A day out in Castlefield ……….. August 1980

The picture has sat for over 40 years in the collection in our cellar.

It will have been in early August and having followed the procession of vintage steam vehicles down to Castlefield I joined in the mix of people enjoying the day.

Location; Castlefield

Pictures; A day out in Castlefield, 1980, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Voices from Chorlton ……… 175 years ago

 In the summer of 1847 Alexander Somerville had come looking for potato blight, that disease which had ravaged the crops of Ireland and had been reported just a little further south in Derbyshire and what he found were a group of farmers and labourers all too happy to show him we were blight free.  

Mr Higginbotham ploughing Row Acre, 1893

Here were many of the people I had come to know, including James Higginbotham, farmer on the green, Lydia Brown whose farm was just a little to the east of the Bowling Green Hotel and old Samuel Nixon, market gardener and landlord of the Greyhound just over the river.

It is a remarkable piece because Somerville reported and in places quoted what they said.  Nothing quite fits you for hearing their voices, talking of farming issues, joking about what newspapers publish and complaining about their landlords.  These are the authentic voices of 175 years ago.

Nor is that quite it.  For when Somerville and Higginbotham inspect the potato field I know where it was. 

Row Acre, Chorlton Row, and the village 1854

It is the strip of land that ran from the Row along what is now the Rec beside Cross Road, and when they stood admiring the Rose of Sharon apple trees and the Newbridge pears we are just behind the Trevor Arms on what is now Beech Road.

It doesn’t take much imagination to recreate that orchard scene with the smell of William Davis’s smithy hard by and perhaps even the noise of the children in the nearby National school on the Green.

Likewise I am pretty sure I can locate the large bank of earth with ash trees which Lydia Brown was so unhappy about and fully understand why she might contemptuously refer to George Lloyd the landlord as Squire Lloyd because of his refusal to allow her to cut the trees back.

Above all it is that calm and steady confidence of the farmer that shines through.

When Mr Somerville came to Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1847

Along with Higginbotham’s pleasure that the weather has won out there is the certainty of a life time of experience that allows George Whitelegg to assert that he didn’t believe in blight. Whitelegg ran the Bowling Green Hotel farmed 36 acres and later would go into speculative building.

Mr Higginbotham was 'only afraid that the blight might come.  When it does come it will be time enough to raise the alarm'.

Mr Whitelegg, of Chorlton, told me that 'he was a potato grower, had heard of the blight, had looked for it, could not find it, and did not believe in it'.

Crossing the green meadows I was told at Brook Farm to go down a path under some trees and examine a field; 'for' said the workman who bad me to go, 'it is best for those who want to find the potato disease to look for it themselves and find their own disappointment.'

I told him that I did not want to find it; that I should be well satisfied to find that the blight was not there, to which he replied briefly, 'then, sir you get satisfaction.  The best grown potatoes in this part of the country are in that field, and never since the day that you and were born did the plants look better.'

Looking out towards the green from Mr Higginbotham's farmyard, circa 1880

I found them after close examination to be all that he described them. 

A large bank of earth with ash trees growing upon it – trees which are not only objectionable as all other kinds are in and around cultivated fields but positively poisonous to other vegetation, ran through the ground causing much waste of land, waste of fertility, and doing no good whatever.

Squire Lloyd is the landlord.  Mrs Brown a widow is the tenant.  She keeps the farm in excellent order so far as the landlord’s restrictions will allow.  But neither herself nor her workmen must 'crop or lop top' a single branch from the deleterious ash trees.

Again I was in the green meadows, where the rain that had newly fallen, and the fresh wind that was blowing, and the luxuriant herbage on every side, and the wild flowers prodigal of bloom, all proclaimed that the insurgents now in rebellion against bountiful Providence must soon be defeated and humiliated.

The bridge Mr Somerville crossed to visit the Greyhound, 1865

At Jackson’s Boat where I crossed the Mersey into Cheshire by the bridge which has superseded the boat, the bridge keeper, Samuel Nixon also publican of the Greyhound,  said 'I have been a farmer all my days and never saw anything that can grow out of land look better.  It is only int paper; they must have something to say in paper.'**

Now that is what I call history.

Location; Chorlton


Pictures;  Ploughing Row Acre before it became the Recreation Ground, 1896  Mr Higginbotham's farmyard, circa 1880s, from the collection of William Higginbotham, detail from the 1854 OS map for Lancashire by kind permission of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and the old bridge across the Mersey, circa 1865

*Somerville, Alexander, A Pilgrimage in Search of the Potato Blight, Manchester Examiner, June 19th, 1847

**Chorlton Row, is now Beech Road

**The Greyhound is now Jackson's Boat

The picture and the demonstration ....... October 1981

This is the story of one photograph from one demonstration.

