To celebrate the May Day Bank Holiday weekend, Wythenshawe Hall held an Open Day on Sunday May 5^th. This was a great opportunity for the Archives+ team to get involved in an event that combined history, community and families.

Joanne Bailey (Community Officer) and Angela Rawcliffe (Learning Officer) started their four-year secondments with Archives+ in April. Joanne and Angela identified original archives that could be adapted for crafts and activities with families, as well as those that would be of interest to the general public, sparking enthusiasm for what archives can offer. Wythenshawe Hall volunteers were on hand to talk to visitors about the Hall itself.

Wythenshawe Hall proved a great subject for research. Angela put together a series of copies of photographs held in the archives . This photo of a 17^th century Siege of Wythenshawe Hall re-enactment in 1925 proved particularly popular!

Joanne and Angela found a box of treasures in the Record Office store room, which included an old copy of Mrs Beeton’s book of household management and a school exercise book from 1859 originally belonging to Rachel Partington of Kearsley.

Rachel’s hard work practising her handwriting paid off. Angela was able to create worksheets based on Rachel’s beautiful copperplate handwriting, featuring the saying ‘Children should be seen and not heard’.

A quill pen and bright red ink was provided. The red ink was kept well away from the authentic archive items, needless to say. There was a moment of concern over the new library carpet at the Hall, but there were no accidents!

Other craft activities included making spinning thaumatropes, a popular Victorian toy that is an early type of animation. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image. We used the image of a bird in a cage. Peg dolls were made from wooden pegs and material including wool and pipe cleaners. The Victorian theme was continued with replica toys and some domestic kitchen items from Wythenshawe Hall’s own collection, including a cast iron kettle, a carpet beater and some old smoothing irons.

The Hall welcomed over 600 visitors, and over 200 of them enjoyed the archives activities. Fifty peg dolls and over one hundred thaumatropes were taken home!

Archives+ will offer a wonderful, purpose-built showcase and repository for the region’s archive and family history. The Archives+ partnership, funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund, will build on the appetite and demand for accessible community history and personal heritage. The project brings together an innovative partnership of statutory, university and voluntary organizations to provide a holistic range of archive and heritage services from one location. This one-stop-shop will make it easier than ever before to find what you’re looking for.

Look our for more Archives+ events on our website and on Twitter.

My name is Nicky Crewe. I started work at the Greater Manchester County Record Office on April 2^nd. I am the National Archive trainee, and will be here for a year. It’s going to be a very significant twelve months, not just on a personal level, but for the Archives+ project and the return to Central Library which has been closed for refurbishment. Archives will be on the move from the Record Office and from their partners who are joining them in the new space.  It’s going to be a very interesting experience to be part of the process and a witness to the developments.

Central Library tram poster

Several new members of staff started work in the same week, so we have been sharing the induction process where possible. It’s a great mix of background and experience, and I feel I am already getting the benefit of working as part of this team.

There are some nice links for me too. I used to live in Manchester, and in the eighties I worked for Manchester Studies as a field worker, collecting photographs and interviewing people for an oral history project. I was thrilled to discover that the Documentary Photograph Archive held here at GMRO is made up of that Manchester Studies collection of photographs, and I have been able to reacquaint myself with some of the connections I made back then.

The City Library is temporarily housed in Elliot House on Deansgate, the same building where I got married at Jackson’s Row, and I worked for Manchester Council for Community Relations based there in the seventies.

The North West Film Archive  was part of Manchester Studies back in my day, so I am familiar with their early work and have followed their success over recent years. It was great to visit them in their present home and see how the collection had grown and developed.

In the last few weeks I have been introduced to the maps held in the Manchester Collection at City Library, visited the local history collection there and sat in with a family history help desk run by the Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society.   We have also visited the Race Relations Resource Centre. We  spent some time in the Search Room with the Friends of Clayton Hall volunteers, exploring records relating to the Hall and the surrounding neighbourhood.

Knowing I am only here for a year is going to make me focus on what I can achieve in twelve months, and I am starting to work on some projects as well as helping the rest of the Archives+ team. And I get to explore the photo collection for daily tweets! Check out the @mcrarchives twitter feed for the latest.

