Readers might be interested in more of my recollections of Fulwood sixty years ago, and also in some of the activities of younger Fulwoodonians. As you read this article, you will realise that it includes that period of the Second World War.

First of all, I will start at Broughton Parish Church. Although this, of course, is not in Fulwood there were two large buildings at the rear of the Church, where boys from Fulwood went once a week to learn woodwork and girls went to do cookery.

Off D’Urton Lane was Fernyhalgh Lane, where there was the Catholic Church with a magnificent cedar of Lebanon and, more interestingly, a well near the church yard.

Then, coming up Garstang Road, there was the grocer who used to put a list on his shop window of late payers ,to their embarrassment and the amusement of everybody else!

On the south side of the Black Bull Inn was the smithy. After school, children delighted in watching the blacksmith beat horse shoes amidst much clanging of metal and heat from his furnace.

Almost opposite the smithy they built the library before the war. The first librarian was a Miss Rose and the whole of Fulwood knew her. The library was very modern for those days and an innovation was a special room for the children’s section. However, the architect’s dream and Miss Rose’s ideas soon came to naught as the adult library soon encroached into the children’s room. One fascinating thing about this library was that, for the first three or four years, there was something wrong with the drainage, and the basement used to fill up with water – to the great interest of the all the children who went there.

In Sharoe Green Lane, where the hospital now stands, was a private junior school: ‘Manor House’, where the more affluent parents used to send their children. Nearby was a pig farm, and people who lived within a quarter of a mile used to have to put up with the most vile smell whenever the farmer put the manure on his fields!

Further along Sharoe Green Lane, and just after it had turned south, were the tennis courts where most of the more athletic minded Fulwoodonians played. One could purchase tomatoes at the attached nursery too.

Further along Garstang Road, we come to a host of other roads (such as Methuen Avenue) leading off it. It is interesting to learn that, before the war, all these houses which had septic tanks were obliged to pay for their connections to the main sewage system. Well, the war intervened. After the war, the Fulwood ratepayers got to work to try to persuade the water company to carry out its obligations. It was like talking to a brick wall but then there was a polio scare. It was realised that leakages from septic tanks, and which flowed into a small stream at the back of the gardens, could attract the polio virus. Suddenly, all the connections were made in a matter of months!

As we continue southwards along Garstang Road, there used to be a garage on the right, just past Queen’s Drive. Alongside this garage was some spare land. On V.E Day, a great bonfire was lit there and hundreds of people turned up to watch. The Home Guard brought along hundreds of thunder flashes to make the evening noisy and memorable. Perhaps I should point out that in those days, the Home Guard was nothing like TV’s ‘Dad’s Army’ and was regarded by everyone as an elite fighting force. Members of the Home Guard lived in every street.

Further along Garstang Road, on the right, was the Harris Orphanage and on the left was The Little Sisters of the Poor; they ran a home for people who had fallen on hard times and who had worked for the Catholic cause. Nearby was St. Vincent’s, which was an orphanage for Catholic children and it also had a school. Along the side of these buildings was a footpath going towards Sharoe Green Lane, which ran past a farmer’s fields. Trespassers who might be interested in purloining apples could expect the farmer to let off his shot-gun at them! There was never any record of anyone being hit so perhaps the farmer fired over their heads!

On Black Bull Lane there was Fulwood and Cadley School, built around 1937. The first headmaster, a Mr Wilson, was only there for about two years before he retired. On his last Friday he told the assembled children that, on the next Monday his ghost would walk up the steps to the platform. So on that Monday some five hundred pupils watched with bated breath for the ghost to appear. But it never did! A few years later, when the war started, air raid shelters were built in the lawns to the sides and front of the school. Here again there were problems with the drainage; the hundreds of children, when the air raid sirens went, had to enter the shelters and walk along the benches at either side -just out of reach of the flood waters.

However, back to Garstang Road: ‘The Nooklands’ in those days was regarded as THE place to live if you were wealthy!

Then there is the crossroad where Fulwood Methodist Church stands. The corner – just before the Church – was always well tended by the local council. Few people known that that corner was given to the council by the Church. It was well known that trams had run along Victoria Road and, 60 years ago, there were still traces of the tram-tracks, which most children knew about.

Lower Bank Road had houses with incredibly long gardens leading down to a stream. Here is an anecdote which might amuse. One member of the Church – as a boy – used to camp at the bottom of his garden, near the stream…sort of high adventure. However, one night it started raining hard: he and his pals abandoned the tent and went back to his house to sleep in beds. The following morning he couldn’t believe it but his tent had been stolen! Thirty years later, he was in the ‘Withy Trees’ talking to a stranger who confessed that, in all his life, he had done one thing of which he was ashamed: he had stolen a boy’s tent from the bottom of a garden in Lower Bank Road!

Up Watling Street Road, on a side road (was it Sharoe Green Lane?) was a slaughterhouse where the youths of the district used to sit on a wall and watch pigs being slaughtered. Perhaps very inappropriate but it taught them not to be squeamish about such things.

Near that end of Sharoe Green Lane was Sharoe Green Hospital. I was once there as a patient. When there were no staff around, I and my pals propelled our wheel-chairs to the top end of the long, gently sloping corridor and raced furiously to the bottom end. It was great fun!

Fulwood Barracks had bleak stone buildings around a large square where the soldiers used to drill for hour after hour. The barrack rooms themselves were on the first floor of these buildings. The story is that, after Dunkirk, the evacuated soldiers of each regiment were returned to their regimental depots. The Loyal Regiment marched all the way from Preston Railway Station to Fulwood to the cheers of the assembled multitude.

The golf course off Sharoe Green Lane had a footpath running at one side of it. It always seemed very select and there was trouble for girls and boys who sneaked off the foot-path to take short cuts. As far as I can remember, on the northern side if the golf course was a large wood. It was here that the local Home Guard held mock battles and the local Boy Scouts also held mock battles. Possibly the local Home Guard thought the Scouts were spoiling their fun and the local Boy Scouts thought the Home Guard were spoiling theirs!

Further north was Squire Anderton’s Wood…a great place for week-end picnics for the local inhabitants. Nearby were the "Hills and Hollows". These were perhaps not as crowded as Squire Anderton’s, but a great place for courting couples to wander!

The Preston North End training ground up Fulwood Hall Lane was the place to watch, for free, the heroes of the town: Tom Finney, Fairbrother, Cummings and so on. Incidentally, Canon Jim Hamilton as a young man also played for Preston North End reserves. He was mentioned in this magazine perhaps a couple of years ago.

Other things which happened in those days: most people went to work by bus, but hundreds went by bicycle: company directors, schoolteachers and factory workers all pedalled away along Garstang Road. Of course, when North End were playing at home, thousands of people would walk to the football ground and many cycled there – parking their cycles at one of the many surrounding houses at Deepdale for a few pence. Rumour had it that some made fortunes!

This, of course, begs the question: how did the youth of Fulwood spend their spare time when they weren’t playing tennis or going to Scouts or Guides, or the several youth clubs? Well, much use was made of Moor Park Open Air Swimming Baths. The water was unheated and very, very cold. Another thing which comes to mind is that every Saturday morning hundreds of children used to go to the Eldon Street Cinema to watch the latest cowboy films (with much cheering and booing!) and laugh at George Formby and Laurel and Hardy.

Durham