History of 60-62 Nelson Street
Until the end of the eighteenth century, Chorlton-on-Medlock was predominantly farmland, with the land owned by the gentry as it had been since the Middle Ages. The road from Manchester to Oxford cut through the middle of Chorlton-on-Medlock, and this was maintained from 1753 by the Manchester and Wilmslow Turnpike Trust, but otherwise the area was mostly open fields until the end of the 1700s.
BEFORE THE PANKHURSTS
All this would change in 1794. A development plan was drawn up for Chorlton-on-Medlock that saw a series of streets constructed leading off the Oxford Road. Each street was named after a battleship (Brunswick, Dover, Brighton, Grafton, Nelson) and they created a grid of freehold plots of lands that were sold off to wealthy industrialists.
The plot on Nelson Street was bought by George Royle Chappell, a non-conformist merchant who, among other enterprises, owned a cotton mill in Beswick. Chappell built a large house on his newly acquired land, which was named Nelson House, and this became his main residence until his death.
At some point before 1832, Chappell also constructed a pair of semi-detached villas next to Nelson House. Chappell had six daughters, and the eldest of these were getting married around this time, so it’s possible the villas were intended as an extension of the family home. For instance, his daughter Betsy married Joshua Proctor Brown Westhead, an early member of Manchester Council and later Liberal MP for Knaresborough and then York, in 1828. Betsy and Joshua moved to nearby Plymouth Grove, but it’s quite likely that they began their married life on Nelson Street.
When George Royle Chappell died in 1860, Nelson House and the two villas were sold by the executors of his will. The buyer was Henry Anthony Bennett, the brother of two-time Mayor of Manchester and Alderman John Marsland Bennett. The Bennetts were stone and timber merchants, and John Marsland Bennett donated the land and funding for the construction of the Church of St Benedict in Ardwick.
Henry Bennett initially lived at Nelson House and rented out the two villas to tenants. As more houses were built on Nelson Street, numbering was introduced. In 1861, the villas were 44 Nelson Street (rented to dancing instructor Prosper Paris and his family) and 46 Nelson Street (rented to the Meek family). By 1871, the houses had been renumbered 60 and 62. Nelson House – originally 1 Nelson Street – would become No. 64.
Henry Bennett was something of a curious character. On the one hand, he was a churchwarden of the Cathedral and an officer in the Kings Own Royal Tower Hamlets Militia. On the other hand, he had a long-term relationship with a former domestic servant, Mary Siddall, in London. Henry and Mary had five children together, and although his obituaries stated that he never married, Mary is listed as Henry’s wife on the 1881 census, when the couple were living at Nelson Street.
Although Nelson House was a charming Georgian country house that had suited George Royle Chappell and his family, Henry Bennett had other ideas. In 1876, he had a new house constructed on Nelson Street that was described by the newspapers as a ‘local curiosity’ and, by one architect, as a ‘waste of money’. 66 Nelson Street was a large neo-Gothic building with no gardens and an unusual layout of rooms.
Bennett continued to rent 60 and 62 Nelson Street to tenants, and from the 1870s, Nelson House was also rented out.
The Pankhursts Move In
Henry Bennett died in 1883, and his properties on Nelson Street continued to be owned and maintained by his heirs. His curious Gothic house became the Schiller-Anstalt German Social Club, which operated until 1911. Nelson House was rented to the Marshall family before becoming a private nursing home in the late 1890s.
Prosper Paris left No. 60 and the house was rented by the Websters, who were also dance instructors and ran classes from their home. Initially, these classes were run by William Webster, but after his death in 1890, his wife Ellen (or Elene) took over, assisted by her brother Archie. Among Ellen’s pupils were the young daughters of Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst.
In 1895, Ellen Webster took her own life and murdered one of her children in a case that attracted both local and national press attention, due to the shocking circumstances and the woman’s fame as a singer and musician. Ellen’s brother Archie and her eldest daughter Eliza continued to live at 60 Nelson Street after the tragedy, offering private dance classes.
The Meek family also left Nelson Street, and in the early 1890s 62 Nelson Street became the Nelson Hotel, an establishment run by Martha Collinson and John Hope Clarke, which advertised itself as a temperance hotel run ‘on the London principle’. Unfortunately, in 1893, it was discovered that the hotel was far from temperate, when it was closed down as a ‘disorderly house’ and its proprietors were arrested.
In 1898, after the death of her husband Richard, Emmeline Pankhurst looked for a family home for herself and her four surviving children at a more affordable rent than their house on Daisy Bank Road. Whether she was familiar with Nelson Street because of her acquaintance with the Webster family or whether she simply answered an advert unaware of the coincidence, we know that, in 1898, she chose to rent the five-bedroomed semi-detached house at 62 Nelson Street from the heirs of Henry Bennett, with Archie and Eliza Webster becoming her next-door neighbours.
