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Doc
Keeper of the Scrolls
2010 Posts
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 Posted -
28/05/2004
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16:31
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LANCASHIRE TEXTILE PROJECT
TAPE 78/AI/05 (Side one)
THIS TAPE HAS BEEN RECORDED ON APRIL 26TH 1979 AT 13 AVON DRIVE BARNOLDSWICK. THE INFORMANT IS STANLEY GRAHAM WHO WAS THE ENGINEER AT BANCROFT MILL AND WHO HAS BEEN THE INTERVIEWER ON MOST OF THE TAPES..
Continuing with the structured questions and we are on the section now dealing with health - and of course, it's Stanley Graham interviewing himself. Any special cures for illness. Well I can remember, we used to have the sweaty sock wrapped round our neck for sore throats, and T.C.P. was reckoned to be a cure for just about anything, and if that failed surgical spirits. If you wanted disinfectant it was either surgical spirit or T.C.P. Friar’s Balsam used to be a big standby, either on a lump of sugar or else inhaling it. Oil of eucalyptus, and as I have already mentioned the home made lemon glycerine and honey. Tonics were the great thing in those days. People used to be thought to need a tonic every now and again. Things like cod liver oil and malt weren't so bad. I can't ever remember us being given brimstone and
(50)
treacle but I think we were on odd occasions. But the worse thing of the lot was a thing called Easton’s Syrup which, if you went to the doctor and he used to look at you and say “Yes, you need a tonic.” and give you this bottle of yellow stuff that just looked like pee and God, it tasted like it too. I think that mostly it was quinine, it was - God, it was terrible stuff, it used to turn your teeth black. I've received words from the foothills that what it was strychnine and that's why they don't make it any more. Of course when you think about it, strychnine is a stimulant for the heart isn’t it? Medicine was different, because of course one of the things that we have seen a revolution in over the last 30 years is medicine. I mean, in those days there was nothing like penicillin and modern antibiotics that we have nowadays, these modern drugs. The nearest you got to a modern drug was what used to be known as M&B for influenza and I can remember my dad once saying that he didn't know which was worse, the influenza, or the bloody M&B. And I think that was quite right, it used to have a very depressing effect on people who took it. I don't
(l00)
think we had to call the doctor very often. If there was anything wrong we used to go down to the doctors. We used to have an old Irish doctor, a fellow called Tommy O'Connell, who lived down at Green End, Didsbury. And we used to go down there and I remember that was an amazing place. Actually, he was a very good friend of my father's and I know a thing that's often laughed about was that my dad once sent me down there at a very early age because he thought my head was too big, some people'd say that that hasn't changed much now - but I remember old Tommy O’Connell, all he did was laugh and send me home, when I went down there He told my mother that he thought I’d grow into it. He has only just died, as a matter of fact a very strange coincidence did come out, anybody who has gone through these tapes and has come across references to Peter Birtles the managing director at Bancroft Shed. Peter Birtles’ family doctor when he was a lad was Tommy O’Connell. And it turned out that we knew a lot of the same people, and I found out then that Tommy O'Connell was still alive. Very funny story about Tommy O'Connell and my dad. They once bought a greyhound, and very good greyhound and spent quite a bit of money on it, and had it in training at the White City at Manchester and it never did a thing. And in the finish the trainer persuaded them to sell it and, as soon as they had sold it this trainer put it over the hurdles, it had never been over the hurdles before and - at least not to my father's knowledge - and it turned out to be a world beater. And
(5 min)(150)
I've forgotten what the name of that greyhound was but it was something like Mick the Miller, but it wasn't the famous Mick the Miller, and I'm not sure if it didn't win the Irish Grand National in the end, the Greyhound Grand National. Anyway, be that as it may, Tommy O'Connell was a very good friend of my dad, and a typical Irish family doctor, he used to have three big bottles in the dispensary at the back - because in those days of course doctors used to dispense a lot of their own medicines. And I remember there were two stand-bys the Mistussi which was to help you to breath and Mist Expect, which was to help you to bring the muck up off your chest and a big yellow bottle which I suspect was for those that didn't need either of the other two. Anyway, be that as it may. We were already into the period of National Health then when you didn’t actually have to pay the doctor so the third question doesn't apply. And we didn't belong to a Friendly Society and so received no benefits. I think that with my father being salaried, if he was off sick he still got his wage just as if he was at work and he would be covered by Lloyd George. The only hospital scheme that I know of was in Stockport. In those days when, the only thing that I can remember is that there was
(200)
a sort of a Penny Scheme for the hospitals that was taken out of people's wages. Now as it turns out, my mother's just reminding me that when I was about two years old I had my tonsils out. It was a regular thing in those days to take children's tonsils out at a very early age. Of course now there is a lot of argument about whether it's a good thing or not, all I can say in that I have had tonsillitis many a time since even though I've had them out. And they very nearly had to pay for me to have my tonsils out in hospital, so there must have been some big change in the method of financing hospitals just at that time - that would be of course about 1938. I can't remember ever paying death or funeral insurance, we have never been ones for having insurance policies like that so nobody in the house was covered. And obviously nobody had any operations at home because those days were long since gone. Babies being born at home, yes I was born at home and I can vaguely remember my sister being born but I can certainly remember Leslie being born at home. And it was a time of great mystery and strange activity, and we didn't really know what was happening. And my mother was, the bed was moved down into the front room and strange people were popping in and out at all hours of the night, and if I remember rightly, one snowy night we were eventually whipped off to somebody else's house for a bit. I suppose while the actual event occurred. And that was of course with the midwife or as my dad used to call her 'the rabbit catcher' and the doctor if and when he could get round. And the midwife would be trained, certainly would be trained.
