STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

Any account of Ellenroad funding would be incomplete without mention of the close links I always had with the Chief Executives office at the Town Hall. In the beginning it was John Towey who saw the potential of Ellenroad and was instrumental in setting up the Steering Committee which got the project off the ground. He made John Pierce, the Chief Planning Officer chair of the committee and in 1986 John retired and John Pierce took over as Chief Executive.
Rochdale was always a forward thinking council, largely because it was Labour controlled in my opinion, and they had a very strong twinning policy. There were regular visits between Bielefeld in West Germany and Rochdale and Ellenroad soon became a essential venue for a visit as the guests toured round the borough. It was good for the town to be seen as sponsors of the biggest industrial archaeological project in the country and full advantage was taken of it. I soon got to know some of the regular visitors, Klaus Schwickert, who was the mayor of Bielefeld was particularly impressive. I remember that the first time he came he listened to all we had to tell him, looked carefully at everything and then took me on one side. “Do you know the German phrase that Audi use in their advertisements?” he said. “Yes.” I replied, “Vorsprung durch technic.” “Do you know what it means?” “Yes, ‘Progress through technology’” “Good! Do you know the meaning of the Yiddish word chutzpah?” “Yes, one definition is a man who throws himself on the mercy of the court as an orphan after killing his parents!” “Good, I suggest you should have a similar expression as a slogan at Ellenroad, Vorsprung durch chutzpah!” I think that was possibly the best definition we ever got of our corporate management style!
Years later John Pierce told me about the first visit made to Bielefeld by Rochdalians. He said that one man was in conversation with a local lady and she asked him whether he had ever been to Bielefeld before. He answered yes, he had been many times years ago. She asked if he recognised any of the features from that time, he said not really, all German towns looked the same from 3,000 ft. when you were bombing them! On the same visit the mayor took his guests to the top of a turret in the castle from where there was a magnificent view of the country around. One mill owner was heard to say “By heck, I’ll bet you had a good view of the bombers coming in from here!” Like Stockport, Bielefeld had a strategic railway viaduct and we were trying to knock it our right through the war. It was eventually destroyed by one of Barnes Walliss’ ‘Earthquake’bombs.
John was a wonderful ally in the fight to keep the Ellenroad Project going. I was always conscious that he was actually CEO of a company that employed 10,000 people and there were tremendous demands on his time but he always responded when I called for help. He will reappear when I talk about the Whitelees Engine.
I could go on to very boring lengths about funding but I shan’t. I think in the end the figure for actual cash was something like £3 ½ million, add in gifts in kind, the MSC contribution and indirect subsidy through MSC from the council and I think you reach a figure of approximately £4 ½ million. I still boggle at this figure myself, it was an enormous sum and as someone once pointed out to me, if this had been on a national monument in London I would have got the OBE! No chance of this happening in Rochdale, my version of it is that I upset too many people in the drive to accomplish our aims.

[Stanley]

HOTELS AND CAR PARKING

You may well ask what these subjects have to do the conservation of Ellenroad. I would have had difficulty answering this question if I’d been asked at any time in the first 18 months at Ellenroad but it soon became obvious that the long term success of the Ellenroad Project depended on factors which at first, seemed entirely separate. Some explanation is needed.

When I had my first meeting with Tony Welton and Gavin Bone in 1984 I set out an overall plan for the project. Two key parts of this plan never got done. One was the provision of the residential educational facility which would have given academic and financial depth to the project. The other, and more pressing matter was the provision of an external service building to give the facilities necessary for the day-to-day running of the engine house.

This latter was, to my mind, crucial to success in that we would be able to raise the quality of the experience of visiting the engine and, in the short term, would give us room for some community based activities. What we were looking at was a building that could provide space for an office for the Trust, toilet accommodation, a café, a meeting room and a small reception and exhibition area. It would become the main entrance to the engine house and the final layout of the conversion of the boiler room was designed with this in mind.

There was a piece of land between the engine house and the motorway which was owned by the council and had been earmarked in the Town Plan as the site for a hotel catering for traffic on the motorway. This made it into a potentially very valuable piece of land. Remember the catchment area I mentioned earlier. Under Treasury Rules the council had a duty to obtain the best price it could in any disposal of the site so their hands were tied, they couldn’t let the Trust have the land at an advantageous rate. It soon became obvious that the route to getting what we wanted on the land was by participating in the planning process connected with the sale of the land and the building of the hotel. The council recognised this and made it a condition of any sale that the building had to be designed sympathetically so as not to clash with the engine house and that the Trust should get some land and car parking out of the deal. This was the best we could hope for and Peter Dawson, the Trust’s architect and myself joined the process and fought our corner for the Trust.

Little did we know what we were letting ourselves in for! We spent five years in meetings and learned a hell of a lot about the economics and designing of hotels but fate always snatched victory away from us at the last minute. I’ll give a very simplified version of the course of the negotiations. Take it as read that there were many more firms and people involved on the periphery.

We started with a French company called Campanile who were never a really serious starter because all they wanted to do was put up a concrete box and sell cheap grub to motorway travellers. After twelve months of desultory negotiations they fell out of the frame.

The next approach was from a firm called Pleasureama who operated casinos but had a subsidiary company called Commodore Hotels. They were looking for sites and one day Peter Dawson and I found ourselves in a meeting with a bloke called Tom Keegan. The purpose of the meeting was to establish the basis for negotiations between Commodore and the Trust. I think that when Commodore came they thought that they were paying a courtesy call to smooth the way to pursuing their scheme and regarded it as a PR exercise more than anything else. They got a bit of a shock when they realised just how much control we had over what happened on the site. However, we weren’t in the business of raising obstacles and soon convinced them that we weren’t a threat but an ally. We were raising the possibilities of co-operation, mutual promotion and laying the basis of a fruitful partnership. In the end we convinced them that there was merit in having a major heritage attraction on their doorstep and the meeting relaxed. It got so relaxed that Tom Keegan started to tell us his life story which, if it was true, was quite incredible. The facets of his career bounced from British Leyland, General Motors, entering a monastery and running a housing association on the Wirral to his present position as a major shareholder in a casino operator. Peter and I were enthralled. When we came out of the meeting I told Peter the guy was either the best con-man I had ever met or a genius, I didn’t know which, the jury was out.

Negotiations with Commodore moved slowly forwards and we got to the stage where we had the whole thing buttoned up. Peter had put a lot of time and effort into designing the exterior of the hotel and laying out the site and we thought we had quite a good result for the Trust. Then came the bombshell. Pleasureama were the subject of a take-over bid and yet another developer fell out of the frame.

Back to square one but so many firms had been helping to develop the plans for the hotel, all at risk, that the only way they could recoup their losses was to encourage another developer to take over the scheme. It wasn’t long before a bloke called Julian Peck from Manchester turned up with another prospect, British Airports Authority. I think their subsidiary which managed their hotels was called Associated Leisure. We started another round of negotiations on another hotel!



The hotel site in front of the engine house in 1987.

[Stanley]

We went through the whole weary process again. In my efforts to get the best deal for the Trust I gave as much help and advice as I could. I brought everybody’s attention to the fact that when the culvert under the motorway which carried the River Beal had been designed the design criteria had been inadequate and there was a danger that what was known as a ‘Fifty Year Event’ , in other words a flood that could be expected once every fifty years, would overwhelm the culvert and that the way out for the water was via the hotel site along the side of the motorway embankment. The brownie points I got for pointing that out and saving a costly mistake in the design enabled me to get my way in siting the provision of water and gas supplies to the hotel. My interest in this was dictated by the fact that the engine house was running on an inadequate water supply and no gas main.

