THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON MAY 1ST 1979 AT 13 AVON DRIVE BARNOLDSWICK. THE INFORMANT IS STANLEY GRAHAM WHO WAS THE ENGINEER AT BANCROFT MILL AND WHO HAS BEEN THE INTERVIEWER ON MOST OF THE TAPES..
I shall carry on now with the description of the pictures in the looming folio. This is the series of pictures which deal specifically with Jim Pollard at work at his looming frame. The pictures are numbered from 1 as they were originally presented as a separate folio.
This is a picture of James Pollard. At the time of the mill finishing he was 62 and had been in cotton all his life. Jim made his own series of tapes, the 78/AA series and for a fuller story of Jim, obviously, I refer you to that set of transcripts.
The first thing I should do is declare an interest. It will become obvious I think that having worked closely with Jim for six years and after many discussions apart from the tapes we did, I have nothing but admiration for the depth of his knowledge about the workings of Bancroft and his abilities as a weaving manager and loomer. Jim is the sort of man upon which the fortunes of the big cotton manufacturers were founded. He was conscientious in the extreme, honest as the day is long and reared in the old fashioned way where a hard day's work wasn’t considered to be anything to he ashamed of. Rather something to be proud about. Jim survives as something of an anachronism nowadays, somebody who really enjoyed his job, did the very best at it he could and in consequence slept soundly at night. I have a lot of respect for Jim and for the sort of work he did. He was tremendously skilled, inventive and also a master craftsman. So, we'll go through the set of pictures I did of him working.
The first thing to do is specify briefly what looming is. Looming should not be confused with twisting or re-using a set of healds and reeds that have been cut out of a finished warp and re-knotted on the Barber Coleman knotting machine. Both twisting and the Barber Coleman are ways of attaching a set of healds and reeds that have already been loomed on to a new warp by knotting all the individual ends to each other.
Looming is starting from scratch by selecting the correct heald and reed and drawing the ends through in such a way as to produce the cloth that is required. It demands an intimate knowledge of cloth construction and even more important, knowledge of how the warp will behave in the loom. There are no hard and fast rules for producing a certain cloth to the correct width and pattern of weave. Cloth contraction in the loom is a product of many factors and these are discussed in great depth in the tapes I did with Jim. Suffice it to say that the profit made on a type of cloth was decided largely by the skill Jim exercised in specifying yarns, instructing the tapers on how he wanted it processing and his own skill at the looming frame. Like many other jobs in the mill, there is more to this craft than meets the eye.
This is an overall shot of the north end of the twisting room, that is the end which butts up to the cart-race where the teagle hoist is and beyond that the tape room. In the top left-hand corner is the pulley which takes the drive from the cross belt, across to the shaft which I described over the donkey engine, and forward into the tape room. At one time that belt also used to drive the teagle hoist. In the top left-hand corner of this room you can just see the vague suggestion of a black shape and what looks as if it might he an electric meter. That is an old DC dynamo which was driven of the shafting and provided DC current for the Barber Coleman knotting machines. I say knotting machines because in the days when this mill was full up with 1120 looms there were two knotting machines working. Now we only have one which can be seen on the far right with a weaver’s beam mounted in it.
Really, there is rather a large gap in our description of Bancroft. This is the fact that I have no series of pictures of the Barber Coleman operator working on his machine. There is a very simple reason for this, the man hated my guts! My experience is that there was no point in doing the pictures if you hadn’t got the confidence of and a relationship with the person who was doing the job. It’s a sad thing but it just so happened that the man, Jim Greenwood, who ran the Barber Coleman machine had neither friendship, confidence or any fellow feeling whatsoever towards me and so those pictures never got done which is a shame. But there again, we did get the rest of it, but that's the reason why there are no pictures of the Barber Coleman machine being used.
There is a story behind this animosity which tells us some interesting things about the way the internal organisation of the mill worked and gives some indication of how serious mechanical faults could arise.
The first bone of contention might have been that Jim Greenwood had a candidate for the engineer’s job and I pipped him at the post. I was told this years after the mill closed but have no idea whether there is any truth in it. If true, it would explain a lot.
There was another matter as well. As I have already said, we had an alternator in the engine house and made our own electricity to mains standard. This was 50 cycles, 440 volts three phase current. By taking one phase and neutral this gave single phase at 250 volts. However, for many years it had been recognised that our current wasn’t up to mains standard. The reason why I knew this was that when it was the day for making the wages up I always had to switch the office circuit on to mains power because the old electronic calculator they used in the office wouldn’t run off mill power. Sidney Nutter said the decimal point jumped all over the place.
