STEAM ENGINES AND WATERWHEELS

[Stanley]

When Bancroft was built the boiler was, if truth be told, under-specified. A 9ft X 30ft Lancashire boiler could be expected to produce 80,000lbs of steam an hour under normal full load conditions. This was barely sufficient for the 1200 looms and ancillary processes such as taping and power generation. In winter when the heating load came on it was definitely in trouble. However, by the 1970s the number of looms had fallen and at peak while I was there I only had 400 on. In summer especially, this meant that the 6ft grates in the furnaces were too big for the load and in consequence, we had to run shorter fires. In other words the firebed was ash and clinker for the last couple of feet at the back. This had two consequences, the first was that there was not enough length of fire in the furnace to burn the volatiles that gassed off the green coal as it was coking at the front of the furnace. Further, because we had the thin covering at the back of the bars, cold air was getting into the flue gas flow. This lowered the temperature of the gases in the downtake and there was not enough heat for secondary combustion to take place. The result was inevitable, we made unacceptable smoke. There was a cure, to install a different type of stoker in which combustion air and fuel could be matched for perfect combustion at any level of load. I have told this story elsewhere.... I failed to convince the management and the consequence was they decided to close the mill using the smoke problem as an excuse.
Sorry about all this detail but if we want to understand the black smoke emitted by the Russian carrier Kusnetsov we need to know the causes. I can tell you that it caused me more problems than almost anything else while I was engineer at Bancroft and as Robert said in Marine engineers, believe me, I did try!

[Stanley]

That letter triggered off the 3 month process of redundancy and closure. Click to enlarge as usual.



Leaving aside the social, psychological and economic effects facing all of us, in terms of running the shed everything changed. I soon came to terms with the fact that weaving a shed out brought a new set of problems. This is a little known area of steam boiler and engine management and I think it's worth spending some time on it.

[Stanley]

Given a well maintained plant sized properly for the load and a reasonable level of competence of the operators the best situation is an engine on top of its job running a reasonable load. Problems arise when the engine is overloaded, the steam demands on the boiler are excessive due to heating load or in rare circumstances, the quality of the fuel drops drastically. What is not as well understood is that too little load can produce its own problems. We have just looked at the effect on smoke control on the boiler but there is more....
We have to step back a little here and talk about 'running boggart'. This is the colloquial term for an engine which is over-speeding because, for one reason or another, the governor has lost control. This is extremely dangerous, mainly because the cast iron flywheels were liable to explode when the centrifugal force exceeded the mechanical strength of the wheel.



This pic of the aftermath of a flywheel disintegration due to overspeed on a large inverted vertical spinning mill engine is a good example of the damage that can ensue. These events are almost always caused by the failure of the engineer to engage the safety mechanism incorporated in every large engine governor. In order to start the safety peg has to be disengaged and reinstated manually as soon as correct speed has been reached. This was the cause of the Bishop House wreck at Burnley. (See Newton Pickles in the LTP for the full story. Also see the Jack Platt interviews for the story of the Bancroft engine over-speeding in the first days of the mill running when very few looms were running and the engine was being commissioned.) These are extreme events, coping with a decreasing load on the engine was easier but had its problems.

[Stanley]

The basic technical problem was that the power plant, the boiler and engine, ran most efficiently at 140psi. As the load decreased (on the last day it was zero looms!) the governor copes by increasing the cut off in the high pressure cylinder. I other words, it shortened the time the steam admission valves were open on each stroke to the point where, running light, it was no more than something round 5% of the stroke if not less. But, and here's the problem, while the leghth of time of steam admission shrinks any defects in the valve, governor or settings stays the same and becomes a greater percentage of the actual admission. This is a severe test of the maintenance of the engine. Many engines ran unevenly due to faults in the engine even when on lull load and when running light became uncontrollable. The simple cure for this was to reduce the steam pressure and lengthen the admission of steam to the cylinder but this is also the most inefficient and if there was a sudden load, like the need to put the shed lights in, the engine couldn't cope. Newton told me of cases he had seen where the engineer had to stand at the steam valve and attempt to control the engine by hand. There was another commonly used strategy which was to maintain boiler pressure but crack the steam valve on the main down to reduce the amount of steam but this also limited the ability of the governor to cope with variations in load. Once again this led to uneven running.
I'm pleased to report that due to all the care and attention I had given to setting the valves and optimising the effects of the governor, Newton and I were sat in the engine house one day with about ten looms on, the boiler at 140psi and the steam valve wide open and the engine ran as steadily as a rock on minute valve events. Newton said he'd never seen an engine run better.... I think you know how much that pleased me.
It has just struck me that I have jumped the gun here, I have not laid out clearly exactly how a shed was 'woven out'. I'll address that tomorrow.....

[Stanley]

'Weaving Out' is the term used to describe the process of running down production at a mill before closure. In order to understand why it wasn't possible to simply close the doors and walk away we need to understand about weaving contracts and the supply chain. Every order for cloth received at Bancroft was a legal contract whereby the mill undertook to supply a quantity of cloth woven to a specification for a fixed price. I say 'fixed' but all these contracts contained clauses that meant that any variation on costs such as labour and fuel during the course of the contract were recognised in the price. The contract varied in size and so at any one time there could be several contracts running in the shed at the same time with different start and finishing dates because of the varying quantities involved. Once the decision to close had been taken, no further orders were taken in and whilst legally three months notice of redundancy had to be given it was understood that when a weaver no longer had warps in the looms they automatically became redundant.
The first effect of the stopping of orders was that once the tapers had prepared enough warps to fulfil existing contracts they were the first to be made redundant. Warp preparation was the next to follow for the same reason. The winders load reduced but they were needed right until the end, in affect the number of winders was reduced by agreement. As the contracts finished, weavers saw the number of warps in their sets reduced and in practice, once a weaver had only three or four of their 8 set of looms running they were made redundant and the warps in their looms were shared out with the remaining weavers. There was one exception, some weavers chose to take redundancy earlier.
So the effect was that starting shortly after the announcement the load on the plant started to diminish. It took about three months for the number to drop until there were only three or four looms running out of the original 1200. In some cases in the old days they wove down to the last warp and it was usually the weaving manager who ran the last set.



