Walking a ghost ………… looking for lost railway stations

Hindlow, Hurdlow, Parsley Hay, and Alsop en le Dale are names that call up images of a sleepy rural past.

Along the route, 2019

And once along time ago they were just a train ride away.

Encountering others, 2019

I should know, because yesterday we visited them, along with Hartington, Tissington, and Thorpe Cloud.

One is a collection of eight homes although it does have its own Norman church.

Another has the pub, while the last we encountered still has a fine stately home, built in the 17th century and owned by a family who may have come over with the Conqueror.

What they all have in common was a railway line, built in the last decade of the 19th century, connecting Buxton to Ashbourne.

The wonder is that it was ever built, because this bit of the Peak District was sparsely populated and remained so.

But the line was a lifeline and at its peak six trains a day ran from Buxton to Ashbourne, carrying passengers, minerals, milk and farm produce.

And in the winter it offered a vital link for the villages and hamlets along the way who might other wise struggle when the snow fell.

As far as you can see, 2019

In 1901 one train which was derailed, remained marooned for three days after a heavy snow storm blocked the line, leaving the crew to be fed by local farmers.

But rail closures are, and were no respecter of communities and ours closed to passengers in 1954, although special excursions were still allowed until 1963, but after that there were no more.

Finally, the line was bought by the County Council and has become a route for walkers and cyclists, commanding fine views across the fields and once past the busy roads, you are plunged into a silent place, interrupted only by the sound of birds.

The route runs through old cuttings, where the trees and the high rock sides seal you in, while at other points the old track is carried on an embankment which offers up perfect views for miles.

And along the way, there can still be found relics of its old railway past, from level markers denoting the gradient to obscure bits of concrete whose function is lost but which will once have done the business of keeping the trains running.

Alsop en le Dale railway station, circa 1959s

It is easy to get lost in what there is, which at one point included a bunch of stray sheep which had escaped from a neigbouring field, but for me it was the tracks railway past, now just a paragraph in a tourist guide, with one of those faded and slightly blurred old pictures which mean little unless like us you have done that walk.

Location; Derbyshire

Pictures; the Tissington Trail, 2019, from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Alsop en le Dale, railway Station, from the collection of J.Wallace Sutherland of Davenport, http://sutherland.davenportstation.org.uk/aaprint/man.html#70-01

Alsop en le dene …………… looking for stories

Some places don’t change over much across the centuries.

Alsop en le dene in Derbyshire, is one of them.

It is a hamlet of just eight homes, and while it can boast a Norman church, it has no pub and has lost its post office.

And you might well drive through it without giving it a second glance, and that would be a shame because there has been a settlement here from before the Doomsday Book.

And as you do, I have been drawn to digging into its past, for no particular reason other than I can and of course that on going fascination for those small rural communities on the edge of bigger things at a time when Britain was going through the Industrial Revolution.

As ever the starting point are the eight census returns from 1841to 1921, along with the parish records.

Together they offer up a wealth of information about the families of Alsop en len dene, from their occupations, places of birth to the age distribution of the community and along the way reveal a few secrets of the lives behind the doors.

For me it is one of those interesting comparisons with Chorlton-cum-Hardy which in the middle decades of the nineteenth century was still a small rural community just 4½ miles from Manchester.

Of course, Alsop en len dene was much smaller, consisting of just forty-six people compared to Chorlton’s 750 inhabitants, and there are other differences.

The vast majority of those engaged in farming in Chorlton were market gardeners looking to provide food for the city’s markets, while in our hamlet there were just three farms of varying size which employed all of the fourteen agricultural labourers.

And unlike Chorlton where the population was drawn from across the UK, in Alsop en le dene only three of the forty-six were not born on Derbyshire or the neighbouring county of Staffordshire.

Added to which of the thirty-one from Derbyshire, eight were born in the hamlet with another twelve from nearby villages.

None of which is a surprise.

The fun will be to track the residents over the eighty years from 1841 through to 1921, charting who went and who stayed, and what if anything changed in the occupations of those who lived there.

A glance at later returns show that the coming of the railway in the 1890s offered up one new occupation, and in turn may have allowed others to look for work in Ashbourne and Buxton which were the two towns at either end of the railway line.

