We continue our occasional series chronicling the athletics festivals which were a financial lifeline for cricket clubs like Lowerhouse in Victorian times, with the year 1885. 1883 and
1884 were successful but the standard of competition was poor, 1885 saw this rectified with affiliation to the AAA but was over-shadowed by a dreadful local event which showed the festival in a new light.
As reported in the Burnley Express on 20th June, 1885, Robert Longrigg, or Longridge, a collier, “went to Lowerhouse Athletic Festival and having indulged somewhat freely in liquor, returned home in a state of intoxication, ” and went to bed, in the room he shared with wife Mary Ellen, and children James Edward, 4, and Ellen, 3 in 15 John Street, which was off Byron Street/Padiham Road.
(image of John Street from Red Rose Collections date unknown)
At about 2.30 am he went downstairs and came back with an iron coal rake with which he struck at the children’s bed, dealing a blow to the head of little James which penetrated the skull and possibly reached the brain. Mary Ellen managed to get her husband downstairs and a constable arrested him and took him to the nearby Kiddrow Lane Police Station whilst Dr. Weir, from Padiham, was called to attend to little James.
When he was brought before the magistrates on the Monday his wife gave evidence, saying after she’d got the rake off him he dived under the bed saying “They are under here”. As Dr. Weir couldn’t say for sure that James would survive, Longrigg was held on remand. He was brought up again on 8th July when Dr. Weir was now able to confirm that James would recover, so the charge was cutting and wounding his son. Mary Ellen repeated her evidence but said she was sure the blow had not been intended for her or the children, he hadn’t known what he was doing and she had no quarrel with him. He would never have hurt James in his right mind.
A desperately remorseful Longrigg now explained what had happened. Whilst watching the sports at Lowerhouse, he saw a disturbance involving two men who he said were “welchers”. A welcher is someone who renegues on a bet, and it sounds like two men were threatening people who owed them money for bets. Already pretty drunk, he left the ground and went to the Bird i’th Hand (Lane Ends) and continued drinking until 8 o’clock. When he came out, he saw the two men, who told him they would thrash some of the people with whom they had been having trouble. He then went drinking in the George IV until 10 pm, before finally going home to bed, thoroughly intoxicated. He dreamed that the two men had followed him up Kithroe (Kiddrow ) Lane, and he had fought with them upstairs before getting the coal rake from downstairs, and, still hallucinating that the two men were there on the bed, he struck at them, but hit James, at which point the screams of the child and his wife woke him up. Robert’s extreme reaction to the threats of the men perhaps indicates that he too owed them money.
When the case came up at the Manchester Assizes in mid-July, as the only witness was Mary Ellen, and as a wife couldn’t legally testify against her husband, the prosecution declined to proceed and Robert was cleared.
He and Mary Ellen went on to have several more children. James recovered, worked as a carter for a coalman, married and had a family and lived until he was 72.
So all’s well that ends well, but the episode shows that there was a darker side to the Sports Day, with heavy drinking, gambling and possible trouble.
ac August 2026