Chinese Birds by Shirley Jamil

Hi, my name’s Shirley Jamil. I was born in Rochdale in 1968. I believe my family were amongst the first Chinese settlers in Rochdale. My parents opened their first Chinese restaurant in July 14th, I think, 1959. And it was at 64 Drake Street. They named it the Spring Bamboo.

It wasn’t a typical Chinese menu as you would think of today. My father made chop suey, he made noodles but he also cooked things like T-bone steak, chicken and chips. For pudding, it was banana fritters, fried banana fritters. Coffee he made with Carnation Milk.

If you can see in the photographs, there’s a picture of me and my mum so you’re probably looking at 1972, 1973. But in the distance you can see there’s a small cabinet and inside the cabinet it’s an ornament of five, now we used to call them pigeons but they maybe pigeons, they maybe doves, and I always believed they were made of marble but I think they’re made of soapstone.

When the Town Hall asked us if they could have it on loan we started wondering what is this? It’s a piece of our history. Who did it belong to? Where did it come from?

I spotted some Chinese inscriptions underneath. I shared the picture with some friends and just asked whether anyone knew what it was, what it said. A message came back saying the inscriptions were general inscriptions which were good luck. The interesting thing was that they were from a language that had started in the 1950s so we can at least date the pigeons from the 50s onwards.