Before Cotton Left Britain: Inside Bancroft Mill Where The Weaving Looms Still Run

SPEAKER_01 0:02 This is the intense noise that weavers had to deal with at the height of the cotton industry. And it sent many of them deaf, paid only for the cloth that they made, and if they turned up on time, this was not an easy job.

SPEAKER_00 0:17 I mean, the noise of a 1200 looms going is catastrophic.

SPEAKER_01 0:21 But at a place like Bancroft Mill in Lancashire, where I am today, a good weaver got good money. In the fairly recent past, the cotton industry was a massive part of the UK. That is before it was all exported to places like India. But here at Bancroft Mill, we have captured the essence of what the cotton industry was like just 60 or so years ago before this mill closed down. And I'm here with Ian Mackay, who um is one of the people who runs the Bancroft Mill Museum, and it is just a spectacular sight walking in, getting all the smells of the engine, and you can see all of the looms and various bits of equipment that have been kept and maintained for all these years, and it looks fantastic. Ian, welcome to what we did before.

SPEAKER_00 1:12 Thank you. Well, I said Bancroft Mill was a weaving mill. There were, of course, spinning mills, but this mill didn't spin, it just wove. And this engine was bought for this mill. It's the only place it's ever been, and it powered all the looms in the mill, and there were 1,250 looms approximately at the height of the textile industry. The engine delivered 650 horsepower. Right. The mill used 37 tons of coal a week, but most of that went on heating the weaving shed. It wasn't used by the engine. But the engine is now the biggest steam engine surviving in Lancashire.

SPEAKER_01 1:54 Okay, and then once the looms are in motion and being powered, then how are they being operated by the people that are working in the mill?

SPEAKER_00 2:03 The weaver who was running the mill had had the ability to stop the loom at any stage. The engine didn't stop, but each loom would be stopped. They were driven by a leather belt which ran on pulleys on a shaft. Now one of the pulleys was fixed to the shaft, so it always rotated and that drove the loom. One of the pulleys was free moving on the shaft, so if you moved the belt onto the free pulley, the loom stopped, but the shaft didn't. So at the end of the day, when you knocked off the belt from the fixed pulley to the slack pulley, you were knocking off. Which is why they knocked off work.

SPEAKER_01 2:43 Ah, and that's why we got the term knocking off. That's why you got knocked off. And how many people would have been working in a place like this?

SPEAKER_00 2:49 There's one engine driver, and that's all. He might have had an attendant who was, for want of a better word, an oiler. But effectively one person ran the engine.

SPEAKER_01 3:00 Oh, really? So this whole thing was operated by a single person. And like an eight-hour day, ten-hour day, something like that?

SPEAKER_00 3:05 Probably a ten-hour day. Hmm, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:07 That must have been. I mean, imagine when this is all up and running, it's kicking up a, you know, you can smell the richness of the kind of uh the oils and things in the air as it is without it being on. It must have been quite a um a dirty environment to be working in.

SPEAKER_00 3:21 Oh in here it was clean. Uh-huh. Absolutely clean. Very often an engine house would have a wooden floor, and that would be kept clean by the engine driver, or the tenter, as he's called, and will be tidier if you put mucky footprints on his floor. So in here it was clean and respectably quiet. These engines are not noisy. Okay. In the boiler room, in the boiler house, that's a bit different. Right. What goes on in the boiler house? That'd be hot and dirty. Yeah. But in here it wasn't. And of course, in the weaving shed, it was as much as anything else, it was noisy. The racket made by the looms was almost unbelievable to modern years. But the engine driver used to sit on a chair in that corner for part of the time. And I won't say doze, but he's he's he'd perhaps read the paper. But he's very much alive to what noises the engine is making and what it smells like and what's you know, what's vibrating and what isn't. And if it changes, he's up. You know, what's what's going on? There's something not right.

SPEAKER_01 4:24 Yeah, I guess it's kind of like when you're driving around in your car and you hear a clunk that you've never heard. Hold on a minute, something's not right.

SPEAKER_00 4:32 And he couldn't just turn up the radio and silence it like that. You know, no, that if he hears a noise, there's something happened that he needs to investigate.

