Friday the 8th November 1974, Bancroft engine house. Not a bad morning, we started as usual at 8am with the shed lights on so this meant a nice bit of load on the engine because we made our own power with an alternator driven by the engine. My firebeater Ben Gregory was finishing this week and I had a new bloke, Bob Parkinson, starting on Monday so I wouldn’t have the place to run single–handed which was hard work. All was well and I sat in my armchair at the desk in the corner of the engine house with a pint of tea and a bacon butty. Christmas was coming, things could be worse! The only nagging thought was the thump in the air pump on the low pressure side which had been there ever since I started at Bancroft and which everybody assured me was water hammer in the body of the pump due to a design fault. It had always been there so I had to live with it.
Being engine tenter on a large steam engine was a responsible job. Apart from obvious things like safety and economy, everybody’s wage depended on how well the engine performed. Smooth uninterrupted power going down the shaft into the shed meant the weavers stood a chance of making a decent wage. The worst thing that could happen was a stoppage due to my neglect so you never left the engine alone and walked round at least every ten minutes checking on all your oil feeds and looking for potential faults. This morning was no exception and on one of my trips round the oils that morning I noticed that the crosshead cotter on the high pressure side was bleeding a bit. The red oil coming out of the slot it was fitted in was a sure sign it was slightly loose.
At dinnertime, when the engine was stopped I got the hand hammer and gave the cotter a clout to drive it up and tighten it. It went in a shade and then sounded solid, job done and problems averted. On the way back round the engine to put the hammer away I clouted the low pressure cotter as I was passing and got a shock, it went up a quarter of an inch! I hit it again and it went in another eighth of an inch and felt soft. A job for Newton Pickles, I’d ring him as soon as we’d started and got settled down after dinner. [Henry Brown Son and Pickles was the local engineering firm who specialised in steam engines and millwrighting. At one point they had over 100 large engines on their books. Newton Pickles was a partner and son of the founder of the firm, John Pickles.]
When I started after dinner the engine sounded strange and it took me a few seconds to realise that the famous Bancroft thump in the air pump had vanished. The low pressure crosshead cotter must have been loose for years! Newton came up that evening and measured up for two new cotters and we scheduled the job for Friday the 20th of December, the day we finished for the Christmas break. On that day, Bob and Jim Fort came up from Brown and Pickles’ after dinner and as soon as the weavers had gone to the pub, they started on the cotters while Bob Parkinson and myself blew the boiler down and got ready for flueing. We had to open up the boiler and flues and get them cool enough for Charlie Sutton and his gang from Weldone at Brierfield to get in the flues the following day and clear all the dust out that had accumulated since July. By Tuesday the 24th the cotters were in and fitted, the boiler was back together and fired up and I was ready at 3pm for Newton to call in on his way back from attending to an engine at Holmfirth, we were going to run the engine and check that all was OK.
As it happened, Newton was held up so Bob went home and I settled down in the warm engine house with my pipe and a pint of tea and the gentle hiss of steam passing into the engine to warm it. There was only one lamp lit and as it came dark the engine house gradually became a magic place. There was the wonderful smell of steam and hot oil, my pipe smoke drifting up into the roof and every now and again, a grunt as the metal of the engine expanded and Mary Jane and James, the two cylinders, settled down in a fresh position.
Just after 5:30, Newton came in accompanied by his grandson John who was a lad at the time and had been across to Holmfirth with his granddad for a trip out. We put the shed lights in and after barring the engine round a couple of times to make sure nothing was catching in the low pressure cylinder because we’d altered the stroke of the piston slightly by fitting the new cotter, I started up and we listened to the engine.
It was a wonderful improvement, there wasn’t a sound out of the low pressure side, the engine was running like a rice pudding! We left it running and sat down at the desk with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red Label and had our Christmas drink! We’d earned it.
