BANCROFT SHED (4) THE WEAVING SHED.

[Stanley]

BANCROFT SHED (4) THE WEAVING SHED.

24 March 2001

The weaving shed was the heart of the mill. You could have the best plant and the best preparation staff in Lancashire but if your weaving shed wasn’t running well there was no profit. Every job in the mill was geared to making the weavers as efficient as possible. Put it another way, if you didn’t look after the weavers you weren’t going to be in a job for long.
The picture of the shed you can see is only a small part of the whole, it was one enormous room that originally held 1250 looms. A forest of leather belts drives the looms from the shafting overhead which is connected directly to the steam engine in the engine house. Once the engine started in a morning, all the shafting turned and individual looms could be set on and shut off by a lever on each loom which threw the belt on to a 'fast' driving pulley or a 'loose' pulley so that it just idled.
The weaver had to stop the loom to insert a fresh shuttle when the one in use ran out of yarn. Each loom had two shuttles, one was always sat on a tray on the end of the loom, loaded with a full pirn and waiting to go in. When the thread in the shuttle ran out the loom stopped automatically and a good weaver would be hovering there ready to whip the empty one out, bang a fresh shuttle in at the correct place in the warp, restart the loom and then load the shuttle again ready for the next changeover. The length of time a shuttle lasted depended on the weight of weft being woven. If the yarn was heavy the pirn held less than if it was light. A medium yarn would last about ten minutes and a light one up to twenty but we didn’t use much of this.
Each weaver in the main part of the shed had ten looms and so you can see that on average, a shuttle needed to be changed and reloaded every minute throughout the day. This was hard enough but if an ‘end went down’, that is, one of the warp threads broke, the weaver had to stop the loom and repair the break. While she or he was doing this, the other looms couldn’t be attended to and if it was a bad break after ten minutes all the looms were stopped. Sometimes there was a really bad problem and a shuttle might take out thirty or forty ends, this was called a smash and in this case the tackler would come and repair the breaks while the weaver kept the other nine looms running. In addition to running the looms the weavers carried all their own weft from skips at the front of the shed so you can see that they were kept busy.
Another instance that stopped the loom was when the ‘cut mark’ came up. If you remember, when I was talking about taping I said that the tape machine automatically put a blue mark on the warp to show when the cut length had been reached. When this happened she went for the tackler and he came and cut that length out of the loom and gaited it up again ready for weaving. The roll of cloth that resulted was carried away by the cloth carrier into the warehouse for inspection and packing.
The weavers were paid on ‘piece work’, the more they wove, the higher the wage. This is the origin of the phrase which is now used for any job where people are paid on production. Right up to the post WWII years, this was all they got, a weaver was only paid for the cut lengths that went into the warehouse during the week. If there were some bad warps in it was quite possible to weave for a week and get no wage. Now suppose a weaver was in this position and come ‘making up day’, usually Wednesday, when the week’s production was totted up and the wages calculated, she or he hadn’t got any cuts off but could see that a cut mark was almost ready to come up on the beam at the back of the loom. The solution was to get a piece of damp cloth and wet the warp to draw up the dye a few layers and when that came through, send a short length into the warehouse. This was frowned on but usually overlooked as everyone knew the consequences if attention was drawn to it. There was no advantage for the weaver beyond getting paid that week because anything short on that warp was added to the next.
After the war the wage structure changed and the weavers went on to a basic wage plus a bonus calculated from the number of ‘picks’ they had put in that week. A ‘pick’ was one double passage of the shuttle across the loom and they were counted by a pick clock mounted on each loom. On making up day, instead of counting rolls of cloth, the pick clocks were read and the wage calculated from those figures. Pick prices were adjusted to take into account the type of cloth being woven.
The first thing that would strike you if you went into a weaving shed would be the noise. A thousand Lancashire looms in full cry was a fearsome thing. It was impossible to hear anyone speak and the weavers perfected a technique known as ‘mee-mawing’. They would speak with exaggerated movements of the lips but no sound and lip-read each other. This was wonderfully effective, if I was going to stop the engine early for some reason, say at holiday time, all I had to do was go to the shed door and mee-maw at the first weaver I saw and in a couple of minutes the word was all over the shed. It had its disadvantages though, if a weaver wanted to say something private she had to make sure that only the person she was speaking to could see her lips!
