STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

Many a time there could be a weaving fault as a warp came close to an end. This wasn’t the weaver’s fault and when the piece was inspected this section of cloth was cut off. The very first cloth woven after gaiting had the loose ends of warp on it that were first wrapped round the cloth roller and that piece was cut off as well. Such a piece of cloth was always known as a ‘fent’. The weavers used to use a suitable fent to make a ‘brat’ which was another name for a short apron but was always wrapped completely round the body and secured with a safety pin or a special apron hook. They were a cheap and very effective way of keeping your cloths clean. Some weavers preferred a bright pinafore because this covered the upper part of their clothing as well. The weavers were never provided with any work wear at Bancroft beyond the fents.

The warehouse was home to other vital pieces of mill equipment. The toilets were in separate blocks outside the east wall in the yard and were accessed from the warehouse. This had two consequences, the clothlookers could see who was going in there and how long they stayed. In 1920 this was serious information because the toilets were where you went for a smoke, smoking was strictly forbidden in the weaving shed, the warehouse and the departments on the second storey because of the grave fire risk. Also it was the management’s aim to cut down on time spent away from the loom and the clothlookers could time you. There was another reason for the positioning of the toilets outside the mill. Both men’s and women’s had a cast iron grill in one wall for ventilation. There was no heating and in winter this meant they were bitterly cold, a disincentive to spending any more time in there than was absolutely necessary. I was told many years later that there was a further reason for the toilets being outside the main structure of the mill, they weren’t part of the ratable value of the mill.



The cast iron grilles in the toilets. You can imagine how cold they were in winter.

I have a story about the toilets… During the very hot summer of 1976 I had many problems because of the dry weather. One of them was that the wooden beams supporting the glass roof in the lady’s toilet had shrunk to the extent that the roof was in danger of falling in. The management didn’t like paying overtime for maintenance of the mill fabric and so I had to attend to it during the day when they were in use. At first I was very wary, signaling my presence every time I went up the ladder to let my ladies know I was about to appear above them. All this went by the board when Phyllis Watson told me one day to get on with it as I wouldn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before! I gave up being a gentleman after that and just got on with the job and I have to report that my education advanced significantly in consequence.

One of the accessories in the toilets was a very old electric incinerator for burning anything that the ladies didn’t want to put down the toilets. I have to report that it was the bane of my life, always going wrong and I got quite used to ladies coming in the engine house and describing in very graphic terms just what was wrong and what I should do about it. I did strike one blow for freedom, part of my job was ordering essential supplies from a mill furnisher at Burnley and I upgraded the quality of the toilet paper without being detected by the management who provided their own. Only a small victory but appreciated all round!

Between the top loading bay and the entrance to the lady’s toilets was a large sandstone slopstone (shallow sink) under the window. On the window ledge was a cactus garden. Not your usual mill accessory but this belonged to Colin Macro the cloth carrier. It was typical of Bancroft in the 1970s that nobody saw anything unusual about this and as long as Colin did his job nobody ever raised any objection.



Next the slopstone was a large steam-heated copper hot water boiler. This was where everyone brewed up and was the equivalent of the ‘water-cooler’ culture in a modern office. It says something about different attitudes in the mill, a water-cooler would have been totally ignored, what people wanted was a nice hot drink. In 1920 each weaver paid a penny a week out of their wage for the use of the boiler and I once worked out that at 1920 coal prices and steam usage it was the most profitable piece of equipment in the mill. This was the only concession towards staff welfare both in 1920 and in the 1970s. Just after WW2 when ‘Britain’s Bread Hung By Lancashire’s Thread’ an outbuilding behind the boiler house accessed from the shed was converted into a kitchen and canteen which provided hot dinners for those who wanted them. In 1970 all the equipment was still in there but the room was only used by smokers.

Fire was an ever present danger in the warehouse and preparation floors and these areas were fully protected by a water sprinkler system. This was a series of pipes in the ceiling punctuated at regular intervals by sprinkler heads. These heads were kept closed by a bulb of glass or a low temperature fusible link that burst or melted if there was fire below it and the temperature rose. In many mills, particularly multi-storied spinning mills the system was fed from a tank at least 30 ft higher than the highest sprinkler head, that’s why such mills always have imposing towers, the sprinkler tank is installed at the top just below the roof. At Bancroft we had enough pressure on the six inch diameter sprinkler main to feed water anywhere we wanted it without the complication of a tank or booster pump. If water flowed through the main it activated a small turbine that turned a shaft with a loose hammer mounted on the end and this struck a gong mounted on the wall outside giving an external warning of fire. I had the job of testing this every week and recording the pressures in a log which was inspected regularly by the insurance company. This water main wasn’t metered and at some point some bright spark had gone to the trouble of piping the connection for the boiler feed water system up to this supply so we never paid for the water.

Up against the wall between the warehouse and the weaving shed was a flight of wooden stairs giving access to the second floor and next to it was a ‘hoist’, this is what we called it but the usual name is a lift or elevator. This was fairly modern and had been installed after WW2 to replace the original one which was much cruder and run off the shafting driven by the engine. This was another of my regular inspection jobs, I had to make sure the safety interlocks and emergency brake were serviceable, keep the pit at the bottom clean and free from flammable materials and check the oil levels in the gearbox. I kept my eye on the rope condition but this was the responsibility of the lift engineers Foulds from Keighley who came once a year to test the lift and renew the ropes if needed. The only other things that concerned me in the warehouse was the lubrication and condition of any elements of the power transmission system that passed through there.

Another thing in the warehouse which we need to take note of is the two tackler’s cabins. Tacklers are famously eccentric beasts. Ernie Roberts was one of them and a good mate of mine, he once told me that tacklers are weavers with the brains taken out. This was typical of the many sayings and tacklers tales that are associated with the craft. I say craft because that’s what it was, the Lancashire loom is a very simple machine, in fact in today’s terms, crude would be a better word but the reason it was never superseded in many Lancashire mills was because of its robustness, versatility and reliability. There were small differences in plain Lancashire looms and I’m not going to bore you with long descriptions of these, all you need to know is that at Bancroft we could weave any plain cloth from a surgical gauze to a heavy canvas. In the later days when orders became scarce it was this ability to quickly change a loom over from one ‘sort’ of cloth to another which enabled us to take small orders and weave them at a profit. Being crude didn’t mean that they couldn’t be finely tuned. Proficiency at ‘Loom tuning’ was the attribute that sorted the good tacklers out from the bad. A small adjustment here and there made all the difference to a hard-pressed weaver chasing picks. We had some good tacklers at Bancroft. I remember Ernie having problems with a loom once that was weaving unevenly. It transpired that a new loom sweeper had decided the nuts holding the frame together were too loose and so he’d got his spanner out and tightened them all up. Ernie soon saw what the problem was, slackened all the frame nuts off which allowed the loom to relax, read the loomsweeper’s horoscope and all was well.



Ernie Roberts having a fag and Roy Wellock honing his skills. A typical scene in the tackler’s cabin.

The funny thing about the tacklers when I was running the engine was that I always got on well with the first cabin but never seemed to hit it off with the second even though one of them was a near neighbour of mine. There was one incident in particular that worsened this relationship. In this second cabin one of the tacklers had some tomato plants in grow bags on the window cill. He looked after them like babies and was well on the way to a good crop. Came the summer holidays and a fortnight’s break. I was working for most of the holidays as this was when I did my heavy maintenance on the boiler and engine so this tackler with the tomatoes asked me to water them for him while he was away. No problem at all until at the beginning of the second week I noticed they were looking a bit poorly. I got my mate Ted Lawson to come over to the mill and have a look at them because he knew about these things. He inspected the offending plants and informed me that it was a bad case of Blossom End Rot! He said it wasn’t my fault, you couldn’t induce it in a week and the most usual cause was over-watering. Well, I think you can guess what happened, the tackler came back off holiday full of the joys of spring until he saw his beloved plants. Of course it was all my fault and he never spoke to me again. I just kept quiet, I knew there was no way I could win that one.

[Stanley]

The cabin walls were lined with cubby-holes each labeled with the loom part it was supposed to contain. I say ‘suppose’ because as far as I could see there was no system whatsoever, the whole place was a glorious jumble of bits of iron and small castings and I couldn’t see how anyone would be able to find anything. Ernie Roberts assured me that there was order in the chaos and he knew exactly where to lay his hand on anything he wanted. He must have been right because I never saw them fast for a spare part. This was a good thing because the firms who made our looms were long gone and if we did need anything we hadn’t got we had to either cannibalise another loom or find it in a scrap yard. On the engine house side of the larger of the two cabins there was a store room holding larger loom parts and two big vats, one containing whale oil in which leathers were soaked before installing them on the looms and one full of linseed oil in which new shuttles were soaked until they were needed.

Maintaining the shuttles was a large part of the tackler’s skill. A shuttle is moving so fast through the loom that it is airborne and it has to be aerodynamically correct. A good tackler knows just which parts have to be shaped and smoothed as they wear in order to keep them working properly. Another common problem with shuttles was ‘ballooning’ of the weft as it flew off the yarn package during one pass across the slay (the wooden bed on which the shuttle traveled through the warp shed). If this happened the weft could snarl up on the next pass and cause a weaving fault. The cure was to line the inside of the shuttle with rabbit fur to put a drag on the weft as it came off the pirn or weft package. In a well run mill supplies of rabbit fur are ordered from the mill furnishers but at Bancroft the management hadn’t bought any for years. The weavers used to bring in odd items of fur clothing like gloves, hats and on one occasion a fox fur stole. These were cut up and used for weft control. Say what you will about Bancroft, we weren’t a big drain on the world’s fur resources!
We may as well include the office in the warehouse description, it was actually a separate building but could be entered from the warehouse and was closely associated with it. The main office was a room about 25feet long, 15feet wide and 8feet high to the ceiling. It had been painted cream on the walls and brown woodwork when the mill was built and I doubt if it had seen much redecoration. The west wall, next to the warehouse was dominated by a fireplace with a mahogany surround with mirror that would get any architectural salvage merchant salivating. To the left of that was an imposing Milner safe that in common with many of its ilk was all show and no substance. The door and the front were absolutely solid but the back and sides were simply sheet metal walls forming a cavity that was full of teak sawdust. (Teak is almost incombustible, it was used in the fire doors as well for that reason) There was a large desk and a table together in the middle of the floor both of which bore the ‘VR’ mark of government property. On the desk was an Imperial typewriter and an old electric adding machine (I have a story about this later…). The main working surface was a long stand-up desk with a solid walnut top under the window facing up the yard. In the old days clerks worked at these desks stood up but we had gone soft over the years and there were two high stools with cloth padding made of folded fents, odd pieces of damaged cloth that were cut out of full pieces. In my time the office staff was Sidney Nutter and his brother Ughtred. Both were from the Nutter dynasty which built the mill but as Sidney often said, not part of the ‘Nutter Millions’. Sidney was full-time and with Jim Pollard the weaving manager ran the mill. Ughtred used to do two or three days a week to help with the making-up and the wages. I didn’t have a lot to do with Ughtred but worked very closely with Sidney and I liked him, he had a wicked sense of humour and I got the impression that in his day he had been a bit of a lad.
I have a story for you about Sidney… Sidney was a very mild and kindly man who hated saying no to commercial travelers when they called in and tried to sell us the latest wonder product. If one called he would send them down to see ‘Our Mr Graham’ in the engine house because he was only the office manager and had no authority. Codswallop of course, he simply wanted me to do the dirty for him. One day a traveler called in and as it happened came straight to the engine house. He was selling a miracle drain cleaner that would remove any blockage and solve all our problems. He had been well trained and had a demonstration for me that was pure theatre. He went through it and I could see that all he was selling was concentrated acid that would certainly dissolve not only a blockage but the joints in the drains as well. No matter, he was good and very entertaining. I told him that we might be interested but could he please do the demonstration again for ‘Our Mr Nutter’ in the office. As the firm was called James Nutter and Sons I have no doubt that the salesman thought he was onto a good thing dealing direct with the owner so I took him up to the office.

Sidney was alone in the office and as it was Tuesday afternoon I knew he wouldn’t be thronged. I took the bloke in and watched as he started his spiel. He opened his case, took out a Pyrex beaker and told Sidney to imagine it was a drain. Sidney was sat on his high stool with his pipe in his mouth taking in every word. The bloke poured some garden soil in the beaker saying that a blockage always contained dirt, then he brought out another beaker full of white grease, took a handful and shoved that in the beaker as well because the cleaner had to deal with grease. The next stage in the demonstration should have been when he whipped out the biggest sanitary towel you have ever seen in your life, wiped his hands on it, shoved it into the beaker and said “There’s always one of these and now you have a blockage!”. He never got that far because when he pulled the towel out Sidney’s pipe dropped out of his mouth and he said “Eh lad, what is it? A blindfold?” This stopped the salesman dead in his tracks and he started to explain to Sidney what the item was. Sidney heard him out, took his pipe out of his mouth and said “My God! Whatever will they think of next!” At this point the salesman lost the will to live, he packed everything away in his case and retreated down the yard, a beaten man. I looked at Sidney and told him he was wicked and then we both burst out laughing. See what I mean? A sly and wicked sense of humour.

