FORGOTTEN CORNERS

[Stanley]

1977 was a snow winter and I decided to get a chimney picture in the snow. I confess I got john to shut the dampers down for a minute so I got good smoke! A forgotten corner in so many ways.....

[Stanley]

Vivary Bridge Mill and weaving shed at Colne in 1979 shortly before demolition. Built in 1895 it is long gone, a forgotten corner.

[Tizer]

Vivary Bridge Mill...

In the centre of Taunton we have Vivary Park (I think Tripps has visited it in the past). The Sherford Stream from the Blackdown hills runs through. It's called Vivary because the site was the location of the medieval fish farm (vivarium) which provided bream, pike and eel for the nearby priory and castle. Does Vivary Bridge Mill in Colne have any link to fish farming in the distant past.

[Wendyf]

Yes there is a link to that area of Colne being a fish farm in the distant past.

[Stanley]

Well spotted Peter. I wonder how many people would have made that connection......



Viv Barnett, landlady of the Dog in Barlick in 1977. Was it really almost 50 years ago....

[Tizer]

Yes there is a link to that area of Colne being a fish farm in the distant past.

Thanks for that, Wendy. It's very satisfying to find confirmation of a guess!

[Tripps]

Well spotted Peter. I wonder how many people would have made that connection......

Anyone who'd been on here too long, was 'keeping up', and had the required velcro memory.

I saw an advert on Gumtree yesterday for a 'vivarium'. Seems it's a glass tank to keep reptiles in - like an aquarium without the water. It gave me a brief flashback to the park in Taunton.

[Stanley]

Best to cover all eventualities. Everything gone now so it's a genuine forgotten corner and I doubt if anyone else recorded it!

[Stanley]

I was on the choir at St Martin's church Norris Bank when I was a young lad and as I have always enjoyed public notices I recorded this one.
However, first of all I would have expected them to spell the name correctly and not use such gobbledygook That it is unintelligible. 'Holy Trinity platt' and 'church plant' lost me completely.
The good news is that I have looked it up on the web and it survived whatever the good Reverend was warning us about and is still functioning as a church. So it doesn't really qualify as a forgotten corner but the notice does!

[Tizer]

I saw an advert on Gumtree yesterday for a 'vivarium'. Seems it's a glass tank to keep reptiles in - like an aquarium without the water. It gave me a brief flashback to the park in Taunton.

I'd always known it as that from when as a child I had a pet lizard (I was always acquiring pets!). Apparently it has a wider meaning:
1600, "game park," from Latin vivarium "enclosure for live game, park, warren, preserve, fish pond," noun use of neuter singular of vivarius "pertaining to living creatures," from vivus "alive, living"

[Stanley]

Almost seventy years ago! Hardly seems credible. A forgotten corner to the world but still remembered by one of the young men....
We were running an old-fashioned threshing machine, in itself a forgotten technology. Notice also that the crop was stooked oats, that means it was cut by an even more old fashioned reaper and binder.

[Stanley]

California in 1980. It was my first visit and one of the first things that struck me was the urban clutter that made almost everywhere look so untidy. I wonder whether there has been any improvement and so this is a forgotten corner. Somehow I doubt it......

[Stanley]

In 1999 I refurbished what was in its time the very latest in textile machinery. A rotary fulling machine which was the modern replacement for the fulling stocks. This machine is now a forgotten corner but the process of fulling some heavy woollen cloths is still needed and there will be a modern equivalent.

[Stanley]

This is the Lytham St Annes Civil Defence volunteers in 1953. I don't know where I got the image but it has always seemed to me that the abolition of what was a very useful organisation was a mistake and a great shame. They are of course a forgotten corner nowadays but could I think have been very useful still.

[Tizer]

Mrs Tiz's father was in the Civil Defence Corps in the 1960s.

Your photo shown above is on the Civil Defence Association web site together with many other interesting pics: LINK
This one caught my eye!...

[Stanley]

Another example of civil precautions that I remember from the immediate post war period was the 'Buffer Depots' that I saw up and down the country as I trammed round on the tramp. These were warehouses where the then Ministry of Supply maintained stocks of essential food and materials to ensure that the government could act to protect society in the event of any shortages. All gone now.
Another instance of government stock-piling I came across was closer to home in Colne. On a piece of land behind the foundry below Primet Bridge, next to the railway viaduct, the Colne scrap merchants, Rushworths, had a pile of scrap looms almost as high as the viaduct. I was told that the government paid them to maintain this stock of cast iron in case it was needed, say for armaments production, and this was repeated many times across the country.
Many will remember the scandal that was caused when Rushworths mounted a flagpole and Union Flag on top of the pile when the King and Queen visited Colne .... People thought that it was wrong to draw attention to what was seen as a testament to the decline of the textile industry.
Long forgotten as well is the fact that 'textile cast', in other words broken up textile machinery, attracted the highest price of any ferrous scrap because the iron produced by melting it was so pure. It was produced from virgin ore using very pure carbon sources.



Scrap looms at Colne.

[Wendyf]

When would that photo have been taken Stanley?

[Stanley]

I don't know Wendy and I don't know where I got it from or when, It isn't one of mine. In fact I was surprised this morning when I found it in my archive!

[Wendyf]

Thanks Stanley, an image search on Google finds the same photo in a 2014 Lancashire Telegraph article called 'The Rise and Decline of King Cotton" which identifies the place as Colne but with no mention of Rushworth's. Would you guess at the 1930's? I'll have to look at when the King & Queen visited Colne.

[Stanley]

I'd place it in the 1950s Wendy when Rushworths were perhaps the biggest operators in the area in the trade of scrapping mills. They were not popular in some quarters because of their close association with the death of an industry.



By the 1970s other firms were involved in what was a lucrative trade. Here we have N&R loom-breaking as part of the demolition of Bancroft in the late 1970s.
There is a whole area of research that has been done on the fraud that was perpetrated during this phase of the history whereby looms were not properly scrapped but were refurbished and exported abroad. There's quite a lot on OG if you go searching for it. See some of the evidence in the LTP.....

[Stanley]

In February 2000 my mate Robert Aram alerted me to the fact that the last complete weaving shed demolition was underway at Baiting's Mill Rochdale so I went over and did the pictures. This was the last complete weaving shed left and so this sort of demolition was over. It was a forgotten Corner.

[Stanley]

The demolition of Dee Mill engine house at Shaw. I had been given the task of legally demolishing this Industrial Monument, the equivalent in legal terms of demolishing Stonehenge. In order to do it I had to spend a year making the case for demolition to the authorities and achieved that eventually by proving to the relevant committee that leaving it as it was was an indictment of the whole system of listing Ancient Monuments. I was called a vandal for doing this by some ill-informed people. It never bothered me because it was the only sensible thing to do.
Long forgotten now but heady stuff at the time!

[Steeplejerk]

It would be impossible to keep them all

[Stanley]

Thanks Tom, yes, you're right and it was in such bad condition, It would have cost millions to save, let alone do anything with it.

[Stanley]

Dee Mill in the glory days. This is the real forgotten corner.



And how it was when I went to it. Totally wrecked.