TAPE 81/VH/1
THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON 19th OF MAY 1981. THE INFORMANT IS ALFRED VICTOR HEDGES, ONE TIME SENIOR PARTNER IN THE FIRM OF PROCTOR AND PROCTOR, ACCOUNTANTS, 3 GRIMSHAW STREET, BURNLEY. THE INTERVIEWER IS STANLEY GRAHAM.
[If you look elsewhere in the LTP2013 version you'll find some research I did later on the Room and Power System. Victor is a good witness because he worked for a firm that acted as secretary to many room and power companies and you can take his evidence as gospel.]
Victor Hedges on the right in 1948.
If I could just get one or two details down about you Mr Hedges. What was your date of birth?
R-16th of April 1895.
So that makes you 86. And whereabouts were you born?
R-In Burnley.
Do you know the address?
R-No.
What was your father’s name?
R-Alfred Hedges. My name is Alfred Victor Hedges.
I was laying bets with myself it might be Albert!
R-No, Alfred Victor.
Have you any idea where your father was born?
R-Yes, he was born in Buckinghamshire, probably Stewkeley.
Have you any idea why he came up to Burnley?
Well, his father had 12 children, no, 14, 8 boys and 6 girls. His father was a farmer. 6 of them he started in farming. My father wanted to farm and his younger brother but his father said there’s enough of us farming! So he sent two of them up north, my father to Burnley where he had some cousins and he was apprenticed or attached to one who had a wholesale grocers business in Burnley. The other one, George, went to Todmorden to do a similar sort of job much against my father’s will. He didn’t want to but he had to. In those days they did what they were told.
So your father’s occupation when he first came up here would be as apprentice to a grocer.
R-Yes, that’s right, yes.
Did he stay as a grocer, what was his occupation for the most part of his life.
R-All that. He gradually took the business over and mortgaged the property, the building they were in and he continued until 1926 or so. And then for reasons of health, the doctor told him he’d to give up, he’d a roughish time during the war. He’d had quite a big business then and the army took his horses for one thing and another and some of his men and so on. He retired to Chester with my mother partly for health reasons and partly because he liked the climate and he liked gardening. Then after that he went south to Tunbridge Wells where my sister lives. I had three sisters but two of them died and one is still alive.
So in your early days you started in Burnley, did you go to live in Chester?
R-Not me because when my mother and father went to Chester I was apprenticed to the estate, Lord Shuttleworth, apprenticed as a surveyor to his agent and so I was working in Burnley then. When mother and father left I stopped on in Burnley, I had rooms and so on.
The Shuttleworths would be at Gawthorpe then?
R-Oh yes.
Whereabouts was the estate office?
R-The estate office was, do you know Gawthorpe?
Funnily enough I shall be going there at seven o’clock tonight.
R-Well I’m blessed! The estate office was part of the building, or one or two buildings, surrounding the coach yard close to the old barn and I can remember looking out of the window and watching the grooms grooming the horses. They had carriages and horses and so on and it was quite a lively going on when the Shuttleworths came to Gawthorpe which was their main home, their main abode but they also had a place at Barbon , Barbon Manor. They used to go there and I can remember it was a big job when they went. They had a special train to take them and why I know, I had to arrange the timetable and get the train ordered and so on.
Tell me something, I find myself doing something now which has nothing to do with room and power but have you been to Gawthorpe lately?
R-Well, I went about a couple of years ago.
Have you seen the Coach House since the reconstruction?
R-No. Well I think when I was there last they were in the process of doing something.
Yes, and they’re going to do the barn now. That’s very good, [Victor having worked at Gawthorpe] I’ll have to tell David about this. [David James Moore who was principal of Nelson and Colne College which had leased Gawthorpe from the national Trust. David was a great friend of mine and was influential in my further education]
R-When we went there a year or two ago, a couple of years ago. But when I was there there it was beautifully kept. The two drives, the top or main drive and the lower drive were beautifully edged and the gardens were walled-in gardens with hollow walls that were heated by fires and all that. It really was a marvellous place at the time.
I’ll be wanting to talk to you more about that I can see, but for the moment we’ll get these things out of the way. You were apprenticed to the agent.
R-Lord Shuttleworth.
Yes, good. Now, your mother’s full name and her maiden name.
R-Amie Emily Judge.
Did your mother meet your father in Burnley?
R-No, down in Buckinghamshire.
So she was born in Buckinghamshire?
R-Oh yes.
How old was your father when he came up here?
R-Do you know I’ve no idea but he’d be youngish, about sixteen or seventeen I should think.
So he went back to marry your mother?
R-Oh no. Well, yes he must have done because I remember hearing him say that she came up with other relatives to visit both him and uncle George at Todmorden. But he must have known her down there.
When she came up did she have any separate occupation.
R-No, no.
Housewife. Yes well, as you can see we’ve gone a long way back into the 19th century. I’d like to just skip forward a bit and get on to Proctor and Proctor. You went to work for or work with Proctor and Proctor when? What year?
R-I entered Proctor and Proctor in February 1923.
That sounds fairly precise. What did you start as?
R-Well, I started there as an ordinary clerk, I was apprenticed there, chartered.
Indentured?
R-Articled Clerk.
What position did you rise to in the firm?
R-A partner, I finished as senior partner.
Couldn’t do much better! When did you retire?
R-The 31st of March 1964.
Now3 then, one or two general questions. Room and Power. Could you tell me what you understand by room and power?
