On a sunny day in the garden of Hough End Hall circa 1900

I doubt I will ever fully know who these three young people are who stare back at me from the garden of Hough End Hall.

Nor will I be able to accurately date the moment the picture was taken.

But one of the girls will be the daughter of Samuel and Sarah Ellen Lomax who took on the tenancy of Hough End Hall sometime in 1895.

The Lomax family had lived in the Hall from 1849 when they had taken over both hall and the farm on the death of Henry Jackson and Samuel had moved in on the death of his uncle in 1895.

So that begins to provide a possible date because Mr and Mrs Lomax had four children.

These were John born in 1888, Ethel Mary in 1891, Constance Amy in 1899, and Eveline in 1910.

None of our three look to be much older than twelve and possibly younger which would place them in the garden sometime at the beginning of the last century.

Of course it is impossible to know which of the three was Ethel Mary, or if one of them was actually her sister Constance Amy.

But it is a start and has reawakened my interest in the hall which dates back to 1596.*

It had been the family home of the Mosley’s till the mid 18th century when it was sold to the Egerton’s who in turn rented it out to tenant farmers.

In the 1840s it was occupied by Henry Jackson who farmed 220 acres beyond the eastern boundary of the township.

This made it one of the largest farms in the area, and Jackson employed 13 labourers, nine of whom lived in the hall.

It was still an impressive sight, leading one observer in 1853 to write that its
“ ivy-covered walls, its clustered chimneys and its gabled roof, present a picturesque and pleasing appearance.”**

Nor did the ivy or its more functional purpose as a farm obscure its classic Elizabethan design.

It was built of brick with three stories. The centre piece was flanked by a bay or arm at each end and a little advance bay in the centre which gave it the characteristic E shape.***    

The large communal areas were later partitioned off into smaller rooms and the census of 1911 describes Hough End Hall as having eleven rooms.****  

It was best reached along the tree lined lane from the Barlow Moor Lane.  The traveller would have a clear view of the hall from some distance away but just as they reached the last few yards the full majesty would be revealed.

A low stone wall either side of the gate gave way to a large open area beyond which partly hidden by hedges and trees stood the main building. Someone, perhaps even Henry Jackson himself had grown the hedge into an arch above the gate.

Hough End Hall is strictly not in the township and yet every historian of Chorlton from John Booker in 1853 has included it in their accounts.

Nor could we escape its presence back in 1847.

Walking from Park Brow down Nell Lane and standing on the low bridge over the Brook, the Hall would be clearly visible.

Not that this would have been the most impressive of views.  This northern side was partly hidden by farm buildings at the back and side.

And I guess to see it at its best was to stand directly infront of the place.

So there is lots more here to explore, including more on Henry Jackson and the Lomas family and as they say wait and watch this space.

Pictures; Hough End Hall in the 19th century from the Lloyd collection, and the collections of Rita Bishop and Philip Lloyd

*Hough End Hall, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Hough%20End%20Hall

**Brooker, Rev John, A History of the Chapels of Didsbury and Chorlton, Chetham Society, Manchester, 1857, page 167, Google Books edition, page 190

***The most detailed description of the Hall can be found in the Victoria County History, A History of the County of Lancaster, Volume 4, Townships; Withington 1911 pages 288-293 and available on online at www.british-history.ac.uk

****A ground floor plan exists from 1938

When geography became history .............. Looking at Other Children published in 1957

Now here is one of those children’s books from the 1950s which has become a history book.

I doubt that Jean and David Gadsby who wrote Looking at other Children ever thought that the passage of nearly 60 years would turn their geography book into a wonderful piece of history.

And yet that it what it has become.  It was part of a series on Looking at Geography published in 1957 by A & C Black Ltd and along with this one included Looking at Everyday Things, Looking at Britain, Looking at the World Today and Looking at Scotland.

Sadly I only have Looking at Children which ran to thirteen chapters and compared the lives of young people in Britain with those of the Amazon Rain Forest, Greenland, Saudi Arabia along with China, Norway, India and Holland.

It is a delightful book packed with fine line drawings and some colour plates.

Of course the book misses out on much of what we might today expect of a trawl through eight countries of the world.  There is nothing on the government or politics of each country or the issues of poverty and underdevelopment but that is to be a tad harsh on what was a book aimed at a young audience.

On the positive side there is much to ponder on starting with how each of these countries has changed over 58 years.

And what leaps out of the page is how different Britain looked.

It starts with those descriptions of everyday life including a time when annual holidays were still taken at British seaside resorts and high streets looked much as they had done three decades earlier.

