BARLICK LIFE IN 1890. (PART TWO)

[Stanley]

BARLICK LIFE IN 1890. (PART TWO)

6 February 2001

Sorry, but you’re going to have to concentrate a bit harder this week, we are going to quote some actual statistics! As you know, I like to look at history from the grass roots level, what the workers were doing. There are two reasons for this, the workers were (and still are) the place where wealth is created, the second reason is that I believe many older historians have neglected them. However, now and again we have to lift our eyes from the gutter and take note of broader events as this helps put our researches into context. I’ll try to make it as painless as possible!
Barlick was never a ‘fancy-weaving’ town. The cloth the mills turned out was almost all ‘Burnley Printers’, these were cheap but serviceable plain cloths made specifically for printing and the export trade. ‘Rag shops’ was the term used in the trade for these mills. The main market for the cloth was India. By 1913 the sub-continent took 45% of the cloth exported from Britain, 3,126 million yards. Looking ahead, whilst this immense market fuelled Barlick’s growth between 1878 and 1913, nobody could foresee that between 1913 and 1918 this trade was to drop 75% triggering the decline of the weaving industry.
There was another factor at work. Barlick has always been out of step with everyone else and this is clearly demonstrated by the pattern of growth in the town as compared to the rest of Lancashire. Between 1887 and 1913 the number of looms in Lancashire increased from 582,500 to 786,200, an increase of 35%. During the same period, Barlick went from approximately 3,000 looms to 20,000, an increase of 550%! Between 1903 and 1915 seven new mills were built and the housing stock increased in proportion. One more figure for you, during the same period, the employed capital of the Calf Hall Shed Company rose from £10,000 on formation to £85,000 in 1913, an increase of 750%. (The CHSC was reputed to be the biggest Shed Company in Britain.)
Right, that’s enough figures, let’s ask a question. Where did the money come from that fuelled this growth? Was there some outside source of capital that saw the opportunity and invested for profit? Remember that we are told nowadays that this is good, Japanese car firms investing in industry in this country are seen as a political and economic triumph! I’ve been researching this for thirty years and I have found no evidence of any outside investment apart from some very small amounts later in the period. By far the greater proportion, and I’d estimate well over 90%, came from inside the town, in other words, re-invested profits from the weaving trade. How was this done?
It’s very difficult to get a clear idea of the level of profits the manufacturers were making because they were mainly private individuals and didn’t have to publish any accounts. Pleading poverty was more their style than boasting about their wealth and if the tone of their communications to the Shed Company secretaries is anything to go by they were desperately poor and being bled dry by the wicked Shed Companies. One of these secretaries, after a two hour meeting with tenants reported to the board that "The tenants gave no evidence that they were suffering hardship in respect of their rent!" In view of the fact that these same tenants built seven new mills in twelve years there is little doubt that he was right!
So I think we can accept that between 1887 and 1913 the trade was doing well, cotton prices were falling, the market was growing and the industry expanded to take advantage of the boom. What was the effect on the town and the workers?
In terms of the built environment, Barlick exploded. Roughly speaking, apart from the Townhead area and the centre of the town every stone house you see now was built between 1887 and 1913! Add to this the mill-building and improvements like sewers, street paving, lighting and the installation of gas and water mains and you begin to get the picture. The quarries on Upper Hill and Salterforth Lane were roaring, all the stone for the building came out of them. There was a brickworks below the quarry on the Park Close side of Salterforth Lane, the bricks were poor but good enough for the inside lining of stone walls and shed-building. All the slate for the roofs came in by rail from Wales and the canal was pumping coal and other essential supplies into the town. In short, it must have been chaotic, the whole town was a building site.
We’ve got a fairly clear idea of how the mills were financed but how about the house-building? More looms and mills meant that more accommodation was needed. Part of this demand for labour was met by people coming into the town to weave and going home at weekend, the Model Lodging House in Butts, now Briggs and Duxbury’s premises was built to cope with this demand. Pubs like the Dog up Manchester Road were lodging houses and anyone with a bed to spare had a lodger.
