Old Darwen Memories
These “Old Darwen Memories” were taken from "The Blackburn Weekly Telegraph", between the 17th of March 1906 and the 4th of August 1906.
Transcribed by Shazia Kasim.
Henry Hargreaves | Thomas Harwood Marsden | David Ainsworth | James Thomlinson | Mrs Watson
George Yates | John Duxbury | John Whalley | Mrs Sanderson | William Taylor | Nancy Hindle
John Chadwick | Thomas Pickersgill | Mrs Bury | Amos Waddicor | Mrs Scholes | Nicholas Fish
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 17 March 1906
A lady to whom I inquired the whereabouts of the residence of Mr. Henry Hargreaves first condensed that gentleman’s name to “Harry Hargreaves” and then informed me that no one bearing it lived in Cranberry Lane. I persevered. “He is fond of music and plays a fiddle…….”
“A fiddle”, her brow contracted in thought.
“Harry – oh, id’s Owd Harry fiddler yow wast. Ye’ should speyk English.”
Having delivered that crushing retort she gave me directions to go as far “as ever yo’ con see, then past a pub, through a gate, an’ there’s a well, isn’t there?”
I didn’t know, but admitted that probably there was.
“Well yo’ll find him at th’ fost o’ three beanses forther. They stand l’th bottoms in a field by theirsels”.
The road was rugged, but at the end of my journey in a commodious, comfortable cot, with a trim garden frontage, I found Mr. Hargreaves, a sturdy veteran, whose years exceed by one the allotted span, the remnant of Hargreaves’s fiddling hand, a quartette composed of father and three sons, who in the bygone days were in great demand at social functions.
“I’ve a fiddle there yet”, and he pointed to the chimney nook where it was hanging. “Many is the good time we had, my father, my brothers and I fiddling at dances and all sorts of do’s. I’ve played in all sorts of places. Once I was sent for by James Shorrock, grandfather of the late Alderman Christopher Shorrock, to fiddle for his Irish haymakers in a barn at Astley Bank, and I remember how he roared with laughter as the men jigged away to the music. And I fiddled at Johnson’s Theatre, too.”
“Johnson’s Theatre,” I remarked, “where was that?”
“It’s been a long while since then. They to come to Darwen for three months at a time, and they acted plays. They were plays about things that had happened, not makeups.
Nowadays plays are made, and things are done on the stage that never have been. It was different then, and when we had a murder or things like that it was acted to us. We had ‘The Factory Girl’, ‘The murder of Maria Martin, ‘Red Riding Hood’…
“The pantomime?”
“Oh no, a play. It was something that had happened. Old Joe Hall was the comic and he could sing.”
“Do you remember any of the old songs?”
“Well not the words. There was ‘Old Ann Tucker’, ‘John Brown’s Wife’, ‘Rock the Cradle, Lucy’ and a lot of others. But I can’t remember the words. There was plenty of singing in those days, especially on beef nights – when the farmers had their do’s.
For a period of something like eight and twenty years Mr. Hargreaves was card master at Top Factory, and this fact led us to chat of the changed conditions in the cotton trade.
“Factory folk are a lot better off than they were then”. Mr Hargreaves continued. “Why, when I was a lad the hours were long and the work hard. A big lad for his age would be started when he was seven years old, and I went it at eight.”
“As a half-timer?”
“Half-timer! No! There were no half-timers then. If you went into the factory you had to work all the day. I worked from six in the morning till half-past seven at night, and four o’clock on a Saturday afternoon”.
“And your wages were?”
“Two shillings a week. When I was going home with the first money I ever earned I was bobbing at a duck on a lodge bank, and I bobbed my two shillings into the lodge. We hadn’t to get a certificate to pass the doctor. When he came to pass us it was a case of looking as well as you could, and if you looked well you passed. My spinner got hold of me and rubbed my face with a cloth to make it look rosy and then he made me put two waistcoats on to look plump. And when the doctor saw me he opened my mouth and looked at my teeth, and said I’d do. They don’t do it like that nowadays. We worked at night by candlelight, for we had no gas, and the piecers would go round with the box snuffers when we were leaving off. They were not particular about running overtime or cribbing at meal times, for there was no inspector, to matter anything. Women are better off now than they were then...”
“In what way?”
“They need to work down in the coal pits about here, with breeches on, short skirts and caps on their heads. Some worked as drawers and some as thrutchers. The drawers had lumps of clay on their heads, and in this a candle would be stuck so that they could see where they were going. They had chains round their bodies, and these were fastened to the waggons they had to pull. The thrutchers had their caps padded, and they had to put their heads against the wagons behind and push for all they were worth. That was the work they were doing the day through in the pits – dragging and pushing the wagons.
“There was a lot of drinking in the old days, and men used to boast about how much they could sup, and make matches. There was one at a public-house and the man had to drink a gallon of ale, then so much water and then…..”
“And then what happened?”
“Then he died through it. But there were a lot of drinking matches of one sort or another. There was more ale sold then after twelve o’clock at night than is sold at many a public-house the day through. Beer-houses closed at eleven, but when they were shut the men used to turn it at the publics. You don’t see the same drinking now.”
We joined a veteran of 81 years “by the book”, Mr. Thomas Heys, and these two gentlemen chatted away about the times when they were boys. “Peace eggs” were mentioned and Mr. Heys joined in with a recollection of the old “pace-eggers.”
“They used to go round the district singing” he said “and two would be dressed in ribbons, another being the basket carrier. They had tinsel aprons on, and their hats, dressed with ribbons used to cost a good deal. Bill Smith and their Tom would start off through Darwen, Tockholes, Chorley and round Bolton back to Darwen again. They sang songs they had made up and practised for months.”
Mr. Hargreaves in the course of his memories told me an incident about the Egerton Band, with which he was connected when a young man.
“One of our players had bow-legs,” he said “and another was knock-kneed. When we were marching along playing the children used to lie down in the streets to find out what band was coming. When they looked under the instruments and saw the bow-legs and the knock-knees they would shout out ‘Egerton band’s coming!’”
Mr Thomas Harwood Marsden
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 24 March 1906
In political and religious movements at Darwen during the past half-century Mr Thomas Harwood Marsden of Lynwood Avenue has played a considerable part. A keen fighter and hard hitter, he is an interesting figure on any platform, for he is representative of that type of man who have raised Darwen from the position of a village to that of a fairly important town within the limits of the past century. Mr. Marsden may claim to be one of Darwen’s ‘pure-breds’. When the inhabitants of Darwen were few, and the houses were widely separated and far from numerous his ancestors lived in the district, and the combination of the names Harwood and Marsden is the 18-carat stamp of local antiquity, for representatives of the families bearing them lived about the hillside several centuries ago.
Mr. Marsden can tell interesting stories of Darwen as it was in the days of his boyhood, and he is the possessor of a rich store of anecdotes of the men who, at different periods, have played their proper part in Darwen’s life. He has laboured under many religious guides and political leaders and taken part in many exciting battles. When he was beaten, many years ago, for a seat on the Town Council, a local poet, accustomed to issuing broadsheets on the events of the moment, hit off several features of Mr. Marsden’s character in “a moving ditty” and invested his poem with the atmosphere of the man. He wrote:
"I’m a sworn foe to jobbery, trickery cant
A teetotaller, too, what more can you want?
And hate like poison all bluster and rant
Which nobody can deny."
Much water has run under the bridge since the days when that song was sung to the old tune of “The Roundheads are Rogues” and Mr. Marsden is now able to survey the happenings of his long life and compare the times present with those past.
“Some folks think that the world on the down grade”, he remarked to me, “and that the people are going to the dogs. But I don’t believe it. And why?
Because my experience proves to the contrary. When I was a lad my parents always saw that I attended the Sunday school at Lower Chapel. The chief business at Chapels then was mining, and when I was going to school on a Sunday morning, I have seen colliers who had been drinking all night, stripped naked, wearing nothing but a pair of clogs, fighting and kicking away at each other. We don’t have that sort of thing now. The public-houses are closed earlier, and there is not the brutal fighting there was when I was a lad. It was a common thing for a man to be so injured in a fight that he died, and with my own eyes I have seen men come from public-houses and go on the Lee, where they fought until one was killed on the spot. No, the world is getting better, not worse”.
We conversed about the drinking habits in the old days for some time, and in the course of our talk Mr. Marsden mentioned a notorious old-time “Hush Shop” which existed at Hill o’m Hoyle.
“A hush shop was a place where beer was sold without a license,” he said, “and this one was kept by an old man who went by the name of Jem Guy. He pretended to be a handloom-weaver, but he did not do much weaving, and had his loom in the house more as a blind than anything else. I drew in for Jem at one time when I was a lad. One day some men went to Jem’s for some fun, and to get cheap beer. Jem was weaving bandanas then. Well they got the beer they asked for, and just as Jem was expecting to be paid they shouted ‘Constable! Constable!’ as loud as they could, and pretending that the officer was coming and they would all be caught, they made a dash right through Jem’s warp, smashing it down, and through the window, just as if the Old Lad was after them. Jem dared not say a word, and he had to put up with it. He never had a successor in the game, but he was well to do, and made a lot of money, all with selling beer illicitly. I don’t know how it was he was never caught, for the brewery cart would come and stop before his house with barrels as it might have been a public-house. There used to be a lot of whiskey making about the moors, and it was brought down and sold to Jem. There was also a lot made about Pickup Bank, and it was brought over in farmers’ carts, and all sorts of secret ways.”
Mr. Marsden then told me the long story of how Lancashire starved in the cotton famine of the early sixties.
“Things were awful then,” he said, “no materials could be got to keep the looms going, the mills were locked up, and the operatives were thrown out of work. Misery and privation was suffered by the people and much of the keenest suffering was amongst those who said nothing but bore it quietly. Lancashire was starving. Soup kitchens were opened, and soup and bread were given out to the famished folks, and one of those kitchens was in the premises now occupied by the Independent Labour Party in Bury Street as a club. Relief came from many parts of the kingdom and even from America: I shall never forget flour coming from America. Three thousand pounds were given out in Darwen and Blackburn in clothing and kind. We were then in an awful state, for the folks had sold what they could. Outdoor work was organised to find the men a bit of something to do. The footpath down the side of the station, by the Albion, was made by the relief workers, and some of the footpaths on the moors were also improved. In order to keep the operatives out of the streets a day school was also organised in William Street, and sewing classes were started for the women. Well, the Relief Committee advertised for a school master, but none of the applicants suited and the Rev. Thomas Davies told them that he thought he knew a man who would do. The result was that I was appointed school master, along with Emanuel Gibson, who emigrated to America when the American war was at an end. We did not teach the abstruse sciences, for our students were carters, colliers and all sorts of people. A register was kept of the attendance of the adults, and if they did not turn up at school when they were not working they got no relief, for it depended on their attendance. We taught writing, reading and arithmetic – anything to get the dull times over.”
