Subject: RE: Dirty Old Town gasworks going :-(
From:
Steve Shaw
Date: 31 May 18 - 08:10 PM
Well I'm not going to enter into disputes about the precise lyrics, but a number of points raised so far in this thread resonate with me. First, me mum and her family were solid Salfordians. She was born in Silk Street. My great uncle Jimmy Curliss, who was killed at Gallipoli, is remembered on a plaque in Salford Cathedral (though his surname is spelled wrong). He's somewhere on the Helles Memorial too but I haven't been able to track down the inscription. Even after my mum's family had moved to Whitefield, into a house now lost to the development around Morrisons, my grandad worked in Salford docks, as he'd done all his working life, and the Salford pubs (especially the ones that had Tetley bitter) were his lifelong stomping grounds. My gran worked in the Halls sweet factory. They don't make 'em like that any more.
I know the Bury-Bolton bit of the canal very well. In 1973 I studied the stretch from the middle of Radcliffe all the way to Bury and made extensive notes on the flora, which I still have, in my own fair hand. My mum and dad still live just a stone's throw from the canal as it nears Elton reservoir, so I still get to see it. Water soldier has taken over large stretches since I did my survey, but apart from that not much has changed. As far as I know, royal fern still pokes out of the towpath wall in Radcliffe and Bury and the lemon-scented buckler fern still grows near where the Farmers Arms (more recently, Benny's nightclub) used to be next to the canal.
You mention Nob End, Dave. In fact, the flat area there, next to the river, is a botanical legend. It is an area on which alkaline waste was dumped for years in Victorian times. It now harbours an amazing flora, totally untypical of that bit of Lancashire. I went there for the day with the legendary Vicar Shaw (no relation) from Oldham, a great buddy of Roy Lancaster (who I've also met), a botanist of the kind you don't get any more. The reverend gentleman, an earthly type of chap, called me his "Radcliffe eye." We wrote many letters to each other for several years, and lamentably, I seem to have lost them all. The Rev was an ebullient man whose enthusiasm for plants, especially weird aliens that had somehow made their way to Britain, was very catching. Roy Lancaster said that he wasn't really a vicar who liked plants - he was a botanist who was also a bit of a vicar. One spring day, when the Rev was in his mid-70s, a brilliant botanist from Darwen called Peter Fentem and I took the vicar up Penyghent to see the purple saxifrage in bloom, an alpine that he'd never seen. Peter and I continued to the summit, as you do, once we'd located the plant in all its glory, but Vicar Shaw wouldn't come up with us. "I've come up 'ere ter see t'purple saxifrage, not bloody view from t'top o' t'mountain!"
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sj