I was always getting complaints from Jim Greenwood about the fact that he wasn’t getting enough power for his machine. The Barber Coleman machine was an American machine and ran on DC power at I think 115 volts. This was rectified from the mill electricity and supplied to the machine. I am not sure whether it was a mercury rectifier or a rotary converter. These complaints from Jim Greenwood got more and more vitriolic and he accused me of being frightened of the engine and not running fast enough! Apart from his lack of knowledge, speeding it up wouldn’t have cured the problem, the fact was that the cycles were perfect, the electric clock in the engine house kept perfect time.
In the end this constant abuse led to a stand-up row and I determined that I would cure the problem. I went out and bought an Avo heavy duty meter for £85, two week’s wages and took readings of everything. I got a severe shock. The voltmeter on the engine distribution board had been altered at some time so that it read the correct voltage even though it was actually wrong. The root problem was that the resistances in the circuit which carried power to the exciter on the alternator had deteriorated over the years and it wasn’t possible to get enough current to the exciter to attain the full 440 volts. We were actually making 400 volts three phase and about 215 volts I think on single phase.
I had a word with the office, got the sparks in and we replaced the resistances in the exciter circuit. This gave an instant cure. The variable resistance used for fine adjustment of the voltage could be run in the mid position and I was making 440 volts on three phase. Single phase went up to just short of 250 volts.
The first consequence of this improvement was that the next time I switched the shed light on approximately 20% of the bulbs in the shed blew. As my father used to say, there is a providence that looks after drunken men and idiots and I had bought a lot of Edison screw bulbs from a fairground proprietor who had converted to bayonet fittings so the bulbs in the shed were no problem.
Shortly after I made the adjustment Jim came to see me. He said that Jim Greenwood was not a happy man. His knotting machine was running approximately 50% faster than it had before and this had shown up all the faults in maintenance which the operators had been getting away with for years. I shame to say I took great pleasure in going up and telling the man that he had asked for more juice and now he’d got it. I had cured a twenty year old fault and the ball was in his court. He never spoke to me again all the time I worked there.
Sidney Nutter was pleased because his calculator worked perfectly. He told me to ignore Jim Greenwood. I did and so this is the reason there are no pictures of the knotting machine. The weavers also gave me a vote of thanks because the shed lights were a lot brighter. Big improvement all round and all because some small and inexpensive fixed resistances needed replacing. I think the job only cost about £15 and I wondered how much money had been wasted over the years.
Now, looking at this overall picture the Barber Coleman machine occupies the top right-hand corner with its associated two frames, two back frames, and the actual knotting machines and beyond that the preparation frame. Just this side of that is a looming frame which has all sorts of stuff piled round it and stocks in front for putting a warp on, you can see which never actually got used.
This was a mechanised looming frame, supposed to be an automatic looming frame, but in point of fact it was never used as such. It probably had been in. the old days but they were never really a success. I didn’t know it at the time but Jim bought the frame out of his own pocket and when he finished he took it home and put it in his garage! Incidentally, in the window bottom behind that can be seen a phenomenon which was common at Bancroft during the summer. Tomato plants growing in plastic bags full of soil on window cills. The atmosphere in Bancroft seemed to be conducive to growing tomatoes and there's been some very fine crops. In point of fact these belong to Jim Greenwood the fellow who ran the Barber Coleman and I don't think Fred lavished any more attention on his plants than he did on me and they were rather spindly things and never really cropped that year.
So there we are. On the right another pair of stocks, this was where there used to be another knotting frame which was not used because there wasn't the need for it. The one that Jim uses is further back to the right. It's not included in this picture but we'll be seeing plenty of that in a minute or two. Some other interesting things in there, warps on the floor ready for being processed. Notice every now and again bags on the floor, pieces of felt and things like that, those are just to let the warps stand on. It's kinder to them than the boards and saves them picking up muck and splinters.
In front of the camera you’ll see a stretch of new boarding going across the floor,
which looks to have been terribly attacked at one point. This is some new boarding which was put in on the instructions of the factory inspector because the old boards had got so worn that it was dangerous. The fact that it's all scarred and chewed up is due to the fact that Jim used to cut his reeds there. In fact if you look very carefully at healds and reeds lay on the disused stocks on the right, in between them you'll see two handles sticking out, those are actually his hammer and his chisel with which he cut down reeds to make them the right size for his warps that he was drawing.
