IOO YEARS AGO THIS WEEK 5 - 11 FEBRUARY 1924
This week's stories include the Silkstone Street man's attempted suicide after three years of unemployment, the pioneering scheme to encourage people to buy their own homes rather than rent, the results of Uncle Ben's limerick contest in the Reporter, the policeman boozing in the Boilermakers Arms, the turns performing at the Hippodrome and the prosecution for putting up a lean-to building without planning permission from the council.
Attempting suicide was illegal and offenders could be jailed. John Burton of Silkstone Street in St Helens appeared in court on the 5th after drinking a bottle of ammonia in front of his family. The man had been unemployed for three years and was treated at Providence Hospital (pictured above) before being arrested and charged with attempting to kill himself. The St Helens Reporter described Burton's appearance in court as: "Pale, haggard and nervous in his attitude". The magistrates remanded him for medical examination to the Whiston Institution, which was the name of the re-branded workhouse.
Last September the St Helens Health Committee had discussed the novel idea of building new houses for sale rather than rent. Currently house builders found it not worth their while to build new homes even with a council subsidy of £75. This, it was suggested, could be increased to £100 if the residents bought the property on a mortgage. Builders would then have greater incentive to construct houses if they knew they could sell them to their residents.
This was not a completely new idea for the St Helens district as some of the working men of Haydock had been taking out mortgages to buy their homes. Haydock was then administered separately from St Helens and it was felt that by following their example, people could purchase their houses over twenty years with their repayments little more than what their rent would have been.
At a St Helens Town Council meeting on the 6th the details of the proposed scheme were presented to it members. Ald. Henry Bates, the chairman of the St Helens Health Committee, said with a subsidy of £100 per home, non-parlour houses could be built at a cost to the builder of £384. If the occupier took out a 20-year mortgage on the property, their weekly payment would be 16s 4d a week, including rates.
However, the increasingly powerful Labour party was against such sales on principle and the council's vote on approving the scheme was split 16 to 16, with the Mayor deciding his casting vote should be in favour of holding a special meeting to discuss the subject in greater detail.
On the 8th a Liverpool hawker called Alice Hewitt was charged in St Helens Police Court with ill-treating her pony by overloading it. Inspector Hallam of the RSPCA said he had found the woman in charge of a light pony cart carrying 19 cwts of coal. The pony was only 48 inches high and was quite exhausted by its burden. Normally Mrs Hewitt hawked oranges and apples but a railway strike had been taking place at the time of the offence and as she could not obtain fruit, she was selling coal. Mrs Hewitt was fined 10 shillings.
We are all familiar with the charge of harbouring a fugitive. However, in the 19th century several publicans in the St Helens and Prescot district faced charges of harbouring a policeman! In other words they had been serving a bobby beer when they were supposed to be on duty. That term was no longer being used in the 1920s. Instead when Edward Armistead of the Boilermakers Arms in Hoghton Road in Sutton was accused of the same offence on the 8th he was charged with "suffering a constable to remain on licensed premises when on duty".
Not that the bobby suffered much during his drinking bout – but he certainly would have done when his superiors learnt of it! The officer in trouble was PC Sydney Davies who was listed in the 1921 census as a 24-year-old boarder at a house in Waterdale Crescent. Davies wasn't in court but Sgt Arthur Cust certainly was. He explained that at 8pm on one evening he had sent the constable to visit all the public houses in Sutton.
His mission had been to check that the regulations concerning sub-letting of licensed premises were being followed, as a result of a recent order by the licensing magistrates. It wasn't until after 1am that he found the constable again rather worse for wear and he needed to be relieved of his duty. As a result the publican was fined £5 and costs. That same penalty was also imposed on Martha Leadbetter, the licensee of the Victoria Inn (now called the Little Pig) in Ellamsbridge Road. Just what happened to the suffering PC Davies, I cannot say – but I think we can guess!
Uncle Ben in the Reporter's children‘s column was in reality its long-standing editor, William Gentry, whose interest in young people extended to being the Chairman of the town's Juvenile Court. In this week's column Uncle Ben gave the results of his recent limerick competition. His young readers had been given the first four lines of a limerick and had been invited to add the final line of their own. The given limerick went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he'd never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies
They affected his eyes….."
