IOO YEARS AGO THIS WEEK (30th AUG. - 5th SEPT. 1921)
This week's stories include a bombshell bigamy admission in a St Helens court, a stormy meeting takes place between unemployed men and the mayor, the stealing by finding at Islands Brow, the long-serving head teachers of St Helens and how a failure to use safety equipment down St Helens Colliery cost a man his life.
It was common for head teachers in St Helens to undertake the job for a very long time – in part because they were often put in charge at a young age. According to their headstones in the Sutton Parish Church graveyard, James Plews had been headmaster of Sutton National School for 34 years and Hannah Parr served as headmistress of the infants' school for 41 years. Earlier this year Captain William Graham, the head of Rainford Village School in Cross Pit Lane, had retired after 35 years in charge.
Then there was John Duffy, who in 1913 was appointed headmaster of St Anne's RC Boys School in Sutton at the age of 24, a position he would hold for 37 years. He was the man who at a teaching conference once compared his students to animals, saying teachers were like lion tamers and a class of 30 to 40 schoolboys could be "as lively as a cage of monkeys"!
William Ashton had been another long-serving head and it was announced on August 30th that he had died at the age of 76. Until his retirement about ten years ago, Ashton had been headmaster of the St Helens Parish Church Schools for 43 years. That suggests he had been put in charge at the age of just 23. A keen cyclist, Ashton had also been president of St Helens Cyclists Club for 37 years.
The "finder's keepers, loser's weepers" saying was popularly adopted in the past when goods were found and kept. However, the police and magistrates saw things differently and regularly needed to remind those that took lost goods that the offence of stealing by finding had been committed. On September 2nd a coal dealer called John Hasselden from Park Road, his son John and an employee called William Houghland appeared in St Helens Police Court.
In May during the miners' strike, the men had come across a motor wagon belonging to Harry Hodson at Glade Hill (at the bottom of Island's Brow), with empty coal bags lying on top. The vehicle had broken down and while the owner was away for a short while, the trio helped themselves to twenty-three of the empty bags. When eventually tracked down by the police, they said they had assumed that the bags were either unwanted or lost.
The clerk to the court told the three defendants that if a person found any item and took no reasonable steps to discover who the owner was, it amounted to theft and so all three were fined 20 shillings. However, Harry Hodson – the coal merchant who owned the broken down wagon – had been buying the surface "crop coal" that during the miners strike was illegally being dug out. So the legality of what he was doing at Glade Hill was rather questionable too – but doesn't appear to have been gone into by the court.
There was an unusual twist to another case in the St Helens court when Peter Healey from Dukinfield was charged with being £24 19s in arrears on his wife's maintenance order. Such cases were quite common with defendants initially given time to pay off their arrears with the ultimate sanction of prison for those who continued to default on a court order. Healey told the Bench that in order to clear his debt he was prepared to pay an extra five shillings on top of the ordered amount. Although the required rate of maintenance was not stated in the newspapers, it was probably around 10 to 15 shillings per week.
That amounted to about nine to twelve months of missed payments and I expect the magistrates were getting sick of his unfulfilled promises. So he was told he must pay £5 down and 5 shillings extra each week or go to prison for two months. Healey replied that he only had nine shillings to his name and said if he went to prison, "I shall have nothing and lose my work in the bargain".
There was some logic to what he was saying. If Healey faced the ultimate sanction of prison, he would not be able to contribute anything to his wife's maintenance during his period of incarceration – and after his release from gaol if he had lost his employment. His wife would not benefit from his imprisonment but the system would have felt it had done its job. Getting Healey's employer to make deductions from his wages to pay the wife was the solution to the problem but rarely does that approach seem to have been taken.
Then came Healey's surprise admission that he wanted to give himself up for bigamy, before adding: "That is what is behind this case", implying that he had two families to support, which was draining his finances. "Tell that to the police downstairs", said the Chairman of the Bench, as he sentenced Healey to two months in prison and the man was reported as continuing to protest as the police took him down.
There was also a lot of anger at the Town Hall on the same day when the Mayor of St Helens met representatives of the unemployed. Accompanied by his Town Clerk, Councillor Richard Ellison was told that most of the men in St Helens who were out of work through the economic slump were no longer entitled to the dole. These payments were only made for a limited period and at just 15 shillings a week were far from generous.
