IOO YEARS AGO THIS WEEK 2 - 8 DECEMBER 1924
This week's many stories include the Kiln Lane lady who won a car in a contest, the Parr woman who used a trick to steal from children, the desperate need for homes in St Helens, the Christmas parties that would now be available to all St Helens schoolchildren, Cholerton's special wireless offer, the mixed entertainment available at Prescot's Palace and the shocking death in a Haydock coal mine after a pit cage was lowered in error.
We begin on December 2nd when the Liverpool Echo reported that Gladys Corrin of Kiln Lane in St Helens had won a new Bayliss-Thomas car in a competition. In the novel contest organised by the United Travellers' Association, people had been asked to calculate how far a new car driven from Liverpool at an average speed of 20 mph would last on a single gallon of petrol. Mrs Corrin estimated the time before the car came spluttering to a stop would be 2 hours 30 minutes 58 seconds.
In actual fact the vehicle ran to Southport and back for 2 hours 30 minutes 56 seconds and during that time covered nearly 50 miles. Bayliss-Thomas had begun making penny farthing bikes in 1874 and later graduated to motorcycles, becoming Britain's first motorbike manufacturer. It is estimated that only around 1,000 Bayliss-Thomas cars were ever made and so Mrs Corrin had a bit of a collectors' item.
In the 19th century a custodial sentence for theft was the norm but by the 1920s low-level thieves could expect to be fined. However, the magistrates in St Helens Police Court on the 3rd were so annoyed by the way Elsie Traverse of Wolfe Row, off Fleet Lane, had stolen from children that they sent her to prison for a month. Described as a young married woman, Elsie had tricked the youngsters into giving her small items.
For example, a little girl had been sent by her mother to take some clothing to her sister in Providence Hospital (pictured above) so she could be discharged. On the way Elsie Traverse stopped her and offered the child a penny to take a message to a shop. The woman said she would look after the parcel of clothing that the child was carrying but when the girl started walking to the shop she quickly disappeared. Although the matter was reported to the police, no trace of the woman could be found.
Three weeks later the girl saw the woman in the reading room in the library and went to get the police. As well as being charged with that offence, Elsie Traverse faced two other counts of tricking children out of articles. The value of the goods only came to £1 11 shillings 4½d, in total, but the nature of the offences meant a prison sentence was inevitable.
If anything the housing crisis in St Helens was getting worse and not better. On the 3rd at the monthly meeting of St Helens Town Council, Alderman Waring said that since he had become Chairman of the Housing Committee he had been inundated with requests for homes. A "tremendous" amount of letters had been sent to him and many people had been turning up at his door.
There was such a long waiting list for Corporation houses, he said, new applications were not currently being accepted. The alderman added: "As far as is humanly possible we will deal with the cases justly and with a view to alleviating the worst cases of overcrowding. No mere human being could solve this problem properly."
For the last three years Christmas parties had been held for around 2,000 of the poorest children in St Helens funded through the generosity of local people. The donated money also paid for some Christmas food parcels to be provided for the unemployed. In the St Helens Reporter on the 5th the Mayor of St Helens, Alderman Thomas Hamblett, said deciding which kids qualified for the parties had been problematic.
"It was a difficult and sometimes a painful task to single out the ten per cent. of poorest children from their classmates." And so after discussing the matter with headmasters, he had decided to go one step further and provide Christmas parties for all of the children attending the town's elementary schools.
In total about 20,000 kids could now look forward to a party, although the extra cost of the expansion meant that there would not be sufficient cash left over to give the unemployed their food parcel. The alderman appealed for public donations, writing:
"The money received will be apportioned amongst the schools according to their need. In some schools very little help will be required, in others the teachers will have to rely almost entirely on this fund. A committee of head teachers has been formed to deal with the whole of the arrangements for these parties. Subscriptions to be sent to me at the Town Hall, so that our school children may be sure of a visit from Father Christmas."
The Palace in Kemble Street in Prescot had an advert in the Reporter. They were following the lead of the St Helens Hippodrome and serving as both a cinema and a music hall. However, the Corporation Street venue would operate as a theatre for a week or two and then act as a picture house. But Prescot's Palace was mixing the two forms of entertainment twice nightly into each programme.