We got to the point where a date was set for the start of the works and the surveyors moved in to start pegging the site out for the groundworks. Another bombshell dropped. BAA decided at main board level that all future hotel developments would be on their own land, in other words, at airports. The whole scheme went into the bin! Peter and I were annoyed to say the least. The only interesting thing that sticks in the mind about this set of meetings was the day that we were privy to a decision on how large the hotel was going to be. Peter and I sat in a meeting and had what was probably the best seminar in hotel design anybody could have. We noticed that they had brought a very old man with them. He was slightly infirm and they had to assist him into his seat. We wondered what he was doing there because he sat there and never said a thing. That is, until they got down to the specifics of room sizes and allocation of space within the building. Then the reason why the old bloke was there became clear. He had the answer to every question on the tip of his tongue. He knew exactly how big rooms had to be, how wide the corridors, how much space should be allocated to the different functions in the hotel and utility areas. In other words, he was a walking encyclopaedia on hotel design. It was a treat to watch him work. Another interesting thing we learned was that in the first year of operation the hotel would have 50% more staff than in subsequent years. This was to ensure that a reputation for service and efficiency could be built up quickly.

The bottom line was that Peter and I never cracked the problem of the exterior services for the Trust and this was to be a major stumbling block for the Trust. At the time of writing it still is so. I hear that Coates have managed to buy the land now but I have doubts whether enough corporate memory of the original concept remains embedded in the Trust to drive forward a final solution to the provision of the external services let alone the residential complex. Until this is done, Ellenroad will remain yet another amateur operation clinging on to the plot by the tips of its fingers and relying entirely on nostalgia to keep it afloat. It makes me sad but it’s not my problem any more.

[Stanley]

All the time, while the hotel planning was going on I was looking sideways to find other ways of extending Ellenroad’s options. I heard they were going to re-design the motorway junction to give access to the biggest piece of undeveloped land in the Greater Manchester area, the Kingsway site on the other side of the motorway. I suggested a link road between the Ellenroad site and Kingsway which would have opened up a lot of possibilities for us but it was never taken seriously.

Then I got wind that the Metro Link system in Manchester was to be extended to Rochdale. I suggested a station at Ellenroad and the use of the dead land inside the motorway junction as a car parking area for a park and ride facility at Ellenroad. Everybody agreed it was a good idea, especially if combined with a link road to the Kingsway site but again, the idea died for want of support.

Finally, my biggest plan was that Ellenroad should build an exhibition centre and start a firm of exhibition designers and builders as a way of generating funds for the Trust. In this latter I was aided by Bruce Robbins who had the original idea of the design facility and took it on himself when the Trust decided they didn’t want anything to do with it. I shan’t go into all the details but Bruce and I got the backing of the Arts Council and I drew up a spreadsheet to test the viability of the project. I got a result which showed that even if we gave away the exhibition space for six months of the year we still finished up with an amazing profit. I found a developer who would get us the funding and asked John Youngman, the Chairman of Coates Brothers, if he would get his finance director to cast his eye over my calculations as I didn’t trust them. He did and came back to tell me I was wrong, I had made a mistake, I had underestimated the profits! It was a licence to print money! However, when I presented it to the directors they refused to have anything to do with it. End of another brave try!

It was round about this time that Coates were taken over by the French firm Total Oil and I soon got them interested in supplying us with oil and looking favourably at our operation. Another prospect was the Co-operative Wholesale Society who had announced they were going to build their new headquarters in Rochdale. I started corresponding with them and laying the foundations of a funding approach to them. Time and time again I drove it home to the directors of the Trust that they should be looking for funding and further, that they should recognise that the leadtime to substantial funding was often measured in years. It’s eight years since I severed my connection with the Trust and it would be interesting to see what funding they have that couldn’t be traced back to the seed corn I was putting down ten years ago.

I think that’s enough about fund-raising. When I started at Ellenroad I knew next to nothing about site management, fund-raising and managing complex relationships between the Trust, the Council, Coates and the various funders. By the time we had finished I was pretty impressive. It was all new, a very steep learning curve and exactly what I was suited to at the time. I was lucky Coates found me, they were lucky they got the right bloke.

[PanBiker]

It’s eight years since I severed my connection with the Trust and it would be interesting to see what funding they have that couldn’t be traced back to the seed corn I was putting down ten years ago.

I take it the eight and ten years referred to above is from when you first wrote your memoir?

[Stanley]

Correct.

Once again, we need to dispose of a few small matters. 1986 was a very busy year apart from funding.

You will have noticed how much time I was spending writing grant applications, letter, minutes and memoranda. I’m sure you will also remember that I saw my first Apple computer in California in 1979. I was driving home one night and as I passed through Burnley a sudden thought came to mind and I parked up and walked into Dixons the electrical retailers. Ten minutes later I walked out with an Amstrad Word Processor with a massive 512k memory! I took it home, plugged it in and started my love/hate relationship with computers. It was a quantum leap forward but anyone who started with computers at that time will remember the trials and tribulations we had to go through. I can remember more than one occasion when I lost half a days worth of work and had to start all over again. Even so, productivity leapt up and I can remember how impressed everyone was when they realised that the Trust had embraced the computer age.

It was 1986 when I made another technological leap on the engine. I persuaded Dave Jones of SOS NDT at Bury to do a Non Destructive Test of the vital parts of the engine and charge us nothing. He came and did the same job for us he would have done for the Central Electricity Generating Board on one of their turbines. The engine passed with flying colours, there were no flaws in any of the rods or cranks. I asked Dave what his overall verdict was and he said that if the CGEB could get the same results with their turbine shafts they would be delighted.

In July 1987 Mary and I had two visitors at Overdale, Mary’s house at Addingham. They were John Robinson from the Science Museum and a bloke called Eberhardt Wechtler who was in charge of the Industrial Museum in Dresden in what was then the DDR, in other words, East Germany. He was over here to lecture and see some of the developments in British museums and John had brought him North to see Ellenroad.

It was while we were having a splendid meal in a Greek Restaurant in Ilkley that Eberhardt made a request. Evidently he had some sterling from lecture fees which he wanted to change into West German Marks before he left UK so that he could buy medical equipment for his daughter who had spina bifida, before he returned to the DDR. I asked him how much and he said that it had to be done in ‘modules’ of £500. And there were several ‘modules’! This gave me a bit of a problem as we were due to be at Ellenroad at six the following morning and Eberhardt had to be on a train out of Manchester at a quarter to nine!

There was only one thing to do, I rang Horace Longden! Horace ran a travel business and I reckoned he would have some contacts who would carry a stock of West German currency. I explained the problem to Horace and he said to leave it to him. The following morning we had a wonderful early morning ride over to Ellenroad via Lord Saville’s Moor and down into Hebden Bridge with the Mozart Requiem playing full blast on the stereo. We kept stopping to admire the field patterns and geological features. Eberhardt loved Ellenroad when he saw it and at seven o’clock prompt, a taxi drew up at the engine house and took Eberhardt and John away. John told me afterwards that he didn’t know where the taxi had taken them but they seemed to go to every travel agents between Ellenroad and Manchester. Eberhardt changed all his money and the driver refused to accept any fare when he dropped them off at Piccadilly Station in time for the train. Eberhardt was impressed but it was all down to Horace, that was the sort of organisation we had at Ellenroad then, all things were possible!



Dave at work at REW. The poor man died young.

