The biggest yet a new exhibition on the story of Chorlton-cum-Hardy

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Peter and I were offered a building site wall to tell the story of Chorlton.  

Now as you know I tell the stories and Peter paints the pictures and between us we have staged exhibitions at the Big Green Festival, the library and across six venues in Chorlton.

And this is the biggest to date.  We are working with the firm McCarthey and Stone to tell the story of Chorlton which will be displayed on the panels surrounding their building site on Albany and Buckingham Roads.

Above; panel 1 of the 16 across the 80 by 30 metre site

It is the old Cosgrove Hall site and the panels stretch for 50 metres along Albany and around Buckingham for another 30.  So no small project.

And with the artwork finished and the final site visit completed this new Glad to be in Chorlton  Exhibition should be up within the next few weeks.

Picture; Peter Topping

One for the diary,... Chorlton History Group in July

One for the diary, full story Tuesday July 3rd

Richard Buxton "a little life lived out in a great century" part five

I am back with my old friend Richard Buxton, the working class self taught botanist who compiled one of the most important books on the botany and fauna of south Manchester.

He is some someone I have written about already http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Richard%20Buxton and I promised to come back to him.

He lived and worked for most of his life in the mean little streets off Great Ancoats Street in the heart of this fast growing part of Manchester.  And today I want to explore his life set against the events of the time.

His was one of those “little lives lived out in a big century" and it encompassed the French Revolution and the long wars with France, unrest at home including trade union activity, demands for the vote and the great Chartists Petitions along with machine breaking, and food riots.

Very little in his autobiography gives a clue to whether he held political views or made comment on the great events of the day.     As a young man he might have known those who rejoiced at the news of the Revolution in France, and listened to calls for better pay, union solidarity and a halt to the factory machines.  He would have rejoiced himself at the news of the victory at Waterloo, and shared the despair as the trade cycles plunged many into unemployment and poverty.

Food riots were not infrequent and he may well have observed the riot that broke out in April 1812 in Oldham Road, New Cross when a food cart carrying food for sale at the markets in Shudehill was stopped and its load carried off.  Nearby shops were also attacked and looted.  The mob was eventually dispersed by soldiers but only as far as Middleton.  There they met with an assembly of handloom weavers, miners and out of work factory operatives gathered to protest against the introduction of power loom machinery at Barton and Sons weaving mill.

The mob which had grown to 2000, was dispersed by “ A party of soldiers , horse and foot, from Manchester arriving, pursued those misguided people, some of whom made a feeble stand; but here again death was the consequence, five of them being shot and many severely wounded.”  
Revolution it was thought was in the air, and the Government responded with the Gag Acts, the suspension of Habeas Corpus   and the rounding up and imprisonment of political suspects.  Here in Manchester radicals were arrested and some like John Night were thrown into the New Bailey prison before being sent on to London, others like William Ogden were just “roughed up”.

Picture; detail from Green's map of Manchester 1794, courtesy of Digital Archives, http://www.digitalarchives.co.uk/

Those from Chorlton who fought in the Great War

I have been thinking about the Great War and in particular the role of my own family in that conflict.

We sent six off to fight for King and Country.  There were two uncles, my grandfather, great grandfather and two great uncles, and because my grandmother was German we had relatives who joined the armies of the Kaiser.

But today I want to return to the impact the war had on our township here in Chorlton.  Now it is something I have written about in the past* when purely by accident I came across the work of the voluntary Red Cross Hospitals on Edge Lane and Manchester Road.

The stories cover only the first two years of the war but reveal the commitment of the community to the care of the wounded, and also reveal that darker side where patriotism tumbles over into hostility and deliberate misunderstanding.



I can remember thinking when I first began uncovering the stories that there is no central war memorial in the village, which is odd given that most places around the country however small erected a war cross or plinth with the names of the fallen as well as those who went and returned.  My own little board school in south east London still displayed in the 1950s the book listing all the students who had gone off to fight, red for those who went and survived and black for those who died.

But in our case the memorials are there, just spread across the township and apart from the one in Southern Cemetery they are associated with our churches.  So in the grounds of the Methodist Church on Manchester Road is a memorial to the fallen of both world wars while similar records exist in St Clements and St Ninian’s churches.  Sadly others have vanished.  My old friend Marjorie remembers a plaque in the MacFadyn’s building at the corner of Barlow Moor Road and Sandy Lane, but sometime during renovation it disappeared.

Many served with the Manchester Regiment but not all, and while most saw action on the Western Front others were at Gallipoli and in the campaigns in Egypt and Palestine.
For some there are a full set of military records which follow the recruit from the moment he joined up to his eventual discharge.  But for many others the record is fragmentary, consisting of his Attestation document, a medical file or letter to grieving parent and in some cases just a reference to the date and place of his death or the list of his medals.

