Post by tomclare on Aug 3, 2010 20:08:56 GMT -1
It's amazing how little things trigger off the the picking the back pocket of our memories. Last night whilst doing some research, I came across the Manmates websites, and ended up trawling around it until well after midnight. All sorts of memories were triggered whilst looking at different photographs and reading the written stories.
Royle Street, Chorlton-upon-Medlock
I was born at 5.44 in the morning of Sunday, 28 April 1945 into the downstairs front room of a dingy, two up, two down, damp and musty, dark-brick terraced house. I was the second son, and also the second child, of Tommy and Olive Clare of number 14 Royle Street, Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Manchester. Chorlton-upon-Medlock at that time was a small, run down urban area, just a mile to the south-east of the war-torn city centre.
Like most of the inner city areas of Manchester, Chorlton-upon-Medlock was characterised by row upon row of small, uniform terraced houses, with tiny, smoky chimneys. These buildings could never be called anything other than slums. For the most part, the families that inhabited these squalid abodes were second, third and fourth generation families of Irish and Scottish immigrants, who had been unable to escape the poverty trap bequeathed to them by their forbears. The properties were owned mostly by unscrupulous landlords, who exploited these unfortunate victims of circumstance, and evictions and ‘moonlight flits’ were commonplace.
Our house was no different to thousands of others throughout the inner city. Upstairs there was a front bedroom and a back bedroom; downstairs, a front parlour and a back utility room that served as a kitchen, dining room and living room. There was also a cellar, which housed a coal chute, and a room running off it that was supposed to be a laundry room. A stone ‘dolly tub’ was in the far corner of the cellar room for laundry purposes, but few, if any, were ever used. The toilet was outside in the back yard, and during the night, or through the long winter months, the trip had to be navigated in darkness. Like the rest of these dwellings, our house had no electricity; gas lamps were the order of the day, but only in the two downstairs rooms. The gas meter was in the cellar, and as I grew older I would have the job of going down and putting a penny into the slot to replenish the gas supply. The upstairs rooms, and the room down in the cellar, had to be lit by candlelight. There was only one water tap in the whole house and that provided cold water only. We had a small gas stove for cooking, and our house was heated throughout by an open coal fire in our utility room downstairs.
Number 14 Royle Street still holds myriad memories, and those memories have remained undimmed with the passage of time. It was my home in my formative years – I learned about life there that’s for sure. To show that house to anybody in this modern era would, I am sure, see them recoil in horror, because by today’s standards it would be classed as uninhabitable, and would certainly be condemned by public health, housing and building inspectors.
Chorlton-upon-Medlock was quite a notorious area in the 1940s and 1950s, and I certainly witnessed things during my childhood that I would hate for any child to see today. It was a harsh existence for families, and for people as individuals. Prostitutes plied their trade freely, both day and night, and they were not too fussy where they entertained their clients. Mostly it was in the back alleyways between the rows of terraced houses. During the evenings they would congregate in groups on street corners, soliciting for clients. The evenings would see drunks roaming the area, and physical violence was often perpetrated by, and upon, these people. An area with such notoriety attracted a wide range of people, from those that we termed ‘money people’ to the ‘down and outs’.
To say that weekends were lively back then would be an understatement of huge proportions. For all the area’s poverty, the pubs in Chorlton-upon-Medlock were always full at weekends, at lunchtimes and during the evenings. Pubs licensing hours meant they would open from 11am till 3pm, and then again from 5.30pm till 10.30pm; Sunday hours were from noon till 2pm, and 7pm till 10.30pm. Problems arose after closing time when people were full of ale. It is no exaggeration to say that on a Saturday evening it was commonplace to see two or three fist-fights outside a pub at the same time.
People lived on their wits, and there were several well known local characters who survived by dubious means. ‘Jimmy the Dip’ was a local pickpocket who mostly looked for victims in the city centre. ‘Scotch Dave’ was a local hard nut, a thief who would steal to order. ‘Billy One Ball’ was a local pimp who was loathed by most in the area. ‘Stuttering Charlie’ was another who survived by thieving, and even today must rank as the ugliest man that I have ever come across. thingy Hazzard and Johnny Grandin operated as fences for the thieves. ‘Fraser’ was a local character who always dressed in morning suit and a bowler hat, but in reality was a ‘con man’. It was a tough area, but that was the lot life threw at you, and families had to deal with it, or sink into despair and oblivion – unfortunately for a lot of families that did happen.