[PanBiker]

You will have noticed how much time I was spending writing grant applications, letter, minutes and memoranda. I’m sure you will also remember that I saw my first Apple computer in California in 1979. I was driving home one night and as I passed through Burnley a sudden thought came to mind and I parked up and walked into Dixons the electrical retailers. Ten minutes later I walked out with an Amstrad Word Processor with a massive 512k memory! I took it home, plugged it in and started my love/hate relationship with computers. It was a quantum leap forward but anyone who started with computers at that time will remember the trials and tribulations we had to go through. I can remember more than one occasion when I lost half a days worth of work and had to start all over again. Even so, productivity leapt up and I can remember how impressed everyone was when they realised that the Trust had embraced the computer age.

We could have sold you one down in Earby. I had been selling and repairing computers for 4 years by then. We did the BBC's and Master series and the Amstrad PCW8256 and 8512 wordprocessor combo's. I used one myself to do the invoicing and correspondence for the business. Alan Sugar did a sales deal, £50 off if you brought in a typewriter, we ended up with a skip full!

[Stanley]

Yes Ian, I was a bit late into computers. Actually, thinking back I think the one I got was 256k and I later made the massive leap forward of installing the 512k card! unbelievable how far we have come......

[Wendyf]

Amstrad didn't start making computers till 1984, first the CPC then the PCW in 1985. First BBC micro in 1981....just thought it was worth pointing out!

[PanBiker]

From the start of Stanley,s last post which is where I quoted from this was 1986 so all the dates are correct Wendy. We were original Acorn dealers and started with the BBC model A in 1981. The model B and upgrade kits for the A to B came out in 1982. I went on the Acorn courses for repairing to component level. I had an original model A and upgraded it later to model B spec and beyond, extended ROM sockets and extra retro fitted 64K of ram. We continued with the Master series and the Amstrad PCW models. I later ended up doing all the Archimedes range to component level in another employment, from there onward to PC's with my own business. I continued to service all the Acorn stuff as a lot of schools had the kit.

[Wendyf]

Apologies Ian, I misread your post.....should have known you would be spot on!

[Stanley]

WHEATSHEAF CENTRE AND VOLUNTEERS


By 1988 we had got as lot done at Ellenroad. The engines were ready to steam regularly for the public and I started doing this in summer. My problem was that I was the only person who could do it. For 18 months I ran the engines every weekend, year round, except for Christmas and New Year. I don’t think anybody realises to this day what hard work this was, I was working seven days a week and putting in an average of 100 hours. I knew this couldn’t go on and called for volunteers from the Friends organisation to attend a course at the engine house during which I gave them a basic grounding in the history, design, principles and day to day management of steam boilers and engines in general and Ellenroad in particular.

I forget now how long the course was I think it was about six months. We finished it by dividing the volunteers into teams and they ran the engine with me supervising. I gradually got to the stage by late 1989 where I could leave them on their own. I’ve always said that apart from getting the engines back in steam, this was the best piece of work I did while I was at Ellenroad. In effect, I made myself redundant once the heroic bit was done!

Embedded in the training of the volunteers was one historic moment for which I claim full and absolute credit. There were two ladies on the course who were very interested in the engine, Joan Smith from Northwich and Thelma Pollitt from Manchester. They were very good students and really took it all in. When I felt that they had reached the stage where they were ready for action I arranged for them to meet me at the engine house and run the engine with me, exactly as we had done several times before..

On the day appointed when they turned up at the engine house early in the morning I told them the bad news. They were running the engine on their own! I would follow them round and keep an eye on them but they were going to do it all on their own. I’ve seldom seen two women nearer to flight syndrome in my life! However, they soon got used to the idea and started by lighting the boiler. I’ll admit that the hoppers on the stokers were already full but then the lads used to do that for me anyway.

They never made a mistake and fired up, warmed and oiled the engine, started it and ran it from ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. I told them that as far as I was aware, this was the first time in the history of engineering that two women had run a 3,000hp. engine completely unaided. I was so pleased with them and made sure that they knew it. Funnily enough this didn’t go down well at all with the other volunteers. There was already a bit of infighting and jockeying to see who would be top dog, Chief Engineer in their terms, and the injection of competition in the shape of Joan and Thelma triggered off a bad attack of ill-concealed chauvinism. It wasn’t just the blokes who were volunteers, I well remember one visitor who was evidently an old engineer telling Joan one day that she ought to be making tea, not running the engine! I don’t think he will ever realise how near he was to having his face re-arranged! Joan’s day job was as a nurse on violent wards in a mental hospital. I told her, she could do my job but there was no way I could do hers. If ever I call in at Ellenroad and either of these two are there I’m always assured of a warm welcome and it’s one of the finest memories I carried away from Ellenroad.



Joan and Thelma in 1998. They stayed the course! Both very conscientious and able tenters!

[Tizer]

Apologies Ian, I misread your post.....should have known you would be spot on!

I almost pointed out the 1980s origin of Amstrad too, Wendy. I read Stanley's sentences: "I saw my first Apple computer in California in 1979. I was driving home one night and as I passed through Burnley a sudden thought came to mind and I parked up and walked into Dixons the electrical retailers....". My mind registered that as him seeing an Apple computer and then going home and seeing an Amstrad and my first thought was `There were no Amstrads in 1979'. I had to read it again and got it right second time around!

[Stanley]

The Apple I saw in 1979 was being used to transcribe the Nixon Tapes and the output was going to an IBM Golf Ball computer which automatically produced printed output. I can remember my amazement when the lady showed me the word processor on the screen and I grasped to possibilities of cut and paste. At the next meeting of the steering committee for the LTP I told them we had to stop manually transcribing on a typewriter and using multiple carbon copies. There wasn't a dry seat in the house! Many years later they admitted I was right and that was why I spent three years doing OCR on blurred carbon copies and digitising 1,500,000 words.

Back to Ellenroad....

During 1988 I had an enquiry from a firm of developers who were building a large shopping centre in the middle of Rochdale for the CWS. They wanted to have some sort of dramatic centre piece in the centre and had got their eye on a preserved engine in a modern house at the top of the town. They wanted my advice on moving and installing the Whitelees Beam Engine.


THE WHITELEES ENGINE

In 1841/42 John Petrie, engine maker of Whitehall Street, Rochdale, built a 20nhp beam engine for John Hurst at Whitelees Mill, Littleborough at a cost of £650. It ran successfully under various owners until 1942 and, apart from a steel flyshaft replacing the original cast iron one, was never modified. In 1957 the Co-operative Wholesale Society were owners of the mill which was weaving blankets at the time. They wanted the engine out to give room for expansion and Holcroft Limited of Rochdale who’s foundry was on the site of the original Petrie works offered to build an engine house and erect the engine there as a monument to Rochdale engineering. It was powered by an electric motor and could be run for the public on special occasions. The engine house was glass-fronted and Rochdalians got used to seeing the engine sat there on the side of the road.

Things remained like this until 1988 when the owners of the foundry, Reynolds Gears, decided to close the works and re-develop the site as a retail barn. The engine would have to go. It was not scheduled or protected in any way and therefore was up for grabs. The people building the Wheatsheaf Centre heard about it and decided they would like it for their showpiece. It was at this point that someone told them they ought to talk to me before they made any irrevocable decisions.

I went to meet them and pointed out that they couldn’t just plonk it on the floor and put an electric motor on it. The first problem was getting it out, it was next to the road but as this was a busy major route it made it inaccessible from that side. Further, they would need a pit twelve feet deep underneath it and then a clear thirty feet above. It soon became clear to them that this was a bit more than they had bargained for. They asked me to come up with alternatives and I eventually found them a large wood saw built in Rochdale by Tommy Robinsons, a deep well pump headgear and a small steam engine to couple up to the pump. They settled on this and I arranged for the whole lot to be refurbished and installed by the Rochdale Apprentice Training School. All this took time but was completely successful.

