From the Evening News, October 9, 1976

25 YEARS AGO

THE rising cost of soccer in Bolton will force teams to pack up before the end of the season.

The warning came today from Mr John Johnston, chairman of the town's Sunday League. He said he had been told before the beginning of the season that the rent of a top pitch would be £45 a season. Now he has been informed that the cost would be £55, and "there will be at lease a dozen sides who won't be able to survive because of the increase."

DID you know it's illegal to carry an unwrapped ukulele in some streets? No, well it's not surprising. This is just one of the little known statutes still on the United States law books. Other hilarious examples include a Chicago rule banning ugly or deformed people from the city streets, and in Maryland people can be fined for maltreating oysters. But the most fascinating comes from the state of Oregon where dead people are not allowed to serve on juries.

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

October 10, 1951

IT was business as usual for Mr Thomas Relph, 28, Ivy Bank-road, Bolton, taxi owner and funeral director, who in a will published today is left £10,000 by Mrs Margaret Johnson Crompton, 55, Albert-road West, Bolton, widow of James Shephard Crompton, of Castleton Manor, Rochdale. For 20 years Mr Relph personally drove his taxi for Mrs Crompton as she made her shopping tours.

WHEN a man was fined at Old-st. (London) for stealing sugar from his employers, the magistrate, Mr Harold Sturge, said: "I don't suppose there is a single person who does not loath having to be employed where a watchman is kept, where someone taps you and says, 'What have you got there?'

"It is a horrible aspect of English life today that servants have got to be searched. In the old days it would be regarded as almost an insult. Now it is regarded as part of the almost ordinary thing to happen in a factory, and all because people will not be satisfied with what they are worth."

125 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

October 10, 1876

A SOMEWHAT unusual sale took place at Prescot last week. Some nine years ago, a married couple, hailing from Prescot, but then residing at Coventry, found married life so difficult that a separation was deemed desirable. The husband remained at Coventry, but the wife and little family travelled back to Prescot. Here, some time after, the husband was summoned before the magistrate and imprisoned for neglect of family. The wife took in a lodger, and here comes the sequel. The lodger, apparently, became so enamoured of his hostess, now a blooming matron of 40 years, that last week he offered to purchase her for the sum of one shilling. The proposition was communicated to the husband, who expressed his readiness to close with the lodger's offer. The result was the insertion of an advertisement in a local paper, in which the husband agreed to sell his wife for the sum of one shilling, and he promised never to molest her or injure her, by any word or act of his, from that day forward. The previous document was signed by him, together with the names of three witnesses.