BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS. (6)
Posted: 13 Mar 2026, 02:42
BARLICK LIFE 1900 ONWARDS. (6)
We’re about to follow Ernie into the world of work but before we plunge into that, let’s have a look at some of the other things that formed part of his life.
At one point I asked him what the status of Wapping and Westgate was in the 1930’s compared with other parts of the town and he was in no doubt that it was the rough area. I asked him who were the people they really looked up to, who they regarded as a ‘proper’ lady or gentleman. He immediately identified old Mr Slater who at this time was living at Newfield Edge, Bracewell’s old house at the bottom of Folly Lane. He said that usually people would quake and quail if they met a manufacturer on the street, hardly surprising really when you consider that in a single industry town these men literally had the power of life and death. If they didn’t employ you, you either starved or left the town.
I think the Slater that Ernie is talking about is Joseph Slater, he married Ada Bracewell, Billycock’s daughter and they were certainly at Newfield edge in 1904. Ernie said they used to be frightened of him because he had a very red face but he realised in later years that this might have been blood pressure or whisky. Every Christmas any child that went to Newfield Edge on Christmas morning got six new halfpennies as a present. I think this was the same man who bought Ernie the clogs and he was certainly never forgotten. Ernie said he was a proper gentleman and he had good memories of him.
This didn’t apply to all of them of course. Ernie could get very scathing about manufacturers and how they treated their workers. Ernie had bowed legs and was convinced it was due to malnutrition when he was a child. He said to me once, “None of Nutter’s children were bow-legged!” He had another caustic comment about them, “Rob the workers, build a chapel and go to heaven.” Harsh words I know, and no doubt some would argue against them, but Ernie had seen hard times and never forgot.
We’ve already talked about Ernie and bad health. He was to have one more episode that left an indelible mark on his memory. He’d started taking an interest in girls and he said that he realised he had what he described as a ‘sore point’! He’d seen the notices which used to be displayed in all public urinals warning about the dangers of Venereal Disease and knew that Syphilis in particular had been a big problem during the First World War so he decided he had better go to his doctor, Dr. Glen.
When he went to see him the doctor took one look at him and said “Syphilis!” and gave him some ointment. Ernie said his blood ran cold because he knew that in those days it was the equivalent, as he said, of ‘Being sent to Siberia’. This was a serious matter, and he decided to go to Burnley where he knew there was a specialist clinic. When he went there the doctor soon reassured him that there was no serious disease, gave him some ointment and sent him home with a note for his doctor. Ernie said he didn’t have a lot of confidence in Dr Glen after that. Being Ernie, he decided to look further into this and one Saturday he got the afternoon train and went to Liverpool where he knew there was a Museum of Anatomy. He said that what he saw there made a big impression on him which he never forgot. I asked him whether there was any attempt at sex education in those days and he said he hadn’t come across any. The only thing he could remember his mother saying to the three lads was that if they ever ‘bairned’ a girl, they would marry her. End of story!
Ernie said that Wilson had diphtheria and scarlatina, this was the old fashioned name for Scarlet Fever. Both these were life-threatening diseases. Scarlatina in particular was very infectious and BUDC built an isolation hospital at Banks Hill where the bungalows are now. There was a special green ambulance and anyone who got the disease was taken into the hospital to be isolated during the infectious phase of the illness. Ernie said that when they got Wilson down there they found he hadn’t got it but because he had been admitted he had to stay there. Ernie went down and pulled faces at him through the window!
Ernie’s mother Margaret told him that she once had an abscess on her breast and the cure was a cow clap poultice! Even Ernie baulked at this but it does show us how much things have changed now.
Of course it’s not surprising that infection was rife. The lack of hygiene in those days is incomprehensible to us. As I’ve said before, if we were moved back in time to those conditions we’d drop like flies because we wouldn’t have the antibodies to deal with the infections that were common. Talking of flies, there were a lot more about in those days and the cure was a flycatcher. This was a roll of paper in a tube with a loop of cotton at one end. You hung it up by the loop and pulled the tube and the roll of paper unfurled and hung there. It was covered with a very sticky substance and when the flies landed on it they were stuck. You left it up until it was full of flies and then threw it on the fire and started another one.
