One of the nice things about Jack Platt as an informant was that he was observant when he was a lad. His story is a gold mine of facts about Barlick in the early part of the last century. So, it’s 1919 and Jack is walking to and from work at Calf Hall six days a week with his mother and Annie. They are living at Amen Corner below Fanny Grey and so they have a pretty good knowledge of what’s going on between there and Barlick.
One of the key features of Barlick which strikes overseas visitors is the way the houses in the town huddle together in the valley bottom around the mills. There’s a very simple reason for this, it made life easier if you lived near your work because you had to walk there and back perhaps twice day if you came home for your dinner. Small cottages on the outskirts of the town were less convenient and so were cheaper to rent. This is why Mrs Platt and her family were at Amen Corner and also explains why they eventually became disused and were demolished. On a larger scale, this is why the village of Stock near Bracewell vanished completely.
Adding to the disadvantage was the fact that apart from one or two streets in the centre of the town, none of the roads were paved. They were dry macadam made of small stones with no capping. In dry weather they were dusty and in wet, muddy. So let’s have a look at Jack’s world in 1919, starting close to home.
There were two ways out of Amen Corner. You could either walk up a footpath which brought you out on Upper Lane between the pub and the waterworks or you could walk out on the lane that skirted the bottom of Whitham’s Park Close quarry coming out on to Salterforth Lane. This quarry, on the Foulridge side of the lane had been owned previously by Billycock Bracewell. Whitham, who had a pork butcher’s shop on Church Street, went into partnership with Bill Moss to run Park Close but this failed and Whitham carried on by himself. He lived on Salterforth Lane.
Jack said he could remember the brickworks working on the low side of the lane. It used offal and clay out of Park Close Quarry and according to Harold Duxbury the bricks were of very poor quality and this was why the enterprise failed. On the opposite side of Salterforth Lane was John Sagar’s bottom quarry. We shall hear a lot more about this later because Jack worked there.
It’s important to bear in mind that Kelbrook New Road wasn’t built until the 1930’s. The only way into Barlick was uphill on to the top lane and down Tubber Hill. This gave the quarry owners a bit of a problem. All the haulage was by horse and the slope up to the top lane was too steep for them to drag the heavy stone carts up. The solution was a small steam winch on the island at the top of Salterforth Lane. A rope was let down and attached to the front beam of the cart and the winch dragged the whole lot up to the level road at the top. Jack said that the horses got so used to stopping in the right place at the quarry entrance that when the rope was shortened because of wear, the carters had great difficulty getting the horses to go the extra yard or two to reach the hook. I’m not clear whether Sagar and Whitham joined at this winch but it would have made sense.
Both quarries tipped their waste on the sides of the road further down Salterforth Lane. A lot of this was removed for roadmaking material in the 1930’s.
Once they had reached the top lane it was a fairly easy journey for both Jack and the horses until they reached Sagar’s other quarry, Loose Games at the top of Tubber Hill where the caravan park is now. The steep hill just below here was terrible for the horses. The stone carts had only a very crude brake and in order to stop the weight carrying the horse and cart away, the carters put a shoe or ‘scotch’ under each back wheel on which the cart skidded down the hill. This didn’t always work and Jack told me that he had seen two accidents where the horses were killed on here.
He never forgot one horse that was mortally wounded when the broken shaft stuck in its side and he said the carter cradled its head and talked to it while they waited for someone to fetch a gun to shoot it. The accidents usually occurred at the top of Lane Bottoms next to where Jim Haworth, the Firewood King and noted Communist, had his hut opposite Letcliffe Lane end. Jack remembered that two of Sagar’s horses were called Robin and Charlie because he used to ride them out to pasture at another quarry owned by John Sagar behind the waterworks.
They usually walked down Barnoldswick Lane into the town past the Hey and the Dog but occasionally Jack said they took a detour to see how work was going on at Newfield Shed where Nutter Brothers were building at Gillians. On Friday March 19th 1920, for some reason, Jack and his mates Harry Grimes and George Horrocks were at a loose end and heard that there was something going on at Bancroft as the new shed had been renamed. They went down and sneaked in to watch the christening of the engine and he mentioned a picture being taken. I didn’t know about the picture of the christening at the time and so never showed it to him but I’d like to think that Jack is one of the lads peeping over the railings.
There were 800 looms in the shed when the engine was christened and by the following month the shed was weaving. On the first day, Mrs Platt, Annie and Jack were there running ten looms between them. Next week we’ll hear from Jack what it was like working in a brand new shed.
SCG/1 March 2003
1044 words.
Is Jack one of the lads on this picture?