THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON MAY 2nd 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..
This tape is a continuation of the description of the pictures in the folio on looming. At the end of the last tape I was describing picture number 28. So we'll move on now to picture number 29.
These three pictures go together. They are a pictorial description of the process of actually drawing two ends. I’m not going to try to pretend that these pictures show all the actions in order, Jim moves so quickly that this is impossible to capture manually in single frames. I’ll describe what you should be looking for and you can look for examples of it.
I’ve watched Jim a lot and often tried to arrive at an average number of ends a minute. The answer I came up with most was just over 40 ends a minute when he was moving at full speed with no interruptions. I reckon he could average 35 per minute over the day.
The process of drawing two ends was as follows. Jim’s left hand will be drawing the slay knife down with the last of the two previous ends as his right hand stabs through the appropriate two eyes (one hook through each eye) and picks up the two ends that the traveller has selected for him. As he is doing this his slay knife is rising through the reed having moved on one dent. By the time he has drawn the two ends back his slay knife is ready to accept one of the ends. As soon as this end is hooked on the knife Jim’s left hand pulls it down and straight up again for the other end. As soon as he has captured that end on his knife his left hand pulls the end through the reed while his right hand is stabbing forward again. While all this is going on he has pressed the pedal controlling the traveller and picked up another two ends. All this has taken less than three seconds.
Of particular note in picture number 31 is that if you look at the ends of the healds you'll see that they look a bit scarred and battered. That's because he's just cut those down from larger healds. As I said before Jim makes do and mends and doesn't buy new healds, and he has cut all those healds down out of larger ones. Jim has saved this firm thousands and thousands of pounds by doing this, and I don’t know anybody else that'd go to the trouble of doing it.
One point about picture 30. I got Jim to pose for this and I used flash simply to make sure I had frozen the movement. Normally all my pictures are done using available light but I broke the rule here.
This is a very interesting picture, and is worthy of very close consideration. It's a close-up shot of the actual shed showing the ends as they're drawn through. Now, I should point out that this is not the same warp that Jim is drawing in picture 31. There is a difference between this warp and the one that Jim is drawing in our picture. The one that he is drawing in our series of pictures, the polyzone warp, is one in a dent. In other words one end goes through each dent in the reed. If you look very carefully at this picture, you'll see that it's two in a dent, two ends go through each dent but he misses a dent in between. If you look very carefully on the reed you'll see that there are two ends trough a gap, and then he misses a gap and then puts two ends through the next gap. This is a different cloth, a different form of construction, and obviously he is drawing it in a different way. If you follow the ends through the heald you'll see how they all pass through their own individual eyes in the heald. It is variations like this that give you, combined with the order in which the healds move in the loom, your cloth construction.
Notice that the first two healds, the front two sets of healds, are different from the back ones. The front two are ordinary varnished healds, which are linen thread coated with about seven coats of varnish. It's just a simple knot that's in them at each end to make the eye and that’s done on what is known as a heald knitting machine. The healds are then varnished with seven coats of varnish to strengthen them. This allows them to stand up to the wear; it's amazing how linen healds will stand up to it, cotton will wear holes in iron. If you look at anything made of steel which has cotton running over it regularly including Jim's hooks you’ll see this wear. Cotton will blunt knives and scissors very quickly. A good test of a pair of scissors is to use them on a bunch of threads.
The back two sets of healds are different, they have metal eyes. Now these are what we call mail eyes. They are simply a different way of constructing a heald, a more expensive way, and in some ways a better way and for certain types of yarn essential. The reason why Jim's using them here is really just because we happened to have them about and they were the right healds for the job, the right size of heald for the job. You'll notice he's got the mail eyes together, and got the varnished healds together. Notice the rods, the way they are passing through and holding all the eyes in place and easy to get to. There’s a very fine finish on those rods, beautiful pieces of wood, very slender, very fine finish. Altogether a very interesting picture that you could study for a long time. It tells you a lot about cloth construction and about looming.
