Gorton, Abbey Hey & Openshaw, Manchester – Exploring the landscape of my ancestors in the 1910s

Routes to my Roots Series

Exploring the Landscapes of my Ancestors

Brief home to my great-grandparents Ernest and Frances, and the place where my grandmother Christiana was born in the 1910’s.

My granny, Christiana, has a special connection for me. I never met her. She died within 24 hours of my birth, but that conjunction of my life and her death bonds me to this woman I never knew. She was born in the Abbey Hey area of South Manchester, in 1912; an area straddling Gorton and Openshaw. Her life here, and my ancestral connection to Manchester was brief. Born to parents who had moved from Carlisle sometime after 1910, they only seem to have stayed a few fleeting years. Presumably it was work that pulled them here. I have no idea why their stay was so short. Christiana’s mum Frances died in 1914 in Carlisle when Christiana was only two, so perhaps it was ill health that necessitated a return, to be close to the care and support of family.

Ernest worked as a grinder in the Armstrong and Whitworth Factory in Openshaw, and Frances worked at home as a dressmaker, fitting in her stitching around raising the tiny children. Christiana and her slightly older brother would have no memory of Gorton or Openshaw, but I wonder what Ernest and Frances’s experience was? Being from Carlisle, they came from ‘out of town’, but would they have felt like outsiders in a city brimming with regional immigrants? Carlisle itself was an industrial town, known for its railways and mills, so Manchester might not have felt so alien. Living first in Fleet Street, and then in Ackroyd Street, these roads were relatively newly built, and presumably relatively pleasant homes, but I am interested in the wider landscape of my relatives. What was their experience of new and old, polluted and clean, urban and rural, and work and leisure environments during their short time in Manchester?

In this blog, I have picked out seven ‘interesting things’ to help me understand the landscape and lives of my relatives in the 1910s. In making my selection, my focus has been to balance notable places with places close to their home and work; aspects which out of proximity, Ernest and Frances would have known.

I usually undertake my blogs as a walk, using my footsteps to explore and digest a place. When I visited Gorton, I was accompanied by disinterested teenagers and elderly relatives, the former unwilling, and the latter unable, to undertake a lengthy urban hike. I therefore had to nibble at the area, visiting what is left of Fleet Street and Ackroyd Street, Tanyard Brow, and Lower Gorton Reservoir. Fleet Street and Ackroyd Street now only partially remain, and in both cases, the exact houses Ernest, Frances, and their children resided, are gone; perhaps the victims of blitz bombing or other calamities? The rest of my exploration had to be done remotely, following these landscapes through maps and the writings of academic and blogging writers.

7 Interesting Things

1. Armstrong and Whitworth’s Armaments Works

My great grandad Ernest, listed on the 1911 census return that he worked at the ‘Sir Armstrong and Whitworth Gun Factory‘. Of this pair – Armstrong and Whitworth – it was Whitworth with the Mancunian connection. This highly successful Victorian engineer, through his financial bequests, has given a legacy to the city through the Whitworth Art Gallery and Whitworth Hall. In 1897, ten years after his death, his company merged with another big industrial hitter, the Newcastle-based Armstrong, Mitchell & Co. The merged company had many works across the north, and this site, bordering Gorton and Openshaw, was one that focused on the manufacture of armaments. It covered a massive area (700 m x 180 m), and was bounded by Whitworth Street to the north, Bessemer Street to the east, Ashbury’s railway sidings to the south; and Clayton Lane South to the west (see Map) (Grace’s Guide, undated).

The name Bessemer Street in itself is interesting. The Armstong Whitworth plant appears to have originally been the site of the Lancashire Steel Company Ltd who arranged with Harry Bessemer to work with his patents, to set up a Bessemer-process steel works here, on agricultural land adjoining the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway (Lancashire Steel Company Ltd, 1863). The street name, it would seem, is an honorary given to the importance of Bessemer and his process, and a legacy left in the landscape of the history of this site.

In 1907, and shortly before Ernest was to begin his brief stint working here, the plant was awarded a contract to manufacture Dreadnoughts – fast, big-gunned and heavily armoured war ships (Grace’s Guide, undated). At this time a new shop with eight bays was constructed, just a few streets to the north, on the aptly named North Street, for the manufacture of smaller guns, screwing tackle, and drills etc. Additionally, the armour plate erecting and grinding shops were also increased by 250 ft. in length, and fitted with four 50-ton cranes (Grace’s Guide, Undated). It was in this part of the works that my great grandad Ernest, being a grinder, would very likely have toiled, perhaps tipped off to the job opportunity by his older brother John, who worked as a ‘crane slinger’ in a gun factory. Maybe he slung heavy metal onto one of those 50 ton cranes alongside Ernest in the same, newly extended part of the factory?

