GEE, it’s great to be back, lad!

That was the US-Lancastrian mix heard at Ringway Airport in 1962 as a party of emigrants came back to East Lancashire for a five-week holiday.

For many of the 100-strong group, it was the first time back on home soil to meet with family, for many decades.

They were all former mill workers, who had gone to work in the American cotton mills after the First World War. Their flight in a turbo prop plane from Boston had taken 14 hours and cost $250 a head.

For one ex-Blackburn woman, 62-year-old Mrs Alice Lawrence, who was visiting her brother, Walter Salt, the trip had brought grim memories of her original journey across the Atlantic in 1915 when she was just 15.

Her ship had been torpedoed and she, her mother, two sisters and brother found themselves on the open sea in a lifeboat crammed with 53 people for five hours, as a German U-boat circled, before they were rescued by a British cruiser.

The family re-sailed for America the next week.

She told our newspaper at the time: “After a huge explosion the captain had shouted women and children first and some men helped us into the lifeboat.

“We had only got about eight yards from the vessel, the Arabic, when we saw her go right down. It took only seven minutes to disappear and it was a sickening sight.”

It was the first time she had seen her family since that day nearly half a century before.

Enjoying his first flight at the age of 86 was war veteran Joe Walmsley, who was born in Blackburn in 1877 and lived in Whalley New Road before leaving for America in 1907.

Looking forward to a real cup of tea for the first time in 30 years was Mrs Mary Matthews, who had come home to see her friend Helena Kearsley in Caldwell Street, Padiham, while Sarah Wilkinson, who had left England in 1912, was planning to stay with her relatives in Read.

Also on the flight were Thomas Pendlebury, Mary Riding, Charles Clegg, Albert Stansfield, who was cousin of Gracie Fields and John Pickup who had all left Blackburn.

Then there was Lydia Lyons and Alice Tillotson, also of Blackburn, and Ellen Watson who came home to see her nephew Ernest Robinson of Burnley.