So as spring arrived, “mother notices how dusty everywhere looks in the sunlight [and] she sets to work ‘spring cleaning’ – scrubbing, dusting and polishing every room” while “father digs the garden, plants the onion, lettuce, and carrot seed and sows early peas and flower seeds.”

But before any one challenges this as an idealistic picture of British life shot through with middle class assumptions it is one I remember from my own childhood and could have been replicated in homes from well heeled Surrey to working class Woolwich and suburban Chorlton.

In the same way I remember in the heat of the summer “the shop keepers pulled down their blinds, so that the sun did not fade the brightly coloured hats and dresses in their windows [and] everywhere was dry and dusty, and the water cart went round the streets.”

All of which may seem nostalgic tosh but was how we lived and it is delightful to be reminded of it from a book which in its way is part of that history.

Pictures; from Looking at Other Children, Jean and David Gadsby

*Looking at Other Children, Jean and David Gadsby, from the series Looking at Geography, 1957

Never go home …………. “or Fings Ain’t What They Used To Be”

This was the advice given to me a long time ago.

At the time I thought it was rubbish because home is where you are from, where your family live and where many of your memories reside.

And so after I left Eltham in the autumn of 1969 for Manchester I did regularly go back, but the arrival of my own family trips became less frequent and now the last time will have been a decade ago.

I still touch base, through family, friends, and of course social media, and over the years continue to write about the house in Well Hall, the Pleasance, the High Street and Crown Woods.

But it is all at a distance and I know I am an “expat” with my experiences pretty much frozen in time.  

That said Well Hall and Eltham still look familiar.  True there are the odd changes, but it ain’t that different from how I left it.

Not so Woolwich where the transformation has been so profound that I find it hard to recognise great chunks of the place.  

Street names may have stayed the same and the odd building is recognizable, but it is like looking through a dirty window.  Bits look vaguely familiar but not much.

And so the warning “never go home” has come through.

Not that I am going down the line that it is “all rubbish now”, or “not like the old days”.  Places change, and in the passage of half a century they change a lot.

All of which was brought home to me by a series of pictures our Elizabeth sent up to me yesterday after she and Colin had spent a weekend in Woolwich.

Their flight from the city was later than mine, but they too were just passing through.

So, for no other reason than I can, and because there will be others like me who found it difficult finding my way around, here are some of those pictures of the Woolwich I have lost.

Well not entirely there is that Wimpy Bar …….

Location; Woolwich

Pictures; Woolwich in December, 2023, from the collection of Elizabeth Fitzpatrick

Before the tram ................ on Barlow Moor Road deciding whether to shop at the Co-op or Seymour Meads

This is the second of those images from 1966 when Seymour Meads still competed with the Co-op, with the two facing each other off on opposite side of Hardy Lane.

The age of the Corporation tram had gone and its successor was still just a dream held by a few transport enthusiasts.

Location; Chorlton

Picture; Barlow Moor Road 1966, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

When Esperanto came to Manchester .... Esperanto Congress, Manchester 1936 .... another story from Lawrence Beedle

 What took my interest when I spotted this poster stamp was the exonym for Manchester. 

It’s definitely Manchester. There is the Town Hall (1877), in the centre the Central Library (1934), the Ship Canal & Docks (1894) plus a couple of 5 storey cotton mills with tall chimneys. The other buildings look like stylised interpretations of the new Sunlight House (1932) and the Midland Bank building on King Street (1935). But I maybe just be imagining that. 

The stamp is approximately 5cm x 7cm. Not an official postage stamp but what is called by philatelists a Cinderella. Stamps affixed to letters for advertisement or propaganda and numerous other reasons like charity, Christmas, fund raising, private mail delivery service, etc. 

These are collected and traded just like real stamps with prices ranging from worthless to hundreds of pounds. This one has a price tag of nearly £5. I have not found who issued them, how many, or the country of origin.

The event promoted was a six day Esperanto Congress in Manchester commencing Sunday 2nd August 1936. Not the annual world conference, that was scheduled for Vienna, but one under auspices of SAT - Sennacieca Associo Tutmonda, translated as Worldwide Non-National Association. A left-wing organisation that attracted trade unionists, workers and socialists.

It was held at the large Co-Operative Hall, Downing Street, Ardwick. That was owned by the Manchester & Salford Equitable Society, and was the venue for the first annual Labour Party Conference back in February 1900. 

Newspaper reports state 200 delegates from 16 countries attended. The whole area was redeveloped in the 1970’s but there will be people who remember the stores and the hall.

The event attracted official attention. There was a civic reception at the Town Hall, fraternal greetings from Sir Walter Citrine of the TUC, and special postmarks from the Post Office. The BBC presented a short programme on the radio ‘Say it in Esperanto’ with some of the delegates.

