My Memories of Culcheth, Glazebury and Croft

First, some local history which may or may not be entirely factual and which you may possibly be already aware of.

The 'Secret Passage'
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There is a small, sloping field on the right-hand corner of Heyshoot Lane where it meets the main road to Leigh/Warrington, and almost opposite the site of Peters Flour Mill. The field was reputed to be the site of a Civil War battle, and a local lad found a sword in the little stream at the bottom of the field. There were several mounds in the field in which, it was said, horses, killed in battle, were buried.
The nearby Raven Inn has/had a bacon store, separate from the main pub, if I remember correctly, and the back wall of the store was said to be the bricked-up entrance to a passage which went to Holcroft Hall, where there was sanctuary for Catholic priests in the form of a 'hidey hole'.
In the ‘40s and ‘50s the Raven had a landlord called Danny Banks, a corpulent figure who was often to be seen standing in the front doorway wearing a white apron. It might have been Danny or his successor who kept a fox in a small cage, poor thing.
Another entrance to a passage, later sealed by a large boulder, was supposed to be in what became the car park of the George and Dragon pub, up the road.
Some village lads said they had been into the passage from this entrance.
It was rumoured that yet another passage to Holcroft Hall could be entered from the kitchen of Old Abbey Farm, which was close to Risley Ordnance Factory. I saw what looked like an entrance on one occasion, but the farmhouse was demolished after an archaeological investigation which did not reveal any passage.
The farm was run by Peter Wareing, brother of Hughie Wareing of New Hall farm, near Newchurch Halt station where, for five years, I caught the train to Manchester when I went to grammar school there, as described later. New Hall was haunted, according to the Wareing family, who were a sober and unsensational family and therefore I have no cause to disbelieve them. The ghost took the shape of a man clothed in a leather carter’s-type jerkin and was seen frequently in the bedrooms.
Another brother, Bob Wareing, farmed between Peter and Hughie. I don’t know if Bob’s Farm still exists.
I have many happy memories of playing, shooting, (without much success I’m glad to say), and working on these farms.

Hugh Wareing at New Hall Farm

Bob Wareing (Standing)

Croft
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As I mentioned elsewhere, I went to St. Lewis’ Catholic primary school, which was adjacent to the church and consisted of one large room divided into two ‘classrooms’ by a folding partition where I learned the basic skills in life. At one end of the room was Miss Killeen, a lovely, middle-aged teacher of the ‘old school’ and who excelled at reading from ‘Treasure Island’, ‘Swiss Family Robinson’, and other great classics.
The teacher at the other end of the school was Miss Atherton, who was less approachable, and greatly feared because of her appetite for the use of a ruler across the knuckles of any unfortunate miscreant. This hurt, as I remember only too well!
It was whilst being taught by Miss Atherton, that I decided to exercise my early scientific curiosity by inserting two glass marbles into my nostrils, then found I was unable to extract them. A local doctor succeeded, with the aid of a pair of forceps. Miss Atherton was not best pleased.

My education was interrupted at this point by an attack of meningitis, accompanied by double pneumonia (in both lungs). Sickness was accompanied by scary hallucinations, such as my hands feeling about four times normal size, and the door of my little square boxroom being at the end of a long corridor, with my mum a tiny figure in the distance.
Our family doctor, an elderly man who always smelled of whisky, diagnosed the infections and he, together with the excellent nursing care I then received at Astley Sanitorium, and penicillin, (which was the only treatment available for infections), probably saved my life.
I learned to walk again by clinging on to the handrail which led from the ward into the kitchen, where it was warm and with interesting cooking smells. Unfortunately, I found it difficult to keep anything down, even the sweets donated by visiting parents.
I still remember the song which my favourite nurse sang: ‘Oh, how we danced on the night we were wed’.
I suppose I was seven or eight years of age, and I was about seven months off school.
My bed was moved downstairs to make it easier for my mum to look after me. She told me later that I lost so much weight that Mrs. Grimshaw, the farmer’s wife across the road, didn’t recognize me and cried when she was told who I was.
I had to learn to like, or dislike, the taste of food again. I remember bananas being a particular challenge.

The priest at St. Lewis’s was Father (later Dean) McGarvey, and it was during one of his altar boy training sessions that I decided that religion was not for me, and I had a giggling fit, which didn’t help. I never told mum about my misgivings over religion, because she was an ardent believer, and her mother, an Irish lady, was quite fanatical, and I didn’t want to upset either of them by expressing my doubts. However, I did tell my sister Pauline that I strongly disagreed with the Catholic negative attitude to birth control and mum found out and vented her anger at poor Pauline, who asked me to keep such thoughts to myself!
After that I was never again critical of anything to do with the Catholic Church but had to bite my lip on many occasions.