Mr. Marsden then told me the story of the important part which he, Elijah Holt, Hartley Ingham, watchmaker of Blackburn, at one time chapel keeper at the Park Road Congregational Chapel; Jacob Wearing, Richard Hedson, and others played in bringing about an improvement by interviewing Sir Charles Wood in London. But that is a long story and my space is full.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 31st March 1906
The hungry forties, and the thirties, too, come within survey in the period covered by the recollections of Mr. David Ainsworth, an interesting stalwart, who lives a link connecting today with the bygone yesterday. It does one good to creep into the confidences of a man who was born 79 years ago, who carries his great years with ease, and whose memory over all that great space of time remains fresh and clear. As Mrs. Acton Tindal wrote, in the days when he was a lad:
Before him stand ungarnished
The realities of life
My chat with Mr. Ainsworth naturally led him to talk of the hardships of the poor and working classes in the early thirties, and it was an incident, illustrating what was then endured, that he concluded by remarking, "I never had a halfpenny spent on my schooling in all my life, for my folks were too poor when I was a lad to lay out the very little money they had in that way. Old John Nuttall used to come over from Waterside with a wallet teaching reading and writing and he would say, "Now lad, don't open that book so wide, it'll want binding afresh."
Mr. Ainsworth then told me how learnt to knit healds under George Kay, and went to work at Bowling Green Mill, under the first Eccles Shorrock. When George Kay went with his family to America, Mr. Ainsworth was promoted to the position of being master heald-knitter at the factory.
"I was ten years old, and wore petticoats when I got that post, and I had 3s 6d a week for being the master heald knitter and for teaching others how to do the work. I was at Bowling Green Mill on procession through the town to the new mill in Union Street and we had dinner in the shed. That was a great day in Darwen. In our procession we had a lad named Walsh-he's dead now-and he walked wearing a frock, bonnet and shawl. He wanted to be a lass, and he walked with them. And he called himself Alice.
"Our folks were as poor as church mice, and all-round the standard of life for the working classes were very low. Flour was sixpence a pound, and everything else accordingly. It was porridge in the morning, porridge for dinner and porridge again at night and when the porridge-pot was put on the table it was helter-skelter with us children for the last spoonful, and sometimes we had words as to whose turn it was to scrape the pan out. We never had tea except on a Sunday and we had it then made from mint and sweetened with treacle. Two quarts of milk could be got for 1 1/2d, but we couldn't spare that money for luxury.
"We had a spell of hard times in 1843, when Hilton's failed. They had a paper mill where the India Mill and Dimmock's Mill is now, and when it stopped there was much suffering. No work could be got in the town. It was at that time the authorities to relieve the folk got them to cutting the old Dole Road. Where is that? It is what is called Police Street now, and the earth stood as high as the wall on the left-hand side. It was all cut out. The men were not paid in money. My stepfather worked all week for a score of potatoes and eight pounds of meat. There was some distress in those days.
"I was between ten and eleven years old when I got my first pair of breeches. My suit had brass buttons on, and trousers, and jacket were buttoned together. I worked on at heald-knitting until I started weaving. It was all work and bed for workers in those days. We were in the factory till half past seven every night, and till five o'clock on a Saturday afternoon.
Drifting in our conversation from the conditions of industry, Mr. Ainsworth said, " we had no policemen in the town then. There were constables in the daytime and watchmen at night. Old Bill Foo was one- his name was Fowler- and he had a curious way of expressing himself and was a great fighter. There was a dungeon in Back Duckworth Street; then there was one in Arch Street and another in the cellar of the Angel Inn. Eccles Shorrock was chief magistrate, and often when Bill had any prisoners to be tried he would march them down to the office at New Factory, where they would get their sentences. If it had not been for the watchmen a lot more folk would have been drowned when Bold Venture lodge burst on August 23rd. I don't think the lodge burst, but that it was a rain cloud which flooded us. It happened in the night-time and there were twelve drowned. I was living in the little houses at the Circus then, and when I came downstairs I splashed into water three or four steps from the bottom, and the hardware my mother-in-law sold was swimming about the kitchen. Two or three were drowned in a cellar under the Angel Inn, houses were carried away bodily from about Lumb Street, and a young lass named Nixon was carried away by the flood. There was a tremendous torrent, a regular flood, and the river running under the Circus lifted the roadway clean up and left a great gulf. That was an awful night for Darwen.
"I was one of the singers at the old Association Chapel, under George Hindle, who got his living by paving the streets. One Sunday we had a minister called Worrell. He was the superintendent minister, but only came to Blackburn about once in three months. Well, on this Sunday he gave George a very solemn tune. In those days the parson gave out the hymn two lines at a time, because the folks were too poor to buy hymnbooks. While we were singing the parson leaned over the pulpit to George and said, "will you go a bit quicker!" George replied, "Nowe". The parson said, "Will you try?" and "Nowe", said George. But while we were singing the next few lines George found is a fresh tune, and we finished the hymn to it, so that we sung it two tunes. The first time was "Richmond" and the second "St. Helens". The second had a rollicking movement. After the service the parson asked what the tune was changed for, and if we could not have sung a bit quicker, without getting a fresh tune, and George said, "Nowe; ah look here, if tha'll mind thy preyching an'll leave eaur singing aloane, tha'll hav enough to do".
Mr. Ainsworth then mentioned to me the names of some of the original members of the old Choral Society of which Joshua Baron was conductor. "There was John Grime, James Hargreaves, Simeon Cocker, Jeremy Hunt, John Hunt, George Hindle, Joseph Walmsley, John Briggs, James Briggs, Richard Crompton , Andrew Bury, John Fish, Thomas Fish, David Fish, John Fish Senior, Michael Jepson, William Jepson, Ephraim Eccles, Richard Entwistle, Arthur Kay, Robert Jackson, James Jackson, James Hindle, Betty Jepson, Sarah Fish, Sebulah Entwistle, John Thompson, and the two sisters named Law. I think they are all dead now but Ibean remember their names. And that is not bad for a man 79 years old". I agreed.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 7 April 1906
The romance of Lancashire Industry is a story yet untold. It deals with men of grit and purpose, who from the humblest circumstances raised themselves and their families to positions of affluence and influence. The late Mr. Joseph Eccles was a cotton weaver, today his sons stand amongst the most respected and influential cotton princes in the County Palatine. Dr. Ballantyne worked as an ordinary carpenter the time he was attending lectures; he has been Mayor of the town in which he now resides. And amongst others, Mr. James Tomlinson, with whom I had an interesting chat a few days ago on life in the old days, is one who for his personal worth was honoured by his townsmen with the highest honour it was within their power to bestow- that of chief magistrate.
Mr. Tomlinson was born in the bad old days, 68 years ago, when child labour was exploited by manufacturers and by parents for what it would bring in. It was not unusual seventy years ago for children of the tender age of six years to be called into the workshop at the Livesey Fold Printshop at five o'clock in the morning and be kept working there until seven or eight o'clock at night for a miserable pittance of 3s. Times were hard, food was scarce and work anything but plentiful. The poor working classes were thankful for anything that was offered them and were glad to live.
Between 1830 and 1838 there was a slight improvement in working class conditions, and it was in 1838 that Darwen's deputy mayor was born. "Chapels was passing from the condition of an important district and was being overshadowed by the rapidly developing Darwen when I was born there on January 4, 1838" Mr Tomlinson told me. "Several collieries about Chapels were worked by the Brandwood's, who owned the Turncroft Estate. When I was eight I went to Dob Meadows to work. We were up at five o'clock, and in the winter time we were often at work until ten and eleven o'clock at night. Little attention was paid to education, but when the Factory Act was altered, Eccles Shorrock opened a half-timers school at William Street where the Reform Club is now. Thomas Holden was the schoolmaster and the education he gave us was of a very elementary character. We were very unfortunate in our school days because we had to adapt our attendance according to the calls of our work. We might go to school half-time for one week, and then for three or four weeks never see the place. When we missed like this all we did was to take the attendance book to the schoolmaster, and he would mark it up for the inspector just as though we had been regularly present. Things are not done like that nowadays."
Mention of the approaching Eastertide reminded Mr. Tomlinson of the "pace-egging" of the old days.
"About now", he said, "the pace-egg poets would be busy producing their doggerel rhymes for the men who, gaudily dressed, went about the district singing. The rhymes were generally somewhat vulgar in character, but at times, fairly good poems were written. One excellent song was written about Walsh's mill. At the time there was a big strike, and we had the plug-drawing riots. It was a long tussle, and the people were very riotous. One man was shot and five were wounded by the military, thirty-three of the rioters being imprisoned. I was quite a child when these occurred. All the windows at the George Inn were smashed one night because a relation of the Walsh's was staying there, and the people took revenge on anyone connected with the master. Dicky Catlow, at Chapels had his windows smashed. The weavers who were knobsticking were accompanied home by crowds, who hooted and pelted them. The soldiers came, and the Riot Act was read in front of what is now the Greenway's Arms, which was then kept by a man whose nickname was Billy-go-Deeper. There was a big hole at the bottom of Hacking Street, filled with pebble-pavers, and on one occasion while rioting was going on the hole was emptied. Long Bill, who was then Police inspector, had his head split with a stone. They were rough times, and when anyone's windows were broken in the nighttime the blame was placed on the shoulders of old Calico Jack. He was a recluse who lived for a long time at Red Delph. The gorse on the moors he cut to make besoms, and he brought these down into the town to sell".
The beginning of Darwen Fair was mentioned, and Mr. Tomlinson told me that it had its origin, he had been told, in the rejoicings attending the coronation of Queen Victoria. "All the clubs and friendly societies had dinner at their clubhouses, and it became known as dinnering day. The day was afterwards kept up, and stalls and hobby-horses established themselves in what came to be known as the fair. There has been some talk of changing the date of the fair, but that would be a mistake, because the fair as it is now held really marks an historical event".
"When a young man I was a member of the Temperance Band, which was in existence nearly a hundred years ago, and the 50's we went to London to play at the Crystal Palace in a contest. We were supplied with a form to say what prizes the band had won and was put down that it had gained a first prize, but it was not stated that occurred forty years before. The band is of very great age. Old Jeremy Leach played the bass trombone in it when a young man, the late Joseph Eccles, father of Alderman Eccles, was a member, and so was Richard Eccles, father of of Mr. James Eccles, the organisor of subscription concerts. We didn't win a prize but we took part in a concert in which 2,000 brass instruments were conducted by the late Enderby Jackson. We were supplemented by 24 military side drummers, and there was a gong drum which stood seven feet high. Two men stood, one on each side, and they were without coats. In the forte passages them men drummed away as hard as ever they could. Although our band did not win we created a very good impression."
Mrs. Joshua Watson
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 14 April 1906
The tales of the people are voices of power,
That echo in many a land:
They lighten the heart in the sorrowful hour,
And quicken the labour of hand.
When Christopher Welsh and his family, more than a hundred years ago, came to Darwen from Wales, the history of the Valley was in its infancy. Where houses, and mills, tradesmen's establishments, and workshops now exist in great numbers, there were then verdant meadows, and the dwellings were few. The history of Darwen as a town of much importance can almost be ascertained from the lips of men and women who are amongst the living today.
"There were fields in the centre of Darwen", I was told by Mrs. Joshua Watson, who lives in Livesey Fold, and who is a granddaughter of Welsh, "and along the east side of the town when I was a child; indeed, I could have counted all the houses in the town in three hours. But there have been great changes since then, and I have seen town grow larger and larger. It is now nothing like what it used to be."
Mrs. Watson has passed the allotted span of years by three, but she still possesses a vivid recollection of incidents in the long past, of men and women who left the impression of their character and their work upon the history of the times in which they lived, and who had something to do in making Darwen what it has since become. Her father was Robert Greenwood, a well-known man, who occupied a little shop next to the "Association Chapel" in Duckworth Street and was the only shoemaker in Darwen nearly eighty years ago. Although now hemmed in the heart of the town today, it was then almost on the fringe.