(250)
Diseases which the family particularly dreaded catching? Well, not really, we were never brought up in fear of any disease but in those days there were still things like diphtheria, scarlet fever, scarlatina. The fever wagon as we used to call it. A yellow ambulance used to be quite a common sight, people's houses used to have to be disinfected when they'd had a disease. Families used to be put in quarantine, children would be off school for weeks and weeks at a time, because somebody in the family had some
(10 min)
infectious disease. There was a place down in Stockport where stuff used to be taken to be disinfected sometimes. I don't know that I really knew any children with rickets, I think I must have done because there were some very poor children at school but I never really recognised it as rickets. In fact the funny thing is that until I started doing these tapes I never realized that if you saw somebody about Ernie Robert’s aged 60 to 63 with bent legs they were nearly sure badly fed when they were children. And it just shows how you can live with things and not recognise them. As for feeding babies herself I know that for a time we were breast fed but mother's grand stand-by was a strange diet for children. This consisted of boiling up fine sago, that's tapioca, with milk and cutting a big hole in the end of the tit so the bobbles could get through and feeding them on that.
(300)
It seemed to do me fairly well and as a matter of fact we fed our children on it as well. The doctor played hell about it but we still carried on doing it, and it doesn't seem to have bothered any of them. As for being particular about disinfecting the house, I wouldn't say that my mother used to go crackers with the bottle of disinfectant but everything certainly was kept clean. She certainly did understand that things kept clean were things less liable to cause disease. And catching flies, there were two methods, the sticky fly catcher which my father loathed and hated and the old fashioned method of rolling up the Manchester Guardian and squashing the buggers on the wallpaper! Eh! It left little red marks all over, but I know none of us could stand flies and I can remember that they were chased round the house and swatted unmercifully. Which was the more sanitary method of disposing with them? I'd hesitate to say but certainly we were spared what Ernie Roberts described as the fly paper with millions of flies on it.
Now then, the next section. Work. The hours he worked - talking about my father, the hours my father worked were just absolutely fantastic. Of course we must remember that we are talking about the period during the war, he was a works manager of a firm employed on munitions and his hours were literally anything that God sent. Sometimes we didn't see him for days at a time if they had a problem down at the plant, he used to stay there.