R-Well, room and power was usually applied to a large building, a large mill owned by a person or company and let out to more than one tenant. I’ve known mills like Wellhouse with six or seven tenants at least and the owner of the building provided steam for heating, all driving power which would be done by, well, you know what it would be done by.
The engine.
R-That’s it, the engine and steam was provided for tapes and the driving of the looms. You could have a mill with six or seven hundred looms perhaps.
Yes, well that’s nice because it’s very close to what my definition of room and power is. Nice to get the definitions right.
R-Oh, and I should say that the landlord provided all the power, all the heating, all the lighting, paid the rates and practically all outgoings and that was charged in the rent. The rent varied with the price of coal, it was a complicated calculation. [see Long Ing Shed for a variation of this, tenants paying a share of the rates.]
Can I just tell you what I understand by that sliding scale because I’ve come across it. I’m talking now about 1903, they had a sliding scale whereby rent was assessed on the price of coal in 1898 and the basic rent was 39/- a loom per year and then there was a sliding scale whereby for every 5d the price of a ton of coal rose, the price of the loom rent went up 6d per year.
R-That will probably be right, I’m not sure of the figures.
Those were the figures in 1903 but I take it we are talking about the same formula.
R-Very similar. It’s probably gone up since then with variations in the price of coal.
Rather like the Uniform List for Weaving. Now when you went to Proctor and Proctor who were deeply involved in room and power. Can you tell me what Proctor and Proctor’s function was in connection with the shed companies. I realise that they were accountants primarily but it seems to me from the evidence I’ve had that Proctor and Proctor did a lot more [than simply do the books] and almost seemed to act as complete agents and managers for the owners. Can you tell me something about that?
R-Well, as far as I can remember, I do remember. The head partner of Proctor and Proctor was called George Proctor. Now his partner was Edward Wood, now Edward Wood was my father in law and he persuaded me to go there when I got engaged to his daughter. He said he could do with me coming. George Proctor was a senior partner and he had a lot to do with room and power. He and a chap called H M Walton who I think was a banker and J C Waddington who was a Burnley lawyer. The three of them were interested in development in Nelson. They bought land between them, built mills and houses round them for their tenants. This was before my time and George Proctor died just before I started with the firm. Edward Wood, his partner, became secretary of a large number of room and power companies in Burnley, Earby, Nelson, Barnoldswick and Salterforth. He was, as well as being a chartered accountant, an engineer, he was very keen on engineering and his hobby was attending to the mill engines. He used to go round possibly once a week to see how they were all going on and he used to take me round with him. He was secretary and more or less manager for all these and when he died I took his position. So it was not only managing, we paid the engineer’s wages. Well we acted as secretary and arranged the repairs and the general carrying on of them. [Slightly puzzling this, P&P certainly didn’t pay the wages of the engine tenters in any mill I know of. Perhaps AVH is talking about the firms who did the repairs.]
That’s as I understand it. Tell me something to clear up a little point in my mind. Have I heard Edward Wood referred to as Captain Wood?
R-No, no you haven’t.
It’s evidently some sort of block in my mind.
R-No, it was Edward Wood but everybody used to call him Teddy Wood.
And that would mean that you came into contact with John Pickles?
R-Oh yes, we came into contact with all sorts of people.
Yes, Johnny Pickles of Barnoldswick. Henry Brown Sons and Pickles.
R-That’s right. He was Edward Woods great friend. They would, well Johnny Pickles’ hobby [job really!] was running engines and things and Edward Wood and I would go and inspect them. Oh, they were very, very keen and whenever there was an engine broke down in the middle of the night we’d ring Johnny and he’d send somebody out to deal with it. Oh we used to call once a month to discuss it.
I should tell you that I’ve done fifteen of these tapes with Newton Pickles.
R-Oh have you? Of course they know a lot about it.
Newton’s a great friend of mine and he’s been very helpful.
R-Well, he could tell you a lot more about the engineering part than I could. Edward Wood was very keen on engineering but I wasn’t particularly.
That’s cleared that up in my mind because that was my understanding, that that was the way that Proctor and Proctor functioned. Almost as agents for the management, running the actual place. And of course, as I understand it, George Proctor used to buy shares in the companies he managed.
R-Oh yes, he was a big financial, well he died worth over a quarter of a million pounds.
That was a lot of money in those days. Have you any idea, I realise it was long before your time, but from conversation or things you have been told what were the roots of the room and power system.
R-As far as I know they would be going well, early in this century, early 1900s, maybe before. I would imagine that they started with a small weaver renting looms in the mill he worked in. That’s how Sir Amos Nelson started, he was a weaver and he started by renting some looms and developed from that. That’s what I am told, I don’t know it for a fact but I think it will be right.
I realise that but it’s an interesting theory. There are certainly references that I’ve come across, in 1834 in Barnoldswick at Gillians Mill there were three different people spinning there. One of them was Bracewell, another was Grimshaw and another was a bloke called Ellis Nutter. They were spinning there obviously for the domestic industry, the putting out trade but there were three different men spinning in the same mill. So it seems to me that the room and power system isn’t something that was suddenly invented, it was something that grew. Another man that I spent a lot of time with and did a lot of tapes was George Forrester Singleton, you know G F Singletons at Blackburn?
R-Oh yes.
