On June 28th 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serbian patriot. A month later Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia and on August 1st Germany did the same in support of their ally. Germany suspected that this might be the chance that France had been waiting for and that once they saw German troops moving east to Russia they might invade from the west. In order to forestall this, the German Kaiser ordered that the ‘Schlieffen Plan’ should be put into effect. This was a scheme for the invasion of France via Belgium using railways to transport the troops.
There is a well-founded theory that the Kaiser was bluffing at this point. His intention was to frighten France and forestall an incursion. He soon found that due to the complexities of the plan, once initiated, it couldn’t be stopped. So, almost by accident, Belgian neutrality was violated, this triggered a treaty obligation owed by Britain and on August the 4th 1914, Great Britain declared war on Germany. The Great War had started and by September the 15th, the first trenches were being dug on the Western Front and four years of bloody stalemate had started.
Jack Platt was nine years old and living at White House Cottage. He could remember the stir that the outbreak of war caused and the rush to volunteer. The war was to have other consequences for the Platt family.
One of the first things to happen on the outbreak of war was that the government requisitioned all the raw cotton it could get its hands on. The reason for this was that raw cotton was one of the basic ingredients for ‘guncotton’ or cordite which was the explosive used as a propellant in guns, from rifle ammunition up to the largest naval weapons.
The shortage of cotton caused short time working in the mills and it was this, added to the fact that the local authority condemned the cottage at White House, that persuaded the Platt family to move to Rawtenstall where there was work to be had in the ‘slipper factories’. It was here that Jack got his first job in 1917 as a last sorter at Hoyle and Hoyle’s slipper works. In 1918 Mrs Platt and her family moved back to Barlick because she and Annie had the chance of a job weaving at Coates Mill.
When they came back, they got a cottage at Amen Corner. This was a little group of cottages also known as Higher Lee, in the fields below Lane Head pub, they were demolished long ago. The family were going to be there a fair while, Jack was married from there in 1928.
Now they were back in Barlick, Jack was booked in to Gisburn Road School as a half time scholar. He spent half a day in school and half a day working with his mother and sister at Coates Mill as a learner weaver or tenter. I asked him how he liked and he said he hated it. He said he used to deliberately cause faults when he loaded the shuttle so he’s be sent out of the mill. His mother persevered with him and by the time he reached 14 in 1919 they had moved to Bird’s at Calf Hall Shed and he was ready to take two looms and run them himself.
Outside the mill Jack was up to his usual mischief. He soon palled up with two other lads, Harry Grimes and George Horrocks and they were a force to be reckoned with. Looking back, I suppose we’d call them juvenile delinquents! Apart from the normal playing about in quarries and damming streams they made dens up on Whitemoor where they were chased off many a time by George Bird, the gamekeeper because it was private land. They got chased for other reasons as well, he told me about raiding the orchard at Peel Whitaker’s farm on Salterforth Lane. He said they used to go there on Sunday when they were all at Chapel and one day George Horrocks got caught because he had that many apples in his jacket he couldn’t run away when the family came home early.
If his mother sent him for a shilling’s worth of eggs, he used to go raiding hen huts and looking for stray nests until he had got the eggs so he could keep the shilling. One night, Jack, Harry and George decided it was pea-pod time so they raided Jim Sutcliffe’s garden at Tubber Hill. Jack said they had a ‘reight do’, they filled a sack apiece and were just leaving when a voice came from behind the garden hut, “Narthen, you can fetch them buggers here. You’ve saved me the trouble of picking ‘em!” Jim had been waiting for them and they got no pea pods that night.
Things got a bit more serious at times. One day they were playing about in Sagar’s quarry at Loose Games on top of Tubber Hill and they found that the door of the magazine was open. There was a full drum of ‘Black Jack’, the explosive they used in the quarry for cracking rock. They scooped some out and laid a trail down to the quarry gate and lit it. Jack says they got the shock of their lives. They expected a little bang but there was a large explosion and they saw bits of the magazine flying all over! They ran away and were never found out but Jack said that it taught them a lesson. Well, he thought it had at the time.
So, by 1919 things are looking up a bit for the Platt family. Jack had reached fourteen years old and left school so Mrs Platt and her three children are all in full-time work and bringing in enough to keep them in relative comfort at Amen Corner. True, by our standards nowadays it would be a very poor life but in those days, they thought they were lucky. The poverty days at White House and Rawtenstall were behind them, there was work about, they had a change of clothes and plenty to eat.
As they walked down the road into Barlick they noticed signs of activity on the site of Newfield Mill which had been under construction since 1914. It looked as though Nutter Brothers were at last going to finish it.
SCG/28 February 2003
Newfield, later Bancroft shed before demolition.