James Charnock – who had been appointed secretary of the local unemployed – told the mayor that it was an "unjust and unequal system of society that allowed it to be possible for people to be starving and not able to help themselves." The mayor was asked to get St Helens Corporation to undertake relief work and a man called Houghton was reported as having talked in an "excited manner". At one point the mayor told Houghton that he would be removed from the room if he did not calm down.
Cllr. Ellison detailed the efforts he had made to set up relief work in St Helens, saying: "I have not the slightest sympathy for doles. What I want is to get some useful public work carried out". The mayor – a builder from Hard Lane – added that he had obtained a Government grant of £13,000 to create work for unemployed men in the borough – although that would not go very far.
At a St Helens inquest on the 5th, the question of careless workers who failed to follow safety procedures was raised. Although many works in St Helens were slowly becoming more safety conscious with improved procedures and equipment – they still lagged a long way behind our modern-day health and safety.
And getting workers to follow the rules and use the safety equipment provided could be highly problematic. The coroner Samuel Brighouse told the hearing that although a belt was provided for men undertaking window cleaning at height, "not one in a thousand used it, and in consequence they found it costly". That was not costly in financial terms but in terms of losing their life.
The inquest in question had nothing to do with window cleaning but the comparison was a valid one. The hearing was investigating the death of John Hackett of Phythian Street who had been killed down the Alexandra pit of St Helens Colliery (pictured above). William Helsby told Mr Brighouse that he and John had been charged with removing an underground roof prop. This had been supporting some other timber where there had previously been a roof collapse.
Stones, dirt and other debris dropping down from the pit roof onto miners was the most common cause of deaths underground – and both installing and removing support props needed to be done with care. However, John Hackett had simply sawed the prop almost completely through and then completed the job by bashing it with a hammer. As the prop came down, a large stone was dislodged. That collapsed all of the wood that was beneath it – and the two men had to run for their lives. William Helsby said his mate ran ten feet before getting clobbered by the falling timber – another yard, he said, and Hackett would have been safe.
However, there was a device called a gablock and chain that allowed colliery workers to pull these props out from a safe distance. When asked why they had not used the safety equipment, William Helsby said they thought they could have removed the prop safely without using it. In other words they simply couldn't be bothered. Mr Matthews, the mine inspector, told the hearing that what they'd been doing was very dangerous work and there was no reason why a gablock and chain was not used – in fact the men had one close to hand. The usual verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Thomas Walsh's reputation took a big dent on the 5th when St Helens magistrates ordered him to pay almost £10 in fines and court costs for diluting milk. The farmer from Portico Lane claimed that one of his cows had knocked over a can of milk and his cowman had decided to replace the lost milk with water. Edward Shannon went on oath to state he had been concerned he would be short for his customers – however he was very experienced at his job and should have known better.
And finally to wrap things up for this week, the non-St Helens article in the Echo that attracted my attention. It began: "The suggestion made at a New York luncheon by Mr. J. C. H. Macbeth, author of the Marconi telegraph code, that possibly Mars or some other planet is seeking to communicate with the world again, raises an absorbing topic."
Again? I don't think the Echo actually meant that little green men had previously been in touch. However, as wireless experiments were being conducted with more powerful sets and using wider frequencies, so strange signals kept being picked up. These would later be confirmed as electrical static or natural phenomena and not aliens speaking Martian!
Next week's stories will include the cases of sheer starvation through unemployment in St Helens, the biker accused of riding like a madman through Eccleston Street, the pub opening hours are revised and the painful case of the St Helens girl at Blackpool.
It was common for head teachers in St Helens to undertake the job for a very long time – in part because they were often put in charge at a young age. According to their headstones in the Sutton Parish Church graveyard, James Plews had been headmaster of Sutton National School for 34 years and Hannah Parr served as headmistress of the infants' school for 41 years. Earlier this year Captain William Graham, the head of Rainford Village School in Cross Pit Lane, had retired after 35 years in charge.
Then there was John Duffy, who in 1913 was appointed headmaster of St Anne's RC Boys School in Sutton at the age of 24, a position he would hold for 37 years. He was the man who at a teaching conference once compared his students to animals, saying teachers were like lion tamers and a class of 30 to 40 schoolboys could be "as lively as a cage of monkeys"!