Well, George founded the firm and he’s very old now, he’s ninety odd and lives at St Annes. You’ll be glad to know he’s in remarkable condition. His experience was more in Blackburn and he told me that as far as he knew, room and power as we know it up here wasn’t quite the same thing in Blackburn. They paid a larger rent but what they were actually doing was buying their section of the shed. It was a sort of rental purchase agreement.
R-I think they rented the looms, the tenant rented the looms. Now in this district, the tenant owned the looms. [See CHSC minutes for occasional instances of this in Barlick where the shed company had distrained looms for rent]
And so in other words what you are saying is that the shed companies provided the looms and preparation machinery as well [in Blackburn] and the tenant rented so many looms and a tape to go with it.
R-Well that was probably in Blackburn but not locally, the tenant provided his own looms here, generally anyhow.
Unless, I have come across instances where say a tenant was leaving because they were trading badly , couldn’t afford to pay the rent, and the shed company has taken the looms in lieu of rent and sold them to the next tenant. Usually the only thing the tenant was renting was room and power. Sticking to Barlick, I wonder whether you can clear one or two things up for me. The Barnoldswick Room and Power Company built Bankfield Shed and they started in 1905, built their first shed and Nutters moved in. James Nutter moved in together with, was it Bradley Brothers? Can you tell me whether James Nutter had anything to do with the building of Bankfield or did he simply rent space?
R-I don’t know, I never had anything to do with Bankfield Shed.
I’ll tell you what intrigues me, and I think you will remember this well, the big boom of 1920 in the cotton industry when everything flew up to the top and then the bottom dropped out of the market.
R-I remember people who were weavers and got a few looms, they used to have pockets absolutely full of notes. They didn’t know what to do with it. Then of course things went the other way and it all fell to pieces.
Well, in September 1920 there were four tenants at Bankfield, or maybe five. They bought the shed from the Barnoldswick Room and Power Company for £122,000 which was roughly £40 a loom. That was a lot of money in those days and Harold Duxbury tells me that about ten years later it was sold for £7,000 which is an incredible figure. It seems to me that James Nutter and perhaps Holden Brothers had something to do with the building of the mill so that when it was sold out it wasn’t exactly sold for what they said as Nutter and Holdens were, in effect, paying themselves. So I don’t think the figures were quite as outrageous as they seem but I’d be interested to find out who were the main shareholders of the company when it sold out.
R-Harold Duxbury would probably be able to tell you that.
I’m certainly going to ask him.
R-You see the trouble with the room and power, when it was full and all the looms were running it was profitable. We used to have a system whereby if a certain number of looms weren’t running, there was an allowance off the rent. Now supposing there were four tenants, we’ll say three, I’m thinking of one mill in particular here. As long as that’s running full you’re making a good profit. If one goes bust and you’ve a third of the space vacant, well there isn’t much profit. If another one goes out you’re running at a loss and that’s just what happened in a lot of cases. Eventually, that’s when the slump came. . [This seemingly obvious comment is very important because the increase of the proportion of fixed costs to income was in SG’s opinion one of the major factors in the decline of the industry.]
That’s very interesting. Can I just put something to you and see what you think about it? I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject lately for some work I’m doing and it seems to me that the economical size for a mill was about 1100 or 1200 looms. This was a nice size for a weaving shed, the engine was a nice size {600ihp] everything was manageable by one man. It seems also to me that about 400 looms was an economical size for a manufacturer [400 looms needed one tape and one clothlooking machine.] Now a time when a lot of them got into trouble was when, between 1900 and 1920, a lot of men who had done very well in room and power built their own sheds. Then, as soon as trade started to become slack they were in the position you were just describing where they’re in a mill which is only running at say two thirds capacity but they still have the same fixed overheads. [Rates, bank charges, heating losses, maintenance bills etc.] would you say that’s a reasonable concept?
R-Oh yes. Yes it is so.
It seems to me that the exceptional trading conditions of say 1900 to 1914 and after the war up to 1920, but particularly the pre-war period, encouraged a lot of people to make a very heavy investment in their own mills. There were eight mills built in Barlick during that period. It seems to me that if instead of that happening, the room and power system could have accommodated those men that there is a possibility that those men could have run at a profit a lot longer than they did after the war.
R-Very probably, yes. It was a very helpful system was room and power. It was profitable for the landlord, providing enough looms were running. It was profitable for the tenant because he had very little expenditure except wages and the cost of yarn. All the other expenses, heating and rates were the landlord’s responsibility.
And another thing about it was that under that system a manufacturer could concentrate entirely on the running of the business of producing cloth and running his business and he didn’t have to bother about anything else.
R-No, you’re quite right. I remember one room and power company tenant, there were two partners, one partner used to go to Manchester to buy yarn and sell the cloth. The other partner stayed in the mill, kept the books and ran the mill so there were no administration overheads as such. [A common arrangement in small firms]
That’s interesting. Yes, if you had two partners one could be the Manchester man and one could be minding the shop. There were no extraneous things like maintaining the fabric of the mill and worrying about the engines because the shed company was looking after all that. That’s one of the things that fascinates me because it seems to have been such a beautiful system.
R-It was a good system. Till of course the bottom fell out of the cotton trade. Then of course the mills became empty, they couldn’t be run at a profit and they were let for all sorts of things. Some just deteriorated like Calf Hall Shed Company. Rolls Royce took over at Wellhouse after the ordinary tenants left but when they left it stood empty. I asked Harold Duxbury, we knew it was going to close, they’d given notice, I asked Harold When Rolls Royce go, will this mill be worth £5,000. he said No, it’ll be worth minus £5,000 because it will cost us money to keep it in order. We were very lucky when Silentnight took it over, very lucky. That was Wellhouse and of course Calf Hall Shed Company had two other mills, Butts and Calf Hall.
