Clowes Street West Gorton And St Marks School

A Memory of Gorton.

I was born at 124 Clowes Street, West Gorton in 1947 and attended St Marks' School between 1953 and 1959. The Head was the formidable Mrs Clayton, and the Deputy Head was Mr Platt, but it was the lovely Mrs Butterworth who taught me to read and write.
Clowes Street was the busiest street in Gorton, with a school, church, chapel, cinema, thirteen public houses and every kind of shop imaginable along its length. All before supermarkets, convenience stores, bingo and clubs, there was no need to travel anywhere else to shop or be entertained.
The house I was born in was rented by my grandparents from a private landlord, but when I was a few weeks old we moved next door into 126 Clowes Street. This was a converted Tripe Shop owned by the Beswick Co-operative Society, which had a butchers next door (128) and a grocers next door to that (130). The houses were Victorian, damp and dark, having been built in the 1800's on ancient small-holdings with names such as Strawberry Fields. They were to accomodate people who were forced to move from the hovels of Manchester's city centre to find work in the rapidly developing railway and engineering industries, for which West Gorton and Gorton was to become famous.
Clowes Street was always a bustling thoroughfare, teeming with shoppers, and had electric tram-cars running along its length on iron rails before the introduction of the number 109 diesel bus service in the early 1940's, but the overhead gas-lights and the granite-cobbled street survived until their replacement in the 1950's.
People were generally poor, but with an honesty that bound them together, and neighbours spent long summer days chatting on their street steps, doing their weekly laundry in the damp basements of their houses or pushing pram-loads of soiled clothes to the Municipal Laundry situated at Gorton Baths on Hyde Road.
My first ever memory is of the Queen's Coronation (1952), when parties were held in most streets, and neighbours contributed to the provision of sandwiches, cakes and drinks for themselves, whilst the children of St Marks' School had a party of their own, and of being asked to bring our own spoon to school, with wool or cotton wrapped around the handle, in case it was lost and then found. Cutlery (ususally bought from the Army and Navy Stores on Hyde Road), was quite a precious commodity after the war. I remember eating jelly and ice-cream from a waxed flower-shaped paper dish, and being handed a commemorative Coronation Mug from a cardboard box.
I remember playing in the dusty back "entries" between the rows of houses or the open spaces at the rear of square blocks of terraced houses called "backs," with games such as Rally-Vo, Kick-Can, Hide and Seek, Paper Chase, Marbles (or "allies"), Football (with a leather "case-ball"), or racing push-carts (or "bogies") made from four old pram wheels bolted to a board and pushed by a mate with a brush-handle (or "stale") as they were referred to.
Everywhere was covered in dust in the long dry summers, and in mud during the long dark and wet winters, and all buildings - including the rows and rows of identical terraced houses - were coated in black soot from their coal fires.
Houses had no central heating, but all had coal fires in most of their rooms, including the bedrooms (though poverty usually prevented these being lit at the same time), and toilets were located in an outhouse in the "back yard" at the rear. Bathrooms were unheard of, but weekly baths were taken in front of the coal fire in the "back kitchen" with adults and children bathing in zinc baths or galvanised steel "dolly-tubs" usually reserved for the weekly washing in the cellar. Hot water was supplied from iron pans heated on the open coal fire in the "grate".
Rooms were hot in the summer and freezing cold in the winter, when windows that let in the cold air were blocked off with newspapers stuffed into any surrounding gaps, and window glass was always cleaned with old newspapers dipped in vinegar.
Food was generally fresh, home-made and not canned or packaged, but it was simple and cheap (there was little cash to spare for luxuries in those days in Gorton) and Cow Heel, Tripe and Onions and Irish Stew were always on the menu. My favourite was always "Cowboy's Dinner" as my late Dad called it - potatoes, peas and bacon, with the bacon fat dripped over the potatoes. Scraps were always used to make an ever-ready stew that always seemed to be boiling away on the "grate" in the kitchen, and which was always served piping hot and with a hunk of bread, especially during the winter.
Talk about conservation and green issues today? There was hardly any waste thrown out in the weekly "midden" or dustbin, ("midden" being an old Norse word for an ash-pit, and used by all my family right into the 1980's), and as every house had a coal fire, most rubbish was burned on it. The only thing left in the "midden" for collection once a week was ash from the fire and old tin cans.
Mates rarely quarrelled, and at my school I remember the following: Alan (Bunny) Clark, Keith (Fudgie) Brooks, Tony Latham, Bernard Burke, Frank Partland, Brain Ravenscroft, Dave Roberts, Stanley Gaunt, Duncan Twigg, Eddie and Raymond Frost and Billy Briggs, and the following girls: Joan and Jean Davies, Lilian Garland, Marilyn Tomlinson, Sandra Jones and Sheila Gaunt.
The eventual destruction and demolition of West Gorton (and later the Gorton area where I grew up between 1960 and 1970) split families and their neighbours forever, and long-standing friendships were permanantly lost. Old friends were re-housed on far-flung housing estates in different parts of Manchester, and I have NEVER met a soul who thought that it was a good idea. It is for this reason that although West Gorton was a wonderful place to have been born and raised, my memories are always tinged with some degree of sadness. Consequently, to all Gortonians and West Gortonians, I send my very best wishes.