As soon as I knew that the Co-op weren’t going to take the engine I had a word with Peter Dawson and we sketched out a preliminary scheme for installing the engine in the bare space in the boiler house where the other Lancashire boilers had been. I also approached the Science Museum and English Heritage and told them what I wanted to do and asked their opinion.



The Frank Wightman drawing of the Whitelees engine as installed originally at Littleborough.

[Stanley]

At this point I should explain that English Heritage do not consider themselves competent to make judgements about machinery. They rely on the opinion of the Science Museum who, though nominally the minor partner in this process, actually hold ultimate power on funding decisions. I was astounded when they turned the idea down on the grounds it would dilute the ‘purity of the concept’ at Ellenroad. I couldn’t understand their reasoning and no matter how I pressed them couldn’t get them to reconsider. I was baffled.

Then I got a letter from David Sekers at Quarry Bank informing me that he had got the Whitelees Engine and was going to install it at Styal. The letter included the phrase ‘Ha Ha, we’ve got it!’ I also found that David had used a selective quotation out of a private letter which he had obtained as supporting evidence for his case to move the engine. All this bothered me. For a start there was no need for supporting evidence as the engine wasn’t protected in any way by the Ancient Monument Acts. Secondly I knew there were close links between Quarry Bank and the Science Museum and I can’t believe that David would consider installing the engine without informing them first. It all smelt to me of discussions in closed rooms and a fait accompli. I have to admit I lost my temper and I’m not ashamed of it. I wrote David a controlled but venomous letter and copied this to the Science Museum and English Heritage. I heard later that photocopies of it had been put on various notice boards in English Heritage and had caused some amusement.

My next move was to contact John Pierce and inform him that Rochdale was being burgled and what was he going to do about it. My case was that the engine had been brought back to the town as an example of Rochdale engineering and, even though nothing was ever committed to paper, it was obvious that the Co-op and Holcrofts had intended Rochdale to be its final home. Further, I wasn’t at all sure that Reynolds actually owned the engine or had the right to give it away. I had an idea that if the matter was traced back to its roots, the Co-operative Wholesale Society were still the legal owners of the engine. John didn’t let me down, he went off and did what he was best at, I was never consulted and to this day I don’t know what he did but the upshot was that Trevor Grice, the CEO of Reynolds informed David Sekers that the deal was off. I was asked to come up with a scheme to install the engine in a glass case outside the Town Hall but I got the impression that apart from the practicalities of this scheme, it was never seen as a viable alternative to installing it at Ellenroad in steam. I was also led to understand that in any dispute with any of the funding bodies, I would most likely get backing from the council. None of this was on paper but it was right up my street.

In January 1989 I did a report for the council that shot the glass case down and then I made a convincing case for installing it at Ellenroad in steam. The next I heard was that Reynolds would give the engine to the Trust and if we could get it out within ten working days they would give us approximately £30,000 as a donation. The exact amount depended on how successful they were in reclaiming tax on the donation. At this point I raised the matter of the ownership of the engine. I pointed out that there were three levels of proof of ownership in law. These were possession, title and provenance. Possession was with Reynolds, I suspected title was with the Co-op and they would have records of purchase that could prove provenance, or in other words, the audit trail. I said that what we needed was a letter from the Co-op which acknowledged that we had the engine and devolved any residual rights they had in it to us. In other words we would have all three elements of ownership and this could never be questioned. I went for this because in my years with museums I have come across so many cases where a museum had artefacts which they couldn’t actually prove belonged to them. John Pierce agreed with me and set in motion the machinery for getting us the documentation from the Co-op. Having done this, I could get going, I was, to put it mildly, in my element. I went down, had a look at the rabbit, arranged for access and went away to lay my plans.



The Whitelees engine in its house at Holcroft foundry.

[Stanley]

My first move was to get hold of Duncan Smith, an excellent millwright I knew at Huddersfield and set him on to help me dismantle the engine. We started straight away and took the engine to pieces inside the house. Norman Sutcliffe was demolishing the foundry and I had a word with him and made sure he could carve a way through to the engine house so we could get near it with a crane and wagon. After seven working days we had the engine in pieces but still had the problem of getting it out of the house. I found out afterwards that a lot of people were watching me and Duncan and were trying to work out how we were going to do it. With only three days to go things were looking bleak to the observers but then I put plan ‘A’ into operation.

I’d looked at the building very carefully and had made up my mind what to do. On the day, a crane with a 120 feet jib arrived on the site. My compressor and two jackhammers were lifted on to the roof and Duncan and I started cutting out the first Bison Beam in the roof. The roof was constructed as a flat roof formed by hollow concrete beams laid across from wall to wall. These are know as Bison beams. Once we had cut the first one out all we had to do was cut a hole in each end of the next beam, attach chains and lift the beam out like a rotten tooth. There was a bit of damage as we tore the beams out, bits of the parapet were dropping near the road but nothing to worry about. By shortly after lunch we had the roof off and started to load all the small pieces on to a wagon. We took these to Ellenroad and got them under cover.

The following day I had the biggest low loader I could find on site and we lifted all the large pieces out and got the whole engine on in one load. By four o’clock in the afternoon we had the wagon and crane at Ellenroad. It was siling down with cold rain and dark but we decided to get it unloaded. I slipped the driver £50 as a backhander, he rang his wife, one of the lads went for fish and chips and we had the lot off by nine o’clock, all under cover and the doors closed. I can tell you that I went home that night, had a shower and a fair dose of single malt. We had the engine and, when they had sorted the tax out, the £30,000! (By the way, the Manpower Services lads got no extra for the overtime but they were so enthusiastic that most of them stayed until the end. They were good lads and not the yobs that most people regarded them as.)



Lifting the engine out at Holcroft Foundry in 1989.

[Stanley]

We have to move forward now to November 1991 in order to follow the Whitelees story to its conclusion. In the interim, we had kept the engine parts dry and oiled, I had found a drawing of the engine by Frank Wightman of Stretford and Peter had drawn up a scheme which sited the engine in such a way that we could install a mezzanine floor, a lift and a walk way through the engine to give access to the main engine house. All this was based on the original plan which was to have the external services. This was a very complicated piece of design and Peter did a brilliant job. We had to have it right to an inch in order to do things like give headroom on the walkway and room to manoeuvre wheel chairs. The whole scheme was based on my measurements of the engine parts. I had to do it this way because the measured survey that the council; had done for me of the original engine had been lost by the Planning Department when the surveyor who did the drawings left for a new job! Frank’s drawing wasn’t accurate enough to trust. We got to the stage where the design was done and I met Peter in his office.

You’re not going to believe what I did next but Peter can vouch for it! We looked over the drawings one last time. I looked at Peter and said “Will you do one last thing for me?” He looked at me askance, I think he sensed something was coming, we knew each other too well! “Yes, what is it?” “Make the pit a foot deeper.” “Why?” I told him I didn’t know, I had a funny feeling and all I could say was that it would be easier to pour a foot of concrete in than dig a foot out. This made sense to Peter and so we did it!

By October 1991 we had gone out to tender for the pit, decided on a contractor, signed up with him and we were waiting for him to, start. He was a week late and I went off for a week on Eigg leaving Graham Riley in charge. I got back on the following weekend and was in early on Monday morning. I went into the boiler house and found the most dreadful mess I have ever seen in my life! There was a jagged gash across the floor, protruding out of it were various bits of scaffolding pole and the edge of a sheet of plywood. This was bad enough but when I looked closely I saw that the hole was full of set concrete to within six inches of the top. I couldn’t believe it, I went into the hut and had just brewed up when Graham arrived. “Have you seen it?” he said. I said, “Sit down, tell me all about it.” So he did, and what a sorry tale it was!