The era into which I was born was undoubtedly harsh, immediately after the cessation of hostilities in World War II. Britain was ravaged by bomb damage, and was economically stretched. There were food shortages that necessitated rationing, and for most young kids growing up, luxuries were now-commonplace things like eggs, cheese, meat, bread, sugar and even sweets – they were all on ration. Wages were low, and most mums took on cleaning jobs, or any other employ they could find, just to supplement the family income. Many dads were unemployed and turned to ‘totting’, as ‘rag and bone’ was known back then. They would go round pushing a hand cart, collecting almost anything they could – used clothing, metal, unwanted household goods or appliances, and would take what they obtained to the scrap merchants for ‘weighing in’. It was recycling, post-war style!
Most streets in the inner city area had suffered from German bomb damage. Where houses had been leveled, the area of ground that was left was covered with cinders, and it was on these surfaces that, as children, we played together. Gradually, the cinders would crumble from the constant treading down, and would eventually harden into a surface. These small bomb sites were known as ‘crofts’.
Most people with regular employment worked in cotton manufacture and light engineering, putting in long hours. At around four o’clock in the morning, in both summer and winter, there would be the sound of the rat-tat-tatting of the knocker-up’s claw on the upstairs windows of the terraced houses. The job of the knocker-up was, of course, to go round the houses, making sure that people would wake for work. His long wooden pole had a claw attachment at one end, which would be tapped on the upstairs window until there was an acknowledgement from a person inside. For carrying out this early morning routine, the knocker-up charged the princely sum of three-pence per house per week from his regular round. Between 5am and 5.30am, you would begin to hear the familiar tread of feet on the cobbled stones as people began to leave for work, and the noise of this slight pitter-patter of feet would build to a crescendo as those on shift work rushed to make their 6am start time. It would then become quiet again until after 7am, when the non-factory people would leave their homes to begin their working day. Various times of the day were signalled with the blowing of sirens from the various factory smoke stacks in the area: 7am, noon, 1pm, 5pm and 5.30pm. There were families in the local area whose lives were organised throughout the day by those sirens.
Without doubt, it was the mothers who kept the families together. Fathers would try and find work of any kind, and those that did worked long, long, hours for meagre recompense. Those that did not, and I have to admit there were many in the Chorlton-upon-Medlock area who had no intention of working, would find solace in different practices – drinking in the pubs being the main one. There were also many families upon whom fate had cast a dark shadow, when the main breadwinner had gone away to serve his country during the war, and had not returned. Some of these mothers were left with four, five or six children to bring up, and had to ensure that there was food on the table and a roof over the their heads – in some cases desperate people had to do desperate things. Some of the more ‘fly by night’ fathers became well known to the local constabulary, and it wasn’t unusual to hear that some of them had ‘gone away on holiday’ for a while, once again leaving the mothers to bear the hardship of bringing up the family.
But for all the doom and gloom, and the harshness of that period, there was also a good deal of sunshine. The communities were very closely knit, and that closeness even remains to the present day among families whose friendships were formed generations ago. There was a spirit of sharing among the poorer people of Chorlton-upon-Medlock, and when a family got into genuine difficulty there was a pulling together for them. Relatives and neighbours would help in whatever ways they could, providing clothing, food and even a few pennies wherever possible.
To illustrate this, the winter of 1947 was particularly long and harsh in the north of England. Fuel for fires was in short supply, and under ration as fuel was also required for industry to help with the regeneration of the economy. In such cold conditions those terraced houses were death traps, especially for vulnerable young children and the elderly. So a group of men from the Royle Street families, my father among them, hatched a plan to ensure that those families survived intact throughout that harsh winter. They made sure that families had enough solid fuel to burn in their fireplaces, that solid fuel being wood. These men would go out at night with handcarts, and walk to the more affluent areas of the city, where they removed wooden doors from the back yards of premises and homes. Living next door to our house, at number 16 Royle Street, was an Irish family by the name of Broderick. Old man Broderick was in his 60s but made his living from selling firewood, and had a shed not a block away in Back Grosvenor Street. Even for him, the harsh winter of that year had made things difficult, as his wood supply dried up. But being part of our community, he was ever-willing to help, and the wood supply that was obtained in the darkness of those nights found its way to his wood shed, where before light of day it became victim of a huge electric saw, and was made into manageable bundles that could be burnt in a fireplace. The bundles were evenly distributed amongst the families each day.