One of my friends at St Lewis’s school was Vincent Banks, whose father ran the General Elliot pub, which had a large overgrown garden, possibly an old orchard. It made an ideal adventure playground, and I honed my stalking skills in it. The pub had the unfamiliar odour of beer - a smell I was to become much more familiar with later in life
Croft Carnival was a big occasion, and very popular. I believed that the Don Cossack Riders really were Russian until one galloped past close to me and the Cossack shouted to his steed, “When I say whoa, I mean STOP”. I was disillusioned.
Carnivals were a great way to have a good time, meet up with friends and enjoy candy floss, toffee apples, and other good things which had been denied to us during the War. 

The War

Having mentioned the War, my only recollection of it at home was my dad making kites out of the dark blue blackout paper and seeing a barrage balloon floating overhead. I believe bombs were dropped, or jettisoned, over Glazebury.
We had orange juice, which didn’t taste of much, supplied by the Government, and we seemed to depend a lot on dripping on toast which, if eaten before it went cold, was quite acceptable. Foreign fruits, especially oranges, were a luxury.
The Americans sent us food parcels, which were welcome because they contained exotic goodies such as chewing gum.
Risley Ordnance Factory was targeted by the Luftwaffe, and they dropped incendiaries which were extinguished by the workers before the bombers could follow up.
There were many Royal Navy sites in and around Culcheth because the area was sufficiently far enough away from major targets such as Liverpool and Manchester, but close enough to have good communications. It was also flat land, so good for radio and radar communications and training.

HMS Aerial was the collective name for a network of training camps. Culcheth was one of the most important inland Royal Navy training centres, and was in a cluster of military sites, including Risley Royal Ordnance Factory, Burtonwood Air Depot (USAAF), Padgate RAF training centre, and Winwick hospital (military use).
The site I passed on a regular basis was HMS Aerial 1, now covered in housing, and was the main Fleet Air Arm radio/radar training centre. I would often see sailors on parade in this camp.
HMS Aerial East, around Newchurch Lane, was overflow training and accommodation.
HMS Aerial South, or Aerial 2 was aircraft radio and electrical training, with hangars, and there were other sites named Gosling 1,2 and 3.
We village kids were sometimes invited onto the major HMS Aerial camps for parties and to watch films.

I don’t know if it’s true, but it probably is, considering the large numbers of sailors who were away from home, but I was told that the girls behind the bars in these places offered services other than providing drinks, and they were employed by the Government to do so, on the basis that it was better to be in control rather than the sailors wandering the streets of nearby towns and catching nasty diseases.
There was a ‘static’ airfield on New Hall farm, Newchurch comprising a small area with, perhaps, a dozen bits of aircraft, guarded by one or two servicemen, which were used to train future pilots in the layout of cockpits and other aspects of aircraft construction. There was a small guardroom, and one day me and my friend Peter Hurst were near the entrance when a guard came out and asked if we wanted to have a look round. (It was a Sunday and he must have been bored, guarding a collection of static aircraft bits and pieces) So we had a look around and that was exciting for a couple of lads. I always remember reading the inscription on an outside wall, which read “A hot engine is always on contact”, and wondering what it meant.
We later used the site to play commandoes and shooting at each other, aiming to miss, of course.

