The book launch of a new history of Didsbury, today at the Parsonage

Now I am not bashful and equally I am not backward at coming forward, so I shall just announce that the pre Christmas launch of the book Didsbury Through Time will be at the Parsonage in Didsbury on the afternoon of December 1st.

Warburton Street, and E.J. Morten's bookshop, 2013 ©Peter Topping

Peter and I will be there to sign copies and the event has been organised by E.J. Morten Booksellers.

The last book on the history of Didsbury was published sixteen years ago while the two standard works  were written in 1969 and 1975.

These two books were published by E.J. Morten so it is fitting that we should have asked them to supervise the launch of the new book on the history of the area.

They specialise primarily in nineteenth & twentieth-century military history studies, travel, sporting and other fine books.

The business has been run from a cobbled street in Didsbury, since 1959 and incorporates a new retail book shop alongside the historical arm.  John Morten  has run the business since 1986 and is always glad to personally welcome trade visitors.

As he regularly travels far and wide to acquire desirable items it is preferential to call first before making a visit to our rare book room.

Didsbury Through Time is available in Didsbury from Morten’s Bookshop on Warburton Road, Didsbury, and of course from all other bookshops.  

* E.J. Morten Booksellers, 6 Warburton Street, Didsbury, Manchester M20 6WA,
Telephone: 0161 445 7629, Email: morten.booksellers@lineone.net

Didsbury Through Time is  available in Didsbury from Morten’s Bookshop on Warburton Road, Didsbury, and of course from all other bookshops.

Painting © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
Facebook:  Paintings from Pictures

Memories of a Stretford Rose Queen in 1928 by Karen J Mossman

Now one of the really nice things about writing the blog is when I can get guest contributors to write about their lives and memories.

So here  is an article by Karen who has kindly written about Molly and the Stretford Rose Queen.

In December 2013, Molly will be 99 years old and in 1928 she was Stretford’s Rose Queen.

I wanted to find out what she remembered about that time.

“We were told at school the Rose Queen was going to be chosen from Old Trafford that year. 

Previously they had been chosen from Stretford and Gorse Hill.

 I was 13 and Dad was very strict and wouldn’t let me go, so I asked Mum. 

She said I could, if I was a good girl. So I washed the pots everyday and she told me to be back before 9.00 and then Dad would never know.”

Molly’s dad was a traveller selling office stationery. He travelled to the far sides of Manchester so didn’t keep regular hours.

The judging took place at Stretford Technical College on the corner of Stretford Road and East Union Street.

The girl’s paraded the ballroom and the winners were chosen by the committee.

The Rose Queen was selected first, followed by the Ladies in Waiting, Maids of Honour and three girls to represent Faith, Hope and Charity.

A friend of Molly’s mum’s had taught her deportment and it had paid off.

It wasn’t possible to rush off afterwards and when she did she called in at her grandparent’s house on St Hilda’s Road. She didn’t have time to stop and Molly laughs as she recalled it.

I charged up to the front door shouting through the letter box: ‘I’m Queen! I’m Queen!’ But when I got home to Ayres Road, Dad was waiting for me and he was very angry.”

I asked about her dress and she said was satin-silk, “It was good quality and made especially for me. 
Unfortunately the day after, I realised I didn’t have anywhere to keep it, so I cut up the skirt and made knickers. I do regret it now. It was very silly. I wish my mother had stopped me.

The day itself was sunny and I was collected in a horse drawn landau with a coachman. 

Dad had a wooden arch at the gate of our house and sent off to Colchester for roses to decorate it with. I was told the landau had been used for a visit to Manchester by royalty.

We travelled up Chester Road to the cenotaph and the streets were lined with people who clapped as I approached. I felt regal, just like a real queen. 

We then went into Longford Park and the lawns were laid out with chairs and there was an orchestra who played music for my entrance. 

Uncle Herbert was music master at Central School in Gorse Hill and he wrote the music for me.”

Local bands also playing during the afternoon and there were various competitions including the judging of council horses as well as a fair.

“I was crowned by Councillor Sutcliffe’s wife and she gave me a necklace with a platinum setting which was bought in King Street, Manchester. 

I still have it in my jewellery box.

We then went for a meal inside Longford Hall and there was dancing in the evening followed by a firework display.”

Molly was the granddaughter of Councillor John Pedder, chairman of the Stretford Parks Committee. “

My family didn’t make a fuss of me because I was Rose Queen, and Dad didn’t even come. 

But on the day everyone treated me nicely. 

It was just a matter of luck I was chosen because I was just an ordinary girl.”

I’d have to disagree with that, Molly was picked because the committee saw how beautiful she was and how elegantly she walked.

