STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

I know, it's yet another pic of the engine at Bancroft but it's different and there's a connection between it and long nights sat there steaming the shed. At the time, in 1977, I didn't have a really wide angle lens, All I had was a Leica CL with a standard 50mm lens and a 90mm. I always had the camera with me, that's why there are so many pics and on this morning I took the flash and the tripod to work with me. The flash was a small El Cheapo and not very powerful. I switched all the lights off and set the camera up on the tripod with the shutter open and then I went round the house with the flash 'painting light' from lots of angles while trying to keep myself out of the image. If you click and enlarge the picture and study the way there are no consistent shadows it becomes obvious but you'd be surprised how many of my professional snapper friends were fooled by it.

[Stanley]

One thing to note is the large can of cylinder oil on top of the HP cylinder. The warmer was on so the oil was always nice and warm and thinned down when you needed it.

[Stanley]

If you look carefully at the top of the high pressure cylinder you'll see a tin kettle sunk into the insulation. This is the original cylinder oil kettle that was with the engine right up to closure. The aperture in the insulation was cut out to the exact shape of the kettle. I think it got lost at some point.

[Stanley]

Looking at that picture I am reminded that running that engine was possibly the best job in the world.....

[Stanley]

Master of all I surveyed. They don't allow jobs like that these days, the whole mill relying on one man to do his job well and so he was left alone. Nobody ever tried to tell me how to run the job. All they were interested in was results!

[Stanley]

I've told this story before but we may have lost it when the site crashed. Peter Birtles, the managing director at Bancroft, came into the engine house one morning and found me asleep in my chair. He woke me and informed me that he didn't pay me for sleeping on the job. Further, he informed me that John Plummer my firebeater was also asleep. I asked him if he had been in the shed and was it weaving all right, he said yes. Then I asked him to look at the pressure gauge and he said we had 130psi on the clock. So I told him..... "Your weavers are all working, we have good steady steam, the engine is running perfectly and if John is asleep you can bet his hoppers are full and his fires clean so on the whole everything is running well. What you don't know is that John and I were here until 2AM this morning repairing a fractured blow-down pipe that would seriously have affected our efficiency and apart from that was dangerous. So on the whole I think we have a good case for ten minutes shut eye to help us through the day. I understand your concern but I think you ought to leave us alone to run the mill and only come down if things are obviously wrong"
He didn't actually say I was right, just muttered something about not having known that and went away leaving me alone. He never came in again.... He knew that I would have been within my rights if I had refused to start and sent for outside contractors, Brown and Pickles, to do the heavy repair. As it was we had saved him the money, kept the mill running and all it cost him was our overtime because we'd used a piece of redundant pipe off the old Cornish boiler. He should have been thanking us.....



I used to like to see John relaxing in his armchair. He was a top class man and if he was relaxing I knew that everything was running well. In my experience the good men are the ones who have time to take their ease. If you see someone running round like a headless chicken you know that they have lost control of the job.

[Stanley]

John emerging from the bowels of the earth while we were doing the repair that morning. A good man, I still miss him. We did good work together and he never baulked at hard dirty work. Not a lot of it about these days! Worth noting that in those days there was no work clothing supplied by the management..... The wives at home had to deal with the muck. The good old days.....

[Stanley]

A frosty morning at Bancroft in 1980. At one time the mill ran a couple of wagons and carted their own yarn and cloth so they had their own petrol pump at the corner of the engine house and the engine tenter supervised it. Over the years it became redundant but the small storage tank was used by the Trust as a reservoir for condenser water after the lodge was destroyed and so it is still in use to this day but the hand operated pump is long gone.

[Stanley]

Another evidence of what a relaxed place Bancroft was. Frank Bleasdale, the winding master and brother of George who used to run the engine, was a good man with the hair-clippers. Can you imagine such a thing being allowed in one of the modern pressure cooker places where employees have to carry chips round so that their activities are constantly monitored? Notice that the engine is running and the job is still going on.

[Stanley]

In the same vein....



Mary Wilkin having her lunch at her looms in 1977, she has a clean tablecloth! Mary was probably the best weaver in the shed and didn't leave her looms unless she had to. This way she was there as soon as the shafting started to turn after lunch. Embedded in this is another evidence of what a good system engine driven looms were. There was never any dispute about hours of work if the engine tenter kept good time.

[Stanley]

The workers at Bancroft loved the place. They said it was a holiday camp compared to other mills in the town. This poster is about as close as the management got to incentivising the workers.

[Stanley]

Some wartime posters survived in the mill. These were on the side of the tackler's cabin in the warehouse.....

[Stanley]

Weavers used to post their own notices on the door into the shed. Often they were poems.... (click to enlarge)



The Wheel of Life.

Author unknown. Dated 1881

We stand at the wheel of life and spin
And we draw the life threads to and fro
And the dark and the light go blending in
And the daylights come and the daylights go.

