Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

WHICH Prime Minister lived in East Lancashire - and might never have got to Downing Street if his bid for a career in Accrington had come off?

The answer and the story behind it are supplied in a new book* by college lecturer Jim Ainsworth on the hard times experienced in Hyndburn during 1927-34 by workers in strikes and lock-outs at cotton mills and by the unemployed subjected to the Means Test.

For, as he reveals, it was in 1929 that Labour leader and the party's first-ever Prime Minister, James Ramsay MacDonald, came to Accrington on the general election campaign trail - and surprised many in the 5,000-plus crowd he addressed by telling them he once lived in town.

It's a fact not well known in Labour history circles, adds Jim, of Claremont Road, Accrington, who goes on to disclose a newspaper account of the occasion and the background to the part the town played in the politician's past.

On the day of the open-air meeting at Accrington, MacDonald mentioned his brief stay there more than 40 years before and recalled the names of people he had known - one of whom was in the crowd and ended up being hauled on to the platform to be reacquainted with him.

But if, one day, a plaque goes up in Richmond Street to record Ramsay MacDonald having lived there, it will mark just seven weeks' residence - though his stay might have been longer if his subsequent wondering about giving up freelance journalism for a job at the town's giant Howard and Bullough textile machinery works had come to anything.

Yet, how he came to the town in the first place was all down to the curate at St Peter's Church, the Rev Mordaunt C Crofton, having an interest in the Christian Socialist movement of the day and him moving on to St Stephen's College, Bristol, where the then 19-year-old MacDonald was a student. It was "with a view to the young student gaining some knowledge of industrial conditions in the North of England and combining this with a seven weeks' holiday," that Mr Crofton got in touch with a St Peter's parishioner Johnny Pilling, who was foreman of the millwrights' department at Howard and Bullough, to make arrangements for MacDonald's visit and for him to stay with Mr Pilling's brother, Andrew, at his home in Richmond Street.

The minister also arranged for him to meet another H and B worker "with kindred interests in social and economic questions," a Mr A T Townsend who, in 1929, recalled how during his stay in Accrington he had gone with MacDonald to "several meetings of a semi-private character" at the old Altham's Caf in the town-centre - nowadays the clothes shop on the corner of Church Street and Blackburn Road.

Another haunt during his stay was the Workman's Home, later the Rechabites Hall, in Abbey Street and during long walks over the hills around Accrington he and Townsend spent much of the time discussing social and industrial questions.

It was after leaving college and becoming a freelance journalist, who, says the 1929 account, "did not enjoy too many of fortune's smiles," that MacDonald wrote to Accrington inquiring over a job at Howard and Bullough's. "But it was realised that he had no training and it was thought that the work would be scarcely congenial to him," the report adds.

"Just about that time, he received an appointment as secretary to an MP and this started him upon the career which led to the Premiership and leadership of his party."

*Accrington and District, 1927-34. The Cotton Crisis and the Means Test by Jim Ainsworth (published by Hyndburn and Rossendale Trades Union Council, price £9.95).

Pancake Day was a flippin' holiday!

IT'S Shrove Tuesday - Pancake Day - tomorrow, an event that now often passes unnoticed.

But older readers will recall that it used to be a big day in the calendar for apprentices in East Lancashire - as, for them, it was a holiday.

This applied in particular in engineering works and foundries. In some, apprentices did not turn up at all on Shrove Tuesday although it was a working day for everyone else.

In others, it was a half-day holiday for the trainees. In fact, earlier this century, the bells of Blackburn's Parish Church were rung at noon on Shrove Tuesday to tell apprentices their holiday had begun. At some plants, apprentices had to turn up as usual, but faced being collared and having their faces blackened by the skilled men in rough and tumbles on the factory floor before being chased out of the works.

By then, however, the custom and the holiday was about to fizzle out. That same year, the apprentices at the giant Blackburn engineering works of Foster, Yates and Thom were warned by the firm that they would be suspended for three days if they failed to turn up - although most other firms in the town still gave their youngsters the day off.

It was holidays with pay becoming increasingly common after the Second World War that led to the apprentices' special break coming to an end - as Shrove Tuesday was no longer recognised as an official holiday.

But long before such dull regulation put paid to an old tradition, many apprentices used to be treated by their employers to wagonette outings to the seaside or country - where, of course, pancakes were on the menu.

But even those left behind to do a day's work still enjoyed a pancake feast that day. For back in 1935, we find the Northern Daily Telegraph reporting that, in Blackburn alone, an extra 5,000 pints of milk were sold for the making of the traditional Shrove Tuesday dish - enough, in fact, to make 25,000 pancakes.

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