© Karen J Mossman, November 2013

Pictures; from the collection of Karen J Mossman
 

Chorlton, Manchester and the Great War, reflections on the forthcoming centenary and an appeal for help

William Eric Lunt, aged 10 on Sandy Lane circa 1905

This is William Eric Lunt aged about 10 on Sandy Lane sometime around 1905.

He was born here in Chorlton in 1895 and died of his wounds on the Western Front in the October of 1916.

His family had farmed in the township throughout the 19th century and in all probability into the century before.

I can only begin to sense the loss his parents felt at the death of their son.

But of course this was an ordeal that was endured by so many here and across the world.

And next year we shall be remembering those years and the human sacrifice along with that vast loss of treasure which could have been used to improve the lives of people.

For most of us it will be an intensely moving moment allowing us to look back into our own families and explore their experiences.

In my case I can count six members who participated.

George Bradford Simpson, circa 1918

They included a great grandfather, my maternal grandfather, two great uncles, and two uncles.

Added to this because one of my grandmother’s was German there will be family members who were in the armed forces of Imperial Germany.

All of which is a trailer to the sheer amount of material on the Great War which will come our way next year.

For 2014 will be the centenary of the outbreak of that conflict and we will be deluged by books, documentaries, fictional accounts as well as films, plays and plenty of new specialist web sites.

And if all goes well I may be making my own contribution with a book of memories, photographs and stories from across Manchester covering the years of the First World War.

So this is an appeal for anyone who would like to share their own family history of the war to get in touch, using the comment box, or via my facebook and twitter accounts.

But, and here I can perhaps be accused of hypocrisy I do have a slight nagging doubt about the degree to which the forthcoming event will be driven by financial considerations, and also begs the question of the correctness in digging around in the lives of people who were involved and who should be afforded a degree of privacy.

Unknown British soldier, circa 1918

Added to this is the very real danger that the amount of coverage may just make the public a little tired of the event long before we reach August 2014 which will be a great disservice to the men and women who were swept up by that war.

All of which leads to the simple observation that perhaps less is better than more.

After all that war has passed out of living memory and in its way is now almost as remote to us as are the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France or indeed the Hundred Years War.

That said I think it is important that we should mark the event with an exploration of the people who “did their bit.”  

And I think it should focus more on local communities rather than the big picture which has been visited and revisited by historians since the Armistice in 1918.

Unknown British soldier, circa 1918

So I shall return to young William Eric Lunt and the other men who went to war from Chorlton, along with the families who waved them off, and those who worked the factories ran the essential services and looked after the wounded in the Red Cross voluntary hospitals all over the city.






Picture; the young William Eric Gaunt, from the Lloyd collection, and the photograph of George Bradford Simpson, and the unknown soldiers  from the collection of Andrew Simpson

The lost diary ........... life in the British Army in 1946

“31 Dec 45.  Went to New Years’ dance at Ashbridge Hospital.”

It is the sort of opening to a diary that most of us will be familiar with, and what follows is a mix of social events, the mundane trivia of army life and an intense record of the young man’s feelings for a woman.

The diary was a present from his mother for New Year, is the size of one of those old driving licenses and went with our young man all the way to Egypt.

Now I know his name and think I have tracked down a little of his life, but that I shall not reveal.

It was was passed to me by a friend who knew him well and thought something of the detail in its pages would shed some light on life in the 1940s.

And over the next few weeks that is what I intend to do.

The opening pages vividly record army life, from the cleaning of equipment, to inspections, and plenty of marching exercises, interspersed with going to the cinema, listening to the radio and trying to get into dances.

It is I guess the everyday preoccupations of a young man in the services.

But running through the first part of the diary is that sad reference to the woman he had fallen for.  In early January he writes that “I still love her” and this remains a a constant through the early part of the diary, getting shortened to “I.S.LH” and although she went off and married someone else she remained special to him.

Now there will be those who argue this is an intrusion or that these are too trivial to warrant a story.

But I disagree, no where will names appear, the identities of everyone will be kept secret and the focus will always be on how a young man away from home got on with life in the army in the years directly after the last world war.

Picture, from the diary January 1946

Views of Urmston in the July of 1957

I am never too keen on these picture postcards which pack four of five images together.

Now it is true that you do get more for your money but the downsize its that they are smaller, the quality is not so good and you lose some of the detail.

Having said that Joyce decided to use this one to send a message to Miss Ella Hooper in the July of 1957 from Urmston.

She was “having a lovely time and lovely weather at Urmston, making the most of bed and the weather before I start teaching next Monday.”

