Celebrating Rosa Grindon and hidden gems to be found in the Fallowfield Brow and Platt Fields Park. Here we share the story behind this extraordinary mural of Rosa Grindon: “A Devoted Citizen of Manchester 1848 to 1923”.
Above to the right, the artist’s visualisation of the Rosa Grindon Mural, based on a circa 1920s photograph rendered in a field of purple, green and white flowers. To know the inspiration behind this image read the details we are delighted to share here. To the left the Google map showing the location which is on the end junction of Albion Road and Mabfield Road. There you will also find an entrance to Platt Fields Park, through that entrance will take you the Shakespearean Garden, read on to find out how that connects to this story.
The Artist and the Local
Ethan Lemon is a British painter whose work focuses on portraiture. His signature style emerged from the fast nature of using spray paint, which he was exposed to as a young adult partaking in graffiti culture. Ethan’s main practice is still on the street, where he spray paints large murals of personal acquaintances as well as historical figures from his home town Stoke on Trent and people from Manchester, where he now resides and works.
Nick Roberts, a local resident of the Fallowfield Brow, who led organising the installation of this mural, first met Ethan in January 2023 when he was working on his first giant gable end murals halfway along Furness Road, also on the Brow. Nick suggested there were other walls around that could use a bit of life, and ended up surveying six potential gable ends for future projects. On the 15th August 2024 Nick and Ethan were thrilled to be informed that the Neighbourhood Investment Fund application had been approved, and the mural of Rosa Grindon will be the third of Ethan’s large murals decorating the Brow.
Who was Rosa Grindon?
Rosa Grindon, née Elverson (1848-1923) was born in the Derbyshire village of Newhall, near Burton-on-Trent. Her father William was an agricultural labourer, who progressed to become a draper, grocer, farmer, and brick manufacturer. Like him, Rosa made her own way in life, working in a succession of domestic roles, from an elderly lady’s companion to a housekeeper. While employed as a Lady Housekeeper to the widower John Gilbert, the Mayor of Lichfield, she performed the duties of his Lady Mayoress and, together with Gilbert’s daughter Florence, helped transcribe mediaeval texts at the Litchfield Cathedral Library for the Early English Text Society.
Despite her early stated opposition to marriage, in her forties Rosa Elverson married the renowned naturalist Leopold Grindon, thirty years her senior, and moved to Manchester to live with him. By that time Leopold, formerly a cashier, was an established lecturer and author, and the couple lived in a terraced house in Cecil Street. Once in Manchester, Rosa Grindon threw herself wholeheartedly into amateur academic, cultural, and social work. She shared her husband’s interest in science, particularly botany.
Rosa Grindon championed many social causes, ranging from combatting air pollution, through fair treatment of domestic servants, to women’s suffrage. She took part in meetings of the Manchester Society for Women’s Suffrage, and in 1913 she was elected one of its vice presidents.
As a lecturer, she covered a variety of topics, including literature and natural history, at such institutions as the Manchester Geographical Society, the Chester Society of Natural Science, and the Manchester Working Men’s Club Association.
A keen supporter of educational and cultural associations, she was the founding member of the Life Study Society, the Ladies’ Chess Club, the resurrected iteration of the Manchester Ladies’ Literary Club.
One area particularly close to Rosa Grindon’s heart was horticulture. Following her husband’s death, she honoured him by founding the Leo Grindon Flower Lovers’ Association, and she was instrumental in the establishment of the Manchester Tramwaymen’s Horticultural Society. She worked tirelessly to help those living in the squalid conditions of the turn-of-the-century Manchester to beautify their surroundings by growing plants, even if they did not have gardens and had to make do with boxes and pots in their windows and back yards.
Her other great passion was Shakespeare. She was President of the Manchester Ladies’ Shakespeare Reading Club, and she built her reputation as a Shakespearean authority in both local and national arenas. She delivered numerous addresses and courses of study on Shakespeare’s plays at various venues in and around Manchester: at her own house, in local libraries, clubs, meeting halls, and theatres.
Between 1909 and 1913, at the invitation of the Shakespeare Festival Committee, she lectured at the annual Festivals held at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. In some of her activities, Rosa Grindon combined her love of Shakespeare and horticulture.
She coached an amateur theatre troupe, the Pastoral Players, who performed scenes from Shakespeare’s plays in the little open-air theatre that she created in her house’s back garden.
She was also the moving force behind the establishment of a small Shakespeare Garden in Whitworth Park in 1916. This was the initiative that led to the creation of the larger and more impressive Shakespeare Garden in Platt Fields in 1922.
Ethan Lemon’s mural pays a fitting tribute to Rosa Grindon, referencing her two life passions and areas of achievement, Shakespeare and horticulture. Simultaneously, its colour scheme of green, white and violet alludes to her suffragist convictions, as these were the colours adopted by the movement, symbolising hope, purity, loyalty and dignity, as well as representing the acronym for Give Women the Vote.