Wigan Album
POTTERY ROAD
9 CommentsPhoto: Frank Orrell
Item #: 31101
Looks like a scene from Steptoe & Son. Great picture.
I think it was about 1992 when I last saw a rag and bone horse and cart in Wigan. I don't know how many there were in Wigan, but in Birmingham in 2002 was the last time I saw a rag and bone man.
You still hear them in Wigan now and again. I heard one a few weeks ago.
Rag and Bone are still out there, but they use vans.
They're not called 'rag and bone men' any more though - I was about to take an old appliance to a Wigan tip when a neighbour told me just to leave it outside for 'Metal Mickey' to pick up - which he did the same day.
Still causes me to smile. After a rag and bone man’s horse dropped dead , in a street off Wallgate. An entry made in the occurrence book. “ The horse was carted off by the knackers”
I stopped a rum chap from 'shifting' my refurbished 1960s Qualcast Panther push-mower about twenty summers' ago - halfway down the driveway with it he was. It had recently been given to me by my neighbour, and I spent hours on fettling and painting it in my garden shed, although; my attempt at re-sharpening its cutting edges had been . . . 'er' . . . somewhat rustic.
There was a pleasant well oiled mechanical purr to the old push mower with delightful silences between sweeps ; each pause dependent upon the vigour of the pusher. A lost sound of summer now replaced by the incessant din of the hover.
That's right Poet: silence between sweeps. I remember a radio prog' in which two experts told how silence is just as important as the music and words, when composing.