Who stole Chorlton’s racecourse?

Now, this is a serious question, because once, according to our own Chorlton historian we did indeed possess a racecourse.

The old lane up to Hough End Hall, 2014

Writing in the December of 1885, Thomas Ellwood recorded that “Barlow Moor is celebrated in the annals of Manchester as the scene in the seventeenth century of animal races and other games prior to the establishment of the Manchester Races on Kersal Moor.  

All that remains to recall the racecourse is the field bounded by Barlow Moor-lane, and the left of the lane  leading to Hough-end Hall, still known as the ‘scaffold field’ where was formerly a low mound, which  served as a vantage point from which to view the contests”.*

And since then, John Lloyd in his book on the township also chimed in with “Horse racing was followed in the 17th century, traditionally the site being a field known as the ‘Scaffold Field’.  The field can be more accurately defined as being the area north of the path in line with the front entrance to Hough End Hall and occupied by the schools and the bowling greens."**

Riderless Races in Rome, 1817 

But Lloyd was merely repeating Ellwood and points out that “Ellwood seems to be the only source and the one frequently quoted”.

To which Eric of Sandy Lane will mutter that all of this was so far in the past that it “ain’t worth a copy of yesterdays Chorlton and Wilbrahamton News”.

And here I would disagree, if only because it does still come up in conversation.

So this much I know, Kersal Moor “achieved its greatest popularity from 1688 to 1816, the period when horse races were held on it”.  That said a later newspaper article pushed back the date to 1687 when an advertisement appeared in the London Gazette, announcing a plate of £20 to be run at Carsall (Kersal) Moor”.****

Chorlton Park, 2020

All of which does indeed push back the date when the “sport of kings” took place in what is now Chorlton Park.

Nor do I think that those events in the 17th century can  truly be equated with our idea of horse racing, because the popular idea of the sport was still in its infancy.

According to a Mr. W.G.C. Frith who was clerk to the Manchester Racecourse in 1963, the first race meeting held at Kersal Moor back in 1687 was “At a time when racing was just emerging from the stage when one man ran his horse against another’s for a private bet”.****

So, there you have it, perhaps those horsey events described by Ellwood were less a series of grand races watched by the good and the rich, and more a set of individual contests where farmers pitted their horses against each other.

I await Eric’s informed and measured response.

Leaving me just to observe that Axon in his wonderful Annals of Manchester, makes no reference horse racing at either Chorlton or Kersal Moor in the 17th century.*****

Scaffold Field and the Observatory, 1854

Although the 1854 OS map for Lancashire , does show an Observatory in front of Brookfield House just a little to the west of the lane  leading to Hough-end-Hall.

As for Scaffold Field this shows up on the Withington tithe map for 1848 as belonging to the Egerton estate and occupied by William Jackson who may have been connected to Henry Jackson who was the tenant at Hough End Hall in the 1840s.

There are a number of William Jackson’s listed as living in Withington in 1841, but none I think are our tenant of Scaffold Field.

So, that is it other than to say the painting Riderless Racers at Rome, has nothing to do with racing in Chorlton, other than it shows horses in Rome which is a city I like.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; lane  leading to Hough-end-Hall, 2014, overgrown Chorlton Park, from the collection of Andrew Simpson,  detail from the 1854, OS map of Lancashire, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/ and Riderless Racers at Rome, 1817, Walters Art Museum

*Ellwood, Thomas L Horse Racing, Chapter VII Badger and Bear Baiting’s, History of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, December 19th, 1885, South Manchester Gazette

**Lloyd, John M, The Township of Chorlton-cum-Hardy, 1972, page 75

***History of Kersal Moor, An Early Manchester racecourse, Manchester Guardian, September 11, 1936

****The end of 276 years of racing history, Manchester Guardian, November 9th, 1963

*****Axon, William E.A., Annals of Manchester, 1885

Wishing you well ........... postcards from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham for the summer ..... nu 5 Greenwich Park

A short series with few words looking at the postcards we sent from Woolwich, Greenwich and Eltham.