We are now getting to the end of the process of drawing our warp. Jim has drawn all the ends through. When he has drawn all his ends through, what he does then is tip his reed up and trap it in the unused heald cords at each end so that the reed lies flat to the healds. Notice that he has drawn more of the sheet through. This is to check that all his ends are running free and to give him enough lease to knot the ends up. Notice also that he has taken the bar out of the two hooks on the frame. The sheet is going straight back to the warp.
On picture number 34 he is knotting a bunch of ends up. Notice that under his arm is a brush. Before he knots these ends he brushes them. The action of brushing them gently pulls each thread to the same tension as its neighbours and once he has brushed them out to his satisfaction he ties them in a knot to stop them slipping back through the reed.
In picture number 36 he is actually brushing the ends and you'll notice that his hand has beaten the camera shutter. In picture 35 the warp is finished and ready for taking out of the looming frame. Yes, I got them out of order! Sorry.
This is the warp card made out and ready to be trapped under the sheet when the warp is readied for the tackler. The warp card is a piece of stiff card which follows the warp right through its progress through the mill. It contains all the information necessary for the tackler, the weaver and the warehouseman. The weaver is paid off that card, it's presented in the office each time a cut or a length of cloth is cut out of the loom and the weaver is paid a bonus on time rate of so much for each hundred picks. A pick is one complete move through the loom of the shuttle back and forward. This card tells the weaver also a lot of other things. It tells them what sort of weft they ought to be using in the shuttle, it tells them whether the cloth is pickfound or not and gives instructions to the weaver in other ways like 'loose ends must be pulled off' and 'weft tags must be pulled off'’. It's a complete record of that warp and as follows this warp right the way through the process until finally when the warp is woven out it finishes up in the office and is then used for booking up production figures in the office. Then of course it is thrown away.
This shows the warp that Jim’s been dealing with on the stocks when he’d actually finished with it. You'll notice that Jim has laid the healds and reeds on the warp and fastened them on with a piece of thrum, you’ll see it in the middle, a piece of banding. That is the condition in which that warp will be when it is collected by the tackler for gaiting into the loom in the shed. We shall follow this warp later when we come to describe the tackler’s pictures.
Here is the warp ready for going down to the shed. Imagine what this floor looked like when say 400 warps had been downed in the same week. This was not an unusual figure in the old days.
This completes the description of looming. We shall go into the shed now and have a look at the weaver.
Every worker in the mill was important but the weaver is the bedrock of the industry. It was the need to weave cloth which was the genesis of everything else. In terms of numbers, amount of work done and economic benefit to the industry, the weaver was king, or in modern times more likely to be queen.
Conversely, in terms of pay and conditions of work the weaver was very badly treated. Much of this steamed from the fact that a large proportion of weavers were women. Much has been written by academics about the fact that women weavers were well paid relative to other women workers in society but this was only because men worked in the same job and there was never any differentiation between sexes in the shed in terms of pay rates.
There is much in the body of transcripts in the LTP about weavers. Mary Wilkins herself was interviewed, 79/AF series, but there were problems with this, it was against her husband’s wishes. Ernie Roberts and Jim Pollard give a lot of information about the weaver’s work and this description by me of the pictures will help as well.
Mary Wilkin was regarded by Jim Pollard as one of the three best weavers in the shed. First a word or two about Mary and about weaving in general. Weaving, in common with every other job in the mill, is a very skilled job. One of the tragedies about weaving is that it has never been recognized as such. I have often thought that this stems from two facts, one is that up to the beginning of the second world war weavers were ten a penny and anybody could get as many of them as they needed and so they weren’t very highly regarded. Second, I think, is something to do with the fact that most of them were women. I think the view that was taken was how could a woman be a craftsman? Be that as it may, my opinion of the job of the weaver is that a good weaver is certainly a craftsman or craftswoman. A good weaver is a treasure; and believe me there aren't many of them about. Anybody that wants to go further into the reasons why there's good weavers and bad weavers should listen very carefully to Jim Pollard and Ernie Roberts talking about weavers.
