FIFTY YEARS AGO THIS WEEK (22nd - 28th FEBRUARY 1971)
This week's many stories include an update on the postal strike, a rebuff for the Pilkington rebels, Prescot FC are in dire straits and Rainhill Hospital's curious treatment for compulsive gamblers that was based on boredom.
Britain's first national postal strike was now in its sixth week and was continuing to cause great inconvenience to St Helens businesses and residents. The Post Office was then a monolithic organisation and so the strike did not just affect letter deliveries but most telephone, telegram and post office counter services too. However strikers were drifting back to work and on the 23rd the Post Office announced that one in five telephonists had returned to their jobs.
Counter services at five main post offices on Merseyside – at West Kirby, Heswall, Liverpool, Dovecot and Birkenhead – were also back to normal. But at St Helens the main office in Church Street was closed – even for pension payments. Volunteer strikers had been attending in order to pay out pensions but they'd stopped in protest at some supervisors manning the counters and breaking the strike. They also said they were refusing to work as they had not received decimalisation training – because, of course, the staff had been on strike for six weeks.
Early on the 23rd, St Helens firemen risked danger from a possible explosion when they tackled a tanker fire on the East Lancs at Carr Mill. The tanker was carrying 4,600 gallons of fuel oil but the fire brigade managed to confine the blaze to the cab and bring the flames under control using two main jets. The cab of the tanker was severely damaged, but the driver had managed to jump clear.
During the evening of the 23rd an emergency meeting of shareholders was held at Prescot Football Club's headquarters in Hope Street. The club was in danger of folding as a result of a police raid in March 1968 that led to thirteen officials being fined for allowing non-members to buy drinks. Club secretary Jim Beasley told the meeting that the club had been financially sound up until then but it was now in a right mess. Eight weeks ago the Chancery Court had given the club six weeks to pay an £11,000 debt to Allied Breweries of Liverpool or forfeit their land and premises.
It was in 1962 that the brewery had loaned them the money for the building of a new social club but since the court ruling none of the cash had been re-paid. "We are waiting for the brewery to come along and tell us what they are going to do," Mr Beasley told the 40 shareholders at the meeting. "We are just in the dark about what is going to happen. In the meantime we are struggling to keep our heads above water."
The shareholders decided to send a letter to the president of their club, Sidney Reakes, informing him of their critical financial state. The Rainhill businessman was a former chairman of Liverpool FC and the letter asked him to bring an attractive Liverpool side to Prescot to reduce the amount of debt.
This was still the era of semi-professional rugby league and many players had other jobs. On the 25th the Runcorn Weekly News published a short feature on Laughton & Wallace, central heating engineers of 202 Nutgrove Road in St Helens. The firm was a partnership between George Wallace and Doug Laughton – the captain of Wigan rugby league team – who told the paper that the big thing in central heating at the moment was "micro bore", sinking the pipes into the plaster. Laughton & Wallace said they installed central heating in just two days while other firms took at least a week.
The Runcorn Weekly News featured a number of St Helens motor dealers in their "Car Guide". These included Ford dealer's Ashall's of City Road, Fiat dealers Forward Autos of Gaskell Street, Broughton's of Knowsley Road and Middlehurst's of Jackson Street. The latter had more than 50 used cars on sale, many of them Ford Cortinas, with an average asking price of about £800 – in today's money that equates to around £13,000.
At about 9.30 pm during the evening of the 25th, an 11-years-old girl was returning to her home in in Old Swan after attending a meeting at her local church. She had only a few hundred yards to go when she was dragged into a black saloon car by two men and driven to Blindfoot Road at Windle. There she was assaulted and later the girl was found in a distressed condition on the East Lancs. There appeared to be a good chance of catching the culprits as one was called Mick and the other had Tom tattooed on the back of his left hand. The detectives were full of praise for the girl who on the day after the attack was willing to retrace the car journey with them.
For the last six weeks Gerry Caughey – the leader of the 7-week strike that crippled Pilkingtons last year – and 100 other rebels had been attempting to get their jobs back at Triplex. The men had all been sacked after going on a further strike but they had not been able to find other jobs – seemingly through being labelled troublemakers. They had all now made peace with the General and Municipal Workers Union, which, as the Daily Mirror put it, was the union on which in 1970 they had "declared war". That was seen as an important first step to their re-employment at Triplex.
However the Guardian wrote on the 26th that the men's hopes of being taken back onto the payroll had been dashed – at least for now. That was because Ford workers were in the middle of what would become a 9-week stoppage for more pay. That had reduced the demand for safety glass for cars; so an overtime ban had been introduced at Triplex and the recruiting of new labour at the Eccleston plant had been stopped.