And of course Rover Company was in Calf Hall and Butts during the war.
R-Yes, in both. During the war Wellhouse was used for all sorts of things like storing tobacco and heaven knows what.
Yes, and Wellhouse was used again for weaving after the war.
R-Yes, when the tobacco and stuff moved out it was used again as a weaving shed.
Yes, I have Newton Pickles on tape telling a wonderful story about starting the engine again after the war, then of course Silentnight took over. Now then, I’d like to talk to you a bit about the organisation, how Proctor and Proctor actually acted for the shed companies. This is important because it’s a subject that isn’t normally addressed because it’s seen as boring but actually it’s essential. Now, as we’ve seen, in the early days George Proctor acted as secretary and later Edward Wood filled the same role. In the early days George Proctor seems to have attended all the director’s meetings, well, he certainly attended the CHSC meetings, would he attend them all?
R-I don’t know because at my time and Edward wood’s time we used to have a monthly meeting of the CHSC and we always attended there but George Proctor would own a lot of shares in the various companies. He would probably have provided a lot of money to start them all. So not only was he the secretary, he owned a large portion.
And am I right in assuming that George Proctor would know people, you mentioned somebody, Mr Waddington?
R-J C Waddington, yes, solicitor.
These people would know where, who had money to invest.
R-They would find people who had money and wanted to invest it. And for a long time they would do very well out of it, till things started to crash of course.
One of the other things that struck me when I was looking at the finances of the room and power industry is the way that, in a place like Barnoldswick, people used the room and power company almost like a savings bank.
R-They did. The shares in the CHSC were like heirlooms and were passed on from family to family and father to son and so on. In a way that was a nuisance because it meant that the number of shareholders kept increasing as the dividends reduced in size. I can remember sending dividends out which were less than the stamps on the envelopes. They wouldn’t sell them because they were family heirlooms.
And I also know that at various times the company not only sold shares but accepted loans off people as well. Did the CHSC function in this way during your time/
R-No that’d be before my time.
That’s interesting because it certainly went on before that.
R-Well they were local institutions you might say.
Of course, one thing that has just struck me is that there was no bank in Barnoldswick. There wasn’t a bank until 1905 so really the shed company would be the easiest place for people to put their money. I’m going to Liverpool, to Barclays tomorrow to the head office. They’ve got some papers there for the old Liverpool Bank, I want to find out when the bank changed hands and when they came to Barlick.
R-It would be Martins Bank before Barclays of course wouldn’t it in Barnoldswick, and somebody before them. It might be East Lancashire or something like that.
Well, in Barlick it was a Quaker firm called Birkbeck and Allcock who became Craven Bank who became Bank of Liverpool who became Midland Bank.
R-I don’t know about that.
[There is a passage here that is wrong information. The chronology of the bank in Barlick is as follows: In 1791 Birkbeck, Alcock and Co formed the Craven Banking Company, between then and 1880 there were several changes of partners but in 1880 the Craven Bank Limited was incorporated. In 1906 absorbed by Bank of Liverpool. 1918 amalgamated with Martins Bank. 1928 the name became Martins Bank. The bank first operated in Barlick from B Dean’s parlour in 1876 and then from the shop next door. In 1891 it moved to the corner of Church Street. Moved shortly afterwards into Station Road and in 1910 moved into present premises in Newtown. See index for latest research.] When William Bracewell died, and he was a tremendous landowner around here, the bottom fell out of the Bracewell interests. There were a lot of court cases, I’d be interested to know what you’ve heard about that.
R-I don’t remember much about it but I know he was a big figure in Barnoldswick.
Well, I’ve got some of the records from the courts of some of the cases that went on. It was more or less a question of as long as William Bracewell was in charge everything held together but the family [and the bank] moved in after he died and split the empire up and that made the opening for the room and power companies to start in Barlick because there was a power vacuum.
R-Well they were started, the Calf Hall Shed Company as you say were started really to employ people.
1888, yes, it’s interesting that the people who called the first meeting in the Mechanic’s Institute were the parson the Rev, E R Lewis and the other people who were moving spirits in the formation of the company were a very diverse lot. Brooks Banks was a jeweller, Dr Roberts, the local GP, Thomas Dent, a baker. They were a very wide cross section of the local people. Was that a fairly common thing in your experience?
R-Yes, in some cases. Take Kelbrook Mill, that was formed in a very similar way by a lot of local people, farmers and so forth.
That would be Dotcliffe?
R-No, Kelbrook Mill, sometimes called Sough Mill
Ah, Sough Mill. It was a self-help shop at one time wasn’t it?
R-I don’t know, that was before my time, I only remember it as a room and power.
Am I right in thinking that was the Earby Shed Company?
R-No, Earby shed company is in Earby. Sough Mill is in Kelbrook. There was a cooperative mill at Nelson, Whitefield Mill I think where one of the tenants was some sort of cooperative but it faded out eventually, I don’t know why.
Was Victoria Mill the Earby Shed Company?
