How century's end was marked 100 years ago

WHERE is everybody? It is a question that might well be asked by a time-traveller coming to East Lancashire from a century earlier to see the arrival of the year 2000.

For back in 1900, it was forecast that Blackburn's then population of 133,000 stood to be 1,463,000 today and that Burnley's could have gone up 20-fold in the 20th century to two million.

They were estimates that were, of course, way out. Burnley's present-day population of 91,400 is even less than the 100,000 of 1900 and Blackburn's would also be down on a that of a century ago if today's total of 139,500 did not also include Darwen's population.

What skewed the guesswork was the formula employed - in a chart drawn up for the Daily Mail's Golden Extra issue of December 31, 1900, commemorating the 20th Century's dawn.

The figures were based on the rate at which both towns had grown during the 19th - so spectacularly, that Burnley had gone from being a village of just 4,800 souls in 1800 and Blackburn from having only 11,500 inhabitants back then.

I am grateful to 86-year-old reader Mr John Fowler, of Nares Road, Witton, Blackburn, for letting me see this special sixpenny newspaper printed with golden ink that was bought by his grandfather all that time ago.

For it also includes some forecasts for the 20th Century that were indeed accurate - electricity superseding steam power on the railways, the building of the Channel Tunnel, air travel, the reaching of the North and South Poles, wireless telegraphy and the achievement of a cure for tuberculosis - even if its predictions of submarine ferry services to France, trains running under centrifugal force on just one rail and of a real cure for cancer being found were ones that did not come true. And in putting the end of the 19th century at the end of 1900, rather than of 1899 - as, according to its front page, did the rest of the world with the exception of the Swedes who celebrated the event a year earlier - the old newspaper gives encouragement to those who today say the arrival of the Millennium is being marked a year too soon.

As there is now, there was a debate back then about the timing of the great occasion - the Northern Daily Telegraph saying on the same date: "Some people hold the opinion that the 20th Century began with the close of 1899.

"The more widely-accepted view is that the 19th Century ends tonight with the close of the year 1900." However the newspaper, under the proprietorship of its abstemious founder TP Ritzema, was much more concerned with how the end of the century was being marked that night at Clitheroe - which was the only town in the country where the pubs had been granted extended drinking hours . . . until as late as one o'clock in the morning.

Referring to the New Year's Eve midnight services taking place in churches across the country, the NDT swiped at the town's licensing magistrates' licence.

"In thousands of places of worship that moment will be greeted by tens of thousands of worshippers on bended knee.

"At Clitheroe, it will be greeted by the opening of the public house," the newspaper said.

And it sniped: "We congratulate Clitheroe on its 'splendid isolation' on this occasion. Its example has not been imitated by one town in the whole land. Clitheroe is passing from the 18th century to the 19th century while the rest of the world is passing from the 19th to the 20th." As it happened, only 23 of the town's 49 pubs and beerhouses which could have taken advantage of Clitheroe's unique extension actually bothered to do so - and there was not a single case of drunkenness before the magistrates the next morning.

"The ratepayers' appeal to the inhabitants of the town to refrain from attending public houses after 11 seems to have had some effect," commented the NDT.

Indeed, it seems that 99 years ago the marking of the end of the century was done more in the churches and on the streets of East Lancashire where crowds of well-wishers exchanged New Year greetings. At Blackburn, the town centre presented a "very animated appearance" at midnight as the bells of the Parish Church rang out the old year and the firing of the the gun at the Cattle Market that was used daily to signal 1pm triggered a chorus of "buzzers" on the town's mills and whistles from railway engines.

And at Burnley, too, the streets were crowded.

"The public houses were no busier than on any ordinary Saturday night and there does not appear to have been a great deal of drunkenness," said the NDT.

Indeed, the only rowdiness seems to have occurred at Nelson where Nelson Brass Band played dance music in the town centre.

"But," reported the newspaper, "unfortunately, considerable horseplay was indulged in by the crowd, as a result of which a young man fell and broke his leg." But if the general sobriety and avoiding the pub on that epochal New Year's Eve contrast sharply with the plethora of boozy beanos planned for the forthcoming Millennium bash, was it really a case of our ancestors being much more moderate sorts back then - when there was actually a pub on almost every corner?

Hardly, for one thing that kept many people out of the pubs was the prospect of drinkers ending up, not legless, but lifeless - because the beer was poisoned with arsenic.

It was a scare that emerged late in 1900, being recognised first in Manchester and Salford - where by the end of November 500 cases were suspected - and later in towns all over the North and Midlands.

East Lancashire's brewers poured advertisements and analysts' reports on the NDT's front page, testifying to the purity of their ale.

That did not stop the Nova Scotia Brewery in Blackburn having to pour away more than 28,000 gallons a week later when its beer was found to be contain the poison and thousands more going into the drains from 33 pubs in Darwen whose stocks were also contaminated.

By January, the cause had been pinpointed - the blame lay in the contamination with arsenic of the sugar supplied to brewers by a Liverpool refinery and in the sulphuric acid used in its manufacture.

The Blackburn brewer successfully sued the refiner for loss of the condemned beer and damage to its trade - winning the then huge sum of £1,950 in damages as well as costs - having told the hearing at Manchester Assizes that the scare had interfered "very largely" with the consumption of beer.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.