Looking for a glimpse of the 1970s from Piccadilly Railway Station ...... a SELNEC bus, some vanished buildings and a slice of Black Forest gateau ......... nostalgia doesn’t get any better

Now if you are of a certain age this will be a pretty familiar scene.

It is one I saw countless times as I walked down from the station towards Piccadilly Gardens.

At first glance it isn’t that different from today but the old bus in its SELNEC livery and the buildings in the far distance behind the Joshua Hoyle warehouse on the left place us sometime in the 1970s.

And if that wasn’t enough the message on the back firms up the date because it is a request to John Dees at Piccadilly Radio to play a song by John Holt who was a reggae singer from Jamaica.

What I especially like about the photograph is that it is a picture of Manchester which I can instantly relate to.

Unlike all those old faded black and white and sepia images from the beginning of the 20th century this is from my time.

If pushed I could tell you where I had been and where I was going while walking down the station approach and who I was with and even where I was living.

Of course for many looking at it today it is as remote as those old photographs from 1900.

And even for me it is a full forty and something years ago which just about sets a shiver going through me and makes me think of just how things have changed in four decades.

Back them the height of sophistication was the cassette tape, which played discreetly while entertaining friends to a meal which started with prawn cocktails, finished with Black Forest gateau and was accompanied by a bottle of Blue Nun.

The debate on the Picc-Vic underground connection rumbled on, and no one had yet got round to putting some rickety chairs on a street corner, serving up some tapas and over expensive wine and calling it cafe society.

Location; Manchester

Picture; Approach from Piccadilly Railway Station, circa 1970s, from the collection of David Harrop 

Well Hall House that fine 18th century pile which went in 1930

Well Hall House date unknown

Now I am fascinated by Well Hall House.

It was built in 1733, replacing the Tudor manor house and was demolished in 1930 and it is a place I have written about and will do so again later next month.

But in the meantime I could not resist posting this picture, which comes from the Edith Nesbit Society.

I don’t have a date but it is clearly late 19th century and may date from when Edith Nesbit lived there.

She is of course known for her children’s books some of which feature Eltham in their stories, but there is one in particular which describes in detail the house and its gardens.

This is the Red House which was written in 1902 just three years after she moved in to Well Hall House,

Which just leaves me to  finish with the picture again.

We are looking at the front of house from the large garden which separated the building from Well Hall Lane.

To our left was the ornamental garden and at the rear more gardens, the moat and three ponds.

The orginal estate had consisted of 33 acres but Edith and her husband took a lease on just 7.

Picture; courtesy of the Edith Nesbit Society, http://www.edithnesbit.co.uk/

Back in Chorlton in the October of 1961

Pemberton Arcade, Barlow Moor Road

“Just a sixpenny bus ride from Piccadilly, Manchester is Chorlton-cum-Hardy – the little green meadow hamlet that grew and grew into a busy suburb.”*

I came across this opening sentence in a pile of old newspapers passed to me by Oliver Bailey.

The collection is a treasure trove of our recent history including reports, photographs and stories.

Most come from papers which have now vanished like the Manchester Comet, the Manchester City News and the Chorlton edition of the Stretford and Urmston Journal but a few despite looking very dated are still with us.

The Manchester Evening News featured Chorlton in its series on People and Places in the October of 1961.  I guess the approach fitted a template which consisted of some contemporary photographs, conversations with locals and reflections on how the area had changed over time.

The photographs included Oswald Road School, the Library and that row of shops on Barlow Moor Road “known years ago as Pemberton Arcade and still remembered as that by older Chorlton folk, [which] provides cover and room for stalls which give it that market atmosphere.”

Mrs Mehre Usha and Mrs Raj Kumai, "window shopping"

And there were pictures of local residents like Mrs Kathleen Foy at a “her pressing board in her shop on Beech Road,” Keith Hannam, “who went to school in Chorlton and now owns a small butcher’s shop in Chorlton Green” and “Mrs Mehre Usha and her sister in law Raj Kumai” who were out for the day “window shopping.”

All of which is good stuff for any local historian but the paper also reveals more detail on events which have all but been forgotten.

Back in 1961 we still had a railway station, which for three years had been selected as “the tidiest in south Manchester, but new travelling habits have placed the fate of the spotless old station in the balance.”  So “officialdom has now given the station a final reprieve to see if the public really wants its station.  If not it will die.”

Now of course we know it didn’t survive but all too often its closure is recorded in just a sentence with little detail around the debate on its future.

In that respect the article is a wonderful piece of history more so because it includes people who were in the 70s and 80s and who talk of that older Chorlton.

“Old timers will recall Chorlton and Withington joining Manchester at the start of the century, and the first trams to Chorlton in May 1907.  Grey haired Mrs Mary Ford aged 84 has lived in the district all her life [and] for the past 52 years in her present gas lit home.  She remembers a smaller more peaceful Chorlton. ‘It was just a village with lots of green fields and very beautiful.’”