SPEAKER_01 4:40 So it would have been a fairly isolated job, but a really important one.

SPEAKER_00 4:44 Oh, very much so. This is the prime mover for the whole mill. They didn't have an electricity supply. So the engine powered a dynamo to charge some batteries. So if the engine stops, it's all stop. Now we know at least of one occasion where that happened. It happened in all engines, I suppose, where some defect occurred, some breakage, and the mill has to stop working.

SPEAKER_01 5:09 And that's the jobs for the people at the end of the day. The jobs stop.

SPEAKER_00 5:12 They don't get paid because they're paid on the piece, they're on piecework. Alright, so the weavers don't get paid, but you've still got to pay all the rates and the fuel bills and all the rest of it. So it all the money's going out, but there's nothing coming in because there's nothing being produced.

SPEAKER_01 5:27 It makes you um realise, actually, in not that distant past, um, being being paid if you if the work wasn't there, that's something quite modern, really. Like that we're so fortunate to be able to keep on getting a pay packet, say the office has to shut for a day or something like that. But back then that wasn't possible.

SPEAKER_00 5:46 Oh no. Well, a long time ago, shall we call it, the weavers were always paid by the piece. They were on piece where you got so much money per piece of cloth. Wow. Okay. Later on, they started to get a basic wage plus effectively a productivity bonus. So that if the work stops, you did at least get some get some money, but not as much. You know, you get your basic pay, but to get any more than that, you had to get weaving.

SPEAKER_01 6:16 And Ian, I wanted to ask you about uh James and Mary Nutter, and we're just standing in front of their images here. So they're responsible for Bancroft Mail. Can you tell me a little bit about the story of the Nutter family?

SPEAKER_00 6:30 James Nutter was born in 1845, um, about 10 miles away from here, and he was the son of an agricultural labourer and one of eight siblings, which gives you a clue about how much money he'd got. He certainly went to school, but by the time he was nine, he was working in a shoddy mill, shoddy being a woollen mill.

SPEAKER_01 6:54 Explain shoddy.

SPEAKER_00 6:54 So this is what is uh a particular product made out of wool.

SPEAKER_01 6:58 Right, okay.

SPEAKER_00 6:59 It's recycled wool, so that's why it's shoddy. It doesn't mean to say it's necessarily not very good, it's recycled wood, wool. He moved to Barn Aldswick and began work as a cotton weaver here. He then moved to somewhere near Manchester, and we're not quite sure where, and he met and he married Mary Jane Chadwick, as she was, so she became Mary Jane Nutter, and they then moved back to Barn Aldswick. And he he lived in a house down the road, which is still there, and he started to grow his weaving business. Now, to do that, he worked in what we call room and power. He didn't have a mill. He rented some space in somebody else's mill and he put some looms on it and he wove some cloth and he sold it and he went and rented a bit more space. So he grew his business until about 1900 he had 900 looms going. So he was weaving himself at first. He would have been weaving, he would have then employed, either got self-employed people to work for him. I don't know quite how it worked, but running 900 looms, he obviously couldn't do it. Yeah. He must have had at least something like 150 people. So at some stage he decided he would build his own mill.

SPEAKER_01 8:15 And so he started with very little at this point. So he was really started with nothing.

SPEAKER_00 8:20 Yeah. He must have had almost nothing at all.

SPEAKER_01 8:22 So how I mean that's what what an entrepreneurial mind to be able to do that.

SPEAKER_00 8:26 Well, the expectation was in something like 1908 that a weaver in a mill, or rather a mill owner with a mill, should be making a pound a week profit per loom. Right. Now in 1908 that's a lot of money. Now I'm not saying that Mr. Nutter made those levels of profit, I don't know, but he obviously made enough money to consider building a mill. And he had this mill designed by a firm in art of architects in Cone, and he started to build it in 1914. Anyway, the trouble was 1914, when they had got to about the second brick, I suppose, when all his workforce pushed off to the Somme or wherever they went.

SPEAKER_01 9:13 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:14 They didn't finish the mill until 1919, and it didn't start production until 1920. And by then, of course, both of these had died.

SPEAKER_01 9:22 Yes, of World War I being a very unfortunate time.

