Once Upon a Time in Manchester

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Manchester cellar dwellings - a Victorian housing scandal
In 1850s Manchester, more than 16,000 people lived underground in cellars
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Dean Kirby
7
Finding George: A Remembrance Sunday Story
A journey to find one soldier who never returned home from the First World War
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Dean Kirby
2
October 2023
The fall and rise of Nancy Dickybird
She was the terror of Manchester police, but Nancy Dickybird became beloved by Mancunians for her singing from the city's jail cells
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Dean Kirby
Slugs and spuds: Victorian Manchester's strange homemade remedies
At a time when there was little real support for the sick outside hospital, working people in Manchester relied on some bizarre remedies
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Dean Kirby
How Manchester came close to a massacre a decade before Peterloo
Years before the Peterloo Massacre, a cavalry charge on unarmed protestors left one man dead
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Dean Kirby
1
September 2023
A New York policeman's terrifying 'adventure' in a Manchester lodging house
Bill Lambert had spent his career battling the Big Apple's hardest criminals, but he came unstuck against two Mancunian thieves
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Dean Kirby
A hot night in a Manchester rat pit
The pub's landlord nipped the rats’ spines with his own teeth to make sure they were dead
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Dean Kirby
2
Step inside Victorian Manchester's wildest pubs
'We've only had five fights and a stabbing since eight o’clock. It’s been very quiet indeed,' the landlord said
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Dean Kirby
An Angelic Book Thief
The slum missionary John ‘Angel’ Gibbons knew a thing or two about the Ten Commandments. Most of all, he knew how to break them
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Dean Kirby
2
August 2023
The Ancoats Skylark
The forgotten story of a Manchester songbird that inspired a poet
June 2023
The hidden heroes of the Manchester Cotton Famine
How children sold their pet rabbits for the pot to help starving Mancunians in the harsh winter of 1862
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Dean Kirby
3
'He took out his pocket watch and plunged into the River Irwell'
How the death of brave police officer Henry Bailey in 1835 as he tried to rescue a drowning boy sparked an outpouring of grief from the people of…
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Dean Kirby
7
© 2023 Dean Kirby
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