Aircraft Manufacturer and Goings on Behind the Manor House Tavern

Digging around in the archives recently, I came up with some interesting wee factlets related to a building o a plot behind and just to the north of the Manor House Pub.

Up until the end of the 19th century, the ground directly behind the Manor House pub shows on plans as "Tea Garden".  It was depicted in a watercolour in 1883. What was to become 318A, (later just 318) Green Lanes was occupied by Mardlin and Norwood Nurserymen. Directory listings also show the presence of James Harvey Jobmaster (A jobmaster supplied carriages, horses and drivers for hire). The map below shows the plot possibly split between these two set-ups with the Mardlin clearly occupying the rear part with the greenhouses (cross-hatching). 

You can see the mid-nineteenth century set-up on the photo below, shot on Seven Sisters Road from just beyond the old turnpike toll booth which stood diagonally opposite the pub. You can see a plan of the pub layout at this time here. The buildings to the left of the Manor House Tavern are probably the jobmasters' premises.

The 1895 Ordnance Survey map below shows the situation up to the mid-1890s.

At the very end of the nineteenth century,  the landlord of the Tavern made alternations to update his premises, he sold the garden to the North Metropolitan Tramways Company for the construction of its horse tram depot and offices. I assume the sale financed the building improvements. 

The next photo shows the scene in around 1905. The pub had been improved by James Swinyard soon after he took it over in 1890 and the two-storey building with the pitched roof shown in the photo below was erected as part of those changes. There had been an old entrance road for use by carts to access the premises on the plot of 318A. This was preserved with an access way beneath the first floor of  new building.

The area to the north of the pub has been developed with a short terrace of shop-houses (numbers 318 to 322) and another of housing (number 326 to 332) and it looks like the tram depot is already in place behind it.  

Although the Mardlin's Nursery site wasn't included in the tram company's development, it closed at the changes to the neighbouring properties and their greenhouses were demolished. The buildings on the front part of the 318A plot survived.

As the 1912 Ordnance Survey map below shows, by this point the tram company had bought a slice of land between 318 Green Lanes and  the Tavern to construct a track to its depot. Swinyard's new two storey building survived until 1920 when it was demolished, probably for the construction of a tram turntable .The former jobmasters buildings are still in place. Those were to be developed as the commercial premises known as 318A Green Lanes which are the primary topic of this article.

318A had some interesting tenants. The first tenant I found was in 1910 when the Electrical Advertising Company Ltd were there. The earliest records evidence them apparently getting into a spat with the local council over the erection of a neon sign over the entrance way.

The neighbouring shopkeepers didn't like what the 'low women' used to get up to  at night in that dark alley and so wanted to keep the sign!

Low goings-on aside, I had no idea that neon signs were in use so early, let alone up and running in our neighbourhood. 

After the sign company the building was tenanted by what appears to have been an automotive engineering company of some sort, Splitter Brothers. Certainly there was a garage showroom with oil pumps at 318 (the two storey building). However, planning correspondence suggests that they also owned the factory premises at the rear.

Below is a photo from the early Thirties shot from outside 320 Green Lanes. It shows the that 318 ad been demolished, the entrance ways to 318A and the tram depot. We can also see what I'm guessing, is the construction of the new Manor House pub after the arrival of the Piccadilly Line. 

The two Splitter Brothers, Bernard and Saul are recorded as living at 16 Woodberry Down in the late 1930s. So one might safely assume that at some point they were doing very well indeed. It was not to last though.  The London Gazette records them as filing for bankruptcy in February 1938.

It seems that the brothers weren't new to notoriety. I've attached a copy of an article from the Illustrated Police News in 1911 which recounts the story of how Saul was shot whilst riding his motor bicycle near South Mims.

For his part, Bernard was apparently no man of straw. Grace's Guide of 1922 shows in his war record that he was Chief Designer for the RAF (and since the RAF was only formed in 1918, he may also have been in the Royal Flying Corps).

That war record leaves me wondering if there was any connection between him and the premises' most surprising tenants - an aircraft manufacturer. The company was Courtney Pope Aircraft Ltd. Their parent company was the biggest employer in the Harringay Warehouse district. In their Amhurst Park Works on Eade Road they made shop fittings. It's conceivable that Splitter and 'Mr Courtney Pope' could have become acquainted through local business networks and set up the Aircraft business together - and equally possible that Splitter's connection to aircraft was pure coincidence. 

It seems likely from records at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum that Courtney Pope Aircraft was manufacturing propellers during the First World War. However the earliest that I've been able to connect them with the N4 area so far is 1928 when they were buying land in Eade Road. Whether that land extended an existing property holding or represented their first acquisition in the area I do not know for sure. However I have been able to find job adverts they placed in 1913 and 1919 which gave their address as Alpha Place, Caledonian Road,  Kings Cross (now Omega Place). So I suspect that as they grew, they moved to larger premises further from the centre of Town and I suspect that they were not local until the 1920s. 

What I am able to say with confidence however is that during the Second World War they were manufacturing aircraft parts in the premises at 318A Green Lanes. One imagines that this may also have comprised some of the activity in Eade Road. With the exception of work occasioned by bombing raids, it seems unlikely that the shop-fitting business would have been terribly busy in wartime. 

I hadn't set out to discover any of this. It's all a bit random, but it does put some flesh on the bones of a place I walk past with great regularity and I hope it's been of interest to those of you who've read this far!

The Ordnance Survey map below shows the situation in 1955.Yoyu can see that by this point 318A had become simply 318 and that the premises had been significantly edlarged.