DIRTY WORK ON BUTTS BECK.

[Stanley]

DIRTY WORK ON BUTTS BECK.


Written 4 December 2000

I had a request for some information about the Coates mills. As I am all in favour of cutting down on the work, I decided to kill two birds with one stone and write it as an article for the View. That’s right, some serious history this week, there will be questions afterwards!
The first thing to make clear is that as far as the historian is concerned, there are two Coates Mills. There is the original mill, long since demolished which stood at the bottom of what is now Rolls Royce car park next to Crow Nest, we’ll call this Old Coates, and the new mill just above Coates canal bridge which is now Hope Engineering. (Demolished in 2009)
Another source of possible confusion as regards Old Coates mill is the fact that one of the partners in the early 19th century was William Bracewell, together with his brothers, Thomas and Christopher. I refer to these as the Bracewells of Coates. They were sons of William Bracewell of Coates the brother of Christopher Bracewell of Green End at Earby who was born at Coates but moved to Earby in 1813. Christopher of Green End had a son called William who became William Bracewell of Newfield Edge in Barlick and was nicknamed ‘Billycock’ possibly to distinguish him from the other Bracewells, who were of course his cousins. Billycock started to build Butts in 1846 and New Mill, later called Wellhouse in 1854. He also owned the Corn Mill, Ouzledale Mill, was in the process of building the new gas works next to the Corn Mill and had many other interests in Barlick and further afield when he died in 1885. A further possible confusion arises here because he had a son called Christopher George.
You might wonder why I am digressing into Billycock history, the reason is that knowledge of him is essential to following the Old Coates story. Bracewell of Newfield edge was a combative business man, his aim was as near total control of the town as he could get. One of his main weapons was control of water supplies and I have much work to do on this subject before it will become completely clear. However, I have enough hard evidence to make some reasonable assumptions about the areas where I have no firm evidence. Let’s concentrate on two instances of this effort to control water.
First and least tangible at the moment is the fact that at some time after 1846 he bought Ouzledale Mill on Forty Steps which was a saw mill at the time. Logic says it pre-dates Mitchell’s Mill (Clough) because I find it impossible to believe that if Clough had been the first build, Mitchell wouldn’t have made sure that he controlled the Ouzledale resource. The fact that he didn’t suggests that it existed before he built his mill. Ouzledale dam was at a higher level than Butts Mill and I suspect that Billycock’s intention was to divert the water to enable expansion at Butts which was short of water. This would have of course had an impact on Mitchell’s business.
For some reason he never pursued this possibility. I don’t know why, perhaps he couldn’t get enough land to expand at Butts, perhaps Mitchell put up opposition because I have no doubt that he would see the danger. So Billycock concentrated his efforts on improving Calf Hall Beck by building Springs Dam below Dark Hill. There is a possible clue confirming Mitchell's control of Gillian's Beck because Bancroft Shed couldn’t be built using Gillians Beck as a water resource until an alliance by marriage was made between the Nutter and Slater families early in the 20th century, Slater owned Clough at the time and crucially, he appears to have controlled the riparian rights back to what was effectively the source of Gillians Beck. There is further evidence that supports this, Gillians Mill, higher up on the beck, never used the main beck as its power resource when it was built in the mid 1780s, it used a small tributary coming down behind Bancroft Farm. The inference from this is that Mitchell got the rights up to the source when he built his mill and Slater inherited them when he bought what became Clough.
One last piece of evidence about Gillians is that when I was engineer at Bancroft I was always puzzled by the fact that there was a by-pass pipe round the dam and provision to send all the water in Gillians directly down to Clough. Sidney Nutter once told me that he thought this dated back to the building of the mill when there was an agreement with Slaters that in hot weather if Clough was struggling for vacuum Bancroft was obliged to send the water direct to Clough instead of warming it in the lodge after use for condensing. This was a big problem when there was a succession of steam mills on a watercourse. I have plenty of hard evidence for this in respect of other mills in the town. The bottom line is that there is enough evidence to suspect that Bracewell appears to have bought Ouzledale to put pressure on Mitchell but failed.
The second instance of this use of water as a weapon against business rivals concerns the water resource at the Corn Mill which relates directly to the fate of Old Coates. The Corn Mill is probably the oldest established use of water power in Barnoldswick. The earliest reference I have so far is November 1640 when it changed hands. Therefore it certainly pre-dated the water powered textile industry and almost certainly any use of water power for sawing wood. It is certainly the best water site in the town as it controls Butts Beck which is formed by the combination of Gillians and Calf Hall becks, the major resources in the town. It had a very large dam stretching all the way back to Dam Head on Gisburn Road, which is now a garage site, and a good flow.