Entertainment on one side, Sidney was a smart cookie. He knew the commercial side of the business inside out and Jim Pollard knew all there was to know about the technology. Between them they kept us afloat through some difficult times and when we eventually closed Jim told me that we had never had a month when we didn’t make a profit. Sidney died suddenly about four months before the mill closed, he had a brain tumour that was mercifully quick. I’m sorry he died so young, he was only 64, but I’m glad he didn’t have to go through weaving out because the mill was his life and all he had ever known. I used to spend quite a lot of time with Sidney and if he had lived he would have been one of my informants, he had already agreed to do it. I once asked him why it was that as the mills closed down all around, many of them weaving the same cloth as us but it never seemed to make any difference to our order books. He told me that he didn’t know the answer because it had always puzzled him as well. The only reason he ever came up with was that the Lancashire industry had lost the will to live, the customers recognised this and gave up trying to source their needs in England, they just went to foreign firms who would give them a low price just to get them hooked. I think there might be something in this because just before we closed I had a conversation with a buyer for Tootals, one of our main customers. He told me that his firm was at its wits end trying to source the cloth that we were weaving for them, nobody else was doing it. Even so, we closed… As Ernie Roberts said, “It’s like a black pudding. A bloody mystery.”
I have another little story for you before we leave the office. I don’t apologise for the fact it puts me in a good light, it happened just as tell it to you. It was mid-winter and very cold. We were firing flat out and just managing to keep the shed warm, those glass lights in the shed let the heat out as fast as you pumped it in. I had occasion to go up to the office to ask Sidney to order a load of coal for me and when I went in they had the fire roaring up the chimney in the office. I asked Sidney why they lit the fire when we had steam pipes in the office. He said that the heating had never worked in that office as long as he’d been there. I felt the pipes and they were only just warm so I told him that there was something wrong somewhere and I’d have look at it when I had time.

Later on after dinner things had settled down at our end in the engine house so I got John Plummer my firebeater to sit in the engine house and watch the oils for me while I went up and scouted round the heating system in the office. I soon found the problem. At some point, many moons ago from the state of the pipework, someone had fitted the steam trap on the end of the line back to front. (The steam trap allows condensate to get out of the system but keeps the steam in) The system was choked with condensate. I turned the steam off to the offices, took the big old Syphonia trap off and replaced it with a modern one, turned the steam on again and went back to the engine house with the old steam trap on a truck.

About half an hour later the intercom between the office and the engine house squawked at me and on the other end was Sidney, he said I’d better come up to the office at once. I went up and found him and Ughtred in their shirt sleeves, all the office windows and doors open and the fire damped down with old tea leaves from the bucket near the boiler in the warehouse. The temperature was about 85F and Sidney was not happy! Apart from the fact that the office was now too hot he didn’t like the noise the new steam trap made outside the back window when it unloaded at intervals. In the end I had to replace the new trap with the old one and cut down on the steam but we finally got it right and never had to touch it again. Sidney asked what the problem had been and when I told him what the fault was I don’t think he quite believed me. It just goes to show the level of engineering ability that had been employed when that trap was installed. All right, I know I’m crowing but we are all allowed our little triumphs!

There is one last thing we should remark on before we leave the warehouse and this was definitely peculiar to Bancroft. A stranger walking down towards the engine house from the office could be forgiven for thinking that his or her eyes were deceiving them as they neared the end wall. It looked for all the world as though there was a hump in the concrete floor and a corresponding dome in the ceiling above. This was not an optical illusion, it was the Bancroft Mushroom. The floor was indeed rising to a hump and this had been noted very soon after the mill was built. Harold Duxbury told me that they had been called in once to investigate what was pushing the floor up and when they dug into the floor they found a mineral deposit which was growing under the floor and lifting the whole of that part of the mill upwards. As it rose it was lifting the pillars which supported the floor of the taping department upstairs and the machines were constantly having to be levelled by putting packing pieces under the feet at each end. They took samples and sent them off for analysis but never reached a firm conclusion.

In 1979 when my mate Norman Sutcliffe of N&R Contractors was demolishing the mill I told him about this and asked him to see what he thought as they got down to it. He told me later that it was a mineral deposit formed as water oozed up through a bed of peat. They tried the depth of the bed with a forty foot girder hung off the crane hook and he said it was at least thirty feet deep. This solved the mystery of the Mushroom! I’d often thought that there was something like that, it was still expanding when I was there and one clue I noted was that in the back wall of the coal bunker which was very close to the affected area there was a strange bed of rock that didn’t look quite right, very red in colour. I think that when the mill was built they came across this strata and had an idea what it was and this is why the boiler wasn’t sited right up to the engine house as it should have been. Instead it had been turned round and moved away from that area. The last thing they needed was something moving under the boiler. Harold didn’t die until 1991 and when I found out about the peat bed I went down to Bank’s Hill and told him what we had found. He wasn’t surprised and I think was pleased to have got a definite answer after all those years. If you go to see the engine at Bancroft the mushroom is partly underneath the present entrance building and the car park. It may be that it can relieve itself by expanding outside and may not bother the building again. I hope so…



Jim and Sid in the office planning strategy.

[Stanley]

TEA BREAK: HUNGRY MEN
In the last Tea Break we left Fred talking about how hard the old Dales farmers were. I told him a story which won’t be out of place here. “There used to be a farmer in Settle called George Staveley, he was a legend up there. He was eighty odd when I knew of him in the 1960s. If you go out of Settle up what they call If Hill towards Bell Busk and Kirby Malham, George had some land reight up on top there as you're going up out of Settle. There's a big hill goes up at the back, a big limestone hill and he had a lot of black cattle up there. Years after he were supposed to have retired he went missing in middle of winter. There was a lot of snow on ground and they got the mountain rescue out 'cause they knew he’d gone to look these beasts you know and it's blowing a blizzard. He didn't used to ride up, he used to walk up this hill every day, eighty odd years old, and all he ever wore were them terrible short Wellingtons that laced up, I should think they were about the worst thing that were ever made for your feet. They found him sat behind three bales of straw watching his beasts and reight enjoying himself and he couldn't understand why they'd come searching for him.”

“Years later I was down at Cyril Richardson's at Little Stainton and a van pulls up and this fella gets out of the passenger seat and it were George Staveley. I said “Eh, look who’s here, it’s George! What are you after?” He said, “Young man, do you know of a farmer called Metcalfe round here?” I said “Aye, just up the road there.” He said, “I understand he has a Standard Ford tractor for sale, a paraffin tractor.” which he had, Wallace had two and he were right attached to them. He didn’t like new-fangled tractors he used to like one that you could stand on when you were driving it, like the old Standard Ford. George said “Wait a minute, would it be Wallace Metcalfe?” I said “Aye.” He turned round to this bloke who was driving, and he said “Hungriest b****r in Craven, we’re wasting us time!” And this voice come down from the house, It were Cyril, he must have come out of door and realised who it were. He says “Well, that'll be a b***dy laugh. It’ll be the two hungriest b****rs in Craven together when you get up there!!”

Fred and I agreed that it wasn’t that these men were mean, it was just that they had led far harder lives than we can imagine and it left its mark. They had to be able and tough or they didn’t survive. This led to us talking about weavers and Fred said that the best weavers were the ones who were hungry, by this he didn’t mean short of food, he said that if you had a weaver who went in the pub, liked a drink and smoked they were the best workers because they had an incentive to earn that little bit more. Fred said “You get these evening shifts, six till ten, it's nearly all to run motor cars. We used to laugh about 'em. There’d be six motor cars stood outside Brook Shed on New Road waiting of their wives coming out at ten o'clock at night, fellas sat in. The wives were working to run the car and the fella were coming to take ‘em home, they were worn out at night.”

On the same subject Fred had some hard words to say about the guaranteed minimum wage. In many ways this was a good thing for the weavers as they were guaranteed at least some wage every week no matter how bad the warps were but as Fred said, the difference in wages between the best weaver in the shed and the worst was only a pound a day before tax. He saw this as the big drawback to the system.



Fred Inman fettling a shuttle in the tackler’s cabin. The vice is what used to be called a blacksmith’s vice and was original equipment from 1920 when Bancroft opened.

[Stanley]

CHAPTER 7: TAPE-SIZING AND SOME CLOTH CONSTRUCTION

The second floor section above the warehouse was dedicated to the processes necessary to prepare the essential components the weavers needed to make cloth, warps and weft. It was divided into three sections, first,at the engine house end there was a department walled off by a wooden partition which housed the tape-sizing department. Next to this and directly over the cart race or loading bay in the warehouse below was a section which had a large double door opening to the outside and a hoist mounted in the ceiling. This was where the taper’s beams were lifted into the building from the wagons below, it wasn’t used for bringing yarn in, this was always unloaded in the warehouse where it was stored until needed in the winding department when it was brought up via the hoist. From here up to the wooden partition which divided the second department off, winding, at the far end over where the cloth-lookers were in the warehouse was an open space used for storing weaver’s warps which had been made on the tape-sizing machines. These warps were taken from this section into the third department, looming, which was in a long wooden partitioned cabin against the outside wall of the building so that it got the benefit of maximum light on the looming frames. The first thing a stranger would notice would be the ceiling of the warp storage section. It was a forest of heald and reed sets which had been cut out of the looms when a warp was woven out, more about this in a moment. They were incredibly flammable and this was one of the reasons why no smoking was allowed in this section and it was all protected by sprinklers.



There were healds and reeds hung in the warp preparation room and far more outside where the weaver’s warps were stored.
Let’s start with the tapers. The basic process carried on in here was taking in taper’s beams from the spinners, setting them up in the tape-sizing or slashing machine and passing the threads through a bath of boiling size (more about this later), round two steam heated copper drying drums, separating the threads into individual strands by splitting rods at the front end and winding them onto a smaller weaver’s warp at the front of the machine. Once the warp had the correct length of yarn it was cut out, delivered to the floor outside to await the loomers and another warp started without stopping the machine. Apart from getting the right number of ends on the warp and the correct length the process strengthened the warp yarn by infusing it with size and drying it. Without this improvement the warp yarns would tend to break up as the reed passed violently back and forth along it during the process of weaving. There were other reasons for sizing as well, some of them different in the 1920s than in the 1970s when I saw the process.



The tape sizing machines at Bancroft.

[Stanley]

Before we look at slashing we need to talk about cloth construction. I can’t tell you all there is to know because I haven’t the knowledge but what I can do is give you some clues as to how complicated the subject is and how skilled the men were who worked out all the variables to make a specific cloth. Let’s start at the beginning. An order would come into the office for so many pieces of a certain quality of cloth. This would be a precise definition of the finished article and if it wasn’t met the cloth contract was invalid. The specification contained some basic information, the quality and count of the yarn to be used for the warp and weft and this could be different for each. The quality was the technical specification of the twist to be used, for instance it could include origin, grade, whether standard or super-combed, whether it had been treated by any proprietary process like Mercerising, gassing or dyeing, whether it was cotton or some other fibre. The count was the weight of the yarn which was measured by how many hanks or leas of the yarn there were to the pound weight. ‘20s’ was twice as heavy as ‘40s’ and so on. Twist as fine as 500s was regularly spun by the best spinners but we never got down to counts as fine as this at Bancroft. Our average count was 40s and perhaps we would go to 60s or 80s for some specific cloths. We regularly wove 8s which made a very heavy cloth. Once these parameters had been set the specification went on to give the pick count which was the product of how close the warp and weft yarns were together and this set the density of the weave. A weatherproof cloth like Grenfell Cloth made by Haythornthwaite’s in Burnley could be as dense as 600 threads to the inch of very high count super-combed Egyptian twist. A yellow duster could be as low as 25 to the inch and low quality yarn made from waste. Bancroft could weave either of these if asked to do so. This wasn’t the end of the specification, it could stipulate things like it having to be pickfound, all tags cut off, no burst selvedges and how these had to be constructed. Finally it stipulated the cloth width.

This is complicated enough but it’s only the specification, Jim Pollard as weaving manager had to work out how to weave the cloth to arrive at this standard. For instance, the simple things like how many ends would there have to be on the weaver’s warp to achieve the width? How much weft would be needed to weave the order? Two simple questions but consider this, every time a warp thread and a weft thread cross they distort each other slightly. 20,000 yards of warp thread will not make 20,000 yards of cloth, there is a contraction to be allowed for. The same applies to the weft and remember that the amount of distortion depends on the density and tightness of the weave, there is no standard allowance. This contraction also reduces the width of the finished cloth and the reduction is greatest the closer to the selvedge you get. So, in calculating the number of ends in the warp sufficient extra have to be allowed for to allow for natural contraction even though the temples on either side of the loom are physically trying to hold the cloth to the correct width. If enough ends are put in to give the width the count of warp threads per inch is higher at each side than in the centre. To even this out a ‘bastard reed’ has to be used which has a smaller count at each side than in the centre and after contraction it measures as correct. Too much information? This is only a fraction of the decisions that have to be made, can you see why it was such a highly skilled job? There are factors that have to be taken account of. If you need say 3,000 ends in a warp, you always specify one or two spares in case a warp thread goes down in the middle of weaving. This allows the weaver to discard the bad warp thread and substitute a better one. Sometimes it is necessary to have stronger threads on the edge of the warp to make a better selvedge, these were put in separately during taping.



Two sets of taper’s beams which have just been lifted in by the teagle hoist to the second storey. The teagle is the machine in the roof and the block at the end was on a runway and could run right out on a cat head over the yard. The warp thread is protected by thick cardboard at each end and a wrapping of brown paper in the middle.

[Stanley]

Once all the decisions had been made about what was needed on the weaver’s warp to get the specified cloth there was the question of ordering the taper’s beams. These were much bigger than the weaver’s beams because they had to hold enough length of warp thread to make perhaps twenty weavers beams. Let’s take a simple example. Suppose you wanted to make weaver’s beams with 2,000 ends in them. You ordered perhaps five taper’s beams with 400 ends on each and enough length to make 20 weavers beams. An allowance had to be made in this length to make up for shrinkage of the yarn as it was being taped and again, this wasn’t a constant, it depended on the type of size, the properties of the twist and how the machine was set up. A further allowance was needed for the waste produced when first gaiting the machine and what was left in it after the completion of the required number of weaver’s beams.
Once the ‘set’ of beams was delivered at the mill it was lifted into the creel at the back of the tape. This creel was a framework that could hold up to ten large beams. From the creel the individual sheets of yarn had to be brought forward and combined with each other before being threaded through the machine, round the drying drums and out at the front end. This was done by tying the new sheets in bunches to the old sheet left over from the previous run. Once the machine was ready to start taping the old sheet and knots went through the machine until the new sheet had reached the front end of the tape and then the old sheet was cut off and became waste. Before this can be done the sizing section of the machine and the drying drums have to be made ready for the next run.
The place where the sheet of warp meets the size mixture is in the ‘sow box’ at the end of the tape nearest the taper’s beams, it is immersed by a roller which pushes it into the boiling size as it runs through the machine and then between two squeeze rollers, the top one covered with taper’s flannel, which squeeze the excess size out of the yarn and allow it to drop down into the sow box. However, before this happens the size has to be made.

