The start of the new century looked encouraging in Barlick. The cotton trade was doing well and new mills were being built. The collapse of the Bracewell empire in 1885/1887 had allowed other entrepreneurs to step in and revitalise the industry leading to the Shed Companies. By 1900 this innovation proved so successful that shed company tenants had started to build their own mills. By 1914 there were twelve mills in Barlick and one under construction, Bancroft, and there was a mill in Salterforth. There were about 25,000 looms and not enough workers in the town to man them so Model Lodging houses were opened to house workers from outside the town.
These profits and the full employment spilled over into the town and Barlick was modernised with public water supplies, water carriage sewers and a gas works. Building started outside the old core of the town and from 1900 onwards we saw the development of the Park Road and Avenue area and Gisburn Road beyond Foresters Buildings. The town was like an ant hill with building sites all over the place and the roads must have been choked with horse drawn carts carrying stone and other materials. This activity stimulated the quarries on Tubber Hill and Salterforth drag. Retail shops proliferated and service industries like building and transport boomed. It would be hard to find a busier or more prosperous town, development had been delayed by the Bracewells but once the dead hand of their influence was lifted the town exploded.
Hindsight is 20/20 vision, what is obvious to us now was not necessarily recognised at the time. In 1903 Erskine Childers wrote 'The Riddle of the Sands' which told the fictional story about German preparations for an invasion of the East Coast of England. (Childers met a sticky end when he was executed for treason by the Irish Free State in 1922. See THIS link.) This was not the only warning voice, the rise of Germany as a political and economic power was seen as a threat to the balance of power in Europe. In addition it was known that they had imperial ambitions and this was a threat to British dominance of the seas and world trade.
I have no doubt that many of our old Barlickers had knowledge and opinions about these developments but their immediate concern was the expansion of the town, full employment and the optimistic atmosphere of the time. As late as 1914 the Nutter interests started building what became eventually Bancroft Shed. The events of 1914 stopped the build and it was not to be completed until 1920.
Looking back it would be easy to decide that these people were sleepwalking towards disaster but we should remember that there wasn't the instant media coverage and opinion that we have today. Nobody, least of all, the politicians and statesmen had any clear idea of what modern warfare would involve or indeed, what could trigger it. We can see now that all the elements of a tragedy were in place.
In 1900 Britain ruled the waves.