I should explain that apart from one or two occasional circumstances, Jim, or rather Bancroft, never bought any healds or reeds for about 15 or 20 years. What Jim used to do was when cotton mills closed down he got people to give him their old healds and reeds and adapted them to use at Bancroft. He saved the firm thousands of pounds. In the rafters you'll see hung up sets of healds and reeds out of warps that have come out of the mill. If you have a warp in the shed and you are going to do exactly the same sort again, that warp has already been drawn through those healds and reeds in the right order. All you do is set them up in the Barber Coleman and the machine works its way across, knots all the old ends on to the new ends, and then all that you need to do is slide the healds and reeds over the knots and you’ve got a warp that's ready to go into the mill without re-looming it.
This is a great labour saver when you have got a shed that's working on standard sorts or on a few sorts. In other words with continuity of production. As one sort comes out of the loom it's replaced by the same sort. Under ideal circumstances you'd have one mill weaving one sort. Unfortunately Bancroft was struggling all the time for orders and we used to be in the position, well at one time we had three hundred odd looms working on twenty eight different sorts. This meant that almost every warp that went back into a loom was a different sort than the one that came out. As a consequence this meant that very often there was very little work for the Barber Coleman machine. We were working on new sorts nearly all the time, fighting for orders, getting different sorts, and having to re-loom them all, because obviously we didn't have sets of healds and reeds ready to be processed on the Barber Coleman. They had to be re-drawn from scratch and this was down to Jim and his knotting frame. We’ll look at a set of pictures now of Jim setting up a warp in the frame and looming it.
This is a picture of Jim stood in front of the stocks, or rather stood in between the stocks and the looming frame. Look at this in conjunction with picture number 4. Actually, this looming frame was designed so that the warp could be hung up in the two big hooks that you can see at the top on the frame. We never used to use it like that, we put the warp in the wooden stock and led the sheet up over the rood that Jim has placed in the hooks. It made a lot of work lifting that warp right the way up there and then lifting it down. It was easier to do it the way that Jim does it. You can rest assured that everything that Jim does with this warp is done in the easiest way possible. [There’s an old saying about this: ‘Give a lazy man a job and he’ll find the easiest way to do it.’ Nothing to do with laziness in this case, just the search for efficiency. It should have said ‘busy’ not lazy.]
There is something I should point out about this warp which is that we didn't tape it at Bancroft. It's one of the very few that weren’t taped by us. We used to refer to it as a polyzone warp, it was a mixture of worsted, the black end nearest to us or the very
dark grey end was pure worsted. Then the next was half worsted and half polyester which was a very coarse yarn, and the other end was all polyester. It was a very hard
sized yarn and wouldn't have gone through the Barber Coleman. It couldn't have dealt with it, not the machine that we had anyway.
These warps were actually a good example of what happens when a mill is failing. They were not our preferred sorts but we had to take whatever we could get to keep the looms running. We were weaving these on commission for a Bradford firm. This meant that they were sub-contracted to us by the mill that had got the order and we got less profit out of them. The cloth was a lining cloth for men’s suits and the three grades on one cloth was something to do with the way the cloth was used. Funnily enough, due to the way the Uniform List of Prices for weaving was drawn up, these warps were the weaver’s friend because they got a good piece rate for weaving them.
So all these were to draw through afresh each time. This is the warp that Jim's working on and it's the warp that is also described when Ernie Roberts, the tackler, is gaiting a loom later.
Jim has just taken this warp which hasn’t got a striking comb in it because we haven't taped it. It came with a piece of sticky tape across as you can see to keep it in some sort of order. Jim is starting right from the beginning with this warp but basically, apart from having to put his own striking comb in the process is exactly the same as it would have been if he had been dealing with a warp that had been taped at Bancroft.
The first thing he is doing in picture number 3, he's got the warp in the stocks and he is straightening all the ends out on it, getting the packing off and getting it into some sort of order. In picture number 4 he's draped the sheet over the frame and he is weighing it up to find out what he has got and getting things into some sort of logical order.
When he has got it on the frame and temporarily held in a clamp he puts a rod on to weight it and get a bit of tension. Then he puts his striking comb in well back into the warp so he has the best chance of picking the ends up in order. He’s spread the ends out over the slotted wooden back of the comb and has got them as straight as he can. He draws the comb down through the sheet on picture 6 and finishes up with his warp held in the striking comb as even as he can get it and ready for gaiting into the looming frame.
