I’ve got a bit of a goodie for you now. In the late 1970s I bought myself a very expensive tape recorder and started to interview people connected with the mills about their lives and what they did for a living. This developed eventually into the Lancashire Textile Project, 1,500,000 words and over 500 pictures. If you want to find out more about this go to Google, type Lancashire Textile Project into the search bar and go forward from there. You’ll find the whole thing is on a funny little website called Oneguyfrombarlick which is run by a friend of mine and contains lots of information about Barlick. My informants were patient and very good to me. They suffered many hours of close questioning about every aspect of their lives and I’ll freely admit that a lot of the transcripts, though invaluable information for the social historian, are not the most riveting thing you will ever read. However every now and again a real gem of information surfaced and what follows is one of these.
Later on I’ll tell you how we went about closing Bancroft down because it is a story that needs telling to get it on the record. The story I want to look at now is how it started up in 1920. I was interviewing an old mate of mine, Jack Platt, not because I knew he had information about the mills but because he had worked in the Barlick quarries and later on had been a wagon driver, another subject close to my heart because I spent 25 years doing the same thing. When he talked about his early work experience I was surprised to find that he was one of the first weavers in Nutter Brothers’ Bancroft Shed. He was in there right at the beginning on the first day they ran the mill. I don’t know whether anyone has ever described this process before but in Jack we have what historians call ‘a prime source’, he was there, his description is straight from the horse’s mouth.
Once the mill was finished and the opening ceremony had been performed in March 1920 Nutter Brothers wanted to commission the mill as soon as possible and get some production out of it. They knew that until they had bedded everything in and sorted out the inevitable teething problems they were losing money every day. The way they tackled this was get about 50 looms in, connect them up to the shafting, get some weavers in and start weaving cloth on a small scale. In 1920 all weavers worked on piece work, they were paid according to the amount of cloth they produced. This was reckoned up only after they had delivered a good piece into the warehouse and it had passed inspection. In 1920 the standard piece length was 100 yards and a good 4 loom weaver, working on an average cloth weight with everything going well could make about 6 pieces a week and get six shillings a piece wage. All this varied with the complexity of the weave and prices were set out in the Uniform List of Weaving Prices agreed between the unions and the industry which was standard throughout the cotton areas. One valuable piece of information Jack gave me was that when he and his mother and sister moved from Calf Hall Shed to Bancroft in March 1920 they were paid a standard wage. This must have been the practice when weaving a shed in because everything couldn’t be expected to run smoothly and the weavers would otherwise not get enough income to make working the initial bedding-in period attractive.
Jack was 16 years old in 1920 and he had been weaving with his mother since he was 12 when he was a ‘half-timer’. The school leaving age was 13 but if a pupil had a satisfactory record they were allowed to work in the mill for half the day and go to school for the other half. They did a week working in the morning and school in the afternoon and the following week this was reversed. My mother did the same thing in Dukinfield and she told me that school in the morning was best because you didn’t have to get up as early. At first Jack worked as a ‘tenter’ for his mother. (‘Tenter’ is a dialect word for someone who watches and helps a process, as engineer at the mill I was the ‘engine tenter’.) For this service his mother got half a crown a week for his services. (twelve and a half new pence.) When he went full-time a year later he was given two looms of his own next to his mother and sister and they worked as a team running ten looms between them. On moving to Bancroft Jack got four looms of his own and the same standing wage as his mother and sister, so they had 12 looms between them.
It’s 1921 at the back of the weaving shed. From left to right: Annie Platt (Jack’s big sister). Iris or Edith Barrett, Mary Joyce and Vera Scott. All young weavers in the shed.
When the mill first started there was only part of the first double row of looms nearest the warehouse, the loom shifters were at work alongside them filling the shed with what would eventually be over 1200 looms. There were 16 cross shafts in the shed driven by bevel gears on the lineshaft, eight were supported by brackets on the pillars holding the roof up, eight were on hanging brackets mounted in between on the girder gutters. Each shaft drove two rows of looms and so there were 80 looms to each shaft. It must have been exciting work because before they started up the weaving manager told them that if someone shouted to them ‘Get out!’ they had to immediately run to the door, through the warehouse and outside into the yard. They hadn’t even to stop their looms, just get out as fast as possible.
