The rolling valleys of West Yorkshire used to be lined like giant trees by the mills that built huge fortunes. Most have now fallen by the wayside as we shipped our skills out to the Far East so Primark and Matalan could rule the high street.
Some remain as sad ghosts of a past few will remember and some stand reborn as trendy apartments reflecting the emperor’s flashy new clothes.
Fresh from school, way back in 1981, I spent part of what is now known as a GAP year working in one such mill just outside the centre of Bradford.
In my case GAP really meant that I had a big gap in my head about what I actually wanted to do now dossing in Sixth Form had been taken so cruelly away from me. It appeared the A-levels I clutched were of little use in the real world.
As summer came to an end it looked like being a long hard winter of discontent.
With my similarly unemployable mate Shirley – so named due to an awful perm that he would still doubtless prefer to the bald pate he sports today – we were kicking our heels when an offer for our “services” was made by local textile magnate, Baron Smudger of Idle, dad of our mate Big Phil.
“Nah then lads, how do you fancy working in t’mill for a few months?” said Smudger way back in the days before he could have got one useful Pole for half the price of two useless layabouts.
Shirley and I had not really seen anything but the outside of a mill and so were pretty clueless as to what he wanted us for. Still we had nothing better to do and it was getting cold hanging about the school gates hoping they would let us back in.
One brisk autumnal morning, Baron Smudger collected us in his rusty, battered Triumph – since gone the same way as the mills – for a rude 8am start with no release until 7pm. My mum waved me off like the first day at school.
As we spluttered down the hill into Bradford, Shirley & I could see there was no brass in muck anymore. Through the misty windows of a once great British motorcar we could see the ruins of a once great British industry; full of cheer we were not.
We were introduced to our fellow workers, a motley crew of blokes who’s only thing to look forward to in life seemed to be the next tea-break and another glimpse of Page Three. It was as close as this lot would ever get to Mandy from Mansfield.
The canteen had not been cleaned since the mill had opened a few centuries ago and the tea mugs looked like the petri dishes from the school labs.
I so wanted to be back in Sixth Form asleep in my favourite armchair, looking forward to a game of darts to pass the time and Fifth Form girls double hockey from my executive box.
Apparently, Shirley and I had a choice to make as there were two mills performing entirely different processes. Essentially, the business was a wool sorter but they also dealt in “waste”.
Smudger asked us which one we would like to choose and, being quicker on the draw than Shirley, I opened my uncontrollable big mouth first opting for wool, as surely waste would be bad news? Wrong!
Working in wool ensured I smelt like a sheep for the next three months and became invisible to girls at a critical point in my development, whereas waste was synthetic fibres and as clean as a whistle, although clearly not good for perms long term.
In many ways you could easily see why the British textile industry – and that was a very broad term – had effectively got stuck on the road to nowhere. Investment in equipment and premises looked like it had simply been ignored.
Sorting was the first in a line of processes that would eventually turn the raw wool into the final product. Wool came in huge bales, often weighing around half a tonne, to be unloaded into the yard.
If you have ever studied a mill you may have noticed the open doors on each floor; look harder and you will see metal hand-rails on each side of the doorway.
Grabs were attached to the bale so that it could be transported several floors to the top and the kingdom of the wool sorter. Two men were then responsible for hauling in the bales, one operating the crane, the other having to trust his life in his mate.
Clearly more dispensable than the crane man – no sex equality in these days girls – he would reach out holding on with his spare hand to the rail and spear the bale with a lethal piece of equipment called a hand-hook.
He would then start to swing the bale to and fro to gain momentum; reliant entirely on the crane man’s timing, the bale would then be landed on the floor like a giant fish on deck.
Get it wrong though and it was not unusual to see man attached to bale flying out of the doors and left suspended in mid-air. Health and Safety had yet to reach the mills.
In pay terms, the floors also reflected a sliding scale with the sorters being paid the top rates and possessing an aloofness to the rest of the workforce that conveniently ignored the reality that everybody spent their working days smelling like sheep.
The sorters used manual dexterity and experienced eyes to pick out the sheep shit and other defective elements of the raw wool before sending it down to the packing bay, now my new kingdom.
As they were paid on piece rates, the quicker they worked, the more they earned and woe betide if you slowed them down. They did though, have a wicked sense of humour especially with young lads who had “certificates”.
One day they asked me up to the top-floor and requested that I stand in a bale full of dag-ends (sheep shit to you and me but they forgot to tell me that bit) and dance up and down to condense this highly valuable commodity for sale to faraway “exotic” markets.
After jumping up and down in sheep shit for an hour they finally confessed, patted me on the back and told me to “bugger off now young ‘un! Come back when you get some brains with those certificates”
Some days it was like being snowed on with wool, trapped in my bay beneath the newly titled “Old Bastards”.
This hi-tech operation I was responsible for was hand-shovelling wool down a shute shaped like a telephone box and lined with a plastic bag. Wool fibres got everywhere and I was perpetually covered in grease; still, it was better than standing in sheep shit.