R-No, Victoria Mill at Earby is the Mill Company. There’s two companies in Earby, The Mill Company Ltd and the Earby Shed Company Ltd. Now Victoria Mill is very old, it used to be an old beam engine there and that, I think must have been a hundred years old. It was a tremendous beam engine. [J&D Yates 1856]
The mill was at one time owned by William Bracewell’s son Christopher but he died three years after his father and he was only 43 years old. That’s one of the things that contributed to the break-up of the Bracewell interests. He died very young but he owned Victoria Mill because I have plenty of references to Victoria. When did the room and power companies start to fade out? [I was wrong here. I was mixing Billycock’s son Christopher George with Christopher in Earby. Too many Williams and Christophers in the Bracewell family.]
R-Well, there was a boom in 1920 and I should think probably about 1930 because the slump started about then. It took some time, it didn’t happen all at once.
Was the experience of the Calf Hall Shed Company, in that it became a property investment company, was that a fairly common experience with the others or did they just get out?
R-Well, there was an original company formed as you say.
They built Calf Hall, bought Wellhouse and then bought Butts.
R-So it was just held by shareholders.
But as the tenants moved out and the cotton industry grew worse Calf Hall had the paper firm in, Butts had Carlsons and Wellhouse had Rolls Royce.
R-Oh we had all sorts of things in. Gradually as the cotton weaving people faded out it was a question of letting it to whoever was possible.
And that’s why Rolls Royce were at Wellhouse. The interesting thing to me is that one of the earliest firms that started in Calf Hall Shed Company is the last firm in Barlick to be weaving and they are in a little weaving shed at the back of Wellhouse Mill, Bendems.
R-They are still weaving much to my surprise quite candidly!
Just a while since they had 64 looms running and they were on a three day week, but they are still weaving and when you think that they are the last in the town, the last of 25,000 looms.
R-Well, you take Burnley, I suppose you’d have 100,000 looms, well it was the biggest weaving centre in Europe Then, the number of mill chimneys you could see if you stood on Healey Heights, oh there were hundreds of them. I won’t say they’ve all gone but they’ve mostly gone anyhow.
The Earby shed building would be stopped by the time you went to Proctors?
R-There was a lot done about 1912 in Nelson, a number. Marsden Mill was one I think. 1908 to 1912 there was quite a number built then.
That’s when the big push was in Barlick. Do you know anything about a firm of builders called Matthew Hawley?
R-No.
There was a Mr Atkinson, an architect, he’s mentioned a lot.
R-I’ve heard the name but I don’t know anything about him.
Did Proctor and Proctor ever act as agents for a shed extension while you were with them? Can you think of any extensions of buildings that were done?
R-No, I can’t remember any in my time. There were discussions about extensions at Clover Mill but nothing ever came of it.
Probably the biggest discussions you would be involved in would be whether to electrify or not.
R-Yes, Most of the time I was there it was just coal fired, these big boilers but towards the end of my time they were turning over to gas and electricity.
Gas for the boilers?
R-Yes. Of course the lighting was changed from gas to electricity. It was surprising, one mill was turned over from gas and the tenants complained bitterly because they said the mill was much colder and you can think of that afterwards because the heat from the gas made a lot of difference so they had to put more heat into the mill.
Of course, when I mentioned electricity I was thinking of individual drives on the looms.
R-There weren’t individual drives on the looms while I was there. There have been since.
Now you surprise me there. I thought there would be a lot of electrification in say the late 1950’s.
R-Now when did I leave, I retired in 1954 so I wouldn’t know about that. There wasn’t much individual drive as I know of.
Would you say that what was happening was that firms were going out and doing away with the engine altogether rather than invest in electrification?
R-No, because the old engine and boilers was a very economical way of carrying on. You see you provided your steam for everything. But I know of a mill, this was Padiham but I had nothing to do with it, I was invited to go and see them turn over from coal to gas and I believe they went back to coal. Of course nowadays you have individual drives to your looms. What I remember was four looms to a weaver, the majority. Then it went to six and then it got to twenty looms to a weaver and then perhaps to fifty, but they were different ways of going on.
Automatic looms, yes. From what I found out when I was running the engine at Bancroft it was a very economical way of providing power for the mill because, as you rightly say, you’ve got to have your steam anyway. The management never really understood that it wasn’t the engine that took the steam.
R-The tapes and other processes.
If you’ve got tapes running 8’s warps [8’s count yarn on the beams, thick yarn] the size they could soak up was nobody’s business. The drying they took and the amount of size that had to be boiled for them. I once told the management, If I told you it took a hundredweight and a half of coal to size one of those beams, would you believe me? They wouldn’t believe me but it was true. They could just eat up steam, It was painful you know, coal consumption used to shoot up. It seemed to me when I was running the engine at Bancroft that the only figures that mattered in the mill were the amount of cloth woven and coal burned. Obviously that’s a very simplistic way of looking at it but generally that was what it was all about wasn’t it. How seriously was coal consumption regarded, coal economy, in the days when you were going round the engines. Was it a major thought in their minds at the time?
R-I don’t know, I don’t think it was. It was taken as normal that you needed so much coal to keep it going and that was that.
Did it ever dawn on people that black smoke was uneconomical, that it was bad burning?
R-Not until the Clean Air Act came in and you were only allowed so many minutes of black smoke.
Would you say it was a good thing because it made people think about the way they burned coal or was it easier in the old days when you just pumped out as much smoke as you wanted?
R-It was easier in the old days because there was a lot of, I’ll not say complaints but there was a lot of difficulty in controlling the smoke. Then of course, coal was nothing like as dear as it is now.
