FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

Jack gives a very good description of sawing stone and reminds us how cruel moving stone from the quarries by horse was. Only timber getting in woodland was more damaging.
That's just reminded me of something I found out when I was researching early road transport. I had always imagined that the horses used for the fast stage coaches would be top of the range but not so. The operators bought horses that had faults like being blind in an eye (or even two!) and ran them until they dropped. We might get nostalgic about horse transport but we shouldn't forget how hard it was on some of them.

[Tizer]

Did you watch the TV programme on Clyde Puffers presented by David Hayman? Marvellous stuff, lots of old photos and he talked with men who'd worked on them in the old days. Shovelling coal into those big buckets, sometimes in the night. Sailing in dangerous seas to the outer isles.

[Tripps]

Yes - I enjoyed it - being a fan of the Para Handy series. I think I've still got some recorded VHS tapes. They still play you know, just connect the player with a SCART lead to the TV and all will be well. Must say though, tht I only do that for the novelty value now - youtube is much more convenient.
Heard them say that they had to carry 20 tons of coal, and 20 tons of water - didn't leave enough space for the cargo compared to diesel engine ships.

Hayman doesn't seem to make much fuss about it but -

"In 2001 he founded the humanitarian charity Spirit Aid which is dedicated to children of the world whose lives have been devastated by war, genocide, poverty, abuse or lack of opportunity at home and abroad. Hayman is currently Head of Operations of the charity which undertakes humanitarian relief projects from Kosovo to Guinea-Bissau, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Malawi and South Africa."

[Tizer]

Thanks for the comment about Hayman. I don't watch much TV or films so his name hadn't registered with me as connecting with anything else (I ought to get out a bit more). I simply enjoyed the Clyde Puffers and the Clydebuilt programmes and liked his presentation, he shows a lot of empathy and compassion. I had a look at the Spirit Aid web site and I can see where that empathy and compassion is doing good works. LINK

I enjoyed the puffer man telling Hayman how when they did the Islay runs they used to drill a small hole in one of the whisky barrels and drain off some of liquor, then close it off and smudge it over with dirt. Then, with a smile on his face, he said: "Of course, that was only at Christmas". For anyone who hasn't seen the programme `Scotland's Vital Spark: The Clyde Puffer' it's available here on iPlayer: LINK

[Stanley]

There are episodes of Para Handy on Youtube if you search.....



The Glenlight making the last delivery to Eigg by puffer. Not sure of the date, I think it was the 1950s. She was Diesel of course.....

[Stanley]

I'm on my water kick again and it's worth looking at this image of Wellhouse Mill in 1963. By that time one of the two dams had been filled in (The one to the East) but the main one was still in place. If you look at the CHSC minute books you'll find that the question of adequate water supplies crops up all the time. One solution was a 185ft deep well on the corner of the dam but it failed to provide a solution. (It's still there of course!)

[Stanley]

I tripped over something in the long grass yesterday which explains some puzzling aspects of the ownership of Coates Hall. Here it is....

Grassington lead mines and Coates Hall.

When Mick and Vicky visited me the other day (October 2016) they gave me a book that they had which was of no interest to them but they suspected I might like. It is 'British Mining No. 46. The Grassington Mines by M C Gill.' One of the excellent monographs published by the Northern Mines Research Society.
O page 18 I found this in a section which examined 'THE END OF CUSTOMARY LAW AT GRASSINGTON'.

'The mines were still owned by small partnerships in the 1740s but, while miners still held shares in them, landowners were becoming the principal shareholders. The latter were not only local but also came from many other places including Swaledale, Airedale and Lancashire. For example, William Drake of Coates Hall, Barnoldswick, had interests in a number of mines and when he died his estate and mining shares were inherited by his godson, William Bagshaw of Derbyshire. The latter family had interests at Grassington before then and a Mr Bagshaw of Derbyshire joined with Tennent's claim to the rights to the Castaway vein. (A long running dispute over rights to mine a vein at Grassington.)
William Bagshaw had mining interests in Derbyshire and with his partners was involved in 40 Meers at Grassington, plus 13 in the Conistone Liberty at Mossdale. The majority of the two dozen or so people employed were at Mossdale.

[I was always puzzled as to how the ownership had moved from Drake to Bagshaw. This explains it. I have an idea that this links into the disputes between Bagshaw and the Canal Company and possibly the Badgery Papers but I haven't identified this yet.]

[Stanley]

I've found the evidence I knew existed about the Bagshawes and the canal company. I've posted it as 'John Bagshawe'.

[Stanley]

The Badgery Papers are still nagging me!
Reading the account of John Bagshawe's altercation with the canal company reminded me that it explained to me the course of the old road down through the field below the canal towards Greenberfield.

