The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 43 ............ who went before us

The story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, and of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

Lausanne Road, circa 1955

Now I was surprised just how little I knew of our house in Lausanne Road.

But then there is no reason why I should.

We moved in when I was two and left before my fourteenth birthday.

Back then I took the place for granted and in the acres of time since then I haven’t given the  place much thought.

But given that I have been drawn back to where I grew up its history and especially those who lived there have begun to interest me.

It was built in the mid to the late 1870s at a time when the area was being developed for the “middling people.” These were the professional classes many of whom may have worked in the city and were drawn to an area which was quickly being built up during the 1860s.

The area had once been market gardens and most of the houses had long gardens which in our case still had a fine collection of apple and pear trees which were still offering up shedfuls of fruit when were there in the 1950s.

All of which would have been known and enjoyed by Miss Jeannie Jeffery whose story tells us a lot about this bit of south east London in the last decades of the 19th and the first few of the next century.

Now I don’t know if she was the first resident of our house but she was there by 1881 and described herself  as “Owner of House Property” which is just about all we do know about her, save that she was born in 1848, her father was a journalist and she died in 1912.

But there is one other detail and that is that in the April of 1888 she married Joseph Henry Wills.  She was 39 and he 34 and Mr Wills was well known to Miss Jeffery because his father and brother had been living in her house as “boarders” and I guess as these things do Henry and Jeannie fell in love.

He was a sea captain as was his father and brother which put them in the same social grouping of many of the others on Lausanne Road.

Their story was pieced together by that mix of documents which reveal the stories of families and their homes.

Lausanne Road, 1872 before our house was built

It began with the census records supported by the street directories and was confirmed by the electoral rolls, all of which are available on line or at the local studies centre.

Each has something to offer.  The census offers a detailed snap shot of who lived in Lausanne Road every ten decade while the directories listing the householder and often their occupation were issued each year as were the electoral rolls.

And these have offered up something of the house’s history from Miss Jeffery to when we left and if I was really minded should take the story pretty much up today.

Armed with the names it is possible to draw out the individual stories looking for the records of births , deaths and marriages and following up on the lives of just one of the occupants through newspaper reports, gravestones and military records.

Of course the real prize are the deeds which will not only chronicle each of the owners of the property but also the original landowner and in some cases legal settlements which are as good as a will.

But these for most of us are locked away in the safe of a building society rarely seen and rarely consulted.

Still there is enough on Lausanne Road to take me on a journey and amongst the personal possessions is the surveyor’s report commissioned by dad in 1951 which describes each room and the war damage to the roof.

So I suspect Lausaane Road will no longer sit in the shadows.

Picture; Lausanne Road circa 1955 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and  Lausanne Road, 1872 OS London, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/


*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road

Today over Chorlton .............. 75 years ago

Now today is the anniversary of the day the first bombs of the Second World War fell on Chorlton.

I say the first but that is not strictly accurate.

There were a series of them that fell on September 4th 1940 between 2.55 am and 10.55.*

Now I don’t know where they fell but I do know that no one was killed.

The air raid alert had sounded at just before 3 am and lasted for ten minutes with the all clear being sounded at five past three and then just seven hours later there was a second alert which began at 10.35 am and continued till just before 11 am.

The Manchester Guardian didn’t carry the story and I have yet to crawl over the Manchester Evening News but somewhere there will be a record of the event.

All of which just leaves me to thank David Harrop who told me about the bombs and remind you that his Battle of Britain and Blitz exhibition is currently on show at the Remembrance Lodge in Southern Cemetery

Pictures; the Heinkel He 111 over Poland, September 1939 from the German Federal Archive featured in  Heinkel He 111 Wickipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_111

*Luftwaffe over Manchester, The Blitz Years, Peter J C Smith, 2003

One hundred years of one house in Chorlton part 59 ............ looking out on the Rec and thinking of Joe and Mary Ann

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.*

I wished I knew more about Joe and Mary Ann, after all they were here longer than any of the families since and in the case of Mrs Scott I missed her by just a year.

The basics I know which include when they were born, when they married and when they died.  Added to which I know that Joes’ dad was a Londoner who moved to Chorlton with his family just as the building boom began in the last two decades of the 19th century all of which made sense given the he was a plasterer by trade and his sons followed him into the building trade.

But that is about it.  I have no photographs of the couple, have not been able to find out much about their siblings, and the anecdotal evidence is fast fading.

There are a few people who still remember them and in particular speak fondly of Joe who built many of the smaller houses around Beech Road which he rented out.

He was a good landlord who according to both Marjorie and Ida was particularly helpful when their families first moved into new houses on Provis and Neale Roads.

Sadly I don’t expect I will be able to turn up much more.

So I will never know what they thought about the great events of the day, how they spent their leisure time or even what their favourite meal was.

And I wish I did because as I write this I am looking out over the Rec at a view which will not have been that different from what Mary Ann would have seen a century ago and I wonder if they spent time there.

