Professor Paul Salveson is a historian and writer and lives in Bolton. He is visiting professor in Worktown Studies at the University of Bolton and author of several books on Lancashire history including a biography of Allen Clarke and his latest production Moorlands, Memories and Reflections. He also owns The Bolton Bicycling Bookshop. How did Boltonians celebrate ‘New Year’ in times’ past? From local evidence, it was with great gusto! Writing in 1930, ‘Old Boltonian’ (one of Allen Clarke’s many pen-names) said that Bolton is “unique among Lancashire towns in the fact that it celebrates the advent of New Year by ceasing work and holding jolly carnival.” Just to make it totally clear, Bolton was like nowhere else.
Professor Paul Salveson is a historian and writer and lives in Bolton. He is visiting professor in ‘Worktown Studies’ at the University of Bolton and author of several books on Lancashire history including a biography of Allen Clarke and his latest production Moorlands, Memories and Reflections. He also owns The Bolton Bicycling Bookshop. How did our predecessors celebrate Christmas? There isn’t much written about how ordinary people in different parts of the country marked the festive season a century and more ago. We’re lucky in Bolton in having a writer who came from a mill worker’s family and wrote about - and for - his own people. That was Allen Clarke, better known by his pen-name ‘Teddy Ashton’. From 1892 until his death in 1935 he produced his ‘Lancashire Annual’ each Christmas, or ‘Kesmas’ in the dialect he used.