Would you say it was cheaper then in proportion? When a weaver’s wage was £1 a week in 1903, coal was 10/- a ton so a weaver’s wage bought two tons of coal. Certainly when we were finishing at Bancroft a weaver’s wage was about £40 and coal was £37 a ton so a weaver’s wage would only buy a ton of coal. Do you think that’s a good way of looking at it? That coal was relatively twice as dear in 1978 than it was in 1908? Probably it was relatively so cheap that people just didn’t bother about it.
R-That would be it, it just came along and nobody bothered about it.
The only thing I’ve come across is people trying different types of coal to see which would burn best.
R-No, not very much. We found what coal seemed to be satisfactory and we stuck to it. I suppose we would compare prices of different kinds of coal but it depended on the engine and what would do best.
Most of the coal in Burnley would be from the Burnley collieries wouldn’t it?
R-Oh yes. Well, there was Habergham and Clifton. I know because one of my jobs when I was at Gawthorpe Estate was to go down the mines and measure the amount of coal that was extracted because they had to pay a royalty to Lord Shuttleworth on the coal. That was a difficult job because I had to go to the far end where they were cutting it. They didn’t have all these safety appliances and underground palaces like they have now. I remember going with a miner who was acting as my guide. We came to a large lump in the ground and he said Be careful how you go over there, that’s just been a fall, if you touch the top as you’re crawling over that will be the end of you. There will be another fall. So those are the sort of things that stick in my mind.
What were you actually measuring, the thickness of the seams?
R-The amount of coal that had been taken out. You see we had plans of all the coal workings and they went along and cut back and took the whole lot off. I used to have to go right up to where they were digging it out with picks in those days. You got used to it but I never enjoyed it very much.
And they were sending the youngest man there.
R-And of course the Executors of Colonel Hargreaves worked most of the coal and they had their own maps. We had our maps and we fixed them together and then they paid so much a ton of coal that was got out. Not a lot but it was quite a reasonable income.
So that would be part of the income of the Shuttleworth estate. What else did you have to do while you were at Gawthorpe, does anything else come to mind?
R-Oh we collected rents, we settled disputes between adjoining tenants. They had land up at Dent near Barbon, I remember having to go up there. I had a motor bike then and I got as far as I could and then I got to the farm house. The trouble was those sheep from the next farm kept jumping over there, those fell sheep could jump some tremendous heights. We had to put wire netting up and I had to sort things out a bit. The interesting thing was that the sheep knew their land and they were valuable flocks. They went with the farm and they didn’t stray. There were vast areas of moorland and they just kept to their own.
They had to be sold with the farm. And the other thing was if I remember rightly, there was a saying, There’s no use putting any more on, they’ll only die back to the number.
R-I remember I spoke to the farmer’s wife and I asked her how they did in winter. She told me they could be cut off by snow for six weeks at a time. I asked about food and she said they kept plenty in. But it must have been a lonely life in those days.
It still is on those high farms. Modern transport has made a difference but it’s a big job going anywhere, let’s put it that way.
R-Of course you know all the farms had to be looked after, they always wanted repairing and we had an estate staff, a joiner and a man and one thing or another. They were the old-fashioned type, the joiner and the general man and you could talk to them. They weren’t interested in pay, they were interested in their work and they were knowledgeable people. There’d be a plumber of course, I’ve forgotten now. Then of course there was a certain amount of trees up at Barbon and we had a forester who looked after them. I did some shooting up there. There wasn’t any at Gawthorpe, not to mention anything else. Those were the days when we had the coal strike, the big coal strike. I’ve forgotten when but it was a very big do, the miners were out on strike. One of the drives that led across the river to the far side had been banked up with coal so the colliers started digging this coal away for their home fires. I had to go and stop them. I went out, and there was a biggish crowd of men, women and children and I told them they were trespassing. They didn’t take much notice of me and then a policeman appeared from nowhere and came up behind me. I said to him Come on and we’ll clear this lot out. So I advanced thinking the policeman would clear them out and a shout went up, Bobby’s on his way, chuck him in the river! That was me! I didn’t know what to do so I just stood and said, Look, you’ve been warned, you’ve not to take it. I wasn’t going to stop to be chucked in the river.
You went to Proctors in 1923 you said?
R-Yes, 1920 or something like that.
It must have been one of the early strikes.
R-Yes, must have been.
You say the road was banked up with coal?
R-It was waste coal that nobody ever bothered about and I suppose they banked it up.
To make the road. What the miners were actually doing was taking the road away to burn it.
R-I went up to the colliery at Hapton and there was an inspector there. I said I wanted to complain about the policeman running away. I said he left me in a funny position. Well, he said, We’ve got instructions not to fall out with anyone, we’ve only enough men to guard the pits and that’s what we’re doing. So that was it practically. Then on another farm I went to watch them digging all over this field where the coal was very near to the surface. The farmer complained because they were pulling his hedges down for propping up but there was nothing we could do about it. That’s one of the things about Burnley there’s quite a lot of coal near the surface. The coal pits go right down and then right up to the top up above here, at Hapton Colliery.
That’s it, yes. There are little drift mines under Bacup road because I know one farmer up there and even though it’s illegal they don’t buy any coal. He just pops up to his drift and digs a couple of loads out and that will keep him going for a long while.
R-Of course it’s exhausted now more or less. Well, the good coal is, the Arley Mine.
Whereabouts was that?
Well it’s part of the coal drift and it was called the Arley Mine, there were several veins one was the Arley, another was the Mountain Mine and various others as you went down.
