IN the hey day of the cotton industry, Britain's bread hung by Lancashire's thread.

For more than 100 years - from the era of steam power, which brought about new mechanised factories - cotton brought prosperity, progress and an ever-increasing populace into our communities.

It was the Great War which brought the beginning of the end for the industry, but by the 1930s there was definitely trouble t'mill, as cheaper cloth flooded the country from the Far East and Gandhi called for an Indian boycott of Lancashire textiles.

It had a devastating effect across the county and in East Lancashire in particular as hundreds of mills closed and thousands of workers left the industry.

World War II did bring something of a reprieve, as our mills received Government orders for uniforms and parachutes, but by the Sixties and Seventies, as Lancashire found it increasingly difficult to compete with foreign imports, one more mill weaved out every week. By the 1980s, it was all but gone.