IN THE LIGHT of all the warnings about the dangers of looking at the sun during Wednesday's eclipse, it seems amazing now that, on the approach of the total eclipse which East Lancashire experienced in 1927, watchers were advised to looked straight at the solar spectacle.

For explaining the sensation - the first Britain had seen for 203 years - the Rev E.D. O'Connor, director of the observatory founded in 1838 at Stonyhurst College, told readers of the Northern Daily Telegraph: "During totality itself, the phenomenon should be observed with the naked eyes or with a pair of binoculars."

Yet, to be fair to the astronomer, he did add that anyone using binoculars should dispense with them before the sun re-appeared as permanent damage to their eyes might result.

But as well as looking forward - somewhat riskily - to the event, which the Stonyhurst observatory was set to record with a camera with an amazing 19-ft focal length during a six-second exposure while, alongside, observers from the University of Coimbra in Portugal would be "taking cinematograph records of the whole eclipse," Father O'Connor was looking even further ahead to the eclipse of 1999.

Accurately, he foresaw this week's invasion of the West of Cornwall as a result of huge improvements in transport that he anticipated over the intervening 72 years. "It is not improbable that travelling in those far-off days may be much easier, more rapid and cheaper than it is today," he said. He guessed, too, that many of the children of 1927, "up to the age of perhaps ten years," would be alive in 1999 and he urged adults to enable them to see the early-morning eclipse of June 29 which brought vast crowds flocking to the 30-mile-wide belt of totality stretching across Lancashire.

"It will be a great joy to them in those far-off days to be able to tell their grandchildren all about the eclipse they saw 72 years ago, " said Father O'Connor. Certainly, the Education Committee in Blackburn assisted schoolchildren to witness the event - more safely than the Stonyhurst astronomer advised - for they bought 10,500 'eclipse glasses' for them. But, the younger ones that Father O'Connor hoped would have the experience of seeing two eclipses in their lifetime, were not the ones for whom they were intended - they were "for the use of senior pupils on approved outings and excursions by the older scholars from certain schools to viewpoints outside the town."

A top out-of-town destination for the event was, as this this notice for East Lancashire eclipse rail excursions reveals (left), the seaside resort of Southport - a spot chosen by astronomers from the Royal Observatory for their official studies. More than 200,000 trippers poured into the town on excursion trains that were arriving every five minutes from 3am and kept cafs, cinemas and dance halls busy all night.

But they were not the only ones determined to make the most of it. Advertisements from the NDT's pages on June, 1927, show traders in Blackburn were keen to exploit the event with slogans such as "The moon may keep the sunshine off you but a Wilds Turnall Waterproof will keep the rain off you all the time" and, more briefly, "Tattersalls pork pies cannot be eclipsed."

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