"There were open fields almost all about when I was a child," Mrs. Watson said, "just a few cottages and a shop in Duckworth Street and a house and shop at the top of Union Street. Darwen was little more than a good-sized village, and there was also the smaller cluster of dwellings at Chapels.
"I remember well enough the first Eccles Shorrock, who was the pioneer of manufacturing by steam power. He was very tall, rather stout, and exceedingly good looking. Few men have had so much influence upon Darwen's progress. He had the first cotton mill in the town, the Top Factory, and I also remember his second, the New Mill, being built in Union Street, where he had erected a number of cottages in which his work people lived. He also opened the first proper day school in the town, the half-timers' school at William Street, and I was one of the scholars under Thomas Holden, uncle to Councillor John Holden, the cotton manufacturer."
Before the railway line was laid between Blackburn and Bolton, Darwen had to depend upon the old stage-coach services, and Mrs. Watson well remembers how these passed through the town.
"They were like omnibuses", she said, "and sometimes they would be drawn by four horses, but more often by two only. When there were letters to deliver, or passengers to put down, they would stop at what is now Gregg's Hotel. There was no cheap tripping then, and it was looked upon as a great thing to go away. Folks would save up their money to have a few days at Blackpool, and they travelled there in carts, sitting on chairs. It was an all-night journey, and they kept themselves waken by telling tales as they travelled along the road. When they went on chairs, they always reckoned to stay a week, for it was a great event, but Blackpool was not what it is now, there were only very few houses, and folks didn't spend much.
"The people lived poorly-porridge two or three times a day, and occasionally boiled carrots and turnips. There was a lot of drinking indulged in, and fighting was common amongst the men. Behind the old Grey Horse, where Police Street is now, there was a style at the top of Bury Street, and it led to a meadow. It was a common occurrence for men to come out of the Grey Horse and go out into the meadow to fight. I saw two men kicked to death during fights of this sort, and the men who did it were transported.
"You will have heard of old Aggie's. It is a name given to an old house at Stepback now, but it was really that of an old woman who, with her husband, lived for years at that lonely spot. I never heard their surname, and they were always known as Old Aggie and Old Aggie's husband. One night, when the old folks had gone to bed, three men-one of them lived in Hacking Street-went out to Stepback to rob them. They crept into the house through a back window and wore masks over their faces so that they would not be recognised. One of them struck a match, but the noise of this and the light wakened Old Aggie, and she roused her husband, who said to the men, "what is your will, tonight?" "Where is your money?" one of the men replied; and Old Aggie said, "we have none". But she and her husband were obliged to tell where their money was, and when they had secured it, the men stunned the old folks by striking them behind the head.
"Next day the men were somewhat easily caught, and they were tried and transported for 21 years. About twenty years afterwards one of them sent a letter home saying that he should never return to Darwen. He was courting the daughter of the Governor and was about to be married."
Mrs. Watson told me how the elder Greenway, uncle to the Revd. Charles Greenway, bargained for the removal of the bell from the old Methodist Chapel, because he did not like its sound, and she also related a story of an early tea-party at the school.
"It was a tea-party for old folks", she said, "and there were cockles and mussels, toasted buts and mechody cream."
"What was that?"
"Rum and tea-and that was the only party at the school at which it was served."
Mrs. Watson was one of four young ladies who had the first ride in a truck on the railway when it was opened between Spring Vale and Darwen in 1848.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 21 April 1906
In the year 1830, which may be said to mark the beginning of Darwen's great development as a cotton manufacturing centre, there was born on the hill-top at Belthorn, George Yates, the youngest member of a large family, all of whom were handloom weavers. Seventy-five years have passed and another is running its course, and in that span of time Mr. Yates, who now lives in Stanfield Street, has seen many changes in the customs and conditions of the people amongst whom his life has been entirely passed. To the heights of Belthorn, isolated as that district was from the growing towns, the new methods came slowly to the people, and in the boyhood of Mr. Yates the handloom weaver continued to pick the shuttle.
"There were eleven in our family", Mr. Yates told me "and we had eight handlooms, six in the shop and two in the rooms above. Nearly every house was provided with its weaving shop. The warp had to be sized. Some sorts had to be woven from the cop and others from the bobbins. The bobbins we had to wind. I have woven bandanas, or silk on the handloom. How did we dispose of our cloth? To the chapman or merchant. There was one in Blackburn of the name James Bolton, and we had to carry our cloth in sacks on our backs from Belthorn to his place and bring back, our warps and weft from Blackburn in the same fashion. The cloth was always taken on Saturdays and before we were paid the cloth was examined. If there was anything wrong with it then we were baited, that is we had something stopped. Sometimes work ran short, and we could not get either warp or weft, and when this happened we had to walk to Blackburn again and again until we were lucky enough to get some.
"There was a lot of famishing in those days. Food was dear, and I have been two months at a time and never seen either sugar or tea—nothing but gruel. We had flour puddings, too and folks kneaded meal balls. They would roll it up, move a coal to one side, and then drop the ball on the hot cinders. When one of its sides was cooked, they would turn it over, and then when the whole was cooked, they would get hold of it with both hands and eat it just like horses. They would not do it now, if they did they would want a doctor fetching, thinking they were poisoned. I took a paper in and paid 9d a copy for it. I was the only one in that part of the country who got a paper. Folk would come seven or eight miles across the country to look at it, and to get the news.
"They did not start work in those days at Belthorn until about Thursday morning. On Mondays they played football matches, with Guide and Pickup Bank, and it was not like what it is now. There were generally a lot hurt, and when Bill o' George's had had a lot of ribs, and legs, and fingers to doctors, well, there had been a grand match. When Thursday came round everybody had to set to, for the cloth had to be in by Saturday or there was no money. They often worked all night on Thursdays to fetch up for their lost time".
With the decay of the handloom industry came hard times for those hill-top weavers. Mr. Yates told me of his own weary trampling about Blackburn and Darwen in search of work. One of his sisters walked to and from a mill in King Street, Blackburn, from Belthorn, night and morning, a total distance of about eight miles, and for her work at two looms she received 9s a week. Hard times for cotton operatives! Mr. Yates himself was amongst the crowds of deposed handloom weavers who besieged the power-loom mills seeking work. These old weavers went anywhere to learn the work, and then they sought employment. Once he obtained work at a mill in Furthergate, and night and morning he travelled the road between Belthorn and that district: often he was up to the middle in snow, and arrived at the factory, with clothes saturated, and had to change before he could go to his looms. And the food he had carried in a handkerchief was in a state of pudding. The plug-drawing riots at Lower Darwen he saw, as well as other serious disturbances, brought about by the great industrial revolutions which were taking place, but which people did not understand. Sad although those old days were, and hard, they had some redeeming features. Each district had some special trait of which it was proud. Belthorn was proud of its "Messiah singer".
"My father was a great 'Messiah' singer", Mr. Yates continued, "and there were nine or ten others. They were all self-educated men, who succeeded by their unceasing perseverance. Night after night they would spend practicing the 'Messiah' and 'Job's Anthem', that is in the seventh chapter of Job. There was one man at Belthorn named Ward, who wanted badly to be one of the 'Messiah' singers, but he was told that his voice was not good enough. Well, he went every morning away into an old delph, and there, alone he prayed that God would give him a bass voice. He did that for twelve months, and then his voice came to him, and it was as good as the voices of any of the others.
"Ward and his wife were bandana weavers and one week they were so placed that they could not finish their piece to take it to the merchant at Blackburn. He did shaving a halfpenny a time. In this particular week they had nothing to eat for about three days, and with the prospect of not being able to take their pieces in they were in a bad way. 'Never mind' she said, 'let us sing Dr. Wyatt's hymn, "The Lord will provide" and they set to. A few minutes later there was a knock on the door, and a man said he had brought a gentleman from London who wanted a shave. Ward set to, and when he had finished the shaving the gentleman asked him what he wanted. 'A halfpenny', replied Ward, and the gentleman put his hand in his pocket and gave him, not a halfpenny but a soverign. 'I can't change this', said Ward looking at the coin, 'for I don't think there is so much money in all Belthorn'. 'Never mind', replied the Londoner, 'I do not want any change'. When his wife took her basket and went to the grocer's, she had to explain to him where she got the money from before he would change it, and then he said, 'I don't believe you."
Mr. Yates lived at Belthorn when Protection was oppressing the people and making existence for them most difficult. He also lived there when the great fight was taking place in Parliament for the abolition of the Corn Laws. A man was sent every morning from Belthorn to Blackburn to get to know the news of how the fight was going on. And one day he came back with the glorious tidings that the Corn Laws were abolished. He carried a big loaf on a pole, and it was a signal to those poor handloom weavers who had suffered under the system of Protection and they turned out and rejoiced.
An interesting incident in Mr. Yates's life is the fact that he walked to Macclesfield, 47 miles away, afterwards taking the train into Staffordshire, to witness the public execution of Palmer, the notorious poisoner.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 28 April 1906
It is almost incredible that a man whose personal recollections embrace the whole local history of cotton manufacturing by steam power is still to be found employed at a Darwen mill. Nevertheless, it is true. Mr. John Duxbury- whom I saw at his cosy cottage in Blackburn Road-is more than 84 years old, yet six o' clock each morning sees him at Brookside Mill, where he is employed. Until he was 76 years of age he was a tackler, there, and accustomed to carrying on his shoulder beams weighing 12 score, and sometimes more, but today his occupation is of a lighter type.
"Our folks," Mr. Duxbury told me, "were handloom weavers and lived in the cottages just below Bank Terrace in Bolton Road. That was in the country for them, for there were fields all round. They had six handlooms, and I was the bobbin winder. That was in the [18]20s, when George IV was on the throne. When William IV was crowned we all went to the Top Factory, with our pots and coffee was served to us. Top Factory had just been built before 1822, when I was born. Carr, Hatton and Co. were fitting it up. There was to be weaving on the bottom floor, the room above was the cardroom, and throstle spinning was carried on in the next room. I was only a lad when the loom smashing riots took place. The hand loom weavers thought they were to be done out of their living by the steam power looms—work being very scarce—and a great mob came from Blackburn and were joined by our own handloom weavers. Eighteen power looms were smashed, and one woman who stole a shuttle was transported.
The shuttles were less than those of the handlooms. The folks were very bitter against the power looms and there were a lot transported over the riots. My eldest brother was one of the loom smashers, and when the soldiers came he took his hook. Hounds were turned out to hunt the rioters, and when he was coming home again he had to run into a sewer to hide. He heard the soldiers tramping over his hiding place, and the hounds came some way up the sewer sniffing, but they did not come far enough. That night he stayed inside that sewer and until the following night. The soldiers having left by that time he came home. He was an apprentice to William Livesey, who had a loom shop at th'Hill o'm' Hoyle. Livesey had several apprentices, lads and lasses, and they were verbally bound to serve him for two years.
"A lot of work was taken to Blackburn by the weavers, who carried it in sacks on their backs, and brought back in their warps and weft in the same way, but work was also put out by John Walmsley for a man I only knew as Old Jack. Neddy Gregson also put out work at Knott Mill. He had twenty-four looms there and they were worked by a water wheel. I think those would be about the first power-driven looms in Darwen.