SPEAKER_00 9:26 It got in the way. Got in the way. Very much so, yes. Whether the Kaiser did it deliberately, we don't know. But it just simply got in the way. And that's why the original idea was to call the two cylinders of the engine patience and perseverance, because it had taken so long to get the mill into production, and their daughter, Eliza, said, No, I want the cylinders called after Mum and Dad.

SPEAKER_01 9:52 And so they've got plaques.

SPEAKER_00 9:53 So that's why one of the cylinders is James and the other one is Mary Jane.

SPEAKER_01 9:57 Does anything with the First World War change the industry? So when the engine does start, you know, it first starts up, had the industry sort of shifted much in those in those years?

SPEAKER_00 10:12 Well, first of all, there's a shift in the product mix. But I think the most important thing is the fact that there's a lot more women who have been used to working and who don't perhaps want to go back to being domestic drudgers. Of the people who are or have been working, there are a lot more people who are able to drive, and there's a lot more petrol engine vehicles on the road for them to drive. And I think these are the sorts of factors that impact what's going on. Because it meant, for example, that the preeminence of the canal for delivering coal disappeared because everybody orders it by road.

SPEAKER_01 10:53 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:54 This particular mill is about a mile from the railway station. Well, there's no point in getting coal to the railway station if you then got to put it into a wagon to get it up here. You might as well put it in the wagon all the way. So, although they did get coal delivered by rail, the incoming coal, and no doubt the incoming product, the cotton, came by road.

SPEAKER_01 11:16 And so was it a lot, was the workforce quite predominantly women then, given that this shift had happened?

SPEAKER_00 11:24 I don't know. Um, we don't have the details from that age. Certainly, men and women were weavers. Weavers are not necessarily female, there's no question about that at all. The only time we can start to put figures on that gets to be about 1940-ish, when we have a list of people who actually worked here in the war. And perhaps a third of them are men and two-thirds are women.

SPEAKER_01 11:52 Um so shall we head over to the weaving sheds then? Let's just do that. Excellent. So, Ian, we're now in the weaving shed, or at least um a demonstration of the weaving shed, because much of it got knocked down, didn't it, or pretty much all of it.

SPEAKER_00 12:04 When the mill closed in 1978, the the whole of the weaving shed was knocked down and housing was built on the land. There was enough room left in what is now Bancroft Mill Engine Museum for us to have now three Lancashire looms to show what these looms looked like.

SPEAKER_01 12:23 How many looms would have been in the mill when it was operational?

SPEAKER_00 12:27 Up to about 1250.

SPEAKER_01 12:29 Wow. Can you sort of demonstrate how these would have been operated? Because you didn't have 1250 people in the weaving shed, did you? You actually had um people sort of operating many looms at once.

SPEAKER_00 12:41 Probably six, but later on up to ten. Wow. And the looms would face each other in rows. Right. Um, this would have been an alley between rows of looms. So this is the weaver's alley.

SPEAKER_01 12:55 Okay.

SPEAKER_00 12:55 And the weaver would do something on this loom and then something on that loom, and then on this one, or whatever. So the weaver would be going upwards and downwards in this alley, attending to the looms, and there would be something like 220 weavers.

SPEAKER_01 13:12 So so would the um looms have sort of been it would have been theirs?

SPEAKER_00 13:16 You know, they come to work, they know which looms are theirs, or what probably, but not necessarily so. Because it's perfectly feasible that you, for example, are more able to work a particular loom than some other loom, or for product reasons, and maybe they haven't got orders for that product. So perhaps you're going to be sent set on some other set of looms.

SPEAKER_01 13:38 It sounds like, I mean, so you've got the weavers alley, you've you're so surrounded by the looms that you're operating. Um, it sounds like a full-on job, like you've really got to be on it constantly.

SPEAKER_00 13:48 Yes. The allow me to take this out of here.

SPEAKER_01 14:53 That so you're just removing a piece of it.

SPEAKER_00 14:57 That's the shuttle.

SPEAKER_01 14:58 Ah, the shuttle.

