A RECENT Memory Lane photograph of Worcester from the 1920s brought a very interesting call from a local man whose forebears, it turns out, were butchers in The Shambles for at least a century.

I followed it up with a visit to the home of 77 years-old Edward (Ted) Blackburn in Prestwich Avenue, to learn all about the Leas and the Blackburns who, between them, were Shambles butchers from about the 1820s until 1930.

Throughout that time, these families, in turn, primarily occupied Number 49 The Shambles - now the shop of JJB Sports, immediately opposite the rear of the Marks & Spencer menswear store.

In fact, it was a1920s photograph of the original butchers shop on this spot that brought the call to me from Ted Blackburn. It was in the Memory Lane feature on Worcester builder Ben Bray (1882-1950) and showed him and his workmen carrying out major improvements to a butcher's shop in The Shambles. The shop sign "F. BLACKBURN" can be clearly seen on the neighbouring premises.

In tracing Ted Blackburn's forebears in the meat trade we have to go back to the early years of the 1800s and to William Blackburn, who was a butcher in High Street, Oldham, and to James Lea (1803-1873), who was a butcher at 49 The Shambles.

The first connection between the Blackburns of Lancashire and the Leas of Worcester, seems to have come with a wedding in 1856. William, Ted's great-grandfather, is listed as a witness at the wedding in St Swithin's Church, Worcester, of James Lea to Elizabeth Pollard.

Significantly, William Blackburn was married the following year, to Ellen Pollard. Was she Elizabeth's sister and from the Worcester area?

A Worcester Directory of 1840 lists two butchers in The Shambles as James Lea senior and James Lea junior. The bridegroom at the 1856 wedding was obviously the son of James Lea senior.

However, a far more positive Worcester connection for the Blackburns came in the late 1870s, when Edward Blackburn, William's son and Ted's grandfather, moved to the Faithful City at the age of about 20.

He set up as a butcher at 48 The Shambles and clearly began courting Ada Eaton Lea, daughter of his trading neighbour at Number 49, James Lea senior.

In May 1880, Edward, then aged 23, married Ada at St Swithin's Church and, before long, the couple were living at 49 The Shambles, where Edward Blackburn began to trade. Had James Lea senior by then retired? His family home by that time had become Somerset Place, Claines.

Later, Edward Blackburn also took on Netherwood Farm, Oddingley, for some years, and it was from there that his son, Frederick James (Fred) Blackburn would regularly ride into Worcester, to court a local girl, Charlotte Elizabeth Cox, whose family lived in Somers Road.

Fred came in by pony, which he left at Tustin's Stables in Farrier Street, and he would sometimes ride home on Charlotte's bicycle.

Fred and Charlotte were married at St Swithin's Church in 1920 and, interestingly, the bride's sister Annie Amelia Cox was to marry another well-known Shambles butcher, Charles Till of Number 37.

Fred Blackburn (born 1891) and his two brothers, William Lea (Will) Blackburn and Albert Edward (Bert) Blackburn were all to become butchers.

Fred probably started working alongside his father Edward at 49 The Shambles, but then went away on active service as a corporal in the Royal Army Service Corps through the First World War and also with the Army of Occupation until about 1920.

His father retired and went to live at 27 Ombersley Road with his wife and his two unmarried daughters Gertrude and Ellen, dying in 1927. He bequeathed to his children various property holdings in Worcester and Kempsey and also a significant number of shares in the Scala Cinema.

Son Fred took over the butchers shop at 49 The Shambles, in the early 1920s and, like his father before him, went regularly to Worcester Market to buy sheep and cattle.

These he always herded back through the city's streets to The Shambles, where there was a slaughterhouse at the rear of Number 49.

Fred's son Ted, born in 1924, has happy memories of his early childhood days living over the shop.

"As a toddler I rode my tricycle about the shop and between the sides of beef hanging in the slaughterhouse," recalls Ted. "At five, I often went with my father to the Cattle Market and he would also take me to the Farmers' Club in Bank Street, sitting me against a side wall while he played snooker.

"All the butchers in The Shambles knew each other, were often great friends, and their families sometimes inter-married."

A proud possession of Ted's today is the ribbon and badge of office worn by his father during his term as President of the Worcester Master Butchers Association.

Alas, Fred Blackburn developed heart trouble and died suddenly in his Shambles shop during an angina attack in 1930. He was only 39 and son Ted was just six.

Fred's widow and son moved out of the shop not long afterwards and went to live in Droitwich Road. Earlier in life Charlotte Blackburn had been an infants teacher at Claines. She died in 1946.

Fred Blackburn's brother Will (1881-1952) ran the butchers shop at Ombersley (now Checketts) for many years, while his wife Nellie was landlady of the nearby historic Crown & Sandys Hotel for a time. The couple later moved to Stourbridge.

Fred and Will's other brother Bert (1886-1956) was a butcher working for a long time at Walker's Abbey Gateway meat shop at Malvern. He was left Little Brook End Farm at Kempsey, but later sold this to the Co-op Dairy and moved to Ombersley Road.

The three Blackburn brothers had three sisters including Gertrude, who for some years owned a substantial expanse of meadow land alongside the Newtown Isolation Hospital. This was left her by her father and is now covered by the Linksview Crescent estate. Fred Blackburn often used his sister's land at Newtown to graze and fatten up his sheep and cattle before slaughter. Gertrude died in 1963, and her sister Ellen in 1969.

Ted Blackburn never had any inclination to continue the family tradition as butchers even though three generations had been in the trade and also two generations of his grandmother's family, the Leas.

Constructing things by hand had always been his boyhood interest, and he was to spend his entire working life of nearly 48 years with the former giant engineering firm of Heenan & Froude at Worcester. He was, in turn, a fitter, the fitting shop foremen, in works study and then a sales engineer.

Ted and wife Rosemary (she's from the former Worcester coal merchant Allbutt family) are celebrating their 52nd wedding anniversary this year.

Ted has been taking a keen interest over recent years in tracing his family tree after been set on the trail by a distant cousin Graham Lea, who lives in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Graham has done a considerable amount of research to compile a comprehensive Lea family tree.