I suspect that at the end of the study we will be left with that knowledge that not a lot changed in Alsop en le dene.

But the stories are there like Francis and Millicent Austen who were married in the neigbouring village of Tessington in 1850 and were in one of the cottages in the hamlet the following year.

He was an agricultural labourer aged 34 and she was eight years younger, had been a servant and had a son born out of wedlock.  I doubt that Francis was the father given that in 1851 the boy retained his mother’s maiden name and did so throughout his life.

By 1861 the family had moved on leaving others to continue the story of the hamlet.

Location; Alsop le dene

Pictures; Alsop le dene, in 1851 & 2019 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

On the corner of Manchester Road, thinking of a mattress and a pizza

So, every time I sit in Cromar, thinking about choosing a pizza or pasta, I often reflect on the mattress I bought when this was a furniture shop.

Wilbraham Road, 2020

Wilbraham Road, 1985

And that mattress will have made its way up from Coupe’s warehouse on Beech Road, which was in the former Wesleyan chapel,which is now Zitano, and which for a while employed a Polish pizza chef, who had been trained in Naples.

Small world really.


Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Cromar on the corner of Manchester Road and Wilbraham Road,  2020, from the collection of Andrew Simpson, and Wilbraham Road in 1985 courtesy of Tom McGrath

Mr. Brightman ….. Chorlton-cum-Hardy……… and the election of 1945

 This is the story of the 1945 election, but not the famous one which sent the Labour Party back to power, and led to the creation  of the National Health Service, and other collective reforms which we now know as the Welfare State.

That election had been in the July of 1945, and a few months later in November, the electors of Manchester went back to the polling booths to elect candidates for the City Council.

The Labour Party were so confident of substantial gains, that they decided to contest every seat in the city.  As the Manchester Guardian reported “for the first time since municipal elections were held in Manchester  the Labour party has nominated a candidate for every vacant seat.  Even the small business wards in the central area – Exchange, Oxford and St Ann’s are being contested”.*

And the article went on to report that “it is an open secret that even the most optimistic Conservatives are concerned not so much about how many seats they can gain as about how many of the 28 seats they are defending they can hold”.

The Party’s local election manifesto stressed the importance of giving the Labour Party control of the City Council so that it could support and deliver locally the national programme of reform, arguing “if progressive policies at Westminster are to be interpretated into realities up and down the country it is the people elected to the local authorities who will have to make them effective”, arguing the track record of the Conservatives had been to obstruct those “progressive policies” …… “the simple fact is that the Tories in a majority have always been fighting a rearguard action against the incessant demands of the people expressed by Labour”.

And nowhere more so than in the case of clearing the slums because “three fourths of Manchester’s 200-000 houses are obsolete by modern standards and half of them unfit to live in , [with] only six out of every ten having baths”.**

Here in Chorlton, the local Labour Party had selected Mr. W. H. Brightman, and Mrs Kelsall, from a list of six at a meeting on September 23rd. 

Earlier in the month Mr. Brightman had indicated in a letter that he could not accept the nomination to the selection panel “as he would be engaged in London for a week or more on Trade Union business”.***

Now there is no record of why despite his absence he was selected but it is clear that he had a proven record of service to both the Labour party and the trade union movement.

According to his election address he was known to “many hundreds of Chorlton residents having lived among them for more than 25 years, had played his part in Hertfordshire in the Parliamentary elections of 1906-11. 

Joined the Labour Party in 1914, a member of the Manchester and Salford Co-operative Party  for many years.  

He was first vice chairman of the Manchester Shipping Guild which he helped form, and was a member of the Executive Committee of the Manchester Council of Labour”.****

He had held various posts in the Withington Constituency Labour Party, Chorlton Labour Party, and the City Labour Group.

And here I have his great grandson to thank for much of the material on Mr. Brightman, as well as a brief biography, from which I learned that Mr. Brightman was born in Islington, and moved to Manchester in 1914 with his second wife, finally settling in Albermarle Road in Chorlton.

