COATES MILLS, OLD AND NEW

[Stanley]

BARNOLDSWICK TEXTILE MILLS
OLD COATES MILL AND COATES MILL.
STATE OF THE RESEARCH AT 4TH DECEMBER 2000.

IDENTIFICATION OF THE MILLS.

The first thing to say is that care must be taken to distinguish between the two mills which had the same name. I have made the distinction by referring to the earliest mill as OLD COATES and the later mill as COATES. Nothing is left on the ground of Old Coates. The later mill closed early and became DOBSONS DAIRY, then it went back to weaving velvet, became CARRS PRINTERS and in the last five years has become HOPE ENGINEERING.

BRACEWELL CONNECTION.
Another source of possible confusion as regards Old Coates mill is the fact that one of the partners in the early 19th century was William Bracewell, together with his brothers, Thomas and Christopher. I refer to these as the Bracewells of Coates. They were sons of William Bracewell of Coates the brother of Christopher Bracewell of Green End at Earby who was born at Coates but moved to Earby in 1813. Christopher of Green End had a son called William who became William Bracewell of Newfield Edge in Barlick and was nicknamed ‘Billycock’ no doubt to distinguish him from the other Bracewells who were, of course, his cousins. Billycock built Butts in 1846 and New Mill, later called Wellhouse in 1854. He also owned the Corn Mill, Ouzledale Mill, was in the process of building the new gas works next to the Corn Mill and had many other interests in Barlick when he died in 1887. A further possible confusion arises here because he had a son called Christopher George.

You might wonder why I am digressing into Billycock history; the reason is that knowledge of him is essential to following the Old Coates story. Bracewell of Newfield edge was a combative business man. His aim was as near total control; of the town as he could get. One of his main weapons was control of water supplies and I have much work to do on this subject before it will become completely clear. However, I have enough hard evidence now to make some reasonable assumptions about the areas where I have no firm evidence. Let’s concentrate on two instances of this effort to control water. First and least tangible at the moment is the fact that at some time after 1846 he bought Ouzledale Mill on Forty Steps which was a saw mill at the time I think and logic says it predates Mitchell’s Mill (Clough) because I find it impossible to believe that if Clough had been the first build, Mitchell wouldn’t have made sure that he controlled the Ouzledale resource. The fact that he didn’t suggests that it existed before he built his mill. Ouzledale dam was at a higher level that Butts Mill and I suspect that Billycock’s intention was to divert the water to enable expansion of Butts Mill which had a limited water resource. This would have course had an impact on Mitchell’s business.

For some reason he never pursued this possibility. I don’t know why, perhaps he couldn’t get enough land to expand at Butts, perhaps Mitchell put up adequate opposition because I have no doubt that he would see the danger. There is a possible clue in the fact that Bancroft Mill couldn’t be built using Gillians Beck as a water resource until an alliance by marriage between the Nutter and Slater families early in the 20th century, Slater owned Clough at the time and crucially, he appears to have controlled the riparian rights back to what was effectively the source of Gillians Beck. There is further evidence that might support this, Gillians Mill higher up on the beck never used the main beck as its power resource when it was built in the mid 1780s, it used a small beck coming down behind Bancroft Farm. The inference from this is that Mitchell got the rights to the beck right back to the source when he built his mill and Slater got these when he bought what was then Clough. One last piece of evidence about Gillians is that when I was engineer at Bancroft I was always puzzled by the fact that there was a by-pass round the dam and provision to send all the water in Gillians directly down to Clough. Sydney Nutter once told me that he thought this dated back to the building of the mill when there was an agreement with Slaters that in hot weather, if Clough was struggling for vacuum, Bancroft was obliged to send the cooler water direct to Clough instead of warming it in the lodge after use for condensing. This was a very pressing problem when there was a succession of steam mills on a watercourse. I have plenty of hard evidence for this in respect of other mills in the town. The bottom line is that there is enough evidence to suspect that Bracewell appears to have bought Ouzledale to put pressure on Mitchell.

The second instance of this use of water as a weapon against business rivals concerns the water resource at the Corn Mill which relates directly to the fate of Old Coates. The Corn Mill is probably the oldest established use of water power in Barnoldswick. The earliest reference I have so far is November 1640 when it changed hands. Therefore it certainly predated the water powered textile industry and almost certainly any use of water power for sawing wood. It is certainly the best water site in the town as it controls Butts Beck which is formed by the combination of Gillians and Calf Hall becks, the major resources in the town. It had a very large dam stretching all the way back to Dam Head on Gisburn Road and a good flow.

