INUNDATED! That's the only word that can describe what happened after I printed a mystery picture of the Antelope Hotel on Thursday.
Phone calls, e-mails, letters . . . they flowed in by the thousand (that's an exaggeration, of course, but you know how I feel!).
All carried the same basic message - the pub shown was the Antelope Hotel on the corner of Peel Lane and Manchester Road West, Little Hulton, by the side of St Paul's Peel Church.
Its nickname was "Poor Dicks". This particular building has been demolished, but a newer one with the same name now stands there. So many messages came in that I cannot possibly mention you all, so perhaps just a couple of extra details may suffice.
Anne Neal was the landlady there for a short time in the 1980s, and she tells me that "there is a tale that one day an old gent came into the pub and explained that he had just directed a 'lost' man to Kearsley as he was looking for the Antelope pub. "On being told that the landlord that 'This is the Antelope', the man replied 'Dern't be daft, this is t'Poor Dicks'."
(Incidentally, Mrs Neal asks if anyone has a picture of Cinder Hill in Darcy Lever, which used to be in, or by, Maze Street. She is also looking for anyone who knows about the Thomasons who lived there in the early 1900s. If you can help, contact her on e-mail: brianneO@ntlworld.com
Mrs Joan Margrove says that the new building was one shown in about 1927, and it was called Poor Dicks by the locals because of the sparse furnishings inside.
Terry Hurst, formerly of Little Hulton, now of Horwich, sent me a message from his father-in-law (not named) who thinks that the pub was known as Poor Dicks after a landlord who was always crying poverty.
"Almost directly across Manchester Road were the Church Inn and the Royal Oak, named as 'Mad Bob Busbys' as that landlord was Manchester United daft!. Both of these pubs were demolished in the late 1950s/60s."
And Paul Richards recalls playing in a band at the Antelope (new) in the late 1960s with the group Five by Three when Joe Wylie was the landlord.
That is just a precis of all the messages sent to me on this subject. I am sorry that I was unable to get back to you all, or name you all in this story, but it would have been a massive task.
I am grateful, though, for your help and interest.
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