December 2013 Archives

Burtonwood – The Truth About G.I. Town

29 December 20133 January 2014 Steven Dowd

Four miles from Warrington in Lancashire, is Burtonwood, the great maintenance base for the American Air Lift to Berlin. There several thousand young Americans, most of whom had never been overseas before, were dumped far from their homes with orders to keep the Dakotas, Skymasters and other aircraft flying through the air door in the Iron Curtain. The success of the Air Lift was apparent to all, but locally the social consequences were less happy for both sides. Six thousand American airmen dumped down suddenly to live near a bleak…

The Vulcan Works – Making the Lion roar again

29 December 201329 December 2013 Steven Dowd

During the early part of 1979, Ruston Diesels Limited, the Company then occupying the historic Vulcan Foundry site, agreed to restore the locomotive Lion which had been a static exhibit for many years in the Transport Gallery of Liverpool Museum. This was to provide project work for apprentices and graduate trainees, and to enable Lion to participate in the forth-coming ‘Rocket 150’ celebrations. On 4 April, the engine arrived at Ruston’s looking rather incongruous on the back of an articulated lorry and during the next few weeks it was stripped…

Southworth Burial Mound

28 December 201317 June 2024 Steven Dowd

I recently purchased a number of the Burtonwood Brewery in-house ‘Top Hat’ magazines from the 1980s, in one of them was this article concerning the excavation of the Southworth Burial Mound which is between Winwick and Lowton. Digging into the roots of history Remnants of a long-lost civilisation have been unearthed from plough-blade depth on open farmland, close to a huge man-made crater which will eventually accommodate colliery waste. And to mark the sensational discovery, being hailed as the North’s most important prehistoric find of the last decade, the archaeology…

Steam-Boiler Explosion at Newton

28 December 20134 July 2020 Steven Dowd

There was a Great Loss of Life by a Steam-Boiler Explosion at Newton.. 22nd Sept 1838 We regret to inform that the Viaduct Foundry on the Manchester & Liverpool Line of Railway at Newton in the Willows, the property of Messrs, Jones, Turner, and Evens, was on MOnday morning last the scene of a dreadful and fatal steam-boiler explosion, by which eight persons are already dead, and two others are lying without much hope of recovery. It appears that Messrs Jones & Co. employ about 200 men, and in the…

Earlestown War memorial – unveiled by Lord Newton.

28 December 201328 December 2013 Steven Dowd

On Saturday afternoon, at Earlestown, Lord Newton unveiled a memorial of the South African war, which has been erected outside the Town Hall in honour of fifty men of Newton-in-Makerfield who volunteered for service in that historic struggle. The cost of the monument, about £360, is defrayed out of the local fund started in 1899 for the relief of necessitous cases arising out of such service. Much of the money was contributed by working men, and happily out of £991 raised it was found necessary to distribute only £215 in…

ST, Oswald’s, Winwick.

27 December 20137 April 2018 Steven Dowd

There is no beginning to the istory of Winwick. It goes beyond the Fourteenth Century to the earliest days of the English, to a time “when a King of Mercia was resisting evangelisation with free slaughter; and then, when we seem to have come to the birth of the ancient Saxon village, we see it again in a remoter vista, shining magically in the opal light of legend. The learned Usher thought that Winwick was Caer Gwentquic, one of the twenty cities collected by the monk Gildas out of Nennius;…

The Public Library – Crow Lane, Newton

16 December 201322 December 2013 Steven Dowd

The first library in Newton-in-Makerfield was, we believe, the one in connection with the Mechanics Institute held at the Printing Works. It contained some 400 volumes, which had a fair number of readers. Adult members paid 2s. 6d per quarter, 1s 6d. to the library, and 1s to the newsroom; junior members paid 1s. 3d. per quarter, 9d to the library and 6d to the newsroom. In the first quarter (April, May, June, 1853) there were 41 members. In 1868 the now extensive library in connection with the Viaduct Institute,…

Lady Hill – Newton-le-Willows

16 December 201322 December 2013 Steven Dowd

I noted that some questions have been asked about Lady Hill, a barrow or not a barrow? good question, I do not think its ever been investigated, The Rev Simpson conducted an investigation into the Castle Hill barrow/mound in the 1840s and it was also investigated in the c1988, but as far as I can discover, no investigations have been done on the the nearby Lady Hill mound. I have transcribed the following from the 1916 Vol II, J H Lane book on Newton. Its a description of the walk…