MOVING HOUSE
Posted: 20 Apr 2026, 01:08
MOVING HOUSE
12 August 2002
When William Bracewell died in 1885, because of his debts the Craven Bank moved in to realise his assets and many people were thrown out of work. At that time the Bracewell interests controlled most of the economic life of Barlick. Within a month, the Craven Herald was reporting that many people were leaving the town, they were moving house to where they could get work. This was easy to do as they were living in rented houses, had very few belongings and could easily find another house in a different town and go there by rail.
In Barlick we still use the word ‘flit’ to describe house moving. This is another example of our Scandinavian connection because the word comes from the old Norse ‘flytja’, to remove. So the ex-Bracewell employees ‘did a flit’. Further, some of them would do a ‘Moonlight Flit’. I don’t know how common this is nowadays but if you were living in a rented house and had debts one way of solving the problem was to move out during the night leaving no forwarding address, this was known as a moonlight flit and used to be very common. I wonder if anyone was looking out for defaulters when Billycock died? Would his rent collectors, who would normally have been on the lookout for this kind of thing, still be employed? I have an idea that the confusion caused by the collapse would have been an ideal time to do this and would be surprised if the opportunity wasn’t taken.
Moving into the 20th century things got slightly more complicated because people were doing well enough to have more possessions. In 1885 an average person living in a back to back would only have a bed, a chest of drawers, a table, a couple of chairs and perhaps a dolly tub, posser and bath, that would be about it. I used to know a bloke in Skipton who told me that when his father flit from Skipton to Carleton he carried all the furniture up there on his back! This wasn’t uncommon particularly if it was only a short distance but usually you hired a local carter or talked to a mate who could get hold of some sort of transport. During my days as a cattle wagon driver I occasionally got lumbered with a flitting and it was hard work. Eventually, specialised firms grew up such as Willis at Skipton who did nothing but removals. Before they started business, the only way to move house from one end of the country to another was to do it by rail, arranging your own transport to and from the station at both ends.
Last year my daughter Margaret flitted from Clitheroe to Perth in Western Australia. Apart from the fact that there was a lot of stuff to be moved, the flit was complicated by the distance and little things like getting customs clearance. She called in Pickfords, another specialised remover, who turned up at her house not with a furniture van but a forty foot container! They packed everything, made an inventory for the Customs and loaded it all. Margaret said that what impressed her most was the fact that the removal man suggested they load the brewing up tackle and the kids bikes last so that they could be first off, the kids could go and play and Margaret could brew up. I tracked the container on the web all the way and was amazed by how quickly it got from Tilbury to Fremantle. Margaret said that it was just as easy as flitting to a house in Clitheroe but slightly more expensive!
All this was triggered off by a slightly different house move I saw here in the US this week. The house you see in the picture was a farmhouse and all the land round it had been sold for industry so the house was useless where it was and was scheduled for demolition. A couple bought it for one dollar (about 70p) and had it moved to a piece of land they had bought in Northfield about three miles from where it originally stood. They got a specialist firm in, Jamesville House Movers and they jacked the house up, put it on a special trailer and in twelve hours moved the sixty ton wooden building three miles and positioned it over a hole already dug for the foundation.
I talked to the contractor and he said they built the foundation under the house after it was moved in because sometimes a wooden house can change shape slightly during the move. They will have it ready for occupation in four weeks and what will then be shaping up to be a £300,000 house will have cost a dollar to buy, £40,000 to move, £20,000 for the foundation plus the cost of the land and landscaping and renovations. The owners had a look inside it when it arrived and they said none of the plaster was cracked and all the doors and windows opened. An impressive and economical operation.
Evidently this firm buys houses as a speculation and has a big field with a number of houses just sat there waiting to be moved on to their new location. You just go along, pick a house, find a piece of land and throw some money at it. Of course it couldn’t happen with our houses in Barlick, it would be technically possible but far too expensive. Funnily enough quite a few buildings including churches in Northfield started life by being moved in like this but in a slightly different way. They were bought out of a mail order catalogue and delivered ready to be erected by a local carpenter.
So wherever you have human beings you occasionally need to have a flit. The difference here is that ‘moving house’ can quite literally mean just that!
