Just what you find on the way to Lymm ……..

I won’t be alone in collecting old canal warehouses.

The warehouse, 2021

They were during the 18th and early 19th century at the cutting edge of design, and were later copied by the first railway companies as the template for warehouse design.

They were created to solve the need to tranship goods from canal to road, and road to canal, and consisted of entrances on both sides from which produce could be brought into the warehouse and stored for onward shipment. 

These entrances were known as loop-holes and were supplemented by large arches at water level which allowed boats to enter the building.

The warehouse, coal year, wharf, 1900 

So I was more than pleased that on Andy’s adventure to Lymm, he took a slight detour and ended y past Warrington Lane and took the pictures of the warehouse which sits beside the Duke’s canal.

The site has changed very little in the last 150 years, and if I had access to maps from the late 18th and early 19th centuries I am sure they would show the same.

And that pretty much is that, other than to say I will go looking for any plans for the redevelopment of the warehouse.

Location, on the Bridgewater Canal,

Picture; the warehouse, 2021, from the collection of Andy Robertson, and the site in 1900, from theOS map of Cheshire, 1900courtesy of Digital Archives Association, https://digitalarchives.co.uk/

The story is simply that there is no story …….. the Victorian family

We will all have some family pictures with faces whose names are lost in time.

"Uncle Bob and Aunty Jean and mother"

And even if there is a name, the family connection has been severed leaving just a host of questions.

So, who were Uncle Bob and Aunty Jean? Their names are recorded on the back of this picture postcard along with the comment that “mother is on the left”.

But just who they were, or when and where the picture was taken were never added.

I wish there were more.

Of course, the fashion historian will be able to suggest the decade the picture might have been taken, but alas I am not qualified to pass such a judgement.

But at least the three are young enough to be wearing clothes from the time they sat for the photo shoot.  With older people there is always that danger that they are wearing the fashions of their youth, which might stretch back into the past.

Sadly, there is no clue from the backdrop or from the objects held by the two women which in probability were also photographic props, and the name of the studio is absent from the back of the card.

Head and shoulders

So, I am forced back on the questions I know there are no answer to.

What special occasion might have warranted the visit to the studio and why is only one of the three staring directly at the camera?

And am I the only one who thinks there is something slightly amiss with the three heads, as if they have been superimposed?

Unknown

But then perhaps that is what comes of staring at a picture for too long, looking for something significant which offers up clues to the picture’s story.

I have Tony Goulding to thank for the picture, which he spotted in the local Oxfam shop, which begs another question, of how it got to be donated, and whether there is a connection between it and the other one he sent me of a young girl.

It would be easy to fall back on speculation, which can be fun but is not very historical, so I shall close with the thought that whoever the four were, at least they have come out into the daylight for a short while.



Location; unknown

Picture; the 3 and the one, dates unknown

The Parsonage in Didsbury by Derrick A. Lea

This is another of the drawings  of our local artist Derrick A. Lea for a while.

He lived here in Chorlton from the late 1940s till the 1970s, produced many fine woodcuts and has been pretty much forgotten.  Of the ten pictures in the collection six are of Chorlton and all but two of these have featured in the blog.*

But this one is the Parsonage in Didsbury and given that other people have written about the place with far more knowledge than I here is an extract from the site of The Didsbury Parsonage Trust.

“The Didsbury Parsonage (Old Parsonage) is a Grade II listed building situated opposite St James' Church, adjacent to the original village green of Didsbury, Manchester. The building and gardens were left to the citizens of the City of Manchester by Alderman Fletcher Moss in his will following his death in 1919.

The building is probably the second oldest one in Didsbury after St James' Church. It may have been built, at least in part, around 1650 ‘for the use of the minister’.  

The most famous and influential resident was probably Fletcher Moss

In 1864, Fletcher Moss, then aged 22, moved in with his parents and subsequently bought the house in 1885. He died in 1919 after an active life of public service and was renowned for his in depth writing on local history, flora and fauna and local people.

Alderman Moss bequeathed the house and gardens to the City of Manchester on his death in 1919 because he wanted the house and its contents to remain, as far as possible, intact 'to show what a comfortable house of the olden times was like'. Unfortunately, the house became difficult to maintain and in 1922 many features, including stained glass and fireplaces were removed.

In due course the house became an art gallery, containing much of the Fletcher Moss Collection, which included several Turner paintings (now in the National Collection). The emphasis of the displays was on items made in or associated with Manchester.

As an ‘economic measure’, the City of Manchester closed the gallery in the 1980's.  In the fine gardens can be seen the graves of several of Fletcher Moss’s dogs, under the yew tree in the shrubbery fronting the house.”**

Picture; The Old Parsonage, Didsbury, Derrick A. Lea







* http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Derrick%20A%20Lea
** The Didsbury Parsonage Trust, http://didsburyparsonagetrust.org.uk/history/

Clytemnestra.... and other Greek women ....... courtesy of Natalie Haynes .... on the wireless

 Despite a lifelong fascination for all things Roman and Greek I missed out on classical mythology.

Clytemnestra

It was not top of the list of things to be taught at Samuel Pepys Secondary Modern, and by the time I got to Crown Woods I was pretty much locked into a variety of A level courses which did not admit time for the stories of ancient Rome or Greece.

I have tried to rectify this, but alas what I know is patchy and pretty much comes from comics, and those Sword-and-Sandal films, which were a genre of largely Italian-made historical and biblical epics that dominated the Italian film industry from 1957 to 1965. 

And in them there are plenty of togas, swords, and semi naked classical statues and the odd Greek hero. 

All of which draws me to  Natalie Haynes who the BBC describes as  'Rock star classicist' and reformed stand-up is obsessed with the ancient world”. 

