The Tram Terminus

Joseph Huggan came from an old Lowtown family of handloom weavers. His was one of the few local families to successfully make the transition to powerloom weaving and large scale manufacturing. Joseph Huggan became the senior partner at Swinnow Grange Mills. He lived at Ravensmount, off Littlemoor Road, now the site of a small private housing estate. He was remembered as debonair, well-groomed and always smiling. The photograph of the Mayors party gives a good view of the Mayoral chain.

The track had a very tight corner at the top of Lidget Hill into Church Lane and trams occasionally left the track coming down Church Lane and crashed into Fred Coe’s Shop. It has been said that every time a tram crashed into this shop he opened a new one with the money he received from an insurance Company. The track was later modified to allow the trams to travel the corner at a more diagonal angle. He did open another shop at the bottom of Richardshaw Lane, which is a steep hill and trams also crashed in to this shop.

The photograph taken looking down Church Lane shows many buildings. On the right is a rather dirty looking Congregational Church. On the right is William Potts clock and watch making shop. Just visible in the distance, facing up Chapeltown is the detached stone house where William Wilson lived. William ‘Havercake’ Wilson made his havercakes on a huge red-hot stone slab, said to be a yard square. He hawked them around the town shouting 'Oatcakes, Oatcakes’. They were very popular in local pubs before the arrival of potato crisps. Just to the right of this photograph on Stocks Green, now Greenside stood a double pair of stocks under a broad tree in the 1740’s.

William Potts of Durham opened his clock and watch making shop in 1833 in the three storied, or garret house seen in the photograph on the bottom left. He remained in Pudsey thirty years, bringing up his seven children. In the mid-1860s he moved to Leeds. William Potts was succeeded by Joseph Parker another clockmaker a local man who specialised in long case clocks with painted dials. The building was probably built as an inn during the late eighteenth century.