Automatic car washes were still quite new – having seemingly only arrived in St Helens in 1969. Promotions were quite common to encourage customers to try them out. Last November Carr Mill Motors had made their car wash free for a whole week promising a "showroom shine in two minutes". The Carr Mill Road garage had previously advertised their car wash in the Reporter at a charge of 5 shillings a time.
For seven days from this week the Four Acre Service Station in Clock Face Road was doing something similar – offering the "remarkable five-brush car wash" free with a purchase of 2 gallons of petrol. When they were first introduced at Four Acre in 1969, the Panda car washes were described as lasting 1½ minutes and were being charged at 2/6.
Frank Marsh from Parbold was fined £1 by St Helens magistrates on the 27th after pleading guilty by letter to parking a car in a prohibited waiting area in Hamer Street. However the 25-year-old had a good excuse for breaking the law. Frank wrote that he had been getting married that afternoon and could find nowhere else to park his car.
We hear a lot these days about gambling addiction with online betting making it so much easier to lay bets. Fifty years ago it was the introduction of betting shops and the expansion of telephone betting – along with fruit machines – that was causing obsessive gambling by some, although there was limited awareness of the problem. However the Echo revealed on the 27th that Rainhill Hospital had created a curious course of treatment for gamblers that was based on boredom:
"A scheme which offers hope of a cure for compulsive gamblers has been pioneered by a Merseyside hospital. Compulsive gamblers are taking a specially-designed course of treatment at Rainhill Hospital, St. Helens, aimed at curing them of the fever which in many cases has wrecked marriages and careers. Those who take the treatment have a betting shop in their own bedroom. A loudspeaker on the wall crackles out the odds and there are pictures of jockeys and horses and racing cards pinned on the walls.
"But there are no “winnings” to collect because everything has been faked. Sometimes the racing tapes are played for hours at a stretch during the 10 days a patient spends there. “The object is to make him fed up and bored with it all,” said a hospital spokesman."
The idea had been introduced at Rainhill some 18 months earlier and gamblers had also been treated for habitual card playing and fruit machine addiction. However the hospital had to admit that the success rate of the treatment was only 50%.
Next week's stories will include the treacherous roads that led to a pile-up at Haydock, hopes rise that the post office strike could end, the Lowe House boxing and the no-deposit homes to buy in St Helens for just a fiver a week.
Britain's first national postal strike was now in its sixth week and was continuing to cause great inconvenience to St Helens businesses and residents. The Post Office was then a monolithic organisation and so the strike did not just affect letter deliveries but most telephone, telegram and post office counter services too. However strikers were drifting back to work and on the 23rd the Post Office announced that one in five telephonists had returned to their jobs.
Early on the 23rd, St Helens firemen risked danger from a possible explosion when they tackled a tanker fire on the East Lancs at Carr Mill. The tanker was carrying 4,600 gallons of fuel oil but the fire brigade managed to confine the blaze to the cab and bring the flames under control using two main jets. The cab of the tanker was severely damaged, but the driver had managed to jump clear.
During the evening of the 23rd an emergency meeting of shareholders was held at Prescot Football Club's headquarters in Hope Street. The club was in danger of folding as a result of a police raid in March 1968 that led to thirteen officials being fined for allowing non-members to buy drinks. Club secretary Jim Beasley told the meeting that the club had been financially sound up until then but it was now in a right mess. Eight weeks ago the Chancery Court had given the club six weeks to pay an £11,000 debt to Allied Breweries of Liverpool or forfeit their land and premises.
It was in 1962 that the brewery had loaned them the money for the building of a new social club but since the court ruling none of the cash had been re-paid. "We are waiting for the brewery to come along and tell us what they are going to do," Mr Beasley told the 40 shareholders at the meeting. "We are just in the dark about what is going to happen. In the meantime we are struggling to keep our heads above water."
The shareholders decided to send a letter to the president of their club, Sidney Reakes, informing him of their critical financial state. The Rainhill businessman was a former chairman of Liverpool FC and the letter asked him to bring an attractive Liverpool side to Prescot to reduce the amount of debt.
This was still the era of semi-professional rugby league and many players had other jobs. On the 25th the Runcorn Weekly News published a short feature on Laughton & Wallace, central heating engineers of 202 Nutgrove Road in St Helens. The firm was a partnership between George Wallace and Doug Laughton – the captain of Wigan rugby league team – who told the paper that the big thing in central heating at the moment was "micro bore", sinking the pipes into the plaster. Laughton & Wallace said they installed central heating in just two days while other firms took at least a week.
