OLD COATES AND NEW COATES MILLS

[Stanley]

File identification: My Docs/research02

Note: I wrote this paper in December 2000 and whilst it is still essentially correct, later research has of course refined it. As there is much of value in it I’m leaving it intact but adding some notes to flag up misapprehensions. I shall append my latest thinking on Old Coates and New Coates at the end.

BARNOLDSWICK TEXTILE MILLS
OLD COATES MILL AND COATES MILL.
IDENTIFICATION OF THE MILLS.

The first thing to say is that care must be taken to distinguish between the two mills which had the same name. I have made the distinction by referring to the earliest mill as OLD COATES and the later mill as COATES. Nothing is left on the ground of Old Coates. The later mill closed early and became DOBSONS DAIRY, then it went back to weaving velvet under the name Yorkshire Plush, became CARRS PRINTERS and in the last five years has become HOPE ENGINEERING.
BRACEWELL CONNECTION.
Another source of possible confusion as regards Old Coates mill is the fact that one of the partners in the early 19th century was William Bracewell, together with his brothers, Thomas and Christopher. I refer to these as the Bracewells of Coates. They were sons of William Bracewell of Coates the brother of Christopher Bracewell of Green End at Earby who was born at Coates but moved to Earby in 1813. Christopher of Green End had a son called William who became William Bracewell of Newfield Edge in Barlick and was nicknamed ‘Billycock’ no doubt to distinguish him from the other Bracewells who were, of course, his cousins. Billycock built Butts in 1846 and New Mill, later called Wellhouse in 1854. He also owned the Corn Mill, Ouzledale Mill, was in the process of building the new gas works next to the Corn Mill and had many other interests in Barlick when he died in 1887. A further possible confusion arises here because Billycock had a son called Christopher George.

You might wonder why I am digressing into Billycock history; the reason is that knowledge of him is essential to following the Old Coates story. Bracewell of Newfield edge was a combative business man. His aim was as near total control of the town as he could get. One of his main weapons was control of water supplies and I have much work to do on this subject before it will become completely clear. However, I have enough hard evidence now to make some reasonable assumptions about the areas where I have no firm evidence. Let’s concentrate on two instances of this effort to control water. First and least tangible at the moment is the fact that at some time after 1846 he bought Ouzledale Mill on Forty Steps which was a saw mill at the time I think and logic says it predates Mitchell’s Mill (Clough) because I find it impossible to believe that if Clough had been the first build, Mitchell wouldn’t have made sure that he controlled the Ouzledale resource. The fact that he didn’t suggests that it existed before he built his mill. Ouzledale dam was at a higher level that Butts Mill and I suspect that Billycock’s intention was to divert the water to enable expansion of Butts Mill which had a limited water resource. This would have course had an impact on Mitchell’s business.

For some reason he never pursued this possibility. I don’t know why, perhaps he couldn’t get enough land to expand at Butts, perhaps Mitchell put up adequate opposition because I have no doubt that he would see the danger. There is a possible clue in the fact that Bancroft Mill couldn’t be built using Gillians Beck as a water resource until an alliance by marriage between the Nutter and Slater families early in the 20th century, Slater owned Clough at the time and crucially, he appears to have controlled the riparian rights back to what was effectively the source of Gillians Beck. There is further evidence that might support this, Gillians Mill higher up on the beck never used the main beck as its power resource when it was built in the mid 1780s, it used a small beck coming down behind Bancroft Farm. The inference from this is that Mitchell got the water rights back to the source when he built his mill and Slater got these when he bought what was then Clough in 1867. One last piece of evidence about Gillians is that when I was engineer at Bancroft I was always puzzled by the fact that there was a by-pass round the dam and provision to send all the water in Gillians directly down to Clough. Sydney Nutter once told me that he thought this dated back to the building of the mill when there was an agreement with Slaters that in hot weather, if Clough was struggling for vacuum, Bancroft was obliged to send the cooler water direct to Clough instead of warming it in the lodge after use for condensing. This was a very pressing problem when there was a succession of steam mills on a watercourse. [New firm evidence confirms this. I found documents referring directly to discussions between Slaters at Clough and Nutter Brothers at Bancroft on this matter.] I have plenty of hard evidence for this in respect of other mills in the town. The bottom line is that there is enough evidence to suspect that Bracewell appears to have bought Ouzledale to put pressure on Mitchell.