Back then the recreational ground was less than a decade old having been gifted by the Egerton’s sometime around 1896.

Before that it was still farmed by a few tenant farmers of whom the Bailey’s on Beech Road and the Higginbotham’s on the village green were ploughing and harvesting from at least the 1840s.

Mr Higginbotham had the plot that stretched from Beech Road along what is now Cross Road.

And given that Joe had been born in 1888 he may well have remembered young Mr Higginbotham working that stretch of land.

Of course when Mary Ann looked out at the place it differed a bit from now.

The trees have matured, the flower beds have come and gone and judging from the old photographs there were far more park benches than now.

But the shelter on the north side survived into the 1980s and then as now there were the odd bald patches where the grass refused to grow back and a remarkable amount of litter, perhaps even more than now which an interesting take on that idea of the good old days.

And back then the Rec went in for a collection of play apparatus dominated by four see saws which looked as equally lethal as the ones I played on in the 1950s.

The trick as I remember was to come down hard so that your companion was lifted off the wooden seat which did on occasion result on them being unseated.

Such were the joys of the see saw.

I have no idea when they vanished and I doubt that anyone else will now.

Of course Mary Ann might have remembered but alas that will be a conversation I will never have.

Pictures; the Rec, 2013-2015, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the Rec circa 1910-33 from the Lloyd Collection

*The story of a house,
http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20a%20house

Blitz stories nu 1 ........ “No chips tonight, they’ve bombed the chippy”

German bomber over Poland, 1939

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the Manchester Blitz the stories of what happened those two nights of bombing just before the Christmas of 1940 will come back out of the shadows.

Many have been lost plenty more tucked away and forgotten and of course there are today fewer people left to speak directly of what happened.

Not that these two nights were the only raids stretching out across pretty much the entire war.

Now the professional historian will turn to the official records dig into the newspaper accounts and with the assistance of the bomb makes try to describe the impact and the destruction of the raids.

After the Raid, 1940

But I want to explore the experiences of the people living directly underneath the path of those German bombers.  Their stories are not always earth shattering but in their way they give a sense of what our parents and grandparents endured.

Like the man who responded to a recent story on the German plane that was shot down and crashed in Hazel Grove.

His was one of the simpler responses and just contained the line “that they got our chippy.”

He was 5 at the time and living in Beswick “when a Navy man home from the Navy for a week came down the street to say the chip shop had been hit.”

And that is pretty much it, but that in a way makes the memory all the more powerful and reminds us this was the level at which the Blitz impacted on people.

The story was passed onto me by David Harrop who is presently mounting a new exhibition at the Remembrance Lodge in southern Cemetery on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz.

Pictures; the Heinkel He 111 over Poland, September 1939 from the German Federal Archive featured in  Heinkel He 111 Wickipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinkel_He_111
 and a page from After the Raid, Issued in 1940 from the collection of David Harrop.

Summer in the City ............ waiting for a tram with a building site as a backdrop

A short series using pictures taken over the last few years celebrating summer in the city.















Picture; from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Summer in the City

Now for no particular reason other than I took them and they are of Manchester, here is a short series celebrating places I like.

All have appeared before and some a long time ago.











Pictures; around Manchester 2002-2015

Walking the streets of Peckham and New Cross a full half century ago ........ and where to go to look

This summer has been an odd one because after more than a half century I have been pulled back to the Peckham of my youth.

We left in the spring of 1964 and while I continued to go to Samuel Pepys for another two years the break had been made and only now have I really given the place much thought.

And I am amazed just how much has come tumbling out as bit by bit the memories drew out new ones starting with the odd story followed by a heap of names, faces and places.

But always sitting there and challenging all those memories was that simple question of how much was truth and how much was just imagined.

After all fifty-one years is a long time and much of what I knew in Peckham and New Cross has long gone or has altered so dramatically that it is all but unrecognisable.

It started with that cocoa factory on Kender Street, extended to the row of shops along Queens Road from Lausanne to Dennet’s  and carried on to countless haunts I had known as a child.

Of course for those who stayed all those places are more easily remembered but for me and plenty of others when you can’t find them it pretty much offers up the prospect that they never existed.

But the internet age offers up countless ways of being reassured and a set of online maps from Southwark Historical mapping is a good start.*

They cover the period 1896 to 1954 and come with the facilty to overlay on a map of today with aerial views from 2013.

Added to which by typing in your old postal code you can get straight to your old home.

There is more but that is for you to find out.

Together they offer a pretty comprehensive guide to the streets of Peckham and a bit of New Cross.

And yes I found the cocoa factory as well as the shops along Queens Road and using the online street directories was able to chart who occupied them at the beginning of the 20th century.

Pictures; All Saints, Hatcham Park, 1950, from the collection of Andrew Simpson 

* Southwark Historical mapping, http://maps.southwark.gov.uk/connect/southwark.jsp?mapcfg=Historical_Selection&search=26%20LAUSANNE%20ROAD%20SE15%202HU