Although the shops in Mellor and Marple Bridge may have satisfied our daily needs for food and household commodities, it was occasionally necessary for all of us to go to Manchester for clothes, or to see the pantomime, or to visit Father Christmas at Lewis’s store. Many of our fathers, of course, travelled to Town every day except Sunday, for there was no such thing as a five-day week for anyone. And we always travelled by train from Marple Station.
One of the joys of railway travel was that chocolate could be bought from a slot machine. Every station had one a tall red dispenser of thin slabs of Nestlé’s milk chocolate. The smaller slab cost a penny, and the thicker one cost twopence. You could buy much bigger bars for the same money in a shop, but the fun of getting it out of an automatic machine would have been lost. You could weigh yourself for another penny, but the longest pennyworth came from the machine that stamped your name, letter by letter, into a metal strip.
But the slot machines have been swept away with the rest of the station that I knew so well. The goods siding has gone with its loading shed and its enamel signs advertising Camp Coffee, Earle’s Cement, Mazawattee and Bovril. The coal yard has disappeared under the asphalt of the car park. The bay platform on the opposite side has gone, too, and the bay itself is an overgrown ditch. The magnificent glass roof, supported on a cast iron framework bearing the entwined initials of the defunct Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway, has vanished, leaving two bare platforms and some flat-roofed huts.
The footbridge has survived, but it has lost its glass-and-timber superstructure. Is there still, hidden under its pillars, a special step for assisting the elderly and infirm from the train? Where now the station-master’s house, the porters’ room, the waiting-room with its roaring fire on winter days?
The booking-office has changed sides. It used to stand at the foot of the stairs leading down from Brabyns Brow. Even the stairs – a flight of six, then five flights of nine – have gone. They were wooden stairs, echoing hollowly to the tramp of feet at the morning rush hour. You could hear a lone late-comer thumping down as the train stood in the station, and a good-natured porter would ask the guard to wait an extra minute until the passenger arrived, breathless, on the platform.
The station exit (assuming you were coming from Manchester) was by another flight of wooden steps, leading via a long covered bridge to the road. I could recognise that bridge with my eyes shut by its smell, compounded of tobacco fumes, coal gas and steam. Unpleasant it may have been, but somehow it seemed to welcome you home. Now it has been replaced by a crude metal stairway and an asphalt footpath.
The station was well-staffed, too, with a station-master, foreman, two booking-clerks, a ticket-collector and several porters. They always seemed to be busy sweeping the platforms, fetching coal for the fires, shifting luggage or counting used tickets. There was one other ‘regular’ just outside the station premises – the old blind man by the entrance to the coal yard, playing his concertina to earn an odd coin.
An illness leading to an operation on my neck when I was barely five necessitated frequent visits to Stockport Baths for ‘sun-ray’ treatment, believed to be beneficial during convalescence. It was then possible to go to Stockport by train, using the old Cheshire Lines route through Romiley to Tiviot Dale, and this was the usual mode of travel for Mother and me. The train started from the bay platform, and often consisted of a railcar – the forerunner of the modern diesel unit. But this vehicle was steam-powered, with its boiler alongside the driver in a special compartment at one end, and a cab at the other so that it could be driven in either direction. The seat backs in the central passenger compartment could be swung over like those in the old trams to enable travellers to face the direction of motion. The local people called it ‘Puffing Billy’.
The LMS trains coming down from Chinley also went to Tiviot Dale, and then went on to the old Manchester Central station (now the G-Mex exhibition centre) via Didsbury and Withington. You could even get to Manchester Victoria on certain trains which took the loop line from Ardwick through Miles Platting.
But most trains, hauled by their little tank engines, went to London Road (now Manchester Piccadilly). These were the LNER trains of the old Great Central Railway, an uneasy stable-mate of the ex-London and North-Western in the Manchester terminus. There was a clear line of demarcation between the two companies’ premises, accentuated by separate booking offices, bookstalls and waiting rooms, although they shared a common roof. Even the platforms were designated differently, those on the LNWR side being numbered 1, 2, 3 . . . , whilst the GC had A, B and C.
At Marple, however, through which passed trains from at least three of the old (pre-1923 grouping) companies, there was harmony, whatever the partisan feelings of its staff. The railways were at the peak of their popularity, and almost every village was served by them, even if (as was the case with Mellor) it meant walking a mile or two to the station.
But already the motor bus was becoming an established form of transport in Mellor. One of the earliest services was run by Joe Hinchcliffe of Ludworth, using a converted army lorry. He was notorious for his reckless driving, and stories about his hairbreadth escapes from disaster were legion.