Some looms had been stopped for years.....

[Stanley]

Eventually we reached a point where the management decided to pull the plug and they let it be known that we would close on a Friday. I think Thursday was pay day in those days and at dinnertime all the staff collected in the warehouse for their final wage packet which included all the holiday pay they were due. As soon as I saw this I told John to stop firing and bank up as I knew there was no way any of them would ever come back once they had their money. That was exactly what happened..... We were woven out!

[Stanley]

The progression of weaving out was very depressing. There were jobs which only had to be done occasionally, like lubricating the bearings on the lineshaft in the mill and I can remember doing it and thinking "Last time I'll do this." It reached the stage where it pervaded everyone's thinking and some weavers decided to do a runner and bugger the redundancy. We got more visitors alerted to the fact that we were closing and I'm afraid I got short fused with some. I told them that nobody had bothered about us and then suddenly we were a National Treasure. Here's the section of my memoirs that covers it. (You may notice that the account I gave yesterday from memory differs a bit from the reality. What follows was written while it was fresher in my mind.)

"Meanwhile, back at the mill, the visitor count to the engine house rose steadily, partly because of the news of the closure which had made the local and national papers but also due to the fact that as I moved further into recording the mill more people became aware of its existence and came to see it. I was also agitating at government level for something to be done about Bancroft, my point was that sooner or later they would have to pick a weaving mill to preserve and the time to do it was while the mill was running and was a viable business. Peter White from the DOE came up to have a look and I asked him why the government didn’t step in and buy the place, if they did it would cost them £60,000 for the whole thing, lock stock and barrel. My suggestion was that they should then divide the shed, half for weaving and the other half for Brown and Pickles who were looking rocky as well. If they gave the weaving side an order for government tea towels they would get their towels better made and cheaper, save the mill and the skills that kept it going. Brown and Pickles could carry on with their normal trade but could also become repairers and trainers for the whole of the steam heritage sector in the country. This would require some investment but I was sure the engineering unions would be partners in this and in the end it would turn a profit and preserve several important aspects of the heritage. Peter told me it couldn’t even be considered because the government couldn’t be seen to be engaging commercially in industry. When I asked how this squared with nationalisation and the Royal Ordnance factories I was told this was entirely different!

Twenty years later I have to tell you that I was right and they were wrong. The mill they had chosen as the favourite for preservation, Jubilee at Padiham, was sold and demolished under their noses and the only one left, Queen Street at Burnley, had to be chosen and supported and many things went wrong there. It still struggles on but in my opinion will always eat money. Bancroft was in the right place, it had plenty of space round it for development, it could have been a multi-interest site and a great opportunity for the heritage and the town.
As far as the mechanics of running the mill were concerned, by 1978 I had mastered it completely. This isn’t to say I had stopped learning but I could run the place with one hand behind my back and my eyes shut. John Plummer my firebeater was a gem. John was always cheerful and interested in his job and I treated him as well as I could, we enjoyed ourselves and did a good job. Coal consumption in winter used to be over 35 tons a week. We had got it to below 25 tons on the same load and could have gone lower but nobody was interested any more.
Weaving a shed out is a painful task. The way it worked in the weaving shed was that as warps wove out in the individual looms they were not replaced. This meant that the weaver’s work gradually diminished and it got to a point where it was economical to stop that set of looms, finish the weaver, cut the remaining warps out and consolidate them in another set of looms. Every day looms finished and the load went down, if the engine hadn’t been so well tuned this could have caused a problem but I had it running so well that it would govern safely on no load and steam at top pressure so there was no sweat as far as I was concerned. What was soul-destroying was the fact that as you were doing a long term maintenance job like oiling the main shaft, you would suddenly realise that this was the last time you would do it.
When the notice went up for closure I rang Charlie Sutton and told him we would never flue again, he was the first casualty. This attrition went on and on and was the worst part of the process, I found it very depressing and so I think did everyone. What made it worse was that it was the end of steam weaving in Barnoldswick, what a sad thought.

The pensioners up the line shaft side on the eight loom sets were the first to go. I remember one Friday night I did my usual trip into the shed after shutting the steam to the engine off to listen for any hot bearings as the shafting slowed and stopped, they would squeal as they slowed down and you could identify where they were. One of the older weavers, I forget her name, was standing in the alley with her shopping bag in her hand, listening to the shafting and watching it stop for the last time as she was finishing. I asked her if she was all right and she said that she’d worked in the mills since she was 13 years old and in all that time had never seen the shafting stop, she was always out of the shed as soon as it was going home time! She wanted to know if it always made that banging noise when it was finally stopping, this was the bevel gears rattling as they slowed and stopped. I told her it was quite normal and she smiled and walked out of the shed. Just think about that, she had never wasted a second in the shed all those years. As soon as the engine started to slow down she was off home. That was the sort of attitude that made them such wonderful workers. All this counted for nothing when the chips were down, they were surplus to requirements and on the scrap heap, what a bloody waste! That lady didn’t live long after, she was 78 and still working a full day and I can’t help thinking that ripping Bancroft out of her life contributed to her death.
It was Wednesday of the last week when we were running and I rang Newton Pickles up and suggested he come up after lunch. We only had about ten looms weaving and I had an idea that when we stopped that day we would never start again. Newton came and I had another visitor that day, Professor Owen Ashmore, a noted industrial archaeologist who had called in to see the engine. I told him he had picked a good day and if he hung on until lunchtime I suspected he might see the mill stop for the last time because I couldn’t see the weavers hanging around when they had received their last pay cheque. By about two thirty in the afternoon the rot had set in, the few weavers that were still working decided they had had enough and stopped. Owen got quite excited and wanted to take a picture of me stopping the engine, I told him I wasn’t going to do it, Newton had more claim than me. He protested but in the end I told him that he had to do it so Newton Pickles stopped the last steam engine on its final working day. I did a picture of him as he stopped it, somehow it seemed more fitting to record the history than be the engineer.
This small incident is a nice illustration of the custom and hierarchy that applied in the mill. Newton was my senior and certainly my superior in knowledge of steam engines but when I told him to stop arguing and stop the engine he deferred to me because he was in my engine house and he was a guest. This was one small part of the system that had emerged over the years and gave us all a framework in which to work. Even the owner of the mill couldn’t buck the system and wouldn’t even try. By the way, it’s interesting that nobody from the management was present when we stopped."

