TICKY TOCK.

[Stanley]

TICKY TOCK.

(28 May 2002)

You may well wonder where I got my title from this week, I’ll put you out of your misery right away, ‘Ticky Tock’ was what Newton Pickles called the Burnley Ironwork’s engine at Clough Mill because it ran faster than any other engine in Barlick at 93 rpm and Newton said it just went ‘ticky tock’!
Clough was the first mill in Barlick to have a steam engine. We aren’t sure when this was but thanks to Mike Ingles' research we know that it was insured with the Sun Insurance Company in 1827. This engine ran the mill, probably supplementing the power from the water wheel, until 1879/80 when a big second-hand Furneval engine from Haslingden was installed. This was very uneconomic and in 1891 the Cotton Times reported that the big engine had been shut down and the beam restarted because of a fall in loom numbers. A further report said that this was not successful because the beam engine was ‘too tight’ however, we know that the big engine was sold in 1900 and moved to Whalley. As ‘Ticky Tock’ wasn’t installed until 1913 we must assume that the mill reverted to running on the water wheel and the beam engine combined. As such, it must have been the last use of water power to drive a textile mill in Barlick.
So what brought all this to mind this week? I was looking at the picture of the engine and trying to remember the name of the engineer in the 1930’s. I remember that he was called Albert but can’t remember his surname (I later heard it was George Hoggarth). I reflected that if Newton was still alive I could have asked him and this brought to mind a story Newton told me about Clough engine.
In 1932 Newton Pickles was 16 years old and was working for his dad, Johnny. One day, Newton was working on a lathe in the shop at Wellhouse when Johnny came in and said “Run me up to Clough in’t van, they’re stopped.” When they got up there, Leonard Parkinson and Harry Crabtree were working on the engine but they told Johnny they couldn’t find out what was wrong with it, when they opened the steam valve all it did was roll over half a revolution and then bounce back. Johnny asked them if they were sure the eccentrics were set right and they said yes, so they tried it again. It did exactly the same thing.
Just then, 16 year old Newton, surrounded by four experienced engineers piped up, “It never will run like that will it!” He’d spotted the mistake they had made which meant that they had timed the engine valves half a turn out. Johnny wasn’t best pleased and told Newton that if he was so clever, he’d better fix it! Newton and Leonard Parkinson moved one of the eccentrics round the shaft half a turn, tightened it up, and they tried it again. Newton said it just went ‘Ticky Tock’ and started perfectly, the weavers were in business again!
Johnny watched for a minute and then he said “Right! That’s it, if a sixteen year old lad can tell me my business it’s time I stopped bothering with engines!” From that day forward, unless he was really stuck Johnny never went to any engine stoppages, he always sent Newton. This caused Newton quite a bit of trouble because many a time he had to deal with engineers who were old enough to be his grandfather and they didn’t take kindly to being told what to do by a lad! Remember that the engineer was God in the engine house, he was master of all he surveyed and even the mill owner would think twice before he upset such an essential worker.
Brown and Pickles looked after Clough mill until it stopped in about 1949 when Slater’s went bankrupt and failed to pay the bill for the last repair done on the engine. In 1946 the engineer was poorly and so Johnny sent Harry Crabtree and Newton to Clough to fire the boiler and run the engine. There was a shortage of coal and Harry and Newt were trying to burn American soft coal that had been sent over as Lease Lend. This was terrible stuff and they were having to burn old motor tyres with it just to keep the fires alight. At this point a coal wagon pulled up and the driver shouted out “Is this Clough Mill?” Newton told him it was and the driver told him that he’d taken this load of coal to Crow Nest and a bloke called Arthur Dobson, the engineer, had told him he wouldn’t burn rubbish like that but if he took it up to Clough there were a couple of silly beggars who’d burn owt. Newton said it was good coal and it was obvious that Arthur had some stock in and had taken pity on them. They tipped the coal and it solved all their problems while it lasted.
I had this experience myself during the fuel shortage in the 70’s. We had dug right back through the stockpile at Bancroft and at the back had come across this stuff that had gone rusty! I asked Newton what it was and he told me it was soft coal left over from the 1940’s, it was so bad they hadn’t tried to burn it. It was all we had so we had to give it a try and Newton was right, it was rubbish. I swear we had two barrows of ash for every barrow load of coal we burned! Just then a wagon pulled up and enquired whether we were Bank Field Shed. I said yes, we backed him in and tipped twenty tons of Sutton Manor’s finest into the bunker! It burned like candle ends and saved our bacon. It was four days before Rolls at Bankfield twigged we had pinched a load of coal off them! Bancroft paid up and we never heard any more about it.

(28 May 2002)