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 is the last transcript and I’m afraid I got carried away on 78/AI/11 part one and overlapped with some of the subjects dealt with here. No matter, I’ll probably give some additional information]
When I first went to work at Bancroft they were in a terrible state because the old Pearn pump which they had in the cellar wasn't capable of pumping hot water to the boiler fast enough to make up for the water which was being evaporated in steam to keep the engine going and supply the process steam. In effect what this meant was that you started up in the morning with your water right up at the top of the glass and the pump just couldn't keep up, you were losing water all day. If you hadn't done something about it you would have got to the stage before the end of the day where the water level was so low in the boiler that the compound valve would have blown and the boiler would have lost its pressure. More about the compound valve in a minute or two. The only thing we could do was increase the rate that water was being pumped into the boiler by some means or another. There were two ways of doing this, we could either use the Weir steam pump which sent the water round the connies and into the hot box to pump water straight from the ‘hot well’ into the boiler to supplement the delivery from the Pearn. Or we could revise our pumping arrangements.
When I first went in to the engine house I had a lot of things to sort out and while the pumps were a priority I had to find a temporary solution. The first thing to recognise is that whatever I did I was going to be pumping large quantities of cold water into the boiler which was inefficient. Another thing to bear in mind was that it is a characteristic of all displacement pumps that the hotter the water, the less efficient they are at shifting it. George Bleasdale had taken the easy way out and simply used both pumps to put cold water in all day. He kept his water levels up but wasted a lot of coal.
We held the matter at bay by starting with a full glass and high pressure in the morning and ignoring the water level falling back. At dinner time, which was an hour in those days, we pumped water as hard as we could at the boiler and fired hard. If the pressure started to get away on us we put both pumps on the well and shoved cold water in. We could get the water up to a reasonable level for the afternoon but by stopping time we were in the bottom nut on the gauges. I used to leave the Pearn running, go home and have my tea and come back afterwards to stop the pump.
There is another problem about putting cold water in the boiler. When the cold water meets the hot water in the boiler the temperature boundary causes electrolytic corrosion in the metal of the boiler. To a certain extent this is mitigated by having a piece of pipe on the back of the feed valve in the boiler which was about eight feet long and perforated with ½” holes. This allowed the water to get up to temperature and most of the corrosion attacked the pipe which was sacrificed for the greater good of the boiler plates.
I had a word with the management, persuaded them that something had to be done and had a word with Newton Pickles. It just so happened they had a large three throw pump in stock which they had bought back out of Finsley Gate mill when it closed and had reconditioned it for Hill’s Pharmaceuticals in Harle Syke but they had never got on with fitting it. This was a Brown and Pickles pump and was different than most three throw displacement pumps in that the valve box on the front was detachable so that it could be taken down to the shop and put on the borer to reface the seats. This clack box is the heart of a displacement pump. The biggest problem with the Pearn was that it needed the clacks completely refurbishing but as the mill couldn’t run without it we couldn’t take it out of service to do it.
So I bought the B&P pump complete with a ten horse power Horace Green motor and bed for £220. B&P would erect the pump for us on our bed. The starter and wiring cost another £65. These prices sound ridiculous in 2003 and will be even more unbelievable in a hundred years.
Now what this meant was that me and Bob Parkinson the firebeater as it was in those days had to pour the concrete bed ourselves with foundation bolts in the correct positions. I forget how many yards of concrete were needed but I know Bob and I were glad when we had carried it all in in buckets and finished it.
B&P came down and dropped the pump onto its bed. If you look in the engine house you’ll find the hole I cut in the floor to drop a chain through from the gantry above so we could get a lift. I had to fabricate all the pipework from old pipe in the mill. The pump was originally made to feed four boilers and run at 100rpm. I fitted a larger pulley and cut it back to 45rpm and it was wonderful, we could put water in the boiler whenever we wanted.
I didn’t stop there. As soon as I had a good pump I took the Pearn off line and rigged up a fitting to bore the seats in situ. I ground the valves in and it pumped like a hero! There is nothing more satisfying for me that getting a result like that with hardly any outlay.
A word here about setting clacks on pumps like this. The mistake that almost everyone makes, including the manufacturers, is to give the clack too much space to lift. You’ll see a lot set to about three thirty seconds of an inch or even more. I used to give them a shade under a sixteenth, this is plenty. A space this size on the periphery of a three inch clack can pass a surprising amount of water. Think of a saw cut round a three inch pipe, you’d never keep up with it. The big pump was set to a sixteenth.