Each tape machine has a size box next to it big enough to hold enough size to complete most of a day’s run on the tape. It has an agitator driven off the shafting and steam jets can be blown into the mixture to boil it. Size is weird and wonderful stuff and many large books have been written on the chemistry and constituents of various sizes for different jobs. The basic ingredients we used at Bancroft for a very simple mixture were tallow, farina (potato flour) or corn flour, a gum such as Tragacanth and water. In 1920 many cloths were sized to give more bulk and weight to the finished cloth and this was achieved by adding china clay to the mix. In extreme cases over 120% of the cloth weight was added size and this was specified by the customer. Once all the ingredients had been added to the water while the agitator was running the steam was turned on and the size brought up to boiling point. Once boiling fiercely it was kept in this state for perhaps an hour of more to give the starch granules time to burst completely. This period depended on the ingredients and the grade of size needed. Once it had reached its consistency it was a creamy fluid and was kept at boiling point while the tape was running.
A pump on the size box transferred the size to the sow box via a ball valve which ensured a constant level. Steam was injected into the sow box to bring the size back up to the boil and once it had reached this point the machine could be started. The copper drying drums are already up to temperature and being kept hot by a constant supply of low pressure steam at about 5psi. All is ready. The tape is set on at a low speed and the web starts to enter the boiling size on its way through the machine. As soon as the new sheet has reached the front of the machine the old warp is cut out, the end of the new warp wrapped round a new beam and the taper inserts splitting bars in the correct order at the front of the machine to separate the threads as they emerge from the drying drum because they are stuck together by the size in a broad sheet, a tape, this is where the process gets its name. When the separated sheet reaches the front beam it is cut out and the weaver’s beam proper is started. The taper leaves the machine running slowly while he makes any final adjustments to the splitting of the web and how the warp is running onto the beam. As soon as he is satisfied all is well he sets the machine on at full speed and the weaver’s warp starts to grow. It will take about 30 minutes depending on the number of ends until the warp is full. When this point is reached the tape is put on slow speed and working incredibly quickly the taper cuts out the finished warp, lifts it out, inserts an empty beam, gaits the web up to it and once it is running evenly sets on at full speed again.
There is one more difference between 1920 running and what we did in 1978. When all three tapes were running under the old system there were labourers in the preparation department who lent a hand whenever there was a two man job like lifting in and gaiting the taper’s beams. In 1978 we had no such luxuries. Until the latter days we ran two slashing machines, Joe Nutter and Norman Gray were the tapers. They laboured for each other whenever possible but if one was busy on his machine Jim Pollard went in and laboured for the one needing assistance. The hierarchy counted for nothing, all that mattered was what needed to be done to keep the mill running. There you have it, all you need to know about taping. I know that you are on information overload but don’t worry, you can always go back and read it again! Bear in mind that this is the idiot’s guide and can’t include all the skills that go into the job. If I’ve flagged up the complexity of the decisions that must be made to produce a properly sized warp fit for a specific cloth, I’ve done my job.



The full beams in the foreground are weaver's beams from the tapes waiting for the attentions of the warp preparation department which made them ready to go down into the shed.

[chinatyke]

However, before this happens the size has to be made.
The basic ingredients we used at Bancroft for a very simple mixture were tallow, farina (potato flour) or corn flour, a gum such as Tragacanth and water.

I have considerable expertise in formulating and producing size formulations. Materials have changed substantially since those days largely as a result of different yarns and high speed looms. Starch (chemically modified) and tallow are still widely used. A typical formulation would contain around 10 different ingredients all with a specific purpose. All these could be combined into one premix to simplify size making and make a more consistent size.

[Stanley]

Quite right China. However Bancroft went for simplicity. In their defence they did use the best ingredients!

TEA BREAK: BODY AND SOUL
Fred and I were having a general conversation about sex education and Fred gave me his views on his attitudes towards physical well-being. He said that he used to subscribe to ‘Health and Strength’ a magazine first published in the 1890s and still on the news stands today. He said that he liked the views expressed in it and quoted one motto; ‘Sacred is thy body even as thy soul.’ What struck me was that old-fashioned though such expressions sound nowadays, this is as true now as it was 100 years ago, it struck a chord in the young Fred and he followed the precept. This got us on to society’s attitude towards modesty and he told me that in his younger days it was expected and enforced. I asked him what he meant by this and he quoted the example of a young Earby lad who was unwise enough to brag to his mates about a girl he had been with and the lass’s family forced him to put an apology in the newspaper. Fred said that this was unusual but very effective, it was the talk of the town for a few days and caused many a young lad to think twice before indulging in loose talk. This was in the 1930s, I don’t think it could happen today and it’s a very good indication of public perceptions and attitudes towards morality. Repressive perhaps but effective in protecting vulnerable people.

We discussed discipline in the family. I asked Fred what sort of punishment he got if he was naughty and he told me that it was always the strap. There was a piece of leather belting from the mill hung up at home as a reminder and “If you did owt wrong you'd get it.” He told me a story that Parkinson told him about his grandfather and discipline. Old John had gone walkabout at one time and Parkinson was 25 years old before they got back in touch. When they met and settled down for a talk Parkinson got his clay pipe out and started rubbing some twist up. His father told him ‘Put that out! Th’art not smoking in front of me!” and this was at 25 years old! Parental authority isn’t what it used to be. Looking back, Fred didn’t think his parents were too harsh with him, he recognised that they were doing their best to keep him in line and out of trouble. I asked him about prayers in the home and he said that they didn’t have family prayers as such but they always said a prayer with their mother before going to bed, in winter they knelt on the hearthrug in front of the fire. I may be wrong, but I doubt if bedtime prayers are as common today as they were in the 1930s. The image of a mother kneeling with her two sons and joining in bedtime prayers is of another age. I can remember my mother saying prayers with me before I went to sleep and this got me to thinking about the deep-rooted need to ask for protection during the night. I suspect it’s a very old fear indeed, when our Stone-Age ancestors slept they were at their most vulnerable. Fred said that they were never allowed to play out after dark and neither did his children.

Fred and Melbourne went to Sunday school and as they got older, church as well. Fred said that Christmas was seen as a religious festival more than a celebration. They got small presents but the main emphasis was on attending church and having a celebratory meal. At Easter they used to dye eggs and roll them in the fields. The old Lancashire custom of ‘pace-egging’, once widespread, is still to be found in some parts of the UK. ‘Pace’ comes from ‘pasch’, it comes from Old English meaning ‘Easter’. (this is where we get the term Passion Play) Pace-eggs are eggs specially decorated for the festival, usually they are wrapped in onion-skins and boiled, this gives a golden, mottled effect to the shells. The Wordsworth Museum at Grasmere in the Lake District houses a collection of highly ornate eggs originally made for the poet’s children.

One of the advantages about regular Sunday School attendance was getting books as prizes at the anniversary celebrations. These joined the parent’s prizes on the bookshelf and so there was always a stock of improving literature in the house. Elizabeth got the ‘Red Letter’ magazine once a week and Parkinson had his Sunday Chronicle. One thing we have to continually remind ourselves about is that reading and conversation were the only ways of passing the time indoors, the bad news for today’s youngsters is that there was no radio, TV or electronic games. If you were lucky there might be a pack of cards or dominoes or perhaps even a board game but beyond this you had to rely on your own resources. I’m sure every modern parent has heard the phrase ‘I’m bored!’ from their children. I wonder how many times this was said when Fred was young? The wonderful thing is that Fred’s generation was not deprived, in fact in many ways they were better off than today’s children.

Whilst on the subject of games it transpired that like me Fred had been a Meccano addict. This was a construction kit consisting of small metal strip and angles which could be used to build almost anything. It turned out that Fred and I were heavily into building cranes because they fascinated us and he told me a nice story about one crane he built which was powered by a clockwork motor. He used to have it on the table and used it to lift weights off the floor but was hampered by the fact that he had to hold it down while playing with it to stop it overturning so Parkinson made him a couple of holes in the table top for the holding down bolts! Can you imagine Elizabeth’s reaction to this? This reminds me of my father’s interest in my models, he was as hooked as I was and I think Fred’s dad was the same, we could both remember the first models we made, Fred’s was a crane and mine was a steam roller.

I like this combination of strict discipline but quite remarkable laxity when it came to serious matters like holding Fred’s crane down on the table. Times may have been hard and moral standards high but there was still room for some latitude. It reminds me of the old saying “tempering the wind to the shorn lamb”. [I wrote this and wondered where it originated, at first I thought it was biblical but a bit of a dig produced this: ‘From Les Premices (Geneva 1594), a collection of proverbs by the French scholar Henri Estienne (1531–98).’ There you are, we can learn something every day.] No wonder Fred is gentle, he had good teachers.

[Stanley]

CHAPTER 8: LOOMING AND TWISTING

We’ve reached the stage where the taper has delivered a sized weaver’s warp into the storage area outside the warp preparation department on the east side of the upper store. If you looked at it you’d notice that the last thing the taper did before he doffed the warp from the tape machine was to insert a ‘striking comb’ in the loose ends. This is a comb with a keeper that fits over the teeth to stop the ends slipping out and becoming tangled. Using it ensures that the person who is going to convert this warp to loom-ready state has a good start, all the ends are separate and in order.

We have to plunge back into cloth construction. It’s been complicated enough so far but the parameters we have looked at were only the ones that needed to be put in place to get the warp to this stage. We now have to look at other aspects of managing the warp to get the cloth specification that the customer wants. I missed these out in the last chapter to keep things as simple as possible.

I’m sure you have noticed in the course of your daily life what a tremendous range of cloths we encounter. Everything from the plain weave of a yellow duster to the complexities of a very high class furnishing fabric or even a carpet. In passing let me mention that there is an even more esoteric form of weaving used for producing things like ribbons and bookmarkers which can have complicated patterns or even pictures and text woven into them. This is a separate and highly specialised trade which I shan’t try to describe. If you are really interested and want to know more seek out a book called ‘A Reputation in Ribbons’ by J F Sebire which tells the story of a Congleton firm, Berisfords, which is one of the foremost ribbon manufacturers in the world. There is also another branch of weaving which makes very wide cloths for the paper-making and baking industries.

There are many ways to achieve complexity in an ordinary domestic cloth. The yarn, the pattern of the weave and the incorporation of coloured threads. We did very little coloured work at Bancroft, most of our cloths were what used to be described as ‘Burnley Printers’, plain cloth that was intended for finishing by bleaching and sometime dyeing or printing with a coloured pattern after manufacture. Even so, there was a bewildering choice of options. The simplest form of cloth was a plain weave, what the loomers called a ‘two stave’ cloth. This meant that it could be woven using only two healds or staves to produce the shed through which the shuttle passed to deposit its weft. At the end of that pass the staves were reversed by the mechanism of the loom to ensure that on its return path the weft lay over the warp threads it had previously traveled under and vice versa. Have a close look at a tea towel and you’ll see what I mean. This is the simplest weave of all and is the one that was first invented thousands of years ago. The next type of weave that we would easily recognise is a twill (a ‘four stave’ weave) where the weft is inserted in the warp in such a way as to produce a diagonal effect on the surface of the cloth. Anyone who has done any dress-making will know that this is a very stable form of cloth construction that resists any tendency to deform it from lying flat and square. Cut ‘on the bias’ it can be made even more stable. Think of the difference between a knitted garment and one woven with good cloth. The knitted garment is much more easily deformed than the cloth, you can even stretch it. This is the same effect.

You’ll be pleased to know that this is as far as I am going to go with types of weave. Plain Lancashire looms are capable of being set up to weave other types of cloth and Bancroft often made these but the more complicated weaves like patterned curtains and furnishing fabric demand much more complicated looms which we hadn’t got. Blackburn was always a centre for what is known as Jacquard weaving and produced cloths of such mind-boggling complexity that it took an expert to understand how they were made. I used to have an overcoat that was self-lined. On the outside face it was a small dog tooth check like a Harris weave and on the inside it was a tartan pattern in different colours. This cloth was woven like that and was in effect two entirely different weaves in the same piece of cloth. Don’t ask me how they did it, I think I know, but I would bore you to tears! All I want to do is to alert you to the possible permutations of cloth construction and loom design.

Leaving on one side loom set-up which was the responsibility of the tackler when he gaited the warp in the loom, the biggest single factor governing the weave was the relationship between the passage of the yarn through the healds and reed in the loom. Just to remind you, the healds are the flexible elements with eyes to guide the thread inserted through them and the reed is the fixed metal comb through which all the threads pass which keeps them straight and in position and beats the weft threads up against each other to tighten the weave once they are in place. Once the individual ends have passed through the reed they are united into cloth by the weft. It follows then that the order and positioning of each end in the heald and reed set is the crucial part of ensuring that the requisite cloth is woven.

There are two ways of achieving this result. The first is to set the warp, the reed and the healds up in a looming frame and using a hook like a small button hook, catch each individual thread and draw it along the appropriate path through the set. This process is often called ‘drawing in’. If a warp has 3,000 ends, unless the specification demands double threads, each individual end has to be installed one at a time. Actually, a really skilled man uses a double hook and draws two ends at a time through different paths, you’ll see that Jim Pollard did this. As you can imagine, this process involved high levels of concentration and was very time-consuming.



Jim Pollard drawing a warp from scratch. The healds are set up in front of him and the reed is clamped fast in front of the healds. Jim is using a double hook which he inserts through the correct heald eyes and picks up two ends from the sheet set up behind the healds. Once drawn through the ends are picked up with a special knife which draws them through the reed.

[Bodger]

Why the word Size for a paste compound , and i recall my father using size on the wall to seal before papering, is there a connection to the size in textile terms ?