(350)
And there is no doubt about it that during the war he was a very conscientious, able and a very valuable worker for this country. This was recognised after the war when they gave him the MBE but he wouldn't go down to Buckingham Palace for it, they had to send it. As for his wage, well all I can say is that 1 think his wage, by the end of the war, about 1950, had got up to about £850 a year which of course sounds peanuts now but wasn't really a bad wage in those days. He was paid for holidays but very seldom took them. He didn't have any, he didn’t have any holidays, he never had time. He didn't have any part-time jobs for the same reason and as for accidents at work, no, just minor accidents. Of course if we start to talk about the days before 1 was born it's a different kettle of fish. I mean he had seen the lot, he’d worked in copper mines in Australia and all over the place, and seen accidents and worked under terrible conditions but that really isn't the subject of this tape. What I think I might do eventually is copy the old tapes which I did with him before and put them in as part of this archive, or as part of another archive. [I’m transcribing this in 2003 and I’ve transcribed father’s tapes and they are in with the archive at Clitheroe] I can never remember him being out of work, probably because a
(15 min)
really good man is always sure of a job. And so I can give no information about being a member of a family where somebody was unemployed or receiving owt from the Board of Guardians or any other charity. I think that would have been regarded as a disaster in our family because we were always brought up to look after ourselves. He didn't belong to a trade union because he was one of the management. As for me, did I have any part-time jobs before
(400)
I started full time work? I did in a way but it was unpaid, or almost unpaid. I used to work in a bicycle shop a fair lot, I used to spend a lot of time in a bicycle shop, helping to repair bikes but that was more or less just because I enjoyed being there, it wasn't because I wanted to earn any money or anything like that. There were one or two perks to the job, I used to get jobs done to my bike for nothing and I used to learn about the job and well, I used to go there any time I had and get no pay at all. When I left school the first job I had was I went through what started off to be a year's practical farming down on a farm in Warwickshire working for a man called Lionel Gleed at Harrods Farm, Whatcote near Shipston-on-Stour. And I chose that job because I wanted it. I had had some good exam results but I wanted to get out of school and wanted to get out working and I got the idea in my head 1 wanted to go farming, I've always had a leaning towards farming. And I went down there and spent a year working with them and living in there. The hours we worked were from about 5 o'clock in the morning to God knows what time at night. It depended, if it was bad weather we'd finish about 5 o'clock, after we had done milking. If it was good weather and harvesting we'd carry on. And the pay I got was £1 a week, I put 10s in the Savings bank and spent the other 10s on Woodbines. And no, I didn't think it was a fair wage, I thought I was worth a lot more and I didn't give anything to my mother because I wasn't at home. I think actually the best thing I did for my mother was getting out of the way for a year. It meant she had less work to do. And as for how my employer treated me, he treated me well, I still go back to visit him, a great
(450)
fellow. Now, what other jobs did I do after my first job? Well, thereby hangs a tale. I was supposed to be doing a year’s practical before going into agricultural college to study farming but, due to an unfortunate set of circumstances, it was something to do with the fact that I couldn't be described as a primary stockman, or something like that - I was called up for the army for national service in 1954. And so when I finished my year's practical at Harrods, I went there in June 1953, I went straight into the army and served two years in the Cheshire Regiment. Bit of a laugh about that was that when I went for my medical they classified me as ‘grade 3, not to be sent for Artillery or Infantry’, because of my eyesight and they put me in the Cheshire Regiment and put me in Anti-Tank, which was the only way they could get me in Infantry and Artillery at the same time! Anyway I enjoyed my army, I didn't like it but I enjoyed it. That sounds strange but I did well in the army and came out as a full Corporal after two years which was quite an achievement. And really got interested in the job, and got interested in the guns and very nearly stayed on, very nearly. I didn't serve any apprenticeship or anything like that and I didn't belong to a trade union then. The reason was that nobody ever asked me, there was no need to be in. My sister did one or two different jobs, mostly secretarial, she was working for the Cotton Board at one time. And my brother when he left school, as I've said before, went to Silentnight as an executive trainee and then decided to go and do mental nursing and finished up down at St Thomas's as a nursing officer.
(500)(20 min)
In the days we are talking about just after the second world war there's no doubt about it there were very distinct differences between labourers and tradesmen. People who had served an apprenticeship 5, 7, or even more years and became journeymen and craftsmen were definitely a cut above what we'd describe as labourers. People who had served an apprenticeship, they had a definite advantage when they went for a job.
