Retirement of Mr. Levi Turner.

[Mixman]

School Teacher Retires

Retirement of Mr. Levi Turner.

From the Craven Herald 1/03/1935

Mr. Levi Turner, who has been on the teaching staff of the Barnoldswick Church School for 28 years, is to retire. Up to three years ago he walked from his home at Earby over the fields to Barnoldswick and back each day of his working week, covering about 25,000 miles in a quarter of a century. He has been associated with three headmasters at the Church School and was among the three teachers who received long service tokens when the jubilee of the school’s foundation was observed in January of the present year.
Music and cricket have claimed a large share of Mr. Turners’ leisure time. For many years he has been conductor of the Mount Zion Baptist Church choir at Earby, and for a long period he has served on the committee of the Earby C.C.



Transcribed from the Craven Herald 1 March 1935

166
Jct

Additional note added February 2012.


It was Levi Turner who was one of the people who lent money to James Cecil Ashby to start up at Ouzledale. (see page 35 of Stanley’s book, “Brown and Pickles, the story of a Pennine Engineering Firm”.)

[Moh]

Was he the father of Miss Turner who taught at Alderhill School in Earby?

[Stanley]

John! Great to see you have found your way back! It won't be long till the search bots catch up and index the archive so all your invaluable posts will be accessible again.

[Mixman]

Yes Moh, Levi (my grandfather) had three children who survived. The eldest was Millicent who taught at Alder Hill School in Earby. She was also a well known local violinist and the first lady chairperson of Earby Urban District Council. She never married and died in 1978 aged 83.

My father Clifford, was her brother, he was the foundryman responsible for the running of the Ouzledale furnace for the majority of his working life. He was one of the first employees at Ouzledale.

[Moh]

She witnessed my accident with a bus in 1949 and accompanied me in the ambulance to hospital. Lovely lady but I believe quite a strict teacher.

[Stanley]

I'd forgotten the relationship John. Am I right in thinking this is your dad tapping the cupola furnace at Long Ing?

[Mixman]

Hi Stanley, thanks for retrieving the picture.

Yes Clifford was my dad, he died when I was 18 and before I had any interest in history of any sort.

Dad was born in 1904 and between 1911, when he was still at school, and 1932 when he was one of the two men employed by James Cecil Ashby, I only have two clues as to where my dad was employed.
1) In a taped conversation I did in 1974 with his younger sister, Rene Smith, she said he worked for Henry Brown.
2) At some point after 1918, he was a trustee of Earby Cemetery and his occupation is quoted as “ mechanic.”

I still need to investigate this further.

[Stanley]

John, Cecil was brought in by Henry Brown and sons to run the foundry at Ouzledale and your dad would work under Cecil there and doubtless at the new foundry in Havre park (1922). When Brown's banked at Havre Park in 1929, Cecil, supported by Calf Hall Shed Co went back to Ouzledale (CHSC owned it) and started what became Ouzledale Foundry on his own account. Here's an extract from an article I did about it.

Butts Mill got its condensing water from the confluence of the Springs and Gillian’s Becks and I have evidence that it was short of water. In the end Billycock had to buy the rights to the Springs Dam and indulge in some very questionable diversions of water above Springs to improve the supply. However, it seems that he might have considered another route to improving his water supplies. In 1903 when the Calf Hall Shed Company bought Butts Mill they found they were also the owners of the Ouzledale Estate. At some point Billycock had bought the property which included the dam and reservoir and I think his idea was to divert water from the Gillians Beck at a higher level which would make it more useful to him. He was going to get the water anyway but at a lower level which meant expense pumping it up. This is the only reason I can think of for him buying the estate and it wouldn’t do him any good because any water he diverted would damage the rights that Clough Mill had to use the full flow from Ouzledale. I have no record of a dispute between Billycock and Mitchell but I’m certain that there was at least a very pointed discussion. In 1892 the Ordnance Survey made another map of Barlick at the larger scale of 25” to the mile and on that edition Ouzledale is still marked as a sawmill and this may well have been true at the time of the survey but it was going to change.

In 1905 a man called Richard Jones rented Ouzledale and installed a furnace. In 1907 he asked the Calf Hall directors to lend him money to install a gas engine to augment the power from the wheel because he was only getting enough power for an eight hundredweight blow. Jones quit the tenancy in 1909 and a man called William Henry Hey of Vivary Bridge at Colne rented the Mill in February 1910 and was running it as an iron foundry using the waterwheel to drive the bellows for draught to his cupola furnace no doubt supplemented by the gas engine put in by Jones. By May 1911 a man called Henry Watts is running the foundry as ‘The Dales Ironworks’ and he scraps the waterwheel in June the same year paying the Calf Hall company £5 for the metal. In June 1912 Watts gets the offer of a partnership with Henry Brown, an engineer in Barlick who needs a regular supply of castings.

We know from the Calf Hall Shed minute books that Brown and Watt were still in partnership at Ouzledale trading as the Dale Ironworks Company in June 1916. Henry Watts either died or retired shortly afterwards and Browns took over the foundry. Harold Duxbury told me that it was then that Henry Brown brought in James Cecil Ashby (Died 1983), a young iron founder who had been working in Leeds, and set him on as foreman at Ouzledale foundry. This foundry did all the castings for Browns including the donkey engines which were fairly big lumps. If you look carefully at the road down to Ouzledale you can still find pieces of slag, the waste from the cupola furnace, which was used for maintaining the road. Browns built a new foundry at Havre Park and abandoned Ouzledale in 1922 but by 1929 had liquidated and James Cecil was encouraged by the Calf Hall company to set up on his own account at Ouzledale. This was to be the start of another manufacturing dynasty in Barlick. The Ashby family prospered and eventually built Ouzledale foundry at Long Ing which became famous as the makers of the Firemaster domestic grate and in 2009 are still in business.