150 years of Co-operation at the People's History Museum till May

A CWS jam advert circa 1930s

Now all most all my close friends can remember their mum’s co-op divi number.

Whenever you bought anything at the local store you had to quote it, to earn the dividend.

Sadly I am not one of them and try as I might it has been forgotten.

But I can remember quoting it when I was sent to the shop and came across some of those blue stamps which took the divi number’s place.

Later I went to work for the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich and later still joined the Co-op bank when we lived in Ashton.

That bank account in the 1970s was quite a life line, for in a time when there were no holes in the wall to dispense money, the Co-op would cash cheques at the weekend at the big Arcadia store.

Co-op cocoa made at the CWS & SCWS-factory,1902

All of which is an introduction to the new exhibition at The People’s History Museum* on 150 years of the Co-operative Movement which runs till May 2014.

“For 150 years The Co-operative has grown to first manufacture and then to sell products. Its services continue to support the families and communities of Great Britain and the world ‘from the cradle to the grave’.

This people’s business began its humble origins as the Co-operative Wholesale Society in Greater Manchester in 1863. The exhibition explores the story and values behind the ‘caring sharing co-op’ and offer a unique insight into the way we shop and live.”

So along with my friend Tommy and a group of fellow co-operators we were taken around the exhibition which includes a number of interactive displays along with plenty of posters and other things to see.

There was a guided tour and the staff opened up some of the archive material for us to handle.

So I shall be going again, taking the family and anyone else who wants to come.

And it is an important exhibition celebrating as it does the idea that people can co-operate to make a better world and that profit is not the only means by which products can be produced and traded.

In an age of banker’s bonuses and that much peddled idea that the markets determine all it is worth reflecting on the Co-op which “is the UK’s largest mutual business, owned not by private shareholders but by over seven million consumers. 

Bus advertisement for The Co-operative Bank circa 1970s

They are the UK’s fifth biggest food retailer and a major financial services provider, operating The Co-operative Bank and The Co-operative Insurance. 

They also operate a funeral services, the third largest pharmacy chain and one of Britain’s largest farming operations. The Group operates 4,800 retail trading outlets, employs more than 100,000 people and has an annual turnover of more than £13bn.

Their members are their owners; members tell them what is important to them and they listen and act on it. 

Its part of their model: as a consumer co-operative, they run their business for the benefit of members. That means members are involved in democratic decision-making and profits are shared with the members. 

Dividend stamps introduced nationally by CWS in 1969

Members also set a social and campaigning agenda that they support.

They have become pioneers in areas such as Fairtrade and combating climate change. The more commercially successful they are, the more they can do to give back to the communities they serve and to influence the wider world.”

So even despite its current embarrassment with its banking arm and faces challenging from the big companies
I think the Co-op is still worth considering and certainly visiting its history.

*The People’s History Museum, Manchester, http://www.phm.org.uk/

Follow @PHMMcr on twitter to keep up to date with the exhibition  #coop150ex

Pictures; A CWS jam advert c1930s, National Co-operative Archive, © The Co-operative Group,
Advertisement-for-co-operative-cocoa-made-at-a-joint-CWS-and-SCWS-factory-in-Luton-from-1902-National-Co-operative-Archive-© -The-Co-operative-Group, Bus advertisement for The Co-operative Bank circa 1970s, National Co-operative Archive, © The Co-operative Group, Dividend stamps introduced nationally by CWS in 1969, National Co-operative Archive, ©The Co-operative Group

Montague Hall, soldier of the Queen, iron driller, and father of ten children

Wynberg in South Africa is a long way from Derby and back in 1888 it must have seemed even further away. Not that my great grandfather had much choice in the matter.

He was a soldier of the Queen and by the time he was 21 had seen service in Gibraltar and the West Indies as well South Africa.

He was one of the thousands of regular soldiers who garrisoned the Empire. It was a life of strict routine, clear discipline and at times sheer boredom. But for a young man who had grown up in Provident Street and later Sitwell Street this was indeed an adventure.

The corners of the Empire he visited were hot, exotic and in the case of South Africa potentially dangerous. Only nine years earlier the British Army had been defeated by a Zulu army at the Battle of Isandlwana while holding off another vastly superior Zulu force at Rorke’s Drift. Within a short while of the Zulu defeat, the British faced a series of military engagements with the Boer settlers which ended in 1881 only to begin again eighteen years later.

By then he had served his seven years and been discharged in the summer of 1892, but was called back to the Colours in January 1900 and would no doubt have been back in South Africa but at 33 he was deemed unfit.
I often wonder what it was that caused him to be rejected in the winter of 1900. He later suffered from chest problems and these may have been in evidence, or it might have been the hard life he had lived since enlisting at the age of 18 in 1885.