And of course nowadays this is all going by the board, there are still apprenticeships, but they don't count for the same as they did. In those days, they made the difference between different grades of social status and now that just doesn't apply. I've already said that in the second world war my father was manager of this factory at General Gas, and of course I was still at school, and then I got into the army and spent two years there. Obviously my father worked on munitions. Jobs for girls and women when I was young? Things were starting to open up a little bit but not much. Really what I think of as women's work, which is the way I was influenced by my education then, are things like teaching, nursing, midwife, it sounds terrible I know but any sort of household work, looking after children. I think that, to take this question here, just as it's written, the first world war did make a tremendous difference, the second world war made a difference again but there was still a lot, and still is a lot of - 1 don't
quite know the word for it - there is still a lot of discrimination against women and it’s not been ironed out yet. I suppose really the only way it will be ironed out is for men to start having the babies as well as
(550)
women but there's no sign of any moves in that direction yet. Spare time activities? When I started work these changed completely because for one thing my environment changed completely, whereas I'd been living in a town I was living in the depths of the country. What I did was buy a gun and start shooting and any time I wasn't working 1 was out with a gun shooting anything that moved and that's just about how I spent that year down at Harrods. We never went to dances, I never had any interest in dancing and I think all the time I was at Harrods I don't think I went to the pictures once, we had a television down there but it depended on how well the generator was running, because we made our own electricity. Sometimes the picture used to vary in size. And I stopped going to Church and started going into pubs instead. I think that I spent as much time in the pub as I did in the Church, as far as the ten bob would allow. But I mean, then you see you could get a fair do of cider for a couple of bob and we used to go out on a Saturday night down to the pub in the village, and just have a jar or two of cider. I didn't take any interest in politics because I didn't understand it and I still don’t and I had no interest in any sport whatsoever apart from shooting. I took my bike down there and rode that a bit but I was too tired by the time I had finished the day's work to do anything else other than just sit down and get ready for going to bed. When I came out of the army it was to find that the family had moved and instead of living in Heaton Moor they were living up in a little place called Sough, near Earby which of course is near Barnoldswick. Due to a strange set of circumstances which is too long to go into here, my father left his employment under rather strained circumstances but with his salary made up and his pension
made up to his normal retiring age. He actually retired two years early and with the proceeds he bought a shop which didn't do very well really. I think because we lived too well out of it. Anyway his eyesight was failing and when I came out of the army, instead of pursuing farming again I came up and started to give a hand up here.
Which leads to another story altogether because at this point, we got to the point where the shop evidently wasn't making the money that it should do. We were running a grocer's shop and a mobile shop going round the farms and it was fairly
obvious that I had to go out and get a job and start earning some money to
keep the family going. And the only thing that I knew how to do that was
any good round here was farming and driving a wagon. And farming didn't seem,
the farming round here never appealed to me because it's all grass farming. It wasn't the same sort of thing as I had been used to. Anyway I realised that that was a dead end anyway, there wasn't the money to be earned at it, and so I started wagon driving to make some money.
And that really was my life for the next twenty odd years. Starting off with local haulage, and then getting into long distance haulage and, I finished up in the end with… I started off with a little petrol Bedford wagon and finished up in the end with a big Diesel 60 foot long and weighing 32 tons and that is a story all in itself. At one point I was driving for a firm called West Marton Dairies, not driving for them actually but driving for a contractor who worked for them picking up milk. Then I was picking up milk. That’s going around the farms picking up milk off the milk stands in 12 gallon kits, or 12 gallon churns as some people call them, but they are not churns. Churns are what you make butter in.
(650)
And also, we used to carry bottles out for the Dairy. It was bloody hard work.
I used to start at, in summer at two o'clock in the morning, and finish at three o'clock in the afternoon, and the wage was about £11-10s a week, something like that. Seems ridiculous now but people were known to make a living, get married and raise children off wages like that. Eventually, when that firm folded up I went working for the Dairy themselves, after a spell on long distance haulage. I went working for the Dairy themselves and finished up driving a milk-tanker for them. I remember when 1 left that job, in about 1969, the wage had got up to £17.50 a week which then again was a fairly good wage really for those times. And it was while I was working for the Dairy that I met Vera, the woman that I eventually married and we had three
children. We got married in 1959, and her job was working at the Dairy on a bottle-washer, and she kept on working after marriage right up to about six weeks before the first child was due, and now we have three children.
And at this point I'm going to leave the questionnaire. As you realise I've shot through it at a fairly tremendous rate, but deliberately because really there isn't as much interest, from social history point of view, in my recollections because as I say, I am a comparatively young man. But for anybody that is listening to these tapes and trying to get an idea of the sort of influences that lead me up to starting a project like this it's the best way I know of just giving an idea of what sort of a childhood
1 did have and what sort of influences were at work on me. Now, what's more
(700)(30 min)
to the point is to get down to things which are actually cogent to the Bancroft tapes themselves. And it'd probably be a good thing at this point to give some sort of an idea of the sort of things that lead me round to thinking about looking into industrial and social history the way that I have been doing. I think it stems firstly from the way I was educated. Stockport Grammar School was a very good school, 1 was very lucky to get in and one of the things that they did educate you to do was to think, you were not only taught the three R's and all the rest of it but you were taught to think, use your head. And I was always a great reader and from a very early age the sort of things that interested me were the history of people like Smeaton building lighthouses and anything to do with people actually constructing things, inventing things, building things. The chief toy I had when I was young was a very large Meccano set and I was for ever building things that involved stringing pieces of string out of the windows of houses across the trees and running trolleys backwards and forwards on them, anything connected with cranes, engineering, anything at all always interested me. And of course I went through the phase where railways were all, this of course was in the days of the steam railways when we used to go and collect train numbers and look into the differences between one sort of a locomotive and another. We spent hours and hours trailing round the locomotive sheds down on the side of the Mersey and cadging rides on locomotives down to the ash-pits, anything connected with transport, engineering, construction, anything at all like that.