The Runcorn Weekly News featured a number of St Helens motor dealers in their "Car Guide". These included Ford dealer's Ashall's of City Road, Fiat dealers Forward Autos of Gaskell Street, Broughton's of Knowsley Road and Middlehurst's of Jackson Street. The latter had more than 50 used cars on sale, many of them Ford Cortinas, with an average asking price of about £800 – in today's money that equates to around £13,000.
At about 9.30 pm during the evening of the 25th, an 11-years-old girl was returning to her home in in Old Swan after attending a meeting at her local church. She had only a few hundred yards to go when she was dragged into a black saloon car by two men and driven to Blindfoot Road at Windle. There she was assaulted and later the girl was found in a distressed condition on the East Lancs. There appeared to be a good chance of catching the culprits as one was called Mick and the other had Tom tattooed on the back of his left hand. The detectives were full of praise for the girl who on the day after the attack was willing to retrace the car journey with them.
For the last six weeks Gerry Caughey – the leader of the 7-week strike that crippled Pilkingtons last year – and 100 other rebels had been attempting to get their jobs back at Triplex. The men had all been sacked after going on a further strike but they had not been able to find other jobs – seemingly through being labelled troublemakers. They had all now made peace with the General and Municipal Workers Union, which, as the Daily Mirror put it, was the union on which in 1970 they had "declared war". That was seen as an important first step to their re-employment at Triplex.
However the Guardian wrote on the 26th that the men's hopes of being taken back onto the payroll had been dashed – at least for now. That was because Ford workers were in the middle of what would become a 9-week stoppage for more pay. That had reduced the demand for safety glass for cars; so an overtime ban had been introduced at Triplex and the recruiting of new labour at the Eccleston plant had been stopped.
Automatic car washes were still quite new – having seemingly only arrived in St Helens in 1969. Promotions were quite common to encourage customers to try them out. Last November Carr Mill Motors had made their car wash free for a whole week promising a "showroom shine in two minutes". The Carr Mill Road garage had previously advertised their car wash in the Reporter at a charge of 5 shillings a time.
For seven days from this week the Four Acre Service Station in Clock Face Road was doing something similar – offering the "remarkable five-brush car wash" free with a purchase of 2 gallons of petrol. When they were first introduced at Four Acre in 1969, the Panda car washes were described as lasting 1½ minutes and were being charged at 2/6.
Frank Marsh from Parbold was fined £1 by St Helens magistrates on the 27th after pleading guilty by letter to parking a car in a prohibited waiting area in Hamer Street. However the 25-year-old had a good excuse for breaking the law. Frank wrote that he had been getting married that afternoon and could find nowhere else to park his car.
We hear a lot these days about gambling addiction with online betting making it so much easier to lay bets. Fifty years ago it was the introduction of betting shops and the expansion of telephone betting – along with fruit machines – that was causing obsessive gambling by some, although there was limited awareness of the problem. However the Echo revealed on the 27th that Rainhill Hospital had created a curious course of treatment for gamblers that was based on boredom:
"A scheme which offers hope of a cure for compulsive gamblers has been pioneered by a Merseyside hospital. Compulsive gamblers are taking a specially-designed course of treatment at Rainhill Hospital, St. Helens, aimed at curing them of the fever which in many cases has wrecked marriages and careers. Those who take the treatment have a betting shop in their own bedroom. A loudspeaker on the wall crackles out the odds and there are pictures of jockeys and horses and racing cards pinned on the walls.
"But there are no “winnings” to collect because everything has been faked. Sometimes the racing tapes are played for hours at a stretch during the 10 days a patient spends there. “The object is to make him fed up and bored with it all,” said a hospital spokesman."
The idea had been introduced at Rainhill some 18 months earlier and gamblers had also been treated for habitual card playing and fruit machine addiction. However the hospital had to admit that the success rate of the treatment was only 50%.
Next week's stories will include the treacherous roads that led to a pile-up at Haydock, hopes rise that the post office strike could end, the Lowe House boxing and the no-deposit homes to buy in St Helens for just a fiver a week.
This week's many stories include an update on the postal strike, a rebuff for the Pilkington rebels, Prescot FC are in dire straits and Rainhill Hospital's curious treatment for compulsive gamblers that was based on boredom.
Britain's first national postal strike was now in its sixth week and was continuing to cause great inconvenience to St Helens businesses and residents.