North West Film Archive

Race Relations Resource Centre

Friends of Clayton Hall

Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society

Ship’s Company, H.M.S. Velox, 6 Feb 1915

My name is Keith Johnson and I have been working behind the scenes at Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives for the last few months, the majority of the time digitising photographic negatives by scanning and saving them to computer as high-resolution TIFF files.

Digitisation means creating digital copies of items from the archives with a view to increasing accessibility. Archives+ holds two key photographic collections, only one of which, the Manchester Local Image Collection, has been fully digitised and is available to view online.

The second collection, the Documentary Photography Archive (DPA) includes well over 100,000 images, mainly from family albums from across Greater Manchester. It captures the many varied aspects of ordinary people’s lives covering a time period from the mid 1800s through to the 1970s. However, only a fraction of these photographs have been digitised project-by-project. Those that have not yet been digitised are viewable by request, either in person or by requesting individual scans to be emailed. This digitisation process is continuing and those images that have been digitised so far are viewable on our Flickr photostream.

As part of a project to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of WWI colleagues from the Archives+ team and I have been digitising images from the DPA. We have found a lot more than any of us expected!

Five soldiers and a dog

The original photographs, and catalogue information which describes them, were created well before the digital age. This means that the photographs are not “tagged” in the way you might expect them to be nowadays (although we try to remedy this when we post them online.) For instance, a photograph of a soldier might be described simply as “Uncle Bill” in the catalogue, and there would be no way of knowing from an online search that he was uniformed, for what purpose, or when the photograph was taken – whereas now you might tag the photograph “soldier”, “1914″, “WWI”, etc.

An initial catalogue search produced a printed list of around 600 items “tagged” with the correct dates and search term variables. Two months later we’ve so far scanned over 2000 items and the end is not yet in sight!

Edward (Ted) Woodall, Marine

The wealth and breadth of the material we’ve scanned already is astounding. There are lots and lots of studio-based portraits of soldiers about to set foot into the arena of battle, many of which bear the wear-and-tear of the passage of time. A lot of these are surprisingly well-preserved and skillfully taken. The digital scans capture a certain immediacy, almost bringing the subjects out of the past and into our age, at the same time making us realise we ourselves could have easily been in the same predicament. In addition there are numerous family portraits capturing wives and children alongside husbands and fathers about to leave and never to return, some of whom we know certain details about, and many we don’t know anything about at all.

Unknown Soldier

Leah and Matthew Irlam (and dog)

Family of four

There are certain portraits featuring men who did return, and we know this from the details provided with the photographs of them when the DPA was originally compiled – and from photographic evidence too. Lots of the family albums show soldiers becoming everyday citizens after returning from war, including photographs from throughout their lives in everyday jobs, holidaying in Blackpool, or becoming unsuccessful political candidates!

G. Philip Robinson – Second Lieutenant in Royal Scots Regiment

G. Philip Robinson, Liberal candidate for Levenshulme Ward – unsuccessful

There are photographs of soldiers and sailors, pilots and their planes, platoons and battalions, of hospital wards containing the wounded, photographs of letters and postcards to and from the frontlines – even some of actual battle scenes, prisoners of war, and destroyed opposition tanks and biplanes. The battle scenes are not necessarily of the famous frontlines we’ve all heard about, but of those in Gaza and Egypt, for instance.

Naval battle

There are hundreds of photographs of the home front. Women feature overwhelmingly in these images – working in munitions factories, as land girls, and as nurses – lots of these in the guise of group portraits alongside the recovering wounded.

Nurses and soldiers on the steps of a hospital

The images I’ve included here are a few of my favourites from those we’ve scanned and are available to view full-size and with further details on Flickr. They represent a small taste of a huge collection from which there is much more to come.

Five soldiers on camels in front of the Sphinx

We hope to upload many more photographs over the next few years and to find out more about the people in them and their wartime experiences by getting involved in the Imperial War Museum’s Faces of the First World War project. If you can shed any more light on the images we’ve uploaded so far, please get in touch on archiveslocalstudies@manchester.gov.uk or leave your comments on Flickr.

I’ve been working through some staff cards of The Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway Works at Horwich - better known as Horwich Loco Works. The building was started in 1885. By 1892 the locomotive factory was fully operational with an erecting shop accommodating 90 engines and 30 tenders. By 1901 the machine shop was extended and the works covered a total area of  116 acres of which 22 acres were covered by workshops.   In 1922 the company amalgamated with the London & North West Railway; the following year saw a merger with the London Midland Scottish railway company. In 1948 the nationalisation of the railway system  handed Horwich works to British Railways. The works finally closed in 1980.

