THEN AND NOW.

[Stanley]

THEN AND NOW.

12 April 2002

I’ve got two pictures for you this week, while I was sorting pictures out I came across an old postcard that I had forgotten about. There was no doubt about where it was, ‘School Lane, Earby’ is written across the bottom of the image so I went down and as near as possible, duplicated the picture. The image you see is not clear enough to distinguish all the detail so let me tell you what I found when I enlarged both images and compared them.
The building on the left of the picture is the corner of the Conservative Club and is almost unchanged apart from the fact that the chimney has been removed from the extension, the railings are exactly the same and there is even a leak from the gutter in the same place as in the original picture! The cart in the background has ‘John Edmondson and Son. Butchers, Earby’ written across the back of it. In Barrett’s Directory for 1902 he is noted as a butcher at 50 Water Street and his cart could be on the way to the slaughterhouse which used to be situated near the railway level crossing. The building on the right is a corrugated iron church which even has imitation buttresses. I know nothing about this but I’m sure one of my Earby readers will fill me in!
What really fascinates me is the boys in the picture fishing for tiddlers in the beck. They look a cheeky and mischievous lot, one has a net and jam jar and another has a small shovel in his hand, no doubt a bit of damming was going on at the same time. Two girls and a lad are looking over the wall and the whole scene has a very peaceful and innocent quality to it. Who were these children? Assuming it was about 1900, what happened to them, the lads in particular? The odds are that at least one of them was killed in the Great War.
I know we have to endure progress and I realise that the Empire Cinema and Armoride's which were to be built on the open ground to the right made a contribution to the town but the modern scene has none of the wonderful qualities of the same place 100 years earlier. Perhaps I’m just an old romantic.
Dig through your old photographs and see what you can find. Go and compare the modern scene with the one in the old picture and you can learn all sorts of interesting things about your town. If you have a camera, take the same picture again and keep the two together, there is nothing more interesting or informative than before and after pictures. If you know about the ‘tin tabernacle’ please let me know.

12 April 2002