A Royal Celebration - Wigan Leisure and Culture Trust

were only about three or four boys in St George’s
school who wore ordinary shoes. They were at a
distinct disadvantage during games lessons as
none of us could afford football boots and
football and rugby (League of course) was played
in clogs. On the other hand I seem to remember
that those who wore shoes for some reason were
always the ones who were selected to play the
drums in the band. I was always given a triangle,
except on the odd occasion when I was chosen to
play a clapper. Do I suspect here that a class
system was in operation at St George’s?
As I got older I remember mastering the art of
attaching new clog irons. The irons were readily
available from clog shops and it was cheaper to
fix your own. You only had to prize off the old
irons with a claw hammer, fill in the nail holes
with matchsticks and then nail on the new ones.
It was important, as winter approached, that you
fitted new irons in good time as these didn’t
slide very well and needed to be run-in. On the
other hand if you let them wear too much they
would break, making walking very difficult
with a tendency to trip you up. Excessive wear
and broken irons were often caused by kicking
sparks – great fun but not recommended if you
didn’t want the proverbial ‘clout round the
earhole’ off your Dad.
A clogger’s shop in Astley, circa 1910.
Wearing in of new clogs was possibly one of the
more painful experiences in life as, unlike the
modern items worn today by clog dancers, the
leather was extremely thick and took a long time
to soften up. A few boys I remember avoided the
painful experience of breaking in new clogs by
having clog soles nailed to the soft leather uppers
of worn-out boots, known as having your boots
‘clogged’. Unfortunately, wearing these didn’t do
a lot of good for your ‘street cred’.
An even more painful experience was to have a
clog sole break. This meant that every time you
put your foot down the two halves closed up and
gave the sole of your foot a nasty nip. A poignant
line in an old Lancashire dialect song goes “Mi
clogs are boo-oth brokken, shoon ah’ve getten
none, tha’d hardly gi mi tuppence for all ah’ve
getten on.”
It’s impossible to talk about clogs without
mentioning the noise created by a large group of
people wearing them. I used to live close to a
junction of several streets where every morning
people from lots of other streets converged on
their way to the mills and coal mines of Wigan. As
a lifelong insomniac I can remember Lizzy
‘t’knocker-up’ starting her rounds in the morning
just as St Catherine’s clock struck four - I never did
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