FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[PanBiker]

A meat pie for a shilling is a forgotten corner now Mick, the going rate is 20 times as much......

A bit more than that Stanley, plus half as much again would be nearer the mark!

You must not have bought a pie for a long time.

[Stanley]

Brown's prize pork pie from Barlic Bites is £1.

[PanBiker]

I thought you didn't eat pies.

[Stanley]

I occasionally have a treat. Barlic Bite Pies are £1, have you checked?

[Stanley]

If you have read Ernie Roberts' evidence in the LTP you will have found references to Holmes' Pie Shop. This building at the top of Lamb Hill is the place. There were others of course and they thrived on business from the weavers on their way home for lunch or at tea time. Shops like these augmented the fish and chip shops and were the earliest 'fast food' outlets in the town.

[Stanley]

I wonder how many people will remember this forgotten corner in 1977. There was a prolonged drought in London and the clay subsoil started to shrink causing a lot of subsidence problems which had to be addressed by very expensive underpinning. This was my Friend's flat in N London and you can see the nasty crack up the left side of the window that they had watched growing all summer. In the end a successful insurance claim paid for underpinning and reinstatement so it all ended well but many people had a worse experience.

[Tripps]

Came across this yesterday. Impossible to imagine today.

STUBBER.jpg

[Stanley]

Was it on the back of a bus seat David?
The remnant of smoking I remember with horror now was the deep brown sticky coating of Nicotine and Tar that covered the beautiful varnished interiors of the Stockport trams. Unthinkable now but totally unremarkable then.



......

[Tripps]

Was it on the back of a bus seat

Yes I guess so. The material of the seat cover looks quaintly old fashioned as well.

[plaques]

How about one of these. Seen today in the tool stall in Colne market.

'

IMG_20230217_120630793.jpg

[Tripps]

I think it's what we used for measuring what was known as "electricity" - until it became too expensive,and had to be abandoned.

[Stanley]

Will this do? I had a mate who was in the trade and could get such things at good prices when I was having a war with the operator of the Barber Knotter at Bancroft. He said I was frightened of the engine and not running it fast enough...... Here's the bit out of my memoir that covers it....

We made our own electricity at Bancroft and in early October as we started to come into the heating season the load on the boiler went up. I started to get complaints from Fred Roberts about there not being enough power to run the Barber knotting machine. This ran on 110 volts DC and any drop in the alternator supply made a big difference to his voltage level. It ran OK off the mains but wouldn’t perform off the engine. His version of it was that I was frightened of the engine and was running it too slow! Not surprisingly this got my back up and I told him that things were no different than they had been for the last twenty years, there was a fault somewhere and I would find it.
I had a fair idea that there was a fault because the electronic adding machine in the office wouldn’t work properly off engine power so I suspected the voltage was down. According to the instruments on the big switch board in the engine house all was OK but I spent £85 on a heavy duty Avometer and did some tests of my own. I found that instead of turning out 450 volts on three phase we were only doing 390, the voltmeter on the board was way out. I tried altering the resistance to the exciter but couldn’t get more than 410 volts so I sent for the sparks and got them to alter the permanent resistances in the circuit. That did the trick! We could get 450 volts now with ease.
Jim came down and told me Fred Roberts was in a right mess. He couldn’t control the knotting machine, it was going too fast. I went up and informed Fred that I had sorted out the problem at my end, he was now on 450 volts as per design and any problems he had were his own, go to it Fred! He never spoke to me again as long as the mill ran, this did not cause me any problems! The calculator in the office was working OK as well.
A side effect of raising the voltage was that the lighting in the shed was much better, this delighted the weavers but gave me a problem because dozens of 150 watt bulbs blew under the higher voltage. I was saved by an earlier stroke of luck. The fair had come to town and I was talking to one of the lads who ran the mobile generators for them and he told me they had a lot of Edison Cap bulbs that were no use to them now. (Screw cap instead of bayonet) He said they were 150 watt, just what we used at the mill so I bought all they had for £15. When we counted them there were a thousand! We didn’t buy another bulb for years. The increased load on the alternator made the belts on the counterdrive slip a bit and I had to attend to that as well. For the first few months it was like this, you put one thing right and it triggered off something else.
All interesting but a forgotten corner now. (Except for the Avometer, I occasionally have a use for that....

[plaques]

Not an expert on these things but I think the one I posted was a Crompton, Parkinson Ammeter. At 16 amp it would be considered heavy duty. The ebay prices range from £40 to £80. A vintage museum piece now.

[PanBiker]

Your Heavy Duty Avometer is a Mk 5. I used a Mk 7 Avo for years on field service until digital IC's and semiconductors became the norm. My Mk7 was ranged for valves and was not accurate enough for semiconductor use and we had to swap to digital meters. The later models of the Mk7 had a stock fault of a slow cut out. You see lots of them at amateur radio rallies on the misc equipment sale tables with the pointers bent because on an over volt situation the cut out didn't trip fast enough, the perils of analogue meter movements.