His election address echoed the Party manifesto , and argued that “unless the Government of the day has the general support of the local council the maximum benefit of existing and future legislation cannot be achieved.  Those enactments must be loyally and capably effected by the local authorities”.

Across the City, the Labour Party did very well, holding on to “all the twenty-one seats it was defending and gained  an additional fourteen  - eleven from the Conservatives and three from the Liberals”.*****

And despite failing to win overall control by just four seats, it was the most successful election “the Labour party has ever fought in Manchester and the Labour members are now for the first time the largest groups in the council”.

Sadly neither Mr. Brightman nor Mrs. Kelsall were successful.  

The Conservative candidates, each gained 66.9% of the vote with Mrs. Kelsall achieving 33.1% and Mr. Brightman 31.4% .

But then Labour had never won a seat in Chorlton.  

In the early 20th century the electors had returned either Tory or Liberal councillors, and after 1945 would continue to elect Conservative candidates until the historic breakthrough in 1986.******

Looking back at the local campaign, the election agent commented that “Chorlton ward had polled well, in spite of the lack of many prominent workers, who were fighting in other wards”, which traditionally was the fate of local elections in Chorlton until the 1970s.********

I doubt Mr. Brightman looked upon the result as poor, given that he and Mrs. Kelsall each polled nearly a third of the vote in what was then a traditional Conservative seat.

He continued living in Chorlton until sometime after 1939.  

At his death in 1950, Manchester Corporation passed a resolution of thanks ….. now that I would like to see.

Leaving me just to thank Mr. MG. Wittard for all his help in writing the story, and a promise that I will go looking for Mrs. Kelsall.

Location; Chorlton-cum-Hardy

Pictures; Labour Party Campaign poster 1945, Labour Party, Mr. Brightman, from the Election Address, and City Election News, 1945 and  Golden Wedding announcement , courtesy of Mr. MG. Wittard.

*Labour Challenge In Manchester Tories on the Defensive, Manchester Guardian, October 25, 1945

**Election Issues in Manchester, Labour and Housing, Manchester Guardian, October 20th, 1945

***Minutes of the Chorlton Labour party, September 13t,h 1945

****Election Address, November 1st, 1945

******More Labour Victories in Manchester, Manchester Guardian, November 3rd 1945

*******The first Labour candidate had been Alice McIlwrick in the November of 1928 gaining 14% of the vote.

********Minutes of the Chorlton Labour Party, November 6th, 1945

The Hanseatic League .... one to listen to ...... today

This is one I will be listening today just after 9 today and then perhaps dipping back to it on catch up.

Ubena von Bremen, a replica of the Bremen cog 

It comes In Our Time, from that wonderful Radio 4 programe hosted by Melvyn Bragg.

"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Hanseatic League or Hansa which dominated North European trade in the medieval period. 

With a trading network that stretched from Iceland to Novgorod via London and Bruges, these German-speaking Hansa merchants benefitted from tax exemptions and monopolies. 

Over time, the Hansa became immensely influential as rulers felt the need to treat it well. Kings and princes sometimes relied on loans from the Hansa to finance their wars and an embargo by the Hansa could lead to famine. 

Eventually, though, the Hansa went into decline with the rise in the nation state’s power, greater competition from other merchants and the development of trade across the Atlantic.

With, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz,Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Amsterdam, Georg Christ, Senior Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern History at the University of Manchester, and Sheilagh Ogilvie, Chichele, Professor of Economic History at All Souls College, University of Oxford

Producer: Victoria Brignell"

Picture; Ubena von Bremen, a replica of the Bremen cog I, VollwertBIT, 2007, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publishes it under the following license: w:en:Creative Commons attribution share alikeThis file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. Attribution: I, VollwertBIT

*The Hanseatic League, In Our Time, BBC, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001vshs

The story of one house in Lausanne Road number 40 ............... "I can see Bognor"

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

Today 50 or more years on I have no idea where “I can see Bognor” came from.

All I do know was that we were on some swings somewhere and as the swings went higher and higher that was what we shouted.

But why Bognor is now lost in time.

And those  playground cries were pretty common back then.

Some like Bognor were instantly made up while others were more complicated and inventive.