[Stanley]

Looking at the canal again reminds me of the fact that when an army of navvies descended on the district and dug an enormous hole right through the town it must have been amazing. Nothing like that had ever been seen in the town and suddenly it became practical to move a load of forty tons with one horse! Forget the space race or computers, I doubt if we can fully appreciate what a shock it was and of course it triggered so much development as coal became available at an economic price.

[Stanley]

The advent of cheap coal was of course the trigger for the use of steam in the mills. This spawned a new business, the coal merchants and a horse drawn local transport system.Until the arrival of the railway later in the 19th century the coal wharf at Coates served Barlick and the one at Salterforth served Earby. Before the advent of the New Road the road to Earby through Salterforth village must have been very busy. We often forget that amongst other things, Salterforth was a canal boat building centre as well.

[Stanley]

When the railway opened and the coal yard was established it became a hub for the new business of coal merchants supplying mainly the domestic market. This was where coal was unloaded and bagged in one hundredweight Hessian sacks. (50kg approx.) One such merchant was Pete Bilbrough, he was Billycock Bracewell's chief engineer and operated out of the Wellhouse premises later occupied by Henry Brown and later Brown and Pickles. When the Bracewell empire collapsed in 1885 he tried a new profession, coal merchant and prospered.

[Stanley]

The mills were served by 'coal agents'. They dealt direct with the privately owned collieries and had considerable bargaining power because they were the distributive link between the pit head and the customers. They dealt in boat loads of coal, forty tons at a time, and these were the units used by the mills when ordering. Until the advent of the railway Coates Wharf served Barlick and Salterforth supplied Earby. The coal was unloaded by hand and transported to the mills in two ton tipping carts.



A typical scene in a mill yard as coal was delivered.

[Stanley]

There must have been hundreds of coal cart deliveries every day but we never see them in contemporary street scenes. I wonder if they did the pics on Sundays?

[Stanley]

This insignificant marker reminds of the oft forgotten fact that before the inter war years the only two routes into Barlick from Earby/Salterforth was either Cross Lane or the very steep climb up the ridge via Salterforth Lane to the High Lane over Upper Hill.

[Stanley]

In the Barnoldswick Manorial Court Rolls we find the following entry: ‘17th April 1733. Every person using the way from Salterforth Town Stoops to Barnoldswick Coates with cart or carriage or any other loads (not having the right to be there) in the mercy of the Lords [fined] 4/-‘. This must be the old road from the boundary at Salterforth to Coates, Cross Lane. This was not a public road as part of it at Rainhall was later designated a private road. From this later judgement we also know that it was not considered of sufficient standard for wheeled vehicles. This is the first direct evidence I know for the existence of wheeled vehicle traffic in Barnoldswick and is proof of the pressure that was growing for adequate roads for such vehicles. The owners of this way were trying to reduce the wear on it by excluding wheeled traffic and hence the expense to them of repairing it.
Nuggets like this are gems of information because we can make certain deductions from them. I noted yesterday that from Salterforth you had two choices if you wanted to go the Barlick, Salterforth Drag or Cross Lane. Wear and tear on horses plus the fact that a steep hill cut down on payload on a wheeled vehicle meant that Cross Lane must have been the favoured route. No wonder that wear and tear was a problem. One has to wonder what the meaning of the phrase 'not having the right to be there' was. Apart from those owning property on the route who else would have a 'right'. Is this an indication that it was possible to come to an accommodation with the landowners? In effect a private toll? We can only speculate but knowing the way the world works it wouldn't surprise me if the local landowners were taking advantage of having a level route as opposed to the significant obstacle of Salterforth Drag.

[Stanley]

Just lost my reply due to a 'General Error' attributed to mySQL. I shall, try again!
The steep slope of Salterforth Lane was a mixed blessing for the operators of Park Close and Sagar's Lower Quarry. One the one hand it allowed cheap and efficient transport of setts to the canal by gravity but was a significant problem for stone destined for Barlick via the upper lane and Tubber Hill. You might wonder why they didn't go the long way round via Cross Lane but we have to take into account the greater distance, the condition of the road and most important, the fact that going downhill with a horse and a heavily loaded stone cart was more dangerous than going uphill. Jack Platt gives an account of a horse being killed near Lane Bottoms when the load ran away, went into the ditch and a broken shaft impaled the horse.
I have no evidence for the use of trace horses to get the carts up on to High Lane but they must have used them in the early days. Later a steam winch was installed on the triangle at the top of the lane and assisted the carts up the hill.

[Stanley]

At the end of the Great War, many ex-WD lorries came on the market and people like the quarry owners were quick to adopt them and at this point the horses and the steam winch became redundant. See Jack Platt in the LTP for an account of the adventure of changing over to motor vehicles!