Emmeline Pankhurst lived at 62 Nelson Street with her children, Christabel, Sylvia, Adela and Harry, and two domestic servants, a cook named Ellen Coyle and a maid named Mary Leaver. In the 1901 census, two of Emmeline’s brothers and one of her nephews are also recorded at the address.
Emmeline had been elected as a Poor Law Guardian in 1894, and she worked as a Registrar after the death of her husband. She ran a registry office from her home in Nelson Street, explaining that this would allow her to operate outside working hours, making it easier for working-class women to register births and deaths.
However, it is the events of October 1903 that transformed 62 Nelson Street from a family home to a site of historical significance.
On 10th October 1903, Emmeline Pankhurst invited a small group of her friends to a meeting at her home, where they agreed to form a new organisation to campaign for women’s voting rights. The organisation would be named the Women’s Social and Political Union (later dubbed ‘Suffragettes’ by the Daily Mail), and 62 Nelson Street would serve as its headquarters for the first few years. In 1905, Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney set out from Nelson Street to attend (and disrupt) a meeting of the Liberal Party at the Free Trade Hall, leading to the first arrests and imprisonments of the suffragette campaign.
After The Pankhursts
Emmeline Pankhurst left Manchester in 1907 to join her daughters Christabel and Sylvia in London, and the WSPU headquarters relocated to the capital. 62 Nelson Street was advertised for rent once again. By 1911, the Walker family had moved in, along with four boarders, and for the next fifty years the house and its adjoining neighbour would be home to an array of tenants.
However, Nelson Street underwent a radical change in the first half of the twentieth century, which would have serious implications for the birthplace of the suffragette movement.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Emmeline Pankhurst lived at Nelson Street, Manchester Royal Infirmary was located at Piccadilly Garden in the centre of Manchester. The site was rather old, and the hospital had long outgrown its building. Discussions began in 1875 to determine a new site for the hospital.
Manchester’s Royal Eye Hospital had moved to a building near the junction of Oxford Road and Nelson Street in the 1880s. This facility was close to the Victoria University of Manchester, which had a thriving medical school by the end of the nineteenth century. For this reason, the area around Nelson Street and Oxford Road made sense as a new site for the infirmary, and a formal plan was drawn up in 1904.
In the 1920s and 30s, real estate companies – first the Northern Realty Company and then Manchester Assets Limited – began buying houses and land on Nelson Street. In 1911, St Mary’s Hospital (a maternity hospital) opened in a new building nearby, and in 1921 Nelson House was donated to the Christie Management Committee and opened as the Manchester and District Radium Institute (associated with the Christie, Manchester’s cancer hospital).
The development of the new hospital site continued over the coming decades. In 1934, after the relocation of the Radium Institution to the Christie in Withington, Nelson House was renamed Lister House and became a hostel for medical students. The Eye Hospital, St Mary’s and the Infirmary amalgamated in 1948 to form the United Manchester Hospitals, and the housing on Nelson Street was torn down to make way for new infirmary buildings.
At this stage, 60-62 Nelson Street remained untouched, and there were tenants living at 62 Nelson Street into the 1960s, when two dentists, a physician and a surgeon are recorded as living and working there.
62 Nelson Street was given Grade II* listing in June 1974 (along with No. 60, as the properties are semi-detached), after a campaign to have the historical significance of the building acknowledged. Nevertheless, even at that time, the local health authority was pursuing plans to demolish the building for further expansion of the hospital site.
In December 1974, just six months after listed building status was granted, the local health authority submitted an application for permission to demolish 60-62 Nelson Street.
It’s fair to say that objections were made.
Saving 60-62 Nelson Street
The campaign to save Emmeline Pankhurst’s former home really began in the early 1970s with the push to get listed building status. When even this didn’t prevent an attempt to demolish the building, a more sustained campaign was needed.
After the last tenants had moved out in the late 1960s, 60-62 Nelson Street sat empty and gradually began to fall into dereliction. Activists, including student anarchists and feminists, squatted the property, but the health authority continued to pursue applications for demolition.
Manchester Council granted permission for a change of use of 62 Nelson Street from a residential property to a community resource centre in 1977, and a campaign was launched to fundraise for a trust to be set up to protect the building. Letters were written to female politicians asking for support, and petitions were signed by people who didn’t want to see the home of the suffragette movement demolished.
In 1981, the campaigners were successful in finally stopping the planned demolition. After this, the Pankhurst Trust were able to secure a lease on the building, agreeing to pay the landlord (then the health authority, now the hospital trust) the peppercorn rent of one suffragette sash per year. Listed building consent was secured to transform the building into a museum, meeting rooms and offices. Construction jobs, apprenticeships and training were offered to women to help rebuild and renovate the building. Linda Carver, one of the women who took part in the construction work, described the advert she answered as a ‘call to arms for the women of Manchester’.
On 10th October 1987, 60-62 Nelson Street opened as the Pankhurst Museum and resource centre. Since 2014, the building has been run by the Pankhurst Trust (incorporating Manchester Women’s Aid) as a museum, office headquarters and to deliver support for domestic abuse survivors.
