TODAY we take a look at life in Blackburn between the two World Wars.

THe ending of the Great War lifted the curtain on the singing and dancing 1920s, when the people of Blackburn worked and played hard – there was a 60-hour week in some of the mills then.

Jazz was king and the Northern Daily Telegraph was full of advertisements for dances, dancing lessons and dance contests.

Local dance halls offered prizes for the winners of Charleston competitions, but then a new craze took over, the ‘Black Bottom’.

The Northern Daily Telegraph dance correspondent complained thus: “The wild frantic floor movements of the Black Bottom, coming so soon after the equally hectic Charleston are a bit too much for this writer.

“We shall have two seasons running during which a big proportion of dancers will have lost sight of dancing as embodying graceful movements of the whole body.

“Young people are in danger of being a generation of leg wagglers, not dancers.”

And the new Bishop of Blackburn, Percy Herbert, added his own thoughts in 1927, saying: “In picture palaces, theatres and novels, we are deluged with the sex problem.

“It is becoming more difficult in every class of life for young people to attain real purity and for marriage to retain what is meant to be.” There was a range for the latest short bobs haircuts among women and this even brought a condemnation from the medical officer of health: “The almost universal practice of bobbing and shingling is apparently leading to neglect of the hair.

“Among girls with long hair, the hair is almost invariably clean,” he lectured.

The talkies arrived in Blackburn towards the end of the 1920s , but home entertainments centred around the wireless and wind-up gramophone.

Shops in town were selling the latest records for 2s 6d and television was still a distant thing – indeed many homes did not even have electricity.

Homes were heated by coal fires and it was coal which drove the mills and factories.

Subsequently, the air was heavy with sulphuric soot and, not surprisingly, death from bronchitis was commonplace and well above the national average at 1,268 per million.

The 1930s brought the desperation of the dole queue and the spectre of another war, but the new arms drive brought welcome relief to the unemployed and a new fuse factory and gas masks works meant jobs for families.

In 1937, a peace rally of 3,000 people, passed a resolution labelling war as a crime against humanity.

The big event of the 1930s was the abdication and then the coronation of King George VI and Blackburn folk held street parties to celebrate.

The Blackburn Trustees Savings Bank promised to give a bank book, credited with 10s, to each child born on coronation day.

There was controversy, though, over Blackburn Education Committee’s gift to school pupils — the proposal to give souvenir mugs was attacked by one councillor on the grounds of refinement.

He suggested the children received instead a cup and saucer, so that they would not learn the habit of drinking out of pint pots.

One Blackburn vicar felt life in the twenties as all part of a masterplan by satan to cause world wide revolution in government, society and religion.

“The immodesty and indecency in women’s dress, the surrender of the outward marks of gracious womanliness for an aping mannishness, the laxness in the marriage vow, as evidenced in the frequency of divorce, the insubordination of children and lack of parental control, are all evidence of the plot,” he said.

Even Mr W E Moss, veteran superintendent of Blackburn Lees Hall Teetotal Mission, looking back on 50 years’ work, in 1935 lamented: “Now, even the fear of hell has gone.”

By that year earnings had risen; a weaver was averaging £1 12s 6d for a full 48 hour week, a male shop assistant at the Co-op got £3 2s 6d, although a similarly employed female assistant only took home £1 17s 6d.

By then it was 1940 and yet again Blackburn provided more of its sons and daughter for a second war effort.