Looking Back, with GILL J0HNSON

EAST Lancashire has just experienced its first cold, white Christmas for some years, but I wonder which winter readers reckon was the worst of all?

Depending on your age and memory, there are three major contenders -- there was the big freeze of 1963, and the white-outs of both 1947 and 1940.

Going back 41 years, the weather of '63 will be etched into many people's minds for both the mountains of white stuff that came down, but also the record number of freezing days and nights.

East Lancashire endured 66 days of bitter cold from December 1962 until the first week of March, when the ice finally began to melt.

It had all begun three days before the festive season, on December 22 and the snow that came down late on Christmas Day lay on the ground for months, being generously added to by half a dozen more snowfalls.

For countless householders the big freeze brought the misery of burst water pipes and by the middle of January more than 1,000 council houses in Blackburn alone were affected.

For many others, there was the agony of having no water at all because the mains had frozen.

Standpipes were set up in the streets and water tankers sent to outlying areas. Sport was wiped out for weeks. As football fixtures piled up, the Pools Panel was born.

But there was no respite for racing punters. In fact, bookmakers' clerks in East Lancashire were thrown on the dole.

But if that was grim, was it anything like the white hell that East Lancashire folk suffered in 1947, when monster snowfalls came down again and again on a region already beset by severe food shortages, a desperate fuel crisis, power cuts and factory shutdowns?

Rural roads and areas were repeatedly cut off and thousands of people found themselves marooned in their homes as snow piled 10ft high up against their doors.

So deep was it that, in Blackburn, trams were abandoned when their motors burned out.

Freezing temperatures stopped the transport of coal, via the canals and railways, so that the government announced a total shutdown of electricity to industry and homes were hit by twice-daily power cuts lasting hours.

In the middle of February, when winter had ravaged the region for weeks and still more agony was to come, a Darwen housewife summed up the ordeal for the Northern Daily Telegraph.

"What a life," she said. "No coal, no electricity, no potatoes, no cigarettes, one small loaf and four burst pipes."