2. Farms and Fields

When we think about big industrial cities of the Victorian and Edwardian era we see images of heavy industry, and repetitious rows of brick terrace houses, exhaling smoke from their chimneys, big and small. But this is only a partial picture; a simplification of an environment that, in its state of flux between rural and urban, still possessed agricultural niches as part of the landscape. It wasn’t all factory and two-up, two-down. In Edwardian Gorton and Openshaw, as was still normal within cities at this time, could be found Birch Farm, Yew Tree Farm, Willow Fram, Deanhead Farm, King’s Road Farm, Lodge Farm and Debdale Farm to name but a few (all on the map below). Almost all gone by the late 1930s. These agricultural islands, a fraction of the former fertile farmland here in the past, clung to existence against an industrialising and urbanising tide. However, before domestic refrigeration technology took off in the 1920s, expanding rapidly in the 1930s, farms were still an important part of the city environment, helping to supply fresh produce to the big population, particularly perishable milk.  

Harry Chadwick, a local man born in Gorton in 1916, recollects that in the nineteen-twenties, despite the area containing one of the greatest concentrations of heavy and light engineering in Britain, at this time it still had a slightly rural feel (Chadwick, 1994). The young Harry witnessed herds of cattle and flocks of sheep being driven along the Hyde Road. He describes a farm track in the vicinity of what is now Wembley Road, that still existed in the 1920s, as being surrounded by fields with buttercups and daisies and with skylarks singing overhead. And whilst we think of the industrial city’s water as being a soup of pollution, Harry remembers tadpoles in the ponds and streams, and fishing in the clear waters of the canal for ‘jack sharps, redbreasts and sticklebacks’ to put in jam jars.

3. Abbey Hey

Ernest and Frances first lived in Fleet Street, a turn of the century terraced street in the developing Abbey Hey area. Of its history, details are scant. One might expect, because of its abbey name, that this place was connected to a monastery, but no. Farrer and Brownbill (1911) state that the origin of the name is unknown, but the surname ‘Abbey’ is recorded in Gorton in 1320 AD and therefore the connection may relate to historic landownership in this family name. It is therefore through changes shown on maps that I have found the best story of Abbey Hey.

In 1848 Abbey Hey was a small settlement, lining a bend called Abbey Hey Lane (see map above). Still largely surrounded by fields at this time, development was beginning to close in on it. The newly constructed Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway swept to its north, and to the south and east, the Gorton reservoirs acted as a watery barrier. At the time the 1848 map was published the reservoir was already twenty-five years old, and it can be seen how it had impacted on the connectivity of Abbey Hey, with the road eastwards blocked. This route, passing Dick’s Lane Farm, no longer going anywhere, is redundant and withered.

By 1894 Abbey Hey as a settlement had grown, but only slightly. At this late Victorian date, the area is still surrounded by fields, but development was creeping nearer. New railway lines surround Abbey Hey in a triangle of tracks, and the little hamlet has acquired the urban trapping of Abbey Hey Park. But it is in the 1904-06 map, a period of little over 10 years later, that big changes occur. By the Edwardian period, Abbey Hey is completely re-developed, with a grid of streets, including Fleet Street, replacing the short-lived park. Churches, a pottery (un-labelled, but named in the later 1916-18 map), a number of brickworks (it takes a lot of bricks to build all these houses!) and a nearby golf course. More change was to come, with houses replacing the pottery and other various ‘works’ sites. Only the original railway line is still in use. The others are now accessible to a different form of transport – the cylce. Reflecting, I think the Abbey Hey of today would be far more recognisable to my relatives today, 110 years later, than it would have been if they could have seen it twenty years earlier in the 1890s.

4. Gorton Mills

In 1796, the Stockport Branch of the Manchester to Ashton-under-Lyne Canal was constructed, linking the settlements along its route. At the time the land here was agricultural, but the canal’s construction facilitated the transport of goods, which changed the geography of the area, enabling industry to begin to spring up along its flow, spreading the city outwards (Cattell, 2019). In the 1780s steam technology began to be used to power textile mills, hand-in-hand with a big demand for cotton textiles. Manchester was one of the main mill towns to capitalise on this boom, with steam-powered mills being built all around the snow-balling city.

Gorton Mill was one of these early steam mills, located to make use of its canal-side location.  It went into production in 1825 and expanded into the 1830s, employing 711 people, including over 300 children in 1832. It expanded still further in the later 19^th C (Cattell, 2019). The mill was acquired in 1844 by another famous Mancunian, John Rylands, who updated the production facilities. The 20^th century marked the end of the mill. Production slowed followed by the great depression and its associated widespread worker strikes. The mill didn’t recover. It closed and was demolished by 1935. In the 1960s blocks of residential apartments were built on the site. These were knocked down in the 1990s. The site remained a largely open patch of grass for thirty years until now. In 2021 the re-developed site saw new ‘with care’ residents, living in apartments for the over 55s.

