BARNOLDSWICK. the Story of a Pennine Town
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BARNOLDSWICK. The story of a Pennine Town ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Anyone attempting to write a story like this stands on the shoulders of so many people it would be silly to try to mention them all. I owe everything I know to everyone who has ever taken the trouble to write the history down, taught me my trade or encouraged me to write. You all know who you are. There, I haven’t missed anyone out! Any mistakes, omissions or downright cock-ups are entirely my fault. CONTENTS Preface 1 1: Where we are. 5 2: Going way back. 7 Interlude: Stone age people in Church Street. 11 3: Hunting and gathering. 15 4: The landscape. 19 Interlude: Barlick goes global? 25 5: De-bunking the Druids. 29 6: The first Millennium. 33 Interlude: Explosive pigeons? 37 7: The Romans. 39 8: The course of the Roman occupation. 43 9: Barlick under Roman military rule. 47 Interlude: They may have been smarter than we think! 53 10: Hard times and Christianity first appears. 55 11: The Romans leave Britain. 59 12: Christianity grows and the Saxons arrive. 63 13: 450AD, Pagans, Christians and home improvements. 67 14: Pope Gregory the Great and Saint Augustine. 71 Interlude: Christmas comes but once a year… 75 15: The Danes, the Vikings and fish hooks. 79 16: Harold and William the Bastard. 85 Interlude: Beating the Bounds. 89 17: The Cistercians come to Barlick. 91 18: Barlick one, Cistercians nil. 95 Interlude: The Bolton Priory Compotus. 1286-1325. 101 19: Famine, plague and foot and mouth disease. 105 20: The consequences of the Black Death. 109 Interlude: Cultural arrogance. 113 21: Villeins and serfs. Wage labour and textiles. 115 22: The grange of Barlick and the seeds of dissent. 117 23: Income, the textile trade and the Peasant’s Revolt. 119 24: The Wars of the Roses and the rise of the Tudors. 123 Interlude: The birth of a dynasty. 125 25: Barlick in 1500. 127 Interlude: Shires, wapentakes and hundreds. 131 26: Barlick versus Foulridge and some old names. 137 27: The 1580 map of Whitemoor. 141 Interlude: The holly and the ivy. 147 28: The Barnoldswick of the 1580 map. 151 29: Badgers, broggers, galls and jaggers. 155 Interlude: with Chris Aspin on packhorses. 159 30: Oxen, horses and wheeled vehicles. 161 31: Roads, bridges and the King’s Highway. 165 32: The coming of the canal, coal and the steam age. 167 33: The Local Board and expansion. 169 Interlude: Matt Hartley and the Majestic Cinema. The day the Beatles came to Barlick. 173 34: The drovers. 177 35: Henry VIII, the dissolution of the monasteries and Wycliffe’s part in the Reformation. 181 Interlude: The builders. 185 36: Printing, broadsheets and newspapers. Prince Rupert. 189 Interlude: Glaciers as bulldozers or rivers? 193 37: Energy. 195 38: Water power, peat, wood, steam power, gas, electricity. 197 Interlude: Barlick corn mill. 201 39: How our Barlickers lived in the 17th century. 203 40: Ronge and white iron. 207 41: The arrival of cotton and the pirate mills. 211 42: The early textile inventions and the water-powered mills in Barlick. 215 Interlude: Power looms. 219 43: The 19th century, some geology, coal, quarries and lime- burning. 223 Interlude: What was the condition of society in the 19th century? 227 44: Mitchell, Bracewell and the rise of the factory system. 239 Interlude: Ordure of the day. 245 45: Barlick in 1855. Trade, credit and living conditions. 247 Interlude: Cooperation in Barlick. 251 46: The crash of 1887, the arrival of the shed companies and the modernisation of Barlick. 257 Interlude: Barlick’s sanitary revolution. 265 47: The Great War. 269 Interlude: Explosive matters. 271 48: Industrial troubles in the 1930s. The More Looms dispute. 275 Interlude: What time is it? 283 49: More Looms. 285 Interlude: The flood of July 11th 1932. 291 50: Another world war and the shadow factories. 295 Interlude: Every cloud has a silver lining. 303 51: After the war was over. Britain’s bread hangs by Lancashire’s thread. 305 Interlude: Blood and steel. 309 52: Barlick in 1950. The Welfare State. 311 Interlude: A tale of a kilt. 313 53: The glory days and the future. 