REACHING the age of 92 made old Roger Haydock the oldest man in Blackburn in 1902, a feat which was held up as an example to hundreds of youngsters - because, a long time before, his wife had got him to give up drink.

And the cocktail of his longevity and abstinence earned him a prominent place in the handbook of that year's Great May Festival staged over three days at the town's Exchange Hall - nowadays the Apollo Cinema - by the Blackburn and District Band of Hope Union whose mission in a borough renowned as beery was "to promote the spread of total abstinence among the children, by methods and preventive." At the festival - and those of many other years afterwards, according to the a pair of programmes lent to 'Looking Back' by a reader - this uplifting ideal entailed the crowning of a May Queen presiding over hordes of young pledge-takers who entertained with song, dance and physical drill. And her coronation in 1902 was preceded by a "Magnificent Character Procession" involving more than a third of the "Choir and Characters of 600 Voices "parading as all sorts - from Little Bo-Peep and Boadicea to Robin Hood and 'You Dirty Boy' - and then raising their voices in an anthem to asbtemiousness entitled "Hip! Hip! Hurrah"

Its rousing chorus went:

Hip! hip! hip! hip! hurrah!

For wine is a mocker and

traitor;

Hip! hip! hip! hip! hurrah!

And whisky's a villainous

cratur;

Hip! hip! hip! hip! hurrah!

And beer kills the joy of our nature

. . . . all of which was followed by plenty of "And so say all of us ," more than a dozen more "Hips !" and another three "Hurrahs!" . And for these, the aged pub-hating Mr Haydock had another message - No smoking! For the pen picture which accompanied his picture told how, after being born at Clayton-le-Dale in December, 1809, and getting married in 1834, he was some years later "converted to the temperance cause, largely through his wife's instrumentality" and had since proved "an ardent, indefatigable, self-sacrificing worker on the side of teetotalism" and was engaged in a a scheme to reduce the number of licensed premises in Blackburn.

And it added: "Mr Haydock is also a non-smoker, and deprecates the enormous increase of this evil among the young."

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.