Years roll away for a small boy on a tricycle

TWICE in its story Bellshill, the Lanarkshire former coal and iron

town, has surprised itself by appearing in unexpected places. First, it

was on maps. Bellshill is not where it used to be. Ramblers in the

byways of its rural past put its roots elsewhere than next to Mossend.

They place it nearer the east end of Viewpark. There was a quarry whose

owner's name was Bell. For his workers he built a row of houses. They

became Bellshill.

When the quarry stone played out and the cottages emptied, Lanarkshire

had one more place-name than it had a place to attach it to. Yet it was

the name that survived. When people left Bellshill, they took their

address with them.

Jack Fisher, a local historian, explains: ''A neighbouring village

called Crossgates (situated at what we now know as Bellshill Cross)

became the focal point of the local area. In about l810 this growing

village itself took on the name of Bellshill, and in its expansion

gradually absorbed surrounding villages such as Black Moss and

Sykehead.''

He suggested that the change in Bellshill's geography might have been

the work of a map-maker who gave up trying to fit in all the rural names

that local people used.

It is to Fisher that Bellshill owes its second unlikely location. He

has put it in a book, Old Bellshill in Pictures.

Until now its story had been available exclusively and in compact form

only in a scholarly booklet by a former teacher at Bellshill Academy.

Uniquely, however, Fisher has chosen to make his chronicle pictorial.

Picturesque is not a descriptive word that instantly adheres to

Bellshill. But for 30 years -- although he wonders if 40 years may be

nearer it -- Fisher has been collecting what images have been felt worth

taking of the town's streets, public buildings, churches, and shops, and

of people going about their everyday lives.

Many of the old photos were issued as picture postcards.

Enthusiasm for local history has produced many similar collections of

unlikely places to have albums of picture-postcard scenes made about

them, although few are less likely than Bellshill. But a rare treat of

Fisher's researches was to find an old card that includes himself in it.

It is a little-changed streetscape which remains recognisable to young

readers, but also contains features that will bring a gleam of

recognition to those whose memories stretch back to l935.

North Road, as viewed in the picture from a bridge that carried a

coal-pit railway, is almost traffic-free. Heading towards the camera are

a horse-drawn van and two lorries. There is an ice-cream barrow. Across

a side-street from a branch shop of the Bellshill and Mossend

Co-operative stands a wooden telephone box.

Coming out of the Co-op dairy is a small boy on a tricycle.

The passing of 60 years has added a shimmering idyllic quality to this

picture of an ordinary decent suburban street. Fisher's memory has added

more.

In his book he can give names to some of the people passing the time

on North Road. He remembers that of the two men across from the

ice-cream barrow, one was Sam Arnott a window cleaner. The ice-cream man

is Tony Coia and the friend he's speaking to was Bob Smellie, a farmer.

While Fisher remembers that the front lorry in the picture was a

Price's coal lorry, he is irked that he has not yet identified the one

coming behind it. He is almost sure it was a fruit and veg lorry, but

not sure enough for a historian to say so in the picture's caption.

The boy on the tricycle, although a racing blur on the photo, he

spotted with no bother. ''I got him right away, no doubt about it. I was

the only one around there who had a trike,'' he explained.

''You knew everybody in Bellshill at that stage. It was a village.''

He conceded that nostalgia had taken its own sweet time to catch up

with him. ''History was a bad word to me when I was at school,'' he

said. He left Bellshill in his mid-twenties to follow his trade as a

joiner and building inspector to Bute and elsewhere.

His first shy steps into the past came after an illness when an

elderly neighbour took him for gentle strolls into ancient Roman times.

Fisher, now 71, first helped with the excavation of legion's bathhouse

in Strathclyde Park and the fort at Twechar.

It was while assisting to gathering material for a Motherwell museum,

planned to open next spring, that his curiosity focused closer to home

and nearer to now.

''Really, it has taken me 30 or 40 years to put this little book

together -- a wee bit here and a wee bit there,'' he said.

At first, he went raking over the past of Motherwell, where he lives,

only to find the ground had at least enough diggers. Bellshill, however,

was untilled soil. ''It has had only this one book, called Old Bellshill

by Ian Cormack, all to itself. So I found myself tending to keep going

back to my own town.''

If holiday postcards seem an unlikely source, their explanation lies

in Bellshill's history. With the discovery of iron and coal in the

l830s, it became a frontier town. Work-hungry immigrants arrived from

many other parts of Britain and Ireland. More exotic late-comers

included Poles and Lithuanians.

A photograph in Fisher's book has a group of Bellshill-Lithuanian

miners, from around l9l0, in their Scotch bunnets and holding their

working gear to bore holes for explosives.

His caption explains: ''Lithuanians came to the area as far back as

l860 as prisoners of war from the Crimea: they came to escape poverty

and persecution. America was the original goal of these emigrating

people but it was cheaper to get to Scotland, and many decided to stay

rather than go on.

''By l900 there were an estimated 3000 in Bothwell parish, with many

settling in Bellshill and Mossend; at the time this picture was taken

there were around 200 Lithuanian families living in the miners' row

behind Main Street.

''Today there is still a strong Lithuanian community in the area and

there is a Lithuanian Club situated on the Calder Road.''

Other local items include what Bellshill did when a town baker fenced

off its common washing green and where it has a house built of railway

sleepers. On the site of a cash-and-carry place a coachbuilding firm

once made stylish cars for worldwide customers.

How old Bellshill got the heavy and dirty end of work comes contained

in the picture story of a flax mill that in turn was used to make

blackening and then wheel barrows before it was converted to a foundry,

a sawmill, and finally an ice factory.

Picture postcards of such places are not beautiful. Even Bellshill

people agree that their finest building was the central shops for the

old Co-op. But they are happy photos just the same.

The modest magic of the town's first picture-book is that by recalling

old scenes it promises also to link new generations. ''I'm told it is

doing quite well,'' Fisher said. ''Many of the early copies have been

sent to places in the world I've hardly heard of.''

* Old Bellshill in Pictures, Jack Fisher, #3.95 at Motherwell District

Council.