Now I don’t think this scene of the park had changed over much between when it was sent to Miss L E Thompson of Shepherds Bush and when I played there a full half century and a bit later.

It is unclear whether “C S” lived in Greenwich.  He sent the card from west London just after midday in the August of 1902 and confined himself to the simple message “Isn’t it nice.”

Location; Greenwich Park

Picture; Greenwich Park circa 1902, Tuck and Sons, courtesy of Tuck DB, https://tuckdb.org/

Unearthing the Past by Sarah Dunant ..... 1. The Past Is a Foreign Country

 This is another of those wonderful radio 4 programmes which brings history alive and in the process explores just how we understand the past.

Portrait of a woman, 1500-1525

There are five episodes in the series, and "The Past Is a Foreign Country" is the firsy which was broadcast on Wednesday, with "Renaissance Menageries" going out yesterday, "Unto Us A Child is Born", today and "An Illness Probably Caused by Love", and "Fashion Icon and Ilfluencer" on subsequent days.

"The acclaimed novelist Sarah Dunant explores the craft of blending fact and fiction to understand the past in a beguiling series of essays centred on the Renaissance icon Isabella d'Este. Written and read by Sarah Dunant.

The best-selling author of the acclaimed Italian Renaissance novels The Birth of Venus, Blood and Beauty and now, The Marchesa, takes us into the archives where she uncovers a wealth of letters and other documentation charting the wonders of the high Renaissance and the life and times of its first female art collector, fashion icon and political operator, Isabella d'Este, marchesa of Mantua. 

In this illuminating series Sarah Dunant unearths wonders that bring alive the past, how people lived, their values and their beliefs. Taking as her starting point the novelist L.P. Hartley's line 'the past is a foreign country' Sarah explores how we must sometimes suspend our own judgements to understand the social, political and cultural forces that determined the outcome of world events and every day life. 

From the acquisition of assets, art and horses, to the fealty of pets, the vicissitudes of motherhood, sex and marriage, and the wielding of cultural influence, Unearthing the Past gives us insights into how we might better understand and appreciate our colourful forebears.

You can hear more from Sarah Dunant about Isabella d'Este on Not Just The Tudors, available now on BBC Sounds. From the Aztecs to witches, Prof Suzannah Lipscomb talks all aspects of the Tudor period.

Produced by Elizabeth Allard"

Location; BBC Radio 4

Picture; Portrait of a woman; sometimes wrongly called Portrait of Isabelle d’Este, 1500 and 1525, Department of Paintings of the Louvre, Room 710, Accession number, INV 894 and MR 109 (Department of Paintings of the Louvre) 

*Unearthing the Past by Sarah Dunant, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m002f8t3  

A Viking hoard of treasure .....two detectorists ..... and a story .... Fool's Gold on the wireless now

 Now it's more than a story of Viking hidden treasure, two detectorists who fail to report the find, and a clue to a period of our history which may change how we see the period of Alfred  the Great.

 Silver penny minted during the reign of Alfred the Great875–880 

So "Fool's Gold" on BBC Radio 4 which spans eight episodes is riveting.

"June 2015, Herefordshire. Two Welsh detectorists - George Powell and Layton Davies - stumble upon a Viking hoard estimated to be worth up to £12m.

They could have become very rich and been celebrated as heroes in museums across the land. But instead, they began to hatch a criminal plot. Narrated by Aimee-Ffion Edwards (Detectorists/Slow Horses), this is the story of how to go from the luckiest treasure hunters on earth, to Newport’s most wanted.

Narrator: Aimee-Ffion Edwards, Contributors: Holly Morgan, Dawn Chipchase & Simon Wicks, Sound design: Peregrine Andrews, Production co-ordinator: Dan Marchini, Additional Research: Holly Morgan, Associate Producer: David James Smith., Producer: Aron Keller, Exec Producer: James Robinson,  A BBC Studios Audio Production."

