25 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

January 4, 1974

A BOLTON vicar today stated his support for Bolton Wanderers' controversial decision to play their third round Cup-tie against Stoke City on a Sunday. The Rev Peter Brightman, Vicar of St Simon and St Jude's, Green Lane, has been a Wanderers fan for more than 20 years, and hopes to watch the match after Sunday morning services. He said: 'Christians cannot change society by the enforcement of out-of-date laws about what one may or may not do on Sundays.'

50 YEARS AGO

From the Evening News,

January 4, 1949

IT was as much as three assistants could do in one town store yesterday to attend to customers wanting Wellingtons and rubber boots, or overshoes of one kind or another. Women and children were the principal clients. This rush for something better than normal to protect the feet from winter's snowy slush is quite the usual thing. 'We know it will come with the first snow-fall', one shopman said this morning. 'It is the way folk react. We could advertise, in the pre-snow days, till we were blue in the face, trying to get the public to buy these necessities before the crisis; but they would still wait until the conditions arrived.'

From the Evening News,

January 5, 1874

WHAT has become of our white Christmas and of our frosted New Year's Day? 1873 departed from us in a mild, spring-like atmosphere, as different from that in which the end of December is usually personified by poets as any one thing could be from another. Fortunately, the writers and artists who compose Christmas and New Year literature have no longer much faith in what were once the accepted traditions of our climate. They know we are liable to the most extraordinary vicissitudes and changes in this respect. They can no longer devise conventional illustrations of December of January, of Summer or Autumn, as these months or seasons were reckoned upon in the picturesque times.

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