Holland Road and a Chorlton we have lost forever

Even I have to admit this is not one of the more compelling pictures in the collection, and so does not shows up in any of the books, partly I suppose because there is a slightly more interesting one taken perhaps a decade earlier showing a group of lads outside the house on the right.

  “People”, as one of my old teacher’s was wont to say, “it is people that make pictures.”

 Not much hope for this one of Holland Road then. I think it must be the 20s or 30s judging from the hats of the girls to the extreme left, but I might be wrong. Otherwise what we have is one of those long rows of homes for the “middling sort” which were springing up across the township from the 1880s. These were there from 1903 and possibly are a little earlier, although I have to say not that much earlier as this was still open land in 1893. And since they were built not much has changed except we now know it as Zetland Road.

 So why bother with the picture?  Well it allows me to talk about Caleb Jordrell and his wife Ann who lived roughly just behind the lamp post in the early 19th century and rented an acre of meadow land stretching back from the picture called Caleb’s Croft.

 I am not so sure I would have liked old Caleb who was 80 years old in 1841 as he was one of the leaders who took part in Riding the Stang which was the practice of publically humiliating wrong doers. This usually involved turning up as aging late into the evening and banging anything that made a noise to draw attention to the individual. Now before you rage at such a barbaric practice, remember we were a community only lightly policed and the tradition of self policing stretched back to the Middle Ages and in different forms could still be found in Revolutionary Russia and China. Having said that it was not so popular here in the township and waned in the years before the 1840s.

 The Jordrell’s lived in a wattle and daub cottage of which there were still upwards of 50 at the turn of the mid century and baptized their children in the parish church on the green in the 1820s. Anne survived him to die in 1855. Like many of her class she seems to have been left nothing and was described as being on parish relief in 1851.

 She was by now 84 and lived with her youngest granddaughter. It was a common enough strategy for large rural families to place at least one child with relatives to ease the chronic overcrowding, and Anne’s daughter lived with her husband John Kenyon and their other four children in a cottage on High Lane.

 John Kenyon paid just 1/6d [7½p] a week which would suggest his was a modest home which more than likely consisted of just two rooms. By comparison Ann and Caleb paid nearly 4 shillings for theirs. All a long way from the grand row of houses which occupied their land just fifty or so years after Anne died.

Now as many of you know I have a tendency to slip back into the 1840s, conveniently forgetting the lack of mains sewage, antibiotics and the internet and more than a little of me wishes I could see what they had seen as they stood by their cottage at the junction of what is now Sandy Lane and Zetland.

 Put simply it would have been fields, some pasture some meadow but none the less open land allowing views north towards Martledge and the Rough Leech Gutter* and east down towards Hough End Hall.

 Only if I had looked south would the view have been obscured by an orchard hiding part of Barlow Moor Road and Lime Bank which today is itself hidden behind Carrington’s and MacDonald’s. Put like that perhaps I could have lived without the internet.

 Pictures; from the Lloyd collection and the Tithe map of 1845 by kind permission of Philip Lloyd 

*Martledge was the area around the four banks and on over what are now the long roads of Oswald, Longford, Nicholas and Newport, while the Rough Leech Gutter followed the line of Corkland Road.