The Post Office was then a monolithic organisation and so the strike did not just affect letter deliveries but most telephone, telegram and post office counter services too.
However strikers were drifting back to work and on the 23rd the Post Office announced that one in five telephonists had returned to their jobs.
Counter services at five main post offices on Merseyside – at West Kirby, Heswall, Liverpool, Dovecot and Birkenhead – were also back to normal.
But at St Helens the main office in Church Street was closed – even for pension payments.
Volunteer strikers had been attending in order to pay out pensions but they'd stopped in protest at some supervisors manning the counters and breaking the strike.
They also said they were refusing to work as they had not received decimalisation training – because, of course, the staff had been on strike for six weeks.
Early on the 23rd, St Helens firemen risked danger from a possible explosion when they tackled a tanker fire on the East Lancs at Carr Mill.
The tanker was carrying 4,600 gallons of fuel oil but the fire brigade managed to confine the blaze to the cab and bring the flames under control using two main jets.
The cab of the tanker was severely damaged, but the driver had managed to jump clear.
During the evening of the 23rd an emergency meeting of shareholders was held at Prescot Football Club's headquarters in Hope Street.
The club was in danger of folding as a result of a police raid in March 1968 that led to thirteen officials being fined for allowing non-members to buy drinks.
Club secretary Jim Beasley told the meeting that the club had been financially sound up until then but it was now in a right mess.
Eight weeks ago the Chancery Court had given the club six weeks to pay an £11,000 debt to Allied Breweries of Liverpool or forfeit their land and premises.
It was in 1962 that the brewery had loaned them the money for the building of a new social club but since the court ruling none of the cash had been re-paid.
"We are waiting for the brewery to come along and tell us what they are going to do," Mr Beasley told the 40 shareholders at the meeting.
"We are just in the dark about what is going to happen. In the meantime we are struggling to keep our heads above water."
The shareholders decided to send a letter to the president of their club, Sidney Reakes, informing him of their critical financial state.
The Rainhill businessman was a former chairman of Liverpool FC and the letter asked him to bring an attractive Liverpool side to Prescot to reduce the amount of debt.
This was still the era of semi-professional rugby league and many players had other jobs.
On the 25th the Runcorn Weekly News published a short feature on Laughton & Wallace, central heating engineers of 202 Nutgrove Road in St Helens.
The firm was a partnership between George Wallace and Doug Laughton – the captain of Wigan rugby league team – who told the paper that the big thing in central heating at the moment was "micro bore", sinking the pipes into the plaster.
Laughton & Wallace said they installed central heating in just two days while other firms took at least a week.
The Runcorn Weekly News featured a number of St Helens motor dealers in their "Car Guide".
These included Ford dealer's Ashall's of City Road, Fiat dealers Forward Autos of Gaskell Street, Broughton's of Knowsley Road and Middlehurst's of Jackson Street.
The latter had more than 50 used cars on sale, many of them Ford Cortinas, with an average asking price of about £800 – in today's money that equates to around £13,000.
At about 9.30 pm during the evening of the 25th, an 11-years-old girl was returning to her home in in Old Swan after attending a meeting at her local church.
She had only a few hundred yards to go when she was dragged into a black saloon car by two men and driven to Blindfoot Road at Windle.
There she was assaulted and later the girl was found in a distressed condition on the East Lancs.
There appeared to be a good chance of catching the culprits as one was called Mick and the other had Tom tattooed on the back of his left hand.
The detectives were full of praise for the girl who on the day after the attack was willing to retrace the car journey with them.
For the last six weeks Gerry Caughey – the leader of the 7-week strike that crippled Pilkingtons last year – and 100 other rebels had been attempting to get their jobs back at Triplex.
The men had all been sacked after going on a further strike but they had not been able to find other jobs – seemingly through being labelled troublemakers.
They had all now made peace with the General and Municipal Workers Union, which, as the Daily Mirror put it, was the union on which in 1970 they had "declared war".
That was seen as an important first step to their re-employment at Triplex.
However the Guardian wrote on the 26th that the men's hopes of being taken back onto the payroll had been dashed – at least for now.
That was because Ford workers were in the middle of what would become a 9-week stoppage for more pay.
That had reduced the demand for safety glass for cars; so an overtime ban had been introduced at Triplex and the recruiting of new labour at the Eccleston plant had been stopped.
Automatic car washes were still quite new – having seemingly only arrived in St Helens in 1969.