And she is back with another series "in which she explores (historical and mythological) lives from ancient Rome and Greece that still have resonance today. 

They are hilarious and tragic, mystifying, revelatory. And they always tell us more about ourselves now than seems possible of stories from a couple of thousand years ago.

Aegisthus Discovers the Body of Clytemnestra Killed by Orestes

Today Natalie stands up for Clytemnestra, who has been characterised as the worst wife in Greek mythology. 

This is open to debate: she's certainly a good mother, if a little bit murderous of her husband. But it turns out that Agamemnon probably deserves it. 

After all he sacrifices one of their daughters to Artemis without a second thought and then turns up at home years later with Cassandra, the future-seeing woman he has 'won' as a prize (also read: trafficked and enslaved) at the Battle of Troy. 

These actions demonstrate a certain lack of respect for his wife, as well as cruelty of the highest order. Cassandra reads the room, obviously, but nobody listens to her. Clytemnestra has a good legal brain and states her case convincingly. But it's unlikely to end well.

With Professor Edith Hall.

Producer...Mary Ward-Lowery”.*

Pictures; Clytemnestra by John Collier, 1882, John Collier, Clytemnestra, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clytemnestra,courtesy of Wikipedia, and  Aegisthus Discovers the Body of Clytemnestra Killed by Orestes - Charles-Auguste Van den Berghe (1798-1853), 2014,this file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

*Clytemnestra, The Long View, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wrk4

Adventures on Burton Road and beyond ………..the silly story

As adventures go it was all pretty mundane and over in less than an hour.

Adventures by tram, 2021

But for someone who has not ventured into Didsbury from Chorlton for a long time it was a bit of a change.

I could blame the virus, but that really was only an issue until I had had the two vaccinations, and then it was just sheer laziness.

So with an appointment at the drop in centre out of the way, it was the slow meandering walk up Burton Road towards the metro stop.

The sun was promising to crack the paving stones, a few couples were already sampling coffee, and others seemed to be about to join them having done the morning school run. 

A shopping experience, 2021

But most of the shops were closed, leaving me to gaze at their displays and yet again ponder on Burton Road’s transformation from small ordinary street full of traditional shops to that mix of cafes, restaurants and “interesting retail experiences”.

In the 1970s I remember that the cutting edge of cosmopolitan dinning was the Canadian Charcoal Pit, which after a night in the Old House at Home was where you ended up.

And because I lived on the corner of Burton Road and Malvern Grove the burger or “dog”, wrapped in its tinfoil would still be warm when I got home.  

If I am honest it was the corn relish and the tomato variant which made the meal.

There may have been other restaurants and takeaways in 1970, but I don’t remember them, and within a year I had moved on, although not before I returned to the house in the September of the following year, and with nowhere to live, slept in the cellar on a settee for a few nights.

And then it must have been a full decade and a bit before I was back on Burton Road which had undergone that retail change, which was fine if you wanted Victorian antique lace, or an Art Nouveau lampshade, but not if you were after a lb. of potatoes, four old fashioned screws and a gallon of paraffin.

The shop with the lot, 2021

I might be wrong,  and the transformation may have been later, but I am confident someone will correct me.

Leaving me just to reflect that the stretch of Wilmslow Road, from Barlow Moor Road down past the old Police Station, has retained more of those old traditional retail businesses, although like so many high streets it has its fair share of charity shops, which seem more upmarket than those you might find in other parts of the city.

Location; Didsbury

Pictures; Burton Road, Burton Road Metro stop and Wilmslow Road, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Now and then ..........The Roaring Twenties ...... and post Covid Britain

I am a great fan of the Radio 4 series the Long View, which seeks to explore comparisons with events today and similar ones in the past.

Entertainment, 1926, Josephine Baker, Paris

Today's programme turns on the expected burst in activity across the economy, politics, and the world as we move out of the stagnation which was Covid.

And for some that leads to that decade following the Great War when there was an explosion of new ways of doing things, from the Charleston to the age of the cinema.

"Break-neck technological innovation, a realignment in both British politics and the global order, a decade of economic boom and bust. Jonathan Freedland and his guests ask if the post-pandemic 1920s deserve their golden reputation and whether we're now on the brink of a second 'Roaring Twenties'.

Joining Jonathan to look back at the 1920s and forward to the 2020s are the historian Dr Luke Blaxill of the University of Oxford, the economists George Magnus and Dr Linda Yueh and journalists Tim Stanley of The Telegraph and John Harris of The Guardian. The actor is Beattie Edmondson.

Manchester, 2021 as Covid regulations are relaxed

Producer Julia Johnson"

Pictures; Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston at the Folies-Bergère, Paris, 1926, Walert, partying in Stevenson Square, 2021 from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*The Roaring Twenties, The Long View, Radio 4, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000wrjs

Better late than never …. travelling the tram to Trafford

I am part of that small band of enthusiasts who opt to ride the new Metro lines as soon as they open.

But for the obvious reasons my adventure on the Trafford Centre spur has been delayed.

It opened in March of last year and we got to travel the route on Saturday.

Usually in the first few days of a new route you can spot the enthusiasts, they come armed with a camera, and in some cases a sound recorder, and a few have been known to even get off at each stop to photograph the platform and accompanying Metro furniture.

We just stuck to the journey from Pomona with a stop over at Barton Road Bridge.

And I confess never made it into the Trafford Centre, visiting instead a car showroom.

Like many travellers, what I like about the tram, is that it is quick, and offers an expanding set of destinations.  

Added to which there is the ease with which you can change routes, which reminds me of the Underground at home.

And like the Tube, its stops are full of clutter and interesting things to clock.

Location; the Trafford Centre route

Pictures; travelling the tram, 2021, from the collection of Andrew Simpson