And our feet grow tired of the weary tread
And our hands grow tired with the endless toil
But each human soul must spin its thread
And wind and colour it coil by coil

We stand at the loom of life and weave
The garb that our souls must ever wear
And look at the faded web and grieve
At the broken ends and the seam of care

For we cannot see as the days go by
And the wheel whirls on in its dull routine
That we let the fibres run all awry
And that in the web they will all be seen

But all must stand at the wheel and spin
And whether the woof be good or ill
The robe that we meet our maker in
Is woven here at the weaver’s will

To the spirit guiding its work with care
A wiser than he will the web unroll
And under the shuttle of patient prayer
Will the garment shine in a perfect whole.

[When Elva Martin, a weaver at Bancroft Shed in Barlick, retired in 1978 she wrote a letter to her workmates thanking them for her leaving present and pinned it to the shed door alongside this handwritten poem.]

[Stanley]

The weaving shed door......

[Spinningweb]

A Lancashire boiler chained up on its destination by Joseph Nall, Carriers.

[Stanley]

Nice pic John....

[Stanley]

When I was running Bancroft in the 1970s there were still people about who could remember the big (9ft) Hewitt and Kellet boiler being delivered to Bancroft when the shed was completed in 1920. It came on a big bogey pulled by a traction engine and I was told that a corner of one of the houses at Townhead had to be demolished to allow it to pass. The engine parts would be delivered from Nelson using the same method. Many of the haulage firms who specialised in such jobs survived well into the 20th century. Edward Box at Manchester was one such and was later amalgamated with Pickford's Heavy Haulage.



Edward Box outfit in WW2 moving a landing craft from GGA at Audenshaw to Manchester docks.

[Stanley]

mentioning delivering heavy weights has reminded me of a story that Newton tells in the LTP. Johnny Pickles sent him and I think it was Jim Fort up to County Brook mill to install a new bearing on the waterwheel. It was a big one and must have weighed over 200lbs. Johnny wouldn't let them use the van so they had to take it on the bus! Worth looking up the transcript, it's a good story! (I think it's on 78/AG/10. The story of the new bearing is on there but the bus story might have been something Newton told me off tape.)



The shaft they fitted the bearing on is still there at County Brook.

[Stanley]

If you click on the picture of the shaft and examine the right hand end you'll see it is very badly worn, roped and tapered. It was so bad that they cast the replacement bronze step with a matching taper and didn't machine it. When Newton and Jim got it installed they set the wheel on and the bearing screamed at them and heated up immediately even though water was showering over it. Newton dropped powdered rotten brick into the bearing and it made even more noise but then started to settle down. Plenty of oil in it and a quick adjustment and it was OK. Newton said it was never touched again until the water wheel was stopped. The rotten brick had acted as a soft abrasive and helped the step to wear to the shape of the shaft. The advantage of the soft abrasive is that it doesn't embed in the bearing surfaces and cause accelerated wear afterwards, it washes out with the oil. A very old fitter's trick when dealing with hot necks.

[Bodger]

A nice project , "tengine needs a bit a fettlin"
.practicalmachinist.com/vb/antique-machinery-and-history/post-civil-war-small-box-bed-steam-engine-320612/

[Stanley]

At 6" stroke it's a big engine! Whoever made it had access to a big shaper, you can tell from the machining marks on the bottom of the bed.....
One thing that always struck me about the old engineers was the fact that unless they wanted polish for show they always left surfaces 'as machined'. I like that finish, Newton was an expert at turning parts so nicely that they needed no finishing. Like a signature.....

[Stanley]

There was a second hand Furneval engine in Clough Mill at one time that (on a larger scale) was very similar to that old engine. It was built in Accrington and they favoured very long stroke and low speed. It was never a success and Johnny Pickles said it was a wastrel. At Clough it was so bad they went back to the old beam engine coupled with the waterwheel until they finally installed Newtons favourite engine, the small Burnley Ironworks engine running at 98rpm. Newton called it 'Ticky Tocky'. The Furneval engine was converted to a tandem and installed in a mill in Clitheroe but was never a good engine....



George Hoggarth running Ticky Tocky.....

[Stanley]

The Clough engine was the one where Newton, aged fourteen at the time, pointed out what was wrong with the engine when all the best brains at his father's firm were baffled. At the time Johnny said "That's it! In future I'm sending Newton out to engines!" He did as well and Newton says that until he gained a reputation he had some interesting moments when this lad turned up to diagnose a fault on an engine run by an old bloke who had spent his life with engines. It didn't take long and at that time he was seen as a sort of infant prodigy.



Bob Fort and Newton Pickles at about 11 years old.... They caught 'em young in those days!

[Stanley]

How many lads that age are going out for Sunday walks and picking flowers? (Let alone wearing school caps!)

[Stanley]

Neston was working full time with his dad by the time he was 13. At first there was a bit of 'boss's son' syndrome but that soon evaporated and he was learning full time from all the old fitters and machinists. Before that he was very friendly with the bloke who ran the Wellhouse engine, a very good man who came to Barlick from Rochdale. He used to go in there any chance he had and always started the engine after the breakfast break which meant he was sometimes late for school. He told me that was where he learned his valve setting and the finer points of lap and lead in valves.... 'Learning at Nellie's elbow' is not favoured today but in some cases can be far more effective than the best university courses when it came to the real world. Especially with someone with Newton's temperament who would have been useless in Further Education. That was how he taught me and any expertise I have now in the shed or with engines comes directly from Newton....