Mellor is the village where I was born, and where I have spent all my life. I have seen it slip from Derbyshire into Cheshire, and from Cheshire into the Metropolitan Borough of Stockport within Greater Manchester, but it still retains an indefinable quality which makes it impossible to think of living anywhere else.
If you approach Mellor from the east – from Hayfield, perhaps – you can hardly miss the signboard at the crossroads which goes under several names: Jordanwall Nook is the quaintest, Five (actually six!) Lane Ends the most descriptive, and Strines Turning the most misleading, for without a map a stranger would not know which road to take for Strines. The signboard is headed with the single word ‘MELLOR’, but the mention of Stockport and the names of its twin towns distract the attention from the fact that this is the eastern boundary of the village.
If you approach it from the west – from Stockport, say, or Marple Station – you may not be sure where Mellor begins, for you can easily miss the diminutive sign by the car park at the end of Town Street.
Should you ask the Vicar of Mellor, he will tell you that he has the cure of all the souls as far as the River Etherow on the fringe of Compstall. This, to him, is the western boundary of his parish.
The Postmaster would have you believe that the lower end of the village should be designated Marple Bridge, and many a newcomer has been persuaded that this is where he lives, and has had his notepaper printed accordingly. But as far as I am concerned, Marple Bridge is a stone arch carrying the Stockport-Glossop road over the River Goyt. I will throw in Town Street and Lower Fold for good measure, but even these are really in Ludworth.
Where Town Street changes to Longhurst Lane, there is a boundary stone set in the south wall of the narrow bridge over the stream. This is where Mellor begins, and let no-one have it otherwise.
The southern boundary is the River Goyt, and the northern boundary is partly formed by the stream I have just mentioned, flowing down through the neighbouring hamlet of Mill Brow. Elsewhere, the boundary is hard to define in a few words, being lost in open moorland.
In some ways, Mellor has an unsatisfactory layout. It has no obvious centre, no village green, no duck pond, but simply straggles beside the uphill road for a couple of miles, whilst a few side roads lead to outlying farms and small housing estates. Longhurst Lane leads out of Marple Bridge, and the two public houses on this road give their names to the areas around them, and these form the village ‘centres’ at the (Royal) Oak and the Devonshire (Arms) which divide Mellor into three distinct sections.
From Marple Bridge to the Oak is a fairly stiff climb, with the steepest portion just above the notorious double bend as the road crosses Slack Brook. The bridge here is called Cataract Bridge (from the waterfall which the bridge conceals), and so the hill is called Cataract Brow, or more usually just ‘Cataract’.
At the top of the hill stand the War Memorial in its neat little park, and the Royal Oak in its row of cottages. Then the second section of the village starts: the road climbs less steeply, and the houses continue.
The road winds on to the next pub – the Devonshire Arms. There comes a sudden transformation from brick houses to stone cottages, which seem to stand on each other’s shoulders as the road gets steeper and narrower. We are in the third section of the village – Moor End – and the road has changed its name to Moor End Road. At the steepest part of the hill, the weary traveller may find refreshment at the third pub – the Oddfellows’ Arms. Then the cottages gradually peter out, and the wild moorland begins.
But if Mellor has shortcomings in its layout, it makes up for them in its superb views. It is not the shape of the village that matters – it is what you can see from it, for Mellor is surrounded by hills: Cobden Edge, Ludworth Intakes and Marple Ridge, whilst high above the houses on its own special hill stands the parish church of St Thomas. Stand where you will, the hills dominate the view. Climb them, and you will see more: Alderley Edge in the south-west, Werneth Low in the north-west, Black Hill to the south. And higher than them all, the majestic plateau of Kinder Scout fills the eastern horizon. Looking westwards on a clear day, the foothills of the Welsh mountains can be seen across the Cheshire plain, or the Mersey glinting in the evening sun at Liverpool.
And the walks! You can leave the main road by a score of footpaths and farm tracks, and trace intricate patterns across the fields and hillsides. Nobody with the slightest interest in the outdoors could ever be bored in Mellor. I can walk from my garden gate to the summit of Kinder Scout without setting foot on more than a few hundred yards of metalled road.
This, then is Mellor, and here I was born – near to the centre of the middle section – in Dene Cottage (now 192 Longhurst Lane) during a snowstorm in the early hours of 3 March 1924. The doctor was delayed by the snow, and I was delivered by the local midwife, assisted by a lady who must surely appear in any chronicle of Mellor covering the first half of the 20th century – Mrs Jowett. At each of my successive anniversaries she claimed: “I held him before his mother did!” – much to Mother’s annoyance.
