25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

December 28, 1974

PENSIONERS living in a Bolton 'colony' of old people's flats and bungalows claim they live in isolation. There is no social centre near Yewdale Gardens and Yewdale Avenue, and no post or telephone box, they say. The nearest shops are a 10-minute walk away and many residents are alone. Now they are asking Bolton Council to consider providing a warden service for the estate.

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

December 28, 1949

SIR, - Fifty years ago I was a ballastman working for £1 a week - but that £1 was worth more than five today. For one shilling you could buy more than you can for ten today. The 'necessaries of life' for the working man were 2d per pint, and 3d per ounce, whilst if he wanted to indulge in spirits he could have his fill at 3d per glass. Food, coal, house rent, were all within easy reach with a shilling or two spare for insurance, friendly society, etc.

In those 'bad old days', we were self-reliant, not State-reliant as today. The State minded its own business and kept its nose out of ours. Give me the good old days to the soulless materialistic days of the present. - Yours, Owd Tum.

125 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

December 28, 1874

SIR,- A kind warm-hearted temperance friend has provided 17,000 New Year's tracts for every house in the borough, and James Barlow Esq., JP, 11,000 for the outside townships. As we have some gratifying cases of reformation from previous year's efforts, we hope that many may be led to turn over a new leaf. In anticipation of the New Year's holidays, I tremble for the drunkards' wives and their starving little children, and the extraordinary crop of wife-kicking swearing, brow-beating, and all the filthy language which will obtain in our streets as a direct result of the drink. If our ministers and Christian men and women all round were thoroughly united in these social questions, we should be very much nearer the millennium. Mr Moody calls the intoxicating cup the 'infernal cup'; liquor shops, he says, are the 'gates of hell' and ever dealing out 'death and damnation'. He says in the United States, if a member of an evangelical Christian congregation was to be seen going to the bar of a publican, and asking for a glass of liquor, he would be disciplined, and if persisted in, would be put out of the church.- Yours, &c, One That Is In Earnest.

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