BY a tradition that goes back to at least 1750, Easter Week in Blackburn has always been coupled with all the fun of the fair.

But though it has not been held there since 1964, for many people the fair is still associated Blackburn's old market square, where it was held every year from 1852, except for 1891 and 1892 when the council banished it to the Wrangling in the Canterbury Street area.

At the 1956 fair, the Big Wheel featured as a major attraction, but, according to the Northern Daily Telegraph, the big crowd-puller among grown-ups that year was Bert Hughes's boxing booth.

Admission cost a shilling, but reckless visitors used to dream of leaving £5 better off -- the seldom-won prize on offer to anyone who could outlast a bout with the booth's resident fighters. The guaranteed winners every Easter were the fair's showmen who collected tons of pennies and sixpences from the thousands who flocked to the fair. They lived and travelled in monster caravans.

In 1953, a Northern Daily Telegraph reporter visiting the caravan there that year of fair folk Mr and Mrs J. Butterworth described its lounge as 'palatial' -- and was astonished to find that it was equipped with a TV set, a luxury that many East Lancashire folk could still not afford in those days.