The North Western Road Car Company was soon on the scene with its long Tilling-Stevens single-deckers. These had the maker’s name in huge letters on the radiator, which was surmounted by an enormous filler-cap held down by brass wing-nuts. Water seemed to be consumed at a greater rate than petrol, judging from the quantities which were poured in at the Devonshire Arms terminus after the long slog up from Marple Bridge.
Inside the bus, the seats were of wooden slats on a steel frame. I used to think that if all the passengers were to push hard on the seat-backs in front of them, as I did, we would climb the hills much quicker. With only me to assist the toiling engine, we ground up Cataract pretty slowly.
The buses carried a crew of two: a driver and a conductor – no single-manning nonsense then! The conductor was equipped with a large money pouch and a ticket punch hanging from crossed leather straps rather like a rebel soldier with his bandoliers. In his hand he carried a rack of tickets – a different colour for each denomination, single and return. I gradually collected a whole set of used ones to use with my own conductor’s outfit. Between stages, the conductor would write the numbers of tickets sold on a chart in a folding wooden board – a notable feat on a shaking platform – using a pencil kept for the purpose behind his ear. He also carried a whistle with which to signal to the driver from outside the bus when it was reversing.
Public servants were proud of their uniforms then: the bus crews wore navy blue uniforms with red piping and a peaked cap, their brass badges brightly polished; in the summer they were allowed khaki drill jackets instead of the heavy serge.
The later Tilling-Stevens had upholstered seats and electric bellpushes instead of the old cord running in loops from the roof. There was even a door which could be shut (but never was) to safeguard the passengers. Then came the Bristols, and occasionally a Leyland appeared. But I loved my old Tilling-Stevens; I hope one is preserved somewhere.
The North Western buses ran from the Devonshire to Stockport, from the Royal Oak to Hazel Grove and, on Fridays only, from Marple Bridge to New Mills via Jordanwall Nook. This was an exciting journey – climbing the hills, you wondered if you might not end up going backwards; going down, you felt sure that the driver could not possibly stop at the bottom. But I cannot recall an accident.
A minor bus service operated around Marple. This belonged to Firth and Kirkpatrick, whose route ran from Marple Station to Hawk Green and back in a circular fashion. Later they obtained the concession for running the school bus from Mellor to the Willows, and branched out into the coach hire business. Their blue Bedfords were a familiar sight on the local roads.
For a distinguished few, the private motor car was the way to travel. Our immediate neighbours seemed to be particularly well-blessed in this respect. On one side of ‘Beaumont’ the Roogans had a large tourer, whilst on the other side the Cloughs had a Hillman saloon. Across the road, the Jowetts’ Morris Cowley occupied the old coach house, whilst at ‘Rawcliffe’ the McClellands had a magnificent Daimler, complete with chauffeur,
Mr McClelland’s brother Arthur had a Humber, whist the Bennett brothers, two doors from us, had twin AC sports cars. I was occasionally allowed to ‘help’ Amold and Norman Bennett as they tuned their cars, proudly returning home to display ‘real motor oil’ on my hands (and my clothes, no doubt!).
Over at his father’s farm beyond Tarden, Jack Cunliffe kept a scarlet racing-car, a low-slung two-seater with the handbrake and the gearshift outside the body. Painted boldly on the side was its name – Red Devil. A fast car with such a wicked name fairly reeked of notoriety, and our elders predicted dire calamities for its owner, although we children loved to see it roaring up Longhurst Lane. If memory serves aright, Cunliffe’s sister had a similar car – was it the Green Devil?
Tradesmen, of course, soon turned to mechanical transport. Ernest Renshaw, the plumber, had a Morgan three-wheeler with its twin cylinders exposed in front of the ‘bonnet’. Behind the two open seats, on either side of the single rear wheel, were stowed the tools of his trade. On the day of the Sunday School trip, he would scorn the bus which was taking us to Buxton. With his wife Prudence beside him, and the two Shipley children squeezed in the back, off he would go in our wake.
Bernard Hall had his Morris, with its petrol can on the running board and its cumbersome folding hood. It was used, I fancy, more for family outings than for the delivery of meat.
Sim Harrop’s sole competitors as travelling greengrocers were the Clark brothers, who kept an old Chevrolet lorry at Mill Brow and drove it round Mellor hawking their wares. Joe Pollard took his bread up to Millards’ cafe in a delightful little Trojan van, with a chain drive and solid tyres. Brooke Bond also used Trojans for many years to deliver tea to shops all over the country.
For medium haulage, there were the Ford vans and the Morris Commercials. But for heavy goods transport, steam was still king. The great lorries with their roadstone from the Buxton quarries, the drays from Robinson’s Stockport brewery, the removal vans – all were driven by steam. Some were the old Fodens with the driver sitting in a sort of slanting coffin outside the chassis to leave the cab clear for the fireman and the machinery. Then came the Sentinel-Cammels with their high-pressure vertical boilers and balloon tyres, the ‘works’ discreetly tucked away underneath to leave sufficient room in the cab for the driver and his mate. They even had a windscreen, which was a considerable advance on the older machines.
