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..
We’re moving on now into a less glamorous but no less essential process at Bancroft Shed. This the winding department which was presided over by the Winding Master, Frank Bleasdale. He was brother to George Bleasdale who I took the engine over from. This department took in weft on ring package which was like a large pirn, transferred this to cone and the cones were then used to wind the pirns for our shuttles. This process reduced yarn faults in the weaver’s package and thus increased loom efficiency.
What we are looking at here is an old Leesona coning machine which converts ring tube yarn, which you can see on the top tray of the machine on to cone. There are no cones on the machine in this picture but we will see some later on. When I say ‘old Leesona’ this is because we bought this machine as scrap for £130 and set it up ourselves.
Putting all the yarn on to one standard cone package was good for the automatic pirn winders as they could be set up for that package and never altered apart from minor repairs or adjustments for yarn count, package size etc.
This is a picture of a trolley with cones on which have come off the Leesona coning machine. The notice on the end, ’30 ERA’ is the count of the yarn and the mill in Rochdale it was spun at. [Two years after this was taken I was at Era Mill photographing the demolition and felling of the chimney.] These cones are ready to go on to the automatic pirn winders.
This is a picture of the Hacoba automatic pirn winding machines. We bought these as scrap as well and installed them ourselves. You can see the magazines on top in which the empty pirns are loaded. Once the machine is sat up and assuming there are no breakages, it will automatically carry on winding those pirns and dropping them into the tray at the bottom, the boxes at the bottom which you can see underneath each unit. They make a very good yarn package, we used to use the old Leesona 50 spindle winders which wound one pirn and then that had to he taken off and replaced by hand. In many ways these were the best winder that was ever invented because they made a beautiful yarn package. In fact we used to wind for other people on these machines. We eventually sold these machines owing to the fact that we found we could get almost as good a yarn package and certainly a lot cheaper in terms of labour off these automatic machines. We also found out that there was a market for the old Leesona machines down in Nottingham for people who were knitting and wanted a very good yarn package for the knitting machines to save stoppages. It seems that the Leesona Universal, the old 50 spindle frame which we used to use, I think it was called the Leesona 90 I'm not sure, I'm not really well up in winding machines, was regarded as the best machine that it was possible to buy even though they were all a tremendous age and second hand. We were selling them down in Nottingham for £50 each. Well, they were £50 apiece picked up at Bancroft so somebody thought they were worth something.
Here is a winder working on one of the Hacoba machines. This is Jean Smith, one of the winders. There are very few pictures on winding here because winding is such a boring job, it's as simple as that. Winding is simply a matter of keeping the machine with full cones on top and magazines full of pirns and repairing any breakages that happen. All that's happening here is that Jean is winding on this machine and there has been a breakage. She has lifted the spool off the top and is examining the spool to see why there was a breakage. She pulls off some thread and breaks it off and then puts it back on.
These are simply pictures of her hands moving at tremendous speed to piece the yarn up, thread it through the various guides and get the spindle winding again.
A very limited set of pictures of a very limited job. That’s what a winder does all day is just travel up and down the machines keeping them running and keeping them fed with pirns and yarn. Funnily enough the winders are always regarded almost as the aristocracy in the mill amongst the women folk. It's always reckoned to be a very nice job to have, probably because they were slightly better paid than the weavers funnily enough and were reckoned to have an easier job. It was certainly less noisy and more pleasant to work in the winding room than down in the shed. This seems to be part of the hierarchy of the mill. I could never really understand it myself because there is certainly a lot more skill in a weaver's job than there is in a winder's.
This is the start of one of my favourite sets of pictures, about one of my favourite people actually, Mr Ernie Roberts. Picture 34 is of Ernie Roberts sat in the tacklers store in the warehouse rolling a cigarette.
I shan't go into too much detail about Ernie apart from the fact that I think that he, in common with people like Mary Wilkin and Jim Pollard, are the salt of the earth. He has seen the lot. He fought for this country in the war, he's seen bad times, he was brought up in terrible poverty, in fact he is bow-legged with rickets. But he had an unquenchable sense of humour and all told he is what I would describe as a complete man. Ernie Roberts was definitely a man and I have a lot of time for him.
What we are going to do now is follow Ernie as he deals with our friend the polyzone warp which we left with James upstairs, sat on the floor waiting for the attention of the tackler.
Just before we go upstairs let us look at another picture of the general confusion in the tacklers store, picture 35. As Ernie says, at one time in the old days under the strict regime that went on then and a keen boss tackler this place would he spotless. Everything would be in its own place. Attrition over the years has meant that everything has quietly broken down, nothing's ever been replaced or even swept up in some cases. We have reached the situation that you can see there where stuff seems to just be piled haphazard all over the place. Strangely enough the tacklers knew exactly where everything was and it was very seldom you saw them hunting round for something. They knew where things were and the job went on well.
