IOO YEARS AGO THIS WEEK (21st - 27th SEPTEMBER 1920)
This week's stories include the angry race-goers who sued a Crab Street charabanc company, the violent Boundary Road woman who pulled down part of her own home, the boy that died at Pilks and the 10-year-old Thatto Heath thief who was sent to an industrial school for 6 years.
We begin on the 22nd when a boy called Ernest Rigby brought an action against a relative called William Bate. The latter was a carpenter from Junction Lane who worked at Clock Face Colliery (pictured above) as a box repairer, fixing the wooden coal boxes as they got damaged. Ernest had begun working for him at the age of thirteen and because they were related, he did not initially enquire about his pay. However the lad soon learnt that he was being cheated, as Bate was not passing on all of Ernest's wages that he was getting from the colliery.
Miners' agent William Cross investigated and warned Bate that if he did not pay the boy all the money that he owed him, the carpenter would be "blacked" from the mine. It was agreed that the back pay would be paid off at 10 shillings per week and a total of £2 was handed over. Then Bate stopped making payments, hence the court action. After hearing all the evidence the judge ordered that the outstanding amount of £11 5s 3d be paid to Ernest. Of course the boy would hand all the cash over to his mother, who, if he was lucky, might give him a small amount of pocket money back.
It does seem horrendous to us that children used to be employed undertaking dangerous industrial jobs. The school leaving age had increased considerably since the 1870s, when boys as young as eight or nine were allowed to work in factories. However in 1920 fourteen-year-olds (and some 13-year-olds) were still routinely employed to undertake work that could prove hazardous.
On the 23rd the inquest on Henry McCormick of Victoria Street, near Victoria Park, was held. The boy was employed at the Pilkington Plate Glass Works in Grove Street and had been wheeling broken glass. The 14-year-old attempted to board a transporter that carried heavy goods up and down the works when his foot got caught in the wheel and he was severely injured. Henry was taken to the Pilkington Special Hospital in Borough Road, which had been created in 1917 to help wounded soldiers and sailors. The state-of-the-art facility had performed miraculous work on military men but could not save Henry who died soon afterwards.
The charabanc business had boomed since the Armistice signing and the relaxation of petrol restrictions. Many new motor coach operators had been established, including William Fillingham of Crab Street. These charabancs were much faster than the horse-drawn wagonettes, which took four hours to get from St Helens to Southport. However horses could be more reliable than motor vehicles, as Fillingham learnt to his cost in St Helens County Court on the 23rd.
The charabanc proprietor had undertaken to transport a total of four groups to the Chester races. One party was to be collected from the Primrose Inn in Park Road and another lot from the Britannia Vaults in Duke Street. They left at 7 o'clock in the morning and William Fillingham returned to St Helens to collect two more groups and take them to Chester. These last two parties were returned to St Helens after the races had finished but those who'd left at 7am were left waiting in Chester Castle Market until the police turned them out.
It was a very wet night and the charabancs never turned up, due to a breakdown of some sort. The abandoned men took a train to Newton-le-Willows instead, arriving at about 4 o’clock in the morning, after which time they walked home to St Helens. William Fillingham was sued for half of the fare that they had each paid in advance. And, in some cases, the amount of wages lost through getting home too late to go to work.
Judge Thomas, after a long hearing, held that the defendant was responsible for the trouble. Although Fillingham's contract with his customers had a clause denying responsibility in case of breakdowns, the judge ruled it to be unreasonable and the man was ordered to pay the amounts claimed.
An extraordinary story was told in St Helens Police Court on the 24th when the landlord of Michael Kiernan attempted to evict him from his home. An agent called Frederick Halsall said the defendant had a very drunken wife and she had carried on violently at the house in Boundary Road (pictured above). The woman had pulled part of the house down and had thrown brushes through neighbours' windows and it would cost £20 to put the damage right. During the last few days, however, the woman had been taken to the mental ward at Whiston Workhouse.
