MORE WATERY MATTERS.
Posted: 11 Feb 2026, 02:59
MORE WATERY MATTERS.
Written 4 December 2000
Last week I told you the story of how I think Billycock drove his cousins out of Barlick by manipulating the water in the Butts Beck and then took James Nuttall to court when he tried to revive Old Coates using the water from the Bowker Drain. Before we get on to what Nuttall did next, we’d better have a look at one of the biggest mysteries in Barlick, the Bowker Drain. William Atkinson says that the Bowker Drain was put in by Billycock Bracewell in order to supply water to his New Mill. Whilst this might be true I have a problem with it. If the drain was put in by Bracewell to supply his own mill, why did he site the take-off point in Eastwood Bottoms outside his land holding? We know from the 1887 sale document that Eastwood bottoms was owned by Mr A B Royd and I know that when the Calf Hall Shed Company bought the mill they were paying the Roundell Estate at Gledstone an annual rent for use of the resource.
Over the years I have been fascinated by this drain, largely because the people who know about it won’t speak! I remember asking Harold Duxbury about it and he smiled, laid his finger on the side of his nose and shut up like a clam. It says a lot about the drain that most of what I know is the result of anonymous tip offs! I have to tell you that even now I know very little about it, if any of you have any information I’d be delighted to hear it.
The Bowker Drain (And its name is another mystery, why is it called the Bowker drain?) runs along the north side of the Leeds and Liverpool canal from a spring in the east corner of the field to the south of Barnoldswick Park which is covered by a stone flag. I’ve looked but I haven’t been able to find it. From there it follows the canal side at a reasonable distance until it passes under the corner of Moss Shed reappearing in the boiler house yard where there is a manhole giving access. It follows the canal side towards Long Ing bridge where it strikes away and passes under Long Ing Shed and the foundry. The mill was built in 1888 so the drain is older. There is another access point between Long Ing Shed and the foundry. It goes down Eastwood bottoms and has no connection with Crow Nest Syke which used to be called Foul Syke. In the field behind the garages there is a large tank with a by-pass round it, this is fed by the Bowker Drain and is where Wellhouse got its water from, this was in the ownership of the Roundell Estate in 1888. From there it goes under Skipton road, under the houses next to Crow Nest cottages, under the Drill Hall and emerges again in a manhole in Rolls Royce car park. At this point it is at a higher level than the site where the Old Coates dams were but is piped into the beck. All very interesting I hear you say, but so what!
You can’t run steam engines efficiently without a constant supply of cold water. Wellhouse Mill could just about make a do with 5,000 gallons an hour and they didn’t waste any, it was all recirculated back into the dams. The 5,000 gallons was needed for boiler feeding and to make up losses in the system. To give you some idea, when I ran Ellenroad Engine light it was pulling about 5,000 gallons a minute out of the River Beal. A heavily loaded engine like Moss or Wellhouse would be circulating about the same amount. The bottom line is that you couldn’t have too much water.
This was where the Bowker Drain came in handy after Bracewell’s death. In it’s hey day it was a very valuable resource and was always regarded as ‘free’ water. Moss Shed could either run off the drain or the canal. Walt Fisher’s father, Stanley Fisher, was the engineer at Moss Shed and in 1932 when the weaving shed at Moss was flooding due to the heavy rain, Stanley turned the engine pump on to the Bowker drain but discharged from the condensers into the canal. This dropped the level in the shed and allowed them to carry on. The Calf Hall Shed Company ran a test on the tank in Eastwood Bottoms in about 1903 and calculated they were drawing almost 5,000 gallons an hour out of it. In later years it wasn’t such a good resource after the Canal Company spent a lot of money piling the sides of the canal thus cutting down on leakage. I also have a theory that the building of the New Road might have disturbed the flow of water to the spring below Barnoldswick Park and this wouldn’t have helped either.
That’s about all I can tell you apart from the fact that I believe the court case between Bracewell and Nuttall concerned the Bowker Drain. If Bracewell built the drain had he piped it straight into the beck instead of allowing it to feed a rival mill and had someone made an enterprising connection into it? Was the dispute over the Butts Beck and the fact that Bracewell was milking it there? Was Bracewell taking it all for Wellhouse? If so, where was his overflow going? I would have thought that even if he had dropped it into Crow Nest Syke, it would have finished up being available for Old Coates dam. Will someone please give me an answer! [In later articles you'll find I eventually solved this mystery, Bracewell was taking all the flow for Wellhouse and went to the trouble of installing a cast iron pipe to carry the overflow from his lodges at Wellhouse directly into Butts beck at a level too low to benefit Coates Mill.]