Here is Ernie up in the preparation floor. He has lifted the warp on to his bogey and is straightening up the bands that are attached to the bottoms of the healds and will be attached to the lambing wires in the loom. He slackens all of them off before he goes down so that they are ready for being attached and tightened up. He is also making sure that the strings are all right and that the eyes are firmly fixed in the heald staves. If any repairs or alterations need doing to those he will get them done up here before he takes it down into the shed.
You’ll notice he has got that warp on his truck, on the tackler's truck, that essential part of his equipment.
Here we see him disappearing at a tremendous rate of speed considering his little bow legs into the hoist ready to go down into the warehouse and thence into the shed.
Here we have Ernie, still moving at a fair speed up the alley in the weaving shed. That picture tells you a lot about the state of our shed. Look at that floor, it was terrible. In some places it was almost impossible to wheel a warp, they'd fall off the truck if you didn't watch it.
Here Ernie has arrived at the back of his weaver’s loom into which he is going to install the warp. This process is known as gaiting a loom. Notice that in this case there in a big space at the back of this loom. This wouldn’t normally be the case, Ernie would he working in a very narrow alley but in order to make things better for myself, easier to photograph, I picked a warp that was going into a loom that was going to be fairly easy to get at. In point of fact this is at the back of the shed on the south side where a lot of looms have been taken out. There was an empty space at the back because Bancroft shed was not full up at this time. There was only about 500 looms in it and there was room for about 850 at this spacing.
This is something that very often happens to a tackler. One of his weavers has come to have a word with him, in this case a particularly young weaver, Susan Longbottom. We were at this time trying to get a few younger girls in but I am afraid that it was done in a very half hearted fashion and never really came to anything. Susan left once we had trained her and went to work at Johnsons in Earby but she wasn't as happy there as she was at Bancroft.
That was one of the things about Bancroft, everybody seemed to he happy working there even though the conditions were so terrible in many ways. Ernie said that Susan would make a good weaver because she was there for the money. This was the only incentive to come and says volumes for the combined effects of high unemployment and low wages in the area unless you were lucky enough to get into Rolls Royce.
This is a typical tackler’s stance. Ernie is manoeuvring the right hand pike of the beam into the bearing surface in the loom. This is an awkward lift as he is too far back because of the warp and the bogey. Almost all tacklers were ruptured at some time in their lives for this reason. Remember that this would be much worse if it was a narrow alley.
Here you see Ernie lifting the left hand side of the warp in.
Here he is putting the chains on to the boss on the end of the beam that was used upstairs for the driving chain on the tape. These chains act as a brake on the warp and allow the cloth motion at the front of the loom to exert tension on the warp. These chains go down on to the levers at the bottom, and then weights are hung on the end of the levers.
This gives a good view of the levers and the chains. The other side is exactly the same. The chain isn’t on the lever here because Ernie needs the warp to stay free for the moment but you can see that when it is attached to the lever and weights are hung on the chain will have considerable tension on it and be a powerful brake.
Ernie is just moving the rocking rail on the back of the loom and will put it in place on the trunnions that can be seen level with the top of the warp.
Here Ernie is reaching through and putting the warp card on to the breast beam of the loom on the weaver’s side. He has taken the band off the warp that was holding the healds and reed secure.
Ernie is passing the healds and reeds through the loom. Notice that he has threaded them through the double bars of the rocking rail and he will lay the assembly down in the middle of the loom where he can reach it when he has got everything ready at the weaver’s side.
Here he has moved round to the other side of the loom. You’ll see his healds and reeds are just resting on the crankshaft inside the loom. What he is actually doing there, he is taking off the temple caps ready for putting the warp through. Notice that the top strings for the healds are already in place on the loom. These are never removed because once set they don’t need altering and they are a good fixed point for the tackler to start from when adjusting the height of his healds.
Here Ernie is attaching the strings on the loom to the top heald staves. This connects the healds to the lifting mechanism on the top bar of the loom. On this loom this is a single shaft. Ernie and Jim Pollard explain these at great length in their own contributions.
Ernie has his healds hung up and he is drawing out his ends over the breast beam of the loom in preparation for forming his shed and completing the gaiting.
In this picture taken from the front of the loom Ernie is still unfastening the knots in the lease of the warp and draping them over the breast beam. Notice that the reed is still fast in the spare ends of the healds where Jim trapped it upstairs.