Furniture to buy at Waring & Gillow

This I think marks the article out for here we have in one place the memories of people who can take us back to the late 1870s and 1880s.

So I shall be returning to this snapshot of Chorlton in 1961 and let the residents throw more light on what our township was like over a hundred years ago.

But in the meantime I can  not resist one of those old adverts which more than anything show how far we have travelled in the 55 years since the story was published.

Pictures, by John Featherstone, from my copy of the Manchester Evening News October 20, 1961

*The country cousin who grew and grew .... from GOING YOUR WAY CHORLTON-CUM-HARDY focus on People and Places, Manchester Evening News October 20, 1961

Not all the interesting stuff is inside the city’s Art Gallery ….

I have been a fan of Manchester’s Art Gallery* for nearly sixty years, and I have my own favourite galleries and paintings.

And along with these there is the interior with that impressive staircase in the entrance to the imaginative link to the former Athenaeum.

But I rarely spend time looking at the exterior other than the casual observations.

So having found myself on the corner of Mosely and Charlotte Streets at midday I decided to record what I saw. 

Location; Mosely and Charlotte Streets

Pictures; Pictures of an Art Gallery, 2026, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

Eltham from the pen of Llwyd Roberts ....... nu 4 the Tudor Barn Farm Offices 1930

Now I am a great fan of the work of Mr Llwyd Roberts.

He was during the 1930s our artist in residence and during that time produced a heap of line drawings of Eltham and the surrounding area.

Some were reproduced from old photographs while others  were as he saw them at the time.

This is old Brewery which  which dates from 1928 in a building which according to Mr Roberts "three farm buildings, connected with Well Hall, were built in 1586 - two years before the Armada. The building on the left, the Tudor Barn, was restored in the 1930s."


Picture; Tudor Barn Farm Offices, 1930, Llwyd Roberts

It’s how we did it in 1970

To be fair shops like these were doing the business for decades before this picture was taken in 1970.

But within a decade and bit, independent shops selling toys, prams and bikes would have been squeezed out by big shinny stores which could buy in bulk, reduce prices and lay out their multiple wares in big spacious spaces.

And the same fate faced many grocery shops, leaving shops like Pinkertons to expand  into selling a range of foods alongside their newspapers.

What I like about the image are the details, starting with the modern signage, the sheer variety on offer at Browns for Toys, and the reference to credit couched in that phrase “Terms Arranged”.

The shop was on the corner of East Court Terrace, but its location has as yet defeated me despite trawling the directories.

But someone will know. ...... And someone did .... almost by the return of post, Andy Robertson looked up the place in the 1969 directory, and discovered that

"Pinkertons 34 Stockport Road, Ardwick, Brown's Cycle Dealers at 32 and John Kirk, grocer at 36.

This block was between Eastcourt Terrace and Old Elm Street, opposite the Apsley Cottage pub, near the Apollo".

And that has allowed me to revisit the story and add the companion picture, which neatly places the two photographs in the run up to Christmas 1970.

Location; Stockport Road, Ardwick,

Picture; Browns for Toys, 1970 -2804, and 1970 - 2811, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

The mysterious house on Whitelow Road and an intriguing story

Now, I never underestimate how a story can grow and shoot off in the most unexpected directions.

The caption on the photograph says Whitelow Road and I was drawn to it by the men working on the road.

It became a story and  I wrote that I would love to know more about the house.*

And that inspired my old friend Andy Robertson to delve deep in to Manchester’s Local History collection where he found another photograph of the same house.

He sent it over adding that “I think I may have solved the mystery. I found m17923 taken in 1959 and the house looks identical. 

You will notice St John’s Church to the right, so this old house was demolished post 1959 and the land is now the church car park. On the old picture the house looks like it could be on a corner. If this is correct we have an exact location for our workmen”.

And that led to a search for the inhabitants of our big house.  In 1911 it was the Cobley’s who had been there from at least 1891 and were in oil with the four daughters of the widowed Mrs Caroline Cobley listed as Co-Partners in Oil Trust along with the son.

The Trust, was listed in 1911 as “Cobley (The) Trust, oil and grease refineries , wheel grease and boiler composition manufacturers, 2 and 4 Stove st Tipping st, Ancoats”.**

In time I will go looking for the company on the maps of the period and see if they are listed in Company House and whether they appear in the local newspaper.

For now it is enough to record that their house was indeed a big one with twelve rooms, matched by the one opposite which had fourteen rooms and is now the site of a block of flats.

Location; Chorlton

Pictures; Whitelow Road, date unknown from the Simpson Collection, and in 1959, A E Landers, m17923, courtesy of Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives, Manchester City Council, http://images.manchester.gov.uk/index.php?session=pass

* Lost in the attic .............. a new collection of photographs of Chorlton........ nu 1 Whitelow Road, https://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/lost-in-attic-new-collection-of.html

**Slater’s Directory, 1911, Alphabet, page 955, Trades page 1958