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The History of Jubilee House

This history of Jubilee House, the home of the Working Class Movement Library, was written in 2009 by Royston Futter, a library trustee. Royston very sadly passed away in November 2024. Royston was a much loved trustee who had served the library in many capacities since he negotiated the move to Jubilee House in 1987. Royston will be much missed by everyone at the library. 

51, Crescent, Salford M5 4WX may be a rather dull address (although the use of Crescent without the “the” is a quirk which us pedants still enjoy using – to see why you need to have a look at the appropriate road sign). However the building that has that address has a long and interesting history. Jubilee House, as it is known, has been a home for pioneering District Nurses and a home for troubled adults; it was a home, or at least an office, for a Cabinet Minister and, of course, the home of the world-renowned Working Class Movement Library and its founders Ruth & Edmund Frow.

It all began in 1896 – the mayor of Salford, Sir Richard Mottram held a meeting in the Town Hall on Bexley Square (the same town hall incidentally where Edmund Frow was to have his nose broken by Major Godfrey, chief constable of Salford when demonstrating against means testing in 1931) in order to suggest ways of celebrating the forthcoming Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

The idea adopted was typical of Salford in that it incorporated a need to do the very best for the poor with a desire to show off its civic pride.  Manchester Faces and Places summed it up in its 1900 edition “The building should be spacious and commodious while the purpose for which it was designed would be a constant reminder of the genuine kindness and care for the poor which, more than anything has endeared the Queen to her people”.

What in fact Sir Richard had proposed was to build a nurses’ home, but not just any old home nor for any old nurses: This was to be a state of the art home for the very District Nurses who provided the much-needed care in their own homes to those too poor to be able to afford to pay and not ill enough to be admitted to, or remain in, hospital.

Sir Richard and his fellow worthies chose a site opposite the Technical Institute (now of course, the Peel Building of Salford University and the place where L.S. Lowry attended art classes for nearly 20 years in the early 20th century).

They appointed an architect, Mr Henry Lord, who had also designed the Technical Institute and who would later design the famous Salford Lads’ Club, and they set up a subscription scheme to raise the money needed to build the new home.

 Manchester Faces and Places describes what happened. “The scheme having been set on foot, the people of Salford contributed money, with the generosity which characterises the shrewd Lancashire folk when an object really appeals to them”. The total cost of the building was £10,000, all raised locally.

Whilst Salford was not the very first place to introduce the idea of the nurse who visited the sick in their own homes (the service had been introduced in Liverpool through the work of William Rathbone in 1862) it was one of the early adopters through an institute founded in 1864. The various pioneering organisations were to become nationally recognised through the foundation of the Queen’s Nursing Institute in 1887. It has to be said that the need for their services was as great in the later part of the 19th century in Salford as anywhere else in the land. Hospital-based nurses, incidentally, had their own nurses’ accommodation at the other end of Salford Crescent where Salford Royal Hospital stood before its conversion into flats.

The building work was completed by December 1899, just under two years from the first suggestion by Sir Richard Mottram. It was occupied by the Matron and 15 nurses by Christmas that year although the opening ceremony, performed appropriately by Lady Mottram, did not take place until January 1901, when all the debts had been paid off. Needless to say the great and the good turned out in all their finery and the speeches, according to the Salford Chronicle and the quaintly-named but short-lived, Salford County Telephone of February 1901, were very long and very fulsome in their praise of Sir Richard and his fellow subscribers.

The building we see today is essentially how it was when it was opened, There were 15 single rooms for the nurses, several slightly smaller rooms for the servants and quarters for the Matron. All these are now used by the library as book rooms. On the ground floor what is now our reading room was the nurses’ dining room and the NALGO Room was the nurses’ common room, complete with grand piano. A lot of the furniture was commissioned from Waring & Gillow; however the beds and several other fixtures and fittings were donated by local businesses. Sadly none of the original furniture survives although there is in the basement the remains of a “clever contrivance for suspending the nurses cloaks round a stove to dry on a wet day” which seems to have excited the reporter from Manchester Faces and Places.

Jubilee House, as it was widely known, remained a home for the District Nurses for over 50 years, indeed seeing the transition from the charitable status of the Queen’s Institute of District Nursing to eventually becoming part of the National Health Service. The costs of nursing people at home were met by the new Health Service in 1948 and district nurses became employed by the Local Authority.

