SIR: In 1990 1 produced a book called 'Railways in and Around Bolton' which was at that time a best seller in the town. Contributory factors to the book's success were the contributions made by local railway people from personal anecdotes and recollections at the back of the book. For this I have to thank the Editor of your paper at that time who kindly included a small piece appealing for interested people to contact me and I would come up and see them and, talk to them about their experiences. This worked out very well.

Although I now live and work in Banbury, I am still a Boltonian at heart. Being born in Bolton and living my first 26 years there I have many vivid warm memories of my childhood and youth, particularly that special event of the year the annual 'Wakes Week' holiday. For obvious reasons this feature of the Bolton calendar has been dispensed with, we live in a very different age from when our horizons reached only as far as Blackpool, Southport, Morecambe, or for the adventurous - Bournemouth! For this reason I am fascinated with the prospect of making some account of what it was all about and how the annual exodus from the holiday-with-pay mills was enjoyed by what must have been well over 100,000 people in one week! I have set myself the task of putting something down on paper about all this to produce another type of history book of Bolton. What would be very useful would be if you could possibly make some mention in the paper of another appeal for personal anecdotes and experiences, photographs of holidays, which I would pay to have copied, memories of former landladies and charabanc drivers and all of the rich panoply that I so vividly remember myself which went to make a kind of frisson of excitement at the end of every June. And of course the consolation for the disappointed few that the fairground was still available.

If you could help with a mention referring to the address below I would be grateful. I think eventually it could be a useful piece of folk history for the town to retain.

Bill Simpson

38 Spinney Drive

Cherwell Heights

Banbury, Oxon, OX16 9TA

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