WELL-KNOWN in local music circles before the war, these singers from Temple Street Methodist Church dropped the 'Street' and were called the Temple Ladies’ Choir.

Sitting in the middle of the second row back is their conductor Herbert Whitaker, joint managing director of the Rustless Iron Company.

He enjoyed a long association with Temple Street, where he conducted an annual Messiah for 25 years – as his father, William H Whitaker, had done before him!

He was also a trustee, chapel steward and Sunday School superintendent.

In 1936 the Temple Ladies’ Choir won first prize in the open class at the Blackpool Musical Festival – an award “generally regarded as the ‘blue riband’” of such events – competing with choirs from as far afield as London and Birmingham and scoring 189 marks out of a maximum of 200.

“Very good choir, tonally well blended and balanced,” enthused the adjudicators’ report. “Fine attack altogether. Certainty of effect in all they did. Words pictured with much imagination and sung with splendid enunciation. A most poetical performance, and wonderfully precise.”