Celebration of mums...
As Mother’s Day approaches, Nostalgia remembers some famous mums from Manchester – both real and fictional!
WOMEN the world over owe a great debt to the implacable spirit of one extraordinary Manchester mother – and her two daughters. In the early 20th century, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Sylvia and Christabel, led the suffragette movement which was instrumental in women gaining the vote.
Their pleas, protests, marches and meetings made it impossible to ignore the massive injustice of women being disenfranchised.
The suffragettes would not be silenced, regularly enduring arrest and imprisonment, hunger strikes and force-feeding to achieve their goal.
The Pankhursts’ story began on Thursday, July 15, 1858, when Emmeline was born in Moss Side to Sophia and Robert Goulden, both political activists.
Robert came from a progressive merchant family. His father was present at the Peterloo massacre and his mother was associated with the Anti-Corn Law League.
On October 10, 1903, Emmeline founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) at her home in Nelson Street, Manchester. It played a major role in securing votes for women in 1918.
Christabel was born in Old Trafford in September 1880. After reading law at Manchester University, she moved to London to become the organising secretary of the WSPU. The press quickly dubbed her ‘the Queen of the Mob.’
Sylvia, born in May 1882, studied at Manchester School of Art before winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, London. She designed the logo for the WSPU as well as leaflets, banners and posters. In 1907, she toured the UK painting pictures of women in the workplace.
The Pankhursts’ activities as suffragettes were not always lawful. Emmeline believed direct action was the only way to get her message across. She later wrote: ‘Deeds not words was to be our permanent motto.’
The Pankhursts richly deserve their place in the pantheon of renowned Manchester mums and their famous offspring.
Although none can match the Pankhursts’ unique achievement, many have excelled in their own way in the world of entertainment – and TV soaps!
A modern on-screen dynasty has emerged from the cobbles of Coronation Street in the form of Middleton-born actress Sally Dynevor and her daughter Phoebe.
Sally has played Sally Webster on the Street since January 1986. She won the award for best on-screen partnership with Joe Duttine, who plays her husband Tim Metcalfe, in the 2016 British Soap Awards.
Phoebe Dynevor, born in Trafford in April 1995, was a child actress in the BBC school series Waterloo Road before landing the starring role of Daphne Bridgerton in the current Netflix period drama Bridgerton.
Another successful Manchester mother-daughter combination is that of writer and presenter Judy Finnigan and freelance journalist and fitness expert Chloe Madeley.
Born in Newton Heath, Finnigan attended Manchester High School for Girls before studying at Bristol University. She joined Granada TV as a researcher in 1974.
Along with husband Richard Madeley, she hosted the ITV programme This Morning from 1988 to 2001.
Chloe Madeley, born in Manchester in July 1987, partnered French skater Michael Zenezini on the ITV show Dancing on Ice in 2011. They reached the final three of the competition. Madeley also took part in the second series of the Channel 4 show The Jump in 2015, finishing in fifth place.
Some of the most explosive mother-and-son relationships have occurred in the fictional world of Coronation Street, featuring a host of Manchester stars.
Who could forget the verbal onslaughts between Elsie Tanner, played by Fallowfield-born Pat
Phoenix, and her son Dennis, portrayed by Ashton-under-Lyne actor Philip Lowrie?
With his get-rich-quick schemes and patchy employment record, Dennis never quite matched up to Elsie’s expectations in the 1960s and early 70s.
Machinist and sometime Rovers Return landlady Vera Duckworth got nothing but grief from her criminal son, Terry, played with sinister menace by Manchester actor Nigel Pivaro.
Vera, portrayed by Liz Dawn, and her husband Jack (Ardwick actor William Tarmey) were exasperated when Terry surrendered custody of his son Tommy for £10,000.
Some of the Street’s most tortured mother-daughter storylines have involved Deirdre Rashid, played by Oldham actress Anne Kirkbride, and Tracy Barlow, portrayed by Salford-born Kate Ford.
Deirdre featured in a love triangle with Ken Barlow and Mike Baldwin, a major fraud trial and a foreign marriage during her hectic years on the cobbles from 1972 to 2014.
Tracy herself was imprisoned for killing her boyfriend, Charlie Stubbs, in 2007, but has since returned to run the Street’s florists.
The Pankhursts feature strongly in the iNostalgia book First in the Fight, the critically acclaimed story of the Emmeline Pankhurst statue in St Peter’s Square and a tribute to the 20 Manchester women on the statue long list. Priced at £19.99 plus postage and packing, the stylish book by historian Helen Antrobus and Andrew Simcock, is available on the inostalgia website inostalgia.co.uk or through an order hotline on 01928 503777.