[Stanley]

Not sure about the answer for that Bodge beyond the fact that the size made by the tapers would have made excellent wallpaper paste!

There was another way. Imagine a weaver’s warp of infinite length, once set up the healds and the reed would be correct for that cloth until they simply wore out and broke. Impossible of course but what was possible was to preserve the relationship of the yarn and the healds and reeds by cutting the warp threads behind the healds and knotting them together so they couldn’t slip through and leaving six inches of cloth at the front of the reed when the warp wove out in the loom. This set was ready for more yarn, all that had to be done was knot each individual end in the new warp to the corresponding end in the old yarn set and carefully draw the knots through the healds and reed before cutting the old warp threads and tag of cloth off and knotting the new ends together so they couldn’t slip back. This worked so long as you had continuation in cloth orders. In practice the sets of healds and reeds were hung in the roof space where they waited for another order for the same cloth to come in. If there wasn’t a ready loomed set for a new order the warp was put on the drawing frame and re-loomed from scratch.

In the old days the process of re-looming an old set to a new warp was done by setting them up in a frame and a man set to and twisted a knot to join each individual end to its mate. Not surprisingly, this process was known as ‘twisting’. It was very hard on the fingers and the twister would often dip his fingers occasionally into a small pot of glycerine and whiting or his own individual mixture which he made up at home. By 1920 when Bancroft became operational there was a new invention, the Barber knotting machine which came in from America. Once you had set up the warp and the heald and reed set, the machine would automatically go through the web knotting each end to its mate. This was much faster and amply repaid the time spent setting the warp up. There were two of these knotting machines at Bancroft in 1920 and two drawing frames. In the 1970s there was one Barber machine left in place and Jim had a drawing frame that was his personal property. When the mill closed down he took it home and set it up in his garage so he could occasionally draw a warp if someone needed one.
In the early days many mills had a heald-knitting frame and a reed making machine. They made their own new components as they were needed. Bancroft never made its own but relied on the commercial heald-knitters and reed manufacturers. In the later days when loom numbers dropped and money was tight Jim survived by cutting old healds and reeds down to size, he was cannibalising the old stocks to keep the mill going. Reeds were polished with a very fine carborundum stone, bent reed wires straightened, broken heald eyes repaired in fact any make do and mend that would solve the problem. Very occasionally Jim would be completely stuck and this was when he went round to see his mates in other mills to see if they had anything that would do. I don’t think we bought a new heald or reed all the time I was at Bancroft.

I have a story about the Barber Knotting machine. I have to report that the man who ran the machine didn’t like me. I could never understand why but in later years it was suggested to me that when George Bleasdale, the old engine tenter finished, there was some hope that a relation of the man on the knotter would get the engineer’s job. I don’t know what truth there is in this but it would explain a lot of things. We have to pop back into the office for a moment to explain how this story came about. Can you remember me mentioning that the two most important parts of the office equipment were the old Imperial typewriter and an electric adding machine that must have been one of the first ever made? The quality of the electricity I was making didn’t suit the adding machine. It was only used on Thursday to calculate the wages and if I didn’t switch the office circuit onto the mains the decimal point on the calculator used to go berserk and jump about all over the place. No problem there but I was always getting digs from the man on the knotter about the fact that his machine ran too slow because I wasn’t running the engine fast enough. More about engine speed later but this wasn’t the problem. His troubles stemmed from the fact that being an American machine it ran on 110v DC which was fine in the early days when this was the voltage used in the mill but became a problem when we went over to 250v single phase for the mill circuits in 1948. The solution was to fit a transformer and inverter which converted the standard UK voltage to one which suited the knotter. The complaints escalated until the man really upset me one day by accusing me of being frightened of the engine. I told him that speed wasn’t the problem and that they had suffered from this ever since the mill was converted to 250v in 1948 and nobody had ever found the cause. I said I’d find it and satisfy him.

You’re right, I was angry! I went out and spent two week’s wage on a heavy duty Avo multi-meter, a specialised piece of measuring equipment which I still have. On the Monday morning I took some readings in the engine house. The meters on the distribution board told me that I was making AC current at 440v three phase which was correct. However, when I took the same reading with the very accurate Avo meter it told me that the voltage was actually a fraction below 400v. An alternator’s voltage level is governed by the voltage of electricity you inject into the main exciter coils. This initial current is made by a small dynamo mounted on the end of the alternator and you can control the level of this and hence the output from the alternator by adjusting the resistance in the circuit between the exciter dynamo and the main coils. My problem was that even when set to maximum the exciter wasn’t delivering the requisite current to the main coils, the fixed resistances in the circuit had degraded and were impeding the flow too much. The reason why the voltmeter on the switchboard was reading the correct voltage was that someone had adjusted it to read 440 when it should have been saying 400!

This was a job for the sparks. I got a professional electrician in and he fitted new fixed resistances. We re-calibrated the voltmeter on the panel using my Avo because being brand new we knew it was accurate. I switched the alternator back on line and went up to the office to see if Sidney’s calculator was behaving itself. He tried it and was delighted, the numbers on the display were brighter, had stopped flickering and the decimal point as steady as a rock. I had earned a cup of tea.

Later in the day I was taking my ease in the engine house with a cup of tea and Jim came down to ask me what I had done to the alternator. Frank Bleasdale, the Winding master had told Jim that his winders were working better than they had ever done and production had risen by about 20%. (They ran off 440v AC) Jim also reported that the man on the knotter wasn’t happy. His machine had doubled its speed and because he hadn’t maintained it properly over the years he was having to overhaul it. On the quiet I think Jim was really pleased but ever the diplomat he didn’t say so. The reason I think this is that anything that pushed production up made his life easier. Later that day I went up into the preparation department and was treated to a torrent of verbal abuse from the vicinity of the Barber Knotter. I simply told the bloke he had asked for better power and now he’d got it he’d have to live with it. Oh, and by the way, the engine is running at exactly the same speed. Game set and match to Stanley, always a nice feeling…

There was a sequel. About two months earlier a man who ran a travelling fair had come to see me and asked if I wanted to buy a lot of 150 watt Edison screw bulbs that he had which were redundant because they had altered their lighting systems. They were very cheap so after having a word with Sidney the mill bought them. All this happened in summer when there was very little demand for shed lighting but then we got a thundery day with low cloud and in the afternoon I decided we’d better have the shed lights on. These were all controlled from a big breaker box on the switchboard. I put the lights on and immediately got reports from the shed that a lot of bulbs had blown. This was of course because it was the first time for almost thirty years that they had received a full 250v. Jim and I went in the shed with a case full of the bulbs I had bought off the fairground people and inside an hour we had every lamp up and running again. The level of light in the shed had gone up tremendously and Jim said that the extra production due to this would more than make up for the extra coal I was burning driving the rejuvenated alternator. Doubles all round! By doing a simple bit of checking and maintenance we had increased the efficiency of the mill and raised profits. I think there may be a lesson in there somewhere…

[Stanley]

TEA BREAK: GAMBLING FEVER
In 1924 a three year old horse called Charlie’s Mount, owned by Charles O’Malley, won the Cesarewitch Handicap at Newmarket… You might wonder what this has to do with our Fred but there is a connection. Fred and I were talking about how his parents passed their spare time, Elizabeth enjoyed her reading, sewing and making peg rugs. Parkinson had his gardening, a pint with his mates and the odd threepenny flutter on a horse. It’s worth remembering that it wasn’t until 1961 that off-course betting on horses was made legal but there was a well-established system of ‘bookie’s runners’ in place all over the country which, though illegal, enabled anyone to get a bet on wherever they were, even on the shop floor at work. The runner would take the bet, get it to a bookmaker who had a telephone or telegraphic connection to the course and the bet was placed. The whole system ran on trust and was largely ignored by the police apart from the occasional arrest or raid to keep things in check. As a schoolboy 60 years ago I used to run bets on my bike to a council house in Green End about three miles from where I lived, there was a small trapdoor in the back door, all I did was knock and it would open, a hand would come out, and I handed the slips over. The system was alive and well in Earby in 1924, here’s what Fred said….

“He got a tip or sommat off one of his cousins. He were a game keeper were his cousin and I don't think he knew owt about horses but he must have told me father about this horse. There must have been some gentry up or sommat you know shooting, and they must have been throwing this tip about. They called it Charlie’s Mount, I allus remember and it won the Cesarewitch and I think it were hundred to one outsider and it were coupled with another horse and they both came up. It were very hush hush at home like but we knew me father had won some money 'cause he bought me a pair of new boots, Beaver boots. Them were good boots 'cause he allus had a pair of Beavers for when he were going out into the fields and I’d started going wi’ him a lot you know, so he bought me a pair an all out of his winnings. He’d about hundred pound to come or sommat like that wi’ this double. It were a fortune you know were that, and anyway he’d telled one or two of his mates and they'd all had a good do on it you know. There were about happen three tacklers then and they’d had a do on it and they more or less cleared this bookie out, he were only like a threepence and a tanner bookie.” I asked Fred who the bookie was and he said there was a bloke called Tom Waddington and it might have been him.

This was serious money in those days, the price of a house. The strange thing about this was that in the 1950s I had a bet on a horse running in the Cesarewitch one night when I was with drink taken in the Craven Heifer at Kelbrook. I didn’t often back a horse but Tommy Fitton persuaded me to have a bet and after rolling the winnings over to another horse I came out two days later with over £300 and have never backed a horse since. Remember that in the same decade my wage as a full-time driver was under £10 a week. My dad told me that he used to combine street bookmaking with his job when he was engineering in Manchester in the 1920s and did well out of it until he got a lot of bets on a horse that he was certain was a loser. Instead of laying them off with the next bookie up the chain he decided to gamble and stand the bets himself. The horse won at long odds, cleared father out and that was the end of his career as a bookmaker!

I have another story for you about betting on horses. Some years after my win I was working with a man who was a part-time river bailiff on the Lune in Cumbria. He used to act as gillie for a bookmaker from the Midlands who was a keen fisherman. The bookie gave him occasional tips which he passed on to his mates including me. They were amazingly accurate and I came to the conclusion that these horses were fixed because out of thirteen horses he gave me, only one didn’t win and that was given with the proviso that if the going was soft it had to be backed each way. Remember, there was no doubt about the accuracy because I was always given the tip before the race. The lad who gave me the tips reckoned to be a gambling man but when the flow of tips dried up with the death of the bookie I asked him how come he was still working? After 12 sure-fire winners he ought to be retired. I never got an answer…

There was a sequel. At Christmas we used to work flat out on the milk tankers delivering bulk milk to Halifax Dairies for separation into cream for the festive market. I got a message from H**** asking me to call in at the Denholme pub and pick up a present for him from the landlord. When I called in on the way back from Halifax the present was a case of very good whisky. My mate had been passing the tips on to the landlord who evidently was a gambler because he had made enough money to retire. Foolish though it may sound, I am proud to say I never succumbed to the temptation to have a bet no matter how attractive the prospect.

[Stanley]

CHAPTER 9: WINDING

I think you know me well enough by now to know what I’m going to say next. Before we talk about winding we’d better make sure we know about shuttles, weft packages and some very basic principles of spinning.
The shuttle is the aerodynamically designed and maintained vehicle which travels back and forth in the loom carrying the weft, or cross threads, through the shed formed by the healds as they manipulate the warp to give the requisite cloth construction. It has a hinged spike inside it which is used to spike the centre of the weft package and hold it in place. The weft travels out of the shuttle through and eye in one end. This eye used to be a single hole, lined with metal or ceramic to make it smooth and hard-wearing. The weft was threaded through the hole by placing it near the inside end and breathing in sharply through the hole. This dragged the weft through the hole but also pulled dust and cotton fibres into the weaver’s lungs. This was ‘kissing the shuttle’ and was a contributory cause to many deaths from Bysinnosis, a lung disease caused by cotton fibres lodging in the breathing passages. Johnson and Johnson in Earby were one of the first firms to make the change to self-threading shuttles. As early as 1912 a Home Office Report concluded that the suction shuttle had no definite links to ill-health, although it did assert that the practice was insanitary and alternative methods were encouraged. The self-threading shuttle became mandatory in the UK in 1952 but many older firms were very slow to make the change because of the expense, I have a kissing shuttle that was made as late as 1973. Fred Inman, a tackler at Johnsons for many years, made an interesting comment about the old kissing shuttles; “But it used to be [with kissing shuttles]when you were having a lot of weft troubles, which you used to do, and you were getting these shuttles off weavers. Some of these fancy women wi’ all lipstick. All their shuttles were covered with lipstick. And I think that were one reason why a lot of tacklers, they didn't really chew twist but they allus had a little bit in their mouths as what as you might say, for a disinfectant. And some on 'em[the shuttles] they were caked up wi’ lipstick and you got some sandpaper and you given ‘em a good cleaning up 'cause you’d to kiss the shuttle to thread it. You'd to take it back to the looms you know and you might have to kiss 'em two or three times to get ‘em going ‘cause the weft were breaking. They said that there were more false teeth in Lancashire weren’t there and more empty mouths than any other county in England.” I’ve heard kissing shuttles blamed for respiratory disease but I had never heard them as a cause of bad teeth before Fred mentioned it. By 1970 all the shuttles at Bancroft were self-threading.

The weft package is a bit complicated. In the early days of the modern industry, from 1830 until after 1900 all weft was made on spinning mules. The way mules work is that all the individual yarn packages that are being spun are started at the same time, receive the same amount of weft on each and are all doffed together. Once the finished packages had been lifted off the spindles a lad went down the mule with a small pot of paste and a brush and put a dab of paste on the bottom of each polished spindle. When the spinning process started again the first few turns around the bottom of the package were soaked in paste and had long enough to dry before doffing. The natural tenacity of the yarn held the main body of the package together and the base was reinforced with the dried paste. These were known as ‘paste bottom cops’ and were standard for many years. There was a bit of waste with these packages caused by the paste sticking the cotton together at the end of the cop and an innovation was brought in to eliminate this. Instead of paste, a small thin paper tube was dropped over each spindle and formed the foundation at the base of the package without using glue. ‘Paper bottom cops’ quickly took over as they were less wasteful. There was a disadvantage to this system. Unless the weaver was very careful when skewering the cop on the shuttle peg the point could wander off-centre and when the weft delivery reached this point the thread broke and couldn’t be restarted so the rest of the ‘skewered cop’ was waste. Jim Pollard told me that you could always tell a weaver who had been taught correctly how to weave these packages because when they were inserting the shuttle peg into the cop to skewer it they held the cop still and rotated the shuttle and not the other way round.

