Preston College, 1988-1999

In 1988 I started work at W.R. Tuson College in Preston. It was soon to change its name to Preston College. Most colleges around the country included the city or town name and outside Preston itself no-one would recognise the name of W.R. Tuson, who had been an Education Officer locally.

The college had been formed in 1974 by the merger of the Grammar School 6th form and the local Technical College. I was told that on formation there was a bit of culture shock on both sides as one side invited the other for a cheese and wine celebration and the other side were offering a pie and pint event... A great story but I've no idea whether it was true... It was true that 14 years after the merger some staff were still in the habit of referring to students as "kiddies".

Before we go any further I'd just like to apologise for those glasses...

I was introduced to the senior team of Departmental Heads at an important meeting. I had joined just at the time when the government had decided that Further Education colleges should become corporations and financially responsible for their budgets and fate, rather than the then current state of affairs where they fell under the control of Local Education Authorities. I had been taken on specifically to introduce computers into the administration of the college and was to start a computerised information system that would hold data on students and supply the government with the F.E. annual statistical data.

The Principal at the time was Mike Clegg and he had plunged the room into an atmosphere of shock and despair by pointing out that the new funding system would mean that colleges could now go bankrupt without LEAs bailing them out. I was to speak to them in the next session and looked at this small sea of shocked and despondent faces, who didn't know me from Adam.

"Well..." I said slowly. "I have to say I've worked with better warm-up acts..." It could have gone hideously wrong and I was relieved when everyone in the room, including Mike Clegg, burst into an uproar of laughter. Incidentally, some colleges were to go bankrupt and found themselves undergoing mergers with other more financially healthy or astute neighbouring colleges.

The college was renamed Preston College from 1 September 1989 and celebrated by sponsoring the BBC's radio show Friday Night is Music Night which was broadcast live from the local theatre. I remember the late Dame Joan Sutherland was the principle female singer, whilst being in her 60s and the then Head of Science spluttering during the interval, "I wish she wouldn't keep doing those... [pause] ... embarrassing female movements!"

The college had bought eight Amstrad 1640 computers. They had 640Kb of memory and unlike the earlier 1512 pictured, they were furnished with one 5.25 inch floppy disk and a [GASP] 20 megabyte (20Mb) hard drive. They came with a package called Ability which was an early program comprising a word processor, spreadsheet, database and calendar. It was pretty basic stuff. The screens couldn't display bold or italic characters and so any special formatting was highlighted by shaded backgrounds to the text.

We also had dot-matrix printers, one to each PC because networking wasn't something to be considered yet. Up until now documents were typed on typewriters. There were a couple of typists on the main site who could rattle out documents at a fast rate on typewriters with steeply rising rows of keys. An Imperial 66 if I remember rightly. Wanting more than one copy meant either typing the entire thing again for a second or third copy or for larger quantities you typed a Gestetner sheet, which created a template document that was then wrapped around an inked drum on a huge machine with a handle and you churned it like a butter churn to produce copies one page at a time. The templates would ooze a sort of pinkish goo and the whole process could be extremely messy.

It took me ages to persuade one of the typists to try a PC. In the end, horrible man that I am, I went into her office very early one morning and took away the typewriter and placed the PC and printer on her desk. I had to be there when she came in to calm her down. "Oh, Mr Burke! What have you done?" I sat her down and she typed the first page. "You don't need to hit the keys so hard..." I said delicately.

We covered the simple things like using the backspace key instead of reaching for Tipp-Ex, the white paint that typists used to correct mistakes. Not that she made many. In fact it was only the strange flatness of the keyboard that led to any mistakes. Having just written a novel - though it would be many years to come before it would end up as a Kindle book - I was in awe of her accuracy and speed on the keyboard. We printed the document out. We then did a two-page document without pausing to change paper (the dot-matrix printers took continuous paper with perforations to split pages apart).