So on Friday and Saturday nights, the "harmonising vocalists" The Taffies performed on stage along with Peptina Graham, described as a "Southern entertainer". Two films called 'When Odds Are Even' and 'Vindicta' were also shown, along with what were described as "topicals", i.e. news/magazine material. And next week the 3 Dancing Durhams and a comedy juggler called Claude were being juxtaposed with various films. The telephone number of the Palace, by the way, was simply ‘30’.
"The whole truth and nothing but the truth", was the promise of J. Berens in their Reporter advert. The Church Street clothier was off-loading lots of women's and girls' winter coats in its sale but insisted it was all quality material: "We have no rubbish to sell. Every coat we have in stock was made this winter, and these have been marked down to prices to suit all pockets, which should command a ready clearance."
What were described as heavy, warm blanket coats for women cost 14/11 and "smartly-cut blanket coats, with real fur collars" cost from 27/6. Girls' coats were priced from 6/11. Joseph Berens' motto at sale time was: "Never mind what it cost". I think what they meant was "Never mind what it used to cost, it's still been reduced", but that's not quite as snappy a slogan!
Cholerton's of Duke Street are remembered simply as photographers but in the 1920s Francis Cholerton was operating out of Bridge Street and, as well as photography, he was a big name in the new wireless retailing trade. The very basic crystal receivers needed headphones to be heard and according to Cholerton's advert in the Reporter, the 'phones almost cost as much as the sets.
If customers purchased three pairs of headphones costing 19/6 each, they would be given a free crystal set costing 30 shillings. Multiple headphones could be plugged into these receivers and as dance music was often played on the radio during the evenings, couples dancing while wired to a set had the potential for getting themselves all tangled up!
Also on the 6th the inquest into the death of John Abbott from Old Whint Road in Haydock took place. The 58-year-old had been a colliery fireman at the Old Boston mine, where he had worked for sixteen years. Mr Abbott had died after stepping out of the pit cage on to a movable landing place that was designed to bridge the space between the cage and the side of the pit.
After the cage was suddenly lowered, the man was precipitated 365 yards down the shaft. At his inquest there was an extraordinary conflict of evidence with John Fairhurst of Kenyons Lane in Haydock and Thomas Joyce of Church Road directly contradicting each other.
Fairhurst was an engine-winder of 27 years experience who insisted he had received a signal instructing him to lower the cage. That consisted of a bell sounding and indicator lighting up but Joyce flatly denied making such a signal. The contradiction could not be resolved and the coroner delivered a verdict of misadventure caused by the cage being lowered too soon.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Lyon Street family row involving a poker, the talent show at the Hippodrome, the bags of coal that fell off a lorry in Moss Bank and the curious case of the illegitimate Sutton baby and the maintenance order.
We begin on December 2nd when the Liverpool Echo reported that Gladys Corrin of Kiln Lane in St Helens had won a new Bayliss-Thomas car in a competition. In the novel contest organised by the United Travellers' Association, people had been asked to calculate how far a new car driven from Liverpool at an average speed of 20 mph would last on a single gallon of petrol. Mrs Corrin estimated the time before the car came spluttering to a stop would be 2 hours 30 minutes 58 seconds.
In actual fact the vehicle ran to Southport and back for 2 hours 30 minutes 56 seconds and during that time covered nearly 50 miles. Bayliss-Thomas had begun making penny farthing bikes in 1874 and later graduated to motorcycles, becoming Britain's first motorbike manufacturer. It is estimated that only around 1,000 Bayliss-Thomas cars were ever made and so Mrs Corrin had a bit of a collectors' item.
In the 19th century a custodial sentence for theft was the norm but by the 1920s low-level thieves could expect to be fined. However, the magistrates in St Helens Police Court on the 3rd were so annoyed by the way Elsie Traverse of Wolfe Row, off Fleet Lane, had stolen from children that they sent her to prison for a month. Described as a young married woman, Elsie had tricked the youngsters into giving her small items.
Three weeks later the girl saw the woman in the reading room in the library and went to get the police. As well as being charged with that offence, Elsie Traverse faced two other counts of tricking children out of articles. The value of the goods only came to £1 11 shillings 4½d, in total, but the nature of the offences meant a prison sentence was inevitable.
If anything the housing crisis in St Helens was getting worse and not better. On the 3rd at the monthly meeting of St Helens Town Council, Alderman Waring said that since he had become Chairman of the Housing Committee he had been inundated with requests for homes. A "tremendous" amount of letters had been sent to him and many people had been turning up at his door.
