Edwardian Nelson Street
Today marks the 120th anniversary of the founding of the Women’s Social and Political Union, which began with a meeting on 10th October 1903. The meeting took place in the parlour of 62 Nelson Street, the house that Emmeline and her family rented from 1898 to 1906. Over the next couple of months, Hannah, our Engagement Officer, is going to be sharing some key moments from the house’s history, and the history of some of the women who have lived here.
When we celebrated Emmeline Pankhurst’s birthday in July this year, I wrote about an Edwardian chocolate cake that I made to celebrate the occasion. So I’ve decided to use cake as my starting point for the history of women in Manchester.
In 1898, when Emmeline rented No. 62, Nelson Street was a semi-residential street in Chorlton-on-Medlock, a suburb on the south side of Manchester. At one end were terraced and semi-detached houses, and at the other end were larger buildings that served various uses (including housing a perfume factory at one point). The Royal Eye Hospital sat at the top of Nelson Street, on the corner of Oxford Road.
Nelson Street in 1905
Because of the significance of the house as the place where the suffragette movement started, it’s easy to forget that it was also a family home. In 1901, the house was occupied by Emmeline, her daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, her son Frank, her two brothers Walter and Herbert, and her nephew Herbert. Before you start picturing Emmeline toiling over a hot stove to feed all these people, the household also included two domestic servants, housemaid Mary Leaver and cook Ellen Coyle.
So any cakes that were eaten at 62 Nelson Street at this time were probably the work of Ellen, rather than the Pankhurst family themselves. Teatime was a British institution, after all, and you can’t have tea without cakes. In the Victorian period, well-to-do middle-class women – copying the fashions of the upper classes – would take tea at the houses of their friends or invite friends to visit them. It was a key part of women’s social life, and it revolved around the domestic sphere.
That would change in the late nineteenth century…
In 1890, Crosby and Walker, a draper’s shop on Oldham Street in Manchester city centre opened a ‘Ladies Tea Room’, offering ‘tea, coffee, and various light refreshments’ for their customers. While this might not seem like a big deal now, it was something of a game-changer in 1890.
Up until this point, restaurants and coffee shops in Manchester were almost exclusively the preserve of men. Men met up with friends and business associates in town, while women did their socialising in the home. For this reason, very few establishments had – how can I put this delicately? – facilities for female customers.
Crosby and Walker didn’t put things quite as delicately!
In their advertisements, which ran in the local newspapers, the store didn’t just offer light refreshments and fresh-brewed tea. They also proudly proclaimed ‘Ladies’ Lavatory Now Open!’
The so-called ‘urinary leash’ – the lack of public toilets that meant that women were restricted in how far away from home they could travel and how long they could spend out of the house – had been protested throughout the Victorian period. The Ladies Sanitary Association was set up in the mid-nineteenth century to campaign for women’s toilets in public spaces and workplaces, for example.
In Manchester, it was actually shops that led the way on cutting the urinary leash. This wasn’t a radical political statement, but rather a very pragmatic realisation that, if women had access to refreshments and toilets, then they might spend longer in the store.
Throughout the 1890s, more shops in Manchester would follow Crosby and Walker’s example, including the charmingly named Chocolate Depot (which sold ‘English and Continental Chocolates’ and ‘High Class Sweets’) on Corporation Street and Satterfield’s (a draper’s) on St Ann’s Square.
Down in London, 1894 saw the birth of a new type of tearoom, a standalone establishment rather than a refreshment room attached to another venue, and one which was expressly advertised to a female clientele. The first Lyons’ teashop opened in Piccadilly, London, and it served hot drinks, savoury dishes, sweets, biscuits and, of course, cakes.
When Emmeline Pankhurst left Manchester for London in 1906, tearooms would become an integral part of WSPU campaign strategy. The initial meeting might have been held in a domestic parlour, but the rise of the tearoom meant that there were now more options for women to meet and plan a campaign. As Elizabeth Crawford has written about, London’s tearooms became important meeting points for the women of the WSPU, and a number of them offered meeting spaces for hire or discounts for suffragettes in recognition of this.
Manchester was a little behind London in the tearoom boom. The first Lyons’ tearoom wouldn’t open here until after Emmeline had left Nelson Street for the capital. However, even before then, the number of establishments offering refreshments (and facilities) for women was growing.
In 1903, the same year that Emmeline founded the WSPU in her Nelson Street home, Manchester Art Gallery opened its tearoom to the public. It advertised to ‘businessmen who only take a light lunch, and ladies who have been shopping in town’, and encouraged its visitors to enjoy light refreshments before exploring the galleries. It was also noted that the prices were reasonably low, so ‘even folks with slender purses may venture to give their children a Saturday afternoon at the Gallery, with the added pleasure of tea away from home’.
Tearooms opened up opportunities for women to spend more time out of the home. Whether it was just extending the amount of time they could spend shopping and socialising, or allowing women to engage with cultural opportunities such as museums and art galleries (to which they could also take their children), or (as the suffragettes would do) giving women space for political organisation and meetings, these new establishments helped to shift the boundaries of the ‘women’s sphere’.
Come for the cake, stay for the participation in public and political life!
An Edwardian Cake Recipe
To celebrate this period of 62 Nelson Street’s history, this early twentieth-century chocolate cake recipe is just the thing. You may remember that this was the recipe I made to celebrate Emmeline Pankhurst’s birthday back in July.
Ingredients
½ lb / 225g butter
7 eggs
½ lb / 225g plain chocolate
½ teaspoon vanilla extract
3 oz / 85g plain flour
4 oz / 115g ground almonds
½ lb / 225g caster sugar
1tsp baking powder
Cherry liqueur for the icing (to taste)
Method
Preheat the oven to Gas Mark 4 (180˚C), then grease and line an 8-inch (20cm) deep cake tin. Separate 7 eggs, keeping both the yolks and whites.
Break most of the chocolate into pieces (keep a small amount to one side for the icing) and melt it in a heatproof bowl. Set it aside to cool.
Beat the butter until it’s soft, pale and fluffy, and then in a separate bowl and using separate utensils beat the eggs whites until they form soft peaks.
Next, beat the egg yolks in a separate bowl and using separate utensils.
Beat the melted chocolate and vanilla extract into the butter, and then beat in the egg yolks. Next, sift in the flour, caster sugar, ground almonds and baking powder. Fold the dry ingredients into the wet, and then when it’s combined fold in the egg whites using a metal spoon. Try to keep as much air in the mixture as you can, while also ensuring the egg whites are fully combined.
Spoon into the cake tin and bake for around an hour.
When the cake is baked, make a simple icing from melted chocolate, a little icing sugar, a drop of water (if needed) and a dash of cherry liqueur (if you wish).