The Angel of Manchester.

Gorton cemetery is situated on a rolling hill where Hyde road and Reddish lane converge. These two remnants of Roman civil engineering are separated by a long stretch of wasteland that was once part of the great inland waterways of Great Britain. The canal has long gone a victim of forward thinking by yet another inept government. Who exchanged what was once a picturesque reed clogged canal walkway populated by wildlife and the fauna of nature, for fly-tippers paradise overrun by muggers, lovers and druggies. Which now boasts more used condoms and empty syringes per square mile than anywhere else in this sceptre'd Isle we love so much.

In the Southwest corner of this quiet resting-place for the long gone, under a canopy of elder trees that hide from view a pile of old broken bikes washing machines and several busted microwave ovens. You will see if you look closely a small dark grey headstone that boasts the name, start and finish date of one, Victoria Dunwelding. The Manchester Angel. Victoria or VD as her friends affectionately knew her suffered greatly at the mercy of this world, but was once a legend in North Manchester. Sadly only a few ageing and decrepit hangers on to life who very soon will join her under the elder trees remember her.

When I was a young boy growing up in west Gorton, I was told the story of the Manchester Angel one hot summer afternoon by a neighbour Lazy Larry as we sat idly watching the bailiffs turn his cosy, comfortable and softly furnished living room into a minimalists dream. They left him with two tea chests. “Its all I need” he cried, “Just give me a couple of tea chests, a hot mug of tea and an arrowroot biscuit and I’m happy”. His words came back to haunt me many years later when at his funeral I could have sworn I saw the words “Produce of India” stencilled on the sides of his coffin.

Victoria was the fifteenth child born to Miriam a honeycomb tripe scrubber from Bolton and Eric a WC engineer and ballcock recycler whose antecedents are unknown. Shortly after Victoria was born her Father left the house with a quantity of copper balls for a customer and was never seen again. This put a great fiscal strain on the family and as a result they were thrown into the infamous Cheatham Hill workhouse which these days goes by the name of North Manchester General Hospital. (No change there then) The children separated from their Mother had to make their own way, and Victoria found it harder than her siblings.

She was an ugly child with a squat face, pug nose, high forehead and a squint that gave her the impression of always being constipated. Weighing in at forty two pound when born, her Mother said after a seventy two hour labour that left her little more than skin and bodily fluids “Never again and I bleeding mean it this time”. It’s this statement some say that prompted her husband to disappear with his balls. We will never know, what we do know is that at the age of three years old she was dumped by a workhouse employee on the steps at the convent of the “Little sisters of the financially embarrassed” in the village of Harpurhey on the outskirts of Manchester city centre. A workhouse diary entry from that day remarks “Its now or never, if we leave it any longer it will be a two man job”. Its thought that this was a reference to her size, workhouse children were weighed every week, and the last entry for Victoria states that she tipped the scales at one hundred and fifty pound. A smidgen over what a three-year-old should weigh.

The sisters treated her no differently than any of the other orphans in their care, she was beaten twice a day (Three times on a Sunday) and was give two square meals of bread and water, breakfast was at three in the morning and supper at midnight. The time in between was filled by work and prayer, work consisted of crawling along carrot furrows on her hands and knees in a large field weeding out the nettles and dandelions with her bare hands, whilst prayer mostly was taken up by beseeching her creator to blow the bleeding carrot field out of existence.

Despite her Spartan life Victoria continued to pile the pounds on and by the time she was fifteen she was a six foot four, (Not counting the stoop) three hundred and sixty pounds mountain of fat and muscle. Records at the time liken her to a cross between a valkrian and an amazon warrior. Time had not tempered her ugliness, rather it had emphasised her faults and her countenance was a site to behold. She still had the squint, exaggerated by the fact that one of her eyes had dropped lower than the other after a particularly bad beating by sister Malicious (I think she was Greek) which also resulted in her sporting cauliflower ears. Her jaw was wide and square; she had no neck to speak of which gave her the appearance of having a tapered head. She wore her hair coconut style, short and spiky, that and the scars from regularly getting her arse kicked by the nuns made her a scary looking person.

So scary in fact that the nuns in fear of reprisals for the beatings they had handed out to her over the years asked her to leave the convent at age sixteen. Out in the world, on her own for the first time in her life she was lost. She left that dreaded place with just the knickers she stood up in and a sack of carrots to keep her going until she could earn enough money to support herself. By hard work and good fortune she was engaged by an engineering firm in Ardwick as an apprentice sheet metal worker. And for the next five years learned her trade under the wing of Harry Stackpole, master tinsmith and panel basher. Harry was an ex merchant seaman with a dubious past, he leaned toward the lavender and was immortalised in the Manchester Guardian headline that ran “I never laid a hand on him, honest” (It was illegal then).

