But if it was difficult to get a chairman to preside over the meeting, it was even more difficult in many places to get a hall in which the meeting could be held. At Sunderland the hall was refused to Mr Bradlaugh because it could not be let for "such damnable doctrines." In Rochdale the Public Hall, although let for week-day lectures, was refused for Sunday discourses. The Rochdale Freethinkers therefore hired the theatre; but the police authorities, whose functions seemed to include "the cure of souls," intimated to the lessee that if he kept to his contract his licence would be in danger. When this was explained to Mr Bradlaugh, he gave way, and delivered his lectures in the open air; in the morning on the Butts to about 3000 persons, in the evening in a large field near Roebuck to a still larger audience. The only result, therefore, of this endeavour to shut him out of Rochdale on the Sunday, was really to procure for him larger and more interested audiences. In January 1861, Mr Bradlaugh went to Leigh, in Lancashire, where no Freethought speaker had been for twenty years. The thermometer was below freezing, and the roads like ice. A menagerie, with real wild beasts who roared and a real elephant who walked the streets, occupied the thoughts of the town. But worse than new place, icy weather, or wonderful menagerie, was the bellman of Leigh. This bellman, wrote my father sorrowfully, was not "a teetotaller, and had offered up considerable sacrifices to Bacchus. This course of conduct sadly interfered with the clearness of his articulation, and to fill the cup of my misery he had also to announce the loss of a donkey. The two announcements were so jumbled together that little was distinguishable except the donkey."[67] [Footnote 67: C. Bradlaugh in _National Reformer_, Jan. 12, 1861.] From Leigh Mr Bradlaugh went in the freezing weather to Warrington, another place in which no Freethought speaker had raised his voice for a score or more of years, but where the editor of the _Warrington Guardian_ had been trying to fan some warmth of hate into the townsfolk. In the issue for January 5th, the editor announced that there was to be "a most ribald, ignorant, and virulent attack upon the Holy Scriptures," adding further that Mr Bradlaugh had been lecturing in the neighbourhood "in such a blasphemous manner that the local papers have been utterly unable to report his sayings. Surely Warrington has enough of temptations to ungodliness without any assistance from stipendiary peripatetics, or pickers up of a lazy living, who cover with their slime, like noxious reptiles, what they want sense or taste to admire."