BANCROFT SHED (6)

[Stanley]

BANCROFT SHED (6)

11 April 2001

This week we’ll have a look at the place all the power came from, the boiler house. I suppose you were expecting me to say the engine house., this is the mistake everyone used to make who visited the mill, all they wanted to see was the engine but the place that makes or breaks an engine house is the boiler house. A good firebeater is a pearl beyond price and I was lucky, I had two good ones while I was at Bancroft, Bob Parkinson and John Plummer.
First, for the benefit of the young ones, I suppose I’d better explain just exactly what was happening in the boiler house. We have to step back a bit here and remind ourselves that there was no public electricity supply in Barnoldswick until 1929 and even then it was on a very small scale. The Craven Herald reported that by November 1929 230 applicants out of a total of 291 had been connected to the mains. It should be recognised that this was a very low power supply suitable for lighting only, this meant that until the mid thirties any commercial premises using electricity had to have their own independent power supply. In most cases, this was a gas engine fuelled by coal gas and driving a generator. Newton Pickles told me he used to go and look after the gas engine and generator under the Majestic Building when it was running late at night for the cinema or dances. I even have an example of a man who made toys at home from scrap wood and had a gas engine in his front room on the Croft!
The mills had only one choice, a steam boiler and an engine driving shafting, all the machinery was run off leather belts from the overhead shafting. Any electricity needed was made by driving a dynamo or an alternator from the shafting. The key to this process was converting the energy locked up in coal into rotative motion in the transmission shafts. The way we did this was to burn coal in a furnace inside a closed metal vessel containing water. As the water boiled in the enclosed space, the pressure rose and eventually you reached the point where you could take off steam to the engine at about 150 pounds to the square inch pressure and use this to turn the shafting.
The first thing to say about this technology is that you will often hear people talk about ‘Steam Age Technology’ in a disparaging way. It is used as a pejorative term for anything that is old-fashioned and out-of-date. Anyone who does this is demonstrating their ignorance because 95% of the electricity we use today is produced by steam turbines. An atomic reactor is a very complicated boiler, the heat from the nuclear reaction is converted into steam and used just as we did at Bancroft.
The next thing to realise is that storing up 25,000 litres of superheated water and live steam in a closed metal vessel is potentially a very dangerous thing to do. The only way it can be kept safe is by impeccable operation, regular maintenance and very strict inspection. The surprising thing about this is that even today there is no recognised qualification for operating land boilers and engines. At sea, the qualifications are very strict and a Marine Engineer’s Certificate is a very valuable qualification. There was a Bill in Parliament to apply the same regulations to land based plant in 1897 but it was withdrawn on July 12th because the session had run out of time and never re-introduced. So we have this situation where two unqualified blokes are working in the boiler house and engine house producing vast quantities of power to run the mill! This applied to all the mills in Barlick, the only criterion was ability and experience and this explains why so many of these jobs passed from father to son, the new firebeaters and engineers were quite literally born into the job.
Back to the boiler house. The first impression you would have got if you climbed down on to the firing floor at Bancroft would have been the contrast between the polished brass of the gauges and water glasses on the boiler and the filthy condition of just about everything else as it was covered with a layer of coal dust. The second impression would come as a surprise, particularly in winter, it was freezing cold! The reason for this is that the boiler is drawing in immense volumes of air into the furnaces to support combustion and this all has to come in through the open door. The firing floor in front of the boiler is the same temperature as the outside air, colder even because of the draught. We often forget that this was a drawback of the open fire in a house. It's why we huddled round the fire, we were avoiding the draught the fire was pulling into the room.
In the old days, boilers were fired by hand. The stoker, or firebeater as we called him had to open the firebox door on the front of the boiler and shovel coal in. This was a skilled operation because it was essential to keep the coal level over the whole of the furnace bed. This wasn’t easy and the rule with a six foot bed was four down each side and a couple in the middle. A rake could be used to level the bed out but a good firebeater didn’t need this and could get the door closed in the shortest possible time. The reason for this was that the longer the door was open, the more cold air got in over the fire and the less efficient the boiler was. On a hard day in winter the firebeater had at least six tons of coal to throw in during the day and the arrival of automatic stokers was the best thing since sliced bread.
