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Monkey Town: The History of Heywood

Heywood People in 1825

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The following page is taken from the 'Village Directory of Bury Parish' section of Edward Baines' 1825 publication History, Directory, and Gazetteer, of the County Palatine of Lancaster.

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© and website design: Christopher Dawson MPHA (Qld)

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Ashworth
Ashworth Valley
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factory conditions
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'The Old Mills of Heywood' Project

Explore the history of Heywood's old workplaces.

Popular Pages

The Devil and the Monkey Puzzle Tree

The Monkey Puzzle tree ( Araucaria araucana ) is not a common sight in Monkey Town. The rather exotic spiked trunk and winding branches always caught the attention of local children, and two in particular that stuck in the memory were the trees in a front garden on Heywood Hall Road (which was on the route to Queen’s Park for many people). One well-remembered aspect of these trees was the superstition surrounding them. Some parents actually told their children to be quiet as they passed the tree, various reasons being that they would have bad luck or lose something, or in some cases even grow a monkey’s tail! This led those children who actually wanted a monkey’s tail to shout out as they passed by the trees. Superstitions about the Monkey Puzzle tree can be found throughout Britain. One widely-shared bit of folklore is that the Devil himself sits in this tree and people have to be quiet when walking past or else they will attract the Devil’s attention and get bad luck. In some

General Timeline of Heywood History

This timeline of the history of Heywood is a work in progress. It is intended to be as accurate as possible, and suggested corrections or additions are welcome. Pre - A.D. 1270 7th century: Middleton is thought to have been settled by this time. 1086: Rochdale recorded in the Domesday Book as Recedham. 1164: Heywood family recorded in local area. 1183: Records for Ashworth start around this time. 1197: Reference to Birtle in records. 12th century: Hopwood family recorded at site of current Hopwood Hall. 1210: Reference to hamlets of Lumhalghs (Lomax) and Hep (Heap) in records. 1260: Land at Pilsworth granted to William de Radcliffe. 1270-1600 1260s-70s: Adam de Bury grants land to Peter de Heywood during this time. 1278: William del Bridge granted land near Bury. 1292: Reference to Hoppewode in records 13th century: Bamford family living in Bamford area. 13th century: Peter de Heywood builds Heywood Hall. 13th century: Woollen mill recorded

Accessing Natural Resources in 19th-Century Heywood

It is easy to underestimate just how much the people who lived in and around Heywood during centuries past relied on local sources of necessities such as coal, water, stone, sand, bricks, clay and gravel. Local dairy farms provided milk, and the various woodlands and open countryside also provided timber and game. Before the 19th century, and especially the development of train and canal networks, the notion of having bricks, coal and similar items transported over large distances was impractical, especially when the local landscape was dotted with dozens of quarries, sand pits, and over 200 small mine shafts and adits. There were also over a hundred small wells that provided water to the residents. These sites are depicted on the map below (specially made for this website and based on historical mapping). Many smaller resource sites would not have be en shown on those old maps, so this has to be taken as probably incomplete. The map is best viewed in full screen (left-click the '

Hey, Hey, We're Monkey Town

'It is with some diffidence that I venture to make an inquiry in relation to an offensive name which is sometimes derisively applied to Heywood. Is the origin of the name ‘Monkey Town,’ as given to Heywood, known? Is it known when the town was first slandered in this way?’ Old Heywood postcard. So wrote ‘H.B.’ to the Heywood Advertiser in 1908. It is not clear just how offended HB really was, because Heywoodites have long been happy to call themselves ‘monkeys’. But where did this name come from, and when? A well-known bit of self-effacing folklore still doing the rounds is that Heywood men used to have tails, and so the stools and benches in the town's pubs had holes in them for the tails to fit through. The reality, of course, is that the holes were there for carrying the stools. A clue as to where the name came from is in the timing. The first recorded mention of ‘Monkey Town’ came in the 1850s, when Rochdale author Edwin Waugh wrote in his Sketches of

The Age of the Electric Tram in Heywood

A Manchester Corporation tramcar. Electric trams were a familiar sight and sound on the streets of Heywood from the 1900s to the 1930s. These were not the first trams in the town, as steam-powered vehicles had run in Heywood during 1881-1905. Those trams had been operated by the 'Manchester. Bury. Rochdale & Oldham Steam Tramways Co.' More about the later years of that service can be read here . In this article, written especially for 'Monkey Town', Michael Baron recalls the years when electric trams competed with other forms of public transport to get Heywoodites from A to B: Over the years, a lot of people have asked ‘Why trams?’ and the answer is not obvious at first. Simply put, railed transport has several advantages over road transport. Firstly, a steel wheel running on a steel rail makes little resistance. Such transport runs freely downhill and on a level surface, a tram can be pushed with one hand. In contrast to this, a wheel on a settled surface

Blood 'Sports' in Old Heywood

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

Submit a Story

If you have researched any aspect of Heywood history and would like to submit an article to Monkey Town, please contact me.

Thanks to the following people for their contributions:

Michael Baron:

'The Age of the Electric Tram in Heywood'

Neil J Richardson:

'The Story of Michael Rukin and Charles Martin Newhouse'

Alan McCarthy:

'Heywood Spitfires'

This website created by Christopher Dawson.
Member of the Professional Historians Association (Qld).
BA Anthropology (University of Queensland); Grad. Dip. Applied and Local History (University of Queensland).
Back o'th' Moss/Mossfield Primary/Siddal Moor
All original material © C Dawson
dawsonchris@outlook.com

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