SPEAKER_00 14:59 It goes backwards and forwards across the loom, and it's carrying thread, and that probably ran out about every five or six minutes. Oh right. So if we've got six looms and one of those runs out every six minutes, that's one a minute. So you're going, you're adding the thread and well, the weaver takes her s his or her spare shuttle and puts it on here and gets it going. Now we've got a spare shuttle again, so thread into there onto whichever of the next room. So that's that's a full-time occupation doing that. In between, making sure that we don't break any threads. Because if we break threads, we get a fault in the cloth, and if the cloth is faulty, the weaver doesn't get paid for it because they're on piecework.

SPEAKER_01 15:43 Ah, yeah. Tell me a little bit about this piecework system then, because um it I think it sounds quite unusual to a modern ear to think that you're you know only getting paid on what you produce.

SPEAKER_00 15:55 Originally they did only get paid on the piece, on a piecework. When of course we're talking about weaving being a hand loom job in your own home, and you got paid according to the length of the cloth that you actually made.

SPEAKER_01 16:11 Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:12 When it became mechanized, that system came with it, so you were paid according to the length of cloth that you made. Now, it must be the case, I think, that a level of faults would be accepted. Because I don't quite see how you can make perfect cloth all the time. But if you were the customer, you would say, Well, I'm not paying for this rubbish, it's full of knots, it's full of whatever. So they had to make high-quality product. And if your weaving wasn't good enough, you're out.

SPEAKER_01 16:48 It's quite brutal, really.

SPEAKER_00 16:50 Oh, yes. Yeah, I say, I'm sorry, you're not good enough. Possibly, you could then go down, I'll say down the road, it might have been across the road or up the road, but you go to some other mill where their product is more amenable to faults. It's a lower quality product. I mean, if this is high-quality toweling, you don't want faults in it. If you're weaving sort of your overall material, perhaps you can be more a little bit more um lax. Lax, that'll do. So you go and you work in such an environment, but your wages are less because the wages are calculated on the amount of cloth that you make and the product the the quality of the cloth and they're set on that basis.

SPEAKER_01 17:32 For this reason, was it quite common for the people working in the weaving shed to sort of try and get a few more hours here, in here, there, and everywhere?

SPEAKER_00 17:43 They were very keen on getting the maximum amount of time that they could, because that maximized wages. So they started promptly and they didn't stop during the day if they could. Well, they had to stop at dinner time, but they didn't stop if they didn't have to, because they need the product. That gives them the money.

SPEAKER_01 18:01 So that's kind of a ten-hour shift, as you mentioned, potentially.

SPEAKER_00 18:05 Probably something like six or seven o'clock in the morning until the same in the evening. It depends what the daylight hours are.

SPEAKER_01 18:11 I guess you couldn't sneak in and in the night time and carry on because you need the engine to be running.

SPEAKER_00 18:15 If you think it doesn't run, yeah. If the engine's not running, there's nothing running. So no, they didn't do that. But if you were late getting here in the morning, probably you wouldn't be allowed in because somebody else had come and they'd give your looms to some itinerant worker. Yeah you know, uh, there were a floating population of weavers who went round on spec hoping that they could get a job for the day. Um, and because you didn't get up in time and you didn't get your job today, and some other weaver got it, you didn't get any wages.

SPEAKER_01 18:51 Would it have been hard graft? Like would would this have been quite a taxing job for those doing it?

SPEAKER_00 18:56 Yes, I think it it would have been repetitive, it would have been ceaseless. It might not have been physically hard work, but it wouldn't stop. You're you're changing the the shuttle roughly one a minute. In that time, you've got to go to the end of the alley and collect more thread from time to time. You're watching to make sure that you're not making any faults. You know, it it's flat out work, although it's not physically demanding.

SPEAKER_01 19:30 Apart from the fact as a as a an office worker, um, you know, we've grown soft these days and we sit down most of the time. This would have been on your feet all day physically for a lot of people in today's world that would have been.

SPEAKER_00 19:42 Well they could have sat, they did have these, they did have those. Oh, okay. They had to be. It's very difficult to sit and do this job.

SPEAKER_01 19:49 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:50 So no, they didn't. They might have sat at dinner time. But you you can't, this isn't a sitting job, you just can't do it.