Location; BBC Radio 4"*

*Fool's Gold, BBC Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0kz4ny8

Location BBC Radio 4

 Picture; English: Silver penny minted during the reign of Alfred the Great, struck 875–880 AD, This image has been extracted from another file: Alfred the Great, silver penny; struck 875–880.png original file, Classical Numismatic Group, the copyright holder of this work, hereby publishes it under the following licenses: Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled GNU FThis file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license. Attribution: Classical Numismatic Group, Inc. http://www.cngcoins.com

That mystery house on Beech Road ........

Now number 121 Beech Road vanished a long time ago.

Hunts Croft, circa, 1960s

It was one of our more elegant early 19th century properties which was set back from Beech Road, and went sometime in the 1970s.

For a long time after its demolition the land was left an open space, with the occasional suggestion that it could be a car park, a project which came to nought when the Corporation and the local traders couldn’t agree on a funding package.

There will be a few people who remember it, but sadly I am not one of them, which means it had gone before I arrived in 1976 or like so many things I was just not that observant back then.

Either way, there is little to mark its presence, save an entry in the tithe schedule for 1845, the Rate books and official maps.

If I have this right, it was Hunt Croft House and in 1845 was the residence of Thomas White who rented it from the Lloyd Estate.

With a lot of digging it will be possible to track its history through the 19th century till its demolition. I know that in 1969 it was occupied by a Frances. J Casse, and in 1911 by Mr and Mrs Chester, their five children, and a boarder.

Looking into the garden, circa 1970s

The house had nine rooms with a biggish garden at the front, ending in a tallish stone wall which ran along Beech Road.

Back in the mid 19th century it looked at on fields.  From the rear Mr White could look out on a field and orchard, while from his front windows he could gaze across to Row Acre, which stretched up to High Lane.

But by the 20th century the fields had all gone, and on either side of this fine old house were shops.

Beech Road, circa 1970s

And here I must admit my mistake, because for years I had mistaken Croft House for Joel View which stood a little further down the road and had been built in 1859.

Many will remember Joel View as the property owned by J Johnny, which I assumed had been built much later.

I even compounded the mistake by arguing that the stone tablet which carried the  name of Joel View had been salvaged from Mr White’s former home and been added to J. Johnny’s.

Dating the picture

Now, even then I knew that this was pushing it, because our own historian Thomas Ellwood had written that Joel View was one of the new developments in the township at the end of the 1850s.

All of which goes to show that sometimes when it is easy to ignore the obvious and create an elaborate theory which is built on sand and that is really just a lead in to two pictures of Hunt’s Croft sent to me by Roger Shelley who took them sometime in the 1970s and which had lain in his negative box until yesterday.

The two images compliment an earlier one taken by N. Fife for which I don’t have a date for, but maybe from the 1960s.

That said it might be possible to date Roger’s pictures, from the shop which is up for sale.  This had been Mr Westwell’s fruit and greengrocer shop in 1969, but sometime in the next decade became The Village Wholefood Shop.

Hunt's Croft demolished, circa 1979-early 1980s

It was still trading when I took a picture around 1979, showing the shop and the site which had once been Hunts Croft.

So that is it for now, although I am hoping Roger has more pictures.

Location; Chorlton



Pictures; Hunts Croft circa 1960s, courtesy of N Fife, the Lloyd Collection and again circa 1970s from the collection of Roger Shelley, and after it had been demolished circa 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The lost canal ….Bert’s Café …. and the Coach and Horses ….. views across Minishull Street fifty years ago

This was one of my familiar views of the Manchester I knew in the 1970s.

Looking towards Minishull Street, 1979

To my left was the tower block of the College of Commerce which some of us affectionately called The College of Knowledge but which had just joined the Art School and John Dalton to become Manchester Polytechnic.