Jim Pollard puts a lot cf the troubles of the industry today down to the fact that not enough attention has been paid to the training of weavers. In particular to the fact that just after the war when the slogan ‘Britain's bread hangs by Lancashire thread’ was commonplace weavers were trained in as little as three weeks before they were running their own looms. It certainly is true to say that the good weavers that are about nowadays are almost all people who learned their trade either before the war or during the war. There are very few good weavers about who have learned the trade since the war. It's as simple as that. If there are, and Mary is one of them, it's because they were born weavers anyway, they were born with the skill in their fingers. There is much to be said for the point of view that good weavers are born not made. They are a certain type of person. They are a person who is generally fairly lightly built, find it very difficult to keep still, are very active, for ever on the go and one further attribute they have got to have, especially working on Lancashire looms, is that they have got to be hungry. When I say hungry, not necessarily physically hungry, but they have got to want the money; because they have got to have an incentive to work. When one looks at conditions in a weaving shed, even nowadays and I dare say in a hundred years, these pictures will just seem fantastic. Because the conditions in the weaving shed are so atrocious that one wonders why people stand it. This of course is showing up in the industry nowadays in the fact that it's very hard to get weavers to work on Lancashire looms, people just aren't interested. Things like noise levels, dirt, responsibility, and the level of sheer hard work that has to go into the job militates against people taking up the trade nowadays. The stock example we have in Barnoldswick at this time is that a woman can go down to Rolls Royce and earn £55 a week just for sweeping up.
Let’s look at the pictures bearing in mind that a weaver’s task is to keep her looms running as near non-stop as she can. Mary’s wage is made up of a fixed payment and then a bonus of so much for every 100 picks registered on the pick clock on her loom. The actual reward for each 100 picks is specified by rules laid down in the Uniform List of Prices. This is an agreed scale between the manufacturers and the Unions which applies to all the weavers in North East Lancashire. Her main task is shuttling, taking the empty shuttle out of the loom, inserting a full one and replenishing the weft package in the empty shuttle. Each loom has two shuttles, one in use and the other ready for use in the shuttle stand on the loom.
This is a picture of our weaver, Mary Wilkin, readying a pirn before installing it in the shuttle which is under her left arm.
Here we have Mary stood in her alley with a seemingly far-away look on her face. She is working almost in a trance. A good weaver can do the job almost without thinking. It gets to be very nearly automatic and it's possible for her to let her mind wander on to all sorts of subjects whilst she is actually weaving. I found this was true while I was driving. I think that if you're really at home with a job and good at it there's no need for your mind to be working a hundred per cent on making sure that you do the job all the time. You can let your mind wander, function on automatic pilot and allow your mind to go off on to different subjects altogether which is what Mary's doing here. She could be thinking about anything, what she is going to give her husband for tea, the colour of her new curtains, anything at all. In point of fact the job that she is doing while she daydreams is preparing a shuttle for the loom.
The weaver’s job consists almost entirely of what we call shuttling; in other words taking out empty shuttles and replacing them with full shuttles. Her job is to keep the looms running and it's as simple as that, to keep cloth rolling off but also to weave good cloth. This means picking up any faults as they occur and keeping those looms running. The sign of a good weaver is that she is sat at the end of her alley and the looms are running away merrily. How much of this free time she had depended on the count and quality of the weft. If she was on fine weft a shuttle could last 15 minutes so with ten looms she could get away with 40 shuttle changes an hour which gave time for a breather but was a lower bonus on the pick rate. If she was on heavy yarn she could have 120 shuttle changes in an hour and no time to sit. Mary preferred these sorts, she was into earning not sitting.
You'll notice that she is holding in her hand what we call a yarn package which is a wooden pirn which has the weft or thread on which passes across the loom through the threads of the warp She's got that in her left hand and she's also cradling the shuttle in her left arm while she is pulling off thread from the bottom of the pirn. In order to weave successfully in the loom the weft has to unwind from the narrow end of the pirn. So you might wonder why she is doing that, pulling weft off the base of the package. This is a sure sign of machine wound weft, rewound weft.
