A LOOKING BACK reader, born the year the Empire first opened in 1910, has recalled the Saturday matinees she enjoyed as a little girl.

The 98-year-old Blackburn resident remembered the old silent black and white films shown there, which were accompanied by piano music.

She also revealed that shoes had a big bearing on how much you paid to go in – 1d if you weren’t wearing them, and 2d if you were!

“We also had to show our hands to the manager to make sure they were clean, it was a grand place,” she said.

Our reader with the grand old age was just one of many who contacted our desk after last week’s story asking for memories of the Empire Theatre, as it prepares to celebrate its centenary in 2010.

Another recalled that one manager was Harry Duckworth, who also worked for washing powder people Acdo, while Tony Haslam remembers going to visit cleaner Winifred Hindle, who he called ‘grandma’ on Sunday mornings in the 1950s, when they were running through the feature film to be screened the following week.

He remembered, too, that all the children were given a present of an orange or a packet of nuts at Christmas.

Thanks, also, to everyone who called to name the two people in the photograph last week, taken at the garage which once stood on today’s Capita performing arts centre site.

We’ve now identified them as brother and sister Billy and Barbara Preston, whose father Harold ran the garage in the 1950s.