WHEN a Looking Back reader spotted these photographs in the attic of her new home she wanted to know more.

But it was not just photographs she discovered and letters and documents helped her discover information about the previous owner, John Wardle who was from a well known Bolton family.

It turned out that John Wardle worked at the then Bolton Evening News where he was mentored by editor Frank Singleton, and found fame in London as a theatre critic and playwright.

His son John Irving Wardle is an English writer and theatre critic.

Now the current custodian of the photographs is hoping other Looking Back readers will be able to shed some light on them. Do you know anything about the wedding photograph we have featured this week? Next week we will feature another mystery photograph from the same family collection.

John Irving Wardle was born on July 20, 1929 in Manchester and is the son of John Wardle and his wife Nellie whose former name was Partington.

His father, John, was a drama critic with The Bolton Evening News and a regular performer at Bolton Little Theatre.

John Irving junior (who it is thought to be known as Irving) was educated at Bolton School, Wadham College, Oxford and the Royal College of Music.

While at Oxford he took part in theatre, performing in a production of The Tempest alongside the actors Nigel Davenport and Jack May, the future directors John Schlesinger and Bill Gaskill and Mary Moore who would become the future principal of St Hilda's College, Oxford.

He did work, anonymously, for the Bolton Evening News when he wrote a fortnightly review spot beginning in 1958.

Her worked for The Times Literary Supplement, The Observer, The Times and was theatre critic for The Independent on Sunday. He has also written for magazines.

Irving has also published two books.

He was a close friend of the writer Harold Pinter having met him when he reviewed Pinter's "The Birthday Party" in 1958 for which Pinter complimented him on his critical sensibility.

In an article in Intelligent Life Magazine, published in the summer of 2010, Irving talks about life after theatre.

"When I lost my job as a theatre critic in 1995 I had no plans for what to do next. Instead of trying something new, I reverted to an old life. I bought a piano, found a teacher and picked up where I had left off at the Royal College of Music in the 1950s," he says.

He talks of his family memories and the family's links with Bolton.

"We lived in Stockport in a house full of old ladies all claiming to be my aunts, whose purpose in life was to fuss over me.

"My stone deaf grandfather, a lone male, was treated with unsparing derision by his wife and had long settled for the role or resident baffoon. My father also slept there but as he worked on a newspaper in faraway Bolton I saw little of him.

"Every morning as I heard him leaving for the office I would shout "Have you got your glasses?"

""Yes". Slam.

"And that was it until the next day. At the weekend he sometimes had a day off and would closet himself in the room with the piano, which he played loudly while my grandmother held me in an armlock by the door."

He said his grandmother would, sometimes, talk about her "pre 1914 life, before her husband's business failed when they lived in a large house in the village of Darcy Lever where she kept a good table and the place was always full of lads". One of those "lads" would be Bolton Evening News editor Frank Singleton.

"Every month she tried to recapture those days with copious Sunday lunches attended by a crowd whom we never saw at any other time. There were no more lads; most of them had been killed in the war," he says.

Irving's mother had been called Nelly and he only discovered this when he was "well over six".

His father and mother had been married for two years when Nelly went into the Bolton Infirmary with appendicitis and died the next day. She was aged just 31.

Once Irving had heard the story he said photographs of his mother suddenly emerged including one of Nelly holding her son "like a prize marrow".

Apparently, he says, The Bechstein piano in the house had been hers and he learned what a wonderful pianist she had been and much admired music teacher.

World War Two came and the family moved to Bolton. Irving's father went into the Army.

He also talks of the autumn day when Frank Singleton visited the family home "one autumn day" saying:

"Frank Singleton reappeared, unannounced, on the doorstep, huge in a button-up raincoat.

"My grandmother received him in true Lancashire style. "Eh Frank!" she said, prodding him in the tummy. You're big enough for a fair!" To her he was still one of the lads round her dining table. But Frank had dined at better places since and he barely acknowledged her."

He suggested to Irving that they went for a walk and they headed for the moors "where all Boltonians go to escape. It is more than just a walk. Bolton lies in a hollow where all the work gets done. From the moors in those days you saw a blanket of smoke hanging over the town, the unshifting reminder of filth and money."

Frank introduced Irving to many new quotations on their trip that day, which included a visit to Bob's Smithy "the pub at the edge of the moors".

The pair went to Frank's home "high above the town, looking towards the open horizon of the Wirral. Frank had indeed risen above it by returning as editor of the Bolton Evening News. He even had a deal with the postmaster that letters would find him if addressed to "Frank Singleton, Moor Platt, Bolton"," says Irving.

Look out in next week's Looking Back for more on John Irving Wardle's recollections.