Once we had the Pearn sorted Bob Parkinson suggested we fit a by-pass between the outlet pipe and the inlet so that we could bleed water round to adjust the flow up on to the connies. This was a brilliant idea and we found we could make incredibly fine and reliable adjustments to the flow. Bob soon got used to it and we ran with the Pearn permanently on line and the B&P was controlled by the level of the water in the hot box by a mercury float switch. It used to start up and empty the box in a few gulps, most impressive.
We were now running the fires on constant load and adjusting pressure with water and the result was that coal consumption dropped by two and a half tons a week on average. The pump paid for itself in three weeks. The management were impressed but more importantly Bob and I had a far easier job, no more coming back at night, no sweat during the day, wonderful set up which I would recommend to anyone.
We made other changes in the boiler house, re-routed pipes and altered settings and eventually saved another half ton of coal a week. We never got any thanks or a bonus. I sometimes wondered whether they even noticed.
A true story for you. Peter Birtles, the managing director, came into the yard one day and congratulated me on the fact that there was only a wisp of smoke coming out of the chimney. We had no instrumentation on the boiler to tell us what combustion conditions were. My method was to get the fire settled down and then adjust the dampers which controlled the amount of air going through the fires until we were making a bit of smoke. I would then open them a crack and all you could see at the head of the stack was a faint haze of blue smoke. This was as near perfect as you could get it. Enough air for combustion but no excess to cool the flues down.
I turned to him and told him that the trouble was that he couldn’t see what I could see. I could see pound notes fluttering out of the top of the stack and drifting down over Barlick. I said that if he could see them he’d do something about it immediately. He said I was being silly so I told him that I could come up with a scheme that wouldn’t cost anything and would save him at least 15% on his fuel bill and get the ‘nuisance man’ off our backs. He perked up and asked me to do it.
What the management had missed was the fact we had 200 tons of stock coal up the yard which was worth £7,000. In addition the government were giving a grant for any scheme which could show a saving of 10%. New underfired stokers which could support any load with complete control over air supply would eliminate the smoke and cut our fuel costs. The plan was that we did the conversion that would cost £10,000. £3,000 would come from the grant and the other £7,000 from burning the coal stock. At the end of the payback period if we started ordering coal again at the same rate we did with the old stokers in eighteen months we would have paid for the stokers and replaced the stock. Everything after that was a saving.
They went away and thought about this and about two months later the management came back and said “Start burning the stock.” I asked about getting the orders in for the new stokers and was told I would be informed later. I went in the boiler house and told John Plummer he was looking at the biggest pillock in Barlick. He asked why. I said “I’ve just closed this mill!”
I was right. They took the £7,000. Never allowed me to buy any more stock and the first letter they had after that about smoke emissions they used as an excuse to close the mill. The bottom line was that we were now owned by Pakistan money and they were buying mills, stripping the assets and closing them down. I have an idea they were destroying capacity so it couldn’t be a threat to them in the future. Doug Hoyle, who was MP at the time told me he knew of about a score of mills that had gone the same way.
That’s enough stories. What I hope I’ve conveyed is that
there was more to running a boiler than meets the eye. Bancroft was an old
plant but we didn't do so badly. Within our limits we ran an efficient power
plant. Most of this was due to attention to detail. The magic wand was a good
example. Newton once told me that an air leak in the brickwork settings the
size of a cigarette wasted a barrowful of coal a year. I’m certain he had no
proof of this but the principle was sound. The more air leaks you stopped the
more efficient your boiler was. The magic wand was a piece of half inch conduit
with a piece of rope in it. We kept is submerged in a paraffin bucket so it was
soaked right through. When you lit the end you had a nice smoky flare and the
procedure was you went round your settings with the wand and anywhere the flame
was sucked into a crack or under a flag you bunged the place up with fireclay.
It sounds crude but it was a wonderful thing to do. All the leaks added up.
