the day went.

We will be exploring what Chorlton was like in the 1850s and again at the beginning of the last century, and how it has changed. Peter will have some of his paintings of Beech Road on display and there will be photographs and stories by me of the road and its shops in the past. This in turn will provide a basis for a discussion on what we want for our community for the future.

And as part of this event we want you to enter the competition to win a Glad to be In Chorlton mug and a copy of my book* which will be out in the autumn by correctly identifying the picture detail from one of the paintings and one of the old photographs on display as well as telling us the shop which now trades on Beech Road from the location of what was Sunflowers.

Peter’s work is on display around Chorlton and can also be seen at https://www.facebook.com/paintingsfrompictures

Picture; one of the panels devised by Peter from a postcard of Beech Road in the collection of Rita Bishop

One hundred Years of one house in Chorlton .... part 15 the midwife calls

The continuing story of the house Joe and Mary Ann Scott lived in for over 50 years and the families that have lived here since.

It is one of those odd things that in the 90 odd years that our house has stood on Beech Road ours are the only children to have been born here. And in a very real sense actually born in the house upstairs in the big bedroom just as it would have been in the past.

Joe and Mary Ann spent almost their entire married life here but had no children, John, Mike and Lois were single and before I bought the house there was only a young couple who were here for just for two years and for most of that were living abroad.

So that brings us to our children, one of whom was born upstairs on an August morning nineteen years ago.

Now in 1992 home births were still a little unusual and even today only account for 2% of all births herein the UK although in Torbay it was 20% in 2010. And there was some gentle medical opposition mostly around the “what if there were complications?” But Withington Hospital was only 5 minutes away and anyway as friends pointed out, who would want to have a baby in a hospital which was full of sick people?

When I tell older friends of the opposition they point to the fact that they and their siblings and parents were all born at home.

Historically hospitals were places where only the poor went. The rich were treated at home. My old friend Alan Brown remembers having his tonsils out in their back bedroom and in the memoirs of the “Mitford girls” there is a delightful story of one of them having their appendix out in the nursery.

Now this is in no way to rubbish the NHS or argue for a golden time before it was introduced. I was born just one year after its creation and have been able to rely on a first class free medical service which is in contrast to the stories from my parents of small dismal cottage hospitals, expensive doctors fees and underfunded general hospitals.

There will be those in Chorlton who will remember the local Rose Queen events of the 1930s which were essentially a vehicle to raise money for our hospitals. And for those of us who have studied and researched the 19th century there are the awful stories of the poor who had to rely on the workhouse hospital or dig deep into the family budget to contribute to their sick and burial societies.

The decision to have our child at home was a conscious one and there was expert advice on hand including Sister Williams who over the years assisted in the birth of all three of the elder boys. And our youngest was nearly not the only one to be born in the big bedroom. When our middle son was due I dutifully called for an ambulance, but just as it arrived there was an accident outside the house involving a man, a bike and the kerb. It was my call, and the ambulance left with the man, leaving me the difficult task of explains why we needed another ambulance to a sceptical switchboard operator, such are the pitfalls of the Good Samaritan.

So for over a quarter of the time our house has been here it has been a home to our children, which I reckon makes us a first in the story of the house.
Follow all the stories of the house at http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson