A shopping list, a coal receipt and a little bit of how we lived in the winter of 1963

Now in an age of online shopping I still like the idea of making a list and going down to the shops but I have grown lazy and have reverted to that simple practice of the man with the van.

And today that was what arrived at 6.30 this morning courtesy of the latest supermarket to get into the business of delivering our groceries.

I resisted for a long time arguing the joy of getting out and meeting people and choosing for myself was a paramount adding that it was just another example of that creeping invasion of the internet into my life.

But historically of course the idea of the man with a van is not new, and if I had been from a certain class I might well have expected pretty much all of my food to have arrived at the door courtesy of the “boy and the cart” from the local tradesmen.

The only difference I suppose is that instead of sending the servant with the list or making a phone call today the order is placed by computer and of course the man in the van is equally likely to be a woman.

And as I stare at the itemised receipt I am reminded what a wonderful little bit of history this list is containing as it does not only a record of what we consume but the cost of everything from two bottles of Gavi, three of Pinot Grigio and assorted household products.

All of which neatly leads me to the shopping list made out by my old friend Marjorie Holmes in the winter of 1963 along with a receipt for two bags of coal delivered to the house by H.Hawkard, “Coal & Coke Merchant, Station Approach, Chorlton-cum-Hardy.”

Now such lists and receipts are the stuff of everyday life and most will be discarded pretty much straight away.

My father being a more canny person did tend to keep these records if only to make it easier to shop next time, which I guess is not unlike that tab on the online site which directs you to your favourites.

In the case of Marjorie few of her shopping lists have survived so I can’t say how typical this one was but it gives an idea of the cost of living back in 1963.

Moreover it indicates she was both a regular customer of the Co-op as the divi number at the top of the page testifies and that the order was delivered.

Back in 1963 we still had a Co-op on Beech Road and the coal merchants continued to operate from the Station approach after passenger trains ceased to rum from Chorlton into Central.

Of course there will be those who mutter this is small history, compared to the bigger picture which saw the Cuban Missile Crisis the year before, the assassination of President Kennedy in the November of 1963 and the slow decline in the popularity of the Conservative Government but this is my sort of history.

Pictures; shopping list circa November 1963 and coal receipt, November 1963, courtesy of Marjorie Holmes from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Snaps of Chorlton ............ nu 13 the Horse and Jockey

An occasional series featuring private and personal photographs of Chorlton.

Now along with churches pubs must be one of the most popular topics for the snapper.

Sadly the exercise rarely extends to the inside so while there are plenty of the outside of our pubs inns and hotels few of the interior have survived if they were ever taken at all.

So here is another pub exterior.

In this case of the Horse and Jockey sometime in the 1960s 0r 70s.

The pub sent me the picture and I often wonder who took it.

Picture; the Horse & Jockey circa 1960s-70 courtesy of the Horse and Jockey

Discovering Eltham

Cover of the new edition 2000

I am back in Eltham where I grew up in the 1960s on the Progress Estate.

They say you should never go back to the places of your childhood and there is something in that.

Either they look smaller and are just that bit different or whole landscapes have so altered that you begin to question if your memory is serving you well.

Now my bit of Well Hall looks much the same but they have moved the station built a motorway and many of my favourite haunts in the High Street have changed.

All of which is a lead in to Discover Eltham by Darrell Sprugeon.*

It is a “comprehensive guide to Eltham, New Eltham, Mottingham, Kidbrooke and Shooters Hill.”  So it pretty much covers everywhere I went as a child and certainly everywhere I would want to take my own grown children who while they are all Mancunians have a soft spot for where dad lived.

Mr Spurgeon sets out to offer his reader a mix of history, and places to see which are all wrapped up in a series of walks “but only where places of interest are concentrated within an area which makes walking practicable and interesting.”

Tudor Barn, Well Hall, 16th century

So “beside the famous buildings of royal Eltham, the area covered includes Wren’ great almshouse of Morden College, the extraordinary Sevendroog Castle, set amongst the ancient woodland of Shooters Hill, the Tudor remains of Well Hall, many interesting Victorian churches and two striking churches of the 1930s, two remarkable housing estates of the 20th century; sites of industrial archaeology, interesting pubs; many of which remain rural in character, and much more.”

And there is much I didn’t know. So despite living close to the church of St Barnabas on Rochester Way, I had no idea that this red brick Victorian church was originally the chapel of the Royal Naval Dockyard at Woolwich.  It was “built in 1859 and dismantled and re-erected brick by brick on its present site in 1933.”

Nor did I know of the existence of three streams which flow through Kidbrook and feed into  the Quaggy River.  Of course the clue is in the name Kidbrook, which is clearly derived from the Upper, Mid and Lower Kidbrooks.

Now water courses are a particular interest of mine.  Most today are buried underground all but forgotten but they were vital to our rural communities providing water and acting as boundary markers.

Progress Estate, Ross Way, 1915

I have to own up that it is the Eltham walks which fascinate me most.

And here there is plenty to read and see because Mr Spurgeon includes a selection of photographs along with the text and maps.

The first edition came out in 1992 and a second much revised eight years later.  I have both in front of me.  

The earlier version I bought on Amazon and the later one has come courtesy of the author.

And as a historian what I finds particularly interesting are the changes to the area in that eight years. All of which makes the book a fascinating chronicle of how Eltham has developed.

I rather think that I shall take both with me on some of the walks, thereby getting an insight into the Eltham of 1992, 2000 and of course today.

Pictures; courtesy of Darrell Spurgeon

 *Spurgeon, Darrell, Discover Eltham and its Environ, Greenwich Guide Books, 1992, revised and updated  2000

Posters from the collection

Nothing more than a poster

Pictures; posters from a collection, 1970-1993

Revealing more of the lives of the poor in Manchester

The project is simple enough and involves a study of the parents whose children were admitted to a children’s charity in the 1870’s and 80’s.

Angel Street, 1900

The charity was the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuges which was established in 1870, and is the subject of a book I wrote with their archivist to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the organisation in 2020*.

The admission books show that in that first year the reasons for accepting young people were mixed.  In some cases both parents were dead and in other’s the surviving parent was finding it hard to manage while in a few cases there was evidence of neglect, cruelty and abuse.

Now each admission and the reasons behind it are unique, and to merely lump all the reasons under the general heading of poverty is unhelpful.

Of course long hours of work, seasonal unemployment, coupled with low wages poor housing conditions and an absence of a welfare state were always going to be the main reasons why many families fell apart.

But that is too state the obvious, what I wanted to do was to examine some of those families in more detail and in the process try to bring their lives out of the shadows and better understand the achievements of the charity.

I am well aware the evidence will be fragmentary and in many cases prove a dead end, but like all such projects you never quite know what will turn up.

44 Angel Street, 1897

From the outset even from a distance of almost 150 years there is a need to respect confidentiality which for the time being means that surnames have been omitted.

The starting point was the simple observation that the parents of children admitted to the Refuge in the 1870s and 80’s would have been born in the 1840’s and 50’s when Manchester was still going through the transformation from a pleasant enough small town to what the historian, Asa Briggs described as “the shock city of the Industrial Revolution.”*

Many of these parents may well have grown against a backdrop of poverty, where long term illness, unemployment or the death of a father or mother might plunge them into the Workhouse.

The study is still in its infancy but the research is proving very interesting.  Boy A had been admitted in the March of 1870 and the notes speak of a father who was a drunkard who “ill uses the boy.”

His mother was dead and while I now know her name I have yet to find out when she died.  The father had been born in Ireland and during the 1850s the family had lived in Liverpool, where all three children were born.

Boy A left the Refuge two years later.

Boy B had been born in Spalding, Linconlshire and both his parents were dead.  He too was admitted in 1870 and left the same year.

Angel Street, 1898

Nine years earlier he had been living with his older sister who he seems to have returned to when he left the Refuge.

The records report that he was “making a living from the streets” possibly selling newspapers or matchsticks.

We can track him into the early 20th century living very close to his old home and working as a glass maker and labourer.

In both cases the boy’s parents had migrated to Manchester and one was working as a shoe maker.

I don’t pretend that two cases on their own amount to a picture but they are a start, and the search for parents does seem to be proving successful.

So as they say watch this space.

Location; Manchester

Pictures; Angel Street, 1900, m85543, 44 Angel Street, 1897, m08360,and  44 Angel Street 1898, m00195, S.L.Coulthurst, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

*A new book on the Together Trust, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/A%20new%20book%20on%20the%20Together%20Trust

**Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, 1963

One hundred years of one house in Well Hall part 19 ........... the unremarkable

This is the continuing story of one house in Well Hall Road and of the people who lived there including our family.*

Now there is nothing over remarkable about these two pictures of our garden in Well Hall sometime in the 1970s.

The quality is a bit iffy but then they are over 47 years old and were taken with one of those old clunky instamatic cameras, which processed the film straight away and turned out the image in minutes.

The film was expensive and from memory you only got eight or so shots, but there was something magical about the instant nature of the process.

Today the mobile phone or the digital camera will do it equally fast with the added advantage that it can be sent on to family and friends across the planet.

But in 1970 this was pretty neat, and how better to use it than a snap of our back garden.

I doubt any of us will remember who took them but they show the garden just as I remember it.  My sisters, and in particular our Stella laid out the garden and Dad was on hand to do the actual work.

And like all back gardens, there in the corner was the shed, full of all sorts of treasures and a real necessity given we didn’t have a cellar.

Dad put it up around 1964 and a full thirty years later it still had that powerful smell of creosote.

Looking at out garden and across to our neighbours there is nothing remarkable about any of them, but that actually makes the fascinating and in their own way a real history lesson.

Here is how we decided to lay out our small gardens back in 1970.

They may not be much different from the same gardens today or those of the 1950s, but they do offer up a picture of life in 1970, added to which they are our garden, which is enough for me.

Location; Well Hall

Pictures; the back garden of our house on Well Hall Road, circa 1970, from the Simpson collection

*One hundred years of one house on Well Hall Road,
https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/One%20hundred%20years%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Well%20Hall

The stories behind the picture ................... Manchester in the 1870s

Now you know just by looking at the photograph that there is a story here.

And the more you look it is apparent that there will be as many stories as there are people staring back at us.

It starts with those young boys, all in uniform and many holding musical instruments and goes on to the adults.

Their tall hats and beards suggest a date sometime in the 1870s.

Of course we do have to be careful because often the appearance of a person, from their clothes to the style of their hair may reflect the fashions of an early age from which the individual has not moved on from.

Finally there is the banner which is difficult toread but there is enough to suggest a message carrying a high moral tone.

So it might be logical to suppose that this is the youth wing of a religious group and that might takes us to the Salvation Army or the Boys Brigade or any one of a number of others.

The Salvation Army is a candidate in that it was formed in 1865 and just possibly so is the Boy’s Brigade which was established in 1883.

But neither fit the picture.  In the case of the Boys Brigade while the organisation was formed in 1883 in Glasgow it would be a full decade before it took root across the country and I know this is not a group of  Salvation Army, because we are in the back yard of a building belonging to the Manchester & Salford Boys’ and Girl’s Refuges which was established in 1870.

Their original purpose was to rescue destitute children from the streets of Manchester and Salford but expanded into a much wider organisation which owned homes, undertook the vocational training of young people and campaigned for better working conditions for those children engaged in a range of exploited labour.

Alongside these activities the charity was also active in the prosecution of parents who were abusive or neglectful, and offered help to others who through bereavement, ill health or unemployment found it difficult to support their children.

Finally like many other children’s charities they migrated some of those in their care to Canada.

In the case of the Manchester and Salford Boys’ and Girls’ Refuges this part of their work lasted just 34 years from 1872 till 1914 in two short periods from 1872-75 and 1883-1914.

The organisation still exists although it is now the Together Trust,  and is based in Cheadle and it is still engaged in the primary role of helping young people.

For me as a historian leaving aside all their good work it is their archive that fascinates me, which includes the records of those who went through the charity including admission books, letters and profiles and photographs.

And as you would expect the archivist of the Trust is very careful about confidentiality and the rights of individuals to their anonymity even a century and bit on from when they were admitted.

That said she regularly features some of the material in the Trust’s blog.*

And that brings me back neatly to our picture which dates from the 1873 and was taken in the back yard of the charity’s building in Strangeways.
Now this I know because I asked the archivist who for good measure supplied the message on the banner which reads Boy's Refuges, Industrial Home, Francis Street, Strangeways.

The rest as they say is for another time.

Picture; resources at the Together Trust, courtesy of the Together Trust,  http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/p/about-together-trust.html

*Getting down and dusty, the Together Trust, http://togethertrustarchive.blogspot.co.uk/