When the More Looms System was brought in during the 1930s one of the compensations given to the weavers to allow them to operate 8 looms instead of four was to bring in larger shuttles and weft packages which would run longer without attention and thus increase productivity. It was soon realised that the best way to achieve this larger package was to use full length cardboard pirns as the basis of this larger package. These were impossible to skewer incorrectly. A further modification was necessary because the greater weight of the pirn and yarn tended to cause the package to slip forward on the shuttle peg when the shuttle stopped at one side of the loom. A small metal ferrule that fitted into a clip inside the shuttle was fitted to the bottom of the cardboard centre and these became known as ‘Welsh-hat pirns’.

All these different packages of weft could be delivered to the mill ready for going onto the loom and so in 1920 Bancroft didn’t have a winding department. The practice of winding weft packages at the mill from larger bulk packages of yarn from the spinning mill began when ring-frames and other more modern forms of spinning ousted the mules for most yarns. These home-made packages were known as ‘rewound weft’. There was another reason for starting to use them in the 1930s. The whole idea of the More Looms System was to get more production out of the weavers. One of the ways to do this was to make the weft package more reliable and cut down on weaving faults. We need to note a basic principle of spinning here. From the raw cotton right through to the finished yarn, once the process has got the individual fibres parallel with each other each subsequent process reverses the direction of travel of the sliver or yarn through the process. This is because it was found by experience that this produced the most evenly spun and reliable yarn. This applied to yarn that was rewound at the mill and the extra processes ensured as far as possible that any faults liable to cause a breakage would surface during the rewinding rather than on the loom. So, from the 1930s onwards a growing amount of weft was wound at Bancroft. In later years from 1973 until the mill closed we refined this even further. We took in yarn from the spinners on large ring cops and wound them onto an even larger package called a cone. These cones were then mounted on the pirn-winding machines and the final weft package produced. This got rid of as many yarn defects as was humanly possible. This was the process that Frank Bleasdale was master of in 1972, running two cone winders and four banks of pirn-winders with two ladies looking after the machines.

[Stanley]

A word about hierarchy in the mill. My mother used to be a beamer in Queen’s Mill at Dukinfield and she once told me that the beamers (producing taper’s beams on large beaming machines) considered themselves a cut above the other lasses working on spinning. The same applied at Bancroft, the winders looked down on the weavers, their job was cleaner, quieter and less tiring.
We’ve just about covered warp preparation and weft package manufacture. Once the warps were loom-ready Jim let the tacklers know and they came up and took them down into the shed on little two wheeled trucks they called ‘bogeys’. The order the looms were filled was strictly governed by the ‘down-list’ on the wall of the warehouse where everyone could see it. As looms became empty they were marked on the list and the new warps went out into the shed strictly to this precedence, first down, first served.

There are a couple of minor details on the second storey to take note of. You will remember me saying that the taper’s beams were lifted in through the large door in the side of the warehouse over the cart race in the yard. The lifting was done by a teagle hoist manufactured by Baldwin and Heap of Burnley. The carriage for the hoist ran out over the yard on a cat-head built into the mill above the doorway and back into the mill on an extension of the runway inside the mill. If you had an eagle eye you would spot that there was a large removable section in the floor under the runway. This was big enough to accept one of the big copper drying drums from the tape machine if one ever needed to be taken out and sent away for repair. It could be lowered directly down into the warehouse and put on a wagon. The door in the side of the mill wasn’t big enough for them to pass through.
I have a story for you about the hoist… As engineer I was responsible for the inspection and maintenance of all lifting gear in the mill. Some of these tasks were discretionary and down to my good sense, others were statutory and had to be done at set intervals. All the old wrought iron lifting chains had to be annealed once a year and the hoist rope had to be renewed at set intervals. I had just had Foulds from Keighley in to renew the rope on the teagle hoist and knew that I would be having a visit from the inspector very shortly. After the job was finished I went and inspected it and found they had made a mistake when fitting the clips that anchored the rope at the end of the cat head. These clips have to be mounted a certain way and they had got them the wrong way round and they had to be reversed before the inspector came because he would fail them. I got on to Briggs and Duxbury’s the local builders and they sent up a wagon with a forty foot ladder and four men to help to rear it onto the cat head. We got the ladder up and I started to climb it. Now I’m not bad on ladders, in my time I have gone up many chimneys and a 200 or 300 feet climb was no problem. This was only about 35 feet but as soon as I started I realised I was in trouble. The first thing was the fact that the ladder swayed a lot and made me feel very insecure, chimney ladders aren’t like that, they are rock solid. The second difference was that when you are climbing a chimney you always have solid brickwork two feet in front of you, in this case all I had was Pen Y Gent 35 miles away! I have to report that I was not a happy bunny and was very pleased when I had got the clips reversed and was back down on terra firma. As the man said, the more firmer, the less terror!

While we are outside in the yard it may be a good time to look at a minor part of the structure, the large garage at the end of the yard. By the time Bancroft opened the era of road transport had arrived and I think that Nutter Brothers must have had at least one road vehicle from the earliest days, if they hadn’t, why build a garage? Jack Platt says that in the 1940s Nutters had two wagons, a flat driven by Bill Wilson and a smaller one that could be used as a flat or a tipper. This was driven by Abe Ware. Jack thought they might have been Albions. He remembered Jim Nutter driving their last wagon, an Albion Claymore. Jim was regarded as a bit of a laugh by Wild’s drivers because he very seldom loaded more than two high with weft boxes while Wild's were four high. Jack said Jim was alright at his own speed but really he wasn't fit to be on the road. Shortly after the war the wagons were disposed of because it was cheaper to rely on haulage contractors. All the coal was delivered by Dennison’s of Bradford who were hauled coal for our suppliers, British Fuel. I don’t think the mill was ever served by horse-drawn transport. If it was, I have found no evidence.



Frank Bleasdale was the winding master but he was also a good barber. He’d pop down to the engine house in a spare moment and give me a crop. Notice that we aren’t wasting time, the engine is running! (picture by Daniel Meadows)

[Stanley]

TEA BREAK: CABLE WIRELESS AND THE CHRISTMAS GOOSE
I was talking to Fred about the advent of piped wireless in Barlick. I realised I knew nothing about this so I rang Walt Fisher at Earby who is always a mine of information on anything to do with electricity. He told me that piped wireless was started in Barlick by Stanworth and Shorrocks who started the Stanrock Radio Relay company from their shop at number one Rainhall Road. We think this was in the 1930s because the telephone number is given as 80. The cost of the service was one shilling a week and the main receiver and hub of all the cables was in the yard on the right up York Street as you turn off Rainhall Road. Later on Stanworth and Shorrocks had their shop in Albert Road opposite the Majestic on the corner, it’s a travel agent now, they used to have a wooden hut on the site where the Post Office is now and this was their workshop. Walt even knew the name of the man who put most of the cables up which were strung around the town, it was Teddy Cook who was the projectionist at the Majestic Cinema at the time. The air raid siren during WW2 was at the gas works on Skipton Road and the warning was relayed from there through the piped wireless system to make sure that everyone heard it. The network was eventually bought by Rediffusion Ltd and only yesterday I noticed a small inspection manhole with their name on the cover in the paving outside the disabled toilets at the end of Fernbank Avenue in the modern paving. They must have refurbished it when they re-laid the paving thinking that it was still in use.

Back to Fred and pastimes… I asked him where he played and it was in the fields and the street, tig, tin in the ring, whip and top, hide and seek. If they had a ball they would go and play in the yard of the Old Grammar School on School Lane in Earby which was a ‘gentlemen’s club’ at that time. Fred said they used to get chased out of there because he had an idea that gambling was going on and they didn’t want anyone to see this as it was illegal. Fred’s best friend in those days was a lad called Haydn Hargreaves, they grew up together and remained friends until Haydn died. They used to do a lot of cycling and Fred told me about a typical trip during the holidays “In fact we went one time did Haydn and me, it were July holidays, we’d be about sixteen. He were sixteen on the twelfth of July and my birthday were December you know, there weren’t much in us. We went to Morecambe and stopped all night, 3/6d. (17p) for tea, bed and breakfast and then we went to Conder Green, over Cockerham Marsh and Pilling Sands to Blackpool. We stopped all night at Blackpool and then came home the day after, well we'd had a marvellous holiday.” Fred said his bike cost £12 in 1924 and when you think about this and convert it into modern money you can reckon 4 weeks wages, this equates today to at least £1000.

Fred’s brother Melbourne was a very keen cyclist, he was in the Cyclist’s Touring Club and the Clarion. This was in the days when ‘Pop’ Hill in Barlick was the main man in the Clarion movement, he was a shoe repairer and clogger at the bottom of Manchester Road and founded the Clarion branch in Barlick. He was killed in an accident at Ribchester and there is a bench dedicated to him at the side of the road just past Yarlside Farm at Bracewell. The Clarion Club was formed originally to distribute Robert Blatchford’s Socialist newspaper, ‘The Clarion’, because the large distributors like W H Smith refused to handle it. They ran tea rooms for ramblers and cyclists and there is still one left at Dimpenley near Newchurch in Pendle. Fred can remember Melbourne’s club handbook, it had the Red Flag on the cover and had the words of the Internationale inside. “A reight Socialist movement”.

One of the nice things about talking to people like Fred is that they can remember small events. The reason I always include these is because they often record acts of kindness and shed light on how society worked almost a hundred years ago. We got talking about the Bancroft family who farmed at Booth Bridge, Thornton in Craven and here’s what Fred said: “He also had two brothers and I think there’d be two sisters at Brown House which were a very big farm and we used to go down there. They always had some geese at Christmas down at Brown House and somebody mentioned it to me, asked me whether I knew where they could get a goose so we walked down to Brown House, went to know if they had any to spare and they had two. So me father says well, so and so wants one. Then he came back and he says you're all reight, they have a goose for you down at Brown House. Then someone else says, I wish I’d known, I could have done with one. Well he says, there’s another one, he has two. There were no telephones nor owt of that you know so we walked down again, I think we walked down in moonlight or sommat like that at night. [One thing we often forget nowadays is that the favourite time for travel at night was when the moon was near full because there were no street lights outside the town] I weren’t reight big. Then at Christmas time me father went down and I can remember, we didn't go, but he carried 'em up in one of them big butter baskets what they used to have. Aye, fetched them home, delivered 'em and then we’d happen broken up for Christmas. We’ll say Christmas were at Saturday, we had Friday off school and we’d to take this basket back had me brother and me. When we got there, I’ll allus remember it, she were baking were Miss Bancroft, “Now then, could you eat a mince pie and a glass of milk?” She filled us a glass of milk up and a mince pie apiece straight out of the oven. We must have relished these mince pies and “Don't you want your milk.” “Oh, yes.” So we just had a sip. “Could you eat another mince pie?” “Yes please.” And we finished up with three mince pies apiece. Well we were as happy as could be! We could hardly get back home to tell me mother like we’d had three mince pies straight out of the oven and they weren’t little uns you know! They were real nudgers, three inches across, it allus stuck in me mind did that. And I can remember when we were going past one time, quite a while after, she said “Oh, them lads did enjoy them mince pies when they fetched the basket back”. Me father says “They could hardly get back home fast enough to tell their mother what a good do they’d had!” But today, ask a kid to walk to Booth Bridge wi’ an empty basket, not on spec of getting owt.”

[Stanley]

CHAPTER 10: THE BOILER HOUSE AND CHIMNEY

No part of Bancroft Shed was more important than another but I have to admit that to me there is a certain amount of magic in the boiler house. This was the place where we unlocked the 100 million years old sunshine from coal and released it back into the light. I’ve always said that when the alchemists delved into the secrets of Earth, air, fire and water in their search for the Philosopher’s Stone and the ability to convert base metals to gold they little realised how close they were getting to doing it. In the boiler house we cracked the problem, we took coal, used air to burn it in the furnaces, boiled water into steam and then converted that steam into rotative motion using the steam engine to drive the shed and make money. We were turning base elements to gold and they called it the cotton industry.

Visitors to the mill always made a bee-line for the polished act that was the steam engine, a big show-off sitting there in the middle of its comfortable sanctum waving its arms about and sending power winging up into the shaft via the whirring ropes when in actual fact the real work of powering the mill was being done down on the stoking floor in front of the boiler. The boiler didn’t do anything to attract attention, there were no moving parts except for the slow groaning process of the moving fire bars in the furnaces slowly conveying the coal down the furnace as it changed from bright shiny coal to rough clinker and ashes. There was a gentle hiss from the under-fire steam jets that helped keep the clinker free-moving and aided combustion. Over all there was a dull roar as air rushed into the furnaces to make combustion possible. Not very attractive, certainly not waving its arms about but doing the most important job in the mill.
The same could be said for my last fire-beater, John Plummer. He died this year and I was sorry to hear we had lost him. He started his career as a stoker (on the boats they called them stokers, in Barlick we called them fire-beaters) on drifters steaming out to the Barents Sea and Bear Island in the most dangerous waters in the world. He once told me that they hadn’t enough room in the small bunker for sufficient coal to get them to the grounds and back so they always started a voyage with extra coal in the fish hold. This had to be carried back to the boiler across the open deck in the worst weather in two three gallon buckets. A hard and dangerous way to earn a living. Later in his career he was on the Fyffe’s banana boats and said that it wasn’t bad going out but on the way back they had to fire for the refrigeration plant as well and that was hard. He also told me that occasionally the market price changed as they were steaming towards the Pool of London and the boat would stop while they opened the holds and threw all the bananas overboard before turning round and going back for another cargo. It was less of a loss to do this than carry on. John knew his job inside out and kept a clean boiler. I was never short of steam with him in charge.

