Of pubs and people

I am never very good at endings.  Just when I think a story has run it natural course I come across something new.

Yesterday it was the bewildering decisions of the licensing authorities and how some people got permission to open new pubs and sell alcohol and others were just knocked back.  I followed the events and reported them and must say thought that was that. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/new-pubs-for-old-and-disappointed.html

In the February of 1907 neither the Royal Oak nor the Bowling Green Hotel were to be rebuilt despite what seemed very good reasons.  And in the same way just 14 years earlier an enterprising Charles Prince Hill was refused permission to sell bottled beer from his confectioners shop on Wilbraham Road.

The Bowling Green Hotel dated from the late 18th century and was a rambling building with ten rooms and in 1907 it had perhaps had its day, although I wish I could have wandered around it.  It had had been where some of our Sick and Burial Clubs had held their meetings, ran one of the two bowling green’s in the village and must have benefited from being so close to the parish church.

Now despite being unsuccessful at the annual licensing meeting the tenant of the pub must have taken heart at the promise of the committee to “visit the place and form our own conclusions on the spot.”  And this was what they must have done, because the following year a brand new pub just a little west of the old one was built.

The much smaller Royal Oak had to wait until the 1920s before it too was replaced by that large pile which stands a little to the east of the old one.

No such final luck for Charles Prince Hill.  Now in time I thought I might pursue Mr Hill who was still there in his confectioners in 1903 but had moved on by 1909 and might have prospered elsewhere.  Either way his successor continued to run confectioners and as little footnote to history and a concession to the present, the building at number 28 is still there.  It is the fifth property along from Keppel Road heading towards the junction with Barlow Moor Road, and what was once a confectioner is now a fast food chicken takeaway.

It wasn’t difficult to track him and his family.  By the April of 1911 he was living at number 8 Silverdale Road which was an eight roomed tall semi detached house.  Silverdale runs parallel with Wilbraham Road, connecting Buckingham and Egerton Road North, and would have been handy for the railway station but was secluded enough on a road tucked away from the noise and bustle of this part of new Chorlton.

The family had not been there long, perhaps just a few months and I would love to know more.  Charles described himself as retired which at 49 seems young, but perhaps it was on the grounds of ill health.  He died aged just 53 in 1915.  I could of course search deeper but perhaps this is an ending.

Pictures; The Bowling Green Hotel, 1970, A Dawson, m49269, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, the Royal Oak from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Walking back to 1848

Well if the sun shines tomorrow evening I will be pleased.  The last time I did the walk in the company of the Civic Society the sun shone and the 40 or so of us who wandered down Beech Road trying to recreate a similar evening in 1848 had a pleasant enough time.

Now I know that trying to talk you back a hundred and sixty years is an odd thing to do but I hope it will be fun.

So in that true style of someone who loves publicity here is a flavour of what the Row would have been like.

At the corner of Beech Road and Barlow Moor Road to the right was Beech Cottage home to the Holts who owned a fair bit of the area around St John’s Street behind  Deansgate plus the estate here in the township.  An estate which stretched from the corner of Beech Road along Barlow Moor Road and down to Hardy Lane almost as far as Cross Road. And that was not all.  Turn and face Barlow Moor Road and all that you can see from the shops to Sandy Lane and a chunk of Chorlton Park was theirs too.

By total contrast was the home of Sarah Sutton at the corner of what is now Beech Road and Wilton Road.   It was a wattle and daub cottage, had been built in the early 19th century and was not demolished until the 1890s.
And of course there is much more. Meet us at the corner of Beech Road and Barlow Moor Road at 7.30 Wednesday June 13th.

Pictures; detail from a Beech Road 1908, m17645, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, Sutton’s Cottage from the Wesleyan Souvenir Handbook, 1907, courtesy of Philip Lloyd

Who would you have to be polite to in 1848? .... A walk down Beech Road in the mid 19th century

Now I can be a bit of a bore when it comes to talking about Chorlton in the 1840s.

It has got to that point where I often wander down a local road lost in recreating what it was like in the 19th century and friends just avoid me, preferring the long route to the pub rather than listen to another history story.

