HAVE readers heard of the old Clubhouses area of Burnley?

According to the late Leslie Chapples, who was born there prior to the outbreak of the First World War, it was one of the town's worst slum areas.

A dedicated local historian, his recollections of the Clubhouses, close to St James' Church, Stoneyholme, are just one of the many works he left behind.

Clubhouses was bounded within Veevers, Union, Blackburn and Calder Streets, accessed by ginnels', and Leslie's family ran a grocery and off-licence shop in Brown Street.

The inhabitants were a close community and often in minor conflict, until real trouble or emergency ensued, when they quickly closed ranks.

There was no hot water in the Clubhouses, simply a cold tap, no bathrooms, gas was the only source of illumination in downstairs rooms, while the bedrooms were mostly lit by candles.

Sanitary arrangements included blocks some distance away from the houses, while rubbish went into open ashpits, rather than dustbins.

The Chapples' family shop was somewhat cramped and overstocked. Beer was kept in a damp cellar, while hot water came from the kitchen range, but it was rarely lit.

In his recollections, Leslie told of his neighbours. Next door lived a family named Rambadt. Father Charlie heralded from either Sweden, or Holland, and his Nordic wife, he remembers, was one day brought home in an open car by a local doctor who had knocked her down in St James' Street. She was weeping with pain and shock and died a few days later!

There was Eliza and Billy Carew, who always seemed the worse for drink, Maggie Berry who had lost her husband and three sons in the war, while Nellie Clegg kept another grocery store, close to the stables that doubled as storage for a local fruiterer!

Albert Cunliffe ran a pet store. He is described as a debonair character who sported a waxed moustache and a straw hat in the summer.

"He was a racy character and not afraid to turn his hand to any type of minor trading and, when the Burnley Fair landed in town in July, he was there selling lemonade from a white enamel bucket at 1d a glass."

The children loved to go into t'trading oyle' to see the rabbits, puppies, kittens, and canaries, while local layabouts would sit round a stove in the centre of the room discussing varied topics.

The houses were cramped. Indeed close to the Chapples home was a room with a bed in the corner, a narrow slopstone under the window, a tiny firegrate, with a bare wooden table and two chairs in the centre of the room - for a family of eight!

Wallpaper was a luxury in those days, the walls were usually limewashed, and many houses were infested by bugs.

Leslie's first school years were at St James' School, where children sat on long forms at a long desk in classrooms, lit by gas.

He told: "Many of the children were ill-fed and ill-clad and my mother often maintained that she was the innovator of school milk, for every Monday she would send to the school the milk left over from the shop!"