The Stinky Brook Regatta

It was a modest sort of 'regatta', staged on Sunday mornings behind the local muck-works, to the rear of St Peter's Church, and featuring little wooden boats created by the menfolk from around Chancery Lane.

They used to race these tiny craft down a brick-lined water outlet which ran for some distance from the works to Sankey Brook, better known to locals as the Stinky Bruck. The men would enthusiastically wager a couple of bob a time on the outcome of each race.

All this and a miriad other bygone memories have been revealed to me by a local character who insists upon remaining anonymous. Born in the old Fol-dol Row, a string of 18 old terraced cottages which once stood along Chancery Lane, he also picks up on our street-games theme which has bounced through this page for the past several weeks.

And he adds a few more to the growing list, including Chocky (a game played with six small stones) and 'Jack Jack, Shine Your Light!', a game played after dusk when a lad armed with a torch would scamper across the wasteland behind Fol-dol Row and vanish into the darkness.

After a long count, the rest of the boyhood pack would set off in pursuit, shouting "Shine your light!" In response, the torch carrier would briefly switch on . . . this quick flash of light providing the only clue as to his hiding place.

During cold, dark months 'winter warmers' were the big craze, recalls my long-memoried contributor. These were tin cans, punctured all round to allow air to circulate and with a looped handle made from stout wire. The kids made little fires inside the tins (National Milk cans were best for the job) from newspaper, bits of wood and tiny pieces of coal.

The winter warmers were set roaring into life, flames shooting from every pierced hole, by energetically swinging the cans round in circles, taking care that the blazing particles didn't drop down your neck!

Fond memories are also stirred about the water-filled old Mile Pit (correct title Marl Pit. as marl, a form of earthy fertlisier, was dug from it in ancient times). "I almost lost my life a few times playing there," says our keen local history buff, who remembers doing some rough-and-ready canoeing on its watery expanse.

He explains: "During the war, and just after, Jimmy Coffey had a scrapyard in Tickle Street, running alongside this pond. He used to get used fuel tanks from wartime aircraft which were torpedo shaped."

Our informant fails to explain how he and his boyhood pals came by these jettison tanks, but adds: "We would cut a hole into the top of them, and boy, oh boy, what canoes these made!" But they were dangerously unstable unlesss loaded with ballast to keep them upright. There were old slagheaps behind the Fol-dol area, where gipsy clans set up camp at certain times of the year. "I knew all of them and helped by obtaining fresh water in their big brass urns. I had a tut-tut (a trolley made from four pram wheels and a plank of wood) and could carry three urns at a time to fill them up at my grandmother's yard. I was paid threepence an urn, not a bad little earner during 1951."

The Gipsy King at that time was a man named Price who drowned in a local water-filled pit known as Paddy's Ackle. Our memory-man, along with one of his young friends, made the gruesome discovery and later attended the funeral at St Peter's Church.

After the interment, in keeping with gipsy custom, the tragic clan leader's belongings and his traditional barrel-shaped caravan were ritually set ablaze, and the gipsy families then departed.

Chemical waste tips once disfigured a brook-side area, off Boardmans Lane and Park Road, known as Paddy's Blunder. But a Warrington firm proved the truth of the old Lancashire adage that where there's muck there's money.

For, our anonymous researcher says: "This waste was bought by Lythgoes, and sold on as farm lime. The firm had a fleet of old army lorries to remove it, and must have made a fortune."

In that same area was the Boardmans Lane timber-yard. But the owner wound it up as a bad business, and disappeared from the area around 1952-53, because the local kids "had a beano" helping themselves to his wood supplies.

How many veteran Parrers can remember Electro House, a big building, and the weigh-bridge on the same side of the road where the urchins would beg lifts from the lorry drivers? ("They were safe days then").

Our researcher, now in his sixties, can name all the shops which once abounded in his Parr neck of the woods, and he clearly recalls the district's sporting heroes and characters -- both the saintly and the dubious -- who populated it.

"A saint, if ever there was one, was Mr Fitzgerald who had a shoe shop. He went round all the Catholic homes on Friday nights, carrying a big bag containing pumps of all sizes. He would then give these out to the ones in need."

ALL this represents just the tip of the nostlagia iceberg and I will be returning to the subject of local soccer legends, colourful characters and corner-shop traders in the very near future.