There was such a long waiting list for Corporation houses, he said, new applications were not currently being accepted. The alderman added: "As far as is humanly possible we will deal with the cases justly and with a view to alleviating the worst cases of overcrowding. No mere human being could solve this problem properly."
For the last three years Christmas parties had been held for around 2,000 of the poorest children in St Helens funded through the generosity of local people. The donated money also paid for some Christmas food parcels to be provided for the unemployed. In the St Helens Reporter on the 5th the Mayor of St Helens, Alderman Thomas Hamblett, said deciding which kids qualified for the parties had been problematic.
"It was a difficult and sometimes a painful task to single out the ten per cent. of poorest children from their classmates." And so after discussing the matter with headmasters, he had decided to go one step further and provide Christmas parties for all of the children attending the town's elementary schools.
In total about 20,000 kids could now look forward to a party, although the extra cost of the expansion meant that there would not be sufficient cash left over to give the unemployed their food parcel. The alderman appealed for public donations, writing:
"The money received will be apportioned amongst the schools according to their need. In some schools very little help will be required, in others the teachers will have to rely almost entirely on this fund. A committee of head teachers has been formed to deal with the whole of the arrangements for these parties. Subscriptions to be sent to me at the Town Hall, so that our school children may be sure of a visit from Father Christmas."
The Palace in Kemble Street in Prescot had an advert in the Reporter. They were following the lead of the St Helens Hippodrome and serving as both a cinema and a music hall. However, the Corporation Street venue would operate as a theatre for a week or two and then act as a picture house. But Prescot's Palace was mixing the two forms of entertainment twice nightly into each programme.
So on Friday and Saturday nights, the "harmonising vocalists" The Taffies performed on stage along with Peptina Graham, described as a "Southern entertainer". Two films called 'When Odds Are Even' and 'Vindicta' were also shown, along with what were described as "topicals", i.e. news/magazine material. And next week the 3 Dancing Durhams and a comedy juggler called Claude were being juxtaposed with various films. The telephone number of the Palace, by the way, was simply ‘30’.
"The whole truth and nothing but the truth", was the promise of J. Berens in their Reporter advert. The Church Street clothier was off-loading lots of women's and girls' winter coats in its sale but insisted it was all quality material: "We have no rubbish to sell. Every coat we have in stock was made this winter, and these have been marked down to prices to suit all pockets, which should command a ready clearance."
What were described as heavy, warm blanket coats for women cost 14/11 and "smartly-cut blanket coats, with real fur collars" cost from 27/6. Girls' coats were priced from 6/11. Joseph Berens' motto at sale time was: "Never mind what it cost". I think what they meant was "Never mind what it used to cost, it's still been reduced", but that's not quite as snappy a slogan!
Cholerton's of Duke Street are remembered simply as photographers but in the 1920s Francis Cholerton was operating out of Bridge Street and, as well as photography, he was a big name in the new wireless retailing trade. The very basic crystal receivers needed headphones to be heard and according to Cholerton's advert in the Reporter, the 'phones almost cost as much as the sets.
If customers purchased three pairs of headphones costing 19/6 each, they would be given a free crystal set costing 30 shillings. Multiple headphones could be plugged into these receivers and as dance music was often played on the radio during the evenings, couples dancing while wired to a set had the potential for getting themselves all tangled up!
Also on the 6th the inquest into the death of John Abbott from Old Whint Road in Haydock took place. The 58-year-old had been a colliery fireman at the Old Boston mine, where he had worked for sixteen years. Mr Abbott had died after stepping out of the pit cage on to a movable landing place that was designed to bridge the space between the cage and the side of the pit.
After the cage was suddenly lowered, the man was precipitated 365 yards down the shaft. At his inquest there was an extraordinary conflict of evidence with John Fairhurst of Kenyons Lane in Haydock and Thomas Joyce of Church Road directly contradicting each other.
Fairhurst was an engine-winder of 27 years experience who insisted he had received a signal instructing him to lower the cage. That consisted of a bell sounding and indicator lighting up but Joyce flatly denied making such a signal. The contradiction could not be resolved and the coroner delivered a verdict of misadventure caused by the cage being lowered too soon.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Lyon Street family row involving a poker, the talent show at the Hippodrome, the bags of coal that fell off a lorry in Moss Bank and the curious case of the illegitimate Sutton baby and the maintenance order.