Mr Kiernan told the court that his wife had for some time acted as if she was out of her mind, adding: "She is a terrible woman, very violent. I am not strong enough for her and she pushed me in and out of the house as she liked." Mr Kiernan said he had called the police at "all sorts of times" during the day and night, and complained about her conduct and the damage she had done. But they "simply winked at it and never did anything to remedy it".
The Bench decided to adjourn the case for a month to see if Mr Kiernan could get another home. But the man said he had worked hard for thirty years to keep the home together and he did not think he ought to be turned out.
Driving licences for motor cars were obtained from St Helens Town Hall, without any form of test being taken, and drivers needed to get into the habit of renewing their licences. Albert Houghton of Home Farm in Bold was summoned to the court charged with driving a motor vehicle without being licensed and for not having two front lights. The farmer explained that one of his lights had gone out and he'd been too busy harvesting to get his licence renewed. A century ago electric lamps were still in their experimental phase and most drivers used acetylene gas lamps, which sometimes went out during a journey. Mr Houghton was fined £1.
John Fenny of Hall Street in Clock Face was instantly killed on the 24th down no. 3 pit of Clock Face Colliery while fixing a prop to the roof. About a ton of debris fell on top of John and it took rescuers about forty minutes to extract him.
Whenever a father told the magistrates in court that he could not control his son, it meant only one thing – that the boy would be sent away to an industrial school for several years. Industrial schools were created to deal with juvenile delinquency and to teach youngsters a trade and were for those yet to commit a serious crime. Those that had done something serious were despatched to reformatories, which later became known as approved schools.
An industrial school was the destiny of James Friar of Pennington Square, off Elephant Lane, when he appeared in St Helens Police Court on the 25th charged with stealing a metal watch. The 10-year-old admitted entering the house of Joseph Travis of Heath Street in Thatto Heath while no one was in and helping himself to the watch. His father Richard told the Bench that he could not control James and so his son was despatched to an industrial school in Liverpool until the age of 16.
It does seem surprising that with so much open water in St Helens, parents allowed very young children to play out of doors unsupervised. On the 27th a toddler named Samuel Balmer of Friar Street, near Victoria Park, drowned in a water-filled pit at Cabbage Hall Farm in Windle City. The boy was just one year and ten months old but had been allowed to play out with a little girl called Annie Fox.
When Samuel fell into the water she went home crying and upon telling his mother what had happened, Mrs Balmer ran the 200-yard distance to the pond. On the way she met PC Pickford who waded into the water up to his waist and brought the boy out. But far too much time had elapsed for the child to be saved, despite the constable applying artificial respiration and little Samuel was declared dead.
The sentence on Thomas Yates in the Police Court on the 27th was for him to "return to Wigan", after he pleaded guilty to "singing for alms" in St Helens. The labourer told the Bench that he had been hoping to get work at Pilkingtons and upon promising to go back home was discharged from the court.
Being a member of "a gang playing pontoon" does not sound particularly threatening, but that was how John Woods was described in the St Helens Newspaper. The collier from Morris Street in Sutton had been playing cards on waste ground off Watery Lane and the police nabbed him when they raided the group. Woods also appeared in the Police Court and the magistrates fined him 10 shillings.
Next week's stories will include the woman who spent 27 years of purgatory with her husband, the drunken Eccleston woman's clothes-line thefts, the Prescot brothers who attacked their parents and the Liverpool Road woman "knocked about shockingly".
Miners' agent William Cross investigated and warned Bate that if he did not pay the boy all the money that he owed him, the carpenter would be "blacked" from the mine. It was agreed that the back pay would be paid off at 10 shillings per week and a total of £2 was handed over. Then Bate stopped making payments, hence the court action. After hearing all the evidence the judge ordered that the outstanding amount of £11 5s 3d be paid to Ernest. Of course the boy would hand all the cash over to his mother, who, if he was lucky, might give him a small amount of pocket money back.