Whatever the problems Billycock had with expansion at Butts, what is certain is that by shortly after 1850 he had made the decision to build New Mill, now known as Wellhouse. There is evidence that this decision puzzled many people in the town because the site he chose for the New Mill had no significant water resource. Many of the legends in the town about underground tunnels connected the ancient monastic site at Calf Hall with Gill Church date from this time. Nothing certain has surfaced yet about watercourses installed by Billycock originating at Butts but I have been told that they did exist. Personally I can’t understand why because he controlled the beck by ownership of the Corn Mill. However, what is certain, and I have hard evidence for this, is that he put a six inch cast iron pipe in from the Corn Mill dam to the New Mill. His intention all along had been to run the new mill with Butts Beck water. This pipe was in place as late as July 1890 when the Calf Hall Shed Company approached the Barnoldswick Gas and Light Company to explore using it to get water from them. So, we have a situation where we know that Bracewell had the capability to divert water from the Butts Beck to what is now Wellhouse. We need to look at Old Coates now to see what Billycock did and what were its consequences.
Information about Old Coates is thin on the ground but grows gradually. There is no reason to suppose that there was a mill on the site before the water-powered textile era, so until I get evidence to the contrary I am assuming that it started as a water-powered textile mill shortly after 1785 when the Arkwright patents were overturned and the technology became widely available. I have evidence that there was water powered weaving in the mill around 1840. Johnny Pickles told his son Newton that there was a beam engine in there before it finished and there is a photograph of it showing a chimney so we know this is true. William Atkinson in his History of Old Barlick says that illegal whisky was distilled in the ‘gas house’. This must mean that a gas plant had been installed for lighting the mill, the 1871 sale document confirms this. The 1892 OS map shows a round structure to the east of the mill next to the access road which could have been the gasholder.
I have no record of who built the mill but as the Bracewell Brothers were the local landowners it looks as though it might be them or their father, crucially, before Billycock Bracewell moved into the town from Earby. At that time they had no problems with water, they were getting the full flow of the Butts Beck and were in as good a position as the Corn Mill. They ran the mill until 1860 and had looms in Clough Mill as well. In fact, in the 1851 census, Christopher and Thomas are recorded as living together at Clough House next to Clough mill and are noted as being in partnership with William, who lived at Coates, in an enterprise which employed 60 men, 44 women, 15 boys and 9 girls. In 1860 there is a record of William Bracewell’s bankruptcy and the other brothers abandoned all their interests in the town. There is a record in Slater’s Directory of 1871 of Christopher Bracewell and Brothers at Waterloo Mill, Clitheroe. The question is of course, what happened?
This is where I have to fly a kite because I haven’t got enough hard evidence yet. Remember that Billycock had put the pipe in to supply his New Mill from Corn Mill dam. This meant that he was diverting a considerable quantity of water from the Butts Beck with a consequent reduction in flow to Old Coates. I don’t think this would have been a serious matter when the beck had a full flow but would certainly have had serious consequences in drought conditions. We know that by this time Billycock had a steam engine in the Corn Mill so there was no imperative for him to put water over his wheel which would obviously have fed Old Coates. In low flow conditions, as long as he had enough water in the dam to condense his engine and provide boiler feed, he could let all the rest go down to Wellhouse. I think this was enough to make Old Coates unviable. The circumstantial evidence that this was so is the fact that six years after the New Mill started, the Bracewell Brothers moved their interests out of the town. The Cotton Famine caused by the American Civil War was just starting then and this may also have been a factor but can’t have been the only reason, whatever the difficulty was, it must have started before the ‘Hard Times’.
It looks as though a man called James Nuttall bought the mill then. I think he had the idea that he could make the mill viable again by using the water from the Foul Syke, also known as Crow Nest Syke, in Eastwood Bottoms which brings water down from below Wellhouse mill into the Old Coates dam where the Rolls Royce car park is now. This didn’t carry a lot of water but could have been augmented by the Bowker drain which had been put in by Bracewell to collect all the water from the North side of the canal plus any leakage from the canal. One thing is certain, in later years, after Bracewell died, it was regarded as free water. Later on, under the Calf Hall Shed Company, Wellhouse ran exclusively off this water but strangely enough, had to pay the Roundell Estate for the privilege.
Whatever his intentions the next thing we hear is that in 1860 there is a case in the Chancery Court of the Duchy of Lancaster between Billycock Bracewell and James Nuttall over the rights to the water from the Bowker Drain and we have to surmise that Nuttall lost because the mill stayed empty and the local farmer, John Raw of Coates Farm, stored his hay in it. I think we can make another assumption here, that Billycock bought the mill once he had convinced Nuttall that he couldn’t run it, there is a sale notice dated 1871 that mentions the old mill. The reason I say this is that there is a mention in the diary of William Dugdale of Barlick that on the 20th August 1874 the boiler was removed from Old Coates Mill and taken to the Ingleton Coal Pits. The crucial thing about this is that in July of the same year Billycock bought the Ingleton coal field. Billycock died in 1885 and Billy Brooks told me that he remembered the mill being demolished when he was about ten years old, this would make it about 1892.
The thing that fascinates me about this story is the picture of cut-throat competition it paints. There’s more, but I’ve run out of space this week, next week we’ll see what James Nuttall did next. Thanks for the feedback I’m getting, it all helps.

4 December 2000