"Darwen was little more than a hamlet then. Folks did pretty much as they liked, and there was a lot of drinking and carrying-on. The public houses were open night and day- from twelve o'clock on Sundays till midnight on Saturdays. They opened again at six o'clock on Sunday morning till serving time. Then they closed, but as soon as the service was over they opened again. I often saw drunken folks turning into church. The hand loom weavers never reckoned to work on Mondays, and sometimes they took Tuesdays and Wednesdays as well.
"I was about eight years old when Eccles Shorrock came. He had been running Dandy or Boggart Factory, at Blackburn. It stood where the Palace Theatre is now, and was Boggart Factory, because the weavers said they could see boggarts in the old churchyard through the windows. They said they saw them every night. Top Factory was empty, for I played in one of the rooms. I was about seven when I went to work as a full-timer at Livesey Fold as a teir boy, and we worked twelve hours a day at the least. Regularly we started at six o'clock in the morning, and if we got away by seven or eight at night, we were let off soon. Well, Eccles Shorrock took Top Factory, and I was one of his first workmen, starting with him about a month after he bought the place, in 1830. There were a few throstle spinning frames, a winding machine, and a warping mill, and he sold warps to the handloom weavers. I was a throstle spinner. That was really the beginning of manufacturing by steam power in Darwen. Steam power looms were put in the mill four or five months later."
We talked of the growth of the cotton industry, and Mr. Duxbury traced it step by step, and in his story the handloom weavers receded from the picture as the power loom weavers came into prominence. He told me of the plug-drawing riots, and how the prisoners were taken on coaches to Blackburn to be tried, many of them being transported and never again seeing their home district.
"Eccles Shorrock was always keen on education, and he got a man named Mr. Wells to come to the mill and give us lessons," said Mr. Duxbury. "When we were at liberty from our work we could go up to him for a lesson. Education was looked upon as a luxury, and working folk were too poor to pay for it".
Mr. Duxbury learnt to weave on the power looms at Belgrave Mill, where cotton manufacturing was carried on by Mr. Edwin Potter, uncle, to Mr. John Gerald Potter, who had 100 looms. There was only one tackler, a man named Thomas Turner. Work was often started at half past five in the morning and it went on till about eight o'clock at night.
An interesting remembrance of Mr. Duxbury's was of the old racecourse. "The races were held on the site where the Duckworth Street Chapel is now, and folks came for miles to attend them. The jockeys used to ride coloured costumes, and there was always a lot of betting. They were abolished, and the last of the races we had at Darwen were at Bob th' Knowles's Farm, on the Moor head.
Mr. Duxbury remembered the old head constable, portly Tom Greem and his powerful assistant, Bill Foo, whose eccentric method of dispensing justice is the subject of many good stories. Then came the police force.
"After we got the police", said Mr. Duxbury, "there were some robberies committed in the night-time, and the shopkeepers got frightened, and thought they were being done by the officers themselves. So they organised a fund and engaged two watchmen, who went round during the night watching the police and anybody else. Every hour those men shouted out the time and told the characters of the weather."
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 05 May 1906
On a Christmas Day four and sixty years ago, when Darwen was developing from its village state, in which it had remained from the days when it was no more than a hamlet, a wayside cluster of dwellings, when the cotton industry was assuming those great strides with which it traversed the whole district, there was born at a little house in Arch Street, a house still standing, John Whalley. The son of an ardent temperance advocate, he followed in his father's footsteps, and as a politician he trod where his father had walked. The father was the most eloquent speaker who, from the ranks of the toilers, ever advocated the principles of Liberalism and progress: the son has taken part in many a strenuous political fight; at election after election has pleaded for the cause, and on behalf of the party whose banner he has upheld has been inspired to write many stirring songs and rhymes. It is as a politician that Mr. John Whalley is best known. In that character he has greater fame and popularity than many of those who have been merely observers of changing customs and conditions in the life of an earnestly industrious people whose progress is common history.
Temperance came slowly into the lives of a people in the days when it was fashionable to be a drunkard, and when a man who could sit the night through consuming liquor was a fine gentleman and good citizen. Yet there were men who saw the evils of those early times, and who joined hands with those who were making for total abstinence. Mr. John Whalley's father was one of the men who withstood the temptations of the age in which he lived. His excellent example was followed by his son John, who 56 years ago joined with the Temperence Society, and is today one of its members.
In the course of these recollections of Darwen's old inhabitants, the name Hill-o'm-Hoyle has cropped up more than once, and naturally so. It was one of the oldest districts and has now disappeared. Mr. John Whalley, with whom I had a chat a few days ago, remembers well its character, and its receptacles for 'the bottom dogs'. Some of the houses within its area were of interest because they were in earlier times the homes of the original men of Darwen, but at a later period many of them became the resorts of the illicit whiskey distillers, of preachers, and others whose lives were not of the higher type. In early days illicit distillers existed in fair number, and Mr. Whalley has recollections of one whose popular name was 'Wigan Bob' and who was a notorious offender. This man suffered imprisonment on more than one occasion, but continued his manufacturing, nevertheless, selling the concoction to people of the district in which he lived, and even allowing some to drink it upon his premises. "There was also a lot of whiskey made on the moors, in secret places," Mr. Whalley told me.
"Poaching was very common, too, amongst the rougher characters, who took game from the moor, and also from Sunnyhurst Woods, which were then preserved. They covered the hills right away through Stanhill Woods and knew every trick. One of them whom I knew had a black dog which went about its work just like a human being.
"It was Hill-o'm-Hoyle which experienced the full force of the flood of 1848. That was a terrible night. I was then living in Arch Street. Even more terrible still it might have been had not the fact that the embankment of the Bold Venture Lodge was giving way been discovered just when it was. The policemen and the town watchmen were about the streets, but the people were sleeping, many of them in the cellar dwellings with which the district abounded. It happened that some of the workmen of Mr. Eccles Shorrock, employed at New Mill, went out to see how the pipes were through which the water came from Bold Venture Lodge. When they arrived, they saw the danger, and realised the possible consequences. The water was tearing down the embankment and was descending upon the heart of town in great volumes- in a flood. They fled down to the dwellings, roused the people- as many as they could- and alarmed the town. The majority escaped, but nine were drowned. Two died in the water in the cellar beneath the shop of Mr. Roan, saddler, in Green Street. My father saved two lives that night, and those were the only people in grave peril who were rescued. Two dwellings were washed away."
It is, however, as an ardent politician that Mr. Whalley is best known. He was interested in politics even in those days when Darwen was struggling, and in an electoral sense was considered to be of small account. Previous to that of 1868 he remembers no election to have taken place at Darwen, or the people to have been keenly alert on the question of their local representation. But Mr. Whalley was not alone, he told me, in those who went down to Blackburn and saw the old hustings on the wrangling.
"There were lively doings", he said. "The candidate and their supporters occupied platforms within barricades, and after the notices were read and the appeal made for a show of hands the fun began. The Tories generally secured the verdict of the chairman on the show of hands, and the Liberals would then demand a poll. Then it was that the proceedings became lively: indeed, there were riots on a small scale. Stones were thrown about, and often people were injured.
"It was in 1868 that Darwen Liberals, as part of the North-East Lancashire Division, had the present Duke of Devonshire and Mr. Grafton for their candidates, and the Tories Messrs. Starkie and Holt, and at that election we saw the last open hustings."
Following that election was established William Street Reform Club, a home of political stalwarts. Amongst the founders was Mr. Whalley, and others were Mr. Thomas Harwood Marsden, Mr. Benjamin Fish, a cloth looker for Mr. Graham Fish, Mr. Fish Fish, and Mr. Ralph Hindle, a winding master. Mr. (now Alderman) John Tomlinson was its first secretary. From its commencement to the present time Mr. John Whalley has been connected with it and during four years occupied the position of president. His life story embraces the history of many great movements, and "as a debater, a speaker, and a reciter," it is recorded in an illuminated address presented to him by the club in 1892 that he has done his duty.
Mrs Sanderson
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 12 May 1906
Let’s fondly cherish old memories true,
Deep in affection’s shrine
And we gladly turn aye for them years
To the friends of Auld Lang Syne
Luddism, the movement against the use of machinery, which obtained such vogue in Lancashire and Yorkshire, had been stamped out by the execution of eighteen persons and the imprisonment of seventeen more when Mrs. Mary Sanderson, better known as “Old Mary Whittaker”, who now lives in Peabody Street, was born in the almost district of Harwood Fold, Eccleshill, but she came soon enough into the world to witness stirring scenes and great industrial development. Then the great cotton industry of today was in its swaddling clothes, and the population of the district below 6,000. It was in 1819 that Mrs. Sanderson was born and at that time Darwen was in its primitive state.
“There were not many houses when I was a girl,” she told me during our conversation. “There were some at Chapels, and then there were fields all the way down to Darwen. We had to go by Robin Bank, and at the bottom of Union Street, near, where the Higher Grade School is now, there was the river, and we had to cross on stepping stones to get to Darwen. Chapels was a little village of itself, and there was Blacksnape and Darwen, the three being separated by fields.”
Mrs. Sanderson lost her parents when she was quite a little mite, and, in consequence she came into association with ancestors, who link her with the early part of the eighteenth century. Her grandfather, William Duckworth, with whom she went as a child to live, had occupied the house at Harwood Fold for more than sixty years, and in that time had combined the occupation of a farmer with that of a handloom weaver, then the staple industry of the district.
“Thomas Kenyon had a school at Hey Fold- it was called an academy- and I was lucky enough to be sent there when I was a little girl,” Mrs Sanderson told me “but education was not much thought of then. Folk were poor and times were hard, and it was a case of everyone getting to work as soon as they could. I could only have been six or seven when I started working as a bobbin winder. My grandfather had seven pairs of handlooms in the loom house, and boys and girls used to come to him to be taught to weave. I don’t know that they were apprentices to him- a thing that was common- or that he paid them wages while they were learning. I went on bobbin winding until I could reach the treadles with my feet, and then I became a handloom weaver, and have woven both cotton and silk.
“There were a number of handloom weavers about Chapels,” said Mrs. Sanderson, and history supports her, for, in addition to J. Pickup of Chapels, Old Eccles, and others mentioned in a record of the time, there is proof to be found in some old Icon houses still standing but decreasing in number, “and they had to work hard to get a living. But on Mondays they never worked. It was the day on which they had what they called the ‘uppings’ that was their football match. It wasn’t football like what we have now. There were two walls, and the players who punched the ball most often over their opponents’ wall won the game and took the stakes. They played for money- that is, the players would put a shilling apiece down, and the winners would take the lot, and after the match go off to the alehouse to spend it. The teams came from Tarton and Guide and other parts, and once when Chapels went to play Guide there was a song I remember, which ran:
There was Charlie, and George Harwood
And Nathaniel Hunt beside
The three best footba players
That ever went to Guide
Mrs. Sanderson has a vivid recollection of the old racecourse to which reference has on more than one occasion been made. When a child, she remembers having accompanied her grandfather to the races, and, with all the crowds of people who had come from all parts, they sat on the hillside at the Top o’ th’ Robin.