But, whatever the disadvantages, Ernie had survived childhood and in 1930 he was ready to go out into the world of work. Now those of us who have any knowledge of the thirties know that there was a recession and much unemployment so you might think that this would mean that Ernie would have trouble getting a job. Not so, the employers had a little trick up their sleeves which ensured that there were plenty of jobs available for healthy young people. They called it the apprentice system.
Surprisingly enough, Ernie’s first job wasn’t in a mill in Barlick, it was in King’s Foundry in Skipton. Remember this was an undernourished fourteen year old lad. His first job was buffing the rough edges off newly cast iron manhole covers. These weighed about 150lbs (75 kg.) and he had to lift every one on to the machine. He said the foreman was a cruel man and it didn’t take Ernie long to work out that he’d be lucky if he survived. The wage was twopence three farthings an hour. (This was slightly more than 1p an hour. He was taking home about 35p for a weeks hard work) He noted that as soon as any of his co-workers reached an age where their wages would be raised they were sacked on some pretence and another school-leaver set on. Ernie said that exactly the same system was operated at Dewhurst’s Thread Mill in Skipton and he described it as ‘slave labour’. So, one day, he started buffing the flanges off the manhole covers, rendering them useless, this did the trick, he got sacked and went home and told his mother.
Margaret hadn’t been very happy about the foundry job in the first place and she told Ernie not to worry, she’d have a word with her sister, Ernie’s aunt Louise, who wove at Bancroft. Since he had been about ten years old, Ernie had been going up to Bancroft regularly on Saturday morning to help his aunt Louise and learn to weave so, when she had a word with the manager at Bancroft, Tom Rigg, he agreed to let her take on Ernie as a learner weaver or tenter. Notice that it was aunt Louise who set Ernie on and she had to pay him a wage. To compensate for this she was given another loom or two which could be managed with help. At that time, only the top-class weavers had six looms, the usual number was four.
It didn’t take long for Ernie to get the hang of weaving. He had the odd bit of trouble like one day he was called into the warehouse over a piece of cloth he had woven with too many ends in the selvedge. Surprisingly, the manager was very kind to him, pointed out the mistake and how to cure it and told him never to do it again.
Ernie always looked forward to Saturday morning because there was a good chance a weaver would miss coming in. If this happened, Ernie was paired up with another learner, a girl, and they ran the four looms for the missing weaver. They got paid two shillings and sixpence for this by the management, one shilling and threepence apiece (slightly more than 6p) Aunt Louise was paying him half a crown a week, so this was a bumper week!
Ernie did two years at Bancroft and graduated first to two looms and then four. By 1932 he was earning about £2 a week. He ‘tipped up’ his wage to his mother and she gave him a couple of bob for himself so Margaret was getting to be a wealthy woman she had two sons working in addition to her own wage. In 1932, this triggered off a move from 1 John Street to 9 Westgate. This was one of the houses that used to stand on the left hand side of Westgate looking uphill. They were demolished for road widening about 20 years ago. Hartley Street, where Ernie was born, was in this block of houses.
The new house was a great improvement. It was a through house with two bedrooms and a parlour in addition to the kitchen. There was a backyard with a washhouse and a tippler toilet. (That’s right, we're back to basic functions again!) Tippler toilets were the first lavatories in the town that worked on the ‘water carriage’ system. That is, water was used to carry the waste away to the sewage works through sewers instead of manual collection. The way they worked was that there was an earthenware pipe about 14 inches in diameter connected straight into the sewer via a water trap and this had a seat on top. It was flushed by the waste water from the sink which collected in a ‘tippler’ in a chamber in the yard until there was enough to overbalance it. When this happened there was a rush of soapy water into the toilet which flushed it out. The shaft down to the sewer could be 15 feet deep and it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that we would regard them as highly unsanitary. They were also very frightening if you were a child.
When I came out of the army in 1956 and found myself in the grocer’s shop at Sough we had a tippler toilet and it fascinated me. I was always a beggar for cleaning things and using bleach so I took charge of the tippler. About once a month I’d lift the cast iron manhole in the backyard and scrub the tippler box out and disinfect it. I remember telling Newton Pickles about this once and he told me that he remembered the tippler toilets at Wellhouse Mill in the engine house yard. It was a two seater and he and his mate would go together for an early morning bowel movement! He said that it was good in winter because the drains from the engine were connected to the sewer and he said that as you sat there the steam from the engine puffed up and kept your bum warm! So you see, there could be advantages in the old technology.