I’ve mentioned the pressure that we ran the boiler at, the pressure gauge,
actually you can't see it on this picture. If you look above the water gauges
you’ll see that there is a pipe coming out of the boiler above them. This had a
large brass pressure gauge on it with a dial about 1ft across which was marked
from 0 to 320psi. A pressure gauge for a boiler is always marked up to twice
the rated pressure of the boiler so that the gauge is always working well within
its capacity and is going to be long lived and accurate. The maximum pressure
on this boiler, the insured pressure was exactly what it had been installed at,
160psi and had never been varied. This boiler was in absolutely perfect
condition. It really was amazing the condition of that boiler. The attrition
on the tubes was so small as to be negligible; and this was after having been
fired for almost sixty years. The construction of those boilers was very good,
this would probably be made of Low Moor Iron, very good quality iron and mild
steel came out of that Low Moor Iron works and this boiler would be made of it.
What you are looking at here is the top of the boiler poking through the boiler settings. At either side, the flagged area at either side of the boiler top is the roof of the side flue. Here again I am not going to try and go into a detailed explanation of flueing arrangements on a Lancashire boiler. Anybody who is interested can find them out for themselves, there are plenty of detailed descriptions available. Sufficient to say that every part of the boiler which couldn't be seen either from the top here or from the boiler house floor was inside the settings and bathed in hot flue gas while the boiler was running. The portion of the boiler which stuck out of the settings, that's this portion here that we are looking at, was covered with a four inch thick layer of pig muck, that’s asbestos insulation to conserve heat, to try and stop as much heat as possible escaping. That’s right, asbestos. At the time this picture was taken it was still legal to use it even though it was known to be high risk. The bottom line was that the asbestos industry lobby was still managing to hold back action against them by lobbying and misinformation.
[See magic Mineral to Killer Dust by Geoffrey Tweedale. Pub. Oxford, 2000. ISBN 0-19-829690-8 for a very full account of the activities of Turner and Newall in this field.]
We swept the top of this boiler frequently and the dust was choking. I am still wondering 25 years later whether I’ll ever regret doing this.
You’ll see that there are numerous pipes coming out of the top of the boiler. They are in order from the back: The connection for the tapes, a 3” pipe going up to the tapes. You'll see that there is a queer sort of a thing there with a spring in the bottom of it in that pipe just beyond the bend, that's a reduction valve which reduced the pressure of the steam to the tapes down to 80psi. This ensured that the tape department was supplied all day at a constant pressure of 80psi. Notice that there is a drain on the bottom of the 3” pipe which dewaters this steam main. There is a by-pass on it for blowing it down every morning. A steam trap is fitted which allowed water past but not steam. This is fine for dealing with small quantities during the day but when you first put steam into a cold main you have to have a faster way of getting the water out, hence the by-pass.
The next pipe moving along the boiler plainly to be seen but slightly out of focus is a very large pipe coming out of the boiler top and going over to the left into another large pipe. This was the main steam range out of the boiler, all the steam for the engine came out of there. On top of it, you can't see it very well in this photograph is a very large valve, what we call the crown valve or junction valve. That valve, when shut down, shut the boiler down completely and stopped all steam getting out of it. [Assuming the tape valve was shut.] That was a 6” main and went straight on to the engine. There is a branch comes this way off that main, you can see the flange and the pipe that comes out of it into a manifold. That manifold fed all the heating mains into the mill. All the pipework that you can see slung about in the boiler house apart from that was connected to either the economisers or the heating system.
The heating system at Bancroft was terribly inefficient and very wasteful. And if you have studied your pictures in the weaving shed at all carefully you'll see that all it consisted of was 2" pipe slung up about 8ft above the floor in the weaving shed and going round in large ranges. There were three ranges in the weaving shed, each of them about 3,000 ft long and they were fed with steam at boiler pressure. That is up to 160psi and they were remarkably inefficient. I’ve seen me in there trying to warm that shed up at 2 o'clock in the morning, putting steam in at 140psi and watching the temperature in the shed fall. That’s no exaggeration. I’ll speak more about this in a while.
You may wonder why such a system was ever installed. There is method in the madness. There are far more efficient ways of getting heat into a large space like that but they all tend to dry the warps out and cause problems with weaving. This method was all wrong but it didn’t damage the warps as the heat crept down slowly from the roof.
