WHICH was the booziest street in St Helens?

Keen nostalgia buff Ken Large reckons he has the answer, after flicking through some ancient records which detailed Bridge Street as having no fewer than 14 pubs during the late 19th-century.

Ken, a key member of the quaintly-named Moss Bank Debating and Walking Stick Society, provides the following list: The White Horse, Adelphi, Nelson, Cock & Trumpet, Black Horse, Queens, Red Lion, Volunteer, Bee Hive, Black Bull (at junction of Church Street with Bridge Street, and owned by the Friendly Society), Shakespeare, Old House at Home, The A1 and Crooked Billet.

Now on to another tack. Argument has always raged about which was the better local rugby league team -- Recs or Saints.

And Ken, whose dad, Ernie, was a postwar winger with Saints, believes that it was exactly honours even. His personal researches have revealed that Saints and the Recs (who formed around 1878 as a rugby union club and eventually folded at the outbreak of the second world war) clashed 46 times. Each won 20 of the games and six were drawn.

THANKS, Ken for those details of the frothy and sporty kind.