Picture number 7 is a picture of what would be the first stage in one of our own warps because the striking comb would already be in. Forget the warp for the moment, what we are looking at now is setting the healds and reed up in the looming frame ready for gaiting up. This is the stage where Jim makes his first independent decisions based on experience. He chooses his healds and reeds to suit the finished cloth he wants to produce. He has first to select good healds with no broken or damaged eyes and a reed with the correct number of dents [spaces] per inch to suit the cloth. This is where he may have to cut down second-hand healds and reeds to size. He will use a pair of fine nosed pliers to straighten out and bent wires in the reed.
The first stage is to set the healds up in the frame. The number of healds depends on the cloth construction he has to achieve. A plain cloth will have two healds, a twill will have four. There are many combinations and remember that the ends have to be drawn through the right heald in the right order. It isn’t just a matter of bringing all the ends through all the heald eyes at the same time.
O pictures 7 and 8 Jim is installing the healds in the frame. There are four for this cloth. He picks out the larger lumps of dawn and dirt and examines all the eyes to make sure they are serviceable. Notice the clutter on the window cill behind him. This is where Jim keeps just about everything he needs to do his job. The funny thing is that an ‘efficiency expert’ would throw a blue fit at this evidence of disorganisation but as we shall see, he might be wrong in Jim’s case. Look at the corner there to the left of Jim. The whitewash has been rubbed off over the years by people leaning on the wall to talk to Jim and Jim leaning on the wall and having a warm over the pipes.
In picture 9 Jim has got his healds sorted to his satisfaction and gives them a good brushing to get all the dust and dawn off them. Notice on the bottom bar Jim’s collection of reed hooks and slay knives together with other small tools. Look how his fent or brat on his lap is covered with dirt which he's brushed out of the healds. He's already got his rods through three of the healds that are hung there. In picture 10 you’ll see that he has got rods through all four of them. In picture 10 he is putting the clip on at the bottom which puts the tension on the healds when he screws it up at the bottom. This holds the assembly tight and steady so that he can work on it. It tends to hold all the eyes in the right position and level. One or two odds and sods laid about there. There's that square object lay on the frame just in front of his right arm as he's pushing that pin through, that is actually a reed stone which is a very fine piece of abrasive stone which is used for polishing the face of the reed if it's been caught with a shuttle and damaged or something like that.
In picture number 11 we see the healds all cleaned and set up and properly tensioned in the frame. Notice that the rods have also been tensioned upwards and are bearing against the bottom of the eyes, in other words they are holding those eyes level, straight and level. Notice that wedges have been put in between the rods and a clip put over the four rods to restrain them against the pressure from the wedges so that the four rods are held at an even space apart. All this helps him to get his hook through quickly and accurately and make a good job when he is looming. The lamp that's hung up in the frame, at the time this picture was taken it hadn't got a strip-light in it. We were waiting for one coming but he used to have that light there and it used to slide from one side to the other and he could put light just exactly where he wanted it. You'll notice in the frame the odds and sods laid about, a knife nearly worn out but very sharp, pair of scissors, the reed stone, and then various polished wooden handles stuck up on the left hand-side. These were all things that he used each day while he was doing his job.
On picture number 12 we see that Jim has laid the reed on the two hooks which hang over the top of the healds. He’s got his tape on there and he is marking out on his reed. These marks give him distances or points on the reed where certain elements of the warp should be when they are drawn in. He'll split those marks again afterwards and they are there to give him an even count all the way down so that he can tell exactly what he's doing when he starts drawing. Notice that his slay knife is already hooked into the reed at this end, you'll just see the tip of it hung through the reed. More of that in a minute or two when we come to it. This is actually a very important part of the operation and is what we call ‘casting out’ his looming marks. This is actually where he sets the warp up for the weaver and it's a very skilled job. In this case he is dealing with a cloth of 36” finished width and so he allows it 37 ¾ “ in the
reed to allow for shrinkage due to contraction caused by the weft when it is weaving in the loom. This allowance varies with the weight of twist, the density of the cloth and many other factors. The only sure guide is years of experience.