Old Mort and Peter Wareing

Farming

In the ‘fifties I loved to get out, after school and at weekends, into the open countryside and to help on farms, usually Hughie Wareing’s, with the cereal or potato harvest, or whatever was happening at the time.
In those days it was hard, physical work for little reward – I remember earning eight shillings, (40p) for a week’s hard potato-picking, but I was young and fit, and recovering from earlier medical setbacks, so it was a challenge for me, and it was my first ‘wage’, so I was happy.
To cut a ripe crop of wheat, barley or oats we first had to open the crop for the binder by scything a binder-width all round the field, gathering up the crop into a sheaf and tying it with a hand-made knot using a few stalks of ‘corn’, (as we called all cereals). Then the binder would cut the rest of the field, and we would stack the corn into ‘stooks’. (I don’t remember anyone using the name ‘stook’, it was always’ hattock’, or ‘attock’). The number of sheaves per stook varied according to which crop it was.
There were many skills to farming in those days, and that was one of them.
We had some terrible weather in some years and had to go round all the stooks, turning them inside-out to try to get them dry. Then the grain would often be of inferior quality or even germinating in the sheaf. I remember us all standing in a tractor shed, watching the rain pouring down.
I think 1954 was especially wet.
Occasionally we had enough good, drying weather to enable us to cart the sheaves into the farm, either to stack outside, or in a barn.
In the early days this was done using horsepower, and I remember one glorious evening, turning to admire the sunset, and allowing the lovely grey mare I was leading (Molly I think it was) to stand on my right foot. She lifted her hoof instantly, and there was no lasting damage, but my foot did hurt for a while, after having had the weight of quarter of a Percheron on it for a second.
I remember showing off by ‘feeding’ a threshing machine all day, by myself – a job which normally involved three men. I had to stay in bed the following day, due to exhaustion.
When the threshing machine came to the farm in the winter, and we threshed cereals stacked in the barns, I was usually given the job of chaff carrier, which meant standing in the narrow space between barn wall and machine, my face inches from unguarded belts and whirling pulleys, with choking dust descending like snow, until the chaff bag was full and I could carry it to the fire, a hundred feet away. Health and Safety played no part in those days.
 A noisy Field Marshall tractor provided the motive power for the threshing machine, but the way the tractor was started was a little complicated and involved the use of a modified 12 bore shotgun cartridge to kick-start the massive flywheel.
Lining-up the Field Marshall flywheel to the thresher was an art in itself.

The arrival of our first combine harvester was a bit of an anti-climax because someone forgot to put oil into the engine, which seized up on the first circuit of the field.
There was one full-time worker on Old Hall Farm, called Louis Jones. He was of the type who could have made much more of life, but that was prevented by two, probably connected, things – his poor health and craving for drink. Louis had two hernias, which I won’t describe in detail, but which forced him to stop what he was doing occasionally, to push his hernias back where they came from, accompanied by a squelchy noise, so how he managed to work was a mystery. He was once persuaded to go into hospital to have his ruptures repaired, but within weeks the repairs were undone by hard physical work. Louis did work very hard.
As far as I know, he invested all his hard-earned cash in beer, every night at the Pack Horse, then he would stagger back to the little derelict wartime hut on the old airfield, which he called home.
The Pack Horse was next door to Newchurch Parish Church, where the Reverand Thomas Blood, son of the notorious Captain Blood, once served as vicar. Captain Blood tried and failed to steal the Crown jewels, in 1671. Surprisingly, he was pardoned by King Charles II.

Old Mort and Mike Wareing

Peter Wareing at Old Abbey Farm

Culcheth

We lived, at first, in Broadhurst Avenue, but our neighbours were noisy and unpleasant, and a constant problem for my mother to such an extent that we were forced to move round the corner into Poplar Avenue, which was much more amenable.
PC Tawse (‘Copper’ Tawse as he was known) was often to be seen on Warrington Road directing traffic, for no apparent reason because there was hardly any traffic to direct, but it gave Copper Tawse something to do when he wasn’t warning little boys like me not to ride their three-wheeler bikes on the pavement.
There was a grocer’s shop on Warrington Road, a couple of hundred yards from The Harrow Inn, towards Warrington but on the other side of the road, and this was run by Ben Weir. Copper Tawse used to hide behind the door of this shop, for a quick smoke. Smoking was allowed everywhere, in shops, cinemas, everywhere.

Culcheth then still had a traditional smithy, on Church Lane, on the opposite side of the road to where the Smithy garage now stands. When I worked at New Hall Farm for Hughie Wareing we used to take items to the smithy for repair. For new implements, etc. we would sometimes go to the Albion Works, in Leigh.
Also on Church Lane was the all-important ‘Chippy’, where we impoverished kids could buy a bag of ‘fish bits’, consisting of fried bits of batter, (no fish) for two (old) pence.
The Harrow Inn, now the Culcheth Arms, was at the village centre end of Church Lane.
There were many people in Culcheth, including my sister Pauline, working for the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority, which had administrative offices and laboratories on Wigshaw Lane. Their social centre was the Daten Club, which is still there as the Daten Sports Club, and it was there that I met my wife Barbara at a dance, over 60 years ago. We were married in March 1966 and honeymooned in the West Country.
My mother and father ended their days on Jackson Avenue, Culcheth.