Nevertheless there is enough to be able to write about many of our young men who went to fight and in some cases to die in battle or in a field hospital.  But here there is a dilemma and it is one I have never really been able to reconcile.  How far does writing about the lives and deaths of these young men become a grotesque intrusion?   Or by bringing their sacrifice out into the open are we not honouring them?  I am not sure I have the answer.

I suppose the easy way out is to write about them but not refer to their names.  This way the true sadness is there but there can be no danger of hurting a living relative. So I have in front of me the record of young man from Chorlton who joined aged 19 in the May of 1915, saw service in Egypt and then for the last two years of the war on the Western Front, where he was reported missing on March 23 1918 and died in hospital four months later of a skin infection while in a German POW camp.

But at the same time there is something a little dishonest in having the records, noting the fate of these young men but not naming them.  It plucks them out of a century of obscurity only to consign them again to oblivion.

And what is more in some cases I know the families, or at least I have researched them through the 19th century, and followed their lives on farms across the township while others are part of the new wave of people into Chorlton as it changed from rural community into a suburb of Manchester.

Harry Hotchen was one of these newcomers.  The family lived on Upper Chorlton Road and his father was a butcher. Ten years earlier they had lived on Brunswick Street in Chorlton on Medlock and before that in Salford where Harry had been born.

He had joined in the May of 1915 just three months short of his 19th birthday, saw service in the Middle East with the Cheshire and Essex regiments and was discharged in the February of 1919 after a spell in the Nell Lane Military Hospital after which I lose him, although there is a reference to a Harry Hotchen marrying in 1928 and dying in the June of 1954 in Chorley.

William Eric Lunt was by contrast from a family who had farmed the land since certainly the early 19th century.  There are Lunt’s buried in the parish church yard on the green and his parents and grandparents had lived in one of the farmhouses on Sandy Lane and were active in the Methodist community.  But his is an all the more darker and sadder story and I shall leave it for another time.

* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Chorlton%20and%20the%20Great%20War

Pictures; Allied Victory Medal, awarded to servicemen and women who had served between August 1914 and November 1918, detail of a letter published in the St Clement's Parish Church Magazine  1917, courtesy of Ida Bradshaw, The Manchester Regiment marching past the Town Hall, March 21st 1915, Thomas E Scholey, Courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, 1914-1915 Star, awarded for service between August 5th 1914 and December 31st 1915

Coming soon, through June, July and August

More trams, a few trains, stories of the floods across Chorlton, along with the Methodists, the Rough Leech Gutter, the artist Tom Mostyn and what lurks below the modern meadows.


 And of course lots of trailers for the book Chorlton-cum-Hardy, a Community Transformed, due out in September. http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20for%20Chorlton

And through most of July, a picture a day and going to school.

Pictures; from the Loyd collection and the collections of Tony Walker and Andrew Simpson

Letters from the Front ..... my family in the Great War

We have little in the way of documents from the men of my family who fought in the Great War.  Now given the class they came from and the distance of time that is not surprising.

And so we have just a few photographs, a handful of letters home and some military records which is not much to sum up the contribution of my immediate family.

We sent six off to fight for King and Country.  Along with two uncles, two great uncles, and my grandfather there was also my great grandfather.  http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/stories-of-great-war.html

Now I have written about the experiences of my great uncle Roger before who ran off and joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force in the August of 1915 and even quoted from his letters and these I have brought out again.

The letters reflected the routines of army life.
“I was shooting on the ranges a day ago. We are in huts and it is fearful muddy all around, we have bayonet fighting, physical drill etc.”

There was the usual preoccupation of waiting for pay day followed by the comment that “the Canadian Government put half our pay in the bank so that of our $33 a month $16 go in the bank”

In some ways army life was suiting him, “I have” he wrote “put a bit of flesh on since you saw me last.”  But his inability to get on with authority led him to the first of his court-martials for refusing to follow orders. And in all of this there was that ever present knowledge that at some point soon he would be shipped to France.

There are no letters from his time on active service but there are his military records which track him across the three years he served and the regimental war diaries. Both are an invaluable insight into the life of a young soldier. His records cover everything from his state of health, further infringements of army discipline and his eventual discharge and journey from France to Britain and back to Canada.

But it is the war diary which best I think opens up the life of my great uncle. Now these regimental diaries had been introduced after the South African war and were meant to help assess how successful army units were under fire and so draw valuable lessons about how to improve performance. They do not record individual soldiers but describe the daily routines, including the periods of rest and recuperation, time in the front line, unit strength and even the weather. Here in great detail are descriptions of attacks and the losses incurred. So armed with these it is possible to know something of his life during those years.

