John Wilson of Sarah Street

John Wilson lived at 21 Sarah Street in Beswick in 1911. He was 67, born in Tideswell in Derbyshire. His wife Alice was 65, from Stalybridge, a Cheetham by birth. They married in 1868. In the house with them were their daughter Annie (Ann Eliza Peel), 42, a cotton reeler; their daughter Hannah, 35; Annie’s boy Leslie, 11; and a boarder, Ben (Benjamin Rogers Barlow), 47, a leading hand in plate bending, born in Salford and already a widower.

Alice had five children. Four were still living. Besides Annie and Hannah there was a son, James, and a younger daughter, Sarah. James and Sarah were not under this roof by 1911.

Uppermill first

John and Alice did not start in Beswick. In the early years of the marriage they lived in Uppermill, Saddleworth, with Alice’s parents John and Hannah Cheetham on Wade Street. Annie was born there in 1869. By the 1880s the family had their own place on Watergate Street. John worked as a carter. Alice was a cotton reeler. The children came up in the mill trades around them: Annie reeling, James piecing, Hannah reeling as soon as she was old enough. On School Street at the end of the decade John was a railway labourer and Alice was home with the younger ones. Sarah was six.

Annie married George Henry Peel on 25 September 1893 at St Thomas’s, Saddleworth. She was 24. George was 28. John’s name stands as father on the register. Annie kept the reeling work after the move into Manchester. By 1911 she had three children living. Leslie was the one staying with his grandparents on Sarah Street. George was not in the house that year.

The gasworks

John’s job in Beswick was labourer at the Bradford Road Gas Works, the Manchester Corporation plant between Bradford Road, the Medlock and the Ashton Canal. The cornerstone went down in 1877. Production of town gas began in 1884. Coal came straight from Bradford Colliery next door. The works had long retort houses, holders, railway sidings off the Lancashire and Yorkshire loop, and a canal basin for oil and liquor. Men on John’s grade broke coal, charged retorts, cleared ash and kept the yard and floors moving. Heat, dust and the smell of tar were the day. The walk from Sarah Street was about ten minutes north up Bradford Road.

Annie’s reeling sat in the same industrial pocket: yarn wound after spinning, mill hours separate from John’s shifts. Ben bent metal plate for a living and brought a skilled man’s wage into the rent.

Sarah Street and the Bull’s Head

Sarah Street was a short terrace street in Bradford ward. Number 21 held three generations plus a paying boarder. Alice ran the house with Hannah. Leslie was still at school age. After tea John went out to the Bull’s Head at 45-47 Ashton New Road, where Robert Leah was publican. The Bull’s Head had been a Beswick landmark for years: ratepayers once held the township meeting there, licences changed hands across the counter, and the main road was the natural draw for men walking off a shift. John drank there. Two pints, talk from the works and the mills, then home down Sarah Street.

What remains

Sarah Street is still on the map through Beswick. The gasworks stopped making town gas in 1971. A holder frame stands on the old site by the canal.

Sarah Street still runs through Beswick. The Bradford Road works stopped making town gas in 1971. A gasometer frame is still there by the canal.