Was there one called Thin Mine?
R-I don’t know that.
Arley rings a bell but I don’t know where it was.
R-Arley was the name of the coal, Arley coal and there was a big vein under Burnley.
So that was Burnley. Altham was a big pit.
R-I don’t know what the coal was there but it could have been Arley too.
Ah! I see what you mean, that was the name of a bed of coal.
R-There were several beds, for instance, at Habergham there was the Arley Mine, there was that vein and then the Mountain Mine. The first thing I had to do we went down on a little truck with wheels on. You lay down flat and you went from one mine to another and they put me on this truck and told me to lay down quite flat because if I put my head up I’d get it knocked off by the best’s hand [?]. They said to look out for the air ventilation shaft and then a space for another door you see just for to block them off. At various places there’d be a door and a space and then another to block them off. Well I hadn’t gone far and my lamp went out. Well I was shooting down this tunnel in the dark and out through the doors. Of course when I got to the bottom they lit my lamp again but it was a frightening do.
Were they gas mines in Burnley?
R-They were candles in those days I think.
So the mines weren’t gassy then. They didn’t have safety lamps.
R-No, presumably not because they lit it again at the bottom. But it was a proper miner’s lamp. It might have been gas I don’t know but they had places shut off where they could relight them and so on.
So they were using safety lamps. Well, Mr hedges, that’s all very interesting. I’m fascinated with Gawthorpe.
R-To get to the hall from the estate offices you went along a passageway to the back door. That was a big back door. You’d a big stone staircase and you went along past underground rooms which the butler would have one, the head housekeeper another and so on. I remember seeing a footman cleaning shoes and he was cleaning underneath the instep and I said what are you doing that for? He said because that’s what I’ve been told to do. He wouldn’t argue.
The funny thing is that I haven’t got my boots on today, I usually wear boots but I polish mine as well.
R-Do you? Well I’m blessed!
I’ve always polished them there and people have asked me why I did it and I’ve always said that it seems to me it’s a good idea to get wax into leather wherever you can. {In the army we were taught to polish the instep]
R-But it [Gawthorpe] was an eerie place when they were away. There was just a housekeeper and her husband, a married couple and they lived in one of these underground rooms. I was at the office one Saturday, I was the only one there and this woman came round to say that the doctors were coming to certify her husband. He was Irish and he’d gone queer. She said they were going to take him away and would I stop them and give her a another weekend to try to get him reasonably sane. So I went to see the doctor in Padiham, he was coming up at 12 o’clock. He said I’ll give you this weekend but you’re solely responsible, which put a lot on me. Well, I’d promised this woman so I said We’ll take the risk. So I had to go and spend the night there. I don’t know whether it was one of the conditions that I had to be with him, I thought that she and he would be sleeping together and that I ‘d have a room to myself but when we went in she said that’s your bed and that’s his bed. During the night he started and said Can’t you hear them, they’re after me. It was boughs knocking on the window and it was the time of the Black and Tans and he was Irish. He said they’re out to get me, but they won’t get me, I’ve a razor under my pillow. I said No! and he said Oh yes I have and he pulled this cut-throat razor out in its case and I thought, Suppose he takes me for one of the Black and Tans? So that was an uncomfortable night and I told this woman in the morning, Why didn’t you tell me he had a razor. She said Oh, he thinks there’s one in there but I’ve taken it out of the case. He wasn’t safe at all, the doctor came up and I told him he wasn’t safe and they’d have to take him away. They did do and he never came back. She never thought he would do you know, it was one of the hazards of estate agency.
It sounds like a very serious hazard to me!
R-It was a serious hazard.
Because whether he had a razor or not, you thought he had.
R-I thought he had and he was a big tall chap of about 6ft and I thought if he turns on me because he thinks I’m against him I have no chance.
It sounds to me as though you had a pretty rigorous job being apprenticed to the Shuttleworth Estate and you’d be an articled Clerk would you?
R-Oh yes.
Now from what I know about articled clerks you wouldn’t be getting much money at all.
R-I don’t think I got any.
Your father wasn’t paying them was he?
R-Oh no, he wasn’t paying them.
But it did happen in some cases.
R-It did happen, when I went to Proctor and Proctor there was some talk about whether I shouldn’t pay them to go there but I got married on £2 a week. What about that now? Mind you I had some from my father and so on.
So when you worked for the Shuttleworth estate you were going down mines, facing strikers and sleeping with mad men with razors under their pillow for nothing. I don’t think you’d do it now.
R-I don’t think anyone would do it now.
I’m sure they wouldn’t. It sounds like a good place to work in the old days.
R-Oh it was a pleasant place and people seemed to fit in somehow.
Did you eat at the house?
R-No, but I was asked in for afternoon tea a couple of times.
You’d have to take your own food with you.
R-Oh yes, I used to take my lunch with me, sandwiches and apples and that. I used to watch these grooms brushing the horses and going shhhh, shhhh while they were doing it and I caught myself many years afterwards doing the same thing.
I’ll tell David Moore, he’ll be fascinated with that and I think that’s a great story about the man with the razor under his pillow.
R-It didn’t seem so great to me at the time.
Oh well, I realise that but it’s a good story and I certainly wouldn’t want the experience. Once again we’ve strayed away from room and power but even so I think it’s been very interesting and you’ve confirmed several things for me including my definition of room and power which is very important. I think it’s a fascinating system.