It does seem horrendous to us that children used to be employed undertaking dangerous industrial jobs. The school leaving age had increased considerably since the 1870s, when boys as young as eight or nine were allowed to work in factories. However in 1920 fourteen-year-olds (and some 13-year-olds) were still routinely employed to undertake work that could prove hazardous.
On the 23rd the inquest on Henry McCormick of Victoria Street, near Victoria Park, was held. The boy was employed at the Pilkington Plate Glass Works in Grove Street and had been wheeling broken glass. The 14-year-old attempted to board a transporter that carried heavy goods up and down the works when his foot got caught in the wheel and he was severely injured. Henry was taken to the Pilkington Special Hospital in Borough Road, which had been created in 1917 to help wounded soldiers and sailors. The state-of-the-art facility had performed miraculous work on military men but could not save Henry who died soon afterwards.
The charabanc business had boomed since the Armistice signing and the relaxation of petrol restrictions. Many new motor coach operators had been established, including William Fillingham of Crab Street. These charabancs were much faster than the horse-drawn wagonettes, which took four hours to get from St Helens to Southport. However horses could be more reliable than motor vehicles, as Fillingham learnt to his cost in St Helens County Court on the 23rd.
The charabanc proprietor had undertaken to transport a total of four groups to the Chester races. One party was to be collected from the Primrose Inn in Park Road and another lot from the Britannia Vaults in Duke Street. They left at 7 o'clock in the morning and William Fillingham returned to St Helens to collect two more groups and take them to Chester. These last two parties were returned to St Helens after the races had finished but those who'd left at 7am were left waiting in Chester Castle Market until the police turned them out.
It was a very wet night and the charabancs never turned up, due to a breakdown of some sort. The abandoned men took a train to Newton-le-Willows instead, arriving at about 4 o’clock in the morning, after which time they walked home to St Helens. William Fillingham was sued for half of the fare that they had each paid in advance. And, in some cases, the amount of wages lost through getting home too late to go to work.
Judge Thomas, after a long hearing, held that the defendant was responsible for the trouble. Although Fillingham's contract with his customers had a clause denying responsibility in case of breakdowns, the judge ruled it to be unreasonable and the man was ordered to pay the amounts claimed.
Mr Kiernan told the court that his wife had for some time acted as if she was out of her mind, adding: "She is a terrible woman, very violent. I am not strong enough for her and she pushed me in and out of the house as she liked." Mr Kiernan said he had called the police at "all sorts of times" during the day and night, and complained about her conduct and the damage she had done. But they "simply winked at it and never did anything to remedy it".
The Bench decided to adjourn the case for a month to see if Mr Kiernan could get another home. But the man said he had worked hard for thirty years to keep the home together and he did not think he ought to be turned out.
Driving licences for motor cars were obtained from St Helens Town Hall, without any form of test being taken, and drivers needed to get into the habit of renewing their licences. Albert Houghton of Home Farm in Bold was summoned to the court charged with driving a motor vehicle without being licensed and for not having two front lights. The farmer explained that one of his lights had gone out and he'd been too busy harvesting to get his licence renewed. A century ago electric lamps were still in their experimental phase and most drivers used acetylene gas lamps, which sometimes went out during a journey. Mr Houghton was fined £1.
John Fenny of Hall Street in Clock Face was instantly killed on the 24th down no. 3 pit of Clock Face Colliery while fixing a prop to the roof. About a ton of debris fell on top of John and it took rescuers about forty minutes to extract him.
Whenever a father told the magistrates in court that he could not control his son, it meant only one thing – that the boy would be sent away to an industrial school for several years. Industrial schools were created to deal with juvenile delinquency and to teach youngsters a trade and were for those yet to commit a serious crime. Those that had done something serious were despatched to reformatories, which later became known as approved schools.
An industrial school was the destiny of James Friar of Pennington Square, off Elephant Lane, when he appeared in St Helens Police Court on the 25th charged with stealing a metal watch. The 10-year-old admitted entering the house of Joseph Travis of Heath Street in Thatto Heath while no one was in and helping himself to the watch. His father Richard told the Bench that he could not control James and so his son was despatched to an industrial school in Liverpool until the age of 16.
