A Mancunian pilot and plane from the Great War ….. stories of porcelain

We are a full century and a bit on from the Great War, and I find it remarkable that so much of the ephemera from that conflict has survived.

Leaving aside the big stuff, like tanks, aircraft and memorials, it is the little things like postcards, letters and pictures along with medals which have survived in large numbers.

In the usual run of these things many would have been lost, destroyed, or so damaged that they were eventually discarded.

Now I know these items once counted in thousands, but the passage of over 100 years was never going to be kind to many of them.

And of these it is the crested porcelain figures which I would have thought were most likely to have been doomed.

Afterall they are fragile, easily chipped or broken and so should not have survived in such great numbers.

All of which brings me to this fine example, which I rather like.

It belongs to my old friend David Harrop and arrived at his home today.

His crested china collection includes everything from bull dogs, battle ships, tanks and ambulances, but this is the first aircraft I have seen.

The porcelain companies had switched with the outbreak of war to making themed war pieces and with an eye to sales added the crests of towns and cities, making the pieces just hat been more attractive and novel.

It worked up to a point but in the case of the battle ship HMS Manchester it fell short of reality, because during the Great War the Royal Navy had no such ship in service.

Still I doubt that commercial interests or that of patriotism was ever going to get in the way of delivering a piece of war porcelain which would sell we…

Picture; crested chine aircraft, circa the Great War, courtesy of David Harrop

A bit of outrageous self promotion

Now everyone should have their fifteen minutes of fame …………. And Emilka gave me mine.

On a visit to the British Library in London and with an odd few minutes to spare, Emilka searched for me, and there,  top of the list was my book on Manchester and the Great War.*

Somewhere lurking in the database will be the others, including the one on Chorlton-cum-Hardy in the  first half of the 19th century,  and Didsbury Through Time.

And in due course there will be the  five I have written with Peter Topping on Hough End Hall, Manchester and Chorlton pubs, the Quirky history of Chorlton-cum-Hardy and the places of worship in Chorlton and Didsbury.

“The British Library (BL) is the national library of the United Kingdom and one of the world’s largest libraries. 

Its collections include more than 150 million items, in over 400 languages including books, magazines, manuscripts, maps, music scores, newspapers, patents, databases, philatelic items, prints and drawings and sound recordings”.**

Leaving me just to return to the book, which was Manchester Remembering 1914-18, which told the story of the city and the Great War through" the voices of those who lived and is vividly illustrated with evocative images", most of which were supplied from the collection of David Harrop.

And allows me to offer up another fifteen minutes of fame to David, who many will know for his his excellent collections of memorabilia from both world wars and the history of the Post Office.

Location; British Library

Picture, from the collection of Emilka Cholewicka, 2019

*A new book on Manchester and the Great War, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.com/2017/03/reflecting-on-anniversaries.html

**The British Library, https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/british-library

Goodbye to that College in Didsbury part 11 ....... and to some of those buildings soon to vanish

I didn’t expect to return to stories of Didsbury College, written back in 2015.

The Drama Hall

After all it was eight months ago when the last farewell party on the green took place and since then the buildings have waited their fate.

Now the Admin Block along with the old chapel and the Gatehouse are listed and will receive some tender care and attention before their future is determined.

But that assortment of 1960s buildings along with the huts have no such future.

The Drama Hall, Assembly Hall and Simon Building still look respectable enough but many of the other additions on the site are tired and pretty much show their age.

So for all those who remember them all with a mix of fondness and other emotions here are two of Peter’s paintings of a little bit of the college which will soon be gone.

They were part of the big expansion in 1967 which the Guardian reported would double the number of students to two thousand making it “the biggest training college in England and Wales.”*

The Simon Building

It would be another five years before I walked through the door of the Assembly Hall, signed up to the NUT and began a post grad course which set me off on 35 years of teaching in Manchester schools.

Not that this was my first encounter with the college, two years earlier I can remember standing in the Drama Hall and listening to Duster Bennet singing amongst other songs the magic Bright Lights.

It was not the best attended of shows but his performance was all you needed, along of course with the bottle of Newky Brown.**

I can’t even say that I enjoyed drinking the stuff but it came in a bottle, was  easier to walk around with and was the chosen drink of all serious students.

What I didn’t know was Duster Bennet was just three years older than me had already had a fine musical career and sadly died in a car crash in 1976 aged just 29.

The Lodge

So standing in front of the Drama Hall brought back many memories.

I can’t claim that I ever spent much time in the grander buildings.

Miss Hargreaves my personal tutor had an office in that imposing 18th century building which was once a home, became a school and Wesleyan college before finishing  up as the admin block for the College.

We had the occasional seminar there and on a cold November day in the 1980s I went looking for an old colleague who was based in one of the small rooms off the main corridor, and later still my old friend Pierre showed me round the place just before its closure.

As for the other two listed buildings, the library which was the chapel was somewhere I rarely went and had no reason to call in at the Lodge.

