Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

THEY used to call it Little Moscow because of its voters' socialist tendencies.

But, curiously, this same town was once described as the "America of Lancashire" - for being young, rumbustious and having hardly any past.

For when the Northern Daily Telegraph's Roving Commissioner ran his rule over Nelson in a special report 66 years ago, he was actually looking at a town that had grown so quickly and relatively recently that few of the townsfolk over 50 had actually been born there. Indeed, when the Telegraph's man called, the town had only been officially known as Nelson for 40 years - and had still only just got on the map as far as outsiders were concerned, despite having a population of 38,000.

For its name, Nelson had to thank the patriotic sentiments of Matthew Pollard. He built and named the Nelson Inn at Marsden on what was then the new road between Burnley and Colne at the time when the country was rejoicing over Lord Nelson's victory in 1805 in the Battle of Trafalgar.

But, wrote the reporter, he did not know he was starting "one of the romances of the cotton trade."

For though, by and by, the inn prospered and hamlet of the handloom weavers' and farm labourers' homes that grew around it soon took on the name of the pub, little happened until 1849 when a boom was triggered by the coming of the railway and the arrival of power looms at Ecroyd's mills at nearby Lomeshaye.

"Other factories sprang up like mushrooms in the night and Nelson began to grow and grow until, doubling its population each decade, it had over 20,000 people living there by the time of the incorporation of the borough in 1891," said the reporter.

"So Nelson is a place without a past. "It is the America of Lancashire, as it were. It has no traditions handed down through the generations either to hamper or inspire its future development - nothing to look back on but a little wayside inn built on the main Burnley to Colne road not much more than 100 years ago."

As a result, he said, in 1932 its character was still only beginning to form.

"The town grew so quickly and people poured in from all over Lancashire and the rest of the country that even yet it is difficulty to place the Nelson type. There are probably fewer natives, say, over 50 than any other town of its size in the county. Probably in many cases their grandparents had never even heard of Nelson," he added.

Indeed, others had still not heard of it long after the name Nelson became official when the borough was incorporated.

For the Roving Commissioner spoke of soldiers from Nelson returning home on leave during the First World War finding that at London railway stations, staff could tell all about the times of trains to Colne and even Nelson in Wales, but were very hazy about the existence of Nelson in Lancashire. Another aspect of Nelson's newness, the reporter found, was the attitude of it inhabitants.

"The people living in the young town have all the qualities and aggressiveness of youth," he said.

"And they are aggressive. You do not need to be in the town two minutes to realise that; you can see by the self-assured way they have of walking along the footpath that they do not know the meaning of an inferiority complex."

But despite living in a town born out of a pub, they were not getting their cockiness out of a glass. For with only 13 pubs, Nelson had the lowest ratio of them per head of population in the country - and the greatest ratio of churches. Yet one hangover still remaining from the town's origins in an inn did allow the people of Nelson assert themselves.

For the Commissioner found that the town-centre Nelson Hotel was, "now, like the town to which it gave its name, enlarged out of all recognition from the little hostelry Matthew Pollard built."

In front of it, there was a large open space jutting out into the main street which was the pub's own private property.

'Here," he wrote, "the police are powerless to 'move on' the mass of human flotsam and jetsam which always seems to congregate aimlessly in the centre of any large town "

Does Nelson still enjoy this strange sanctuary from the law, I wonder?

More pieces in the 'spite wall' puzzle

TWO more readers have joined Looking Back on the quest for origin of the old "spite wall."

The wall, at Ribchester Road, Wilpshire, was made out of rubble, old tiles and half bricks.

The owner of Clayton Manor made his neighbours build it so they could not look into his house.

Mrs S Wood, of Clayton-le-Moors, recalls being told as a girl that it was built by her stone mason grandfather, Thomas Connor, and his mate some time after the First World War for one of the bosses at Accrington textile machinery engineers Howard and Bullough, where they worked. Mrs Elsie Ellison, who used to live not far away at Shore House Farm, Ramsgreave, also remembers seeing the wall for the first time as a lass. She, too, was told it was put there to stop gawpers gazing into the Manor, which still stands today - part being flats and the rest a residential home.

Mrs Ellison also remembers the wall being demolished but isn't sure of the year.

But, like Mrs Woods and many others, she first came across it on a walk to Copster Green.

The village used to be so popular before the war with picnicking townies, trekking from the tram terminus at Wilpshire, that residents used to make many a copper from supplying them with refreshments.

Mrs Ellison recollects, too, that, in those days, Copster Green also went by the name of Goose Muck Hillock.

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