FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

The monkey puzzle tree on Chapel Street. Not 100% certain but I think this was Nurse Edith Barlow's house, the famous Barlick midwife.

[Stanley]

This is more like an extinct species than a forgotten corner. Abel Taylor and his son David in the Barn at Green Bank on Gisburn Old Track in 1956. At that time Green Bank had no electricity, not even a septic tank (the contents of the bucket toilet went on the covered midden with all the other muck and was spread by hand on the land.). He had no tractor and very little farm machinery, everything was done using Old Dick, his horse and a few horse drawn implements. Lighting in the house was by paraffin Tilley lamps and there was a Lucas Low-vo wind driven generator to give light in the shippon from small 12 volt bulbs. He was milking by hand. They are sat on a 'proven kist', a storage container for 'proven' (abbreviation of provender) which was the high protein cattle food used to boost milk output. I can't even remember Abel having a car at time. I used to help with haymaking and silage making and have happy memories of working at an entirely different pace....

[Stanley]

Abel Taylor mowing in 1956 with Dick the horse and his old Bamford mowing machine.

[chinatyke]

Abel Taylor mowing in 1956 with Dick the horse and his old Bamford mowing machine.

Would that be the same Bamford as JCB? Did JCB originally start as farm machine manufacturers?

[Stanley]

I don't know. Have a look at THIS site..... I fancy there is a family connection but can't find it.

[chinatyke]

Thanks for the link. In November 1967 JCBamford (Excavators) Ltd made an unsuccessful bid for the entire share capital of Henry Bamford & Sons, so not the same company but both based in Uttoxeter and I would guess the Bamfords must have been related.

[David Whipp]

On the Pendle War Memorials thread, Stanley has referred to the old co-op building on Albert Road.

Co-op folk removed some stuff before the building was demolished; I can ask David Clamp, who was manager at that time, if he remembers anything.

I know David rescued an upright piano, which subsequently spent a long number of years in someone's hallway, gathering post.

A quarter of a century on, the lady of the house decided it was time to redecorate and eventually found a home for the piano with a family in Colne. Wonder where it'll end up next?

[Whyperion]

Abel Taylor mowing in 1956 with Dick the horse and his old Bamford mowing machine.

Would that be the same Bamford as JCB? Did JCB originally start as farm machine manufacturers?

On the site 'family tree'
"Just prior to this(1948) Joseph (always known as Joe) who had been in the family business since 1935, left the firm to start his own very successful excavator manufacturing company J.C. Bamford (Excavators) Ltd.

[chinatyke]

Thanks. I glanced at the family tree page but missed that.

[Stanley]

Thinking about the stage I am at in the shed and the impending visit of one of the Nutter family to Bancroft engine this pic of Aunty Liza Slater starting Bancroft engine on March 13th 1920. James Nutter had died in 1914 and his wife was ill so Aunty Liza did the business. Johnny Pickles was there and told Newton that when they attempted to start the engine it refused. It turned out that the fitter in charge of the erection had taken a steam valve out of the HP cylinder to make sure they couldn't start without him being there. He was in the Dog having a pint..... They brought him back, he popped the valve in and away it went.
(Aunty Liza Slater was James' sister)

[Stanley]

SPRING MILL WEAVING SHED ENGINE CHRISTENING. It is gratifying to chronicle another development in the manufacturing industry and commercial enterprise of some of the people of Earby who have within the last few years started in the line of business. For some length of time Messrs. Bailey, Watson and Berry have rented room and power from Mr. William Gill at the Grove Shed, but during the past year they have built a new weaving shed in a higher part of Earby, capable of holding 460 looms, for the manufacture of coloured goods, and they have also built commodious rooms for preparatory work, warehousing etc. The architect was Mr. W.H. Atkinson of Colne, and the following were various contractors :- Masons work Messrs. Cowgill and Wilkinson – Earby Joiners work Mr. Charles Watson - Earby
Slating Mr. William Stanworth – Burnley Plastering Messrs. Heap and Thornton – Barnoldswick Concrete Work Nuttall – Barnoldswick Glazier Varley and Sons – Colne Steam Heating Brooks – Crosshills Engine Burnley Iron Works
On Saturday afternoon the ceremony of christening the engine was commenced by Thomas Bailey who made a few remarks suited to the occasion and concluded by calling upon his daughter Miss Jane Alice Bailey to christen the engine which she named Alice Ann. After the ceremony all the work people to the number of 200 or more were provided with an excellent knife and fork tea served in the new warehouse. The following ladies presided at the tables :- Mrs. W.M. Berry Miss. Jane Watson Mrs. Charles Watson Mrs. C.W. Bailey Miss J.A. Bailey. After tea a social evening was spent over which Mr. W.H. Atkinson of Colne presided. The programme included songs by :-
Mrs. Heaton
Miss C. Brown
Miss A. Brown
Miss Tattersall
Messrs. Joseph Foulds
J. Turner
and W. Turner
Mr. John Rediough gave a recitation. Mr. W.N. Berry was the pianoforte accompanist and the Earby Brass Band played for the dancing. The entertainment proved very enjoyable.
A number of new looms are already in the shed and Messrs Bailey are engaged in removing their looms and other machinery to their new premises and the place they are vacating is to be filled with looms by Messrs Hartley.

