SUPPORT for men involved in the council "dirty jobs" strike came today from the Bolton and District Joint Sewerage Board - which serves more than 250,000 people in Bolton and seven surrounding towns. The board has given backing to the local corporation manual workers' claim for a £16 10s a week minimum wage. So far the board's giant sewage works at Ringley Fold has escaped the official guerrilla strike action by the unions, which has shut down sewage works in many parts of the country. Worsley, Leigh and Atherton, Heywood and Eccles sewage plants are already strike-bound.

50 YEARS AGO

WE cannot, alas, please everybody. No newspaper man ever expects to. But we lend a respectful ear to specific complaints. What, however, can have provoked the indignation of a correspondent this morning who wrote: "I am horrified and distressed by the way the 'Bolton Evening News' took on recently. This newspaper has always had a high reputation. Now it has come down to the lowest possible standard. It is only good to light a fire with. I hope I am not asking you in vain to alter immediately this attitude of yours. Otherwise I would withdraw your readership. Thank you in advance for improving."

Just that! Challenging, bracing, but a shade less helpful than those readers who do tell us what it is we've done wrong. 125 YEARS AGO

AN ELOPEMENT INTERCEPTED

"There's many a slip 'twixt the cup and lip." This well-worn adage has just received another testimony to the truth. An account has been given of the detention in Liverpool of a runaway couple from Manchester - the elder, a schoolmaster, a married man and the father of a family, and the other a young woman, the daughter of a commercial traveller, with whom he had been on terms of intimacy. The pair had embarked on a steamer bound for New York.

Through the friendly offices of the detectives at the landing stage, the mother of the young woman got on board the steamer, where one of the detectives found the young lady in the steerage. He told her a friend on deck wished to speak to her before she left her native country.

She accompanied the officer, and found on deck her mother addressing the partner of her flight in language more emphatic than complimentary or pleasing. The daughter, however, was determined to risk her fate with him for whom she had left her home.

The officer then took another "tack" and tried to induce the man to return. That at first he stubbornly refused to do; but, being reminded that at Manchester there were, independent of the present proceedings, certain other little matters that might be "rendered ugly" by telegraphing and stopping him at Queenstown, he consented to go on shore with the women. On gaining the pier, the three entered a cab and proceeded to Manchester.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.