The second instance of this use of water as a weapon against business rivals concerns the water resource at the Corn Mill which relates directly to the fate of Old Coates. The Corn Mill is probably the oldest established use of water power in Barnoldswick. The earliest reference I have so far is November 1640 when it changed hands. Therefore it certainly predated the water powered textile industry and almost certainly any use of water power for sawing wood. It is certainly the best water site in the town as it controls Butts Beck which is formed by the combination of Gillians and Calf Hall becks, the major resources in the town. It had a very large dam stretching all the way back to Dam Head on Gisburn Road and a good flow.

Whatever the problems Billycock had with expansion at Butts, what is certain is that by shortly after 1850 he had made the decision to build New Mill. There is evidence that this decision puzzled many people in the town because the site he chose for the New Mill had no significant water resource. Many of the legends in the town about underground tunnels connected the ancient monastic site at Calf Hall with Gill Church date from this time. Nothing certain has surfaced yet about watercourses installed by Billycock originating at Butts but I have been told that they did exist. Personally I can’t understand why because he controlled the beck by ownership of the Corn Mill. [Later evidence is that he was evidently the tenant of the Corn Mill before he eventually bought it in 1859. Evidence for this is in an indenture of 1859 recited in the Bracewell sale document of 1887 which appears to record the sale of the mill to Billycock by the Bagshawe family, former proprietors of the Coates estate.] However, what is certain, and I have hard evidence for this, is that he put a six inch cast iron pipe in from the Corn Mill dam to the New Mill. His intention all along had been to run the mill from Butts Beck water. This resource existed as late as July 1890 when the Calf Hall Shed Company approached the Barnoldswick Gas and Light Company to explore the possibility of getting water from them. They used the water and paid for it for a short time. Evidence is CHSC minute books.

So, we have a situation where we know that Bracewell had the capability to divert water from the Butts Beck to what is now Wellhouse. We need to look at Old Coates now to see what Billycock did and what were its consequences.
OLD COATES MILL.
Information about Old Coates is thin on the ground but grows gradually. [See additional paper below] There is absolutely no reason to suppose that there was a mill on the site before the water-powered textile era. So, until I get evidence to the contrary, I am assuming that it started as a water-powered twist mill shortly after 1785 when the Arkwright patents were overturned and the technology became widely available. I have evidence that there was water powered weaving in the mill around 1840/1850. John Pickles told Newton that there was a beam engine in there before it finished and the photograph shows the chimney so we know it became steam powered. William Atkinson in his History of Old Barlick says that illegal whisky was distilled in the ‘gas house’. As there has never been any suggestion of finishing at the mill this must mean that a gas plant had been installed for lighting the mill. The 1892 map shows a round structure to the east of the mill next to the access road which could have been the gasholder.

I have no record of who built the mill but as the Bracewell Brothers were the local landowners it looks as though they might be responsible. Crucially this was before Billycock Bracewell moved into the town from Earby c.1835. At that time they had no problems with water, they were getting the full flow of the Butts Beck and were in as good a position as the Corn Mill. They ran the mill until 1860 and had looms in Clough Mill as well. In fact, in the 1851 census, Christopher and Thomas are recorded as living together at Clough House next to Clough mill and are noted as being in partnership with William, who lived at Coates, in an enterprise which employed 60 men, 44 women, 15 boys and 9 girls. In 1860 they abandoned all their interests in the town and there is a record in Slater’s Directory of 1871 of Christopher Bracewell and Brothers at Waterloo Mill, Clitheroe [This is another example of the confusion that can be caused by the use of the same forenames by the two branches of the family. This Christopher Bracewell and Brothers is the Earby lot. For more information on this family read The Bracewell Story.] The question is of course, what happened?

