Tag: local history

by Carole Gausden

Street Life: The Lane – Part 1 (before incorporation)

Miss Mary Taylor lived in the house where the dog’s home stands today. In 1841, she sent her manservant, John Robinson, to take a record of the inhabitants of every dwelling in Moston. This private census provided a unique snapshot of Moston Lane at a particular moment in history. The hotch-potch of lanes and farm tracks that became today’s Moston Lane, started at Rochdale Road and wound its way to approximately where the Gardeners Arms now stands.

Moston was mostly farm land, but surprisingly it was the domestic hand loom which was more important to the local economy. On the Lane, there were 56 households in total. 34 relied wholly or partially on silk weaving for their income, while only 11 were supported by farming, with the remainder involved in trades such as bricklaying and textile finishing.

Weavers had a reputation for independence, and it wasn’t unusual to find them taking a St. Monday holiday in Boggart Hole Clough.

John Whitehead (known as Jack o’shop) kept a provision store at Street Fold, where he also baked oatcakes. It appears to have been the only place to purchase food on The Lane, with the nearest competition being from Ann Schofield on Ashley Lane (formerly Brass Knob Street).

Beer was to be obtained at the Thatched House, and from Samuel Taylor at the Owd Loom or John Whitehead of the Bluebell. For anything stronger, it was necessary to go to Kenyon Lane where there was a ‘hush’ whisky still.

The small number of given names made nicknames essential. Some of the more picturesque were Owd Yeb, Billy Buttonhole, Old Gimp, and Plutcher. And, because Sarah Holland’s tiny cottage was called ‘the castle‘, she was known to everybody as Sally Castle.

A couple of characters singled out in the census were John Howard, famous for running down (catching) hares twice. And Emmanuel Herd of Great Hurst farm, who claimed to have often sighted the Moston Boggart.

Some years later, an animal carcass believed to be that of the Boggart, was found trapped in briars on Nuthurst Farm. When it was exhibited at the Blue Bell Inn, hundreds flocked to view the creature.

Over the 40 years between Miss Taylor’s census and the nationwide census of 1881, many things had changed in Moston. The domestic silk weavers were all gone, and farm land was starting to disappear under bricks and mortar. The remaining farms on the Lane were mostly in the stretch from Yeb Fold to Toll House and Turnpike farms at Chain Bar.

Incomers who had been born in places as diverse as North and South America, Australia, Italy and Russia, as well as all counties outside Lancashire, had settled in Moston by 1881. These newcomers were a mixture of ‘masters’ and ‘men’.

John Sankey, born Salford, employed 74 men at his match works, as well as a number of women making up matchboxes at home.

John Barber from Castleton Derbyshire, was one of two rope and twine makers living on the Lane, close to the ropewalk.

There was little physical separation of the classes on the Lane. Chain Bar was a typical example, with a mill owner who manufactured cotton sponge (absorbent) cloth, living in close proximity to a coalminer and a lamp man at the colliery.

In the 1841 census, there had been a significant number of females supporting themselves and their families by weaving. In some parts of the country, it was common for middle-class daughters to be kept at home to assist with domestic duties. On the Lane, girls from professional and the better-off classes were often sent out to learn a trade such as millinery or dressmaking.

With daughters out at work, families would sometimes employ a servant, like Mary Rose from Wednesbury, Staffordshire. She worked for Alfred Antrobus, a commercial traveller in provisions, and his wife. The statutory school leaving age was then 12, but Mary was only eleven. She was one of a number of similarly aged girls from the midlands who found employment in Moston.

As the Lane evolved from its semi-rural aspect, a few amenities began to spring up alongside shops and houses. Sergeant Moses Thompson lived at Number 2 Moston Lane, in a house belonging to Lancashire Constabulary. Jane Tickle occupied a cell at the Police station next door.

In 1845, a silk mill started up in a former residential school for pauper boys, which had once been a workhouse with 10 inmates.

