AND SOME THERE BE WHICH HAVE NO MEMORIAL

[Stanley]

AND SOME THERE BE WHICH HAVE NO MEMORIAL

4 August 2004

I’ve always been a sucker for the unsung hero. The world is full of forgotten people because our collective memories are so short. In the past there was little that could be done about this unless someone who cared had access to a medium that could publish the story. With the advent of the internet and global publishing we can all do something about perceived injustice. It goes without saying that this piece will be subjective and possibly factually flawed, nobody can hold the complete truth. So what follows is my personal view of a course of events which I consider important enough to bring to the world’s notice.
It is always dangerous to try to identify the genesis of a field of study. In the case of Industrial Archaeology this start point is more than usually blurred. We have to distinguish between descriptions of technology which were recorded to promulgate knowledge and research by historians interested in economics and industry as adjuncts to their own field of study. I have read disorganised accounts by antiquarians published as early as the beginning of the 19th century which to my mind were pure industrial history. I suppose that Smiles’ great work ‘The Lives of the Engineers’ is probably one of the best examples.
My first encounter with a book that seemed to me to be verging on Industrial Archaeology was Abraham Newell’s ‘A Hillside View of Industrial History’ which was published in 1925 and was intended to be an introduction to the subject for students. This triggered me off and in the 1970s I found that there were many authors venturing into this field, R A Buchanan, Owen Ashmore, Kenneth Hudson, Arthur Raistrick, these are just some of the men who spring to mind. The Association for Industrial Archaeology was formed and IA began to be regarded as a serious subject in its own right rather than an adjunct to economic history.
The academic front wasn’t the only place that things were stirring. The economic and industrial changes after WW2 spelled the demise of many old industries and people on the ground were beginning to notice and regret the wholesale destruction of what had been vital elements, not only of industry but of local communities. It is at this level that we will find the heroes who are the subject of this piece.
We should take a pace backwards here and look at the circumstance that prompted me to write this. I was visited by two good men, Derek Way and John Ecclestone who were collecting a series of interviews with anyone who had any input into the early days of Quarry Bank Mill Museum at Styal. I was associated in an advisory capacity in the early days with the museum and one of the questions they asked me was how the replacement water wheel for Quarry Bank, the wheel at Glasshouses Mill, Pately Bridge, was found.
A few weeks previously I had a conversation with a man called Chris Aspin of Helmshore, a noted authority on water power in the North West and a personal friend. I was asking him about a colleague of his, Derek Pilkington, who died aged 60 in 1991 and Chris told me the story of how they had been consulted about what was then the proposed Quarry Bank Museum.
A man called David Sekers contacted them in 1979, he had been responsible for the creation of Gladstone Pottery Museum at Etruria in the Potteries and had got the job of starting the Quarry Bank enterprise. I know David well and one of his great strengths is that he will admit his ignorance and seek guidance. He knew about Chris and Derek and their work at Helmshore and asked them for advice on how to get hold of old textile machinery. Derek and Chris told him that there was no problem, everything he needed was available at scrap prices or even free and they gave him the contacts. Problem solved.
Just as he was leaving, and as Chris says, evidently as an afterthought, David said “I don’t suppose there is any chance of finding a large suspension water wheel we could use?” I suspect that he had a shock when Derek told him that he knew where one was available and it could be bought for £1,000. This is the wheel that is installed at Quarry Bank but that's another story. The interesting thing about this encounter is the reason why David went to see Chris and Derek in the first place.
During the late 1960s Chris and Derek were hot news in terms of Industrial History. Television crews from all over the world visited them. The Burghers of Ghent sent a deputation to seek their advice on a new museum, visitors came from America and many other countries to look at what they had done and assess its worth.
Ten years before, Chris and Derek, as members of the thriving Helmshore Local History Society had noted the speed at which the local textile industry was being destroyed. The main element of this was a specialised branch of the textile industry know in the trade as hard waste condenser spinning. This industry took the waste fibre and yarn from local mills, imported specialised waste from abroad, mainly Russia, and by a process of breaking down, blending and mule spinning re-cycled this ‘waste’ into a valuable soft cotton yarn much prized in the industry particularly by manufacturers making cloths for raising, in other words, with a nap.
There was an even older remnant of the early local industry, a fulling mill driven by a water wheel using old-fashioned stocks to process woollen cloth. This was Higher Mill at Helmshore, still being run by the family who had owned it for generations but almost as a hobby. Early in the 1960s it became known that Higher Mill was to be closed and Chris and Derek decided that something had to be done about this, the question was what?