SPEAKER_01 19:57 And um, there were occupational hazards as well involved in operating heavy machinery like this, maybe rare, but things could happen, right?

SPEAKER_00 20:06 The greatest occupational problem was deafness. The weavers went deaf.

SPEAKER_01 20:12 Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:13 They got cloth ears. I mean, the noise of a 1200 looms going is catastrophic.

SPEAKER_01 20:18 Oh, is that where cloth ears come from? I don't think so.

SPEAKER_00 20:22 But very, very noisy, and in those days they did not have hearing protection. It was a different time, standards were different, expectations were different. You can't translate now into then. But a hundred years ago, weavers went deaf. That's it. Now it's possible to trap your fingers in this loom, and these days I doubt it would meet current requirements, but they weren't current requirements then, they were the requirements of the time. The shuttle could fly out of the loom, and there is a mark there where in this case that one did. So it hit that and it flew out. And if it hit the next weaver down, well, that weaver said tut tut or oh dear or some other phrase which sprang instantly to mind, you could be killed by a shuttle. It wasn't that common, but it happened.

SPEAKER_01 21:20 So how would the shuttle kill you? By because it's quite sharp on either end.

SPEAKER_00 21:23 Could it pierce you or I think it depends where it hits you.

SPEAKER_01 21:27 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 21:27 I mean, if that hits you on the elbow, it's not so bad. But if you happen to be bending down, it hits you on the ear.

SPEAKER_01 21:33 How fast would it have flown in?

SPEAKER_00 21:35 40 miles an hour.

SPEAKER_01 21:36 40 miles an hour. Wow, okay, yeah, because this is quite I mean, it's it's relatively small, but it's a really solid piece of wood with with with metal ends and the metal shaft uh running through the middle. So that that's a that's quite a bit of kit to be coming at you that fast.

SPEAKER_00 21:51 Do you want me to run a loop?

SPEAKER_01 21:52 Uh yeah, okay. Why not?

SPEAKER_00 21:56 I thought you were going to say, do you want me to um do you want me to hit you with a shuttle little? I wasn't going to say that, but I'm hoping this will lump.

SPEAKER_01 22:13 For those listening, they would have heard just how loud that was, and for those who are viewing, I mean, it is quite an I mean manic almost to watch it moving, and it's amazing. This bit of kit, which is well, how old is it?

SPEAKER_00 22:26 This one dates from about 1912, as far as we know.

SPEAKER_01 22:31 Wow, so over a hundred years old, and it's still operational. It still works. That noise amplified across all of those looms. You mentioned it it made them go deaf. It must have been such a strange, difficult environment to work in that. Um maybe you started to um kind of mask it out a little bit. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 22:53 There's some suggestion that the noise of a lot of looms is less damaged. To the hearing, the noise of one.

SPEAKER_01 23:01 Oh.

SPEAKER_00 23:02 Because with one loom, you hear the peaks and the troughs of the sound. Yeah. With a lot of looms, it's noise.

SPEAKER_01 23:07 It's even out.

SPEAKER_00 23:08 It's white noise, so it's evened out. But weavers went deaf.

SPEAKER_01 23:13 Okay, so they were sort of mouthing together.

SPEAKER_00 23:15 They did match, and of course, sign language works. But then as the weavers moved up and down the alley, there's some point, of course, where two weavers meet.

SPEAKER_01 23:27 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:27 And they had time to pass a few words and say, Have you heard about Fred or whatever? And no, what about Fred? And but then of course it was a much smaller community.

SPEAKER_01 23:39 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 23:39 So outside the mill, they probably lived quite close to the people that they worked with. So people did know what was going on. It was a I said it was a smaller world.

SPEAKER_01 23:50 Yeah, I mean, um if you were working in a loom like this, you you said you would have been living nearby, probably. Probably. So, and maybe you would rarely leave the place that you were born in.

SPEAKER_00 24:01 There were plenty enough examples of people who never went any further than than here. All the weavers for this mill would have lived in Barn Holswick. Just like all the ones who worked in Cone or whatever would have lived in Cone. There was no need for otherwise. And it would not be unusual for somebody to spend their entire working life, you know, within a hundred yard radius of where they started.

