CAN readers wipe away the years for window cleaner Kevin Dixon?

He puts a shine on folk's perspective on life down in Chessington, Surrey, but wonders whether the ancestry of the National Federation of Master Window and General Cleaners, the 50-year-old trade body to which he and 8,000 others belong, reaches back much further - and to East Lancashire.

Mr Dixon has a copy of the very first issue, dated April, 1913, of the monthly journal of the Window Cleaners' Federated Associations, established four years before and with its head office located at 111 Redlam, Blackburn.

Passed on to him by a former customer, the old one-penny journal reveals how, in that time, the organisation - Motto: "Sweeten Life with a Bright Outlook" - had expanded to a network of more than 30 branches nationwide and had a full-time general secretary based at Blackburn.

He was Frank Mack who, the journal said, was "one of the pioneers of the federation" as well as a being a "brilliant speaker and organiser of exceptional ability."

One of the main purposes of the body was to provide insurance cover for members against personal injury and damages claims by property owners and it was collecting more than £2,000 a year in premiums by 1913. "They would also be trying to get a common rate of charges established for their members and prevent the trade from being undercut by part-timers such as the lamplighters who went around the streets turning the gas lamps on and off and, in between, turned their hand to window cleaning," says Mr Dixon.

But what became of it all? He can find no mention of the organisation after 1913. He thinks it may have become part of the Manchester-based National Window Cleaners' Assurance Society, especially because its journal, a 1926 copy of which he also has, looks very similar to the one launched 13 years earlier in Blackburn by the Federated Association.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.