[Stanley]

Newton Pickles stopping Bancroft engine on the last working day.

[Stanley]

When we had stopped the engine for the last time I told John to bank the boiler as normal and we all went home. Newton and I had already decided what our strategy was going to be. We had not given up on the hope that the closure might not be permanent or at least that the engine and boiler might be saved. So we decided to oil everything up and do whatever we could to increase the chance of re-starting at some point. So we ran the engine for an hour and oiled it up internally and externally. We also put anti-freeze in the air pump when we had stopped.



Newton supervising the oiling up. I got my turn to stop the engine for the very last time.



Then we blew the boiler down, knocked in the lids and left it empty and dry. That was all we could do. Much later, when the Bancroft Trust took over the engine and restarted it Newton told me we had done a good job. There had been some external deterioration in the interim but internally the engine was as good as it had been when we stopped it. We had given the volunteers a good start!

[Bodger]

Maybe not the right forum but with a connection, the pics of the workers stirred a memory, my pals mother did out work for Dobroyd mill in Jacksons Bridge, they used to deliver bolts of cloth to her and she would fit the cloth over a frame in front of the window, when working she would be looking through the cloth looking for faults and repairing same i think the term for her job was a "mender"

[Stanley]

Quite right Bodge and usually high quality woollen cloth like worsted suiting. A very skilled job and highly prized because it was clean and you worked at your own speed.



I still had a few tasks and some supervision over the rest of the week after stopping and oiling up. All the main fuses had to pulled from the small mains electricity supply, someone else took care of the meter reading. A major job was to shut down the water connections into the mill. There were two, one was the normal mains water supply but the other was much larger, the direct connection to the main for the sprinkler system. This valve hadn't been touched for many years and it was a major operation getting it shut without breaking anything. I was amused to find that when we shut the normal mains supply down various mains water supplies in the mill were still running. We had been stealing water for years! Nothing to do with me of course so I kept quiet.
Another job was to make sure all outside doors were secure by screwing the doors to the frames, we were aware their could be some looting and vandalism. I shame to say that I did consider winning one of the shed clocks at one point! They were fusee movement and very accurate.



Daniel Meadow's pic of me winding one of the two clocks, once a week on Saturday morning. I resisted the temptation but later found that someone else had nicked them!
Then I locked the door, posted the keys and walked away from a very enjoyable period of my life. All part of the rich tapestry!

[Bodger]

http://100photos.time.com/photos/lewis- ... w_facebook

[Stanley]

Wonderful bloke Lewis Hine. Look for his other pics. Nice that Daniel's pic triggered that!
I'll go into what happened next at the mill tomorrow...... Overslept this morning!

[Stanley]

After walking away from the mill I had to come to terms with the fact that this phase of my life was ended. I was bloody angry I can tell you but knew that my course was clear, I had some decisions to make! I can clearly remember lying under a wagon in 1972 in the pouring rain changing a 400lb rear spring on my cattle wagon. (I did all the maintenance as well as the driving) I had to lift the spring by hand and a bit of cunning. I got to the stage where I had one end up close to the eye the shackle pin went in and I got Vera out to hold it in place with a rope while I got the pin in. I said to her at the time that there were better ways than this to earn a living! I was 36 at the time, in my prime and as strong as a horse but I knew it couldn't last. When I had the spring secured and was in the house getting warm with a pot of tea I made Vera a promise that by the time I was 40 I'd be off the road and doing something a bit less demanding! That same year I saw an accident on Beattock in which five people were killed as I was going up to Lanark one Monday morning. I immediately gave the brother I was with a fortnight's notice. That was what led me to the big turning point that saw me have over six happy years at Bancroft. Now that had been taken away from me I was only sure of one thing, I needed an occupation and it was as sure as hell not going to be anything that exposed me to forces like those that had ripped my life to pieces! I had some thinking to do...... It was obvious that I needed a different skill set. Jobs for steam engine tenters were thin on the ground!

[Stanley]

Funnily enough, steam engines were still ruling my course. The pic above is of David Moore, then the principal of Nelson and Colne College. Daniel Meadows was Artist in Residence for Pendle at the time and he brought David to see the engine. David is sat in the engine house looking at some of the work I was doing at the time on the LTP and he made me an offer. He had started an initiative called Open College. It was run in conjunction with Lancaster University and was a two year night school course which, if completed successfully gave you a place at Lancaster. I started on the course two years before the mill closed and was successful in getting a place but as we didn't close until December 1978 I missed that year's intake. I needed a job to tide me over the next year......

[Stanley]

Once again, as so often in my life, chance took a hand. I had never regarded my research into steam engines, water power and the associated industries as a transferable skill but I got a job offer from The Department of the Environment (Ancient Monuments). I had formed an association with them during my work on the Lancashire Textile Project which I did in my spare time whilst still the engineer at Bancroft and they of course knew about my predicament. They offered me a job as a temporary researcher tasked with identifying and photographing water powered mills in the Lake District particularly those that had been engaged in bobbin making for the textile industry. T one time, the conversion of coppice wood into bobbins was a major industry there, plenty of wood and water power.
I can remember setting off up the road heading for the Lake District on a bright sunny morning in a good care with all my cameras and wondering if it was a dream and congratulating myself on my luck. But then I remembered a motto that I had seen carved over a doorway somewhere. "Take what you want, you have paid for it!" and it struck me that perhaps all those hard years had been my down payment for this job. Whatever, for nine months I had a whale of a time researching in record offices, travelling round some of the best country in England and making nice pictures. Perhaps there was some justice after all!



