BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS(7)

[Stanley]

BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS(7)

06 July 2001

It’s 1932, Ernie is 16 years old and weaving on four looms at Bancroft. In those days before regulations were brought in which led to re-spacing of looms there were 1100 looms in the weaving shed at Bancroft. They were crammed in as tight as they could get them.
I asked Ernie if he could ever remember any accidents at Bancroft and he said that there were only minor ones apart from a young woman who was killed when a fire door fell on to her, he wasn’t sure whether this was while he was there or shortly before. Bancroft was still running on the old four loom system, only very good weavers or those with learners as helpers had 6 looms. All the weavers were paid by the piece and Ernie reckoned that a good weaver could earn ten bob for each loom. (50p.) The cloth pieces were 100 yards long in those days and if you had a really good week on good sorts with no mishaps you could get two pieces off a loom in the week. Ernie said that he was sure this was deliberate, the bosses had the loom speeds and cloth lengths worked out so that the weavers had an incentive to work as hard as possible. He said that a good weaver was like a flash of lightning moving round the alley, they begrudged stopping for anything, even going to the toilet. Roy Wellock used to tell a story about an old weaver he worked with who had an old Nuttall’s Mint tin next to his loom and he made water in that and emptied it at break times.
There were no sweepers or oilers in that system, the weavers did all this for themselves, they carried their own weft and cloth and were under pressure all the time. You may remember when I was describing Bancroft I said that the tackler's wage was based on what his weavers produced. They knew exactly how much each weaver was getting because they brought the pay round to the weavers each Friday in a small tin on a tray with square wooden divisions and there was a wage slip in each. If a tackler had a weaver that wasn’t performing and they knew of a better weaver looking for a job, they would get the bad weaver sacked and set the good one on. Ernie said that this method of paying the wage to the weaver went on until the late sixties.
Early on in 1932 work was short at Bancroft and they were on short time. Margaret and her eldest son Fred were weaving for B & E M Holden at Calf Hall Shed and they had plenty of work on so she went to the boss, Edward Holden, and asked him if he could find some looms for Ernie. He said yes and when Ernie went down he put him on six looms! As Ernie said, they must have been short of weavers! This was pig heaven, he was getting over £2 every week but this was interrupted on July 12th when a flash flood caused by a cloudburst on the Weets raised the level of the Calf Hall Beck so much that it burst through the floor of the shed and stopped production. It took about a month to get back into full swing and Ernie settled down on four looms.
On the 31st of March 1934 B and E M Holden wove out at Calf Hall and Ernie got a job with Cairns and Lang at Westfield as a sweeper. They were trying the eight loom system out at Westfield and as part of the deal with the weavers certain jobs like cloth-carrying, sweeping and oiling were taken off them so they could manage the extra looms. The wage for sweeping was 27/- a week (£1-35p.) and there were seven of them. After a while they went on strike and got an extra shilling but had to do more work for it. Ernie was getting a bit fed up with this but then the management decided to do away with the sweepers and go back onto the four loom system. This meant they were short of weavers so Ernie was offered 4 looms and he was back on at least £2 a week. He gave his mother £1 and kept the rest for himself and reckoned he was a ‘Weekend Millionaire’! He was so flush that he went out and bought a brand new Hercules bicycle on the ‘drip system’ at half a crown a week. (twelve and a half new pence)
In 1935 Cairns and Lang wove out and Ernie found himself out of a job, he was ‘standing for work’ at Pickles at Barnsey Shed. Each morning, along with about fifty other job-seekers he would go and stand in the warehouse at Pickles and wait for the engine to start, if any weavers were absent the tackler would come out and select a weaver. If there were no looms they would shout ‘All Up!’ and that meant another day to ponder on. Ernie was on the dole and had to sign on saying that he was standing for work but hadn’t been successful. He particularly resented the way the ‘Little Hitler’ as he called him, behind the counter, used to treat them.
One day, after being turned away yet again from Barnsey, he was stood on Long Ing canal bridge mulling over whether he ought to join the army when the manager at Long Ing Shed walked by. He was called Alf Peckover and Ernie had known him for years. He stopped and asked Ernie what he was doing and as soon as he heard he was out of work offered him a job sweeping. Ernie took the job, started straight away and stayed at Long Ing until he was called up for the army at 23 years old in 1939.