Transcribed from Yorkshire Pioneer 1st May 1896 by Bob Abel, used with his permission.
These articles also appear on the Earby & District Local History Society web site www.earbylocalhistorysociety.co.uk

[David Whipp]

Just popping back to the co-op piano from Albert Road...

The good lady who accommodated the piano for a quarter of a century in her front door hallway assures me that occasional visitors played a tune or two and hubby regularly plinked along the keyboard.

She also mentioned that decorating has yet to begin... another forgotten corner!

[Stanley]

Don't mention decorating to me..... I am desperately trying to avoid it. Problem is that the way things are going I shall live forever.... That's a bit of a quandary! Will the Kids let me live in increasing squalor as they see it, or will they just leave me to get on with it..... I want that to remain a Forgotten Corner!
I notice that one Forgotten Corner is having a lot of work done on it. The end property in Commercial Street which has been a tattoo parlour for a while is scaffolded. I keep meaning to get a pic of it but forget every morning!



I shall try to remember to take my camera with me......

[Stanley]

I remembered to take my camera and here's the back side of the tattoo parlour....

I tripped over this image in the archive yesterday.



This was in 1978 in a back garden on Havre Park. It's a wind driven generator that Newton built just because he fancied it. He sold it to Jack Grayson, 'Paraffin Jack' as he was known at Bancroft where he was a loom-sweeper.



Jack was a good worker and the weavers liked him but everyone agreed he was a bit different. He lived on his own at Havre Park and the wind generator was right up his street. He came to a sad end, he wasn't seen for a while and in the end the police broke into his house and found he had been dead for a while. Jack kept a lot of cats and when the officers got the door open they shot out into the garden and vanished. It transpired that they had been eating Jack to stay alive..... Man eating cats in the town..... I think this qualifies as a Forgotten Corner.

[PanBiker]

Jack had more than one go at his "15 minutes of fame". Back in the late 60's his house was invaded by the spooks from Menwith Hill and U.S. Navy technical guys when he reported that he had heard the lost "USS Scorpion" submarine, (it was lost with all hands). The spooks came to inspect his old radio receiving equipment. It was old RCA or Hallicrafters WWII surplus equipment with LF coverage from memory, he had a simple end fed wire antenna. They concluded that the equipment was capable of receiving transmissions but could not confirm that he did.

[Stanley]

I didn't know about that Ian. He always struck me as a man with an interesting past who had chosen to be reclusive. I met a bloke like that on the Isle of Eigg. Very quiet and didn't seem to have a job, vanished off the plot occasionally but always landed back home eventually to stay with his father who was the local doctor. The word was that he was SAS and still on the pay roll. Never sure of course but it wouldn't surprise me at all...... There are some interesting hidden stories out there.... I have a current friend who lives quietly on a very adequate pension who I know was Special Branch. He keeps a very low profile.
It reminds me of an occasion back in the late 1960s when I was returning early in the morning from one of my long trips up to the NE of Scotland and followed a black Land Rover from Skipton down to Broughton . No number plates and driving suspiciously steadily. My crap detector whined so much that I had a word with the Barlick police sergeant and a couple of weeks later he buttonholed me and said that he couldn't give me any details but I was quite right, my information had caused a bit of a stir because whoever it was wasn't supposed to operate in the district without giving a heads up to the local constabulary.... Always a good idea to keep close contact with the police when you were bending the log book as much as I did in those days.... I don't know whether that's a Forgotten Corner or not....

[Tizer]

It reminds me of an old chap who lived in a little cottage down the lane from us until recently when he went to live with his daughter's family in the Midlands. Lived a very quiet life, just him and his wife, they made the odd trip out to the shops. You'd see him tending his veg patch and he did some fishing. We used to chat with him over the hedge and found out he'd been in the RAF and one day he told us about when he was at `an airfield somewhere in the East of England' but he never knew exactly where. He'd been sending SOE agents out to France in Lysanders!