The reading went on and I think the thing that really triggered me off in the finish, were two books, one by L.T.C. Rolt, ‘Tools for the Job’ and the other of course, the famous although suspect standard, Smiles 'Lives of the Engineers'. And this reading was going on when I had been forced to take up, when I say forced, I wasn't an unwilling recruit to the ranks of long distance drivers, I enjoyed it. But I was doing a fair bit of reading
(750)
then, and there is one thing about long distance wagon-driving, it gives you plenty of time to think. Of course, with wagon driving I started taking an interest in road building, people like Telford, Macadam, Metcalfe, people like that. Andy really, it’s a very slow growing and very long term interest that's grown up over the years into the history of industry, why we run industry how we do it. What were the influences that formed it and when it started. It's been a very slow growing, very long process of growing, from an interest into what's turned out now to be my living. And I suppose I was influenced a lot by my father. I've also always been interested in the fact that so much seems to be lost when people die, and that's one of the reasons why about 10 years ago I spent a lot of time recording my father's life story. As I have already mentioned we never actually got round to finishing it because some of the recollections from the first world war were so painful. They actually made him poorly. But it gives an indication that my mind was already working on lines like this as far back as that.
Now then, what happened was I was in a position where I was driving long distance, living in Barnoldswick but not spending much time there. I’d just about reached the limit of my ambitions as far as driving was concerned because I had got the biggest wagon you could have on the road and the heaviest. I was doing more hours than anybody else and not doing myself any good and I had already decided that by the age of 40 I wanted to be out. I'd be about 37 at the time. And then another thing influenced me, I saw a very bad accident, I'd already had one myself and been off work for about three months and I saw a very bad accident. I saw five people killed up at Beattock on the A74, Glasgow-Carlisle road. And this led me to do a lot of thinking about what I actually wanted to do, and I decided that driving was getting to be, the sort of driving we were doing, 100.000 miles a year, was getting to be a young lad's game and it was time I got out. And just at that time I was talking to a bloke in Barlick, and he said to me “What are you going to do next?” I said I didn’t know, I said there’s only one job that I want and that’s running the engine at Bancroft Shed. And he said in that case you want to get over there, they are looking for a firebeater and the engineer retires in 12 months. So I did, I made immediate enquiries
(800)(35 min)
and got myself booked down for the job and handed my notice in. And one of the nicest things that has ever been said about me was said about me at that time by Dick Drinkall the bloke I was working for at the time. Somebody asked him what he was going to do when I left and be said "I don't know, we'll have to set two good men on and a mechanic!” That turned out literally to be true. Anyway I left Drinkalls and long distance driving, and went into the mill which was completely new, completely new to me. And it was just like going into another world, because Bancroft had never changed from the day it was built. It was exactly as it had been built both in structure and organisation. It was exactly the same in 1973 as it was in 1921 when it started. And it gradually dawned on me that what I was actually working in was a piece of industrial history and as my thinking began to settle into more regular patterns I soon realised that something which had been nagging at the back of my mind for a long while, namely the fact that the thing that was our fastest wasting historical asset wasn’t the artefacts, mill engines and things like that, it was the people who were dying. And I decided that I'd try and record as much as I could of the conditions in the mill while I could.
Now at this time I was very lucky, I met a fellow called Daniel Meadows, a young man who had been sent into this area by a combination of the good offices of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Nelson and Colne College to be what is known as 'Artist in residence' for the area for two years. In other words he came into the area to act as a catalyst and work on other people to try and encourage them to take up the arts. That's basically the idea of it, it's a form of education. And during the course of these studies of the district, he came into contact with me because I was running this steam engine and one thing lead to another, we struck up a friendship. I taught him all about steam engines and mills and he taught me all about taking photographs. And all of a sudden I realised that I had now got the tool I was looking for.
