Every town has forgotten nooks and corners that slowly fade into obscurity and eventually get destroyed or altered fundamentally by the march of progress. When this happens there is a frantic search for images and information but it is usually too late. I've been taking note of some of these for years and have quite a collection now. There is a lot of our town history here! Here's an example in Barlick. Ripe for development, it can't survive much longer. This is just below Commercial Street in Barlick, on the bank of Butts Beck. These basement units are the old shambles for Barlick, used by many of the local butchers for slaughtering and butchering meat. The beck was a handy waste disposal unit. The gap nearest the camera is where Briggs and Duxbury had their original workshop in Commercial Street until the 1930s but it burned down later. At one time they extended into the building on the other side of the ginnel and constructed an over-bridge to join the premises together.
It was lunch time on Monday July 11th 1932 and a young Harold Duxbury and Evered Holdsworth were in the joiners shop on Commercial Street looking out of the window towards Butts and commenting on the threatening storm over Weets and the heavy rain that was falling. The beck was running so fiercely that it carried away the back walls of the red brick stables below on the side of the beck and completely destroyed some more old buildings in Butts. The level rose until it was within a foot of the doors in the shambles below, the stables were covered almost to the top of the ground floor. As they watched they saw two hands sticking out of the top of the end stable door and realised that someone was trapped in there. Harold and Sid Barnett decided they would have to go and rescue whoever it was. They tied themselves to a rope and set off into the torrent.
When they got to the stable door they found that rubble had been washed against it and it was jammed shut so they had to take turns diving below the water to clear the obstruction. They opened the door and found that the man was a carter called Widdup who had been sheltering in the stable when the storm struck. They lashed him onto the rope and signalled to be pulled back to safety. Harold said they were like drowned rats. The carter seemed to be all right but died shortly afterwards and there was little doubt it was because of his experience. There were two things that stuck in Harold’s mind about this matter: The first was that the report in the paper credited his father with the rescue. The second was that in his pocket was a gold watch he had been given for his twenty first birthday and it never worked again after the flood.
I told you there was history in these forgotten corners!
The basement slaughter houses in Butts.