William Ashton had been another long-serving head and it was announced on August 30th that he had died at the age of 76. Until his retirement about ten years ago, Ashton had been headmaster of the St Helens Parish Church Schools for 43 years. That suggests he had been put in charge at the age of just 23. A keen cyclist, Ashton had also been president of St Helens Cyclists Club for 37 years.
The "finder's keepers, loser's weepers" saying was popularly adopted in the past when goods were found and kept. However, the police and magistrates saw things differently and regularly needed to remind those that took lost goods that the offence of stealing by finding had been committed. On September 2nd a coal dealer called John Hasselden from Park Road, his son John and an employee called William Houghland appeared in St Helens Police Court.
In May during the miners' strike, the men had come across a motor wagon belonging to Harry Hodson at Glade Hill (at the bottom of Island's Brow), with empty coal bags lying on top. The vehicle had broken down and while the owner was away for a short while, the trio helped themselves to twenty-three of the empty bags. When eventually tracked down by the police, they said they had assumed that the bags were either unwanted or lost.
The clerk to the court told the three defendants that if a person found any item and took no reasonable steps to discover who the owner was, it amounted to theft and so all three were fined 20 shillings. However, Harry Hodson – the coal merchant who owned the broken down wagon – had been buying the surface "crop coal" that during the miners strike was illegally being dug out. So the legality of what he was doing at Glade Hill was rather questionable too – but doesn't appear to have been gone into by the court.
There was an unusual twist to another case in the St Helens court when Peter Healey from Dukinfield was charged with being £24 19s in arrears on his wife's maintenance order. Such cases were quite common with defendants initially given time to pay off their arrears with the ultimate sanction of prison for those who continued to default on a court order. Healey told the Bench that in order to clear his debt he was prepared to pay an extra five shillings on top of the ordered amount. Although the required rate of maintenance was not stated in the newspapers, it was probably around 10 to 15 shillings per week.
That amounted to about nine to twelve months of missed payments and I expect the magistrates were getting sick of his unfulfilled promises. So he was told he must pay £5 down and 5 shillings extra each week or go to prison for two months. Healey replied that he only had nine shillings to his name and said if he went to prison, "I shall have nothing and lose my work in the bargain".
There was some logic to what he was saying. If Healey faced the ultimate sanction of prison, he would not be able to contribute anything to his wife's maintenance during his period of incarceration – and after his release from gaol if he had lost his employment. His wife would not benefit from his imprisonment but the system would have felt it had done its job. Getting Healey's employer to make deductions from his wages to pay the wife was the solution to the problem but rarely does that approach seem to have been taken.
Then came Healey's surprise admission that he wanted to give himself up for bigamy, before adding: "That is what is behind this case", implying that he had two families to support, which was draining his finances. "Tell that to the police downstairs", said the Chairman of the Bench, as he sentenced Healey to two months in prison and the man was reported as continuing to protest as the police took him down.
There was also a lot of anger at the Town Hall on the same day when the Mayor of St Helens met representatives of the unemployed. Accompanied by his Town Clerk, Councillor Richard Ellison was told that most of the men in St Helens who were out of work through the economic slump were no longer entitled to the dole. These payments were only made for a limited period and at just 15 shillings a week were far from generous.
James Charnock – who had been appointed secretary of the local unemployed – told the mayor that it was an "unjust and unequal system of society that allowed it to be possible for people to be starving and not able to help themselves." The mayor was asked to get St Helens Corporation to undertake relief work and a man called Houghton was reported as having talked in an "excited manner". At one point the mayor told Houghton that he would be removed from the room if he did not calm down.
Cllr. Ellison detailed the efforts he had made to set up relief work in St Helens, saying: "I have not the slightest sympathy for doles. What I want is to get some useful public work carried out". The mayor – a builder from Hard Lane – added that he had obtained a Government grant of £13,000 to create work for unemployed men in the borough – although that would not go very far.
At a St Helens inquest on the 5th, the question of careless workers who failed to follow safety procedures was raised. Although many works in St Helens were slowly becoming more safety conscious with improved procedures and equipment – they still lagged a long way behind our modern-day health and safety.
And getting workers to follow the rules and use the safety equipment provided could be highly problematic. The coroner Samuel Brighouse told the hearing that although a belt was provided for men undertaking window cleaning at height, "not one in a thousand used it, and in consequence they found it costly". That was not costly in financial terms but in terms of losing their life.