Uncle Ben said that the entrants were not very sympathetic to the greedy boy's plight, writing: "All who entered it seem to have decided that he deserved special and severe punishment. Poor lad; he suffered one way and another! The number of Beecham's pills our members made him swallow was almost sufficient to keep the whole population of St. Helens fit and strong for a year.
"It was a clever rhyme, and the idea of giving one of Beecham's pills to the lad after his feed of mince pies showed a commendable idea of the value of regulating medicine in such distressing circumstances. Unfortunately, however, the rhyming of “pill” with “ill” was too easy; too many competitors thought of it, with the result that I could not give one a prize without similarly rewarding the others, and then, I should not have had enough prizes to go round." And so the winner of a fountain pen was Reginald Cook from Thatto Heath Road, whose complete limerick did not rhyme ill with pill but instead went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he’d never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies,
They affected his eyes,
And he fancies he sees mince pies still."
These days if someone builds a property without permission from the local authority, they can always seek retrospective planning permission – with demolition being the ultimate penalty. I don't think they would be prosecuted straight away. But in St Helens Police Court on the 11th, Sarah Collins of Park Street and a bricklayer from Talbot Street called Herbert Sneyd were prosecuted for failing to give notice to the council that they planned to erect a new building.
Mrs Collins had hired Sneyd to erect an extra room at the rear of 5 Park Street, which she owned and which had previously been used as a discharged soldiers and sailors club. When the Council received the building plans, they discovered that the lean-to structure had already been built and was in use. Both defendants pleaded ignorance of the regulations and were fined 20 shillings each.
I wrote last week (and the week before) about lads getting up to mischief on a Sunday when there was very little for them to do – what today is often described as anti-social behaviour. On the 11th a youth called Joseph Parkinson was fined 20 shillings plus 5 shillings damages for being part of a gang of boys that had smashed 17 street lamps on a Sunday afternoon. Parkinson admitting breaking five of them.
And finally, the Hippodrome Theatre in Corporation Street was now calling itself "the home of stars" and from the 11th included these turns in their line-up: Clown Aroo ("Animal mimic entertainer"); Ara and Zetta ("Trick and comedy cyclists"); Toots Hanlon ("Versatile entertainer"); Dick Rawson ("Character comedian") and Elliott Savonas ("Present their great creation The Garden of Harmony"). The Zetta in the cycling act appears to have been a woman called Zetta Hills who achieved fame in 1920 by almost pedalling across the Channel on a water cycle.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include another crash at suicide corner, the drunken father from Rainford who said he refused to be chicken-pecked, the marbles stolen from Nuttalls bottleworks and the bizarre claim of kidnapping.
Last September the St Helens Health Committee had discussed the novel idea of building new houses for sale rather than rent. Currently house builders found it not worth their while to build new homes even with a council subsidy of £75. This, it was suggested, could be increased to £100 if the residents bought the property on a mortgage. Builders would then have greater incentive to construct houses if they knew they could sell them to their residents.
This was not a completely new idea for the St Helens district as some of the working men of Haydock had been taking out mortgages to buy their homes. Haydock was then administered separately from St Helens and it was felt that by following their example, people could purchase their houses over twenty years with their repayments little more than what their rent would have been.
At a St Helens Town Council meeting on the 6th the details of the proposed scheme were presented to it members. Ald. Henry Bates, the chairman of the St Helens Health Committee, said with a subsidy of £100 per home, non-parlour houses could be built at a cost to the builder of £384. If the occupier took out a 20-year mortgage on the property, their weekly payment would be 16s 4d a week, including rates.
However, the increasingly powerful Labour party was against such sales on principle and the council's vote on approving the scheme was split 16 to 16, with the Mayor deciding his casting vote should be in favour of holding a special meeting to discuss the subject in greater detail.
On the 8th a Liverpool hawker called Alice Hewitt was charged in St Helens Police Court with ill-treating her pony by overloading it. Inspector Hallam of the RSPCA said he had found the woman in charge of a light pony cart carrying 19 cwts of coal. The pony was only 48 inches high and was quite exhausted by its burden. Normally Mrs Hewitt hawked oranges and apples but a railway strike had been taking place at the time of the offence and as she could not obtain fruit, she was selling coal. Mrs Hewitt was fined 10 shillings.
We are all familiar with the charge of harbouring a fugitive. However, in the 19th century several publicans in the St Helens and Prescot district faced charges of harbouring a policeman! In other words they had been serving a bobby beer when they were supposed to be on duty. That term was no longer being used in the 1920s. Instead when Edward Armistead of the Boilermakers Arms in Hoghton Road in Sutton was accused of the same offence on the 8th he was charged with "suffering a constable to remain on licensed premises when on duty".
