From the Evening News,1992 - GOING . . . going . . . gone! The very last mill chimney on Chorley Old Road was demolished by Bolton steeplejack Fred Dibnah yesterday.

The huge chimney, at Atlas Mill, is the last of 14 which used to dominate the Chorley Old Road skyline, and one of the few remaining in Bolton. After toppling the chimney Fred said: "As far as I'm concerned it should be still up there polluting the atmosphere. This country is knackered now, but when this chimney was built this country was something. Now, like the chimneys, there is little left."

25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

October 26, 1977

COUNCILLORS have decided that a group of small terraced cottages in Bolton should be demolished rather than improved. Nos 1 to 23 Davenport Street, Bolton, stand near the path of the proposed northern limb of the inner relief road - a fact which the housing committee was told had caused the area to deteriorate rapidly. All the homes are classified unfit, with dampness, bad internal layout, outside toilets, and dangerous staircases. Most of the residents are pensioners.

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

October 26, 1952

WOULD the re-introduction of the "cat" or birch prove a deterrent to the thugs who commit their crimes with the "cosh", the razor blade, bicycle chain or pistol? Are the existing penalties for crimes of violence enough to protect the man in the street?

Recently the Magistrates' Association voted against the re-introduction of flogging, which was abolished under the Criminal Justice Act of 1948. This was the decision of men and women in direct day-to-day contact with the country's wrongdoers, but the vote could not be called representative of all magistrates. The Lord Chancellor, who rejected demands made in the House of Lords this week that flogging should be brought back, said that the proposal would put the clock back 100 years.

100 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

October 25, 1902

MARY Ann Neville was found so helplessly intoxicated in Manchester-rd., Great Lever, on Friday night that PC Bennett had to convey her to the Police Station on a tramcar. On promising the Borough Magistrates this morning that she would leave the town, Neville was discharged.

SAYINGS: When a preacher gets so that he can scold his congregation as fiercely as a man scolds his wife, he is in training to become an evangelist.