NEWTON PICKLES.  ENGINEER AND MASTER CRAFTSMAN.  BORN 10^TH OF MARCH 1916, DIED 1^ST OF JANUARY 2001.

Tuesday, 02 January 2001
 
 
 

Yesterday was a quiet day, everyone in Barlick seemed to be recovering from the New Year celebrations.  I decided it would be a good day to call in on my old mate Newton and his wife Beryl to wish them a happy New year.  I had a cup of tea with them, a good crack with Newton and he pulled my leg because he’d read my last piece about him and me testing the Bancroft engine one Christmas Eve long ago and he reminded me of something I’d forgotten to put in to the article.  If you remember, Newton and I were sat in the darkened engine house listening to the engine running like a rice pudding and drinking whisky. 
 

Young John, Newton’s grandson was with us and after a while he got a bit fidgety and said “When are you going to stop this engine?”  I said “If it’s getting on your nerves, you stop the bloody thing, you know how!”  Me and Newt had a good laugh and John went to stop the engine but he was too short to reach the stop valve and we had to break off from the serious matter of our Christmas drink while we found a buffet for John to stand on.  He did it and the engine stopped.
 

This was typical Newton, he had a memory like a sharp knife and once you triggered him off, he would recount an incident as though it happened yesterday.  Even better, as far as a historian is concerned, he would tell you the same story twenty years later in exactly the same detail, he was totally reliable as a witness.
 

When he’d finished saucing me, we had a good laugh and unusually, as I went out he gave me a big hug, unusual behaviour for him.  They were getting ready for going out to have a meal and that was the last I saw of him.  Beryl rang me this morning to say he had died during the night.  I’ve only just remembered that hug, very strange but welcome.
 

The first thing I want to say about Newton is that knowing how I feel I can make a guess as to how his immediate family are feeling today.  There is such a hole in so many people’s lives this morning and it can’t be filled.  Time will heal I know, but nothing anyone can say can make it better.  The only thing I have to offer is that the better the person, the bigger the loss, it’s almost as though it is part of the price we have to pay for having someone like Newton in our lives.  He was like a father to me and I shall miss him so much.
 

I’d like to tell you something of the Newton I knew and how he affected my life.  In 1973 when I took over Bancroft engine I knew I was in for a steep learning curve but comforted myself with the knowledge that it would all be written down somewhere and all I had to do was get the books and read them.  I was in for a shock!  I soon found out that there was nothing practical written down, plenty about the theory, written by blokes who had never run an engine in their lives but nothing about what you actually did to run an engine.
 

This was where I had a stroke of luck, I heard about this firm in the town, Henry Brown Sons and Pickles and when I rang them a funny bloke came on the line and when he heard my problem said he’d come up to see me.  Now, there are two sorts of people in this world, the ones who reckon they know but won’t tell you and the ones who really do know and will tell you all.  Luckily for me, Newton was the latter.  I told him my problem and he took me under his wing.  From then on it was plain sailing, when I came up against a problem I rang Newt, he came up, sorted me out and pointed out what I ought to be looking into next.  I think the proudest day of my life was when he came into the engine house one day, stood there listening to Mary Jane and James for a second or two and then turned round to me, “It’s running better than it ever has since it were put in.  Tha wants to be careful, tha’ll mek an engineer yet!”
 

When Bancroft reached the end of its days Newton was with me in the engine house on the Wednesday afternoon of the week when we anticipated stopping on the Friday.  We were making plans for what we would do to the engine to make sure it would be in good condition if anyone wanted to start it up again.  We’d had a lot of visitors that week, the word had got round that Bancroft was stopping and people naturally wanted to see it running one last time.  Professor Owen Ashmore from Manchester was there and he said he’d just watch the engine stop at dinnertime, he wanted a picture of me doing it.  I told him that if I was right, when we stopped at dinnertime it would never run again because the weavers had been paid and I doubted whether they’d come back.  That being the case, I wasn’t going to stop it, Newton could do it.  I remember Newton protesting but I told him that the job was his.  It was the last Barlick engine and he’d looked after all of them, he could kill the last one.  He did, and I have a picture of him doing it.  It seemed fitting that he should preside over the end of steam in Barlick.  We cheated of course, we banked the boiler and the following day Newton and I ran the engine one last time while we flooded it with oil and I stopped it after that.
 

Ten years later I rang Newton one day and asked him whether he’d like to play with the biggest Meccano set in the world.  I had the job of assessing a very big engine at Ellenroad with a view to getting it going again as a heritage attraction.  One of the things I had to do was run the engine to see whether there were any major faults.  So Newton and I finished up in this engine house with a machine five times as big as Bancroft that hadn’t run for ten years.  It was covered in rust and pigeon muck but I had been oiling it for a month and had a full head of steam on and everything thoroughly warmed up.  Newton stood next to the governor ready to adjust it once we got it to move and I opened up the steam valve and put full steam on it. 
 

For a moment or two nothing happened, steam poured out of the packings and filled the engine house but there was no movement.  It had got to the stage where, being winter and a very cold day, we couldn’t see each other.  Suddenly there was a grunt from somewhere and Newton shouted “It’s away!” and next minute there was a tremendous thud and the engine house shook, or seemed to.  “What the hell was that Newt!”  “Tha’rt all reight Stanley, it were only t’pigeon **** falling off the flywheel!”  There was a big cake of pigeon muck about six inches to a foot deep on the top of the wheel and what we had heard was the sound of it falling 30 feet into the cellar below in one lump as it slid off the wheel!  As the engine freed itself up the steam leaks stopped and we ran it for about 15 minutes, identifying where the loose bearings were and flooding oil into it.
 

We decided we’d had enough engineering for a while and so I decided to shut the steam off.  We had already decided that we wanted to find out how dangerous it was, we wanted to see how long it would run on vacuum when the steam was off.  I blocked the governor rod up to keep the valves open as Newton shut the stop valve down.  The engine started to speed up and we stood there in awe as it ran faster and faster.  Afterwards, we agreed it had got up to about 100 revs a minute, twice the speed it should run at and very, very dangerous.  Eventually it slowed down and stopped and I turned to Newton and said “Why didn’t you get out when it started to overspeed?”  He said, “I was waiting of thee!”  Then we both burst out laughing.
 

A couple of years later Newton was in a poor way.  He had nursed his second wife Olive through cancer and was very low.  I went to a foundry I knew and got some castings made for a couple of steam engines.  I took one set round to him at Vicarage road and told him I wanted him to make me into a turner.  He had to make an engine out of the castings and I’d do the other set.  Six months later he had an engine, I had made mine and had it passed by Pickles and shortly afterwards he met Beryl and started another very happy period of his life.
 

So there you are, that’s my version of Newton Pickles, a funny old bugger but the best teacher and friend a bloke could have.  I owe everything I know about engines and machining to him and will never forget his generosity and support when I needed it most.  There’s lots more to tell about him but I shall be telling the stories for many years yet.  My thoughts go out to Beryl and the family, I have lost a friend, their loss is greater than mine.  One last word, you may have wondered about the title of this piece.  “Engineer and master craftsman” is what Newton had carved on his father’s gravestone in Kelbrook Churchyard.  I reckon he deserves the same epitaph.
 
 

SCG/Tuesday, 02 January 2001

1722 words.