“There were always great doings at Darwen races,” she said, “and along with the club walks they were the events of the year. The publicans had wooden huts round the racecourse, in which they sold drink, and there were a few stalls where food was sold. The course stretched right away from Union Street down below Peabody Street, the horses would race round, and round until it was over. They started and finished at the Union Street end of the course. The jockeys wore red, blue, yellow and other coloured jackets, and there was plenty of excitement.”
In her early days Mrs. Sanderson was in the singing pew at Lower Chapel- “th’ Higher Chapel,” she called it, and it is by that familiar name the historic sanctuary is known amongst old Darweners. Richard Eccles, a son of Nathaniel Eccles, of Dandy Row, was the singing master. There was a bass fiddle at Lower Chapel, and on it, the accompaniments were played. After the split, she said, “the fiddle was taken down to Duckworth Street and Will Jepson played.”
It was when she had married and gone to live at Hoddlesden that Mrs. Sanderson, at that time Mrs. Whittaker, came to know Jeremy Hunt. The Congregationalists of Pickup Bank were then worshipping in an old cottage, and it was Jeremy who taught them how to sing and also perhaps, inoculated the district with that keen love for music which is such a prominent feature at the present time. Jeremy urged the building of a schoolhouse, and a builder was got to do the work. The people themselves provided him with the material. Men and women and children went out with sacks and different things, and they gathered stones from the beds of the hillside streams and any place where they could be found, and took then across the bleak rough country to the site where being brought into existence a building in which so much good work was afterwards to be done. Mrs. Sanderson herself carried stone there in her apron and was proud of her burden.
Mrs. Sanderson’s life has been one of strenuous worthy effort. She has passed through interesting times, and witnessed great changes in customs and methods in the 67 years she has lived. As a woman of the people, she has played her part worthily, and it must indeed be for her a proud reflection that she lived to see one of her daughters, her eldest – Mrs James Tomlinson- in the high position of Mayoress of Darwen.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph, 19 May 1906
The Leaches, who at the beginning of the last century, and still nearer to our own times, had associations with Holden Fold, are amongst the oldest families of Darwen. Their history stretches back over centuries, and their lives as farmers, coal-getters, and handloom weavers is incorporated in the annals of the district. It is through his grandfather on his mother’s side—Mr. Joshua Leach—that Mr. William Taylor, now of Rosehill Terrace, has kinship with the family.
Much of the property at Holden Fold was owned by Joshua Leach, and, as proving the antiquity of the family, it may be mentioned that it been sold on lease extending over seven lives. Joshua was the last of the seven Leaches who had held the houses under the lease, and before his death, he purchased the property out, so that it passed on to be divided amongst the members of his family who survived him. Those houses he had in the Dole times, and the fact that he had to pay rates and taxes at a time when his tenants were unable to pay him rent owing to their poverty placed him in a very unfortunate position. He was not only a handloom weaver, but also a manufacturer of the looms until the time when there was no demand for them owing to the advent of the power looms.
Mr. William Taylor, with whom I talked at his home a few nights ago, gave me a graphic picture of those olden times when “it was all work.” Himself three years beyond the span allotted man, he was set to work 68 years ago at the loom house of his grandfather, winding bobbins for the handloom weavers. He was five years of age at that time. His grandfather had seven pairs of looms in the Holden Fold loom house, and amongst the weavers who worked for him were Nathaniel and Andrew Hunt James Lightbown. Education was not thought of in those early days, and bread-winning was the chief thing to which even a child of most tender years should supply its hands. It was in those hard times for children that Mr. Taylor received his industrial education.
“I was bobbin winding till I was nine, and then I went drawing at old Engine Pit at the closes near Harwood Fold,” he told me, “I was working for my uncle, Thomas Hutchinson--Tum o’ Ned he was called, because his father’s name was Ned. There were girls and young women working in the pits. They wore breeches, like lads, and with a chain fastened round their waists and passed between their legs they would draw the sledge—not tubs, but sledges—in a bent position just like dogs. My aunt was a drawer. Their way was lighted by a candle fixed in clay and stuck on the end of a sledge. Very young lads were employed in the pits, some when only seven or eight years of age, and that was because men’s prices would not be paid. We went into the pit about six o’clock in the morning, and we had no fixed time for coming out. We were let loose when the work was done, and that was very often late at night. The colliers had no fixed time for starting, and we were never sure of them, owing to their rough drunken habits. They came in just when they liked, but we had to there at six o’clock. There was a lot of drinking then. Men did not think they were men unless they could drink a lot, and I remember that a stranger came into the house we kept then—the Oddfellows’ Arms—and treated the colliers to beer. When he left they pretended that they would lead him to Darwen, but instead of doing that they led him to the Top o’ th’ Rough and nearly murdered him. They left him for dead, but he climbed a fence, crossed a field, and lay hidden until next day. The men were caught at Tythebarn—one was called Little Harry o’ Roger’s, and the others were named Taylor. They got fifteen years each and were transported. They never came home again.
Mr. Taylor then told me how Bold Venture, the title of one of the town’s lovely parks, obtained the name. “It was through my grandfather, George Taylor, on my father’s side,” he said. “He had been a journeyman calico printer for Greenway’s printing ‘rainbows’ and he decided to start in business for himself. He took a little hut, right away in the corner at the top end of the lake, and the people called it a ‘bold venture’ on his part. The description stuck and the place is called Bold Venture to this day. He had a garden at High Lumb Hoyle, and grew very big gooseberries. I don’t know whether his speculation was a good or a bad venture, but they worked on their hut for some time, and then gave up. He died about 60 years since.
“There was a lot of handloom weaving done about Blacksnape and although many of the loom houses have been altered, they can be picked out very easily to this day. The weavers were very badly paid when I was a lad, although they had been paid better in earlier times. We had to work a week for 3s 9d, that is, we could weave three pieces and we got 15d a piece for them. These had to be carried to King Street, Blackburn, to a place called “the old woman’s” because it was managed by a woman. She ran the warehouse, received the pieces and put out the work.
“I went to work for John and Joseph Place as a weaver when I was ten years old. We were supposed to be there at half past five in the morning, but that meant a quarter past, and we were there till about eight o’clock at night, and nearly six o’clock on Saturdays. My wage was three shillings a week. The wages for workmen on the Brandwood estate, either on the brow or in the Delph, were 12s a week, and carters, with two horses to look after, got 13s. The average wage of handloom weavers about us would not be above 5s a week. I remember that old Turner had silk in and he only made 10s”.
Mr. Taylor gave me some very interesting particulars about many old coal pits. In particular, of that at Heyfold, a yard mine, where the St. James’s Vicarage now stands, the old Hollins pit, which was opposite the present Industry Mill, and others. “There were a lot of little mines” he said, “all about – indeed there was almost one in every field for miles. Coal was sold 1½ cwt for 2½ d at some pits, and at Eli Walsh’s they were 11d a tub, which was more than 3cwt. The original road to Hey Fold was across the bridge which now leads into Woodfold Mill yard, and Ralph Sharples had a house at the end of the bridge. There were only fields about there, and I can remember when there was only one between Shorrock Fold (at the top of Police Street) and Sunnyhurst, and that was Nick Holden’s Farm, which was pulled down when St. George’s Church was built”.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 26 May 1906
The Shorrocks are amongst the most ancient of Darwen families. Centuries ago, so far back as the early part of the sixteenth century, representatives were living about the district, in particular at Eccleshill, and the name is to be found recorded at an even earlier period. The name, probably derived from sher rock or steep rock, as the late Mr. Abram believed, is one which goes back into the earlier life of Darwen – to the days when it was not even a village, and when dwellings were scattered here and there, great distances apart, over a verdant area. Mrs. Nancy Hindle, who now lives in Bolton Road, is a present-day representative of this ancient local family. She is a link which serves to connect the family chain of the Shorrocks, who are it is believed largely all of one stock. Before her marriage she was Nancy Shorrock, and by that name she was better known to old inhabitants than by the name she obtained upon her marriage. She was born at Darwen seven and seventy years ago, at the time when the district was just entering upon the prosperity which the introduction of steam power and new inventions had to produce from the cotton manufacturing industry. The days of her childhood were those which divided old conditions from the new. In her life she saw Darwen thrive in its infancy, cover vacant spaces with factories and with dwellings for the workers. She has witnessed the passing of many worthy and quaint characters from the district, and the unfortunate disappearances of many old and even historical landmarks. When I talked with her at the residence of her son, Mr. James Hindle, jeweller, she told me many interesting things of old Darwen places and faces.
It was at Dob Meadows Mrs. Hindle was born, and her father, Ralph Shorrock – a man well known to many of Darwen’s older inhabitants- was engineer at the print works which have been frequently mentioned in the course of this series of articles. At Dob Meadows Works it was that children were sweated and overworked in those days. They were deprived of the opportunities for obtaining education so that they could ‘addle’ two or three shillings by labouring over a number of hours adult men will not work in these better times. Early in the morning these dots of six and seven and eight years of age were called to work, and they were kept at it until seven, eight and even later hours at night. Fortunately, Mrs. Hindle was a girl and saw little of this system of child slavery.
James Shorrock, her grandfather, was uncle to the first Mr. Eccles Shorrock, a man who had more than a little to do with setting Darwen upon its feet, but it was not with that branch of the family that Mrs. Hindle came most closely in touch in her girlhood days. She knew James Shorrock, the father of the late Alderman Christopher Shorrock, best, and although he was a man of middle age when she was a child, then living in Union Street, she remembers him well and many of his characteristics. Mr. Shorrock was at that time living at Shorey Bank and was a partner with Mr. Eccles Shorrock. He was a man who enjoyed a good joke. “One day,” Mrs. Hindle said, “Mrs. Shorrock asked me to go across to Mrs. Eccles Shorrock’s house with a packet and leave it along with her best respects. Well, I had often wondered what ‘best respects’ were, and the packet not being properly fastened I thought I would peep inside and find out. When I saw the contents I danced about and shouted to my mother, ‘I know what best respects are’. ‘What are they?’ she asked, and I replied ‘Grey yure wi’green ribbon teed to id’. This came to Mr. Shorrock’s ears and when he had company he would send for me and ask me what best respects were”.
Mrs. Hindle went to a school conducted by old Mary Beckett, near Joe Bentley’s wood yard down Croft Street—now the marketplace—and afterwards to the school at Belgrave, of which Mr. White was master. She was living in Union Street when New Mill was being built, and she remembers William Walmsley, brother to the late Mr. John Walmsley, cotton manufacturer, being killed whilst the operations were going on. William’s wife was called Isabella, and she was a baker of famous oatcakes. At the present time there is in the possession of Mrs. Hindle’s son the bowl from which punch was ladled in the New Mill shed during the festivities occasioned when the late Queen Victoria was crowned.
