hunch back of padiham

Elija Poole was another old codger who lived in a cottage adjacent to the "Hand and Shuttle" inn, and he had a remarkable deformity.

Those were the days when deformities were referred to quite freely and with no offence given or taken, and old Elija was often ribbed about his. It took the form of his right foot being twisted round at 90 degrees so that his foot was always at right angles to the left one. Thus was his story anyway………

When pressed to tell how he became afflicted with this odd foot, Elija told a tale about how, when he was a young man, he had once gone to Burnley to the pictures and afterwards to a pub in a less salubrious part of the town. What with one thing and another, Elija staggered out well after closing-time anddown to Burnley centre to find that the last tram to Padiham had long gone. So he sat on a doorstep to ponder the situation.

At that time, during the depression, taxis (if any) were a recourse totally out of the question for most folks, so Elija decided that he would have to walk it. Now, walking the three and a half miles or more from Burnley to Padiham after the pictures was a fairly ordinary thing to do on Saturday nights, chiefly undertaken to save the tram fare. But, Elija was in a right state, so after half an hour trying to collect himself, he heaved himself to his feet and started.

He had hardly managed to get halfway across the road when suddenly he caught his foot in a tramline, sideways on, and try as he might it stuck fast, resisting all attempts to free it. Now Elija wasn`t a very bright youth (this state of affairs persisting for the rest of his life), and it never occurred to him to undo his boot laces and take his foot out, so he set off from Burnley centre, dragging his trapped foot along the groove in the tramline until he was able to slip it out at the end of the rail at the Memorial Park terminus at Padiham, by the "Whalley Range" pub.

By that time the foot had become a fixture in it`s inclination to starboard and remained so, resisting all attempts to straighten it.

Elija couldn`t remember how long it took him to do this trip, but did recall later that because of his new-found circular gait, it took almost as long to get to his house from there as it had done from Burnley to Padiham.