Wild Family Visit

A few months ago I was asked to do some research for a family who were visiting Stockport from Melbourne, Australia. Their ancestors had lived at 31 Market Place, now Staircase House, they also had an ancestor who was mayor of Stockport and one who who penned several books and plays.

Rather excitingly, they visited Stockport this week and myself and Margaret greeted them to show them the research we had, items from our archives and old photographs of Stockport. We were even able to show them books from our archive which were written by their ancestor William Isaac Wild!

This was followed by tea and scones with the mayor, before returning to the library so they could examine the material in more detail.

It was a fascinating day, and lovely to meet the people who I had researched for. It was so interesting finding the information, as their ancestors were a rather notable family in Stockport there was a fabulous amount of information to be found.

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School Meals in the Post WW1 Depression

In my last post I wrote about the ‘Explore Your Archives’ project we are working on ready for November. I referred to the committee minutes I was reading, and wondering why the number of children taking free school meals dramatically dropped, leading to the closure of school canteens throughout Stockport. Since writing the post (which you can read here) I have done some more research, and found the reasons behind this. 

 The 1906 Education Act allowed local authorities to provide school meals, but it was not until the 1921 Education Act that local authorities were required to provide them. There had been a school canteen service running in Stockport from 1913 with a steady number of children attending weekly – ranging between 80 to 100. The service provided free meals for destitute children, running the cost as a loan to their fathers.  This scheme also provided food for children of men who were serving in the Great War.

During the post war depression unemployment in the UK doubled from 1 million to 2 million, and on the 10th June 1921 unemployment reached 2.2 million. Obviously this had an impact on the provision of free school meals, which Stockport canteens seem to have coped with admirably.

In the heritage library we hold local newspapers on microfilm, going back to 1822. To give the canteen minutes some context I searched through the Stockport Express and Stockport Advertiser from March 1921, to see what news was being reported and how this shed light on the changes in the provision of school meals.

The Stockport Express in 8th April 1921 stated that there were 20,263 men, women, boys and girls registered at the Stockport Unemployment Exchange – an increase of 282 from the previous week*. This is reflected in the canteen minutes  – in October 1920 66 children were supplied with a free meal, by 18th June 1921 this had jumped to 809 children and ‘steadily increasing’. The highest number of children they provided for was in July 1921 which saw 907 children in one week. The newspapers were full of advertisements stating ‘Ex-Service Men, Wives and Families are Starving’ painting a grim picture of life at the time.

When the Education Act of 1921 was introduced, there were strict circumstances in which children were eligible for free school meals whereas previously this had been at the discretion of headteachers. The Board of Education introduced a rationing system to limit the cost to the government to £300,000. This is recorded in the canteen minutes as a scale of relief had been adopted for the unemployed, resulting in a decrease of 330 children, and the numbers gradually declined until April 1922 when they returned to the level they were before – this accounts for the closures of canteen centres and decline in the number of children attending which piqued my interest.

This part of the project has been excellent for researching using the library’s resources, and finding the historical context of a document.

*I mentioned a little about unemployment post WW1 in this post.

Ephemera Collection

Ephemera is the main are where items are added to the library archives every year – it includes leaflets, advertisements, tickets, programmes and posters which give us a valuable insight into past times.

The Ephemera Society define ephemera as;

“Essentially produced to meet the needs of the day, such items reflect the moods and mores of past times in a way that more formal records cannot.”

There is a box in the library of ephemera waiting to be classified – which is what I am getting started on! 

It is essentially a box full of junk mail (all relating to Stockport of course) but when you start looking at the boxes of older ephemera you can understand how important it is to keep for future generations, and you can actually see influences from the old ephemera as our current trends move towards vintage and retro styles.

Firstly I have been dating each document and stamping it, before using the classification schedules to decide how it should be classified – you can see some examples from the ephemera I have been classifying and some older examples.

The Avondale Collection

We have recently had donated a large collection of documents relating to Avondale School, as it has now closed. The documents have been used for displays and range from the 1940’s up until recent years. There are an array of newspaper articles and photographs of a range of school life including school trips, sports events, classroom activities, and also photographs of staff. It is a large collection which Lauren & I have been sorting through and cataloguing so it can be placed in the archives.

The photographs from each display board have been placed in separate envelopes, which are then assigned an accession number so they can be easily accessed. It is a large collection so we do have a long way to go before the whole collection has been catalogued!