There is of course one other factor which might have had a bearing on the Bracewell Brother’s failure, the Cotton Famine due to the American Civil War and this would be a contributory cause, but here again I have a problem, William of Coates and his brothers went bankrupt in 1860 and the Hard Times had only just started. Atkinson says that they were limited in business acumen and were hampered by being in old-fashioned mills. Mitchell was in the same position at Clough but survived until 1867 when he sold out to John Slater who immediately modernised his investment.
Four years after the court case with Bracewell, one report says that James Nuttall started to build New Coates on a green field site to the north east of Coates Bridge with the advantage of the canal water for condensing. This was the first mill to be built on the canal side in Barlick and I think that Nuttall’s experiences with Bracewell had taught him to look for the most reliable water resource, he found it in the canal.
New Coates was originally built for 300 looms, it was powered by a beam engine and William Atkinson says ‘It was built for those would-be manufacturers who had been thwarted at Old Coates Mill’. A shortage of capital delayed completion and there is some confusion as to the actual starting date because a sale document of 1870 mentions a ‘Warehouse on the canal side now used as a bobbin mill’. There is a warehouse marked on the 1853 OS map in the south western corner of the land where New Coates Mill was built which I think was originally built by old William of Coates to service his business as a clothier putting out work to his domestic handloom weavers. To compound the confusion, I’ve been given a date of 1869 when the mill was definitely weaving. No doubt all will become clear eventually but at the moment I favour the later date if for no other reason that in 1864 the industry was still reeling from the shock of the Hard Times.
In the Craven Herald of 8th of September 1888 there was a report that ‘Coates Mill works on as usual during the depression caused by the collapse of the Bracewell interests’. I can’t help thinking this must have given one or two people much satisfaction. Billycock's hegemony in Barlick is often spoken of as something to admire. I think I share this view as regards his business success with his mills but when you dig deeper into the subject you begin to realise that he wasn’t encouraging any development in the town that wasn’t directly controlled by him. There is an unmistakeable linkage between the date of Bracewell’s death in 1885 and the rise of the shed companies with all the opportunities that they presented to the smaller entrepreneurs. William Atkinson makes some veiled comments to this effect and he was quite an astute observer of the scene.
New Coates started well and the names of the early tenants bears out Atkinson’s statement, James Nutter was in there with 56 looms in 1880. Bell and Russell in 1896. Coates Manufacturing Company, late Dewhurst and Harrison, is mentioned in 1905 with 400 looms. By about 1912 the mill was owned by Riding's Mill Stores of Blackburn. It was tenanted and run by the Coates Manufacturing Company which was a consortium of Earby men led by Walter Wilkinson who used to be the manager of the Co-operative Stores at Earby. Some of the names associated with him were Jack Myers, Nelson Duckworth, Elisha Harrison(?), Waddington and others. Walter Wilkinson had three sons, one of whom, Granville Wilkinson, went to Whitefield at Nelson and started there. The Coates Manufacturing Company may have bought the mill off Ridings when they built the extension on the canal bank. This would probably be when Johnny Pickles put the Hick Hargreaves engine in and according to Newton Pickles this was round about 1925 or 1926. They bought the engine second hand from a mill in Bolton that was closing down. It was a gear drive but Johnny decided he would convert it to ropes and they cast segments to bolt to the rim over the gearing and turned the rope grooves in situ in its own pit. Newton said it was the truest running flywheel in Barlick.
There’s some confusion about when New Coates closed down as a weaving shed but there is mention of it standing idle until it was bought in 1931 by Dobson’s Dairies of Manchester. Newton Pickles, at 15 years old, got the job of getting the engine going again and told me a good story about this. When they went down to light the boiler it wouldn’t draw, the smoke just puthered back into the boiler house in their faces, he said they were as black as the fire back. At this point Johnny walked in and burst out laughing when he saw the mess they were in. “Eh Newton” he said, “Tha’ll hev to larn t’chimney to smook again!” The problem was that the chimney was cold and damp and had developed a back draught, they had to get into the chimney bottom and light a fire to start an updraught. Once they had done this they could light the boiler fire and the heat soon dried the flue out and they were away. The engine ran almost 24 hours a day all through the war and shortly after WWII Brown and Pickles installed a new boiler. It ran until the late 60’s I think as a dairy and then went back to weaving velvet for a time but not using the engine. Later it became Carr’s Printers but when they moved out into Calf Hall Shed it became Hopes light engineers who changed the name to Hope Mill. [As I edit this in 2010 we have news that Hope Engineering are going to move into Calf Hall Shed which is empty after Carrprint failed some years ago.]
