Astronomy is very fashionable now. Manchester’s Brian Cox is the golden boy of extra-terrestrial wonderment and isn’t it good to hear those luxurious northern vowels on prime time BBC? There’s going to be an important and rare astronomical event soon. The Transit of Venus will occur on 6 June, just after the Queen’s Jubilee and Cox and Co will be out there observing like mad because the next opportunity to see this phenomenon will be in 2117. So this is your chance, if it’s a nice clear night, get out and look for it. This opportunity will truly not to be repeated in any of our lifetimes.

And the first time anybody ever in the world predicted and saw this was in Salford.

It was another northern lad with a fascination for astronomy who predicted and observed the planet Venus lining up exactly between us and the sun so that a black disc appears to move over the surface of the sun. He was William Crabtree, a cloth merchant from Salford, born 1610, who went to Manchester Grammar School, married well and had time for an expensive hobby, astronomy. His mate, Jeremiah Horrocks did a lot of the maths that led to this seemingly magical forecast and on 24 November 1639, Jeremiah in Preston and William in Broughton saw the planet Venus, the morning and evening star, move slowly over the face of the sun.

Now this is a moving and almost mystical experience and there’ll be many a new-ager watching on June 6th and feeling all romantic/emotional about this but the Transit of Venus is serious stuff. Only six Transits have ever been observed. They happen in pairs separated by 8 years so there was one in 2004 but then it’s a long, long wait until the next pair, 105 years this time, so not until 2117. The British government sent Captain Cook to observe a 1760s Transit and the measurements taken of the times Venus appeared and disappeared in its passage allowed scientists to work out the true distance of the sun from the earth then the true size of the solar system. So when some clever-dick asks ‘How do they know the size of the solar system eh? How do they know?’ you can tell ‘em. ‘By working it out from the Transit of Venus as first observed by a Salford lad from Broughton’. You can even see a picture of him in Manchester Town Hall. It’s one of them murals in the Great Hall. We’re rightly proud of William Crabtree of Salford.

So what size is it, then, the solar system? It’s big. Very big. You wouldn’t believe. Ask Brian Cox.

Manchester Guided Tours is collaborating with Band on the Wall for a series of local history talks.  They are free of charge!  The bar opens at BotW at 12 noon, and they will be serving two-for-one delicious food.

The last talk was on Sunday April 22nd at 2pm.

The Women who Made Manchester

Manchester’s women have long been renowned as a driving force.  Britain’s first Domestic Goddess worked here, the Pankhursts shook the country and got us the vote and the writer who documented Manchester’s industrial explosion was a woman.  There are many others, less well known but equally feisty who helped us along the way.  Hear their stories in this fascinating illustrated talk.

Anne Beswick is a Manchester Green Badge Guide, showing people, locals and visitors, around our city and telling them some of the great stories that happened here. She’s interested in many different subjects, the industrial past, transport, science, social change, the natural environment and even does a Manchester Poetry walk.

You can read Anne’s quirky blogs on our blog /news page, and she’s is often to be heard discussing matters local on BBC Radio Manchester.

Keep a look out for more info on the series.

Eighty years ago come 24th April marks the anniversary of the Mass Trespass on Kinder when ordinary working men and women had the nerve to take on the Duke of Westminster’s keepers to establish their right to walk freely in the English countryside.

In the 1930s there were three million unemployed, many young people among them, and conditions in depressed Manchester were filthy. We’ve got beautiful countryside nearby but it wasn’t accessible to ordinary people. It was private land for landowners only. At Easter 1932, a group from Manchester were chased off Bleaklow by gamekeepers, a regular occurrence then, but this lot decided to do something about it.

On Sunday 24th April they called for a mass trespass, expecting a small number but 500 northern lads and lasses turned up that day. There was some nervousness at such unexpected crowd but Cheetham-born Benny Rothman galvanised the crowd and led them onto the Duke of Devonshire’s land.

They met a gang of gamekeepers armed with sticks. There was a fight, one gamekeeper got a sprained ankle, but the crowd continued to Kinder and were met by another group of protesters coming from Sheffield. As they returned from their successful trespass on the master’s land, six ramblers were arrested and tried by a jury consisting of military men and country landowners. Five were jailed, including Benny Rothman who got four months.

Rothman continued the fight for the right to roam over British countryside and lived to see the foundation of the Ramblers Association, National Parks and the Countryside and Rights of Way Act of 2000 before he died in 2002, aged 90.

Benny Rothman is not so well known as those other Manchester radicals like the Pankhursts, Richard Cobden, John Bright or Henry Hunt but he should be. The Kinder Mass Trespass isn’t the Peterloo Massacre but it’s important and it’s in the great tradition of an independent city that’s for many a year stood up for the rights of the mass of ordinary folk.

There’s even a song for the Kinder Trespass by Salford-raised Ewan McColl. The Manchester Rambler says “I may be a wage slave on Monday but I am a free man on Sunday”

Lots of things happening to mark the anniversary. See www.kindertrespass.com

By Anne Beswick

If you take your kids to Manchester Museum one of the highlights for them will be the skeleton of Stan, the Tyrannosaurus Rex in the Fossils department. There’s often a team of cooing kiddies clustered round the long-gone carnivore listening in rapt amazement as Stan’s story unfolds. That lasts a few minutes then they resume digging each other with pencils, making and breaking friends and saying they’re hungry, like normal kids.

They also usually completely ignore my favourite fossil, tucked modestly in a side bay. It’s big, covering about five foot square and unlike Stan, it’s real. Don’t tell the kids just yet but Stan is a copy. The original was found in the Badlands of Dakota USA so Stan isn’t a local lad. You can reveal that devastating news when you tell them about Father Christmas.

