Adventures across Greater Manchester on Derby Day …. and a boring alert

Now, three of our sons are United fans, and a heap of my friends follow City, so instead of a morning’s wait for kick off we took ourselves out to Cheadle Royal and Stockport.

The morning was hot, and the supermarket was full of people buying crates of beer and nibbles, while the sports shop was a mix of sturdy types looking for outdoor climbing gear, kids wanting footballs, and a family kitting themselves out for a day at the archery range.

Added to which my eye was drawn to three slightly out of focus figures modelling summer tops.

All in a day’s shopping.

I leave Mrs. Trellis of Provis Road to award the most boring story of June with her blue and red rosette.

Location; Cheadle Royal and Stockport

Pictures; Adventures across Greater Manchester on Derby Day …., 2023 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Letters should be addressed ....... Prisoner of War Post, Stalag XVIII.A. Germany .... stories of a P.O.W.

 It’s always in the detail, so while you need the “big picture” which places everything in the past into a context, it’s the little bits which give meaning to the grand sweep of history.

And this letter to a Mrs. Hirst of Caldecott Road Higher Blackley is no exception.  It was sent by the Red Cross at the beginning of April 1945 and concerned her son Frank who was a P. O.W. in Germany.

The Red Cross was “very glad that your son’s camp address is now known [and] letters should be addressed to him as follows, Prisoner of War Post, Kriegsgefangenenpost, Gnr. Frank Hirst, British Prisoner of War No: 9611 Stalag XVIII.A. Germany”

Stalag XVIII.A was in the southern part of Austria near the town of Wolfsberg.

Just when he had been captured is unclear, but his family will no doubt have been relieved that they had a contact point to send letters.

And to know that he was entitled to Red Cross parcels which went via Geneva to the camps.  

Mrs. Hirst also received a leaflet which detailed the contents of a typical parcel which" are specifically planned to supply what is most needed in the Prisoner of War Camps.”

These included biscuits, cheese, jam, milk, and cold beef, and variations provided by the Indian Comforts Committee of the Indian Red Cross Society and contained “curry, lentils, certain spices and rice”.

Added to these there were supplies of tobacco, cigarettes and soap.

The leaflet also offered advice on what to include in the letter as well as information on how prisoners could correspond with family in Britain.

But and there always is a but the Red Cross acknowledged that due to “the present conditions in Germany, the dispatch of all individually addressed parcels to prisoners of war had been suspended by the G.P.O.  for the time being, but the International Red Cross Committee at Geneva will continue to deliver Red Cross food parcels to all camps”.

This was after all the closing stages of the war. The western allies were fighting their way across Germany, while the Red Army was moving to occupy Vienna and capture western Prussia.

All of which meant that on that April day the war in Europe had just over a month to run.

As yet I don’t know what happened to Frank Hirst, when he was liberated and how his life after the war played out.

He was born in January 1921, had an elder brother and his parents ran a fish and chip shop from 75 Milton Street in Southport.  

They were from Huddersfield and by 1939 had moved to Higher Blackley.  

By then his father appears to have given up battering fish and described himself as a “power loom woollen weaver, unemployed”.

In time more about the family will come to light, but for now it is this letter which offers up so much detail about the fate of P.O.W’s and which will have relevance to anyone who had a relative captured by the Germans in the last world war.

Location, Southport, Manchester, and Austria.

Pictures; Red Cross letter, 1945, courtesy of David Harrop.

That temperance hall ……… memories of the 1970s ..... and a lost landscape

 This is Charles Street, or to be more precise, that bit of Charles Street that runs the short distance to Princess Street.

Looking down Charles Street, 2023

I vaguely remember it back in the 1970s as one of those areas waiting for something to happen.

Just behind is Sackville Street and the former buildings of UMIST, while to my right hidden by the multi storey car park is the railway viaduct.

Someone will correct me but apart from the Swinging Sporran that Scottish theme pub on the corner of Sackville Street all I would have seen ahead on either side of me on a day in 1971 would have been open land.  

