Former Little Theatre, Stockport, Manchester (UK)

Near Saint Peter's Square, Stockport:

"STOCKPORT

GARRICK SOCIETY

The country's oldest 'Little Theatre'

was founded at a meeting at the

Church Coffee Tavern on this site,

24th October 1901"

Elizabeth Raffald in Stockport, Manchester (UK)

In Suffragette Square in Stockport there is a series of flat wooden benches which remember several prominent women. This one is dedicated to Elizabeth Raffald (1733-81), a woman I've mentioned before in relation to Stockport and Manchester, and who is perhaps most noted for her famous book, The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769).

My Elizabeth Raffald posts:
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Elizabeth Raffald in Stockport
Elizabeth Raffald in Manchester and Stockport

The Frogs of Stockport, Manchester (UK)

I could hardly believe it when I arrived in Stockport: there were frogs all over! Giant ones! An odd feeling came over me when I thought back to going round Hull after all the toads celebrating the twenty-fifth anniversary of Philip Larkin's death here. And then there were the bears of Cherokee, North Carolina here, and the horses of Aiken, South Carolina here: yes, this was another must. Of course, this is the town with Robinson's regional brewery, so hopping is important here, but the frog leaflet says that the animals are a celebration of 'all the great changes that are taking place in Stockport', and that each frog is sponsored by a local business. The frogs live here from 29 June 2019 until 28 September.

1. Nexphibian. Connectivity near the town hall.

2. Golding. Named after the hop used in Unicorn beer.

3. KermIT. 'One dapper digital dude'.

 4. Cornelius. In pyjamas and ready for bed at Holiday Inn.

5. Prince Regent. Close to Regent House.

6. Ferdinand. In Mersey Square.

7. Robert. In all his multicolour.

8. BUSter. So the 192 route has had an album in honour of the route?

9. Mrs Mersey - the Happy Shopper.

10. This Little Guiding Frog of Mine. Girl-guiding, that is, in Suffragette Square.

11. Sir Lovealot. Designed by the pupils of St Thomas Primary School.

12. Chemit. 2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table.

13. Midas. The gold gives it away, perhaps.

14. Sir Norman Frogster. Not to be confused with architect Sir Norman Foster.

15. This Little Froggy Went to Market. Well, what else in the Market Place?

16. Strawberry Fields. Stockport is home to Strawberry Studios of Joy Division fame.

17. Fanatical Frog. Apparently 'wearing some of Stockport's fabulous and iconic landmarks'.

18. Sir Hopaslot. 'Fresh from his starring role in the sequel to Wind in the Willows'.

19. Edgeleap. Something to do with sport.

Paul Morley: Nothing (2000)

In a way, particularly at the beginning of this book, which is non-fiction, it could be said that much of it deals with the writer and music journalist Paul Morley, his obsessional interest in rock culture. It also deals with his life particularly up to the time he was twenty years of age, or eighteen as he thinks at the time, because the reader is drip-fed the information here as it initially came to his often imperfect knowledge.

But it really hovers around this eighteen or twenty period, bringing in Morley's two sisters (Jayne and Carol) and his mother (Dilys). This was when Morley's father disappeared for good, because he (a sufferer from depression who had previously suffered from the electro-convulsive 'therapy' designed to cure him, but in fact which (as Stanley Middleton once wrote so accurately of one of his fictional characters) 'raddled' his brain). (And I know the exact meaning of this because I (for my sins) once assisted on several occasions in the administration of this barbaric 'treatment' at a psychiatric hospital.)

On the final disappearance of the father, he left the family's Stockport home and headed south in his firm's ford Escort van, fitted a kind of pipe to the exhaust, stuffed the window and inhaled the poisonous carbon monoxide fumes until he was dead: in a rather ghoulish touch, Morley says that he looked in the peak of health with his pink face. Not that Morley ever saw it though, because at the beginning he says that the only dead body he ever saw is that of Ian Curtis, and goes on to say that his father (like Marc Bolan and Elvis Presley) all died in 1977. On the other hand, Morley speculates at the end, maybe he didn't see Curtis's body at all. (Ian Curtis of course died in 1980.)

Psychological truth is relative, fugitive, as speculative as many pages in this book, lost in the turmoil of the mind. And suicide brings turmoil to the family, can lead to endless guilt feelings, endless reasoning, crazy thinking, in a way that, say, death from cancer or some other disease, or death in war, etc, can't equal: that doesn't in any way lessen other deaths, but suicide is different. Different because it can seem arbitrary, preventable, pointless, but perhaps above all a denial of the value, even of the existence, of those left behind.