The march was called to draw attention to the new generation of nuclear weapons and their delivery systems which were becoming operational at a time when relations between the two Super Powers were going through a turbulent period.

This one was held in the October of 1981 in Manchester and the route took the protesters from All Saints to Crown Square.

The lead banner is that of the Manchester City Labour Party, and quite a few people are carrying The “No to Cruise Missiles” placards.

I can’t now remember how many participated and given that the press at the time along with the Police tended to underestimate numbers I won’t bother trawling the records.

Suffice to say that looking at the collection of images I took on the day it was a big one.

Leaving that aside, and acknowledging that it is my picture, I do think this one captures the sense of what it was like to be on such a demonstration at that time.

And by extension pretty much what it would be like at any time.

What strikes you first is the range of ages, and while some of the youngest will have had little say in whether they were going to take part there are some teenagers present, who could have voted with their feet and gone elsewhere.

And even given the seriousness of the event someone has said something which has caused those closest to smile.

It is just the way that these things worked and often it would be the banter which lifted the spirits on a cold day which might also threaten rain.

This day seemed bright and warm and free from rain.

We are at a point in the march soon after the procession has set off and the paper sellers are conspicuous by their absence.

No doubt they were further back, near the beginning, hovering over those who were yet to set off.

And as yet there seems to be no shouted chant, which usually got the desired response, although just occasionally the shout would be ignored or got muddled in its execution, which led to a ripple of laughter down the line.

Looking carefully at the image I can name five individuals with certainty with an option on another five who I recognise but can’t call up their name.

But I remember we continued up Oxford Road and through St Peter’s Square into Piccadilly but after that I am unsure how we got to Crown Square, possibly down Market Street or Cannon Street, and then I am guessing along a bit of Deansgate.

Someone will remember.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Manchester Peace demonstration, 1981, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The Lost Adventure ......... the eight year old and the disused railway line

All I have left are some vague memories, but they have persisted with me for nearly sixty years, and I can’t shake them.

We will have been no more than ten and maybe younger, and as we all did in those days we roamed free over our bit of south east London.

It might be east towards Blackheath and Greenwich or out beyond Peckham into Dulwich.

Back then the extent of our adventures were governed by how far we could walk, although within a few years that had become the whole of London and beyond with the help of a Red Rover and Southern Region.

On this particular day we had come across a disused railway track which I think was somewhere around Nunhead, and the game was to walk along the stone parapet of the road bridge over the line.

I chose not to do the walk of chance, but we were all so close friends that no one thought the worse of me for declining.

For a while that disused railway track became our playground and we would walk along its bed, climb up the slope of the cutting and look for discarded treasure.

But time is cruel to such hidden hideaways and within a few months it was all but forgotten and we had moved on.  Partly I suspect because it was some distance from where we lived and in my case I was never quite sure how to get there on my own.

And anyway even a gang of lads in short trousers, dirty knees and torn jumpers, eventually tire of a long straight piece of ground.

Now sixty years on I have wondered where it was and so todayI roamed over google street maps, carefully scrutinized the OS map for 1872 but found nothing.  Neither did an online search for the disused railway lines of south east London prove any more fruitful.

Of course the line may well post date 1872 and it may now be lost under redevelopment.

Here in Manchester many of our old abandoned tracks have become the route for the new tram network.

But I won’t give up looking and next time I am home I might try and track that adventure of sixty years ago.

And within ten minutes of posting the story, Kathy Penney wrote to me, "Try at the top of Athenlay Road. As you turn left in to Merrtins Road there are the remnants of a stone bridge and if you take the next right it leads you in to Brenchley Gardens. I think the line there ran all the way up to Crystal Palace, but sadly was axed by Beeching. 

There was a time you could walk the route up to Crystal Palace but I think there are a few new developments in the way now.

I think if you look at the London, Chatham & Dover Railway or LCDR who established the Highline railway at Crystal Palace in, may have been the 1850's, you should be able to see the route it took. Good luck".

And this I will do!

Location; south east London

Picture, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Emilie Bux..............a German bride in post war Derby in the summer of 1923

I remember my grandmother as a stiff, serious woman who rarely smiled and got cross at what she thought was frivolous spending.