Those men also removed nameplates from front doors of commercial premises in both the local area and city centre. Most of these nameplates were made of metal, particularly brass, but they were screwed on to large wooden boards either attached to the front door, or bolted onto the adjacent wall. The men removed these nameplates, and once back at Broderick’s they would unscrew the metal plate from the wood, which would then be sawn up. The metal plates went somewhere else. My father had an old school friend, the son of a Polish immigrant family named Bolger. The name apparently had been shortened to Bolger from Bolgekititz, and Charlie, their youngest son, had started up in business just after the war as a scrap metal merchant. His premises (which would play a part in my learning of the Munich disaster some years later) were on Fairfield Street, close to London Road railway station on the edge of the city centre. Dad knew Charlie pretty well, and he, together with Bob Taylor from number 12 next door, would haul the metal plates on a hand cart over to Bolger’s scrap yard for ‘weighing in’. No questions were asked by either party. Father and Bob would leave the premises with an amount of cash, which again was distributed evenly amongst the families when they returned to Royle Street. I’m more than certain that they were never ever given the ‘going rate’ for the metal plates, but then with no questions being asked they were never going to complain. Obviously, the metal plates were melted down at Bolger’s and then moved on. The men took a lot of risks doing what they did, and on several occasions had skirmishes with the local police. Fortunately for them all it never resulted in any of them having their collars felt!
Dad was also innovative in the home during this period. Our living room adjoined Broderick’s on one side and Taylor’s on the other. Dad worked out where Broderick’s fireplace would be, and was aware that Taylor’s fireplace adjoined Dolly Murphy’s at number 10, so was of no use. Surreptitiously, Dad removed two bricks from the bottom of the wall adjoining Broderick’s living room, just where their fireplace was. Each evening, Dad would remove those two bricks from that wall, and some of the heat from the Broderick’s fire would find its way into our living room. It was several years later that Broderick found out what Dad had done.
In most families there was someone who had mastered the art of playing a musical instrument, and on balmy summer evenings, especially after the pubs had locked their doors; it was not uncommon to hear impromptu concerts going on in the street. My mother and father had beautiful singing voices. Mother was a fine soprano and had sung with the Manchester Schools Girls’ Choir, while Dad had a wonderful tenor voice, and was to sing professionally in future years. The street concerts were a joy to behold as barber shop groups, individuals, and duets all performed. It wasn’t unusual for people who lived in the surrounding streets to find their way round and sit until the early hours of the morning listening to the talents of our families.
Royle Street, Chorlton-upon-Medlock
I was born at 5.44 in the morning of Sunday, 28 April 1945 into the downstairs front room of a dingy, two up, two down, damp and musty, dark-brick terraced house. I was the second son, and also the second child, of Tommy and Olive Clare of number 14 Royle Street, Chorlton-upon-Medlock, Manchester. Chorlton-upon-Medlock at that time was a small, run down urban area, just a mile to the south-east of the war-torn city centre.
Like most of the inner city areas of Manchester, Chorlton-upon-Medlock was characterised by row upon row of small, uniform terraced houses, with tiny, smoky chimneys. These buildings could never be called anything other than slums. For the most part, the families that inhabited these squalid abodes were second, third and fourth generation families of Irish and Scottish immigrants, who had been unable to escape the poverty trap bequeathed to them by their forbears. The properties were owned mostly by unscrupulous landlords, who exploited these unfortunate victims of circumstance, and evictions and ‘moonlight flits’ were commonplace.
Our house was no different to thousands of others throughout the inner city. Upstairs there was a front bedroom and a back bedroom; downstairs, a front parlour and a back utility room that served as a kitchen, dining room and living room. There was also a cellar, which housed a coal chute, and a room running off it that was supposed to be a laundry room. A stone ‘dolly tub’ was in the far corner of the cellar room for laundry purposes, but few, if any, were ever used. The toilet was outside in the back yard, and during the night, or through the long winter months, the trip had to be navigated in darkness. Like the rest of these dwellings, our house had no electricity; gas lamps were the order of the day, but only in the two downstairs rooms. The gas meter was in the cellar, and as I grew older I would have the job of going down and putting a penny into the slot to replenish the gas supply. The upstairs rooms, and the room down in the cellar, had to be lit by candlelight. There was only one water tap in the whole house and that provided cold water only. We had a small gas stove for cooking, and our house was heated throughout by an open coal fire in our utility room downstairs.
