BORN into poverty in 1924, it was in the midst of the Depression that George Booth started looking for work when he reached his teens.

His whole upbringing in a two-up, two-down in Brookhouse Lane, Blackburn, had instilled in him the knowledge he had to bring money into the house at the earliest opportunity.

Bygones has featured George’s childhood, living with his mum and older sister Elsie, following the death of his father from war wounds when he was only six months old.

Today, we tell how, after working as a grocer’s errand boy while still at school, earning a precious 2s a week, he made the move to a full-time job.

It was 1937/38 when he at last found a job as an apprentice shuttlemaker at Jones Textilities, a firm with several factories in Audley, which specialised in manufacturing furniture and component parts for the textile industry.

Writing in his memoirs, George said: “I must have just turned 14 when I turned up on my first Monday morning; there was no kid-glove treatment, you were there to work from the word go.”

The entire shuttle was made in the factory and George found himself amid the lathes and machinery in the joinery department on the first floor, from where completed shuttles were packed and dispatched to the four corners of the globe.

He worked from 8am until 5.30pm, with a noon finish on Saturday — that’s 48 hours a week for the princely sum of 4s 10d a week, just a little over 1d an hour.

The floor was watched over by the stern and unsmiling foreman Fred Smith.

Elsie was by now working in a clothing firm near the centre of town which turned to making army clothing for the war and, in the sudden rush of new orders, his mother was also taken on there.

George moved on to the Northrop Loom company where, thanks to his previous experience, he was quickly transferred from the top floor bobbin shop to shuttle making.

He got an extra 1s a week, but his working conditions were much improved.

War broke out in his 16th year when he was attending evening classes at Blackburn Technical College — and also learning to dance.

“I first attended the YWCA in Oak Street with friends and then graduated to the popular Alec Marsden dance hall then, finally, Tony Billington’s, the gathering place during the ’30s and ’40s.

“It was fated that I should meet Irene, the girl I would eventually marry in the dance hall, but in the mean time, common sense told me to seek some trade before I reached 16.

“Something told me to train for war work in the engineering industry and I got a job in a fully equipped engineering workshop which had been hastily established in a disused cotton mill in Great Harwood.

“The man I worked with was a lovely man by the name of Jack Todd, who was straight out of the Dickensian mould — colourful, unusual, comical and dependable, who had started his working life as a wheel wright.

“He mended broken engines and we went all over the area on buses to Bacup, Burnley, Manchester and over to Yorkshire; him carrying a hot meal in a wicker basket.

“I remember during the war we had to carry out a lengthy repair job at a cotton mill in Bacup in the middle of winter, which meant leaving Blackburn on the 7.11am bus to Haslingden, then catching another to Rawtenstall, another to Bacup, then walking up hill for over a mile and crossing a snow-covered field to reach the engine house by the mill lodge.

“I remember that another job involved taking a huge 15 tonne flywheel off an engine at a Burnley factory, during the Wakes Week shut down.”