Stockport In The Great War

Glynis Cooper is a historian with an unprecedented record of researching and writing about local history, and with close to twenty titles to her name, she certainly knows what she is doing. Glynis Cooper, has roots in the dark satanic mills that surround Manchester and the outlying areas such as Stockport.

In Stockport In The Great War, Glynis Cooper takes through each year of the war and how it affected what was then the County Borough of Stockport. The modern day Stockport is completely different to the Stockport of 1914, in that areas such as Cheadle, Bramhall and Hazel Grove were not part of the Borough, but towns in their own right, even if they may have relied on Stockport for many services.

Stockport has always straddled two counties, Cheshire and Lancashire, that border the Mersey which runs through the centre of its town, which rises about the town from the Goyt and the Tame. Nothing had changed in Stockport in 1914 from when Friedrich Engels described the town as ‘renowned as one of the duskiest, smokiest holes in the whole of the industrial area’.

War was declared on 4th August 1914 and Cooper notes that in the Stockport Advertiser did not mention the war until you came to page 6, after two pages of adverts. There was the usual local news in the paper and a ‘shocking threat of cucumbers’ that were threatening the town. She also tells us that five days after the declaration of war the 6th Battalion of the Cheshire Regiment, Stockport’s local battalion, lodged its colours in St George’s Church.

We do learn that by 1915 the ongoing war was giving a temporary boast to the cotton trade around the town that had never really recovered fully from the American Civil War. By this time Stockport had come to see itself as a Garrison town in part, but there was also the working war effort and the hospitals in the town.

I do like the tips that the Stockport Advertiser published in 1915 on how to economise to aid the war effort and I am sure some things have not changed today;
• No private house building to be undertaken
• No unnecessary home improvements to be made
• No luxuries to be bought
• Reduce the number of servants
• Meals to be only two courses instead of five courses

Throughout the book there are some wonderful snippets of information and pictures of parts of Stockport that now rest under concrete in part to the idiots in planning at the council. We can learn, unlike their counterparts in the rest of Cheshire and across the Mersey in Lancashire, Stockport farmers were more intransigent in using female labour, which even Derbyshire used!

This is a fabulous book for not only those that are interested in Stockport but those of us who love the history of the North West of England and its industrial and agrarian history. This book brings back the notion that all history is local, even wars on foreign fields and it is always fantastic to learn more about the area I know so well.

I always knew that Stockport Infirmary was used as a military hospital during both wars, what I did learn that it was not the only military hospital in the town;
• Reddish Military Hospital
• Dialstone Lane Hospital
• Sir Ralph Pendlebury Auxiliary Home Hospital
• Stepping Hill Hospital
• Stockport Workhouse
• Offerton Industrial School
• Stockport Girls Industrial School
• Bishop Brown’s Memorial Industrial School

This list intrigues me and will send me to find out more, and that is what Stockport In The Great War is like, the more you read the more you want to investigate yourself. This really is a wonderful and interesting book about Stockport in the Great War. ( )