In those days, there was no water laid to the houses, it had to be fetched in buckets from the wells, and generally, the conditions of life for the people were not distinguished by features of convenience. Handloom weaving was disappearing, but here and there were people who clung to the old industry and tried to drag a livelihood from it. One of them was a woman known by the nickname of “Old Blackbonnet”- Mrs. Hindle never knew her by any other name- and she was a woman of very eccentric habits. Another quaint character was old Nancy “Caddick”- probably Chadwick – who had a donkey and cart, and fetched coals from the pit at the bottom of Turncroft Lane. Mrs. Hindle frequently saw her when she was living at ‘Brick House’ then a public house, but now known to the present generation as Barton Cottage and standing at the Redearth Road end Turncroft Lane. Old Mary had a peculiar way of getting her donkey along the road, for to tempt it on she would walk before it with a wisp of hay in her hand and allow it to catch the scent. Redearth Road district was then very barren. The old Black Horse used by the Catholics as a church, was standing, and in addition there was the house of old Henry Mather, with his loom house at Cross Barn, which was pulled down when St. John’s Church was built; and the old Bent House, nearer Sough. Behind the “Last Rose of Summer” public house there was a farm, which was occupied by Mr. George Hindle, grandfather of Mr. F. G. Hindle, Liberal candidate at the last general election. From all the way up to Blacksnape there was little but fields. At Dangerbus Corner, at the bottom of Turncroft Lane, there was a row of houses and a calico-sizing place, which was worked by a man known as ‘Old Dick Sizer’. In the course of our talk, Mrs. Hindle mentioned Bobbin Hill, where power looms were first fitted up, and where they were broken by gangs of loom smashers, some of whom came from Blackburn and from Guide. It has disappeared in order to make way for the rebuilding of the premises of the Victoria Buildings in Bolton Road.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 2nd June 1906
Mr. John Chadwick, J.P, is the link connecting the present with the past generation of Darwen tradesmen, and of Darwen as it appeared, and of people who moved in it nearly three quarters of a century ago, he has a lively and kindly recollection. We talked of those bygone days and people at Highfield House, Mr. Chadwick’s residence on the eve of his birthday. Six and seventy years ago on the 29th of May, he was born at a shop in Market Street.
“There were only two other butchers in the town when I was a lad,” Mr. Chadwick told me, “and one of them was Roberts, who first had a shop in Union Street and afterwards moved to the top of School Street where his son is now. The other was George Matthews, who had a shop in Market Street where Catlow is. There was no early closing in those days, and the few tradesmen there were kept open very late, often till twelve o’clock. Darwen was a very small place at that time, but although the people worked long hours and there was only candlelights at night, they did not go early to bed. They were off to the factories at five o’clock in the morning, and it was very common for them not to finish till nine o’clock- sometimes half past nine—at night. There were some rough doings—drinking in the public houses through the night, and some brutal scenes occurred in the streets. I remember a woman named Hutchinson—a very big and very strong woman who had worked as a drawer in one of the coal pits. She and her husband came out of a public house, and she encouraged him to fight with another man, saying, “Give me thi close an’ give him a hiding”. As the men fought on the ground she went on encouraging her husband by patting his back, and she held out the promise “If tha doesn’t beot him aw’ll beot thee!”
“Some of the leaders didn’t set a very good example and there was one minister who was found lying in a ditch bottom drunk. The constable lifted him up, looked at his face, and then put his back, saying, ‘It’s only own _____; he’ll noane be wanted till next Sunday’.
Football was played against Bury and other districts, and other sport was dog fighting, cock fighting, bull baiting and bear baiting. Men travelled about with bears, and at Blacksnape they would allow them to be baited by dogs, charging a fee per dog. If the bear happened to get hold of the dog with his paws he would squeeze it. Bull baiting was very common, and it was defended because it was said that the beef was made more tender when the bull had been baited by dogs before being killed. We had a dog which had its legs broken twice over in bull baiting contests.
“Darwen was paved as far down Market Street as the New Inn, up Bolton Road as far as Wraith Street and to Redearth Road, 65 or 70 years ago, and the rest were indicated roads formed of broken stones. All round about that area were fields. There was no Railway Road and the road to Trinity Church was up Church Bank Street. The building now occupied by Mr. Costeker as an office was then the Holy Trinity Vicarage, and there were gardens on both sides of it. There were arches in what is now known as Arch Street and they still exist there, but have been covered up. I played under them, and old George Whittaker had a blacksmith’s shop beneath them. Then there was a hollow where a row of shops stands now, Old Swallow and others, who went round with their barns, playing ‘The Murder of Maria Martin’ and some of Shakespeare’s plays, made their stand at that place. On Saturdays stalls lined the street from the Angel Inn down to the Commercial Inn, and beyond that there was nothing except very small shops. These stalls were illuminated by candles, and when the storms came—and we had some storms in those days—and the stalls went over and there were some lively scenes.
“The streets were not swept, but were tidied up by Long Jimmy with a rake. He got all the rubbish together, and then threw it into the river, which was open. When the river was in flood all the stuff was swept away. Jimmy was a sort of town clerk, borough surveyor, and Lord High Everybody—all rolled into one. And his wages were 10s a week. For water for domestic purposes we had sometimes to go at least a mile. There were fish in the Darwen 65 years ago, and I have seen the water quite clear. The river was open from Spring Vale to Scotshaw Brook, Lower Darwen and here and there were a few wooden bridges. On the right-hand side of the river looking towards Blackburn there was scarcely anything but fields. One of the bridges existed at the Circus and simply led to Potter and Co.’s bleach works on what is now the Market ground. There was another at the bottom of Union Street and there was also one which led to Darwen Mills. There were two tollbars on the old highway between Darwen and Blackburn, and four between Astley Street and Bolton. One of the bars was where St. Edward’s School is, and another 200 yards this side of the Aqueduct Inn. Foot passengers went through free, but horses and conveyances had to be paid for. There was always a lot of traffic on the roads, which were very rough, and the mail coach ‘Red Rover’ which started from Blackburn at five o’clock in the morning, came through Darwen and picked up passengers on its way to Manchester. There were other coaches besides. The roads were dangerous then, owing to the footpads and highwaymen who robbed travellers. I used to go to Skipton Market on horseback, and we always waited for the butchers from Bolton, so that we could travel together in safety. Fifteen or sixteen would come riding down the road, and then we would join in. It was an all-night journey, and on one of my journeys my clothing was frozen to the middle. Belthorn was a lawless place and a lot of the footpads came from about there. Either fifteen or sixteen Belthorn men were transported for thieving at one time, and a lot of stolen property was found in a pit in that district. There were a lot of illicit whiskey distillers all round the outskirts and sheep stealing—which was a hanging matter—was also common.
Nicknames were very common in the old days, and I remember Jim o’ Jack’s o’ Harry, Dick o’ Tums o’ Rutchets, a member of an old Darwen family, Rutchett’s o’ Dicky’s, Joan o’ William’s, and old Calico Jack. Old Jack was a queer character and lived in a Delph on the moors. There were some very curious characters about High Lumb Hall district, and Bill Foo, whose mother Ailse Foo had a shop in Market Street, had tussles with some of them. Bill was a big, stout, powerful fellow, and he was not gentle with his prisoners.
Roger Aspinall, father of the late Dr. Aspinall, had a grocer’s shop on the Green, where the Provident Store is now, and a relative of his, James Aspinall, had a shop in Green Street where Dr. Ballantyre has his surgery. Roger was a very feeble, nervous old man and dare not go out at night. There was also Old Molly Bury, who said she could do better selling wet stuff than dry stuff and gave up her little grocery shop to manage the Black Bull which she owned. She built the houses behind the Bull. She was a wealthy woman, and had two brothers who were doctors”.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 16th June 1906
Much water has gone under the bridge since the day when Mr. Thomas Pickersgill first saw light at the Weasel in Tockholes over four and eighty years ago. His father and his mother belonged to Yorkshire, and after they had migrated to the little hill-top village, their son, who is now Darwen’s oldest veteran, was born. “There were seven stone steps up to the bedroom at the Weasel”.
“When I was a lad,” Mr. Pickersgill said, “there were not many folks in Darwen, and I knew the names of nearly everybody in the centre of the town and in the main street from one end of Darwen to the other, but I cannot remember them all now—I seem to forget.
“I was not more than three years old when I used to go to Dob Meadows watching the tier boys who worked there tiering, and some of those youngsters were not much bigger than myself.
“Names! It was rather unusual to call folks by their proper name. The folks used to christen their neighbours themselves and gave them nicknames which would stick to them through life. There were lots of old folks whom I knew well enough by their nicknames, but whose real names I never knew at any time.
“Old Joe Brass Girl will be known to many very old Darweners. He was a man when I was a child, and went about the town selling toffee and doing odd jobs. I think he was an old printer, and took to going about when he got too old and weak to work at the calico printing works.
“More than seventy years ago old Mike o’ Cicely’s had a garden in Wellington Fold, at the top. “That was before the Dole Lane was cut. We old people call it Dole Lane to this day, because it was cut in the dole days by men who were paid a shilling a day for their work, but many of the younger generation only know the lane as Police Street.
“Old Nancy Chadwick lived in what we called the Alley, which was near the Grey Horse, and she was a curious character. She had a donkey, and carried coals to the houses of folks who didn’t want to give orders for a load. The donkey had a pannier on each side, and when she had got her order Nancy would trot her donkey off to the brow of some pit where the owner was not very particular. There she would gather the coal, and when the panniers were filled, deliver it to her customers.
“I knew old Jimmy Greenway, the uncle to the late Charles Greenway, very well. He was a pottering old man when I was a lad. Moderately tall he was and walked rather sharply. I remember that he rode a mule, because a donkey was too small, and he dare not get astride a horse. One day he was riding up Dove Lane, and the mule spotted some nice grass beyond the hedge. It wanted that grass and to reach it marched right through the hedge and dragged old Greenway along with it. The entrance to old Jimmy’s grounds was where Bottom Croft Mill now stands.
“At the top of what is now called the Tip were a few very old houses, and Bill o’ Davy’s lived in one of these. He was the old bellman before Old Tom Bam. Bill was reckoned to be a very good-living fellow, but he was rather vulgar in his speech. “I knew old Tom well and often saw him out in his uniform—with his red knee-breeches and vest and his green coat. He wore a tall black hat, and it had a thick band round it. I think there was some trimming round the brim. Tom was a little fellow, and he had a remarkably good voice for his job. Whatever had to be announced he was called upon to do it, and often several announcements would follow each other. Between each Tom would ring his bell once. Every week a cartload of potatoes was emptied on the Green, and when this occurred, he had to go round with his bell telling the folks that the potatoes had arrived and their price.
“I never knew any constables at Darwen before Bill Baker and Bill Foo. Baker was the head constable and the gentleman, whilst Foo was the assistant and the runner. Bill Foo got all the rough work to do, for Baker took the top end of town, and I have seen Foo about eleven o’ clock at night taking drunken men to the dungeon under the Red Lion in Arch Street. There were steps down to the dungeon and these were covered by a big door. Foo would open the doors, push his prisoners in, then lock the dungeon door, throw down the door on the top of the steps, and fasten it. And there his prisoners had to stop until he released them—in pitch darkness.
“There were a few handloom weavers in the centre of the town, but not so many when I was a lad. All up Market Street there were cellar dwellings under the shops. I remember that a man named Ainsworth lived in one, and another man was old Henry O’ Harry’s—that was his proper name. Ainsworth was a carter, and had about three or four horses. Old Tup’ny Pies had his shop in a cellar, and got his name from the fact that he sold pies at two pence each. I never knew him by any other name.
“Jim o’ th’ For End was a handloom weaver, and lived in the houses in the hollow now filled in at The Tip. Other handloom weavers were Bill ‘o’ Davy’s and old Mike o’ Cicely’s. There were two or three old weavers in Gregg’s Gardens. Little Singing Dicky was one of them, and he had a place with several looms, on which he allowed weavers to work for sixpence a week.