The Mosses

A feature of the area were the Mosses – areas of peat populated by birch trees, cotton grass, sphagnum moss and other acid-loving species, which lay close to Culcheth, Glazebury, etc. and part of the enormous wetland system including Chat Moss, which alone covered 36 square kilometers. The peaty soil, if farmed well, was very fertile, and salad crops, and celery in particular, were often grown on the peat. When we lived on Heyshoot Lane, Glazebury our next-door neighbours were Joe Marsden and family, and Joe would carry the celery smell home with him and always have delicious celery for us to eat during the season. He worked for Mr. Marshall whose two sons, Eric and Allen still farm on the Moss, I believe.
A notable feature of the Moss near Old Abbey Farm was a small ‘maggot factory’ in which fish heads and other decaying bits and pieces were fed to large trays of maggots, which were dyed and sold to fishermen. I went inside once and the smell was hardly noticeable, but once outside, the smell was dreadful, and if the wind was blowing towards Culcheth it was very unpleasant for the villagers.
A characteristic of the peat soil was its ability to burn for prolonged periods, (hence its use in domestic fireplaces), and I have seen a deep, still-burning pit in the peat which was very difficult to extinguish. It could have swallowed a tractor, or a person, or both.
I once watched, fascinated, as a man cut peat on Glazebrook Moss then stacked it up to dry, for use as fuel instead of coal. He must have been one of the last, if not the last, peat-cutter in the area.
Men, including my father, who worked on Irlam steel works, used to walk or cycle across the Mosses to and from work. I remember seeing goods trains on the Manchester to Wigan main line stop on the moss to allow the driver or fireman to set rabbit snares or collect the unfortunate rabbit. The steel works used to light up the sky, especially when the coke ovens were being emptied.

Dangerous Diversions

The scrap iron used on the steel works to convert into steel contained many decommissioned firearms, etc, and my dad once brought a pair of Very light (flare gun) pistols for me and my friend Peter to play with.
We set about re-commissioning them by the simple expedient of filling the large-bore barrel with a length of steel electrical conduit held in place by bits of wood rammed around it. (We had discovered that steel electrical conduit was exactly the right diameter to take a .410 shotgun cartridge.)
We made holsters to hold our ‘pistols’ and practised fast-drawing following a signal from whoever it was who was not ‘armed’. On one unfortunate occasion, Peter spun on his heels too far and shot up my Raleigh All Steel bicycle, which was leaning against a wall. I had to mend about five punctures in my front wheel tyre.
Another experiment was to remove the lead shot from .410 cartridges and replace them with a single ball-bearing, also courtesy of Irlam Steel Works, which we passed through the barrel of my .410 shotgun, just to make sure it would!
This shotgun-cum-rifle had incredible power and was effective over 300 to 400 yards. We once spent about two hours digging one of the ball bearing ‘bullets’ out of the, (extremely hard), heart of a pine tree trunk.
We stopped using the weapon on the advice of a parent, who pointed out that the maximum breech pressure for my .410 shotgun was three and a quarter tons per square inch, and this was certainly exceeded by our modified shotgun firing ball-bearings.
As if to emphasize the point a local sportsman, who was using both a 12-bore and a 10-bore gun, accidentally mixed up the cartridges and inserted both a 12-bore and 10-bore cartridge into the breech of his gun, and was severely injured by the ‘back-blast’.
Our other dangerous pursuits included stealing matches from home and setting fire to the railway embankment (which the steam trains did anyway, so nobody worried), and rolling through the flames, Commando-style, and firing arrows at each other using our (now superseded) flat bows. We also did this using air-guns, which certainly tested our reactions and ability to hide.
We also attempted to make petrol bombs by inserting a sparkplug into the tight-fitting lid of a tin which contained a small amount of petrol. We heated the tin over a fire, to encourage the petrol to vaporise, then attached leads from a tractor dynamo, retreating behind some suitable cover, and winding the dynamo furiously. All we got was a faint plop as the lid blew off.

Big School

After I (eventually) passed the 11-plus exam my mother somehow managed to get me into the very large Roman Catholic Xaverian College, Rusholme, Manchester which had, I think, about 300 pupils, all boys. (It still exists but is ten times larger now.) The college was staffed by a mixture of Xaverian Brothers, originally called the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Francis Xavier, and laymen. To reach the college every morning I had to catch the 7.32 train from Newchurch Halt. I was invariably late and ended up running alongside the engine, egged on by the train driver or fireman. These days Health and Safety would not be happy with a small boy running along very close to the big wheels of a moving steam train, but at the time it didn’t seem to be an issue.

