Writer Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was born at Wyberslegh Hall in High Lane, and went on to become one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. He is best remembered for Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired the musical Cabaret, and A Single Man - novels which explored homosexuality at a time it was still criminalised in the UK.
Here at Stockroom, home to the Stockport Local Heritage Library, we are fortunate to hold part of the Isherwood family archives, which offer a unique glimpse into the early life of the writer.
Between 2022 and 2024, I undertook an archives apprenticeship at the Stockport Local Heritage Library. I came across the Isherwood family archives by fluke, having no prior knowledge of Christopher Isherwood being from the area. With some background on the author, I had always associated him with the Berlin of his early novels or the glamorous literary circles of California. When I found out this feeling was shared by most people I spoke to, I became determined to learn more about Isherwood and open up access to the fascinating collection of items we hold.
Image: Christopher Isherwood and his younger brother Richard, c1913 (Stockport Image Archive reference: 19499).
We acquired the Isherwood family archives in 1982. They were deposited by a retired photographer of the Stockport Advertiser and delivered in Christopher’s old school trunk. A simple, hand-written box list of the items was created at the time, but since moving over to an online catalogue, the items had pretty much remained untouched, waiting for further description to be made discoverable for the public.
Repackaging and cataloguing the items made me feel personally invested in the Isherwood family story, seeing Christopher’s name inscribed in his childhood novels or his parents’ illustrations for the nursery book they created for him. It felt special to be the first person in years to study these materials, but also significant to be doing so in the very area they originated from - miles away from other Isherwood repositories – to slowly unravel fragments of both Isherwood’s story and history that is local to us.
Admittedly, Isherwood had a complicated relationship with the area. Born into landed gentry with ancestral ties to Marple Hall, his early life here contrasts with the liberal existence he would later embrace as an openly gay writer living across Europe and California. For him, the England of his childhood with its rigid social constraints became something he longed to escape.
Yet he spent the last decade of his life turning to non-fiction, writing about the past to discover and interrogate his true authentic self. He travelled back to Stockport in 1966 to start research for Kathleen and Frank (1971), an autobiography of his family - researching the very items I was holding in my hands.
Below I will highlight 5 items from this unique collection.
The Story of Bobby and Albert
Images: The Story of Bobby and Albert (Heritage Library reference: S/80 Z/13).
How The Story of Bobby and Albert came into the Heritage Library’s collection remains something of a mystery. I have included the book here as an honorary mention, as the item is not part of the archive we acquired in 1982. Instead, it was discovered in our Strongroom among our rare books.
The Story of Bobby and Albert is an illustrated children’s book, written by Isherwood's father Frank in 1911 for his 7-year old son. Credit must also go to his mother Kathleen, whose initials KBI adorn several of the illustrations. Both Frank and Kathleen were talented illustrators and storytellers, who clearly helped shape the imagination of the young Christopher.
In the book, two of Christopher’s rag dolls, Bobby and Albert, have come to life, embarking on adventures and competing with other nursery toys for the attention of “Master Christopher”. The story takes a strangely dark turn when two toy rabbits are slain and burned on a bonfire, punished for favouring naughtiness over virtue. Christopher himself is easy to spot in the illustrations, identifiable by his distinctive haircut.
The blending of life and fiction, with Christopher appearing as a fictionalised character in stories, was a motif started by his parents, and carried forward by Isherwood himself. He often wrote about himself in the third person, for example as “Herr Issyvoo” in Goodbye to Berlin, or as “Christopher” in Christopher and His Kind. The Story of Bobby and Albert is one of the stories that may mark the beginning of his interest in self-mythologisation, and it also shows how deeply storytelling ran in the family.
Notebooks and Travel Diaries of Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood
Image: Photo of Kathleen Machell Smith (Stockport Image Archive reference: 19494) and her architecture notebook, 1895-1898 (Archives reference: D1460/1/5/1).
Many of the items in the Isherwood Family collection relate to Isherwood’s mother, Kathleen Bradshaw Isherwood (née Machell Smith). We hold Kathleen’s pre-marriage travel diaries from 1897-1899, her architecture notebook from 1895-1898, an account of a trip to Spain with her husband Frank in 1907 and a daily prayer book she kept from 1885 until her death, which she annotated with significant family events as they occurred.
Perhaps the reason her travel volumes have remained in the local area - and were not taken with Isherwood to California like her other journals - is that he was not particularly impressed by his mother’s travel writing. In Kathleen and Frank, he quite harshly describes her travel journals as ‘seldom interesting’ as they keep ‘turning into a guidebook’. [1]
Yet while Isherwood may have found her style impersonal here, Kathleen’s eye for detail and her deep interest in architecture and art are undeniable. Around the same time of writing these journals, she collaborated with her mother Emily Machell Smith on writing a guidebook, Our Rambles in Old London, which was published in 1895 and critically well-received. Often travelling with her mother - whose Victorian ideas of womanhood were still a lot more conversative – Kathleen may have felt that the formality of these travel journals was all she felt able, or safe, to express.