Whatever the problems Billycock had with expansion at Butts, what is certain is that by shortly after 1850 he had made the decision to build New Mill. There is evidence that this decision puzzled many people in the town because the site he chose for the New Mill had no significant water resource. Many of the legends in the town about underground tunnels connected the ancient monastic site at Calf Hall with Gill Church date from this time. Nothing certain has surfaced yet about watercourses installed by Billycock originating at Butts but I have been told that they did exist. Personally I can’t understand why because he controlled the beck by ownership of the Corn Mill. However, what is certain, and I have hard evidence for this, is that he put a six inch cast iron pipe in from the Corn Mill dam to the New Mill. His intention all along had been to run the mill from Butts Beck water. This resource existed as late as July 1890 when the Calf Hall Shed Company approached the Barnoldswick Gas and Light Company to explore the possibility of getting water from them.

So, we have a situation where we know that Bracewell had the capability to divert water from the Butts Beck to what is now Wellhouse. We need to look at Old Coates now to see what Billycock did and what were its consequences.
OLD COATES MILL.
This is Old Coates from a lantern slide before the demolition in 1892.
Information about Old Coates is thin on the ground but grows gradually. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that there was a mill on the site before the water-powered textile era. So, until I get evidence to the contrary, I am assuming that it started as a water-powered twist mill shortly after 1785 when the Arkwright patents were overturned and the technology became widely available. I have evidence that there was water powered weaving in the mill around 1840/1850. John Pickles told Newton that there was a beam engine in there before it finished and the photograph shows the chimney so we know it became steam powered. William Atkinson in his History of Old Barlick says that illegal whisky was distilled in the ‘gas house’. As there has never been any suggestion of finishing at the mill this must mean that a gas plant had been installed for lighting the mill. The 1892 map shows a round structure to the east of the mill next to the access road which could have been the gasholder.
I have no record of who built the mill but as the Bracewell Brothers were the local landowners it looks as though they might have built it, crucially, before Billycock Bracewell moved into the town from Earby. At that time they had no problems with water, they were getting the full flow of the Butts Beck and were in as good a position as the Corn Mill. They ran the mill until 1860 and had looms in Clough Mill as well. In fact, in the 1851 census, Christopher and Thomas are recorded as living together at Clough House next to Clough mill and are noted as being in partnership with William, who lived at Coates, in an enterprise which employed 60 men, 44 women, 15 boys and 9 girls. In 1860 they abandoned all their interests in the town and there is a record in Slater’s Directory of 1871 of Christopher Bracewell and Brothers at Waterloo Mill, Clitheroe. The question is of course, what happened?

This is where I have to fly a kite because I haven’t got enough hard evidence yet. Remember that Billycock had put the pipe in to supply his New Mill from Corn Mill dam. This meant that he was diverting a considerable quantity of water from the Butts Beck with a consequent reduction in flow to Old Coates. I don’t think this would have been a serious matter when the beck had a full flow but would certainly have had serious consequences in drought conditions. We know that by this time Billycock had a steam engine in the Corn Mill so there was no imperative for him to put water over his wheel which would obviously have fed Old Coates. In low flow conditions, as long as he had enough water in the dam to condense his engine and provide boiler feed, he could let all the rest go down to Wellhouse. I think this was enough to make Old Coates unviable. The circumstantial evidence that this was so is the fact that six years after the New Mill started, the Bracewell Brothers moved their interests out of the town.

Here are some references that fill in some of the details. Coates Farm and Mill mentioned in an electoral roll of 1844. The tenant, Mr. Thomas Eastwood, mentioned in 1844 will be in the farm. Another note of 1851 census says Christopher Bracewell was cotton manufacturer in partnership with his brothers Thomas and William Bracewell. Employers of 60 men, 44 women, 15 boys and 9 girls. 1848 electoral roll notes him as elector of Coates. 1859 electoral roll gives Christopher, Thomas and William as electors of Coates. Chris and Thom noted as Barnoldswick and William as Coates. 1881 census. L&Y strays. William Bracewell born Barnoldswick 1818 is 63 years and living in Rimington. Also with him is son William b.1857 aged 24 years. In 1860 there was a report in the Burnley Advertiser of William Bracewell's bankruptcy.
It looks as though a man called James Nuttall bought the mill then. I think he had the idea that he could make the mill viable again by using the water from the Foul Syke which brings the water down from below Wellhouse mill. This didn’t carry a lot of water but was augmented by the Bowker drain which had been put in to collect all the water from the North side of the canal plus any leakage from the canal. There’s a big mystery about this drain, who put it in and why and I’m still working on it. One thing is certain, it was regarded as stolen water.

