The remaining mills tried to keep going. They advertised for ring spinners and doffers, cone winders, slubbing frame tenters, blenders, slitherers, woollen warpers, and burlers and trimmers. When did you last see any of those? And exactly what does a slitherer do?

     This was a poor town. It wasn’t full of commuters to Leeds and Manchester yet. Every week the newspaper reported the people who had been stealing coal from the coal yard on Stansfield Road. “We thought it was free,” said three young women one week. Stealing from electricity or gas meters was always routine news. The bigger news was the butcher robbed in his shop by masked men armed with knives. They were too poor to actually buy it. They couldn’t make both ends meat.

     But it was a town where the most extraordinary things could happen. The Reverend J Turner was horrified when the train he was to catch with his family to Manchester didn’t stop as per timetable. It thundered straight through at express speed. The vicar and family were aghast; they had a bus to connect with in Manchester to get them to the airport for their holiday. The station master must have seen the expressions on their faces. As they recounted their plight to him he thought quickly. He knew there was another train due to start at Littleborough further up the line for Manchester. He contacted the Littleborough station master and arranged for this train to come especially back to Tod to collect the vicar. The vicar got a train, he got his bus, and he got his plane on time. Beeching would have been horrified. Can you imagine anything like that happening today? Sadly no. But this was life in a small town. 

     At the Hippodrome Theatre the Todmorden Players performed Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Niggers. You couldn’t call it that today could you? In the USA it was renamed And Then There Were None. Here, it is now called Ten Little Indians.  At the Town Hall there was regular wrestling. Dr Death was due to meet Chief Sitting Bull. This Sitting Bull came not from the plains of Dakota but from Batley.

      In May as I was sweating about exams at college, Shankly and Liverpool won the League title again and Everton beat Sheffield Wednesday to win the FA Cup.

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