Postcards From Home : An Edwardian Google Street View

I took delivery of a newly acquired Edwardian picture postcard the other day - a view looking up Manningham Lane in Bradford. There was something rather familiar about the scene, especially the wrought iron canopy on the right of the photograph. After a little digging I discovered I had another old postcard featuring the same canopy and looking the other way - down Manningham Lane towards the city centre.

What I have finished up with, of course, is a kind of Edwardian Google Street View. This gave rise to the thought that if I can ever gather together enough old vintage postcards of West Yorkshire I can somehow stitch them all together to provide a dynamic bridge to the past.

I wrote about the original postcard (the second one displayed here) back in 2009 and the discovery of a second view of essentially the same buildings gives me an excuse to share the short description I first published seven years ago. 

"I recently acquired a new postcard which shows Manningham Lane in Bradford in 1902. On the left of the Francis Frith card are the Royal Standard Hotel, the Theatre Royal, and the Theatre Tavern, all of which are now sadly gone. The grand building in the centre background was the Bradford office of the Yorkshire Penny Bank. The last time I checked - about a year ago - it was occupied by a bar called "Brass" which had, thank goodness, retained a fair amount of the internal decorations.

All the buildings in the foreground were still in existence until the 1980s and 90s when they either burnt down or were demolished to make way for a monstrous new inner ring road. The Royal Standard was originally built as a Turkish Bath which came to have its own licenced refreshment rooms. Eventually the refreshments superseded the bathing and it changed its name to the Royal Standard Hotel. Towards the end of its life the Royal Standard became a bit of a dive (the whole Manningham Lane area had fallen on hard times by then) and it was a regular haunt of Peter Sutcliffe, more famously known as The Yorkshire Ripper."

A Confluence Of The Independent Labour Party

When you get a confluence of rivers you get two of more insignificant rivers joining together to become significant. When you get a confluence of ideas you often get a sea-change in science, technology, the arts, or some other field of human activity. But sometimes you just get a confluence of things - names, places, words, shapes - and we call it serendipity. And it's interesting. This week I have had a confluence of the Independent Labour Party.

It all started on Sunday when we called in on our old friends Kathy and Arthur and they gave me a photograph (which features me, amongst others, holding a framed portrait of Kier Hardie) taken some 35 years ago at an Independent Labour Party (ILP) gathering at Clarion House in Nelson. The photograph is reproduced on my Daily Photo Blog.

And then, a couple of days later and quite independently, I was sorting through some old papers and I came across a collection of three documents which date back to the 1914 Conference of the ILP which was held in Bradford. The three documents are illustrated here and they are a wonderful Souvenir Programme, a quite beautiful silk badge or bookmark, and a delegate's credential in the name of Mr J. S Middleton. For a moment I wondered how I had acquired these three quite rare artifacts, but the name of the delegate provided the necessary clue.

J. S ("Jim") Middleton (1878-1962) was the assistant to James Ramsey MacDonald, the first General Secretary of the British Labour Party. At the time the ILP was still an integral part of the Labour Party and therefore he would have been at the 1914 ILP Conference which was that organisation's "Coming of Age" Conference. Jim later went on to become General Secretary of the Labour Party, a position he held until the end of World War II.

I never met Jim - who had died before I got involved in politics - but in the 1970s I did know his widow, Lucy Middleton. Lucy herself had a long and outstanding career in the labour movement, serving as a MP in the 1945 Labour Government and later becoming the first Chair of "War on Want". I knew Lucy well and she encouraged me in my own involvement in the Labour Party. We shared a love of Labour History and it was her who gave me the three documents reproduced here.

The ILP cropped up a third time this week when I was reading Andrew Marr's "A History of Modern Britain". In the first chapter he discusses that tremendously influential 1945 Labour Government and looks at the background of several of its leaders such as the Prime Minister, Clement Atlee. Atlee was also active in the ILP having joined in 1908 and in 1913 he became a Lecturer at the London School of Economics. But, as yet, I have not been able to discover whether he was at the 1914 Bradford Conference, but no doubt someone will write in and tell me. If he was it would make the confluence almost perfect.