Billy says that it was surprising how many ordinary people became entrepreneurs and financed house building for rent. He names Joe Standing, a weaver, who built some houses near the Corn Mill and Sandy Harmer, another weaver who lived in St James’ Square and built some houses on the Croft. The local builders prospered, Jim Shaw built Mosley Street and Park Road. Johnny Broughton built half of Denton Street, the three houses below Foster’s Arms and the row up Brogden Lane. These houses were either bought or taken up for rent as soon as they were built. Rent is fairly easy to understand but how did ordinary people mange to buy houses when they were in relative poverty and has no safety net like Social Services to protect them?
The first thing to recognise is that the banks knew a boom when they saw one and were eager to invest and get their share of the profits. They were on to a good thing because there was no risk in lending money to builders to finance house building on a rising market. The same thing applied to shed-building, there was no shortage of loan capital available to finance building. As regards domestic rent, I haven’t any direct evidence yet as to what levels were but working out the figures, assuming a payback of the cost of the house in 21 years and an interest rate of 3% the rent for a two-up and two-down terraced house would work out at about 2/6 a week. (12½ p).
I asked Billy about house prices and how people managed to buy in those days and he said that a two up two down terraced house cost £130, a family house with garrets (attics) was £240 and a big family house of high standard was £370. His family started in a small cottage on Newtown on a very low rent, as things improved they bought a new house through the building society off Jim Shaw on Mosley Street. This pattern was common and the factor that made all the difference was having a large number of children, getting them into the mill at ten years old and keeping their wages. The usual procedure was that children ‘tipped up’ their wage and got a penny in the shilling for pocket money. If you had eleven children, as Jim Brooks had, it is easy to see how they could take on the cost of buying a house once the children started working.
There was a drawback to this of course, children cost money to rear! Billy says that everyone was in debt while their kids were coming on. Sources of credit were relations, the pawn shop and credit at local shops. In those days, most shops would let you buy ‘on tick’ with a ‘shop book’ as long as you were either known to the shopkeeper or you could show a fully paid up rent book.
I asked Billy how it was that ‘off-comed ‘uns’ could get established when they came into the town. He said that there was always the chance that they had left their previous debt behind them by doing a ‘moonlight flit’ and so had a clean start in Barlick. Here, a surprising factor comes into play, because Barlick was a ‘rag shop’, the weaving was simple and children could learn to weave very quickly so it was easy to get your kids into work and earning as soon as they could go part time at ten years old. These factors applied to established Barlickers as well of course.
When you’d paid for your own house you looked for a way to invest for the future, remember, there was no state pension or social benefits. The best way to do this was to buy the house next door and rent it out. If you could manage it, you invested in building a row of houses using money borrowed from the bank and financed by the rents. If you did this, you usually built one house on the row to a higher standard for yourself or in some cases, as a shop so you could have another source of income. If you look at the buildings in Barlick as you walk round you’ll see a lot of this kind of development.
The end result of this period of prosperity and the willingness of ordinary people to invest in the future while their income was high was the extraordinary growth of Barlick and the high proportion of owner-occupied houses and small property developers. Joe Standing and Sandy Harmer were following this pattern and they were not alone.
There’s another interesting sign of this process that can still be seen here and there in the town. Take a stroll on to the top of Lower North Avenue and look at the gable end of the house next to the sheltered accommodation, you’ll see that the ends of the walls aren’t straight, the stones have been left sticking out ready for the next phase of building. These ‘toothing stones’ are a sure sign that further building was expected but the boom ran out. In almost every case this was around the beginning of the First World War. There are other examples of this, keep your eyes open and take notice of them.
This has been a very brief explanation of what happened in Barlick between 1887 and 1913. It was an extraordinary time and it’s no accident that it was at this time that the old Local Board was replaced by the Urban District Council. As the town grew, local government had to expand and grow with it. There’s lots more to find out about this brief interlude in Barlick’s history that resulted in the wonderful town we see today. The key point as far as I’m concerned is that it was fuelled by local thrift, hard work and investment. Every time I hear some politician telling us how good it is to get external investment I think about Barlick and what was achieved by self help. Nobody could change their mind and withdraw the investment, it was permanent and locally controlled. I think there is plenty of room for this kind of enterprise today and would love to see it happen.

6 February 2001