Stones, dirt and other debris dropping down from the pit roof onto miners was the most common cause of deaths underground – and both installing and removing support props needed to be done with care. However, John Hackett had simply sawed the prop almost completely through and then completed the job by bashing it with a hammer. As the prop came down, a large stone was dislodged. That collapsed all of the wood that was beneath it – and the two men had to run for their lives. William Helsby said his mate ran ten feet before getting clobbered by the falling timber – another yard, he said, and Hackett would have been safe.
However, there was a device called a gablock and chain that allowed colliery workers to pull these props out from a safe distance. When asked why they had not used the safety equipment, William Helsby said they thought they could have removed the prop safely without using it. In other words they simply couldn't be bothered. Mr Matthews, the mine inspector, told the hearing that what they'd been doing was very dangerous work and there was no reason why a gablock and chain was not used – in fact the men had one close to hand. The usual verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Thomas Walsh's reputation took a big dent on the 5th when St Helens magistrates ordered him to pay almost £10 in fines and court costs for diluting milk. The farmer from Portico Lane claimed that one of his cows had knocked over a can of milk and his cowman had decided to replace the lost milk with water. Edward Shannon went on oath to state he had been concerned he would be short for his customers – however he was very experienced at his job and should have known better.
And finally to wrap things up for this week, the non-St Helens article in the Echo that attracted my attention. It began: "The suggestion made at a New York luncheon by Mr. J. C. H. Macbeth, author of the Marconi telegraph code, that possibly Mars or some other planet is seeking to communicate with the world again, raises an absorbing topic."
Again? I don't think the Echo actually meant that little green men had previously been in touch. However, as wireless experiments were being conducted with more powerful sets and using wider frequencies, so strange signals kept being picked up. These would later be confirmed as electrical static or natural phenomena and not aliens speaking Martian!
Next week's stories will include the cases of sheer starvation through unemployment in St Helens, the biker accused of riding like a madman through Eccleston Street, the pub opening hours are revised and the painful case of the St Helens girl at Blackpool.
This week's stories include a bombshell bigamy admission in a St Helens court, a stormy meeting takes place between unemployed men and the mayor, the stealing by finding at Islands Brow, the long-serving head teachers of St Helens and how a failure to use safety equipment down St Helens Colliery cost a man his life.
It was common for head teachers in St Helens to undertake the job for a very long time – in part because they were often put in charge at a young age.
According to their headstones in the Sutton Parish Church graveyard, James Plews had been headmaster of Sutton National School for 34 years and Hannah Parr served as headmistress of the infants' school for 41 years.
Earlier this year Captain William Graham, the head of Rainford Village School in Cross Pit Lane, had retired after 35 years in charge.
Then there was John Duffy, who in 1913 was appointed headmaster of St Anne's RC Boys School in Sutton at the age of 24, a position he would hold for 37 years.
He was the man who at a teaching conference once compared his students to animals, saying teachers were like lion tamers and a class of 30 to 40 schoolboys could be "as lively as a cage of monkeys"!
William Ashton had been another long-serving head and it was announced on August 30th that he had died at the age of 76.
Until his retirement about ten years ago, Ashton had been headmaster of the St Helens Parish Church Schools for 43 years. That suggests he had been put in charge at the age of just 23.
A keen cyclist, Ashton had also been president of St Helens Cyclists Club for 37 years.
The "finder's keepers, loser's weepers" saying was popularly adopted in the past when goods were found and kept.
However, the police and magistrates saw things differently and regularly needed to remind those that took lost goods that the offence of stealing by finding had been committed.
On September 2nd a coal dealer called John Hasselden from Park Road, his son John and an employee called William Houghland appeared in St Helens Police Court.
In May during the miners' strike, the men had come across a motor wagon belonging to Harry Hodson at Glade Hill (at the bottom of Island's Brow), with empty coal bags lying on top.
The vehicle had broken down and while the owner was away for a short while, the trio helped themselves to twenty-three of the empty bags.
When eventually tracked down by the police, they said they had assumed that the bags were either unwanted or lost.
The clerk to the court told the three defendants that if a person found any item and took no reasonable steps to discover who the owner was, it amounted to theft and so all three were fined 20 shillings.
However, Harry Hodson – the coal merchant who owned the broken down wagon – had been buying the surface "crop coal" that during the miners strike was illegally being dug out.