A big problem with tipplers was if they got blocked, remember, they could be 15 feet deep. Harold Duxbury told me once that he had a man who was an expert at clearing them and at times did nothing else. He used an old fashioned mop with a long handle and the trick was to fill the pipe above the blockage with water and then use the mop as a piston to drive the water and the obstruction through into the sewer. A Barlick version of Dyno-Rod!
As you have probably realised, anything to do with tipplers fascinates me! This raises a serious point though, have you any idea of the number of people who have no idea what happens to the waste in a lavatory when you flush it? It’s a question of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and I have never been able to understand why such things don’t fascinate people. Alright, I realise I am probably an exception but I always need to know why and how something works. This may be one of the reasons why history fascinates me so much, I need to know the nuts and bolts of my town and how it works and stories like Ernie Roberts’s life tell us so much about the society we live in.
Once again I’m going to leave Ernie for a while and look at other subjects. I hope that reading about life in the 1930’s has awakened memories in the older end and perhaps enlightened the young ones a bit. As I’ve said before, it was a hard life, especially for the women folk. Many people bemoan the fact that now we have washing machines, refrigerators, electricity and central heating we have lost something of value. The people who say this must never have had to do without these ‘luxuries’! I still have an open fire in the front room but would hate to have to go back to my childhood days for so many reasons. Perhaps the greatest is the fact that I can sit here at my computer in the kitchen and talk to all you lot out there without even leaving the house.
One last confession. I was talking to one of my readers last week and they were saying nice things about the Ernie articles, one comment they made was that it was obvious that I liked Ernie. This is an understatement, I loved the bloke. He was so direct and down to earth and I never heard a hard word from him unless it was about the lot of the workers. What saddened me most was the fact that he never got his retirement, he died in 1982 of a brain tumour. If anyone ever deserved a long and happy rest after all the hard times he went through, it was Ernie. His ashes are scattered on Brown Hill and when I look up there I think about him and his jokes and stories. He taught me a lot about Barlick and I shall never forget him. If there’s one basic reason why I enjoy doing the research and writing it’s because I can give the Ernie’s of this world a voice and recognition that they could never have got in their lifetime. History isn’t about Kings and Queens, it’s about little people like Ernie who made the world go round.
We’re about to follow Ernie into the world of work but before we plunge into that, let’s have a look at some of the other things that formed part of his life.
At one point I asked him what the status of Wapping and Westgate was in the 1930’s compared with other parts of the town and he was in no doubt that it was the rough area. I asked him who were the people they really looked up to, who they regarded as a ‘proper’ lady or gentleman. He immediately identified old Mr Slater who at this time was living at Newfield Edge, Bracewell’s old house at the bottom of Folly Lane. He said that usually people would quake and quail if they met a manufacturer on the street, hardly surprising really when you consider that in a single industry town these men literally had the power of life and death. If they didn’t employ you, you either starved or left the town.
I think the Slater that Ernie is talking about is Joseph Slater, he married Ada Bracewell, Billycock’s daughter and they were certainly at Newfield edge in 1904. Ernie said they used to be frightened of him because he had a very red face but he realised in later years that this might have been blood pressure or whisky. Every Christmas any child that went to Newfield Edge on Christmas morning got six new halfpennies as a present. I think this was the same man who bought Ernie the clogs and he was certainly never forgotten. Ernie said he was a proper gentleman and he had good memories of him.
This didn’t apply to all of them of course. Ernie could get very scathing about manufacturers and how they treated their workers. Ernie had bowed legs and was convinced it was due to malnutrition when he was a child. He said to me once, “None of Nutter’s children were bow-legged!” He had another caustic comment about them, “Rob the workers, build a chapel and go to heaven.” Harsh words I know, and no doubt some would argue against them, but Ernie had seen hard times and never forgot.
We’ve already talked about Ernie and bad health. He was to have one more episode that left an indelible mark on his memory. He’d started taking an interest in girls and he said that he realised he had what he described as a ‘sore point’! He’d seen the notices which used to be displayed in all public urinals warning about the dangers of Venereal Disease and knew that Syphilis in particular had been a big problem during the First World War so he decided he had better go to his doctor, Dr. Glen.
