September tour: Sun 15 Sep 2019, 2.30pm.
Meet: outside the Beetham Hotel on Deansgate.
Booking: Please press here to book with eventbrite.
Tea at the Midland (optional): Please transfer to the site by pressing here.
Tea at the Radisson (optional): Please transfer to the site by pressing here.
* It pains us to say it but this is the only properly-researched Midland Hotel tour. We’ve tried to spread the word, but for reasons best known to themselves most of the other Manchester guides don’t want to learn from fresh research…It’s called politics.
* This tour is based on original research carried out by 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 at the Midland because…they didn’t!
(Why is that not common knowledge? Please see hilarious explanation at the end).
* And after you’ve drunk on our sensational stories, try some sumptuous refreshments (optional) at the Midland or Radisson.
***
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, Ed Glinert, Penguin author and prolific Manchester tour guide, has now done some serious research into this story and come up with some startling twists. So come and hear the real story of the Midland Hotel and its neighbouring hotels: the Radisson, Great John Street, Beetham and co: entertaining, enlightening and expertly researched anecdotes about Winston Churchill, the Pankhursts, John Barbirolli, Michael Collins, the assassination attempt on Tony Blair, what the King of Afghanistan got up to, why George Best wasn’t at reception…
NEXT 2019 TOURS Meet entrance to the Beetham Tower, Deansgate, 2.30pm.
• Sun 28 July.
• Sun 1 September.
Book a private tour for your group!
We catered for 60 very happy ladies from Wilmslow U3A recently.
* Background to the controversy
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 though 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, the Manchester Blue Badge Guides 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…
