Wigan Album

My grandma, Bertha Twinem, used to live in Douglas House, on the ground floor. Was very happy there until 1969 or 70, when the Douglas burst its banks and her flat was flooded. She never really got over the distress. It's more than a 90 year old can handle.

I remember that flood well, we lived on the 1st floor, number 18, so we got away with it, but the Douglas was really polluted in those days so those ground floor flats must have been a real mess after it subsided. I can remember a guy conoeing through the car park and partway up millgate.

Like most reporters, they often get names and places wrong, Kitty Higginson is Kitty Higgins her husband was Jack and the top of Douglas Street was Chapel Lane where Wigan Printing was located.
Having said that Margaret Walker (Peggy to her friends) and her husband Jimmy where good friends with my mother and dad, they had a daughter Margaret and son Joe who was a mate of my brother Alan, we lived at the corner of Douglas Street and Harrogate Street.
I don't remember Gladys Halliwell or David but Mrs Moore I am sure was still known as Mrs Sedgewick she had a son Michael but married again. Mr Moore might have been Scottish as he bought a Scottish Sunday newspaper, there was strip cartoon we used to read in dialect, something like oor Willie! He loved to go fishing. They did move to Marsh Green but the Higgin's, Walkers and our family moved into Douglas House.
I think the flood was in 1964 or 1965, I remember turning out in the pouring rain to catch to bus to Leigh to go ten pin bowling, I'd be about sixteen. Crossing Douglas bridge which was much lower then, I could see a tree wedged under the bridge and the swollen river backing up rapidly, first it started spurting out through the old stone retaining wall and then it overflowed the top and pouring into all of lower Scholes and over to Woodcock house, as it got deeper it flowed over the bridge towards Douglas House. I can steel feel the panic when it rose above the first step into the ground floor corridors of Douglas House. I made a quick exit and caught the bur to Leigh. when I got back, the only way in was via a plank that someone had laid from the railings in Douglas Street into someone's first floor kitchen window.
The following morning the water and subsided and there was a rowing boat stranded in the road at the bottom of Millgate outside the Horseshoe Pub. The bridge was subsequently rebuilt and raised.