4 December 2000
Written 4 December 2000
Last week I told you the story of how I think Billycock drove his cousins out of Barlick by manipulating the water in the Butts Beck and then took James Nuttall to court when he tried to revive Old Coates using the water from the Bowker Drain. Before we get on to what Nuttall did next, we’d better have a look at one of the biggest mysteries in Barlick, the Bowker Drain. William Atkinson says that the Bowker Drain was put in by Billycock Bracewell in order to supply water to his New Mill. Whilst this might be true I have a problem with it. If the drain was put in by Bracewell to supply his own mill, why did he site the take-off point in Eastwood Bottoms outside his land holding? We know from the 1887 sale document that Eastwood bottoms was owned by Mr A B Royd and I know that when the Calf Hall Shed Company bought the mill they were paying the Roundell Estate at Gledstone an annual rent for use of the resource.
Over the years I have been fascinated by this drain, largely because the people who know about it won’t speak! I remember asking Harold Duxbury about it and he smiled, laid his finger on the side of his nose and shut up like a clam. It says a lot about the drain that most of what I know is the result of anonymous tip offs! I have to tell you that even now I know very little about it, if any of you have any information I’d be delighted to hear it.
The Bowker Drain (And its name is another mystery, why is it called the Bowker drain?) runs along the north side of the Leeds and Liverpool canal from a spring in the east corner of the field to the south of Barnoldswick Park which is covered by a stone flag. I’ve looked but I haven’t been able to find it. From there it follows the canal side at a reasonable distance until it passes under the corner of Moss Shed reappearing in the boiler house yard where there is a manhole giving access. It follows the canal side towards Long Ing bridge where it strikes away and passes under Long Ing Shed and the foundry. The mill was built in 1888 so the drain is older. There is another access point between Long Ing Shed and the foundry. It goes down Eastwood bottoms and has no connection with Crow Nest Syke which used to be called Foul Syke. In the field behind the garages there is a large tank with a by-pass round it, this is fed by the Bowker Drain and is where Wellhouse got its water from, this was in the ownership of the Roundell Estate in 1888. From there it goes under Skipton road, under the houses next to Crow Nest cottages, under the Drill Hall and emerges again in a manhole in Rolls Royce car park. At this point it is at a higher level than the site where the Old Coates dams were but is piped into the beck. All very interesting I hear you say, but so what!
You can’t run steam engines efficiently without a constant supply of cold water. Wellhouse Mill could just about make a do with 5,000 gallons an hour and they didn’t waste any, it was all recirculated back into the dams. The 5,000 gallons was needed for boiler feeding and to make up losses in the system. To give you some idea, when I ran Ellenroad Engine light it was pulling about 5,000 gallons a minute out of the River Beal. A heavily loaded engine like Moss or Wellhouse would be circulating about the same amount. The bottom line is that you couldn’t have too much water.
This was where the Bowker Drain came in handy after Bracewell’s death. In it’s hey day it was a very valuable resource and was always regarded as ‘free’ water. Moss Shed could either run off the drain or the canal. Walt Fisher’s father, Stanley Fisher, was the engineer at Moss Shed and in 1932 when the weaving shed at Moss was flooding due to the heavy rain, Stanley turned the engine pump on to the Bowker drain but discharged from the condensers into the canal. This dropped the level in the shed and allowed them to carry on. The Calf Hall Shed Company ran a test on the tank in Eastwood Bottoms in about 1903 and calculated they were drawing almost 5,000 gallons an hour out of it. In later years it wasn’t such a good resource after the Canal Company spent a lot of money piling the sides of the canal thus cutting down on leakage. I also have a theory that the building of the New Road might have disturbed the flow of water to the spring below Barnoldswick Park and this wouldn’t have helped either.
That’s about all I can tell you apart from the fact that I believe the court case between Bracewell and Nuttall concerned the Bowker Drain. If Bracewell built the drain had he piped it straight into the beck instead of allowing it to feed a rival mill and had someone made an enterprising connection into it? Was the dispute over the Butts Beck and the fact that Bracewell was milking it there? Was Bracewell taking it all for Wellhouse? If so, where was his overflow going? I would have thought that even if he had dropped it into Crow Nest Syke, it would have finished up being available for Old Coates dam. Will someone please give me an answer! [In later articles you'll find I eventually solved this mystery, Bracewell was taking all the flow for Wellhouse and went to the trouble of installing a cast iron pipe to carry the overflow from his lodges at Wellhouse directly into Butts beck at a level too low to benefit Coates Mill.]
