Delving for the third time into the photographs taken by my uncle, Geoff Burke. Perhaps a little background information might not go amiss here. Geoff was born in 1933 in Rochdale to John (my grandad) and Annie Burke. The first family home was on Church Street near the Rochdale gas works and despite the steep hill the smell from the works never failed to make me gag a bit whenever we visited my Great Grandma Brierley who was Annie's mother and who still lived on the street into the 1970s.
John and Annie however moved with their two children Allan (my Dad) and Geoff to a large house on Fenton Street in Rochdale not far away from the railway station. Geoff never married and spent many years caring for Annie after John passed away. Following her death at the age of 90, he moved to Blackpool, following Allan and his family who had moved there in the 1970s.
Despite the move he never sold, nor cleared out, the house on Fenton Street and this task fell to myself with my brother Frank and our families. Despite his claims that there were no old family photographs, we found many such albums. Whatever his motives were for denying their existence I have no idea.
It could be said that Geoff was a keen photographer. I tend to think of him more as a keen collector of photographic equipment that seldom got used and even then no one ever got to see many of the photos he had taken. He had a large collection of cameras and each one saw him go to his favourite spot to retake photos he had taken with every new camera, perhaps to compare them. Favourite spots were Broadfield Park behind the town hall and beyond to the parish church of St Chad.
Broadfield Park gave a fantastic vantage point, looking high above the town hall and town centre. Rochdale was well known in those days for having a very attractive town centre and had proudly named the road quite grandly as The Esplanade. It was home to the town hall, an astonishing number of banks, the main post office, Remembrance Gardens with a large cenotaph and a generously wide road.
The road was in part wide because it was one of the widest bridges in the world, covering the River Roch which disappeared somewhere near the main library at one end and only emerging some 446 metres later at the far side of the town centre. On its way it replaced no less than seven earlier bridges.
Broadfield Park was set against the steep slope towards the parish church and had the local nurses' home at one end. At the other end the terraced paths converged towards the junction of The Esplanade with Manchester Road. It had a large pond and a huge chunk of stone with a sign that said the stone had been moved here from somewhere in the Lake District by a glacier in the ice age. Bloomin' stone age men leaving their rubbish all over the place...!
Of more interest are the odd photos taken around the town. This is Oldmill Street either in or around the Lower Falinge district of Rochdale. I'm afraid I never did get all those many districts in my head. This street is now mostly residential but this photo betrays the reason for its name.
The car is a Ford Zephyr Mk II, one of the Three Graces of Consul (the cheapest and most basic), Zephyr and Zodiac (top of the range). They were made from 1956 through to 1962.
Not quite sure just where this is. Most of Uncle Geoff's photos were either shoved into tins and boxes and even the ones in albums had few hints as to who, what, when and where... Here, one lady isn't tempted at all by the thoughts of a new mop whilst another stares dubiously into the window of Domestrix, wondering how on earth vacuum cleaners work and whether they might be dangerous.
The Salvation Army Citadel. There is no identification other than this. Whilst I know that the present day building is on Newgate, I'm not sure where this is or was in the early 1960s. Leave a comment if you know? The cars shown here are a Wolseley 15/50 or 16/60 on the left and a Humber Sceptre.
A very early example of a supermarket, here shown just around the corner from Redcross Street. My grandad on my Mum's side had a traditional grocery shop on Yorkshire Street and it was the advent of these shops that led him to have to fold up and sell.
They were a halfway stage to today's supermarkets. For the first time you had to go and find and fetch your own collection of tins and bits and pieces instead of standing at the counter whilst the grocer did all the fetching and carrying for you. As far as I remember there were as yet no conveyer belts, you had to push all your purchases yourself along a formica plastic top until they were within reach of the till operator.
However all sorts of new goods were coming out at the time with brands such as Camay and Knights Castille soaps, individually wrapped replacing the large bricks of evil smelling red carbolic and dark green Fairy soaps that if not rinsed off quickly would strip hands of any remaining flesh - well that's what it seemed like, although of course they didn't...
A church social event. Annie Burke, my grandma, is next to the last lady on the right of the middle row and her mother, Maggie Brearley, is next to her to our left. What the event was I have no idea. They went all over to whist drives playing cards and she was never happier than when rummaging through a jumble sale - unless it was when trying to persuade you that you no longer needed your favourite pullover because there were needy people who needed it more than you.