Still Sober After All These Months

It is now over six months since I embarked on my lonely odyssey to visit, record - and of course, drink at - as many traditional British pubs as I could still find. Conscious of the fact that in an age of smoking bans and cheap supermarket booze, pubs were vanishing faster than Gordon Brown's supporters, I was determined to get around as many as possible before the only choices left were plastic play-pubs and snotty gastro-pubs. Six months on, it is time for an interim report.

The project has changed name and changed objective a good few times during its short lifetime. It started as the "100 P Challenge" (100 pints in 100 different pubs). Soon it morphed into the "100 Px2 Challenge" (100 different pints of beer in 100 different pubs). Then I decided to focus the odyssey on my own county of Yorkshire and it became Great Yorkshire Pubs. Then I got lazy and lost my evangelical fervour. I stopped going out, drank very little, became introspective and grew my toe nails. Sad.

So yesterday I decided to relaunch the project. I dusted down the blog site and set out to blog another Great Yorkshire Pub. I found myself in Bradford so I visited a bar called "Brass". You can get an idea of the place from the photograph above. To find out what I made of it, visit the Great Yorkshire Pubs blogsite.

Back To The Workhouse

I used to work with a chap called Jim Seddon. Jim was a great character who could tell a story like few others. I was young and just starting out, Jim was old and approaching retirement. He would tell me about his working life which had taken him from being a nurse to being a Senior Lecturer in Management Studies. However, his first job, he would tell me with great pride, was as an Assistant Taskmaster in a Workhouse. I never knew whether to believe him or not - you could never clearly identify the boundary between truth and invention in his stories : but that was half the delight of them. I always intended to check up on this story when I got the time an opportunity - could anyone have worked in a Workhouse in what would have been the mid 1930s?

This morning, my wife Isobel had a hospital appointment and I went with her. In addition to providing company and moral support, I had a reason for making the journey as the appointment was at St Lukes' Hospital Bradford. This is the hospital where I was born some 59 years ago and - to the best of my knowledge - I hadn't been back since. And just twenty years before I was born there it had been Bradford Workhouse. The building has changed little - the above photograph was taken just a couple of hours ago - and as soon as you enter the hospital gates you know that this was built as a serious institution.

According to the excellent http://www.workhouses.org.uk/, the Bradford Workhouse in Little Horton Lane was built in 1852 at a cost of £7,000. Designed by a celebrated firm of Workhouse architects it had that severe, institutional look of all such buildings. However, shortly after it was opened it was described as "a spacious, handsome, and admirably arranged building. It has room for about 350 inmates, and attached to it is a spacious infirmary". Within the next thirty years it must have expanded somewhat as, at the time of the 1881 census, there were 725 residents listed. Reading through the 1881 list you get a true feel of the tragedy of such places : women and children living their lives out in poverty and shame. The full list (which can be found on the above mentioned site) also provides a clear indication of why people ended up in such places. It is made up of three main groups : widows or unmarried women with children, the old and the disabled. The census list records the "disability" : the largest group being "inb" (or "imbecile"), but there is also a fair smattering of "deaf" and "blind" as well. Further research reveals that the workhouses themselves came to an end in 1930 when the various Boards of Guardians were abolished by the 1929 Public Health Act. But many of the institutions continued as "Public Assistance Institutions" with few changes right up until the National Health Service was introduced in 1948 (the same year, and indeed the same month, that I was born in St Lukes).

So the answer to that question which has been at the back of my mind for the last thirty years is "yes", Jim could well have started his working life in a "Public Assistance Institution" or workhouse. Indeed, had I have been born a few weeks earlier maybe I would have been born in the workhouse! Looking back at that list of 1881 inmates, looking back at that list of deaf, blind and disabled people, I feel a kind of bond with them. In a way it's part of my roots : a part I am quite proud of.