But just now and again I actually get asked to share those stories.  So this Wednesday which will be June 13th I will be walking down Beech Road fully prepared to tell you what you could have seen in the summer of 1848 and more importantly who you’d have to be polite to.  And there were a fair few of those, starting with the Holt family who lived on their estate at the top of Beech Road where it runs into Barlow Moor Road, and assorted other rich people along the way.

But there were also some farmers, the blacksmith William Davies and Samuel Nixon who ran the Travellers Rest which was the small beer shop at the end of the Row* not to be confused with the Horse and Jockey the slightly larger beer house on the green.

So, we start at 7.30, at the point where the Row joins Barlow Moor Lane, by the gates of Beech House, and for those who don’t live in 1848, it’s the junction of Beech Road and Barlow Moor Road, hard by the tram terminus.

*It’s still there although it hasn't sold beer for over a century, now number 70 Beech Road,  the premise is Franny and Flier.   The Row was the name for Beech Road

Picture; the village and the Row in 1845, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Getting help with the past

This is not an advert more an appreciation of one of those magazines which have been helping many of us make sense of family history.

Now there are plenty of them about along with web sites and plenty of radio and TV programmes, all catering for that most basic desire to find out where we came from.

In my case it was to carry on the work of my two sisters who did it the hard way in the 1970s, visiting parish church yards and writing off to the family, friends and the General Registry Office.

Now I have never really been interested in just hoovering up past family members and have never had a desire to trace them back to the Doomsday Book.  I stopped at around 1800 and set out to fix my family in the context of where they lived and what was going on at the time, and of course what came to light was a remarkable group of people who “lived out small lives in a big century”.

So the BBC magazine Who Do You Think You Are?* just suits me fine.  There are plenty of reviews and general historical stories to fix a family as well as help pages and an opportunity for readers to share their research.  But above all for me it is the monthly upgrades of what sources have been put online which recently included a “major online Dorset collection,” the digitalisation of more convict records and the Manchester collection.

There are of course those who view all this as just popular entertainment which in one sense it is.  But then shouldn’t we all get some pleasure from finding out about great granddad and on the way learning about the place and time that shaped him?  Doing history always seems a more positive process than just being told something.

And many family and amateur historians do contribute to the bigger picture whether it is turning up unseen documents or providing an insight into the lives of working people a hundred or more years ago.  In our case it was amongst other things a twenty-five hand written letter detailing the experiences of my uncle from the Manchester blitz, via a convoy to South Africa, the fall of Greece and a particularly grim time in Basra.  All of which was complimented by a set photographs which perfectly accompany the letter.

So I think we should take the whole family history industry seriously, after all the history books are full of the lives of the rich, the important and the famous, but the lives of the people who cleaned their houses, grew their food and fought their wars are still under represented.

All of which takes me back to this edition of WDYTYA, with articles on our Servant ancestors, the Catholic registers, Court Records and Gardeners of the Past.  And I know that for some these will be light weight and only skim the surface, but they are a starting point for many just beginning to uncover their past families and I guess the first time they have engaged in history since their school days.

So there you have it.  The July edition of what I reckon is a pretty neat do it yourself family history.

Pictures; from cover of the June edition, and air gram from 1940 in the collection of Andrew Simpson

*http://www.whodoyouthinkyouaremagazine.com/

Walking in Chorlton in 1841

Chorlton-cum-Hardy is an odd name for where we live given that we were actually three distinct areas with small clusters of houses in between.

In the centre was Chorlton grouped around the green and along the Row,* while to the south between the Brook and the Mersey was the lonely outpost of Hardy, and to the north of Chorlton was Martledge, which is the area roughly from the Four Banks up to the library and the area around the long roads of Longford Nicholas Newport and Oswald Roads.

In between there were little grouping of houses which I often refer to as hamlets but I suppose may have been too small even for that title.

I like Greenwood’s map which dates from the beginning of the 19^th century because although it doesn’t have the detail of later maps, but is bright colourful and still does the business.