Not that the bobby suffered much during his drinking bout – but he certainly would have done when his superiors learnt of it! The officer in trouble was PC Sydney Davies who was listed in the 1921 census as a 24-year-old boarder at a house in Waterdale Crescent. Davies wasn't in court but Sgt Arthur Cust certainly was. He explained that at 8pm on one evening he had sent the constable to visit all the public houses in Sutton.
His mission had been to check that the regulations concerning sub-letting of licensed premises were being followed, as a result of a recent order by the licensing magistrates. It wasn't until after 1am that he found the constable again rather worse for wear and he needed to be relieved of his duty. As a result the publican was fined £5 and costs. That same penalty was also imposed on Martha Leadbetter, the licensee of the Victoria Inn (now called the Little Pig) in Ellamsbridge Road. Just what happened to the suffering PC Davies, I cannot say – but I think we can guess!
Uncle Ben in the Reporter's children‘s column was in reality its long-standing editor, William Gentry, whose interest in young people extended to being the Chairman of the town's Juvenile Court. In this week's column Uncle Ben gave the results of his recent limerick competition. His young readers had been given the first four lines of a limerick and had been invited to add the final line of their own. The given limerick went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he'd never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies
They affected his eyes….."
Uncle Ben said that the entrants were not very sympathetic to the greedy boy's plight, writing: "All who entered it seem to have decided that he deserved special and severe punishment. Poor lad; he suffered one way and another! The number of Beecham's pills our members made him swallow was almost sufficient to keep the whole population of St. Helens fit and strong for a year.
"It was a clever rhyme, and the idea of giving one of Beecham's pills to the lad after his feed of mince pies showed a commendable idea of the value of regulating medicine in such distressing circumstances. Unfortunately, however, the rhyming of “pill” with “ill” was too easy; too many competitors thought of it, with the result that I could not give one a prize without similarly rewarding the others, and then, I should not have had enough prizes to go round." And so the winner of a fountain pen was Reginald Cook from Thatto Heath Road, whose complete limerick did not rhyme ill with pill but instead went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he’d never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies,
They affected his eyes,
And he fancies he sees mince pies still."
These days if someone builds a property without permission from the local authority, they can always seek retrospective planning permission – with demolition being the ultimate penalty. I don't think they would be prosecuted straight away. But in St Helens Police Court on the 11th, Sarah Collins of Park Street and a bricklayer from Talbot Street called Herbert Sneyd were prosecuted for failing to give notice to the council that they planned to erect a new building.
Mrs Collins had hired Sneyd to erect an extra room at the rear of 5 Park Street, which she owned and which had previously been used as a discharged soldiers and sailors club. When the Council received the building plans, they discovered that the lean-to structure had already been built and was in use. Both defendants pleaded ignorance of the regulations and were fined 20 shillings each.
I wrote last week (and the week before) about lads getting up to mischief on a Sunday when there was very little for them to do – what today is often described as anti-social behaviour. On the 11th a youth called Joseph Parkinson was fined 20 shillings plus 5 shillings damages for being part of a gang of boys that had smashed 17 street lamps on a Sunday afternoon. Parkinson admitting breaking five of them.
And finally, the Hippodrome Theatre in Corporation Street was now calling itself "the home of stars" and from the 11th included these turns in their line-up: Clown Aroo ("Animal mimic entertainer"); Ara and Zetta ("Trick and comedy cyclists"); Toots Hanlon ("Versatile entertainer"); Dick Rawson ("Character comedian") and Elliott Savonas ("Present their great creation The Garden of Harmony"). The Zetta in the cycling act appears to have been a woman called Zetta Hills who achieved fame in 1920 by almost pedalling across the Channel on a water cycle.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include another crash at suicide corner, the drunken father from Rainford who said he refused to be chicken-pecked, the marbles stolen from Nuttalls bottleworks and the bizarre claim of kidnapping.
This week's stories include the Silkstone Street man's attempted suicide after three years of unemployment, the pioneering scheme to encourage people to buy their own homes rather than rent, the results of Uncle Ben's limerick contest in the Reporter, the policeman boozing in the Boilermakers Arms, the turns performing at the Hippodrome and the prosecution for putting up a lean-to building without planning permission from the council.