Nana, date unknown

These are childhood memories and people I talk to remember her differently. To them she was a warm funny woman who was very intelligent.

But she had a lot to contend with. Emily née Bux Hall was born in Germany moved here in the years directly following the end of the First World War.

She came from a prosperous family, grew up in a large timbered house and settled in a two up two down terraced house on Hope Street in Derby.

She faced the prejudice of people who had suffered during the long years of war, lost loved ones and could not quite understand how my grandfather would want to marry a German.

All their frustrations and anger settled on my Nana, who had her washing smeared with mud. There were the mutterings behind her in the shops and perhaps worst of all there was the way they took it out on her children who had been born in Germany.

Nana and Uncle Roger, 1929

Mother was beaten with an ebony ruler across her knuckles for speaking German in school and my uncle was called names in the playground and constantly had to defend himself in the street. It upset both of them but also filled them with a desire to do well. In the case of Uncle Roger this led from Traffic Street School to a scholarship at the Bemrose School.

12 Hope Street was a traditional terraced house with two rooms downstairs and two up with a small lean to at the back, beyond which was a shared yard and the outside lavatories.

You stepped off the street into the front room. 

The fireplace was off to the left and on the same side on the far wall was the door to the kitchen. The staircase to the bedrooms was at the back of the kitchen. It was a steep and enclosed staircase and I remember it as very gloomy and a little scary.

Nana, 1934

During their thirty years or so living there my grandparents softened what was a simple and basic place. They personalized the yard adding flowers and herb borders, but it was a small area and was overshadowed by tall buildings at the back.

Nana also had to live with the knowledge that her own family back in Germany had not been happy at the marriage. But she was a woman of immense resilience and she bore this with a stoic determination to make the best of whatever life threw at her.

Nana and grandad, date unknown

Early in the marriage she had to make her own way from Germany to England with a newly born son and a two year old daughter. Grandfather was demobbed in Belfast in 1922 and there are no records to suggest the army brought her and the children home as well.

This would have been no easy journey involving a train to a German sea port, and after an arduous sea crossing, an equally long train trip in a foreign country with two little children. But she met the challenge.

She faced up to the long periods of my grandfather’s unemployment during the 1930s, when news of a job ten miles away had him walking to the site only to discover a long queue of men already patiently waiting for the chance of employment.

Mother and uncle Roger, 1938

Somewhere along the line, possibly after the second war, she managed to scrape together some capital, and either bought or rented a tiny corner shop.

I have no memory of the shop, or when she gave it up and nor do I now know exactly when she and granddad left Hope Street for a grand semi, in the village of Chellaston, and now there is no one left to ask.

Mother, 1942

No one who can fill in the gaps in my memory and the research I have done in the last decade.

But one abiding piece of knowledge is that for all the prejudice she faced in the communal backyard in Hope Street in the 1920s, she saw both mother and father serve in the RAF in the Second World War, and had to be reconciled to the death of her son in 1943, aged just 21 in an enemy Prisoner of War Camp.

Pictures; Emilie Bux circa 1918, with Roger Hall, 1929,  walking through Derby in 1934, in the backyard of 11 Hope Street, date unknown,  mother and uncle Roger, 1938, and mother, 1942, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The uncomfortable side of steam travel ....... part one

Sometimes to quote that historian “the past comes back to bite you on the bum” and so it was when I uncovered a selection of pictures I took back in 1980 of steam locomotives.

And the images were not the bit that did the biting, it was the realization that I am old enough to have travelled on trains pulled by steam locomotives which were in regular service.

So not for me the trip on 3 miles of track lovingly restored by steam enthusiasts on a line that died under the direction of Dr Beeching.

No, these were main line expresses hurtling north to Derby and Manchester, which places my youth in the 1950s which to quote an equally imminent philosopher means that "I have fewer years ahead of me than behind".

But putting all of that to one side the pictures are of the Steam Exposition from 1980 .

And it was a day of fun.

Down at what is now the Science and Industry Museum a huge collection of people had gathered to watch, drive or ride on a variety of steam driven machines, from railway locomotives to steam  tractors with more than a few vintage cars and buses thrown in.

So here was the day.

And over the next few weeks a few more of the pictures will make their way on to the blog.

Location; Manchester




















Pictures; The Steam Exposition, 1980 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

An arch and a heap of gravestones .... April in Chorlton

Location; Chorlton Green

Picture; An arch and a heap of gravestones, 2023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson