Postbag

There’s a particularly lively postbag in the latest issue of Milltown Memories — including a letter from Alan Brooks who owes his very existence to the Hebble Bus Company!

ALAN WRITES:

May I pick up on the paragraph (issue 2) that Alice was so keen on John that if the bus was full she used to run up the Buttress to catch it at the top?

I know this to be true for my father, Jim Brooks, was the bus driver. In 1933 he came down from Durham in search of work, as the family business had gone bankrupt due to the recession.

Jim found work as a driver for the Hebble Bus Company and John, who had also come down from Durham, was his conductor.

They were given the Burnley route and would arrive in Hebden Bridge at tea-time. The bus would be full of people who were only travelling as far as Heptonstall Road and occasionally, if Alice was late out of work, she would be near the back of the queue and there would be no room for her.

My father had to set off without her, dropping off passengers as he went.

By the time he got to Cross Lanes the bus would be half empty and there would be Alice, slightly out of breath after running through Hebden Bridge and up the Buttress,

The lengths some people will go to for love!

Ed: Alice and John were not the only ones to find romance courtesy of the Hebble Bus Company! Alan tells us that his father, Jim, also met his mother, Joyce Barker, on the buses. They married in 1939 — the day before the Second World War broke out.

And Keith Newbitt remarks on the "miracle" of The Man Who Rose From The Dead:

I noticed in the article "T’was a dark and stormy night" that Benjamin Foster "lay down in his white bed of snow, shed his last tear, uttered his last groan and breathed his last sigh. Shep was found stretched across his beloved master’s breast."

But, surprise, surprise! A Heptonstall man is reported as finding the body "stiff, cold and lifeless, standing in a ghostly upright position."

Could he have been the worse for wear and seen one of the whitewashed stones?

Ed. Oops! This error in Diana Monahan’s excellent account is down to the editing, to which I can only hold up my hand and apologise. One or two other readers have also pointed out this apparently miraculous rising from the dead!

Read the full story in Milltown Memories, issue 3. If this or other stories stirs a memory, we'd be happy to know - send us your memories and comments.