(850)
I had in my hands then the tool to do what I wanted, which, it was fairly obvious what had to be done, I had to take photographs of the mill and of the people in it and build up a record, a day to day record of everything that went on in the mill. And basically this is where the Bancroft Folio stems from, but you must realise that the Bancroft Folio we use in these tapes is a very limited selection from a very extensive negative file. I had to draw lines and draw limits somewhere, and what I did was draw up a set of pictures which was of a reasonable number, at the moment it stands at about 350 and it'll probably get up to about 500 before we have finished. That would show the story of what was going on in the mill. At that time I had no idea of putting tape recordings with it. It was going to be the photographs and writing, but one or two other factors started to come into the matter then.
(40 min)
Obviously I was looking out for people who were interested, and looking out for finance and things like that and this lead me in several directions. One of them was the Science Museum, and the other was the Department of the Environment. Two people, John Robinson at the Science Museum and Peter White at the Department of the Environment, listened to what I had to say and decided that there was perhaps something here worth looking at and introduced me to a Dr Marshall at Lancaster, at the Centre for North West Regional Studies. To cut a long story short, everybody decided that I had got something that was worth preserving. It was suggested to me that I might combine sound recording with the photographs to give a better picture
of what was going on. Further collaboration with Elizabeth Roberts at Lancaster who had just completed her work on the project on Barrow and Lancaster lead to the use of structured interviews and doing really good social history tapes. The DOE agreed to finance it parts of it and then installed the whole project in Pendle Heritage Centre and things have blossomed from there.
(900)
The stage we have reached now in April 1979 is that most of the pictures have been done. All the pictures of the mill working have been done because of course now the mill is closed down, it closed down on December 22nd 1978 and we were all made redundant. At that time the Department said that they would employ me for a year to allow me to finish this work before I go into University which is what I am doing now. And I am just reaching the stage where there's two things going on with the Bancroft Project, finishing the tapes off and N&R Construction, that is Norman and Reuben Sutcliffe of Todmorden are busy demolishing the mill and scrapping all the machinery. Now this of course means two things. It means that nobody will ever have the chance of doing the Bancroft Folio again and it also means that I will not finish the Folio of pictures on Bancroft until the last vestiges of the mill are finally demolished and cleared away. And I thought perhaps that at this stage it'd be a good thing if, for my own, to get things straight in my own mind and also to help me to get a bit nearer towards actually finishing the project, if I sat down and did the tapes which I have to do to describe the engineer’s job and also describe my impressions of other people's jobs.
And that's the reason I am sat down here today with this tape recorder. It means that I can’t do all of it now because there will be another section of the Bancroft Folio, devoted to the demolition, the last days at the mill and the demolition and that will be added on sometime later this year. Of course I'll make another tape on that. But what we have tried to do is to give a picture of what a mill was actually like when it was working. When I say a picture I mean a picture in depth, a very detailed picture and in some ways a very personal picture. And what I have done is try to do pictures of people doing jobs and then let them describe what they are doing themselves. Then of course I add my description, the mill manager will add his description and we’ll finish up with a very clear idea of what people were doing, how they were doing it and what their own thoughts were while they were doing these jobs. Whether it works or not for people in hundred years isn't for me to decide, it’s for you to decide because of course this tape that I am making now will be used for a long while into the future. The only thing that I can say about that is that I have done my best. One of the things which I've said many, many times comes into my mind now. In years gone by people were limited when they came to try to preserve things like the Bancroft Story. They were limited to things like the written word and sketch books. Well nowadays we have got the 35mm camera, Uher tape recorder and fairly sophisticated methods of copying and transcribing and things like that. We can perhaps forgive them for not leaving us a full picture but one thing is sure and certain, the people that are listening to this tape now, and when I say now I mean probably in a hundred years from now in 2089 or whatever you call it then. They won't forgive us. And the one thing that I keep hammering away at at the moment and which saddens me, is that so much is being lost. At the moment we are seeing the townscape of North Lancashire change at such a tremendous speed that people just can't believe it. A way of life is going and part of our heritage and what you are listening to now is one man's attempt to try and preserve some of it.
(45 min)
SCG/05 September 2003
6,571 words.
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Stanley Graham (Engineer & Researcher) Tape 06