After arriving at Manchester’s Central Station, I then caught a bus to Rusholme and had another short walk into Victoria Park and Xaverian College. Returning to Culcheth after a long day in Manchester meant arriving home about 6pm. If I missed the bus and/or train in Manchester I would go into Central Library to collect another book or two about shooting and hunting, which were my passions at the time. (Now I am very much against the killing of animals for fun.) If I had enough money I would buy four ounces of fudge in a nearby sweet shop, because I was hungry. I also bought spares and cartridges for my .410 shotgun from a gunsmith on St. Ann’s Square.
Travelling on the train allowed me time for a lot of reading, and I consumed three books per week, on average. My fellow-passengers on the outward journey were mainly men working at Irlam Steel Works and, coming back, often schoolgirls, who, I quickly learned, were rather more raucous and earthier than boys.
My days at Xaverian College were strained due, in part, to the threat of the punishment meted out to offenders caught talking in class or eating sweets, or guilty of other misdemeanours.
The Physics teacher, a dour Scotsman called Mr. Burns, had an effective answer for such pupils, consisting of tweaking the sideburns, and twisting the short hairs, which forced the unfortunate lad to bend down until his head almost touched the floor, whilst Mr. Burns delivered a lecture which was intended to teach his victim the error of his ways.
The most sadistic staff member, also a lay teacher, whose name I have forgotten but taught History, was a short individual who walked with a tilt due to an accident when qualifying as a Judo Black Belt. He would drag his victim to the front of the class and nominate another, perfectly innocent, pupil to cane the unfortunate guilty party. If, in the teacher’s opinion, the innocent lad did not use the cane vigorously enough he himself would be caned, by the teacher. This, and similar forms of torture were very scary for a quiet lad from the country such as me, and I was in constant fear that I would be the next victim.
I was the victim once and received the highest level of punishment (for talking in class I think) and was sent to the headmaster, who was a Brother and had his office in the big Victorian building beyond the cricket pitch. I arrived at the headmaster’s study with two other fearful miscreants, and we entered the room and noted a large collection of canes of differing lengths and thicknesses, mounted on a wall, and which confirmed our worst fears. Sure enough, the headmaster selected one of these canes and flexed it menacingly whilst lecturing us on the lack of wisdom we had shown. Eventually he told us to bend over with our heads against a wall but, instead of using the cane, he kicked us hard in the backside, so that our heads hit the wall with a sickening thud and I saw stars. I never offended again.

Sport played a significant part of college life, and in the summer it was cricket. Only once in five years, when it stopped raining and was our turn for cricket, did I get the chance to play. I strapped the gear on, squared up to the bowler, and was out first ball! This coloured my lifelong attitude to cricket and I never played again or took any interest in the sport. When, in the winter, it was our turn to play football, we had to walk to Platt Fields and my performance there was limited to a few ineffectual kicks in the position of fullback. These experiences convinced me that I was not destined to be a sportsman, and so it proved to be.

My farming activities stood me in good stead because I gained a place in Winmarleigh agricultural college, near Garstang, and embarked on a two-year National Diploma course.
The students were again all male, so we invited ladies, usually from teacher’s training colleges, to our dances, and they came by coach from Skelmersdale, or more distant places such as Ambleside. The ladies were given every chance to at least have a dance or two because our college head would ‘allocate’ one of us to one of them, at least for the first dance. Sometimes lasting friendships, or even marriage, resulted. We lads escaped from college life as often as we could and headed for the pub. On my twenty-first birthday, the chosen pub was located remotely in the Bleasdale Fells, and we travelled in the cars of those who were fortunate to possess one. On arrival, several of my fellow students went to the bar to order drinks whilst I played darts. When my drink was brought over it had a very peculiar smell and an even stranger taste, but I was told I must drink it because it had cost a small fortune. After a few mouthfuls the effect was instantaneous and profound, because I suddenly had difficulty in even hitting the dartboard. Arriving back, very late, at college we used the usual route, through cooperating student’s bedrooms to our own, but lurking in the shadows was the warden, who ‘gated’ me for a week, and pubs were out of bounds. About this time, in 1966, I married Barbara, as previously mentioned, and we are still together although, unfortunately, she has Alzheimer’s and is in a care home.

Epilogue

After leaving Winmarleigh I was successful in getting a job with the MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) and did experimental work in the form of field trials with various pesticides, afterwards doing similar work with a succession of commercial companies. I travelled to Eastern Europe, France, Spain and Germany, and I met some great people. These were the most interesting and rewarding times.
I am now living alone, except for occasional visits from a small outdoor black cat called ‘Rocket’, with excitement provided by games of carpet bowls and coffee mornings and listening to good music whilst drinking red wine from Tesco.

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