Ernie has brought the reed forward and placed it in position on the slay. It is now in the position where it will be when the loom starts to weave.
The change in numbering here is because I had to insert the following pictures at a later date. When I was doing the original pictures the engine was running and I had to get back to it. I had pushed my luck by staying away so long. I waited until Ernie was gaiting a polyzone warp on the same weaver’s set of looms and finished the covering of gaiting in that way.
The main difference is that the loom Ernie was working on in the first phase of coverage was a right handed loom. On this loom the knocking on lever is at the left hand side but the loom is otherwise identical apart from one quite important detail. On the previous loom Ernie slotted the reed into the slay before the hand shelf went on. On this loom he has not done this. He will put the reed in place in a different way. I think this is because this loom was what they call a fast reed but I’m not sure.
In the picture Ernie is trapping the ends of the warp between the top roller, the sand roller and the cloth roller below. The sand roller is covered with either coarse sandpaper of a strip of metal perforated like a nutmeg grater. This roller grips the cloth and pulls it through the loom against the resistance of the loom weights and chains. In this case, and until there is sufficient cloth to replace this, it is the warp that is gripped.
Notice that he is using his ruler, it’s one of the few things, apart from stirring tea, that a tackler uses his ruler for, pushing these ends into that gap. It's a very critical operation because it's essential that all these ends should have an even tension on them.
Once all the warp ends are trapped in the sand roller Ernie ties a band across and then winds a couple of turns round the sand roller by hand. Recognise that normally the cloth winds on the cloth roller but while he is starting the loom he winds the warp on to the sand roller. Only when he has woven enough does Ernie wind this all back and attach the cloth to the cloth roller. At this point the weaver takes over the loom.
Here Ernie has drawn the reed forward, and is slipping the slot in the hand shelf over it . This is a fast reed loom, once the reed is in the hand shelf it is held solid.
Here Ernie is fitting the hand shelf and reed into the slay.
Ernie is under the loom now attaching the bottom strings from the healds to the lambing wires on the motion under the loom. The lambing wires are the rods which run down to the shedding motion underneath the loom, the tappets.
Here Ernie is putting the rods through behind the healds which are tied in place and help to give the shedding of the loom. He puts these in in the different sheets controlled by the healds and they help to form the shed of the loom while it's running. Notice his foot is on a lump of waste on the floor. This is what he used to cushion his hip bone when he was on the floor dealing with the shedding motion. A tackler of Ernie’s experience always puts a bit of something warm on the floor to protect himself.
Now the reed is in it’s correct place Ernie can replace the temple caps. He knows the warp is in the correct place because there has been no weaving and hence no contraction. The stud that will fix it in place is in the shuttle stand by his left hand.
This is a nice picture of a loom running and you can actually see the weft across the shed before the reed beats it up. Ernie weaves about three feet of cloth and then stops the loom and winds all the fag end of the warp off the sand roller. He can then cut the cloth off straight and replace it in the correct place, on the cloth roller and trapped by the sand roller. From here on the weaver is in charge, she can start earning money again.
The whole process of gaiting a loom, if all goes well, takes about a quarter of an hour. It looks simple on these pictures but there is a lot of skill embedded in the process. I’ve asked Ernie about this but these small wrinkles are so ingrained in him by experience that he can’t tell you what they are.
This is an overall picture of a Lancashire loom, empty and ready for the sweeper. Usually these looms were swept by the sweeper when they were empty because that was the time when they were easiest to get at. However, this wasn’t always the case as we shall see in later pictures.
This is a typical picture of a tackler at work on a loom in the shed. Ernie is changing this loom over from one cloth to another. He is changing the tappets.
I think he is putting this loom on to a single rose wheel. These are the rose wheels that he has here on the floor. This is the set of rose wheels for this loom. There are four rose wheels on one, three an another and the one he has in his hand just has two and I think he in putting that one back on.
Here he is fitting the ordinary double tappet, this is for a plain cloth.
Ernie is still fitting the rose wheel. He’s fitting the correct driving gear on to the shaft on which the wheels are fitted. Lots of information about loom construction in these pictures.