Mrs Jowett will not, however, be remembered for her attendance upon my arrival into the world, but, since she lived in the so-called ‘Manor House’, she was to many the ‘Lady of the Manor’. We will meet her on several occasions later in the story.
Mother came to Mellor at the end of the 19th century as a baby, when her mother and father – a Manchester warehouseman – moved out from Harpurhey. They settled in ‘Spring Bank’ - now 24 Moor End Road. Father was also an emigré from Manchester – he came from Victoria Park where (so he boasted in later life) he played football with a lad called Laurie Lowry, who was to become better known as an artist than a goalkeeper. Father’s parents came to Mellor around 1910, taking a house called ‘Fair Hope’ (now No 121) on Cataract Brow.
A few years before my parents’ marriage in 1920, my maternal grandparents moved to the lower of a pair of semi-detached houses called ‘Slackwood’ at the junction of Knowle Road with Longhurst Lane. My father’s parents left the district after his marriage, returning in the ’thirties to ‘Highmoor’ in Gibb Lane.
In 1926, my father commissioned William Chadwick , a local builder, to build a house. Mrs Jowett owned most of the available building land, and a plot was obtained on Longhurst Lane almost opposite the Manor House, where she lived. So ‘Beaumont’ (275 Longhurst Lane) came to be built, and there I lived until my own marriage in 1950, when once again Mrs Jowett and Mr Chadwick provided the land and the house – this time in Townscliffe Lane. ‘Beaumont’ took its name from that of my maternal great-great-great-grandmother. Her name appears on a loving cup dated 1808, which passes from mother to daughter. It is now in the possession of my sister May, after which it will presumably pass to my niece, and then to her eldest daughter.
My wife Joan and I chose ‘Tryfan’ for the name of our new house (where we still live) after our favourite Welsh mountain. Now we are just No 54, and no matter how much easier it is for the postman, one cannot help regretting the house-names we knew. I could recite them all off in order as a boy – Egorievsk, Normandy, Beaumont, Oak Bungalow, Hafod, Felthorpe, Appletree Cottage – all, no doubt, with some interesting reason for being chosen by their original owners. Some were carved permanently into gateposts (where they may still be seen), some were engraved or embossed into metal plates, some merely painted in various styles of calligraphy. No-one ever needed to put ‘Longhurst Lane’ into their address; ‘Beaumont, Mellor’ would always find us. I believe that nowadays I could get away with ‘54, SK6 5AP’.
My mother’s brother also settled in Mellor, and her sister lived a couple of miles away in Marple for many years after her marriage. My maternal great-aunt Maud and her husband Frank Saxon lived in Mellor, too, first at Richmond Hill Cottage (50 Moor End Road) and later in White Row. My father’s aunt and uncle lived with their daughter at ‘Thornbury’ (now 197 Longhurst Lane).
There were thus many houses in Mellor with which we had some family association, and many more which we knew intimately because our friends lived in them. What happy hours I have spent in the cellar of 1 Gibb Lane, in the wash-house at ‘Norette’, on the balcony of ‘Kenore’ or in the garden shed at ‘Newlyn’! And in the playroom at the Manor House, or on the tennis-court at ‘Rawcliffe’ or in the garage at ‘Normandy’!
The old houses are still there, but quite a few new ones have appeared in the gaps, whilst some bigger housing estates are discreetly tucked away off the main road. What other changes have there been in the past seventy years? We’ll look at two of them now; others will crop up in later chapters.
First of all, there are street lights, or more to the point there is electricity, for all the houses were lit by gas or oil lamps when I was a small boy, and the roads were unlit. Neither were there any “cats’ eyes” in the road; they arrived just before World War 2. There is a story about Mrs Renshaw, who lived in Moor End: during the wartime blackout she was walking home from Marple with my parents. “My word,” she said, “It is dark! They haven’t lit the cats’ eyes yet!”
Secondly, the roads are no longer paved with granite setts (stone blocks) – “So that the horses could get a grip”, as I was always told – although tar macadam was coming into use. Oh, the joys of the road-menders! The steam-roller, puffing its filthy smoke at it chuffed and crunched its glorious way, flywheel spinning, eccentrics whirling, worm and chain steering. The tar boiler, with the fire underneath, and a big tap at one end from which issued forth the black, sticky stream. “Go and smell the tar,” my mother used to say, “It will do your chest good”. Little did I need telling – I was prepared to stand there and smell it all day!