We covered printing the same document more than once and at that point, without any need for retyping it or dealing with messy gooey sheets and copier machines, she began to see some advantages in this new-fangled technology. True... she did break a keyboard through battering at it with great force but I just replaced it immediately and she got used to a new way of working.

So now it was time for me to start on the student record system. The database in Ability was very basic and had no chance of coping. In any case, the individual functions contained within the Ability package were being outshone by seperate packages such as the word processor Word Perfect; spreadsheet packages Multiplan, SuperCalc and Lotus 1-2-3; and database dBASE III+

There wasn't really anyone with knowledge to help me. I printed out the Help pages and slogged all hours. I ended up with a working version that held details of all the courses (massive shock to the Academic staff that GCSE English from one awarding body couldn't be lumped with GCSE English from another body or that City & Guilds level one Fabrication and Welding was not the same as City & Guilds level two or three Fabrication and Welding and that they could not be lumped together under C&G Fab and Weld...

I needed to network three computers together to work on the database. I had already had to import from America a hard disk drive of unbelievably large size - 40Mb... I had a team of two data entry staff who at times had to put up with all sorts of mishap. On one enrolment day a member of the academic staff just unplugged one of the computers to plug in a kettle... The database locked up and lost a shed load of data. After an hour I found that only the one record that had been being worked on had actually disappeared, but that the pointers or signposts within the database software had been messed up and couldn't recognise the missing records. A couple of days to fix.

It took a long time to get to the stage of submitting the annual FESR (Further Education Statistical Return). The return had to be a text file with all fields (Surname, Forenames, Date of Birth etc) each starting at a particular place in the row of characters. This meant if the person had a short surname like "Moss" you had to pad the surname with spaces until it took up all the space allocated to surnames. Except that dBASE didn't like padding with spaces. If it saw two spaces together it "corrected" it by deleting back to a single space.

I ended up padding with asterisks (*) and then writing a program in the Basic-A programming language to replace any asterisks with spaces. Getting this right had me working 13 or more hours per day for months. The computer department at County Hall ran lots of tests on my data and gleefully told me when handing over reams of paper that "This is why only trained computer scientists should write programs..."

That year we were the last college in the UK to send in a return. Usually following submission the Department of Education and Science would contact the college with a long list of errors or possible mis-matches (such as a 23-year-old having fees waived because they were under 18). There could be hundreds of these to work through.

I got a phone call from an incredulous person at the DES. "Your return only had 5 errors! How did you do that?" We sorted out the five errors whilst on the phone. We may have been the last college to submit the return but we were the very first to have an accepted clean return. I began to get queries from other colleges.

Then the very next year Lancashire Country Council decided all ten of its colleges (the move to corporate status had been decided but not yet passed through into law) were to get mini computer systems and a software package called FEMIS that had been developed by staff at the Further Education Staff College - the college that trained college staff. The mini computer would be running Unix as an operating system and the database software would be ORACLE.

The PRIME mini computer was delivered and had an incredible 16Mb of inbuilt memory (RAM). In 1969 they had sent Apollo11 to the moon with less computing power! It could support eight people working at terminals all at the same time! The terminals were "dumb" terminals. They were not computers in their own right but just like the keyboard of a PC now. The green screens that came with them made them look like a home computer and one keyboard was stolen even whilst the rest were being unloaded from the lorry! Someone was obviously hoping to be able to plug it into their TV and to play games on it...

There were lots of courses on both ORACLE and the FEMIS systems. Most of these were held at the Staff College which was in Somerset near Weston-Super-Mare. Lancashire wasn't going to send ten people from ten colleges so I found myself one of three or four people who was on a team to be trained and who would then train other Lancashire staff on return. Lancashire also set up a county wide team to monitor and support colleges.

Running this at County Hall was an ex-colleague from Blackpool College, Pete Ryan and with co-ordinating control and oversight for County Hall was my old boss from Blackpool District Education Office, Clive Lockwood. At an initial meeting which included college Principals, Clive recognised me and nodded at which Mike Clegg must have registered some surprise because Clive explained "John was one of my better appointments at the DEO!" Aw, don't fight over me, chaps...