During his seven years with the First Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment he was hospitalized thirteen times of which eight were for sexually transmitted diseases and had his good conduct pay suspended for a brief spell.

His return to civilian life in Derby was punctuated with at least one drunken brawl with the police and despite living with our great grandmother for ten years he married another woman.

Those ten years saw him and our great grandmother, Eliza crisscross the country from Bedford where they had one child to Birmingham where they had another two and to Kent where they lost a son aged just six months.
Our views of late Victorian marriage are coloured by a prim and proper morality which did not reach every corner of society and certainly did not touch my great grandparents. To all intent and purposes they were married and appeared so on the five birth certificates and one death certificate which were issued between 1896 and 1902. But there is no marriage certificate.

Which may have made it easier for our great grandfather to marry in the November of 1906 in Gravesend in Kent and go on to have another five children.

At the outbreak of the First World War he enlisted in the West Kent Regiment, never went abroad and died in July 1916.
He was and remained an enigma around which family stories have arisen.

Both my Derby family and the family in Kent believed he had served in India. My grandfather gave his own place of birth as Wynberg in South Africa despite the fact that he was actually born in Birmingham and one of Montague’s Kent children always maintained that there was more about his life than they knew.

There remain many corners of his life which are shrouded in mystery. He lived at a time when it was still possible to reinvent yourself with little concern that a paper trail of documents would catch you out. In his case these are sparse enough.

I continue to hope that more will turn up but the passage of time makes this unlikely. Perhaps one day we will visit the military base at Wynberg in the same way that I have seen the drill hall where he signed up in 1914. But in the meantime it will have to be Provident Street.

Earlier stories on great grandfather Montague
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/falling-through-cracks-part-one-story.html
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/falling-through-cracks-part-two-story_25.html

Picture; Montague in the uniform of the West Kents, circ 1914-15, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Fallowfield Loop

On the Fallowfield Loop by Withington Bridge, August 2009, Phil Champion

Now I am back with the Fallowfield Loop that disused railway line.*

It began in 1891 when the stretch between Chorlton and Fallowfield was opened, followed the next year with an extension up to Fairfield.

The line provided a new route for the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway to run trains from Sheffield into Manchester, and local stopping services ran from Fairfield and Gorton on the Hope Valley line to Manchester Central via Hyde Road, Fallowfield and Chorlton-cum-Hardy before joining a section of line from Old Trafford into Manchester Central.

And today I want to feature the work being done on the stretch which has “created a linear park and wildlife corridor, linking parks and open spaces. It has an interesting flora – some of which may represent all that’s left of the lost, ancient rural landscape of South Manchester.”**

Now given that I always believe there is no pint in rewriting what has already been done very well I shall direct you to a fascinating article on the Loop from David Bishop on the Friends of Chorlton Meadows.

Picture; on the Fallowfield Loop by Withington Bridge, August 2009, Phil Champion


 *The Fallowfield Loop, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/a-forgotten-river-old-railway-track-and.html

** Friends of Chorlton Meadows, http://friendsofchorltonmeadows.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/the-fallowfield-loop-and-greening.html

Picture; on the Fallowfield Loop by Withington Bridge, August 2009, Phil Champion

Manchester by Andy Robertson

Now I am always flattered when people offer me either stories or pictures for the blog.

And so here are two from the camera of Andy Robertson who I first met on one of the history walks.

He has a fine collection of images stretching back three decades and over the next few weeks I shall be featuring some of those which show our changing city.

These capture the way the area around the Palace theatre has begun to be transformed.

Opposite the theatre is that new build that rose after years of the site being used as a car park, while a little further back is the even newer property by the river which dwarfs its neighbour.

Pictures; from the collection of Andy Robertson

Falling through the cracks or how to be lost to history Eliza Boot known also as Hall 1872-1963

Detail of Eliza's birth certificate

It remains one of those big mysteries to me that some people just fall through the cracks and are lost to history.

Now I am not talking about the dim distant past when few people could write and official records were kept to the minimum.

This is the story of a woman who was born in 1872, who had five children, four of which were taken into care and who had at least one brush with the law.

She died aged 91 and in all that time there are just ten references to her and even some of those are incorrect. So her death certificate gives her age as 89 when she was two years older and her husband as John Nelson Montague who she never actually married.

This of course is something which anyone engaged in family history is all too well aware of.

Detail of Eliza's death certificate, 1963

Even so Eliza Boot seems to have been unlucky.

Apart from the records of her birth and death, she appears just three times on the census and once registering the birth of her last child born in 1902.