There is of course one other factor which might have had a bearing on the Bracewell Brother’s failure, the Cotton Famine due to the American Civil War and this would be a contributory cause, but here again I have a problem, William of Coates and his brothers went bankrupt in 1860 and the Hard Times had only just started. Atkinson says that they were limited in business acumen and were hampered by being in old-fashioned mills. Mitchell was in the same position at Clough but survived until 1867 when he sold out to John Slater who immediately modernised his investment.
Four years after the court case with Bracewell, one report says that James Nuttall started to build New Coates on a green field site to the north east of Coates Bridge with the advantage of the canal water for condensing. This was the first mill to be built on the canal side in Barlick and I think that Nuttall’s experiences with Bracewell had taught him to look for the most reliable water resource, he found it in the canal.
New Coates was originally built for 300 looms, it was powered by a beam engine and William Atkinson says ‘It was built for those would-be manufacturers who had been thwarted at Old Coates Mill’. A shortage of capital delayed completion and there is some confusion as to the actual starting date because a sale document of 1870 mentions a ‘Warehouse on the canal side now used as a bobbin mill’. There is a warehouse marked on the 1853 OS map in the south western corner of the land where New Coates Mill was built which I think was originally built by old William of Coates to service his business as a clothier putting out work to his domestic handloom weavers. To compound the confusion, I’ve been given a date of 1869 when the mill was definitely weaving. No doubt all will become clear eventually but at the moment I favour the later date if for no other reason that in 1864 the industry was still reeling from the shock of the Hard Times.
In the Craven Herald of 8th of September 1888 there was a report that ‘Coates Mill works on as usual during the depression caused by the collapse of the Bracewell interests’. I can’t help thinking this must have given one or two people much satisfaction. Billycock's hegemony in Barlick is often spoken of as something to admire. I think I share this view as regards his business success with his mills but when you dig deeper into the subject you begin to realise that he wasn’t encouraging any development in the town that wasn’t directly controlled by him. There is an unmistakeable linkage between the date of Bracewell’s death in 1885 and the rise of the shed companies with all the opportunities that they presented to the smaller entrepreneurs. William Atkinson makes some veiled comments to this effect and he was quite an astute observer of the scene.
New Coates started well and the names of the early tenants bears out Atkinson’s statement, James Nutter was in there with 56 looms in 1880. Bell and Russell in 1896. Coates Manufacturing Company, late Dewhurst and Harrison, is mentioned in 1905 with 400 looms. By about 1912 the mill was owned by Riding's Mill Stores of Blackburn. It was tenanted and run by the Coates Manufacturing Company which was a consortium of Earby men led by Walter Wilkinson who used to be the manager of the Co-operative Stores at Earby. Some of the names associated with him were Jack Myers, Nelson Duckworth, Elisha Harrison(?), Waddington and others. Walter Wilkinson had three sons, one of whom, Granville Wilkinson, went to Whitefield at Nelson and started there. The Coates Manufacturing Company may have bought the mill off Ridings when they built the extension on the canal bank. This would probably be when Johnny Pickles put the Hick Hargreaves engine in and according to Newton Pickles this was round about 1925 or 1926. They bought the engine second hand from a mill in Bolton that was closing down. It was a gear drive but Johnny decided he would convert it to ropes and they cast segments to bolt to the rim over the gearing and turned the rope grooves in situ in its own pit. Newton said it was the truest running flywheel in Barlick.
There’s some confusion about when New Coates closed down as a weaving shed but there is mention of it standing idle until it was bought in 1931 by Dobson’s Dairies of Manchester. Newton Pickles, at 15 years old, got the job of getting the engine going again and told me a good story about this. When they went down to light the boiler it wouldn’t draw, the smoke just puthered back into the boiler house in their faces, he said they were as black as the fire back. At this point Johnny walked in and burst out laughing when he saw the mess they were in. “Eh Newton” he said, “Tha’ll hev to larn t’chimney to smook again!” The problem was that the chimney was cold and damp and had developed a back draught, they had to get into the chimney bottom and light a fire to start an updraught. Once they had done this they could light the boiler fire and the heat soon dried the flue out and they were away. The engine ran almost 24 hours a day all through the war and shortly after WWII Brown and Pickles installed a new boiler. It ran until the late 60’s I think as a dairy and then went back to weaving velvet for a time but not using the engine. Later it became Carr’s Printers but when they moved out into Calf Hall Shed it became Hopes light engineers who changed the name to Hope Mill. [As I edit this in 2010 we have news that Hope Engineering are going to move into Calf Hall Shed which is empty after Carrprint failed some years ago.]
4 December 2000