At Chain Bar, a primitive Methodist chapel was built in 1864, and the Catholic cemetery was created in 1875. A Methodist chapel school opened at Street Fold in 1881.

The foundation stone for the Simpson Memorial was laid in 1885. The centre’s influence on Moston’s cultural life will feature in The Lane part 2, 1890 to 1959….coming soon.

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by Carole Gausden

Street Life: Where did it all go….?

Imagine stepping into your house to find it had gone back seventy years in time.

If you had a telephone, it would be bakelite, and probably stood on the hall table for maximum impact on the neighbours. The primitive instrument didn’t have a single push button, let alone a touch screen. I wonder how many of today’s youngsters would know how to go about using it to ring Failsworth 1956?

In the kitchen, you would probably find packets of clear starch, washing soda, dolly blue and laundry soap on the oilcloth-lined shelves.

Somewhere there would be a wash boiler or zinc tub with posser, rubbing board, flat irons and a ‘maiden’ (wooden clothes airer).

If the house lacked a larder, there might be a wooden cabinet with perforated zinc doors. This meat safe was designed to allow air but not flies to get to foods now kept refrigerated.

Fireplaces were the focal point of the living room. The hearth would have a stand with fire irons (poker, shovel, fire tongs and small round brush), known as a ‘companion set’. The mantelpiece likely had at least one black and white family portrait, sometimes hand-tinted to pass as a colour photograph.

Hi-tech at the time, the radiogram replaced the piano as the status symbol in ‘the best room’. With parlours kept exclusively for visitors, a fire screen (the more ornate, the better) concealed the bare, seldom used grate. Lacking a parlour, the one my parents received as a wedding present stood before the desultory iron grate in their bedroom.

The most noticeable bedroom disappearances are, chamber pots (the Po), flock mattresses, and counterpanes. Wartime shortages meant bedding was often patched and dingy from much laundering. Young housewives disguised the shabbiness of their beds with fashionable sateen or lacy counterpanes like the ones they saw at the cinema.

My grandparents slept on their lumpy flock (kapok) mattress until the 1960s.

As a young child, I had my afternoon sleep on that bed. But I was oblivious to the lumps while falling asleep to the strains of ‘My old man said follow the van’, which was one of nana’s extensive repertoire of music hall songs.

In the days when Friday night was Amami night, bathrooms for those lucky enough to have one, were often cramped and cold.

My mum’s horror of nits meant my long hair was washed with either Derbac or green soft soap in the kitchen’s pot sink. Something must have worked, as I never had an infestation of those nasty crawlies.

Between the weekly hair wash, pin curls (a strand of hair secured by two crossed kirby grips) would do for work. But come weekend, styling was achieved with paraphernalia the Spanish Inquisition might recognise.

Water lily shampoo pads were the latest thing. After washing, setting lotion was applied, and depending on the style required, one or more items of ironmongery were employed. A sort of curved bulldog clip with fierce teeth was used for waving, while curls were created by winding hair onto metal curling pins.

Until the boyfriend’s knock sounded at the front door, the finished style was protected by a hair net. These nets could vary from ‘invisible’, to the full ‘Ena Sharples’.

The lad’s hair would likely be Brylcreemed, and if he was a ‘sharp dresser’, might be sporting drainpipe trousers and crepe soled, ‘beetle crusher’ shoes.

The disappearance of some items is to be regretted, but I feel seamed stockings won’t be missed by anyone forced to wear them. They were becoming old fashioned when, as a young teenager, my dad came home with a pair he probably bought cheaply from someone in the pub or at work. Those seams never stayed straight, and I would honestly rather have gone out with my legs covered in gravy browning, complete with eyebrow pencil seams, which was the wartime answer to a shortage of stockings.

Products containing the lethal hexachlorophene once added to Signal toothpaste and baby toiletries, has rightly been consigned to the dustbin of history. However, rather than vanishing altogether, other less than healthful products simply changed their name. These days, no cigarette manufacturer would dare tempt smokers with benign pastoral names like Woodbine, Sweet Afton or Passing Cloud.