So the legality of what he was doing at Glade Hill was rather questionable too – but doesn't appear to have been gone into by the court.
There was an unusual twist to another case in the St Helens court when Peter Healey from Dukinfield was charged with being £24 19s in arrears on his wife's maintenance order.
Such cases were quite common with defendants initially given time to pay off their arrears with the ultimate sanction of prison for those who continued to default on a court order.
Healey told the Bench that in order to clear his debt he was prepared to pay an extra five shillings on top of the ordered amount.
Although the required rate of maintenance was not stated in the newspapers, it was probably around 10 to 15 shillings per week.
That amounted to about nine to twelve months of missed payments and I expect the magistrates were getting sick of his unfulfilled promises.
So he was told he must pay £5 down and 5 shillings extra each week or go to prison for two months.
Healey replied that he only had nine shillings to his name and said if he went to prison, "I shall have nothing and lose my work in the bargain". There was some logic to what he was saying.
If Healey faced the ultimate sanction of prison, he would not be able to contribute anything to his wife's maintenance during his period of incarceration – and after his release from gaol if he had lost his employment.
His wife would not benefit from his imprisonment but the system would have felt it had done its job.
Getting Healey's employer to make deductions from his wages to pay the wife was the solution to the problem but rarely does that approach seem to have been taken.
Then came Healey's surprise admission that he wanted to give himself up for bigamy, before adding: "That is what is behind this case", implying that he had two families to support, which was draining his finances.
"Tell that to the police downstairs", said the Chairman of the Bench, as he sentenced Healey to two months in prison and the man was reported as continuing to protest as the police took him down.
There was also a lot of anger at the Town Hall on the same day when the Mayor of St Helens met representatives of the unemployed.
Accompanied by his Town Clerk, Councillor Richard Ellison was told that most of the men in St Helens who were out of work through the economic slump were no longer entitled to the dole.
These payments were only made for a limited period and at just 15 shillings a week were far from generous.
James Charnock – who had been appointed secretary of the local unemployed – told the mayor that it was an "unjust and unequal system of society that allowed it to be possible for people to be starving and not able to help themselves."
The mayor was asked to get St Helens Corporation to undertake relief work and a man called Houghton was reported as having talked in an "excited manner".
At one point the mayor told Houghton that he would be removed from the room if he did not calm down.
Cllr. Ellison detailed the efforts he had made to set up relief work in St Helens, saying: "I have not the slightest sympathy for doles. What I want is to get some useful public work carried out".
The mayor – a builder from Hard Lane – added that he had obtained a Government grant of £13,000 to create work for unemployed men in the borough – although that would not go very far.
At a St Helens inquest on the 5th, the question of careless workers who failed to follow safety procedures was raised.
Although many works in St Helens were slowly becoming more safety conscious with improved procedures and equipment – they still lagged a long way behind our modern-day health and safety.
And getting workers to follow the rules and use the safety equipment provided could be highly problematic.
The coroner Samuel Brighouse told the hearing that although a belt was provided for men undertaking window cleaning at height, "not one in a thousand used it, and in consequence they found it costly".
That was not costly in financial terms but in terms of losing their life.
The inquest in question had nothing to do with window cleaning but the comparison was a valid one.
The hearing was investigating the death of John Hackett of Phythian Street who had been killed down the Alexandra pit of St Helens Colliery (pictured above).
William Helsby told Mr Brighouse that he and John had been charged with removing an underground roof prop.
This had been supporting some other timber where there had previously been a roof collapse.
Stones, dirt and other debris dropping down from the pit roof onto miners was the most common cause of deaths underground – and both installing and removing support props needed to be done with care.
However, John Hackett had simply sawed the prop almost completely through and then completed the job by bashing it with a hammer.
As the prop came down, a large stone was dislodged. That collapsed all of the wood that was beneath it – and the two men had to run for their lives.
William Helsby said his mate ran ten feet before getting clobbered by the falling timber – another yard, he said, and Hackett would have been safe.
However, there was a device called a gablock and chain that allowed colliery workers to pull these props out from a safe distance.
When asked why they had not used the safety equipment, William Helsby said they thought they could have removed the prop safely without using it. In other words they simply couldn't be bothered.
Mr Matthews, the mine inspector, told the hearing that what they'd been doing was very dangerous work and there was no reason why a gablock and chain was not used – in fact the men had one close to hand.