5. Tanyard

Tanning is a business that needs plenty of water, which is presumably why the tanyard in Gorton was located on the Gore Brook. The Gore Brook, which gives its name to Gorton, is probably derived from the Old English word ‘gor’ which means ‘dung, dirt or filth’. This is ironic because dung, dirt and filth are all part of the tanning process.

Footwear, belts, water bottles, saddles, harnesses, bags and machinery – leather was necessary to the making of all these vital, pre-manmade-material goods. Until the 19^th century, leather processing was time-consuming and stinky, involving many stages. To remove fat and flesh and follicles, water-soaked raw-hides were pounded clean, immersed in an alkali solution – either quicklime, or originally, urine – then ‘scudded’ with a blunt knife (Colville Leather, 2018; Manchee, undated). The lime used to make the quicklime would probaly have been sourced locally as lime was found in the area. In fact, in the history of the nearby Belle Vue Gardens, it is known that the site, before the arrival of pleasure seekers, was used for the digging of lime (Boardman, undated).

Next came the ‘bating’ stage, in which an enzyme-rich dung was kneaded into the hides in vats of water, fermenting the skin and making it supple. Hides were finally stretched on frames and soused in tannin-rich water, with the tannins provided by tree bark or other suitable plants. This ‘tanning’ stage is the vital step that preserves the hide and makes it malleable and semi water-resistant (Manchee, undated). In the 19^th C the technique of chrome-salt tanning revolutionised the leather industry, reducing the processing time from around one year to as little as one day (Colville Leather, 2018)

The Gorton tanyard, which dates to at least the late 18^th century, must have provided quite an assault to the nose. Apparently, tanneries were typically located on the outskirts of towns because of their evil-smelling pong. Even in the 1920s, when presumably they were using the more efficient chrome technique, Harry Chadwick reminisces that “I didn’t venture into this part of Gorton very often because the stench from the tannery in Tan Yard Brow was horrible!”(Chadwick, 1994). The tannery closed in 1959 but some of the workers cottages, with their hand made Flemish-bond brickwork, are now Grade II listed buildings (Historic England, undated).

6. Belle Vue Gardens

In 1836, a man called John Jennison took over a lease for grounds at Belle Vue. Jennison, a gardener and botanist, had already been dabbling in attracting visitors to his own gardens, offering up his home grown produce and showing a collection of native birds (Boardman, undated). The Belle Vue site was already being run as tea gardens where William Crisp had been operating for two years. Jennison could see the possibilities for expansion. Located on the edge of the city but in the 1830s, still very much in rural territory, the gardens initially struggled. But luck was on Jennison’s side. In 1842 Higher Broughton Zoological Gardens closed, and in 1843 the Longsight railway station adjacent to Belle Vue opened, meaning that issues of competition and access were solved and business bloomed (ibid).

In the 1840s the map (below) shows a sedate ‘attraction’, with formal gardens and a few buildings to the east of the site, presumably providing refreshments. Open ground and a variety of small lakes and ponds occupying the rest. Given the site’s previous history of lime digging, I think it might be plausible that some of these lakes were formed from the lime pits left from this mineral extraction. This reminds me of The Eden Project in Cornwall, another large botanical attraction making the best of a former extractive industry.

The 1850s, in the wake of the entrepreneurial and creative zeitgeist of the Great Exhibition of 1851, Belle Vue Zoological Gardens expanded. Boardman provides a timeline in which a succession of attractions were added. To the existing gardens, maze and racecourse came, in rough but not exhaustive chronological order: zoo animals including bears in bear pits, firework island with a huge painted scenic backdrop for firework displays, a huge ballroom capable of accommodating 10,000 people, a boating lake, Italian gardens, an Indian grotto, an elephant house, monkey house and camel house, and open air sea lion pools. In the era that my relatives were living in Gorton in the 1910s, they may have been tempted by new attractions like a hall of mirrors, toboggan ride and roller-skating arena.

The reputation of Belle Vue became huge, not just in Manchester, but as a major regional attraction as ‘the playground of the north’. People flocked to the site to dance, watch wrestling, see the circus, listen to orchestral and band concerts, see exhibitions, and more. The park diversified still further in the 20^th century with a rollercoaster and other rides, and a speedway circuit. But times and tastes change. Towards the end of the 1950s, Belle Vue, probably looking quite dated, declined and died, finally closing in 1982.

7. Gorton Reservoirs

On the day that I visited the Gorton Reservoirs, a power boat buzzed and skimmed the water surface, pushing v-shaped wakes shoreward. From the peripheral reservoir path, the trees, abetted by flat topography, blocked visual clues to the city suburbs beyond. Like Harry Chadwick and his recollections of semi-rural Gorton in the 1920s, for a while, circumnavigating the water, I too felt the city draw away.