Anyway the photograph was taken in the tiny village of Axbridge where we were staying during one of the courses by FEMIS staff, some of whom I am still in touch with. It was 4 July 1990, we were staying in the village pub next to the church and it was the night Gazza cried as England lost to Germany in a penalty shoot out. There were three of us there that night: me, Pete Ryan and the MIS Officer from Nelson & Colne College, Rob Burnett who became a great pal and ended up working for EMIS, as the firm behind the software FEMIS became.

I don't have a great many photos of Preston College itself, but this one was taken at a ceremony to open a new amphitheatre that some of the construction students had built behind the college, using reclaimed materials such as old paving stones etc.

My student record system had to be abandoned once Femis software arrived, but I put the same skills to use on a finance system and another system to log part-time teachers' hours. These bits of software were sold to other colleges by Preston with a percentage of the proceeds coming to me. Invariably those colleges wanted some bespoke work doing to meet their unique requirements and eventually I came to view it as a bit of a pain in the butt.

However I was building a reputation for myself, not only with colleges but with the LEA and even the government department. The old DES had become the DfES - surprising many of us by calling themselves the Department for Education and Science. As one conference pundit put it: "Nice to know that the Department are actually for education..." It sometimes doesn't seem like that nowadays. At some point education ceased to be seen as an investment for the government and more a way of charging would-be students enormous sums of money that would take them years to pay off student loans.

Anyway, I was approached to become involved with a new organisation representing the interests of college Management Information Systems - managers were invariably called MIS Managers, ho ho, great hilarity all round. The new organisation would be the National CMIS Board which would lobby on behalf of MIS and co-ordinate responses to government green papers.

I found myself speaking at conferences quite a bit and at consultative meetings with the DfES, EMIS, and for the NCMIS Board. I made a point of never criticising without offering an alternative way of doing things and this was usually appreciated by those I was addressing.

One of my responsibilities for the National CMIS Board was editing and producing (having very near written 90% of it myself) the quarterly bulletin which soon featured my "How to do it" articles. These covered SQL techniques, the production of menu systems within Unix and so on. When I retired some 20 years later some kind people remembered these articles in tributes.

The government were however keen to cut down on the number of organisations lobbying and there was pressure to merge with NAITFE, the National Association for Information Technology in Further Education. The photograph shows from left Keith Duckitt from the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) looking on as John Rockett, chair of the National CMIS Board shakes hands with Malcolm Himsworth of NAITFE to merge the two organisations to form the National Information and Learning Technologies Association (NILTA).

Meanwhile back at Preston, the now creaking Prime computer was replaced by a DEC Ultrix system with extendable data storage. EMIS software was expanding with Oracle-based financial records and staffing records as the Further Education Funding Council brought in new annual statistical returns to give information on staffing and colleges had to produce more formalised financial reporting.

Nightly, weekly and now monthly back-ups were being done on a variety of tapes and cassettes using 1/4-inch tape whilst in-house PC-based systems were still using floppy disks that were no longer as soft as they used to be and which became known as stiffies - ooh-er...

Here is a selection of backup media in use at the time. We were starting to look for software packages that would allow our PCs to connect to the Oracle databases as up until then people using the two systems were forced to have two monitors and keyboards on their desks.

Forward another few years and the early DECs were replaced by more powerful DEC Alpha Servers.

My own desk was now much more tidy... It was amazing just how much paper could be generated by computer systems!

One year my regular articles in the NILTA Newsletter took on a rather whimsical aspect that Christmas. I wrote the entire thing in rhyme. Easy at first, I was cursing myself by the time I finished it in the early hours of one morning!

I was being featured in other magazines by now. This photo and a few others were taken by Dennis from EMIS.

We had by now installed software on most PCs that made them capable of connecting to the Oracle database store and were starting to use Microsoft's Access database as a front end to in-house Oracle developments.