This is where I have to fly a kite because I haven’t got enough hard evidence yet. Remember that Billycock had put the pipe in to supply his New Mill from Corn Mill dam. This meant that he was diverting a considerable quantity of water from the Butts Beck with a consequent reduction in flow to Old Coates. I don’t think this would have been a serious matter when the beck had a full flow but would certainly have had serious consequences in drought conditions. We know that by this time Billycock had a steam engine in the Corn Mill so there was no imperative for him to put water over his wheel which would obviously have fed Old Coates. In low flow conditions, as long as he had enough water in the dam to condense his engine and provide boiler feed, he could let all the rest go down to Wellhouse. I think this was enough to make Old Coates unviable. The circumstantial evidence that this was so is the fact that six years after the New Mill started, the Bracewell Brothers were out of business.

It looks as though a man called James Nuttall bought the mill then. I think he had the idea that he could make the mill viable again by using the water from the Foul Syke which brings the water down from below Wellhouse mill. This didn’t carry a lot of water but was augmented by the Bowker drain which had been put in to collect all the water from the North side of the canal plus any leakage from the canal. There’s a big mystery about this drain, who put it in and why and I’m still working on it. One thing is certain, it was regarded as stolen water.

Whatever his intentions the next thing we hear is that in 1860 there is a case in the Chancery Court of the Duchy of Lancaster between Billycock Bracewell and James Nuttall over the rights to the water from the Bowker Drain and we have to surmise that Nuttall lost because the mill stayed empty and the local farmer, John Raw, stored his hay in it. I think we can make another assumption here, that Billycock bought the mill once he had convinced Nuttall that he couldn’t run it. The reason I say this is that there is a mention in the diary of William Dugdale of Barlick that on the 20th August 1874 the boiler was removed from Old Coates Mill and taken to the Ingleton Coal Pits. [Your information from the Burnley Advertiser advert of 24/06/1871 raises another possibility, that Billycock didn’t buy the mill but bought the boiler in this sale Another interesting clue in this advert is that ‘a plot of land fronting the highway from Barnoldswick, a former warehouse, now a bobbin mill fronting on the canal’ are mentioned. See my remarks below about William Bracewell’s will and the warehouse.] The crucial thing about this is that in July 1874 Billycock bought the Ingleton coal field. Billycock died in 1887 and Billy Brooks told me that he remembered the mill being demolished when he was about ten years old, this would make it 1892.

COATES MILL.
Four years after the court case with Bracewell, 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 to take advantage of canal water 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. 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. Various tenants are mentioned over the years, 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 Ridings Mill Stores of Blackburn. It was 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, ? Duckworth, Elisha Harrison, ? Waddington and others. Walter Wilkinson had three sons, one of whom, Granville Wilkinson, went to Whitefield 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 be 1919 and would probably be when Johnny Pickles put the Hick Hargreaves engine in which they bought second hand from a mill in Bolton which had closed. There is a Universal Metallic Packing order dated 14/08/1919 for this engine. Johnny converted it to rope drive by fixing CI segments on top of the existing gears and turning the rope grooves after the engine was assembled, in its own pit. Newton says it was the truest flywheel in Barlick. There’s some confusion about when it closed down but there is mention of it standing idle until it was bought in 1931 by Dobson’s Dairies of Manchester. [Later evidence suggests I am wrong with this date. CHSC minute books for 16/01/1935 record that Dobson’s Dairies were negotiating with CHSC for space in Butts Mill, this never came to anything. I can’t see them talking to Calf Hall about Butts if they already owned Coates. So, I think we can date Dobson’s purchase of Butts as 1935.] Newton, at the age of 15, got the job of getting the engine going again. Later, after WWII, Brown and Pickles installed a new Lancashire boiler. It ran until the late 60’s as a dairy and then went back to weaving velvet for a time but not on the engine. Later it became Carr’s Printers but when they moved out into Calf Hall Shed it became Hopes, engineers.