The engine at Stott Park Bobbin Mill, it wasn't all water power!

[Stanley]

I went into three years at Lancaster with no fixed ideas but ended up doing History. One highlight was the fact that when we got to the lecture on steam in the Industrial Revolution they asked me to do it. Bit of a surreal experience lecturing your fellow students! It went down quite well.
I the year when I was working for the DOE, Les Say, the general manager at Rolls came round and persuaded me to help him in his effort to set up the Bancroft Mill Engine Trust, it was a set up, they elected me first chairman and before I resigned to go to Lancaster I advised them on setting up the Trust and becoming a charity. When I resigned they made me a Trustee but I couldn't give enough time to it so after a decent interval I resigned that as well and became one of Yesterday's Men! I'm glad I did it, I think we set the Trust on the right track, it is still healthy and running well.

[Stanley]

After Lancaster I did two years at Pendle Heritage in charge of the interpretation team. I had a good bunch of people and I think we did good work but then in 1984 I got a phone call..... Steam engines were about to re-enter my life in a big way!

[Stanley]

Here's the relevant extract from me memoirs......

I keep mentioning the Important Phone Call. You’ll be pleased to know that we’ve arrived at it at last! I was sat in King Street minding my own business one night in late October 1984 when the phone rang. The bloke on the phone was called Gavin Bone and he was the executive in charge of special projects for a company called Coates Brothers who manufactured high quality printing inks. They had bought a mill near Rochdale on junction 21 on the M62 at Newhey. The reason they had gone for the site was that in terms of transporting their products it was the best site in the North of England. They intended to demolish the mill and build a new factory which was to replace all of their small branches in the North. They had a problem, there was a steam engine in the mill and they wanted to know what, if anything, they could do with it. Could I meet him and a colleague at the mill to discuss the matter? The answer was yes and we set a date. I was interested because I knew the mill he was talking about, it was Ellenroad Spinning Mill and contained one of the most famous mill engines in Lancashire. It was the largest remaining textile mill engine in the world and was, to the best of my knowledge, still in working condition.

Over the next few months I pieced together the story of what had brought Gavin to the point where he picked up the phone and rang me. We have to go back a year and take note of a surprising connection but before I do that I’d like to do my thing about the Random Improbability Factor.

After almost 65 years of bouncing around in this world of ours I am convinced there is something in Chaos Theory. Further, it doesn’t only affect systems like the weather, it is at work in every sphere of life. Douglas Adams in his four part trilogy (Yes, that’s right, four parts) which is usually known as ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ posits a theory in the first book in which he says that there is a force at work in the universe which he calls ‘The Random Improbability Factor’. His theory is that there is a set of odds against any event in the universe happening. For instance, the chances of me being run down by a defective bus driven by a man called Fortescue must be extremely remote. If somebody had the resources and time they could put a figure on the odds. The actual odds don’t matter, we all know that such an event is possible. If it did happen, Adams’ theory says that for some reason the odds suddenly dropped from whatever to 1 to evens. He says that this happens because the Random Improbability Factor has come into play. We have all seen instances of this. In our lives the result is that by ‘chance’ or ‘luck’ extraordinary conjunctions sometimes happen and they almost always carry an opportunity. Whether we grasp the opportunity or not depends on us.

Back to how this all came about. Remember my mate Robert Aram, the collector of chimneys, mill dams and almost any industrial archaeological artefact? One of the ways Robert kept his finger on the pulse of what was available was to tread the ground. He used to allocate time each week to travelling round the region and visiting little known and out of the way sites. Of late he had got more time for this, he had taken my advice when I told him he had to make up his mind whether he was a property developer or a teacher. He couldn’t be both. He had given up teaching and was developing some of the sites he had bought to finance his lifestyle and his activities as the most active private collector of artefacts pertaining to the Industrial Revolution in Britain.

Sometime during 1983 he called in at Ellenroad. The mill had closed in 1982 and Robert knew it was empty but guarded by a local security firm. He had a cup of tea with the guard and during the course of the conversation the man said the mill contained 2,500,000 square feet of space. Robert told him he was wrong but the man insisted. He said he would bet Robert a tenner that he was right, Robert said “Righto!” and they went round to the side of the mill that faced the motorway and the guard directed Robert’s attention to the sign advertising the property for sale. Sure enough, the sign said 2,500,000 square feet! It was a signwriter’s mistake and should have been 250,000 square feet but Robert told the guard he was right and gave him a tenner! The guard was surprised, he had only been using a figure of speech. He took the tenner and when Robert gave him his card and asked him to remember his name if there was anything he should know, the guard took notice and pinned it on the wall in his cabin.

During 1984 Gavin Bone was a regular visitor to the site as Coates made up their mind whether to buy it or not. He was sat having a cup of tea with the security guard one day, this was of course the only place where this was possible on site, everything else was shut down, and voiced a problem he had out loud, “Where the hell do I find someone who knows about steam engines?” The guard pricked his ears up, grabbed Robert’s card off the wall and said to Gavin “Try him, he knows all about them.” Robert’s tenner was beginning to pay off!

Gavin rang Robert and asked him about the engine. Robert told him he had the wrong man and gave Gavin two names, one was John Robinson at the Science Museum and the other was me. Gavin rang John who told him the bloke he wanted was Stanley Graham. Gavin said “That’s funny, you’re the second person to tell me that this week!” So Gavin rang me and this whole connection fell into place. What happened next was up to me.

[Stanley]

Bear in mind that at this point I knew nothing about the engine or Coates plans. I had heard about Ellenroad but had never seen it, I was always too busy with my own engine, going to see another would have been like a busman’s holiday! To this day people are always surprised by the fact that I have visited so few of the engines left in preservation. All I knew was that they were talking about demolishing the mill so I did no preparation as I had no facts to start from.

