By the end of March 1920, Bancroft Shed was ready for a start up and Mrs Platt, Annie and Jack were three of the first weavers in the shed. Jack was able to tell me many things about the process of starting a new shed and answered a lot of questions for me.
I’ve often wondered about the process of starting a shed up from scratch. I know enough about engines, boilers, shaft transmission and looms to know that there were many things that could go wrong. It had always seemed to me to be obvious that you couldn’t just fill a shed with weavers and preparation staff and start up full bore. Jack was able to give me enough clues to work out what was going on.
The first thing to recognise is that Nutter Brothers, and this means the Nutter family, had a big investment in the new shed. They had started building it in March 1915 but had been held up because of the war. James Nutter, who had first made the decision to build, had died in 1918 and never saw the shed completed. Wilfred Nutter was the man who finished the scheme off and his job was to get the mill producing as quickly as possible.
Early in April the shed started running regularly but with only about twenty looms running. This meant that the engine was very dangerous because a combination of a new and untried engine with a very light load was a recipe for over-speeding. This was when the engine ran out of control and turned the shafting far too fast. Jack said that the first thing they were told was that if they heard the shafting speeding up they had to run out of the shed immediately. He said this happened a few times and once when he came back in he found that one of his looms was on top of its neighbour! The belt had snagged and lifted the loom up into the air dropping it when the strap broke.
While all this was going on, looms were still being brought into the shed and installed. Jack said they were second-hand looms and that a man called Jim Monks was cleaning them before they were fixed. There were two tacklers, Fred Bracewell and Bill Monks and they were setting up looms ready for weaving. Bill’s wife, Mrs Monks wove next to Jack and he says she used to look after him. There was only one box of weft in the warehouse and he used to carry weft for his mother, Annie and Mrs Monks. They kept his looms going while he was doing this.
As the shed gradually settled down, more weavers came in and a young lass got the set of looms next to Annie and they mated up together. They used to go out for a brew together and one day later in 1920 they were just going to go out but Annie had some ends down so she said she’d follow in a minute. As her mate went through the fire door out of the shed it fell and killed her. Jack said they had to stop the mill and get every man in the place to lift the heavy door off her. He remembers them laying her on a bed of waste cotton on a table in the warehouse but she was dead. The workers started calling the shed the graveyard and there might have been another reason that reinforced this..
I’ve yet to get to the bottom of this story but I’ve been told by several people that they were short of flags when they finished the shed and somewhere at the back of the shed there was a gravestone that had been re-cycled. I looked for it many a time but never found it.
This sudden death was a shock to them all, Jack wasn’t liking weaving any better than he had before and he was thinking seriously about asking his mother if he could do something else when fate took a hand.
Late in the summer of 1920, Jack and his mate Johnny Grimes were going down to Salterforth to have a swim in the canal. They took a short cut through the quarry and noticed a window had been left open on one of the huts. They climbed in to see what they could find and Jack picked up some brass tubes off the desk and shoved them into his pocket. They went and had their swim and as they were coming back up Salterforth Lane Jack remembered the tubes and realised that they were just the right size for pushing a stub of pencil in so you could use the last half inch. He had a piece of wire and started picking out the grey powder in the tube when there was a hell of a bang and Jack looked down and saw his fingers were on the floor!
There was no telephone or 999 service so his mates ran off and found an adult. They got a bloke to get his milk float out and they took Jack home where his mother sent for the doctor. The doctor came and looked at his hand and said he’d have to go into hospital the following morning. They wrapped his hand in cotton waste and bandaged it up and he laid in bed all night. By morning the tick mattress and the floorboards under the bed were soaked in blood and they borrowed Harry Palmer’s father’s milk float and set off to Burnley with him.
Well, we’ll continue that story in our next as they say but the thing that always struck me was that the doctor, whoever he was, was a bit callous. I know there was no ambulance and that there wasn’t the same urgency about injuries in those days but here we have a sixteen year old lad with half his hand blown off and it was left until the following morning. Different days and different attitudes. Tune in next week and I’ll tell you what happened.
SCG/1 March 2003
The weaving shed at Bancroft.