Beneath me were two of the biggest skivers – Shirley and me apart – I had ever known. Dennis and Minnie – so named because he was always moaning…”going to be a terrible day this, I can just feel it” had the responsibility of “landing” the catch.
Perched on a rickety old wooden tray with wheels, the bale was kept under control by a vacuum attached at the base, sucking the air out of the bag, ready to be wheeled out when full.
The nylon sack was placed over the bale like a giant condom as Dennis and Minnie began to sow it up as quickly as they could. Jokes about mail sacks and Her Majesty’s pleasure were never well received.
The reason for the haste was because if the vacuum failed – as it often did – the bale would suddenly come to life like a balloon filling with air at a rapid rate.
Expanding and then lurching like a collapsing tower, wool would explode all over the mill floor. Recovering this and bagging it up again took ages.
One day though, Minnie was on his own and Shirley had joined me above to help with a very dense and heavy Norwegian wool. Strictly speaking we should have only filled the cavity about halfway but Minnie had it coming.
We filled it to the top and waited as Minnie heaved away below; the cart rumbled out and then a groan.
“Oh f*ck! No…stay there…don’t fall over…nooooooo……you little bastards…!!!”
It was like an earthquake and as we peered down the shaft all we could see was the golden Norwegian wool; we thought we had killed Minnie and that Smudger would kill us! Sadly, Minnie survived to ruin many more a happy day.
Lunchtime was the most eagerly awaited part of the day – apart from hometime – and we would eat like victims of a shipwreck then dash off to the waste section and dive headlong into the stacked multi-coloured bags of acrylics as if it were a Caribbean sea.
We zipped up our Parkas against the chilly winds pouring in through the open floors and closed our eyes, sleeping like little Eskimos.
The radio was always on and, as this was in the days before mobile phones, our alarm call was the Town Hall clock half a mile or so into the distance, through the wide open doors offering a panoramic view of Bradford centre.
Tracks of the day that stay with me now were “A Good Year For The Roses” by Elvis Costello and the magnificent “Labelled With Love” by Squeeze.
We often missed the chimes only to be hunted down by Baron Smudger and threatened with deportation back to Idle.
Gradually, we earned some respect from the other lads. They never quite conceded the view that anybody with qualifications was totally inept, a view formed when my mate JB did a similar stint a few years previously and one I did little to challenge.
Occasionally we were entrusted with the crane but it soon became clear that between the two of us we barely made one decent operator. Shirley had lost confidence after dropping a bale and almost “bombing” a parked lorry whereas my vertigo was not an asset.
So we decided that I would operate the crane – even if I could not look out of the doorway any more than one floor up – and Shirley would grab the bale, hold on for dear life and trust me to land him and the wool to safety.
Peters and Lee would have been better suited!
How I did not kill Shirley only God knows. Timing was crucial for Shirley’s survival prospects especially with a crane man that had his eyes shut. On the final swing in with the bale he would shout “Drop!” and, most times, I did.
The one time I got it wrong and out he flew with the bale, four floors up and colour draining from his face. All I could do was lower him slowly to the ground; neither of us had a future as mill men.
Strangely it was an illuminating experience and also a sad time to see an industry that was vanishing fast for many reasons – some self-inflicted but many beyond its control – it also opened our eyes to what people had to do to earn a crust in real life.
Our time was coming to an end at the mill as Christmas approached and it seemed the future – as was proven – was bleak for the employees. But not without one last moment of humour that would scar – literally – Shirley for life.
Darkness brought an eeriness of its own to the mills; throw in some rain and you may well have been back in another century awaiting a horse-drawn carriage across the shiny cobbles carrying Count Dracula.
There had been an attempted office break-in which mystified us all as the only thing worth nicking was Baron Smudger’s thermos flask.
Minnie had claimed to have seen the fleeing robber.“‘e were eight foot tall and black as soot!” said Minnie, eyes bulging with fear “…an I reckon he’ll be back again!”
Over the next few days various “sightings” were made of our mystery intruder and each time he grew sootier, a few inches taller and more menacing. Walking through the mill as darkness fell became riddled with nerves, so I took to walking with my hand-hook.
This was a potentially lethal tool and so it almost proved. One night I was walking through the ground floor, packed with bales ready for dispatch, queuing silently in the darkness.
It was eerily quiet, the sorters had gone for the day and most activity ceased. I thought I heard something in the distance and, given recent events, was content to assume it was only a rat. And then again…I stopped in my tracks…hook poised.
I felt a hand reach out, grabbing me by the leg and almost shat my pants on the spot. My heart bounced through my jaw, without thinking I swung around and down came the hook until it met a halting resistance…embedded in Shirley’s knee!
There was my mate clutching his bleeding knee, rolling on the floor in agony and all I wanted to do was pull it out of his knee and stick it back this time into his head.
To this day I am told the scars are still visible.Fortunately, Shirley recovered and went on to play a decent standard of football but perhaps more fortunately is that Baron Smudger decided it was time to part me from the hand-hook.
It was time to go back to school.
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