Years later I got an inkling, never voiced to me but there were clues along the way, that Coates had been offered a deal by Rochdale Council. The Council knew about the engine of course and it was seen as a liability. Heritage and the preservation movement had taken firm hold and Ellenroad was definitely a candidate for some sort of scheme. The problem was that it was so big that it frightened everyone to death. They all knew what should be done but nobody had actually addressed how to do it. When Coates bought the mill I think the Council saw a possible opportunity to get this problem off their backs and so they offered Coates a deal whereby if they could do something positive about the engine, the Council would back their application for a grant to build a new access road to the site from the main road. I heard seven figure sums being bandied about at one time. I have to stress that I have no direct evidence for this but it would certainly explain why Coates Brothers were so keen to do something.

Came the appointed day and I went to the mill and met Gavin Bone with his colleague Tony Welton. Gavin was good but Tony was really impressive, he was as sharp as a knife and every question he asked went straight to the point. He was definitely slit trench material in my book! At first the questioning was general and aimed at ascertaining just how much experience I had with these things. All this happened in the engine room and I can still remember being awe-struck when I walked in. It was dirty, rusty and there were pigeons flying in through the broken windows but even in this state it was magnificent. The flywheel was gigantic, I later found it weighed 85 tons and was 28 feet in diameter. The whole thing was awesome. They started to get to the point when Tony asked me if they could do anything with it. I asked them a question, ”What’s your core business?” When Tony said ink manufacturing I said “Here’s my first piece of advice and it’s free. You’re looking at £3,000,000 minimum here if you want it to run again. My advice is to scrap the bugger and get on with making ink. It’s not scheduled yet and I can get the lads in this weekend and we’ll shift it in a week.” They looked at each other and then Gavin said, “That may not be the preferred option. Assuming we gave you the job of saving it how would you go about it?”

This was the crunch point, I had to think on my feet and produce an answer. Straight off the top of my head I gave them the following plan. Even now I am amazed because in the end, with one exception and one hold-up, neither of which were foreseeable, it was exactly what we did. Tony Welton never forgot it and when he finished at Coates he said it was the one thing he always remembered about that first meeting, the fact that I got it right first time without any preparation. That has always pleased me.

“The first thing we have to do is to assess what we have, decide whether it can ever run again, steam it to make certain and then get out a costed plan of what actually has to be done to the buildings and the artefacts. Next we have to get the local council on board and involve them, we will need a steering committee in the first place and the seats should be equally divided between the council, Coates and English Heritage as major funders. Then we have to set up a charitable trust as a company limited by guarantee and sort out a management structure. Once we have these elements in place and ownership of the site settled we have to start a programme of works, all arms of which have to proceed in parallel. We make the place safe and secure, we re-furbish the whole of the machinery and the buildings, we form a Friends Organisation and train them to run the engine, we build an external facility which will hold all the services necessary to run the engine house as a visitor attraction and finally, we recognise that the engine house will always lose money and therefore eventually we need a facility which includes fifty bedrooms, and all the necessary facilities to hold weekend study conferences primarily aimed at steam technology but doing anything else which will bring money in and visitors to the site. This last can wait on the back burner until we have all the rest in place, however, we need to set up an interpretative team straight away to start to gather the materials we will need to interpret and teach on the site.”

Tony pulled me up at this point and I can remember that at the time we were in the old board room of the mill, “Correction Stanley, the study facility is, in the final analysis, the key to the whole operation. It goes on in parallel with the rest.” He was the only person apart from myself who ever saw the importance of that element. Apart from me nobody else ever mentioned it again.

They withdrew for a moment and then came back. “How much do you need to make this work?”. I said that before I answered that question I’d want a couple of months to assess the place, then I’d have enough information to give some concrete opinions and blue sky figures. They agreed to pay me while I assessed the project, we decided that this had to be done before the end of February 1985. They also asked for some references so I went home with a job and a lot to think about. I got on to my friends and asked them to put a word in, DJ, David Sekers, John Robinson and Robert, they all sent letters of recommendation to Coates and eventually Coates informed me that subject to the results of the assessment of the site they would like to have me on board. Yippee! I went home, rang Robert and had a good drink!

[Stanley]

You may be puzzled as to why I advised scrapping the engine. Looking back, I am convinced that my mind was in overdrive that day, it was exactly the right thing to say at the time. I had been asked to go down to Ellenroad and advise them as to what they should do. In terms of their business, scrapping the engine was the most economical, effective and certain way of dealing with the problem. Remember that I didn’t know anything about possible linkages with the council at that time, all I knew was that we were looking at the biggest single heritage problem in Britain at the time. Therefore, my advice was sound and absolutely in line with what I had been asked. In addition, there’s nothing like disarming criticism! If the project was to go ahead, I wanted to be able to say to them at some time in the future when things got sticky, “Remember what I told you in the engine house?” The occasion did arise a couple of times and my reminding them of this was always a show stopper! In case you’re wondering what I would have done if they’d said yes, even I don’t know the answer to that one, I suspect I’d have gone into salesman mode and sold them the project. However, as you’ll see later, I was quite capable of scrapping artefacts as big as this but the Dee Mill saga belongs to a later chapter!

This is as good a place as any to divulge one of my favourite and most effective weapons in the constant fight to get my own way! The morning after my meeting with Coates at the mill I wrote both Tony and Gavin a letter. This was something I had learned from David Moore. When you have had a verbal exchange with some party, either a meeting, a telephone conversation or any circumstance in which the details of the transaction weren’t recorded at the time, send them one of these letters. You always start by thanking them for the time they gave to have the meeting or call, specify the date and time. The next paragraph always starts; ‘My understanding of what we agreed is……..’ Then give a list of points, you can cheat a bit here and insert anything you wanted or delete anything you didn’t like. Also you can word the description of the point to give it the emphasis you want. After the list the final paragraph always says; ‘If your understanding varies from my own, please let me know by return of post.’ What you have done is put the ball squarely in their court. You have told them exactly what you are going to do and unless they get their act together and write back immediately they haven’t got a leg to stand on in any dispute. The reason why so many people conduct important business by telephone is because they don’t want any evidence that can pin them down. Another point is that most people’s comprehension of the written word is so bad that they won’t recognise that what you are doing is modify the agreement to suit yourself and in any case, in nine cases out of ten a beaurocrat won’t bother to do anything other than acknowledge the letter. I promise you, this works like a charm. Another associated ploy is that whenever you have a telephone conversation, keep a file note of the time, date, person’s name and a brief account of what was said. This can be invaluable when the shit hits the fan.

