WALKING WITH DAVID 4

[Stanley]

WALKING WITH DAVID 4

First published 22 September 2000.

We got as far as the Dog last time when we were following David round Barlick. Before we continue I’m going to have to backtrack to Ouzledale because some new evidence has surfaced this week about it. As I keep saying, history is never static and I’m never ‘right’.
In 1887 Henry Brown had a small engineering company in Earby, which mainly concerned itself with repairs to textile machinery, the first workshop was in Victoria Mill. In Barrett’s Directory for 1902 the Earby premises are still in use but in 1900 Brown’s rented space off the Calf Hall Shed Company in the old mechanic’s shop at Wellhouse Mill for £25 per annum and started work there. The work they were doing involved making new parts from castings and shortly after Browns moved into Barlick, in 1904, Henry Brown went into partnership with a man called Watt who was in business in a small way as an iron founder at Ouzledale. Some time later, Watt died and Browns carried on as iron founders there until 1922 when Henry Brown and Sons bought land at Havre Park and built a large foundry there, this is the brick building that is now the centre part of Gissing and Lonsdale’s works.
By October 1929 Browns were in trouble and liquidated but paid out 19/6 in the pound. Ashby, their foundry foreman started on his own account in the old foundry at Ouzledale and this was the genesis of the modern firm Ouzledale Foundry at Long Ing. Ashby was still there in 1936 because he asked the Calf Hall Shed Company to do some repairs to ‘Ouzledale House’ where he lived at that time and build him a new building costing £200, this will be the red brick building in the yard.
The Calf Hall Shed Company bought Ouzledale in 1903 so both Browns and Ashby were tenants. In 1911 the company sold the water wheel to Mr Watt, presumably for melting down, he paid £5 for it. The next mention I have is after the Great Barlick Flood of the 11th of July 1932 when the foundry was badly damaged by flood water and cost £185 to repair. Right, that’s brought you up to speed on the latest research, let’s go back down to the end of Crow Row and have a look at The Hey.
In my early days of research into Barlick I was puzzled by the number of people who were marked in the census records as living at the Hey. Later I realised that the whole of the area around Hey Farm was originally known as Hey. The weavers in Crow Row that I have identified are said to live there. ‘Hey’ is a very old word that perhaps gives us a clue, it means an area of land surrounded or protected by a hedge. One peculiarity of the holding is that there are very few stone walls, apart from the croft and the farmyard, all the field boundaries are hedges right the way through to Bancroft, this is a sign of a very early holding.
I bought Hey Farm in 1959 with seven acres of land for £2,000 off ‘Sailor’ Brown. Prior to that, it had been in the ownership of the Crook family since at least 1822 and they were the local wheelwrights. At the time I bought it, Manchester Road outside the croft was a lot lower and narrower than it is now and we had a large barn butting on to the road. Round about 1970 the Council decided to alter the road and it was raised about six feet and the slope evened out, at the same time they widened it and we lost the barn. As a matter of interest, the stone from the barn was used to improve the last bend above the houses on the outskirts of Earby as you climb Stoneybank.
The Hey is a very old settlement, much older than the present house. I can’t prove it but I think it was originally a timber hall and was rebuilt around 1670 or 1680. The deeds are incomplete and only start in 1714. The farm was originally Glebe land purchased under Queen Anne’s Bounty to provide revenue for Bracewell church. It had an allotment on the moor of eight acres but this was leased to John Slater in 1845 for 25 years and later sold. Crooks owned the farm having bought it from the church. The field that runs down into the valley bottom where Gillians beck runs down from the Weets is called The Flows, I think because of the number of springs that rise in it. There is one spring, which had a stone trough in it, that used to supply the water for the house, I found some very old pipes there once. This had a watercress bed growing in it and we’d often pop down the field for a bit of watercress for a salad in winter.
One thing that I’d like to mention in connection with Hey Farm was our long time lodger in the orchard, Ted Waite. Ted just seemed to turn up shortly after I bought the farm and was always about giving me or my dad a hand. He never took any money but spent a lot of time with his feet under the table in the kitchen getting a good feed. I remember we were having a conversation one day about the fact that he didn’t like living with his brother John and I think it was Vera who suggested that he could do worse than get a caravan and hide it behind the house in the orchard and live there.
All totally illegal of course but what a wonderful arrangement it turned out to be. I was on the tramp in those days wagon driving for Billy Harrison at Thornton in Craven and more often than not would be away all week looking for loads up and down the country. It was a great comfort to me to know that Ted was there at home in the orchard if Vera needed a hand with the stock or any of the jobs round the farm.
As the kids grew older they used Ted’s caravan almost like a Wendy House. Ted had a unique way of frying eggs, he used to get the fat in the pan so hot that it was on the verge of bursting into flame and then crack the eggs in. You could always tell when he was having a fry-up, blue smoke would be pouring out of all the windows and the kids would be in there watching, awestruck. I’ve often thought since, in this modern ethos where every single man who takes an interest in children is seen as a potential pervert that we were very innocent in those days. The thought that there could be anything wrong never even dawned on us and as it happened we were totally correct, the kids have never forgotten Ted, they loved him to bits. Mind you, he did teach them some quite risqué verse! I remember one that started ‘Once upon a time when the birds shit lime and the monkeys chewed tobacco…..’ Anyone remember the rest of it?
Hey Farm was a good place to rear kids, they had all the farm animals to teach them about sex. I well remember one day when Susan and Ted were looking at some cattle in the croft and arguing about calving dates, Susan turned out to be right and she was only eight years old! Hey Farm was an adventure playground for the kids and their friends.
Let me tell you one more story, having a barn and feeding animals in a built-up area is an open invitation to every mouse in the neighbourhood to take up residence so we always had a lot of cats about. We got to the stage once where we had run out of cats and I asked Ernie Dawson at Thornton Hall Farm if he could fit me up with a few. Now Ernie’s cats were famous for being good mousers but they were absolutely wild. I couldn’t see how we were going to catch them but Ernie said there was no problem, he got me an old sack and told me to hold it over the drainpipe at the back of the stable while he went round and rattled the door. He did and cats started to fly out of the pipe into the bag, I counted four and then took the bag away and tied it up. When I got home I found there were six! The problem was that the sack was a bit rotten and as I was going up Gill Brow in the wagon the cats escaped and started to do a wall of death act round the inside of the cab! When I got home we let them escape out of the cab into the barn, gave them plenty of milk and they took up residence straight away. Another problem solved.
I often look at Hey Farm as I pass and think back to the good times we had there. By the way, the Conference Pear on the end wall is forty years old this year, my dad and I planted it in 1960. Now that does make me feel old!
We didn’t get very far this week did we! Next time I’ll take David’s alternative route over Forty Steps and back up Gillians Lane to Letcliffe. Come to think, there’s plenty there to keep us going, I wonder whether we’ll finish this walk before Christmas?

22 September 2000