As for Kathleen’s own opinions on her diaries, she modestly told Christopher’s brother Richard: ‘Perhaps someone will be glad of it, some day.’ [2]
World War I Letters from Frank Bradshaw Isherwood to his parents
Image: Photo of Frank Bradshaw Isherwood, 1914 (Stockport Image Archive reference: 19505), items relating to his musical interests and a letter from at the front (Archive references: D1460/2/1/14, D1460/2/1/15 and D1460/2/1/13).
Christopher was only 10 years old when his father Frank was killed in action near Ypres during the First World War. Understandably, this had a deep impact on the family.
Isherwood later wrote that, after Frank’s death, his mother increasingly started to retreat into the past, idealising the brief, happy years the family spent together at Wyberslegh Hall. Over time, Frank assumed a near-mythic persona in the family imagination - a fallen war hero, whose legacy Isherwood felt he was unable to match. [3]
The letters from Frank that we hold at the Heritage Library offer a firsthand account of life at the front. Writing to his mother at Marple Hall, the tone in Frank’s early letters from 1914 is still optimistic, liking the war “much better than the South Africa War” and writing that the soldiers are “really having quite a nice time”. That said, he acknowledges that if he gives away too much, his letters would be stopped by the censor. [4]
As time went on and anxiety at home increased, Christopher began falling ill more frequently. In his letters from early 1915, Frank often expresses concern for his son’s health. The final letter we have from him is dated 1 May 1915 and addressed to his father. It ends with the hope that Christopher has recovered and returned to school. Just days later, on 9 May, Frank was killed in battle. [5]
Press cuttings relating to Isherwood’s career
Image: Scrapbook with press cuttings relating to I Am a Camera (Archive reference: D1460/2/6).
By the 1950s, Isherwood was a successful writer living in the United States. He had carved out a new path for himself, in opposition to the one that had been laid out for him by his family. Although his relationship with his mother is often described as complex, adding to Isherwood’s wish to rebel, correspondence between them reveals they maintained a strong, affectionate bond throughout their lives.
The original theatre programmes and press cuttings held in our collection, collated by Kathleen, demonstrate how closely she followed her son’s career. One scrapbook contains cuttings from Durrants press agency in 1954, with empty envelopes that indicate they were requested by Kathleen. Most of these clippings relate to the positive reception of the London production of John van Druten’s I Am A Camera, the play adapted from Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin and later the basis for the musical film Cabaret (1972).
Fun fact: Kathleen’s press cuttings are collated in a retro-looking scrapbook of The Muppet Show, that in itself might be worthy of a spot in the archive. Since Kathleen died in 1960 and The Muppet Show did not air until 1976, the cuttings must have been compiled in the scrapbook later, either by Christopher’s brother Richard or by someone else, before the materials entered our archive.
Christopher Isherwood’s childhood books
Image: Christopher Isherwood’s childhood novels, The Pilgrim’s Progress and Sons of the Vikings: An Orkney Story (Archive references: D1460/3/13 and D1460/3/8).
Though Isherwood’s own voice is largely absent from the archives we hold — none of his letters or diaries remain here in Stockport — the collection does preserve several personal items that once belonged to him. These include an old red wallet, the school trunk in which the archive arrived (now held by Stockport Museums), and a number of his childhood books and novels – items that you can imagine were left behind by Isherwood when he left the family home, but were carefully kept by his family.
Some of these beautiful volumes are signed on the first page in Isherwood’s own childhood handwriting. Others carry personal inscriptions from family members, showing that they were once exchanged as gifts on birthdays or at Christmas.
These inscriptions do more than hint at possible literary influences. They position the items as part of an ongoing family dialogue, one that ultimately helped shape the writer Isherwood became.
A passage from the final page of Kathleen and Frank seems fitting:
“So he began by questioning Richard and later borrowed from him Kathleen's diaries and Frank's letters, which Richard had kept at Wyberslegh. While reading through these, Christopher saw how heredity and kinship create a woven fabric; its patterns vary but its strands are the same throughout. Impossible to say exactly where Kathleen and Frank end and Richard and Christopher begin; they merge into each other.”* [6]
The Isherwood family archive is available to browse on the Stockport Local Heritage Library’s online catalogue. Some of the items will be on display at Stockroom in the Heritage Library between the 1st of February and 1st of March 2026.
Written by Nicole Peeters, 2026.
References:
[1] Christopher Isherwood - Kathleen and Frank, page 16
[2] id., page 3
[3] id., page 1-2
[4] Stockport Archives reference: D1460/2/1/1
[5] id.: D1460/2/1/13
[6] Christopher Isherwood - Kathleen and Frank, page 510
