[Retlaw]

Originally Posted by Hill Walker

Many thanks to all.

I think the annotation has been cracked. The 'railway sleepers' in the first photo are almost certainly tramway sleepers. At both the left and right of the photo you can see the spacing of the drill holes for the rail shoes, its too close to be the five foot eight and a half inches of the standard railway gauge but its about right for the four foot gauge of Accrington trams. Also I done a web search for other tramway football teams and found evidence that at least Preston, Glasgow and Newham had them. As to the 'Leister' this is perhaps not a mis-spelling but an abreviation of Leicester that seems to be in (slight) use even today. If you do a Google search for 'Leister University' you get offered a lot of University of Leicester pages. Perhaps more significantly a hunt through American medical paper citations makes references to 'Leister-University' tracking down the research again you end up at Leicester University (Hospital).

Given the above I am satisfied that the annotation can be read as "Tramwayman's Leister 1911".

Special thanks to MargretR that guide to copperplate script will prove very useful, its far better than the one I've been using.

Tram tracks laid on wooden sleepers and buried under the road, I think not, they would have rotted away very quickly. There are still some tram lines under some of the roads in Accy, also seen one of the power lines, when some lecky blokes dug the pavement up near Oak Hill Park, they said over 700 volts and still live, they couldn't understand how it was still live, and would be reporting it.