SO big -- 30 inches wide, in fact -- was the original of a photograph sent to Looking Back by reader Mr Zafar Iqbal that there is only space to show a third of the staff and pupils of the old Blackburn High School who were captured by the panoramic camera that took it in 1928.

Shopkeeper Mr Iqbal found the picture behind a cabinet in an old garage at the rear of the Victorian house he recently moved to in Preston New Road, Blackburn -- little more than a stone's throw from where the group posed for their photograph.

But it comes to light at a somewhat apt time -- almost 40 years from the day in 1961 when the school quit its original home for brand new premises in Buncer Lane that now, together with those next door of the former Witton Park Secondary School, form part of Witton Park High School following the merger of the two in 1968 as they went comprehensive.

Yet, though back in 1928, the High School -- better known as the Blackburn High School for Girls -- still lay outside local authority rule, despite it first coming partially under the control of the town's education committee in 1908, it was, in a sense, "co-ed" 40 years before it became so in the switch to the comprehensive system. For, as the front row of the picture shows, among its pupils in 1928 were small boys -- as well as girls who were obviously far too you to be at a high school. Evidently, these youngsters are from the High School's preparatory school, Crosshill, accommodated in a large house of that name a short distance away, which closed soon after the Girls' High came the town council's control in 1932. Until then, its pupils came from the town's better-off homes and had parents who could afford its fees. For the school was founded in 1883 -- in a former private house that was the first ever to be built in Preston New Road -- for the daughters of Blackburn's cotton mill owners and professional folk who had previously had to send them to boarding schools to get a decent education.

The house where the school began adjoined the now-gone Trinity Methodist Church which stood at the corner of Montague Street and was built in 1824 by the eminent surgeon Dr James Barlow, famed for performing the first successful Caesarean section in Britain in 1793.

When the school opened it had 29 pupils and three teachers in addition to the head, but it grew so quickly that in 1892 it expanded into the large extension that was to be the home of the Girls' High for almost another 70 years.