Attempting suicide was illegal and offenders could be jailed. John Burton of Silkstone Street in St Helens appeared in court on the 5th after drinking a bottle of ammonia in front of his family.
The man had been unemployed for three years and was treated at Providence Hospital (pictured above) before being arrested and charged with attempting to kill himself.
The St Helens Reporter described Burton's appearance in court as: "Pale, haggard and nervous in his attitude".
The magistrates remanded him for medical examination to the Whiston Institution, which was the name of the re-branded workhouse.
Last September the St Helens Health Committee had discussed the novel idea of building new houses for sale rather than rent.
Currently house builders found it not worth their while to build new homes even with a council subsidy of £75.
This, it was suggested, could be increased to £100 if the residents bought the property on a mortgage.
Builders would then have greater incentive to construct houses if they knew they could sell them to their residents.
This was not a completely new idea for the St Helens district as some of the working men of Haydock had been taking out mortgages to buy their homes.
Haydock was then administered separately from St Helens and it was felt that by following their example, people could purchase their houses over twenty years with their repayments little more than what their rent would have been.
At a St Helens Town Council meeting on the 6th the details of the proposed scheme were presented to it members.
Ald. Henry Bates, the chairman of the St Helens Health Committee, said with a subsidy of £100 per home, non-parlour houses could be built at a cost to the builder of £384.
If the occupier took out a 20-year mortgage on the property, their weekly payment would be 16s 4d a week, including rates.
However, the increasingly powerful Labour party was against such sales on principle and the council's vote on approving the scheme was split 16 to 16, with the Mayor deciding his casting vote should be in favour of holding a special meeting to discuss the subject in greater detail.
On the 8th a Liverpool hawker called Alice Hewitt was charged in St Helens Police Court with ill-treating her pony by overloading it.
Inspector Hallam of the RSPCA said he had found the woman in charge of a light pony cart carrying 19 cwts of coal. The pony was only 48 inches high and was quite exhausted by its burden.
Normally Mrs Hewitt hawked oranges and apples but a railway strike had been taking place at the time of the offence and as she could not obtain fruit, she was selling coal. Mrs Hewitt was fined 10 shillings.
We are all familiar with the charge of harbouring a fugitive. However, in the 19th century several publicans in the St Helens and Prescot district faced charges of harbouring a policeman!
In other words they had been serving a bobby beer when they were supposed to be on duty.
That term was no longer being used in the 1920s. Instead when Edward Armistead of the Boilermakers Arms in Hoghton Road in Sutton was accused of the same offence on the 8th he was charged with "suffering a constable to remain on licensed premises when on duty".
Not that the bobby suffered much during his drinking bout – but he certainly would have done when his superiors learnt of it!
The officer in trouble was PC Sydney Davies who was listed in the 1921 census as a 24-year-old boarder at a house in Waterdale Crescent.
Davies wasn't in court but Sgt Arthur Cust certainly was. He explained that at 8pm on one evening he had sent the constable to visit all the public houses in Sutton.
His mission had been to check that the regulations concerning sub-letting of licensed premises were being followed, as a result of a recent order by the licensing magistrates.
It wasn't until after 1am that he found the constable again rather worse for wear and he needed to be relieved of his duty. As a result the publican was fined £5 and costs.
That same penalty was also imposed on Martha Leadbetter, the licensee of the Victoria Inn (now called the Little Pig) in Ellamsbridge Road.
Just what happened to the suffering PC Davies, I cannot say – but I think we can guess!
Uncle Ben in the Reporter's children‘s column was in reality its long-standing editor, William Gentry, whose interest in young people extended to being the Chairman of the town's Juvenile Court.
In this week's column Uncle Ben gave the results of his recent limerick competition.
His young readers had been given the first four lines of a limerick and had been invited to add the final line of their own. The given limerick went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he'd never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies
They affected his eyes….."
Uncle Ben said that the entrants were not very sympathetic to the greedy boy's plight, writing:
"All who entered it seem to have decided that he deserved special and severe punishment. Poor lad; he suffered one way and another! The number of Beecham's pills our members made him swallow was almost sufficient to keep the whole population of St. Helens fit and strong for a year.
"It was a clever rhyme, and the idea of giving one of Beecham's pills to the lad after his feed of mince pies showed a commendable idea of the value of regulating medicine in such distressing circumstances.
