Wigan Album

I remember buying veg off Ken's stall, and he features in the film, "Wigan Market Hall.....The Final Days" which you can see on Youtube.

We too when in the market would call there Irene.
Ken lived to be 93 too, good evidence that eating plenty of vegetables and fruit benefits your health.
In winter and with no heating in the fruit market I remember they would stand on layers of cardboard, they said it helped stop the cold from the concrete floor striking up to their feet.

https://www.legacy.com/uk/obituaries/wigantoday-uk/name/kenneth-hall-obituary?id=46197381

Ken had a stall inside the main Market Hall when I used to buy off him, Cyril....the adjoining fruit market had gone, but I DO remember it.....I remember getting discarded lettuce leaves from under the counters for our tortoise when I was a child, and seeing the exotic-looking tissue-paper wrappers that tangerines came in at Christmas. I remember buying veg from the fruit market when I was first married, and running there from Wigan Park when my young son fell in the duck-pond and I had to take him home in a taxi.....I had to beg for some cardboard boxes for him to sit on in the taxi or the driver wouldn't have taken us......oh, the memories that a Wigan World photo brings back!

Irene, I remember going to a house on Greenfield Avenue at Ince in the early 1980s, it was an old lady who lived there and there was a Tortoise in the garden which she said had belonged to her sons.
The lady also said that in Autumn it would go under the garden shed until it got warmer in the next year, and had been doing that for years. I often thought about it and wondered how it had gone on over the years. Hopefully it had later been found and maybe still living a good life somewhere, just so long as it hadn't been found and mistreated.

I don't remember them being given by by fairgrounds, see link below,
'I'm sure that was once a Wigan joke, maybe the Bolton Evening News has just heard it', but the pet shop on the Wiend always had them for sale, but we wasn't allowed one, though some of my friends kept them in the 1950s and 1960s and remember them always on the hunt for greens. https://www.theboltonnews.co.uk/comment/4541045.coconut-goldfish-or-tortoise/

We had a tortoise when our children were growing up, Cyril.....he was found wandering along Warrington Road in Abram in the 1980s and we took him in; I assumed he had escaped from someone's garden and I placed an advert in the papershop window, but no-one claimed him so we kept him. He lived for a number of years and I remember taking him into Abram School to show the children when I used to help out there. We called him Topsy and our Jamie, (49 now), still has a picture he made of Topsy out of plastic shapes. One year he just didn't wake up from his hibernation and we buried him in the backyard where he joined a budgie called Ollie and a few fairground goldfish, one memorably called "Glug" by the children!

I remember school friends who had Tortoises and theirs died too when in hibernation Irene, it must be tricky getting things just right.
I've been reading on the web that it's only recently that they've been doing research on their hibernation or brumation, and it's interesting reading through the article. https://www.rvc.ac.uk/research/news/general/world-tortoise-and-turtle-day-research-from-the-royal-veterinary-college-reveals-risk-factors-to-tortoises-during-brumation-in-uk

Remember this bloke well and his stall in the old fruit market.

Irene,that same thing happened to m my tortoise Timmy..he just never woke up,I would be about twelve at the time and I have a photograph of me sat on a cane chair in our back yard and I was holding him..I used to have a locket and chain and Timmy’s photo was inside the locket..I really loved that little tortoise.