In these modern times Esperanto is still being studied, spoken and written. There are Apps for your smart phone including Duolingo and Google Translate. Radio China International broadcasts an hour long radio programme in Esperanto on shortwave. SAT still have an annual congress and the 94th one was scheduled for Moscow this year.

Location; Manchester, 1936

Picture; The Esperanto Stamp, 1936, courtesy of Lawrence Beedle

Remember them ……..

After over 80 years a war memorial to some of the men who fought in the Great War has come out of the shadows.

The memorial went into storage sometime after All Saints Church was bombed in 1940.

The details remain sketchy, and it is unclear whether the church was the one in All Saints in Chorlton on Medlock or the one in Stretford.

Many of the men listed came from Hulme or Chorlton on Medlock and David Harrop who is now the custodian of the memorial says that “two possibly three are interred in Southern Cemetery, and many family members of these men are interred in Southern, it really is the most appropriate location and reflects the memorials origins”.

All of which points to the All Saints Church on Oxford Road.

The church was badly fire damaged and was demolished in 1949.

So it is fitting that David will be placing it in his permanent exhibition in the Remembrance Lodge at Southern Cemetery.  The exhibition already contains many items related to the two World Wars and some which have links to servicemen and women who are interned in the Cemetery.

A heap more work needs to be done on the men listed and in time it maybe possible to finally identify the church.

But for now, as David has said it’s presence in Southern Cemetery “is the most appropriate location and reflects the memorials origins”.*

Location; The Remembrance Lodge Southern Cemetery

Pictures; the War memorial 2023, courtesy of David Harrop

*The memorial will be on show later in the year or at the start of the next

Looking for the family on Mincing Street in 1895

Here  is a bit of a detective story .



Mincing Street, 1895

It is June 1895 and even without checking the newspapers for the week I can tell it was a warm day by the number of people out on the street.

Of course it may have just been  the presence of C.H. Godfrey with a camera that drew an audience.

The family may even have been asked to pose for the shot.

Either way the presence of a photographer in a working class part of the city five full years before the beginning of the last century was bound to pull a crowd.

Posing for the photographer, 1895

The fact that there were not more may have been down to it being a workday.

But this was still a time when a camera was a novelty and as soon as the photographer set up it drew the curious, the vain and more than a few who had just not seen the new art of photography working its magic in front of them.

And for us there is a lot to see, from the family group including the chap with a cup of something in his hand to the woman at the corner house watching both the cameraman and the cat.

What first drew me in was the pub on the extreme right hand side.

This was the Lord Derby which in 1895 was run by Thomas s Harrop and in 1911 by Mrs Edith Williams.

Mr Harrop has yet to show up on official documents but I know from the 1911 census that Mrs Williams was a widow who had been married for 42 years and was assisted by her son in law and daughter.*

The Lord Derby

The Lord Derby was on Dantzic Street and had seven rooms which marked it above many of the properties in the area.

And then as you do I wondered about the eight people in front of us.

It started with their names, because once armed with an identity it is possible to start a search for who they were.

And a  name might lead to an entry in the census returns with their ages, places of birth and occupations.

Added to which it would allow us to access the rate books which in turn would offer up details of the houses, from their rateable value to the rents that were charged.

And finally using the 1911 census it would be possible to discover the number of rooms in three two houses.

But all of that hangs on a name and there we have come unstuck.

If I were in Central Ref I could go through the pages of the Rate Book looking for Mincing Street and there for 1895 would be the names of the tenants and the landowner.

But sitting here at home the alternative in the short term is the directories, but sadly the residents of Mincing Street proved too unimportant to be listed.

So all that is left to say is that our three properties may have been back to back houses and that what appears to be a street corner on the extreme left was the entrance to a closed court comprising of nine properties four of which were back to back.

The Derby Arms and Nelson Street which became Mincing Street, 1893

I say they were back to back because that is what the maps from the 1850s and 1893 suggest, but no research ever goes smoothly, and the 1911 census records the nine houses on Mincing Street as possessing  four rooms.

So there is lots more to do but in the meantime for the really curious I shall leave you with this.

The fencing high up behind the pub was part of the protective wall around the old St Michael’s graveyard.

There will be more but not yet.


Picture; Mincing Street with a family on step, 1899, C.H. Godfrey, m03380, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass and Nelson Street in 1893 from the OS for South Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/

*Census, Enu 02 183, St Georges Manchester, Lancashire, 1911

** Census, Enu 02 245-253, St Georges Manchester, Lancashire, 1911