WHEN Mr T Hall saw an advertising feature in the Bolton Evening News recently, it brought back many memories to him. It was for Crown Garden Leisure at 23 Chorley New Road, Horwich, and a caption to a picture said that the building was in a former garage.

As it happens, 90-years-old Mr Hall lives in Codnor, Derbyshire, but has relations locally who obviously send him the paper.

He writes: "I can go back to the early 1920s. Mr Jack Jones had the garage built after the war, and I started work there in 1925. It was quite a big concern, with four wedding taxis, a motor hearse, and three motor coaches (in those days, of course, they were charabancs and all had canvas hoods).

"Mr Jones had the coaches named 'Pride of the Moorlands'; he had five men working for him, with part-timers at weekends.

"We used to have quite a lot of opposition, with price cutting, etc., and one day Mr Jones put the board outside saying 'Blackpool Free'. We had quite a rush on, and obliged everyone.

"I was at the firm for seven years, and always kept in touch as the later years went by. Mr Jones lived at 21 Chorley New Road, and his daughter Lilly had a gramophone shop there in the late 1920s."

Incidentally, Mr Hall tells me that even at 90, he still does a lot of sequence dancing. When he had his 90th birthday, his daughters organised a dance, and 120 people attended, including every relation that he has. Among the presents he got were 18 bottles of whisky.

Whisky and sequence dancing - that's obviously the secret of a ripe old age . . .