The college was expanding. This was a new sports and gym building. We tried to photograph it from the same spot every day as it was being built, but the most advantageous spot was from a classroom so we had to set the camera up every day instead of being able to leave it on a tripod all the time. Eventually we had an animated file, but it was just a bit wobbly here and there!

The college was holding an open technology event one weekend and I had seen this jukebox at a jukebox show in Leeds a couple of weeks before. Whilst most jukeboxes were still playing records and a few had started to play CDs, this one played video files on a PC inside the box and regularly downloaded new ones from satellite to keep itself up to date. I arranged to hire one for the event and it created quite a bit of interest at the college.

Here I and my team of a couple of technicians were about to move office to the far end of the academic IT office.

On taking the large printer from its sound-proof hood I found a computer chip. Oops... I wonder where that came from?

In 1999 I had my name put forward for a national award. NILTA gave several awards on an annual basis and there was one aimed at users or managers of information systems in colleges who had gone over and above what would normally be expected of someone doing such work. The Awards were announced Oscar style at the NILTA Annual Conference.

And I found myself walking to the stage to shake the hand of the Chief Executive of the Further Education Funding Council, David Melville.

Things happen sometimes that feel horrible or unjust and cause a lot of pain and anxiety at the time but then turn out to be the enabler for something much better to happen. Several of these coincided over a couple of years. I then had a chance meeting with the Principal of Myerscough College - Lancashire's "land-based" college of Agriculture and Horticulture. He wanted me to go and work for him and after a while I agreed to meet and discuss it with him. I went through the formalities of applying and attending for interview alongside other candidates but came out of the interview as the Head, not only of the college Management Information System but of all things I.T. including the network, academic computers, the lot. The only downfall was the job title - Head of I.T. and MIS... Hit and Miss...! But that would give me a few laughs at various conferences as a way of breaking the ice.

Preston held me to a three month notice period and the only concession was to release me one day a week to go to Myerscough. Whose I.T. network was an absolute disaster. I felt like a good car mechanic who gets a job maintaining vehicles at an airport only to find the aeroplanes don't work... But this state of affairs wasn't the college's fault mainly but the firm that had promised what they lacked the skills to deliver. But this is now a different story for a different article.

Work Index

Creeping Bentgrass, Golden Wedding Party in Garstang

Last night found us driving out to Garstang to play for a Golden Wedding party for two lovely people who have booked the band in the past, several years ago and remembered us from then.

The format of the party roughly followed the format of the wedding, 50 years ago, with speeches by the Best Man and Groom. There was an Irish Raffle. We hadn't heard of this before but basically prizes chosen had to remain on your table in front of you and more tickets were drawn than there were prizes. Once the stock of prizes ran out, winners were allowed to pinch a prize from someone else, which made for a lot of fun and a much-travelled bottle of champagne! The tin of beans didn't move about anywhere near as much...!

Barry and Marlene, it was a pleasure to play for you again, I just hope we have that sort of energy when another ten years goes by to Miss Franny and my own 50th Anniversary! Heck... I wish I had that much now!

And just to bring past gigs up to date, here's a couple I missed over the Christmas and New Year period...

The 29th December saw us out at Darwen, playing at the house party of some long-standing friends. Very informal and lots of fun. We were pipped at the post this year and missed out on a hat-trick of winning Brian's quiz...

New Year's Eve saw us playing at the Thurlby Club in Preston, where we had played earlier in the year. A game of Bingo was held to raise funds for necessary repairs to the roof. David won and donated the prize back with a wish that they did the bit over the stage first...! A really good night with a load of laughs!

Club Night in Preston for Creeping Bentgrass

On Saturday night we were playing at the Thurlby Club in Lea, Preston. A tiny stage forced me to re-think our usual layout and I placed the keyboard at an angle to give myself enough room to stand. It worked very well as I felt there was less of a barrier between me and the audience.