And in the distance  there would have been some low-rise brick buildings which had seen better days, with the Refuge building away off to my right.

The corner of Charles Street and Princess Street, 1957

Photographs from the city’s digital image archive show a collection of tired looking shops, warehouses, and workshops along this bit of Charles Street.  

The pictures date from the 1950s into the 60s and they show buildings which l guess were on the desk for clearance long before I washed up in Manchester in 1969.

Perhaps there will be people who can share their photographs of the area just and during that redevelopment, which would plug the gap in my memory.

And undeterred by that failure to remember, I went looking for answers. 

The OS map for 1950 confirms that mix of tired looking shops, warehouses, and workshops most of which appear to be there sixty years earlier.

They would have been home to a mix of small-time businesses, which in 1911 included a firm of mattress makers, some shirt manufacturers along with two printers, a basket maker, herbalist, tea agent and bookbinder.

Earlier there had also been a sawmill, a rope walks and beyond the bend in the river Medlock a heap of textile mills, timber yards and a printer works.

But our bit of Charles Street was not really developed until after the 1850s.

There will be stories but for now the one that intrigues me is that of the Brighton Temperance Assembly Hall which stood on the corner underneath the Ibis Hotel.

Trees on the corner of Charles Street and Princess Street, 2023

The building was already there by 1849 when it went under the name of the Carpenter’s Hall and was large enough to contain an ante room as well as the main hall.

It had a short life and was gone by 1893, but despite attempts to discover the history of either hall, both have yet to come out of the shadows.

The Manchester Guardian didn’t see fit to record the doings of either place, and as yet no pictures have turned up, leaving me to go looking in the rate books and trawling the street directories.

Such is the life of a retired jobbing writer with aspirations to be a historian.

Location; Charles Street

Pictures; Looking down Charles Street, and the corner of Charles Street and Princess Street, 20023, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the same corner in 1957, Charles Street from corner of Princess Street, 1957, H. W. Beaumont, m00882, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass 

When the Thames was still a working river nu 2 ............. across to St Paul's

It is just one of those simple things that as you get older there are more and more things you can use as a bench mark marking the passage of time.

And this is one of them for while the painting dates from 1907 I can still remember the river as a working highway where all manner of ships and boats plied their business.

As a child in the 1950s crossing London Bridge there was plenty to see from the cranes and warehouses to tramp steamers and lightermen.

Picture; the River and St Paul's from the Shot Tower, in the series LONDON SERIES V Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

Looking for our vanished history on the side of the road ........... the drainage grid

I have to say I can never get enough of street furniture or the history that they have to tell.

Recently I pondered on the demise of the finger post and before that the water trough and the iconic red telephone kiosk.

More humble than all of these but with a story to tell are the cast iron drainage grids that adorn the side of all our roads.

This one from 1936 belongs to Manchester Corporation and the picture was taken by Graham Gill who first floated the idea of looking for these bits of the past.

Now there are also shed loads of those that date from now defunct authorities.

Somewhere in the collection is one from Withington UDC which had a short history from the mid 1890s to 1904 and was wound up when the four townships of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, Withington, Burnage and Didsbury voted to join Manchester.

And across the country there will be plenty more grids still in place bearing the names of similar lost authorities.

In Eltham, Woolwich and Plumstead I bet there will be some bearing the old Borough of Woolwich title and more in Deptford and other London Boroughs which were amalgamated.

So the challenge is there, from Well Hall and Woolwich to Withington, Stretford and Levenshulme to record the lost drain covers, and by extension their Town Halls, letter heads and any other relics.

Which in turn could lead to stories on the growing responsibilities of local authorities and a bit of their own unique history.

Location; everywhere

Picture; Manchester Corporation street grid, 1936, from the collection of Graham Gill

Who stole my history? ………….

It’s not so daft a question because for most of us the story of who we are and more importantly the stories of our families stretching back through the centuries are not there to be read.