Associated with this subject is the concept of the ‘Pearl Harbour File’. Susi told me about this one and it’s a cracker. Always keep copies of memoranda and letters in a personal file of your own. This is your property and you keep it at home. Always plan for worst case and if and when you need it, a PHF can be a killer! I have to admit I have been known to send memoranda with nothing but a PHF in mind. The technical term for this is ‘Covering Your Arse!’. Once again, people are idle and don’t read things. When the storm comes and someone denies having known something you just wave the piece of paper at them and they fall over.



I had a new baby!

[Stanley]

Back to the job in hand. Winter was upon us and as I pondered about how to attack the assessment of Ellenroad I learned from Gavin that Coates had a serious deadline. In order to qualify for a large grant, they had to have the factory built and producing by November 1985 so they had to start on the demolition. He asked me if I had any recommendation as to who to set on. I told him to speak to N&R at Portsmouth Mill, Todmorden and ask for Norman Sutcliffe. N&R had demolished Bancroft and I liked them. Like all demolition contractors they were a slippery lot but they had the tackle and did a good job. Gavin went off and did his homework and shortly afterwards told me he liked my choice, he had had a look at one or two firms but had settled on N&R who had agreed to do the job for a demolition credit of £50,000.

A word of explanation here. The demolition credit is the amount the contractor pays to the owner of the building for the privilege of knocking it down and becoming the owner of any plunder. The main source of income for N&R out of this job was any cut stone and metal they salvaged out of the structure. Gavin was pleased with the price he had negotiated but I told him to beware. I said that from my experience he had better regard this money as a short term loan from N&R because Norman was as cute as a barrow load of monkeys and would get it back out of him in extras. Gavin bridled a bit at this, he informed me that he was used to negotiating and there was no way he would allow Norman to get away with anything. I got the definite impression that he had under-estimated Norman and so left it at that!

I started the assessment in January 1985 and at about the same time N&R moved on to the site to demolish the mill. A lot of things happened at once here so I’ll split them up and tackle what I had to do as regards the engine house first. I should add that Coates asked me to act as their agent in the matter of the demolition and advise them as it went on so I was doing my own thing and liaising with N&R at the same time. This was a good thing as it gave me access to the N&R cabin for a warm and a brew whenever I wanted it. It also helped me to get a better idea of what demolition actually entailed which was an education.

The first decision I had to make was how much of the mill I would need to make a decent heritage attraction. I needed all the buildings containing the plant associated with the engine and space for car parking and any additional buildings we would need to make the place work. This meant I wanted the engine house, the boiler house, the rope race, the pump room, generator house and chimney. All these existed. In addition but not so obvious I needed control of the river, weir, cloughs and the tunnels and wells at the back of the engine house which carried the condenser water to the engine. I would also need space in the field outside for the additional buildings. These added up to a considerable piece of real estate and I began to get a feel for the size of the operation.

The first part of the assessment was to physically get myself into every nook and cranny of the complex and inspect them. The open spaces of the buildings gave little trouble, the problems arose with everything above and below ground. I remembered that Peter Tatham, Robert’s steeplejack, lived half a mile up the road in Milnrow at Tim’s Terrace. I went up and had a word with him and told him I wanted Ellenroad chimney laddering and inspecting. He was pleased because when he first started as an apprentice with his grandfather, Ellenroad had been one of their regular contracts and they only lost it when Firs, a Manchester firm, put in a lower price. Peter also laddered the inside of the rope race so I could get access to the roof space above the engine house. This doesn’t sound too big a job but it involved a straight climb of about sixty feet up the inside of the race to gain access to a small door in the gable of the engine house itself.

While Peter was doing this I started with the underground elements. I lifted the manholes on the three wells at the back of the house. The wells were ten feet in diameter and about twenty feet deep and full of water. I persuaded the fire brigade to come to Ellenroad for a practice and after we shut the clough, they pumped the system dry and sent a rescue man down with me while I crawled through the system to inspect it. At one point they got a bit paranoid and dragged me out but I persuaded them to let me finish. Looking back, they were right, it was dodgy but I think they were impressed. Whenever I went back to them for help they always came and did whatever I wanted for nothing, it was always booked down as training I think!



Rochdale fire brigade emptying the jack wells.

[Stanley]

The next element was the flues. I gained access under the boiler and inspected the settings then I went into the main flue between the boiler and the chimney. What a mess I found. The maintenance had obviously been neglected during the latter days of the mill running. They had stopped using the remaining Lancashire boiler and had installed a small package boiler for heating which had been run on forced draught. The effect of this was that there had been a heavy carry over of partially unburned coal into the main flue and it was full to within eighteen inches of the top. We are talking about a six feet square section flue running right across the back of the existing boiler and down the side of the engine house, under the access passage and on to the chimney base. Looking back I was crazy to go in there alone, the only precaution I took was to let Norman know I was going in and get him to come and give me a shout every hour to make sure I was still alive! I crawled all the way over the dust to the chimney base and came to the conclusion the whole flue had to be rebuilt together with the boiler settings.

There remained one other trip underground into the pipe tracks which carried the intake and outlet pipes from the condenser to the wells. This started in the cellar and was a horrible, restricted seventy five yard crawl through a wet tunnel. I didn’t enjoy this bit at all but got it done and was relieved to find there were no obvious problems. Later on I had to go in here again to install some pipes for the cooling system in the new factory. They needed a cold water supply and the river was the obvious place to borrow it from. The original plan was to dig a trench down the back of the engine house but I pointed out that there was no need for this as there was a pipe duct already in place. The only problem was that the contractors wouldn’t use the existing duct, they said there wasn’t enough room. I told Gavin to leave it to me and I put the pipes in one weekend ready for when the contractors started on the Monday morning. I didn’t do this to be clever, the last thing I wanted was to go down that hole again but doing it gave me brownie points with Coates and I needed them onside.