This week's many stories include the Kiln Lane lady who won a car in a contest, the Parr woman who used a trick to steal from children, the desperate need for homes in St Helens, the Christmas parties that would now be available to all St Helens schoolchildren, Cholerton's special wireless offer, the mixed entertainment available at Prescot's Palace and the shocking death in a Haydock coal mine after a pit cage was lowered in error.
We begin on December 2nd when the Liverpool Echo reported that Gladys Corrin of Kiln Lane in St Helens had won a new Bayliss-Thomas car in a competition.
In the novel contest organised by the United Travellers' Association, people had been asked to calculate how far a new car driven from Liverpool at an average speed of 20 mph would last on a single gallon of petrol.
Mrs Corrin estimated the time before the car came spluttering to a stop would be 2 hours 30 minutes 58 seconds.
In actual fact the vehicle ran to Southport and back for 2 hours 30 minutes 56 seconds and during that time covered nearly 50 miles.
Bayliss-Thomas had begun making penny farthing bikes in 1874 and later graduated to motorcycles, becoming Britain's first motorbike manufacturer.
It is estimated that only around 1,000 Bayliss-Thomas cars were ever made and so Mrs Corrin had a bit of a collectors' item.
In the 19th century a custodial sentence for theft was the norm but by the 1920s low-level thieves could expect to be fined.
However, the magistrates in St Helens Police Court on the 3rd were so annoyed by the way Elsie Traverse of Wolfe Row, off Fleet Lane, had stolen from children that they sent her to prison for a month.
Described as a young married woman, Elsie had tricked the youngsters into giving her small items.
For example, a little girl had been sent by her mother to take some clothing to her sister in Providence Hospital (pictured above) so she could be discharged.
On the way Elsie Traverse stopped her and offered the child a penny to take a message to a shop.
The woman said she would look after the parcel of clothing that the child was carrying but when the girl started walking to the shop she quickly disappeared.
Although the matter was reported to the police, no trace of the woman could be found.
Three weeks later the girl saw the woman in the reading room in the library and went to get the police.
As well as being charged with that offence, Elsie Traverse faced two other counts of tricking children out of articles.
The value of the goods only came to £1 11 shillings 4½d, in total, but the nature of the offences meant a prison sentence was inevitable.
If anything the housing crisis in St Helens was getting worse and not better.
On the 3rd at the monthly meeting of St Helens Town Council, Alderman Waring said that since he had become Chairman of the Housing Committee he had been inundated with requests for homes.
A "tremendous" amount of letters had been sent to him and many people had been turning up at his door.
There was such a long waiting list for Corporation houses, he said, new applications were not currently being accepted. The alderman added:
"As far as is humanly possible we will deal with the cases justly and with a view to alleviating the worst cases of overcrowding. No mere human being could solve this problem properly."
For the last three years Christmas parties had been held for around 2,000 of the poorest children in St Helens funded through the generosity of local people.
The donated money also paid for some Christmas food parcels to be provided for the unemployed.
In the St Helens Reporter on the 5th the Mayor of St Helens, Alderman Thomas Hamblett, said deciding which kids qualified for the parties had been problematic.
"It was a difficult and sometimes a painful task to single out the ten per cent. of poorest children from their classmates."
And so after discussing the matter with headmasters, he had decided to go one step further and provide Christmas parties for all of the children attending the town's elementary schools.
In total about 20,000 kids could now look forward to a party, although the extra cost of the expansion meant that there would not be sufficient cash left over to give the unemployed their food parcel. The alderman appealed for public donations, writing:
"The money received will be apportioned amongst the schools according to their need. In some schools very little help will be required, in others the teachers will have to rely almost entirely on this fund.
"A committee of head teachers has been formed to deal with the whole of the arrangements for these parties.
"Subscriptions to be sent to me at the Town Hall, so that our school children may be sure of a visit from Father Christmas."
The Palace in Kemble Street in Prescot had an advert in the Reporter. They were following the lead of the St Helens Hippodrome and serving as both a cinema and a music hall.
However, the Corporation Street venue would operate as a theatre for a week or two and then act as a picture house.
But Prescot's Palace was mixing the two forms of entertainment twice nightly into each programme.
So on Friday and Saturday nights, the "harmonising vocalists" The Taffies performed on stage along with Peptina Graham, described as a "Southern entertainer".
Two films called 'When Odds Are Even' and 'Vindicta' were also shown, along with what were described as "topicals", i.e. news/magazine material.
And next week the 3 Dancing Durhams and a comedy juggler called Claude were being juxtaposed with various films. The telephone number of the Palace, by the way, was simply ‘30’.