I’m often asked if this level of noise made the weavers deaf. It might have damaged their hearing slightly but nowhere near as much as you would imagine. Courtaulds did a big research programme on finding ways to cut down on the noise from Lancashire looms but gave up in the end because it couldn’t be done. In any case, they concluded that it was mostly mid-frequency noise and not particularly damaging. The most damaging thing in the shed was the fine cotton fibres floating around, we called it ‘dawn’. This was bad for you and caused ‘Weaver’s Lung’ (Byssinosis) after long exposure. Even this wasn’t too bad in a weaving shed as the fibres were quite large, the risk was much higher in the carding room of a spinning mill. On the whole, even though you would think it was a hell-hole, the shed was quite a healthy place to work in.
As engineer, my responsibility for the shed was to look after the shafting, make sure the temperature was always at least 55 degrees F when the weavers came in and 60 degrees by an hour later, switch the lights on when it came dark during the day and keep the speed of the shafting as steady as possible. All the lights were controlled from the engine house as this was a considerable load on the engine and I had to know when it was going on.
As for the speed the looms ran at, there was one weaver on what we called ‘The Pensioner’s Side’ under the lineshaft called Billy Lambert, he always got called ‘Billy Two Rivers’ for some reason. He was an ex-tackler and worked on one of the eight sets of looms up that side. I used to go in of a morning and just stand at the end of Billy’s looms. He would make a little gesture to me, either speed up a bit or slow down or leave it as it was. I would go back to the engine house, make an adjustment to the governor, leave it about ten minutes and then go back in and check with Billy. The reason for this need to adjust the speed was because of the leather belts. Humidity affected how well they drove the looms. If it was damp they stretched a bit and slowed the loom, if dry they tightened up with the opposite effect. Attention to detail like this and careful valve setting on the engine made a lot of difference to the weavers. After I had been there about three months Jim Pollard told me I was a popular bloke because I’d put the weavers wages up thirty shillings apiece! (£1.50) This on a top wage of £40 a week.
To modern eyes the weaving shed was a fearsome sight but in fact once you got used to it it was a lovely place to work. Ask any weaver and they will tell you that hard as it was, they enjoyed the work. They could see what they were producing, the cloth was rolling off the loom on to their side and they could see it growing as they wove. There was a lovely atmosphere in the place and it was always a joy to go in the shed and walk round inspecting the shafting. That is unless I was in bad odour because we hadn’t managed to get the shed warm enough at starting time.
Another thing that would strike you about the shed was the quality of the light. A weaving shed has a saw tooth roof with slates on one side and glass on the other. In a well-designed shed the glass faces due North and sunlight never enters, it is all reflected light. This is the best light to work in as there are no shadows, it was a very even light and perfect on a good day for weaving.
Each June, I used to gather a couple of tacklers up and together with the firebeater, we would go on the shed roof and whitewash the windows to keep the heat down in the shed. This was quite effective but even so, the sheds were hard to keep cool in summer and even worse to warm in the winter. In winter, in hard weather, John Plummer and I were often in at midnight firing the boiler and putting steam through the pipes in the shed at 140 pounds to the square inch, even so, we sometimes missed the target!
Right, over the last few weeks you should have got a fair idea of what we used to do in the mills. There’s much more to tell but if you want to know more, find an old weaver and talk to them. I miss the weaving shed, I made a lot of friends at Bancroft but I have to admit that next to the engine house and the boiler, my favourite place was the shed with the weavers. You could always have a laugh, even if things were going badly. Everyone helped one another, nobody was into ‘office politics’ to get promotion. They were weavers and proud of it and I don’t think most of them ever wanted to be anything else. I don’t blame them, I know it sounds sentimental but in lots of ways it was a family and when the sheds fell silent, I think we lost a very important part of Barlick life.

24 March 2001