[Stanley]

My problem at Bancroft was under voltage not over! I thought about it afterwards. It was obvious that someone, most likely George Bleasdale the engineer before me, had been altering the voltmeter on the distribution board to read 440V under the impression he was actually raising the voltage. What was happening was that the resistances in the circuit to the exciter on the alternator were deteriorating and had reached the stage where they were out of effective range. I got a proper Sparks in and he fitted new resistances with the big variable resistance set central and that meant I could properly control the output using the Avometer as my standard.





Two views of Windy Harbour at the junction of Colne Road and the head of Barnoldswick Lane. This group of buildings on the Barlick side of the junction was demolished in the late 1950s.
I had found this name; 'Windy Harbour' in multiple locations and when I was researching pack horse trains I found that this was a name commonly given to anywhere that was an overnight stop for drovers or packhorse drivers.

[Stanley]

Bob Parkinson in 1977 when he was firebeater for me at Bancroft Shed. He was Vera's uncle but I never worked out what, exactly, the relationship was. He was never really cut out for the job but it suited him at the time. A very serious man who did the job well.

[Stanley]

A weaver's alley in the shed at Bancroft in 1976. For over a century this was the daily workspace of many thousands of weavers in the town. At one time we had 25,000 looms. It's definitely a forgotten corner now....

[Stanley]

One of the saddest sights for anyone who had worked in the mills was the4 scene when demolition converted the everyday tools of making a living into rubbish waiting to be disposed of. This was true of the weavers personal effects like their buffet that they had a sit on during the day. It's very hard to forget sights like this in the warehouse at Bancroft Shed in 1979.

[Stanley]

During the later days of weaving it wasn't economical to sweep unused looms and they gathered dirt down until they looked as though they had been left out in the snow. Apart form being a health hazard (The dirt down was the cause of the industrial disease Byssinosis) the weavers said it was depressing to work in the middle of dereliction like that but nothing was ever done. This is a forgotten corner that everyone was glad to see the back of.

[Stanley]

Like many other work spaces in the mill the tapes often had a very untidy look about them but this was not a reflection of the levels of skill and expertise that were at work. Running a tape or warp sizing machine was one of the most skilled and therefore highly paid jobs in the mill. If you want the inside story go to the LTP and read Horace Thornton's evidence.

[Stanley]

Jackson's wagon from Nelson picking up beams from Bancroft Shed for return to the spinners. They also carted cloth and skeps and boxes containing weft. When there were 25,000 looms in the town carriage of these goods was a commonplace sight. A completely forgotten corner now.....

[Tripps]

It's taken me quite a while to find this vaguely remembered list of forgotten corners from the Diamond Geezer's blog. It also must be a candidate for the longest sentence ever written. Hope there are no copyright issues - if so I'll delete - but I post it as a tribute.