It does seem surprising that with so much open water in St Helens, parents allowed very young children to play out of doors unsupervised. On the 27th a toddler named Samuel Balmer of Friar Street, near Victoria Park, drowned in a water-filled pit at Cabbage Hall Farm in Windle City. The boy was just one year and ten months old but had been allowed to play out with a little girl called Annie Fox.
When Samuel fell into the water she went home crying and upon telling his mother what had happened, Mrs Balmer ran the 200-yard distance to the pond. On the way she met PC Pickford who waded into the water up to his waist and brought the boy out. But far too much time had elapsed for the child to be saved, despite the constable applying artificial respiration and little Samuel was declared dead.
The sentence on Thomas Yates in the Police Court on the 27th was for him to "return to Wigan", after he pleaded guilty to "singing for alms" in St Helens. The labourer told the Bench that he had been hoping to get work at Pilkingtons and upon promising to go back home was discharged from the court.
Being a member of "a gang playing pontoon" does not sound particularly threatening, but that was how John Woods was described in the St Helens Newspaper. The collier from Morris Street in Sutton had been playing cards on waste ground off Watery Lane and the police nabbed him when they raided the group. Woods also appeared in the Police Court and the magistrates fined him 10 shillings.
Next week's stories will include the woman who spent 27 years of purgatory with her husband, the drunken Eccleston woman's clothes-line thefts, the Prescot brothers who attacked their parents and the Liverpool Road woman "knocked about shockingly".
This week's stories include the angry race-goers who sued a Crab Street charabanc company, the violent Boundary Road woman who pulled down part of her own home, the boy that died at Pilks and the 10-year-old Thatto Heath thief who was sent to an industrial school for 6 years.
We begin on the 22nd when a boy called Ernest Rigby brought an action against a relative called William Bate.
The latter was a carpenter from Junction Lane who worked at Clock Face Colliery (pictured above) as a box repairer, fixing the wooden coal boxes as they got damaged.
Ernest had begun working for him at the age of thirteen and because they were related, he did not initially enquire about his pay.
However the lad soon learnt that he was being cheated, as Bate was not passing on all of Ernest's wages that he was getting from the colliery.
Miners' agent William Cross investigated and warned Bate that if he did not pay the boy all the money that he owed him, the carpenter would be "blacked" from the mine.
It was agreed that the back pay would be paid off at 10 shillings per week and a total of £2 was handed over. Then Bate stopped making payments, hence the court action.
After hearing all the evidence the judge ordered that the outstanding amount of £11 5s 3d be paid to Ernest.
Of course the boy would hand all the cash over to his mother, who, if he was lucky, might give him a small amount of pocket money back.
It does seem horrendous to us that children used to be employed undertaking dangerous industrial jobs.
The school leaving age had increased considerably since the 1870s, when boys as young as eight or nine were allowed to work in factories.
However in 1920 fourteen-year-olds (and some 13-year-olds) were still routinely employed to undertake work that could prove hazardous.
On the 23rd the inquest on Henry McCormick of Victoria Street, near Victoria Park, was held.
The boy was employed at the Pilkington Plate Glass Works in Grove Street and had been wheeling broken glass.
The 14-year-old attempted to board a transporter that carried heavy goods up and down the works when his foot got caught in the wheel and he was severely injured.
Henry was taken to the Pilkington Special Hospital in Borough Road, which had been created in 1917 to help wounded soldiers and sailors.
The state-of-the-art facility had performed miraculous work on military men but could not save Henry who died soon afterwards.
The charabanc business had boomed since the Armistice signing and the relaxation of petrol restrictions.
Many new motor coach operators had been established, including William Fillingham of Crab Street.
These charabancs were much faster than the horse-drawn wagonettes, which took four hours to get from St Helens to Southport.