If you notice on this reed there are three black marks just about nine inches to the left of Jim's left hand. These are brass dents, each strip of polished steel in that reed is called a reed wire and the space between is a dent. Those are brass ones and they're so positioned that by looking at them you can tell what size that reed is. There'll be four spaces between the first two, or rather four dents in between the first two brass wires and two dents in between the next. That's 42 dents to the inch which is the size of that reed. It saves counting how many dents there are in an inch. This is where Jim governs the cloth construction by the number of healds, the way he laces them up, the size of the reed, the width, any combination can be done here. In actual fact these are what are known as simple cloths that we are doing here with four staves. It is possible with a Jacquard to have 30 or 40 staves to a cloth. This makes looming far more difficult of course but Jim’s is difficult enough here. The only difference is that with a Jacquard with a lot more staves in. The staves in a heald are the flat pieces of wood that go through each side of the heald. There are four at the top and four at the bottom in this set. The more staves you have in, the more complicated things get. But actually the principle is exactly the same.
In this picture Jim has returned to the warp. He has got it into position and he is hanging his comb up, with the lease of the warp trapped in it, just on that top rail with two pieces of string.
Here Jim has put a bar under the sheet of warp and lifted it up and put it in the two hooks at the top where originally the beam itself was supposed to hang. Notice that his comb is still tied on to the back of the frame with the lease of the warp running through it.
The next thing he does is pass all those ends downy through the large clamp at the bottom of the looming frame.
He has got all his ends as evenly tensioned as possible and has temporarily clamped the tail of the warp in the frame. What he is aiming for here is to get the sheet in exactly the right position and as even as possible against the wooden beam above the healds and reeds.
Jim is satisfied with the orientation of the top of the sheet so he clamps a piece of wood across it to hold it in place.
Now the top of the sheet is positioned and clamped Jim opens the bottom clamp and passes the comb down through it. It’s not easy to see but notice at this point that the bottom clamp is lined with felt. This allows it to hold the sheet firmly but allows Jim to draw the ends up through it and through the healds.
[In the original folio 17 and 18 are the wrong way round. On 17 the clamp is being fitted, on 18 it is in place. Apologies for that if you are looking at the originals.]
Jim has got his sheet straight in the bottom clamp and has tightened it up by pressing it in with his left hand while with his right he is fitting one of the ‘G’ cramps which push the clamp dead tight up against the warp sheet. Notice that a small mechanism has put in an appearance on the end of the broad cast iron track nearest to the camera. This is the traveller which is operated by a pedal on the floor which actuates a bar running across the back of the traveller bed. This little mechanism saves a wage because instead of having a ‘reacher in’ on the back of the frame. That is a labourer sat on a buffet who’s job was to select the ends and hold them in position for the loomers reed hook. The traveller does this automatically each time the pedal is pressed. The bed on which it runs is pivoted so that it can be moved back from the warp sheet while the comb is threaded through.
Jim has moved the traveller bed up to the warp, notice how it has pushed it in towards the healds. Jim is tightening the clamp at the far end which holds the bed in place and he will do the same at this end as well.
Jim is making his last checks on the tightness of the ‘G’ cramps holding the bottom clamp on the frame. Jim has achieved his objectives. He has got the warp sheet in its correct position, under tension and presented in exactly the right position to be able to be picked out by the traveller ready for him to hook through the healds.
Jim is now ready to start looming. He has moved round on to his buffet and is making his final adjustments to the clamp with which he can adjust the height of the eyes in the healds. You get a good view of the traveller in this picture. Notice how the traveller has been set in its starting position. You can see the flat bar which is operated by the treadle and the hooked rod from the traveller which connects with it and transfers the motion to the traveller whatever its position on the bed. If you look very carefully you will see that two ends are selected and held separate from the sheet. There are two ends because Jim draws two ends through two eyes at once. His reed hook has two hooks on it. Occasionally he used a hook with three hooks but not very often. You can see the felt in the clamp on this picture. This allows Jim to draw the ends up through the clamp but holds the sheet in tension. Notice that there are no loose ends hanging below the bottom clamp. Jim has cut them all off level with the clamp so that he has exactly the same length of end to draw through each time he takes two ends. Another thing worth noting is that Jim has left some spare sheds at the end of the set of healds. He never starts right at the end of the healds.
Jim is sat behind the frame and he is actually drawing his first ends through. Now this is the first time that you see the actual process of drawing; he does it with a small tool
which has two hooks on it. You’ll see that the ends which were presented by the
traveller are in his hook. Actually there are three ends here, Jim must be looming an extra end in the selvedge to strengthen it. Another of the small decisions on cloth construction he has to make based on experience.
He has pushed the hook through an eye in the heald but this has blurred out because the action of the hook was moving it sideways. In this case I think Jim was drawing all three ends through one eye in the heald, this will be to strengthen the selvedge which takes quite a lot of strain in the loom as the temples restrain the cloth against contraction from the weft. Don’t worry about this too much, we’ll see the temples and describe them when we get on to the loom pictures. What we need to look at now is what happens to the ends once Jim has drawn them through.
