BANCROFT SHED (5)

[Stanley]

BANCROFT SHED (5)

10 April 2001

In previous weeks we looked at the preparation departments and weaving. The next stage in the production and delivery of cloth took place in the warehouse.
The warehouse at Bancroft served more than one purpose but as far as cloth production was concerned, this was where the clothlookers operated. When the cloth came off the loom it was as a roll of cloth on a wooden roller. The cloth carrier took this into the warehouse and it was loaded on a plaiting machine which did three jobs, it wound the cloth off the roll over a table and passed it through the plaiter at the back of the machine which folded the cloth into a neat pile, as it passed over the table it was measured for length and at the same time the clothlooker examined it for faults.
In the old days, the clothlooker was a powerful man, it was always a man. He could fine weavers for faults and short lengths. If he took a dislike to a weaver he could make their lives a misery. Each cloth length was marked with the weaver’s number so he knew who had made it. Wednesday was usually ‘making up’ day. This was the day when, under the old piece work system, the number of ‘cuts’ woven that week was reckoned up for each weaver. Suppose there was a lot of cloth to plait, it was quite possible for the clothlooker to make sure that a certain weaver’s cut didn’t go through that day and so they lost that part of their wage for the week. True, it would be made up the week after, but this was little consolation to a weaver who needed a regular income.
The clothlookers had another hold over the weavers. The process of weaving produces a certain amount of waste thread. In my day the weavers simply brought their clean waste into the warehouse and tipped it into sacks. Dirty waste off the floor was dealt with by the loomsweeper and was called 'sweeps'. This was always taken out of the mill and stored separately because due to oil contamination it was prone to combust spontaneously, we stored ours in the old air-raid shelter in the yard and it had no value, it was disposed of as rubbish. In the old days, the clean waste had to be inspected by the clothlooker to make sure the weaver wasn’t being careless and making too much waste. This was particularly prevalent in the days when ‘paste bottom cops’ were used straight from the mule. It was very easy when skewering these on to the shuttle peg to ‘stab’ them, that is get them out of line and they wouldn’t weave out properly. Stabbed cops were always seen as a sign of careless weaving. Again, weavers could be fined for careless waste and this resulted in some interesting consequences.
Ernie Roberts told me that when he was weaving before he rose through the ranks and became a tackler he always used to stuff his stabbed cops inside his shirt and take them home with him to burn on the fire. Other weavers adopted a different strategy, if you look at the accounts for mills during the early part of the century you might be surprised to find the number of times the local plumber was called in to rod the mill drains to clear them of obstructions. This was almost always cotton waste, the weavers used to flush the waste down the toilets and eventually there was a blockage! (There was a vogue in the 1970s for paper disposable knickers, these were equally troublesome in the drains!) Clean waste had a value as it was recycled through the condenser waste spinning section of the trade and made into soft yarn for specialised cloths like Winceyette and duster cloth, any cloth that had to have a nap put on it by raising.
Most of the space at the engine house end of the warehouse was used for storage of weft boxes and skips waiting for return to the spinning mills. Nearer to the clothlookers stacks of cloth waited for transport to the cloth merchants. However, one corner was definitely the workers territory. There was a row a washbasins under one of the windows and on the window cill next to it was the water boiler for brewing tea and a large stone slopstone. The entrances to the toilets were near here and everything was in full sight of the clothlookers. They could count how many times you went to the toilet or for a brew during the day and this could be a cause of trouble in the old days. I have to say that the toilets at Bancroft wouldn’t pass any sort of test today. Both ladies and gents had a window opening covered not with glass but with a cast iron grill. This ensured good ventilation but also made sure that in winter, they were freezing cold and didn’t encourage anyone to hang about and have a chat or a smoke.
The hot water boiler was a big steam heated tea urn. Again, going back to the old days, it was the most profitable piece of machinery in the mill. The workers were docked a penny a week off their wage for use of the urn and I worked it out once how much it made for the management in a year! This calculation was made even more unfair when you realised that all the heat that went into running the urn eventually finished up heating the mill and so saved the mill owners money on the heating costs!
One nice little touch at Bancroft was the fact that Colin Macro, the cloth-carrier had a cactus garden on the window cill where the washbasins were and this gave the corner a bit of interest.
We had a bit of an emergency one day when one of the weavers collapsed in great pain. She was carried into the warehouse and laid out on a low pile of cloth. When Dr Love turned up to see to her he commented on the fact that it was an ideal casualty bed!
The tackler’s cabins were in the warehouse and these were always a good place for a crack, a joke or a bit of a discussion about any subject under the sun. There was some horticulture here as well, Albert Gornall, who lived in the little cabin, cultivated tomatoes on grow bags on the window cill. He asked me to water them for him during the holidays as he knew I would be in each day doing maintenance on the engine and boiler. I saw to them religiously but by the end of the first week I could see they were looking poorly. I got my mate Ted Lawson who was an expert on tomatoes to come across and have a look and he told me they had ‘Blossom End Rot’ and it was terminal. He also told me it wasn’t my fault but this didn’t do me any good when Albert came back after the holidays and found his children were dying! He didn’t speak to me for six months afterwards.
Ernie told me a good warehouse story one day. He was working for B&M Holdens at the time and was walking down the warehouse with one of the brothers one morning and one of his shoe soles was flapping from the toe, his shoe was coming to pieces. His boss noticed this and said, “Eh Ernie, we can’t have thee walking about like that, you might trip and fall!” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a roll of notes. Ernie immediately perked up, he thought he was going to get a sub for a pair of shoes. Holden pulled the rubber band of the roll of notes and gave it to him, “Put that on lad, it’ll stop it flapping!” Ernie said he was reight disappointed!
In the old days the warehouse was the scene where another daily ceremony took place. In those days there were a lot of ‘tramp weavers’ moving about Lancashire. These were day labourers, mostly men and always good weavers. For whatever reason, drink, family troubles or whatever, they didn’t want a regular job. The way they operated was that they would come and stand in the warehouse first thing in the morning as the mill started. The tacklers would go into the shed and if any of their weavers had missed coming to work they would set a tramp weaver on the looms to keep them going. If the regular weaver turned up they had lost that day's work. This was hard but all the mill owners were interested in was keeping the looms running. The other weavers accepted this and there was seldom ill-will between the regular weavers and the tramps, they were seen as an unwelcome necessity but they had a living to earn as well.
The warehouse was where you met other people as they went about their work, it was warm and smelt nicely of linseed oil and leather and cotton. Ask any worker in the mill towards the end of the industry when the sanctions for faults and bad waste had died a natural death and they will all have happy memories of conversations and good times with their mates in there. During the course of my working day I had to walk through there frequently and I don’t think I ever went in there without a talk with one of the weavers, a joke with the tacklers or a little bit of interest. Perhaps I’m getting old but I’d like to walk through there again and have a crack with my mates.
Nest week I’ll look at the engine house and even more important, the boiler house. Thanks for reading the articles, if you want me you know where to find me.

10 April 2001