WALKING WITH DAVID 6

[Stanley]

WALKING WITH DAVID 6

10 October 2000

The last time we swept up behind David we ended up standing at Windy Harbour outside Bancroft Farm at the top of Barlick Lane, now called Manchester Road. We’ll walk uphill and go into Letcliffe up the lane and past the old farm on to the playing fields. Before we do, take the time to look back across Barlick towards Ingleborough and Pen-y-Ghent on the horizon and the drumlins around Marton to the right. Whenever I come back into Barlick after time away I always choose this route so that I can look at the view. You’ve got the whole of the town laid out below you and I often think to myself that there are worse places to live than our little town.
One of the glories of the English Local Government system is the investment that has been made over the years in public open spaces. As a lad in Stockport much of our time was spent on ‘the park’ playing on the swings and the slide and living in constant fear of the ‘parky’, a fearsome man whose role in life seemed to be to stop us doing anything imaginative at all! Have you ever wondered what first prompted local councils to invest in gardening and bowling greens? The main reason wasn’t as altruistic as it seemed, they weren’t simply trying to make things nice for the workers, what drove a lot of the thinking in the late 19th century was the great ‘Physical Efficiency’ debate.
The First Boer War in 1880 was a turning point for Britain and the Empire in a lot of ways. One of them was the realisation that the majority of men who presented themselves for service in the army weren’t fit to recruit. Advances had been made in public health but nobody had actually looked at the overall physical condition of the workers. It came as something of a shock to a country which believed itself to be the most modern, efficient and wealthiest nation in the world with the largest empire to suddenly realise that one of the costs of rampant urbanisation and industrialisation was a savage deterioration in the health of the lower classes. This sparked off a national debate about physical efficiency and one of the results was a theory that stated that ‘Rational Leisure’ was one of the methods that could be used to improve health. Anything that got the workers out into the open air, playing gentle sports such as bowling or tennis, listening to bands or simply walking in gardens was a ‘Good Thing’, hence the rash of public parks and open spaces.
Letcliffe was originally a farm on a hilltop at the south end of Barlick. Before 1772 Letcliffe was owned by William Bulcock of Barcroft, Burnley but in that year his son Robert sold the farm to John King, described as ‘Yeoman of Barnoldswick’ for £325. The farm passed down through the King family intact until 1836 when Joseph King left the land to his two sons, William and John. In 1837 they divided the Farm into East and West Letcliffe. On August 18th 1878, at a sale at the Seven Stars Inn, John Eastwood bought East Letcliffe for £1000. In 1901, John Snr died and his son, John Eastwood of West Didsbury, Manchester, sold East Letcliffe to the council for £1300. On The 20th June 1902, the Rev. F W Patten who was chairman of the council opened the park to the public. It was laid out as a recreation ground at the top of the hill with formal walks and a wonderful natural bandstand lower down.
During or just after WW1 a tank was placed on a plinth on the recreation ground but I have yet to search out the details and what happened to it eventually. If anyone knows anything about this I’d be pleased to hear from them. The War Memorial was originally placed in the park but this was not the most sensible decision the council ever made, old people don’t do too well when walking uphill and, apart from Nov 11th each year, it was sadly neglected. Its present position is far better. The ornamental lamp and drinking fountain which used to stand in Church Street at the top of Butts was moved up to the park but like the War Memorial has since made another move and is now in Town Square.
There is one other item of great interest to me in the park. If you look carefully you will see that here and there, dotted about the park and sometimes forming part of the garden surrounds, there are some large cylindrical pieces of stone about twelve inches in diameter. These are the cores out of the third borehole sunk at the waterworks on Whitemoor. There is a lot I don’t know about the waterworks on Whitemoor, I haven’t got round to digging into that yet but I can tell you a story about a repair that was done there in 1939.
Newton Pickles, the man who taught me all I know about steam engines, was 23 years old at the time and working for his father at their engineering firm, Henry Brown Sons and Pickles, based at Wellhouse Mill. At this time, the Council owned and ran the waterworks and gasworks and Johnny’s firm did all their heavy repairs. Newton’s father sent him and Jim Fort up to the waterworks one morning, they had had a smash on the headgear of the big well that was 96 feet deep and about eight feet in diameter. Next to this well was a 300 feet deep borehole and both wells had pumps in them driven by separate steam engines.
When Newton and Jim got there they found that one of the buckets had jammed in the bore of the 96 feet well pump and when it did so it stopped the engine dead and smashed the gear drive to the pump, bent the crankshaft and sheared the drive shaft keys. All told it took them almost six months to repair the pump and get it going again. This didn’t interrupt the water supply to the town, the pump on the deep bore could supply all that was needed.
The first job they did when they got there was clear all the broken pieces out of the way and extract the jammed bucket from the pump, this alone took five weeks. When all the other repairs were completed, the last job was to install the new bucket in the pump and for this, young Newton had to be lowered 96 feet down the well in a bosun’s chair to work on it. You might well ask, what about the water in the well? This wasn’t a problem because if the deep bore engine and pump were kept running 24 hours a day it lowered the water level in the strata below the bottom of the 96 feet well. This meant that Newton could step out of his chair and stand on the broken rock in the bottom while he worked on the pump.
At one point he found that he needed another spanner and so he shouted up the shaft for them to let one down. Because of the noise of the engine and the gear driving the other pump they couldn’t hear what he was saying and so they stopped the borehole pump. As soon as they did this, the water started to boil up through the rocks under Newton’s feet and he had to start climbing up the rusty two foot diameter delivery pipe in the shaft. Henry, the labourer from the gasworks, realised what had happened and shouted to them to start the borehole pump again or Newton would be drowned! They did so and the water started to fall back. By this time, Newton tells me he was soaking wet, frightened to death and not at all pleased with whoever had stopped the engine! Newton is still alive, he’s 84 now and if you met him on the street it would be very hard to imagine that he’d ever been in such a dangerous situation as that. But that’s history for you, it reminds us that men like Newton had to do things like that to keep the town going. Next time you turn your tap on, think about Newton and the men like him that made it possible for the town to survive.
I’m going to stop following David now and get back to some of my other favourite things in the town. However, I hope by filling in some of the gaps in David’s wake I have persuaded you that there is a lot to be said for knowing something of the town’s history. Instead of looking at round lumps of stone you will think of Newton scrabbling up that rusty pipe, pursued by water 90 feet down under the moor. Look for the mushroom in Bancroft yard and think about all the money that was made out of Gillians Beck. Barlick didn’t just happen, it took a lot of hard work and skill to make the town we have today. My pleasure is to understand more and more about it, my joy is to pass the knowledge on. Thanks for reading so far, there’s a lot more to come yet!

10 October 2000

[Tripps]

Enjoyable and instructive read. Thanks.