BANCROFT SHED.

[Stanley]

BANCROFT SHED.

You’ve probably realised by now that I don’t have any grand plan about what order I write about things in the View. I tend to write about what is at the top of my mind or have been asked to do a piece on. For various reasons I have been looking through a lot of images from 1978 in the last couple of weeks and one of the things that bore in on me was the misery of weaving a shed out. We knew at the end of September 1978 that the mill was to close and so we had three months of depressing work with redundancy hanging over us, this week I’ll tell you how it was done.
As with so many of my stories, I have to step back a bit and explain what happened before we got the news. In 1978 I was in trouble with the Council ‘Nuisance Man’, we were making too much smoke and he was a constant visitor. This problem was a technical one, it was caused by the type of stokers we had and the fact we were on light load, only 350 looms were running. I looked into the matter and went to the management with a scheme whereby we could cure the problem at no cost over 18 months by installing new stokers and taking advantage of government grants and improved efficiency. A key element of this scheme was to stop paying coal bills and burn the coal stock in the yard.
Peter Birtles, the managing director, listened to my ideas, took the paperwork and I went back to the engine house. As I sat there with John Plummer, my firebeater, having a cup of tea, the awful truth dawned on me. I said to John, “You’re looking at the daftest bugger in Barlick! I’ve just closed the mill!” I had realised that the management had forgotten they had £7,500 up the yard in coal stock and that what they were going to do was burn the stock, take the money, and close us down. There were other factors involved and the owners of the mill were looking for any cash flow they could find, our welfare would be the last consideration. Shortly afterwards a notice went up announcing the closure and blaming it on the fact we were producing black smoke.
One of these days I’ll explain exactly how a weaving shed worked but for the moment all you need to know is that it was a continuous process of yarn coming in one end and cloth going out the other. The looms had varying amounts of yarn on the beams and so stopping the mill by weaving out the contracts we had wasn’t an exact science, all the looms wouldn’t run out of warps on the same day. What happened was that as a warp was woven out, that loom stopped and gradually the weaver’s wages fell as more and more looms emptied. When a weaver only had three or four warps left, he or she was sacked and those warps were cut out and given to another weaver. Gradually, the number of looms dropped as did the number of weavers.
The processes at the beginning of the production chain suffered first. As soon as the last warps were sized, the tape machines stopped. Shortly after that the warp preparation department ran out of work. Next were the winders, when they had wound all the yarn in stock on to pirn package for the shuttles, they went down the road. In the end, the only people left working were the remaining weavers, enough tacklers to service the looms, the warehouse staff who dealt with the cloth from the loom, Jim Pollard, the weaving manager and of course, me and John in the engine and boiler house. They couldn’t do without us until the last loom stopped.
The tackler’s work load dropped as did their wages. Tackler’s wages depended on the number of looms they serviced and so they started to feel the effects very soon after the notice went up. Some of them decided to get out before the end, even though this meant losing redundancy pay.
In the engine room and boiler house we had our own problems. So many of the maintenance jobs like oiling the main shaft in the mill, maintaining the water courses and the boiler were long term, they were done every month or so. I found myself doing jobs and thinking, well, that’s the last time I’ll have to do that! This got to be very depressing and was made worse by familiar faces disappearing from the shed.
There was also the problem of managing the engine on light load. An engine is far more unpredictable and dangerous on light load than heavy. We were lucky in this respect, the engine at Bancroft was in good condition and I had it tuned to perfection. Newton Pickles used to come up and have a look at us frequently, he knew what the problems were. I remember him sitting there one day when we had fairly high steam pressure and about 50 looms running and he said that unless you knew you’d never have guessed it was running so light.
The projected date of closure was Friday 22nd of December 1978 but by Wednesday of that week it was obvious to me that the weavers weren’t going to stay the course. I had a word with Jim and he agreed with me that it was doubtful whether we’d weave after dinnertime. The weavers had had enough. They were being paid off at dinnertime, what reason was there to make them start up again in the afternoon?
I remember that on the day we had a visit from Professor Owen Ashmore of Manchester University. I told him that if he hung on until dinnertime he’d see Bancroft stop for the last time. I’d already rung Newton up, I wanted him to be in at the death. Come dinnertime, I was sat in my chair and Newton asked me whether I was going to stop it as it was after time. I told him I wasn’t going to, he had better do it himself, he was better qualified. He didn’t argue much and in the end he stopped it while I did the pictures. It was only right that he should, he'd looked after it all its life.
Several of the weavers came down into the engine house to have a look at the engine, it was almost as though they were saying goodbye to an old friend. John Plummer asked whether he should draw the fires but I said no, I told him to bank them up as usual and come in at 9am on Thursday morning. There were two reasons for this, some weavers were coming in for their wages the following day so I wanted the shed to be reasonably warm and Newton and I wanted to run the engine once more so we could flood it with oil in case anyone wanted to start it again.
The following day this was just what we did. We ran the engine for about an hour and made sure that the cylinders were flooded with oil. Then we oiled up every surface on the engine. I stopped it for the last time and we blew the boiler down and opened it up to ventilate and dry out. The water board came and turned the water off and we drained everything in the mill down to protect it against frost. Anything we couldn’t drain like the air pump, we dosed with anti-freeze. In short we did everything we could to minimise the damage that would be caused by leaving the plant idle and untended. Newton told me that later on when he went to restart the engine for the Bancroft Trust all our work paid off. He said the rods came out of the cylinders as shiny as the day it had stopped.
How significant was the closure of Bancroft? At the time, I had no perspective on this, I was too hurt and angry. All I wanted to do was walk away from the bloody place, it was a relief. Twenty years later, I can get some sort of a handle on it. Bancroft wasn’t any more important than any of the other mills in Barlick apart from the fact that it was the last one left running in the old-fashioned way. True, there were still some looms left in Barlick, about 96 at Bendem's in Wellhouse Mill and I think there were some at Fernbank but the glory days were over. Nobody would ever weave cloth in Barlick again in a purpose built shed driven by a steam engine.
With this closure a whole way of life died out. There are still many people in the town who worked in the mills and if you ask them they will nearly always tell you what a good and happy job it was. There was something very satisfying about being part of an enterprise which took in raw material at one end and turned out a finished product at the other. Everybody knew exactly what their part in the process was and even though there were minor disputes from time to time, they were always with someone you knew personally, like Jim Pollard, and we always found a solution.
I always thought that running the engine at Bancroft was one of the best jobs I ever had. It was full of interest, brought me into contact with all sorts of people and was a joy to learn. It triggered me off into my pursuit of history because I realised that what I was looking at was something unique, it was one of the last manifestations of the first industrial revolution and was part of the foundation of everything we rely on today.
It’s all gone now but the legacy lives on. It was the fact that there were good mills in Barlick standing empty that brought Rover and Rolls Royce in during the 1940s. Other firms followed after the war, look at the number of mills that are still being used as production units for other trades. Without the mills Barlick would have stayed an insignificant backwater between two main roads and would never have made the leap into being a thriving, self-contained manufacturing town.
I was lucky enough to be in on the end of this process and as long as you do me the favour of reading my pieces about this history I shall continue writing them. A bloke told me a few months ago that “Nobody reads nowadays.” If the feedback I get from these articles is any indication, he was totally wrong and was simply dumbing down the public because they didn’t go to Oxbridge like he did. Thanks for listening to me, I’m always pleased to hear from you.