So on October 15th 1917, “weather fine. Battalion carried on with musketry and squad drill during the morning. Afternoon Recreation. Attack in the north continued, all objectives gained”

So here is the usual mundane and routine of army life, but mixed in are the reports of planned actions, real fighting and the casualties. On the morning of October 30th 1917 the diary recorded that
“Barrage opened at 5.50 am sharp. Enemy artillery opened up immediately. Our troops left trench at 5.54 am. At 6.00 am covering fire became intense. At 6.20 am supporting platoons of “A” and “C” Coys left the trench. On account of smoke it is very difficult to see any movement beyond Woodland Copse. At 6.25 am, “B” Coy, went over the top. A considerable amount of our shrapnel in bursting short at this time, some bursts occurring right over our trench.”

These were made in the heat of battle and only later typed up. This particular entry was timed at 6.30 and signed by Captain W.J. Atherton. Shortly after wards the diary continued with
“one of the runners bringing the report was wounded enroute and the other runner Pte, LeMarquand, stopped and bandaged his comrade’s wounds before delivering the report."
A little over an hour later “C” Coy had reached its objective and the men were “digging in”

Later after the fighting was over the diary attempted an assessment of the attack which reported that the artillery barrage was “generally faulty and unsatisfactory. Many causalities being inflicted by our own artillery barrage on our men before they left their trenches for attack”
“The going was extremely heavy on account of the marshy nature of the ground over which the attacking troops had to pass. In many cases men could only advance by helping one and another long.” **
And concluded with the list of causalities which amounted to 400 men killed, missing or wounded out of a total of 590.

I guess this pretty much sums up what the rest of my family went through somewhere on the Western Front.  But nothing much else has survived.  Although we do have a short letter from my uncle to my dad in the December of 1918 and it came with a Christmas postcard which well reflects the prevailing propaganda.

The Great War had ended just a month before and uncle Fergus and his battalion of the Black Watch were in Cologne.  He wrote that “Cologne was a lovelly city with some fine cinemas” but they were prohibited from fraternizing with the civilians which for a young man of 21 was a bit of a bore given the attractive young women he came across.

But duty was never far away and preparations were being made because “we are crossing the Rhine tomorrow” and there was a determination “to show the rest of the division the way as we proved to be the finest marchers during the trek to Germany.”  In its way it is as telling as that written my my great uncle in the midst of the war. There is no sense if triumphalism just pride at the job done and the one yet to do and a respect for the German city they were occupying.

So there you have it letters home from two young men , one just eighteen and the other twenty-one.

Pictures; letter from James Rogers[Roger James Hall] February 1916, and With Best Wishes for a Happy Christmas and Victorious New Year, December 1918 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

They spoke for the children sent to Canada

Yesterday I reflected on the great debate about the correctness of sending our children to Canada.  

There are those that maintain that they did go to a better life, and that the motives of those engaged in the policy was driven by the best possible motives.  All of which  I have explored, describing  the conditions in Britain during the last quarter of the 19th century and the absence on the part of the State to intervene in meaningful way.

But the evidence is stacking up that many didn’t enjoy the warm sunlit uplands that they should have been entitled to, instead for some there was hardship loneliness and long hours of work compounded in a few cases with cruelty and abuse.

Of course much hangs on the degree to which there was knowledge at the time that things were not going right.  Many of the supporters of the policy derided and rubbished the reports of neglect and abuse, explaining them away as exceptions to the rule and mistakes which had been made in the early period of settlement.

This will not wash any more.  In the first decade of the last century a small band of socialist Guardians on the Chorlton Union argued the case against sending children from our work house to Canada citing evidence and making a principled stand.

They pointed to the long hours and lack of schooling that was the lot of many of the children which as they argued contravened our own child protection laws and above all was an abrogation of our duty to solve the problem here in Britain.

Now the research is in its early stages but I can do no worse than quote from their letters and their speeches which were all reported in the Manchester Guardian.

Speaking at a meeting of the Guardians in 1910, Catherine Garrett had said

“they were not fighting particular cases but the general principle of sending out children to another country to live and to be employed there under conditions which were illegal in their own land.  In some cases children of seven were being sent out by boards of Guardians.”

And laying aside the principle it was the simple exploitation of the young people in their care that drove William Skivington to hammer away at the issues from 1907 onwards.

“First British children from Poor Law Unions and philanthropic institutions emigrated to Canada were sent to work for their livelihood at an age which would not be tolerated in this country.  Next, these children, not being adopted, were being hired for work; they were received in Canada only because child labour was allowed there, and hence they had seven applications for every child; that for children from seven years of age the conditions denoted forced labour, not voluntary or free ; that being employed or hired work they were robbed of their childhood and of the opportunity of a sound education and that emigration of young children for working purposes savoured of traffic in child labour carried on between agencies in this country and agencies in Canada.  Children would not be allowed to go from the care of the Guardians to anything like such conditions in this country.”

Sadly they were still in a minority and every attempt to reverse the policy was defeated.  But what I think is important is that even at the time there were those who were uncomfortable at the policy of sending children to Canada and had the evidence to cast doubt on the optimistic view that we were sending these young people to a better life.

Picture;from the collection of Lori Oschefski

Sources; from the Manchester Guardian 1907-1910