And then, almost overnight, they were gone. Fodens turned from steam to diesel, and the great names of Leyland, Albion, Thorneycroft and Dennis appeared on the road.
Going, too, were the horses. Even Mr Leach the breadman learned to drive a Morris van. As the horses disappeared, so did the cobbles, under a layer of tar and granite chippings. Solid tyres gave way to pneumatics, and on the back of the newer cars a triangular sign read ‘Four Wheel Brakes’, for until then only the rear wheels could be retarded, and this was a warning that the car could pull up much quicker than many on the road.
The internal combustion engine had come to Mellor, but “Shanks’s pony” still carried most of us in safety and with sufficient speed.
There were two other forms of transport in the locality which hardly affected our lives at that time. One – the canal – was in decline, and we could not foresee the boom which was to come after the War when it provided a new leisure activity. The other was in the ascendant (both figuratively and literally): carriage by air.
Marple had been an important junction on the canal system since Samuel Oldknow and Richard Arkwright were instrumental in causing the Peak Forest Canal (Whaley Bridge to Marple) and the extension to Ashton to be built at the end of the 18th century. Later they were subscribers to the Macclesfield Canal, which linked the Peak Forest with the Trent and Mersey. The railways, however, gradually became the owners of the local canals, and much of the freight was transported more swiftly by rail. In my boyhood it was still possible to see a few laden barges working their way through the locks at the top of Brabyns Brow, some of them drawn by horses, but their numbers became fewer and fewer.
One of the local industrial plants which had its coal delivered by canal was Goyt Mill; the factory was built on the canal bank at Hawk Green, and the boats could pull up alongside the boiler-house to discharge their cargo. But passenger travel died out many years before the time frame of this book, and so the canals played no part in our daily lives except for an occasional walk along the towpath. Little did we think that the railway line between Marple (Rose Hill) and Macclesfield would eventually disappear, whilst the canal along the same route would be thronged with pleasure craft.
Aeroplanes were few and far between in the skies over Mellor, and children and grown-ups alike would rush outside to see one if its engine was heard overhead. I retain a memory of going into the garden of ‘Beaumont’ to look at a great airship – the R100, rival to the ill-fated R101. I now know that the date of this sighting must have been 25 May 1930, two months before it flew from Cardington to Montreal.
We had on our doorstep a private airfield at Woodford, owned by A V Roe & Co Ltd since 1924 as a testing ground for the aircraft which were built at their factory in Newton Heath on the edge of Manchester. This field was also used by the Lancashire Aero Club, of which John F Leeming was a leading light. It so happened that Leeming was client of my father, who audited the accounts of Leeming’s cleaning cloth business.
When Leeming formed Northern Air Transport at the original Manchester airport at Barton in 1930, he invited Dad to attend the Air Displays which took place every summer. The invitation did not extend to the family, however, and Mother, May and I had to enjoy them vicariously through Dad’s accounts of the day’s events. I still treasure a programme from the Great Air Pageant of 1932. Another programme (now lost, alas!) was autographed by the leading aviatrix Amy Johnson.
Strange, then, that with A V Roe at Newton Heath and Woodford, and Fairey Aviation at Heaton Chapel (Stockport), we should see so little flying. Indeed, my first close encounter with aviation did not come until 1939. The new Manchester Airport had opened the previous year at Ringway, and on 20 May l939 it played host to an Empire Air Day Display (yes, we had an Empire then!). A friend (probably Norman Attwood) and I cycled to Ringway to witness this show, which was marred by the crash of a Westland Lysander during an exhibition of slow flying.
Undeterred by this dramatic demonstration of the dangers of aerial navigation, I queued up at the end of the day for a ‘joy-ride’ in a de Havilland Dragonfly. On reaching the head of the queue, I was bitterly disappointed to discover that there were no half-fares. I had only half-a-crown (12½p) in my pocket, and the charge was five shillings (25p). As I turned away with tears in my eyes, a kind gentleman standing nearby took pity on me, and supplied the extra half-crown. He never knew that not only did he give me my first flight, but he also moved my feet another step along the road which was to lead me into the aircraft industry.
Now Ringway is Manchester International Airport, barely half-an-hour’s drive from Mellor, from which one can take wing to any of the five continents, and I can sit in our garden and watch the airliners make their final circuits as they bring passengers and cargoes from all over the world. The canals have turned from freight traffic to pleasure cruising; the airlines have developed from flying circuses to the biggest transport system ever known.