WE'VE traced the source! Not of the Nile exactly, but of the little backwater where the raw material for kids' home-made canoes was stockpiled during immediate post-war years.

Brian Orrell of Crow Lane West, Newton-le-Willows, puts us in the picture after reading earlier accounts on this page of the perilous little canoes which youngsters created from obsolete aircraft fuel tanks before launching them on local ponds, flashes and canals.

And he adds another memory-tweaker in remembering the glass-tube fuel connectors, fitted to the tanks, which made superb pea shooters!

Brian says he's 99percent certain that those fuel tanks were from a supply dump located in fields between the naval camps HMS Gosling-Camp 5 and HMS Cabala, at Lowton. The latter was on the site of what is now Lowton Civic Hall and its surrounds, in Hesketh Meadow Lane, and which, after hostilities, became the site of the married quarters for officers at the Burtonwood air base.

"In the early 1940s", Brian adds, "our American friends established a dump of many thousands of long-range fuel tanks in two types, 'wing tip' and 'belly'. Those best suited for canoe-making were the wing tip drop tanks, intended for a one-way journey and which were jettisoned when empty. An aircraft could not land with full tanks in place".

To allow a clean break when clamps securing the tanks to wing tips were released, the fuel connection was made by glass tubes, with rubber tube sleeves and Jubilee-type clips.

"I can vouch, from first-hand experience, that those glass tubes made very fine pea-shooters and most boys at that time (1943 to 45) had them", says Brian. The technique in acquiring them was to either bribe a US Marine sentry or distract his attention by pestering him with the familiar kiddie chorus of that time, "Got any gum, chum?" Then one of the urchin gang would sneak into the compound, helping himself to the tubes, packaged in open crates.

"I have often pondered over what the USAF made of the lack of connecting tubes when the time came to use the tanks in anger", says Brian.

And,returning to the boat- making business, he adds: "It was not unknown for a complete tank to be removed by the local lads and then cut into two along the joint, to use as a canoe.

"At the end of the war, the remaining tanks were removed and sold to local scrap merchants". They, in turn, sold them on for a bob or two to kids keen to own their own fuel-tank craft. And, as our long-memoried writer points out: "Archaeology at the local ponds would prove interesting, but that's another story".

MANY thanks, Brian, for your detailed and fascinating account.