"Unfortunately, however, the rhyming of “pill” with “ill” was too easy; too many competitors thought of it, with the result that I could not give one a prize without similarly rewarding the others, and then, I should not have had enough prizes to go round."
And so the winner of a fountain pen was Reginald Cook from Thatto Heath Road, whose complete limerick did not rhyme ill with pill but instead went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he’d never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies,
They affected his eyes,
And he fancies he sees mince pies still."
These days if someone builds a property without permission from the local authority, they can always seek retrospective planning permission – with demolition being the ultimate penalty. I don't think they would be prosecuted straight away.
But in St Helens Police Court on the 11th, Sarah Collins of Park Street and a bricklayer from Talbot Street called Herbert Sneyd were prosecuted for failing to give notice to the council that they planned to erect a new building.
Mrs Collins had hired Sneyd to erect an extra room at the rear of 5 Park Street, which she owned and which had previously been used as a discharged soldiers and sailors club.
When the Council received the building plans, they discovered that the lean-to structure had already been built and was in use.
Both defendants pleaded ignorance of the regulations and were fined 20 shillings each.
I wrote last week (and the week before) about lads getting up to mischief on a Sunday when there was very little for them to do – what today is often described as anti-social behaviour.
On the 11th a youth called Joseph Parkinson was fined 20 shillings plus 5 shillings damages for being part of a gang of boys that had smashed 17 street lamps on a Sunday afternoon. Parkinson admitting breaking five of them.
And finally, the Hippodrome Theatre in Corporation Street was now calling itself "the home of stars" and from the 11th included these turns in their line-up:
Clown Aroo ("Animal mimic entertainer"); Ara and Zetta ("Trick and comedy cyclists"); Toots Hanlon ("Versatile entertainer"); Dick Rawson ("Character comedian") and Elliott Savonas ("Present their great creation The Garden of Harmony").
The Zetta in the cycling act appears to have been a woman called Zetta Hills who achieved fame in 1920 by almost pedalling across the Channel on a water cycle.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include another crash at suicide corner, the drunken father from Rainford who said he refused to be chicken-pecked, the marbles stolen from Nuttalls bottleworks and the bizarre claim of kidnapping.
The man had been unemployed for three years and was treated at Providence Hospital (pictured above) before being arrested and charged with attempting to kill himself.
The St Helens Reporter described Burton's appearance in court as: "Pale, haggard and nervous in his attitude".
The magistrates remanded him for medical examination to the Whiston Institution, which was the name of the re-branded workhouse.
Last September the St Helens Health Committee had discussed the novel idea of building new houses for sale rather than rent.
Currently house builders found it not worth their while to build new homes even with a council subsidy of £75.
This, it was suggested, could be increased to £100 if the residents bought the property on a mortgage.
Builders would then have greater incentive to construct houses if they knew they could sell them to their residents.
This was not a completely new idea for the St Helens district as some of the working men of Haydock had been taking out mortgages to buy their homes.
Haydock was then administered separately from St Helens and it was felt that by following their example, people could purchase their houses over twenty years with their repayments little more than what their rent would have been.
At a St Helens Town Council meeting on the 6th the details of the proposed scheme were presented to it members.
Ald. Henry Bates, the chairman of the St Helens Health Committee, said with a subsidy of £100 per home, non-parlour houses could be built at a cost to the builder of £384.
If the occupier took out a 20-year mortgage on the property, their weekly payment would be 16s 4d a week, including rates.
However, the increasingly powerful Labour party was against such sales on principle and the council's vote on approving the scheme was split 16 to 16, with the Mayor deciding his casting vote should be in favour of holding a special meeting to discuss the subject in greater detail.
On the 8th a Liverpool hawker called Alice Hewitt was charged in St Helens Police Court with ill-treating her pony by overloading it.
Inspector Hallam of the RSPCA said he had found the woman in charge of a light pony cart carrying 19 cwts of coal. The pony was only 48 inches high and was quite exhausted by its burden.
Normally Mrs Hewitt hawked oranges and apples but a railway strike had been taking place at the time of the offence and as she could not obtain fruit, she was selling coal. Mrs Hewitt was fined 10 shillings.
We are all familiar with the charge of harbouring a fugitive. However, in the 19th century several publicans in the St Helens and Prescot district faced charges of harbouring a policeman!
