Wigan Album

What a lovely, happy photo. You actually look familiar to me!

Irene
I .was born in Ladies Lane Hindley
Dad worked at Education Office Cousin Fred taught at St peters you may have known of them.

I am from Ince Neil, and attended Ince Central Primary School so I wouldn't know your cousin Fred, but I am guessing he was Fred Scarborough who I have heard of on the "Memories of Hindley" facebook site.....am I right in that? So many people have shared memories of him on there and he seems to have been a very popular teacher, You must be very proud of his memory. I DID attend Hindley Grammar School and got a grant for my uniform from the Education Office as my parents couldn't afford it. Sadly, my gentle and humble Mam was treated as if she were a scrounger by the man who dealt with us and we both came away in tears ; I will never forget that day as long as I live. I don't recall his name and your Dad may or may not have known him, depending if he worked there at the same time, (this was 1964), but I have often hoped that Karma caught up with that horrible individual at some point in his life. My husband is from Hindley, being born in Bridge Street in 1950 and living there until the house was demolished in 1962/63, and his family moved to Mornington Road. One of my friends from HAGS lived just off Ladies Lane in Jenkinson Street, but apart from that I have no connection to that area, so I am obviously mistaken, and yet I just feel I know you. Anyway, it's been nice to have a chat!

Not as many get to celebrate 25 years of marriage in this day and age

Fifty for me in 2024, PeterP, and we have just been to my neighbours' Diamond Wedding Celebrations at "Summate to Ate" in Hindley, which used to be The Co-op. I wonder if Neil and Anne from the photo remember it as such?

When a boy it was the Co~op. With is own bakery and dairy delivering milk and bread by horse and cart. in store used to pat butter slice bacon bag tea and peas etc. stables across the road in Carr street. Mind you i was born in 1935 Went to Hindley Grammar in 1947 with a second hand blazer and cap in short trousers.

Neil, I have an absolute fascination for the old ways of packaging and have looked on youtube in vain in the hope that there might be demonstrations. I believe the grocery assistants could fashion little bags from paper of different colours to hold sugar, currants etc, without using sellotape. I have some original paper bags with a Brooke Bond Tea advert on the front, two original white paper three-cornered toffee-bags, (now brown with age ), and a brown paper carrier bag with string handles with an advert for a butcher's shop on the front....I remember people often had one of those hung on a nail behind their back door when I was a child. My husband says I am a fire hazard with the amount of cardboard boxes, brown paper and string which I keep! I hate plastic. Like you, I would have had a second-hand blazer for HAGS had we known anyone who went there and who was willing to pass their old one on to me, but there was only myself and two boys from Ince Central who passed the scholarship in 1964 and I knew no other girls who went there. I don't remember the Co-op bakery but there was a bakery , (Excel, I think it was called), in Hindley when I was at the grammar school in the 1960s and the smell of baking bread down by the Bird I'th Hand was mouth-watering!

Excel bakery was next to St Peters school as you say.
Lads and girls went to the back wall at night as it was very warm after they had been to the Rex cinema or Berts Bar for pop and crisps.
Have still got our ration books from the war. and identity cards.

Fantastic Neil! Peter was born in 1950 and I was born in 1952 so we didn't have ration cards but we are 1940s re-enactors, and one year at the Pickering 1940s event there was a display in a charity shop window containing a ration book from Bridge Street, Hindley, from an address just a couple of doors from where Peter was born. My late brother Ronnie, 19 years my senior, used to go to the pictures in Hindley as a lad, as well as to The Bug in Ince, and told me many tales.