Ernie Wise was one. So was the actor and author Leslie Sands.

So, come to that, were more than 40,000 other people over the years - the T&A Nignog Club was phenomenally popular.

It took its last gasp just 20 years ago this year, having served children in the city well for nearly half a century.

The Nignogs, and their sister organisation, the Yorkshire Observer Smilers, offered a lot for the sixpenny entry fee.

For a tanner (2.5p) you got an enamelled brass badge (on a pin for girls), greetings in the T&A and a small present on your birthday. You also got the chance to take part in organised sports, cycling, rambling and - for the stage-struck - a chance to tread the boards at the Alhambra in the annual Nignog Revue.

It was in these revues that the young Ernest Wiseman and Leslie Sands took their first steps on the stage.

In the days before youth clubs, the Nignog soccer league gave many lads their first taste of football on a proper pitch with real goalposts. It also started Ken Teasdale, of Allerton, on a lifelong love affair with sport.

He played at under-18 level in the league and went on to play in goal for Bradford Boys and as a part-time professional with Bradford City during the war years and later for Accrington Stanley before embarking on a life as a postman and as Bradford's most senior football referee (in 1991 he found himself officiating in a Bradford University match, one of three, in which the combined ages of the refs was 157 years). He also played Bradford Central League cricket and later became an umpire.

Ken spotted some correspondence in the Dalesman magazine about the Nignogs. One letter came from Nan Reynolds in Orpington in Kent, in which she remembered getting a cake from the Nignogs on her seventh birthday. It was covered in chocolate icing and had her name iced on it, and it stayed in her mind because it was her first birthday cake.

That's an important point - there wasn't a lot of money around for most Bradford families in the early days of the club, and the 1930s, when the Nignogs were in their heyday, were particularly bad economically.

Another letter, from A Whitehead of Bridlington, Nignog number 3207, recalls the idea of promoting good healthy outdoor exercise.

The Nignog cycling club provided plenty of that, giving youngsters what may have been their first view of a Yorkshire outside the smoke-blackened walls of the city.

There was also the Nignog swimming club, which taught thousands to swim (and in a city where mill dams were both dangerous and tempting in hot weather, who is to say how valuable those lessons were?).

The swimming club spawned the Nignog Floaters, a sort of pioneering formation team who toured the country giving exhibitions.

The swimming club was the last remnant of the Nignogs to disappear, defeated by rising bath hire costs and a shortage of helpers. It died in 1978, mourned by many, but remembered with affection by even more.

Bradford coal merchant who had a heart of gold

Bradford has got a new street name - a previously unnamed thoroughfare off Legrams Lane is now Greyhound Drive, recalling the dog track which once flourished in the area.

But reader Margaret Lee wondered whether anybody remembered John Willie North's field, behind the greyhound track, where she used to play as a child. Who was John Willie North? she wondered.

Her letter to the T&A brought a couple of quick responses. One of them was from Eric Lindley, of Shipley, who spent his early years as an accountant in Bradford dealing with Mr North, a coal merchant, amateur pharmacist, philanthropist, teetotaller and Methodist.

Mr Lindley recalls his using the field for the horses which drew his coal carts through the streets. Apart from coal, he sold an ointment allegedly made to a recipe of his grandmother's which was successful in a small way for some years and was advertised nationally.

He also liked large, second-hand cars which he would hire out.

Mr Lindley remembers his quiet generosity, too. "Many of his customers were living in straitened circumstances, being war widows or wives with families, looking after gassed and wounded husbands," says Mr Lindley.

"John Willie would cull his list of debtors, and there were often 'write-offs'."

Mrs H Dewhurst, now 86 and living in Tong Street, was brought up in Princeville, and remembers 'scratting' for coal in John Willie North's field during a mining strike. There were also pickings to be had from the side of the nearby railway track when either fuel or money were short.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.