Monkey Town: The History of Heywood

There is a widely-held belief among modern Heywoodites that, sometime in the distant past, judicial hangings used to take place behind the Queen Anne Inn. Variations on the story have trials being held inside the Queen Anne, or at the Freemasons public house across the road, and that a tunnel used to connect the two pubs for transporting the condemned prisoners from one place to the other. Some people think that the murder trials were held at the old Heywood police station on Hind Hill Street, although that was not built until the 1930s. The gallows were said to be in a yard behind the Queen Anne Inn, and the last man supposedly hanged there has been identified as ‘Jimmy Dawson’. However, the only Lancastrian James Dawson known to have been executed was born in Salford to a mother from Bury. He was a captain in the Manchester regiment of volunteers and was hanged, drawn and quartered in 1746 at Kennington Common, London, for high treason. Queen Anne Inn (left), Heywood cen...

The following article about one of the earliest schools in Heywood - the 'Free School' next to Heywood Chapel (now St Luke's) - is reproduced from an 1893 edition of the  Bury Times . 'The charity which is spoken of as the Heywood School, in the century and a half of its existence, must have done much to aid in educating the children of Heywood and the surrounding townships. A building which has been used as the school adjoins the Victoria Hotel, in Church-street, and bears an inscription over the door which tells passers-by that it is a free school. The building is now in a very dilapidated condition, and is probably only fit to be pulled down, but as the site is a freehold one in a central part of the town, this of itself is of considerable value. The school was what is known as a dame school, and was taught, as the name implies, by a female. The charity had a somewhat peculiar beginning. It was founded by a man who did not reside in Heywood, and the na...

The following article about the 'Hatter's School' is taken from the Heywood Advertiser , June 1906. The school was located at Hopwood from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century, and the original building still stands today on Stott Lane, near Hopwood Hall. 'Hatters Cottage', Stott Lane. The original date stone reading 'School House, Rent Free, 1754' is still in place. (Google Earth) 'The inscription on the old building is School House. Rent Free. 1754. The best remembered teacher is Joseph Kenyon. At least two persons still survive who were his pupils eighty years ago, these being Mrs. Susannah Partington, widow of Charles Partington, Queen-street, Tonge, Middleton, born 1821; and Ann Aspinall, Alexandra-street, Hopwood, Heywood, born 1817. It is shown conclusively that originally the masters dwelling of four rooms (two down and two up) was likewise used for the school, but later a one-storey building, nine yards long by five wide, w...

(Greenbooth is in Rochdale but is covered here because reservoir was built by the Heywood and Middleton Water Board.) The old village of Green Booth now lies deep beneath the waters of the Greenbooth reservoir to the north of Heywood. For younger Heywoodites this conjures images of a Biblical inundation, leaving an underwater village unwillingly trapped in time. In reality, the village of Greenbooth was already dead when the Heywood and Middleton Water Board built the reservoir and submerged it in the 1960s. Green Booth village (Greenbooth Memories). Although the place now has the one-word name 'Greenbooth', it was originally called Green Booth, with Green Booth Woods being on the slopes. The area has some significant history, as it was visited quite often in the 1750s by John Wesley , the famous founder of the Methodist Church. He stayed just up the hill at Blomleys, where he established a small Methodist chapel. A weaving mill was built at Green Booth during the ...

Little was recorded of everyday life back in late-18th-century Heywood, but in the 1850s the newly-established Heywood Advertiser ran a couple of articles on what was still ‘living memory’ material - ‘Heywood Seventy Years Ago’. This is now more like 230 years ago. One of these articles featured some of the leisure pursuits of our forebears, and some of those pastimes clearly seemed barbaric and crude even to readers in the 1850s. Badger baiting. ( Wikipedia ) Entertainment in the village of Heywood had a bit of a rough-and-ready rural feel to it in 1780, as might be expected in what was still largely a pastoral district. The little village was only beginning to grow as the first local cotton mills opened at Wrigley Brook and Back o’th’ Moss, commencing the decades-long transformation of the village of fustian weavers into a thriving industrial mill town. There was of course no Internet, no television, no radio, and any decent form of live theatre in the district must have ...