However horses could be more reliable than motor vehicles, as Fillingham learnt to his cost in St Helens County Court on the 23rd.
The charabanc proprietor had undertaken to transport a total of four groups to the Chester races.
One party was to be collected from the Primrose Inn in Park Road and another lot from the Britannia Vaults in Duke Street.
They left at 7 o'clock in the morning and William Fillingham returned to St Helens to collect two more groups and take them to Chester.
These last two parties were returned to St Helens after the races had finished but those who'd left at 7am were left waiting in Chester Castle Market until the police turned them out.
It was a very wet night and the charabancs never turned up, due to a breakdown of some sort.
The abandoned men took a train to Newton-le-Willows instead, arriving at about 4 o’clock in the morning, after which time they walked home to St Helens.
William Fillingham was sued for half of the fare that they had each paid in advance.
And, in some cases, the amount of wages lost through getting home too late to go to work.
Judge Thomas, after a long hearing, held that the defendant was responsible for the trouble.
Although Fillingham's contract with his customers had a clause denying responsibility in case of breakdowns, the judge ruled it to be unreasonable and the man was ordered to pay the amounts claimed.
An extraordinary story was told in St Helens Police Court on the 24th when the landlord of Michael Kiernan attempted to evict him from his home.
An agent called Frederick Halsall said the defendant had a very drunken wife and she had carried on violently at the house in Boundary Road (pictured above).
The woman had pulled part of the house down and had thrown brushes through neighbours' windows and it would cost £20 to put the damage right.
During the last few days, however, the woman had been taken to the mental ward at Whiston Workhouse.
Mr Kiernan told the court that his wife had for some time acted as if she was out of her mind, adding:
"She is a terrible woman, very violent. I am not strong enough for her and she pushed me in and out of the house as she liked."
Mr Kiernan said he had called the police at "all sorts of times" during the day and night, and complained about her conduct and the damage she had done.
But they "simply winked at it and never did anything to remedy it".
The Bench decided to adjourn the case for a month to see if Mr Kiernan could get another home.
But the man said he had worked hard for thirty years to keep the home together and he did not think he ought to be turned out.
Driving licences for motor cars were obtained from St Helens Town Hall, without any form of test being taken, and drivers needed to get into the habit of renewing their licences.
Albert Houghton of Home Farm in Bold was summoned to the court charged with driving a motor vehicle without being licensed and for not having two front lights.
The farmer explained that one of his lights had gone out and he'd been too busy harvesting to get his licence renewed.
A century ago electric lamps were still in their experimental phase and most drivers used acetylene gas lamps, which sometimes went out during a journey. Mr Houghton was fined £1.
John Fenny of Hall Street in Clock Face was instantly killed on the 24th down no. 3 pit of Clock Face Colliery while fixing a prop to the roof.
About a ton of debris fell on top of John and it took rescuers about forty minutes to extract him.
Whenever a father told the magistrates in court that he could not control his son, it meant only one thing – that the boy would be sent away to an industrial school for several years.
Industrial schools were created to deal with juvenile delinquency and to teach youngsters a trade and were for those yet to commit a serious crime.
Those that had done something serious were despatched to reformatories, which later became known as approved schools.
An industrial school was the destiny of James Friar of Pennington Square, off Elephant Lane, when he appeared in St Helens Police Court on the 25th charged with stealing a metal watch.
The 10-year-old admitted entering the house of Joseph Travis of Heath Street in Thatto Heath while no one was in and helping himself to the watch.
His father Richard told the Bench that he could not control James and so his son was despatched to an industrial school in Liverpool until the age of 16.
It does seem surprising that with so much open water in St Helens, parents allowed very young children to play out of doors unsupervised.
On the 27th a toddler named Samuel Balmer of Friar Street, near Victoria Park, drowned in a water-filled pit at Cabbage Hall Farm in Windle City.
The boy was just one year and ten months old but had been allowed to play out with a little girl called Annie Fox.
