History

Not much detail is known about Marjorie Hurst, who is believed not to have married and never worked and spent much of her later life looking after her father, a retired manager of the Union Bank. 

Elderly residents, then schoolgirls, recall a tall, elegant woman who would always say hello. One former resident said of her "She was the sort of lady with a standing about her and someone you looked up to. She would tell us to call her Auntie Marjorie ".

She was though a woman with a social conscience and, when she died around the time of the Second World War having lived into her 80s or 90s, she bequeathed a legacy to Knutsford Urban District Council of cash, property and land in Silkmill Street so that the poor of the town could live in the town centre. 

Her aim - using part of a family fortune believed to have been made through the cotton trade - was that the town's poor and needy should have affordable accommodation in the road which connects Knutsford's two main streets. But after years of the council providing virtually rent-free housing in four cottages, the properties fell into disrepair. Then In the early 1980s, town councillors received permission from the Charity Commissioners to increase the rent - provided a new, smaller trust was set-up. A decade later the trustees secured a housing association grant to renovate Marjorie's four cottages - and then cash was awarded to build six flats next door. The block was completed in the late 90s.