Only very occasionally, and very briefly, does Paul Morley lapse into overwriting of the kind that, for example, destroyed the appalling first (and surely last?) novel that Morrissey wrote, but then that is to be expected. This is a heartfelt search to find his father, to find out what led him to the supreme act of self-effacement, the outsider southerner who proudly owned his own home 'up north', who dressed differently from the northerners around him, spoke differently from them, and finally drove away from his adopted – but in so many other ways unadopted – north to the south, to the tiny Bull's Cross near Gloucester, to do the undoable. I really enjoyed Nothing.

Rowena Edlin-White: Kate Douglas Wiggin and Bramall Hall (2007)

I had intended to tie in a blog post about Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856–1923) with a visit to Bramall Hall, Stockport, Cheshire, but unfortunately it's been closed 'for restoration and refurbishment' since the end of this September, and doesn't re-open until spring 2016. Meanwhile I've read Rowena Edlin-White's Kate Douglas Wiggin and Bramall Hall, which underlines the very interesting relationship between the North American writer and this part of England.

Kate Douglas Wiggin first visited England in 1890, the year after the death of her first husband, Samuel Bradley Wiggin. It was towards the end of her stay – after she had also visited several countries in Europe – that she accepted Charles and Mary Nevill's invitation to visit them at their home: Bramall Hall, the Elizabethan manor house which the calico printer Thomas Henry Nevill had bought for his son Charles in 1882. She stayed there five days, but this was to be the first of many usually annual visits up to about 1913, after which the First World War – along with Charles's death – intervened.

In her autobiography My Garden of Memory – published posthumously but in the same year as her death – Wiggin speaks of Bramall Hall's 'picturesque beauty and grandeur', and says that the death of Mary (1901) and Charles (1916) 'left a great blank in my list of English friendships'.

She loved the luxury of the great house, and slept in the Davenport Room:

'When I go to bed at night there is a procession of room-maids, ladies' maids, housekeepers and others, with warming pans, jugs of hot water, candles, eider-down quilts, and hot gin and water! In the morning a procession arrives with different articles, and oh! how I like it!'

Wiggin initially visited Bramall Hall with Chatto & Windus publisher Percy Spalding's wife, although later she went with her sister Nora Archibald Smith (also a writer) or George Riggs, her second husband, whom she married in 1895.

Kate Douglas Wiggin is noted for the 'Penelope' books, the first of which – Penelope's English Experiences – was published in one volume with A Cathedral Courtship in 1893, although revised editions of each were published in 1900 and 1901 respectively. The germ of Penelope's English Experiences began on her first visit to Bramall Hall, and her most famous book – Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903) – was dedicated to Charles Henry Nevill, 'under whose dear English roof so many of these chapters were written'.

Rowena Edlin-White wrote her doctoral thesis on Kate Douglas Wiggin, and it is clear from the back cover of this very interesting book that she wants the 'Penelope' series to be as well known as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. And also, of course, that the link between Kate Douglas Wiggin and Bramall Hall be better known: which it probably won't be while it remains closed.

Strawberry Studios, Stockport, Greater Manchester

Strawberry Studios, Waterloo Road, Stockport.

'STRAWBERRY

RECORDING STUDIOS

1968 TO 1993

Association with the band 10cc

resulted in some of the most memorable

music being produced at these Studios.

Paul MacCartney, Neil Sedaka, [The] Stone Roses,

The Syd Lawrence Orchestra and

many others also recorded here.'

One of those 'many others' were Joy Division, who recorded their first album Unknown Pleasures here in April 1979.

The Waterloo pub opposite was the watering hole.

Samuel Bamford in Stockport

The above sculpture of the poet Samuel Bamford is on a BHS wall in central Stockport. It was unveiled in 1978 and is part of a much larger series of reliefs. 

Below is a link to a much longer Bamford post:

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Samuel Bamford in Middleton

Elizabeth Raffald in Manchester and Stockport

Elizabeth Raffald (née Whitaker) was born in Doncaster in 1733 and worked at Arley Hall, Cheshire, where she became housekeeper. She met her future husband John Raffald there. The couple moved to Manchester in the early 1760s, where John had a florist shop and Elizabeth was involved in a number of business enterprises, although she is most noted for her highly successful book The Experienced English Housekeeper (1769), which she dedicated to her former employer Lady Elizabeth Warburton.

In Exchange Square, Manchester:

'ELIZABETH RAFFALD

1733–1781

Cookery book author and publisher of

the first Manchester trade directory

Established a cookery school, shop

and domestic service agency

near this site'

The Arden Arms in Millgate, Stockport, was rebuilt in 1815 by John and Elizabeth's nephew, George Raffald junior. It was on land originally used as a market garden and passed on from John to his brother George Raffald senior in 1760. Its interior is unusually well preserved.

Elizabeth Raffald was buried a few hundred yards from here, in the parish churchyard.

My Elizabeth Raffald posts:
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Elizabeth Raffald in Stockport
Elizabeth Raffald in Manchester and Stockport