At Bancroft we used Leesona and Britoba pirn winders. All our weft was rewound at by us from the spinner’s package, via a cone winder on to pirn winders. The reason it was put through these processes was that this eliminated weak shops in the weft because the yarn broke during the process of re-winding, and it produced exactly the right size of package for our shuttles. Rewound weft was the surest way of minimising weft faults at the loom and therefore cut down on efficiency losses. A characteristic of pirn winders is that when they finish building a package they wind a couple of turns on the base of the spindle so that the weft is feeding in the right place to start the new pirn. So the first thing the weaver has to do before she loads that shuttle is pull off the thread until it is feeding from the tip of the package. You can see it flying off in her hand. Notice in the pictures that there are two full shuttles laid on the shuttle stands of looms that are running. One stand is empty, she will place the shuttle she is dealing with on here. The stand on the right is empty. This is almost certainly because her tackler is repairing or adjusting that shuttle for her. This no problem because if you look the cloth on the roller is cut out. This loom is waiting for a warp. Mary is paid stopped time for that loom while it is empty. On that stand you can see a small piece of sandpaper. If Mary catches a shuttle on a metal part she will rub it down with that to keep it smooth. Also on the stand is what looks like a small handle. That is a hook very similar to the one that Jim uses for looming, but it's longer and has a bend in it. Mary uses that for drawing any ends of the warp through the healds and reed which has ‘gone down’, which she is replacing because it has broken. It’s a reed hooky and heald hook combined so it's very thin and whippy to go through the dents in the reed. You'll see her later on using that to take an end up.
Mary’s hands are moving so quickly that it’s just not possible to take photographs fast enough to keep up with her. What she’s done, remember she was holding the pirn in her left hand and the shuttle was under her left arm with the peg opened and facing the floor. The shuttle peg is the metal prong on which the hollow pirn is mounted. Once she’s finished drawing that thread off, she keeps hold of that pirn with her left hand, reaches across her body with her right hand, gets hold of the body of the shuttle, pulls it off her arm and then pushes the peg up through the yarn package. Of course the pirn has a hole through the middle of it. Notice that I have said she pushes the peg through the pirn. This is a throw-back to the days when Mary started weaving when paper tube packages were delivered straight from the spinner to go on the loom. It was very easy to ‘stab a cop’ of you pushed the package down on to the peg. The way Mary was taught was to hold the package still and skewer it with the cop by rotating the shuttle as it entered the cop. This doesn’t matter with full pirns but Mary still does it the way she was taught. She is drawing some yarn off now and at the same time her hand is starting to move over to close the peg carrying the yarn package down into the shuttle. As she does this she drags the thread over the slot in the end of the shuttle which threads the yarn through the eye of the shuttle.
One other thing to notice about that shuttle is that the top end of it is lined with fur. This controls the weft as it is being dragged off the package by the passage of the shuttle through the loom. If this fur wasn’t there the yarn would tend to balloon as it flew off the package and snarl up in the eye of the shuttle thus causing a break and wasting time.
Having installed the package and threaded the shuttle Mary is pulling off a yard or two of yarn to ensure that it is running freely. Notice that her gaze has shifted. She is subconsciously checking on her looms as she prepares the shuttle.
Incidentally, you’ll notice that in all these pictures of people doing their work they are not reacting to me and the camera at all. This is because I took literally thousands of pictures and they had got so used to me using a camera that I was part of the scenery.
In this picture Mary is wrapping the loose end of the yarn round the shuttle so that it doesn’t hang down on the loom and perhaps get caught up in the motion.
If you have eagle eyes you will see that I have cheated here. Mary is putting the refilled shuttle back on the loom but it’s not the same loom that she was working on before. I missed this shot and as the next shuttle had just run out I waited until she was putting the shuttle back on this loom.