At Bancroft we had automatic wide ram coking stokers. These were very efficient as long as you had a good load on and we could burn coal smoke-free. They were supplied by hoppers which were filled using an electric auger from the bunker so most of the time the firebeater simply pushed a button to fill his hoppers. When the level fell in the bunker just before delivery he had to shovel the coal to the auger.
The firebeater's most important duty was to make sure that the water level in the boiler was correct. Almost every case of accidents with boilers could be traced back to low water. As steam is made and passed out to the engine, heating circuits and processes in the mill, the water level falls and has to be made up by powerful pumps forcing water in against the pressure in the boiler. The rate at which this water is passed in depends on the load on the boiler and so the firebeater had to be sure he knew what was going on in the mill. Every now and again he used to go for a walk round, check the shed temperature and visit the tapes to find out what they were doing as they were our biggest steam users.
Having identified a coming demand the trick was to start firing for the load 15 minutes before it happened as it took that long to increase steam production because of the large mass of water in the boiler. A good firebeater who was alert to these changes could hold steam at 140 pounds to the square inch all day no matter what happened in the mill. This meant that the engineer could keep his engine running at exactly the right speed for the weavers and this in turn meant greater production.
Winter was a bad time for the firebeater because an important part of his job was to make sure the mill was warm enough when the weavers came in for work. Under the regulations we had to have the shed at 55F on starting and 60F by eight o’clock. On a very cold night this meant that the firebeater had to be in at midnight putting steam into the mill at full pressure. Even then, there were occasional days when we missed and I used to get terrible stick from the weavers as I walked round doing my inspections. My only defence was to tell them to remember to put their thick knickers and vests on the following day! I’m sure they thought we were trying to save coal but they were wrong, this was one job we never skimped on and we really did our best to get the shed warm.
Maintenance on the boiler never stopped. I used to test the water every day for total dissolved solids. This was very important for safe and efficient running and I used to control the quality by varying the amount of chemicals we injected into the boiler each day and blowing down a certain amount of sediment first thing in the morning before the boiler was started up. Once a month my water treatment bloke, Charlie Southwell, used to come and do more extensive tests for me. He owned the firm which supplied the chemicals but always came out from Manchester to do my test himself because he enjoyed visiting the engine house so much.
The firebeater’s biggest enemy was the Council ‘Nuisance Man’, the Environmental Health Inspector. He used to come down on us every time he saw us making excessive smoke. The firebeater had to keep an eye on the chimney top and adjust the draught through the fires by raising or lowering his side flue dampers. These were large steel sliding shutters that could be slid down or up to regulate the flow of gas through the flues. He could see the chimney top from the firing floor through a mirror mounted on the side of the engine house porch. Our problem was that in later days, when the number of looms fell and the load decreased our fires were shorter and there was no way we could avoid making excessive smoke because of air leakage through the firebed. In the end, this was the excuse used to close the mill.
One good thing about having to react 15 minutes before an event happened in the mill was that the firebeater could always finish work first. Half an hour before stopping time he would stop feeding coal, shut his pumps down and start burning his fires off, as he did this the pressure rose. Once the fires were burnt off he cleaned his bars, ashed out and raked a small amount of the remaining red hot coals to the front of the furnace. Then he threw twenty five shovels full of coal into each furnace, closed the doors and just opened his dampers a crack. We called this ‘banking up’ and this coal smouldered away all night keeping the boiler up to pressure. As soon as he had finished these tasks he could lock the boiler house doors and go home.
The pressure would drop back a bit as I was running out to a finish but by the following morning when the firebeater came in to start work he would have the same pressure on the boiler that he had when he started to burn off the night before. The only time the boilers ever went cold was during the holidays. I’ll tell you what happened then next week.

11 April 2001