She was happy working at Foundry construction until its closure in the late thirties after it was found liable for the illegal use of low hydrogen welding rods containing arsenic that had been used on ducting installed at a hospital where several patients were poisoned. (No change there either) Out of a job and alone again she eked out a living by collecting coal eggs that had fallen from passing freight trains onto the railway tracks which she then sold from door to door. She was quite successful at this (Well no body was gonna say no was they?).

Doing the coal run during the day and working as a bouncer in the clubs of Manchester by night, over time Victoria managed to save a little nest egg. And together with Busta Jarvis a fellow doorman and boyfriend they rented the basement of a department store next door to the famous Listons bar and opened it as the now infamous Labia lounge. There is confusion about the intended name of the club. Busta suggested they call it “The VD club” but that was vetod. Victoria always maintained that she wanted the club named as homage to the frightful time her Mother had giving birth to her. It’s a matter of record that the signwriter was dyslexic, although the term they used in the sixties for this condition was pillock. In any case the name stuck and the legend of Victoria Dunwelding the Manchester Angel began.

Business was good for a time; the club became a popular haunt for the public, police officers, judges and the odd MP. Some quite famous celebrities were connected to this Manchester hot spot. People such as Johnny ‘Knucklehead’ Bailey the British heavyweight bare knuckle champion, Gloria ‘Those aren’t my drawers’ Gousei the glamour queen from Salford and Barry ‘Pigsick’ Barlow notorious henchman for the Tray quins who terrorised Ashton and Duckinfield for decades. Its rumoured that pigsick who disappeared in the late sixties is now an integral part of the concrete structure fondly known as the Arndale centre (Aka brick shit house) but this has never been substantiated.

The good times were not to last, for on the night of February the fifth less than nine month after its conception the club became a raging inferno. It was never discovered how the fire started, whether it was a carelessly thrown match, a cigarette left to burn or the deliberate act of a sick mind we will never know. Some believe it was a war between the Tray Quins who wanted in on the Labia and the police who always had a finger in Victoria’s Labia club.

One thing is sure, that night Victoria displayed amazing bravery, she fought her way through the inferno time after time to rescue punters trapped by smoke and flames. Carrying people two at a time on her shoulders she would take them to safety and return into the wall of heat to rescue more. She was burned terribly, but with great determination and total disregard for her own safety she saved the lives of over a hundred frightened and thoroughly pissed of, pissed up people that night.

After several weeks in the intensive burns unit at her old workhouse (North Manchester General) she found the courage to look at the damage to her face. What she saw in the mirror frightened even her. Gone were her cauliflower ears, gone was her pug nose, her squat face had ballooned out, her once squinty eyes were now just slits in her plug ugly face. Her coconut hair had been burned clean off leaving an angry patchwork quilt of red and purple scar tissue. But worse of all, Busta the only man who ever made her feel like a real woman and who she had tried to save time and time again before being forced back by the flames was burnt to a crisp in the gents toilet of the club and not enough of him could be scraped off the floor to hold a funeral.

She decided to leave England and her sad memories behind her and travel to Tibet, where in the foothills of the Himalayas she could live as a simple monk in a quiet monastery for what remained of her life. With a heavy heart and a truckload of salmon paste sandwiches she boarded a freight class aeroplane at what then was Ringway airport. And began her long journey to the Mashtup temple in Bangalot Tibet where she lived out the rest of her life in prayer and thought, surviving on handouts from local people friendly to the monastery (Mostly carrots to her dismay)

She died peacefully with Bustas name on her lips (What was left of them) and would have been buried in Tibet but the Head Lama complained that they didn’t have the room for her saying “Tibet’s not that big ya know”. He insisted her body be returned to England. Because of her disfigurement and the fact that she was returned to her native country via a long sea voyage (Cheaper than airmail) it was a closed casket do. A young cub for the Gorton and Openshaw reporter never having laid eyes on her dubbed her the Manchester Angel.

Victoria was laid to rest under the elder trees in Gorton cemetery on the sixth of March 1975. Nobody lined the streets for her funeral cortège; no one came forward to recite a eulogy for the Manchester Angel who saved so many lives that fateful night. Only two people attended her funeral, Sister Rosa Ree and a tall sallow chap with a gaunt face and a peculiar face tick who kept repeating “I didn’t have to come ya know”.

The small grey headstone bears these simple words. “Here lies Victoria Dunwelding spinster and part time door person. 1889-1975. It’s a piss poor tribute to the big woman with an even bigger heart who rests below it.

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