Notice that the mechanisms on the loom are clean and so is the floor apart from the loose ends of balled up yarn that Mary drops while she is shuttling. She will sweep these up at lunch time. It is a waste of time to keep walking down to her waste tin and throwing them in.
These three pictures are of Mary starting a loom. Number 8 is actually a different loom that the other two but the operations are in order. She has changed the shuttle. Now, what she is doing in number 7, she's taken the empty shuttle out, you can see it in the tray on the loom, and she’s putting the full shuttle in. Now what she has to do is push that shuttle right down into the box as far as it'll go. To do that she reaches over behind the shuttle box and eases the spring on the box with her right hand and with her left hand, with the second finger she just pushes that shuttle home into the end of the box. Sometimes she uses a small metal rod on a handle to do this if a swell spring is tight. The reason why the shuttle has to be pushed right home on the picker is top make sure it gets a full blow on the first stroke of the picking stick to ensure that it travels the full width of the loom.
On number 8 she has her right hand on the knocking on lever and her left hand on the slay or ‘hand shelf’ to give it a good kick off. She doesn't just rely on the machine driving it, she helps it off and she is just about to set that loom on. You can see the shuttle in the box.
In picture number 9 she has done it. The loom's away, you can see that it's blurred and what she is doing is pulling off the weft tag which she has trapped in the cloth at the far side. In other words when she loaded that loom she put the shuttle in at the place where the last one had run out. This is known as ‘finding the pick’ and such a cloth will be noted on the warp card as ‘pickfound’. The loose end of weft that is left hanging out of the cloth where the shuttle was inserted is called a ‘weft tag’ and is the reason for the instruction on the warp card, ‘weft tags must be pulled off’. She either cuts it with her scissors or sometimes just pulls it off with a pair of flat ended tweezers. In this way it is impossible to see a mark in the cloth where one shuttle ran out and another one started. This could only happen on a Lancashire loom run manually. If by chance the weft ran out at the selvedge or if it wasn’t a pickfound cloth Mary would anchor the loose end of the weft under the temple to hold it while the loom started. The temple is the small metal clip on each side of the cloth between the place where the shuttle is running and the breast beam of the loom. This small housing holds a brass roller with metal spikes in which is offset to the cloth in such a manner that as the cloth passes through the grip of the roller it is pulled out sideways to stop the cloth contracting in the shed where it is weaving. If this wasn’t done the cloth would not weave as it would be trying to get narrower. This contraction is caused by the action of the weft in the warp and is a characteristic of any weaving operation.
On the early automatic looms the box just loaded a full shuttle at the end of the shed no matter where the weft ran out so there was always a small mark on the cloth. On later models they put a small feeler on that detected when the pirn was about to run out and stopped the loom so that the weft tag was always on the selvedge. This meant that there was always a small amount of weft left on the pirn which was waste but it avoided a pick mark in the cloth.
The next seven pictures show another routine shuttle change but this time all doesn’t go well. I picture 10 Mary is putting a freshly loaded shuttle into the box ready to start the loom up again.
Here Mary is reaching down towards the gear wheels at this side of the loom and what she is going to do there is something that she does every time she re-starts a loom after she has changed the shuttle. She just lets off the tension on the cloth a bit otherwise she'll get a thin place on the cloth where she starts. She just lets it off two or three clicks depending on the type of cloth she has got in.
Mary has started the loom and is pulling the weft tag off from under the temple.
Here Mary is refilling the shuttle she has just taken out of the loom but while she is doing this the loom stops. The weft stop motion has detected that the weft has broken.
Here you can see that Mary has put a new package in the other shuttle and placed it on the shuttle stand. She has taken the other shuttle out of the loom and is examining it to see what is wrong. She draws some thread off it. Now you'll notice there isn't a lot of thread left on that pirn, you can see just by the back of her right hand. Now a lot of weavers wouldn't have bothered doing that, they'd have pulled that pirn out, thrown it into the waste box and started with a fresh shuttle straightaway. But Mary is a good weaver and she likes to weave all her pirns off; she has been brought up in the old way not making much waste. So, instead of just taking the easy way out, she is finding out why it's not run off, why that pirn hasn't run off properly as it should have done. And if I remember rightly, I mean this was in 1977, it's two years ago when it happened, but I think if I remember rightly it was because it was just a bad place in the thread. What we call a thick shop in the thread which had caught in the eye and broken the weft. Anyway, she draws a bit off and in the next picture we’ll see her popping it back in where it broke.
