First published, December 1996

SUCCEEDING generations of passers-by must have gazed up in puzzlement at the large letters A.D. (normally meaning Anno Domini) carved into one of the town centre's most prominent Victorian buildings. For it bears no accompanying dateline.

Now, at last, the riddle is solved. For the letters have nothing to do with the year in which the Imperial Buildings, on Ormskirk Street, were built.

That A.D. happened to be the initials of the rather splendidly-named Alfonsus Dennett, a prominent St Helens citizen of the day who was responsible for construction of that imposing edifice.

The intriguing information comes from Alfonsus' great-nephew, Leslie T. Swift of Cherwell Road, Westhoughton, in responding to a query on this page from a gang of Carr Mill Hotel arm-benders who had been pondering over what the Imperial Buildings began life as.

Alfonsus Dennett, says Leslie, lived between 1848 and 1922. He had a grocery business in St Helens for many years and entered local politics at the age of 38, serving as a councillor in Hardshaw ward.

The Imperial Buildings were opened around 1886. "It would appear they were originally used for political purposes", says Les, for a local newspaper item of the time reported that a meeting for friends and supporters of Alfonsus Dennett, then a council candidate, had been staged there.

He was the elder brother of Leslie's paternal grandmother Christina Swift, who herself was well known around the St Helens district, especially in argricultural circles.

Says Leslie: “Recent family-history research has revealed, in the local press report of my grandmother's funeral in 1935, that she was "a sister of Alfonsus Dennett who erected the Imperial Buildings..."

And it would appear that shops have long graced the ground-floor frontage of that imposing edifice.

A newspaper advert for 1896, which Leslie has unearthed, states: ‘Dennett's New Shop Is Now Open.’

Among other things it offered ‘choicest English beef (bullock and heifer); finest Scotch mutton; and Welsh Wether mutton.’

And Leslie, still researching into the Dennett side of his forebears, signs off with another interesting fact. "That hardy ‘water rat’ of yesterday, Walter Dennett, whose swimming exploits you recently featured, was a nephew of Alfonsus.

Both were members of Lowe House Church - Alfonsus being one of its founders."