BRITAIN’S bread may well have hung by a Lancashire thread, but there were many other industries which added to the industrial fabric of the county.

In Blackburn, for instance, was a company which is believed to have been the only one in Britain which manufactured wooden tower wagons.

It was S Rawlinson and Sons, which was first established way back in 1840 in Audley Range, where the family lived for many decades.

The business was handed down through three more generations, and the last to take control of this family firm, before being sold, was Fred Rawlinson Wilkinson and his cousin Ronald Walsh, both great grandchildren of the founder.

Fred’s daughter Mrs Anne Moore, who still lives in Blackburn, still has the very first and the last catalogues produced by the company and which show its products went all over the country, as well as the world, including Johannesburg.

The business was launched making horse drawn, telescopic tower wagons – members of the family were also wheelwrights – and over the years a wide range of models were developed for diverse applications and operating conditions.

The first, published in the early 1900s, gave its telephone number as 15y and its telegram address as Rawlinson, Audley, Blackburn.

The patent tower wagon and drum carriage builder was a contractor to the Government and was also on the War Office list. It provided wagons for electric tramway companies, lamp companies and the postal telegraph department.

More than 150 towns and corporations the length and breadth of Britain, from Aberdeen to York, had wagons and carriages built by the Blackburn business.

In those early days, as well as tower wagons, it made such items as telephone hand carts, wooden coke lorries, heavy castings wagons, derrick wagons fitted with revolving platforms, and ladders for lamp trimmers.

When Fred and Ronnie were at the helm from the 1940s – Ronald was in sole charge during the Second World War, when Fred served in India – the firm’s tower wagons were still produced in wood.

Anne remembers that one was made specifically for the Queen’s Coronation in 1953 and another for putting up Blackpool illuminations.

Able to tailor-make modifications to its range to ‘mid air challenges’ the company made a bespoke wagon for the resort’s 60ft lamp post.