At the Scowcroft's in High Bank Lane
About 1970
Photographer unknown (perhaps Gill Slater)
This photo is not long before I first met Sandra at Lostock Tennis Club in the Autumn of 1970. "Saw Sandra" is more accurate. I noticed her serving behind the bar with David Porter (my father's solicitor) so this would be the summer of 1970. I'm on the balcony at the Scowcroft's at the top of High Bank Lane in Lostock. I think Tony Scowcroft is stood behind me.
Gatherings of 'the set' took place quite often there. I watched the 1970 World Cup Final in the Scowcroft's television room when Mike Scowcroft, Tony's younger brother, complained about 'Acute CA', the name he jokingly used for a condition he said he had which I won't go into. Mr and Mrs Scowcroft go away for a weekend and a party gets held with drinking, dancing and things going on in the bedrooms (including Mr and Mrs Scowcroft's bedroom). No drugs though, and nothing serious. Just fun. Once, a chap called Dave Fletcher took all his clothes off and danced naked. "Why not?" everyone thought.
In 1970 supermarket chains (chain stores generally) had not yet taken off in towns like Bolton. If you wanted something, you probably bought it in Bolton (or perhaps Manchester). A lawn mower, say: R & J Marsden. A car: Southern Brothers or Vernon's. Anything related to plants and gardening, Podmores (there weren't any garden centres). A made-to-measure suit: Scholes & Scholes or Ault's. Cheaper suit: McCartney's. A school uniform: the shop in Bolton (I don't remember its name) owned by the Wotherspoon family. Jewellery: Prestons of Bolton. As I remember it, the Scowcroft family owned F. J. Webster Ltd (Havadeal) on Spa Road for joinery and timber. Anything else, probably Whitakers department store. I might be exaggerating a bit. There was Burton's, for example, and shoe shops as part of a chain, and Boots, Marks & Spencer, Timothy White's etc, but generally, it was profitable to trade only in Bolton with spin off benefits for accountants and solicitors. William Hares (steel), Townsons, Booth's steel, Hick Hargreaves (where Sandra's father worked as a photographer and my friend Pete Donnison's father was at one time mangaging director) and Edbro are some of the manufacturing names around at the time. The Bolton Evening News was still owned by the Tillotson family (Marcus Tillotson who my parents knew) and who lived in a big house on Victoria Road with an indoor swimming pool. The son's name was Peter.
The point is, Bolton had a class of quite wealthy families who perhaps played golf together and tended to send their offspring to public schools. The 'set' I'm referring to is those offspring, some of whom I knew and liked but my 'real' friends in 1970 I had been at Bolton School with: Midge Magee, Jack Stredder, Gordon Smith, Pete Turbefield, 'Plank' Dawson and a number of others. It's amusing now how our sons, all of whom went to Bolton School, occasionally mention family names of people they know in their own generation as the same family names of the generation above mine and who, at one time, were the backbone of Bolton business. Hilary Farnworth and Gill Wotherspoon, incidentally, came to our wedding in February 1971. Harry Vernon, who I have hardly seen since his family moved to Jersey in the 1970s, was my Best Man.
This is a bygone age. Chain stores took over, industries closed, Bolton Market lost its mojo, then Middlebrook (with Bolton Wanderers Football Club) and Amazon happened. The town of Bolton is a hollow shell of what it once was.
Middlebrook
As an aside, I happened to be on the management team of the Planning and Engineering Department of Bolton Council in the 1990s when the idea of a new retail park at Middlebrook kept coming up and which the Council kept on resisting. But it kept on coming up and eventually Ray Jefferson, the Director, told us that Gordon Hargreaves, who owned Bolton Wanderers, had finally persuaded the Council when the developer Emerson came in tow. A planner called Steve Burns, one of my colleagues on the management team, likened it to a cock sat on a fence in Horwich. He said the cock will never stop crowing.
Since then, Horwich has never looked back. No wonder Bolton likes to say Middlebrook is in Bolton. Middlebrook likes to say it too. It's only a matter of time before it's in Manchester.
Bolton Arena
A spin off benefit of Middlebrook is I can say I designed Bolton Arena. I don't say it but yes, I did, and I have the drawings to prove it. Someone else had designed one and Gordon Hargreaves didn't like it. The Council's Director of Leisure asked me to come up with a better design, so I did.