When Samuel fell into the water she went home crying and upon telling his mother what had happened, Mrs Balmer ran the 200-yard distance to the pond.
On the way she met PC Pickford who waded into the water up to his waist and brought the boy out.
But far too much time had elapsed for the child to be saved, despite the constable applying artificial respiration and little Samuel was declared dead.
The sentence on Thomas Yates in the Police Court on the 27th was for him to "return to Wigan", after he pleaded guilty to "singing for alms" in St Helens.
The labourer told the Bench that he had been hoping to get work at Pilkingtons and upon promising to go back home was discharged from the court.
Being a member of "a gang playing pontoon" does not sound particularly threatening, but that was how John Woods was described in the St Helens Newspaper.
The collier from Morris Street in Sutton had been playing cards on waste ground off Watery Lane and the police nabbed him when they raided the group.
Woods also appeared in the Police Court and the magistrates fined him ten shillings.
Next week's stories will include the woman who spent 27 years of purgatory with her husband, the drunken Eccleston woman's clothes-line thefts, the Prescot brothers who attacked their parents and the Liverpool Road woman "knocked about shockingly".
We begin on the 22nd when a boy called Ernest Rigby brought an action against a relative called William Bate.
Ernest had begun working for him at the age of thirteen and because they were related, he did not initially enquire about his pay.
However the lad soon learnt that he was being cheated, as Bate was not passing on all of Ernest's wages that he was getting from the colliery.
Miners' agent William Cross investigated and warned Bate that if he did not pay the boy all the money that he owed him, the carpenter would be "blacked" from the mine.
It was agreed that the back pay would be paid off at 10 shillings per week and a total of £2 was handed over. Then Bate stopped making payments, hence the court action.
After hearing all the evidence the judge ordered that the outstanding amount of £11 5s 3d be paid to Ernest.
Of course the boy would hand all the cash over to his mother, who, if he was lucky, might give him a small amount of pocket money back.
It does seem horrendous to us that children used to be employed undertaking dangerous industrial jobs.
The school leaving age had increased considerably since the 1870s, when boys as young as eight or nine were allowed to work in factories.
However in 1920 fourteen-year-olds (and some 13-year-olds) were still routinely employed to undertake work that could prove hazardous.
On the 23rd the inquest on Henry McCormick of Victoria Street, near Victoria Park, was held.
The boy was employed at the Pilkington Plate Glass Works in Grove Street and had been wheeling broken glass.
The 14-year-old attempted to board a transporter that carried heavy goods up and down the works when his foot got caught in the wheel and he was severely injured.
Henry was taken to the Pilkington Special Hospital in Borough Road, which had been created in 1917 to help wounded soldiers and sailors.
The state-of-the-art facility had performed miraculous work on military men but could not save Henry who died soon afterwards.
The charabanc business had boomed since the Armistice signing and the relaxation of petrol restrictions.
Many new motor coach operators had been established, including William Fillingham of Crab Street.
These charabancs were much faster than the horse-drawn wagonettes, which took four hours to get from St Helens to Southport.
However horses could be more reliable than motor vehicles, as Fillingham learnt to his cost in St Helens County Court on the 23rd.
The charabanc proprietor had undertaken to transport a total of four groups to the Chester races.
One party was to be collected from the Primrose Inn in Park Road and another lot from the Britannia Vaults in Duke Street.
They left at 7 o'clock in the morning and William Fillingham returned to St Helens to collect two more groups and take them to Chester.
These last two parties were returned to St Helens after the races had finished but those who'd left at 7am were left waiting in Chester Castle Market until the police turned them out.
It was a very wet night and the charabancs never turned up, due to a breakdown of some sort.
The abandoned men took a train to Newton-le-Willows instead, arriving at about 4 o’clock in the morning, after which time they walked home to St Helens.
William Fillingham was sued for half of the fare that they had each paid in advance.
And, in some cases, the amount of wages lost through getting home too late to go to work.
Judge Thomas, after a long hearing, held that the defendant was responsible for the trouble.
