FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

There's a funny story behind this note and the £10 note that was with it. I found them being used as a bookmarker in a secondhand book on steam.

[Stanley]

We forget that there were 14 weaving sheds like this in Barlick employing about 300 people in each.

[Stanley]

One for the Earbiers. My friend Joan Smith on the left talking to Hedley Bradshaw and his wife Sophia. This was in 2000, Hedley was suffering badly from loss of short term memory but remembered everything from the old days. Sophia was bright as a button. Hedley died in February 2002, Sophia is still alive and well in 2013. Hedley started his career as Firebeater at Grove Mill and ended up as engineer at Spring Mill till it closed. He was a good tenter even though he didn't understand many things on the engine, he once rang Newton Pickles and asked him to come up to the engine as it was out of synch with the little tune he whistled to it every morning. Neston went and found Hedley was right, the governor ropes were loose. Sophia had her own claim to fame, she was a very good singer and was once told by Kathleen Ferrier that she should turn professional. Sophia is in a care home in Barlick but thinks she is in Southport but they tell me she is happy. Lovely couple.
Incidentally, Joan and her friend Thelma enabled me to fulfil a lie-long ambition. I trained them up and one day they ran Ellenroad engine completely by themselves from lighting the boiler to shutting down, possibly the first time in history this had been done on an engine that size by two women!

[Stanley]

Wellhouse Mill demolition in 1981.

[Stanley]

Demolition of Bancroft shed in 1980.

[Stanley]

A sad picture. Jim Pollard surveying the smashed looms he had worked with for forty years. Bancroft demolition in 1979.

[Stanley]

Hey Farm in 1969 before road widening took the barn.

[Stanley]

Dick Lancaster of Paradise Farm, Horton in Craven. He had come with me into the East Riding to load bales of hay.

[Stanley]

Dick Lancaster in his office, a large muckheap. He was signing a cheque for the transport of the load of hay I had just delivered.

[Wendyf]

Lovely picture, I can feel the warmth coming off that heap.

[Stanley]

Those were the days Wendy when we lived up to our necks in substances that today would be classed as noxious health hazards. When I think of the amount of excreta of various kinds I have ingested with my butties I wonder how we ever survived! Or could it be that we got the benefit in better immune systems? I'm all for hygiene and better standards of public health but I'm afraid we have gone too far in domestic cleanliness. I have a little bit of evidence for this. When West Marton Dairies went over to cheese making, Colin Barritt, as manager of the milk handling was put in charge of starter culture preparation as well. Colin was superb in matters of cleanliness and applied the same standards to his treatment of the starter cultures. Each day he would seed new milk with the remains of the old starter and it was left to breed during the night. After a while he and Fred Taylor, the cheese maker, noted that the starter wasn't performing as well as it should. It was Fred who came up with the answer. Colin was so clean and was treating his starter so well that he was actually reducing its resistance to airborne bacteria and this meant that when it was exposed during the process it got the equivalent of a dose of flu! He and Fred worked out how to preserve cleanliness but allow a controlled amount of exposure to bacteria and within a few days the patient recovered and went on to do its job properly. If it works for a culture of bacteria like starter, it works for humans as well!
Dick was a great character and we got on well. He always described his situation as "Small wife, large family".

[Wendyf]

I'm sure that a daily lungful of ammonia from the stables keeps me free of colds in the winter! Weren't smelling salts ammonia based?

[rossylass]

Go on... Tell us then!

The photos are magic.

[Wendyf]

I've been chatting to my neighbour about the photo of Mrs Metcalf at Brown Hill that you posted for me in another topic.



He came to live at Higher Burnt Hill in 1958 when he was 16 and remembers Bessie Metcalf and her son John well. Her husband worked at Rolls and used to walk there & back, but things got too harsh in the winter of '63 and he couldn't continue to farm and walk to work. Bessie used to work at the Hartley hospital.

[Wendyf]

A photo of Higher Burnt Hill Farm, probably taken around 1900?. I think the people could be Hargreaves Procter and his wife Susan with other family members.

[Stanley]

I knew he worked at Rolls. They had a Jowett Bradford van in the yard for years. Funnily enough Jack Emmott at Hainslack on Warley Wise Lane had one as well. I wonder if it was the same one?



John and Mae Wallbank at Brown House Farm, Gisburn Old Track in 1957. Lovely couple. Both dead now....

[Stanley]

Abel Taylor with the stack of barn sileage that he and I built by hand in 1957. Greenbank Farm, Gisburn Old Track.

[Stanley]

Abel Taylor and David in the barn at Greenbank in 1956. They are sat on a proven kist which was specially shaped to make shovelling the cattle feed out easily. Hard to realise this was 57 years ago..... (Note the clogs)

[Stanley]

Mechanised farming at Greenbank Farm in 1957. Based on an old Austin Heavy 12 it was the only bit of farm machinery driven by an engine.

[Stanley]

Abel Taylor's gelding 'Dick' in the windbreak wood at Greenbank Farm. He did all the fieldwork except the hay carting. A very gentle and intelligent horse who knew his job inside out. When young David was a small child he was once sat in the stable doorway when Abel turned Dick loose. He went straight out of the door stepping carefully over David who thought it was all a big laugh. Abel never forgot it.....

[Stanley]

Abel mowing with Dick in 1956. A good crop! The mower is a Bamford 'Two Horse' mower, so called because the cutter bar would have needed two horses to pull it but was made suitable for one horse by mounting a small petrol engine to drive the cutter bar, all the horse had to do was pull the mower. The engine was water cooled and every round Abel had to stop at the ditch and use an old baked bean tin to top up the water in the open topped jacket round the cylinder. Hopelessly old-fashioned even then but it did a lovely job of shaving the meadow.

[Stanley]

Click to enlarge. This goes back to 1954 and is from the Chester paper. The bloke feeding the threshing machine on the left of the top picture is the old fart. In those days our beards were black.....

[Stanley]

Yarlside Farm at Bracewell. The milk stand to the left of the gate is an old friend, I picked up thousands of 12 gallon kits from here. They are all redundant now but a few survive.

[Stanley]

Milk stand at the junction of Rainhall Road and the lane to Rainhall Rock at Barnsey.

[Stanley]

The entrance and office at Barnsey Shed in 1982.