SPEAKER_01 24:25 Yeah, and you sort of marry your neighbour. Possibly. Um maybe you you know you go to the pub with all your friends after work, all your colleagues after work, who maybe you haven't even maybe sped one and a few words to.

SPEAKER_00 24:37 I I think the point is that it's a smaller community. You're familiar with the people who live in it. Those people whom you meet and you come across are the people effectively that you marry, that you live with, that you have children by and all the rest of it. So the world was simply smaller.

SPEAKER_01 24:57 Yeah, because I I love this idea of sort of like looking out for each other's children on your street, whereas like today we barely speak to our neighbours, so it's a straight.

SPEAKER_00 25:04 Well, the last weaver that we know of to have lived was a lady called Hilda Ellsworth. And she was born a couple of hundred yards down the road, and she always lived within a couple of hundred yards of that house. And when she went into care, it was in Barn Aldswick, and that was where she died. So she'd never lived outside Barn Aldswick. Now I don't know what she did with her life in the interim bit.

SPEAKER_01 25:31 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:31 But you know, there's plenty examples of people like that. They don't need to go anywhere else. The town provided all the facilities that they needed.

SPEAKER_01 25:41 And um, talk to me about the Weaver's Alley because there's an interesting story. Um, when I did the uh feature on the Bleach Packers at Catalyst Museum, a lot of people said that actually that uh their story was the basis of a song. I can't for the life of me remember which song they were talking about, but um actually the weaver's alley inspired a song as well, right?

SPEAKER_00 26:01 As far as I know, the looms face each other in pairs, so that there is a path between them down which the weaver can walk. So that is the weaver's alley. And I understand that Gracie Fields, the the you know, the Rochdale Canary, who sang a song called Sally, Sally Sally, Pride of Our Alley. I believe that not only is it related to the alley or the the where she lived, it's also to the weaver's alley, in that Sally was the best weaver in this alley. Right. It may not be true, but it sounds plausible enough to me.

SPEAKER_01 26:43 It's a good story, even if it's not true.

SPEAKER_00 26:45 Even if it's not true, it's a good story. Exactly. I mean, you know, what a politician's for. But um, you know, it's possibly so. We don't know a lot of the facts about this sort of thing. It's gone into history. And the fact that we don't know makes it more interesting. Because if you knew all the answers, there'd be nothing left.

SPEAKER_01 27:04 And the types of um cloth and material that would have been made on these looms, you've got one loom to my left which can do um writing, the other one can't. What sorts of um uses were uh these sort of being created for generally?

SPEAKER_00 27:18 The one on this side that you heard running is making a calico, and a lot of that went for what's called printer's cloths. Right. Um if you were going to print a design onto cloth, you need another, you need the the cloth that you're going to print onto with another cloth to carry the ink, and that was used as printer's cloths, but they made lots of other products, some of which are actually detailed on one of the exhibits, and I don't know what the devil they are. I mean, there's lots and lots of different names of things, and they they made Jeannettes. Jeanette. Yeah. What's a Jeanette? Well, I don't know either. But I mean, you know, they made these things presumably in response to a demand from the market.

SPEAKER_01 28:02 Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:03 Whatever demand that used to be. Whatever the demand was. The business model for Bancroft Mill, and I don't think it was unusual, was that you ordered some cloth, we looked at that cloth for you, and we worked out how many threads it had to the inch and what diameters and all the rest of it, and we gave you a price and we said, right, we'll weave you that cloth, we wove it, we gave it to you, and that's where we finished. What you do with it is your affair.

SPEAKER_01 28:32 We didn't care at that point.

