BARLICK LIFE IN 1890. (PART ONE)

[Stanley]

BARLICK LIFE IN 1890. (PART ONE)

6 February 2001

I’m still working away on the taped interviews I did with Billy Brooks in 1978 when he was 96 and these were the basis of my article on childhood and work which was in the View on January the 19th. I think we’ve got enough for another look at Barlick at the end of the 19th century so this week I’ll start by talking to the younger ones again.
Billy was born in 1882 and he went to school at Rainhall Road School which was then the Wesleyan School. He started at school when he was five years old and left at thirteen but he was working half-time in the mill from the age of ten. Barlick was a very different place in 1890 than it is now. If you stood outside Rainhall Road School and looked across the road towards what is now Mosley Street you would get a bit of a shock! There was nothing there but fields as far as the eye could see. The buildings which are now shops on the same side of Rainhall Road as the school were there, the end one, next to the school was a bakehouse run by a man called Frank Metcalfe. The first buildings on the left hand side of Rainhall Road was the row which starts with the chemist’s shop next to the surgery, none of the other houses and shops had been built.
Looking across towards Long Ing, the railway was there, Wellhouse Street and Railway Street had been built and behind them Wellhouse square and most of the houses on the Hill Streets were built. There was nothing after them down towards Long Ing except for an odd cottage and farm building until you got down to Long Ing Shed which was built in 1887.
The roads, even in the town centre weren't paved, they were simply covered with broken limestone and after 1897 were rolled down hard by a steam roller, the Local Board bought this roller from Fowler’s at Leeds and it was seen as a great improvement. Even so, the roads were rough and rutted by the constant procession of horse drawn carts carrying coal from the railway and canal to Clough, Butts and Calf Hall mills and all the other traffic of the district. Billy says that the only maintenance was to sweep up the loose stones and slutch from the gutter and throw them into the ruts. If there was a bigger hole, this was filled by contractors, men who took on the job of road repairing by breaking or ‘knapping’ stone into small pieces and hammering them into the road surface. There was a stone pavement at each side.
Just think about this for a minute or two. All the old photographs that we have of the town centre were taken in fine weather, they don’t show what it was like when it was wet. Remember that all the ladies wore long skirts that almost brushed the ground, what would it be like crossing the road which was muddy, rutted and covered in puddles? Ladies lifted their skirts while they were crossing but even so the hems of their dresses and underskirts would get splashed by water and mud. It gets worse! As the horses went about their work they would make water and drop horse muck in the street. The box cart collecting the contents of the pail toilets would occasionally leak a bit or splash out of the lid when it went through a pothole. Bits of rubbish, coal, ashes, whatever was being carried, would fall off as well and the whole lot got ground up into porridge by the cart wheels. We are not talking about the most hygienic road surface in the world! This was bad enough but things got even worse when the sun came out.
I suppose all of you have watched cowboy films at some time or another. The way you could tell that someone was coming, long before you saw them, was the plume of dust raised by the horses hooves. If any of you have been to Australia you will have seen the same thing there on the unmade roads. Barlick town centre was exactly the same. The biggest nuisance in dry weather was the dust from the roads, especially if there was any wind. Bear in mind what was in the dust, every sort of dirt you can imagine from faeces to people spitting in the street. This horrible mixture of dirt and bacteria got everywhere.
Think of another thing. A lot of food in shops and on stalls was on open display, there was no refrigeration and when you got it home, all you could do to protect it was to cover it up. Milk delivered in open cans onto the doorstep got its own dose of bugs and in summer, many milk hawkers delivered twice a day because the milk went sour in a very short time. The consequence of all this was that people were constantly eating infected food and the biggest single cause of ill health was a constant low level of food poisoning and diarrhoea. There was a benefit to this, if you survived you had a marvellous stock of antibodies in your system. Modern scientists are beginning to suspect that many of today’s new ailments like ME, allergies and asthma are more prevalent because we are not exposed to enough germs.