But, some things really did vanish. Who now remembers Rinso (detergent), pluck (offal for animals) or Benger’s food (wheat flour and extract of pancreatic enzymes which pre-digested warm milk for invalids).

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by Alan Hampson

Jacem

St. Mary’s Road, Moston, is almost entirely residential nowadays, but not so long ago it housed several industries, including one which is almost completely forgotten.

John Johnson of Manchester, an iron wire-drawer and maker of nails and pins, had a business in the early 1800s on Shudehill, and later in Ancoats and Dale St. In 1838, he handed over the business to his younger sons, Richard and William (born in 1809 and 1811), the firm being named “Richard Johnson and Brother”. An older son, Thomas Fildes Johnson, became a cotton spinner, taking no part in the wire trade, but Richard and William expanded the business and made their reputation by supplying the wires for the first cross-Channel telegraph cable in 1851.

In 1853 the brothers took over the Bradford (Manchester) ironworks on Forge Lane and after William’s death in 1860, Thomas’s son John Thewlis Johnson became a partner, the firm now becoming “Richard Johnson and Nephew”. This is a name still familiar to many, as it thrived right up to the 1970s, when it was acquired by Firth Brown Ltd. The brothers also held shares in the nearby Bradford Colliery.

In addition to producing wire and cables, which now included copper and brass as well as iron, around 1860 Richard co-founded another firm to make hardware items such as wire gauze, netting, brick ties, concrete reinforcing mesh and many other items for domestic as well as industrial use. Two new partners joined him in this venture: William Clapham and Joseph Morris (from Swansea) – this firm, based at the old Dale St premises, was named Johnson, Clapham and Morris. The combined operations employed around 550 people in 1861.

The company enjoyed continued success and after St.Clement’s church on Lever St closed in 1878, it was acquired for their main office and warehouse. By 1880, Richard had earned enough to buy a grand house in Chislehurst, Kent, where he died in Feb 1881, although his body was brought back to Cheetham Hill Wesleyan Cemetery for burial in the family vault. An only son, also Richard, had died in 1865, so once again it was a nephew, William Henry, that carried on the Johnson name.

Phenomenal business expansion prompted the establishment of a new, larger works in Moston, (sometimes referred to as Newton Heath), begun in 1902 off St.Mary’s Road, close to Tymm St. The new – appropriately named – Clapham St and Wireworks St (now Beechdale Close) were later added. Miner’s lamps, bedsteads, galvanised dustbins, lawn-mowers and all manner of other products supplemented their range, under the brand-name “Jacem”, formed from the initial letters of the company name.

William Henry Johnson had four sons, of whom two were killed in action in Belgium during the First World War. Since their father had died six months before the war started, each in turn briefly became managing director. William Morton Johnson was a Captain in the Manchester Regiment, and died on 2 July 1916; Capt. Ronald Lindsay Johnson, Royal Field Artillery, was killed on 29 May 1917. Ronald, in his will, desired his estate to be shared among the workers at J, C & M – this was later effected by purchasing part of the Broadhurst estate and creating playing fields for the works staff, named in his memory.

Around 1925, the company acquired premises next to St. Cuthbert’s church on Third Avenue, Trafford Park, which they named “Jacem House”. By now they were acting as general hardware wholesalers, and this became their head office and warehouse, while retaining the works in Moston and elsewhere for manufacturing their own-brand items. At their height, they also had premises in Liverpool, London, Middlesbrough and Glasgow, and offices in Australia and New Zealand.

As “Jacem”, they continued to supply hardware goods and were reputed to be a good firm to work for – they even featured in a promotional film for Stretford Borough in 1933, showing off their well-equipped staff canteen. Gradually, however, the manufacturing side was scaled down, and the Moston site was sold in 1934 to Ferranti Ltd (another story, as they say).

The company continued to trade as wholesalers up to the 1970s at least, and although I have not discovered exactly when it closed, Jacem House was demolished during 1989, much of Trafford Park ‘village’ following soon after.

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