Their first idea was for the the local history society to buy the mill and preserve it. When they looked into the matter of funding they found that like many things in life, it wasn’t as simple as it looked. In order to qualify for funding they needed to set up a charitable trust to administer the enterprise.
I’m not sure of the exact date but Chris and Derek got their men together and formed The Higher Mill Trust. The founding Trustees were Dr Rhodes Boyson, Owen Ashmore, Walter Nutter (Managing Director of the research department at Textile Machinery Makers Ltd.), Walter Hardman (joint Managing Director of L&W Whitaker who owned the adjoining spinning mill) and Maurice Edmondson, a locally born man who had worked in the Ministry of Education. The thing that strikes me about this is that there are no conservation or museums people, an indication of how radical this scheme was. The object of the Trust, and this was the really innovative idea, was to preserve the mill just as it was and run it as a working museum so that the public could see the fulling, drying and raising processes actually being performed.
In those days the Scheduling of Industrial Monuments (or the equivalent in those days) was the responsibility of the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works in London. Protection was applied for and eventually given. The original file still exists at English Heritage and is numbered AA/100014/1. Anyone conversant with the Civil Service file numbering conventions will realise that this is a very early file in the series. The men from the ministry involved and named in the file were: Lord Winterbottom, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. T E Radice, Lord Winterbottom’s Private Secretary. A W Cunliffe, the Assistant Director of the “Ancient Monuments” Department. Dr. Craig, the Inspector of Ancient Monuments. D G Luckes, The Ancient Monuments architect. R Tatton-Brown and R G Jones, two civil servants in the ministry. (If any of you are wondering how I managed to get access to the file in the days before Freedom of Information, I had an ally in the higher echelons of government who totally agreed with my efforts to record the enterprise of these two men.)
In 1967 the Trust bought Higher Mill for £2000 and after a short interval started running it for the public. For the next six years they hosted groups of visitors who came from all over the world to see what was in those days, a brilliant piece of innovation in museum practice. Redundant machinery was being operated and interpreted in context by using it for the purpose for which it was intended. After spinning and weaving, fulling is the most ancient textile process and this was the only place in the world where the public could see it in its original setting.
All this was not accomplished without problems. Chris mentions particularly the architect who they thought was working for them pro bono, he miscalculated the scale of the heating problem by omitting to allow for heat losses through the roof and then sent them ‘a huge bill’ which was the subject of threatened legal action because it wasn’t paid promptly!
There was friction between the County Museums Service and Chris and Derek over the running of the Trust and all this came to a head in 1974 when they found that all the locks had been changed and in effect, the Lancashire Museums Service had thrown them out of the mill they had saved. This was a crushing blow for these two good men and they severed all connection with both mills.
Meanwhile, the much larger hard waste condenser spinning mill next door was scheduled for closure, it was owned by L&W Whitaker who made it known they were open to any proposals to preserve it. The Lancashire Museums Service, under the leadership of John Blundell got it scheduled and took it over. Chris and Derek argued against this as in their opinion there were far better mills which deserved saving but their views were ignored. The old guard at the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works had gone and Chris says that they offered to meet the new Inspector to explain their case but they were never consulted.
It isn’t my place to comment on these events or criticise the actions that caused them. What concerns me is that Chris and Derek were in effect written out of history. I have had a long association with what is now the Lancashire Textile Museum and have never once heard or seen their names mentioned as the innovators who first started the enterprise. Whatever caused this rift it should not be allowed to obscure the names of two unsung heroes. Chris Aspin and the late Derek Pilkington deserve to be recognised for being in the forefront of the movement towards the modern concept of the working museum. Chris still recalls with pleasure the deep well of enthusiasm and support they tapped at the Ministry of Public Buildings and Works. He recalls a stream of visitors from there coming up and promising total support. One man, Chris can’t remember his name but he was a Knight of the Realm and had reputedly been one of Winston Churchill’s secretaries, urged them to “leave the cobwebs alone!”
Those were heady days, Chris isn’t bitter about the affair, but was saddened by it. He and Derek had a great store of knowledge and information about the early water-powered textile industry and it was a shame that this was never fully utilised. Chris published his life work this year, ‘The Water Spinners’ which is a magisterial overview of the early textile industry and the product of forty years painstaking research.
So I present you with two names, Chris Aspin and Derek Pilkington. Please note them and their story, they should be remembered and honoured as two important pioneers in a field which was to become a valuable concept in museum interpretation and what we now call Industrial Archaeology.

4 August 2004