The usual verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Thomas Walsh's reputation took a big dent on the 5th when St Helens magistrates ordered him to pay almost £10 in fines and court costs for diluting milk.
The farmer from Portico Lane claimed that one of his cows had knocked over a can of milk and his cowman had decided to replace the lost milk with water.
Edward Shannon went on oath to state he had been concerned he would be short for his customers – however he was very experienced at his job and should have known better.
And finally to wrap things up for this week, the non-St Helens article in the Echo that attracted my attention. It began:
"The suggestion made at a New York luncheon by Mr. J. C. H. Macbeth, author of the Marconi telegraph code, that possibly Mars or some other planet is seeking to communicate with the world again, raises an absorbing topic."
Again? I don't think the Echo actually meant that little green men had previously been in touch.
However, as wireless experiments were being conducted with more powerful sets and using wider frequencies, so strange signals kept being picked up.
These would later be confirmed as electrical static or natural phenomena and not aliens speaking Martian!
Next week's stories will include the cases of sheer starvation through unemployment in St Helens, the biker accused of riding like a madman through Eccleston Street, the pub opening hours are revised and the painful case of the St Helens girl at Blackpool.
It was common for head teachers in St Helens to undertake the job for a very long time – in part because they were often put in charge at a young age.
According to their headstones in the Sutton Parish Church graveyard, James Plews had been headmaster of Sutton National School for 34 years and Hannah Parr served as headmistress of the infants' school for 41 years.
Earlier this year Captain William Graham, the head of Rainford Village School in Cross Pit Lane, had retired after 35 years in charge.
Then there was John Duffy, who in 1913 was appointed headmaster of St Anne's RC Boys School in Sutton at the age of 24, a position he would hold for 37 years.
He was the man who at a teaching conference once compared his students to animals, saying teachers were like lion tamers and a class of 30 to 40 schoolboys could be "as lively as a cage of monkeys"!
William Ashton had been another long-serving head and it was announced on August 30th that he had died at the age of 76.
Until his retirement about ten years ago, Ashton had been headmaster of the St Helens Parish Church Schools for 43 years. That suggests he had been put in charge at the age of just 23.
A keen cyclist, Ashton had also been president of St Helens Cyclists Club for 37 years.
The "finder's keepers, loser's weepers" saying was popularly adopted in the past when goods were found and kept.
However, the police and magistrates saw things differently and regularly needed to remind those that took lost goods that the offence of stealing by finding had been committed.
On September 2nd a coal dealer called John Hasselden from Park Road, his son John and an employee called William Houghland appeared in St Helens Police Court.
In May during the miners' strike, the men had come across a motor wagon belonging to Harry Hodson at Glade Hill (at the bottom of Island's Brow), with empty coal bags lying on top.
The vehicle had broken down and while the owner was away for a short while, the trio helped themselves to twenty-three of the empty bags.
When eventually tracked down by the police, they said they had assumed that the bags were either unwanted or lost.
The clerk to the court told the three defendants that if a person found any item and took no reasonable steps to discover who the owner was, it amounted to theft and so all three were fined 20 shillings.
However, Harry Hodson – the coal merchant who owned the broken down wagon – had been buying the surface "crop coal" that during the miners strike was illegally being dug out.
So the legality of what he was doing at Glade Hill was rather questionable too – but doesn't appear to have been gone into by the court.
There was an unusual twist to another case in the St Helens court when Peter Healey from Dukinfield was charged with being £24 19s in arrears on his wife's maintenance order.
Such cases were quite common with defendants initially given time to pay off their arrears with the ultimate sanction of prison for those who continued to default on a court order.
Healey told the Bench that in order to clear his debt he was prepared to pay an extra five shillings on top of the ordered amount.
Although the required rate of maintenance was not stated in the newspapers, it was probably around 10 to 15 shillings per week.
That amounted to about nine to twelve months of missed payments and I expect the magistrates were getting sick of his unfulfilled promises.
So he was told he must pay £5 down and 5 shillings extra each week or go to prison for two months.
Healey replied that he only had nine shillings to his name and said if he went to prison, "I shall have nothing and lose my work in the bargain". There was some logic to what he was saying.
If Healey faced the ultimate sanction of prison, he would not be able to contribute anything to his wife's maintenance during his period of incarceration – and after his release from gaol if he had lost his employment.
