THERE was the roller skating rink, the basement snooker hall under the Royal picture place and dancing at the Ambulance Hall.

You could fish in Duggie’s pond, play in abandoned air raid shelters in Devonshire Road or drink hot Vimto in Howarth’s milk bar.

This was Chorley in the 1950s and you can walk down memory lane with historian Jack Smith, who has written a new book about life in the town more than half a century ago.

Jack has lived in Chorley all his life and founded the historical and archealogical society back in 1953.

He recalls that in the fifties Chorley had five cinemas, such as the Odeon which ran the Mickey Mouse Club on Saturday mornings and the Theatre Royal, with its second balcony, known commonly, as the ‘monkey rack’.

“As well as housing the cheapest seats, this was also a place from which we were often ejected. Seated there, we were above the projector beam showing the picture and would tie bits of paper to cotton and dangle them in the beam!”

On Sunday evenings, the ‘Big Band Sound’ could be heard at live shows on the stage of the Plaza Cinema, while there was dancing at church clubs or the Ambulance Hall, before the ‘Vic’, over the arcade near the market and the ‘Tudor’, dance halls opened.

There was a roller skating rink off Cunliffe Street, and on Sunday afternoons the place to be seen, dressed in your best, was the ‘main drag’ in Market Street, where he and his mates would eye the girls.

Jack was a delivery boy, with a bike and carrier basket, for Messrs Stones, who has a shop next to the Red Lion and delivered newspapers for the newsagent’s shop in St Thomas’s Road.

Besides train-spotting, there were fish to catch, often in places where ‘No Fishing’ signs were treated like invitations, such as ‘Duggie’s’ at Chorley Hall Farm, although it was the mill lodges that were the greatest draw, because most of them contained goldfish.

“We could bring the fish home in buckets and supplement our spending money by selling them to certain pet shops in Chorley,” he said.

“Of course, the canal was good for so many things. We had a go at making a strange sort of canoe from surplus aviation fuel tanks obtained from Messrs Hitchin’s scrapyard at the bottom of Harper’s Lane.”

Young people were then encouraged to join clubs or organisations and in 1953, Chorley saw the formation of a Boys’ Club in a house in Brown Street, by Mr Hurst.

One of its main sports was boxing and two of the Chorley Club boys won titles; Brian Collinson became a National Boys’Club champion in 1957 and a year later Harold True became amateur heavyweight champion of East Lancashire and East Cheshire.

During this decade the Army Cadet Force was also formed, plus St George’s Pipe Band who played before the Queen in 1958.

Chorley Through the 1950s by Jack Smith, which includes 300 images, is published by Db Publishing and priced £9.99.