Promotions were quite common to encourage customers to try them out. Last November Carr Mill Motors had made their car wash free for a whole week promising a "showroom shine in two minutes".
The Carr Mill Road garage had previously advertised their car wash in the Reporter at a charge of 5 shillings a time.
For seven days from this week the Four Acre Service Station in Clock Face Road was doing something similar – offering the "remarkable five-brush car wash" free with a purchase of 2 gallons of petrol.
When they were first introduced at Four Acre in 1969, the Panda car washes were described as lasting 1½ minutes and were being charged at 2/6.
Frank Marsh from Parbold was fined £1 by St Helens magistrates on the 27th after pleading guilty by letter to parking a car in a prohibited waiting area in Hamer Street.
However the 25-year-old had a good excuse for breaking the law. Frank wrote that he had been getting married that afternoon and could find nowhere else to park his car.
We hear a lot these days about gambling addiction with online betting making it so much easier to lay bets.
Fifty years ago it was the introduction of betting shops and the expansion of telephone betting – along with fruit machines – that was causing obsessive gambling by some, although there was limited awareness of the problem.
However the Echo revealed on the 27th that Rainhill Hospital had created a curious course of treatment for gamblers that was based on boredom:
"A scheme which offers hope of a cure for compulsive gamblers has been pioneered by a Merseyside hospital.
"Compulsive gamblers are taking a specially-designed course of treatment at Rainhill Hospital, St. Helens, aimed at curing them of the fever which in many cases has wrecked marriages and careers.
"Those who take the treatment have a betting shop in their own bedroom. A loudspeaker on the wall crackles out the odds and there are pictures of jockeys and horses and racing cards pinned on the walls.
"But there are no “winnings” to collect because everything has been faked.
"Sometimes the racing tapes are played for hours at a stretch during the 10 days a patient spends there.
"“The object is to make him fed up and bored with it all,” said a hospital spokesman."
The idea had been introduced at Rainhill some 18 months earlier and gamblers had also been treated for habitual card playing and fruit machine addiction.
However the hospital had to admit that the success rate of the treatment was only 50%.
Next week's stories will include the treacherous roads that caused a pile-up at Haydock, hopes rise that the post office dispute could be coming to an end, the Lowe House boxing and the no-deposit homes available to buy in St Helens for just a fiver a week.
Britain's first national postal strike was now in its sixth week and was continuing to cause great inconvenience to St Helens businesses and residents.
The Post Office was then a monolithic organisation and so the strike did not just affect letter deliveries but most telephone, telegram and post office counter services too.
However strikers were drifting back to work and on the 23rd the Post Office announced that one in five telephonists had returned to their jobs.
Counter services at five main post offices on Merseyside – at West Kirby, Heswall, Liverpool, Dovecot and Birkenhead – were also back to normal.
Volunteer strikers had been attending in order to pay out pensions but they'd stopped in protest at some supervisors manning the counters and breaking the strike.
They also said they were refusing to work as they had not received decimalisation training – because, of course, the staff had been on strike for six weeks.
Early on the 23rd, St Helens firemen risked danger from a possible explosion when they tackled a tanker fire on the East Lancs at Carr Mill.
The tanker was carrying 4,600 gallons of fuel oil but the fire brigade managed to confine the blaze to the cab and bring the flames under control using two main jets.
The cab of the tanker was severely damaged, but the driver had managed to jump clear.
During the evening of the 23rd an emergency meeting of shareholders was held at Prescot Football Club's headquarters in Hope Street.
The club was in danger of folding as a result of a police raid in March 1968 that led to thirteen officials being fined for allowing non-members to buy drinks.
Club secretary Jim Beasley told the meeting that the club had been financially sound up until then but it was now in a right mess.
Eight weeks ago the Chancery Court had given the club six weeks to pay an £11,000 debt to Allied Breweries of Liverpool or forfeit their land and premises.
It was in 1962 that the brewery had loaned them the money for the building of a new social club but since the court ruling none of the cash had been re-paid.
"We are waiting for the brewery to come along and tell us what they are going to do," Mr Beasley told the 40 shareholders at the meeting.
"We are just in the dark about what is going to happen. In the meantime we are struggling to keep our heads above water."
The shareholders decided to send a letter to the president of their club, Sidney Reakes, informing him of their critical financial state.
The Rainhill businessman was a former chairman of Liverpool FC and the letter asked him to bring an attractive Liverpool side to Prescot to reduce the amount of debt.
This was still the era of semi-professional rugby league and many players had other jobs.
