BARLICK IN THE LATE 1930s. (2) WORLD WAR.

[Stanley]

BARLICK IN THE LATE 1930s. (2) WORLD WAR.

29 December 2002

As far as Jim Pollard was concerned, 1939 wasn’t a bad year. When his mother married again in 1937 and moved to Birmingham Jim flitted to a rented house in Barlick. Early in 1939 he married Ivy and they settled down to married life. So here we are, Jim has achieved his ambitions. He’s independent, married, playing cricket regularly for Barnoldswick (and getting 7/6 a week from Wilfred for doing it!) and has the job of his choice up at Bancroft. Listening to Jim telling his story, it became apparent to me that Wilfred Nutter had taken a shine to Jim, I couldn’t draw Jim out to talk directly about this but he did say that he thought that Wilfred saw in him the attributes that were missing in his own family. Jim was passionately interested in the two things that ruled Wilfred’s life, cotton and cricket.
In the early days Jim didn’t see this as an advantage, left to his own devices he would have happily sat at the looming frame every hour of the day but as Jim put it, “I thought I was being mugged about.” Wilfred kept moving him about to different jobs, at one stage he even put him in the shed for two months to learn to weave. It seems quite clear to me that Wilfred had plans for his protégé and was making sure he understood every operation in the mill. Bancroft was busy and with a down of 500 warps a week the sizing and preparation departments worked overtime four days so Jim was doing about seventy hours a week.
There was one cloud on the horizon. Over in Europe Germany was re-arming and under Hitler was pushing her boundaries further out. We now know that Hitler’s grand plan envisaged a general war in Europe by 1944 and if he had his way he wouldn’t go to war with Great Britain. When he invaded Poland in September 1939 he didn’t expect this to trigger off full conflict but as we know now this was the last straw and by the end of the year we were at war.
The declaration of war had many consequences for Barlick but the one that particularly engaged the minds of all the able-bodied young men was ‘When will I get my calling up papers?’ I’m afraid I’m going to sound like an old codger now to my younger readers but it has to be done. You can have no idea what a depressing prospect this was. If you were a fit male over the age of eighteen years you could be certain that one day a small buff envelope would plop through the letter box informing you that you had to attend a local centre for medical examination, if you were found to be fit you were in the forces for the duration of hostilities. You knew about the horrors of the First World War and you’d seen the reports of the Civil War in Spain. Unlike 1914, you knew that this was bad news, there was no enthusiasm, very few volunteered, you just sat there and waited for the blow to fall.
Just before Christmas 1940 Jim got a bit of a surprise because Ivy brought his dinner up to the mill. Normally she never did this and as soon as Jim saw her face he knew there was something wrong, he was right, Ivy gave him his dinner and a small buff envelope and then burst into tears. Jim’s heart fell into his boots, he opened the envelope and sure enough, he had received the call to arms.
In these days of instant communications and computers we have got used to bureaucracy taking its time over things, no matter how important. Pre-war, when the only way of speeding things up was to use a printed form it only took four weeks to get Jim through his medical, issue a rail warrant and get him into basic training at Hadrian’s Camp at Carlisle. He was no longer a good preparation man but a trainee artilleryman. By June, after a further specialised training course at Oswestry he was a fully fledged anti-aircraft gunner on 4.5 inch heavy Ack-Ack guns.
The Quick Firing 4.5 Ack-Ack gun (QF meant that the round and propellant charge were in one unit like a very big rifle bullet) was the standard defence against high flying aircraft at the beginning of WW2. It fired a 35lb high explosive shell to a height of over 30,000 ft. Each battery of guns was controlled by a predictor unit which gave the height and direction of the enemy planes and the time fuses on each round were adjusted to cause them to explode at the same height as the aircraft. The aim wasn’t to hit the aircraft, this was almost impossible, it was to explode the round close enough for the shrapnel fragments to damage the plane and bring it down.
Jim was posted to various places in England and Scotland during the next year. The guns were sited near centres of industry and their job was to either destroy attacking planes or to harass them so that their aim was spoiled.
There were lighter interludes. At one point he was stationed near Steventon in Ayrshire and to while away the time between air raids they played the officers at cricket. His talents were soon noticed and before long he was invited to play at Ayr Cricket Club, a county team. The day he was taken down there to play he noticed the large queues to get into the ground and soon realised why. There was a large notice advertising that ‘Pollard of Lancashire’ was to play that day. Old cricket fans will realise straight away what was going on! Between 1930 and the 1950s one of the most famous Lancashire County players was Dick Pollard, commonly known as ‘Th’old Chain Horse’ because of his ability to bowl fast for long spells. The Ayr supporters thought they were getting Dick when in fact they got Jim!
Shortly after this Jim experienced something that up until the war was the exclusive prerogative of the rich, he got on a boat and set off to see the world. The only thing that’s certain about travel on this scale is that things are never the same again, next week we’ll have a look at where he went and the effects it had on him.

29 December 2002