KEEPING WARM
I note that according to government figures, over six million households in Britain are in fuel poverty, in other words they spend more than 10% of their total income on energy. We all know that fuel prices are constantly rising and it is estimated that by 2050 this figure will have risen to nine millions. The assumption is that most of these families cannot afford to keep themselves warm in winter. I am lucky in that my daughters have made sure I am in a well-insulated house and helped me to install a stove so that whatever happens I can always keep warm, if necessary I can burn me books! I have every sympathy for anyone who has to economise on heating, we all know how miserable it is to be cold. I'm sorry, but I can't suggest any way to get round the high cost of energy but you won't be surprised to hear that it got my mind going on what it was like for the Old Barlickers.
Let's leave our prehistoric ancestors on one side apart from my fantasy about the first family who found natural fire caused by lightning and preserved it by keeping a fire permanently lit in their camp. I always imagine some young lad, charged with looking after the fire during the night, who falls asleep, lets the fire go out and has to face the wrath of the tribe the following morning. I'm sure it must have happened but of course we have no evidence.
Come forward to the Roman occupation of the Isles. We know that there were Barlickers then because the community was strong enough to build a small church by the 7th century. At that time they would be living in small timber framed, wattle and daub homes with thatched roofs. No glass in the windows and in the early days no door either. The most likely substitute for these would be a skin hung in the opening. There was no chimney, just a central fireplace and a hole in the roof above it. One thing we can be certain of, they would be living in permanent draughts, the only warm place would be next to the fire or in bed covered with whatever skins or rough fabrics they had. Imagine what this meant in terms of temperature. They would be lucky if they could keep the indoors temperature five degrees Fahrenheit above outside, in other words it would be cold enough to freeze water on a bad day. Now that is real fuel poverty! I doubt if any of us could stand it. My only experience of anything like that apart from the normal business of working during the day in low temperatures was one miserable night spent in a fox-hole in bitter weather in Germany during my army service. We were young, well-fed and fit but I can still remember how the cold penetrated to the bone.
By the 17th century things had improved a bit, houses were being rebuilt in stone and wooden doors and shutters were common. At this time we begin to see chimneys in ordinary houses which meant slightly better control of the fire and with the erection of a few wooden partitions we can well imagine a warmer living space as long as they had fuel to burn. This raises the question of what they were burning on the fire. In early times there would be no shortage of wood because the population wasn't too great for the resource and we have good evidence that Barlick was well-wooded. The records of Bolton Abbey prove that in the 14th century we were the best source of timber in a twenty mile radius and people were making money as woodsmen and turners. However, as the population rose, pressure on the woods increased and this may be why, as far as we can tell, Barnoldswick Wood as it was called shrank to what we have today, isolated hedgerow trees.
It must have been around this time that peat digging started on Whitemoor. We get an important clue in the Manorial Court Rolls for 18th October 1762. One of the customary rights of people living within the bounds of the Manor of Barnoldswick and Salterforth was that they were allowed to bring turf (for fuel), sand and stone from the moor down into the town for their own use. A bye-law passed on this date restricted the size of the wagons used by limiting the teams to three horses. The same bye-law also curtailed this right to the months of May to September inclusive. This shows that the roads used weren’t paved because the tenants were only allowed the privilege in dry weather to protect the ways from wear. The fact that there was a restriction on the number of horses suggests that bigger teams were common in the Manor. At least some of this traffic must have been peat (turves) for house fires.
In the early days of coal mining in Colne there was almost certainly coal brought into the town in small quantities for the fires of the very well-off inhabitants but it was far too expensive for ordinary folk. By 1800 all this changed with the advent of the canal, coal could be efficiently transported in quantity, the price fell and for the first time in Barlick's history it was possible for ordinary people to have a good fire as long as they had enough money to pay. Even the little squatter's hut in Walmsgate had a fireplace and a chimney. By 1900 we had the gasworks. This didn't have a lot of effect as regards gas heating as it was too expensive but gas cookers soon became available and these would throw out quite a lot of heat. More important for domestic heating was the fact that a by-product of making gas from coal was coke and there are still people alive in Barlick today who would have been sent by their mother down to the gasworks with a little home-made cart on old pram wheels to get a bag of coke for the fire or the wash-boiler.
So, looking back we have a lot to be thankful for. Double-glazing, well fitted doors and insulated roofs. As long as we can afford the bill the gas central heating will give us any temperature we need. Bedclothes are cheap and if everything else fails we can always go to bed and snuggle under a warm duvet. Apart from giving a bit of thought to families who are having difficulty paying their energy bills, think back to the days long ago when life was nowhere near as comfortable. Think of the effort that had to go into maintenance of the fire, turves to cut and carry and firewood to chop, then the ashes had to be carried out. There is a saying about logs, they warm you twice, once when you split them and once when you burn them. I hope you have a warm winter!
Happiness is a warm house and a good stew.