"The whole truth and nothing but the truth", was the promise of J. Berens in their Reporter advert.
The Church Street clothier was off-loading lots of women's and girls' winter coats in its sale but insisted it was all quality material:
"We have no rubbish to sell. Every coat we have in stock was made this winter, and these have been marked down to prices to suit all pockets, which should command a ready clearance."
What were described as heavy, warm blanket coats for women cost 14/11 and "smartly-cut blanket coats, with real fur collars" cost from 27/6. Girls' coats were priced from 6/11.
Joseph Berens' motto at sale time was: "Never mind what it cost". I think what they meant was "Never mind what it used to cost, it's still been reduced", but that's not quite as snappy a slogan!
Cholerton's of Duke Street are remembered simply as photographers but in the 1920s Francis Cholerton was operating out of Bridge Street and, as well as photography, he was a big name in the new wireless retailing trade.
The very basic crystal receivers needed headphones to be heard and according to Cholerton's advert in the Reporter, the 'phones almost cost as much as the sets.
If customers purchased three pairs of headphones costing 19/6 each, they would be given a free crystal set costing 30 shillings.
Multiple headphones could be plugged into these receivers and as dance music was often played on the radio during the evenings, couples dancing while wired to a set had the potential for getting themselves all tangled up!
Also on the 6th the inquest into the death of John Abbott from Old Whint Road in Haydock took place.
The 58-year-old had been a colliery fireman at the Old Boston mine, where he had worked for sixteen years.
Mr Abbott had died after stepping out of the pit cage on to a movable landing place that was designed to bridge the space between the cage and the side of the pit.
After the cage was suddenly lowered, the man was precipitated 365 yards down the shaft.
At his inquest there was an extraordinary conflict of evidence with John Fairhurst of Kenyons Lane in Haydock and Thomas Joyce of Church Road directly contradicting each other.
Fairhurst was an engine-winder of 27 years experience who insisted he had received a signal instructing him to lower the cage.
That consisted of a bell sounding and indicator lighting up but Joyce flatly denied making such a signal.
The contradiction could not be resolved and the coroner delivered a verdict of misadventure caused by the cage being lowered too soon.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Lyon Street family row involving a poker, the talent show at the Hippodrome, the bags of coal that fell off a lorry in Moss Bank and the curious case of the illegitimate Sutton baby and the maintenance order.
We begin on December 2nd when the Liverpool Echo reported that Gladys Corrin of Kiln Lane in St Helens had won a new Bayliss-Thomas car in a competition.
In the novel contest organised by the United Travellers' Association, people had been asked to calculate how far a new car driven from Liverpool at an average speed of 20 mph would last on a single gallon of petrol.
Mrs Corrin estimated the time before the car came spluttering to a stop would be 2 hours 30 minutes 58 seconds.
In actual fact the vehicle ran to Southport and back for 2 hours 30 minutes 56 seconds and during that time covered nearly 50 miles.
Bayliss-Thomas had begun making penny farthing bikes in 1874 and later graduated to motorcycles, becoming Britain's first motorbike manufacturer.
It is estimated that only around 1,000 Bayliss-Thomas cars were ever made and so Mrs Corrin had a bit of a collectors' item.
In the 19th century a custodial sentence for theft was the norm but by the 1920s low-level thieves could expect to be fined.
However, the magistrates in St Helens Police Court on the 3rd were so annoyed by the way Elsie Traverse of Wolfe Row, off Fleet Lane, had stolen from children that they sent her to prison for a month.
Described as a young married woman, Elsie had tricked the youngsters into giving her small items.
On the way Elsie Traverse stopped her and offered the child a penny to take a message to a shop.
The woman said she would look after the parcel of clothing that the child was carrying but when the girl started walking to the shop she quickly disappeared.
Although the matter was reported to the police, no trace of the woman could be found.
Three weeks later the girl saw the woman in the reading room in the library and went to get the police.
As well as being charged with that offence, Elsie Traverse faced two other counts of tricking children out of articles.
The value of the goods only came to £1 11 shillings 4½d, in total, but the nature of the offences meant a prison sentence was inevitable.
If anything the housing crisis in St Helens was getting worse and not better.
On the 3rd at the monthly meeting of St Helens Town Council, Alderman Waring said that since he had become Chairman of the Housing Committee he had been inundated with requests for homes.
A "tremendous" amount of letters had been sent to him and many people had been turning up at his door.
