Working On Blackburn Market In The 1950s

A Memory of Blackburn.

I was born in 1935 and raised in Blackburn, attending the Grammar School until my widowed mother could not afford to keep me there. I left school in February 1952 and got a job as a Junior Clerk in the Markets Department of the corporation, which was then run by James Peel with other office members Fred Morris, John Smith, Cyril Bateson, Harry Ormerod and Vincent Clark. I was there till I did my National Service in the Royal Navy, doing the Russian course as a translator, which started in August 1953.

This photograph shows the Market Hall tower. Two of the office staff had to re-set the clock at midnight when the clocks went forward and back each Spring and Autumn. We were given the keys to get in the Market Hall and got a ladder to reach the door in the tower above the stalls. We then had to climb up a stone staircase to the mechanism of the clock and turn a heavy handle to adjust the four hands on the clock-face. This was a dismal job in the pitch blackness at midnight.

This c1960 photograph also shows the market stalls on 'King Billy Street'. These all sold fruit, vegetables and flowers when I worked there in the 1950s. In my day they were wooden stalls with canvas sheets overhead that were made by a firm in Port Glasgow. Six sections (A, B, C, D, E, F) of about 36 stalls in each, on the main cobbled square sold mainly cloth, fabric, stockings, dresses and suits by traders from Manchester and Bolton on Wednesdays and Saturdays, the main market days. For each stallholder there was wooden batten with sockets for electricity above the traders for which they had to rent bulbs from a small 'lamps office' that the Juniors had to man on market days.

Every Tuesday and Friday the stalls on the square had to be put up by a gang of men under the supervision of Hedley Verity. The big market area had small square steel inserts in the cobbles into which wooden posts and planks to make the stall were placed, and the canvas put up over the stall. Each market day two of us in uniforms with a peaked cap would collect the rents from the 'casuals' who took over stalls were the regular trader hadn't appeared that day. On wet days it was an awful job as the rain poured off the canvas into the gap between the stalls on to our heads and shoulders. After market day the stalls were all taken down in the evening and the timber posts, battens, planks and canvas were stored in a big cellar underneath the shops of King Billy Street.

On Tuesday and Friday mornings two of us had to be on the square at 6.30am for the farmers' vegetable market when they would arrive with spuds, cabbages, carrots, cauliflowers etc from their farms in the Ormskirk and Southport area to sell to the wholesalers like Fred and Myrtle Harty, who had large wooden premises in between the Market Hall and the Town Hall, and on Victoria Street. On Mondays there was a cattle market next to the slaughterhouse on Canterbury Street where farmers would bring the animals they no longer wanted, cattle, pigs, sheep and horses. Two-day old bull calves were tied up in sacks with just their heads showing before becoming veal next week. The animals were held in steel pens and occasionally one would leap over, escape and run amok in Darwen and Church Streets, chased by the slaughtermen. Large bulls often did this, to much consternation.

A memory from Mr Arnold Bell, posted to the Frith website by the Frith Memories Archivist on his behalf and with his permission, from information he sent in a letter to The Francis Frith Collection.