The contractor had arrived on site on Monday morning and Graham said he was worried from the start. He said they didn’t seem to be very sure about what they were doing. They started to cut the floor and when they had opened up a narrow trench, started digging by hand. This was according to the scheme of work we had set out but they were being far too cautious and were digging too narrow a trench. At about four feet they hit running sand and water and panicked. They tried to hold it back with the plywood and scaffold poles and when this didn’t work, they poured cement on the trench. At this point Graham had the sense to stop them and call Peter Dawson. Peter came up, took one look and said “This is a job for Stanley!” He told the contractor to go away until he was called for.



Not a pretty sight!!

[Stanley]

Being El Supremo is heady stuff and most of the time it was great fun but every now and then a decision drops in your lap which has to be dealt with and there is only one good answer, the right one. This situation was a classic example and was just one of many I had to take while running the project. We had made a promise to deliver the Whitelees Engine in steam at Ellenroad the following May and it would be tremendously damaging if we didn’t fulfil our promise. The botched trench in the floor of the boiler house was only the tip of the iceberg, this was only one part of a very complicated problem and as I sat there with my cup of tea in the site hut I had to get all the facts marshalled, sort out the priorities and decide what was the best way forward. As Sherlock Holmes once said, ‘this is a three pipe problem’. I lit up and pondered.

You’ll remember that I mentioned earlier that when Total Oil took over Coates I had approached them and asked them to supply us with oil for the engine free and they agreed. This initial overture had matured over the months and Total, via Coates had become very interested in the engine for PR purposes. After a lot of discussion we came to an agreement which was that when we had the Whitelees engine in steam, Total would host an open day at the engine house. They wanted this to be in May 1992 and a lot of pressure was put on me to agree to this. I knew it was an incredibly short timescale but I also knew that this was a crucial opportunity for the Trust so I took the gamble and agreed. This set in motion a train of events that couldn’t be stopped as Total geared up the PR exercise and started to make preparations for the day. Remember, this was in late summer 1991 and all we had was a heap of engine parts and a bare concrete floor.

Apart from the administrative pressures there were some very serious practical problems. We were proposing to dig a hole fourteen feet deep, forty feet long and fifteen feet wide within three feet of the foundations of the engine house and, more importantly, the engine beds of the Ellenroad engine. Further, this hole didn’t start at ground level, the floor of the boiler house was six feet lower than ground level before we started. In effect we were going to go down over twenty feet into an alluvial flood plain and nobody knew exactly where the water table was. All I knew for certain was that we were at least ten feet below the level of the River Beal and it was a virtual certainty that we would hit water.

Put like this, I can forgive anybody who is reading this for coming to the conclusion that I was mad! There were plenty of people about who would have agreed with you but to my way of thinking, this wasn’t a problem in respect of whether the project was possible, it was simply a difficulty that had to be addressed and a solution found. I had to start from the point where I believed it was possible and we could do it. The first thing to do was think clearly about it. The water was no problem, all that was needed to combat this was a good pump or pumps that would dewater the excavation as fast as water flowed in. The danger, and it was a big danger, was that if we hit pockets of sand in the sub strata, these would become liquid and start to flow until they attained a level. If these sands formed part of the sub strata under the engine house foundations we would. In effect, pull the foundations out from under the building and the engine.

Peter and I had taken all this into consideration when we let the contract out but it was fairly obvious that the contractor had totally mislead us as to his abilities and that we had to have a rethink about everything. I told Peter that we hadn’t to get downhearted about what had happened. In effect, we had dug a trial hole and established how serious the problem was. More importantly we had received a warning that our concept of setting a contractor on to excavate and pour a foundation was fundamentally flawed, a normal contractor didn’t have the expertise that I needed.

Now then, this is going to sound like a diversion but it isn’t, it’s a valuable piece of advice! I’ve always been a nosy bugger, if I see something that intrigues me I always go and ask questions, this is how you learn. Another point, never underestimate the value of serendipity and lateral thinking when you are planning anything. They can be diversions sometimes but occasionally, they help you to come up with innovation and can be very effective.

I was still in the site hut, drinking tea and smoking my pipe. Peter had gone back to his office and Graham was leaving me alone. By the way, don’t forget we had a signed contract worth about £25,000 hanging out over the precipice with a contractor who was going to have to be fired! I put that can of worms on one side for the time being and drifted off into deep thought. Another little point, if anybody had come in at that moment they might well have asked themselves what this leader was doing, half asleep in a chair in the corner!

[Stanley]

My mind drifted off to Morecambe Bay the previous summer. I had been up there for some reason and noticed a lot of activity out on the sands. A construction gang seemed to be digging holes out in the bay. Nosey bugger syndrome took over and I walked out to look at what they were doing. They were digging a trench in the sand fifteen feet deep and below water level in sand! I got talking to them and asked how the hell they could get away with it. Anyone who has ever dug a hole on the beach knows what happens to sand when you get down to the water table, it goes liquid and unstable, this was exactly the problem we had at Ellenroad. The bloke in charge of the site showed me, they had installed a refrigeration system along each side of the line of the trench and had frozen the sub-strata, this allowed them to dig deep enough to lay the sewage outfall pipe which was the reason for the trench. I was fascinated by this and stored it up in my mind. More to the point, I remembered the name of the firm, MGF from Astley near Manchester.

I picked up the phone and after a few enquiries found myself talking to John Kelly at MGF. I arranged for him to come up to the engine house that afternoon and have a look at the rabbit and then I went down to Rochdale to see Peter.

The conclusion I had come to was that we were looking at the problem in the wrong way, we were thinking in terms of a concrete lined hole ready to drop the engine into. What we really needed was a piece of trench the right size to build the concrete pit in. This hole had to be safe and waterproof in the bottom to allow us to work. I flew this past Peter and told him about John Kelly and he brightened up a bit. Then his face clouded as he remembered the small matter of the contract! He told me that the contractor could take us to the cleaners if he wanted to. I said “Forget about that, it’s my problem, I’ll go and see the bloke.”

I rang the contractor up and he was in his office so I went to see him. I called in at an off-licence and bought a bottle of whisky (which the Trust never got charged for) and thus armed, descended on the unfortunate bloke. He was sat in his office looking very miserable. He cheered up a bit when I plonked the bottle on the table, asked for two glasses and said “We’ve got things to talk about!”

I’m afraid I didn’t have much mercy on him. I started by laying out the facts. He had bitten off more than he could chew. The mess he had left us was a major complication. We had two ways of proceeding, either I invoked the terms of the contract, we went to law, and after spending a fortune on lawyers one of us won and the other lost, or, I gave him a cheque for £1500 and we tore the contract up. It didn’t take him long to decide, I gave him the money, he gave me the contract and a letter saying he was withdrawing. I left the bottle on his desk and drove away wondering how I was going to explain this to the Trustees!

Peter arrived at the engine house after lunch and I told him what I had done and gave him the contract and the letter. Remember, this was five hours after first seeing the problem, we had a possible solution, we’d thrown £1500 at a big problem and made it go away and we had a trenching contractor coming in that afternoon. Not a bad morning’s work by anybody’s standards. Recognise that all this was only possible because I had the power to act, the imprest account and good support. In any normal set up we would have been into a long round of meetings and in the end would have come up with a compromise that probably wouldn’t have worked. Actually, if that had been the case I think the Trustees would have jettisoned the project!

John Kelly came and I liked him straight away. He was a big, young, pleasant Irish bloke and he gave every evidence of knowing what he was talking about. Inside two hours we had agreed what we were going to do, set a price and arranged for them to start that week, I think actually it was the following day but am not certain about that.