His wife would not benefit from his imprisonment but the system would have felt it had done its job.
Getting Healey's employer to make deductions from his wages to pay the wife was the solution to the problem but rarely does that approach seem to have been taken.
Then came Healey's surprise admission that he wanted to give himself up for bigamy, before adding: "That is what is behind this case", implying that he had two families to support, which was draining his finances.
"Tell that to the police downstairs", said the Chairman of the Bench, as he sentenced Healey to two months in prison and the man was reported as continuing to protest as the police took him down.
There was also a lot of anger at the Town Hall on the same day when the Mayor of St Helens met representatives of the unemployed.
Accompanied by his Town Clerk, Councillor Richard Ellison was told that most of the men in St Helens who were out of work through the economic slump were no longer entitled to the dole.
These payments were only made for a limited period and at just 15 shillings a week were far from generous.
James Charnock – who had been appointed secretary of the local unemployed – told the mayor that it was an "unjust and unequal system of society that allowed it to be possible for people to be starving and not able to help themselves."
The mayor was asked to get St Helens Corporation to undertake relief work and a man called Houghton was reported as having talked in an "excited manner".
At one point the mayor told Houghton that he would be removed from the room if he did not calm down.
Cllr. Ellison detailed the efforts he had made to set up relief work in St Helens, saying: "I have not the slightest sympathy for doles. What I want is to get some useful public work carried out".
The mayor – a builder from Hard Lane – added that he had obtained a Government grant of £13,000 to create work for unemployed men in the borough – although that would not go very far.
At a St Helens inquest on the 5th, the question of careless workers who failed to follow safety procedures was raised.
Although many works in St Helens were slowly becoming more safety conscious with improved procedures and equipment – they still lagged a long way behind our modern-day health and safety.
And getting workers to follow the rules and use the safety equipment provided could be highly problematic.
The coroner Samuel Brighouse told the hearing that although a belt was provided for men undertaking window cleaning at height, "not one in a thousand used it, and in consequence they found it costly".
That was not costly in financial terms but in terms of losing their life.
The inquest in question had nothing to do with window cleaning but the comparison was a valid one.
William Helsby told Mr Brighouse that he and John had been charged with removing an underground roof prop.
This had been supporting some other timber where there had previously been a roof collapse.
Stones, dirt and other debris dropping down from the pit roof onto miners was the most common cause of deaths underground – and both installing and removing support props needed to be done with care.
However, John Hackett had simply sawed the prop almost completely through and then completed the job by bashing it with a hammer.
As the prop came down, a large stone was dislodged. That collapsed all of the wood that was beneath it – and the two men had to run for their lives.
William Helsby said his mate ran ten feet before getting clobbered by the falling timber – another yard, he said, and Hackett would have been safe.
However, there was a device called a gablock and chain that allowed colliery workers to pull these props out from a safe distance.
When asked why they had not used the safety equipment, William Helsby said they thought they could have removed the prop safely without using it. In other words they simply couldn't be bothered.
Mr Matthews, the mine inspector, told the hearing that what they'd been doing was very dangerous work and there was no reason why a gablock and chain was not used – in fact the men had one close to hand.
The usual verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Thomas Walsh's reputation took a big dent on the 5th when St Helens magistrates ordered him to pay almost £10 in fines and court costs for diluting milk.
The farmer from Portico Lane claimed that one of his cows had knocked over a can of milk and his cowman had decided to replace the lost milk with water.
Edward Shannon went on oath to state he had been concerned he would be short for his customers – however he was very experienced at his job and should have known better.
And finally to wrap things up for this week, the non-St Helens article in the Echo that attracted my attention. It began:
"The suggestion made at a New York luncheon by Mr. J. C. H. Macbeth, author of the Marconi telegraph code, that possibly Mars or some other planet is seeking to communicate with the world again, raises an absorbing topic."
Again? I don't think the Echo actually meant that little green men had previously been in touch.
However, as wireless experiments were being conducted with more powerful sets and using wider frequencies, so strange signals kept being picked up.
These would later be confirmed as electrical static or natural phenomena and not aliens speaking Martian!
Next week's stories will include the cases of sheer starvation through unemployment in St Helens, the biker accused of riding like a madman through Eccleston Street, the pub opening hours are revised and the painful case of the St Helens girl at Blackpool.