Wigan Album

It seems several of the buildings here are also in the recently submitted photo of "Wallgate, WiganPier & Eckersleys Mill"

I'd guess the viewpoint here is just off the right hand edge of that photo looking towards the mill building with the apex roof.

75 years on, I wonder if any of those six chimneys are still surviving?

Josh last time I looked only half a chimney was left standing.

Seems that all that industrial smoke that we were all subjected to in that era, that smoke must have contributed to all those abominable smog conditions.
Smogs, they were really awful conditions.
The clean air act brought about cleaner air conditions.

Yes, bronchitis was known as the Lancashire disease.

A.P. Those smogs were just added aggravation to all those poor miners that were suffering tragically from the dreaded lung diseases attributed as a result of working down the pit, plus the many, many asthma suffers.

Albert, the mention of smogs reminded me of the times we would spend an afternoon at the pictures, at luchtime on entering it could be clear and maybe brilliant sunshine, however many a time on coming out when the film was over there would be a thick smog and be lucky if the buses were still running, if not it would be a cold walk home with other folks casting eerie shadows as they hurried their way through the smog.

"Smogs, they were really awful conditions.
The clean air act brought about cleaner air conditions."

Yet throat and lung cancer is higher now than it's ever been.

I read somewhere that Lancashire (most of it) was built on low lying marshland. Take into consideration the comments so far and it’s easy to see why bronchitis was such a prevalent and awful affliction in Lancashire.

I have mentioned this somewhere on W.W.A. previously. In the late fifties, early sixties, in the Wigan Borough Police, we began to be issued with smog masks. It was a metal plate, it had a space cut into it for your mouth, and your nose went into a groove for your nose, above it.
A medicated gauze would cover your mouth, and nostrils, held in place by the metal plate.
At refreshment time the gauze was changed, as where your mouth and nose had been, it was caked in a sticky black tar substance. That would have gone into your lungs.

I remember a girl at school showing me the effects of cigarette smoke blown onto a piece of white lint...

As police officers each of us doing point duty absorbed into our lungs copious amounts of toxic exhaust fumes.
In the fifties and early sixties, all traffic travelling north, on the western side, to Glasgow, and traffic travelling south had to go through the centre of Wigan, traffic was always very heavy, and it was prior to the introduction of motorways. There were two points to man, one at the bottom (Wallgate/King Street) the other at the top. (Wallgate/Library Street) .After an hour on point, your face was covered in soot.

after an hour on point duty albert your arms must have felt like lead. i often wonder if the present day driver would be able to understand the hand signals we had to use

You’ve hit the nail right on the head there rt. Did I know you at Wigan?. It is such a long time ago. In May, God willing, I will have been drawing my Police pension 34 years.

Albert, Did you know a police officer named Maurice Ramsdale? Don't know where he was based, but he sometimes did the point duty at The Saddle junction. That would be early 1950's. His family and my own were friends when I was a child.

AP The only Maurice I knew was Maurice Heyes. On retirement he worked as a messenger, in Wigan for one of branches of a well known bank