This is an overall picture of the warp in the frame when Jim has drawn almost three quarters of the ends. We’ll look at the details in the next few pictures. This is the set up and you’ll see that there are only two tools, The hook laid on the reed and the slay knife in one of the dents on the reed.
[There are no pictures 25 and 26 in my folio. I have an idea that I decided in the end not to use them.]
This is a closer look at the reed and the tools.
If you are really on the ball you will have noticed that these pictures appear to be out of order. They are actually of different warps. I couldn’t afford to be away from the engine long and so had to keep an eye on Jim, dash up when I thought it was appropriate and snatch a snap or two. Notice that Jim is using the same double hook but that it’s a different slay knife in this picture. The number of hooks on it is different.
This may be the time to try to describe the clay knife to you. I’ve been dreading this because I know it is mission impossible. The only way to really understand it is to sit at a frame and use the knife and watch what is happening. However, I’ll do my best because not many of you will ever get this opportunity.
The Slay knife isn’t a knife and it’s not used on slays! There’s a good start for you. The slay is actually part of the loom upon which the shuttle runs. This isn’t a knife because it doesn’t do any cutting. However, it is always called a slay knife so we’ll just have to live with it.
Notice that in all these pictures the knife is hung in the reed. It has a small 90 degree bend in the tip to stop it dropping out. The top part of the knife isn’t fixed to the bottom part, it’s simply retained in the two parts at the bottom by a diamond shaped stud which engages with a hole in the bottom fork. Notice that the pointed part of the bottom fork appears to have a turned up tip. As the knife is passed up through the dent in the reed the flat wire passes under the pointed part of the forked bottom aided in its entry by the turned up end on the fork. The flat wire passes down into the bottom of the fork and because the bottom end of the knife is bent over towards us, the wire passes up the opposite side of the knife when it drawn down. The net effect of this is that the knife has magically moved one dent to the right by being moved up and down. I know this is difficult but read that once or twice and you may understand it. If not, don’t worry, just recognise that one up and down movement moves the slay knife along one dent to the right.
One other thing we should mention is that as the knife reaches the top, Jim puts one of the warp threads into the hook on the knife and as it is drawn down it pulls the thread through the dent in the reed and leaves it there as it passes upwards again. This thread is then threaded through one eye in the heald and one dent in the reed. It’s as well to recognise here that if an eye or a dent is missed, all the ends have to be pulled back and re-drawn or the cloth will have a mark right through it.
One other thing to note on this picture is the handle of the reed hook which is lodged in the slot in the frame just to the right of the slay knife. The one with the dark handle. This is Jims favourite reed hook. He has had it for over 40 years and his fingers have worn the handle to the shape of his grip. It started off in life the same shape as the one that’s laid on the reed.
One more point to notice on this picture is the two metal eyes which you can see screwed into the bottom stave of the healds. The strings on these connect to the lambing wires in the loom and are part of the mechanism that moves the healds up and down in the loom.
There are more pictures of looming but at this point I had reached the end of the tape and so we’ll go on to them in the next transcript.
I think one of the things that's always struck me about this operation is the fact that nearly all the tools are more or less home made. They are very homely tools. Like the pieces of rod bent to hang over the top of the healds to support the reed. I don’t think for one minute that those were actually supplied with the frame in the first place, it's just that things have evolved over the years. I mean Jim has been using this looming frame now for about 40 years and I should think that he very soon evolved his own ideas and his own methods, and he has stuck to them ever since. This is why for instance he doesn't have the beam up on the frame, he has it on the stocks at the back. Lying on the reed itself you’ll see the double hook that he is using and also you'll see the slay knife which is hung in the reed.
A good loomer can do about 10,000 ends a day on this sort of work. That’s a really good loomer, a top class man. Jim has been known to do 25,000 ends in a day, admittedly starting very early in the morning and doing overtime at night but this gives an idea of Jim's calibre purely as a workman, as a loomer. He could have earned his living all his life as a loomer. And in point of fact, silly as it sounds, anybody that's listening to the tapes that I made with him would realise that we have said many a time he could have earned more money as a loomer than he could as a weaving manager and loomer at James Nutter’s. When you think about it 25,000 ends a day, well it must be world record standard. I'm not saying that there's nobody ever been faster than Jim, that would be stupid but certainly men of Jim’s calibre are very few and far between to say the least.
SCG/21 September 2003
6,807 words.