Usually I stand with the keyboard in front of me, the mic stand in front of that and then usually some floor-standing swivelling lights in front of that again. We were expecting a few games of Bingo, but in the event they played a Spanish game that they called "Cassie-Cassie" (Sp?) This had each player with a sheet of nine playing cards having three rows of three cards and the caller turned over a card from a second full deck. Like Bingo they played four corners, then a T shape with the cross bar either at the top or the bottom, two vertical rows and a full house. It was quite good fun and didn't take as long as Bingo with 90 balls to choose from.

We played two sets mainly from our 60s song-list to an enthusiastic crowd of around 50-60 people and were told later that in the audience was a guitarist who used to play with The Ivy League who had apparently said "These lads are bloody good!". Thank you kind sir! Our first playing of the Elvis song Can't Help Falling In Love With You.

Large Format Slides

I recently came across a few boxes of large format colour transparencies, shot on 120 film (6x6cm or 2.25x2.25inches). They were shot on a Mamiya C330 twin lens reflex camera that I bought in the early 1970s mainly to take wedding photos with, that being my job at the time.

But I also shot lots of stock photos for magazines etc. The film I used for colour slides was Ektachrome64, rated at 64 ASA or ISO as we would say now. I used to process this myself using Barfen chemicals, which had to be kept at a constant temperature around 40 degrees centigrade, which was achieved by filling the bath with hot water and floating the tank containing the film...

The slides have not fared well. The containers are not airtight and they are heavily contaminated with 30 years worth of dust. I've removed the worst of it but the photos are still not exactly best quality. Short of spending hours on each, they are going to stay that way I'm afraid!

St Annes Road West, the main shopping street of St Annes on Sea just south of Blackpool. When the Lancashire mill workers flocked to Blackpool, the mill owners took their holidays in St Annes and Lytham. So much more refined you know...

Lytham Windmill in snow. We don't see a lot of snow on the Lancashire coast so shots like these were quite saleable to magazines and I used to make the most of any snowfall we might get, often driving out before the snowploughs had been out.

The impressive front of the Harris Library and Museum in Preston. Shots like this often find themselves on the front covers of local magazines, though on this one I haven't left enough space for text to be added without obscuring the columns.

More to come!

Large versions of the photos: st annes, windmill, harris library

Hodder Bridge and the Crossing of an Army

August 1983 saw me dashing about the Lancashire countryside, avidly snapping away at anything that was falling down, had already fallen down, or had a story to tell.

At the time I had a series, John Burke's Curious Lancashire running every now and then in the bi-monthly magazine Lancashire Magazine.

This is the River Hodder, a tributary of the Ribble. The bridge has obviously seen better days but fits all of my criteria in that parts of it have fallen down, the rest of it looks (though I'm not sure it is) in imminent danger of falling down, and it most certainly has a story to tell.

Across this bridge marched an army. Not just any old army, but an army on their way to a battle. Not just any old battle, but a battle that would change the course of English history.

The army was led by Oliver Cromwell, a name that even today can divide the country. On that day in 1648 his men were on their way to Preston, where they would win a huge victory upon which hung the fate of the Civil War. Following the battle the Royalist cause collapsed. The Parliamentarians called for the King to be brought to trial and six months later he was beheaded at Westminster on such a low block that he was forced to lie prone on his stomach in humiliation.

Return to Curiosities: Bridges Index

Preston Curiosities

I've had a couple of days off work with Miss Franny this week and to celebrate I caught a horrendous cold and sneezed my way through the night and most of yesterday. This didn't stop Miss Franny from allowing me to take her out to Preston for a look round though - she's made of sterner stuff than to allow a simple cold to keep her in. Even when it's mine...

Ages since I was in Preston though. I worked at Preston College for 12 years and used to go down to the town centre at least once a week, preferably when the market was filled with junk stalls! The above photo is the Harris Museum and Art Gallery.

I took the camera with me to take my mind off coughs and other violent expulsions and left Miss Franny going round the shops whilst I went off to find ... er... these shops...