The best fossil at Manchester Museum is a fossil tree, the roots and the base of the tree’s trunk, and it’s called a Lycopsid. Lycopsids were one of the major tree types in the Upper Carboniferous, that’s about 320-290 million years ago (mya), give or take. So they were already pretty ancient when the dinosaurs first turned up. That’d be about 230mya and they were pretty much in charge from 135mya to their famous extinction 65mya. So when the dinosaurs were top dogs so to speak they were probably eating lycopsids, scratching their backs on lycopsids and peeing on lycopsids. They grew to 50m in 15 years which is pretty big, pretty fast and if the dinosaurs were the dominant animals for a while, the lycopsids were the plant equivalent for an amazing length of time.

The lycopsid fossil at Manchester Museum is the best fossil because it’s real, you can touch it and it’s really, really hundreds of millions of years old. Even better, the lycopsids were the main trees that made the great coal beds that fuelled the Industrial Revolution so it was coal from trees like these that was shovelled into all those steam engines when Manchester led the world. Even better still, this specific fossil was found in Clayton, Bradford, England. Right here in the Manchester coalfields, in east Manchester, the Workshop of the World, now part of Sportcity and part of Manchester’s future.

Apart from the rocks that the city is bedded on, this is the oldest bit of Manchester we have and it was once a living, growing part of what’s now our city. If you’re a Mancunian, this fossil deserves your respect.

And just to put things in perspective, the lycopsids survived the great extinction that killed the dinosaurs. They’re not great trees any more, just inconspicuous ground cover, green slimy stuff to most of us, Selaginella and club mosses to botanists. That makes my favourite fossil even more wonderful, well it does for me anyway.

By Anne Beswick

It’s well known that Manchester is a great place to do some shopping but until I started doing some research on the Abode Hotel near Piccadilly I didn’t know how important we were in the post-war fashion industry.
Abode was originally built for Horrocks, Crewdson and Company in 1898.  John Horrocks had started up as a cotton spinner in 1791 with a couple of early spinning mules in the corner of his father’s stonemason’s works.  He made a big success of this new-fangled technology and ended up with huge factories in Preston and a prestigious headquarters in Manchester’s Cottonopolis.  And the company kept ahead of the market.  In 1947 they started one of the first ready-to-wear collections in the country.  This was just as clothes came off-ration and modern women got even busier so didn’t want to make their own clothes any more thank you very much.  Big success.

Horrockses dresses were the must-have item of the 1940s and 50s.  They were expensive, from £4 to £7, so a week’s wages for a working girl but good quality and ultra-stylish.  There was a Colour, Design and Style Centre in Manchester (I’m still trying to find out exactly where) and many of the garments were made at Ivy Mill on Pin Mill Brow in Ancoats.  It was said that you could tell an Englishwoman abroad because of her Horrockses dress.  The ultimate accolade came when these stylish clothes were worn by royalty, The Duchess of Kent and Queen Elizabeth herself as a stylish young woman wore the best of English fashion, Horrockses.

And Horrockses dresses are still ultra fashionable.  I found about half a dozen for sale through vintage-outlets in a quick google search ranging from £70 to £150.  There are also new garments available in Horrockses patterns and fabrics through the Victoria and Albert Museum.

They are gorgeous.  A bit nipped-in-at-the-waist for this portly guide but it’s great to know that a respected northern firm once had the fashion world in the palm of its hand.  Good quality and good timing, it’s a northern thing.

Anne Beswick’s next tours of Piccadilly Basin and Abode Cream Tea are on Weds 3 May and Thurs 20 September 2012.  Booking required on 07505 691105

 Manchester Guided Tours donned silly costumes and took a free guided walk to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee and the Olympics on March 17th from Manchester Visitor Information Centre. Queen Victoria lead the walk with Bonnie Prince Charlie, George Best, Lady Anne Bland, Basil Chamneys, John Dalton, Victoria Pendleton, Annie Hornimann, cycling suffragettes Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst making appearances!

 £81.54 was raised for the Lord Mayor’s Charity.  Thank you very much to all those who came on the tour and generously donated.

Download English Tourism Week Flyer

MHF is a celebration of Greater Manchester’s unique history and heritage, through a ten day programme of events and activities

With a wide range of activity from talks and walks, to film showings and games to play, MHF will appeal to all ages and backgrounds.

Manchester Guided Tours are lead a series of walks for the Histories Festival, including Imigrants of Manchester, Medical Manchester, The Gangs of Manchester, Mrs. Gaskell’s Manchester, Ancoats and Little Italy, Chinatown, Germanchester, Cottonopolis, Manchester’s Victorian Dark Underbelly (including tour of Manchester Police Museum), Irish Manchester, Annie Horniman’s Manchester, The Peterloo Massacre, Friedrich Engels in Manchester, Tour of Uninteresting Objects, Town Hall Tour and Town Hall Clock Tower Tour.

Saturday 3 March’s Celebration Day was the biggest day of the festival with over 80 exhibitors, including Manchester Guided Tours, in the Town Hall.

Do have a look at the Histories Festival facebook page to see photos and videos of all the fabulous festival events, including of some of our tours.

Manchester Town Hall CLOCK TOWER guided tours.

• After the sell out success of the Christmas Town Hall Clock Tower tours Manchester Guided Tours again lead groups up the 173 steps to the top of Manchester’s Town Hall clock tower again during the Manchester Histories Festival,
• Have a look at Jean Bailo taking Fred the weather man up the clock tower on Granada Reports.
• Read about the striking success of Manchester clock tower tours, when Manchester Guided Tours enjoyed taking hundreds of people up Manchester Town Hall’s iconic clock tower in December 2011.
• Read the Mancunian Matters article about how Manchester City Council is considering the permanent return of popular clock tower tours.