Here’s a unique picture for you. This is Fred Inman who was 76 at the time putting a belt up in the shed while the mill was stopped at dinner time. Tacklers used to do this while the shed was running. It's obviously a very dangerous thing to do and it always surprised me that tacklers were prepared to do it but this dates back to the days when tacklers were paid on the amount of cloth that the weavers got off the looms and rather than leave a loom stopped all through one period of running of the engine if a belt broke they’d repair it and put it up while the engine was running to keep their own wages up. This has hung on in the trade and a lot of tacklers will still put a belt up when the shed's running, when the engine’s running. When Fred did this he was putting it up with the engine stopped but the method's just the same. You just take hold of the belt, form a loop and flick a loop up so that it drops over the pulley. It’s not easy but when I tried it I found that you could soon get the knack with a bit of practice. When you have put it on to the shaft pulley it doesn’t drive until tension is put on so you can position it on the driven pulley and as you push it on with the flat of your hand the tension kicks in the belt starts to drive the pulley and throws itself on. This is on to the loose pulley, it is always the outside pulley so that this can be done while the shaft is moving. Once it starts, get your fingers out sharpish!
This is a very sad picture, something which was quite common in the shed at this time. These are stopped looms gathering dust and dawn and gradually looking like a snow scene. This picture encapsulates the problems of the industry. I’ve seen weavers who had a set of looms like this next to them go and sweep them because they couldn’t bear to look at them all day. A very depressing sight.
This is a series of pictures of ‘Paraffin His job was to sweep looms all day. I think they had about 140 looms a week to sweep and we had three sweepers when we were lucky. Regarded in the mill as the lowest but even so a very skilled and essential job. Anyone who doesn’t believe this should try doing it. Jack could sweep five looms while you were doing one.
Jack was a good sweeper but had some peculiar ways. He used to take the top strings off the looms which annoyed the tacklers no end. But apart from that a good man at his job.
Jack came to a bad end. He lived alone and had a lot of cats. He collapsed and died and before he was found his cats had started eating him. What a sad end.
This a view up the warehouse from the engine house end. A dark, gloomy place, stacked up with boxes, piles of cloth, anything that nobody could find any room for anywhere else was stacked up in the warehouse. There were boxes down there that hadn't been stirred for years and weren't stirred until the mill closed down and they all
went out for scrap. Costly empties that should have gone back to spinning mills that had long since gone defunct. Iron pillars again, concrete floor and the main activities that went on there were storing yarn, storing cloth and at the top end, where the light was good, at the south end you see where the light's coming in through the windows were the cloth looking machines.
This series of pictures is of Fred Cope, one of our clothlookers, at work on his plaiting machine inspecting and measuring cloth and then bundling it up ready for dispatch to the customer.
On picture 67 you can see clearly how the cloth roller from the loom is mounted at the front. The cloth is led up over the table and is plaited or folded by the mechanism under the cloth table. As it passes over the table Fred is watching it for faults. If he finds any the weaver can be disciplined however as weavers got more scarce they were given greater latitude. In the old days a clothlooker was a powerful man in the shed, he could cause you to lose your job or be fined. Those days are long gone and the constant complaint from management at the end was that the clothlookers were passing faults through.
On 69 you can see the plaiting mechanism working and the makers name, Whites of Colne who made looms as well.
On 70 Fred is taking the folded cloth out of the machine and in the next three pictures is bundling it on the table and tying it up. Notice how he has left a tag of cloth hung out of the middle of the bundle. This was marked with waterproof black crayon with the cloth type and length.
This is a nice picture of one of the piles of cloth waiting ready to go out to the finisher. This is not the same cloth that Fred was bundling up. This is a far better cloth, better and heavier cloth, you can see it's smaller rolls but typical of the way all the cloth in the warehouse was stacked up. The loose tag that hangs out at the end has the measurement written on it and so it's easy to reckon up what the cloth is.
The warehouse was also the place where the ablutions were. One washed ones hands in the warehouse and also kept ones cacti if one had a little garden. These here are Colin Macro’s, the roller carrier who was stone deaf and a bit of a character. He kept these cactus in the corner, and everybody used to get a bit of fun out of watching his cactus grow, he had quite a collection there at the finish and they seemed to do very well on the window cill in common with the tomato plants.
76 is actually the next window but one to the cactus garden and is the boiler for boiling water to make tea. It’s heated by steam from the boiler and everybody in the mill can go there any time they want and brew up. At one time some of the mills used to charge a penny a week for the use of this boiler and I worked it out once that with coal at about ten bob a ton, they were making more profit on the boiler than they were on a loom. It was just amazing, even at a penny a week it reckoned up if you had about 400 weavers in the place. Notice the big stone sink, beautiful stone sink, it really is a beautiful thing that. I don't know what will happen to that when they pull the mill down but I hope it doesn't get cracked up, it's too good.
77 is an overall picture of the end of the wash basins, part of Colin's garden, the hot water boiler and some cloth stacked up. Everything went on in the same place, there is no division, people brewed their tea up whilst looking at the cloth they had manufactured on the looms. I often used to wonder whether this wasn't part of the reason why Bancroft was such a satisfying place to work at. People could see the result of their labours and it wasn't regarded as being out of the way or abnormal to brew ones tea up next to a pile of the stuff that you have just made.