Whatever his intentions the next thing we hear is that in 1860 there is a case in the Chancery Court of the Duchy of Lancaster between Billycock Bracewell and James Nuttall over the rights to the water from the Bowker Drain and we have to surmise that Nuttall lost because the mill stayed empty and the local farmer, John Raw, stored his hay in it. Harold Duxbury gave me an important clue when he talked about investigating the overflow from the dams at Wellhouse Mill to find out where it was running to. He put dye in the outfall and was surprised to find it was piped directly to the Butts Beck below Crow nest mill. In other words, it was piped to a point below the old lodge for Old Coates which was where Rolls Royce car park is on Crow Nest Road. Bracewell had gone to all that expense to make sure that Old Coates wouldn’t benefit from his waste water. I think we can make another assumption here, that Billycock bought some of the contents of Old Coates once he had convinced Nuttall that he couldn’t run it. The reason I say this is that there is a mention in the diary of William Dugdale of Barlick that on the 20th August 1874 the boiler was removed from Old Coates Mill and taken to the Ingleton Coal Pits. The crucial thing about this is that in July of the same year, Billycock bought the Ingleton coal field. Billycock died in 1885 but no mention of Old Coates in the sale of 1887 so he hadn’t bought the mill itself. Billy Brooks told me that he remembered the mill being demolished when he was about ten years old, this would make it 1892.

COATES MILL.
Four years after the court case with Bracewell, James Nuttall started to build New Coates on a green field site to the north east of Coates Bridge with the advantage of the canal water for condensing. This was the first mill to be built on the canal side in Barlick and I think that Nuttall’s experiences with Bracewell had taught him to look for the most reliable water resource, he found it in the canal.

New Coates was originally built for 300 looms, it was powered by a beam engine and William Atkinson says ‘It was built for those would-be manufacturers who had been thwarted at Old Coates Mill’. A shortage of capital delayed completion. In the Craven Herald of 8th of September 1888 there was a report that ‘Coates mill works on as usual during the depression caused by the collapse of the Bracewell interests’. I can’t help thinking this must have given one or two people much satisfaction. Various tenants are mentioned over the years, James Nutter was in there with 56 looms in 1880. Bell and Russell in 1896. Coates Manufacturing Company, late Dewhurst and Harrison is mentioned in 1905 with 400 looms.

By about 1912 the mill was owned by Ridings Mill Stores of Blackburn. It was run by the Coates Manufacturing Company which was a consortium of Earby men led by Walter Wilkinson who used to be the manager of the Co-operative Stores at Earby, some of the names associated with him were Jack Myers, ? Duckworth, Elisha Harrison, ? Waddington and others. Walter Wilkinson had three sons, one of whom, Granville Wilkinson, went to Whitefield and started there. The Coates Manufacturing Company may have bought the mill off Ridings when they built the extension on the canal bank. This would be 1919 and would probably be when Johnny Pickles put the Hick Hargreaves engine in which they bought second hand from a mill in Bolton which had closed. There is a Universal Metallic Packing order dated 14/08/1919 for this engine. Johnny converted it to rope drive by fixing CI segments on top of the existing gears and turning the rope grooves after the engine was assembled, in its own pit. Newton says it was the truest flywheel in Barlick. There’s some confusion about when it closed down but there is mention of it standing idle until it was bought in 1931 by Dobson’s Dairies of Manchester. Newton, at the age of 15, got the job of getting the engine going again. Later, after WWII, Brown and Pickles installed a new Lancashire boiler. It ran until the late 60’s as a dairy and then went back to weaving velvet for a time but not on the engine. Later it became Carr’s Printers but when they moved out into Calf Hall Shed it became Hopes, engineers.

SCG/04 December 2000/2502 words.
Revised 26 November 2003/2772 words.

[Stanley]

Bumped.