IT must have been a case of "sing as you go" when these folk dressed up in their finery and sailed off along the canal on a pleasure cruise from Blackburn about 100 years ago.

For, as can be seen at the left of group standing on the prow of the barge, they were accompanied by an upright piano.

The picture comes to Looking Back from local history enthusiast Hubert Hartley, of Knuzden, and is of a Conservative club's outing. He is not sure which Tory club it was, but as the picture was taken near the bridge that carries the Blackburn-Darwen rail line over the Leeds and Liverpool Canal and Bolton Road near Blackburn Infirmary, he thinks the party may have been from the nearby Ewood and Hollin Bridge Conservative Club -- which was to be destroyed by fire in 1994.

Hubert says that, as it avoided any locks until Johnson's Hillock, near Heapey, the usual trip on the canal from this point was westwards to nearby Whittle Springs where a mineral-water spa had been developed in the 1840s. By the time this photograph was taken, the spa's popularity as a 'health resort' had declined, but well into the 20th century the Howard's Arms there provided children's attractions of swings and a boating lake and for adults there were a bowling green and brass band concerts in the grounds at weekend, not to mention of the products of the nearby Whittle Springs Brewery. It dried up when it was taken over in 1929 and shut down by Nuttall's Brewery, of Little Harwood, Blackburn, which soon afterwards became the now-gone Matthew Brown Lion Brewery.

The black diamonds painted on the barge's prow identify it as one belonging to old-established Blackburn coal merchants Crook and Thompson whose origins went back to 1810 when John Thompson, of Hoghton, was transporting coal by barge from mines at Wigan to the then-terminus at Riley Green of the canal's western length. After the extension in 1816 of the waterway into Blackburn, the company set up three wharves in the town -- at Audley Bridge, Eanam and Nova Scotia -- and with the coming of the railway in 1846 established sidings at Whalley Banks.