Coal, Cotton, Canals.” A room full of awed and delighted students, at the restored Wigan Pier’s The Way We Were heritage center, dutifully repeat, “Coal, Cotton, Canals.”Ĭoal came down from the Lancashire hills, canals came up from the Mersey River’s estuary, and they met at the town of Wigan. As all learning is based on repetition and memorization, the class will repeat after me: Coal, Cotton, Canals.

Let us listen as the Victorian schoolteacher explains. To understand the rest of the joke that made Wigan Pier famous, you have to understand Wigan, an industrial town in Lancashire, just to the north of Manchester.

The joke becomes a little less incomprehensible when you realize that in British English, the word pier no longer retains its original meaning of any structure built over the water but instead applies only to those elaborate pleasure palaces built over the ocean at seaside resorts such as Southport. This ’ere is Wigan Pier!’” Popularized by music hall comic George Formby Senior (who would start his London act with “Good Evening, I’m Formby fra’ Wigan, and I’ve not been in England long”), this joke had them rolling in the aisles in the first decades of the 20th century.

It was stopped so long that a passenger stuck his head out the window and called to the signal box operator, ‘Is this Southport?’ ‘Southport?’ the railroad man answered. Ajoke made Wigan Pier famous: “There was this train full of passengers going to Southport, and it got stopped at an open drawbridge.

The way to wigan pier