Presentation of Manchester Free Trade Hall Relic to City of Leningrad

Among the papers I found recently in a file folder related to the 1964 settlement of the estate of my grandmother Mina Magdalena Jonas,  were the newspaper clipping and two letters. I had no prior knowledge of this. What is amusing is that the clipping, without the letters, would have been very mysterious, as my grandmother is not mentioned by name in the clipping.

Newspaper clipping

Letter from Leonard C. Howitt to
M.M. Jonas, Feb. 7, 1956

Letter from Philip P. Dingle  to
M.M. Jonas, Feb. 29, 1956

However, the accompanying letters make it clear that my grandmother had saved the day by working with the Manchester City Architect to provide the Russian translation so clearly desired. Since this blog is about Internet wandering/wondering, I wondered what this was all about, and about the people involved.


Easiest to discover is the Free Trade Hall itself, with its own Wikipedia article, which states that the Hall "was bombed and left an empty shell in the Manchester Blitz of December 1940." Reconstructed after the war it became known as a concert hall, and perhaps most notoriously for a Sex Pistols concert that began the Punk Rock era (see, for example, "The Sex Pistols’ 1976 Manchester “Gig That Changed the World,” and the Day the Punk Era Began").

Remarkably, almost the next Google search I tried ["free trade hall" 1956 leningrad] led me to a recent (2016) article on "Manchester and Leningrad: From Fraternal Allies to Partner Cities" by Catherine J. Danks, published in English with the "Bulletin of the St. Petersburg University. HISTORY." Danks writes about, among other thing, the 1956 trip to Leningrad--"In 24th February-5th March 1956 the first civic delegation from Manchester spent ten days in Leningrad."--and about how "[t]he Lord Mayor presented the City of Leningrad with a tray made from timbers salvaged from the old Manchester Free Trade Hall that had been bombed during the 1940 blitz."

In addition, Danks's article shows how involved the Manchester Town Clerk Philip B. Dingle (author of the second letter above) was with the planning of the whole trip and overcoming opposition locally to the trip, and also that he was one of the delegates on the trip.

My wondering now, of course, is can I find out (a) whether there is photograph of this tray anywhere, and (b) whether there are other sponsored relics of the Free Trade Hall. Living in the shadow of the Pentagon, I know that relics from the 9/11 terrorist attacks have been presented by the relevant authorities in New York and Washington to various groups that helped with the rescue missions, etc. So what was the parallel thinking with respect to the Manchester bombing? Smaller questions intrigue me too, such as what newspaper (and date) is this clipping from.