LOOKING Back's recent glimpse at the "Garrison Theatre" shows that brightened up bleak Sunday nights for troops billeted in wartime Blackburn bought back many memories for reader Mrs Vera Elvin -- as she appeared in them several times as a girl of 10 or 11.

Mrs Elvin -- then young Vera Slater -- was also a stage partner of another young regular performer in the concerts, singer-dancer Rene Royds, who was shown in our recollection of them last month billed as 'Garrison's Ever Popular Juvenile Star' in the programme for the 100th show in 1943. Together with friend Jean Higham, Vera and Rene competed as an acrobatic trio and won a bronze medal in the Lytham Dance Festival of 1939, the last to be held until after the war. The girls -- with Rene at the right and Vera sandwiched between her and Jean -- are pictured barefoot.

The other youngsters belonged to a dance troupe that also starred in one of the concerts -- Mrs Elvin only recalls that one of them was Margaret Littler.

Also pictured are tap dancer Jimmy Culshaw and his partner, a young woman named McHugh.

A link that several of them shared was being a pupil of Blackburn dancing teacher Ricky Blundell -- whose pupils included young Vera, Rene and Jimmy.

"Ricky Blundell was a wonderful teacher and dancer," Mrs Elvin recalls. "He danced like Fred Astaire.

"But he was called up into the RAF and we had to find another teacher.

"I started to learn ballet and eventually qualified as a teacher.

"When Ricky started up again after the war, I went back to him as an assistant teacher.

"He held his classes in the Kenzita Ballroom in Railway Road and that is how I met my future husband, Ken Elvin, who had the Kenzita."

And it was though the Garrison Theatre that Mrs Elvin's sister met her husband as her 21st birthday was coming up. "My Dad thought it would be nice to invite some of the soldiers stationed around Blackburn to her party. He asked one of the soldiers at a Garrison Theatre show for the name of his Commanding Officer and that soldier later married my sister," says Mrs Elvin.