317 Index: 319 PREFACE In 1940 my system got a bit of a shock. One late summer’s morning my mother dressed me in new clothes and took me along Didsbury Road in Stockport, down Travis Brow and through some iron gates into what looked like a cage. It was Hope Memorial primary school and was a different world. I remember that the first thing Mrs Ackroyd taught her new class that day was how to sweep the floor and to this day I am grateful for this extremely practical lesson. My mind goes back to it many a time when I watch someone using a long brush and I reflect that it’s a pity they didn’t have the benefit of that early lesson. I soon settled in and I remember that one of the things that intrigued me was that every room had a strange picture hung on the wall, mostly coloured red. I found out eventually that it was a map of the world and the red bits belonged to us. As I went forward through my education I was taught the importance of the Empire and its place in our history. We also learned about Kings, Queens and famous people, particularly soldiers who had fought our wars for us. To be honest, it held no appeal for me at all and I never raised any enthusiasm for ‘history’. It was years later that I started to take an interest in the history of the world around me. I was a long-distance trucker and spent a lot of time alone in the cab with plenty of time to think… Who built the roads and the bridges? Why were the towns and villages built where they were? Why hadn’t anyone taught me about these things and the people who accomplished them? I had a serious accident and was off work for six weeks so I started reading history books to pass the time and can still remember the one which triggered me off. It was ‘Lives of the Engineers’ a Victorian classic by Samuel Smiles. From then on I was hooked and started a serious search for knowledge. As I progressed I realised that what really interested me was the history of my adopted town, Barnoldswick, and the lives of the people who lived there. Forty years later I am still fascinated by these subjects and write a column in the Barnoldswick and Earby Times every week. The feedback I get from these pieces has convinced me that I am not alone in this curiosity about our town and how it developed. Every now and again someone will ask me a question that brings me up short. Often it’s about something I have never heard of and the question triggers me off into some digging to find out what I can. I was asked an entirely different sort of a question recently, ‘What good is local history? What can we learn from reminiscence, surely these are modern times and everything is different?’ I think the thing that shocked me most was the idea implied in the question that looking at the past was a waste of time so I had to sit back and have a bit of a think…… The place I start from is that I obviously don’t agree because I spend so much time reading books, walking about with my eyes open and eventually sharing what I have found out with the readers of my articles. I am reinforced by the feedback that I get and the number of people who tell me that they read the pieces every week. So we can be fairly certain that the subject is popular but this doesn’t really answer the question I was asked so forgive me if I get a bit philosophical. On a personal level and accepting the fact that this is a product of getting older, I enjoy sitting down with friends and remembering the things we did when my beard was black. Many of these memories remind us of silly things we or other people did and yes, it could even be who was bothering with whom! I was reminded of this one day when a man told me about his mother who was the illegitimate daughter of a prominent business man in the town. As a child she would go up to him in the street and say “hello daddy” because she knew he would give her sixpence and then walk swiftly on! I suppose that nowadays a clutch of social workers would start worrying about the little girl and how this ‘trauma’ was going to spoil her life. Of course, not having the benefit of any psychological brainwashing, the child went blithely on, spent the sixpence, and I’m glad to report is still alive and well aged over 90 and totally undamaged by the experience. I’m daft enough to think that we can learn something from this and apply that knowledge to our lives. Kids are far more resilient than we give them credit for. Looking further afield, we all need to have some sort of direct connection with the world. Nowadays far too many of our younger people get this experience second-hand through a computer screen on a global scale instead of from the hedges and fields all around us and things they can touch, after all, sensory deprivation is used as a form of torture.