We need a description. When you walked into the yard at Bancroft the first thing that would strike you was the large arched window in the end of the engine house. Behind it you could see a hint of polished steel, a glint as the tail rods moved in and out and rising above the bulk of the engine, the polished balls of the Lumb governor whirring round and controlling the engine. This was what dragged visitors straight into the engine. If you had taken notice while you were in the yard you’d have seen a large pile of coal next to a low building and further to the left a large green sliding door. Behind this was the coal bunker and the Lancashire boiler. The pile of coal was our reserve stock and varied from 150 tons to up to 300. The mill used 10 tons of coal a week in summer and 35 tons in winter when heating forced consumption up. Many people were surprised by these figures, they thought the engine was the biggest user. Not so, most of the coal we burned was for heating the shed, running the tape-sizing machines and heat losses in the plant, more of this later.

Inside the green door the floor level drops four feet to the level of the bunker floor and the stoking floor. The Lancashire boiler front is on the right and at the end of the stoking floor is the firebeater’s easy chair and a shelf for his personal belongings. There is a lamp over the boiler front shining on the highly-polished brass pressure gauge and the sight glasses which allow the firebeater to see how much water there is in his boiler. The only movement you can see is the slow rotation of the camshafts on the furnace front which drive the walking firebars. The walls are whitewashed but soon get a covering of coal dust, nobody could ever describe the place as a clean environment. We did our best but it was always a constant struggle against dust from the coal and the ashes. Just inside the door, above the three steps down into the house is a small derrick with a block and tackle. This is used for lifting the wheelbarrow out when it is full of ash and clinker (fused ash). Once up to ground level the ashes are tipped across the yard against the wall. Funnily enough this heap never seemed to grow, there was always someone wanting some ashes for an allotment path or for a base on which to lay flags and they knew they could just take what they wanted. One thing to note about the boiler house is that the stoking floor was the coldest place in the mill, winter and summer because of the constant draught of air coming in through the door and rushing under the firebars.

JohnPlummer779802.jpg

(Click to enlarge) My friend John Plummer. the best workmate you could ever have and I told him so before he died. I still miss him.

[Stanley]

Over the years there have been many types of boiler, the most widely used and successful has been the shell boiler. As it's name implies it is a shell or tank of steel containing water heated by a furnace. Various designs were tried but William Fairbairn’s ‘Lancashire’ boiler patented in 1844 was the definitive design and was never excelled for durability, simplicity and overall economy. This is what we have, a nine feet diameter Lancashire Boiler fired by coal via mechanical stokers, the standard mill boiler for the last one hundred years.

Imagine a steel cylinder thirty feet long by nine feet in diameter with end plates pierced by two tubes three feet in diameter running through it's entire length. The fires are on grates at the front of these internal tubes and a system of flues leads the flame and hot gas through the tubes, back under the boiler through the sole flue or flame bed and then back round the outside of the shell and out to the chimney. The flues are built of brickwork and the boiler is supported by this structure and completely enclosed except for the front and a small part of the top where the safety valves are mounted and steam pipes come out to serve the engine and mill. This arrangement of flues means that the whole of the boiler below water level is bathed in hot flue gas.
In the flues between the boiler and the chimney is the Green’s economiser, a nest of cast iron tubes bathed in the hot flue gas through which water is pumped on its way to the boiler thus raising it's temperature. If you fill a domestic kettle with hot water it boils quicker using less fuel. Exactly the same principle applies here. Feed water has to be pumped in to the boiler to make up for steam use and the hotter this feedwater is the less coal we burn. Every ten degrees Fahrenheit you raise the feedwater temperature increases overall boiler efficiency by one per cent. The steam is led away through a six inch bore steel pipe, well insulated to conserve heat, and goes into the engine house to the high pressure cylinder on the engine.

No boiler can function without draught to force air through the fire bed and on a set-up like ours this is provided by a brick chimney 130 feet high, all the flues are connected to its base. Be aware that not all boilers get their draught like this, modern installations can have pressurised boiler rooms, individual forced draught on each furnace from powerful electric fans or a fan behind the boiler physically dragging the air through the flues and exhausting up a short stack. Our draught was natural and initiated by the chimney. We need to know a bit about chimneys and how they work, what I’m going to say applies to your open coal fire at home as well.

The layperson usually assumes that the chimney sucks the air into the bottom of the flue. Sorry, this is wrong, the chimney is full of hot gas and this is lighter than the atmosphere so there is a differential in pressure between the flue system and atmospheric pressure. It is this difference in pressure that allows atmospheric pressure to force air in through the furnaces to try to equalise the pressure inside and out. The difference at Bancroft was about half an inch water gauge. Very roughly this translates to slightly less than half a pound to the square inch pressure. Not much is it but plenty to drive air in through the fire bed.

This difference in pressure is a product of two factors, the temperature of the gases in the chimney and the height of the stack. The first explains why a cold flue draws so badly and the second why you always get a better draught in a two storey house than a bungalow. That’s why the chimney stacks on bungalows are often twice as high as on a normal house. The old engineers and mill designers had learned from experience what height they needed in a given situation and how wide the flue had to be for a given number of boilers. A single boiler like Bancroft had a typical 130ft stack. Larger installations went up to 250 feet and some special use stacks like those on chemical works could rise to 500 feet. One thing I learned much later in my career was that all stacks were undersized, I don’t want to get too technical here but if Bancroft had been provided with a 200 feet stack it would have saved them about 10% on the fuel bill during the life of the mill. I realised this when I was running a similar boiler to the one at Bancroft at Ellenroad on a stack 230 feet high and was amazed at the savings.

Mill chimneys are wonderful constructions and look so slender and fragile but if you look at archive film of bombed out cities during WW2, especially Hiroshima and Nagasaki you will see that the main structures that survived unscathed were the factory chimneys. They need regular maintenance by skilled men called steeple jacks, annual inspection by binocular, three to five year inspection by laddering, this latter operation often included giving the whole structure a coat of double-boiled linseed oil for weather protection. Occasionally more expensive repairs are needed. This was always money well-spent but unfortunately many mill owners, including Bancroft, only saw it as an expense, not an investment. Our chimney was neglected but not to the extent it was dangerous.

[Stanley]

The boiler is run at a maximum pressure of 160 pounds to the square inch (psi). If the pressure should rise above this point there would be a danger of straining or even bursting the boiler. This is safeguarded against by the deadweight safety valve mounted on top of the boiler at the front. This is a valve held shut by a large weight. Any pressure over 160psi is great enough to lift the weight and allow steam to blow off to the atmosphere through a three inch pipe poking out of the roof until the pressure falls below 160psi when the valve shuts again. Another safety device is the compound valve. This acts as both a high steam and low water safety device. If the dead weight valve can’t cope with the steam output the compound valve will open to ensure perfect safety. It also opens to give warning of low water level in the boiler a most dangerous condition.

One more point about safety. It surprises many people to know that the government plays no part in the day to day running and inspection of boilers. This is the responsibility of the insurance company who carry the risk on the plant. Their inspectors ensure by regular checks that the boiler is safe. The insurance company stands to lose money if there is trouble so they make sure that all is well with the running and maintenance. The system works well and keeps down premiums and accidents.

The boiler house and the engine house are part of a team and their function needs to be described together. Let’s have a quick look inside the engine house and then describe how engine and boiler worked together to power the mill.



The Hopkinson dead-weight safety valve.

TEA BREAK: FERRETS AND THE WOMAN’S LOT
Talking about the mince pies at Booth Bridge reminded Fred of the friendship between his father and mother and the farm man and his wife at Fence End Farm. Fred said that George Proctor owned all the land round there and that the tenant at the big house [now called Queen’s Mead I think but then it was Fence End House] was Captain Smith. This figures because Captain Smith and his brother in law Mr Jacques the architect were major shareholders in the Earby Gas Light and Coke Company and the Mill Company which ran the old Bracewell interests at Victoria Mill. George Proctor was associated with both these enterprises because his firm Proctor and Proctor, accountants of Grimshaw Street Burnley, were secretaries and managing agents for both these and many other local companies.

Parkinson used to send Fred down to Fence End some Saturdays to borrow the farm man’s ferret if he was going rabbiting in the afternoon. Fred said he’d set off at eight in the morning and often went back with his father in the afternoon to go rabbiting at Elslack. He said that sometimes if someone else was going with him his dad would say it was too far for Fred to walk twice in one day so he would give Fred the money for the Saturday afternoon matinee at the cinema.

We talked about how his dad worked the ferret and it turned out that Parkinson had similar views to me, he let the ferret go down loose but muzzled with a piece of string and only used a line on another ferret if he wanted to entice the original one out if it had a rabbit bolted up. This happens occasionally if your ferret gets a rabbit holed up in a dead end in the warren, the rabbit is reasonably safe because the ferret can’t get at any vital parts and it would stick there with the ferret getting very angry and scratching at its back end to try to shift it. This can be annoying if you are on top waiting for the ferret to either bolt a rabbit or come out itself. All you can do is either have patience or send another ferret down on a line to coax the first one out. A frustrated ferret is one of the funniest sights in the world, they will come out of the hole and run round in circles, often on their back legs, chattering away to themselves. The trick is to block the hole and wait for them to try to get back down, then you have to grab them and do your best to quieten them down. On Sunday afternoon, after dinner, Fred and his dad would walk back to Fence End together to return the ferret.

Fred’s father was an outdoors man and when he wasn’t out hunting he would very seldom spend all evening at home. Fred said he wasn’t a boozer but liked his gill of beer [half a pint in local parlance but only a quarter of a pint in Imperial Measure] and a game of billiards at the Band Club. If it was a moonlight night (for walking in the dark) the farm man from Fence End and his wife would walk down to Earby and visit. The men would go to the Band Club for a beer and the women would sit in the house and keep each other entertained. Fred said that he was aware even then that there was a difference between the status of men and women, he reckoned the women were regarded as second class citizens and were reared with that attitude. The nearest his mother ever got to leisure was sitting in the house with a neighbour or going to church with a friend. One thing was certain, any woman who went to a pub on her own would be very suspect unless she was an old widow, a married woman would never dream of doing this.

This isn’t to say that Parkinson and Elizabeth never went out together. They enjoyed going to the first house at the Empire Cinema, this loosed at eight and if he wanted Parkinson would still have time for a beer. Fred said there was a stage at the Empire and the Earby Amateur Operatic Society used to put on occasional shows which were very well attended. At these times regardless of the weather or the phase of the moon, the farm man from Fence End and his wife would walk down, perhaps with a cart lamp for light, and often had to change into dry shoes and socks before going to the show.

I asked Fred when he saw his first motor car and he said it was after the Great War. A man called Caswell at Lina Laithe [Punch Bowl Farm] had a Ford Model T. I asked Fred how he went on for petrol and he said that there was a shop on Water Street called Frank Wilkinson & Son who sold bicycles and Pratt’s petrol in tins.

The Inman family had relations at Brierfield and occasionally Elizabeth would set off with the lads, they walked to Earby Station, caught a train to Colne and from there got the tram to the Boundary, from there they walked into Nelson centre and met the aunt. I was a bit surprised by this and asked Fred if the trams didn’t run all the way, he said they did but by walking the last bit his mother saved about fourpence and this was the price of a loaf! After meeting and a bit of window-shopping they all walked up to Brierfield and had tea. Coming back they got the tram all the way to Colne and then onto the train for Earby.

Times have certainly changed haven’t they, we hear all this talk nowadays about people not taking enough exercise and driving everywhere, this certainly wasn’t the case with Fred’s generation, perhaps that’s why he is still alive and well at 98! I can remember that my mother used to think nothing of setting off with two children walking and another in the pram and hiking seven miles to Dukinfield to see her sister and then walking seven miles back. Perhaps it will take a massive rise in the cost of owning a car and running it to make the difference needed to get this generation fit again. Mind you, some things change more slowly… I admit to being out of touch with modern married life but I often wonder if there is still some of the second-class citizen attitude lingering on in attitudes to women, we hear much about equality but I suspect that even today there are women who will only attain perfect freedom when they become widows. I hope I’m wrong but somehow I doubt it.

[Stanley]

CHAPTER 11: THE ENGINE

First, a very brief history of the steam engine. The first practical steam device used in this country in the early 18th century was Captain Savery's steam pump, ‘The Miner’s Friend’. This was a simple device with no moving parts apart from internal flap valves which raised to the pump by condensing steam to form a vacuum and then forced it upwards by pressure of steam in the same vessel. This was simple and very inefficient but it filled a pressing need, the raising of water to a higher level to de-water deep mines. The only way to convert this energy to rotary motion was to pump water up to a pond and allow it to run back over a water wheel.

The first improvement on this was Newcomen’s Atmospheric engine. A piston was pulled down by a vacuum created by condensing steam in a cylinder and it was returned to the top by the weight of the pump rods hanging from the opposite end of a large beam joining the two and pivoted in the middle. It was more efficient and was very successfully used in the tin mines of Cornwall where the profits were high and the coalfields of Wales and the Midlands where fuel was cheap. It was simply a pump, some attempts were made to convert atmospheric engines to rotary working so they could drive a shaft but they were very inefficient and soon overtaken by improved engines.

James Watt improved the atmospheric engine by condensing the steam outside the cylinder thus greatly raising it's efficiency because the cylinder was not cooled down at every stroke. At this time the engines were still used as pumps. Rotary motion could only be gained by pumping water to a higher level to run a waterwheel.