The cards record the name of employees, their date of birth, their job title, industrial injuries, how old they were when they first started work and the reasons why they may have left. I recently came across an employee card which had a newspaper cutting stuck to the back of it – this is very unusual. The worker’s name was Fred Haughton.

Mr Haughton had been with the Railway service since joining as a 13 year old check boy in 1913. He stayed with the service until joining the Royal Navy in 1920. What’s particularly interesting about this man is that he served in the Second World War on board HMS Prince Of Wales.

Whilst on board he was given the position as Chief Ordnance Artificer, this position was one of the most dangerous jobs on board as he would have had to inspect, test, assemble and disassemble all types of weaponry on the board the ship.

He was part of crew which tackled the infamous Bismarck of the German Navy in May 1941. The battle dented and bruised the Prince of Wales but no lives were lost and the Bismarck was slowed down in her pursuit of the British Merchant Navy.

The newspaper cutting explains that when Mr Haughton received the Distinguished Service Medal for mastery, determination and skill in action during the battle, he told King George VI the dramatic story about the sinking of the Prince of Wales.

Fred Haughton was also part of the crew when the Prince of Wales was attacked by the Japanese Naval Air Force on 10th December 1941. She was attacked for over 13 hours and eventually was damaged too much and sunk. Mr Haughton was one of the few survivors to make it onto a life boat and survived this attack.

Using war medal records on Ancestry.co.uk I was able to find out that in 1944, 24 years after Mr Haughton joined the Royal Navy, he was again given another medal which was for Long Service and Good Conduct.

It is not known when Fred left the Navy but most personnel left the forces soon after the end of the Second World War. Using birth, marriage and death records online I found out that Fred Haughton was married in 1925 and he died in December 1978 in Bolton, where he grew up.

Fred Haughton is just one ordinary name among the thousands of loco workers at Horwich. His story, however, shows his involvement in two of the most famous battles of the Second World War. Using sources freely available at any Manchester City Council library we can bring Greater Manchester’s everyday archives to life.

First up we have a promotional  leaflet for Flesh club night at The Haçienda, 29 September 1993. Flesh was one of the North West’s largest gay events – ran in conjunction with the North West Arts Board, It’s Queer Up North and Manchester City Council. For more information, have a look at GB127.M800/FAC51:　Flesh.

The Hacienda Flesh – GB127.m800/3/2/1/6

The Hacienda Flesh – GB127.m800/3/2/1/6

We hold the Queer up North archive which includes photographs, film and promotional material relating to the festival between 1992 – 2006.  Some items from this collection have been digitised and can be viewed within our LGBT history set on Flickr. By far one of the most popular and striking items is this theatre promotional poster.

‘It’s Queer Up North’ queerupnorth theatre festival poster, Sep 1994 – GB127.M800/3/3/1/27

Next up, is a drawing depicting a police raid on a drag ball in Hulme, in 1880, taken from the Illustrated Police News.

Police raid a drag ball in Hulme, in 1880, taken from the Illustrated Police News

Material relating to the campaign against Section 28 can be found within various collections we hold.

‘Section 28 – a Guide for workers in the Social Services Department’, Manchester City Council, 1988 – GB127.M775/1/5

Never Going Underground concert, Feb 1988

Gay Unity, Feb 1988

A LGBT history source guide, with relation to our collections, is available on our website – The National Archives have also produced a guide which will help you find records relating to gay, lesbian and bisexual history.

Abraham Lincoln, by Garrison, c.1850 (m73755)

As the largest processor of cotton in the world, Manchester took a strong moral and political stance by supporting Lincoln despite his blockade of the Confederate states beginning in April 1861. This measure drastically reduced supplies of cotton reaching Liverpool and, therefore, the cotton mills of Lancashire.

Free Trade Hall, Manchester (m51890)

At a meeting of the Workingmen of Manchester, held at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862, an address was read congratulating Lincoln, offering support to his struggle and urging him to emancipate all American slaves, despite the economic distress caused by his actions.

The meeting took place just as the cotton famine was beginning to have serious distress across the county (it affected different Lancashire towns at different times, but all were suffering by the winter of 1862).