Now I realise that all my readers are not engineers and a lot of what I have told you here is double dutch but I can assure you that anyone who had been with us in that engine house would have enjoyed the experience. There was just one bulb lit on the far side of the house and Newton and I sat there sipping whisky and listening to a perfectly tuned steam engine ticking away at 68 revolutions a minute. After about ten minutes we stopped the engine, shut everything down and sat there in the semi darkness with the whisky, the engine talking to us as it cooled down and the ghosts of the old engineers listening approvingly as we talked about engines and the magic of steam. Young John couldn’t understand why we weren’t going home and it wasn’t until we had finished the whisky off that we decided Christmas had better start or our wives, Olive and Vera, might have had something to say about it.
By today’s standards I suppose Newton and I were victims, there we were, on Christmas Eve, having to work. It wasn’t like that to us, we were interested in the job and even though it was our living, were fascinated by the power of steam. It’s a happy bloke that can have an experience like that and when I look at the speed people are rushing about today chasing what they call quality time I can’t help feeling sorry for them. If you should happen to see Newton, ask him about the time him and Stanley ran Bancroft engine on Christmas Eve and he will recall it instantly. How many jobs give experiences like that which are fresh in the mind after 25 years?
One more Christmas story and I’ll leave you to mend! I was asked the other day whether I had a Christmas Tree and my reply was unprintable. I always liked Christmas Trees until I found out that I had been subjected to manipulation for years. I don’t like manipulation and so I turned against the dreaded Yuletide Tree. Why?
We have to start with St Boniface, this wasn’t his given name, he was born in 675 in Wessex, named Wynfrith and was educated by the Benedictines at Exeter and Nursling (between Winchester and Southampton) They must have done a good job because he became a Benedictine monk, and was ordained a priest by the time he reached 30. Between 716 and 722 he made two attempts to evangelise the Frisian Saxons but was repulsed by their king, Radbod. Frisia was an ancient region of Germany and the Netherlands that lay between the mouths of the Rhine and the Ems. He returned to England to find he had been elected abbot in his absence but declined the post as he wanted to pursue a career as a missionary. He travelled to Rome where Pope Gregory gave him the task of converting the pagans to the east of the Rhine and changed his name to Boniface. Radbod had died by this time so Boniface went to Frisia to help Bishop Willibrord convert the Frisians and in 722 he went to Hesse and founded a Benedictine monastery as a base camp.
He was called to Rome and the Pope made him a missionary bishop and introduced him to Charles Martel who’s protection was essential to his mission. Martel (The Hammer) was Mayor of the place of Austrasia and in effect became the ruler of the Frankish kingdom, roughly equating to modern France. The story goes that when Boniface arrived at Geismar he found the Pagans worshipping Thor under a sacred oak tree where they made human sacrifices. His solution to this was, to say the least, direct. He cut the oak down and replaced it with a fir tree which grew, miraculously at a great pace. He told the pagans that the triangular shape of the tree was to remind them of the three points of the Trinity. This symbol was gradually accepted by the pagans and eventually became a universal symbol of Christmas in what became Germany.
We move on rapidly to George IV in England, leaving Boniface to come to a sticky end at the hands of the Frisians and become a martyr of the church. George IV brought the Germanic symbol of Christmas to England but it never took hold outside the royal family and its sycophants because of the unpopularity of the monarchy. It wasn’t until Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert re-introduced the custom that it took hold in England. From then on it became the universal symbol of Christmas it is today. Some scholars have opined that it was Albert who introduced the concept of candles on the tree to represent the light of Christianity, others point out that the baubles are probably a vestigial representation of the human sacrifices made under the oak of Thor.
So, what have we got? A pagan symbol stolen by the church to reinforce the brainwashing of the Germanic pagans, used again by a German monarchy to cement its place in a foreign country. If you read the history and believe it, it reminds you of human sacrifice, religious domination and monarchical social engineering. So, sorry, no Christmas tree for me. Mind you, I’m not consistent, I wear the kilt and that’s a Victorian con trick as well. I have feet of clay………
The two cotters. I couldn't bear to throw them into the scrap!
SCG/Sunday, 17 December 2000
