William Edmund Sowerbutts (4 January 1911 - 28 May 1990) [1] was an English gardener and panellist on the long-running BBC Radio 4 programme Gardeners Question Time.
Born in Ashton-under-Lyne, Lancashire, the son of a market gardener, Sowerbutts wanted to become a journalist on leaving school, but his father died when he was 16 and he started work on the family's smallholding. The family first opened a stall on Oldham's Victoria Market and later on Ashton's outdoor market.
Sowerbutts toured the area giving lectures to local gardening and allotment societies. He went on to appear in the first edition of How Does Your Garden Grow?, soon renamed Gardeners' Question Time , an offshoot of the World War II Dig for Victory campaign. The first programme was broadcast from the Singing Room at the Broadoak Hotel in Ashton-under-Lyne on 9 April 1947. On the first panel along with Bill were Fred Loads, Tom Clark and Dr E.W. Sansome. Sowerbutts and Loads later went on to become household names, appearing every Sunday at 2 p.m. on the BBC Home Service. In 1950, Professor Alan Gemmell joined. The banter between the trio attracted a large following, with the listenership building up to two million.
Tameside Council placed a Blue plaque in his honour on the Broadoak Hotel.
Tameside is a metropolitan borough of Greater Manchester, England, named after the River Tame, which flows through it, and includes the towns of Ashton-under-Lyne, Audenshaw, Denton, Droylsden, Dukinfield, Hyde, Mossley and Stalybridge. Tameside is bordered by the metropolitan boroughs of Stockport to the south, Oldham to the north and northeast, Manchester to the west, and to the east by the Borough of High Peak in Derbyshire. As of 2022, the population of Tameside was 232,753, making it the 8th-most populous borough of Greater Manchester.
Ashton-under-Lyne is a market town in Tameside, Greater Manchester, England. The population was 48,604 at the 2021 census. Historically in Lancashire, it is on the north bank of the River Tame, in the foothills of the Pennines, 6 miles (9.7 km) east of Manchester.
Oundle is a market town and civil parish on the left bank of the River Nene in North Northamptonshire, England, which had a population of 6,254 at the time of the 2021 census. It is 69 miles north of London and 12 mi (19 km) south-west of Peterborough. The town is home to Oundle School.
Robert Edward Sheldon, Baron Sheldon PC was a British Labour Party politician and life peer who served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Ashton under Lyne from 1964 to 2001.
Dukinfield is a town in Tameside, Greater Manchester, England, on the south bank of the River Tame opposite Ashton-under-Lyne, 6.3 miles (10.1 km) east of Manchester. At the 2011 Census, it had a population of 19,306.
Hyde is a town in Tameside, Greater Manchester, England, which had a population of 35,890 in 2021. Within the boundaries of the historic county of Cheshire, it is 5 miles (8 km) north-east of Stockport, 6 miles (10 km) west of Glossop and 8 miles (13 km) east of Manchester.
Droylsden is a town in Tameside, Greater Manchester, England, 4.1 miles (6.6 km) east of Manchester city centre and 2.2 miles (3.5 km) west of Ashton-under-Lyne, with a population at the 2011 Census of 22,689.
Gardeners' Question Time is a long-running BBC Radio 4 programme in which amateur gardeners can put questions to a panel of experts.
The Fivepenny Piece were a five-piece band, originally formed in 1967 in the area of East Lancashire around Ashton-under-Lyne and nearby Stalybridge in Tameside. The band met and performed on Wednesday nights at Ashton's Broadoak Hotel, which gave them their original name The Wednesday Folk.
Gerard Kearns is an English actor. He is best known for playing Ian Gallagher in the British version of the comedy-drama series Shameless.
Winifred Emms, best known by her stage name Hetty King, was an English entertainer who performed in the music halls as a male impersonator over some 70 years.
Arthur Brooke (1845–1918) founder of the British tea company Brooke, Bond & Co. Ltd born in Manchester, Great Britain. Established his business in 1869 and was making £5,000 a year at the age of 30 with shops in all the major cities of Britain and warehouse in London.
Lynford Hall is a neo-Jacobean country house at Mundford, near Thetford in the English county of Norfolk. It is now a hotel.
The 1931 Ashton-Under-Lyne by-election was held on 30 April. It was triggered by the death of the town's Labour MP, Albert Bellamy, and resulted in a victory for the Conservative candidate, Col John Broadbent.
Pennine Blue, later known as First Pennine, was a bus company serving the Tameside area of Greater Manchester, England. It was an independent bus company running services to/from Ashton-under-Lyne in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Its depot was initially based at Britannia Street in Ashton-Under-Lyne, before moving to the Globe Industrial Estate in Dukinfield, and finally to the current location on Broadway in Dukinfield where it now operates as first pioneer.
Hugh Mason was an English mill owner, social reformer and Liberal politician. He was born in Stalybridge and brought up in Stalybridge and Ashton-under-Lyne until he entered the family cotton business in 1838 after a seven-year period working in a bank. Having originally opposed trade unions, Mason became a paternalistic mill owner, creating a colony for his workers with associated facilities and ensuring that they experienced good conditions. During the Lancashire Cotton Famine of the 1860s he refused to cut workers' wages although it was common practice.
Raymond Ray-Jones was an English painter and etcher.
Lewis Tatham Wright,Baron Wright of Ashton under Lyne, CBE, was an English politician whose career was strongly connected with the textile industry in Lancashire in North West England. He was also President of the Trades Union Congress.
Alan Robertson Gemmell was Professor of Biology at Keele University and a regular member of the panel on the BBC Radio Home Service programme Gardeners' Question Time from 1950 for some 30 years. Disagreements on the programme between Gemmell and fellow panel member Bill Sowerbutts became legendary.