Over to the right was the Fire Station and Police Station on Whitworth Street West. Leaving just the tall buildings of the British Rail office block and the swirling S bend pile which was more glass than wall.

Lost view of Minishull Street, 1979

And for those really in the know hidden behind the hoardings in the first picture was Bert’s café and Placemate that night club which had once been home to the Twisted Wheel.

To which there was the Coach and Horses on London Road which my Pubs of Manchester Past and Present tells me "was originally an artisan's house with a workshop on the top floor.  It ended its life as a Tetley house at the bottom of Piccadilly Approach on the corner of Upton Street".*

We would sometimes cross the car park from the college and spend an evening in there, ostensibly discussing the next essay but quicky ending up on the football machine drinking from those old-fashioned straight glasses.

Go back to 1850, and the spot from which the pictures were taken and this was Coal Yard of the Bridgewater Canal Company, supplied by an arm of the Rochdale Canal.  The canal still exits running beside Canal Street and running  eventually in one direction to the Dale Street Basin and  Castlefield in the other.

That canal arm, 1850

But the arm which also nudged Little Davis Street has long gone.  It was still there in 1950 and may well have been filled in when the College of Knowledge was built in the 1960s.

Leaving me just to reflect that for a while the Poly occupied the warehouse which once abutted the arm of the canal while I have written about Little David Street and some of the people who lived there.*

The Rochdale Canal with the vanished arm to the right, 1980

I could again explore that history from the 1850s but instead will settle on Bert’s Café which remains with me over 50 years after we frequented the place, eating Bert’s sausage sandwiches and swapping stories of the night before.

Given that it was just a few minutes’ walk from the College and we were the archetype students, we would put a morning breakfast over the first lecture of the day. 

The place consisted of just one room with a serving hatch from which Bert delivered the orders which mainly consisted of chips with egg, or bacon or sausage with a variation of these in sandwiches.  The bread was white, the spread marg and the coffee was hot milk with a hint of the brown stuff.

In the winter the windows were always steamed up and in the summer the door was permanently open but had those plastic-coloured strips which rustled in the wind and were a concession to privacy.

The view, 2025

Location Minishull Street

Pictures, looking towards Minishull Street, 1979 from the collection of Andrew Simpson and the arm of the Rochdale Canal,  1851 from Adshead’s map of Manchester 1851 courtesy of Digital Archives Association, http://digitalarchives.co.uk/ and the view in 2025, courtesy of Google Maps

*Pubs of Manchester Past and Present, http://pubs-of-manchester.blogspot.com/2010/01/coach-horses-london-road.html

** Little David Street, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/search?q=Little+David+

Passing the bridges ………

It will have been in 1979, and I guess it was sometime in the summer and on a whim, I took a trip on the River.

Now if you were born and grew up in southeast London paying to travel the Thames was a rare event, reserved for impressing a girlfriend.

On this day I will have been home from Manchester which had already been my adopted city for a decade, so reckon that pleasure cruise would have been a way of reuniting with my city.

Or it may have just been an excuse to try out a new camera.

Either way I used up two films, and still have the negatives which sat in the cellar for 40 years before I brought them out of the shadows.

 Looking at the direction of some of the images I will have taken the trip upriver from Greenwich past the Tower and on to Westminster.

Back then I didn’t record the exact destinations or who was with me, but it was a rewarding day and I still have heaps of pictures of that grimy London, which the tourists see but never bother “snapping”.

I did and many of those warehouses have now vanished or been converted into swish riverside apartments.

The waterfront has been “cleaned up” and new properties stand where once cranes unloaded diverse cargoes from pretty much everywhere.

Added to which since I sat on the benches of that boat new bridges cross the River and stepping back from the water are shedloads of gleaming glass and steel tower blocks.

All of that said these images instantly bring back that smell of the Thames and the noise of the river traffic.

And now it’s a full 45 years since the journey which has gone in a blink.

Location; The River

Pictures; wot I saw on a trip along the Thames, 1979, from the collection of Andrew Simpson