Beyond the steam main are two more fixtures on the boiler which were common to every Lancashire boiler of this size. The first one was the compound valve and the second one was the dead weight safety valve. The dead weight valve had the function of allowing any excess steam pressure to escape. It was set at 160psi and if the pressure rose above that it would lift and get rid of steam as fast as the fire could make it. Normally, the only time this valve lifted was when the boiler surveyor asked us to demonstrate that it operated at the correct pressure. This happened ever year when we were working after the annual inspection. The inspector would turn up and we gradually brought the pressure up until it blew. I never liked this because it upset our routine and made the engine uncomfortable. If, for any reason at all, that valve failed or couldn't cope with the amount of steam that was being made, the compound valve which is a combined high pressure safety valve, and low water valve, would come into operation. That used to open at 165psi and it would let off steam as well. In other words, there was never any danger of the safety valves not being able to get rid of as much steam as the fires were making if everything in the mill stopped suddenly while we were firing flat out. Bear in mind that this was possible, say if we had a fire or an accident.
The compound valve was also a low water warning valve, this was why it was called ‘compound’, it served two functions. There were two types of low water warning one blew a whistle the other type, and this was what Bancroft had, opened the safety valve. What it consisted of was a float which floated in the water in the boiler. It was adjusted so that as long as the water level was above 2” on your gauge glass it didn’t operate. In other words, 4” above the top of the tube. Now, a very peculiar thing about the Bancroft compound valve was that for years it wouldn’t work. I did everything I could to make it work. We stripped it down, re-built it, did all sorts and we couldn’t get it to work. One day, all of a sudden, it cured itself. My theory is that we had missed weighting one of the valves correctly, these valves were noted for being difficult to balance. The only way Newton did it was to set it so that it was balanced when his small hand hammer was on the main balance weight. I think that what had happened was that scale had gathered on the float and it had found its own balance. Whatever the reason, it suddenly started working on its own. The only trouble was that it used to blow 4” above the bottom of the gauge glass which was rather high. Now this was no hardship because we never used to get the water level down that low after we improved the pumps. The fact was that the Bancroft compound valve did work but it didn't quite work at the level that Hopkinson’s had designed it to work at. In other words if you were firing that boiler and you let the water get down to within 3” of the bottom of the gauge you could expect that valve to lift any minute. If it did lift, of course it dropped your temperature, the pressure in the boiler drastically and you were into trouble straight away keeping your engine going and keeping everything working. So of course you avoided that situation. The fact is that it would have given you plenty of warning if you had been running into low water conditions for some reason beyond your control, like a break down of a pump or your firebeater falling asleep or a complete idiot running the boiler, something like that. You would have got very adequate warning.
The top of the boiler was a very dirty place, it's not so bad on this picture, we’d evidently had a whitewash round. We used to whitewash and brush round, wipe the painted top of the boiler down with a piece of oily waste. We used to do everything we could to improve things but the boilerhouse was a dirty place, there is no getting away from it. Running a Lancashire boiler under the systems we operated under was a mucky job.
This is a picture of John adjusting one of the clocks on the stokers at the front of the boiler during the day when it's running. The ‘clock’ was a graduated dial on the infinitely variable reduction gear that controlled the drive to the stoker from the electric motor mounted at the bottom of the unit.
You can see that we had an extremely efficient arrangement for keeping coal in the bunker, we used to have old skip lids between two planks. This was actually a very practical method of containing the coal. When the wagon delivered the coal was just above the level of the top board. This was a good time for the firebeater because though restricted in the space he had in front of the boiler, he didn’t have to shovel coal to fill his hoppers. He just switched the auger on and the hoppers filled automatically. As soon as the coal level dropped in the bunker the skip lids could be pulled out and stacked in the old boiler house next door giving plenty of room in front of the boiler and letting more light in. It was very easy to trap your fingers between the rake handle and the skips when they were up. There was a gap under the bottom board which could be used for getting at the coal with the shovel when you were banking the fires at night.
This picture gives a very good idea of what went on during the day in the boilerhouse. That was John's job, to keep his eye on the steam pressure and make any necessary adjustments to the water feed or the stokers. Keep the hoppers filled and most importantly, take the occasional walk round the mill to see what was going on. This was a pleasant part of the job and actually essential to running the boiler.
Firing a single Lancashire boiler for the mill was like a game of chess if it was done properly. Because of the large amount of water in the boiler, about 5,000 gallons, we had a great capacity for withstanding overload. A boiler this size on high firing will make about 8,000 lbs weight of steam an hour. That means it will convert about 800 gallons of water into steam. For short periods, by shutting the feedwater off, you could stand double this load. This was very handy but if you think about it it meant that the boiler was very slow to react to increased rates of firing. If you were going to keep your water feed and steam pressure dead level you had to anticipate the demands of the mill. It took 20 minutes for the boiler to react to a change in firing load. So john’s walks round the mill were vital. Twenty minutes before I increased the load on the engine by putting the shed light on, or the tapers started a new set or boiling up a next batch of size, John opened his fires up an appropriate amount. The result was that when the load hit us he was ready for it. The needle on the pressure gauge never shifted. This was the mark of a good firebeater.