The data for the bar chart comes from the 1841 census.

Pictures; Greenwood’s map of Lancashire by kind permission of Digital Archives http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/


* The Row or more accurately Chorlton Row was renamed Beech Road

Stories of the Great War

The Great War has now passed out of living memory.

 For most of us today the abiding image of that conflict are the rows of military gravestones, many bearing that simple inscription “A soldier of the Great War.”
And if we were pushed we might recall those grainy black and white pictures of soldiers staring back at us, and the poems of Wilfred Own and the other war poets expressing “the pity of war.”

But for everyone who died many more came back.  Most like the men of my family rarely spoke of the experiences nor would I expect them to.  By the time I was old enough to speak to them as an adult that war had been over for the best part of sixty years and they were older than I am now.

Which is a salutary thought for my memories from being 17 and 18 which was the age when most of them went are at best hazy and certainly fragmentary, add to that the awful things they must have seen and it is not surprising that they said so little.

We sent six off to fight for King and Country.  Along with two uncles, two great uncles, and my grandfather there was also my great grandfather.  They either volunteered or were called back to “the colours”.  And because my grandmother was German we had family members in the forces of Imperial Germany.  All of which has led me to reflect that for us the Great War was nothing less than a family civil war.

Their motives for going were as mixed as their experiences.  My great grandfather had served as a young man in the late 1880s in the army of the old Queen and was still on the reserve list, although he had been turned down for active service in the second South African War he rejoined in 1914.

In the case of one my great uncles it was an opportunity to escape from a life he was unhappy with.  As a British Home Child* he had gone to Canada in the May of 1914 aged just 16, spent a difficult year on farms across Nova Scotia and New Brunswick finally running away, changing his name and lying about his age to join the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the August 1915.

And his brother who was my grandfather also lied about his age and joined up in the May of 1916.
Other members of the family seem to have volunteered ahead of the call up.  But like so much of my family history the documentary evidence is thin on the ground.  But what there is does run against the popular view of the struggle.  My great uncle Roger was forever coming up against military authority, my grandfather prolonged his stay in the army until 1922 and my two uncles rose from the ranks to NCO and officer.

Nothing particularly odd in all of this except that it is my family and my story and over the next few weeks I want to explore more of their experiences.

Pictures; Montague Hall 1914, George Simpson circa 1918, from the collection of Andrew Simpson
* British Home Children were children sent to Canada and later Australia and settled on farms and as domestic servants

All you ever wanted to know but never knew where to look .... an index of books on British Home Children

Even today when you tell people that 100,000 children were sent from Britain to Canada between 1870 and 1930, the usual response is surprise, followed by bewilderment and those simple questions of why and how?  

Of course here in Britain we have had a record of sending people out to other lands, whether it was as criminals from the 17th century, and settlers from the 19th or in the case of children to Canada and later Australia well into the 20th century.

Now there is some fine research being done, mainly in Canada, and a lot of serious work to help those who were sent as children to Australia as late as the 1970s to piece together their former lives but here in Britain there is still a deep chasm of ignorance.

Those who do pursue the topic are either a small band of historians or relatives who discover by accident that a parent or grandparent was settled in Canada.  In my case just over a year ago I made the connection between a great uncle and the British Home Child scheme which was responsible for the settlement of orphan and street children to former parts of the Empire.  My great uncle Roger was neither orphan nor homeless street child but one of those with a parent who the authorities deemed as “unfit to have control.”

When I first began researching his life and the BHC scheme I had little to go on, but with the help of people also on that search I found much that helped me.  And today many of these people I count as friends.  So perhaps this is the moment to refer to Lori who has collected together the biggest collection on the internet of books on British Home Children http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/book--article-library.html

Her site http://canadianbritishhomechildren.weebly.com/ is a wealth of information, links and opinions which allow the researcher to lock into the growing interest and work on BHC.  Now at this point I should also mention other colleagues and friends as well as sites, but that would only distract for the moment from the task which is to highlight this index.

Picture’s from the collection of Lori Oschefski