Wigan Album

Frank Blackledge is in St Annes graveyard now.
The building used to be the barn of the farm.

Most definitely a thing from the past , those were the day's the guy would fill your tank ,wipe your windscreen , and take your money (in some cases ) Nowadays you have to do it all yourself , whilst the staff sit it their cosy ,warm shop waiting for you to come in , again in some place's they look like thunder ,it's as if they think their doing you a favour !

I remember that service very well, where a nice man would come out of his office as soon as he saw you roll in front of the pumps. That has jogged my memory of a petrol station in Westhoughton many years ago. He wore a flat cap and and a brown overall coat. I suppose there’s too many cars to do that these days… everything is self service if you think about it.
There’s apartments now where the petrol station was.

When as young teenagers a gang of us would sometimes walk up past here of an evening and for a laugh we would stand or stamp on the rubber piping strips laid across the forecourt that rang a bell inside for the attendants to know a car had arrived, we tried to leg it before they come out but sometimes he'd come out quickly and see us and chase us off, we'd do the same when walking back. It was a novelty that soon wore off though, and we possibly did it as there wasn't any petrol stations around where we lived, later I'd often see other young teenagers doing the same thing at other petrol stations.

I remember the garage as blackledges in the mid 60s; cliff brown seemed to be manager ?

Worked there in the mid-seventies for ten years, but it had the modern showroom etc then, the workshop was still part of the original barn .

AH, Cliff Brown was the son in law and he did end up running it

Wigan Mick; thanks for that, I was a friend Peter Brown Cliff Browns brother