OUR main picture comes courtesy of Rewind reader Kenneth Bennett.

It was taken more than 70 years ago at the old Swindon Cattle Market, and Mr Bennett’s grandfather, Arthur Brown, is among the men posing with an old buggy.

Mr Brown, who died in the early 1950s, is the man toward the right who wears a flat cap and a buttoned-up dark overcoat.

“The picture was taken in about 1945 or 1946,” said Mr Bennett, 77, who lives in Pinehurst.

“The market was off Marlborough Road. You could get to it in two ways. One was by the pub near the old railway line went down the side. They had to bring the cows in that way.

“The other was Marlborough Road, just past the Locarno on the opposite side, behind Gilberts.”

Mr Bennett has vivid memories of the market.

“I was always going to get the chickens and the rabbits. They sold cows, horses, everything, and at the very bottom they sold the chickens, the rabbits, the ducks and things like that.

“It used to be packed. It’s a shame the old market went, really.”

Mr Bennett remembers many other landmarks of the period, including a local pub, the Bell and Shoulder of Mutton, which stood opposite Gilberts and made way for a road alteration scheme almost half a century ago.

Swindon is thought to have held cattle markets in one form or another at least as early as the 13th century, and the tradition survived into the 1980s.

The location Mr Bennett remembers opened in the 1870s on a site largely occupied today by Dewell Mews. A statue of a Wiltshire Horn sheep, sometimes sporting four elegant wellington boots, commemorates the location’s history.

Mr Bennett found the photograph of the market among his grandfather’s effects, alongside other historic items.

One is a copy of the miniature Swindon Advertiser featured in last week’s Rewind, which was issued as a promotional souvenir in the 1920s during a fundraising drive for the Victoria Hospital.

Another is a copy of a proclamation issued to troops during World War Two by famous British General Bernard Montgomery, although how Mr Brown, a First World War veteran, came by it is unknown.

Dated January 23, 1943, it marked the Allied capture of Libyan capital Tripoli from Nazi forces.

Montgomery congratulated troops on an unparalleled achievement.