On the 25th the Runcorn Weekly News published a short feature on Laughton & Wallace, central heating engineers of 202 Nutgrove Road in St Helens.
The firm was a partnership between George Wallace and Doug Laughton – the captain of Wigan rugby league team – who told the paper that the big thing in central heating at the moment was "micro bore", sinking the pipes into the plaster.
Laughton & Wallace said they installed central heating in just two days while other firms took at least a week.
The Runcorn Weekly News featured a number of St Helens motor dealers in their "Car Guide".
These included Ford dealer's Ashall's of City Road, Fiat dealers Forward Autos of Gaskell Street, Broughton's of Knowsley Road and Middlehurst's of Jackson Street.
The latter had more than 50 used cars on sale, many of them Ford Cortinas, with an average asking price of about £800 – in today's money that equates to around £13,000.
At about 9.30 pm during the evening of the 25th, an 11-years-old girl was returning to her home in in Old Swan after attending a meeting at her local church.
She had only a few hundred yards to go when she was dragged into a black saloon car by two men and driven to Blindfoot Road at Windle.
There she was assaulted and later the girl was found in a distressed condition on the East Lancs.
There appeared to be a good chance of catching the culprits as one was called Mick and the other had Tom tattooed on the back of his left hand.
The detectives were full of praise for the girl who on the day after the attack was willing to retrace the car journey with them.
For the last six weeks Gerry Caughey – the leader of the 7-week strike that crippled Pilkingtons last year – and 100 other rebels had been attempting to get their jobs back at Triplex.
The men had all been sacked after going on a further strike but they had not been able to find other jobs – seemingly through being labelled troublemakers.
They had all now made peace with the General and Municipal Workers Union, which, as the Daily Mirror put it, was the union on which in 1970 they had "declared war".
That was seen as an important first step to their re-employment at Triplex.
However the Guardian wrote on the 26th that the men's hopes of being taken back onto the payroll had been dashed – at least for now.
That was because Ford workers were in the middle of what would become a 9-week stoppage for more pay.
That had reduced the demand for safety glass for cars; so an overtime ban had been introduced at Triplex and the recruiting of new labour at the Eccleston plant had been stopped.
Automatic car washes were still quite new – having seemingly only arrived in St Helens in 1969.
Promotions were quite common to encourage customers to try them out. Last November Carr Mill Motors had made their car wash free for a whole week promising a "showroom shine in two minutes".
The Carr Mill Road garage had previously advertised their car wash in the Reporter at a charge of 5 shillings a time.
For seven days from this week the Four Acre Service Station in Clock Face Road was doing something similar – offering the "remarkable five-brush car wash" free with a purchase of 2 gallons of petrol.
When they were first introduced at Four Acre in 1969, the Panda car washes were described as lasting 1½ minutes and were being charged at 2/6.
Frank Marsh from Parbold was fined £1 by St Helens magistrates on the 27th after pleading guilty by letter to parking a car in a prohibited waiting area in Hamer Street.
However the 25-year-old had a good excuse for breaking the law. Frank wrote that he had been getting married that afternoon and could find nowhere else to park his car.
We hear a lot these days about gambling addiction with online betting making it so much easier to lay bets.
Fifty years ago it was the introduction of betting shops and the expansion of telephone betting – along with fruit machines – that was causing obsessive gambling by some, although there was limited awareness of the problem.
However the Echo revealed on the 27th that Rainhill Hospital had created a curious course of treatment for gamblers that was based on boredom:
"A scheme which offers hope of a cure for compulsive gamblers has been pioneered by a Merseyside hospital.
"Compulsive gamblers are taking a specially-designed course of treatment at Rainhill Hospital, St. Helens, aimed at curing them of the fever which in many cases has wrecked marriages and careers.
"Those who take the treatment have a betting shop in their own bedroom. A loudspeaker on the wall crackles out the odds and there are pictures of jockeys and horses and racing cards pinned on the walls.
"But there are no “winnings” to collect because everything has been faked.
"Sometimes the racing tapes are played for hours at a stretch during the 10 days a patient spends there.
"“The object is to make him fed up and bored with it all,” said a hospital spokesman."
The idea had been introduced at Rainhill some 18 months earlier and gamblers had also been treated for habitual card playing and fruit machine addiction.
However the hospital had to admit that the success rate of the treatment was only 50%.
Next week's stories will include the treacherous roads that caused a pile-up at Haydock, hopes rise that the post office dispute could be coming to an end, the Lowe House boxing and the no-deposit homes available to buy in St Helens for just a fiver a week.