So for me it was those 1960s buildings where I filled my time along with the huts whose floors creaked, and which were cold in winter and stuffy in summer.

The huts are still there and may be just maybe Peter will paint them as part of his collection of the college buildings; after all I guess some may even predate the Drama Hall and Simon Building.

And I rather suspect that for most of the students who passed through in the years after 1967 it will be the Drama Hall, Assembly Hall and Simon Building which will loom large in their memories.

Paintings; the Drama Hall, Simon Building and Lodge © 2015 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
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*Plan to cater for over 4,000 student teachers, George Hawthorne, The Guardian, April 19 1967

**Newcastle Brown

A Chorlton Chartist, co-operative ventures and a wish which almost came true

Finding a Chorlton Chartist is not an obsession, although I do have to admit it does flirt into my mind quite regularly.

During the late 1830s into the 50s the Chartists campaigned for an extension of the vote to working men alongside a raft of other issues which were about improving the conditions of the working class.  Now friends smile and point out that a rural community like Chorlton was both isolated and unlikely to entertain radical politics.  To which I have to reply why not?

We were only 4 miles away from Manchester, many of our people would have visited the city and certainly many more would have come into the township in the course of the year.  The French Revolution and the periodic “hard times” had stirred the pot and I just cannot see how the radical ideas for a better society would not have been known and debated here.

After all there is no special reason why rural communities can not challenge the establishment.  The Tolpuddle Martyrs who were transported for being in a trade union were farm labourers, the Swing Riots in the south and west were about agricultural workers protesting at new methods of farming and alongside our farming families there had been  handloom weavers who themselves became more radicalized during the early years of the 19th century.

So it is possible even if we don’t as yet have the evidence.

And I was reminded of this when I read my friend Lawrence’s recent post on his blog, Hardy Lane Scrapbook Now there were plenty of people attempting to follow the Rochdale Pioneers and set up local co-operative societies which aimed to offer good quality food and goods at a decent price with the added benefit of a loyalty dividend from the profits to be shared out amongst the members.  , The Manchester and Salford Co-op was founded on Christmas Day 1858 and Lawrence in his post, Origin of M&S goes a little way to disentangle the myth from the reality.*

Nor were the Rochdale Pioneers the first to attempt “co-operation” but what I suppose marks them out is that they succeeded where the others for a variety of reasons failed.
And one of those groups which did not make it long past their brave start was the Hume and Chorlton Joint Stock Provision Company founded in the October of 1840 with one shop on Clarendon Street Chorlton on Medlock.

The Chartist paper the Northern Star covered their launch and early expansion in 1840 and for me it sums up exactly what these early co-operators wanted to do.

“Hulme And Chorlton. – At a meeting of the Committee of management of the Hulme and Chorlton Joint Stock Provision Company, October 22nd it was unanimously resolved, in consequence of the increase in business, and for accommodation of shareholders and other, that we open another shop in the township of Hulme.  The above resolution has been carried into effect, and we have opened a shop at 10 Melbourne-street, Bradshaw-street, Hulme.  We are determined to make the shopkeepers of the above township sell their bread at the same price we have made them in Chorlton, that is, the 4lb. Loaf for 7d.  On opening our shop in Hulme, several customers, on calling for a 4lb. Loaf, tendered 8d. For it; and when the shopman returned them one penny they seemed surprised.  This shews that the working classes are not alive to their own interest, or else they would have known the advantage of co-operation.  If they will only pay us a visit, we will assure them they will lose nothing by it; but on the contrary, gain.  We likewise call on all Corn Law repealers to visit our shops, and we will give them what they have been fighting for a long time-namely, cheap bread.  Working men, come forward and assist us in keeping down the profitmongers.  Shares, 5s each may be paid in instalments of 6d per week.  The Committee meet every Thursday evening, at eight o’clock, at their rooms, over the shop, No 26, Clarendon Street, Chorlton.” The Northern Star November 7 1840

Sadly it seems they fell by the wayside.  A trawl of the directories for 1841 and 1850 show no listings for the Hulme and Chorlton Joint Stock Provision Company, and they are not mentioned again in the Northern Star for 1840.

It may be that like many of these early societies they lacked sufficient resources.  Certainly the price of their shares at 5s [25p] was far less than the Rochdale Pioneers who just four years later set their shares at £1.  And the 1840s were a hard time.

Now I have every expectation that more will come out about this co-operative venture in Hulme and Chorlton on Medlock.  It maybe that later editions of the Northern Star for the years from 1841 onwards will have something on them and locked away in the Working Class Library in Salford there may be a manifesto, a set of accounts or even a contemporary description.

And in just the same way I travel in hope that there will be a reference to my Chorlton Chartist.  After all just as I was concluding the chapter on the murder of Francis Deacon I came across a link to the Chartists.  Francis had been murdered in a local beer house by George Leech, the husband of the woman who ran it.

