The Sweet Shop And The Imperial Cinema

A Memory of Oldham.

From John Moloney; john@moloney.com
I was moved to Oldham as an evacuee from Stretford in 1941 to live at 395 Featherstall Road North. The house was occupied by my great-great aunt, Ellen Farrow, and her son Fred and his wife Maggie. When I arrived I was full of impetigo (at least that's what I was told). I was literally scrubbed from head to toe, then bandaged, over an ointment on the sores. The next day I was embarrassingly taken on the bus to a clinic, bloodied bandages showing below my short pants. There, the bandages were painfully removed and I was washed with calamine lotion. Whatever the treatment, the sores healed and there was no recurrence of the problem.

Maggie and Fred Farrow both worked at the Willowbank Cotton Mill at the bottom of Granville St.

Fred also worked taking tickets evenings and weekends at the Imperial Cinema which was only three doors away across Granville St. If my friend George Rigby and I were good, and only sat in the front row, we could get in for free on Saturday mornings to watch Flash Gordon and wonderful cowboy shows.

Our house, 395, was next door to the sweet shop on the corner of Featherstall Rd and Granville St and because of rationing and little money, sweets were a very seldom and precious occurrence. As a young lad I used to lie in bed wondering if I could remove a brick out of the wall and get myself a treat. I never managed it.

Across the street and down a bit was the Willowbank Hotel run by Tommy (was it Johnson?) a former footballer, and he kept a chicken coop at the back of the cinema. One day he was collecting eggs and threw one at me. I was petrified. You couldn’t get real eggs for love nor money, only the powdered stuff, and here was a real egg on it’s way through the air towards me. I managed to catch it and he said, take it home lad.

I have been back to Oldham many times and it has changed almost beyond recognition in some areas. The house I lived in is gone, in fact the whole row have gone, sweet shop and all, including the Imperial Cinema and the Willowbank Hotel.

---

---