Number 14 Royle Street still holds myriad memories, and those memories have remained undimmed with the passage of time. It was my home in my formative years – I learned about life there that’s for sure. To show that house to anybody in this modern era would, I am sure, see them recoil in horror, because by today’s standards it would be classed as uninhabitable, and would certainly be condemned by public health, housing and building inspectors.
Chorlton-upon-Medlock was quite a notorious area in the 1940s and 1950s, and I certainly witnessed things during my childhood that I would hate for any child to see today. It was a harsh existence for families, and for people as individuals. Prostitutes plied their trade freely, both day and night, and they were not too fussy where they entertained their clients. Mostly it was in the back alleyways between the rows of terraced houses. During the evenings they would congregate in groups on street corners, soliciting for clients. The evenings would see drunks roaming the area, and physical violence was often perpetrated by, and upon, these people. An area with such notoriety attracted a wide range of people, from those that we termed ‘money people’ to the ‘down and outs’.
To say that weekends were lively back then would be an understatement of huge proportions. For all the area’s poverty, the pubs in Chorlton-upon-Medlock were always full at weekends, at lunchtimes and during the evenings. Pubs licensing hours meant they would open from 11am till 3pm, and then again from 5.30pm till 10.30pm; Sunday hours were from noon till 2pm, and 7pm till 10.30pm. Problems arose after closing time when people were full of ale. It is no exaggeration to say that on a Saturday evening it was commonplace to see two or three fist-fights outside a pub at the same time.
People lived on their wits, and there were several well known local characters who survived by dubious means. ‘Jimmy the Dip’ was a local pickpocket who mostly looked for victims in the city centre. ‘Scotch Dave’ was a local hard nut, a thief who would steal to order. ‘Billy One Ball’ was a local pimp who was loathed by most in the area. ‘Stuttering Charlie’ was another who survived by thieving, and even today must rank as the ugliest man that I have ever come across. thingy Hazzard and Johnny Grandin operated as fences for the thieves. ‘Fraser’ was a local character who always dressed in morning suit and a bowler hat, but in reality was a ‘con man’. It was a tough area, but that was the lot life threw at you, and families had to deal with it, or sink into despair and oblivion – unfortunately for a lot of families that did happen.
The era into which I was born was undoubtedly harsh, immediately after the cessation of hostilities in World War II. Britain was ravaged by bomb damage, and was economically stretched. There were food shortages that necessitated rationing, and for most young kids growing up, luxuries were now-commonplace things like eggs, cheese, meat, bread, sugar and even sweets – they were all on ration. Wages were low, and most mums took on cleaning jobs, or any other employ they could find, just to supplement the family income. Many dads were unemployed and turned to ‘totting’, as ‘rag and bone’ was known back then. They would go round pushing a hand cart, collecting almost anything they could – used clothing, metal, unwanted household goods or appliances, and would take what they obtained to the scrap merchants for ‘weighing in’. It was recycling, post-war style!
Most streets in the inner city area had suffered from German bomb damage. Where houses had been leveled, the area of ground that was left was covered with cinders, and it was on these surfaces that, as children, we played together. Gradually, the cinders would crumble from the constant treading down, and would eventually harden into a surface. These small bomb sites were known as ‘crofts’.
Most people with regular employment worked in cotton manufacture and light engineering, putting in long hours. At around four o’clock in the morning, in both summer and winter, there would be the sound of the rat-tat-tatting of the knocker-up’s claw on the upstairs windows of the terraced houses. The job of the knocker-up was, of course, to go round the houses, making sure that people would wake for work. His long wooden pole had a claw attachment at one end, which would be tapped on the upstairs window until there was an acknowledgement from a person inside. For carrying out this early morning routine, the knocker-up charged the princely sum of three-pence per house per week from his regular round. Between 5am and 5.30am, you would begin to hear the familiar tread of feet on the cobbled stones as people began to leave for work, and the noise of this slight pitter-patter of feet would build to a crescendo as those on shift work rushed to make their 6am start time. It would then become quiet again until after 7am, when the non-factory people would leave their homes to begin their working day. Various times of the day were signalled with the blowing of sirens from the various factory smoke stacks in the area: 7am, noon, 1pm, 5pm and 5.30pm. There were families in the local area whose lives were organised throughout the day by those sirens.