When he went to see him the doctor took one look at him and said “Syphilis!” and gave him some ointment. Ernie said his blood ran cold because he knew that in those days it was the equivalent, as he said, of ‘Being sent to Siberia’. This was a serious matter, and he decided to go to Burnley where he knew there was a specialist clinic. When he went there the doctor soon reassured him that there was no serious disease, gave him some ointment and sent him home with a note for his doctor. Ernie said he didn’t have a lot of confidence in Dr Glen after that. Being Ernie, he decided to look further into this and one Saturday he got the afternoon train and went to Liverpool where he knew there was a Museum of Anatomy. He said that what he saw there made a big impression on him which he never forgot. I asked him whether there was any attempt at sex education in those days and he said he hadn’t come across any. The only thing he could remember his mother saying to the three lads was that if they ever ‘bairned’ a girl, they would marry her. End of story!
Ernie said that Wilson had diphtheria and scarlatina, this was the old fashioned name for Scarlet Fever. Both these were life-threatening diseases. Scarlatina in particular was very infectious and BUDC built an isolation hospital at Banks Hill where the bungalows are now. There was a special green ambulance and anyone who got the disease was taken into the hospital to be isolated during the infectious phase of the illness. Ernie said that when they got Wilson down there they found he hadn’t got it but because he had been admitted he had to stay there. Ernie went down and pulled faces at him through the window!
Ernie’s mother Margaret told him that she once had an abscess on her breast and the cure was a cow clap poultice! Even Ernie baulked at this but it does show us how much things have changed now.
Of course it’s not surprising that infection was rife. The lack of hygiene in those days is incomprehensible to us. As I’ve said before, if we were moved back in time to those conditions we’d drop like flies because we wouldn’t have the antibodies to deal with the infections that were common. Talking of flies, there were a lot more about in those days and the cure was a flycatcher. This was a roll of paper in a tube with a loop of cotton at one end. You hung it up by the loop and pulled the tube and the roll of paper unfurled and hung there. It was covered with a very sticky substance and when the flies landed on it they were stuck. You left it up until it was full of flies and then threw it on the fire and started another one.
But, whatever the disadvantages, Ernie had survived childhood and in 1930 he was ready to go out into the world of work. Now those of us who have any knowledge of the thirties know that there was a recession and much unemployment so you might think that this would mean that Ernie would have trouble getting a job. Not so, the employers had a little trick up their sleeves which ensured that there were plenty of jobs available for healthy young people. They called it the apprentice system.
Surprisingly enough, Ernie’s first job wasn’t in a mill in Barlick, it was in King’s Foundry in Skipton. Remember this was an undernourished fourteen year old lad. His first job was buffing the rough edges off newly cast iron manhole covers. These weighed about 150lbs (75 kg.) and he had to lift every one on to the machine. He said the foreman was a cruel man and it didn’t take Ernie long to work out that he’d be lucky if he survived. The wage was twopence three farthings an hour. (This was slightly more than 1p an hour. He was taking home about 35p for a weeks hard work) He noted that as soon as any of his co-workers reached an age where their wages would be raised they were sacked on some pretence and another school-leaver set on. Ernie said that exactly the same system was operated at Dewhurst’s Thread Mill in Skipton and he described it as ‘slave labour’. So, one day, he started buffing the flanges off the manhole covers, rendering them useless, this did the trick, he got sacked and went home and told his mother.
Margaret hadn’t been very happy about the foundry job in the first place and she told Ernie not to worry, she’d have a word with her sister, Ernie’s aunt Louise, who wove at Bancroft. Since he had been about ten years old, Ernie had been going up to Bancroft regularly on Saturday morning to help his aunt Louise and learn to weave so, when she had a word with the manager at Bancroft, Tom Rigg, he agreed to let her take on Ernie as a learner weaver or tenter. Notice that it was aunt Louise who set Ernie on and she had to pay him a wage. To compensate for this she was given another loom or two which could be managed with help. At that time, only the top-class weavers had six looms, the usual number was four.
It didn’t take long for Ernie to get the hang of weaving. He had the odd bit of trouble like one day he was called into the warehouse over a piece of cloth he had woven with too many ends in the selvedge. Surprisingly, the manager was very kind to him, pointed out the mistake and how to cure it and told him never to do it again.
Ernie always looked forward to Saturday morning because there was a good chance a weaver would miss coming in. If this happened, Ernie was paired up with another learner, a girl, and they ran the four looms for the missing weaver. They got paid two shillings and sixpence for this by the management, one shilling and threepence apiece (slightly more than 6p) Aunt Louise was paying him half a crown a week, so this was a bumper week!