12 August 2002
12 August 2002
When William Bracewell died in 1885, because of his debts the Craven Bank moved in to realise his assets and many people were thrown out of work. At that time the Bracewell interests controlled most of the economic life of Barlick. Within a month, the Craven Herald was reporting that many people were leaving the town, they were moving house to where they could get work. This was easy to do as they were living in rented houses, had very few belongings and could easily find another house in a different town and go there by rail.
In Barlick we still use the word ‘flit’ to describe house moving. This is another example of our Scandinavian connection because the word comes from the old Norse ‘flytja’, to remove. So the ex-Bracewell employees ‘did a flit’. Further, some of them would do a ‘Moonlight Flit’. I don’t know how common this is nowadays but if you were living in a rented house and had debts one way of solving the problem was to move out during the night leaving no forwarding address, this was known as a moonlight flit and used to be very common. I wonder if anyone was looking out for defaulters when Billycock died? Would his rent collectors, who would normally have been on the lookout for this kind of thing, still be employed? I have an idea that the confusion caused by the collapse would have been an ideal time to do this and would be surprised if the opportunity wasn’t taken.
Moving into the 20th century things got slightly more complicated because people were doing well enough to have more possessions. In 1885 an average person living in a back to back would only have a bed, a chest of drawers, a table, a couple of chairs and perhaps a dolly tub, posser and bath, that would be about it. I used to know a bloke in Skipton who told me that when his father flit from Skipton to Carleton he carried all the furniture up there on his back! This wasn’t uncommon particularly if it was only a short distance but usually you hired a local carter or talked to a mate who could get hold of some sort of transport. During my days as a cattle wagon driver I occasionally got lumbered with a flitting and it was hard work. Eventually, specialised firms grew up such as Willis at Skipton who did nothing but removals. Before they started business, the only way to move house from one end of the country to another was to do it by rail, arranging your own transport to and from the station at both ends.
Last year my daughter Margaret flitted from Clitheroe to Perth in Western Australia. Apart from the fact that there was a lot of stuff to be moved, the flit was complicated by the distance and little things like getting customs clearance. She called in Pickfords, another specialised remover, who turned up at her house not with a furniture van but a forty foot container! They packed everything, made an inventory for the Customs and loaded it all. Margaret said that what impressed her most was the fact that the removal man suggested they load the brewing up tackle and the kids bikes last so that they could be first off, the kids could go and play and Margaret could brew up. I tracked the container on the web all the way and was amazed by how quickly it got from Tilbury to Fremantle. Margaret said that it was just as easy as flitting to a house in Clitheroe but slightly more expensive!
All this was triggered off by a slightly different house move I saw here in the US this week. The house you see in the picture was a farmhouse and all the land round it had been sold for industry so the house was useless where it was and was scheduled for demolition. A couple bought it for one dollar (about 70p) and had it moved to a piece of land they had bought in Northfield about three miles from where it originally stood. They got a specialist firm in, Jamesville House Movers and they jacked the house up, put it on a special trailer and in twelve hours moved the sixty ton wooden building three miles and positioned it over a hole already dug for the foundation.
I talked to the contractor and he said they built the foundation under the house after it was moved in because sometimes a wooden house can change shape slightly during the move. They will have it ready for occupation in four weeks and what will then be shaping up to be a £300,000 house will have cost a dollar to buy, £40,000 to move, £20,000 for the foundation plus the cost of the land and landscaping and renovations. The owners had a look inside it when it arrived and they said none of the plaster was cracked and all the doors and windows opened. An impressive and economical operation.
Evidently this firm buys houses as a speculation and has a big field with a number of houses just sat there waiting to be moved on to their new location. You just go along, pick a house, find a piece of land and throw some money at it. Of course it couldn’t happen with our houses in Barlick, it would be technically possible but far too expensive. Funnily enough quite a few buildings including churches in Northfield started life by being moved in like this but in a slightly different way. They were bought out of a mail order catalogue and delivered ready to be erected by a local carpenter.
So wherever you have human beings you occasionally need to have a flit. The difference here is that ‘moving house’ can quite literally mean just that!
12 August 2002