Looking Back, with Eric Leaver

SHE was the glamour-puss of black and white TV - the sweater-girl, dumb blonde who stunned 1950s viewers with her own 3-D effect.

But back in 1956, Sabrina (real name Norma Sykes, of Blackpool) was looking for a career change; a move up from the silent sex-symbol character she played in comedian Arthur Askey's "Before Your Very Eyes" show.

And it was in January that year that she chose East Lancashire as the place to make the switch - breaking her silence to appear as a solo vocalist at Nelson's Imperial Ballroom.

Sabrina was also rapping out publicity for her "saucy" Sunday newspaper story, seen billed on the wall behind her with the headline "I'm not dumb!"

She never made the big-time as a songstress and had a hard time making herself heard at the outset when she took the stage at Nelson.

For as the Northern Daily Telegraph reported, male admirers crowded round the bandstand carried on whistling and shouting for so long that she could hardly get in a note in edgeways.

Among her fans was 32-year-old Nelson singer Terry Dale who, that night, rushed from a concert at Burnley to croon the special "Sabrina Samba" number that local photographer Albert Morris and butcher Alan Ashworth composed in her honour and later presented a copy of the score to her backstage.

Missing mugs in a tale of Olde Bull

AFTER a recent revamp, the one-time Brewer's Arms pub in Blackburn has re-emerged as Pitchers Bar. But who remembers when the town-centre hostelry, sited in Salford, looked like this? Pitchers' ancestor was Ye Olde White Bull, established in 1750. It was knocked down along with three adjoining properties in 1959 to make way for a new pub of the same name which opened the following October.

It became the Brewer's in April, 1979, after its interior had been transformed during a four-month closure.

But one thing drinkers really took to at the opening in 1960 of the luxurious new Ye Olde White Bull - a flagship for owners Dutton's as it backed on to the site of their now-vanished brewery - was its special glazed pottery tankards.

Customers had the choice of drinking from regular pint glasses or from the tankards which featured a coloured picture of brewery founder Thomas Dutton on the side. In the new pub's first fortnight, dozens of the tankards disappeared as take-home souvenirs of what was evidently a pinchers' bar.

Jim's book traces vanished scenes

SHORROCK Fold was a much-used passage linking Church Street with Lord Street and the Market Square, but vanished in Blackburn's town centre redevelopment in the late 1960s. It comes to light again in a new book compiled by local history researcher and trams buff, 60-year-old Jim Halsall, of Accrington Road, from some 80 history-related drawings, photographs and stories which appeared in the old Blackburn Times between 1890 and 1939.

Jim will be signing copies of his book "Blackburn In Times Gone By" (Landy Publishing, £6), at two town-centre bookshops next Saturday.

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