It is remarkable that the workingmen’s address offered support to the Northern cause. This was at a time when it was widely thought that the quickest way to restore the cotton supply, and hence end the depression, was for Great Britain to recognise and intervene on behalf of the Confederacy. In supporting Lincoln and the Union, Manchester workingmen put their principles ahead of their economic self-interest.

This decision came at a cost as the Lancashire Cotton Famine saw many textile workers lose their jobs, or work reduced hours, and struggle to feed their families. Local author Edwin Waugh contributed a series of articles on the home life for Lancashire cotton workers during the Cotton Famine to the Manchester Examiner in 1862 showing the impact that the Civil War was having on everyday lives across Lancashire (our ref: 942.72 I49A).

Queuing for charity, Illustrated London News, 22 Nov 1862 (m10066)

Contemporary sketches in the Illustrated London News show cotton workers idle in mills, making do with old clothes, queuing for charity and scrambling for news from America.

Bare cupboards, Manchester, Illustrated London News, 22 Nov 1862 (Illustrated London News m10038)

Lincoln wrote a letter on 19 January 1863 to thank the people of Manchester for their support. Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives holds a photocopy of the transcript received by Abel Heywood, the Lord Mayor of Manchester and the Chairman of the Chairman of the meeting of Workingmen, on 9 February 1863.

Letter from Abraham Lincoln to the Workingmen of Manchester, 1863 (page 1) (GB127.MISC/604)

Much later Mr. and Mrs. Charles Phelps Taft of Cincinnati, Ohio, donated a statue of Abraham Lincoln as a reminder of the link between Manchester and the United States. The statue, by George Grey Barnard, was originally sited in the grounds of Platt Hall, Platt Fields Park, in 1919. It was moved to Lincoln Square on Brazennose Street in 1986.

Abraham Lincoln Statue, Platt Fields, Rusholme, 1943 (m06148)

A set of documents relating to Lincoln held by Manchester Libraraies, Information and Archives (including the rest of Lincoln’s letter) can be found here.

Statue of Abraham Lincoln, Brazennose Street, 1987 (m06141)

Introduction by Dr David Brown, Senior Lecturer in American Studies, University of Manchester

Before the introduction of civil registration in 1837 the births, baptisms, marriages, deaths and burials recorded in parish registers were often the only official record of people’s lives. They’re  an invaluable resource for family historians.

The collection contains some fascinating and intriguing entries – the parish registers for Weaste, St Luke document the marriage of Emmeline Pankhurst (née Goulden).

Ref L136/1/2/1

As you can see from the record Emmeline Goulden marries Richard Marsden Pankhurst on 18 December 1879.  You’ll also notice that Emmeline is listed as full age as she is over 21.

Lydia Becker, the founder of the Women’s Suffrage Journal was baptised on 20 November 1827 in, Hollinwood, St Margaret.

GB127.L41/1/2/2

Her birth date, 24 February 1827, is recorded as are her parents names and place of residence.

Manchester is the birth place of the Academy Award winning actor Friedrich Robert Donat who starred in Goodbye, Mr. Chips, The Count of Monte Cristo and Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps. He was baptised in the  parish of Withington, St. Paul on 9 April 1905.

(ref:M650)

Samuel Bamford, a witness to the Peterloo Massacre and a radical politician who campaigned both for parliamentary reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws,  was baptised in Middleton, St Leonard on 11 April 1788. The entry lists him as ‘Samuel son of cotton spinner’.

Interestingly there are numerous entries for ‘Samuel Bamford’ between 1785 – 1789 – with identical parent names, Hannah and Daniel Bamford, and occupation, cotton spinner,  with all events (baptisms and burials) occurring within the same parish – we have chosen the baptism entry which correlates with his birth date.

Free access to Ancestry.co.uk is available in all Manchester City Council libraries.

“Drink When You’re Dry or the Groans of an empty Beer- Barrel” was written by ‘John Barleycorn‘ (who is a personification of the crop barley) in January 1820 to “his old friend” John Bull (who is a personification of Britain), in which he lays down his opposition to the temperance movement, stating,

“What! Quarrel with good liquor! The juice of sweet barley! The poor man’s cordial, the sinews of this strength, and the beverage of his forefathers! O it’s a monstrous piece of folly! And as rank treason against the constitution of an ENGLISHMAN, as ever was hatched in the skull of a mounteback.”

