Turn back time and take a walk through town
LET’S take a stroll through Cheltenham in the twilight years of Queen Victoria’s long reign. There’s the Gloucestershire Echo & Evening Telegram office in Clarence Parade and close by is the auction house of C Gostage & Co. A lodging house is run by Mrs Lacy and the chemist shop of J A Bennet is also where births and deaths are registered.
Two tailors are in business, a brace of solicitors, one dressmaker and a malty whiff engages the nostrils as we pass Carpenter’s Brewery. Professor of music Miss J Macfarren gives lessons at her home, while J Howett is a maker of chronometers, watches and clocks.
Completing the hive of activity is the GPOA reading room. (What GPOA stands for we may never know.)
Half a dozen banks were found in Cheltenham. The Bristol & West of England, Capital and Counties, County of Gloucestershire, Lloyds, National Provincial and Savings Bank. If you had a letter to send, the General Post Office in the Prom (now Waterstone’s) was open from 7am till 10pm Monday to Saturday and on Sundays from 7am till 10am, then 5pm till 6pm. There were four deliveries a day (only one on Sunday) and the stamp for a letter cost 1d. (Postcards three-farthings). For 6d a 12 word telegram could be sent anywhere in the country.
Carriers delivered packages to outlying parts and operated from town inns. So if, for example, you had a parcel for Gloucester, you took it to Mr Brown’s office at the Fleece (which stood on the corner of the High Street and Henrietta Street) in time for the 11am or 6pm run.
Deliveries to outlying villages were less frequent, due to lack of demand. Woodmancote boasted 381 inhabitants, Gotherington 388 and Bishops Cleeve 650 - and remote, rural communities they must have been.
Back in Cheltenham, if infirm, or just plain lazy, you could hire yourself a wheelchair (known as Bath chairs elsewhere, but not in Cheltenham) from 14 stands about town. Horse drawn cabs were licensed to operate within a four mile radius of the centre stone (still to be seen on the corner of the High Street and Bennington Street) at 9d for the first 15 minutes, then 3d for each additional 15 minutes.
Alternatively, horse drawn buses operated between all principal hotels and Cheltenham’s five railway station, Lansdown, St James’s, Malvern Road, Leckhampton and Charlton Kings.
There were 25 elementary schools, including the Ragged and Industrial school in Milsom Street, a boys’ orphanage in St Margaret’s Road and at the similar establishment for girls in
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Winchcombe Street. Perhaps more enlightened by present day standards was the creche in Albion Street. “The children of mothers who go out to work are here taken charge of and fed for 3d per day from 8am till 8pm”. The proprietor was Miss Gooding.
Among the many businesses were coopers, cork cutters, cycle manufacturers, organ and harmonium builders, livery stable keepers, plus rope, saddle and corset makers.
A glimpse at the The Cheltenham and district Post Office directory 1891 – 92 tells us that the town’s population numbered some 50,000. First in the list was F Abbott, a porter, of 16, Granville Street, while bringing up the rear was Alfred Zebedee, a flyman (ie. cab driver) of 6, Naunton Parade.
The Prom was mostly residential, although number 13 was home to the Sanitary Inspection Association and the town abounded in captains, majors, colonels, lieutenant-generals, generals and erstwhile military types.
More prevalent than any other profession, however, were clergymen. There were 46 places of worship in Cheltenham presided over by 120 Anglicans, 17 non-conformists, four RC priests and one Jewish reader.
Other establishments we might have encountered on our stroll through Cheltenham as it moved from the straight laced Victorian era into the more relaxed Edwardian years can be seen in the adverts you see on this page, which were first published in a guidebook of 1901.