Detail from Equality of Sacrifice,, a 1931 

Now, given the sheer number of members of just my family I understand why, and I concede it is possible to piece an individual’s story back to at least 1837 using government records and further back with the aid of parish records and if you are lucky family documents.

But for most of us, we don’t feature in history other than as a walk on part carrying a spear or a washing basket, leaving historians to write about the good and the great, along with the not so great and the bad.  

This did change at the beginning of the last century and really got into its stride in the middle decades when school text books began to feature the lives of “ordinary people”.

But even then the battles were always the achievements of the generals, and the great scientific breakthroughs were down to clever men, while the advances in social and political legislation were attributed to caring and far sighted politicians who in some cases “saw the light” after a chance encounter with the poor, the sick or the unjustly treated.

And it was almost always men, not women.  

One history textbook covering the 18th and 19th centuries, in its fifteen chapters offered up just two women, one was a servant and the other was Marie Antoinette whose contribution to the events in the chapter was to demand some cake and have her head cut off.  

To be fair there was a picture of a group of angry French women storming the Palace, but the student was left to draw their own conclusions about why they were there.

The book remained in use well into the 1980s.

All of which will not be a surprise to many today but was how we got our history until relatively recently.  It wasn’t so much that history ignored them it was more it just didn’t recognize them.

Chorlton Row, circa 1880

In the same way our history is often distorted by those who post “olden day pictures” of some place vaguely familiar with no reference to a date, an exact location or where it came from.

This is as useful as using the newspaper wrapping from yesterday’s fish and chip supper as an in depth guide to the events of the day.

And now there is AI, which is in the news as I write.

My Wikipedia tells me that AI is about “perceiving, synthesizing, and inferring information—demonstrated by machines, as opposed to intelligence displayed by humans or by other animals. Example tasks in which this is done include speech recognition, computer vision, translation between (natural) languages, as well as other mappings of inputs”. *

So far so good and recent news reports suggest that it offers stunning opportunities for medical break throughs and is already becoming integrated into how we do things. **

Ploughing Row Acre, circa 1892

But and there always is a but it does seem to lead to some odd, misinformed, and downright silly offerings.

Last week I reflected on one offering from an AI source*** on the history of Chorlton, which was so wrong on so many counts that it had me doing a history walk in 1848.

Added to which it authoritatively reported that Beech Road “was also home to several laundries, which gave it its nickname 'Washhouse Lane'. One of these laundries was converted into a restaurant called The Laundrette in 2013, which still retains some of its original features”.****

Of course, given the dire warnings of some about AI its ability to leave a false trail of how we lived is small beer.

I am reminded of a 1970s cartoon by R. Cobb which shows a robot called “Automation” turning  to a university graduate still wearing a mortar board and clutching his degree certificate, and commenting dismissively “Oh … haven’t you heard?  The Industrial Revolution is over …. We Won …”*****

Taking the holiday snap, date unknown

I await developments on just what AI will do, but if it continues to rewrite history, all my fears of a twisted Establishment version of the past where families like mine are written out of history in favour of a handful of clever Kings and Queens assisted by generals politicians and the odd scientist will be the least of our “historical” worries.

Location; Now and then

Pictures; detail from Equality of Sacrifice, Will Dyson, a 1931 election poster for the Labour Party, Chorlton Row, now Beech Road, date unknown possibly, 1880s, courtesy of Miss. Booth  and ploughing  Row Acre, possibly for the last time, courtesy of Mr. Higginbotham, circa 1892, courtesy of Miss. Booth from the Lloyd Collection and detail form a picture postcard, location and date unknown, from the collection of Ron Stubley

*Artificial Intelligence, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence

** New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI, James Gallagher, BBC News May 25th, 2023, New superbug-killing antibiotic discovered using AI, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-65709834

***How not to write a history of Chorlton ….. or when dinosaurs roamed Beech Road …… and Batman opened a bar, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2023/05/how-not-to-write-history-of-chorlton-or.html

**** ***A History of Chorlton,  March 24th, 2023

*****The Cobb Book, Ron Cobb, 1975

Stories behind a Salford postcard ...... from Sue Tydd

It began as a story about a Salford postcard and a question about Gertie and Delia who were mentioned on the back which became the inspiration for Sue to research the family and write the story.