GB127.Broadsides/F1820.34

The date of the  second document “Clench the Nails” is unknown. It implores

“Parents, teachers, when you give instruction Clench the Nails with the Temperance Pledge.”

GB127.Broadsides/FND.193

We also have photographs within the Manchester Local Image Collection of buildings that hold special significance to the movement, such as Temperance Billiard Hall.

Temperance Billiard Hall, m18044, c.1958

Also from the Local Image Collection are two photographs of pro-temperance  demonstrations from 1906 and 1890.

Temperance Demonstration, Droylsden, 1906 ,m68985

Temperance Party, c.1890, m68983

We have plenty of fantastic archives related to the temperance movement, which you can search for here and why not check out The People’s History Museum’s,  Demon Drink! Temperance and the Working Class exhibition, which runs until February.

They are annotated 1930s Ordnance Survey maps, accompanied by index cards that record the location of aerial bombs which caused damage to the City of Manchester. Originally used by the City Architect’s Department, the maps show fire bombs as red dots, high explosives as blue dots and line mines as green dots. Red shaded buildings represent demolished buildings while pink shaded buildings were damaged but still standing.

The original volume containing the maps (ref GB127.MISC/1192) is held by Manchester Archives at the Greater Manchester County Record Office but it is fragile, heavy and difficult to produce. They were digitised in September by the Centre for Heritage and Collection Care (CHICC),  using a Phase One 1Q180 and took around 4 – 5 hours to photograph.

You can now view the maps and zoom in to street level online through the University of Manchester Image Collection. Martin Dodge of the University of Manchester explains on his blog how the maps were discovered in the Town Hall Extension in 2011. Martin has also created a really good stitched together version of the city centre maps.

The first map shows a  heavily bombed area of the city centre, the second is a close up showing damage to the Free Trade Hall and Manchester Central Library.

CHICC have also blogged about the bomb maps. The Imperial War Museum North are holding a 20 minute walk and talk ( 3 – 31 December 2012) to explore the theme of the Second World War Blitz on Britain.

You can find links to all of our digitised map resources including the bomb maps on our website. Home security information summaries for the Manchester District can be found on our Flickr and over 400 photographs of Manchester during the war can be found at the Manchester Local Image Collection.

The photographs below, taken from the Manchester Local Image Collection, show the damage caused to Victoria Station, Miller Street and the Assize Courts.

Miller Street, Blitzed property

Assize Courts Bomb damage

Victoria Station, after the blitz, bomb damage, Easton, J B

Damaged caused is also documented in 1930s Ordnance Survey maps. These bomb maps have been digitised by the Centre for Heritage Imaging and Collections Care and you can now view all the maps, search by area and zoom into your own street at the University of Manchester Image Collections website.

Fire bombs are red dots, high explosives are blue dots and line mines are green dots. The red shaded buildings represent demolished buildings while pink shaded buildings were damaged but still standing.

In a book issued by Manchester City Council, to commemorate the 60^th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, many accounts of the Manchester Blitz were recorded. A former police officer recalls witnessing a direct hit to Manchester Cathedral, on 22 December 1940;

I was having a walk round at about 5 o’clock in the morning with another chap and we were passing the Cathedral talking away and suddenly everything around us went black, the air was full of sparks, and I saw the west doors of Cathedral coming out, and I knew they didn’t open outwards, they opened inwards – but not this time.

We recently received the Home Security Intelligence Summaries for the Manchester Region, transferred from Ministry of Defence in Portsmouth which cover the period September 1939 – May 1945. They also give more detailed information on the Manchester Blitz; including information on damage and casualties, accidents, events at sea and in the air.

Home Security Intelligence Summaries for the Manchester Region (Ref GB124.A.HSI/2)

Home Security Intelligence Summaries for the Manchester Region (Ref GB124.A.HSI/2)

Manchester Libraries have plenty of books available for loan relating to the Manchester Blitz, Imperial War Museum North recently released a series of photographs of buildings destroyed on their Facebook page and we also hold many relevant archives which are searchable on the Greater Manchester Pasfinder catalogue. All Manchester Libraries, Information and Archives map resources are listed on our website.