Ernie did two years at Bancroft and graduated first to two looms and then four. By 1932 he was earning about £2 a week. He ‘tipped up’ his wage to his mother and she gave him a couple of bob for himself so Margaret was getting to be a wealthy woman she had two sons working in addition to her own wage. In 1932, this triggered off a move from 1 John Street to 9 Westgate. This was one of the houses that used to stand on the left hand side of Westgate looking uphill. They were demolished for road widening about 20 years ago. Hartley Street, where Ernie was born, was in this block of houses.
The new house was a great improvement. It was a through house with two bedrooms and a parlour in addition to the kitchen. There was a backyard with a washhouse and a tippler toilet. (That’s right, we're back to basic functions again!) Tippler toilets were the first lavatories in the town that worked on the ‘water carriage’ system. That is, water was used to carry the waste away to the sewage works through sewers instead of manual collection. The way they worked was that there was an earthenware pipe about 14 inches in diameter connected straight into the sewer via a water trap and this had a seat on top. It was flushed by the waste water from the sink which collected in a ‘tippler’ in a chamber in the yard until there was enough to overbalance it. When this happened there was a rush of soapy water into the toilet which flushed it out. The shaft down to the sewer could be 15 feet deep and it doesn’t take much imagination to recognise that we would regard them as highly unsanitary. They were also very frightening if you were a child.
When I came out of the army in 1956 and found myself in the grocer’s shop at Sough we had a tippler toilet and it fascinated me. I was always a beggar for cleaning things and using bleach so I took charge of the tippler. About once a month I’d lift the cast iron manhole in the backyard and scrub the tippler box out and disinfect it. I remember telling Newton Pickles about this once and he told me that he remembered the tippler toilets at Wellhouse Mill in the engine house yard. It was a two seater and he and his mate would go together for an early morning bowel movement! He said that it was good in winter because the drains from the engine were connected to the sewer and he said that as you sat there the steam from the engine puffed up and kept your bum warm! So you see, there could be advantages in the old technology.
A big problem with tipplers was if they got blocked, remember, they could be 15 feet deep. Harold Duxbury told me once that he had a man who was an expert at clearing them and at times did nothing else. He used an old fashioned mop with a long handle and the trick was to fill the pipe above the blockage with water and then use the mop as a piston to drive the water and the obstruction through into the sewer. A Barlick version of Dyno-Rod!
As you have probably realised, anything to do with tipplers fascinates me! This raises a serious point though, have you any idea of the number of people who have no idea what happens to the waste in a lavatory when you flush it? It’s a question of ‘out of sight, out of mind’ and I have never been able to understand why such things don’t fascinate people. Alright, I realise I am probably an exception but I always need to know why and how something works. This may be one of the reasons why history fascinates me so much, I need to know the nuts and bolts of my town and how it works and stories like Ernie Roberts’s life tell us so much about the society we live in.
Once again I’m going to leave Ernie for a while and look at other subjects. I hope that reading about life in the 1930’s has awakened memories in the older end and perhaps enlightened the young ones a bit. As I’ve said before, it was a hard life, especially for the women folk. Many people bemoan the fact that now we have washing machines, refrigerators, electricity and central heating we have lost something of value. The people who say this must never have had to do without these ‘luxuries’! I still have an open fire in the front room but would hate to have to go back to my childhood days for so many reasons. Perhaps the greatest is the fact that I can sit here at my computer in the kitchen and talk to all you lot out there without even leaving the house.
One last confession. I was talking to one of my readers last week and they were saying nice things about the Ernie articles, one comment they made was that it was obvious that I liked Ernie. This is an understatement, I loved the bloke. He was so direct and down to earth and I never heard a hard word from him unless it was about the lot of the workers. What saddened me most was the fact that he never got his retirement, he died in 1982 of a brain tumour. If anyone ever deserved a long and happy rest after all the hard times he went through, it was Ernie. His ashes are scattered on Brown Hill and when I look up there I think about him and his jokes and stories. He taught me a lot about Barlick and I shall never forget him. If there’s one basic reason why I enjoy doing the research and writing it’s because I can give the Ernie’s of this world a voice and recognition that they could never have got in their lifetime. History isn’t about Kings and Queens, it’s about little people like Ernie who made the world go round.