CONVERSATION WITH NEWTON PICKLES 13/08/82

[Stanley]

CONVERSATION WITH NEWTON PICKLES 13/08/82

In a casual conversation with Newton this morning several items came up and I set them down while they are fresh in my mind.

BOWKER DRAIN.
Newton recalled a conversation with Stanley Fisher, Walt Fisher’s father who was engineer at Moss Shed and he says that Moss used to draw water out of the Bowker Drain where it passed the mill. There was an inspection trap and a suction pipe was put in there. Mr Fisher told Newton not to believe all the stories he heard about the Bowker Drain as there had never been enough water coming down it to run the Moss Engine. This was illustrated when the canal was drained and the mill had to be kept going by extending the intake pipe to the condenser pump into the centre of the canal to use the last remnants of the water. Eventually the mill had to stop. If there was water in the Bowker Drain sufficient to run the engine one would have thought they would have used it.

Mr Fisher also said that most of the water in the Bowker Drain came out of the canal in the first place and that when the Canal Co repaired the banks of the canal the flow of the Bowker Drain slowed down drastically.

[Even in 2004, 22 years later, the Bowker Drain is still largely a mystery. One thing I am certain about now is that parts of it must have existed before the canal because it drains the water from the bottoms at the foot of Bob Preston, the field opposite Lower Park Marina. This water gets under the canal via two 18 inch culverts made with oak baulks that must have been put in when the canal was built and I don’t think the Bowker Drain as such is that old. I also know that Rolls Royce paid to have the drain re-made with concrete pipes because B&D had the contract and I have seen the original drawings which show the drain as ending near Cockshott Bridge but Harold Duxbury once told me that at that point it picks up water from an older drain that starts at a spring in the field below where the New Road now runs, beyond the line of the old railway. Harold said there is a flag in the field covering the spring and it is in a gravel bed. OS SD 88504603.]

The pump at Wellhouse was a pulsometer pump and lifted the water out of the well in Eastwood Bottoms. [ OS SD 184720] Newton says that the site on which Wellhouse was built is possibly the worst site in the town. It was always short of water.

CLOUGH MILL ENGINE.
Newton says that he and his father were once called out to the engine at the mill in Whalley which lies under the railway viaduct. When they went in Johnny looked at the engine and said he had seen it before. It was the engine which had been installed in the old engine house at Clough when the beam engine wan taken out. [I later found this was incorrect, it was installed near to the beam engine because in 1891 the Furneval was stopped because the number of looms had fallen and the beam engine restarted after some trouble getting it freed up so the two were there at the same time.] It ran at about 38 rpm and was installed in the engine house at Judge Walmsley Mill, Whalley running under instead of over. They did quite a bit of work on it down there. Newton said it was only in Clough for a year or two and was taken out by Burnley Ironworks when the new engine was installed in 1913. [see below. The new engine was sold in 1900 and they ran on the beam engine until the new BI engine was installed in 1913] He thinks Burnley Ironworks installed it at Whalley shortly afterwards. He also said that his Father said the reason why it was taken out was that it was a wastrel.

[The last twenty years have produced a lot of information about this engine. It was made by Furneval at Haslingden and installed new at Clough. It was single cylinder condensing, 33 inch bore and five and a half feet stroke. When it was moved to Whalley in 1900 it was converted to a tandem by Ashton Frost who added a new HP cylinder and it was rated at 300 hp in this form. It ran 900 looms, 16 ft diameter flywheel with 14 cotton ropes. The engineer at the time Newton worked there was George Garrat.]

He refers to some trouble at Clough with the air pump. This was horizontal and was always a source of trouble, it needed priming every time before a start could be made. They cured it eventually by re-piping it to the well. It had been piped with three inch wrought iron pipe even though the inlet on the pump was four inch. The pipe had been carred up over the years and after replacement with four inch pipe it gave no trouble at all. This is interesting as It has a bearing on why Clough were so sensitive about the temperature of the beck water and had the arrangement with Bancroft so that cold water could be bypassed round the Bancroft dam.

LONG ING SHED
When Stephen Pickles bought the Long Ing Shed from the Shed Company he sent for Johnny and told him to do whatever needed doing to make the engine run successfully without stopping every few days as it was then. [The millwrights and engineers had always been Rushworth’s from Colne as they were major shareholders in the Long Ing Shed Company.] The engine wasn't very big even though it was a double tandem but was badly short of vacuum. The problem was solved by reboring the air pumps and fitting them with new buckets and rubber valves. I say solved but there was still some doubt and Johnny suggested making a new connection to the well. This would have involved a lot of digging and Newton suggested piping the jet condensers themselves to the well with two inch pipe. Johnny agreed to this and they borrowed a two inch drill which was also a tap from the water board. The first one was easy and they bored it in 3/4 of an hour and fitted the spigot and valve. This was good going as the drill was hand powered with a ratchet. The second took about five hours because the core in the condenser body must have slipped when it was being cast and instead of being 3/4 of an inch thick the wall was 1 ½ inches. It was three o'clock in the morning before they were through. This cured the problem completely.

WELLHOUSE MILL.
I mentioned to Newton the fact that Robert Aram was thinking of buying the shafting in the shed at Wellhouse at present occupied by Bendem [The last weaving firm in Wellhouse with I think 98 looms] and he told me that Brown and Pickles had made all the shafting for that shed when Widdup took it over. He remembered particularly the fact that when they were fitting the three inch shaft up for the tape machine they found they were one bolt short in the last coupling. Johnny was most upset because he had ordered the bolts himself and thought they must have lest one on the way down from the shop. He made Jim Fort count all the bolts in the couplings and found that Newton had made one of the couplings with seven holes instead of the usual six. Newton said there was no particular reason, it was just that the dividing head was already set up and divided this coupling exactly, he had never realised that it was seven holes instead of six. His father sent him back to the shop to make another bolt even though it was late at night and there were already five bolts in the coupling. “Just like me Father” says Newton, he wouldn't let the shaft run with a bolt missing even though it was safe. Newton also mentioned the fact that as far as he remembered all the couplings on this job were muff couplings instead of flange like they were at Bancroft.

Revised from the original notes by SCG/03 October 2004