IWAS very interested in your 'Looking Back' article (Lancashire Evening Telegraph August 10), about how iron hoops were fitted on old wooden cartwheels.

This is because my father, Herbert Wade, who was born in Darwen in 1885 and died in 1965, served an apprenticeship as a wheelwright's blacksmith at Sam Rawlinson's in the Audley area of Blackburn.

He later worked for Cocker's in Peabody Street, Darwen, and for Alec Tootle, who had a forge on a farm at Entwistle.

I remember from being 10 years old in 1938, watching my father put these hoops on the wheels. It used to take four adults to lift them from the fire and quench them in a large tank of water as it started to burn into the wood. My father used to measure out the length of flat steel for the hoop and, by heating and bonding it (no rollers), made it into the correct shape and the overlap of the ring was welded together by two strikers hitting the hot metal and fusing it together.

The trade was dying well before the war. I used to swing on the hand-pumped fire bellows with my father during school holidays.

A favourite tale he used to tell me about, when he was an apprentice around the late 1890s and early 1900s, was that he used to get worried about the new-fangled motor cars and the talk of the possibility of rubber tyres.

The old wheelwrights all re-assured him that they would never do away with horse and carts, lad.

F WADE, Taylor Street, Preston.

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