REMEMBER last week's picture (top) of the mystery roving fishmonger with his horse and cart in a rainy Blackburn Street long ago?

Several readers got in touch to say I was right in my guess that it was taken in now-vanished Fisher Street.

But 71-year-old Darwen reader Ken Halliwell also believed he could identify the old-time trader -- as "Owd Aughton", who is pictured (inset).

His proper name was James Aughton and as well as hawking wet fish around the Bastwell, Brookhouse and Accrington Road areas he had a fishmonger's and greengrocer's shop at 217 Whalley New Road near the Seven Trees area -- premises that are today the Pizza Italia takeaway.

Ken estimates the picture was taken in the late 1920s -- since, he says, Mr Aughton later handed over the business to Ken's uncle, Harry Dickinson, after he married the fish man's daughter in 1935.

But 68-year-old Higher Croft reader Ernie Lightbown, who lived in Hornby Street, not far from Fisher Street, until 1956, reckons the photograph dates from the late 1940s -- as he recognised the fish man's customer in the picture as a woman householder who lived at either 3 or 5 Fisher Street, outside which, he says, the snap was taken.

"I can't remember her name, but I knew it was her because she had one leg shorter than the other," says Ernie.

But 62-year-old Terry Hannon, of Knuzden Brook, who lived at 13 Fisher Street believes that the woman was his grandmother Mrs Elizabeth Hogg who lived down the street at No.19.

He guesses that the picture was taken before 1939, when he was born, as he has no recollection of the fishmonger or his cart.

Like Ernie, he has fond memories of another horse-and-cart business of the era -- Italian ice-cream seller J Bogganio and Sons whose premises were at 47 Fisher Street, outside which one of the family, John "Sonny" Bogganio, is pictured (bottom) around 1949 with one of the firm's two carts, drawn by a horse called Flower.

"I used to help him put the horse into the cart's shafts," Terry recalls.

Next door to Bogganio's, says Ernie, was a business which bottled vinegar and liquids like bleach and detergent and, on the corner directly across the road, was Godber's shop which everyone knew as "t' firewood place."

Another horse-and-cart outfit recalled by Terry was Stanton's which delivered earthenware flagons of sarsaparilla and dandelion and burdock pop to homes in Fisher Street.

"The chap who came round for them had to wait at every house in the street for the empties -- while they were emptied of water as everyone used them for hot water bottles. And sometimes he had to wait until people had got up out of bed," Terry laughs.