NO doubt many of you remember when there were slaughterhouses in the middle of Bolton, and when, as a 1951 report in the Evening News said: "Each week 100 pigs can be seen trotting across Deansgate in the direction of a Bolton grocery store. They go up an alley alongside the premises, and reappear in three weeks' time in the form of 3,000 rations of bacon."

Not a pleasant job, but then, even nowadays someone has to do it.

The 1951 story continued: "Founded 100 years or so ago, the Deansgate bacon curing firm, now run by three brothers who are grandsons of the founder, is the only one in Bolton still licensed by the Ministry.

"Before the war, several local butchers cured their own bacon, and thousands of local people expressed preference for the local brands. But nowadays the housewife has to take what she can get.

"'We have nothing at all to do with the collection of pigs to be killed, or the distribution of the bacon after we have cured it,' said a spokesman for the firm. 'The Ministry sends the pigs to us, and says where the bacon has to go'."

The pigs were killed at the town-centre premises, de-gutted and boned, then cooled in a refrigerator. The carcasses were then injected with brine and placed in a salting refrigerator. Some of the bacon was smoked.

"Nearly the whole of a pig can be eaten," said the report. "The trotters are, of course, a delicacy, as is the tongue, and the head is used for making brawn. The tail? That is the tastiest bit of all, and used for making soup. The rest of the pig goes into the manufacture of bacon."

The brothers had been in the pig trade for so long, they had grown accustomed to answering somewhat peculiar questions from a humorous-minded public.

They were a little puzzled, however, when one housewife went into the shop and ask for a yard of pork. She meant three pigs' feet.

But one of them was quick to reply when another shopper asked: "Have you a pig's nose, mister?"

"No," he quite truthfully replied.

That wasn't the only abattoir in Bolton, of course. Some other shops had them as well, and in 1954 there was a big row over whether a slaughterhouse in Howard Street could be re-opened when meat was de-rationed.

At a Council meeting, Ald Alf Booth said that he had been to the house of one of the objectors. "A crematorium must be 100 yards from dwellings, and here we have a slaughterhouse three yards from the window of a living room." Another slaughterhouse would be only 100 yards away at the rear of Blackburn Road.

And when the members of the Markets Committee went on their annual inspection, and visited the abattoir at Birkenhead, they agreed for the need of a new slaughterhouse for Bolton, working under hygienic conditions. According to the paper, "the inspection left some members of the party feeling (temporarily at least) that they ought to become vegetarians." Suggestions for the site of a new abattoir included Astley Bridge and Chew Moor.

However, in 1964 the wholesale butchers of Bolton formed themselves into a company called Bolton Abattoir to build a new slaughterhouse to replace the 80-years-old building in Foundry Street. It cost £200,000, was in Lever Street, and the process had been designed to accommodate up to 500 and 600 cattle units a week. Adjoining the abattoir was a new pork processing factory built by pork butchers Mark Schofield.

It was hoped that as well as providing local butchers with meat, many of the carcasses would be exported.. "They will be loaded into refrigerated lorries at the abattoir. Then the lorries will be driven on to ships at the docks and off to the continent, probably into France and Germany," said Mr James Wilson, one of the butchers who formed the company.

In 1979, though, it was announced that Bolton abattoir in Lever Street was to close, with the loss of 168 jobs. In 1985 it was re-opened by a Rochdale firm, but three years later closed again, with the owner blaming Bolton Council for adding to his expense by making him employ meat inspectors and a vegetarian."