SCG/04 December 2000/2502 words.
Revised 28 March 2004.


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Old Coates and Coates mills. Latest thinking.

One of the problems I have with the research in Barlick is that in order to make sense of what I have got I have to sit down and do a paper on it drawing all the threads together. As soon as I have done this new research results pop up and the original paper is incomplete or actually mistaken. This exercise is a classic example of this.

You’ll notice that in order to explain Coates mill I feel I have to go back to Old Coates and the Bracewells. I have always believed that the two mills have to be considered together and this was reinforced recently when I got hols of a copy of William Bracewell’s will. This is William Bracewell 1756-1830 of Coates. He was grandfather to Billycock and also his cousins, William, Christopher and Thomas of Coates who failed at Old Coates in 1860. If you’ve read the Bracewell Story you will see that my estimate is that William(1756) was the most important member of the family and founded the modern dynasties in Earby and Barnoldswick. He was a very wealthy man and it is quite obvious that he built the original watermill at Old Coates in about 1803. I have no firm date but this is where everything I know is pointing. One thing to note here is that I have never found any evidence that there were Arkwright water frames in the early mills in Barlick. Chris Aspin agrees with me on this point, he thinks that the very early mills were doing water powered roving and spinning by hand for the domestic weavers. There is nothing to suggest that Old Coates was any different.

Notice in the 1819 will that William leaves ‘all my messuages, lands, tenements, [and] hereditaments, machinery, cotton and stock in the mill and premises situate and being in the township of Coates aforesaid.’ to William his son and more important in view of our probing into Coates Mill, ‘Also reserving to my son Christopher Bracewell the cotton goods which may be in or about the warehouse adjoining my house or which may be on the weavers or any other person’s possession’

We have to use our heads here. The reason why I believe this mention of a ‘warehouse adjoining’ is important is twofold and requires some more detailed explanation.

The first circumstance is that I have not yet found evidence of where William(1756) lived. In the early days of my research I assumed that it was Coates Hall or thereabouts. All the evidence I have found since points to the fact that this was not so. Further, I am beginning to suspect that the house and warehouse referred to stood on the present site of Coates Mill. [ The 1871 advert in BA seems to confirm this. If as the will says the house and warehouse were ‘adjoining’] There are many tantalising clues that this was so but I haven’t found the smoking gun yet. Secondly; what I do know is that there is mention of a warehouse on that site before 1864 [See 1st edition of the OS 1853] and that logically the land-holding of that farm, if it was on that site, covers not only the land on which Nuttall built Coates Mill but also the Old Coates Mill. In the electoral roll of 1844 (14 years after William’s death) William and Thomas Bracewell are noted as partners in the freehold of Coates Farm and Mill. The tenant is Mr Thomas Eastwood. (What was known as ‘Eastwood’s Farm’ was on the opposite side of the road to the Coates Mill site and this suggests that Eastwood was farming both holdings but as tenant only at Coates Farm. The brothers were running the mill.

Information about James Nuttall is very thin on the ground. In 1848 there is a mention of a James Nuttall of Coates being an elector of Barnoldswick and same in 1859. In the 1871 census there is a James Nuttall (51) of Orchard Cottages (now Orchard Street?) as being a grocer and draper at that address. In the 1890 Local Board Elections a James Nuttall, gent, is mentioned as living at Thornton in Craven. Assuming a birth date of 1820 this could be the same man. In 1860 (same year that Bracewell Brothers of Coates failed) a James Nuttall is mentioned as being in dispute with Billycock over water rights. I have no firm evidence of this but have vague clues that this was over use of the Bowker Drain water which Nuttall would have needed to make Old Coates viable. The Imperial Gazetteer for 1860 records James Nuttall as being shopkeeper and farmer of Barnoldswick. Barrett for 1883 records James Nuttall as grocer of 7 Church Street (no mention in Barrett of 1887).