This is the Miller Arcade, a Victorian shopping arcade based on the Burlington Arcade in London. It is, as can be seen from the photos, a little quieter than I remember the Burlington Arcade being!

Outside the main entrance, offset to each side is a matching pair of oblong spaces, surrounded by railings and what appears to be an entrance arch. No one seems to admit to this but they remind me very much of entrances to underground toilets, lots of which used to exist. The provision of public toilets these days is a dying art, helped along by the main use of them these days seeming to be the sale and intake of drugs, with any poor unfortunate who just happens along at the wrong moment to wash the stones being at substantial risk. Anyway, if anyone can confirm whether these oblongs were once staircases leading down to palaces of relief, please add a comment!

This is Stoneygate, looking back towards the centre of town. Preston had several gates, and a few streets are still named appropriately: Friargate and Fishergate etc. This was once the most pleasant approach to Preston, having come from the bridge over the River Ribble. Of course that was contested at times in the past - Preston has hosted not one but two battles... One on the Civil War and one when the Scots came down, only to be defeated and then hunted down ferociously - there's enough to devote a future entry to these at some time.

Somewhere near Stoneygate as remembered by this "Near this site" blue placque, the Cock Pit was where Joseph Livesey first drew up the public pledge and started the Temperance Movement. He said "I can't be doin' wi' all this drunkeness when we're tryin' to concentrate so as we can bet on which bird'll rip t'other to shreds..."

Also very close to here is the Arkwright House. The white portion of the building shown was the house of Richard Arkwright. Born in 1732 he kick-started the Industrial Revolution by inventing a spinning and carding machine that produced a thread from raw cotton. Cottage industries became replaced by large mills, with housing being built around the mills to house the workers. Not everyone was overjoyed at this. It was a time of unbelievable change for the English way of life. We now live through another similar age of great change.

I remember being shown around the engineering department of a large college in 1986 being shown lots of empty rooms with computerised equipment whilst the Head of Engineering pointed out each one saying, "This one will do the work of a hundred men..." Those hundred men today are all out of work and it doesn't stop. Self-scan tills, computers where you can self-register a visit to the doctors or check-in at the airport. People won't be necessary at all in the future and the chances to meet someone else and share a casual conversation is doomed to become a dying art. I'd predict, because I see the beginnings of it already, that people will become more and more isolated and distrust anyone else, becoming either fearful or aggressive. I don't want to be around to see it and in that I'm sure I'm echoing every other generation since Richard Arkwright's time if not before.

The Industrial Revolution caused lots of resistance against machinery, long hours and exploitation. Those who found themselves out of work were put into the workhouses, to be separated from their wives and husbands and set to work on a diet of thin greasy leavings. Workhouses were meant to be harsh - they were meant to give people an incentive to work as they were the last resort of starving families. There's no easy answer to this because our less harsh regime today means lots of out-of-work families get more in benefits than some workers could ever hope to earn.

In Preston, mill owners acquired mini arsenals of weapons and ammunition to defend their factories from smashers and machine wreckers. In 1842 there was a strike by workers after wages were cut by 25%. A crowd gathered and was opposed by a troop of militia. Sam Horrocks read the Riot Act but was hit by a flung stone. The troopers levelled their guns and fired over the heads of the crowd. Thinking they were firing blanks because no one had been hit, the noisy crowd advanced. With the next volley five fell dead. The sculpture commemorating the event outside the Corn Exchange is close to the exact spot but the protagonists are facing the wrong way - they were the other way about. Lively place, Preston...

Return to Curiosities: Buildings and Infrastructure Index Page

A Drive Through The Illuminations

It's been years since we did it. Driving through the famous Blackpool Illuminations, that is.

Last night I was dying to get out of the house and find some fresh air. A day either peering at a computer screen or talking on the telephone had left me feeling a bit cooped up.

I suggested a ride out into the countryside and Fran countered it with a suggestion we go shopping but we could go to the Asda in Fulwood, north Preston. So a compromise and we set off around 7:00pm taking all the back roads through Elswick to Broughton then cutting down the A6 to just past the M55/M6 junction and then across to the Asda.