You might wonder what could go wrong… plenty actually. The greatest danger was from some fault on the engine. Remember this was a brand new engine with tremendous power running on light load and all sorts of things could go wrong. The worst thing that could happen was if it decided to ‘run boggart’, the common term for over-speeding. If the engine exceeded its design speed of 70rpm there was a real danger of it picking speed up quickly to a point where the cast iron flywheel flew to pieces because of the excessive centrifugal force. This wasn’t common but was by no means unknown. I have run a much larger engine at twice its rated speed and the 85 ton flywheel survived the experience so it was possible for the Bancroft engine to run fast enough to make the situation in the weaving shed dangerous but not disastrous for the engine. There could be a fault in the system of shafts inside the mill which transmitted the power from the engine, a bearing could heat up to the point where it seized solid and the power of the engine could easily break a shaft eight inches thick like a rotten stick. There were many things that could go wrong and it was almost inevitable that some of them would. The engine manufacturer, in this case William Roberts and Sons of Phoenix Foundry in Nelson, had several of their best men there to help the mill engineer keep everything safe. Roberts’ foreman on the Bancroft contract was a very experienced man called Jack Waddington and he would be a good bloke to have with you for the first week or so.
A little story about Jack Waddington, he was in charge of the engine on the day they had the opening ceremony. The great and good had assembled in the engine house, the boiler had a head of steam, the speeches were made and Aunty Liza, James Nutter’s eldest daughter who had married Joe Slater of Clough Mill, opened the stop valve to start the engine. Nothing happened. Arthur Roberts, one of the brothers who owned the Phoenix Foundry was present and shouted for Jack Waddington only to be told he was over at the Greyhound pub having a beer. A runner was sent and a short while afterwards Jacky appeared and was immediately pounced on by his boss who informed him that the engine wouldn’t start. Jack said of course it won’t, not until I have put the valves in, you didn’t think I’d let you start it without me being here did you? With that he took the valve covers off the high pressure cylinder, slid the cylindrical steam valves in, bolted the covers back on and said there you are, it’ll go now! Eliza opened the valve, the engine sprang into life and everyone cheered. Johnny Pickles of Henry Brown Sons and Pickles was there and told this story to his son Newton the man who taught me all I know about engines so we can be pretty sure it’s true. It says something about the regard that Mr Roberts had for his foreman that he didn’t sack him on the spot, not surprising really because he was such a valuable employee. Roberts’ lost Jack later when he was put in charge of erecting an engine at Bradley Mills in Nelson. He liked the plant so much that after it was commissioned he handed his notice in and stayed at the mill as engine tenter until he retired.
Back to Jack Platt and his four looms. As it turned out the warning about getting out quickly if told to was no idle threat. They had to evacuate several times over the first few weeks because of over-speeding, evidently the engineers were having a problem with the governor on the engine. Once when this happened Jack came back in to find that one his looms, about 1200lbs of metal, had been picked up bodily and dropped on top of another loom. As the engine over speeded the leather belt driving it from the drum on the overhead shafting had flown off the drum, caught on a bolt head and became a winch cable dragging the loom up until it hit the shafting which broke the belt and allowed it to drop. Jack was quite impressed! He confessed to me that he had run out once or twice without being warned, he just felt like a break from work and a bit of fresh air.
The shed and the machinery gradually settled in and within six weeks Bancroft was fully operational and running smoothly. By that time the standard wage had been cancelled and the normal piece rate working brought in. This wasn’t the end of the teething problems, there was a tragedy. A major danger in any cotton mill is fire. Water sprinkler systems were fitted in the most vulnerable areas such as the offices, warehouse and the preparation departments upstairs. Part of the fire precautions was to have heavy secondary fireproof doors fitted throughout the mill where they would do the most good. There were two entrances into the weaving shed from the warehouse and these had double wooden doors for use during the day but with a big teak fire door protected with tin plate on both sides hung on rollers running on a heavy metal track above the doorway which was closed at night. One day in I think 1921 a young woman weaver was going out of the shed into the warehouse to brew up and the fire door fell on her killing her instantly. Jack could remember helping to lift the door off her and lay her on the table in the warehouse with a lump of cotton waste under her head. Bancroft got a nickname that day which stuck for many years, they called it ‘The Graveyard’. By the end of 1920 the shed was commissioned and fully operational.