[Stanley]

John didn’t see any big problem. What he suggested was that we dig a trial hole right up against the foundations of the house and go down as far as we needed to find out just what was happening. Meanwhile, we opened one of the shutters into the boiler house and make a temporary ramp with rubble so that we could get an excavator and a dump truck into the boiler house. Once we were ready, we would start digging down into the floor over the whole of the area we wanted. We were going to take the hole out in one lump. As the hole went down we would sheet pile it round the outside to protect us and the foundations from cave-in. We couldn’t use Larsen piles which are the normal sheet piles that would be used because these would have to be driven by a pile driver and we couldn’t have that sort of vibration near the foundations. Anyway, there wasn’t enough headroom to take the pile driver. We needed another system.

John had the answer. We would use sheet piles but without the locking flange that sealed Larsen piles. These would be arranged loose but overlapping around the periphery of the hole and would be supported on the inside by a large box section frame that contained hydraulic jacks. The idea was that these could be pressurised and as they expanded they forced the piles against the sides of the excavation. The method of excavation was that the area at the bottom of each pile was dug out by hand until about two feet was clear below the pile. There was a hole in the pile at the foot and the chisel of a pneumatic jack hammer could be used to drive the pile down until it was firmly seated again in the base of the hole. Then the same operation was repeated all round the trench until all the piles were down to the two feet level. At this point the excavator could start to remove the two feet of trench bottom freed up by dropping the piles. The beauty of this was that the only place where sand and water could run was at the point where you were working on the original pile. If this happened it was easy to drive the pile down with the jack hammer and stop the flow. As we got deeper, another reinforcing frame was inserted and so on until we had reached the depth we needed. At this point we would pour 18” of concrete in the hole to anchor the bottom of the piles, take out the bottom frame and shutter up for the wall of the pit. Once the bottom four feet of wall was poured the rest of the frames could be taken off, the piles cut of at ground level and the rest of the pit poured to specification. Nowt to it!

Of course, there was a lot more to it than this but we had the right firm now and work went forward very quickly. There were only three men on the job, the excavator driver, a labourer (He was the most Irish Irishman I have ever come across in my life and a tiger for work!) and Jack the Pit Boss. The latter was a bloke who had been working on the Channel Tunnel and had come out of the job because he said it was too dangerous. We couldn’t have had a better man, he knew exactly what he was doing and all the tricks of the trade. His methods were very simple, for instance, we had a pump running all the time draining the hole and the big problem with this is that the water is so dirty, liquid mud in fact, that it would normally choke any centrifugal pump. Jack’s answer was simple, on the first day he asked me to get him some bales of hay. Every morning he would put a bed of hay down in the sump and sit the pump on top of it, this acted as a simple filter and the pump could do its job. He used hay as well whenever there was an inrush at the bottom of a pile, he would simply stuff a cake into the site of the inrush, the debris caught in the hay and made its own seal. Problem solved.

There was one other major danger, this was what is known as ‘boiling’. What happens is that it is possible to reach a point where the pressure of water from below is enough to break through the material in the bottom of the pit. The effect of this if it happens is that the whole of the bottom of the pit looks as though it is boiling as the water breaks through. I asked Jack about this and he said he didn’t think it would happen. As we got further down the material we were working in was boulder clay with isolated pockets of sand. The pockets would boil but Jack reckoned that the strata was strong enough to withstand the pressure and we wouldn’t get a big boil. It was good to watch the three of them working together. There wasn’t a lot of shouting when we got a minor boil, everyone knew what to do.

The way Jack managed the problem was that while the excavator was working, he always kept about five tons of dry borrow stacked up just to one side. Jack would direct the shovel to where he wanted him to dig and would indicate how much bite he wanted. He was watching the ground all the time. If they hit sand and it started to boil, Jack signalled the driver who dropped the bucket of spoil that had caused the problem to one side, swung round and got a bucket full of dry borrow. While he was doing this the labourer would have grabbed a cake of hay and he and Jack would be dancing on this like dervishes! The excavator then dropped the dry material on the boil and they did this until it was stopped. If it was near the side of the hole Jack would drop the piles close to it before making another attempt. If this didn’t cure it he would leave that place and work round it until it had become higher than the rest of the pit bottom, at that stage it could usually be dug out. We never hit a really serious boil and managed to contain all the sand we hit. I asked Jack what he would do if it all boiled and he said “Get out! But there’s no problem as long as you can see daylight!” I knew what he meant. There was all the difference in the world between a boil in the Whitelees Pit and one twenty miles out under the Channel!

[David Whipp]

You may be going on to mention this Stanley; how was the pit tanked to prevent water getting in after concreting?

[Stanley]

Didn't need it David, it was so massive and done so well that it never leaked beyond an odd weep which I think would heal up naturally.

While the pit was sinking, John Kelly, Peter and I had a look at the plans for the pit. John said he’d like to quote for the concrete work, it was a bit outside their normal brief but he had the equipment and the men and would like to see the job through. We only had one standard to go by, their work on the pit, judging by this we could do worse so we set MGF on to do it. The nice thing was that even with the money I had shelled out to get rid of the original contractor, we were inside the original price. Deep sighs of relief all round.

A word now about the pit itself. The first thing to recognise is that what we were actually doing was building a concrete boat and putting it into possible twelve feet of water in a rainy season. I had some experience of this when Cyril Richardson built a big pit at Little Stainton to hold the slurry from the farm buildings. I told him it was wrong when the contractors built it but he never took any notice. All was well until he emptied the pit in the spring when the water table was high. As they emptied it, the pit floated up out of the ground and cracked! The bottom line is Archimedes’s Principle: ‘If a body is partly or wholly immersed in a fluid, the up thrust or loss in weight is equal to the amount of water displaced’. In other words, the construction of the pit has to be heavier than the same volume of water. In the case of the Whitelees we used a 100% safety margin. We couldn’t give it the weight in the walls because we were short of room so we put a massive concrete collar all round it to locate it and make sure it was far too heavy to float.

In addition, the pit had to be poured very accurately as it had to fit the dimensions of the engine. We couldn’t pour it all at once because of the frames and even when we had finished the walls, the central pillar that supported the flyshaft bearing couldn’t be cast until its relationship with the walls could be accurately measured. This support had to be accurate to 1/16 of an inch. Another complication is that large amounts of concrete generate considerable heat when it is setting. This raises problems with expansion and contraction which are approximately quantifiable but a lot depends on the skill of the person building the shuttering. John and Peter were reasonably happy with all this so we decided to let the contract out on this basis.

Meanwhile, Jack and his mate had to deal with the mess left by the original contractor. The concrete had to be cut out as the piles went down and I reckon it put another £1000 on the job. Even so, it was a cheap price to pay for good work. As the pit sank the hole looked enormous. It was of course wider, longer and deeper than the finished pit which had to fit inside it. It looked big enough to drop the Ellenroad Engine in and have room to spare! In the end we got the depth, put in a mat of reinforcing steel and poured 18” concrete in the bottom to stabilise the piles. Jack and his mate were finished on the job at this point and there was one funny incident. We had all taken a shine to these two, apart from the fact they were masters of their craft and were getting us out of (or into!) a hole, they were nice blokes. Jack treated his labourer shamefully, he swore at him terribly all the time and I asked the labourer one day why he stood it and never swore back. “He’s the boss and while we are in the hole what he says goes. My time comes when we finish!” On the day they finished the labourer got his turn, egged on I have to say by us. He started into Jack and swore at him solid for what seemed like five minutes, Jack never said a word. When it was done, they had a good laugh and a cup of tea and disappeared from our lives. I can’t say how much admiration I have for men like that. When all the suits and the shoes have finished managing, blokes like them simply climb into the hole and do the job. Given the choice, I am in the hole with them rather than the conference room.