There was such a long waiting list for Corporation houses, he said, new applications were not currently being accepted. The alderman added:
"As far as is humanly possible we will deal with the cases justly and with a view to alleviating the worst cases of overcrowding. No mere human being could solve this problem properly."
For the last three years Christmas parties had been held for around 2,000 of the poorest children in St Helens funded through the generosity of local people.
The donated money also paid for some Christmas food parcels to be provided for the unemployed.
In the St Helens Reporter on the 5th the Mayor of St Helens, Alderman Thomas Hamblett, said deciding which kids qualified for the parties had been problematic.
"It was a difficult and sometimes a painful task to single out the ten per cent. of poorest children from their classmates."
And so after discussing the matter with headmasters, he had decided to go one step further and provide Christmas parties for all of the children attending the town's elementary schools.
In total about 20,000 kids could now look forward to a party, although the extra cost of the expansion meant that there would not be sufficient cash left over to give the unemployed their food parcel. The alderman appealed for public donations, writing:
"The money received will be apportioned amongst the schools according to their need. In some schools very little help will be required, in others the teachers will have to rely almost entirely on this fund.
"A committee of head teachers has been formed to deal with the whole of the arrangements for these parties.
"Subscriptions to be sent to me at the Town Hall, so that our school children may be sure of a visit from Father Christmas."
The Palace in Kemble Street in Prescot had an advert in the Reporter. They were following the lead of the St Helens Hippodrome and serving as both a cinema and a music hall.
However, the Corporation Street venue would operate as a theatre for a week or two and then act as a picture house.
But Prescot's Palace was mixing the two forms of entertainment twice nightly into each programme.
So on Friday and Saturday nights, the "harmonising vocalists" The Taffies performed on stage along with Peptina Graham, described as a "Southern entertainer".
Two films called 'When Odds Are Even' and 'Vindicta' were also shown, along with what were described as "topicals", i.e. news/magazine material.
And next week the 3 Dancing Durhams and a comedy juggler called Claude were being juxtaposed with various films. The telephone number of the Palace, by the way, was simply ‘30’.
"The whole truth and nothing but the truth", was the promise of J. Berens in their Reporter advert.
The Church Street clothier was off-loading lots of women's and girls' winter coats in its sale but insisted it was all quality material:
"We have no rubbish to sell. Every coat we have in stock was made this winter, and these have been marked down to prices to suit all pockets, which should command a ready clearance."
What were described as heavy, warm blanket coats for women cost 14/11 and "smartly-cut blanket coats, with real fur collars" cost from 27/6. Girls' coats were priced from 6/11.
Joseph Berens' motto at sale time was: "Never mind what it cost". I think what they meant was "Never mind what it used to cost, it's still been reduced", but that's not quite as snappy a slogan!
Cholerton's of Duke Street are remembered simply as photographers but in the 1920s Francis Cholerton was operating out of Bridge Street and, as well as photography, he was a big name in the new wireless retailing trade.
The very basic crystal receivers needed headphones to be heard and according to Cholerton's advert in the Reporter, the 'phones almost cost as much as the sets.
If customers purchased three pairs of headphones costing 19/6 each, they would be given a free crystal set costing 30 shillings.
Multiple headphones could be plugged into these receivers and as dance music was often played on the radio during the evenings, couples dancing while wired to a set had the potential for getting themselves all tangled up!
Also on the 6th the inquest into the death of John Abbott from Old Whint Road in Haydock took place.
The 58-year-old had been a colliery fireman at the Old Boston mine, where he had worked for sixteen years.
Mr Abbott had died after stepping out of the pit cage on to a movable landing place that was designed to bridge the space between the cage and the side of the pit.
After the cage was suddenly lowered, the man was precipitated 365 yards down the shaft.
At his inquest there was an extraordinary conflict of evidence with John Fairhurst of Kenyons Lane in Haydock and Thomas Joyce of Church Road directly contradicting each other.
Fairhurst was an engine-winder of 27 years experience who insisted he had received a signal instructing him to lower the cage.
That consisted of a bell sounding and indicator lighting up but Joyce flatly denied making such a signal.
The contradiction could not be resolved and the coroner delivered a verdict of misadventure caused by the cage being lowered too soon.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include the Lyon Street family row involving a poker, the talent show at the Hippodrome, the bags of coal that fell off a lorry in Moss Bank and the curious case of the illegitimate Sutton baby and the maintenance order.