Although Fillingham's contract with his customers had a clause denying responsibility in case of breakdowns, the judge ruled it to be unreasonable and the man was ordered to pay the amounts claimed.
An extraordinary story was told in St Helens Police Court on the 24th when the landlord of Michael Kiernan attempted to evict him from his home.
The woman had pulled part of the house down and had thrown brushes through neighbours' windows and it would cost £20 to put the damage right.
During the last few days, however, the woman had been taken to the mental ward at Whiston Workhouse.
Mr Kiernan told the court that his wife had for some time acted as if she was out of her mind, adding:
"She is a terrible woman, very violent. I am not strong enough for her and she pushed me in and out of the house as she liked."
Mr Kiernan said he had called the police at "all sorts of times" during the day and night, and complained about her conduct and the damage she had done.
But they "simply winked at it and never did anything to remedy it".
The Bench decided to adjourn the case for a month to see if Mr Kiernan could get another home.
But the man said he had worked hard for thirty years to keep the home together and he did not think he ought to be turned out.
Driving licences for motor cars were obtained from St Helens Town Hall, without any form of test being taken, and drivers needed to get into the habit of renewing their licences.
Albert Houghton of Home Farm in Bold was summoned to the court charged with driving a motor vehicle without being licensed and for not having two front lights.
The farmer explained that one of his lights had gone out and he'd been too busy harvesting to get his licence renewed.
A century ago electric lamps were still in their experimental phase and most drivers used acetylene gas lamps, which sometimes went out during a journey. Mr Houghton was fined £1.
John Fenny of Hall Street in Clock Face was instantly killed on the 24th down no. 3 pit of Clock Face Colliery while fixing a prop to the roof.
About a ton of debris fell on top of John and it took rescuers about forty minutes to extract him.
Whenever a father told the magistrates in court that he could not control his son, it meant only one thing – that the boy would be sent away to an industrial school for several years.
Industrial schools were created to deal with juvenile delinquency and to teach youngsters a trade and were for those yet to commit a serious crime.
Those that had done something serious were despatched to reformatories, which later became known as approved schools.
An industrial school was the destiny of James Friar of Pennington Square, off Elephant Lane, when he appeared in St Helens Police Court on the 25th charged with stealing a metal watch.
The 10-year-old admitted entering the house of Joseph Travis of Heath Street in Thatto Heath while no one was in and helping himself to the watch.
His father Richard told the Bench that he could not control James and so his son was despatched to an industrial school in Liverpool until the age of 16.
It does seem surprising that with so much open water in St Helens, parents allowed very young children to play out of doors unsupervised.
On the 27th a toddler named Samuel Balmer of Friar Street, near Victoria Park, drowned in a water-filled pit at Cabbage Hall Farm in Windle City.
The boy was just one year and ten months old but had been allowed to play out with a little girl called Annie Fox.
When Samuel fell into the water she went home crying and upon telling his mother what had happened, Mrs Balmer ran the 200-yard distance to the pond.
On the way she met PC Pickford who waded into the water up to his waist and brought the boy out.
But far too much time had elapsed for the child to be saved, despite the constable applying artificial respiration and little Samuel was declared dead.
The sentence on Thomas Yates in the Police Court on the 27th was for him to "return to Wigan", after he pleaded guilty to "singing for alms" in St Helens.
The labourer told the Bench that he had been hoping to get work at Pilkingtons and upon promising to go back home was discharged from the court.
Being a member of "a gang playing pontoon" does not sound particularly threatening, but that was how John Woods was described in the St Helens Newspaper.
The collier from Morris Street in Sutton had been playing cards on waste ground off Watery Lane and the police nabbed him when they raided the group.
Woods also appeared in the Police Court and the magistrates fined him ten shillings.
Next week's stories will include the woman who spent 27 years of purgatory with her husband, the drunken Eccleston woman's clothes-line thefts, the Prescot brothers who attacked their parents and the Liverpool Road woman "knocked about shockingly".