The pit immediately after the 18" of concrete had been poured in the bottom. The two sets of starter bars you can see in the base are for the supports for the entablature and flywheel which couldn't be poured until the walls were finished and cooled down so we could measure accurately. The sacrificial piles are still in place and full length. They are still supported by the top hydraulic frame, the bottom one has been removed because the concrete has hold of it. The next job was to install the rebar for the walls , install the shuttering, pour the first lift and when that had set, remove the top frame and pour the remainder of the wall. Then the piles could be cut flush with the concrete before pouring the collar that made up the weight of the concrete to more than the displacement thrust. Nothing about this was easy and it was a wonderful job done with no fuss at all.

[Stanley]

The next gang that moved in installed the complicated network of reinforcing bars and erected the first lift of shuttering. When all was ready we hired a concrete pump and ordered the mixer wagons. We pumped the first pour in and gave it four days to set then we removed the rest of the hydraulic frames, cut off the pile heads below finished ground level, raised the shuttering and poured the rest in one day. After a week we struck the shuttering and revealed the pit in all its glory. There was a bit of making good to do but very little, it was a wonderful job and definitely rock solid and waterproof.

.There were still two elements of the pit that needed to be done, one was the central pillar for the flyshaft bearing and the other was the cylinder base. I was fairly confident about my measurements but decided to leave these until we had the beam in place and I could do some accurate final measurements. As it turned out, this was a very wise decision! Apart from this, we now had a pit, all we had to do was build the Whitelees Engine!

At about Christmas 1991 we had the pit ready for the Whitelees engine and a deadline of March 21st to have it in steam for the Total Open day at Ellenroad. We also had a problem in that I was running short of funding. This had been building up for a bit but I had been concentrating on getting things done on the ground more than funding. This wasn’t a matter of policy on my part, it was simply priorities. The Directors were getting restless but I told them I didn’t see any problem, I would carry on working and booking my time but they could pay me when they had the money. They weren’t really happy with this but had no alternative, I just shoved all this to the back of my mind and got on with the job in hand.

I had been laying plans for a while, I knew I had no money for skilled help and had to build the bloody thing myself so I had a word with a firm at Castleton who supplied lifting gear and they gave me eight 30cwt chain blocks and trolleys that had just come out of Lucas’ from long term hire and I installed one on every beam in the roof of the boiler house above the pit and all the way across the floor. I had them tested and insured and so had a way of shifting all the pieces of the engine single handed. Some of the pieces weighed more than 30cwt but I had the beams tested to 3 tons and knew the blocks would stand the overload so that was all right. I bought some nylon slings and won a couple of pull lifts from a friendly engineering works and we were ready to begin.

I had a word with Rochdale Training and they lent me two apprentices for the duration and Cecil Hufton, one of the volunteers said he’d come in and help me full time. Cecil was an old bloke but he was invaluable because apart from giving a hand with the heavy stuff he cleaned all the parts as we got them out of the stack.

At the same time I had a firm of pipefitters working to put the main in to the engine. I had begged a very expensive pressure reducing valve and the money for the pipefitting was already budgeted so that bit was sorted. I think we finally got cleared up in the boiler room by mid-January, there was a lot to do because we had to dig the temporary ramp out and clear all the muck away left over from the pit construction..

At last, we were ready and I quickly slipped into a routine of 14 hours a day building the engine. I’m going to give quite a full description of this because it isn’t a subject you’ll find documented anywhere else as far as I know so I may as well get it out of my head and down on to paper. First of all, a general point. Every time I have stripped or moved an engine under English Heritage supervision they have always laid great stress on the fact that every part has to be identified and numbered. I had no hassle with them over the Whitelees because they weren’t funding it and as far as they were concerned it didn’t exist. They knew what I was doing and had refused to fund on the grounds that it would ‘dilute the concept’ of the project but the funny thing was that nobody ever came back to us and asked for the return of the funding we had already had. They would have been entitled to do this if they had stuck to the rules after they refused to countenance funding because in legal terms, what I was doing was breaking the funding agreement by installing the Whitelees.

I didn’t discuss this with anyone except Peter Dawson, I told him I had an idea I knew what was going on and that EH had got themselves into a position where they couldn’t actually do anything. Besides, I had indications from them that regardless of the Science Museum opinion, they would ‘give a fair wind’ to the installation of the Whitelees. In any case, what could they do? If they asked for the money we hadn’t got it and under the terms of the constitution of the Trust which I had drawn up, if the Trust liquidated guess who had to take control of the Project? The Museums .and Galleries Commission, in other words, the Science Museum. All they could do was allow the volunteers to run it so what the hell! As for numbering every part, this was crazy as it was already done. All engines were erected and fitted in the shop before being dismantled and shipped to the site. The old fitters marked every piece that needed it and the rest just fell into place if you knew what you were doing. I had photographed it all in situ at Holcrofts and I had the Frank Wightman drawing. This was all I needed.



The MGF shuttering man stripping the shuttering off the flywheel shaft support pillar. He took ages making the shuttering and had more strong backs on the outside supporting it than you would have thought possible. He knew what he was ding. I had a very accurate reference point cast into the floor of the pit, a piece of rebar with a punch mark in the centre and the result when it had cooled down was within 1/32" of design which is quite remarkable for a structure like this. Peter Dawson was very impressed! He thought I was being too demanding. Notice that the holding down bolts are cast in situ and the threads protected by red insulating tape and the bed for the flywheel journal is fitted to test the vertical accuracy because if it needed adjusting this was the time to do it before the concrete had finally hardened. There was no need, it was dead on target. All this was so satisfying!
One more thing to note. You can see that the cast concrete of the pit is about 3ft wide round the edges. This is the top surface of the massive collar we cast into the last pour to add enough weight to the structure to withstand any up-thrust from the flotation effect if the water table ever rose. Peter cubed the volume of the construction and we added a 50% safety factor. Overkill I know but I have seen what can happen to structures like this and the extra concrete was relatively cheap. This pit will never float!

[Stanley]

The first thing we needed to do before we could start the erection was make a very strong frame to hold the entablature beam and erect a pillar to hold the outboard end of this. Normally the entablature beam would have sat in the side walls of the engine house and these would be very heavily built to support the weight and the other forces that came on it when the engine was working. In our case one of the side walls was missing and the engine was too far away from the main wall of the engine house to carry the other end. This was because of how we had to site the engine to take into account all the other design considerations. I had no problem with this because the entablature beam was cracked and had been repaired at some time. This is quite common with cast iron entablature beams. If the engine gets a slug of water or there is some other malfunction there can be a lot of lifting strain on these beams and being cast iron they frequently crack. What we were going to do was erect a pillar made of thick wall steel pipe and put in two girders across to the wall which would accept the original entablature beam between them and restrain it. This held the beam in its correct position and strengthened it against any future strain. Even if it broke in two, the engine would function.

My problem was that this was a heavy construction and we had no money! I went down to Rochdale Electric Welding and had a word with Matt Ingoe and his son John. REW had been my boiler repairers at Bancroft and were the bee’s knees. They could do any type of heavy repair on boilers in either welded or riveted construction. They had some wonderful craftsmen working for them and had never let me down. They did all the upgrading on the Lancashire boiler when we re-commissioned it. They had also inserted the replacement pillars in the boiler room for us and in the course of that job John had come up with a slightly more risky but very effective way of doing the job. This had reduced the time needed to do it and he offered to lower the price. At the time, this would have caused more hassle than anybody needed because I had already agreed the funding so I told him the original price stood but that he owed me. I never told anyone about this but in February 1992 it was pay back time! John gave me some terrible stick but the upshot was that the following day Paul Greenwood and Stuart Lomax turned up with a plant wagon and with no drawings started to do the job for me.