“Jack o’ Lodney-Don’s was a convict, and had been transported. He was not allowed to go into anyone’s house, but he went about the streets singing out about the matches he sold. They had brimstone at both ends, were a little longer than other folks, and were thick. He sold a lot. Tum o’ Queen Dicky’s was a barber and had a shop near the entrance to the old Market House. I also knew Jos o’ Theston’s.
“There were three night watchmen. Bill o Davys’s was one, Jem o’ Nick’s was another, and the third was a tall man, whose name I forget. These men would go about the streets during the night shouting out the time and the weather”.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 23rd June 1906
Why dost thou search? Why urge my memory
To conjure up old times to life again?
To think on all times backwards, like a space,
Idle and void, where nothing e’er had being.
And thou has peopled it again:
O thou hast set my busy brain at work!
Travelling back into the period of a departed past by the agency of memory of an old inhabitant, in her recollections living with the people of a long gone by but still not forgotten generation, we are brought into touch with the beginnings of the great commercial enterprise which give Lancashire its present-day prosperity. Customs strange to our modern ideas, methods alien to the new thoughts, come into the old-time picture and we view the primitive stages of our vast industries. Habits and operations that are in themselves singular are revealed, yet in all we can trace the foundation of our developed state in these early days of the century. And as the opening of the present century appears to us, so may our days, our ways, and our businesses appear to those who attempt to recall a century hence all that we enjoy and are proud of today. The customs and the thoughts of one generation are distinct from those of succeeding generations- the habits of ours are not those of the other, nor are the ambitions of the two alike.
All this is well realised when I revive the recollections of an old lady like Mrs. Bury, with whom I had a chat at her residence in Heys Lane a few days ago. She is in her 86th year, but time has rolled gently above her head and touched it lightly. She is not one of an old Darwen stock – not any of those families Darweners claim as the foundation stones of their town, but the greatest number of the years of her life have been spent in the district. “Darwen was only a village when I came to it,” she told me. “The town which a century ago had less than 4,000 inhabitants in all its area had a population increased in numbers by some 7,000 people. Some of the old village industries were dying, or had disappeared, new employments were coming into existence. It was the period of the growth of a new commerce and fresh enterprise. Protection, the bane of the day, when Mrs. Bury was in her girlhood, was doomed: the application of steam to manufacturing purposes was working out a natural revolution in methods.
Mrs. Bury, I have said, was not born in Darwen. It was in the neighbouring borough of Bolton that she first saw light and where she first experienced the factory system of her time. There is much contained in her assertion that “there were no inspectors when I was a lass”. It reveals how much the work people were at the mercy of those who cared to inflict hardships upon their employees. The days of her girlhood were those in which child and female labour was unduly and often improperly exploited in the cause of making families rich. The child was particularly exploited because its labour was cheapest to the employer, though dearest to the nation. Mrs. Bury was favoured in her day. It was not her lot, as it was the lot of some, to be sent into the mill before she had reached the age of eight years, to have her face scrubbed with a cloth just before being sent in to see the certifying surgeon in the mill office, so that the inflamed flesh might be mistaken for the rosy tint of health, or to undergo many of the cruelties often inflicted upon the very young in the early days of the factory system. These were common in the cotton manufacturing districts, not only in the district in which she lived, but also in Darwen and other parts where it existed. It seems strange today to say that a little girl should go into the spinning room – to act the role of piecer- work which is now done by boys- yet this was the work which Mrs. Bury had to do when she was a child, labouring through the long hours over which work then continued.
Mrs. Bury was one of the first women to travel on the railway, which, when she was young, extended only between Manchester and Bolton. It had not been carried on to Darwen and other parts of East Lancashire, which could be reached only by travelling on the coaches or on foot. She had the prevailing fear of the new conveyance and told me how on an occasion when she had been on a visit to Stockport, and had walked thence to Manchester, she and a companion continued their walk to Bolton, because “we were too frightened of the train to ride".
Then she came to live at Egerton, and there saw more of the primitive methods available to East Lancashire for travelling. “We saw the coaches coming through from Blackburn and Bolton, and also the conveyances bringing people from Bolton, who were going by road through Darwen, Blackburn, and Preston to Blackpool, for that was the way they travelled. “They often called out to us as they went past, telling where they were going", she said. “The road was not fairly straight as it is in these days", she continued, “but was zigzag and the surface was rough." How different the conditions for trippers then to what they are nowadays, when excursions go so far a field as Paris for a day's outing!
The attractions of Darwen drew Mrs. Bury and her husband to it from the wayside village of Egerton a little more than half a century ago. Egerton was small, but Darwen itself was larger, although a village. The river was open, running through the district. Green fields and meadows existed where now stand rows and rows of houses and mills in which the multitude find occupation. “At the lower end of Heys Lane there was a nursery, or a small wood", said Mrs. Bury, “and the children would cross the river to play amongst the trees. There was a little bridge by which they could get across, and a cottage beside it. All was open, nothing but fields down to where Percival Street is now. At that time we went to live in a house with one room up and one down. And there were plenty like that in the town. The rents were about 5s a week. On the Lee side of Blackburn Road there were very few houses. Near where Orchard Street is there was an orchard, and that is how the street got its name. Lower down, where a block of shop property stands, were the gates entering the grounds of Mr. Walsh, who afterwards moved up the hill a little to live in the house formerly the home of his brother. It is now known as the Alexandra Hotel. The Walsh's were a family of great influence in Darwen in those days."
So Mrs. Bury went on, speaking of people and places that have now disappeared, filling one with astonishment at her wonderfully preserved recollection, as we:
Open memory’s book again-
Turn o’er the lovely pages now
And find that balm for present ills
Which past enjoyment can bestow.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 07 July 1906
The Blacksnapes ridge and slopes, forming the eastern boundary of the Darwen valley, and the people who lived there have a history and characteristics distinct from those of the town, which is today in a more highly developed state. The road which runs through the heart of that little outlying hilltop village exists as a reminder of the Roman occupation of Britain, for it was formed by one of the most renowned regiments of the Roman army, who furnished the garrisons of Lancashire, and some of whom encamped at Ribchester. Blacksnape in later time came to be fairly populous and thriving village, the home of industrious handloom weavers and of colliers, whence wrestlers and football players went forth to battle for their district against the men of other villages. A quaint village, hard in some of its features, yet interesting. Blacksnape today had not upon it the stamp of progress, it is regarded as a place to some extent decaying by those who know it only in the modern aspect, but men and women who where acquainted with it in the early part of the past century realise that even Blacksnape has moved onward and made some progress. This I gathered in the course of my conversation with Mr. Amos Waddicor at his home in Philip Street the other morning.
Mr. Waddicor has been described to me as one of an old Darwen family, but it was not at Blacksnape, but at Drummer’s Stoops that he was born. In his boyhood the handloom weaving industry was struggling against the competition of the steam power loom, established in the town. Born in 1836, Mr. Waddicor was sent into the pit at a very early age, and at 13 he went to the mill, subsequently entering the business of a coal merchant. At Blacksnape Fold John Fish lived, and he was known as a manufacturer of handlooms. To those who wove in the loom shops attached to the houses he supplied work, and he was one of the few important enough to travel by coach to Manchester to do business with its merchants. It was usual for him to join it at the top of Bolton Road. Some of the oldest loom shops still remain, although they are now put to uses other than those for which they were originally intended. Those who gained a hardly-won pittance from the soil by farming often swelled their incomes by earnings on the loom.
The men who possessed a few looms were known as cotton manufacturers, but Briggs and Harwood and others who had flourished there, had passed away, and the old-time academy of James Nuttall, who taught a little reading, writing and arithmetic was closed when Mr. Waddicor in his boyhood’s stage came to be an observer of the customs and the people of his time. He just knew his great grandmother, who died at the age of 80 years, and his great grandfather, who died in 1841, and was 88. Today they lie at rest in the burial ground at Lower Chapel. It was Mr. Waddicor’s father, Thomas, who carried on the services in the vestry after the secession from Lower Chapel which culminated in the establishment of the Duckworth Street Congregational Church. All the Waddicors were handloom weavers and that was almost the staple industry of the Blacksnape area.
John Cook was then one of a leading Blacksnape family, and it was a Miss Cook, one of its members, that George Pickup, father of the late William Pickup, an ex-Mayor of Darwen married. John was a very well-known man. Another of the leading families was that of John Riley, who was a farmer, grocer and publican. The Kershaw’s also originated at Blacksnape and were chiefly colliers. Then there was old John Holden, who was a coal proprietor and got a lot of coal out of the land he farmed.
John Fish o’ Baron’s, whose family is still living, was a man of much intelligence and was the politician of the district, paying great attention to the progress of public affairs. How slowly news came to that little village in the old days will be gathered from the fact that John was the only man in Blacksnape who took in a newspaper, and even he, so Mr. Waddicor told me, “joined at it with William Chew, of Dewhurst’s, who was a farmer and coal proprietor.” John was a cripple.
“Amongst those who were weavers were Richard Waddicor, William Waddicor, who lately died, and my brother John. The Yates’s of Far Hillocks were very old handloom weavers, and at Near Hillock was James Briggs. The Yates’s have left Blacksnape, and I believe the family is now principally scattered about Edgworth and Bolton, although one member, Yates Yates, kept the Griffin Inn at Hoddlesden. Old John Holden had a farm on the wayside between Drummer Stoops and Grimehills, and he never married. His brother Edmund had a farm just below.
“The Dixon’s farmed at Whittlestonehead for a long number of years and owned the farm. Two of Dixon’s daughters married George Pickup’s sons, James and Robert, who were both farmers. Robert is a farmer near Sleeper Hills and James is dead. At Drummer Stoops lived William Fish, who came from Lower Darwen after he had given up work and bought a few cottages. William was an intelligent man and was an old Calvinist. He attended the old Lower Chapel for a time, and then left and started a new place of worship in a room behind where Mr. Entwistle had his druggist shop in Market Street. In his younger days William was a first-class violinist and afterwards a leading singer, possessing a splendid voice and a thorough knowledge of music. He was in great demand for more than 20 miles around.
“John Entwistle, who lived down at Grimehills, was an old handloom weaver and very eccentric. Himself, William Aspden and a few more formed a party, who always had a ‘grand-day’ when Turton fair came round. They would go there on a fighting expedition, and I have heard how they knocked the stalls over. In the latter part of his life John became a leading spirit of the Primitive Methodist body, then in its infancy, and did good work as open-air preacher. Both himself and his wife were interred at the Redearth Road burial ground. About Blacksnape there was a lot of fighting, and nothing was thought about going into the open and stripping naked for a fight. When not fighting themselves, they would have dog fighting or cock fighting. There are one or two of the old cockpits about the district yet. The birds were trained for the fray, and were fitted with metal spurs, the battles being for money stakes. The Townsends were famous fighters, as were John Rostron, Thurston Cooper and others.