There is a consequence to this which isn’t immediately obvious. Every time the pressure alters on a boiler the metal has to adjust to it. In effect it swells slightly on high pressure and shrinks on lower pressure. The metal actually expands and contracts. This is a very small movement but over the years it tends to damage the boiler and result in fatigue cracks, loose rivets and leaks. The worst duty for a boiler is in a brewery where tremendous demands are made for steam to heat vats and tanks. The best duty is running an engine with a good firebeater because the pressure is rock steady all day.
One small point here as well. The firm didn’t supply overalls. We had to buy our own. Jumble sales were a good source of old trousers and shirts!
This is a bit of old fashioned work. We called it handballing. What John's doing there is firing the boiler by hand. This was not normal practice. On this particular day the gearbox on the right hand furnace had failed and in order to keep the mill going we had to fire by hand.
Normally, on a hand fired boiler the firebox door is half the size of the three foot diameter furnace. Ours was only 4” high so shovelling coal in was an art. Remember that you had to get the coal six feet in to the back and precisely placed. The trick was to take small shovelfuls and it took a bit of doing, it took a lot wore doing than you'd think.
Keeping a firebox supplied with coal is a lot more complicated than it looks. The usual Hollywood image is of large men doing a lot of grunting and shouting while they throw large lumps of coal on to a fire. Forget it! The aim is to cover the whole of the firebars with a layer of coal that the draught can penetrate easily, you have to have air to get combustion. If the layer is to thin, too much air will get through and cool the flue gases down. Too thick and it will block the air and not burn properly. The worst crime is to have holes in the fire which cancel out an equal area of fire because they are not burning anything but letting large volumes of cold air in.
When you are firing a grate of any description, always remember to fire it round the side and then down the middle. In other words, a firebox that size which was six feet long and three feet wide you put about seven shovelful down each side, and four or five down the middle and that will give you a flat bed. If you throw coal into the middle it won't scatter to the outside, you’ll finish up with a big heap in the middle.
If this was a normal firebox opening John would get it right and not have to rake it afterwards to make it flat, it would be laid flat by itself. We were hampered with the narrow opening and on picture 89 you can see the consequence. John has fired his furnace and is making sure he has got it right by raking it flat. Remember that it’s hot enough to melt steel in there. The heat is burning the hairs off his right forearm and scorching his face. The intense glare isn’t doing anything for his eyes either. If you could see his face he will have his eyes screwed up to protect them.
When I was firing like this I used to put three down either side right at the back and then put a couple in the middle, and then put three more down either side nearer to me and another couple on the middle and then I’d attend to the front corners. You could burn a bed four or five inches thick and once you had the door closed it was a good fire. It took a few minutes to drive the volatiles off and during this period you got a bit of smoke. This was the trouble with hand firing and was one of the reasons why Fairbairn developed the Lancashire boiler. The theory was that if you had one firebox running white and clean while you were stoking the other, any volatiles that were driven off met the hot flue gas from the other fire in the downtake at the back of the boiler and burned in the flame bed or sole flue under the boiler. This could work but it was hit and miss. The biggest flaw was that in order to fire you had to open the door. This automatically meant excess air and bad combustion.
There is a dividing wall in the downtake called the mid feather which keeps the two streams of gas separate until they meet in the flame bed. This was fitted because it was quite common for the volatiles to explode when they hit the hot gas from the other flue. This could develop into a series of small explosions and set up a vibration which was very bad for the brickwork. The mid feather ensured that these ignitions took place in the flame bad which was a far more solidly protected space with the boiler above and the foundation walls at each side. Some engineers called the downtake the ‘explosion box’ for this reason. At Ellenroad there were explosion lids at the top of each side of the downtake. The theory was that the heavy lid would jump and relieve the pressure.
