WALKING WITH DAVID 5

[Stanley]

WALKING WITH DAVID 5


27 September 2000

We’re still following David Whipp on his walk through Barlick but this week were going to take his alternative route from Forty Steps over towards Gillians Lane and Bancroft Shed.
Well, as I suppose many of you know, I ran the engine at Bancroft Shed from 1972 to when it finished in December 1978. Actually, I did the first three months on the boiler but from July, when George Bleasdale retired, I was the engineer. I think I might surprise you a bit now, I’m not going to go on at great length about the mill, I shall write a book about it for you one of these days. What I would like to talk about is what it was like working there.
Running the engine at Bancroft was the best job I ever had, bar none. I enjoyed my wagon driving but it wasn’t a patch on Bancroft. My job was to make sure that the mill could run every day, I was responsible for everything as far as the pulleys above the looms, the tacklers looked after the belts and the looms. The firebeater and myself had to make sure the shed was warm, that we always made enough steam and I turned the steam into power with the engine. Briefly, for the younger readers who have never seen a plant like that, we burned coal in a large boiler to make high pressure steam which was used for heating, boiling size and even brewing the tea. There were no electric motors on the machinery, everything was driven by leather belts or cotton ropes from rotating shafting mounted on the ceiling. The shafting was turned by a large steam engine, rather like a steam locomotive on the railway but much bigger and it didn’t move itself, it simply drove the shafting. Coupled to the shaft was a large alternator that made all the electricity we needed for lighting and the few small electric motors in the mill.
The different departments in the mill were the office, the warehouse, the weaving shed, the winding room, the warp preparation department, the tapers and the engine house and boiler house. Everyone depended on everybody else, the whole place was geared to giving the weavers the best warp and weft we could manage, they wove the cloth that made the money and kept the place going. It might surprise you to know that Bancroft always made a profit, right up to the end. It was closed because it was worth more in the scrap yard than it was working according to the accountants.
Leaving that on one side because it’s still a painful subject, the most striking thing about Bancroft was how happy everyone was while going about their work. It was a very short chain of command and everyone knew everyone else in the mill. If it was weaving right, everyone was happy and it showed. I’ve only ever seen one other place like that and that was West Marton Dairies in the old days. I know it sounds funny now but it was like one big happy family.
There was one funny thing about Bancroft that I didn’t find a solution to until they demolished the mill. We had a mound in the floor of the warehouse that had pushed the pillars up and bulged the floor above which happened to be where the tape sizing machines were. We called it the Bancroft Mushroom and over the years several attempts were made to find out what it was. When a test hole was cut in the concrete floor it was found that what was forcing the floor up was a growth of crystals about three feet thick. Pieces were sent away for testing but nobody ever came up with a good explanation for what was happening or how to cure it so the hole in the floor was filled in again and we simply kept packing the feet of the tape machines up whenever they got too much out of line. In 1980 when the mill was being demolished I had a word with Norman Sutcliffe who was a partner in N&R who were dropping the mill, I knew Norman well and when I told him about the mushroom he was intrigued because he’d seen something like it before.
When they dropped the warehouse and stripped the concrete off the mushroom was laid bare, it was a cap of whitish crystals on top of a big boggy patch, evidently there was a spring underneath. Norman lifted a girder with the crane and dropped it end first on to the bog and it slid in about fifteen feet just by its own weight. Norman reckoned, and I think he was right, that the spring had been trapped by the building and that minerals dissolved in the water were rising to the surface and crystallising out and this was what formed the mushroom. If the water could have run away it would never have crystallised and the problem wouldn’t have occurred. If you’re interested, the site of the mushroom lies about half way between the present day entrance to the café at Bancroft and the boundary wall.
There used to be a lodge between the road and the engine house. This was all ripped out and landscaped but Gillians Beck still runs under the site in a three feet diameter concrete pipe. I’ve seen the beck coming in over the field at the top of the dam a foot deep for the whole width of the dam, about 60 feet, when we had a really wet time.