Picture; Flixton Road and Moss Road, Church Road and Memorial Gardens and Stretford Road by Lilywhite Photographs, courtesy of Tuck DB, http://tuckdb.org/

The story of the Artic Convoys, today at Chorlton Library

Back in February, there was one of those remarkable days when a lot of us came together to honour four people who gave up six years of their lives in the service of their country during the last world war.*

One was a fighter pilot, two served on the Atlantic convoys and one drove a petrol lorry across the city during the blitz.

And today Bernard Leach will be giving a talk on the Arctic Convoys at Chorlton Library between 2-4pm as part of Chorlton Book week and their Grand Day Out event for the over 50's

"Chorlton Good Neighbours launched a campaign to get a medal awarded to the Arctic Convoy veterans, which was successful when the government announced the awarding of the Arctic Star medal.

Bob Cowan, 93, a Chorlton Good Neighbours regular, and an Arctic Convoy veteran, was at the centre of the MEN & Chorlton Good Neighbours campaign which led to the Arctic Star medal eventually being awarded. He finally received his medal over the summer, but it was just sent in the post and as he is nearly blind, he mislaid it. I recently helped him to find it.

I saw Bob this morning whizzing along in Chorlton on his walking frame and he has agreed to come to the event at the library. Cllr Sheila Newman has agreed to present Bill with the Arctic Star medal at this event on behalf of Chorlton Good Neighbours and all the local people who would like to acknowledge the important role that Bob and other local ex-servicemen and women played in WW2. 

All are welcome at this event

There is a video of Bob talking about the Arctic Convoys at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZXWDlZNweE

Bob Cowan - the Arctic Convoys and other memories of World War 2
www.youtube.com

Bob Cowan is soon to be 93 years old. He was born in Moss Side, Manchester. Here he talks about his memories and experience of war at sea during"  Bernard Leach

*“ordinary lives in extraordinary times” remembering and honouring four from Chorlton http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/ordinary-lives-in-extraordinary-times.html

Picture, Bob Cowan during the war

A new book for Didsbury

There will be some and I know this to be true who will think that a story about a book with my name on it is just outrageous self promotion.

The cover of the new book

Nevertheless today across Manchester on the shelves of bookshops both large and small will be a new book on the history of Didsbury.

This is Didsbury Through Time, which is a joint venture between me and local artist Peter Topping, and I am quite pleased with the result.

It is a collection of old images of Didsbury juxtaposed with an equal number of new ones and a bit of text.

Peter sourced the old photographs and added the contemporary ones and I wrote a series of comments about them.

It is a well tried and trod formula and one that does appeal.  But we decided on something a tad different.

First because Peter is an artist we have included some of his painting instead of photographs and presented them in a slightly different way.

Some authors put the old black and white pictures  first followed by the same spot shot in colour, and all the images are grouped by a theme, so all the pubs are together, followed by the churches, then a collection of carts, trams and horse drawn wagons, and lastly the odd street scene.

The Italian dancers at the Coronation Festival in 1911 on Wilmslow Road.

In our book as you turn the pages the order of old and new is mixed up and because we both like walking we have taken the reader along a route from the east to the west of Didsbury, which allows people to come across buildings, street scenes and quite a few hidden gems just in the way you would if you walked through the township.

And we have tried also to do something different with the text.

All too often in such books the author just tells the reader what they can see for themselves, whether it be the lack of parked vehicles in 1900, the profusion of horse drawn wagons or the simple observation that a lot more men wore hats in the past.

Instead we decided to write about named individuals who lived behind the front doors, sold merchandise from the shop on the corner or left their mark in some other way.

Bertha on the "Flying Man"

And one such person was Bertha Geary aged thirteen of School Lane who in 1911 heard history.

"We saw the flying man on Tuesday night fly over head.  Beaumont is his name.  I wish you could have seen him.  

It made such a noise.”

He was André Beaumont and he was one of 30 competitors in the Daily Mail Circuit of Britain Air race in 1911. 

Flying in a Blériot XI he was the first to complete the course which was no mean achievement as many of the aircraft either failed to take off or crashed along the way.

So to him went the £10,000 prize which was awarded to a man whose real name was Lieutenant Jean Louis Conneau of the French Navy.

All of which today we take for granted but was pure magic and wonderment to young Bertha, for who the persistent buzzing of the aircraft’s engines above her head was something new and I guess louder than anything she had yet encountered.

Peter's painting of the Olde Cock

And what Bertha did on the postcard she sent her friend was to write her own address, and with this I was able to track her on a street directory, find out her surname and look her up on the census record.

All of which brought  Miss Geary and her family out of the shadows and led us to know a little bit more about the people who lived in Didsbury.

Pictures; from Didsbury Through Time. 

Didsbury Through Time is published this week and available in Didsbury from Morten’s Bookshop on Warburton Road, Didsbury, and of course from all other bookshops.  


Painting © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures, Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk Facebook: Paintings from Pictures