Here she is putting the shuttle back in where it ran out. Now it gets a bit complicated here. The weft broke just before the shuttle was entering the box at this end. Now this is the wrong end for a loom to stop, A Lancashire loom should always stop with the shuttle in the box next to the knocking on lever. We are looking at a bit of top class weaving here because Mary is putting the half empty shuttle in and pushing it into the wrong box for starting because this is how it was travelling when the weft broke. There is no picture of it but when she gets it into this box she throws the loom over by hand to alter the shed and then flicks the shuttle through the thread into the box at the other end.
The shuttle is in the far box and Mary is moving towards the cloth take up motion to let it off a couple of clicks before restarting the loom.
Here she is setting the loom on. Remember this is a left hand loom, the knocking on lever is at the far end so she’s got her left hand on the lever and her right one on the hand shelf. The loom is away and running. That little set of pictures says a lot about Mary which of course is the reason why I put them in. A lot of people wouldn't have bothered, they'd just have banged the fresh shuttle in and away and that's it. But not Mary, she is a good weaver, she is trying, so she does the job right.
Notice the dawn on the healds in that picture and the way it’s collected on the pillars round about. A lot of dust floats about in a weaving shed, not as much as people think but enough to make things very dusty at times.
This is a different kettle of fish altogether. If you remember when we were talking about making up sets of back beams to make weavers warps we said that very often there was a spare end, or perhaps even two or three spare ends in a warp. Well what we are looking at here is a spare end on a warp and the way the weaver deals with it.
Many a time during the course of weaving a warp one end might go down badly, or keep breaking. In that case the spare end is brought across and used to replace that bad end. But in the meantime while it's weaving you have got to do something with the spare end, so what you do is take it back round the warp and as the warp winds off the spare end keeps winding through in the same place. Now obviously those threads are going round and round but the rest of the warp's winding forwards and it gradually builds up until you have got a fairly thick rope of weft on the warp. Every now and again the weaver will cut that off and let it start afresh if it starts to get too thick. Or, as in this case, she might decide that she needs that end. In that case she will cut it and just take that end off, and take that end through with the rest of the sheet and use it to piece up.
Here Mary is doing something which is one of the biggest parts of the weavers job. She is taking up an end that's gone down. Notice she has got her tools there, a pair of scissors on the cloth and a reed hook in her hand. She has reached over with her right hand behind the heald and she has found the end that's loose and tied another piece onto it to make it the right length for drawing through. She puts her reed hook through the eye in the heald that that end should be coming through and hooks into the thread as she is holding it with her right hand and draws it through the heald.
Here she is doing the same thing again but she is drawing the end through the reed. She’s got hold of it behind the reed and she is pushing her reed hook through to pick up the loose end.
She’s drawn the end through and is trapping it under the temple. Normally she'd just leave it hanging loose because she wouldn’t be near enough to the temple to do that, but in this case the end's gone down very near to the temple so she reaches in and traps it there. Then she sets that loom on and lets it weave off. Here again she will pull the tag off to leave the cloth perfect.
This is a picture of Mary taking an end up again. She's just drawn the end through the heald, but this picture is from the same side as Mary. This is a typical attitude in a typical job that a weaver has to do. You’ll see them doing this many times during the day and for this reason the weaver is said to spend most of her time putting right other people's mistakes. There again, an interesting picture, a lot can be picked out of it. I'm not going to go into too much detail at the moment because a lot of this will come out when other people are describing the jobs themselves.