Her medical records along with everything connected to her stay in the Workhouse have long since been destroyed and the only reference left to her children being taken back into care does not even mention her by name.

A newspaper report from 1894

All of which leaves just one listing in a street directory two brief comments in letters and a newspaper report of a drunken brawl when she was 22.

There must be more but I fear it is well buried.

Part of the problem is that she did just fall through the cracks.

She never married my great grandfather so that record does not exist and she did not qualify to be registered for National Insurance in 1911 and I doubt that she subsequently got on to any work related register, and she seems to have evaded the 1891 census.

If she did bother to register for a Parliamentary vote we won’t be able to locate her till after 1928 and even then it will be difficult to know where she was registered.

Added to that she manages to muddy the search by alternating between the family surname of Boot and that of my grandfather who was called Hall.

Eliza's address in 1921, Court 5, Hope Street

Of course there will be those who knew her but even here the search is all but over.

My mother never mentioned her, nor did her son who was my grandfather.

Both died in the 1970s and since then so has anyone who would have had a direct connection with her.

There is one brief entry in a letter written by her nephew in 1941 asking after her health and the comment from her daughter that “I only lived with my mother for about six years and she was in the change then and rather moody, so I did not get much information from her.”

Sadly we never picked up on that clue and that trail is now also closed down.

It would be easy to speculate on the character and life of my great grandmother from the little we have.  The drunken brawl, the separation from my great grandfather and the fact that her children spent much of their young lives in care could all be woven into a colourful story.

The birth certificate of Eliza's dauggter, 1902

Add to this that one of her sons deliberately preferred to give his aunt as next of kin when he enlisted in 1915 and that Eliza never featured in my childhood.

Now that is strange given that I was born in 1949 and regularly visited my grandparents up to 1961, a full two years before she died.

But to write such a story would be to slide into the realms of fantasy.  I did not know her, and there is not enough to conjure up her life in all but the barest details.

So for now and perhaps forever she will continue to fall through the cracks.  Not the best of outcomes.

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

On a wet night looking across at the old Well Hall Odeon

Another in that occasional series which feature contemporary photographs of places with a history.

Now I have never lost my affection for the Well Hall Odeon or the other cinemas in Eltham, and so when I recently ran a story on that picture house by the roundabout Larissa promised me a picture.*

And here it is taken at night on one of those wet days that seemed to sum up January 2014.

Look carefully at those brave and hardy souls working out can be made out in the second of the two images.

I have long held to that simple maxim that when you feel like doing something energetic, lie down to the mood wears off which I suspect explains my widening girth.

So all credit to the people who were caught in Larissa's picture.

Pictures; the old Well Hall Odeon, © Larissa, January 2014


*Eltham’s cinemas, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Eltham%27s%20Cinemas

The Flying man and Mrs Martha Meredith....... tales from Didsbury at the Chorlton Cafe

Now it is not often that you get to hear about how a book was written rather than what is in it.

But that is exactly what is on offer for the next history talk at the Post Box  Cafe on Thursday February 13th.

The book is Didsbury Through Time which records some of the changes to the area over the last century and a bit, mixing old images of the place with new photographs and paintings and focusing on the people who lived behind the doors.

People like the young Bertha Geary who on a June day in 1911 saw the “Flying man” and Mrs Martha Meredith who ran “the Supper Bar (Fish and Chips)” at number 1 School Lane.

Mrs Meredith was 36, described herself as a widow with a 14 year old daughter and shared her home with her brother in law, as well as the young Mary Ann who she employed as a servant and John Wilson the boarder.

This a a different approach to the usual then and now books which feature an old image and its modern equivalent supported by a few sentences stating the blindingly obvious differences.

Along with stories of the people and some striking paintings by Peter the book has been designed to allow the reader to walk across Didsbury, taking in the buildings and its history, starting in the east at Parrs Woods and finishing in the west at Barlow Moor.

Peter will describe the process by which he chose the original images and talk about his paintings while I will tell a few stories and shed some light on how the research was done.

And as an added bonus Mike Billington will accompany the stories and pictures with songs of Didsbury.

Tickets include the usual excellent pre-talk dinner at 6 pm followed by the talk at 7.30.

Nor is that all, for later in the month and into the next there will be more history at the Cafe, including another of those walks around Chorlton and the history dinner where between course there will be some dark stories and a chance to ask questions about our townships past..

The Flying man and Mrs Martha Meredith....... tales from Didsbury at the Post Box Cafe, February 13 at 7.30, the Post Box Cafe,  0161 881 4853, www.thepostboxchorlton.co.uk

Picture; Mrs Meredith on School Lane circa 1911

*Didsbury Through Time, Peter Topping and Andrew Simpson