In a strange way this picture of the window in the office which met you as you went in through the main office door into the lobby of the building where the offices were. I put that in because in many ways I think that picture typifies the mentality of the mill owners in the days when places like Bancroft were built. You'll notice that this sign doesn't say ‘Please enquire’ or ‘Knock and enquire’ it simply says ‘Enquire’. It might be just me but I can read a lot into the wording of that notice and of course the way it's done, in stained glass, in proper leaded lights in a mahogany frame. The whole of the offices are panelled in mahogany, beautiful.
Here we are in the office. This was the place where Sidney Nutter worked. Notice that in this office they were originally stand-up desks but somebody has brought in that foppish form of pandering to the bodily needs of the staff, the high stool. Not only that, but it’s padded and there’s foot rests as well. In the old days these desks were worked at standing up, there were no stools but the fact is that we got a bit softer at Bancroft between the wars and they started using stools.
What can one say about things like that? This office was where it all went on, there was no more spent in the office than there was anywhere else. Picture number 81 shows Jim and Sidney Nutter in the office. Sidney was an amazing man, one of the original Nutter family but as he often said, not one of the Nutter millions. He ran that office single handed, he did everything, accounting, wages, invoices, dispatching cloth ordering yearn and coal. The only help he had was once a week when his cousin Ughtred Nutter used to come in and help make the wages up. The calculator on the desk is the one that used to drop the decimal point before I altered the voltage.
Sidney got so despondent about the way things were running at the mill that he retired early and inside six months was dead suddenly of what seemed to be some form of brain tumour. It was a great loss for me because I had arranged to interview him and he was a goldmine.
Notice the fire surround behind them. There was an open fire in the office and on a cold day in winter they lit a fire. I asked one day why they did this and Sidney told me that the steam pipes had never been able to heat the office. All the engineers had tried but nobody had managed to improve it. Of course I saw this as a challenge! To cut a long story short, I turned the steam trap round on the end of the pipe so that it was fitted the correct way round and went back to the engine house. An hour later the intercom squawked at me and it was Sidney, he wanted me in the office. I went up and the temperature was about 85 degrees. They had all the doors and windows open and the fire damped down with tea leaves! I cracked the heat down and eventually fitted a restriction valve but the office heating problem was cured after 57 years.
I realise that stories like this will be looked at askance in 100 years time, I can hear researchers saying ‘He’s doing a bit of self-promotion here!’. Unfortunately not. The sad fact is that there were good engineers and bad engineers and Bancroft had had its share of the latter during its working life.
There’s only one reason for this picture of Fred Inman. I like it and the man himself. As I re-transcribe these transcripts in September 2003 Fred is still alive and well and living in Earby. I rang him only two days ago to clarify a point about automatic weft stop mechanisms on automatic looms and he gave me the answer straight away.
Fred is adjusting one of the clips which holds the shuttle peg in place in the weaver’s shuttle. It’s just a nice typical picture of a good man with enormous experience doing a skilled job with the minimum of tools. Fred has done extended interviews with me see 78/AH series and 2001/FI.
This is a picture of one of the weavers, Mary Cawdray, one of the old fashioned weavers and a really good one. She is cutting some fur and sticking it in her own shuttle. Typical old fashioned Lancashire weaver Mary, knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to tell anybody about it. I had a lot of time for her, a good weaver, not the fastest weaver, not the best weaver but a good steady weaver, always there, always weaving and very reliable. One interesting and telling fact about this picture is that the fur she is cutting up is from and old fur hat brought in by one of the weavers. Bancroft were too tight to buy any so the weavers brought bits of old fur in and I’ve known Ernie Roberts go to jumble sales to look for old fur off clothes and hats. You couldn’t make it up!
The tattooed arm you can just see behind Mary is Colin Macro the roller carrier that I was talking about that had the cactus garden. He used to spend quite a bit of time in the store roomy talking to the tacklers, or just sitting there with the tacklers because he had great difficulty talking to anybody because he was stone deaf but he used to spend quite a lot of time in there. The store room was a bit of a meeting place where
all sorts of things both political and sexual were discussed This with the weavers as well, they were pretty broad minded lot, very down to earth and prone to good natured gossip. We had many a good laugh in there, usually connected with other people’s misadventures and failings. All part of the atmosphere of working at Bancroft. It was a good place to work, there's no doubt about it. I’ll be quite honest, I still haven't really reckoned up why.
SCG/23 September 2003
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