R-There’s no doubt about that and it did help shall we say working weavers like Amos Nelson who had the ambition to get on. They started with a few looms and did surprisingly well.
Valley Mills. How many looms were there at Valley Mills?
R-Oh it was tremendous. I went there, I used to know Sir Amos a bit, my father in law, Sir Amos and one of the Waltons and a doctor used to golf together. I used to fit in sometimes if one of them was missing. We went to see Sir Amos and he showed us round the mill. It was a tremendous place and he was very good was Sir Amos, he was a clever man. Of course he must have been to get where he did. Very decent man to get on with.
Do you know anything about the Lustrafil plant At Nelson?
R-Er, I think there was one at Bridge Mill, I don’t know anything about it though. It might have been in Valley Mills? I don’t know.
I have an idea it was at Valley Mills, I know there was some trouble with it at one time because the fumes of it were very had for the workers.
R-It could easily have been because he did show us, it was the beginning of the artificial thread industry. He did show us and that was right at the beginning. Ten to one there’d be unexpected results from it.
As I understand it was the first use of sawdust and acid. They were turning cellulose into rayon, I think that was the basic process. I’ve talked to people who worked on it and it wasn’t very nice. It used to make their eyes swell up, their eyeballs swelled up until they couldn’t close their eyes. If they got an attack of it there eyelids wouldn’t come down over their eyes and it was terribly painful. Which isn’t any sort of a judgement on Sir Amos but I just wondered if you knew anything about it.
R-I did see it in its infancy, measuring up these artificial threads.
Were you ever involved in the cleaning up or repair operations afterwards of anything like an engine running away? I’m thinking in particular about Bishop House, that was round here wasn’t it?
R-Yes, that caught fire didn’t it?
No. Bishop House ran away and blew up.
R-That’s Bishop House in Burnley. I remember that but I’d forgotten it ran away. Yes, it did. I don’t know if it didn’t kill somebody or hurt somebody.
Killed a weaver.
R-Killed a weaver, I’d forgotten that.
If I remember rightly the tape room was over the engine house and it broke the beams and brought the tapes down over the engine which made it a lot worse. Can you remember any big breakdowns yourself?
R-Well there have been breakdowns but I don’t particularly remember them. It was a case of getting Pickles on to them straight away, he was very good. But Bishop House would be, I’d forgotten about that until you mentioned it, I remember we acted as secretary and manager there.
Whose was the, what company was that?
R-The Bishop House Mill Company. It was owned by shareholders and it was a classic case. It was divided into three parts and it was a very economical mill to run. Then one tenant moved out and was replaced by a firm that made toys, they were all right but never any good. Then a second firm went out and that reduced what had been a very prosperous company to a loss making company. We were left with one tenant at the end and one of these, not Lebanese but that type, came along and bought this other one (tenant firm) and I said You’re going to run it are you? I wanted it running. He said Oh yes, but he never did, he closed down eventually and that ruined the company of course.
When you say ‘ruined the company’, that ruined the mill company as well?
R-They had to go into liquidation, the whole mill company went into liquidation. One of the most prosperous, steady and ‘good future’ mills just went like that.
I remember Newton saying that when they did the work on the engine, and Johnny was alive at the time, when they asked about the insurance the company said you don’t need to bother about insurance, we’ve been saving the money for years. They put the money into a contingency fund and there was enough to do anything they wanted with the engine. They were talking about converting it to rope drive, Newton wanted to do that but in the finish it was put back as a gear drive engine.
R-Yes, yes.
The engineer that was there is dead now.
R-Wood?
No, Not Teddy Wood, the engineer at Bishop House in those days.
R-Oh yes.
He’s dead. Newton promised his father he’d never tell anyone while the man was alive but the reason that engine ran away was because the engineer forgot to put the low speed peg in on the governor when he started the engine.
R-Was that so?
Yes.
R-Glory!
Of course that’s all water under the bridge now. Newton said that I am the first person he has ever told but he said it didn’t matter now because the man was dead. He says that the reason why the engine ran away was that he’d never put the safety pin back in the governor when he started it. The oiler put his rag into the ropes and brought them off the pulley and the governor bars dropped. Because the safety pin wasn’t in it didn’t break the valve linkage and stop the engine. The valves simply stayed wide open and the engine started picking up. Newton said the pin was on the desk, he found it there. There had been a woman killed and the engineer was in a terrible state anyway so Newton and his father thought there was only one thing to do. They reasoned that it wasn’t going to do anybody any good if they left the pin out and it might help someone if it was in, so they put it back in. I thought it was nice because it showed a certain amount of responsibility in one so young.
R-And of course it wouldn’t have done anybody any good. Well I’m blessed! That’s interesting.
It’s nice that I was able to tell you that after all these years.
R-I remember now, as I say, I was thinking it was a fire.
The thing that stuck in Newton’s mind was that when the engine ran away, when the flywheel burst, it picked up the barring engine which stood in front of the flywheel and threw it out of the engine house, across the road. Newton said that the young woman who lived in the house had just got up when the engine came through the bedroom window and landed on the bed. He said the biggest job they had on the first day was getting that engine out of the house. In the finish they had to saw through the floor round it and drop it into the front room of the house and then take it out of the front door. He said that was the hardest job they had because there’s nowhere to hang chain blocks up in a house.
R-No you couldn’t.
Anyway, I feel we’ve done enough for today, I’ve really enjoyed it.
R-Yes, it’s been very interesting.
SCG/03 December 2000
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