Here’s something that you won’t believe and is not in any text book. The downtake of the boiler is the hottest part of the flues. My old flue chap Charlie Sutton once told me that in the old days they always used to look for melted gold in the dust in there. He reckoned that more than one nagging wife had finished up down there. He also said that occasionally on hospital boilers they had found amputated limbs in there. Not a bad place for getting rid of waste like that. Occasionally someone would bring us confidential papers or a dead animal to burn. We used to do this when burning off at stopping time. The paper wasn’t so bad but the dead dogs were never burned within a fortnight of flueing. Charlie said it took ten days for the smell of burning flesh to dissipate. Too many stories! One last little known fact about flues. The flame bed of a Lancashire boiler that had been fired well over a long period was as white as snow. Don’t ask me why, it was covered with a thin layer of white flue dust.
This is a good place to describe how a Lancashire boiler is managed during the periods when the engine is stopped overnight or at weekend. The mass of water, steel and brickwork that makes up a Lancashire boiler and its settings takes a lot of heating up from cold. It was a fact that after the weekend stoppage the boiler didn’t achieve peak production until Wednesday when the heat had reached its peak in the settings. It would have been easier in terms of boiler management if we could have fired 24 hours a day and seven days a week. However, we had to accept normal working hours and manage the boiler accordingly.
The way we did this was to make sure the boiler kept up to 140psi 24 hours a day. This needed heat input during the night and the way we did this was to ‘bank the fires’.
Half an hour before stopping time you could always see the firebeater vanishing down the road on his way home. This was because he had finished for the day. He had made sure that over the last 90 minutes of running he had gained on his water and had got it up to about an inch below the top of the gauge glass. Then what he did was clean his ashes out an hour before stopping time. About 45 minutes before stopping time he made sure his hoppers were empty and opened his firebox doors and raked his fire out level over the bed and allowed it to burn off. This was a very fierce fire covering the whole of the grate area and steam pressure would rise a few pounds.
When the fire had burned off he was left with a grate covered with clinker, fused ash, and an occasional patch of red coals. He pushed all the dead clinker over into the ash pit and moved all the red fire down to the back of the bars. Then he shovelled about thirty shovelfuls of coal into the box in a heap against the dull coals at the back.
He repeated this one the other furnace and then shut his dampers down until they were just giving enough draught to move the smoke away up the flue. Then he went in the cellar, shut his pumps down, locked the cellar door and went back to the boiler and shut the feed valve into the boiler.
He now has a boiler full of water and with two slow fires in. Shut the boilerhouse door and off home John, job well done.
Meanwhile the engine is still running and the steam pressure might drop 20psi in the last hour but this was no problem. Overnight the boiler will lose about two inches on the gauge glass because of the warmer steam going into the engine but the banked fires will slowly burn and when you come in first thing in the morning you’ll have about 130psi on the pressure gauge and a half full gauge glass. All you have to do to get the boiler going is fill the hoppers, rake the banked fire to the front of the bars. Chuck a couple of shovelfuls on, shut the door, open the dampers and when you see white fire on the poker holes in the door, set your stokers on. Then open the feed valve, go to the cellar, open up down there and set the feed pumps on for a very slow feed. Go and brew up, in half an hour you will be ready to start the day.
This is stuff you won’t find in the text books and is the value of prime source material which is what the LTP is all about.
I have told you about the problems we had with the Proctor stokers running on short fires. I decided to try an experiment to see whether I could improve things. The basic problem was that due to the fact that the stokers weren't working at high enough capacity I was getting excess air at the back of the fires and inefficient combustion. The answer seemed obvious, I heeded longer fires. So what I did, I blocked one of the tubes off. I blocked it off simply by fitting a cover over the ash pit and blocking all other air holes up with slag wool. The idea was to fire on one tube with a heavy fire and thus gain efficiency. The question was, would one tube run the mill? There was only one way to find out.
We got everything ready the night before and went home. Now the firebeater I had at this time was useless, he had replaced a good lad and didn’t last long. He never turned in the following morning so I was on my own.
I started the day with a full gauge glass and almost 160psi with a full fire in the one tube that was running. By dinner time I had got down to 75psi and hardly any water and the engine was struggling with the load. The problem was that as the pressure dropped the engine used more steam and it was a vicious circle. I had to ask the tapes to stop and during the dinner hour I fought to get steam and water back. I should say that I was in no trouble because Jim knew I was trying a new strategy. He also knew I was on my own and came down to see if he could help in any way. By starting time after dinner I had gained a little pressure and some water and because the tapes had shut down I managed to stagger on until stopping time.