Hilda Grundy trained at Jubilee House in the 1950s and remembers it only too well, particularly the strict regime of the Matron and her deputy who lined up all the nurses, according to seniority of course, every morning and evening before handing out their duties. In the early days, prior to the amalgamation into the NHS the nurses were still expected to collect a small fee from each patient and she recalls her older colleagues saying this was the only part of the job which was really hated by all the nurses.

Hilda remembers just how very poor conditions were in many of the households they visited. So much so that a newspaper was considered an essential item to take with you in order to have somewhere clean to put down the nurses bag. She recalls in an interview with Ann Monaghan for the Lifetimes project that there were no houses with bathrooms anywhere in her “patch” of the inner city in those days before the great clearances of the 1960s.

Hilda stayed at Jubilee House until 1956. By then Queen’s Institute had been replaced by the rather more down to earth City of Salford Public Heath Department and the Home Nursing service was headed by Matron Miss N. Perry. However in 1956 it was decided that District Nurses should live in houses provided by the local authority within the community rather than all together in a home and so began a new chapter in the life of Jubilee House.

The Kelly’s Directory of 1957 shows that Jubilee House was called The Crescent Occupational Centre and had become a home for adults with learning disabilities still operated by the old City of Salford Public Health Department. It changed its name but not its role to The Crescent Adult Training Centre in 1964 and remained as such until in 1972 when it became part of the Social Services Department of the newly-expanded Salford Metropolitan Borough Council, again providing shelter and training for adults with learning disabilities.

It ceased to be used for this purpose in 1986 when its residents were dispersed either into the community or to smaller, more family-oriented units. Social Services’ loss proved to be Cultural Services’ gain.

Royston Futter, the Cultural Services Manager, had recently met the Frows and had been made aware that they were looking to ensure the future of their amazing collection, held at their home at 111 Kings Road Old Trafford. Amazingly this coincided with the one year when there was a bit of additional funding available and the City Council offered the Frows not only a home for the collection (which was coveted by several academic institutions) but, and this proved the clinching argument, a new home for themselves. So, following a short period of renovation and decoration which, of course, included having William Morris wallpaper put up in their living room, Jubilee House finally attained its present use as the Working Class Movement Library, in 1987 when the founders moved in with their collection. The attraction for them, apart from the stewardship of the local authority was that whilst Salford realised that the collection was itself of great importance it also realised that it was the Frows, their knowledge, scholarship and hospitality which made it unique.

Ruth & Eddie remained extremely happily in residence until just before Eddie’s death in 1997. The staff accommodation which became their flat is now the administrative offices of the library and their bathroom the library’s darkroom!  It was quite usual for every reader to get a cup of tea from Ruth and the spare room in their flat (on which they insisted on paying the full rent of course) was a haven for many a waif and stray, including your author on several occasions.

By 2006 the restrictions on local government expenditure meant that Salford was unable to continue operating the library as part of the Leisure Directorate and the Trustees, who had all along retained ownership of the collection which had by then expanded to well over four times its original size, took over the day to day responsibility for funding and running the library.

Jubilee House stands today as a proud tribute to two of the greatest British institutions in the vanguard of true public service. Firstly the District Nursing Service, still as ever providing care to anyone who needs it regardless of any consideration of their circumstances and secondly, but no less importantly to the wonderful idea of the free public library whereby the whole of human knowledge  would be made available free of charge to all who want to study, learn and be informed. It is also, of course a tribute to those individuals Sir Richard and Lady Mottram and Ruth and Edmund Frow. It is difficult to imagine more diverse couples, the High Tory mayor of late Victorian Salford and the dedicated left wing book collectors and political activists; however the one thing that they had in common was a burning desire to help improve the lot of ordinary people, something that Jubilee House has been proud to do for over a century and, hopefully, will continue to do for many years more.

Royston Futter, June 2009

Acknowledgements

Much of the research for this article was carried out by Veronica Trick in her usual efficient and comprehensive manner

The staff of the Salford Local History Library and the Staff of the Working Class Movement Library were their usual helpful selves.

Sources

Manchester places and faces Vol 11, July 1900 (Salford Local History Library)

Interview with Hilda Grundy by Ann Monaghan, Lifetimes project (WCML collection)

Salford Chronicle and Telephone, Sat 2 Feb 1901 (Salford Local History Library)

Cohen, Susan  District Nursing in late Victorian & Edwardian Britain (article in Occupations series).

Kelly’s Directory of Manchester and Salford 1957-1969 (Salford Local History Library)

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  • Belinda Scarlett
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