IF you walk down Bank Street and look up to your left just before reaching Bank Street Chapel, you will see near the top of the white building the words H Rigby & Co.

It will mean nothing to relative newcomers to the town, but in fact at one time the firm made footwear for millions of people.

There seems to be a little confusion as to who created the business. Some time ago I received a letter from a Mrs Rebecca Coleman (nee Rigby) of Hampshire, who told me that her great-grandfather Job Rigby started the Leather Shoe Company in 1881 when he occupied premises in Lottery Row, off Bradshawgate. "He passed the business to his two sons, Herbert and Arthur, and the company changed its name to Messrs H Rigby & Co. around 1931," she told me.

However, an article which appeared in the Evening News in 1957 said that the business was "started in a three-storey building adjoining Bank Street Chapel. The original owners were the brothers Hargreaves,

from whom the business passed to Herbert Rigby, and the present owners, Norman and Fred Balshaw, acquired it in 1932."

Whichever version is correct does not really matter. The fact remains that the company made shoes, and the 1957 article told of how "an ultra-modern, streamlined, organisation, with countrywide and continental connections, has been built up from what was once a purely local business catering for shoe repairs in and around Bolton."

The company was described as "leather factors and grindery merchants", where soles and heels for all types of footwear were manufactured. A factory was built in nearby Brown Street for the main production, and Bank Street became the firm's headquarters, although 1,000 heels of women's high-heel shoes were "covered" by hand, still at Bank Street.

During the war, the firm made more than 2,000,000 pairs for the Forces, and all the hides used were British tanned, many of them in Bolton.

However, over the years the leather trade had fast been contracting. On a trip to Nice in the late 1950s, Norman Balshaw bought a pair of plastic sandals and wondered how they were made.

The brothers visited a firm in Blackburn which had started to build the necessary machinery, according to a French invention the previous year, and on the spot ordered one of the first machines.

By 1963, plastic sandals were being turned out in Bolton at the rate of one every 15 seconds, 40,000 a week on three machines running 24 hours a day, using 15 tons of PVC a week. The paper reported, in August 1962: "Millions of feet will tramp the beaches this Bank Holiday weekend clad in sandals which were made in Bolton." The sandals cost little over half-a-crown (12p) to produce, and you could buy them for 4s 6d (22p).

"They are comfortable, pliable -- but do they harm the feet?" asked the paper. The answer Norman and Fred Balshaw gave was: "They said electric light bulbs hurt the eyes when they were changing over to electricity from gas mantles." Could the sandals be repaired? No. It was cheaper to buy a new pair! Before long the Balshaw brothers were selling more than a million pairs of their plastic sandals to Woolworths each year.

What had been Musgraves No 8 mill in Bentinck Street, off Chorley Old Road, was bought and used as a warehouse to hold stock produced from October to March each year, ready for delivery to Woolworth's 1,200 stores throughout the UK, at the beginning of April.

Six lorries a day were loaded at Bentinck Street for the whole of April to dispatch advance orders for the summer season.

Children's Wellingtons were also made during the late summer for dispatch at the end of August.

Over the years, however, there was a decline in the plastic sandal business, and in 1983 Rigby's was taken over. Norman and Fred retired, but Norman's son, David, continued there until 1988 when he moved to the Lake District. The firm closed at the end of the 1980s.

And there's the condensed story of a Bolton firm which shod the country...

Another interesting point about the firm. After the Second World War, Norman Balshaw negotiated the import of shoe machinery from Germany, for which Rigby's became the sole concessionaires. At the time, there was no one in this country producing shoe machinery as all engineering firms had been on arms contracts (and, seemingly, not all German engineering firms had been bombed!)

Norman later negotiated the import of Neoprene cement for shoe manufacturing, and sold this product to every major shoe maker in Britain, at a time when it was not available anywhere else.