Without doubt, it was the mothers who kept the families together. Fathers would try and find work of any kind, and those that did worked long, long, hours for meagre recompense. Those that did not, and I have to admit there were many in the Chorlton-upon-Medlock area who had no intention of working, would find solace in different practices – drinking in the pubs being the main one. There were also many families upon whom fate had cast a dark shadow, when the main breadwinner had gone away to serve his country during the war, and had not returned. Some of these mothers were left with four, five or six children to bring up, and had to ensure that there was food on the table and a roof over the their heads – in some cases desperate people had to do desperate things. Some of the more ‘fly by night’ fathers became well known to the local constabulary, and it wasn’t unusual to hear that some of them had ‘gone away on holiday’ for a while, once again leaving the mothers to bear the hardship of bringing up the family.
But for all the doom and gloom, and the harshness of that period, there was also a good deal of sunshine. The communities were very closely knit, and that closeness even remains to the present day among families whose friendships were formed generations ago. There was a spirit of sharing among the poorer people of Chorlton-upon-Medlock, and when a family got into genuine difficulty there was a pulling together for them. Relatives and neighbours would help in whatever ways they could, providing clothing, food and even a few pennies wherever possible.
To illustrate this, the winter of 1947 was particularly long and harsh in the north of England. Fuel for fires was in short supply, and under ration as fuel was also required for industry to help with the regeneration of the economy. In such cold conditions those terraced houses were death traps, especially for vulnerable young children and the elderly. So a group of men from the Royle Street families, my father among them, hatched a plan to ensure that those families survived intact throughout that harsh winter. They made sure that families had enough solid fuel to burn in their fireplaces, that solid fuel being wood. These men would go out at night with handcarts, and walk to the more affluent areas of the city, where they removed wooden doors from the back yards of premises and homes. Living next door to our house, at number 16 Royle Street, was an Irish family by the name of Broderick. Old man Broderick was in his 60s but made his living from selling firewood, and had a shed not a block away in Back Grosvenor Street. Even for him, the harsh winter of that year had made things difficult, as his wood supply dried up. But being part of our community, he was ever-willing to help, and the wood supply that was obtained in the darkness of those nights found its way to his wood shed, where before light of day it became victim of a huge electric saw, and was made into manageable bundles that could be burnt in a fireplace. The bundles were evenly distributed amongst the families each day.
Those men also removed nameplates from front doors of commercial premises in both the local area and city centre. Most of these nameplates were made of metal, particularly brass, but they were screwed on to large wooden boards either attached to the front door, or bolted onto the adjacent wall. The men removed these nameplates, and once back at Broderick’s they would unscrew the metal plate from the wood, which would then be sawn up. The metal plates went somewhere else. My father had an old school friend, the son of a Polish immigrant family named Bolger. The name apparently had been shortened to Bolger from Bolgekititz, and Charlie, their youngest son, had started up in business just after the war as a scrap metal merchant. His premises (which would play a part in my learning of the Munich disaster some years later) were on Fairfield Street, close to London Road railway station on the edge of the city centre. Dad knew Charlie pretty well, and he, together with Bob Taylor from number 12 next door, would haul the metal plates on a hand cart over to Bolger’s scrap yard for ‘weighing in’. No questions were asked by either party. Father and Bob would leave the premises with an amount of cash, which again was distributed evenly amongst the families when they returned to Royle Street. I’m more than certain that they were never ever given the ‘going rate’ for the metal plates, but then with no questions being asked they were never going to complain. Obviously, the metal plates were melted down at Bolger’s and then moved on. The men took a lot of risks doing what they did, and on several occasions had skirmishes with the local police. Fortunately for them all it never resulted in any of them having their collars felt!
Dad was also innovative in the home during this period. Our living room adjoined Broderick’s on one side and Taylor’s on the other. Dad worked out where Broderick’s fireplace would be, and was aware that Taylor’s fireplace adjoined Dolly Murphy’s at number 10, so was of no use. Surreptitiously, Dad removed two bricks from the bottom of the wall adjoining Broderick’s living room, just where their fireplace was. Each evening, Dad would remove those two bricks from that wall, and some of the heat from the Broderick’s fire would find its way into our living room. It was several years later that Broderick found out what Dad had done.
In most families there was someone who had mastered the art of playing a musical instrument, and on balmy summer evenings, especially after the pubs had locked their doors; it was not uncommon to hear impromptu concerts going on in the street. My mother and father had beautiful singing voices. Mother was a fine soprano and had sung with the Manchester Schools Girls’ Choir, while Dad had a wonderful tenor voice, and was to sing professionally in future years. The street concerts were a joy to behold as barber shop groups, individuals, and duets all performed. It wasn’t unusual for people who lived in the surrounding streets to find their way round and sit until the early hours of the morning listening to the talents of our families.