The papers at the time carried the lurid details of the murder and the degree to which George had a drink problem and regularly deserted his wife, but one of them in an almost throw away comment described how he had been involved in industrial action as a railwayman in 1847 and stood trial for conspiracy.

This was a time of heightened social and industrial unrest.  The second great Chartist petition had been rejected by Parliament just five years before and had been followed by a general strike commonly called the Plug Riots and in the year after the murder of Francis Deakin  another petition would also be ignored.

Leech was tried with others some of whom were Chartists and the trial popularly referred to by the Northern Star as the “monster indictment“ has the flavour of a show trial. But he was acquitted “as nothing more was proved than “picquetting.”

Now I would have preferred someone a little more heroic as my link to Chartism but history is messy and you don’t always get what you hope for.  And there might even be more to George than the murder and the drunken stories, so we shall see.

Picture’s The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, April 10, 1848, photograph taken by William Kilburn, from the Wikipedia site  & the Parish Church as it would have looked during the 1840s from the collection of Tony Walker

*http://hardylane.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/origins-of-m.html

Looking out from the Crescents some time before now

The caption just says Salford from the Crescent and is undated.

But the artist was William Westall who was born in 1784 and died in 1850.

Now that doesn’t help very much but at least I can be confident that it will not have been between 1800 and 1806 when the young artist went east with Admiralty on a voyage that took him to Australia and on to China and India.

Later in 1830 he published Great Britain Illustrated and around that time was also producing drawings for the publisher Rudolf Ackerman.

Location; Salford

Picture; Salford from the Crescent, William Westall, date unknown, m77235, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

Goodbye to that College in Didsbury part 12 ....... passing the lodge without a second thought

Now the thing about lodge houses even those that belong to posh mansions is that most people just ignore them.

In the old days distinguished visitors would barely give the lodge and its occupant a second glance while for tradesmen, the curious passerby and those up to no good the chap at the gate was someone you were polite to or tried to avoid.

And in the year I walked past the lodge into Didsbury College I don’t think I even really noticed it but this grade II listed building is worth a second look.

I can’t be sure when it was built.  It is not there on the 1854 OS map but has made its appearance on the map for 1894.

The original building consisted of an entrance room, a small narrow staircase and two equally small rooms above.

Now I may be wrong but there is no evidence from the census returns that it was a residential property but that said there may be someone out there who can tell me different.

Certainly the security guard we talked to thought so but I am not so sure.

That said there is today very little of the original save a built in cupboard in the main room and that staircase.

All of which just leaves us with Peter’s painting of the building as it looked when the MMU still ran the site and students and lecturers passed on their way to work.

Paintings; the Lodge © 2013 Peter Topping, Paintings from Pictures,
Web: www.paintingsfrompictures.co.uk
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A chance conversation and a discovery ........ a five minute encounter on the bus

Now I know that Manchester is a cosmopolitan city but what are the chances that a casual conversation with a stranger on the bus should reveal that not only were we both from London but both grew up in Greenwich not more than a mile from each other?

Manchester 2009

Not only was that but our early years spent in Peckham again just a mile away.

It had started with the woman asking me if the bus terminated at the bus station and in the course of a few minutes we picked up on each other's London accent and the rest as they say became the surprise of the evening.

We never exchanged names but I discovered that her son lived in Chorlton and her daughter in Levenshulme and that she was moving to Southport where her brother lives.

And there I suspect the story comes to an end but if there is one thing I have discovered over the years you can never say never.

So a chance conversation and a five minute encounter on the bus have yet to run its course.

My fellow traveller lived in Lee which is just down the road from Eltham and back beyond that lived on the Old Kent Road which with a short walk down Pomeroy Street across Queens Road brings you to Lausanne Road where we lived in the 1950s and early 60s.

Eltham, 2014

Now I don’t draw any more significance from the set of coincidences other than to say it made me feel rather happy.

Manchester is my adopted city where I have lived since 1969 which means that I have been here far longer than in London and love the place.

But there is no getting away from the pull of where you started off in life.  That said all those other experiences do get overlaid.

And like many it can lead to a bit of confusion as to who I am.

Woolwich and the river 2011

Most people maintain I have a London accent and one expert correctly placed me across the river in south east London.

My sons will affectionately mimic me but forty years in the North have changed it subtly, but when my sisters are up or I get excited it reverts to that Eltham accent.

And I never quite feel at home until the train pulls across the river into Waterloo Station.

But all my grown up experiences have been here in Manchester, our kids were all born here and I get a quiet pride from walking the streets and taking in the history.

Setting all that aside I can also fell a pull for the Highlands where the family originated, and Newcastle upon Tyne where they settled after crossing the border, and have even been known to reminisce about Derby where mother grew up after the family arrived from Germany.

Quite a lot really following that chance conversation.

Location; all over

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson and Elizabeth & Colin Fitzpatrick