A Lancashire Past

This book concerns a vanished world.

From 1926 birth, the year of the General Strike in the UK, the life of, and significant influences on, a working-class boy.

Industrial Lancashire location bordering the Yorkshire Dales. Family struggles in the cotton industry and a World War I diversion.

Active participation in Trade Unionism and local Labour party by Father and Grandfather. Father, ex officio.

Three siblings, all soon initiated into the connection between work and money, coupled with the necessity for food production from hens, allotments and the countryside.

Parental marriage breakdown. Rescue by loving, extraordinary grandparents. Overcrowding and a nomadic lifestyle.

Father, increasingly politically active. Secretary of local branch of Communist party. Author, soon a trusted messenger. Surreptitiously collecting correspondence 'officially' considered seditious and earlier feared intercepted by 1930s' Special Branch.

Family habitually and totally committed to the open air and associated rural pursuits. Rambling, cycling YHA. And at a time long before total motorised domination and ecological concerns.

Blessed with an above-average brain, selected at ten years for grammar school education, in a pioneering wave of local working-class children thus 'privileged'.


An educational system and atmosphere unprepared for and unwelcoming to the children of artisans. Enthusiastic sporting commitment, mirroring the wider family involvement.

A stubborn adolescent, determined to resist family wishes and pressure to follow higher education, joining the war-time labour force aged sixteen.