They fabricated the base for the pillar, erected the pillar and cut out the wall of the engine house for the two girders. We lifted the girders into place and as they tack welded everything into place I went out to the site hut for a pot of tea. Actually, I started off to go for the tea but on the way noticed Cecil dragging a lump of cast iron out of the heap of engine parts ready to clean it. Now I’ve always claimed to have a crap detector in the back of my head. It whines when I get close to anything that can be described as crap! It started whining as I watched Cecil and my brain suddenly kicked into gear. I looked at the offending lump of iron and said “What the bloody hell’s that?” Cecil looked up, he said he didn’t know but there were two of them. I looked at the lump and I knew what it was, it was a raising block for a pedestal bearing. The problem was I couldn’t think where it fitted, I had no memory of it. As I looked at it I realised that there was only one place they could fit, under the trunnion bearings which sat on the entablature beam and supported the engine beam. If this was true, we had a problem because all my calculations were based on the fact that we only had three inches of clearance between the beam end and the roof when it was running!

I went into the hut and got the working copy of the Frank Wightman drawing out. I saw the reason for the problem straight away, Frank had missed the raising blocks out when he drew the engine. I hadn’t worked off his measurements but had used the drawing as an aide memoir when I was measuring the individual parts to get the dimensions of the pit. I had missed the blocks out of the measurements. A quick trip into the boiler house and a measure up showed me I was nine inches out! Remember what I said about my conversation with Peter when we finalised the drawings of the pit? Was some subconscious mechanism at work in my head? I’ll be buggered if I know but was I ever glad I’d listened to my voices! I went in to the boiler room and shouted up to Paul, “Can you do a bit of a modification for me? Drop those two girders nine inches.” Paul looked at me and asked if I was joking, I told them what had happened and I’ll always remember what Stuart Lomas said after I had apologised. “Don’t worry Stanley, they call it engineering!” Luckily all they had to do was cut out the web of a short piece of girder on top of the pillar and cut another nine inches out of the wall but what a let off!

Our next problem was to lift the entablature beam into place. This weighed about two tons and it was a complicated lift to get it above the girders and manoeuvre it into its place. We managed it and started to weld in the restraints that would hold it firm. Meanwhile I had to address a problem I had identified while we were lifting the beam in. We had just enough room to work but we wouldn’t have enough room to lift the engine beam in over the top especially when the raising blocks were in place. The problem was that there was room for the beam but not enough room for the space taken up by the chain blocks and trolleys which ran on the beams in the roof. I had to retire for another think!

We had some 30cwt pull lifts, these are a useful tool, not really meant for lifting but they take up very little room and are a ratchet winch that has a very short lift. I could do the final part of the lift with these but I hadn’t got a sky hook. A sky hook is the finest asset a fitter can have, it is a mobile hook that you can stick to the sky anywhere you want it and so get a lift! I remember when we were re-roofing the rope race in the early days I looked at Peter’s drawings and the roof was to be supported on substantial wooden joists, perfectly adequate for the job. I told him they were no good, I wanted steel beams 18” deep. He looked at me as though I had gone crackers and said “Do you think they’ll be strong enough?” I told him they weren’t there to hold up the roof, they were there to help whoever had the job in future of hanging something in the rope race or doing a lift below. “When that fitter goes to have a look at the job he’ll look up into the roof and he’ll know straight away that it was a fitter who specified those beams. He’ll be a happy man!” Unfortunately I hadn’t designed the roof of the boiler house with the Whitelees Engine in mind so I had to improvise.

We punched a hole in the concrete roof and put a strong beam across the hole with a wire sling hanging down through the hole. The beam was packed up on bricks until there was just a small loop inside the boiler room. We had a sky hook! This was used for the final lift, we got the beam as high as we could, then inserted the raising blocks and trunnion bearings and sat the engine beam in its place. Job done and we could all go home for some tea!





Two pics to remind you of the scale of the problem we had with the pit. Nothing was easy and anyone coming in and seeing the second scene could have been forgiven for thinking it was chaos! Not so, everything was going well!



This was where Paul and Stuart were at when I broke the news to them that I wanted another 9"! They cut the web out of the small section of 'H' beam on top of the pillar and lowered the end in the wall. Problem solved.

[Stanley]

Now we had the beam in place I could do my final measurements to locate the central pillar and the cylinder base. I thanked my lucky stars that I’d had sense to leave this until I had the beam up. Remember, I’d lowered the whole of the engine nine inches! When we lifted the cylinder out of the engine house at Holcrofts I hadn’t dismantled it, we hadn’t enough time. It had been sat there for two years with its cover on and the piston and rod still inside it. I had to pull this to bits to lessen the weight and also to get accurate measurements of the stroke so that I could get the cylinder at the right height. The cylinder of a steam engine is longer than the stroke and the piston should be mounted so that at mid-stroke the piston is at mid point in the cylinder. This leaves an equal amount of clearance at each end. This is necessary to accommodate any small amounts of water that may be carried over to the engine. If there isn’t any room, the slug of water, being incompressible, stops the piston dead before it has reached the end of its stroke and something has to break in the engine.

When I got the cover off and lifted the piston and rod out I was intrigued by what I found. The bottom of the cylinder had been scarred by deep channels chiselled into it leading across to the outlet for the cylinder drain right in the bottom. I didn’t understand why this had been done but noted it, measured the bore, made my calculations and built a temporary girder frame to hold the cylinder at the correct height, this was calculated to give equal clearance at both ends of the stroke. Next, I went into the workshop at home and made all the holding down bolts out of two inch black bar and cut and threaded authentic square nuts for them. All this took about a week during which Cecil and the lads carried on with sorting and cleaning engine parts. I had told them which we would need next and they were making a good job of them. The place looked like a proper fitting shop as all the parts of the flywheel and the various keys and wedges lined up in gleaming rows waiting for the build.

I marked up the position of the concrete pillar in the pit, adjusted the height of the pocket in the wall of the pit for the outrigger bearing of the flyshaft and mounted the cylinder on its temporary frame. Then I rang John Kelly at MGF and they came down to do the final concreting in the pit.

I did my final measurements before we located the central pillar. This was a very ticklish job and we used far more strongbacks than usual to support the shuttering. We poured it all except the last two feet then I fitted the bed plate for the flyshaft bearing in exactly the right place. At the same time we shuttered round the temporary framework supporting the cylinder and poured the concrete in that. The rest of the concrete was poured in the pillar and we gave it a week to cool down before we struck the scaffolding. The pillar was as near perfect as we could get it. If ever you go to Ellenroad watch the crank as it swings round at the back of the pillar and notice how small the clearance is between it and the pillar.

I was ready now to start on the flywheel. I had been looking forward to this because it was potentially the most challenging job on the engine. If I didn’t get it right it wouldn’t run true and as it was a geared drive, this wouldn’t do at all! With the help of Cecil and the lads I got the main bearing housing on the pillar installed and the outrigger bearing on the side of the pit. One last measure up and check with the level and I was ready. I waited until they had gone home and then set to to lift the flyshaft and flywheel boss into place. I did this on my own because it was a very heavy lift, far heavier than anything else we would have to do and actually was pushing the tackle to its limits. I used two blocks all the time and had to keep the whole lot balanced. Working slowly and with many a pause for thought and inspection I moved it quietly over to its place and lowered it in. I breathed a sigh of relief as it sank into its bearings and there was something about the way it rested there which made me sure I had got it right, it looked comfortable. The nicest part about this of course was the look on the lads faces when they came in the following morning. I told them the good fairy had been busy in the night!



The heaviest lift, the fly shaft in place sat in it's bearings. If a thing looks right it generally is and this looked just right to me!