Improvements followed in boilers and engines. Pressure, power and efficiency gradually rose and the rotative beam engine was built where a shortened version of the pump rod was used to turn a flywheel by means of a crank. By the end of the nineteenth century the engine had been laid on its side, the beam dispensed with and we had the horizontal engine. Detail changes were made, different arrangements of cylinders, valve motions and drives but to all intents and purposes the engine we describe here was the ultimate product of two hundred years development and experience in the art and mystery of steam engine design and building. The design was often further ‘improved’ but it’s interesting to note that the vast majority of the engines that survived until the end of the industry were horizontal, cross compound, double acting, Corliss valve, condensing steam engines.

HORIZONTAL because it lies on the floor giving good access to all parts. CROSS COMPOUND because there were two cylinders and two beds, one driving each end of the crankshaft. The larger cylinder or low pressure runs off the steam exhausted from the smaller or high pressure giving greater efficiency. DOUBLE ACTING because steam is admitted at each end of the cylinder and forces the piston each way in turn. CORLISS VALVE refers to the method of closing the valves by means of a system of springs and dashpots named after the inventor, an American, George H. Corliss. CONDENSING because the exhaust from the low pressure cylinder is condensed in a receiver separate from the cylinder. This increases the overall pressure of steam by creating a vacuum in the exhaust pipe making for improved efficiency. Let’s look at our engine at Bancroft, Mary Jane and James.

Ropedrive773709.jpg

(click to enlarge the image)

Imagine yourself sat on a girder in the top of the engine house looking down on the engine. The first thing you will see is the flywheel, twenty tons of cast iron sixteen feet in diameter and grooved for the thirteen ropes which connect the flywheel to the smaller or second motion pulley driving the lineshaft beneath us. On the left hand wall a large pipe enters from the boiler and delivers steam at 160psi to the small or high pressure cylinder. On the right of the house is the larger or low pressure cylinder with a pipe at the right of the cylinder which goes under the floor to the exhaust valves on the high pressure side. Out of the front of each cylinder comes a piston rod which joins on to the crosshead, a large block of steel which slides in a recess on the engine bed which keeps it moving in a straight line. Hinged on to this crosshead is the connecting rod leading to the crank on the end of the crankshaft. In effect this is an arm turning a handle, the cylinder is the muscle, the crosshead the elbow, the connecting rod the forearm and the crank the handle on the crankshaft. As the rod moves back and forth it turns the wheel and powers the mill. Both sides of the engine are identical apart from the size of the cylinders.
In between the flywheel and the cast iron engine beds are the eccentric rods which control the valves on each cylinder. On the left side of the flywheel on the high pressure bed stands a large gentleman with two balls on his head. This is the Lumb governor and he controls the speed of the engine and regulates the steam flow at the required level for the load on the engine. He is driven by the three ropes running on the left side of the wheel from the flyshaft to his base. As Walt Fisher once said “As the speed rises the governor’s balls fly outwards”, this outwards movement controls the steam access to the engine and therefore its speed.

The engine lives in a large house with tall well lit windows, thirty feet from floor to eaves, thirty feet wide and sixty feet long. The cylinders and engine beds are bolted down on to large solid brick and masonry piers which go down through the cellar to firm foundations in the ground below. This cellar is twelve feet deep.

The flywheel of the engine is grooved for thirteen cotton ropes which are preserved by a dressing of tallow and graphite, this is why they look black and shiny. These pass up to the back wall of the engine house and drive a smaller or second motion pulley mounted on the lineshaft which runs for 250 feet to the back of the weaving shed. The second motion pulley is eight feet in diameter, the same width as the flywheel and grooved for thirteen ropes as well. When the engine is running at 69 revolutions per minute (rpm), the second motion pulley and the lineshaft it drives is rotating at about 150rpm, this can vary slightly due to the condition of the ropes, the weather or the load. The second motion pulley is carried on two large pedestal bearings and as the lineshaft goes out towards the engine house wall it carries another large pulley which is used to drive the alternator through a countershaft geared to give 750rpm. Everything in the mill and shed is driven off this shaft by gears and ropes or by electricity generated by the alternator. All the power comes from coal.

[Stanley]

In the shed the lineshaft runs along the wall which is heavily built to support the weight and resist the dynamic forces of the lineshaft. At regular intervals on this shaft bevel gears are fixed which transfer a drive at right angles to a matching bevel on a secondary shaft running across the shed parallel with the rows of looms. The bevels aren’t exactly the same, one has an extra tooth called a ‘hunting tooth’ so that the teeth mesh differently on each revolution. This promotes even wear. The cross shafts are supported by bearings or ‘necks’ at ten feet intervals attached to the roof members and pillars. At intervals on these shafts are drums which transmit power to the looms by means of leather belts. Each loom has a belt and can be stopped or started at will by means of fast and loose pulleys.

There is one more essential part of the power plant, this is the large dam or mill lodge outside between the yard and Gillian’s Lane. It was fed by Gillian’s Beck running down from the moor at the back and this is a good supply which never fails even in the driest summer. The dam was about three hundred feet long by eighty feet wide and at the lowest point was about ten feet deep. It held the cooling water for the condenser on the engine and as I have often said, helped God to give us 12psi steam pressure for nothing. It was essential for economic running.

Right, you’ve got a good overview of the plant now. I don’t want to fall into the trap of writing a text book on steam boiler and engine running and maintenance. Perhaps the easiest way to convey how we actually drove the mill is to describe a day in the life of James and Mary Jane.

[Stanley]

TEA BREAK: ENTERTAINMENT
I asked Fred about families that had been badly affected by loose behaviour and drinking and he said: “They were nearly all big families where the fathers were boozers you know. I mean they were very, very poor, hand me downs and what other folk had given 'em and all that. Ernest [Roberts] told about wearing lasses shoes, button shoes, and you’d see them same, happen wi’ one clog and one shoe, one clog too big and another too little and well, in fact some on 'em smelled. They'd never known what a bath were or to be washed properly or owt of that. They hadn't even a handkerchief or not even a piece of rag, all they'd do is wipe their nose on their sleeve. I know some of them lads and lasses and they've turned out really good, what were fetched up very, very rough, ‘cause they saw enough at home and I suppose they thought well if I get wed it it’ll be a different carry on, they've been really good parents.” He reckoned that having such a bad early life had been an education for them and in many ways had been a good thing.

Fred could remember street performers, the barrel organ man with the monkey sat on top of the two wheeled organ and even a dancing bear, he thought that this was before the Great War. He intrigued me with a tale about a street game they had where one lad would be tied up in a sack and he had to dance about pretending to be the bear. “And he used to shout addy-on-conkay, he’d be dancing about in the sack and then when he’d had a do, he got out and t’others went in.” I’ve guessed at the spelling of what they shouted of course but if anyone has ever come across this game I’d love to hear about it as this is the first time I have ever come across it and the ‘addy-on-conkay’ is almost certainly a corruption of a foreign phrase, if I were to take a guess, French.

Another popular street activity was bowling hoops of iron made by the blacksmith. Fred said they called them ‘bowls’ and they had a ‘guider’ for them, a short piece of bar with a hook on the end and if they were rolling downhill they would steer the hoop with the guider. He remembered bowling his hoop from Earby to Fence End and back many a time. He and Melbourne got three halfpence a week pocket money and usually spent it on Charlie’s Rock, like a seaside stick of rock but made at Nelson by the uncle of Stanley Whittaker who used to have the garage at the old blacksmiths on Skipton Road. The man’s name was Hodgson and his rock was a favourite in Earby for many years. Fred could remember some things called ‘turnovers’, he said they were like a horse shoe with a lid on and they cost a penny, when you opened the lid there was a small present or sweets inside. Once again, this was a new one on me, has anyone else ever come across them?

I asked Fred about going to the cinema and he said that the Empire wasn’t built until about 1914 and prior to that there used to be film shows in the Weaver’s Institute at the side of the cricket field on Saturday afternoon. He thought the price was a penny a show. When the Empire opened the admission charge went up to three pence.

It seems funny nowadays but one of the regular entertainments in the town was political meetings and election hustings. Remember that there was no entertainment apart from the cinema and the occasional show so church functions and political meetings were a good way of passing the time. Fred said that up to about 1922 or 1923 the political choice in the Skipton Division was between Conservatives and Liberals but in about 1922 there was a Labour candidate and his father, who had always voted Liberal, immediately became a Labour man. Fred said that this meant that his mother voted Labour as well, there was never any question of her following her own choice, her job was to support her husband’s politics. Fred could remember a candidate called O G Willey who later gained a seat in another constituency. Roy Bird was the successful Tory candidate and Fred said they went to his meetings as well, in all they had free entertainment four or five nights in a week. He said the Labour meetings were good because there was a lot of heckling and argument between the stage and the audience but if you interrupted the Conservative speaker at the Albion Club you were immediately thrown out. Nowhere near as much fun! Simple pleasures, perhaps there is a clue here as to why so few people take an interest in politics today, the fun has gone out of it and we have mass entertainment overload swamping our minds every day.



Forgive me but we can't have too many images of Fred!

[Stanley]

CHAPTER 12: A DAY IN THE LIFE OF JAMES AND MARY JANE

It comes as a surprise to many people to find that the entire power production and maintenance staff of a mill the size of Bancroft consists of two men, the engine tenter and the firebeater. The firebeater’s job is to provide steam for the engine, production processes, heating and hot water services. He is looked upon as a menial and treated as such whereas in fact he is the most important man in the mill. Without him nothing runs and if he does his job badly he can waste enough coal to make the mill uneconomic and close it down. His domain is the boiler house, which, no matter how much he sweeps, polishes and whitewashes is a dirty, often cold and a draughty hole. Yes, that’s right, cold, even though he is burning seven tons of coal a day in winter the boiler house is never warm. The fires devour cold air which rushes in through the open door and up the flues. There is always a draught from the yard outside across the front of a boiler and the doors always have to be left open wide enough to allow this combustion air to enter, even on the coldest day in winter.

The ready-use supply of coal is in the bunker. This is a space immediately in front of the boiler which can hold about 30 tons which is topped up as needed by the coal wagon. The coal stock outside the boiler house is only used when all else fails due to strikes, breakdown of transport or bad weather. There is an auger to lift coal from the bunker to the hoppers on the stokers but this will only function when there is plenty of coal in the bunker. When the level falls the firebeater has to remove the boards which hold the coal back and shovel fuel into the hoppers as needed. Unlike the old days we do not fire the boiler by hand. The coal is fed on to the grates by the Proctor Wide Ram coking stokers which spread it on the coking plates at the front of the grate and walking firebars slowly move it back as it burns until it drops off the back as ash and clinker into a pit which is cleaned out once a day or more often if the coal quality is bad. The air supply to the furnaces is regulated by the dampers which are movable doors in the side flues at the back of the boiler, these are opened or closed as necessary. Constant regulation of the dampers to suit combustion conditions and load is the responsibility of the firebeater. He is aided by a mirror mounted on the engine house porch which he can see from the stoking floor. This allows him to see the top of the chimney and the way he judges the amount of air needed is to gradually close the dampers until he gets a trace of black smoke at the chimney top. Then the dampers are opened a crack and all that can be seen at the chimney head is a faint blue haze which means you have optimum burning with no excess air which only cools the furnaces down. Some mills have complicated instrumentation to help the firebeater to achieve this, at Bancroft we had none, not even a draught gauge.

The firebeater’s hours are long and the work is demanding. In winter when the mill needs a lot of heating he is often in at midnight or even earlier to get the shed warm for the weavers the following day. In summer he is in at 07:00 and finishes at 16:30. Let’s follow him through a typical days work in winter.

At 02:00 on a cold frosty night in January our firebeater comes into work. John Plummer lived on the Ranch near Earby and the only way he could get to work was to walk which took him about 30 minutes, in the latter years he got himself a bike. When he arrived at the mill his first job was to open the mill gates and go into the boiler house. Once inside he switches the lights on and looks at two things, the water gauges and the pressure gauge. Depending on need this is the time to blow down some water out of the boiler. The reason for doing this first is that while the boiler is still any sediment settles to the bottom. The boiler slopes towards the front and at the lowest point there is a specially constructed blow-down valve. If this is cracked open for a short time it will remove any sediment at the front of the boiler. Done regularly this keeps the internal conditions in the boiler at optimum level. The water is tested regularly and boiler treatment chemicals are used to encourage the sediment to form so it can be blown out.

Imagine you are with him when he first opens the boiler house door, your first impression would be the smell of slowly burning coal, warmth and the sound of crickets chirping in the brickwork. Remember the door has been closed all night with minimal draught on the fires. There are always crickets in boiler houses, I don't know what they live on but they survive lay-offs, whitewashing and drought. As you look up at the pressure gauge you will get a surprise, lay persons always expect it to say zero when the boiler is still but it will be at 120/140psi. The boiler is always kept hot and so keeps it's pressure. Our firebeater notes the pressure and more important, the level of water in the gauge glasses. These are two glass tubes connected to the water in the shell and shielded by armoured glass cages. They show what level the water is at in the boiler as this is the single most important thing to watch. There is one sure and certain method of blowing a boiler up and that is to run it short of water. The reason is that if the tubes containing the fires are not covered with water they are not cooled, they become red hot, lose their strength and collapse, usually rupturing as they do so. We don’t want any headlines so we keep an eye on the water level at all times. There is a pointer at the half way mark in the glass tubes labelled ‘Working Level’. This only a guide, in practice the boiler is safe as long as you can see a level anywhere in the tube. When he finished last night John made sure that the water was within an inch of the top of the glass, it will have dropped a bit during the night but not much. If it has dropped more than this he knows there is a fault somewhere, perhaps he left the valve controlling the steam supply to the tapes open the night before. When he stops at night all the steam connections from the boiler are closed with the exception of the main pipe to the engine. This is left connected so a small amount of steam can be bled into the engine during the night keeping it and the main pipe warm so as to avoid water condensing in the system. Having satisfied himself that all is well the firebeater walks across the front of the boiler and pulls down the balance weights on the end of the wire ropes which control the side flue dampers. Then he goes up on top of the boiler and opens the damper between the boiler and the economiser. At once the fires start to roar as the pull of the hot stack gets the draught going. The dull bed of coals on the grate which has been smouldering all night to keep the pressure up burns up first bright red then a brilliant white which will hurt your eyes if you look at it too long. While he is up on the boiler top he opens the by-passes on the drains for the heating services and cracks the valves open to let steam into the pipe runs to warm them and blow the condensate back to the hot well in the cellar. He then descends and presses the button controlling the coal elevator which lifts coal out of the bunker and fills the hoppers on the front of the stokers which hold 3 hundredweights of coal each. As these are filling he opens the doors of the furnaces and draws some white hot coals up to the front with a heavy iron rake. When the coal drops down from the stokers it will fall on to these coals and be ignited. Once this has been done the fire will burn all day without opening the doors, fresh fuel being fed in from the stoker to make up for what is being burnt. The slides on the stoker hoppers are opened, the coal drops and after a few moments wait to get a good fire going on the coking plates the stoker motors are switched on. You might wonder why we don’t leave the hoppers full of coal to save time in the morning. Many people have tried this and been caught out by the coal catching fire and when they come into the house in the morning they have a real mess to sort out. The stoker motors drive the rams through an adjustable gearbox which meters the coal going into the furnace by adjusting the speed at which the stoker ram operates. Coal is fed from the hopper onto the dead plates and the moving firebars which begin their measured tread carrying the fire back down the furnace. If all is adjusted correctly, by the time the firebed reaches the end of the bars and falls into the ashpit it has burned completely and is ash and clinker.