[Stanley]

Unsung heroes with interesting pasts Tiz. We walk past them every day in the streets.
This reminds me of the biggest Forgotten Corner of them all, the life experience of the old people. It's the reason why I did the LTP and every time I did an interview I got a surprise. Quite naturally the young dismiss the old, what do they know..... I always tell them (and I'll bring it up next week at Keele with my US students) to talk to their old family members and try to learn something of their lives. I remember my surprise when I found out that Bob Jacobsen had doe 35 trips as a tail gunner with the 100th Bomber Group. Billy Brooks remembering the Boer War and old Stephen Pickles giving me some very scurrilous information about some well known manufacturers in the town (Noted and filed but never divulged!). This store of information is the biggest black hole in research into history because it's by talking to them that we can learn what their frame of reference was and it can give an entirely different view of what was happening to them.
Take note and do it yourself, you could get a bit of a surprise. Too late when they are dead...... (That's why I wrote my memoirs for my kids......)

[Stanley]

I saw a convoy of silage making equipment heading through the town this morning, huge tractors and trailers, Hundreds of thousands of pounds investment. My mind went back sixty years to me and Abel Taylor making this stack of silage in the barn at Green Bank, all carted by horse and two wheeled cart and every last blade of grass unloaded by me with a two tine fork. Easy when the stack was low but when it got above my head it was hard work! I was a fit lad but it made me poorly! I think hand work on this scale is a Forgotten Corner today, I don't know anyone who would take it on, even the dreaded immigrants!
Incidentally, this was the first year Abel did this and there was a bit of a problem. The side wall of the barn against which the silage was stacked was the party wall to the house. The juice from the stack penetrated the wall and all the wall paper went black..... Not good!

[Stanley]

Mentioning harvest at Green Bank reminded me of this Forgotten Corner. 1954 and we were called out of training at the Dale near Chester to help with the harvest. No doubt a PR move but we enjoyed the break! By the way, the reporter got it wrong, it was a threshing machine we were working on and not a combine.

[Stanley]

It just struck me that that was 62 years ago.... At this age everything is a forgotten Corner! (Including being 18 years old)



The people are the biggest forgotten corner of course. Rag Albert taking the sun outside his house on I think it was Market Street in 1982. Albert was one of the town's most recognisable characters. He got his by-name because for many years he mad a living as a rag and bone chap. Itself a redundant occupation, I suppose the nearest thing we have today are the scrap chaps in their white vans. Albert and his ilk collected anything from scrap down to bones and old clothes, they all had a value. I don't know about Barlick but in Stockport the most common medium of exchange was either donkey stones



or in later years, plastic windmills for the kids.

[Stanley]

Earby RAOB trip in the 1950s....

[David Whipp]

This is the rubble left from the demolition of what was left of the former test beds at the Rolls-Royce plant at Bankfield.

When I was a little 'un, the test beds had enormous exhaust 'silencers' stretching towards our house from the end of the factory. I used to wake up to the whole house vibrating with the testing; I recall cracked windows were a regular feature of life.

When researching minutes of the old Barnoldswick Urban District Council a couple of years ago, I came across several references to the problems caused by the testing, even though people tolerated a lot more then.

I think it was the last exhaust installed that was erected vertically; we thought it was for testing vertical take off engines...

The sight of these metal tubes is clear in my minds eye, but I've no photos to hand I'm afraid.

These test beds were where Frank Whittle's engine was developed during the Second World War.

Maybe in one way it's a sad sight to see them reduced to rubble, but the demolition of the old Bankfield Mill is a sign of future investment in new Bankfield; something to record and remember, but not regret.

[PanBiker]

I remember the test beds well, from our viewpoint over Valley Road and Wellhouse the whine of the engines as they wound them up heralded a mirage like heat haze over Bankfield. As kids we used to leg it down Victory Park to get nearer to the test beds, the path through the field to Greenberfield was only a green field away from the action. I can imagine how it must have looked from where you were David.

[Stanley]

I can remember the beds running and stories about them throwing chicken carcasses in to find out how a bird strike would affect the engines. The (possibly apocryphal) story was that one day they slipped up and chucked a frozen chicken in with disastrous results). I can remember the exhaust melting the snow in the field.....
I think they stopped using the facility after the introduction of the RB211 engine as it would have meant building a bigger facility and it was decided to move testing to Derby.



An associated picture. Building the car park at Gill Brow. I'm not sure about the year, possibly in the 1950s.