The Gorton reservoirs – upper and lower – were built in c.1823-25 and were among the first impounded reservoirs to be built in the country (Engineering Timelines, 2020). Constructed by the Manchester and Salford Waterworks Company, they raised Manchester and Salford’s water-supply capacity eight-fold to about 900, 000 gallons per day. This was a long over-due remedy, helping to alleviate the massive water supply issues of the rapidly expanding industrial town, whose population by 1811 stood at 79,459 (Hassan, 1984).

Initial gains were soon lost as supply failed to keep pace with growing population demand. This was compounded by water flowing into the company’s reservoirs ‘being undermined by building activity and polluted industrial effluents’ (Hassan, 1984, p30). Hassan is scathing about the Manchester and Salford Waterworks Company, calling them ‘outstandingly incompetent’ for their inability to maintain supplies, develop enterprising new schemes, and manage their shareholder’s money. By the 1840s, Manchester’s sanitary conditions were, once more, appalling. In 1851 municipal management replaced the disastrous ‘virtually unregulated profit-seeking private enterprise’ (Hassan, 1984, p41), and whilst not perfect, finally municipal water supply delivered to the people of Manchester improvements in this most essential of all resources.

In exploring this area through the Edwardian lens of my ancestors, what I have found most revealing is the nuance that the act of thinking about the past can tend to erase. In a period in which urban spread was yet to fully engulf this landscape, tropes of factories, mills and terraced housing are true, but are far from the whole picture. Whilst Harry Chadwick, in his childhood memories, talks of the Gorton skyline being a forest of chimneys, he also recollects old lanes, fields, farm animals and wildlife as being part of his world.

“Yet there was also, in late Victorian and Edwardian culture, a real sense of paralysis in the face of the enormity of the task – anxiety was induced by perceptions of the unprecedented complexity of both urban problems and cities themselves. This intensified ambivalence and awareness of complexity was shaped, too, by an intensified awareness of plebeian lives. “

Woods, 2018, p221

From our post-industrial perspective, the Victorian and Edwardian brick homes and factories will have a variety of meanings, be these affectionate, nostalgic, functional or disdainful. Putting myself in the place of my ancestors, I wonder about their feelings about the place they lived. Would they have appreciated living in relatively new homes and streets (recognising their different experience to those still living in overcrowded inner city slums)? Would they cherish the municipal parks for their leisure, so much a feature of the Victorian and Edwardian cityscape? Or would they have felt overwhelmed by the rate of change around them, and the new complexities of life in the expanding city? Common people would have always worked long hours doing tough work, but would living amongst a congestion of people, with a congestion of foul air, have made them unhappy and yearning for what they knew was lost? In all likelihood my relatives, like other members of the proletariate, in response to their environment, felt sometimes anxious, sometimes accepting and mostly ambivalent (Woods, 2018).

References

Boardman, D. (undated). Belle Vue Revisited. www.manchesterhistory.net. Accessed 1 Feb 2022.

Cattell, S.J. 2019. Archaeological excavation : Gorton Mills, Abbey Hey Lane, Gorton, Manchester. University of Salford. Technical report for Southway Housing Trust.

Chadwick, H. 1994. Childhood Memories of Gorton in the Nineteen-Twenties. Published by Neil Richardson.

Colville Leather, 2018. A brief history of leather tanning. https://www.colvilleleather.co.uk, Oct 02, 2018. Accessed 31 Jan 2022.

Engineering Timelines, 2020. Lower Gorton Reservoir. http://www.engineering-timelines.com. Accessed 1 Feb 2022.

Farrer, W. and Brownbill, J. 1911. ‘Townships: Gorton’, in A History of the County of Lancaster: Volume 4, ed. London, pp. 275-279. British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/lancs/vol4/pp275-279. Accessed 1 February 2022.

Grace’s Guide. Undated. Joseph Whitworth and Co. Grace’s Guide To British Industrial History, www.gracesguide.co.uk. Accessed 30 Jan 2022.

Hassan, J.A., 1984. The impact and development of the water supply in Manchester 1568–1882. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 133, pp.25-45.

Historic England, undated. 56-60, Tan Yard Brow www.historicengland.org.uk/. Accessed 1 Feb 2022.

Lancashire Steel Company Ltd, 1863. Funding call ‘Advertisement’, The Chemical News, London: 1 August 1863, p279. Accessed 1 Feb 2022.

Manchee, S. Undated. A Quick History Of The Leather Tanning Industry www.blackstockleather.com/history-of-the-leather-tanning-industry/. Accessed 31 Jan 2022.

Woods, S. 2018. Anxiety and Urban Life in late Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1880-1914. PhD Thesis, History. University of Cambridge.