25 YEARS AGO

BETWEEN 15 and 20 officials in the Bolton Education Department received large salary rises above the £6 pay limit this year. They were educational psychologists and advisers, and in some cases the annual rises amounted to £1,000 and more.

A LOCAL works football club, angered by the threatened closure of their ground, have written in protest to the Duke of Edinburgh and the Minister of Sport.

Burton's FC has also contacted both Bolton MPs and local sporting bodies in an effort to stop the closure of their Halliwell Road pitch. Several other clubs play there, and several thousand spectators watch games there each season. Mr Ken Butler, general manager of the Burton group at Halliwell Road, said: "One of the problems is that hardly any of the team work for this firm. We are giving them these facilities at the exclusion of our own workers. Our rounders team ended up disbanding because it could not use the ground."

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, April 18, 1951

BOLTON Fire Brigade were still spraying hoses today on 200 tons of oil-impregnated timber that caught fire in a scrap yard belonging to Joseph Whitehouse Ltd., metal merchants, Roxalina-st., late last night. A first the tightly packed timber woodwork from spinning-mule carriages repelled most of the water being played on to it at the rate of almost 2,000 gallons a minute. The firemen were on the roof throughout the night, directing hoses on the blaze. Residents kept up a "shuttle service" with jugs of tea for the firemen.

125 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News, April 18, 1876

SIR,- The production which appeared in your issue of last Thursday, signed "Farmer", is about on a par with another which appeared some time since, signed by two authorities, so far as logic is concerned. Both draw the lamest conclusions from the most absurd premises. "Farmer" in allusion to "Mrs Kershaw's owd coaw", says she "must a bin a good un" as "awth'foke e Eagley un a greight lot o Bolton han bin drinkin her milk."

There is nothing extraordinary in that, for as the milk would be mixed together, of course all Mrs Kershaw's customers would get some of it. A little further on he says if the "wisdomites" will look at the undrained condition of Eagley, they will not need to look anywhere else for the cause of the epidemic; that is, they will find it. Well, this is at least definite. Surely public analysts and medical men generally will now cease to cudgel their brains as to the cause, and certainly if Mr Cross, our worthy member, had been in possession of that information, it would have been unnecessary to ask Government to investigate the subject. But, jokes aside, it is not apparent to everyone, that if the epidemic had been caused by the undrained condition of Eagley, that it is improbable in the highest degree that it would confine itself to Mrs Kershaw's milk customers.

In the face of such improbabilities, it is amazing to me how anyone can assign any other cause than the one generally, and I believe truly, assigned. - Yours &c., Consumer.