ALAN WHALLEY'S WORLD

IT was a perilous task driving unwilling cattle through the main streets of St Helens to the town-centre slaughterhouse.

At any moment a spooked steer might break from the herd, career into a shop window or burst through a store door, scattering panicking customers before it.

One who remembers it well is reader T. Finney of Kent Road, Sutton, a schoolboy cowherd during the 'twenties.

He recalls how his dad was tossed by a bull in the Red Oxide Works at the bottom of Peasley Cross Lane. "Luckily for him, he was thrown behind some barrels and so escaped."

Our Sutton correspondent used to help his dad drive cows each Saturday morning from a Rainhill farm, via Nutgrove and Factory Row, to the Foundry Street abattoir.

The stun-gun was not in use in St Helens at the time (1929). "The cows were knocked down, inhumanely, with an axe; and each set of family butchers slaughtered their own animals."

T.F. recalls that the leading local butchers of the time were W. Holt & Sons, Hattons, and Turner & Sons for whom his father worked.

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