WHY, I am often asked, are native St Helens folk known to our Scouse invaders as woolly-backs?
Well, the reason dear chums, is that they have got it all wrong.
In fact, the original woolly-backs were Liverpudlians!
It all harks back to a long-ago age of heavy manual labour and limited mechanical assistance; a time when Mersey dockers had to lift and haul goods brought into port by world-wide shipping traffic.
One of the humbler tasks, often assigned to the lowlier ranks, involved toting piles of fleeces, imported from places such as New Zealand, on bowed shoulders, resulting in residual clumps of wool clinging to their backs.
CHANGED
Thus that nickname (once aimed rather sneeringly at St Helens folk, but these days expressed with leg-pulling affection) has stuck.
What has changed, rather mystifyingly, is that the woolly-back nickname somehow - and at some unknown period of time -became switched from Liverpudlian to Sintelliners' shoulders.
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