This pattern of intermittent employment and the feeling of not being in charge of his own destiny had an effect on Ernie, he started reading the paper and taking an interest in politics. He was drawn in particular to a bloke called Jim Haworth, the ‘Firewood King’, who was one of the leaders of the Communist Party in Barlick at the time, he lived at Lane Bottoms. Ernie used to go to the meetings and listen to Jimmy Rushton speaking and he said it all seemed to make sense to him. He said in later years that “Communism was a bloody good thing, the only problem was it didn’t work!” .
Ernie recalled one meeting on Jepp Hill in 1932. There was an industrial dispute on between the 27th of August and the 27th of September over the introduction of the ‘More Looms System’ and Dotcliffe Mill at Kelbrook was blacklegging. Rushton said that they’d go down there the following day and knock the belts off, he told them all to take a bottle of water to drink and winked at them, Ernie said this was because the bottles were to be used as weapons. The following day a crowd of about two hundred of them marched off down to Kelbrook but when they got to the village they were confronted by a band of extremely large policemen!
The police soon broke the company up and Ernie and his mate found themselves running down towards Earby, their intention was to come back to Barlick via Salterforth. As they were passing Earby police station a bobby saw Ernie’s mate had an injured hand and said “Come on inside lad and we’ll look after that for you”. Ernie smelt a rat and legged it again but his mate was taken into the police station, treated kindly but charged with causing a riot. He was summonsed and fined £7, a lot of money in those days. Ernie said it took him years to pay it off.
Ernie’s interest in politics grew stronger, he said that he knew something was wrong, there were the manufacturers living in big houses and driving round in motor cars and there he was with his britches arse out and no work! He gradually came to the conclusion that the only difference between the mill workers in Barlick and Negro slaves on an American cotton plantation was that the weavers weren’t torn away from their homes but the slaves were fed and clothed. He was particularly bitter about old folk on pensions, as he said, how could anyone be expected to live off ten shillings a week (50p.) even in those days. I asked him if it was possible to starve to death in Barlick in the thirties and he said that if you were old and infirm he was sure you could. He said that the verdict at an inquest would be ‘Found dead’ whereas the truth was they had either died of malnutrition or hypothermia.
Ernie could get quite worked up on this subject and it was easy to understand why. He had been in poverty himself and suffered the consequences and had seen what it did to other people. When you think of the number of people that had the same experience the only wonder is that a Labour government wasn’t returned with a landslide majority every election! I asked Ernie about this and he was quite sure what the answer was, he reckoned that the biggest part of the working class were voting the same way as their bosses on the grounds that they knew what was good for the country. Margaret always voted Conservative as did all her family, Ernie said they were “Bloody ignorant!”
I’m very conscious that we’ve spent seven weeks on Ernie so I’m going to leave him for a while and have a change of subject. I’m quite sure from the amount of feedback I have had these last few weeks that a lot of you have enjoyed being reminded what life was like in those days. We sometimes hear the phrase ‘the good old days’ and when I look really hard at what life was like I wonder how anybody could regard what I find as good. I asked Ernie about this and he said that life was simpler then, the hard bits were bad and there was real poverty in Barlick but I was struck by the fact that on numerous occasions when he was describing something really serious he’d burst out laughing. His theory was that people were brainwashed into low expectations. They saw nothing wrong in saving for a year and living very narrow lives so they could afford a week at Blackpool.
I have always said that it’s impossible to judge a window in time like our look at the 1930’s unless you can see it through the same eyes as the people who lived then. I think the thing that impresses me most is the miserable lot that women had. Ernie himself comments on this, he says that some men regarded women as chattels, not partners, they saw nothing wrong in giving their wives a pittance to run the house and spending the rest in the pub. Think of the drain on Margaret’s system of multiple pregnancies and malnutrition because she fed her kids before herself. The nice thing is that she lived to be 74 and had a far better experience at the end of her life than she did in the beginning. I’m glad of that but I can’t forget the women of the generation before like Sarah Ann Rocky who finished up in dire poverty on 50p a week. Things have changed, and thank God for it.

SCG/06 July 2001