By this time Peter had laddered the chimney and the rope race so I climbed both and we had a good inspection. The most enjoyable part was the chimney, I am scared of heights but if you want to see the top you’ve got to go up the ladder. There is a tremendous sense of elation when you’ve conquered a fear like that and gained your goal. There’s nothing like the view from the top of a 220 feet high chimney and surprisingly enough, the gentle sway of the head in the wind can be quite relaxing. A lot of people can’t believe this, but chimneys are never absolutely stationary. They always transmit vibrations in the ground and magnify them and in any wind at all will sway appreciably. This feels worse than it is because it is so unexpected.



The view in 1988.

[Stanley]

I had to sit down then and write the report. On the whole it was good, as far as I could see there was little wrong with the boiler and engine and no irreparable faults in the rest of the structure. The chimney needed the drum on top replacing which had been removed by Firs some time in the 50’s and there were a lot of general repairs and replacements needed but the bottom line was that there was no obvious catastrophic damage which would preclude putting the engine back in steam. My blue sky figure of £3million hadn’t changed. I fired all this lot off at Gavin and informed him verbally that I intended to run the engine but he had never heard me say this as strictly speaking, it was illegal. I also neglected to inform him of the fact that if anything went seriously wrong Coates would be liable! It seemed best to keep this bit of information to myself..

You’ll have to forgive me if I go on a bit here but I am going to deal with one of the high points of my career as an engineer. What I was proposing to do was to run the biggest textile mill engine in the world for the first time since 1974 with no insurance and several serious faults in the system. I didn’t do it lightly, I knew the risks but I also recognised that nothing would enthuse Coates more than seeing the engine in steam. Besides, I had the biggest Meccano set in the world to play with and I wasn’t going to pass this chance up!

I had an engine connected to a boiler and about ten tons of coal in the bunker. What I didn’t have was a feed pump that would work against pressure because of a frost damaged main. I also had no electricity supply. I started by giving the engine a thorough oiling and injecting a mixture of diesel and oil into all the cylinders to soak into the rust and the rings. I kept on doing this for a week until I was sure I had got as much lubrication into the bores and moving parts as I could. Then I took the lid off the boiler and put about 3,000 gallons of water in with a fire hose. When I had it full to the top I put the lid back on and fired up. As soon as I had steam I got the big Weir steam pump in the pump house going and tested the feed line. As I suspected it was cracked by frost and this meant we couldn’t put any water in while there was pressure on the boiler. I went home that night leaving a crack of steam going into the engine to warm it through. I had already warned Newton Pickles and the next day in February 1985 he and I went to Ellenroad and had a real play out!

While Newton did last minute oiling, essential because we had hardly any lubricators on the engine and would need all the initial lubrication we could get, I fired the boiler until we had 140psi on the clock. I should say at this point that there was an additional problem with the engine as in its last year of running, the right hand connecting rod had been removed and the engine was run on the left hand side only. We had no knowledge of how well the connecting rod had been re-installed. The parts of the engine are so large that you couldn’t just go and shake a bearing to see how much play there was in it, I had inspected it and as far as I could see it was safe enough to run. We would know more about it when we got it moving.

We had reached the point where we had to go for it. We couldn’t put any more water in the boiler and so had to gauge the fires against the water level. We locked the engine house door, Newton took station next to the valve gear and held the steam valve on the cylinder wide open and I opened the 18” stop valve. Nothing happened. There were surprisingly few leaks but even so, the engine house started to fill with steam. My heart was dropping into my boots when there was a grunt from the engine and Newton shouted “It’s away, the seal has broken!” He meant the grip of the rusty piston rings on the cylinder bores had been overcome by the pressure. By this time I couldn’t see anything at all because of the steam, I was blind and running on sound alone. I heard a groaning noise as the pistons scraped their way through ten tears accumulated muck and rust in the bores on the first stroke and then there was a tremendous shudder ran through the air. “What the hell was that?” I shouted, I was really worried. “Thar’t all reight, it was only the pigeon shit falling off the top of the flywheel!” shouted Newton. There was some thumping from the bearings but the engine started to gather speed, I cut back on the steam in case the governor didn’t get hold but it was OK. As we got up to about 50 rpm the governor took hold and the engine settled down to a noisy but relatively steady running speed. The only draw back, but this was temporary, was the foul smell from the cellar as the four air pumps delivered thousands of gallons of stagnant water into the drain back to the river.

As the seals established themselves the fog started to clear and we saw a glorious sight, the Ellenroad Engine in full flow for the first time in ten years! It was a wonderful moment but we didn’t have a lot of time to appreciate it because we had to start running round pouring oil into the bearings. It was a wonderful quarter of an hour, the engine was badly out of adjustment both in terms of the valves and the bearings but was running and as far as we could see there was nothing fundamentally wrong with it. We decided we had pushed our luck far enough and Newton went to shut the steam off. I told him I wanted to do an experiment as he shut down, I wanted to block the governor open and see how much effect the vacuum had after the steam was turned off. I jammed a brush head under the governor rod and Newton shut the valve down. The engine didn’t slow, it started to speed up and the brush head was stuck fast under the rod. It was getting really serious before it eventually began to slow down. Newton and I agreed afterwards that it must have been doing near enough a hundred revs a minute, far faster than it had ever run in its life before. This was very dangerous as the main danger with these engines is that overspeed increases the tension in the castings of the flywheel so much that they break and the wheel explodes. We got away with it but I made a mental note to do something about it.