The Salford postcard, circa 1900

John McCabe was baptised at St. Nicholas, Dublin in 1854, he moved to England as a young man firstly to an aunt in Macclesfield and later to Manchester where he married Margaret Maloney a Galway girl in 1875 at St. Wilfred’s in Hulme.

Numerous children came along in the following years the eldest Julia in 1876 followed by John, Margaret,
Frederick, William, Florence, Theresa, Bridget (Delia), Matilda (Tilly), Joseph and Gertrude (Gertie) in 1891.

Quite possibly there were more children (I haven’t found out about ‘Geff’ mentioned by Delia on the postcard to Gertie) born to this Irish catholic family before Margaret’s life was cut short in 1897.
John having been left widowed with children ranging from infants to children of a working age with presumably no family locally had little choice but to admit at least two of his young children into the care of Holly Mount.

Holly Mount, 1894

The orphanage/ school of Holly Mount in Tottington on the outskirts of Bury admitted children from poor catholic families who else-wise were destined for life in the Workhouse.  The establishment was run efficiently by the Sisters of Charity of Jesus Christ a Belgian order of nuns.

A board of guardians administered financial matters.

It would have been a formidable place for the young girls to enter sharing living space with over 200 other young girls.  It was normal for girls to remain here until reaching 13 years of age an acceptable age at the time to begin a working life.

As with other similar institutions the girls were taught numerous domestic duties to equip them for married life and often a life in domestic service.

Not unsurprisingly John still of a reasonable age remarried in 1899 to Emily Roberts and sired at least two children with her and raised her son William alongside them. 1901 the new family  are living in Hulme with only Theresa from his first marriage living amongst them, Tilly and Gertie are to be found on the census for Holly Mount.  John passed away aged 73 years old in South Manchester.

Bridget, fondly called Delia from the postcard married Charles Dunderdale in 1928; a widower 20 years her senior with an already adult family. Passing away in 1941 Charles left a reasonable sum of money to Delia, she herself died in 1963 her probate details her beneficiaries as Matilda Evans and Mary Gertrude Grant widows.

Manchester Royal Infirmary 1950, where John Wilcox was a patient

From searching through local records it is confirmed the ladies are her sisters Tilly and Gertie.
Matilda, (Tilly) had been born in 1887 and as we know from earlier spent some time after her mother’s death at Holly Mount.

She married John Wilcox a Rubber Heel Moulder in 1909, a daughter Lilian was born soon after and as often happened died in infancy.  A son Harold was born in the early part of 1911, by the time the child is one month old John Wilcox is a patient in Manchester Royal Infirmary.

The cause or illness I do not know or in fact if he ever returned home, it is documented  though he passed away in 1913.  One hopes Tilly found happiness again in 1916 when she married James Evans having at least four children with her second husband she passed away in 1975.

Of Gertie as yet I haven’t located her marriage although we do know she married a man with the surname of Grant, perhaps this was also a second marriage and so proving problematic to locate.
Florence married Giovanni Geri and passed away in 1966.

Other siblings I have yet to find in their adult life, I’m sure a bit more digging will unearth more information and I will update accordingly.

What we can learn from this family is life wasn’t always easy or kind in the 19th century or indeed the 20th century and many families were separated due to the death of one or both of their parents at a tender age; including my grandmother who was suddenly orphaned at eight years old, but that’s a story for another day.

© Sue Tydd 2017

Pictures; Peel Park, circa 1900, marketed by Tuck & sons,  from the collection of David Harrop, Holly Mount School, 1894 from the OS map of South Manchester, 1894 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ Manchester Royal Infirmary, 1950 , m52916, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass