Section 4: Who lived in YOUR house?
I have tried to collect details of the occupants of all the properties in Manor View at various points, so that you can discover who lived in YOUR house in the first part of the 20thC. However, I have not included details of occupants living in the various houses in the last 80 years (for privacy reasons) - so the most recent data relates to the occupants of the properties in the 1939 census. After struggling to find a way to make this information easily accessible I eventually resorted to producing PDFs listing all the residents at the following key periods (click on the blue button for each year range to open PDF showing names of residents at each address):
Click blue button on left to open PDF for the 1910 'Domesday' Survey
1910 - At this period, only the first wave of houses 'Manor Villas' - the Victorian semi-detached houses located on the stretch of Manor View between Briarfield Avenue and Rosemary Avenue - had been completed and were almost fully occupied, although work had begun on building the second wave (on the south-east side of the road and around the corner in East End Road; and several of these new properties had already been purchased. These records were recorded in the 1910 Lloyd George 'Domesday' Survey - and mainly provide details of plot values etc:
Click blue button to open PDF for the 1911 census
1911 - In the space of only a year, new residents have moved into more of the properties built in the second wave, and the 1911 census provides much more detail about family composition (names, ages, occupations, etc); though still only the First and Second waves of building are included.
Click blue button to open PDF for Registers & Directories
1909 - 1936 - In the absence of any Census data for the period after 1911, I have scoured Directories and Electoral Registers to discover the names of residents in houses built in all three waves - these provide little else apart from names (often only of the head of the household), but in quite a few cases it confirms that residents from 1911 (or their descendants) continued to live in the same properties.
Click blue button to open PDF showing residents in 1939 Register
1939 - This pdf showing entries from the 1939 Register lists residents living in all three waves of building - with dates of birth and occupation, plus some notes showing if they also held responsibilities relevant to the Second World War (such as Air Raid Wardens, Ambulance Drivers, etc). Where the phrase 'CLOSED RECORD' appears, this indicates that the entry has been redacted as the person could still be living - so most of them would be children/young people. Some current residents may even have purchased their house from individuals listed on this sheet!
As details for this Register were collected at the start of WW2, some young men had already left home to join the military, and it is possible that some wives and children had been evacuated to rural areas - so entries may not always represent entire family groups.
One of the things I noticed when putting together the above spreadsheets, was that in the 1911 census, several of the households listed included servants. And although no domestic servant is listed for our own house in any record, when the house was built there seems to have been an expectation that a live-in servant would have been employed: we still have the bell box above the kitchen door and when we first moved in there were bell pushes next to the fireplaces in both the living room and dining room (much to our children's dismay, these were no longer connected, but there were signs that there had also been one in the bathroom). It was clear that the tiny box room over the kitchen (with its miniscule fireplace) was designated as the 'servant's quarters' as there was also a bell ringer just inside the door to that room!
To date, I have only managed to locate an early photograph of the exterior of ONE pair of houses in Manor View - those of numbers 14 and 16 shown on the first page of this site, which were provided by Miss Nye who used to live at number 16 - if YOU happen to have any early photos of YOUR house, I would love to include them on this page of the website! However, I am sure that lots of us could contribute images of original interior features of our homes (many of which are very individual) for a collage which I have started below:
The final section provides a glimpse of what it was like living in Manor View forty or fifty years ago ...