At home, your mother did the best she could to keep the house clean but sweeping the floor simply spread the germs even more. The nearest most people got to any sort of antiseptic was carbolic soap or boiling water. The wonder of it is that people survived this constant attack, it is certain that if we had to live under the same conditions we would go down with very bad stomach ailments very quickly. This is exactly what happens to many people who go for a holiday to India and other tropical countries. ‘Delhi Belly’ had its counterpart, we’d call it ‘Barlick Belly’ nowadays!
Right, that’s enough disease and sudden death for this week! What about the rest of your life in 1890. One thing that has always struck me when talking to very old people like Billy is the amount of time they spent out of the house. There was a very simple reason for this, apart from eating and sleeping there wasn’t a lot to make it worthwhile staying in. During the week, the only light in the house was a ‘tuppeny snuff-less dip’ on the kitchen table. This was a candle made out of tallow and Billy says they smelt nasty when they were lit. He used to go out to buy them for his mother from the shop and he says that they were hung up by their wicks like a bunch of grapes. The shop-keeper would snip you a couple off and wrap them up for you, they cost about one new penny each. Billy says that when paraffin wax candles (the same as we use today) came out they were seen as a great improvement. The very best candles were made of beeswax but only the rich could afford these.
At weekends things improved because on Saturday and Sunday an oil lamp burning paraffin was used instead of dips. Even so, if there were eleven children in the family, not everyone could get near the light! Another weekend happening was that Billy’s mother would send him to Jacob Bailey’s shop for a pennyworth of sharp sand to scatter on the flag floor of the kitchen. This helped to keep the floor clean as it scrubbed the flags when walked on in clogs with irons and was changed every weekend. Not surprisingly, you spent a lot of time out of the house looking to see what was going on or getting up to mischief.
There were very few street lights and most of the town centre was in darkness. This was a great boon to Billy and his mates because it helped to conceal them as they ‘made their own amusement’. A man called Isaac Barrett was schoolmaster at Rainhall Road and he used to run evening classes for anyone who wanted to improve themselves, he lived in the small cottage adjoining the school. Billy says that at this time they were starting to clear the land across from the school to build Mosley Street and there was a lot of rubbish about. They got a branch off a tree and leaned it against the school door and then knocked on it. When Isaac opened the door the branch fell in on him!
If you remember I said that the shop next to the school was a bakehouse run by Frank Metcalfe. If you look at the gable end you’ll see that there is a window there that’s walled up now. Billy and his mates used to stick a pin in the woodwork at the top of the window and over it they hung a piece of black cotton with a button on the end. They went down towards the back of the house and jiggled the button with the cotton so that it tapped on the window. When Frank came out to see what the noise was they pulled the button up to the top of the window and hid round the corner. They would do this two or three times and Billy says that Frank got very upset, he knew someone was playing a trick on him but because it was dark he didn’t know how it was being done!
Down at the Skipton Road end of the town there were a few houses round the Corn Mill and the new gasworks but from there down to the canal it was all fields, the only houses were the three cottages at Crow Nest. Coates Mill was at the top of the hill on the left hand side of the road but was a lot smaller. There was a cottage on the Barlick side of the canal bridge. One of these fields near the corn mill was used as a football field, Billy says he can remember Barlick playing in a cup tie there for the Bradford City cup. He says that a lot of people turned out to watch, leaning over the wall.
The strongest impression that comes through from Billy’s account of the town is the fact that people had to make their own pleasures. A meeting at the chapel was popular because ‘it was somewhere to go’. At election time a political meeting was as big a draw as a good programme on TV is to us, but bear in mind that this wasn’t ‘The Good Old Days’. Low levels of infection were endemic, there was no Social Security and we know that inside a couple of years, half the town was to be on strike and times were very hard. How did they survive?
As we saw last week, it was by local credit, hard work and pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. In view of the present debates about the future of Pendle there might be a valuable lesson to learn from history here. Over to the politicians and planners!

6 February 2001