I remember butterscotch Angel Delight, and power cuts, and the way cassette tapes used to spool out and you had to wind them back in with a pencil, and rolls of shiny Izal toilet paper, and waiting by the letterbox for the evening newspaper to arrive, and watching the football results on Ceefax, and Woolworths, and Abbey Crunch biscuits, and briefly making contact with schoolfriends on Friends Reunited, and having to include a fax number in your email signature, and MacFisheries, and flipping back and forth through Choose Your Own Adventure books, and sheets of plastic hole reinforcers, and writing tedious letters to penpals, and always following the Green Cross Code, and Wombles, and Singing Together, and the Junior Jet Club, and packets of Opal Fruits, and pools coupons, and clackers, and trying to keep your tamagotchi alive, and phonecards, and waiting for your photos to come back from the chemists, and the burble when connecting to dial-up, and the thickness of telephone directories, and going on genuinely blind dates, and storing floppy discs in special boxes, and locating books in libraries by flicking through drawers full of index cards, and pushing Parker Royal Blue ink cartridges into fountain pens, and the noise that meant one of your MSN Messenger buddies had come online, and having to lick stamps, and politicians being expected to tell the truth, and date stamps in library books, and using a typewriter to write an important letter, and Girobank, and listening to the music that accompanied the testcard, and shillings, and Pong, and pogs, and cola cubes in sticky paper bags, and watching Robinson Crusoe on television every school holiday, and elm trees, and discovering new music on MySpace, and Buzby, and Findus Crispy Pancakes, and Junior Choice, and photo albums held in place with sticky corners, and cutting stories out of newspapers, and aniseed Spangles, and writing out the track listing on mixtapes, and United bars, and receiving a new cheque book through the post, and It's a Knockout, and school dinner ladies serving up scoops of mashed potato, and Windows 95, and Big Ted, and overhead projectors, and Reliant Robins, and the clunking noise when you pushed a video tape into a video recorder, and flash bulbs on cameras that only worked four times, and lolly sticks with jokes on, and hot cheese oozing out of the side of a sandwich toaster, and Noodle Doodles, and replacing the ribbon on dot matrix printers, and Global Hypercolor t-shirts, and being bored on Sundays, and Rentaghost, and Stylophones, and scuffed shoulderbags with your gym kit festering inside, and pinning down a Spirograph, and Edd the Duck, and music centres in cabinets, and Dymo labels, and Knightmare, and those square plastic tags they used to keep bread fresh (a different colour every day of the week), and cleaning cassettes, and Minesweeper, and Lynx Africa, and discovering the true lyrics to your favourite song in Smash Hits, and Livestrong wristbands, and burning your own CDs, and Tippex, and The Weakest Link, and satchels, and salt and vinegar crisps in blue packets, and Napster, and discussing Big Brother, and the Tufty Club, and Peter and Jane, and Janet and John, and transistor radios with extendable aerials, and Casey Jones, and Humberside, and Brookside, and having to get up off the sofa to change channel, and posters for rabies at Channel ports, and medium wave, and car tax discs, and cheque guarantee cards, and football shirts without adverts on, and ringing the Speaking Clock, and cursive handwriting, and slide rules, and storing your Post Office Savings account book somewhere safe, and electricity showrooms, and cathode ray tubes, and the Ronco Fuzz-Away, and winning a goldfish in a bag, and drapery stores with everything stored inside stacks of wooden drawers, and free milk at breaktime, and the Nimble hot air balloon, and Challenge Anneka, and fingerspaces, and bottles of frothy Cresta, and rubbers with a blue end which could erase ink, and C&A, and recording the chart new entries off the radio, and storing things in empty film canisters, and not being able to buy milk on Sundays, and shell suits, and waiting for the television to warm up, and distressed denim, and Denim, and smoking in pubs, and lemon-flavoured alcopops, and custom ringtones, and party lines, and Eye Of The Tiger, and yesterday, and green anoraks with snorkel hoods, and majority government, and putting your chair up on the desk at the end of the day, and plastic-wrapped boxes of Meltis Berry Fruits, and Record Mirror, and Safeway, and Moon landings, and circling programmes in the double issue Christmas Radio Times, and polyester bedsheets, and Lemmings, and not knowing what your classmates did over the weekend, and 4:3, and using Letraset to give your lettering a professional touch, and Ready Steady Cook, and going on holiday without taking a phone charger, and puffing away on a candy cigarette, and flared trousers, and ringpulls, and saving up for a Christmas hamper from the milkman, and medallions, and the Britannia Music Club, and getting the deposit back on a bottle of Corona, and opening up a webpage without being asked about cookies, and Puffa Puffa Rice, and cars without seatbelts, and CDs in jewel cases, and cinema double features, and the importance of knowing where your nearest payphone was, and student grants, and Disney Time on bank holiday afternoons, and the Dairy Book of Home Management, and Donkey Kong, and plugging in extra RAM, and flicking through the Littlewoods catalogue, and four star petrol, and religiously checking your biorhythms, and sending chain letters to five other people, and Tupperware parties, and changing the battery in your Walkman, and the poll tax, and ITV Digital, and the Puffin Club password, and punched computer cards, and collecting Smurfs from National garages, and never quite being able to see Magic Eye pictures but being too afraid to admit it, and the Stratford Olympics, and sitting in the dark watching your holiday snaps using a slide projector, and sending text messages, and Rupert the Bear annuals, and Pacman, and Eurovisions where the voting took less than an hour, and buying a comic every week with your pocket money, and Mr Benn, and Tony Benn, and The Bionic Woman, and pickled onion Space Raiders, and log tables, and remembering to put your carbon paper the right way round, and Chef's Square Soups, and two-bar electric fires, and black and white, and working nine to five, and Blockbuster video, and free discs on the front cover of magazines, and Skips, and adverts for K-Tel gadgetry, and the Avon Lady calling, and corduroy jackets, and having to buy refills for your Filofax, and iron-on transfers, and 12 inch remixes, and watching Saturday's football results revealed on the Grandstand vidiprinter, and redeeming Green Shield stamps, and reaching down inside the cereal packet to find a random toy in a plastic packet, and nobody's desperately interested if you remember them too.
posted 07:00 : comments (90)

[plaques]

... and replacing the ribbon on dot matrix printers,

Still got my dot matrix printer, somewhere, along with a couple of spare ribbons. And he said these machines never wear out and he was right. But when true descender type came along it had to go,

[Stanley]

Who is 'The Diamond Geezer'?



Today's forgotten corner is Thornton in Craven Railway station. We forget how 'local' the railway service was at times. A small village Like Thornton had its own railway station and regular services.

[Tripps]

Who is 'The Diamond Geezer'?

Diamond Geezer Blog


He does a remarkable blog every day which contains enormous (colossal) amounts of information. How one man can do it on a daily basis is beyond me. Mainly London based now since Covid, but he used to travel. He went to Bury market one day. He hasn't missed a day for many (more than 15?) years. The search facility is very good.

In my opinion he has the most extreme case of OCD I've ever met. Unless that's me by looking at his blog almost every day.