William Atkinson in his ‘Old Barlick’, page 74 [An amateur, unpublished history but in my experience very reliable] Says that erection of Coates Mill started in 1864 and was built for 300 looms. He says that shortage of capital delayed completion. He alludes to this time as being ‘Bog Dog versus Little Dog’ and says that the new mill was built to give ‘those would-be manufacturers who had been thwarted at in their efforts to become such at Old Coates Mill’ an avenue to succeed. There is no doubt that he was referring to Billycock here. Read the Bracewell Story, my researches into the Bracewells and clues picked up in the broad sweep of the history of the mills convinces me that there was a lot of resentment in the town directed against Billycock and his ruthless methods which were strangling enterprise in the town. The new shed at Coates was the first concrete reaction to this and significantly was commenced 21 years before Billycock died.

We need to fly a kite here. One of the most striking aspects of the local sources of capital that went into the wave of involvement in textiles from 1860 onwards is the importance of profits from retail trade. John Slater bought Mitchell’s Mill in 1867 and a large part of his initial capital came from the grocery trade. The Brooks family were grocers and became major manufacturers. Nuttall was a grocer. This is a much neglected field of research and whilst I have no firm evidence that James Nuttall did buy Coates Farm and the Old Mill in 1860 when the Bracewell Brothers of Coates failed, all the circumstantial evidence points to this. In Barlick terms the progression is classic, grocer to mill owner to gent in one generation. I have found nothing to suggest that he ever entered manufacturing himself. He was the first man in the town to build a shed solely for tenants, he was the first into genuine room and power. In this respect, Coates Mill is absolutely crucial. It wasn’t until Billycock died in 1885 and William Bracewell and Sons failed that the floodgates to enterprise were fully opened and Long Ing and Calf Hall Shed companies were formed. It is true that prior to this manufacturers like the William Mitchell and later Slaters at Clough were renting space in their mill to tenants but these were manufacturers in their own right.

As for the James Nutter connection. He was born in 1845 in Rimington and the first mention of the family is that they were living in Townhead, Barnoldswick at the 1861 census. James was 16 and working in a local mill. He and Thomas Slater Edmondson, together with James Edmondson I think, started their entrepreneurial activities selling bibles at a guinea apiece. (Some of the Slater family were doing the same thing and it’s tempting to think there was a connection) In 1864 he would have been 19 and since the family had no inherited wealth, this alone would seem to preclude him from any part in the building of Coates Mill. Further, in his obituary in the Craven Herald dated 10/02/1914 it was stated that he went to Edenfield and worked for Porritt and Austin to learn the trade of wool-spinning. His wife, Mary Jane was born in Edenfield. The obituary further states that he started manufacturing with 56 looms in Coates Shed and stayed there for four years. I have no definite date for this enterprise but at the end of the Coates tenancy James Nutter went into Clough Mill in partnership with Thomas Slater Edmondson with 96 looms. In 1888 when the Long Ing Shed Company opened their mill, James and Thomas Slater moved from Cough to Long Ing and increased to 400 looms. In 1891 this partnership was dissolved, Thomas Slater stayed in Long Ing with the 400 looms in his own right and James moved into Calf Hall Shed as a tenant with 414 looms. In 1905 he was one of the original promoters of Bankfield and had 900 looms there. In 1934 when the Nutter Brothers interests were re-organised after the failure in Earby James took over Nutter Brothers new shed at Bancroft with 1250 looms.

CONCLUSION
So, the bottom line is that any reference to James Nutter as being the builder of Coats Shed is erroneous. I have yet to find the smoking gun that says it was definitely James Nuttall but I’m convinced this is the case. I suppose it’s all down to a typographical error if the EH Pendle mills survey says it was James Nutter, they meant James Nuttall.

Now we wait for the next gems to come up but I don’t think any of the above will be altered significantly.

SCG/28 March 2004