In other words they had been serving a bobby beer when they were supposed to be on duty.
That term was no longer being used in the 1920s. Instead when Edward Armistead of the Boilermakers Arms in Hoghton Road in Sutton was accused of the same offence on the 8th he was charged with "suffering a constable to remain on licensed premises when on duty".
Not that the bobby suffered much during his drinking bout – but he certainly would have done when his superiors learnt of it!
The officer in trouble was PC Sydney Davies who was listed in the 1921 census as a 24-year-old boarder at a house in Waterdale Crescent.
Davies wasn't in court but Sgt Arthur Cust certainly was. He explained that at 8pm on one evening he had sent the constable to visit all the public houses in Sutton.
His mission had been to check that the regulations concerning sub-letting of licensed premises were being followed, as a result of a recent order by the licensing magistrates.
It wasn't until after 1am that he found the constable again rather worse for wear and he needed to be relieved of his duty. As a result the publican was fined £5 and costs.
That same penalty was also imposed on Martha Leadbetter, the licensee of the Victoria Inn (now called the Little Pig) in Ellamsbridge Road.
Just what happened to the suffering PC Davies, I cannot say – but I think we can guess!
Uncle Ben in the Reporter's children‘s column was in reality its long-standing editor, William Gentry, whose interest in young people extended to being the Chairman of the town's Juvenile Court.
In this week's column Uncle Ben gave the results of his recent limerick competition.
His young readers had been given the first four lines of a limerick and had been invited to add the final line of their own. The given limerick went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he'd never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies
They affected his eyes….."
Uncle Ben said that the entrants were not very sympathetic to the greedy boy's plight, writing:
"All who entered it seem to have decided that he deserved special and severe punishment. Poor lad; he suffered one way and another! The number of Beecham's pills our members made him swallow was almost sufficient to keep the whole population of St. Helens fit and strong for a year.
"It was a clever rhyme, and the idea of giving one of Beecham's pills to the lad after his feed of mince pies showed a commendable idea of the value of regulating medicine in such distressing circumstances.
"Unfortunately, however, the rhyming of “pill” with “ill” was too easy; too many competitors thought of it, with the result that I could not give one a prize without similarly rewarding the others, and then, I should not have had enough prizes to go round."
And so the winner of a fountain pen was Reginald Cook from Thatto Heath Road, whose complete limerick did not rhyme ill with pill but instead went:
"A smart little boy of Carr Mill,
Who boasted he’d never been ill,
Ate so many mince pies,
They affected his eyes,
And he fancies he sees mince pies still."
These days if someone builds a property without permission from the local authority, they can always seek retrospective planning permission – with demolition being the ultimate penalty. I don't think they would be prosecuted straight away.
But in St Helens Police Court on the 11th, Sarah Collins of Park Street and a bricklayer from Talbot Street called Herbert Sneyd were prosecuted for failing to give notice to the council that they planned to erect a new building.
Mrs Collins had hired Sneyd to erect an extra room at the rear of 5 Park Street, which she owned and which had previously been used as a discharged soldiers and sailors club.
When the Council received the building plans, they discovered that the lean-to structure had already been built and was in use.
Both defendants pleaded ignorance of the regulations and were fined 20 shillings each.
I wrote last week (and the week before) about lads getting up to mischief on a Sunday when there was very little for them to do – what today is often described as anti-social behaviour.
On the 11th a youth called Joseph Parkinson was fined 20 shillings plus 5 shillings damages for being part of a gang of boys that had smashed 17 street lamps on a Sunday afternoon. Parkinson admitting breaking five of them.
And finally, the Hippodrome Theatre in Corporation Street was now calling itself "the home of stars" and from the 11th included these turns in their line-up:
Clown Aroo ("Animal mimic entertainer"); Ara and Zetta ("Trick and comedy cyclists"); Toots Hanlon ("Versatile entertainer"); Dick Rawson ("Character comedian") and Elliott Savonas ("Present their great creation The Garden of Harmony").
The Zetta in the cycling act appears to have been a woman called Zetta Hills who achieved fame in 1920 by almost pedalling across the Channel on a water cycle.
St Helens Reporter courtesy St Helens Archive Service at Eccleston Library
Next Week's stories will include another crash at suicide corner, the drunken father from Rainford who said he refused to be chicken-pecked, the marbles stolen from Nuttalls bottleworks and the bizarre claim of kidnapping.