The next tour is on Zoom, the full tour – every story, every nook, every cranny, every celeb.
Date: Tuesday 29 June 2021, 8pm.
Meet: On your computer!
Booking: Please press here to book with Evenbrite.
Cost: £7.50
We can’t enter the hotel in person with a group because of Covid and building works, and even when we can go in on a tour we find half the rooms booked out for conferences and meetings.
* So this is a wonderful alternative. Come with us around the hotel, inside and out, into every nook and cranny, to hear every sensational story, from the comfort of your own laptop.
* The tour is based on original research carried out by me, Ed Glinert, the author/journalist/tour guide who, yes, cracked the Jack the Ripper mystery (East End Chronicles, Penguin, 2005).
* No handed down stories that were never checked in the first place.
* We won’t tell you Rolls met Royce here, because…they didn’t!
Why is that not common knowledge? Please see hilarious explanation at the end.
So come and hear the real story of the Midland Hotel: entertaining, enlightening and expertly researched anecdotes about Winston Churchill, John Barbirolli, the IRA’s Michael Collins, how MI5 and MI9 foiled Vladimir Putin’s crack troops, what the King of Afghanistan got up to, why George Best wasn’t at reception…
Book a private Zoom tour for your group! We catered for 60 very happy ladies from Wilmslow U3A recently.
Why the fuss about the Midland and Rolls & Royce?
Since time immemorial (well, around 1924) every tour guide, writer and journalist has told you that on 4 May 1904 Charles Stewart Rolls and Frederick Henry Royce met at the Midland Hotel and decided to go into business together, as displayed at the entrance.
What a great event in Manchester history. Well, I have conducted some serious research into this story and come up with some startling twists. But, say, how comes the new research about Rolls and Royce not meeting at the Midland Hotel isn’t accepted by all the guides and the hotel, even as countless history societies, car groups and Rolls & Royce themselves are coming round to my way of thinking?
Well it goes like this…
Ed Glinert: I’ve just discovered, after meticulous research, that Rolls and Royce didn’t meet at the Midland Hotel! As I’ve written 10 books for Penguin and other major publishers, solved the Jack the Ripper mystery, and worked for Private Eye for more than 10 years, you should take this seriously.
Manchester Blue Badge Guides: We don’t want someone coming up from London [Glinert has been in Manchester since October 1977] telling us that what we’ve been saying for 30 years is wrong.
Jonathan Schofield: Ignore Ed and he might go away.
Midland Hotel management: Oh dear. Don’t tell anyone.
Ed Glinert to the Midland Hotel management: But it makes the story better now. You’re missing an excellent marketing opportunity. Sooner or later you’re going to have take down those plaques…