Mr. Waddicor then told me of the coal getting industry. The pits were small ones, ranging from 18 to 30 yards deep and were shown as turnpits.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 28 July 1906
Tis sweet to pause, as on we creep,
Up life's precipitous ascent,
And sure to view from summit steep,
A new race, go where once we went,
'Tis interesting to travel with an old inhabitant through memory's space back to the days of the long ago, to revive in them recollections of old-time happenings and of people now numbered amongst the great majority, and to learn something of the conditions under which people lived who have left their impress on the history of a district. Mrs Ann Scholes, who now resides with her son-in-law in Buff Street, is rich in the possession of a rare stock of the folklore of Blacksnape and Hoddlesden, about which she spent the days of her girlhood; and notwithstanding that 84 winters have passed over her head, she can tell stories of the life of men and women who long since passed away. Her pictures of life in the days when she was in her childhood-the early days of the century now closed-possess no sombre tints. Memory has retained for her only that which is bright and cheerful, and as she entrusted me with her recollections she mentioned to me a garden- a garden by a brook-a garden where flowers she grew when she was young.
"I can almost see the flowers now", she said, and her eyes glistened with the joy’s remembrance brought to her. "There was a brook close by, and the water from it kept the roots of the plants moist, so that the bloom came on them in abundance. They were the bonniest flowers in all the world, I think, and the garden was full of them".
It is difficult to associate the beautiful in nature with the bleak height and slopes of Blacksnape and the surrounding area, yet this feat Mrs. Scholes accomplished in a few eloquent sentences. She loves her native area, and despite all that we call improvements that have come into modern life to make it easier and better she clings to her idea that there were "no days like those old days."
Her life was not tinged with that unremitting strife associated with the struggle for existence so many of the people of eighty and a hundred years ago had to endure. Thomas Watson, her father, was for his times in a fairly comfortable position. No fewer than half a dozen handlooms were his own and fitted in the loom-house at Far Scotland Farm in 1821, when Ann was added to his numerous family. A man of steady habits, an Independent, and a worshipper at the old Pole Lane Chapel, he had none of the unstable habits so prevalent amongst many in Blacksnape and Chapels, and his family had to endure none of the hardships which attended other households. He got his work from James Shorrock, the father of the late Alderman Christopher Shorrock, who then lived at Prince's and was doing a rare business amongst the old handloom weavers, and when he had manufactured it into cloth he took it, along the old Roman road or across the fields on his back, and returned with its equivalent in food or coin. All the family were put to the handlooms, and this, with the little the farm produced, kept the family.
It was not much that the farm could add to the income of the family, for-and here Mrs. Scholes made confession of the state in which others were 80 years ago-the buttery of the farm had to be taken to Bolton to be sold. "We could not afford to eat it", she told me, "and there was nobody about to buy it, so my father had to walk to Bolton with it in a basket, and he would stand at the cross where the Earl of Derby was beheaded, offering it for sale at 3d a lb".
Porridge formed a staple food, but there were also other types admitted to the Watson household, and to some of the others about the district. Now and again a beast was killed, and on that "beef night" there was rejoicing and merriment. The butcher had no share in that rough-and-ready slaughtering: he got none of the profit and chunks of desh were carried away to the different farms. Often there was more than could be eaten at the moment, and this was put to pickle in salt. It lay in brine come two or three weeks and then a hole was bored and a string passed through, by which the beef was suspended from the roof of the house, where it dried and hardened, and it was used as needed.
"Handlooms were very common at all the farmhouses about Hoddlesden and Blacksnape," Mrs. Scholes told me, "And the majority of the loom houses still stand. I never went to school because there was not one at Hoddlesden. There was some teaching at Blacksnape by Mr. James Nuttall, who also went round selling the folks books and pamphlets, which told them what they had to do to get in Heaven. I got my learning at the knee of my mother, and a little in the Sunday school, and now I can read anything almost."
Mrs, Scholes then proceeded to recall to me some of the old Blacksnape families, who were, she said, mostly Independents, the heads being men whose descendants are a part of the backbone of Darwen in these times. There was James Briggs, set down as a "cotton manufacturer" in a directory of the time, because he had about half a dozen handlooms which the members of his family worked. Mrs. Scholes herself went into the loom-shop of her own father directly she was tall enough to wind bobbins for weaving. Tom Sanderson, the father of either eleven or twelve children, and an attender at Pole Lane and Lower Chapel, lived in the top house at Blacksnape. John Fish was well known and of importance because he was one who put out work to the handloom weavers and dealt with the merchants. John Holden, too, had handlooms. One of his daughters became the wife of Joseph Baron. At Pinnacle Nook, James Cooper lived. He worked for James Shorrock and was killed whilst taking cloth to Manchester. Fish Fish was a farmer, shopkeeper and handloom weaver and he had a big family. At Drummer Stoops lived Thomas Waddicor, who frequently preached at Lower Chapel. The grandfather of Mrs. Scholes lived at Th' Hillock Farm, and there was also Bob o' Briggs. John o' Bob's lived at Cockerman's Nook, was a handloom weaver, a Primitive Methodist and a decent chap. Andrew, the father of Staveley Bury, the organist for a number of years at Trinity Church, lived at Near Scotland, and Oliver Duxbury, the grandfather of Thomas Harwood, the tinsmith, was also a farmer. John o' t' Slack (John Leach) lived opposite the brook and it was in his gardens that the "most beautiful flowers grew." Coming up Slack Brow there was old Kester Hindle, brother to old John o' t' Sunnyfield's ancestors of the late Dr. Hindle and Mr. F. G. Hindle. At Layrock Hall lived old Timothy Holden, grandfather to Alderman T. Lightbown. He was a farmer and handloom weaver. John Kirkham had his house at th' Top o' th' Meadow, Thurston Briggs at Stanhill and William Fish at Stand Farm. William was a great singer and for many years was singing master at Mount Street Chapel, Blackburn.
Amongst Mrs. Scholes' recollections is one of an excursion she made to Blackpool in a shandry, more than seventy years ago with her uncle George and several others. The rain was pouring down when Preston was reached, and so it continued until beyond Kirkham. The start had been made in the early morning and it was nearly dark when the party arrived at Blackpool, which then had few houses and none of the attractions with which it is crowded today.
Blackburn Weekly Telegraph 04 August 1906
Amongst Darwen families extending back over centuries is that of Fish, a family Mr. Nicholas Fish is connected with. The Fish family is indeed one of the most ancient in the district. Members of it lived in Darwen centuries ago, farmed along its hillsides and worked their handlooms. The father of Mr. Nicholas Fish was Thomas Fish of Bent Hall. His grandfather was also Thomas Fish, and his great-grandfather was Nicholas Fish. Both now lie in the Pole Lane burial ground. It was on the little farm at Bent Hall, situated on the left-hand side of Bolton Road, near the Bull Hill Hospital, that Mr. Nicholas Fish was born. Coaches were running between Blackburn and Manchester in the days of his boyhood. Handloom weaving helped many a little farmer to make a living pittance, and conditions were much different for the people to what they are today. Many of the changes that have taken place, Mr. Fish has observed, for he is now on the border line of three score years and ten.
"My grandfather was a notability in his time", Mr. Fish mentioned to me during our conversation. "He had a little farm at Harwood Fold, and he was also the assistant Poor Law officer for many years. The leader of the choir at the old Pole Lane Chapel, and at the old Ebenezer Chapel, he sang alto when he was 70 years of age. My grandfather on my mother's side was called Briggs-another old local family-and he was called John o' Henry's. He lived at Cranberry Fold and was an old freeholder. At the time when the common land was being stolen from the people all over the country, a statute acre was given to him so that he would not grumble, and the fencing is round it yet.
"My earliest recollection is that of the handloom industry, and of getting up very soon in the morning, when I was no more than three or four years of age, to wind bobbins. In our loom-house at Bent Hall we had four handlooms and there were three of us bobbin winders.
"May poling was very common when I was a boy, and it was the custom to decorate or plant farmsteads with the branches of young trees. Different trees had different significance. The holly was a symbol of contempt and it was an insult to place it over the door or in the chimney stack. The mountain ash had a different meaning because its common name of wicken rhymed with 'my dear chicken'. By using different kinds of branches at Maypole time one person could convey what regard he held another in. I remember that my father used to keep a hayfork, the prongs beautifully burnished by his bedside, and we never knew why. But one night, when we were all in bed, the May polers came. They climbed the low slanting roof and were decorating the chimney stack when one of them knocked a loose stone down the chimney. Out of bed my father jumped, picked up the hayfork he had handy, and downstairs he went. As we children crowded to the window we saw him with nothing on but his shirt, and with his hayfork in his hand, chasing the terrified May polers across the meadow.
"Old Black John, who lived in Cranberry Fold was a Fish, but I never knew to what branch of our family he belonged. He was one of those who got an acre of land when the common was enclosed, and he had to do what he liked with it so long as he lived, but afterwards it had to pass to the lord of the manor. He fenced it round and worked at it. The centre he mowed, and round the side he grew vegetables and he converted it into worthy capital land. He had only one pair of clogs in his lifetime that anyone knew of. If he found nails on the road he would drive them into his clogs and any pieces of iron he came across he would fasten to them also. When he was walking down the road his footstep sounded like that of a horse. Some-time after his death, many years ago-it must be nearly half a century-one of his clogs was found in the river and it weighed 15lbs
"James Briggs, a distant relative of my mother was known as Gentleman James, because although he was really no better than anyone else, he always appeared to be superior. He wore neat knee breeches, white stockings in the summer-time and low shoes. He also had a top hat, and it was something to have a top hat in those days.
"Old Timothy's farm was a little one, and also at Bull Hill. His name was Timothy Holden and he was one of the old Darwen stock of Holdens. He never got any other name but Old Timothy and was a peculiar character. His word was as good as a warranty as to the quality of a cow. Once my father sent for him to look at a calf, and after Old Tim had examined it most carefully he was going away, when my father said, "Yo've sed nowt, Tim!" Old Timothy turned and replied, "Id'll be a cow if i'd lives". Tim was a handloom weaver as well as a farmer.
"Jem o' Ayster's- his surname was Harwood- had not a farm really, but there was an old building on the roadside which had been used to put in relays of horses required for the coaches, and in this he kept a cow or a donkey. He had one cow which had toes turned up five or six inches like the end of a chinese shoe, and this animal was known as "old long toes". Jem eked out a living by combining several occupations, and amongst them was that of drawing teeth. He had one of the horrible old screw machines, a wrench really, and it had a short lever which he pressed against the tooth. Really the tooth was drawn out on the principle of drawing a nail out of the floor by leverage. It was a terrorising and sickening operation.
"Down at Graining's Brook old Davy Holden lived. A man over six feet high he was, with a great massive head, and a remarkable figure altogether. He had an old-fashioned garden in which he grew the old flowers and the old herbs.
"One of the Kay family was Alick, a joiner, who was very eccentric. He made coffins, and it was said that he made his own, and that one day he got into it and persuaded his wife to put on a black bonnet, just to see how it would look.
"We got our groceries at Pall Mall (it is called Bowling Green now) at the shop of Timothy Fish, who was one of the pioneers of the railway between Bolton and Blackburn and lost £4000 in it. Timothy was a very religious man and as honest a man as could be found. He had always a pleasant word for the customers to his shop, knew everybody by name, and could attend a half-dozen almost at one time, serving them very rapidly.
"John o' t' Knew kept the White Lion in my early days, and before becoming a publican he was governor of the old Darwen workhouse. He always made potato pies for the country people who came to attend services on Sundays. They would go to church or chapel in the morning, then to the White Lion, where they would have potato pie, a drink and a smoke, and in the afternoon they would go to service again.
Mr. Fish told me of many other old Darweners, of the conditions of life of the people generations ago, and many interesting anecdotes, but, unfortunately, my allotted space has run out.