Needless to say, the last job that day was to rip out the modifications, light a fire on that side and fire the boiler up to 150psi with a full glass and banked fires. The firebeater came in the next morning, he had been suffering from a headache! It was the hardest day I ever had at Bancroft and perhaps the lad was brighter than he looked. The experience wasn’t wasted though, I had proved that it was mission impossible.
It had been a day of heavy demands because the tapes had heavy warps in. The tapes were the people that used our steam and used the coal. Nobody ever knew how much coal it took to tape a complete set of back beams in say 8’s twist. That’s very thick twist and the heavier the twist, the more size it takes and the harder it is to dry on the cylinders. They could eat steam and the thing that made it worse was that when we sent steam up there we never got it back again. No, that isn’t a mistake, whenever steam was used in the mill we tried to get the hot condensate back to the engine. This was the best feedwater there was, perfectly clean and at high temperature. If you could have fed a boiler on nothing but condensate you wouldn’t need any boiler treatment. We used to move heaven and earthy to return every drop of condensate we could get, and I should think at Bancroft we were fairly efficient in this respect for an old plant. My comment about the tapes is because they were the biggest steam users and none of the steam came back as condensate.
This was my favourite annual task. Once a year, the first fine week end in June, we used to whitewash the shed roof windows. In point of fact we were supposed to whitewash the slates and the windows as well but we never whitewashed the slates, we used to whitewash the windows. The idea was to cut down the amount of infra-red radiation getting into the weaving shed through the windows. This wasn’t direct sunlight, it was radiation from the slates which were in direct sunlight.
I forget how many windows there were in that roof. I did once count them, I've forgotten how many thousands there are. I did once paint all the lot of them with whitewash in a day by myself and it nearly put my lights out! I think there's twenty odd bays about 250ft long and it's a fair number of windows. But from then on I used my head and got a gang going. On picture 91 they are Ernie Roberts on the left, John Plummer the firebeater telling the tale and Roy Wellock another tackler.
You can see it was a lovely morning, about 05:30, misty and it’s going to be a hot day. Beautiful conditions and a treat to be up there. It took us about three hours. The only problem was the water in the gutters and the sharp edges of the slates nagging at your ankles if you didn’t watch it. Theoretically we were supposed to go up on the roof later in the year to scrub the whitewash off the windows with wire wool but I was crafty, I mixed the whitewash thin and by September it had almost washed off.
This is a nice picture that illustrates the old Lancashire saying, ‘One foot in the field and one in the shed’. In the early days of the water-powered industry people worked in agriculture and the textile industry. In summer when water was low and hay harvest was important they worked in the fields, in winter they were in the mill.
The same theme repeated. This was the view out of the cart race door in the shed. Dark satanic mill?
At this point in time, May 2nd 1979 this is the last picture in the Bancroft Folio. There may be more pictures of the demolition and scrapping. At the moment it looks as though the mill is going to be razed and everything will go. At the moment all the looms are being scrapped and the shafting cut out of the mill. Obviously I have been following this story through and I shall continue to do so until we are sure what is happening.
That will be the time to finish off this folio and time for me to make my last tape which will be of course a description of the eventual destruction of what was the last steam driven weaving shed in Barlick. I’m getting to the stage in this project now where I can take an overall look at the sort of things that I have been recording. Obviously in a lot of respects I am not really satisfied. I feel that I could have done better. However, without wanting to sound too arrogant I'm not too badly pleased with the way it is shaping up. I think that we are beginning to get a good overall picture and that it what I set out to do.
I wanted to give people in the future a clear overall picture of what it actually felt like, and was like, to work in what is now an obsolete industry. We'll never see the like of it again. We’ll never see investment like this on these sorts of things again in situations like this. The world isn’t geared for it, the world nowadays is geared towards the big multinational corporations. Small units are not complicated units like Bancroft, not in major trades like textiles. The only unit that can pay now in textiles is either a little back street shop or a massive operation involving thousands of people working under the umbrella of one of the big companies. The day of the old cotton manufacturer has gone completely and we'll never see anything like it again. It was, when all was said and done, the beginning of the factory system that we know today. It's history and it's now passing into limbo. All I can say is that I am glad I had the opportunity of being able to do something, however imperfectly it's been done, to record the passing of that industry. However we'll leave the final conclusions and epilogues until we have done the last pictures.
SCG/24 September 2003
7,594 words.