The firebeater now opens a small valve at each side of the boiler and a hiss from each firebox announces that a small quantity of steam has started to blow up through the firebars. This helps the fused ash or clinker to break up and allows air to get in between the bars to effect combustion. The boiler is now firing, the next job is to start the feed pump while the fires settle down.

The check valve on the right hand side of the boiler is opened. This is left closed at night for safety, it allows water to flow into the boiler from the feed pumps but bars any reverse flow, theoretically the non-return element of the valve should stop any feed-back but no mechanism is perfect and so we don’t trust it overnight. We follow the firebeater across the yard to the cellar under the engine house. Here he oils and greases his pumps and starts the both boiler feed pumps on automatic control. This means that these pumps will only run when there is condensate to pump back into the boiler. This condensate is the water from the condensed steam which has drained back out of the heating system. This is pure hot distilled water and is ideal for boiler feeding, we return all we can as it saves fuel and boiler treatment. Once everything is running satisfactorily John goes back to the boiler house, checks his fires and the operation of the stokers and then goes back on top of the boiler to check his heating circuits. His aim is to close the by-passes on the automatic drains as soon as the cold condensate that has been sitting in the pipes all night has cleared the circuit. The slower this happens the better as this cuts down water-hammer in the pipe runs which can be very destructive. The best way to check on this is to feel the drain pipes, they will be ice cold while the condensate is flowing but will soon get too hot to touch when the steam has filled the pipe run. As the drains warm up he closes the by-pass on each run. From now on, the automatic drains will control the condensate flow. The firebeater knows from experience how much water he needs to introduce into the feed to make up for any losses so at this point he will probably go down into the cellar and set the by-pass valve on the auxiliary pump which regulates the rate of extra water passing into the boiler to make up for these losses. His aim is to feed water at a rate sufficient to raise the water level in the boiler slowly so that when the engine starts he has almost a full glass and the correct pressure.



The two feed pumps in the cellar at Bancroft. The Pearn three throw on the left and the big Brown and Pickles pump in front of us that solved all our problems when I installed it.

[Stanley]

He is now set up for a while and as long as he keeps his coal hoppers full, watches the water level and regulates his fires to maintain constant pressure he is free to do anything else he fancies. A walk round the mill unlocking fire doors, a brew and a read of yesterday’s newspaper, it’s still only 03:00 and today’s news is still being printed. The well organised firebeater has his easy chair where he can keep his eye on his boilers. We will leave him now and creep back to our beds until morning secure in the knowledge that all is well..

07:00. It’s still dark and we return just as the engineer arrives to get his engine ready for the days work. We shall come back to this point and follow him later.

Down in the stokehole things are much as we left them at 03:00. The stokers are groaning and squeaking away to themselves, not I should add because of any neglect, the firebars, due to the heat and ash, have to run dry, metal to metal, and so complain every now and again. There is the gentle hiss of steam under the bars and the deeper roar of air rushing into the firebox. If all is well the water level will be well above the brass pointer which shows working level on the water gauges and the pressure will be about 130psi. At about 07:30 the firebeater speeds the stokers up and opens the dampers a little, his aim is to be in a position to give the engineer all the steam he needs at 08:00 with a full fire when the engine starts and the process load comes on. Hoppers are topped up and there is a sense of urgency now. The firebeater watches his boiler carefully, he must have his fire right to the back of the bars and burning bright, water level correct and steam at 150psi dead on 08:00. No mean feat even for an experienced man. At two minutes to eight an almost inaudible rumble starts up, this is the main shaft behind the boiler house wall starting to turn. The observant bystander will note that the boiler pressure drops three or four pounds as the engine starts. Enormous volumes of steam are rushing up the pipe to the engine to give it the power to start the dead weight of the shafts and gears moving in the mill. This is the biggest pull there will be on the boiler all day but it only lasts a matter of seconds. The rumble of the shaft rises in volume until the engine has reached it's running speed. Then all the lights go out and come on again as the engineer switches from mains power to the alternator. The stokers and pumps stop as the switches trip out and must be started again immediately so John has a quick trot across to the cellar. The engineer hears the pumps in the cellar restart and this tells him that his firebeater is awake and on top of his job. The plant is now independent of outside energy. As long as the steam is kept up and all runs smoothly we are immune from power failures.

The firebeater tops his hoppers up, has a quick check that everything is as it should be and then goes up into the mill to read the temperatures in the shed, he sees the men on the tape processing and forms an idea of what steam they will be demanding. A close eye has to be kept on the weather, a shower coming over during the day can mean 100 horsepower extra load on the engine to run the shed lights and a drop of ten pounds pressure in as many minutes if he is not on top of his job. Dampers must be adjusted to give correct combustion, a good guide is to have just the faintest feather of smoke at the chimney top. There is one job that John must attend to which wasn’t necessary in 1920. He has to keep an eye on the economisers at the back of the boiler to make sure the water passing through them doesn’t boil as this can damage them. When it was new the economiser ran under boiler pressure, it was connected directly to the boiler and so could run at a far higher temperature without boiling. Over the years attrition on the pipes has weakened them and the insurance company will no longer accept the risk of running them under pressure so we have to control the amount of hot gas passing through the nest of cast iron tubes. This means we extract slightly less heat from the flue gases than we would with a perfect system but we still get a good saving of about 7% on fuel consumption.



John Plummer, firebeater and friend, about his normal duties. He is making a small adjustment to the speed of the stokers which is one way of regulating the amount of steam he is making.

[Stanley]

The small everyday tasks are attended to, sweeping up both down below and on the boiler top. Some boilers were insulated on the front plate but ours was bare steel and so we kept it tidy and protected by brushing it with a mixture of Black Lead and oil. The pressure gauge and water glasses are polished with Brasso and the water gauge glasses blown through to make sure they are clear and giving a true reading. A blocked water glass can show a safe boiler when water is at danger level, this is why there are always two independent glasses. Sometimes a glass will burst, not as fearsome as it sounds as the pressure is automatically cut off from them by an internal safety mechanism and the armoured cage stops the glass from flying about. A gauge glass can be changed while the boiler is firing in five minutes using just one spanner. Feed water levels and temperatures, steam pressure, mill temperature, load, coal supply to hoppers, all these points must be watched constantly until at 11:30 the boiler fires are slacked back for dinner when the engine stops for half an hour. The stokers are slowed down and as dinnertime approaches the pressure drops until at 12:30 there is only I00psi. As soon as the engine stops the firebeater opens his fires up again to start building pressure and water levels ready for a start at 13:00 when he will need 130 or 140psi. If he didn’t ease back before dinner the pressure would soon rise to 160psi after the engine stopped, the safety valve would lift and good steam would blow off wasting fuel. At 13:00 the engine starts again and then settles down for the afternoon which is usually easier as everything is warmed up, bearings are free and steam consumption is down.
At 15:30 the firebeater starts to think about banking his fires up for the night. The coal in the hoppers is allowed to run out and when they are empty the fires burn away till only a red hot bed of coals is left. The stokers and dampers are shut down, the fires pushed to the back of the firebars and the grates filled to the front with coal shovelled in through the door, about thirty shovels full in each furnace, twelve down each side and eight down the middle. The dampers are closed completely and then opened a crack, just enough to stop coal smoke from leaking back into the boiler house. This coal will slowly burn from the back and keep the pressure up all night. The trick is to do all this and finish up at 16:00 with at least 120 pounds of steam, a glass full of water and all tidied up. The engine will run off what is in the boiler till 16:30 pulling it down to about 80 or 90 pounds. The pressure will quietly build up during the night and you can usually reckon on having the same pressure in the boiler when you come in in the morning that you had at 16:00. A quick wash and our hero is ready to lock the boiler house up and set off for home and bed. Tomorrow is another day.

The firebeater is regarded as a menial and treated as such but a good firebeater is a pearl beyond price and a joy to follow, his trademarks are steady pressure, a clean floor and a smoke free chimney. He will usually be found sitting in his chair looking as though he has nothing to do. This is the mark of a competent man. John was such a man and a joy to work with. Let’s go back now nine and a half hours and follow the engineer in through the engine house door as he starts his day at 07:00.



John has burned his fires off and now he's pushing the white hot coals that remain to the back of the bars before he banks the fires and shuts the boiler down for the night. he always got away about 30 minutes before the engine stopped but I booked his time right up to stopping. The management never questioned this, they knew they had a good man who was on too low a wage. They tended to leave us alone as long as things were running smoothly.....

[Stanley]

If ever a man was monarch of all he surveyed it was the old fashioned engine tenter. He was absolute master of the engine and boiler, his word was law and strong mill owners have been known to go in fear of an interview in the engine house. The old days have gone, there is no place for autocrats in modern labour relations. I suspect that this is one of the main reasons for the decline of the steam engine, an independent prime mover, since the war. No one wants all their eggs in one basket and men who are fit to take charge of a responsibility like running an engine are few and far between. If the engineer doesn't turn up for work the mill doesn't start. Nowadays there isn't anyone who can stand in for him so things are even more difficult. The engine tenter must be absolutely reliable and master of his engine or trouble follows as night follows day. I was once asked what happened if I was ill. “You just come and be poorly in the engine house, it's as simple as that”. Actually I was lucky because I had my mate Newton Pickles who taught me all I know and he would come up and run the engine for nothing at the drop of a hat.

Back now to 07:00 on our cold and frosty morning. We follow the engineer into the engine house and the first impression is warmth, the smell of cylinder oil and the subdued gleam of polished steel and brass from the giant laid out on the floor in front of us. There is a slight hiss of steam from the warmer valve on the high pressure cylinder which has been dribbling a bit of steam into the engine all night to keep the castings warm. There is an occasional rumble from the feed pump in the cellar below as it fires up to empty the hot well which is taking in the condensate from the heating system. It was always a slightly anxious moment when you first switched on the lights, vandalism is a national sport these days and the thought lurks at the back of the mind that someone might break in one night and put a hammer through the lubricators, this sort of thing has happened and no doubt will again.

The first thing is to get your coat off as the temperature in the house never drops below 60 degrees even on the coldest night, then up to the side of the flywheel on the high pressure side. A brass teapot stands on the engine bed full of oil and this is used to fill up the oil pockets on the eccentric sheaves, then the crankpin lubricator which is bolted to the guard rail is filled. This feeds the crankpin through a banjo which is bolted to it, this lubricator is set on and starts it's measured feed one drop every four seconds. The oil it is feeding can’t get into the bearing until the engine starts but by that time there will be a pool of oil in the banjo and that goes in the bearing on the first revolution to give an initial slug of oil. The wrist pin is next, this is the bearing in the crosshead which carries the back end of the connecting rod just in front of the cylinder. This lubricator is filled up and set on as well. The brass teapot is put back on the engine bed where it came from. Next the rod lubricator on each end of the cylinder is filled with cylinder oil from the kettle which lives in a pocket specially made for it in the insulation on top of the high pressure cylinder. This is to keep the oil warm as it is too thick to pour otherwise. This kettle is the original one supplied with the engine nearly sixty years ago and is shaped to fit the pocket. Newton always used to tell me that rod lubricators did no good on an engine that was properly lubricated during running hours but I still used them. A bit more oil couldn’t do any harm.
Now we go round to the low pressure side and do the same procedure in reverse up there. Two rod lubricators, wrist pin and crank pin then fill the pockets on the eccentric sheave. Back down the low pressure side, pick up cylinder oil kettle off the bed where it was left after filling the rod lubricators, go round to high pressure cylinder and top up the big Kirkham automatic cylinder lubricator on the front end of the cylinder, this big mechanical lubricator oils the cylinder while the engine is running, mainly by injecting oil into an atomiser in the main steam pipe which loads the steam with oil droplets thus ensuring that all the internal parts get their fair share. There is another lubricator on the low pressure cylinder but this is only used under heavy load, normally enough oil is carried through with the steam from the HP side to ensure lubrication. I used to use it for ten minutes before stopping the engine to make sure that the LP cylinder (LP is Low Pressure and HP is High Pressure) was well-oiled for the night. Next, the Lunkenheimer is topped up, this is a small lever operated lubricator perched on the back of the HP cylinder which is used for occasional oiling of the valves which are under steam pressure while running and also for an initial dose before starting. Then fill up the cylinder oil can which sits on a ledge at the front of the cylinder keeping itself warm, this oil is used for the valve motion and bonnets on both cylinders and the small cups on the linkage of the air pump bell crank just behind the low pressure cylinder above the slide. All these points are oiled now.



The Dobson Block motion on the HP cylinder that controls the admission of steam and the opening of the exhaust valves. A simple and effective motion that never gave any trouble if it was maintained properly.