Notice the polish on the hand shelf or slay cap of the loom there, where she normally places her hand when she's starting and stopping the loom. This is a similar sort of polish to the one that's on Jim’s looming hook, there is only one way to get it, use something regularly for years and years and look after it. Notice as well the warp card hung up on the piece of wire on the loom which gives the weaver all the information she needs about those warps. That card follows that warp and is hung up on the loom with it, and every weaver knows how to read the information on it and knows exactly what she is doing.
This picture is so simple and yet a book could be written about it. The information that's contained in that one picture is just amazing if you care to do the necessary research. What you are looking at is a pick clock which is counting the number. of picks in hundreds. In other words that clock is showing 323,800 picks. The pick clock is the method used to determine how much work a weaver has actually done during a shift or a week and she is paid off those figures and on a time rate as well.
The weavers fought for years for pick clocks, and I think that it's true on the whole to say that when they eventually got them it didn't do them much good. They weren't the answer to everything as they thought they would be. As I say, the history could be written of the fight to get pick clocks introduced because the pick clock was essential to a different payment for cloth than just being paid by the piece. Until the introduction of the pick clock, weavers were paid by the piece and that meant that it was possible to work all week with bad warps and not get a single cut off the looms and consequently not get paid any money. This situation went on right up to the end of the second world war and people find it very hard to believe. Admittedly the management, out of the kindness of their hearts would give them an advance on the next week's wages but in point of fact it was possible to weave all week and not get any money.
This is a nice little picture of Mary showing her taking her lunch. Again, a lot of information in this picture. She takes her lunch at the looms. We had a canteen with an oven in it for warming stuff up and a couple of benches but most of the weavers seemed to prefer to stay by the looms. By dinner time it was usually fairly warm in the shed. As you can see, Mary has got a buffet in between two looms and it's quite comfortable thank you. She is resting on the cloth on one loom, and she is using the cloth on the other loom as a table cloth, one thing about this canteen, it always has a clean table cloth. She has been down into the warehouse and brewed herself a pint of tea and she has got a book and she’ll spend half an hour there. We used to have an hour for dinner, but after consultation with the workers and the unions and we decided during the fuel shortages of 1976 that we’d make do with half an hour for dinner as it meant that we got away from the mill half an hour earlier at night. We finished at half past four instead of five, and it meant that we saved half an hours heating each day which was of course a saving on the coal bill. The weavers seemed to take to it quite well and in the end I think everybody rather liked this half an hour dinner break because it meant that the day was half an hour shorter really. A typical picture of a Lancashire weaver taking her break at dinner time.
I must say here that in common with Ernie, and anybody that's listened to Ernie Roberts’ tapes will know what he thinks about Mary Wilkin, in common with Ernie I have the greatest regard for Mary and people like her. I think that they are the salt of the earth. She was a marvellous worker, Ernie says that she is possibly the best Lancashire loom weaver he has ever seen and that must be a recommendation in itself. A most pleasing personality, spotlessly clean, always the same. When I say that I mean you could always be sure when you saw Mary that you'd get a smile, you'd get a kind word and if there were any complaints about anything they’d be put in a reasonable manner. She wouldn't be expecting you to move mountains in order to suit her. And really there is not much more you can say about somebody like Mary. With weavers like that I don't see how any business could fail.
Admittedly, Mary was one of the exceptions. She was one of our best weavers. But they were the people that I felt sorry for. In point of fact Mary left Bancroft before we actually closed down and the reason she left was that she got fed up with the dirty conditions and when you knew Mary it was very easy to understand that because she was meticulously clean in herself. She just couldn't stand the way things were deteriorating at Bancroft and things were getting dirtier and dirtier all round. And, well, really that's about all I can say about that. Very sad in some ways. I can't remember where Mary went working. I think it was to Johnsons in Earby. Where ever she went she was certainly a loss to Bancroft and I remember saying at the time, more prophetically than 1 ever dared think, that if people like Mary were leaving Bancroft then we might as well all bloody well leave because there was nowt for us - and by God, in the end that proved to be true.
SCG/22 September 2003
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