25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, July 26, 1975

MOTORISTS are to lose free parking spaces at the Chorley Street and Folds Road car parks in Bolton, it was decided yesterday. Chorley Street will become a fixed-charge park, and Folds Road a contract-only park.

FIREMEN battled through the night to control a blaze at a Little Lever warehouse which destroyed about 100 tons of paper, worth about £2,000. The cause of the fire at the Creams Paper Mill, Mytham Road, is still a mystery.

50 YEARS AGO

THE good folk of 1913, passing along Deansgate and Bradshawgate one December day, had the great thrill of seeing a fire engine without horses streaking along at a speed that surprised the police officers on point duty. Horses were last used here in 1916, by which time two petrol-propelled engines had been secured. The last solid tyre engine retired with the horses.

SIR,- May we ask for a little humanity towards our young children who are wondering how long it has been a crime to play against their own back gates?

Half-a-dozen boys between the ages of six and nine were playing cricket when a policeman came along and moved them away. The same boys have been brought up with black-outs, rations and coupons and surely it is not too much to let them have a bit of fun before they go for cannon fodder for the next battle.

What a sorry world it would be if their was no children's laughter. People who do not want to hear them should buy ear plugs instead of going for a deaf-aid.- Yours, etc., Mother of Two Boys.

125 YEARS AGO

SIR,- I am requested to call your attention to some material errors in the paragraph under the heading 'Mad Freak of a Drunken Man', in yesterday's's Evening News, and ask you without prejudice to insert the correction. Abraham Haslam was not, at the time of the occurrence, 'in a state of semi-intoxication', as your report describes. He certainly was not at one o'clock, and as he had not taken any intoxicating drink in the interval, it is not at all likely he was so at the time mentioned.

The door was not 'fast', nor was it 'burst open by a neighbour' at all. It is true that the man and his wife were seen not 'found with a rope twisted round each of their necks in the form of a figure of eight'. His wife had dragged him to the door, which was open, she shouting murder, and her husband making her cry.

It is not true that 'Haslam was endeavouring insanely enough by twisting the centre of the rope to commit simultaneously the double crime of homicide and suicide'. The fact is the rope, though tied round her neck in an immovable knot, was simple held round his own to frighten rather than hurt.

Haslam is an excitable man, and being dragged down the stairs by his wife, together with the gathering crowd drawn around by her outcries and his mockery, made him appear in that 'semi-intoxicated' condition which he most certainly was not. - Yours &c., Alfred Wicks, Market-street.