Of these there was the playground rhyme which told a story using the titles and characters of popular TV Westerns.  It may well have been inspired by that 1959 song Delaware which had references to fifteen states of the United States, beginning with the question “Oh what did Della wear boy? and offering the answer “She wore a bran new Jersey.”

Our TV version may have been a skipping rhyme appropriated by us lads, but as hard as I try I can’t remember any of it.

I have on firmer ground with the games we played which ranged from “fag cards” to marbles and cap bombs.

Most of these had seasons of which conkers was the obvious but marbles and cap bombs and even hoola hoops  seemed to have their moment in the year.

Of course some were tied to that part of the year when it was dry and sunny but most I suspect were dependant on a new delivery from Hong Kong.

Once in the shops they played out their time until they were either broken or replaced with a new fad.

Now of all of these it was “fag cards” that I was most ambivalent about.  It took me time to master the skill but even then I was never that good at flicking them or managing to hit the card which rested on the wall so I tended to lose more than I won.

Added to which I never saw the attraction in collecting the dog eared and grubby cards that had been in half dozen pockets and the subject of endless playground games.

I preferred collecting them as brand new items  and going in for the occasional deal to swap one rare card for another.

I say fag cards but by the 1950s they were mostly from boxes of tea or like Flags of the World bought over the counter from our newsagents on Mona Road.

I can’t remember how much but it was probably a penny for which you got the card and a slice of pink bubble gum.

All very simple activities and ones I tried introducing to my lads when they were young which pretty much made them the only kids growing up in the 1980s and 90s to have lived the 50s.

It worked, although I have to say it ranked a little lower than the fads of the 1980s which saw a certain toy reappear in the 1990s and again just a few years ago.  So like their dad my three have already begun revisiting their youth.

But they were lucky even I drew the line at Bognor.

Pictures; Flags of the World, courtesy of Flags of the World,http://www.deanscards.com/c/716/1956-Topps-Flags-of-the-World, cap bombs taken from http://www.samstoybox.com/toys/CapBombs.html,  and the model of Raphael, Ninja Mutant Turtle from the collection of Josh Simpson

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

The poem man

I am not sure my old friend Rod Whitworth will approve of the blog title but as we have known each other for half a century I guess he won’t mind.

We first met in 1974 when we discovered we both lived in Ashton-under-Lyne, and as we both worked at the same place it made sense to travel in together.

Although I have to confess Rod did the driving and was born in Ashton while I had only washed up there in the spring of that year.

Since then, we have drifted in and out of each other’s lives occasionally meeting up to swap stories of grandchildren, books we have read and where in Manchester to get the best cheese barm.

And it was on one of those encounters that I discovered Rod was a poet, and an accomplished one as many of his poet friends testified yesterday when he and others read their poems.

It was a zoom session which allowed a large audience of friends, family and publishers to come together from around Britain and out across the world.

And we gathered in recognition of his new book of poetry My Family and Other Birds, at which point I could fill the page with reviews but will add just one from Peter Sansom, poet and co-director of The Poetry Business who wrote “it's so compellingly written that it's also that rare thing, a poetry page-turner.  Wonderful."

Me and Rod, 2012

But enough of the praise which Rod would downplay anyway, instead it is another example of the talents so many people have, but for a variety of reasons do not always bubble to the surface.

I think of heaps fine photographs which match the best of the “recognised photographers” but are the work of people who were busy with the day job and the everyday preoccupations of the school run, what to cook for tea and Aunt Edna’s birthday present.

Some only took to taking pictures late in life, others squeezed them in between other things exhibiting them on social media rather than in a gallery.

Or those who took to writing, perhaps through a writing group but equally found an audience through social media.

As a secondary modern boy who at the age of eleven was judged “wanting ability” and consigned to a school which lacked the resources and prestige of its neighbouring grammar school I still need sometimes to shout that we all have that ability to express ourselves in a meaningful way which resonates with others.

And that is it.  My order for My Family and Other Birds is on its way.*

* My Family and Other Birds, Rod Whitworth, 2024, is available from the author at rod.whitworth@me.com or Vole Books,  https://www.dempseyandwindle.com/rodwhitworth.html