We bumped into Rachel and Katie in Asda and caught up on a bit of news, then zig-zagged up and down every single aisle - oh joy - because we had no idea where stuff was.

Fran claimed she was disappointed because she had wanted to go to look around the clothes section and it was closed off. There was someone watching over me after all... It was daylight when we went in. It was pitch black when we came out.

So I headed back for the A6 but then turned left towards Preston until I hit the old Blackpool Road and we drove through Lea and then left through Warton and Lytham, then along the front at St Annes and so to Squires Gate at the start of the Illuminations.

By the time we got to the Pleasure Beach we had joined a crawling queue of traffic. This surprised me a bit, I didn't think the Illuminations were that popular these days to have such a queue mid week, but obviously they still draw visitors in.

So we stayed mostly in first gear and inched our way along the Promenade, seeing all 3 of the current illuminated trams - the trawler, the warship and the wild west train.

I turned off at the Gynn, just before the large standing tableaux along the cliffs at North Shore. They are best seen on foot and we'll go another night.

But I had had my fresh air, mingled a bit towards the end with exhaust fumes. It also struck me as we drove along the Golden Mile how the smell of frying onions has totally disappeared, such a shame! In the 1970s and 80s until the yellow M and Burger King arrived, burgers were griddled in their scores and kept hot by piling them on their ends in a heap of fried onions. They were put in a bun with or without onions and you added ketchup and mustard to taste and they were gorgeous! You wouldn't have dreamed of putting salad or pickles on them in those days but they tasted fantastic.

I don't often do burgers these days and if I do it has to be as a meal, not in between meals. As a teenager calories used to bounce off me. Now they cling on hard and fast...

I was driving of course so the photo is an old one. But interestingly for the past day or two it has been the one getting the most hits at Flickr, where you can see a larger version.

Flickr have recently changed how this works. Follow the link then click on the photo. It will be shown on a black background but then you will see a link for view all sizes.

Old Photos Jumble

Here's a bit of a mixture for you! Over the past few days there's loads of old photos gone through the scanner and many of them were one-offs or have specially interesting stories to them.

The first one was taken in 1986 I think. Blackpool Zoo orang utan Azimat had a baby daughter called Victoria. Vicky is now the grand old mother of the orang utans at Blackpool and has a glorious smile for visitors - she was trained to show her teeth as she had dental problems when young!

From the same year, here is the old Manxman. As the name suggests she was the ferry to the Isle of Man and as such was featured in one of George Formby's most famous films. It was No Limit made in 1933 and featuring the Isle of Man TT races. George played George Shuttleworth who crashed his bike but was given the chance to ride for a team and won not only the race but the girl - Florence Desmond who apparently couldn't stand him... or perhaps the way his missus stood by with a look of wrath and a tape measure every time they had to film a screen kiss!

The Manxman is shown in Preston Docks where for several years she served time as a nightclub. Wonder whether the ghost of George used to sing "Riding In The TT Races" in the main bar...?

I could almost have left this one uncaptioned and asked you to tell me what it was!

It is in fact the view down the toilet of Skipton Castle. As you can see, they preferred a long drop! The bar across guards against anyone trying to climb up the toilet to break into the castle during a seige. Not a nice job, but the tactic worked well and was a tried and tested way of sneaking into castles! Phew... what's that smell?!?

And lastly, this is Axbridge near Cheddar in Somerset. A few of us had gone down to Blagdon for a computer system course and we stayed at one of two pub/hotels in the village.

The date was 4 July 1990. Ring any bells? We sat in the bar watching England being knocked out of the FIFA World Cup in the semi final. Gazza cried and my mate Pete and I took our pints and sat in a deserted but very warm square until I decided to get the camera and take some photos.

Talking of ringing bells, our hotel was right next door to the church and the clock tower kept striking every quarter hour until two o'clock in the morning then started again at six!!!