SPEAKER_00 28:33 Well, we've done our bit, we've supplied it to you. You know, that that's what you wanted, that's what you got. I think that was the norm. I'm fairly certain that the people who managed the mills had a very good idea what these products were for because they worked in that trade. Mr. Nutter, for example, went to the cotton exchange in Manchester, and he went every, I think it was Tuesday mornings, every alternate Tuesday, to buy the thread that kept him going for the next fortnight. Now, most of this thread was probably spun in Stockport or Oldham, and it would be woven in Blackburn and Burnley, but he bought his thread so he would have a very good idea from the thread makers about it and what it was going to be used for and what everybody else was buying. He would buy this perhaps from stock. It would be on the train that afternoon to Barnalswick. In those days it had a railway, and we could be weaving it that afternoon before Mr. Nutter got back. So it could do it. But three-quarters of the world's cotton comes up the railway from Liverpool to Manchester. It's come from places like South Africa, Rhodesia, Egypt, Pakistan, it wasn't called Pakistan then, the eastern United States, India, places that were sort of British on you know on the and it goes back out again to clothe the British Empire. This is what Mr. Nutter's doing. This is world trade. He's expecting to make money. And when you see him, classic Victorian entrepreneur, except he wasn't a Victorian entrepreneur, but standing like I am somebody in this community. I'm on the council, I'm a magistrate, I'm something in the church, I'm whatever these things, you know, and I am a man of substance. That's what he was. Yeah. And he did very well.

SPEAKER_01 30:29 And it's amazing that this mill brought him to that position from having had nothing in the first place.

SPEAKER_00 30:35 All I can think of is that he managed by his own efforts to make enough money to build the mill. We don't know what it cost.

SPEAKER_01 30:44 And what kills the cotton industry eventually? Um, so in 1978, is it that this mill shuts down for good?

SPEAKER_00 30:52 It closed basically at the end of the year in 1978. Um, the final straw was that the council wrote to him and said, Look, we're fed up of mills making dirty smoke. The Clean Air Act has been in 1956, I think it was. Um there were various mechanisms in place to allow people to make changes, but the mill said no, we cannot do it economically. Trading conditions are just not good enough, we'll have to give up. Most of the trade either got exported to, shall we say, the Indians of this world, without meaning India. Anyway, it was exported with the technology. And don't forget that a lot of the cotton industry was replaced by artificial fibres. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:44 You know, nylon, terrolene. It's a it's a a modern story as as it is an old one. We we export uh a lot of our waste to other countries now, to the to developing countries, and and back then we were exporting our cotton production.

SPEAKER_00 31:58 It's never changed in essence. I mean, technological development is taking place always, and some process that used to be done is now not carried on anymore, or it's done differently. Certainly it's probably mechanised, so the the cotton industry just couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_01 32:20 And it's the we don't want the dirty work here. We're happy for it to happen somewhere else.

SPEAKER_00 32:24 Well, there's always a bit of that. But what happens, don't forget, is first of all, there's something like 2,600 looms and mills in Lancashire at the height of the cotton industry. Wow. They start Just in Lancashire. In Lancashire, yeah, they start to close. Perhaps the closure rate accelerates, but then for example, the firm that makes the shuttles goes out of business. And the firm that makes something else, the guy retires. There's lots of bits of leather on here, but the number of sources of leather perhaps diminishes. So the tanners close. Yeah. The mills close a bit more. Now the technical college that used to offer umpteen courses in weaving doesn't offer them anymore. The apprentice training school that trains weavers closes. It goes into a downward spiral.

SPEAKER_01 33:20 And you've got parallels today with AI replacing a lot of people's jobs. Um, and it, you know, one thing goes and it means a whole raft of other things goes as a result.

SPEAKER_00 33:29 Yes, it's just the same. I don't know what they do these days about giving employment to people who are perhaps less able or less adaptable than others, but the process, in essence, I don't think has ever changed. No.

SPEAKER_01 33:42 Well, Ian, it has been absolutely fascinating finding out all about the history of Bancroft Mill. And the fact that you keep this alive is just incredible. And you do have these open days where you s where you show people just what it was like when it was running back in the day, and people can come to see this quite regularly, right?

SPEAKER_00 34:00 Yes. The the engine run well, every three weeks we will fire the boiler and the engine will run in steam at full speed, just like it did when it was Bancroft Mill as a working mill. And all the bits of machinery that we've got that work will be working. So the public's entirely welcome to come.

SPEAKER_01 34:22 Well, if you want to see a slice of history here at Bancroft Mill, do come along to that. Ian, it's been a pleasure. Thank you for joining what we've done.

SPEAKER_00 34:28 Thank you very much indeed. Thank you.