[Stanley]

An early Albion wagon very similar to the ex-WD vehicles that came on the market after the Great War. Solid tyres, acetylene or oil lamps, no driver protection and low powered petrol engines with inadequate gearing and brakes. Despite all this they speedily displaced horses and the opportunity to set up general haulage firms was grabbed by several people in Barlick Read Emma Clark's transcripts in the LTP for her husband, Billy Clark, and how he set up one of the first such businesses. Read Jack Platt for his account of the early days. When Sir Amos Nelson built Gledstone Hall using direct labour, he had a very early motor lorry driven by Percy Graham. His first job every morning was to go round picking workers up and one day he was stopped in Earby when a bobby overtook him on his bicycle and booked him for 'Driving at a furious pace'. Remember that the roads were all the old water-bound Macadam surfaces and they soon started to break down under the increased traffic driving road improvements.



This road was heavily used by the lorries from the quarries and would have been virtually destroyed from 1915 onwards. This triggered investment in roads and tar spraying and chipping.

[Stanley]

One of the things that strikes me whenever I look at images of the town from around 1900 is the relative absence of trees. If you take any of these scenes and re-photograph them today the town has far more trees and foliage. I've often puzzled over this because I have sound evidence that in the 15th century Barlick was the best source for large timbers in a large area. See the Bolton Priory Compotus for this. The only thing I can put the change between then and the late 19th century down to is the growth in population and the need for wood for house warming. The advent of the canal brought cheap coal in for household heating and the pressure on the native trees declined. Perhaps many of the large mature trees we have today were already growing as saplings when these early pictures were taken.

[David Whipp]

I almost commented about trees when I saw this picture... they do tend to grow!

[Stanley]

There was one major attack on the trees in modern times and that was during the General Strike of 1926. Arthur Entwistle told me that you couldn't buy an axe or a saw in the town because they had been snapped up by people desperate for some wood to burn. Remember that many were still cooking on open fires and cast iron ranges. On 4th November 2005 Dorothy Carthy told me that during the 1926 strike a rumour spread in the town that there was wood available at her Uncle's farm at Calf Hall (Walter Broughton). He was invaded by wood gatherers and fired his shotgun in the air to frighten them off. The police arrested him and put him in the cells for the night. Dorothy's dad had to milk for him and do the milk round the following morning. Definitely a Forgotten Corner!

[Stanley]

Talking about the General Strike of 1926 brought a lot of forgotten corners to mind. One of them isn't Barlick related but worth a mention I think.
In the army we used to have a saying, "bullshit baffles brains". It was well known that many officers valued orderliness and appearance more than how well we could function as soldiers. Hence the obsession with kit inspections and smartness. It spread beyond the barrack room, we had another saying, "If it moves salute it, if it doesn't, paint it white". There was never any shortage of white paint and brushes for painting kerb edges and garden surrounds, The RAF Regiment in particular were famous for it. One joke was that even the coal and coke piles were whitewashed but that actually had a basis in fact. If you throw whitewash over a fuel stack, any pilfering is immediately obvious and in the days when barracks were heated with coal fires there was constant competition to 'improve' supplies of fuel!
All mills had a stockpile of coal to cover gaps in deliveries. I never saw a mill stock pile painted white but I am sure that there was a low level of pilfering during the strike. I have no doubt that extra precautions would be taken to avoid it. The temptation if you had a cold house would be enormous. This was the time when waste tips at collieries were 'mined' by out of work people scavenging for any coal they could find. If you go to the LTP and look for the transcripts of my interviews with Victor Hedges he relates the story of how the unemployed raided the roads at Gawthorpe Hall which were made of colliery waste and had a percentage of coal in them. He tells of the police being brought in to eject the scavengers. I have read accounts of poor people dredging the canal bed at coal wharves to rescue any coal that had fallen into the canal. We complain now about fuel but at least it is available!

[Tizer]

Cornwall had no coal seams and it all had to be imported. The rich Cornish mine owners eventually built or bought smelters in South Wales so they could take their metal ore to the coal instead of vice versa. We can imagine how precious a bit of coal would be to a householder in Cornwall! Of course, they had their own scavenging but it was metal ore (which they could sell) rather than coal. As the value of the metal rose or fell so the scavenging likewise rose and fell. Some of the ordinary folk carried on the ancient methods of tin streaming on the moors right up to the end of the 19th Century.

[Stanley]

'Scavenging' and 'Hunter gathering' are closely related and used to be powerful influences. I can remember during the war how important Blackberrying and collecting Rose Hips was. In very early history survival depended on it of course before the advent of farming. As lads I can remember we were always collecting something and our pockets were often stuffed with found objects. I wonder how strong that instinct is today? It reached a peak of course as Bonfire Night approached. In the LTP Ernie Roberts relates how weft boxes and skips in mill yards were targets and were heavily defended by the manufacturers. I suspect the nearest mass movement we see today is the stampede at the sales! Not quite hunter-gathering but I suspect the same basic instinct. We still talk about 'hunting for bargains'.