Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

THEY tramped proudly in their hundreds up to Darwen Tower yesterday to commemorate the day 100 years ago when the first sod was cut up on the moors for the building of the town's lasting Diamond Jubilee landmark tribute to Queen Victoria.

But many East Lancashire folk need go no further than rummaging in the bottom of an old drawer to unearth their own family links with that great occasion a century ago.

For distributed by the thousand that Jubilee Day holiday of June 22, 1897, were medals that were a special souvenir of the old queen's 60-year reign.

Almost 22,000 of them with the queen's head on one side and Blackburn's coat of arms on the other - each a gift of jubilee-year mayor Frederick Baynes - were presented to the under-16s who attended the town's Sunday School school.

And at Burnley all the under-13s among the 15,000 children who flocked into the park of Towneley Hall - thrown open to them by its resident, Lady O'Hagan - to enjoy roundabouts, swings, sports and "grotesque balloons" received specially-struck medals that were a gift of the town's Mayor.

Burnley also marked the queen's jubilee with electric illuminations in Queen's Park and with fireworks. But at Nelson there were fireworks of another sort - when the Socialists Party arranged for an outdoor lecture on "Jubilee Cant" to be delivered by a Mr J. Jones, of Wigan.

A crowd of several hundred gathered as Mr Jones arrived at the corner of Chapel Street to begin his anti-royal speech. The police - a sergeant and three constables - moved in to warn the orator to move on as he was creating an obstruction and when he would not budge, he was seized and escorted from the scene by the officers who were "loudly hooted by the crowd."

Elsewhere, Jubilee Day had been preceded by thanksgiving services in churches all over East Lancashire, but at Burnley, one Redmond Dogherty, described as "an old man, nearly 70," went instead "rejoicing because of the glorious reign of Her Majesty" in the pubs, which had been granted special extensions, and ended up being fined 10 shillings (50p) for being drunk and disorderly.

More sober was the festivity at Blackburn's workhouse were the inmates were granted a "general holiday" as well as a "generous dinner" and entertainments. But though those celebrations may have passed from the scope of living memory, the enduring tributes remain in East Lancashire in the form of all those souvenir medals, many of which must still be around, and with a pair of building projects that were designed to be lasting symbols of the queen's spectacular reign - Darwen Tower and the Victoria Wing at Blackburn Infirmary.

The first sod for the Tower was cut by Darwen's Mayor, cotton magnate Alexander Carus, but not until the town, which had grown from a small village during Victoria's reign, had done the occasion proud with a civic procession of police, postmen, Rifle Volunteers, magistrates and a "body of gentlemen" to Holy Trinity Church and the "feu de joie" salute afterwards by the Volunteers in the market place.

At Blackburn, the day was marked by a special meeting of the Town Council, a thanksgiving service at the Parish Church and a procession, with bands playing, to the Infirmary where the Mayor laid the foundation stone for the new wing, with some 1897 coins and copies of Blackburn's newspapers being placed in a bottle in a cavity beneath the stone.

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