On the 12th of July 1932 there was a cloudburst on Weets and the water filled the dam with silt and burst the wall out between it and the road. There used to be a large picture of this on the wall in the Pioneer Stores but it seems to have gone now. This was the same flood I mentioned last time that damaged Ouzledale.
Just above Bancroft is Gillians Fold. This was originally a small group of handloom weavers cottages but in 1785 this all changed. On the 14th of November 1785 the Court of Kings Bench cancelled Richard Arkwright’s Letters Patent on the water frame and the technology of spinning by water power was thrown open to all who would use it. The next twenty years saw an amazing burst of energy devoted to converting any water mill that could be had to cotton spinning. There weren’t enough redundant water mills to satisfy the demand and so new mills were constructed anywhere where rights could be secured on a suitable watercourse. All the water textile mills in Barlick started at, or about this time.
Two brothers called William and Henry Lambert saw their opportunity and in about 1780 they were running a cotton mill at Gillians. They insured it for £50 for the buildings, £20 the machinery, £50 utensils and goods in the mill and a house and warehouse for £80 including the contents. By 1790 they had expanded and added a four storey ‘spinning factory’. This was probably a building used by hand spinners to supplement the output of the water wheel. The water power resource wasn’t very large as they don’t appear to be using Gillians Beck but a smaller tributary from the gill behind Bancroft Farm, the remains of the dam and lodge can still be seen there. I suspect that the reason for this was that Mitchell had already secured the water rights to Gillians Beck for his own mill on the site of what was later Clough Mill. Many of these early mills failed and Gillians was no exception. By 1813 Henry Lambert was bankrupt and the mill and ‘Gillians House’ was for sale. In 1831 the mill was being run by John Smith who insured the mill for £100 and stock for £50. Lambert had also started another small mill at Lower Parrock and by 1831 it was owned by William Mitchell and also rented by John Smith so it looks as though Mitchell might have bought Gillians as well.
These small mills were producing either 'sliver' for their spinners or yarn that was used by the hand weavers as weft. It wasn’t strong enough to be used as warp thread and this was still being spun by hand. Manufacturers like Lambert, Smith and Mitchell ‘put out’ their yarn to independent handloom weavers who worked at home, they took the cloth back from them and paid them so much for every piece they wove. This is the origin of the phrase ‘piece work’ and also the word ‘apiece’.
Lane Bottom cottages further up Gillians was a handloom weaver’s ‘fold’. Apart from farming, weaving was Barlick’s biggest industry and the coming of water powered spinning accelerated the growth because it freed up hand spinners for other jobs and gave the weavers more raw material and time to work. It’s no coincidence that the early 19th century saw an increase in house building in the town and many older buildings were refurbished.
The next building of interest is Bancrofts Farm at the top of Gillians Lane. When I was at Hey Farm Johnny Simpson was farming here and Alwyn Simpson and his brothers still have it. I don’t know much about the farm beyond the fact that it is obviously a very old settlement. I once saw Johnny buying a muck shovel at Gisburn and was amused to see he had bought a ‘number 3’ (they went up to 12 which was the largest size). I asked him why he was getting such a small one and he said that he could shift as much with a small shovel as a big one! He was right when you think about it.
On the triangle of land opposite Bancroft Farm there used to be a small group of cottages called Windy Harbour. There were some remains there in the 1950’s but all surface trace has gone now. (Much later, when I was researching pack horses and droving I found that the name ‘Windy Harbour’ is quite common in the north of England and is almost always associated with an overnight halt for pack horses and drovers. I have no evidence of such a use at Bancrofts but it is a definite probability.)
We’re reaching the end of our space for this week but I want to flag up one other little item near the top of Gillians. About 100 yards down Barnoldswick Lane, on the left hand side where the hedge at this end of the Flows meets the road there is a small stone walled enclosure which is now totally overgrown with trees and bushes. Old Barlickers call this ‘Poor Bones’ and it is where poor people on ‘outdoor relief’ from Skipton Workhouse used to break stone to qualify for 'Outdoor relief', the dole. I always think about the miseries of that system when I pass there and we should get together and preserve this as a piece of Barlick’s heritage. Perhaps if David’s reading this he could do something about it. You don’t have to own something to get it listed, anybody can do it, over to you David!

27 September 2000