Went looking for 71 Grosvenor Street on Friday but didn’t have camera on me. Most of the old buildings are gone and it’s all 1960s council housing and later. Closest I could find was 94-96 on the corner with Anson Road (big dual carriageway)? One way traffic system prevented me from going back but will explore further….and add pics.
I found a Samuel Crompton living on Grosvenor Street in Chorlton, Manchester in the 1841 census! Must be Chorlton-on-Medlock which would make it Grosvenor Street next to MMU, over the road from the School of Art. How strange is that. Born in 1821, aged 20, profession given as a surgeon. Don’t know anything else, couldn’t see the rest of the result without paying 60 quid.
Is this his letter? How did the ‘lady from Lancashire’ come by it? Is it connected with the earlier Crompton? Who knows. Interesting though, a connection…
I’m going to look for 71 Grosvenor Street, Manchester
Been thinking about Samuel Crompton’s bits of string too small for use…
In that moment of discovery, looking through a set of old brown files in the gallery office, we believed we had found something momentous (well, you had). And we had.
Something about Mary’s ‘believe me’ really excites me. Somebody spun those cotton yarns a long time ago. Somebody carefully annotated a series of small card tabs and wound the samples around them. And then went home and had tea. Maybe they got sent to Samuel Crompton. Somebody put them to one side, in a box or a drawer, and they became accidental survivors, archaeological fragments of something once real but now out of reach. And then, their potential really opens up. Such humble things become so potent.
I love the possibility, even if it’s only temporary and is shot down by research, that they could be the first yarns from the mule. That the reality of what they are is up for grabs. It’s the slippery-ness of story-telling, filling in the gaps between the bits and pieces with bits and pieces of other stories and making it momentarily true. Not a very curatorial response, more a romantic one.
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