AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER

[Stanley]

AFTER THE WAR WAS OVER

30 December 2002

Jim finally got back to Barlick and Civvy Street in summer 1946, he was thirty years old, married and had survived a very close brush with death. He decided to take it easy for a while, enjoy home life and have a look round. The first thing that struck him was how little Barlick had changed, he didn’t actually say it but I got the impression that after his experiences it must have seemed strange that the town hadn’t changed as much as he had. I asked him what the attitude was to ex-servicemen and he told me there was no reaction at all. The war had ended over a year ago and it was not the thought that was uppermost in people’s minds, he wasn’t Jim Pollard, conquering hero, more a case of ‘Oh, you’re back are you!’
Unlike many places in Britain Barlick hadn’t suffered from enemy action. Indeed, it could be argued that the war had treated the town very well. In 1940 the government had moved the Rover Company up to Barlick and they took over Grove and Sough Bridge at Earby, Calf Hall, Butts and Bankfield in Barlick and had Bracewell Hall as an administrative centre. Rolls Royce took over the Rover aero engine interests in 1942 and even though this commitment was scaled down after the war Barlick was left with its first new industry ever and it paid twice the wage that the mills did. This was crucial to the town’s survival and we should always remember that it was not planned help for a failing textile town but a complete accident of fate, Hitler was bad news for so many people but in a strange way he had brought about an improvement for us.
Jim soon got bored with doing nothing so he thought he’d have a walk down to the Labour Exchange to see what work was going. The clerk offered him a job at the gasworks on the retorts, a very dirty job in bad conditions. Jim said “You must be joking!! Can’t you see I’m graded C3?” To no avail, that was it, shovelling coal or nothing, so he decided to take a walk up to Bancroft. The following week Jim was back on his seat behind the looming frame and he stayed there for the next thirty two years.
What interested me when I was talking to Jim in 1978 when we knew we were closing in December was his assessment of what had gone wrong after the war. How could an industry like textiles that was so important to the town fade away? Who was to blame? He reminded me that after the war the cry was ‘Export or die!’ and ‘Britain’s Bread hangs by Lancashire’s Thread.’ Good weavers were scarce, the supply of tramp weavers had dried up before the war, Briggs and Duxbury moved into the redundant Model Lodgings in Butts in 1936. All the manufacturers were concerned with was production, quality didn’t matter, they could sell anything they wove so they recruited labour, trained them in a few weeks and then put them on a set of looms. There were cosmetic changes to attract labour like canteen facilities, transport to and from work and relaxation of rules but the fundamentals didn’t change at all.
The More Looms System was universal by now but in Bancroft’s case, none of the looms were modified to take the larger shuttles that made the system possible. They relied on the skill of the tacklers to time the looms accurately enough to make them weave. This meant more traps and smashes and a reduction in efficiency, remember that most of these looms were second-hand when the mill started in 1920. Worst of all in Jim’s eyes was the fact that men like Wilfred Nutter were still working in the same mind set they had before the war, to them labour was factory fodder, there was an unlimited supply and all they had to do to make money was to keep wages and maintenance to a minimum and weave as much cloth as they could. The fact that a sweeper at Rolls got more than the best weaver in the shed didn’t even register with them, it was as though the new opportunities didn’t exist.
In the late 1940s Jim hadn’t got this clear insight into what was going wrong, he was concentrating on his job, to get warps into the shed and cloth out as efficiently as he could. The thing that concerned him most was the fact that notwithstanding his increased responsibilities, as short time hit the industry after the post-war boom, he was laid off on the dole with the rest of them. It irked him that he was a key man but was treated no better than a loomsweeper. Suddenly there was a ray of light, he got a letter from Ayr Cricket Club offering him the post of professional. At that time he was at his peak as a cricketer and this looked like a golden opportunity, however, there was a problem, Ivy didn’t want to move so Jim swallowed his disappointment and made the best of a bad job. Before he refused the job at Ayr he went to Wilfred Nutter and showed him the letter, he told him that the only thing that would stop him going would be if he was put on a guaranteed wage regardless of whether the mill was stopped or not. Driven by the double prospect of losing a good worker and a mainstay of the Barlick cricket team Wilfred agreed and Jim wrote to Ayr declining the post. The sad thing is that he regretted doing this to the end of his life.
There is little doubt that the causes of the death of the mills in Barlick were more complicated than Jim’s version, there is also no doubt that a man of his experience knew what he was talking about. I get the impression that most of the manufacturers were in a time warp. They had a choice, they either grabbed their capital and got out or they risked losing it all on modernisation. I think that in terms of their own wealth, they made the right decision and the end result was to kill the industry and drag Barlick kicking and screaming into the twentieth century. The bottom line is who paid the price? In the short term it was the people who made it all possible, the workers.

30 December 2002