24/09/03 10:08
I have, this day, transcribed the last of the LTP tapes. I have had a celebratory whisky. There is much to yet before the archive is complete but the major task is finished. That is, apart from one last task. I have realised as I did the last transcript that the epilogue was never recorded. Thankfully this means that it hasn’t to be transcribed, I shall just write it.
The first part is the completion of the Bancroft story. The second will be some comments on the project as a whole.
These are three pictures which Daniel Meadows too over a period of four years which encapsulate everything that happened at Bancroft. All the other pictures in the archive have been done by me and Daniel taught me all I know about photography so it is fitting that the last three should be his. They need no explanation, they are Bancroft running, notice the slight haze at the chimney top and the steam coming out of the tape room. Bancroft being demolished by N&R Contractors and Bancroft after the housing estate had been built on the site of the weaving shed.
What transpired after May 1979 was that the mill stood derelict for a while and all negotiations for its sale as a unit collapsed. At the time I taxed Peter White who was Her Majesty’s Inspector of Ancient monuments for North West England about the fate of Bancroft. I wanted the government to buy it, give it a government cloth order at a penny a yard above commercial prices and run it as a heritage site. At the same time I suggested that they buy Brown and Pickles out, move them into the shed and drive their machinery from the engine. B&P could then become a centre of excellence for training young engineers and acting as a contractor for the heritage industry whilst being an attraction in their own right.
He said that the government couldn’t enter into a commercial operation and that a decision had been taken to allow Bancroft to be demolished and then they could run screaming down the corridors of power crying rape and get the mill they had set their hearts on, Jubilee Mill at Padiham. In April 1986 N&R Contractors bought Jubilee Mill and demolished it. English Heritage had to take Queen Street Mill at Padiham under their wing eventually and it has never been a success. As I write, its long term future must be open to doubt.
Bancroft Mill then became the subject of a Derelict Land Grant and was demolished apart from the engine house. Pendle Borough stepped in and arranged finance for preserving the engine and boiler house. The firm who had bought Boardman’s out, the original owners, sold the land for housing and left the scene with their money. Discussions started with a view to forming a Trust and running the engine in steam.
Whilst all this was going on I was busy elsewhere at Lancaster doing a degree in history as what was laughingly called a ‘mature student’. To tell the truth I had very little interest in Bancroft, I had done what I could to record it, seen a wonderful opportunity squandered and was bruised. I was approached about the Bancroft Trust but said I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. However, a man called Les Say who was the manager of Rolls Royce in Barnoldswick invited me round to his house one evening and persuaded me to join their steering committee. It was a set-up of course and at the first meeting they voted me in as chairman. So, my association with Bancroft continued, I was chairman during the initial setting up of the trust and the start of the refurbishment. I became a Trustee. By this time I was at Lancaster and resigned from the trust as I couldn’t devote enough time to it. I have never held any post with them since but have watched their progress.
The Bancroft Mill Engine Trust still steams the engine regularly and they are an established heritage attraction staffed solely by volunteers. I have nothing but admiration for the way they have kept it going over the years and their future looks bright.
So, the mill and the workers have gone. All that remains is the engine, boiler and chimney. However, thanks to the LTP there is a record of what the engine drove, what went on in the mill and most importantly of the people who lived and died in its service.
There is of course the complimentary work on the spinning industry where we did exactly the same exercise in a condenser spinning mill.
I have just allowed myself the luxury of totting up the statistics. Since September 2000 I have re-transcribed 188 transcripts, 1,294,264 words. It doesn’t seem a lot when you say it quickly.
There’s an old Jewish rag trade joke that says never mind the quality, feel the width. Well, I’ve done that and it’s impressive. How about the quality?
Mr Pirsig said that the best definition of quality was ‘the pursuit of excellence’. Bearing that in mind and looking back at all those words which I have read and re-read more than anyone else will ever do I feel I am allowed an opinion.
I believe that this is the best and most comprehensive prime source research that has ever been done on the N E Lancashire steam weaving industry. I hope that future researchers will find it useful. What is certain is that this material comes straight from the workers who did the job. It is their voice and if ever the phrase ‘dignity of labour’ was applicable to anything, it can be used here. What shines through is honest people working in an honest craft and doing the best they could. If I have been able to give them a voice that can echo down the years I am so pleased. They were, and in some cases still are, my friends. Without them I couldn’t have done this. I thank them and I shall never forget them.
I recommend you do the same.
Stanley Challenger Graham, Barnoldswick./24 September 2003
8,639 words.