EDITH LEESE, on a short visit from her home in Prestatyn, stepped off the bus and looked up, WRITES DAVID HODGKINSON.

Stark against a grey skyline, stood the old Briarcroft Hall, now a saddened shell, a pitiful reminder of a gentler generation. Edith wept.

This was the final legacy of the pit people of Howe Bridge.

And of Fletcher Burrows, the mining concern which in the first half of the 20th Century ruled and shaped the lives of a village community, giving them work, a place to live and a place to socialise.

The Briarcroft Hall.

The final story in our voyage of discovery through The Briarcroft Days belongs to Edith's brother...Albert Cooke, a pitman for 52 years.

Albert, who reaches 90 this July, worked in the coal industry all his life; his employment gave him membership of the Briarcroft - from the day in 1920 when he began as an office boy for the Wigan Coal & Iron Company at their Sovereign Pit in Westleigh.

The son of a tram driver, he has vivid and happy memories of those long-gone years:

"In 1921 came the Miners Strike. Because I worked in the office I had to carry on. I was stationed in the powerhouse, but every 15 minutes a telephone call came through. 'I'm all right here, sir' I reported. I was just 13.

"Soon after I was transferred to the new Parsonage Pit. I weighed the first coal that came out of the mine. I never thought I would see the day when it closed and the headgear came down.

"I remember workers had to be wary of their language in those days. The Fletcher family were devout churchgoers, Burrows were righteous Baptists. I've known men sent up from the pit face for swearing."

When Albert was 16 he went to work underground as a haulage hand at Gibfield Colliery where he remained until it closed in 1962 when he transferred to Agecroft to work the final years until he retired.

Life away from the pithead meant the Briarcroft. "We all went there," he said. "I joined the club in 1923. There was tennis in the summer, football, billiards, table tennis and dances every weekend.

"Jim Hilton, the under manager at Gibfield, ran general knowledge classes and there were courses in woodwork.

"Many a marriage came out of the Briarcroft, too - including mine.

"I went on a mixed camp to Colwyn Bay in 1930 and there I met Annie Battersby. She lived less than a mile from me and was in the dressmaking section, but I didn't know her.

"We were married in 1933."

Albert, who has two children, four grandchildren and two great grandchildren, has lived in the same house in Bag Lane, Atherton, from that day.

"Both my wife and I were staunch members of the Briarcroft," he said. "It's such a shame to see it die away.

"There are so few of us left now. All we have are the memories of a wonderful time."

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