News – November 2025

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Thursday 27th November 2025 – Club Meeting – Speaker, John Carpenter with a presentation about ‘The Libraries of Manchester’.

John began by pointing to a history that confirmed Manchester has always been a ‘radical’ city. He exampled such developments as the first British canal system and the world’s first formally scheduled Railway service together with many science innovations through physicists such as John Dalton and even today with the development of Graphene technology. On the Music side, Manchester was well known for its diverse tastes ranging from The Hallé Orchestra to the offerings of The Hacienda venue.

Moving on to his main subject, John described the Manchester Libraries as having ‘International Significance’ and highlighted 5 examples of the area’s finest libraries.

Firstly, and probably the oldest library in Manchester, The Chetham’s, Library attached to The Chetham’s School, was set up as part of a legacy of Humphrey Chetham in 1653 and has been in continuous use ever since. The Library is on the first floor of the building, a feature of most libraries which helps to avoid the dampness which has a detrimental effect on books and archives. The Library became the first publicly accessible library in the UK. It was frequented in the mid 19^th century by the german revolutionary socialists Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.  Much of the archives are Manchester centric.

Moving along from Chetham’s Library, via the old Market Street, One came to Mosley Street and the site of the Portico Library. The Portico was conceived as a meeting place where Manchester’s business men could meet over a coffee and discuss the newspapers and refer to the library’s literary archive. It was designed by Chester architect Thomas Harrison who is also noted as one of the founders along with Richard Cobden, John Dalton, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Peel and Peter Roget. The Portico Library is quite small compared to its contemporaries and nowadays has changed to charity status to gain support from sources such as the National Lottery.

On the west side of the city, on Deansgate, stands the John Rylands Library. This library was built by Enriqueta Rylands, the widow of Manchester businessman John Rylands, and was designed by London architect Basil Champneys. The Library was opened in January 1900 and is of International significance. It is now part of the University of Manchester.

Moving back across to Mosley Street and St. Peter’s Square, is the Central Library opened in 1934 by King George Vth. It’s the second largest library in the UK after Birmingham Municipal Library but has a larger tally of literary and archival content with many first editions and original manuscripts.  A fantastic feature of the Central Library is it’s circular first floor palladian Reading Room.

John lastly detailed number 5 of the featured North West Libraries, ‘The Working Class Movement Library’ located in the neighbouring city of Salford.  This library was set up by life partners Eddie (Edmund) Frow and Ruth Haines, both members of the British Communist Party and includes books, periodicals, pamphlets, archives and artefacts, relating to the development of the political and cultural institutions of the working classes created during the prolonged Industrial Revolution. Their collections eventually outgrew the semidetached home where they lived and Salford City Council offered to re-house their library and the Frows at Jubilee House, a former nursing home close to Salford University.  The Frows died during the 1990s and the library collection is now an independent entity.  The collections have been enlarged to include social interventions such as the Suffragette Movement, The Spanish Civil War and the Kinder Trespass led by Benny Rothman of Timperley near Altrincham,

Finally John mentioned the Carnegie Libraries. Andrew Carnegie was born in Scotland’s Dunfermline and emigrated to the USA with his parents in 1848.  He became a very successful businessman and benefactor. He created a fund to establish public and university libraries. He funded 1,689 libraries in the United States and 660 in the British Isles.  John showed us one Carnegie Library in the Manchester suburb of Chorlton which showed how Carnegie had stipulated that the Library’s architecture had to convey the classic value of education through reading and learning.  There are 24 Carnegie Libraries in the Manchester conurbation and in John’s Q&A session we found out from David Bryant that Knutsford had one as well although it is now a children’s nursery.

Thursday 20th November 2025 – Walk – Lindow Moss

Several walkers started from The Plough & Flail in Mobberley,  across water-logged fields and passing The Quaker Burial Ground.  A brief diversion took the group to a peat area where there was a theory that it was the final resting place of ‘Lindow Pete’! Who knows?

Thursday 13th November 2025 – Club Meeting – Speaker, our very own Andrew Allen with a presentation entitled ‘Cryptography. The Art of Secret Writing’.

Andrew explained that his fascinating subject can be split into three eras of cryptography: manual methods up to WW1, electromagnetic methods up to WW2, and digital era up to the present day; time did not allow to discuss this third era. Andrew’s excellent presentation started an explanation of the difference between a cipher (replacement of a single letter with another) and a code (using a symbol or number to represent a letter, word or phrase).

Andrew started his presentation by explaining how the most basic cipher works: the Caesar Cipher which just scrambles the alphabet to make decrypting more difficult and how they can be deciphered by using frequency analysis (eg. the commonest letter in the English language is “e”, 12%). He then explained the cypher invented by Blaise de Vigenere which was immune to frequency analysis but was eventually cracked by Charles Babbage. Codes were used to pass messages during the time of Mary Queen of Scots. But it was in the first world war that code books were used extensively to pass messages to avoid enemy scrutiny. One weakness of this system was the logistical problems in making sure that all users were working from the same book. Andrew went on to illustrate his talk with other examples of cryptology such as the Zimmerman telegram which provoked the USA to enter the first world war; the Beale papers where the location of a treasure hoard in Virginia is contained in enciphered papers (never fully deciphered); and the location of Diana Dors’ wealth which she had managed to conceal from the tax authorities and, despite her notes being deciphered, has never been found.

Thursday 6th November 2025 – Walk – Whitegate

The Walking Group took on a 4.5 mile walk in what was  a perfect autumn day starting at Blakemere Hall Farm Village. The route went through the Magical Wood into a delightful hidden valley passing the Joshua Tree centre, round the Sandiway lakes onto Whitegate Way, a former railway. Other members were invited to join the walkers in the Village, at the Balkemere Centre, for lunch.