This all sounds dangerous, and you’re right, it was. What has to be recognised is that we were in unknown territory here. Nobody had ever run the Ellenroad Engine at full speed with no load, not even ropes on the wheel. Even with the low pressure we were using we were dealing with tremendous forces and we had to know how the engine would react, especially if someone made a mistake. Neither Newton or I ever imagined that there was enough vacuum in the condensers to make it pick its feet up like it did, it surprised even us, but we had to find out and what I did was the only way to do it. I remember reading a memoir by a very famous American engineer and builder of steam engines in the 19th. century, Charles T Porter. In it he said that the faster you run an engine the less movement there is in any loose bearings. He demonstrated this by deliberately slackening bearings off and running his engines at high speed to demonstrate how quietly and well the bearings ran. I never quite believed this until we ran Ellenroad that day at 100rpm. I can assure you it ran like silk even though there was a quarter of an inch of play in the right hand cross head and crank brass! Porter knew his stuff but how else would we have found out?

Eventually, 300 tons of iron came to a stand still and we brewed up, had a pipe and did the inquest. The first thing I asked Newton was why he didn’t run when it overspeeded. “I was waiting on thee!” he said. Now that really is slit trench material! We both agreed that it had run a bloody sight better at 100rpm than 50 because the bearings hadn’t time to knock but we weren’t going to try it again! All told we were like a couple of dogs with two tails apiece. We had reason to be because we’d just made history and proved that the Ellenroad Engine, though it might need some TLC, was a runner! Now we knew we had an engine, we agreed to run it again for Coates. I arranged it with Gavin and he and a few others turned up the following week and we ran one more time in semi-public just to whet their appetites. I think that if any encouragement was needed, this steaming did the trick. None of them had seen anything like it before and they were all suitably awe-struck. Newton and I passed among them in nonchalant manner as if this was something we did every day of the week!



1985. Newton oiling the pedestal bearings which had no oilers on them. I was running round the others.

[Stanley]

The second time we ran was less eventful of course because we had no dramas on starting or stopping. We ran it for about half and hour this time and almost put a polish on the rods. There was however, one thing different. When we came to light the boiler the day before, the chimney wouldn’t draw. In other words, there wasn’t enough natural draught on the flue to get hot gas drawn into the chimney and gain artificial draught due to the difference in temperature between the flue gasses in the chimney and the exterior air. Actually this isn’t quite accurate. The draught on a flue is the product of the difference in weight of the column of gas in the stack and the air outside. This difference in weight because the flue gas is hot reduces the atmospheric pressure in the furnace below the ambient pressure and it is this difference that drives air in to the furnace and supports combustion. The flue is under a disadvantage when you first start up with coal because the black smoke, loaded with carbon particles because of incomplete combustion, is heavier than clean air and so as it fills the stack you have to have quite a differential to get it lifted to the top. It worsens as the smoke cools in the cold stack. Even the forced draught fans won’t lift it and so extraordinary measures have to be taken. In Newton’s words, “You have to larn the chimbley to smook!”

To do this we opened a door in the main flue at the back of where the old economisers used to be and built a wood fire in there to further raise the temperature of the gas. After a few minutes you could feel the air being drawn into the chimney and the wood started to roar as it burned. At this point we shut the door, and shovelled some more coal in, we were away. Another point to mention is that at this time we didn’t have any automatic stokers, we had to fire by hand direct into the furnaces.

A couple of days after we had steamed the second time I was up on the chimney and there was a strong smell of sulphur. I asked Peter about it and he said he had noticed it since the second firing. We went down and opened the flue door and had a peep in, the whole of the flue was on fire, we had set fire to the flue dust which was actually partially burned coal. We shut the door and left it to it. There was nothing we could do, it wouldn’t do any harm and in the event it did a good job because it burned for three months and kept the flue dry all winter. It also reduced the level of dust in the flue to about a foot of proper flue dust on the floor. This was the industrial equivalent of mother sweeling the flue at Norris Avenue in my childhood!

While we are talking about flues I’d like to recount one incident that happened much later when I was running the engine each weekend for the public. We started doing this as soon as we had a viable engine, properly insured and this was before I had trained the volunteers so I ran the engine every weekend by myself for 18 months. I got it to a fine art and knew that if I got to Ellenroad at about four o’clock in the morning I could fire up, warm the engine and be ready to run at ten o’clock. It may sound strange but I often used to think as I drove over to Ellenroad first thing in the morning that it was nice to unique. I was the only man in the whole world setting off to run a 3,000 hp engine on my own. There must be thousands of people who would have given their eye teeth to be doing this.

On the particular morning this incident I want to describe happened it was very cold and foggy. I lit the fires as usual but had no draught and the products of combustion were blown back by the fans on the stokers into the boiler house. I knew I had to shut the stokers off and open the flue door at the bottom of the chimney in order to light a fire at the chimney base to get the column of air moving in the stack. There was no wind and when I opened the flue door the smoke fell out of the chimney and gathered in the yard like a big black pool! I’ve seen smoke fall from the top of the chimney down to the ground in similar conditions but I’d never seen it as bad as this. It intrigued me and I tried an experiment. I lit a piece of oil soaked rag and threw it into the smoke just to see what happened. There was no danger of explosion because it wasn’t confined. The rag was extinguished immediately it hit the smoke, there was no oxygen at all in the mixture.

Curiosity satisfied I waited until the smoke had run away along the ground and the chimney base was clear and then I hung an old raincoat soaked in diesel in the flue entrance, lit it and waited for a minute. It soon started to pull and was roaring away. I went into the boiler house, turned the stokers on and then went outside and shut the flue door. That did the trick and the draught soon built up to normal as the hot flue gases warmed the flue. The point about this story is that it shouldn’t have happened because a flue doesn’t normally lose it’s draught in a week, it takes much longer than that. In this case, I reckon it was my fault because I’d started a green fire on coal too soon, I should have burned wood or very small quantities of coal to keep the smoke down on starting. However, I was in a hurry and careless and what I’d done was try to get the chimney to lift heavy smoke, heavy enough to overcome the draught and literally choke the flue. I’d never seen this before and it just goes to show that we can always learn from our mistakes.



Newton 'larning the chimbley to smook'. We didn't realise at the time but he was flue cleaning!